Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Flooftel (floofinition) – A hotel or motel that allows pets to stay or caters to pets. ‘Flooftel’ is often misused for ‘flooftella‘, but other than sharing the same roots, the two words are not related.
In use: “Although a luxury hotel, the Overleaf is also a flooftel, allowing pets to stay with their owners.”
I was reflecting on my Air Force command and control past today.
We’d begun moving into the small computer age back in the early 1980s. The Air Force — and the Defense Department — were being cautious. Locally, we realized that much of the repetitive, manual entries we did on logs, messages, and grease boards, along with the phone calls used to relay information, could be done via computers. We began visualizing and flow-charting the entire process. Military Airlift Command (MAC), which had operational control over us, said, no. Don’t. Stop.
At my next assignment, with Tactical Air Command (TAC), a young major had begun computerizing the mission flows. He was manually doing it himself. Watching him, I began asking questions about why he wasn’t doing this and that, which led to me taking over what he was doing. He and I had a lot of fun working on that. Five years and two assignments later, I was in Europe with a small flying unit. They had begun using computers to do some of the stuff I’d wanted to do. As soon as I saw it, I maneuvered to get involved.
They were happy as hell to let me. Controlled by the J-4 and J-5 Directorates of JCS, with input and oversight from the National Reconnaissance Organization (NRO) and NSA, USAFE didn’t care what I did. Locally, several officers were being advised that small computers were the future and were starting to take computer programming classes, but most weren’t familiar with them, so the commander and DO told me, “Go for it.”
So I did. By the time that I left four years later, other offices in my unit had enlisted my help, as did other units on base, asking me to share all the stuff I’d done with my small computers to automate and correlate information. My trend to incorporate computers continued with my next assignments with Space Command.
This all came to mind via “60 Minutes” and Crucible last night. “60 Minutes” featured a segment on Artificial Intelligent (AI). Crucible, a James Rollins thriller that I’m reading, features Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as part of the plot. I ended up thinking back to the MAC days and how and what robots could do. With scenes from WarGames flashing through my head, I visualized all those messages, reports, and phone calls associated with mission profiles, aircraft configurations and repairs, and mission execution, and how computers and robots could augment or replace humans.
It’s intriguing to think about. After a twenty years-plus career, I’ve been out of the military for over twenty years. They may have come to grips with many of the ideas I considered and the inherent obstacles.
Somehow, I doubt it. The military has always lagged behind for much of that, preferring to spend their annual funds to modernize weapon systems, if possible. You never know, though; those in charge have now grown up with computers as part of the digital age. My thinking would probably amuse them because they’ve gone so far past that. Oh, to be a bit in the system and overhear what’s going on.
Well, actually, I guess that’s what I was: a bit in the system.
Called Mom today to wish her happy birthday. I was born sixty-three years ago, today, if the records and Mom’s memory are accepted. I accept both, especially Mom’s memory. I wished her a happy birthday because she did all the work. I’m not lyin’, I don’t remember any of it. It was barely like I was there.
“Wasn’t I overdue?”
“Yes, eight days,” she answered.
“Oh, eight days. That’s nothing.”
“After nine months, it feel likes eight years.”
###
I woke up with pain. I knew it was time and woke your father up. “The baby’s coming. We need to go to the hospital now.”
I was already dressing. He got up slowly. While he dressed, I went down to the car. Our apartment was on the third floor. There wasn’t an elevator. I knew it would take me time to get down those three flights of stairs.
I was down in the car, and hard labor had begun. I wasn’t surprised. You sister took just three hours. I was in enormous pain because it was all happening so fast. I was wondering, what’s taking your father so long and kept blowing the horn, shouting, “Come on.”
He finally came down. I said, “What were you doing?”
He said, “I was combing my hair.” I could’ve killed him. No jury would have convicted me, if there was a woman on it.
He started driving, came up to a stop sign and started to stop. I said, “Do not stop.”
A motorcycle cop pulled us over right after that. Your father told him that I was in hard labor. The cop said, “Follow me.” He turned on his sirens. We blew through every red light and stop sign.
When we arrived at the Fort Belvoir hospital, the nurse came out to meet us. She said, “Oh my God, you’re in labor. You should have come in as soon as it started.”
I said, “I did. I got here as soon as I could.”
She said, “Let me get a wheel chair.”
I started labor right at six in the morning. You were born at seven twenty-four.
After giving birth, I was taken to the maternity ward. There were seventeen beds, all with women who’d just given birth. A major came in. She said, “All you ladies who gave birth yesterday need to do your exercises.” This was a military hospital, remember. They didn’t coddle you. They were military, and they treated you like you were in the military. Visitors and flowers, candy, all that wasn’t allowed, because they worried about germs and infections, and they began exercising you right away.
Well, I’d just given birth, so I didn’t exercise. The major said to me, “You. Why aren’t you exercising?”
I said, “I just gave birth four hours ago.”
“Do your exercises. Now.” So I did.
The next day, we dragged our iron beds down the hall to another ward, where we were discharged. You were thirty-two hours old when I took you home.
A stream popped into my mind. It began with Reese Witherspoon. I’d read some article on her. I remembered her as Tracy Flick in Election. Then I struggled with, who was the male lead in that movie?
First to pop into my thinking was that guy from Fidelity, you know, the one who starred in Grosse Pointe Blank? He has that sister, Joan.
Yes, John Cusack, that’s right. No, that wasn’t him in Election. Whoever was in Election had been in WarGames, Biloxi Blues, and The Freshman. A Matthew. Clean-cut, kind of a boyish look. Matthew… Ward? What? No. Matthew. Matt…LeBlanc. No. Matthew Perry. Shut up. Matthew McConaughey. No, fool. Matthew…Matthew…
Damn.
Go back. Ally Sheedy was in WarGames. That doesn’t help. Matthew was in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, remember? Yes, what’s his last name? What’s his last name? Married to Sarah Jessica Parker. Remember her in L.A. Story as Steve Martin’s character’s young girlfriend?
At last: Broderick. Matthew Broderick.
Thank you.
Now who played the scientist in WarGames? Was in 9 to 5, Tootsie, Cloak and Dagger… Starts with a D. Daryl?
What?
“Eating the rich has no nutritional value.”
I read that on the package, in the nutritional panel, before I buy the cookies. Nothing about fiber, sugars, or fat. “No vitamins are in this product,” the manufacturer claims. Serving size is stated, “Whatever you can pack in.” My kind of cookies.
I’d gone to the store for something snaky and discovered the “Eat the Rich” cookies. I put them after musing about whether these will satisfy my needs, but take no chances and add a hefty brownie from the bakery. After arriving home, I open the cookie package with tenderness, preserving the package so I can close it later to preserve the cookies’ freshness. I also like that cookie Mount Rushmore of rich people on the front. Trump, Gates, the Koch Brothers, and Jamie Dimon are easily recognized. So is the Queen of England.
I pull a few cookies from the bag. Naturally, I want to eat Trump first. Well, I don’t know if that’s natural, but it is my impulse. The bag’s back lists all the rich cookies that they make but caution that not all the rich may be inside. They warn, too, some cookies might be broken.
All the cookies are busts of rich people. I find a Donald J. Trump. Orange, the resemblance is pretty good, for a cookie. I sniff it for impressions and get nothing. I figure, the cookie being orange, it might taste like pumpkins or orange, maybe lemon or some other citrus flavor. No; it tastes like cold and greasy McDonald’s Big Mac and French fries. Despite that, I eat the whole thing. I feel a little sick when I finish it. It leaves a bad aftertaste.
Half a cup of hot coffee dilutes the aftertaste. I check out other rich cookies and discover the cookies have the people’s names on the back. Bill Gates. David Koch. Queen Elizabeth. Mark Cuban. Alice Walton. Howard Schultz. Musk. Bezos. Zuckerberg. Sergey Brin.
David Koch’s cookie is white as a plastic Starbucks lid. No smell to it. I take a bite. Hard and crunchy, it has no taste. Frosted pink, with a pink hat. Queen Elizabeth is more appealing. Nibbling on her hat, I’m rewarded by a sweet raspberry lemonade taste. She’s so yummy, I eat her all.
I find a Larry Ellison but I don’t want to eat it and move on to another shortbread offering, Mark Zuckerberg. He’s white-faced with brown hair, with a frosted white shirt and the shoulders of a blue suits showing. I munch on the suit. A flavor I can’t identify overwhelms me. Another bite also mystifies me, reminding me of raw broccoli covered with milk chocolate. I want another bite. Sourness coats my tongue. Dill pickles. Despite that, I want one more bite. A black licorice flavor rises.
Half the cookie is gone. I figure I’ll finish it and stop. Zuckerberg’s head tastes like cotton candy one one side and bad tuna fish on the other. Two bites remain. First one is lemony but the second one tastes like forty cats shat in my mouth.
I drink the rest of my coffee to drown the flavors. After a minute, I start looking through the cookies for another Zuckerberg. That first, mystifying flavor haunts me. I don’t have any more Zuckerberg cookies. I head to the store to buy another bag, but it’s like they say: Zuckerberg might not be in the next bag. Although the bags cost ten dollars each, I buy three bags to improve my chances of getting a Zuckerberg.
Driving home, I wonder about that. He reminds me of Facebook. I don’t know what I’ll get but I feel like I must keep looking.
***
This is entirely fake news. I don’t know if “Eat the Rich” cookies exist outside of my imagination. They were just a whim springing out of a glance at a bag of frosted animal cookies.
Finals week ended on a Thursday.
We’d finished Game of Thrones last month (and I’m still going through withdrawal). June found us beginning and ending Good Omens. We also completed the second season of The OA, the final season of Sneaky Pete, the only season of Happy, and the latest available season of The Orville. The night before last, I finished The Expanse and we watched the last episode of season two of Barry. (I read that HBO has renewed it for a third season). Last night, I watched the final Bad Blood (is it over?). Tonight, we watched the final episode of The Colony. They’ve announced that it’s cancelled.
I thought Good Omens was well done. I thought Michael McKean stood out. Tennant and Sheen did the impressive jobs that I always expect of us. Good Omens certainly entertained us, especially after a Wanda Sykes comedy special, Not Normal, warmed us up for the final episode.
All that’s left now is to wait for something else to catch our interest. In the meantime, plenty of books remain to be read. First, I think I’ll play a game on the computer.
You watching anything interesting?
Floofbrarian (floofinition) – an animal who resides in a library.
In use: “Harriet, a Brooklyn Art Library floofbrarian, is a great help to all who enter the library.”
h/t to ForwardDog.com and The Sketchbook Project for Harriet’s photograph.
My wife pursues an eternal quest to improve our health. Frequent new food stuffs are introduced to the home. I usually try them to observe what impact they seem to have on me as well as how they taste.
Not all work out. Our pantry has a shelf of forgotten foods and drinks that neither of us adopted as part of our normal diet habits. I think one jar is marked “Best By Oct 2003”. We can’t bring ourselves to throw it out. We’re just too sentimental.
Today, I give you beetroot juice.
Beet juice, according to WebMD, is supposed to be terrifically healthy. Well, juice from the root is supposed to be even better, a superfood that will amaze you.
Okay, we said, buying some from our local heath food store. Amaze us.
It comes in a fine, whitish powder form, like chalk. Adding the desired amount to a glass of water and stirring gives you a red drink that looks like cherry Kool-Aid.
It don’t taste like cherry Kool-Aid.
It tastes like beets. That’s not a problem, if you like eating soiled old socks. I know that I probably seem old-fashioned, but I take exception to the taste of socks in my mouth.
But holy-moly, the beetroot juice has a kick.
The first time that I drank it, it was like I’d been injected with niacin. I felt flushed and hot. Every pore was utilized to let the sweat burst out of me. I drank it late in the evening. That wasn’t a good idea; I then had too much energy to sleep, as if I’d had a quint-shot mocha right before going to bed.
We’ve learned that this isn’t an uncommon reaction. Besides that, we discovered that our beetroot drinking should not be done around the same time as our coffee drinking. Some people suggested drinking beetroot instead of coffee. Oh, how we laughed as we plotted on how to eliminate people making such cruel suggestions.
The coffee wasn’t given up. I moved my beetroot drinking to the late afternoon. My reaction isn’t as severe as that first venture, but let me tell you, it’s like my brain has been vacuumed clean and my senses have been blown out. My thinking and memory both seem sharper. My creativity level seems to have been kicked to another level, too.
I’m more ambivalent about its impact on my dreams. I already dreamed and remembered my dreams (or imagined that I did), and this beetroot juice seems to have me dreaming with my clarity and remembering them with more details.
It could be a coincidence, but my writing output jumped after I started drinking the beetroot juice. I typically typed about twelve to fifteen hundred words a day. Now I’m typing twenty-five hundred to thirty-five hundred a day. I’m typing an extra half hour because I just don’t want to stop. That’s a significant difference over a ten day period.
It also helped my walking output. I’d been riding a streak of sixty miles per week the day that I began drinking the beetroot juice. I frankly didn’t think I’d be able to sustain it for another week, which was a bummer. But the beetroot juice revitalized me, so I’ve now gone six weeks averaging sixty miles a week.
The one drawback that I’ve noticed is that the beetroot juice doesn’t go with other foods, especially anything sweet, and especially bananas. I swear, I’ll never eat a banana and drink beetroot juice again.
Bank on that.
Floofnet (floofinition) – 1. Quantum communications systems used by animals to share information such as gossip, homes that give out food and treats, and warnings of danger. 2. World wide web that’s devoted to animals.
In use: “People always assumed that animals sniffed one another to pass messages and learn more. The reality is that such behavior was respected by the animals as an ancient tradition, although they admitted that it was also part of their disinformation campaign to keep humans ignorant of their abilities. They’d long before replaced sniffing with the floofnet, an almost instantaneous method of sharing information across long distances.”
Seen on a pickup truck in town.
Pickup truck is an interesting expression. Why is it used? According to Wikipedia.org, it’s of unknown origins, but was used by Studebaker in 1913, although it was hyphenated as two words then.
