BSBFB

BSBFB shout-out and Hall of Fame genuflection to Thor Heyerdahl. I remember checking Kon-Tiki out of our little library and watching snow rime our windows while I dreamed of piloting a raft across the Pacific. Peru to Polynesia on a dancefloor of balsa logs. Bad. Ass. He was trying to prove a point:

Heyerdahl believed that people from South America could have settled Polynesia in pre-Columbian times. His aim in mounting the Kon-Tiki expedition was to show, by using only the materials and technologies available to those people at the time, that there were no technical reasons to prevent them from having done so. (Although the expedition carried some modern equipment, such as a radio, watches, charts, sextant, and metal knives, Heyerdahl argued they were incidental to the purpose of proving that the raft itself could make the journey.)

Sometimes you prove a different sort of point than you were after.

Any way you slice it, it’s a wan bunch we’ve got running the country. It wasn’t always so. There was a reason children carried around little stuffed bears, and still do. It wasn’t a stuffed kitty or lamb or giraffe or cow. It was a bear. A Teddy bear.