TAMARA FOR DUMMIES CH VIII or "What/Whom is our Gibraltar?"

People do tend to keep their focus on the strangest things, don't they?  I know I do.   Here are a couple of hot items I have heard/read discussed/disgust on TV or the Internet in the past couple of days:

*  Whether or not it is okay for a politician to use a teleprompter and/or notes written on his/her hand to aid in the delivery of speeches.
*  What was the best Superbowl 44 commercial?  (It was the Doritos Dog Commercial! http://www.nfl.com/videos/nfl-super-bowl-commercials/09000d5d816443b1/Doritos-dog-commercial)
*  Whether or not Pro Lifers/Pro Choicers, Republicans/Democrats, Letterman/Leno should have open opportunity to openly share their views with each other in public forums.

[Technical Stuff:  Please add to above list as relates to your own experiences and post on own blog if applicable.]

Mr. Twain and his cohorts-in-travel, as they passed into that infamous narrow strait between Africa and Europe, found themselves caught up in their own strange foci:

* What IS the North African "Pillar of Hercules"? (or is that "Pillow of Herkewls"?)
*  Whether or not a legit poet could possibly write both "Ode to the Ocean in a Storm" and "Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship' within a combined 1-hour time frame
*  Whether or not the more refined and genteel of folk do indeed put their gloves on one hand at a time.

[Tip: The later was evidently a trick question as it was put forth by a woman to a poor unsuspecting-the-game-plan-thus defenseless man.  This is why women are not allowed to play NFL football.  We're too cunning for the men to be able to keep ahead of us in the game....]

While I am myself a great proponent of thinking, and thinking a lot and for oneself, it isn't too hard to see that people do tend to:

a)  get caught up much too seriously into the sometimes not-so-serious things of life or
b)  get caught up way too much into the somewhat-more serious things of life

and all because of concern for what others may/may not think and inner realization that we ourselves cannot possibly figure every possible thing out for ourselves and forgetting that there really could not be more than One who knows everything there is that needs to be known:

In a few moments a lonely and enormous mass of rock, standing seemingly in the center of the wide strait and apparently washed on all sides by the sea, swung magnificently into view, and we needed no tedious traveled parrot to tell us it was Gibraltar. There could not be two rocks like that in one kingdom.

[Remember: At this point I am not too proud to take us back a posting or two and shamefacedly recall my own great consternation at another being, a one Mr. Twain, and his  attempts to sabotage my nascent writing career and thus recall my over-concern for what he may have been thinking of me!]

And as Twain is so good to remind us, short of God Himself, no other person is ever going to know everything about everything: 

The ancients considered the Pillars of Hercules the head of navigation and the end of the world. The information the ancients didn't have was very voluminous. Even the prophets wrote book after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must have known it was there, I should think.

And indeed, it is quite often a burdensome thing to keep up on all there is out there in our world and to be able to process and accurately decipher all we need to know.  It is all too easy of a temptation to look to Mr. Joe Blow over there to our right or Ms. Johnna Doe yonder to our left and let them determine what is right or wrong for us.  It is no wonder at the relief we can feel if we procrastinate long enough on decision making until time is up, thus taking the decision right out of our hands.  Or, in Mr. Twain's own salty words, "I must have a prodigious quantity of mind; it take me as much as a week sometimes to make it up."

If we do look to some other human to tell us what/how to think we would likely just end up with someone like Twain's "Oracle" who spouted on at great length about things he had twisted and garbled all together or "the Idiot" who....well, I have no need to describe him as his nickname says it all.

And, as Mr. Twain's wrap-up of his Ch VII succinctly lets us know, if we let someone else do the thinking for us, they do not take us in, we do that for ourselves!