For those who like to read my books as well as these columns—I
trust there are some—there are two sales in FeBlueberry. Xanth
#40 Isis Orb, the one originated by a ten year old girl, will
be on sale on the 6th through Early Bird Books, downpriced
to $1.99 for that day only. Then on the 26th my collection
Alien Plot will be available for .99 via Early Bird for that
day only. Be there.
I read the third Vampire Love novel, Forever and Always, by H T
Night. The first put Josiah, a mixed martial artist, into an
association with vampires after he saves one of theirs from gang
rape. The second, The Werewolf Whisperer, saw Josiah help his
friend and roommate survive as a werewolf. In this third one, while
Josiah is away for a month getting special training, his girlfriend
Lena and friend Tommy start getting feelings for each other. Uh-oh.
But there's another intriguing woman who has her eye on Josiah, so
who knows what will happen? Things complicate, and at the end Lena
must choose between the two of them and a third man. Meanwhile Josiah
is becoming the foretold leader who will save the vampires from
destruction. These are all action-packed fairly wild adventures, with
new things constantly appearing. Vampire and werewolf fans should
like them, as well a martial arts fans.
I watched Indecent Desires, a 1968 B/W movie. A man finds a cute
doll in the trash, maybe 12 inches tall. He strokes her—and a
shapely (we see her nude) neighborhood blonde feels the touches and
thinks she's going crazy. It is evidently a voodoo doll tuned to her.
He sees the real woman on the street and imagines making love to her.
But she's not for him, and that makes him angry, and he starts
torturing the doll by poking a lighted cigarette at her face—which
she also feels. Then we see a man making love to the blonde's
brunette friend. Later the first man takes a belt to the doll,
beating her up, and the woman feels it. He undresses the doll, and
the blonde's clothing comes off. She refuses to talk to her friends.
Then, jealous, he rips the doll's dead off, which kills the blonde.
End of movie. The blurb says it's one of the most bizarre ones ever
made. I think it's merely inadequate. Who dumped the doll in the
trash? Who hexed it to connect to the blonde? Why was an innocent
woman brutally killed? There's no rationale, no proper resolution.
There could have been a real story here, in competent hands. As it
is, it's a nice series of lovely nude girl sequences and not much
else.
The second movie on the disc is My Brother's Wife, from 1966, B/W.
The actors are obviously reading their lines. A young man, Frankie.
visits his older brother Bob who has gotten married in the two years
they've been apart. Mary, the wife, is an attractive brunette. They
are interested in each other from the start. Her husband doesn't pay
her much attention, but Frankie does. Frankie has a girlfriend of his
own, but that doesn't even slow him down. He happily has sex with
both of them, and promises both to go away with each, the moment he
gets two thousand dollars, because he's broke. He's a real heel. Mary
is about to get the money for him, stealing it from her husband, when
she discovers a letter to him from the other woman and catches on.
She kills herself. End of movie. Why did I bother?
I watched The Last Woman on Earth, a 1960 movie, one of a set of
two I got for two dollars. You get what you pay for; maybe some day
I'll learn that. It's in color, but the colors are washed out. The
acting is clumsy. Two men and a woman, Harold, Martin, and Harold's
pretty wife Evelyn, go diving off Puerto Rico, then come up to find
everyone on the island dead. Something had deleted the oxygen from
the air, while they were underwater, but it is returning, so they can
survive. But they're alone. Thus Ev is the last living woman. She
takes a shine to Martin. This is of course additional mischief. They
run away together; Harold comes after them, they fight, Martin dies,
so it's just the two of them. End. Again, I fault it for being
inadequate. No explanation of the sudden oxygen lapse, no
clarification of the extent of it. Is it limited to the island, or is
it global? A cosmic accident, or malign alien act? Will it happen
again? As it is, it's just a love triangle of no distinction.
I watched Invasion of the Bee Girls, the other movie on the
disc. This one is better. For one thing, it has sexy nude women in
it. Men are suddenly dying from sexual overexertion. Some cosmic
force is turning some women into queen bees, in that they keep the
men at it until they expire. A warning goes out, but many men
foolishly refuse to heed it and go right on having sex. Par for that
course. There is a video on the nature of bees, especially the
queens, interspersed with an extended seduction sequence by an
attractive lady doctor who has bees in her laboratory. Then we see
what's she's up to: radiating and treating young women with special
honey so that they become queens too. Julie is assisting an
investigator, when they catch her and are in the process of
converting her when he catches on and rescues her. They are making
ordinary love as the movie ends with music borrowed from Star Trek.
It says this is a cult classic. I can see why: sexy nudes and sex.
I watched The Last Unicorn, musical animation with fixed
backgrounds. I read the book way back when it came out, and found it
okay but not spectacular, and hardly remember it now. When it comes
to unicorns I think I did more of a job in my Adept series, where
there are herds of them, they play music on their horns, each horn
with the sound of a different orchestral instrument, and can change
shape. There was going to be a movie, but it never materialized.
That's always been my luck. But let's see what they did with this
one. The white filly unicorn learns that she may be the last of her
kind. She is captured and put in a fake monster show with a fake horn
plastered on her forehead, as the real one can't be seen. So she's
another pretend monster, ironically. A young wizard, Mandrake, with
real magic but poor control, frees her and the other animals. They go
to find the Red Bull, who had driven off all the other unicorns. But
the fiery Red Bull is determined to wipe her out. The wizard changes
her into the human Lady Amalthea to escape the bull. And the king's
son, Prince Lir, gets interested in her, thinking her human, but
can't seem to win her love by his great deeds. And we learn that the
king had the Red Bull drive all the other unicorns into the sea,
because only possession of them all makes him happy. And she will
soon join them, unless the right elements come together to enable her
to defeat the king. And they do; she becomes the unicorn again,
fights back against the Red Bull and drives him into the sea, and all
the unicorns are freed. It is one rousing climax. She too is freed,
but her destiny is not with the prince or with the other unicorns,
but it seems to be back in her forest where things don't die. It's a
great movie.
I watched RPG, the letters standing for Real Playing
Game. My novel Killobyte featured a virtual reality game that
tries to kill the players, so this is in my territory. My novel was
going to be a movie, but they fouled it up and it never appeared. Had
they only been willing to follow my novel, instead of change it, when
each change just took it farther away from feasibility—but that
wasn't my call. Movie makers can strike me as halfway crazy; you can
verify this by asking any other writer who has been passed over for a
movie, or had his novel fouled up by them. RPG sets up a contest of
ten old people, for a day, in young attractive bodies in an
unfamiliar location, only one of whom will survive. They will be
killing each other, but they need to know the true identity of whom
they kill, or the killer loses when he/she touches the hologram of
the supposed deceased. There has to be one death every hour. So each
wants to learn his/her own identity, but not have it known to others.
There is a circular building in the forest with a charged wall. They
start pairing off, male/female, female/female, having sex, enjoying
their young bodies while they have them. One woman suspects another
is a man, and pushes her into the wall, where the charge kills her.
One down. The killer lies about her involvement. The deceased girl
turns out to have been a man. A boy tortures and kills a girl, who
turns out to have been a singer. A girl tries to kill a boy, but dies
herself. A girl attacks a girl. A boy kills a girl. No one can be
trusted. It gets easier to guess as the number of survivors
diminishes. At last there is one survivor, our protagonist. He pays
his entire fortune to get to keep the young body. But it was all
pretense, the other players mere actors; his body soon turns old, and
they have his fortune. A good taut movie, but with questions, such as
why didn't the rich old man do due diligence before trusting these
shysters with his millions? If it was all a charade for the benefit
of the one client, why did they have things going on that he couldn't
see? So could they have made a better one from my novel? The
potential was there, but given their apparent ineptitude, probably
not. Movie makers, like novelists, vary widely in competence, as I
trust my reviews show.
I watched The Exotic Time Machine, which turned out to be soft
porn, breasts and female genitals shown, actual penetration not.
Mostly sex to music, with a thin story line connecting the erotic
sequences like beads on a string. It's a genre, the object being to
show lovely flesh in action, repeatedly. Leon and Daria make out on a
space station, run afoul of a time portal and suddenly he is in the
past, seeing Marie Antoinette, with breasts like balloons, in the
boudoir making out with Mimi, her maid. Marie is annoyed because the
king sends all her lovers to the guillotine. So she quickly seduces
Leon, the king catches them and sends Lean to the Bastille. Daria,
trying to rescue him, finds herself in Arabia, in the Sultan's harem,
where the other women set up her action. Aladdin shows up and makes
out with one of the girls. Then they are taken to the sultan, where
Shahrazad dances for him. Speaking as one who collects the Arabian
Nights tales and adapted one for a novel, Hasan, I can
report that this is sadly garbled. But that's hardly the point; bare
breasts and butts are the point. Meanwhile back at the Bastille Mimi
rescues Leon and makes out with him. Then Daria finds them and
conjures them back to the future, Mimi too. Where fascists are in
charge; it seems they have changed history. Mimi must be returned,
though she may now be pregnant with Leon's child. Hmm. As these
things go, it's okay.
I watched the Discover video Evolve: Size. Ants are small,
elephants are large, but the total mass of ants outweighs that of
elephants on Earth by a huge amount. There were pygmy elephants, one
tenth the weight of the big ones. They were on an island off
California, until mankind arrived and ate them. Why so small? With
diminishing resources, the small one were more agile and better able
to forage. There once were dragonflies with a wingspan of three feet,
when there was more oxygen in the atmosphere. Insects are limited
because their surface air tubes can service only so much flesh. But
bacteria stayed small for three and a half billion years. Gravity is
limiting; size can grow in the water. The blue whale is the largest
creature who ever lived. Whales started out on land, then moved to
the water. About six million years ago whales grew large; scientists
are not sure why. My guess is to avoid being shark bait. Blue whales
eat krill, 800 feet below the surface. The biggest land creatures
were vegetarian sauropods like Brachiosaurus, 30 tons. They had much
longer necks than giraffes, with with lighter bones, 60% filled with
air, but strong. When the asteroid struck 65 million years ago, the
big creatures died while the small mammals survived. My theory is
that the mammals were also mostly deep in caves, shielded from the
firestorm that was the surface. They were protected by the
temperature shielding the deep rock provided. Then they emerged and
took over the vacated surface. And grew larger. But carnivores were
limited by the underlying predatory ratios; Tyrannosaurus Rex was
probably as large as a predator could get and still find enough to
eat. Human beings are governed too; the taller the man, the more
children he has, while women do better petite. Sexual selection. But
we are smaller now than we were 50,000 years ago. How come? They ran
out of food. They had to turn to the plants growing out of the
garbage mounds. Today with a better food supply, we are growing
again. How big can we get? It's complicated, but probably not much
more than six foot two, and five eight for women.
I watched Monster Island. Josh wins a vacation on a jungle
island in the Bermuda Triangle, and invites his high school friends
along, hoping to win back his girlfriend, but that seems unlikely.
During a show a giant wasp attacks and carries off a girl, Carmen
Electra, who Josh was starting to get interested in. So the boat
leaves with most of them, but Josh stays to try to rescue Carmen,
along with seven others. They encounter a giant praying mantis. Then
a manlike green water monster, the piranha man. They are rescued by
an older man from the Department of atomic energy who seems crazy. He
says the island will soon sink. They continue with their rescue
mission, losing members to a praying mantis, a giant spider, giant
ant; then are joined by Atomic Energy man, who changed his mind.
Human slaves serve the big Queen Ant; they get them to revolt and
attack the ant. They finally are rescued by a helicopter as the
volcano blows. Josh, proving his courage and constancy, while others
tend to fold or cheat when the going gets rough, finally wins back
his girlfriend. It's a wild, largely nonsensical, but fun movie. The
monster insects are a bit too mechanical to be completely convincing.
However, Carmen Electra plays herself, and it's fun watching her sing
and dance. Sort of like getting a free show along with the movie.
I read Astro City #11 Private Lives. In my day Donald Duck
comics were 52 pages in full color for a dime but needless to say,
that day is long gone. This is 176 full color pages for around
fifteen dollars, part of a series I seem to be reading in random
order. This one concerns the private lives of those associated with
the super heroes, a look behind the scenery as it were. The first
story concerns Kim, the Silver Adept, champion of the light, the
savior of myriad living souls across countless realities. Only it's
from the perspective of her office manager, an ordinary woman who has
to scramble constantly to keep things on schedule when Kim
oversleeps, as she often does. And in another story, Ellie, who loves
machines and constantly repairs and befriends them, even killer
machines, so when things go wrong they return to her. The ordinary
folk, out of the limelight, who do the work. It's an interesting take
on the superhero business, and probably accurate.
I watched Battledogs, which I got for two dollars. It starts out
with a bang: a young woman at an airport feels discomfited and goes
to a rest room stall, where we see her badly scratched arm. Then she
shifts into a wolf and charges out to kill people. And there are many
wolves wreaking havoc, leaving a trail of mutilated bodies. The
police try to contain the damage. In due course she reverts to her
human form. The authorities seem to know about the condition, and
mean to treat it. A bite infects a victim, who becomes a werewolf. It
seems they have to keep the victims' heart rates down, keep them calm
so they won't transform. One major, Brian, is trying to handle the
problem amicably, understanding and treating the wolves. But it seems
that a general has different ideas; he wants a ruckus so that the
military will get more funding. Also, he wants a weapon: wolves with
the minds of men. The young woman is the focus; both sides want her,
for good or ill, respectively. This intransigence makes the good guys
get hunted while the wolves invade the city. If they get out of the
city before the authorities bomb the bridges, the world is doomed. So
it's wolves vs machine guns. But the good guys do find the cure, and
maybe romance at the end. This is one taut action film, probably not
too sensible if thought about, but well worth the money.
I watched Shock Treatment, a musical “sequel” -- the
quotes are theirs—to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. So
you know from the outset it will be wild. The protagonists are Brad
and Janet, the staid couple who ran afoul of the demented happenings
in Rocky. Denton, where they live, is a completely normal
town; everyone knows that and you'd better believe it. Maybe Brad
doesn't quite believe it, so they have him committed to Dentonvale,
the local loony bin—I mean, hospital. Actually Denton is one
giant TV studio, with the citizens watching every nuance from their
grandstand seats ad cheering on the event in the manner of a football
game. They put him in a cage in a straight jacket, gagged, and work
on Janet, to talk her into being more sexy. The hospital personnel
are reminiscent of horror movies, including a sexy nurse whose short
skirt often shows off her panties. Soon Janet is in a slinky black
outfit, and she's not bad; she can sing and slink with the best of
them. Maybe too well; the crowd starts demanding more Janet instead
of the other stars, who may be getting a trifle jealous. She's
stealing the show! There's a little song and dance at every stage,
and of course it's all a stage. So does it match the original? Not
really.
I read Vampires Vs. Werewolves by H T Night, the fourth in the
Vampire Love series. Lena finally clarifies that it is Josiah she
loves, and they are happy for a while; in fact she gets pregnant with
twins. Then he gets involved in a combat deal to save his friend
Tommy, and doesn't tell Lena because, well, she may still have
feelings for Tommy. When she finds out she feels betrayed, and
departs. And disappears. It turns out that the bad promoter has
captured her, and will kill her if Josiah and Tommy don't perform,
such as in a final big match where one must kill the other. That
annoys them both, and they wind up rescuing Lena and going after the
bad guy. Along the way is an encounter with The Deity, a godlike lady
who helps Josiah get his mind straight. Also a phenomenal series of
mixed martial arts matches featuring the Seven Deadly Sins. For
example Tommy has to fight to the death against Lust, the shapeliest
immortal female ever. He doesn't want to kill her, but. They finally
manage to unify the warring vampires and werewolves against a common
enemy. So there is plenty here for fans of supernatural martial arts.
I watched Dark Streets. This is a blues movie, not my genre, but
the description mentioned “the most seductive music ever
created,” and I was curious. For four dollars it was worth a
look. Chaz has it all: a hot nightclub, two glamorous singers, sexy
dancers, and that seductive music. Then his father dies, apparently
murdered, and others close to him are getting killed. There are
financial problems. A cop brings a friend of his, Madelaine, and
she's lovely and a top singer, but is she also a spy? Meanwhile there
keep being city blackouts that darken the streets and interfere with
the nightclub. Are they connected? As it turns out, yes, and poor
Chaz, betrayed at every turn, is the ultimate victim, dead. This is
indeed a dark street. As for the seductive music, I found it sad
instead. But it's an interesting movie.
I read Armistice, the Inlari Sagas, by four authors: M J
Kelley, Dana Leipold, Wolf Dietcich, and Elaine Chao. This is a kind
of sequel to Interspecies, which I reviewed here last year.
Both relate to the presence on Earth of the inlari, humanoid aliens
with horns, who have been chased from world to word by relentless
enemies. At first they are welcomed to Earth, and their technology
brings advantages, but later relations are mixed, and the two species
go to internecine war. These are twenty stories along the way,
positive neutral, negative, showing the different personal
interactions. What strikes me is its seeming reflection on existing
situations on Earth. Such as the experience of the Jews as global
exiles, the American Indians as displaced inhabitants, the African
Americans as enslaved immigrants, or the gay/lesbian community as it
comes out of the shadows. Some are treated well; some not well; some
are brutally slaughtered. There are atrocities on both sides, and woe
betide those on either side who show compassion for the other. This
seems to be inevitable when differing cultures mix, unfortunately. I
read this with appreciation but not much pleasure, because of its
painful truths.
I read Pallitine Lost, by Roderick Davidson., sequel to
Pallitine Rising, which I reviewed in 2013. In the prior
novel, the girl Taryn had dubious beginnings but straightened out in
due course and came of age, thanks to the generosity of her Pallitine
sponsor. Now after his death she becomes a Pallitine herself, and is
immediately immersed in serious adventure. A plague is spreading; at
first the authorities didn't take it too seriously, but suddenly it
became monstrous and voracious and they have to find its cause and
deal with it before it wipes out everything. It turns out to be
spread by the mixing of blood, somewhat in the manner of rabies.
Taryn gets wounded and blooded, as it were, and is infected. They
manage to save her, but the mischief is not entirely gone, and it
seems she will inevitably become one of the zombie-like damned. So
she hurries to accomplish her mission before that happens. But an
evil sorcerer is working to spread it, and he is no easy case; he can
do remarkable and deadly magic, and seems to have no conscience. It
gets ugly before the conclusion, and that is only a partial victory;
the battle has not yet been won. The action is hard hitting and the
outcome uncertain. No romance; perhaps that remains to be seen.
There's another novel coming.
I watched Bermuda Tentacles, science fantasy adventure. My kind
of junk. The USA president is down in the Bermuda Triangle, so our
crack navy team is sent to rescue him. They encounter giant metallic
tube worms that tower above the ships, a hundred feet over the water,
and attack. They dive toward the capsule that contains the president,
avoiding the tube worms. The worms turn out to be the projections
from a much bigger underwater creature of extraterrestrial origin.
The crew finds itself inside an alien city that is inside the
monster. They land in it and search for the president's pod. There's
a lot of old equipment here, collected over the centuries. Small
tentacles attack from the water, picking off individuals. Flying
metal globes attack from the air. They reach the president just
before his air runs out, but have to fight their way out. Tentacles
galore! They make it to their craft with the president and power out
past the tentacles. But the monster follows, rising into the air like
an enormous starfish, and starts lasering ships. They decide on the
nuclear option, though this may wipe out many people including
themselves. But maybe they can fly the bomb into the monster and have
it implode. They have to wait for it to attack another target,
because only then is it briefly vulnerable. That means serious
losses, but it works. There's even a tiny bit of a hint of possible
romance at the end. This turned out to be less junky and more
exciting than I expected.
Last Column I discussed my travails on the Adult Trike. They continue. The
tilt in the drive is not that much, but my reflexes steer me off
regardless. It reminds me of something at a fun-house when I was a
child. There was a huge man shape with stairs inside it, so people
could enter at the foot and exit at the head. There was a continuous
line of people going through. I think it was the entrance to the
horror house. Every so often it would wiggle a little, and there
would be a chorus of girlish screams. Then it would chortle HO HO HO!
I wondered why such a little wiggle caused such alarm. Now, about 75
years later, I finally understand. It was like a trike tilt. That
sensation of falling is maddeningly compelling. Your logic tells you
there's no real danger, but your body dates from fifty million years
back (sorry, anti-evolutionists; I am not one of you) when it was
dangerous to fall out of a tree, and any indication a fall was
starting brought an immediate defensive reaction. Those who lacked
that reaction died, and have no descendants. Now you know. I
continued to fight it. One time I slowed almost to a stop, maybe a
tenth of a mile an hour, and did make it nervously through without
swerving. Another time I tried hugging the right side, to avoid the
worst of the tilts, but my right hind wheel go caught in the brush
and I had to get off and extract it. Another time I tried to swerve
left before the worst of the tilt, went zooming out of control across
the center and screeched to a stop on the left side as the trike
tumbled over. I got scratches on my left hand and a nasty little
gouge on my left forearm. (Pause here for the monster's HO HO HO!) So
yes, I succeeded in falling on my tricycle. How was it possible in
the space of about three feet? Well, the tilt made me over-react, and
then I overreached again as I seemed about to sail into the trees,
and that threw my weight against the side hard enough to tumble the
trike over. If I hadn't reacted I'd have been okay. Sigh. I'll keep
trying; brace yourselves for future reports of the old man on his
trike.
We get constantly deluged with solicitations, mostly for money. If we
answered them all we'd go broke; each is an insatiable black hole.
The thing about it is that they are all for good causes. Did you ever
hear of a solicitation for a bad cause? Yes, the hungry
children of the world do need feeding. The American Constitution does
need defending. The old school does need money to operate on. We'd
like to help them all, but we can't, so we have become quite choosy,
while feeling constantly guilty. One thing I note is that each cause
seems to think it is the only one doing the job, when there may be
hundreds in that specialty, plus whole governments trying to help. I
feel that's a form of dishonesty. They should admit that they are one
cause of a number of that type, then argue why they deserve your
money more than the others do. At such time, if ever, I see that kind
of honesty, I'll really have a problem turning them down.
For those of you who didn't notice: our email server was down for about
three days, and nothing got through to us. Finally they fixed it, but
we're not sure they told the senders that their notes were not
getting through. Anyone who tried to contact me and got no bounce and
no response, that's probably why. I hope not too many million dollar
movie offers got lost. Speaking of which the Xanth TV option expired
in NoRemember, a fitting month, but then was restored in Dismember,
then lost again. Then it sprouted again in Jamboree. Maybe this time
it will hold. Readers keep asking my why I don't have a Xanth movie,
as if I could wave my little finger and it would happen. I've been
trying for twenty years to get a movie, but the billionaires who
finance such things are not noted for their common sense and don't
realize what a potential market there is for Xanth. Yet.
I set aside the time I used to use for archery practice for Chores I
wouldn't otherwise get around to. I quit archery because I was losing
too many arrows, when they went where they chose instead of where I
aimed them. It's been a good trade-off; I have accomplished many good
things. This time I used the time to properly define and list and
shelve the new books I acquired the past two years. You'd think this
would be an easy routine. Ha! It's not as bad as tilting on the
trike, but it is a challenge. First I have to figure out their
Library of Congress alphanumerical designation. It should be in the
book, behind the title page, but usually isn't, so I have to work it
out for myself. There's the challenge. One was Ancient Ice
Mummies, that my wife gave me for Christmas two years ago.
Remember Otzi, the Ice Man of 5,000 years age? I have him as a
character in my GEODYSSEY series. He may be the world's oldest murder
mystery. He was shot in the back and left to be hidden by a passing
glacier. His daughter was bereft. (I know more about my characters
than the archaeologists do.) So how is this book to be defined? I
finally decided GL for prehistoric archaeology and worked out the
rest of the coding; that's where it goes on my library shelf. There
there was a little book and disc on King Tut; that's in the DT
section. Then Female Nude. That's under N, no not for Nude,
for Art. But how can I just define it and put it away on the shelf?
I had to page through it again. You wonder who actually looks at such
pictures? I do. Once you've seen one breast, you've seen them all? I
want to see them all! Bad Girls Need Love Too, the collection
of provocative covers from the 1960s. Talk about sexy! That goes
under PN, and yes it needs another page by page examination. Then
there's Dirty Minds, about how our brains influence love, sex,
and relationships. That's the one where the lady author got into an
fMRI imager and masturbated to climax so they could record her brain
in the process. Feisty girl! She remarks on how epileptic seizures
may inspire intense religious devotion. Interesting insight, no?
Maybe my problem with religion is that I'm not epileptic. And He's
a Stud, She's a Slut. Many insights there. So this was no rapid
processing, but it had its rewards. I'd be more efficient if I could
turn off my mind and feeling, as others do. To me, that's life.
I like words, maybe because I do use them in my business of writing
fiction. The right word in the right place is vital to me, and I can
spend considerable time getting it right. Any serious writer will
understand. I have a considerable vocabulary, for all that in my
looming dotage I often can't remember a word I use constantly; I
mentioned in a prior column how my wife needed to come up with a word
I'd lost, “pizza.” So it surprises me when I encounter
one I've never heard of. In the past month there were two:
kakistocracy and anhedonia. The first means government by the worst
people in society; the HIGHTOWER LOWDOWN used it when pondering
the recent election. The second is a lack of pleasure or the capacity
to experience it, which state some of us liberals may find ourselves in as a result of that election. Columnist David Brooks used it to
describe Donald Trump. I have paid more attention to Brooks' columns since reading
his sociology book, phrased as a novel, The
Social Animal, one of the best I've read recently. Then
there's the description columnist Leonard Pitts
quoted, where a West Virginia bureaucrat called First Lady Michelle
Obama “an ape in heels.” Now that's an interesting word
in such a context, ape. The bureaucrat denied this was racist. Well,
I remember the old saying about defining a duck: if it looks like a
duck, walks like a duck, and quacks
like a duck, it probably is a duck. I'm inclined to call this one
Donald, as we head into the Duck Dynasty.
Couple of reader feedbacks promote further discussion. D E Evans said that
regardless what THE HUMANIST magazine says, there is no need to throw
Jesus away, while doubting the credibility of the Resurrection. He
provided a link to an article by Neil Carter, titled “An
Atheist's Defense of the Historicity of Jesus.” I'm agnostic
rather than atheist, but this is close to home. Two selected quotes
make the point: “The existence of two or three professionals
within the study of antiquity claiming that Jesus never existed does
not signal a sea change in that field.” “But the many
contradictions and variations we encounter within the gospels (and
noncanonical books) point to the unreliability of the sources,
but not necessarily to the complete nonexistence of their
central figure.” This relates to a point I have made, that most
issues are not either/or, but along a broad spectrum in between.
Jesus may not have existed as a God, but also, may not never have
existed, ungrammatical as that may seem. The absence of evidence is
not evidence of absence. The author suspects that the truth is indeed
in between, and that there may be “layers of legend” over
a kernel of original history. I can see it; there could have been a
wandering preacher who was later considerably enhanced and
divinitized by those eager to believe. It has happened elsewhere.
And guns. I received a savage condemnation on “smart” guns.
“The so-called 'smart' gun is not smart at all, it's quite
possibly the dumbest, most useless, and most dangerous invention in
history. In the first place, it would mean no one can use anyone
else's weapon, which is its intent, but which would cripple our
ability to train with weapons that we do not own. It would also mean
much more expensive weapons that poor people can't afford.” And
on for another page. Obviously I had little understanding of the
philosophy of my reader, and he has I think even less of mine. But to
address just what I have quoted: I do not agree that the smart gun is
stupid or evil, but if I did, I think something like poison gas would
be worse. What I have objected to is the NRA's (that's the National
Rifle Association, which purports to represents hunters and such)
resistance to a smart gun even being put on sale; that severely
limits my own right to buy a gun, as the smart gun may be the only
kind I would want. I think the NRA is hypocritical here. Making the
smart gun available is hardly the same as banning all other guns, and
I suspect only a nut would think so. I would want a gun that could
not be stolen and used against me, or somehow gotten hold of by a
child and dangerously fired. Such a gun is hardly dumb, useless, or
dangerous compared to regular guns. As for training—why not
train with your own gun? But if you want to train with other guns,
then do so; they are pretty freely available elsewhere, and training
centers surely have many you can borrow or rent for the occasion.
Then, fully trained, you might elect to buy a smart gun of the type
you prefer. How can any rational person oppose that? Why does the
NRA? I conjecture that the NRA's real mission is not freedom of arms
so much as the profit to be made from unrestricted gun sales, and the
money of criminals and idiots is just as good as that of responsible
folk. The carnage following such sales is not their concern, right?
Even so, their denial of the smart gun makes no sense to me. Do they
really want to guarantee that there is no safe gun available? That's
nuts, and I use that term in the sense of crazy. If you don't want a
smart gun, don't get one; don't try to enforce your foible on others.
I would welcome any rational response, as I got with my Jesus
comment.
Book review in THE HUMANIST of the book His Porn, Her Pain, by
Marty Klein. Intriguing title, and I saw a picture of her looking
over his shoulder with utter horror. Now that pornography, that is,
sexual expression, is freely available via the internet, has the
world really gone to hell? Does porn really lead to violence, mental
illness, and community dysfunction, as the anti-pornists assert? The
answer becomes vague, but seems to be no. The antis resort to
misinformation, which alone suggests that they know their cause is
lost. It seems that religion is the main opposition, which makes me
wonder why this should be a religious obsession. I may have commented
before on how in the old days the Israeli authorities were losing
devotees to neighboring cults that offered sex with luscious
priestesses as an inducement, so they tried to make sex itself
sinful. This had nothing really to do with morality, and everything
to do with competition for members and their money. That attitude
spread to Christianity, I think via the apostle Paul, and persists
today. Maybe not coincidentally, religious observance is fading
today. I don't see that as necessarily a bad thing.
I have a pile of clippings as usual, and am already well beyond the
length I prefer for these columns, so will give them short shrift.
George Will remarks on how today at some educational institutions
anything over a score of 70% is a grade A, and students take
correction as an insult and violently resist learning. Thus we seem
to be heading into an age of proud ignorance. That explains a lot,
politically. NEW SCIENTIST reviews a book, The Myth Gap, that
says too much information today is shrouded it obscure terminology,
and what is needed is to tell it instead in stories of passion. Amen!
They should hire fiction writers to translate technical information
to human terms. Bizarro cartoon that made me laugh: engineers
looking at a large dam from downstream, and one says “I'm cool
with putting a mural on a dam. It's the subject matter that's
creeping me out.” The mural is a realistic depiction of cracks
leading into a gap in the wall, with water surging out. A new edition
of Adolf Hitler's autobiography Mein Kampf, banned for 70
years in Germany, is now a bestseller there. They are really
interested in seeing how that warped mind lead to the horrors of the
Nazis. I read it in high school—it wasn't banned in America—and
was morbidly impressed myself. Hitler wanted to be a architect, but
didn't make the grade, so became a politician instead. Parallels can
be drawn to today's politics around the world. It's scary. Another
newspaper article “Can home remedies curb cold?” says
Vitamin C can shorten the duration of a cold by about ten percent.
This is yet another example of the promotion of ignorance. They have
tested Vitamin C only in relatively low doses, so that it has only
marginal effect. That's like giving a man dying of thirst a
thimbleful of water, and saying water has only slight effect. I tell
you yet again: take one gram an hour, and Vitamin C may stifle your
cold entirely. I have not had a cold get out of hand in decades.
That's a lot of C, so don't do it unless actually fighting a cold,
and do be prepared for some indigestion. Why don't they do a real
double blind test? Because the big pharmaceutical companies that make
their riches on the equivalent of snake oil would lose a huge amount
of money if folk could so readily avoid colds and not need snake oil.
News item: the eight richest men have as much money as over half the
world's poorest population. They're still hungry for more. Another
item: we truly are stardust; key elements of our bodies were made in
supernovae. Conservatives really are better looking than average. It
seems that personal attractiveness leads to better jobs and more
money, and thus they want to maintain the status quo. How then, to
account for my own liberalism? Well, I didn't do it by being
attractive, I did it by getting lucky after getting screwed by the
status quo. Now you know. Locally an outfit called Food Not Bombs was
feeding the hungry, and got arrested for it. What? Turned out that
they were more interested in confrontation than in getting along, so
did not cooperate with the system or the police. When a lady police
officer tried to reason with them, they shouted slogans to drown her
out. They were actually more about bombs than food. And an article
about Snopes, the online fact checker: it is getting attacked itself,
apparently by those who don't want facts replacing misinformation.
Sad commentary, no?
So meanwhile what have I been doing, apart from reading books, viewing
old movies, and opinionating on the state of the world? In Jamboree I
wrote several chapters of the collaborative novel with J R Rain, The
Journey, plus a couple of stories. Writing is mainly what I do.
Next month I'll catch up on more reading and viewing, write another
story, then get serious about Xanth #43 Jest Right, about the
comedienne no one takes seriously. That will surely shorten the next
few HiPiers columns. Are you relieved? Our TV tower malfunctioned; it
no longer rotates, and the serviceman said that the pre-amp atop it
is probably shot, but he doesn't climb towers any more. No one does.
So we're stuck with essentially one station, the closest one, from
Ocala. We're not thrilled, but haven't figured out what to do. I
don't pay a lot of attention to the TV, but my wife does. Sigh. And
one night I couldn't sleep, as happens on occasion, so went to the
study to read, so as not to disturb my wife and because reading puts
me to sleep. I soon nodded off, so turned out the light, then set out
to make my way in darkness back to the bedroom. And got lost in my
own study. I groped for the hall to the bedroom, and couldn't find
it. I felt for a wall, but found no wall. Where was I? I finally
blundered into the bathroom, turned on the light, and discovered that
I had gotten oriented so that I was facing east when I thought I was
facing north. No wonder the terrain was unfamiliar. I could have
tumbled down the stairs. In future I will turn on a light ahead
before I turn off the light behind; better wasting a few steps than
getting lost. Yes, I see my critics nodding; they are surprised only
that it took me so long to discover that I am a moron. But with luck
my true readers who think I am smart will have fallen asleep before
they reach this part. Okay, until next time--
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