Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
I turn to the news. Hamas attacked Israel with missiles. Israel declares they’re in a state of war.
A sigh builds and falls.
Here we go again. More war. As so much of it has proven so useful in the past.
Just see how it’s going for Putin after Russia attacked Ukraine.
Mood: philosophical
Hello, fellow life travelers. Welcome to another day of the journey.
Today is Friday, October 6, 2023. Buoyed by a balmy zephyr it’s already seventy outside and the sunshine rules. 86 F will be our high, I’m assured.
I’m in a reflective mood today, the product of a night of dreams. Days often seem so closely like the one the day before it and so in, like we’re standing in a hall of mirrors looking backwards and forwards to the same thing being endlessly repeated.
Not true, of course. The seasons change. So does the daily weather. So does how we physically feel and appear, typically in small ways, hour by hour, day by day, month by month through our piece of time. Yeah, many changes are seen but unless there’s a sudden sharp intrusion, most of our visible changes come in slow increments. Sometimes the pace of change can take a lifetime. I’m often surprised looking in the mirror or suddenly unable to do something that I used to do without thought. The change was coming but I didn’t see it.
After reading about the speaker selection process going on, The Neurons are having fun. Politicians who horrify me are being mentioned, like Steve Scalise and Jim Jordan. Neither of them have done anything in my purview which generates respect and admiration; instead, I found myself mildly ill at the thought they might become Speaker. I can’t imagine them being reliably intelligent or skillful enough to pull together the GOP and keep them focused. I’d use the metaphor about the GOP being as unmanageable as a herd of cats, but I like cats and don’t want to insult them.
Back to The Neurons. After reading and thinking, I found myself with “Better Man” by Pearl Jam circling the morning mental music stream (Trademark swirling). Jordan? Scalise? Can’t they find a better man or woman? Like that, Eddie Vedder is singing, “Can’t find a better man,” in my mental stream as The Neurons giggle and guffaw. Silly little immature booger heads.
Stay positive and keep reaching for the stars. Let’s embrace this day and go forward. Here’s the music. Cheers
Yes, a large part of our press is all about monetizing the news. Monetizing it means excitement is needed. What’s more exciting than a horse race!
This is just one example of how the press fails the nation (and world) by playing meaningless whataboutisms, and doing sloppy, superficial comparisions between the parties, candidates, and so on, in a tortured effort ‘to be balanced’.
Last night, a group of us met to have ‘a beer’ and talk.
Politics came up. They always do. One of my friends was very excited about an idea he had: what if Liz Cheny was nominated to be House Speaker?
This is in reference to the Republican mess now going in the US House of Representatives. Rep. McCarthy, an R from California, was voted into the office in January of this year. It took fifteen rounds of voting and many promises from him to win the office. Less than ten months into the year, another Republian, Matt Gaetz of Florida, decided that McCarthy should be removed.
I’m simplifying. The GOP is a fractured party these days. I read that there are now six factions. One faction isn’t interested in governing; they just want to make life difficult for everyone until Donald Trump is POTUS again.
The latest fracas which brought down McCarthy was the battle to fund the government and avoid a shutdown. McCarthy ended up making a deal with Democrats to pass the legislation. That angered Gaetz and others. Thus Gaetz made his move.
Former representative Liz Cheney, R out of Wyoming, daughter of career politician Dick Cheney, was voted out of office for her stand on President Trump. A Republican, Trump won the election to be POTUS in 2016 as a bombastic outsider. He’s a polarizing person. He’s been documented to be a serial liar. History has shown him to cheat contractors. He’s constantly in court, suing, and counter-suing people and businesses. Trump made promises that he didn’t keep. He’s been married three times and has been known to have several affairs. All in all, his character, as seen by the public, is less than shiny. Yet, he manages to keep a base of supporters who will do anything for him.
Democrats decided to start impeachment proceedings — twice. The second was initiated after Trump escalated declarations that he hadn’t lost the election to remain POTUS, but had it stolen from him. He made speeches to that effect and claimed there was overwhelming evidence. That ‘evidence’ was presented to courts sixty-one times. No court agreed with him. The SCOTUS refused to hear any cases about it. Yet, Trump persisted. The riot in the Capital on Jan. 6, 2021, was the breaking point for many when Trump refused to take action to mitigate the escalating violence.
Liz Cheney was one of the few Republicans who thought Trump may have broken the law and violated his presidential duties. She agreed that it was incumbent on the House, as a body of government used as part of the checks and balances on executive power, should investigate the facts. Most of the rest of the GOP didn’t agree and Cheney ended up outed from office.
My buddy’s idea is interesting. Everyone agreed that Cheney is ethical and would probably be effective as Speaker.
But could she ever be voted in in the first place? Doubtful that Republicans would; they made little to save her from being voted out of office before. She was derided as a RINO – Republian in name only.
And it’s unlikely that Cheney would pick up votes from Democrats. While she’s considered ethical by most, she still had many positions which Democrats won’t accept. When in office, she voted for and supported Trump’s policies and positions. She was, in effect, a Trump enabler, which is what led to this mess.
Why would Democrats want to restore such an enabler to a position of power? I don’t.
So I told my friend last night.
It was The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in our backyard, if that movie was done by cats.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is a 1966 spaghetti western film. That name, ‘spaghetti western’ was given to a series of western films based on the US west, but generally written, directed, and produced by Italians and filmed in Europe. Sergio Leone was one the leaders of this movement. With a string of successful films, he became influential in how westerns were made. This film was one of his masterpieces and judged by film critics to be significant.
Clint Eastwood starred in several spaghetti westerns, including this one. The movie’s morally complex story is that three gunfighters are searching for stolen gold during the American Civil War. The gold is supposed to be buried in a cemetery. The three men are searching and fighting for it while coping with the war going on. They eventually find the cemetery. A final showdown is set up.
It’s a climatic scene, delivered with long shots of the three gunfighters interspersed with tight close ups of the squinting and sweating sunburned men as flies pester them. These movies were always gritty and tense, with impressively realistic details. A music box is playing – yes, it’s part of the story – along with the titular theme song. When the music box finishes, the gunfight commences and finishes the tale.
My cats, Papi and Tucker, aided by a stranger, recreated the scene in the backyard. A jay provided the background ‘music’. Standing in an equilateral triangle about eighteen feet apart, Tucker and Papi faced off against a gray and white stranger.
Tucker is a black and white long-haired/short-haired mix with crazy long, white whiskers. There looks like some Maine coon in those whiskers, along with his ears and face shape. He used to be a fierce fighter but has finally chilled as he’s aged. Papi, the ginger blade, is years younger. He’s been in a few fights – he was in one just last night – including at least twice with Tucker, but prefers to not fight if fighting can be avoided.
A strong wind was blowing. Tucker was in sunlight on a small knoll on which three trees are perched. Their branches blew wildly over his head. The stranger was back by the wooden plank fence between two bushes. Papi was in shadowed dark green grass. The only movement I saw on the three floofs were small eye slides and ear shifts.
Though Tucker isn’t the right ‘colors’ to be Eastwood, his expression was worthy of being Clint’s character. I could easily imagine a cigar in Tucker’s mouth as he stared down the other.
A few minutes into it, Papi slowly settled into a more comfortable watching posture. Tucker followed suit a couple minutes later, encouraging the third cat to do the same. They stayed like that for about three minutes. Then, Papi, I guess growing bored, looked around and discreetly walked off. Tucker lowered his head down for a nap. The stranger carefully shifted, and then went up the fence and away from the scene.
All very anticlimactic. While it reminded me of the famous movie scene, none of these three participants were ugly. I can’t speak for the stranger, but my two can sometimes be good, or bad. Come to think of it, they’re as morally complex as the gunfighters, and just as entertaining.
Mood: rebellious
Mornin’. It’s Wednesday, October 4, 2023. At least that’s what my coffee said.
White marshmallow clouds blanket us from horizon to horizon in Ashlandia, where the tourists are dwindling and the locals are arguing. Blue sky and sunshine are chiseling through the clouds but it’s an uneven venture. 58 degrees F now, they’re seducing us with suggestions that 71 F is possible today. Looking at the clouds and feeling the air’s chilly fingers, my visage is askew with doubt.
As far as plans and activities for today, I’m still an avid spectator of the NY v. Trump civil fraud case. I am progressive and not a Trump. The proceedings are engrossing as Trump tries bullying the judge and intimidating others, and fascinating how Trump’s lawyers are working hard on the appeal angle, as though the trial’s results have already been shown.
Likewise, the ousting of McCarthy as Speaker of the US House of Representatives holds my attention. I was wondering what Rep. Gaetz was trying to do when he initiated these proceedings. It seemed like a petulant child’s demand. Ousting the current speaker without having another in line seems like poor judgment, politics, and organization. Conversely, one of the GOP’s continuing strains is to show the Federal government is ineffective, giving them grounds for more dismantling, so he might be thinking this was a good way to make government more inefficient.
But — it could also be that this is just another hardline GOP tactic to undermine President Biden’s ability to govern and/or tank the economy to make him — and the other Democrats — more vulnerable in the upcoming 2024 elections.
Finally in my mind, this could be a ploy to create an opening to make DJ Trump the Speaker. I was wondering how many Republican representatives would actually support that idea. Something to research later.
Also drawing my attention yesterday and today was Kari Lake’s demand that all Republicans cease their campaigns and throw all their energy and efforts into supporting Donald Trump. In her eyes, the election which he lost and the way he’s now being treated as a citizen facing investigations and trials is cruel and unfair. (Sob, sob, so sad.) She called it a line in the sand.
Between her rhetoric and Trump’s rising sharp calls for different people to be shot (such as retiring general Mark Milley) or attacked, it really makes me wonder where Trump and his supporters really want to go.
BTW, did you see Mr. Trump’s call for shoplifters to be shot? Pretty dramatic for small crimes, isn’t it? Bit of overkill, perhaps? Not more than a little ironic for a man accused of and on trial for multiple much more serious charges. At least he’s able to defend himself in court, whereas he called for police to shoot shoplifters as they leave the store. So much for those Bill of Rights and the presumption of innocence.
It’s interesting, too, that Trump is basically calling for shooting white people. A study I read of shoplifting arrests show that over 70% of shoplifters are white, which is significant because the US population is about 58% white (back then). This info is from a 2014 study in the American Journal of Psychiatry, so it’s a little dated.
Which is weird, isn’t it, his call for shoplifters to be shot? Because white voters make up Trump’s base, right? At least that’s the presumptive assumption.
Although we who watch and read what Trump does and says, and his low awareness of truth and reality are not surprised; I’m certain Trump is assuming that shoplifters are people of color.
BTW, that same study showed that females are more likely to shoplift than males.
All those spectacles somehow inspired The Neurons to play some Talking Heads. Der Neurons are specifically cranking “Road to Nowhere” from 1985 in the morning mental music stream (Trademark embittering). I found a nice video of David Byrne performing it live. Hope you enjoy it.
Listening to the music prompted me to question, are we as a nation on the road to nowhere? Or is it the GOP, tearing themselves apart with political theater because their only policy is to ban, overturn, and throwback policies and ideas to a long ago decade?
Much more coffee is needed on my part to understand these things. Be strong, stay positive, test negative, and carry on. I’ll try doing the same. Here’s the music. Cheers
Revision continues. Read. Change. Correct.
Two complicated chapters slowed progress. They remain in need of fixes. But I think their changes should be addressed in context of the entire story. So I press on into the next chapter. Read. Revise.
Those were complicated chapters. And important because of the revelations they delivered. So going through them meant patience and diligence.
But I felt that I lost some of the thread. I wondered if I was confusing myself with attempting too many changes to improve the flow. So, I want to let those chapters slip out of mind and see how they read the next time they’re approached in their natural order.
Page 306 is under scrutiny. The main protagonist is enduring an unidentified illess. Going through the prose affects me. Empathizing with the character, nausea and lethargy overtakes me. Dryness spreads from my lips, invading my mouth, takes over my tongue, slipping into my throat. My eyes grow weary. I want to stop.
But there are goals. There must be discipline. The goal for today’s session is to reach page 330, a completely arbitrary number presented to the pscyhe because I work better with order, structure, and goals, a condition of my personality and my work history.
After page 330 is reached, eighty pages will remain.
First, I’m going on a break. Stretch. Walk in the sunshine. Breathe in, as the character tells himself, breathe out. Like the song “Machinehead” by Bush: breathe in, breathe out.
I’m not looking for perfection. I just want to be happy with the story.
Just for the record, my preferred pronouns are he/him.
I respect others’ choices. The idea of gender is a wholly human creation, a long-ago first stab at categorizing creatures as we sought to understand their roles. Like many things in science, it was an okay first guess. I’d say that it’s a better guess than the idea that the Earth is flat, that fish went underwater for the winter, or that the universe revolves around the Earth. Those were all accepted scientific truths.
But we evolve, study, and learn. We test ideas and form new ones. New angles and insights develop. What we know about sex and gender, and gender identity, is much different today than what was known a hundred years ago.
It all becomes problematic because it’s hard to let go of things we previously learned, to understand that we made some conclusions which aren’t quite right. It’s also challenging because so many of our mores, roles, and language is tied up with gender and sex.
As societies, we’re struggling now, much as we’ve strugged to learn and change in previous centuries. Eventually, we’ll grasp the complications and grow to understand that it’s not just about male and female. By then, of course, the needle will have moved, and we’ll know yet more that will force us to face new challenges.
Such is the beauty of science and our existence. As much as we learn, we come to understand how little we know. Assumptions and conclusions which we consider solid and resolve are proven to be wrong. And that gives us the opportunity to keep striving to learn and keep up.
I, for one, am always falling behind. But I’m gonna keep trying.
Mood: positive
Let’s close our eyes and bow our heads; September, 2023, is passing. Today is Saturday, September 30, 2023. A fresh month — October — begins tomorrow.
“Alexa, weather,” I say.
“It’s 49 degrees in Ashland. Today’s high will be 62 degrees. Today’s forecast includes showers.”
I’m boiling her response down. Alexa is one of three sources for my daily weather info. The other two are my home system and wunderground.com online. I also often scan MSN’s weather forecast for us.
I do this because we’re located on the fringe of a small town, about three and a half miles long, with a population of about 20,000. I live on the southern end. The town is in a valley alongside Interstate 5. The southern end is where the valley pinches together and becomes a pass. For all these reasons, getting precise weather forecasts is troublesome. We’re usually a few degrees warmer than the forecast in the summer and a few degrees colder in fall and winter.
I don’t doubt Alexa’s forecast for today. It rained off and on through the night. Rainclouds are as thick as a Black Friday shopping crowd. Those clouds don’t look like they’re going to wander off without dropping more rain on us.
The cats are happier and more mellow with this weather. Both come in for shelter, washing before napping. Papi’s preference is the master bed where I keep a folded blanket at the foot for the cats. Tucker will used that at night, but it’s Papi’s during the daytime. Tucker prefers being with us in the daytime. He’ll haunt the desk in the snug, sleeping to the right of me, shoving around papers and rearranging equipment. I enjoy having him there, with his cute little black and white face and long, whirly whiskers at repose as he sleeps.
My wife and I have plans for the evening. Scienceworks is doing an outdoor showing of the movie E.T. Show starts at 6:30 PM. There will be food and beverage trucks, along with an ice cream truck.
Forecasts for that period tell us it’ll be colder by then, and it’ll be raining. Should be fun.
My wife particularly wants to go because she only saw E.T. once. This was when we were stationed on Okinawa, Japan. We saw a VHS bootleg copy of the movie, and the production values were terrible. Bootleg copies of films and TV shows was how we saw a lot of things in those pre-net, pre satellite TV days. Phoning home was still a major production that required us to go to the USO and use one of their expensive long-distance lines.
Well, with talk of “phone home” and memories of the way it was in 1982, Les Neurons have cranked up ELO’s 1977 song, “Telephone Line” for the morning mental music stream (Trademark fantasy). Makes sense, and I will allow it.
Stay pos and be cool, and strong. I’m refreshing my coffee — do you want a topoff? Here’s the music. Let the real day commence. Cheers
Everything is changing. I’m not stupid. I know that it’s not unusual for things to change. Weather changes, clothes, all that. I’m not stupid.
This is different, you know? This is real change.
I was born in 2032. May, a taurus. I can’t remember much of my early life. I guess it was okay. Then the crumble began. You know, bridges collapsing, blackouts, gas and electricity shortages, water shortages.
I remember that from when I was around ten and our school was shut down. Dad said that taxes had been cut, so you know, the government didn’t have the money for schools, and we couldn’t afford a pay school. Dad was working a full-time job and two part-time jobs. Mom was working three part-time gigs. Working their asses off, both of them. My auntie, who was disabled from diabetes, schooled me and my sisters and cousins in our family room. That’s where she lived.
I did what I could myself. Made some change from helping with cleanups. People would abandon their cars and places, and I’d pirate things and sell them door to door. Tapes and books, old computers, that kind of thing.
We were always hungry, picking berries, apples, plums, whatever we could find. Best time was when I was a teen. Used to be able to pay two dollars to bus tables for fifteen minutes in a restaurant. They let me eat anything that was left. I’d try to stuff things in my pockets for my family, if I could, but I was so damn hungry all the time.
That lasted ‘bout five years. Now I’m 31, and it’s all gone. I’m trying to find a new gig but all I got is my ‘lectric bike and clothes. Most days, it’s too hot to be outside, you know? Gets over 110 by noon, and then climbs twenty degrees more.
Like Mom used to say all the time, the times, they are a-changin’.
Michael Seidel, writer 