Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Where is the fur
Where is the purr
Where is the regarding gaze
Maybe out in the sun
Somewhere having fun
Or resting in some shade
Then he arrives
Taking me by surprise
Leaping onto my lap
To tell his news
Through chirps and mews
It’s my buddy, my fur friend, my cat
Frida’s here and the smoke is here, and the heat is coming. It’s July 11, 2025, 68 F locally, 93 F pitched as the day’s high. I stepped outside to check it all out and smoke jumped into me and kickstarted my sinuses into broken water line mode. I ditched the outside work planned and vacuumed instead.
My spouse last used this vacuum. Like many Boomer Americans, we are over vacuumed. A cranky, ancient Hoover is on standby along with some Black & Decker Dustbuster copy cat, and a central vac system. I was using the central with the power head. This system features three outlets and a 30-foot long vacuum hose.
The hose was tangled into several knots. As I untangled it, I grumbled to myself about my wife’s tangling habits. I’d just untangled her hair dryer cord and her Apple laptop cord. This seems to be a world of tanglers and untanglers. Knotters and Unknotters.
Firings, tariffs, lies, and bullshit highlight the Trump news day cycle. More flooding struck several states; more wildfires have forced evacuations. The biggest news circulating at the mo seems to be Trump’s efforts to coerce Brazil not to enforce due process in their nation by slamming them with a 50% tariff. Such a law and order person, isn’t he? Yeah, that’s snark.
Today’s song is “Ride Captain Ride” by Blues Image. The song was popular in the U.S. in 1970. I recall being with my friend, Scott, and talking about the song, as he was supremely enamored with it. It’s a mellow rock tune and one that invoked a faraway cast to his gaze. I heard that he died of a drug overdose a few years later and have always wondered if the song about sailing to another world was his secret fantasty. Come on, we all have them, those secret fantasies. Before I move on from the song, I want to mention, this is the only Blue Image song I know.
Off to pursue my not-so-secret writing. Have the best Frida available. Cheers
A new scam is out there. “Scattered Spider” is behind it, according to the FBI, and they’re targeting airlines and airline passengers.
The FBI said the hackers, known as Scattered Spider, use “social engineering techniques” like impersonating employees or contractors to convince the target company’s IT help desks to grant them access to internal systems. “These techniques frequently involve methods to bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), such as convincing help desk services to add unauthorized MFA devices to compromised accounts,” the FBI said. “They target large corporations and their third-party IT providers, which means anyone in the airline ecosystem, including trusted vendors and contractors, could be at risk.”
I first learned about it a few weeks ago. Friends reported they’d been scammed. After struggling to get airline tickets, they called the airline. On the phone for about forty-five minutes, they finally were able to purchase their tickets.
None of it sat right with them. They called the number back and got air, so they decided to go to our local airport in Medford and address it at the ticket counter. There, they were told, “You have seats but no tickets.” That confused the agent as much as my friends. Further research was pursued with phone calls at the airport, and then the agents leaned in to my friends across the counter and said, “I’m afraid it appears that you’ve been scammed.”
Since that first time, two other people were scammed in similiar ways. All thought they were dealing with the airlines; but they’d been redirected without their awareness. People pretending to be the airline helped them out. The end, except it wasn’t.
Credit card companies were contacted. As their credit card numbers were now out there in con artists’ hands, new cards were needed.
All of this may or may not have been the ‘Scattered Spider’ group. Could be copycats or just others acting in parallel. It’s a messy, ugly world. It doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.
Sorry that I’m late with posting. Hope all were still able to carry on.
Today is Sunda, July 6, 2025. Temp right now, at 6:30 PM, is 94 F. Sunshine floods the valley and clouds have are absent, giving us an endless blue vision.
Slept the day away after requesting wife drive me to ER at 2:20 AM. Spent three hours there. Paralyzing and mounting abdominal plague began haunting me at 10:30 PM. Despite a pain killer, some antacids, and a couple glasses of water, it kept ratcheting up, and nausea began a background chorus. So, with deep and persistent mutterings about intercourse and life, we went to our local ER. The pain began in my back against my spine but soon became a traveller, going all over my upper abdominal area. I joked that an alien was in there trying to break out. BP was way up, temperature was normal. A couple rounds of morphine were IV’d into me. Blood was drawn. EKG was completed: looked great. Everything came back normal. With kidneys working, a CT scan was done: all normal among my organs. They finally said: looks like gas.
WHAT? WHAAAT? WHAAATTT?
Oh, wait. There might be something going on with your gall bladder. A follow-up course was established to investigate it.
The doctor said, avoid fatty foods and fried foods, and hydrate. Still moaning and groaning with pain and ab tenderness, my wife transported me home. I went in and violently puked for a couple minutes. With the tv on for company and a hot compress on my abs, I played with sleep. Pain subsided enough for a few hours and sleep was brokered. At 9:30, I consumed painkillers and anti-nausea meds they’d sent home with me. I returned to the idea of sleeping and fitfully did a Z dance for the next few hours before finally getting pain free at noonish. A bowl of buckwheat mash with blueberries and a couple chucks of papaya were cautiously consumed. Deep sleep came in for a four hour shift. And, BTW, my wife did a great job of taking care of me, as she always does
After being morphine’d while I was at ER, The Neurons ordered a dose of “King of Pain” by The Police for the early morning mental music stream. I laughed at the little skunks and their humor but the 1983 hit song is today’s theme music.
It’s been a no-coffee day. Dinner was a sweet potatoe with steamed veggies. Triple digits are playing for the area tomorrow. Time will tell with what comes next. Cheers
Floofments (floofinition) – Garments or articles of clothing used when engaging with animals. Origins: First known use, late 20th century, United States (South Carolina).
In Use: “Whenever something had to be done with Rolex (named for the way he watched) like administering medicine, giving Rollie a bath or clipping nails was pursued, Sue and Andi first donned well-worn floofments — essentially heavily used older clothing no longer worn in public and thick gloves — to protect their bodies.”
WordPress blues struck again. Reading another’s post, I moved to comment. WP responded, hey, is this you? We’re asking because you’re not logged in.
I clicked to another tab which indeed showed me logged in.
That led me to an uncomfortable place. I don’t want to log in and re-enter my password on a page asking for such when I’m already demonstrably logged into that site. Cause, suspiciously, even though the URL looked okay and the page seemed genuine, it smelled. It this wasn’t a digital offering on a laptop but instead something tangible, it would stink like milk left out in a hot apartment for a month. It would arouse suspicions like a Nigerian prince offering me a million dollars if I just loaned him five grand for a day.
That’s how we live these days, at least in my abode, where phones aren’t answered unless the number is known, where unexpected packages are treated with deadly caution, strangers knocking on the door are ignored, and links in emails are triple-vetted.
Of course, it might have been some sort of WordPress malfunction. That kinda happens, too.
They call it sticker shock. My wife and I labeled it a friggin’ kick in the head.
We decided to make brownies for our annual Fourth of July gathering. To give it an Independence Day flavor, red, white, and blue chocolate M&Ms would be added to the top. I hustled to the store to buy said M&Ms.
First stop, Bi-Mart, didn’t have them. Second stop, Albertson’s, did. One size: 38 ounces.
38 ounces. Seriously? Who needs that many M&Ms? But if I need to…I guess…
$15.99. On sale. Marked down from $17.99.
Get out of here. What are these, organic M&Ms hand-wrapped by virgins in gold foil?
Neither price was acceptable to me. As a boomer, I remember M&Ms as something I bought a little bag of for a quarter. Last time that I bought a pound of M&Ms, they were like $5. Even a pound bag seemed more than enough, and this wasn’t that many years ago. What are people doing, spooning M&Ms into their mouths?
The world has gone friggin’ nuts. I really am channeling the old codger in me, aren’t I?
Sunshine hangs long and hot. The temperature rests at 95 F. The sky darkens, heralding a fleet of clouds. The fleet burgeons as more clouds drift over to see what happens. Darkening and darkening under added layers of clouds, the sunshine skips out on the rest of the day. So dark at 4 PM, we’re forced into turning on houselights. Thunder cruises through with long throat clearing. We look out, talking out our thoughts, “Looks lik it’s going to rain.” “It’s going to storm.”
Wind dashes around and through the trees. Then it sinks.
The day grows still and dark. Feeling bored, the thunder slinks off. The darkness stays, the clouds remain, and the temperature puts it hat on 87 F, and stays there. Tension builds as we wait and look, asking each other, looking outside for clues, surfing the net for information. Friends share on the net, “weird weather.” No one knows nothin’; we wait.
It’s weather’s move.
The coffee shop had net problems today. Shrugging that away, I told myself, “Just write and check the net later.” Two and a half hours later, I’d finished 2300 words and the story had progressed as if I had some notion of what the hell was going on.
The Hunger Band was on my stomach’s center stage by then, their first notes careening through the rest of my bod. Coffee shop net still down, I listened to the Hunger Band’s sorrowful lyrics about dying of starvation and decided, “Yes, I’ve written enough. Time to go home and eat.”
Now to explore the kitchen to see what the Hunger Band will find acceptable. Salad? Maybe. Burrito?
Hmmm.
Michael Seidel, writer 