Proliferation
Sam Aurelius Milam III
For most of my life, I've pondered the distinction between things that are alive and things that are not alive.  No matter what distinction I devised, I could always think of an exception.  Mobility?  Some living things don't move.  Some non-living things do move, although not necessarily under their own power.  However, some living things also move only under the influence of some external force.  Mobility isn't a reliable distinction.  Breathing?  Plants and animals transfer gases very differently from one another.  How about viruses?  How about seeds or eggs?  Whatever living thing you consider, if it breathes at all then you eventually must reduce the concept of breathing to the process of respiration, that is, consuming fuel, releasing energy, and producing waste.  A wood stove does the same thing.  Reproduction?  Some living things don't reproduce.  Mules and some women that I've known come to mind.  The fact is that a simple, general, and unambiguous distinction between what's alive and what isn't alive remained elusive for many years.
Sometime during the year 2005, I reduced the idea to the simplest form that I could imagine.  I sat aside all of the various ways that we intuitively decide if something's alive or not alive.  I based a tentative distinction on the simplest and most pragmatic characteristic of life that I could imagine.  I speculated that if a thing can die or be killed, then it's alive.  If it cannot die or be killed, then it isn't alive.  It's such a simple distinction that it took me several decades of pondering to think of it.
After that, I spent some time thinking about the nature of killing something.  You can crush a man or you can crush a rock.  To crush the man kills the man.  To crush the rock doesn't kill the rock.  Furthermore, a man can die without being crushed.  Not only that, you can disrupt a man's form at least to some extent, as for example by amputation, and still not kill him.  Thus, to merely disrupt or destroy the form of something doesn't necessarily correspond to killing the thing.  The essence of killing a thing resides in the termination of a process that exists within the thing, whether or not its form is changed.  After I realized that, I had my distinction.  If a thing has a form in which a process is under way, and if the process can be terminated without necessarily changing the thing's form, then the thing is alive.
The distinction seemed to be a good one.  It was simple, general, and unambiguous.  However, I failed to consider all of its implications.  Eventually, someone mentioned one of them to me.  That is, according to my distinction, a running automobile engine is alive.  At first, I was skeptical.  However, I gave the matter some thought.  It's a fact that we've long applied the terminology of life to our devices.  When an automobile engine stops running, we say that it died.  If we want somebody to turn off a light, then we might tell him to kill it.  We talk about our computers remembering things.  We refer to malfunctioning appliances as being sick.  Not only that, we frequently talk to our devices as if they're alive.  A man is just as likely to talk to his lawn mower as a woman is to talk to her geraniums.  It isn't even a new idea.  Literature is rife with tales of machines taking over the world, of electronic systems becoming self-aware, and so forth.¹  I documented some of my thoughts in the January 2006 issue of the Frontiersman in an article titled Gods Ourselves.  In that article, I suggested that maybe there's more to it than terminology.  It's as if we've unconsciously recognized the existence of a life form without consciously admitting it.
I haven't yet thought of a better distinc-

A Box of Kisses
Original Source Unknown.  Forwarded by BLA, of Schertz, Texas.
Some time ago, a man criticized his 3-year-old daughter for wasting some gold wrapping paper.  Money was tight and he became angry when she used the paper to decorate a box to put under the Christmas tree.  Nevertheless, she brought the gift to him the next morning and said, "This is for you, Daddy."
He was embarrassed by his earlier overreaction but his anger flared again when he found that the box was empty.  He yelled, "Don't you know when you give someone a present, there's supposed to be something inside it?"
The little girl looked up at him with tears in her eyes and said, "But Daddy, it's not empty, I blew kisses into it, all for you, Daddy."
The father put his arms around his little girl and asked for her forgiveness.
An accident took the life of the child only a short time later and, as the story goes, the man kept the gold box by his bed for many years thereafter.  Whenever he felt discouraged, he'd take out an imaginary kiss and remember the love of the little girl who'd put it there. *

Stray Thoughts
Sam Aurelius Milam III
Technobully — A technobully is someone who, by controlling product availability, forces new products into the marketplace without any regard for how silly or how useless they are and for no better reason than that he can make a profit by selling them to technosuckers.
Technosnob — A technosnob is someone who sneers at other people for using products that aren't as new or as fancy as his own.
Technosucker — A technosucker is someone who mindlessly welcomes any new product without regard for how silly or how useless it is and for no better reason than that it's new.  My father taught me that all progress is change but not all change is progress.  Most people today have failed to learn that lesson.  They're technosuckers.

Old Timer's Lore
Overheard by Sam Aurelius Milam III
Losing Situation — Don't wrestle with a pig.  You'll both get dirty but the pig will enjoy it.