Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Snap, crackle, and whoosh. September’s final Frida descends on us. September 26, 2025. 54 F outside. Sunshine, blue sky, changing trees, classic Americana fall look. We’ll climax at 80 F today.
Dreams again propel today’s music choice. I’ve been dreaming deeply, frequently, vividly. While thinking about last night’s featured dream this morning, all about a boat ride on a wide river on an overcrowded boat, followed by a fast drive on a wide highway in an overcrowded car, Les Neurons brought Mazzy Star into the morning mental music stream and “Fade into You” plays.
[Verse 1]
I wanna hold the hand inside you
I wanna take the breath that’s true
I look to you and I see nothing
I look to you to see the truth
You live your life, you go in shadows
You’ll come apart and you’ll go blind
Some kind of night into your darkness
Colors your eyes with what’s not there
[Chorus]
Fade into you
Strange you never knew
Fade into you
I think it’s strange you never knew
h/t to Genius.com
Reading last night, this morning. Realizing again how much U.S. conservatives feast on violence and hypocrisy. Decry violence, but always blame others for it, and never do anything about it except their Twister edition of the blame game. In that way, they’ll always have their violence, always have their game to play, which distracts and enrages their base, and keeps conservatives going. If not for violence and taking down freedoms, and giving tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy, the GOP has no platform. Sure, the claim they’re for law and order. Anyone without their head up Trump’s ass knows that’s a play they’re putting on. The GOP staunchly declare they’re for small gov’t, another farce as they launch government into being meddlesome and invasive while reducing the ways in which it’s helpful. GOP also lectures that it’s for state’s rights, but that’s only when doing so serves them. No, they’re for big, controlling, violent government.
The Trump Regime likes to brag ’bout how great it is. How wonderful they’re making the United States. Trump is especially bullish about his accomplishments but when you line up the facts, he comes across like a fourth grader bragging about getting the best grade in class when it turns out he failed. This thought comes after reading a Daily Kos piece about Trump’s FEMA withholding funding from hurricane victims. Trump’s alternate female version, Kristi Noem, bragged about how fast they were doing it. Turns out the states are saying, nope. We’re not getting much help from them.
Hope peace and grace shows up in your day. If it shows up in mine, I’ll offer it some coffee, something to eat, something to feed upon and grow. Got my coffee. Awaaay we go. Cheers
“Right now, it’s 71 degrees in Ashland,” Alexa burbles. Yeah, bull. I check my Oregon Scientific home system. 58 F. That feels correct. Wherever Alexa gleans her weather, it’s down in the valley, where the sunshine has cleared the mountains and trees enough to burn off the mountain night chill.
This is Twozda, September 23, 2025. Autumn has grabbed the season. Trees are doing their leafy transformation. Travel ‘n tilt are spinning us toward the cold in the Earth’s uppers. Summer is coming down under. Still, sunshine will unfold and coddle us in Ashlandia until we’re crisping in the mid 90s. That’s F. For Fahrenheit.
Headlines are blushing about one of Trump’s newest EO. Dancing off shards of his alternate reality, TACO declared antifa a terrorist organization. Antifa is neither of those things. But that Donnie’s showing his inferior mind skills. Also blasts open impressions that he’s not the spear tip of a fascist movement. What better says that you’re fascist than to outlaw an antifascist movement? The question to put to Donnie and his ilk: how many terrorists attacks has antifa been behind? But we know Donnie will bluster something like “three hundred million,” without moving a wrinkle. He’ll smoothly lie, “Antifa was burning down D.C. Making it unsafe to walk the streets in Los Angeles, Chicago, Memphis.” His brain and mouth cannot connect with truth, facts, and reality. Like, it’s rightwingers who are the primary source of U.S. violence. Most prevalent among them are white males bleating about how unfair life has been to them. Like Donnie. Look at the gun facts. Men, and white men, are more likely to be a shooter. They’re usually conservative to right-wing. Like Donnie. But in Donnie’s alternate history, he is a hero, and not a feckless bully, fool, and coward. Otherwise he’d come right out and fess up to his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
I was thinking about Trump’s sentences. How they tangle. Lines of Christmas lights. Hoary spider webs. Restaurant clink and babble. Some words pop up in a brief burst of sense. “Then he said that he wasn’t going to do that. I got so angry.” Then the tide of indecipherable overwhelms again. Some cheeky Neurons responded with “Blinded by the Light”. Manfred Mann’s Earth Band had a hit out of it. Bruce Springsteen wrote the lyrics. It’s one of those songs that even when you know the words, some troubled region still queries, “But what does it mean?” That’s how I think of much of what Delicate Donnie says: but what does it mean? The gibberish is almost English as spoken by someone not tethered to precepts of logic, history, and sentence structure.
Hope peace and grace get out from under the rock and comes out and gives us some support. Coffee has found a place among my Neurons. Here we go. Cheers
Unfettered by good sense, morality, or wise advisors, Trump is more frequently turning to violence for answers. A few months ago, he sent the U.S. national guard to LA on trumped up ideas about ‘restoring the city’. All with half a brain knew we were witnessing political theater and an attempt to intimidate anyone who opposes him. He’s threatened or used the same tactics on other cities, including the nation’s capitol, Washington, D.C. Each time, these are ‘blue’ cities, which means the Democratic Party holds many leadership positions. Each time, too, the facts about crime rates and violence which he cites are absolute lies.
Trump employed the U.S. military to attack Iran to destroy their nuclear weapons capabilities. Its success is questionable. Since then, he used the U.S. military to attack and kill eleven people in international waters. He gave no evidence to justify his actions. Acting like the king he thinks he is, he’s decided he has a divine right to attack and kill others if he deems them a threat. He’s shown the same disregard for intelligence, critical thought, and law as his minions employ armed and masked ICE agents to disappear people, regardless of their legal status, often making up questionable reasons for their actions.
Now, when someone who supported him, Charlie Kirk, a person who advocated violence, was killed, Trump blamed, without evidence, ‘radical left violence’. In his catalogue of political violence, Trump never mentions the violence he has advocated. He never mentions his supporters’ attack on Congress on Jan 6. Instead, he pardoned those people and rewarded one who was killed while breaking in and refusing police officer’s orders to stop. As Robert Reich writes, Trump never mentions Democrats who have been shot and killed. Trump calls Democrats enemies of the United States and treats them as such. He likes to make believe that he’s as strong and ethical as fictional characters like Superman.
But Trump, with his words and behavior, continues to display his brand as a bully, a divider who preaches hate. He’s a threat to common sense, peace, and justice, and he needs to face facts for a change and step up and take responsibility for the rising violence and polarization in the United States.
Before it worsens.
We’re in a weather triangle, a tangle of seasonal changes. Summer is drifting away, taking its warmth and going elsewhere. Today’s high is 75 F, an eleven-degree scramble from our current posture. Thunderstorms threaten again. Looking back, we had few days over 100 F, a relief from previous years when clusters of such days savaged us. Much more rain is visited upon us than usual, allaying drought worries. For the record, this is Thirstda, September 11, 2025.
So, here we sit, looking back at 9/11 while pondering the assassination of Charles Kirk. I’m in a triangulation of despair about the U.S.’s polarization and violence, lamenting, another gun killing, and dismayed reflection on Kirk’s rhetoric, spewed often, about killing others. Some will say that his death by gun seems karmic; he’s reaping what he ordered for others. We’ll see the question, is this a tipping point for the U.S., often played out. We won’t know until we’re further down the road. What we do know is that Kirk, as we often see from the right in the U.S. in this age, cherry-picked Bible verses to foment resentment, hate, and violence. What we also expect is some spillage from the conspiracy machine, trying to use Kirk’s death as a wedge between us, trying to make a bad situation worse. Unfortunately, that’s how some people now think.
There’s one clear bennie for Trump from this, in that Kirk’s death will be a distraction and take some pressure off Trump about his relationship with Epstein and lessen the drumbeat to release the files.
Meanwhile, from down south in northern California, emerged a story about vanishing rural hospitals. SF Gate reports, “The closure of Glenn Medical Center, located north of Sacramento in remote Glenn County, is expected to happen as soon as next month. It’s one of at least 28 anticipated hospital closures in rural California, which is confronting financial hardship under the Trump administration’s punitive health care policies that include cracking down on access to coverage for patients who are in the country without permission.” The county housing Glenn Medical Center went for Trump 2:1. FAFO.
The problem with writing this off as FAFO and moving on is that thinking people know the reciprocal and collateral effects of rural hospitals shutting down. Beyond the simple impact that those citizens will now need to travel further for healthcare, their healthcare will decline. It’s inevitable. To travel further, they’ll need to take more time off from work. Most will resist doing that, resist making those trips. That’s often how the human mind works. They’ll hold off for whatever rationalizations they fed themselves and then it will be too late for some. Unemployment will climb as these hospitals and medical centers close. The lack of such facilities will make these communities less attractive for living and business opportunities. What company will want to move a factory there, when basics like medical treatment is limited? The ironic center of all this is that they’re Trump voters and brought it on themselves by supporting Trump and his agenda. There’s no joy in seeing and knowing that. Just weariness.
Today’s song is by the Rolling Stones. This is a 1968 beat. “Sympathy for the Devil” focuses on human violence through Satan’s viewpoint. “Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name. But what’s puzzlin’ you is the nature of my game.”
I watched with glee while your kings and queens
Fought for ten decades for the gods they made
I shouted out, “Who killed the Kennedys?”
When, after all, it was you and me
Let me please introduce myself
I’m a man of wealth and taste
And I laid traps for troubadours
Who get killed before they reach Bombay
h/t to Genius.com
So now we shout out, who killed Charles Kirk? When after all, it’s you and me, and our polarized, paralyzed government. Pleased to meet you.
On to a ‘new day’. Coffee has blessed my taste buds. May grace and peace find us all. Cheers
The headline misled me.
Biggest-Ever Black Hole With Mass Of 36 Billion Suns Discovered: ‘Cosmic Behemoth’
Naturally, I thought this was a political piece. I thought surely that they were referring to the Greedy Old Trump Party, commonly shortened to GOTP, or the Trump Regime as the biggest-black hole ever.
The GOTP used to be known as the GOP, or the ‘Grand Old Party’. But under Trump’s squeamish, heavy-handed leadership, the spineless GOP has become a seething unprincipled black hole of greed and avarice. A place where they decry pedophiles while protecting pedophiles, where they scream that they’re pro-life as they turn their heads from children dying. Truth and facts go in and get bent out of shape into lies and falsehoods. History morphs into a lopsided retelling of all the great things which white men did. The black hole’s idealogical forces twists intelligent discourse into childish mouthings.
The GOTP black hole is a time portal, trying to push the world back to a pretend time, which they fantasize was better for all because white men were in charge, and all knew and understood. They liked that time because industry and commerce were not hamstrung by regulations to keep employees, or air, water, and the earth safe. Only two sexes were recognized, and only one was respected. The weaker, fairer sex, aka ‘the female’, known to be emotionally charged and weak of mind, was conditioned to accept their place in the bedroom and in the kitchen, staying home to raise more slave labor. Other sexual choices were kept in the closet, done in darkness, never to be spoken of in daylight. Abuse of others was allowed as long as the perpetrator was wealthy, white, and male, or dutifully mouthed the appropriate platitudes and respected the power structure. Religion was settled as a Christian thing with malleable morality and loudly stated and often ignored values. Do your sentence at church every Sunday and feed your local house of worship some gold and trinkets and your soul was saved, freeing you for Saturday night debauchery and business day cruelty. “Nothing personal,” are the words they like to use. “It’s just business.” Greed was blessed by God.
Blacks knew not to get too uppity. Browns kept quiet and stayed to their side of town, as did ‘the Asians’. If necessary, a little police violence could be used to keep them in their place and protect the white man’s place. Sure, it might lead to a little tension and soul searching in the aftermath, but it could all be swept away by the whites, because they were writing history. Then all would be good again.
As for the rest, the poor and sick, put them to work in the fields and factories. Slave labor keeps prices down and profit margins up. Children are the best little workers because they’re too young and ignorant to protest or complain. They eat less so they can be paid less. Let them ‘pull themselves up with their own bootstraps’. Hard work is good for the soul.
Make a profit off every piece of human suffering and indignity. That’s what comes out of the Trump Regime black hole. Plate it with gold to make it shiny and increase its value. Only gold has value, you know.
That’s the Trump Regime. I don’t care what science declares. Trump and the GOTP don’t, so why should I? So I reiterate my position: the Trump Regime is the biggest black hole ever known. It’s the biggest black hole in the Universe. Hitler and his NAZIs, and several other dictators, have been close, but Trump is just getting started with his attacks on logic, humanity, science, education, history, and decency. He’ll prove that he’s the greatest, most beautiful black hole ever.
What’s most sickening is that Trump and the MAGAts think that’s the most wonderful title that can be won because their world has become so perverse and irrational. Sure, a few are learning otherwise that it’s not as great as they expected in episodes christianed FAFO, or ‘The Leopard Ate My Face’. But most MAGAts are so far into the black hole that truth, empathy, education, facts, and science can no longer reach them.
Maybe that’ll change someday, after the black hole turns on itself and is finally gone.
Boom, and it’s June’s last day n 2025. Boom, it’s another Munda.
Today is Munda, June 29, 2025. Boom, it’s gonna get hot again in Ashlandia. 99 F. 73 F at the mo. My friend in Melbourne, Australia is miserable with cold, wet rain. I feel for him. The weather rarely satisfies us for many consecutive moments, especially if you’re a prince like me, cognizant of every ripple casting anything less than perfection.
Despite a heavy load of dreams, today’s music comes from PINO Trump’s “One Beautiful Big Bill”. News outlets are generally roiling with disgust about the bill. It’s a grab bag for the rich and strips away help for the poor and sick, and shreds protections for our land, water, and air. The bill removes gun controls and taxes so it’ll be easier and cheaper for people to pay guns. This, in a nation already slathered with gun violence. Just this weekend, two fire fighters were shot and killed and others were wounded in an ambush in Idaho. People polled are heavily against the One Big Beautiful Bowel Movement, for just reasons.
Yet, this bill is the perfect bill for this nation at this point. Filled with what the fuck provisions, sponsored and pushed by a liar and a cheat (yes, that’s Trump), it’s a bill by a billionaire for a billionaire. One that encourages and rewards greed, violence, and selfishness. Perfect for the ‘Christian Nation’ visualized in Project 2025. I have always considered Trump a con man; now his con has come to full light, and his supporters are the main marks.
BTW, read Mock Paper Scissors small’s bite on the bill: Playing Clue: GOP, In Congress, With Paperwork. If that doesn’t cause your GRRRR Meter to max out, nothing will.
Today’s song, then, is “Nasty” by Janet Jackson. The Neurons popped the song into my morning mental music stream after I read about the bill and the GOP capitulation and hissed, “Nasty.” That was all it took, and I was hearing, “Nasty. Oh, you nasty boys.”
Just read that Trump is to visit America’s newest Florida funpark, Alligator Alcatraz. Maybe a gator will get ‘im. It’s good to have dreams.
Hope your weather fits your needs and your day works out beautifully. I’ll do my best. Give me a cuppa. Here we go. Cheers
Munda, June 23, 2025, has burst open with sunshine in Ashlandia. Climbing already, the temperature has surged from 50 F to 68 F with a final destination of 84 F. Blue sky is all I see, except for Sol rising in the east.
There’s early evidence that PINO Trump’s risky decision to bomb Iran did little outside of increasing the chances for war. Monitoring groups say that no radiation was detected coming from the bombed sites. Radiation would be expected if radioactive materials were being stored there. Trump had been telegraphing his intentions and the stealth B2 Spirit bombers’ movements were being tracked and reported in the media. Iran said it had evacuated from from Fordo and the attack did little damage to its nuclear aspirations. Time will tell.
Meanwhile, Iran has fired missiles at U.S. bases. Trump has never been a student of history, but come on, man. Did he really think that after his failed negotiations that bombing them once and warning them, “That’s it, it’s done,” was really going to do it? He’s obviously never been in fights or seriously competitive situations. One rarely gets knocked back once and say, “Gosh, well that’s over. I’m done.” No. The first knock down usually pisses the other party off. Iran has a definite macho history of being just like Trump, declaring, “If you hit us, we’re going to hit you so much harder.”
Trump has bought into the whole idea of ‘war is peace’. Not surprising. He’s been demoing upside down backwards thinking for years. And he’s thrived because backward thinking is plentiful among voters and business people. In a sidebar, Trump now has us at war with science, education, common sense, economic and world history, and Iran.
Another sidebar: hey, MAGAts and Trumpettes, remember when Trump promised to keep the U.S. out of Middle East wars and conflicts? How’s that playing out for you? Trump used to warn that President Obama was going to bomb another country because negotiations had failed. Classic Trump projection. Maybe he should send in Jared Kushner to broker another peace plan, because that first one is so robust. Yes, that was snark.
Displaying a remarkable sense of whimsy, The Neurons have place “Upside Down” in the morning mental music stream. No, not “Upside Down”, the disco hit by Diana Ross. No, this is the chill Jack Johnson tune of 2006 made for the animated film, Curious George. Guess Les Neurons thought that calming down and relaxing in the face of rising enshittification of the world would be good for my blood pressure or something.
Coffee has been served. Hope you all have the best day you can amidst the chaos and enshittification. Cheers
Dreamed my wife and I went car shopping. I found a sleek new silver sports car. Turned out that it was a Chevy Camaro but it was completely unlike any Camaro previously produced. This car was low, wide, and fast. I didn’t see much of the exterior in the dream except that it was so brightly polished, its silver surface hurt my eyes.
I instantly like it and wanted to sell my wife on it. “Here, babe,” I said. “Take it for a drive.” I had to coax her because she doesn’t trust her driving skills. Finally relenting, she entered the car and got behind the wheel. The car was electric and made little sound. She was amazed. Then she began driving it. After a bit, she said through a big grin, “I really like this.” So we bought the car with dreamlike ease. The whole time, she remained behind the wheel. When I asked if she wanted to keep driving, she replied, “Yes. This is fun.” That pleased me.
We went to a parking garage. As she pulled the car into a slot, a group of young men came up and began hassling us. Annoyed, I told them to go away. At that point, I discovered that my wife had the car’s roof retracted. As I told her to put it up, one of the young men reached into the back and took out a brown folder of papers. I asked him to give them back. He mocked me and walked away with his friends. They began throwing the folder around as they would in a game of keep away. Getting angrier, I found a large orange and a large green papaya. I wrestled with what to do with them. As the man who first took the folder caught it, I hurtled the orange at him, hitting him in his ankle. He went down with a cry, complaining of pain. The rest didn’t know what had happened.
I went over and picked up the folder. A second man threatened me. I threatened him back with the papaya. Another guy laughed and said, “That’s just a papaya.” I hit him in the face with it, knocking him over. As he sat on his ass in pain and astonishment, I returned to the Camaro and my wife drove us away.
Michael Seidel, writer 