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Local Secretary's Message Gerry's Grumblings By Gerry Schulze

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Among the duties of LocSec, which I am not fulfilling, is the duty to call a business meeting of the officers at least once every quarter. In theory notice of the meeting should be given, and all members should be invited to all but the executive session in which we vote to triple our salaries.

I don't think it's reasonable to drag everyone to Little Rock for this meeting.

The challenge of being LocSec is that it's hard to decide what the real purpose of this organization is. There are probably twice as many reasons to join Mensa than there are Mensans. For me, Mensa is fun because it's a good place to talk about twenty topics in five minutes.

I think intelligence is just like any other measurable human characteristic that we have in varying amounts. There's a top two percent of people with any measurable characteristic.

Being in the extreme of anything has its consequences. I think of Mensa as a support group for people who suffer from high intelligence syndrome. Mensa has been highly therapeutic for me.

High intelligence syndrome is easily treatable. You don't have to go to the lengths of Kurt Vonnegut's dystopia "Harrison Bergeron" Just apply beer as needed.

That reminds me of when we used to have Arkansas Mensa meetings in a bar. Maybe we'll do that again. One of my favorite Mensa experience involves a meeting in a bar.

Several of our members had too much to drink. I ran into one of them a few days later. Here was our conversation:

Gerry: Hi, have you recovered from the meeting yet?
Friend: Yeah. I got a little drunk, didn't I?
Gerry: No.
Friend: A lot drunk?
Gerry: Yeah. Are you ready for next month?
Friend: Ready? What do you mean?
Gerry: You agreed to debate the preacher on the existence of God.
Friend: I did, oh [expletive signifying excrement deleted]!
Gerry: I think you'll do fine. You've got the affirmative.

Only the last part was untrue. My friend actually had the negative, a minister who was in the group had the affirmative. They had the debate. It was great. We need to do something like that again.

The Yahoo! Group is going well. Bruce Crabtree has been posting a science fiction novel he wrote, chapter by chapter. I can say that the first four chapters are very interesting. He has posted twelve, and I haven't read past four. Nevertheless, four chapters are enough for me to heartily recommend the book.

I've also been reading Bruce's The Bastrop Kid. I'm about half way through it. It's great that we have such a diverse set of talents in our group. I'd like to recommend that anyone else who is interested share with the group.

Finally, I think I'm supposed to be appointing people to various positions. If anyone is interested in being appointed to any position, let me know. If the position does not exist, we can create it at the executive business meeting.

Max Planck, the physicist who opened the quantum age, was an extremely unlucky fellow. His beloved first wife died early and the youngest of two sons was killed in the first World War. He also had twin daughters whom he adored. One died giving birth. The surviving twin went to look after the baby and fell in love with her sister's husband. They married and two years later she died in childbirth. In 1944, when Planck was eighty-five, an Allied bomb fell on his house and he lost everything-papers, diaries, a lifetime of accumulations. The following year his surviving son was caught in a plot to assassinate Hitler and was executed.