7/4/1776

Two hundred twenty-nine years ago, the first major, legal step to establish a sovereign and independent coalition of states was taken by some of the most brilliant and corageous men in history. The document they drafted, whose adoption we celebrate on Monday, was the precursor to, second only to the Magna Carta, the most important and ground breaking, legally binding document ever conceived by a body of men. I salute the actions of these men, and hope that everyone will take only the thinnest moment, on this upcoming anniversary, to consider the audacity of the action we celebrate, and honor the many men and women throughout our short history who have fought and died protecting the philosophy from which it was born.

"When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation."

You Might Be a Moron if...

Divination - the occultic practice of ascertaining information by supernatural means.

Most people know what the word “divination” means, and many would even be able to give a few techniques used by practitioners of this ancient “art.” Predicting the future by interpreting the shapes in steeped tea leaves, casting various animal bones to the ground, and examining the entrails of freshly killed chickens top the list. What many people don’t know, however, is that virtually every culture, in almost every place at sometime, someone with either deep delusionary tendencies or a really twisted sense of humor, decided to do something, examine the results of that something, and then predict the future based solely on how that particular pile of dog poo smelled, or something as equally ridiculous.

Fact – If you believe in divination, or any human ability to predict the future with any more accuracy than a statistical guess, you’re a moron and you need to have mommy put your helmet back on before two o’clock pudding.



I’ve compiled a short, and very incomplete, list of the various types of divination known throughout human history, each one being more ridiculous, incredulous and amusing than the last. Many end in 'mancy', from the ancient Greek manteia meaning “divination or fortune-telling”, or 'scopy', from the Greek skopein meaning “to look into or to behold.”

aeluromancy - dropping wheatcakes into water and interpreting the result
aeromancy - divination by examining what the air does to certain things (like a kite?)
alectoromancy - divination by a chicken: grains of wheat are placed on letters and the chicken "spells" the message by selecting grains
alphitomancy - dropping barleycakes in water and interpreting the result (for years there was a white-hot debate over which kind of cake most effectively told the future, we can only hope most of those people were too busy arguing and throwing cakes into buckets of water to get around to breeding.)
anthropomancy - divination by interpreting the organs of newly sacrificed humans
astragalomancy – casting, like dice, knucklebones marked with letters of the alphabet (Come, on! Daddy needs a new Psionic Manifesting Capsule!!)
axinomancy - divination by the hatchet: interpreting the way it quivers when whacked into a table
belomancy - divination by the flight path of arrows
bronchiomancy - divination by studying the lungs of sacrificed white llamas
capnomancy- divination by interpreting the smoke of an altar or sacrificial incense
catoptromancy – divination by interpreting images in a mirror
cleidomancy - divination by interpreting the movements of a key suspended by a thread from the nail of the third finger on a young virgin's hand while one of the Psalms was recited (okay, seriously, what the fuck. Somebody had a laugh with this one…)
coscinomancy - divination by a balanced sieve
cromniomancy - divination by onions (onions?!?!?)
dactylomancy- divination by means of rings put on the fingernails or the number of whorls and loops on the fingers
daphnomancy - divination by burning a laurel branch and interpreting the crackles of the flames
extispicy - divination by examining entrails
fractomancy - interpreting the structures of fractal geometric patterns
gyromancy - divination by walking around a circle of letters until dizzy and one falls down on the letters or in the direction to take (this one is a personal favorite…)


hydromancy - divination by examining what certain things do in water or when taken out of water, such as coffee grounds or tea leaves; hydatoscopy - if rainwater is used; pegomancy - if spring-water is used (BillCosbyscopy – if chocolate Jello pudding is used.)
hepatoscopy- divination by examining the liver of sacrificed animals
kephalonomancy - burning carbon on the head of a mule while reciting the names of suspected criminals; a crackling sound will be heard when the name of the guilty party is spoken (How the fuck do you get a mule to sit still for this?)
lampadomancy- interpreting the movements of the flame of a lamp
libanomancy - interpreting the smoke of incense
lithomancy - divination using precious stones
lecanomancy - dropping precious stones into water and listening for whistles (I don’t get this one either, but I’m also not in the habit of dropping precious stones into water and waiting to hear them scream…)
metoposcopy - interpreting frontal wrinkles
molybdomanc - (divination by melted lead: interpreting its noises and hisses when dropped into water
myrmomancy - divination by watching ants eating (okay, seriously, this is just getting ridiculous…)
oinomancy - divination by wine (I’ve been told I can predict the future after I drink too much whiskey, “I’m think I’m gonna hurl..”)


omphalomancy - interpretation of the belly button (My father-in-law used to tell my wife that, not only was the belly button installed into the human form to act as a reservoir for ranch dip while eating carrot sticks, he also warned her that if she unscrewed it, her butt would fall off. He is a very powerful wizard.)
oneiromancy - interpretation of dreams
onychomancy - interpreting the reflection of sun rays off fingernails (I used to know some guys that did that all the time, “whoa… Dude, check out my fingernails… they’re, like, glowing…”)
ornithomancy - interpreting the flights of birds (They’re all going south, that means the Broncos will win the Superbowl.)
ovomancy - breaking eggs into a container of water and interpreting the shape of the egg white
papyromancy - divination by folding paper
pyromancy - divination by fire
rhabdomancy - using the divining rod or magic wand
rhapsodmancy - divination by a line in a sacred book that strikes the eye when the book is opened after the diviner prays, meditates or invokes the help of spirits
sideromancy - interpreting straws of hay thrown on a red-hot iron (what about interpreting wads of watermelon jello thrown at the exposed scrotum-sack of a guy dressed like Hitler?)
skatharomancy- interpreting the tracks of a beetle crawling over the grave of a murder victim
splanchnomancy - reading cut sections of a goat liver (these people sure like cut open animals…)
tasseography - interpreting tea leaves
tiromancy- interpreting the holes or mold in cheese (that’s right, divination through cheese, and you thought it was just a tasty snack. By the way, what does cheese say when it’s picture gets taken?)
urim v'tumim - reading sacred stones attached to the breastplate of the high priest in ancient Judaism
uromancy - divination by reading bubbles made by urinating in a pot



Okay, that’s enough. All the rest were in good fun, but interpreting the bubbles in your pee is about as preposterous as it gets. The lesson here today, folks, is that divination is stupid and anyone that believes in it is equally so. Here at On The Rocks, we are committed to exposing sham and flim-flam at every possible opportunity and plan on taking down this behemoth of ignorance one brick at a time.

Next week: audiobooks.

Do You Hear What I Hear?

The first revolution took place on November 29, 1877, when Thomas Alva Edison made the first public demonstration. At the time, few people saw the potential of the contraption he’d designed, mostly because he described his “talking machine” as a means for businessmen to record their own dictations with the ability to play them back at will. The secretaries of America (at least the ones that weren’t being schtupped at the time) paused for a collective shudder. Like any great invention that escapes into the pristine wilderness that is capitalism, evolution takes over as busy-fingered tinkerers strive to offer bigger, better, faster and more at low, low warehouse clearance prices. The phonograph, literally meaning “writing sound” in Greek, underwent numerous incarnations in the hands of manufacturers worldwide, such as the “Gramophone, “ “Zon-o-phone,” “Graphonola,” and the most successful, “Victrola.”



The second, and most important, revolution occurred in 1892. It was this year that a company called Berliner patented the disc recording media, which they successfully argued was so different from Edison’s cylinder technology, they needn’t pay royalties. With the recording discs being easier to manufacture and ship, and by avoiding the costs of royalties, they were cheaper than cylinder recordings. In addition to the cost benefits, consumers found it much easier to store and catalogue their collections as thin discs as opposed to the cumbersome cylinders, and with the affluence that typified the late nineteenth century in America, the home stereo system was born.

For the first time in history, music could be enjoyed without the need for live musicians.

Many minor improvements were made on the design over the course of the following years, but no great changes took place for a very long time. The record was the standard in almost every American home, but as we all know, technology builds upon itself exponentially and the next revolution was inevitable.

The next occurrence that most closely resembles revolution, ignoring the strange but very important 1956 invention by Bill Lear called the 8-track cartridge, was the reel-to-reel cassette tape, or the compact audiocassette. Introduced by Philips in 1963, this little technological wonder not only boasted the “not-terribly-crappy” sound quality guarantee, but its miniscule size shot off the next great leap forward in audio technology: portable audio.

Dass right, I’m talkin’ about the muhfuckin’ ghetto blaster!




It’s revolution left and right, because as soon as the boom box hit its peak in the early eighties, Sony’s 1979 invention, the Walkman, was flying off the shelves like so much volleyball. The portable audio revolution was taken a step further into personal portable audio. The only problem was that it was terribly difficult to break dance with headphones on.

The “Big Bang” of digital audio took place in 1983, when Philips introduced the compact disc. Suddenly, as a consumer, you could have it all: inexpensive, compact and portable media with flawless, truly digital audio quality. While many folks still hold dear to their boxes of vinyl Dylan albums, the compact disc was the high mark of audio fidelity.

We find ourselves currently in the midst of another audio revolution, and it’s no surprise it’s related to computers. MP3 is an audio compression format, known as “lossy compression,” which allows the large “WAV” tracks of a compact disc to be compressed at about 10:1 without losing significant audio quality. This medium became greatly popularized with the transmission of data over the Internet, allowing people to rip, store, trade and play audio files over their limited bandwidth. According to Wikipedia, the sound quality of MP3 can be described thusly:

[MP3] provides a representation of pulse-code modulation-encoded (PCM) audio data in a much smaller size by discarding portions that are considered "less important" to human hearing.

It is here, in the gap between CD and MP3, in the concept of “less important to human hearing” that the debate occurs. As MP3 technology grows more and more standardized, as more and more people rip their audio CDs into MP3, or simply download them from the internet onto their iPods and other devices, will audio quality standards drop as well? Will anyone ever come to know the rich, full, dense sound that can only be achieved on a vinyl recording? If the CD is the benchmark, are the differences between CD and MP3 so great, that audio recordings at large will suffer because someone has deemed huge sections of data “unimportant to human hearing?”

Until now, every worthwhile revolution in audio technology has been in the arena of better quality, less degradation, smaller media and more portable technology. MP3 seems to be an exception because, even to an untrained ear, the quality of an CD significantly outpaces that of MP3, but the MP3 format grows each and every day, backed up by the smallest, coolest and best technology available on the market.

Will there be a time when a young music aficionado will have gone his whole life without ever setting his ears to a compact disc, much as many our age have never heard a vinyl record? Will MP3 destroy not just music industry, but music fidelity as well?