Not that Babe Ruth . . .

Hello earthlings: . . . Babe Ruth here. No, not the one that may pop into your underdeveloped minds, but all of us here pick famous nicknames from the nearby planets we’re assigned to, just for fun. Not often I make my presence known, besides not easy to do, as our outpost, for privacy reasons, is on the far side of the moon, and getting a radio wave to bend around not as simple as your Einstein seemed to think. Then again, occasionally we manage. We’re here doing a survey of intelligent life on this arm of the galaxy, but as you can probably well imagine, we’ve not found much. A wasted effort you say? Not really. It’s always good to know what there is and what there isn’t. One thing I can tell you, however, is that it takes intelligence to find intelligent life, perhaps the reason your species has yet to find any. Have you thought of that? No? I’m not surprised.

Witnessing a potentially great country obsessed with choosing their leaders from a list of second stringers is a sad thing, for us, and so are the many wars that everybody dedicates so much energy, blood, and treasure to wind up, while the very effort prolongs them into the far distant future. And talk about poisoning the very planet that harbors thee. Or is it thou? Your old literature is very confusing, but not as confusing as the present literature: A book about a penguin a bestseller? You’ve got to be kidding!

Still and all, there is one bright spot that harbors a few sprinkles of hope, and that is the meeting each Saturday at a nondescript restaurant called El Chaparral. Granted, much of the talk is about bacteria, but there are other subjects as well. To know what those other subjects are, you will have to attend . . .

mt