Ever wonder what the idiom “jump the gun” means or where it came from? Probably not. But if you think about it… jumping the gun… I’ll bet you think it is similar to ‘jump the broom’ which comes from two possible sources. The first derives from 19th Century Britain when civil marriages began to be recognized as valid in contrast to traditional church marriages blessed by a clergyman. The second is a possible older source coming from the Romani people of Wales in which the wedded couple actually jumps over the common broom plant rather than the household version used to sweep floors. Two very different things as evidenced in the below included images.
Of course, the bride and groom weren’t expected to leap over an entire broom plant, but just the branches of one, most likely to ensure fertility or good fortune. On the other hand, ‘broomstick marriages’ became known as marriages of dubious validity. Shacking up as it is now called by most, and often referred to as ‘common law’ marriage in more polite society, which is called politically correct society. SSDD.
Marriage has meant many things to many people ever since people became people. The fantasy of having one husband and many wives was never really practical for the general population mainly due to financial considerations.Therefore marriage is more often recognized as a union, by law or spirit, between two people for the sake of producing offspring. And yet, since we no longer need to produce offspring in such great numbers to assure the survival of the species, marriage no longer requires the production of children or even the intent of procreation. At least, the common western idea of marriage is loosely based on love and law and the idea of having a life-long companion.
Not so in other countries where, as most westerners are aware, multiple wives are still available for men who can afford them. These practices are perfectly normal in countries where the number of children killed variously by disease, war, famine or mothers trying to have only sons to fill their husband’s with pride is inordinately high. These countries are considered to be ‘Third World’ countries where living conditions are less than ideal. I am not really referring to China when I say some mothers actually kill their infant daughters because husbands demand she produce male children in order to ensure HIS lineage. The infanticide of daughters is as old as the hills. Daughters can be liabilities in some societies while sons are venerated. All of this is quite confusing and ass backwards, if you ask me, which you didn’t. Depending on the ‘raising’ and the societal ideals, women and men can be virtually indistinguishable as adults with women taking on traditionally male roles and vice versa
.
I would like to see the world drinking a Coke together, holding hands and singing in tune, but I will not see this global tranquility in my lifetime. At least, not this lifetime. Such visions of utopia have never really fit very well into the laws of physics (both Newtonian and Quantum). Newtonian Physics predicts and requires that things move from order to chaos. Quantum Physics is full of strange things. Since we think and therefore we are on the Quantum scale, our thoughts are strange and affected by so many variables, predicting what our brains will think of next is probably impossible without aligning a number of factors just so prior to observing the thought you thought you had predicted in your equations. See? Right.
But I digress. Let’s get back to the ‘un-jumping the gun’ idea which is a fallacy according to evidence of time travelers as produced on videos uploaded to YouTube. If you could travel back in time to a place where you ‘jumped the gun’, you could conceivably not jump it. This might sound like a good idea, but just remember, the ‘Butterfly Effect’ is like the ‘weak gravitational’ effect. Gravity is actually very weak at the quantum level; however, gravity is like Serrano peppers: the more there is, the stronger the force. The force builds until the entire structure of space and time collapses in on itself to form a Black Hole.
Ah, you are thinking Black Holes might be a non-PC term? Right. Why does it have to be a Black Hole? Why can’t it be a White Hole? Well, yes. It can be a white hole because the very idea that nothing ever escapes from a Black Hole’s gravity appears to be false. Black Holes seen with the use of various telescopes as the centers of huge flowing masses of gas and debris have enormous, luminous jets of gas shooting out of what must be their polar regions. If you are oriented above or below (relatively speaking) the polar regions of a Black Hole, it wouldn’t be black at all, but white, bright and powerful. In fact, the flip side of a Black Hole is a White Projection. Black pulling it all in and white shooting it all out. Yin/Yang and such.
This image from Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) is likely the best of ancient and brilliant quasar 3C 273, which resides in a giant elliptical galaxy in the constellation of Virgo (The Virgin). Its light has taken some 2.5 billion years to reach us. Despite this great distance, it is still one of the closest quasars to our home. It was the first quasar ever to be identified, and was discovered in the early 1960s by astronomer Allan Sandage. The term quasar is an abbreviation of the phrase “quasi-stellar radio source”, as they appear to be star-like on the sky. In fact, quasars are the intensely powerful centres of distant, active galaxies, powered by a huge disc of particles surrounding a supermassive black hole. As material from this disc falls inwards, some quasars — including 3C 273 — have been observed to fire off super-fast jets into the surrounding space. In this picture, one of these jets appears as a cloudy streak, measuring some 200 000 light-years in length. Quasars are capable of emitting hundreds or even thousands of times the entire energy output of our galaxy, making them some of the most luminous and energetic objects in the entire Universe. Of these very bright objects, 3C 273 is the brightest in our skies. If it was located 30 light-years from our own planet — roughly seven times the distance between Earth and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to us after the Sun — it would still appear as bright as the Sun in the sky. WFPC2 was installed on Hubble during shuttle mission STS-61. It is the size of a small piano and was capable of seeing images in the visible, near-ultraviolet, and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.
I can’t prove or disprove any of what I just wrote simply because I cannot prove or disprove that my mind actually thought it in the first place or just picked it up from somewhere else when I was sleeping. I do know this one fact, which is verifiable if you search for it, that supports all my theories and goofy crap: America is a wonderful, magical place where you can go to Disney World at any age and, likewise, you can be born white and grow up to be black… if you have the time, the money and the inclination.
You Can’t Un-jump the Gun Ever wonder what the idiom "jump the gun" means or where it came from? Probably not. But if you think about it...