The Recovering Hopper

Vaya Con Dios, Enero

2012-01-31T20:47:00.005-05:00

“Across from us, perhaps half a mile distant, partly screened by rainbow and mist, like as island slapped by a Titan, a gigantic wheel slowly rotated, ponderous and gleaming. High overhead, enormous birds rode like drifting crucifixes the currents of the air.”

And with that skipbeating image, January fades out like the final point of light on a turned-off tube teevee, like a beautiful whisper …

[Note: skipbeating image taken from Roger Zelazny’s The Guns of Avalon, pg. 119 of my Avon paperback edition.]

Falling

2012-01-30T18:41:00.002-05:00

Read a news article online this afternoon. It seems some woman had a seizure on a ski lift and fell thirty feet to her death. The headline was, “Woman Dies in Fall.”

Down at the bottom a reader comment caught my eye: “It’s not the fall that kills you; it’s the sudden stop!”

To which my immediate thought was: “Someone has to create portable personal inertial dampeners!”

Why not me? I’m a dreamer! I took three semesters of physics classes!

Rockefeller had Oil; Carnegie had Steel. Jobs had the iPhone. Gates has that operating software stuff.

Hopper has – the Personal Portable Inertial Dampener! The P-PID!

Now I got some heavy duty thinking to do. I don’t know how to beat classical Newtonian physics, but that wild-haired guy did it a century ago, along with a pack of twenty-somethings a decade or two later.

* * *

All kidding aside, say a small prayer for this poor unfortunate woman. (And let’s hope this doesn’t cause all ski lifts across the country to be banned.)

Disposable People

2012-01-29T17:00:00.000-05:00

© 1980 by Marshall Goldberg and Kenneth Kay

I was planning to launch this review with a ebullient and loud-shouted, “I loved reading this book!” but, realizing I just read a 316-page novel about a national epidemic that horribly slays 20 million people, something didn’t feel right. So let me simply state this was a Great Guilty Pleasure. That’s right, two capital Gs and a capital P.

Now, Disposable People ain’t no timeless work of art, indeed it is all but forgotten today, but I read it as a youngling and it left an impression. In fact, it was my first medical thriller (of the half-dozen or so I’ve read over my lifetime). Way back in 1980 I recall racing through it, enjoying every page, every disgusting description of etiological mayhem savored, every crack in the fiber of society incredulously awestriking. Truth be told, though, I too all but forgot it, until I stumbled across it online recently, and had to purchase it via my online book store.

It is remarkably truly a product of its time. Envision those 70s disaster movies. That’s Disposable People. “Starring Jimmy Stewart as The President!” “Shelly Winters as Miss Dalrymple!” “Martin Balsam as Dr. Henry Gault!” You get the drift. It’s also filled with glorious politically incorrect jaw-droppers. There’s a disparaging gay slur early on and more than a few instances of sexism that would never be published today, even in a work of fiction. The men are all He-Men, all tops in their field, be it medical, military, or political, and all wield six-packs and bed the sex-hungry women that surround them.

All while combatting the most lethal epidemic since the Yellow Fever of the early 20th century. Consolvo’s Ulceration, it’s called, and it’s a nasty piece of sickness. Once infected, any cut on your skin immediately festers, growing in length and width at nearly observable speeds, rotting your body while you’re still alive. It’s painful, putrid, and a forty-eight hour death sentence, forty-seven hours of which are pure torment. There’s no cure, but there is a vaccination. Unfortunately, the vaccination causes a sped-up-on-steroids flare-up of Consolvo’s Ulceration in ten percent of those taking it.

Like those 70s disaster movies, we take a global, high-level view just as frequently as we get the man-on-the-street vignette. The President, a Lincolnesque southerner name of Lloyd Dobson, is a main character, as are the Secretary of State and Attorney General. Then, trickling downward to mere mortals like you and I, you have generals, ambassadors, industrialists, doctors of all stripes, scientists of all flavors, teevee personalities good and evil, assorted military personnel, public officials, migrant workers, poor Mexicans, and even Death Row convicts.

The hero is lone wolf doctor hunk Noah Blanchard, dashing bachelor who’s the best epidemiologist on the planet, hopping the hot spots of the globe, a Colonel is the Air Force and an avid fisherman. You know, our Ideal Vision of Manliness, c. 1979. Noah is drafted by the President at the recommendation of a too-fat and too-old Surgeon General, tasked with the impossible task of beating the Ulceration and saving the United States. After hooking up with an up-and-coming newslady (a walking, talking amalgam of the power politics of 70s women’s lib), Noah begins a wrenching journey to find the cause – and ultimately, the cure – of the disease. Course, it doesn’t hurt that coincidence landed him right at ground zero of the outbreak.

I kid, but I liked it a lot. It was a very readable novel, though not without mistakes. Epidemic armageddon was better done in Stephen King’s The Stand, a target Goldberg aims for but doesn’t quite hit. In the middle of the book there are a couple pages detailing the fates of various individuals as civilization collapses around them, something King did much better, and I wish Goldberg incorporated more frequently in People. If I wrote the thing, I’d pepper the first half of the novel with little tragedies, and salt the final half with scenes of resourceful survivors and what they had to do to survive, no matter how grim.

A few more nits to pick. For a book written by a doctor, I expected a bit more medical stuff – terminology, pathology, a little Cliff Notes version of the phenomenon of epidemics. There’s a little bit at the beginning and some stuff at the end, but the majority of the novel focuses on the political – and geopoltiical – angle. And speaking of the end, I found the “cure,” which had to be tricked out of a schizophrenic virologist, inexplicably cheap. Say, for example, you write a whole book about a car that won’t start, and on the second-to-last page, someone says, “Gee, Bob, didja put the key in it?” And you slap your head, insert the key, and start the car. The End.

Still, a worthy read. Though I forgot the title and the author for decades, several scenes remained with me. The image of movement within the wound of a victim still gives me chills when I think about it today. Scenes of desolation in the southwest as well as the hunt for the carrier – patient zero – also never really left my mind. All in all, I’m glad I was able to go back in time and revisit these pages again.

Grade: A-minus.

Dragon Heart

2012-01-28T14:02:00.003-05:00

My Pacific Islander name is

Ch’yu-anunka-p’nuka’ien

Which means …

Yes, translated literally, it means “The Man Who Broke A Dragon’s Heart.”

Such is the power – and the curse – of my existence.

Fear me and tremble.

RELATED POST:

My name in Zulu ...

The Stage and the Gilded Cage

2012-01-27T20:41:00.000-05:00

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like a snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

- William Shakespeare, As You Like It

All the world’s indeed a stage,
And we are merely players,
Performers and portrayers,
Each another’s audience
Outside the gilded cage.

- Neal Peart, Limelight

Man, I love me some Rush.

"History" Channel

2012-01-26T21:06:00.001-05:00

Some more mockery of the “History” Channel I found amusing –

Again, from Mark Shea’s blog.

Bumper Stickers

2012-01-25T20:33:00.001-05:00

It never fails to completely amaze me how many Obama / Biden bumper stickers I still see on cars on the road.

I mean, are the owners of these vehicles proud of their choice? Are they not aware of the rising national debt, the zero job growth, the unacceptably high unemployment rate around nine percent, gasoline prices hovering at $3.50, rising taxes (or the threat thereof), failed stimulus 1, failed stimulus 2, and any other big business bailouts not covered under failed stimuli 1 and 2? I mean, if this was George Bush, he’d have been crucified years ago in the press.

But hey, their guy speaks and looks good.

I wonder: how many Carter / Mondale bumper stickers were being proudly displayed back in 1980?

Daddy's Law

2012-01-25T20:25:00.001-05:00

It is an immutable law of nature, much like Murphy’s Law and the Peter Principle, that:

Whenever daddy is taking care of two or more preadolescent children,
and mommy is away on business or whatnot,
and the water on the stove is boiling,
and the microwave is beeping,
and the house is in complete disarray,
and the table is still not set,
and one child needs help with a homework question,
and the other child just did a nosedive into the dishwasher,

the telephone will ALWAYS ring.

ALWAYS.

An immutable law of nature, called Daddy’s Law.

Underworld Awakening

2012-01-24T20:37:00.004-05:00

My head was splitting, my ears were aching, my eyes were twitching, my heart was pounding, my stomach was churning, my brain was reeling.

And none in a good way.

It was ten minutes into Underworld: Awakening, the vampires vs. werewolves movie my pal dragged me too. Well, I wanted to check out the chick in the leather outfit, and I was basically virgin to all the other Underworld: Nouns, so I was willing game. Poor, poor me.

It’s only January 24, and I have already surpassed my annual cinematic quota of bursting brains. Bursting brains via bullet, gun, fang, grenade, needle, you name it, the movie’s a very bloody entry into the annals of attention-deficit drama. Everything about it was depressing: the washed out cinematography, the concrete lab-fortress as modern-day Castle Frankenstein, the joyless existence of every single character, even the Star Trek redshirts. And I am so tired of that vampire look of the past twenty years – a cross between Abercrombie & Fitch model and something outta the pages of my wife’s Vogue magazine.

What sickened me most, I think, was the oozing evil of the thing. Not true scary and seductive evil, like that Lambs movie; this evil is just plain stupid and boring. Vampires were evil, the werewolves were evil, each and every human was evil. Heck, I was even rooting for the main character, Kate Beckinsale’s vampire, to get killed. No mercy, no hope, nothing. This, I thought, desperate to give my theatergoing experience some meaning, is the World without Christ.

Yet I enjoy the Resident Evil flicks. Why? I think it goes back to that hope thing. In the latter movies, there’s always a plucky band of human survivors trying to overcome the zombie psycho menace. True, they’re killed off one by one and in similarly grotesque ways, but a few always overcome, and hope wins the day, at least in some small measure.

Plus, Milla just kicks Kate’s butt any day.

Underworld: Awakening – Grade: D. (Hey, the 3-D was impressive)

Block Blues

2012-01-22T17:13:00.001-05:00

I have writer's block.

I'd love to write about the Shroud of Turin, my current subject of interest. Almost finished with a scientific-oriented treatment of the relic, then it's on to a more faith-based book on the topic. The sciency-one hasn't budged my setting on the belief-o-meter, though. Still about 90-10 in favor. In fact, the Rational, Reasoned and Enlightened book actually seems to be falling on the side of ... authenticity. The silly little cloth that silly little flat-earthers believe in might be - well, can't say it's the burial cloth of Christ, but we're forced to say it's not a forgery.

I'd love to write about some funky philosophy. I skimmed through a 20-page online summary of Pyotr Ouspensky's work that reignited my interest in his work. Now, I never finished Tertium Organum, so I can't pen knowledgeable and thoughtful opinions on it; but a couple of themes have permanently taken up residence in the real estate beneath my skull, and periodically bang on the pipes. One day, soon, I'll finished that tome. Then the trick'll be to write it into a piece of fiction.

I'd love to write about the football games. I'm thinking a Giant-Patriot rematch, which I think the suits are also pushing for. But since that's my prediction, it'll be a Niners-Ravens Superbowl. We'll see.

I'd love to write about my latest read, Disposable People. But those thoughts I'm saving for the review in about a week. A third into it, and I'm not disappointed. My first medical thriller, first read at the tender age of 11. Some images permanently seared into the noggin, one such just revisted three decades later. Surprised at the maturity of the book for me at that age, not to say that the book is mature, being a bombastic relic of its age, the late 70s.

I'd love to write about my new job, how well it's going. But that'll jinx it. Block or no block, work is off-limits here.

I'd love to write about politics; there's an endless treasure trove there. The pack of jokers vying for the Republican nomination, each of whom stands a good chance of losing against the worst President in the past century, or at least since Jimmy Carter. I honestly want none of them to win: Not Romney, not Gingrich, not Santorum, not Paul, and certainly not Obama. What to do, what to do, come November? It's depressing.

Man, I hate writer's block. No feeling worse than being unable to write a sentence ...

House of the Vampire

2012-01-21T22:32:00.001-05:00

...

She felt the recycled chill of the air conditioning upon small arms. What contrast to the heavy heat just beyond those doors! She imagined the sound of his sneakers padding along soft carpet, down unlit corridors, his fingers tracing black-painted moldings, dust and cobwebs framing the exhibits. His eyes, completely focused to the darkness, spotting creatures and secret passageways in every shadow . . .

Then she realized she’d glimpsed an intimate part of his world, a part shared with no one ever before. Had he known she would, bringing her here? She thought so, perhaps. She watched his profile as he strained to see past the bars, poor eyesight hindering his search for his imagination, and realized that the final exhibit was The Time Machine: two little boys, trapped in a fantasy world more than three decades lost, fading with the tiptoe of time.

Let's Go to the Hop

2012-01-20T20:07:00.001-05:00

Little One, minutes before going to her school’s Sock Hop.

It’s times like these that I literally thank God I have a wife, i.e., I’m not a widower. I don’t know how I’d handle these dances and such. While my girls, being girls, love these things with infinite passion and excitement, me, I’d actually rather be at the dentist. Getting a cavity filled. Easier to deal with than a roomful of parents making small talk.

The Hound

2012-01-19T21:44:00.000-05:00

“All things betray thee, who betrayest Me.

…

Naught shelters thee, who wilt not shelter Me.

…

Lo naught contents thee, who content’st not Me.

…

Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.”

* * * * * * *

Why can’t I seem to get this right???

Voorloper

2012-01-18T20:51:00.002-05:00

(minor spoilers)

I learned two things reading this book. (1) I just can’t get into Andre Norton books, and (2) there’s a reason why this was one of the Great Unfinished Novels of my reading youth.

Regarding the first point, this analogy popped into my mind quite unexpectedly while showering this morning. Imagine me as a baseball pitcher. Ms. Norton comes up to the plate, swinging a bat, spitting out some chewing tobacco, playing with the sleeves of her jersey and the tags on her gloves in an intricate ritual that would drive any sane person bonkers. She swings the bat, and I notice words written on it:

Web of the Witch World

Hmm. I go into my windup and hurl a fastball straight down the center, bullseye-style, right at that spot where hitters blast ’em out into the parking lot. Norton swings and – whoosh! It’s a miss! She solidly hit nothing. Strike one.

She goes back to the dugout and picks up another bat. During her pre-pitch dress rehearsals, I see different words on this one, really just one word:

Voorloper

Out of respect and admitted admiration, I decide to take it easy on Ms. Norton. I slowly lean back, kick a leg up, and under-hand pitch a 40-mph gentle lob right over the plate for her –

Whoosh! Swing and another miss!

Oh, brother.

Translation for tone-deaf readers: I want to like her, like her writing, really I do, but I just … don’t. I’ve tried two in the past four years and I don’t know if I want to try any more. Which is a pity, because she has a large body of work and is fairly respected in the SF community. So maybe it’s me.

If so, it’s not a recent development. True, I was unable to finish Web in ’07 or ’08. But you have to go back three decades to find my first non-completed Norton book, Voorloper. It was a point of honor for me to get this and finally finish it.

Which brings me to point two. Why didn’t I like Voorloper?

Well, on paper (how ironic) I should have. An intriguing world populated by settlers far removed from earth. Settlements attacked by the mysterious “Shadows”, leaving no survivors save for the occasional infant. The “Tangle” – a writhing mass of thorny vegetation that chokingly grows outwards on the plains. Semi-psychic healers, one of whom I fell in love with all those years ago. Well, a drawing of her. The book’s evocatively illustrated by Alicia Austin.

So with all these pluses, how come I didn’t sync with it? Not sure. The plot is kinda been-there-done-that: monsters attack our villages, lets send in the boy-on-the-cusp-of-manhood whose father just died with the misfit clairvoyant girl to solve the mystery. Linear, overly expository, characters at best two dimensional. The only time the story picks up – well, attains speeds of 10 mph instead of the usual 5 – is toward the end when our two young people enter some sorta abandoned ancient alien outpost and somehow make everything turn out right.

I was a little confused, though, about what actually happened. And not in a good way, like a PKD or Thomas Pynchon kinda way. Were there one or two sets of aliens? A good race and a bad race? Or did the good race become bad when humans arrived on Voor? Or did only some of the good aliens turn evil? Why was some parts of the abandoned ancient alien outpost good and other parts evil? What was the role of the plants – and the “Tangle” in all this? What were the “Shadows”? What was the obsidian statue outside the outpost – a good alien or a bad alien?

The novel also contained one of the biggest deus ex machina props I’ve come across in a while. An alien necklace is conveniently found lying in the grass, an alien necklace which fits our hero perfectly, opens doors, operates machinery, and maybe even gives him superhuman strength for all I know.

However, I’m lashing out a little too harshly, I think. I did finish the thing in three days and read deep into the night. I did want to find out the answers to the mysteries the novel offered. I did enjoy Voor and the culture of the Voorlopers, and wished Norton revealed a bit more of its history and geography. And I loved the names of the settlements; brought an Old West feel to an SF story. Bottom line, I guess, is that there were a lot of ingredients that taste good on their own, but when combined make a pretty unremarkable goulash.

Up in the air whether I’ll try another Andre Norton book. Maybe if I read something luminous and fawning, something with a little detail that piques my interest. But whenever I go to them used book stores, there’s always a trove of her books on the shelves. Could it be because …

Grade: C+ (the plus only due to Austin’s illustrations)

Celebrate Good Times

2012-01-17T18:51:00.000-05:00

1. Little One did her very first presentation! In front of a dozen members of her Brownies troop, she explained how she loves to write in cursive ( - “which they don’t even teach until third grade!” - ), displaying a poster board of the script alphabet and taking questions afterward (!)

2. Patch has graduated from Preppers to Pre-School in her daycare! Thanks to some lollipop-bribing over the holidays, she is now potty trained, and, well, she’s been long ready intellectually from the next step. Her Preppers teachers will be sad, but with Patch’s vocal abilities, they’ll be able to hear her on the other side of the school.

3. Wife has some sort of work-related connection with Gail – Oprah’s whatever – and scored all sorts of awesome points getting her company’s PR firm involved. I must confess I’m not too solid on the details, only listening with half-an-ear and half-a-brain. But kudoes for her! Here’s to an awesome 2013 bonus!

4. And me? Well, I keep doing all right at my new job, but as far as personal celebration goes –

To Die in Italbar

Disposable People

The Humanoids

Spider World

– all came in the mail today! And I’m looking to finish Voorloper tonight! Lots of tres cool escapism and beard-petting SF paperback reviews forthcoming!

Celllllllllllllll-a-brate Good Times – COME ON!

Two Very Different Sides

2012-01-16T18:36:00.002-05:00

So I’m plowing through Dr. Heller’s 1983 book on the Shroud of Turin when I come across this passage, referencing author Ian Wilson, whose book I just gave a glowing review to –

I hung up and, figuring my afternoon was probably shot anyway, went to my car and drove to my favorite book emporium, which nine times out of ten had what I wanted. It had the Wilson book. I returned home and read it straight through. The book was quite entertaining, but Wilson’s science was awful. I knew from my own studies that his history was a fanciful collage, and I suspected that his art history might be, too. Wilson was clearly sold on the fact that the Shroud was authentic, and his bias showed heavily.

Okay then.

In all fairness to Wilson, let me just say Heller is talking about his first book, The Shroud of Turin, written in 1979. The one I read was his 1998 offering, The Blood and the Shroud. The science, art history, and history history may have been updated in some way. Won’t know until I read that older work.

Anyway, Heller’s book is a very interesting “live action” report of what happened from the point of view of STURP, the Shroud of Turin Research Project, a group of around 40 scientists who sprung together in 1978 last-minute to run the Shroud through a battery of scientific examinations. Though a bit of a curmudgeon, he’s very readable and charismatic, and I’m enjoying his contribution to Shroud literature (for the record, I’m about a third of the way in).

At lunch I read a chapter where Heller describes how things just seemed to come together for the ad hoc group of scientists: STURP is declared a non-profit agency in record time, donations fly in just as needed, a wild stock tip supplies hotel fare, an old lady volunteers to hand-weave an imitation shroud for a trial run. As I’m reading all these I suddenly spoke out loud: “It’s a secular miracle!” and then I burst out in laughter.

It’s okay, and not meant in a spiteful spirit. I’m a scientist at heart who believes in the Truth of the Gospel.

Five Dog Names

2012-01-15T20:15:00.000-05:00

I’m trying to train my girls, ages seven and three, to think outside the box.

For example –

Yesterday, over lunch, we were discussing dogs. The wife wants to buy one, the little ones want to buy one, but I want to hold off a little while longer. At least until the girls are a bit older, so I ain’t the only one walking him. Anyway …

“What would you name our dog?” I ask them. “Let’s say we got five dogs – ” their eyes light up – “what would you name each one?”

After some whispered consultation, they come up with this:

Sweetie

Buddy

Shadow (for a black dog)

Marshmello (that’s the correct spelling)

and

Wednesday.

Hmmm. Okay. Now let’s think outside the box.* “Those are all great names,” I say with much grandiosity. “Do you want to know what I’d name them?”

Groans.

“I would name our five little puppies …”

Maximillian

Boris

Guillermo

Empedocles

and

Wallace.

While I think these are different, “fun” names for pets, the girls, sadly, do not agree. In fact, I don’t think I even got all five out over their chorus of BOOOOOOs.

Oh well. The training continues …

* One day I’m going to brainstorm a list of terms to replace that old cliché, “outside the box,” and post it.

Wilson's Shroud

2012-01-14T13:02:00.001-05:00

Finished reading Ian Wilson’s The Blood and the Shroud last night, and, well, I was impressed. Quite readable, highly informative, obviously well-researched, I couldn’t put the thing down, which frankly surprised me. I read it during my lunch break, I read it waiting for dinner to cook, I read it while the little ones were in the bath tub, I read it until past midnight most nights this week. Verdict: A.

More importantly, it nudged my believability-in-the-Shroud’s-genuiness over from 75-25 to 90-10. Primarily through his methodical casting-of-doubt upon the 1988 carbon dating research and secondarily through his overall even-handedness. No one’s a bad guy in Wilson’s book, even the bad guys (from a pro-Shroud point of view, that is). I believe, independent of Wilson’s writings, that there was an agenda to carbon-date the Shroud to the mid-fourteenth century, thus proving it a “fraud.” After reading Wilson’s level and reasoned reasonings why a 2,000-year-old cloth could be erroneously dated to c. 1350 AD, my faith in the relic solidified.

Perhaps a post later down the road on the carbon dating, or perhaps the history of the Shroud (at least according to Ian Wilson). Right now I don’t feel qualified to write on the topic, simply because I don’t feel that I’ve internalized the subject enough. Truth be told I’m feeling an itch to read the 314-page hardcover over again. In fact, the final 60 pages are a chronology of the Shroud, almost year-by-year, from the death of Christ to 1998, the date of the book’s publication. Whatever you may think of him, Wilson is always thorough.

I took Patch with me this morning to a used book store and found another book of his, Holy Faces, Secret Places, for 96 cents. (This in a store where Stieg Larsson papercraps still sell for ten times that much, such is our culture.) Picked it up because it does contain pages of info on the Shroud of Turin and the Cloth of Edessa, which, according to Wilson’s main theory, are the same. I’ll get to that, too, later in the month.

Also, Wilson’s 1978 book The Shroud of Turin is now on my Acquisitions List.

Book Drop!

2012-01-13T19:09:00.000-05:00

Yay!

In the mail this week, SF paperback goodness via Christmas gift card to online book store:

Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov

Space Vulture by Gary K. Wolf and Archbishop (!) John J. Myers

En route:

Humanoids by Jack Williamson

To Die in Italbar by Roger Zelazny

Disposable People by Marshall Goldberg

Spider World: The Tower by Colin Wilson

Let the book reviewing begin!

In Search Of

2012-01-12T21:06:00.003-05:00

Thinking about the self-inflicted demise of The History Channel (a Swamp People marathon tonight. Really? On the History Channel?), my mind wandered to that most awesomest of shows from my youth: In Search Of.

I’ve spoken about it often here at the Hopper. Next to the original Battlestar Galactica series, it was probably the only thing I regularly watched on night-time teevee at that age. True, when slightly younger, me and the family would watch Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Chico and the Man, and, of course, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, on Sunday nights. Around age eleven, I suddenly became too cool for such fare. But not for In Search Of.

In fact, In Search Of was downright creepy. Also, downright awesome, if you forgive the repetition. That opening synthesizer and wah-wah theme song; the psychedelic, moody, oppressive background music; Leonard Nimoy and everything about him – voice, moustache and/or goatee, those loud 70s suits and fat ties; and best of all, the topics. The paranormal, extranormal, abnormal, anti-normal. Strange sightings, cryptids, histories mysteries, edge-of-science-stuff, vanishings, legends true, false, and middling. Every week I looked forward with goosebumped anticipation. Thank God my dad was into this, too (at least, I guess; I don’t think I had the foresight to plan out these viewings).

Each 22-minute episode focused on a single, sole topic aimed directly at the imagination of eleven-year-old boys all across America. Occasionally the show veered into the hokey, to small degrees, but it always maintained a somewhat objective scientific mien. That, coupled with the dignity Spock brought and exuded with his superhuman vocal chords, gave the show a seriousness that you just couldn’t shake. Many episodes focused on respectable “mysteries” – mysteries of literature, historical events, people and peoples of ages past.

So, scanning my memories, I tasked myself to come up with a top-ten of greatest In Search Of episodes. Now, we all know memories are leaky things, quite malleable and often possessing agendae of their own. If I err somehow, well, take it in the spirit that it’s offered: Creepy Nimoy goodness!

10. The Dogon tribe

An African tribe that somehow knows of the existence of Sirius and its smaller stellar companion – invisible to the naked eye. Though I didn’t grasp the significance back then, I somehow have never forgotten this episode.

9. Jack the Ripper

My first encounter with this serial psycho from 1880s England. The sheer violence shocked me, truth be told, I, who loved swords and sorcery and science fiction mayhem at this point. I still can’t get interested in this historical mystery due to the gore factor.

8. The Shroud of Turin

Hey, I’m currently reading a book about this! Again, my first encounter with a historical mystery. Never completely escaped my mind. Well, it did for a few decades, but lately I’ve been thinking about it!

7. Michael Rockefeller

Okay, I don’t remember seeing this as a kid. Saw it in a rerun about ten years ago, and this truly never really left my mind. Youngling of the beyond-wealthy and uber-powerful clan, he seemingly chucked all that wealth and power … to study primitive cultures as an anthropologist. However, hubris must be passed along genetically, as he ran afoul of a particularly nasty tribe (allegedly) and – disappeared without a trace. What happened to him?

6. The Amityville Horror

Vaguely remember this, and rewatched it on youtube around Halloween (you can see most In Search Of episodes on youtube). Man, was I into this back around 78 or 79. Scary stuff. Drew me like a moth to flame.

5. The Oak Island Money Pit

Buried treasure. Just beyond your grasp. Many tried to dig it up. All failed. Some died. Every ten feet down, a sign. An elaborate trap? Otherworldly engineering? Who knows? Something I’d love to. Learn more. About.

4. Amelia Earhart

In a similar vibe with Michael Rockefeller, these types of mysterious vanishings toy with my obsession buttons. Many years later I skimmed through a book about her. Lots of alternate theories of what happened to her (captured by Japs, starved on a distant island, etc), but I think she and her co-pilot just plain veered off course and crashed into the ocean. I don’t want to think of what happened after that.

3. Ogo-Pogo

A sea serpent, or rather, a lake monster like the Loch Ness critter. I recall some footage from the episode. Interesting, intriguing. What caught me most, though, was the name of the dang monster. It’s gotta be of Indian derivation, but there’s a spookiness in a million-year-old modern brachiosaur named Ogo-Pogo.

2. Bigfoot!

As every eleven-year-old boy was in the late 70s, I was completely enamored by Bigfoot. Read tons of books on the cryptid, watched anything and everything I could on the subject. This episode held my first viewing of the Gimlin-Patterson film footage, of which I have never made up my mind. I think I’m of the opinion that there’s a fifty-percent chance the creature exists. Still, though, the possibilities are so intriguing I am completely amazed and dumbfounded a decent horror movie has never been made about the beast. Aside from The Legend of Boggy Creek, of course.

1. UFO abductees

This was before the whole abduction phenomenon began in the mid-80s. So I was treated to learned about Travis Walton primarily. Some other stuff, too, but I can’t quite remember what exactly. However, I do know that this was the very first episode of In Search Of that I ever watched! And I was hooked, baby, hooked!

Here’s that theme music –

History (?) Channel

2012-01-11T20:41:00.003-05:00

My sentiments exactly!

(But I still watch the kooky stuff every now and then ...)

Hat tip: Mark Shea

Mysterious Herb

2012-01-10T21:44:00.002-05:00

Quick – what tastes like a cross between root beer and thickly medicinal licorice?

It’s my mysterious herb, that I can’t quite decide whether I wish to despise it or lay down my life in its cause.

For those of you who began reading this post thinking I was going to write something about an enigmatic fellow name of Herbert, well, I am. Herb’s last name is of Spanish derivation: zarzaparrilla (yes, that’s right, roll those rrrrs and go heavy on the y-sound at the end). But, truth be told, he goes by the nom de guerre of

S a r s a p a r i l l a !

No, sarsaparilla doesn’t make you drunk. I don’t drink and blog. But I am high on life!

Waterloo

2012-01-09T20:45:00.001-05:00

OK, so maybe it’s not my Waterloo. Maybe it’s my own literary Battle of Borodino.

I’m putting Tolstoy’s War and Peace back on the shelf. It bested me. In a world where Hoppers hop maniacally between work, children, household chores, friends, and a never-ended inertial battle against low energy, there just isn’t any room for an eleven-hundred word eighteenth-century Russian masterpiece of literature.

Weep not for me, children. It goes back on the shelf, not in the trash can.

This is not the first time I’ve thrown in the towel. Recently, I had to surrender to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (about 50% completed), Pyotr Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum (60% completed), Father Walter Ciszek’s He Leadeth Me (33%), Robert Anton Wilson’s Eye in the Pyramid (20%) and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (5% before my head exploded). All are back on the shelf, and all will be tackled again.

Many books required a second go to get through: Dicken’s Tale of Two Cities, Clive Barker’s Imagica, PKD’s Time Out of Joint, Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco. Some of my proudest accomplishments are when I finally master books like these, absorb them and make them my own. I never leave a Good book permanently unfinished, provided that “G” in “good” is capitalized.

What happened? I guess my heart wasn’t into it. I first cracked the book in 1984, reading the first 80 or 90 pages. This time around, I raced through the beginning, eager to get past the “soap opera” elements of the story and on to the Napoleonic Wars. Well, I got there, and it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t Red Badge of Courage. It was good, don’t get me wrong; I’m not panning the book. But when I found myself making excuses not to read it, that was the red flag. Life is too short to waste on reading something that doesn’t drive you crazy with anticipation.

War and Peace goes back into semi-retirement. I may get to it sooner or I may get to it later, but I will read the whole thing before I shuffle off this mortal coil.

(For the record, I reached page 236 – Chapter XII of Part III – before reaching this decision. I began it on November 26, and probably invested twelve or fifteen reading sessions.)

(First paragraph note: Waterloo is the battle which effectively ended Napoleon as Emperor of France and threat to Europe. Borodino was the battle which effectively ended Napoleon’s campaign into Russia. A more fitting metaphor, no?)

Shroudy With A Chance ...

2012-01-08T17:33:00.003-05:00

I finally found something moderately fringey-ish to read up on.

A few months ago I wrote about my disenchantment with the JFK assassination, a little topic of weirdity that fascinated me every November for ever since I saw the Oliver Stone flick. Reading Gerald Posner's conspiracy-debunking book last year debunked all the spooky fun out of the events of November 1963. In this post, here, I wrote about my search for a new goosebump-inducing, beard-petting topic of study.

Even though the list I came up with included some freaky stuff and some sciency stuff and some mental-idea-ideology stuff and some plain-kookie stuff, nothing really grabbed me. So I read up on the Civil War and read a science fiction book or two in the interim, along with starting a new job and piloting the leaky vessel known as the S. S. Hopper through the iceberg laden Holiday Sea.

But there was something nagging me, something just beyond my consciousness. I may have had a dream about it; it's on the tip of my tongue to tell inquiring minds, 'cept for the fact I don't recall an actual dream. When I got out of the hospital in February 2009, with a new spiritual fervor, I remember taking a few books out from the library, skimming a couple, taking some notes, planning some blog posts. But nothing fruitful came of it.

Saturday, on errands with Patch, I stopped at my favorite local library and found two intriguing books on the Shroud of Turin. You know, that burial cloth upon which supposedly holds the transmitted image of Christ. Something is driving me to learn more about it. I don't know why or what for. All I know is that right now it interests me.

My first encounter with the Shroud was sometime in the late 70s, watching that awesome weekly show In Search Of as a lad. About six months ago I came across it again on youtube (actually while watching an In Search Of on the "Amityville Horror" in conjunction to reading said book; the Shroud episode was on a list of recommended videos on the right side of the page). Then, that dream I may or may not have had. So I borrowed the two library books and I'm already 45 pages into the first.

Maybe some posts to follow every couple of days or once a week. I don't know; I don't know where this is going. Right now I'm probably 75-25 in favor of it being the authentic burial shroud of Jesus. But that 1988 carbon-dating evidence is pretty daunting (modern science tells us the cloth is from circa 1325 AD). I need to do more reading to firm up my opinion, one way or the other.

The Shroud of Turin is said to be the most investigated / researched / studied object ever made by man. Now it'll be studied by one more guy.

The Searchers

2012-01-07T17:32:00.000-05:00

In lieu of a full-court review, of which I lack the desire and energy to write, I’ll give you three letters, three words, and eight marks of punctuation:

OMG!!! She’s Ethan’s daughter!!!

There.

Now, as a side note, I have the book upon which The Searchers is based, also entitled The Searchers. The slim paperback I have is so yellowed with age I wouldn’t be surprised if either John Wayne or John Ford personally handled the book. Apparently, Ethan is known as Amos in the book, and from what little I know, little else is changed. Except, perhaps, the ending and the whole meaning of the work. Anyways, I plan on traversing those pages come summertime.

Make My Mind

2012-01-06T20:08:00.000-05:00

Kinda busy tonight, so –

Aw, shucks. I’ll be honest.

I’m tired from a long week at work, tired from raising children, tired from detoxing due to my New Year’s diet, tired from … well, I’m tired.

So’s the Mrs.

We’re gonna watch a flick together tonight. I can hear little footpads two floors upstairs telling me she’s marshalling the little ones to bed. Good. Let me type this quickly and get it posted. Big weekend, with the football playoffs (Go Giants!), church, my father-in-law visiting, errands tomorrow, cutting up that gigantic tree branch that crashed on my deck last month. But tonight I’m watching a movie. (I have The Searchers starring John Wayne DVR’d, but I’m not sure I can cajole the wife into watching it.)

In the meantime, why not check out my latest musical obsession? I was way into these guys around 1996 or 97; they were probably the last rock band I enjoyed before delving into classical.

Ghosts of the Battleships

2012-01-05T20:51:00.006-05:00

It’s been said the Golden Age of science fiction is not the Forties or the Fifties. No, the Golden Age of science fiction is around Eleven. When a boy’s eleven, and he gets pulled in just past the event horizon of Asimov, or Bradbury, or Clarke, or Heinlein – well, life is good and complete and endlessly fascinating and overflowing with wonder.

As a corollary, Eleven was probably the most wonderful time of my life. This was a year or two before my parents divorced. I lived in a house I loved, I lived in a neighborhood filled with endless possibilities, I went to a school I was comfortably perfect in – or perfectly comfortable in – and I pal’d around that year with a kid named Mark, getting into all sorts of devilishly fun mischief you can really only appreciate if you had once been an eleven year old boy.

Yeah, we were in school together, in the same class. Though we weren’t “bullies” by any stretch of the imagination, we made up elaborate backstories about our classmates. I remember a somewhat heavy ethnic kid – who probably wound up a collegiate offensive lineman – that took the brunt of our weirdness. And he never even knew it.

But most of our troublemaking happened around the neighborhood. Ring and run was a favorite past-time. That soon grew boring, so, being criminal masterminds, we recruited my little brother to do the ringing and running. We, of course, would hide in the bushes in the house across the street and observe the homeowner’s reaction. I even had the grand idea to tell my brother to ring the bell, run to the edge of the property, and lay at the base of a three-foot stone wall out of sight of the front porch. Unfortunately, the owner, dumbfounded and perplexed, decided to walk out and leisurely inspect just about every inch of his front yard. He literally stood two feet directly above him, yet never spotted my no-doubt terrified little brother. We, of course, giggled with glee from safety on the other side of the road.

Like many gateway drugs, this led to harder stuff. Harder in this case meant: let’s have my little brother “play dead” at the side of the road, half on the curb, half off, while Mark and myself would camouflage ourselves behind nearby shrubbery. We’d wait a remarkably short time before cars pulled over to investigate this “dead” child – at which point my brother would take off running like the devil himself was after him. We always made sure we were close enough to hear the remarks of our “victims” as they returned to their cars: “I thought he was dead!” I remember one young man saying to an older woman as clear as if I heard it at dinner tonight.

Me and Mark targeted a local home fix-it supply store called Rickels, causing mayhem for their poor minimum-wage employees. We set all the display alarm clocks to go off all at once. We put six-inch hollow black plumbing tubes into the fake toilets and closed the lid – ho, ho! what a surprise awaited the unsuspecting shopper. We even got kicked out by the store detective one day.

There was a stream that meandered beyond the wooden fence in Mark’s backyard. We hopped over and followed it all the way down to the mill and the pond a little way’s away. The stream was overflowing with tin cans. We hit upon the idea of asking the mill owner’s permission to fish out all the cans and recruited my brother to help. Of course, he eventually fell into the blue scummy water and had to bike all the way home to shower the foul odor off himself. This was probably the most altruistic thing we did (at least superficially; I believe we had it in mind to make 5 cents off each can, but it never got that far).

Another time we had the intelligent idea to stick a Frankenstein mask on the end of a stick, go under a nearby two-lane bridge, and poke it up over the sewer grating at passing cars. Very quickly, however, the tables were turned on us as a motorist – who obviously had no sense of humor – pulled over, ripped the Franken-stick out of our hands, and hurled it at us spear-like as we fled down the stream away from the road.

Over in my neck of the woods, we hit upon the idea of trying to scare people a different way. I stole a plastic tin of talcum powder from my mother’s dresser as Mark came over my house one night. We did up our faces to look as unnaturally pale as possible, then moved out down my street, looking for houses with windows open and “victims” visible inside. We found a few and paraded as zombies back and forth on the sidewalk … and elicited exactly no response. A rare dud for us, I suppose.

I have lots more memories of those days, a lot disjointed, a lot that run on to no discernible conclusion. There was a birdcage that hung on a tree at that stream behind Mark’s house for no comprehensible reason whatsoever. Playing Battleship with Mark in my backyard and Mark taking the destroyed battleships, hovering them about in the air, saying something that the “ghosts of the battleships are returning!” Going to the movie theaters by ourselves for the first time, and seeing … The Poseidon Adventure 2 (!) Mark extolling the virtues of the Chuck Heston movie The Omega Man one afternoon, then calling me up later that day after I went home to exclaim, “It’s on teevee right now!”

And many more I won’t bore you with, primarily because they probably wouldn’t make any sense to you.

* * * * * * *

I’m not big on the Facebook thing; probably cause I’m about a generation removed from its target market I suppose. After my hospitalization in 2009, when I unexpectedly found myself with a lot of down time with a pink slip with my final check, a friend strongly encouraged me to sign up. Reluctantly I did, because such public non-anonymous displays embarrass me. But guess who “friended” me a month later? Yup. Mark. My best friend from over thirty years ago.

We corresponded and caught up, and maybe checked in once a year or so, all via email. Then, out of the blue, he let me know his family was coming cross-country into town to visit relatives. Would I want to get my family together with his for a bite to eat?

Immediately as I read his words, all the thoughts and memories preceding flooded through me. Stuff I hadn’t thought of in decades. Would I? You bet. Opportunities like this you can’t just leave to “tomorrow.”

One night between Christmas and New Years, Mark and I met and grabbed some Mexican food with the families in tow. Over a couple of beers we reminisced and caught up with life stories and chatted up our jobs and houses and towns. He and his wife have two daughters, just like me and mine have, though a year or two older. They shyly played the mental chess pre-adolescents do, barely speaking to each other until breaking the ice as we’re all putting on jackets to leave.

It was a tremendous ninety minutes that I wish was two or three times longer. We left in the rain making promises to reconnect in a few years when my family would be vacationing near his once my little ones are a bit older. On the ride home all they talked about were Mark’s daughters, while I drove watching the wipers rhythmic motion, my mind half in 2011, half in 1978.

Hot Herbal Tea

2012-01-04T18:38:00.003-05:00

It was an awesome herbal tea, having all the esoteric qualities that made an herbal tea awesome. Intrigue, mystique, strange familiarity, a timeless invitation into the enternal now, a devilishly haunting aftertaste. Indeed it haunted me all that cold, rainy afternoon as I murmured over and over to myself, “I will either drink this tea hereforth every single afternoon, or else it will never, ever pass my lips again.”

Operatics

2012-01-03T20:39:00.002-05:00

Around 1997 I became disgusted with contemporary music. No, that’s being a bit dramatic. But I distinctly recall driving up to CD World one night, cash in hand and looking for something cool to buy, and after casing the store for over an hour, literally finding nothing to pique my interest. Nothing at all.

A change was needed.

A couple years earlier, in my band’s heyday, looking to expand my musical horizons, I began listening to a local classical music station. Over the summer. Didn’t get too far into it (aside from realizing I liked the music of some guy named Sibelius). But my ma bought me a “sampler” 10-pack of CDs, each one of a different heavy-hitter. Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, to name a few (but no Sibelius).

So, five years later, desperately seeking something new, I decided to throw myself wholeheartedly into classical music. I believe I wrote about that mini-quest elsewhere here on the Hopper. But in true Hopper form, I quickly grew bored of classical music, and again needed a fix of something new.

Why not – Opera? Surely that would truly challenge my long-held proud musical identity as a grunge guitarist. Surely that would make me grow as a musician, being such a foreign – yet well-proven musical influence.

I bought a “Mad About Wagner” CD, which introduced me to some of the famous passages of his Ring cycle, and a few others. It was mostly music, though, with no singing other than a chorus here and there.

Then I tried La Traviata by Verdi, The Barber of Seville by Rossini, Le Nozze di Figaro by Mozart. But none particularly grabbed me, and I was about to write off Opera until I borrowed Carmen by Georges Bizet from a local library. It was April of 1999, and I was in the middle of renovating my apartment. That night I was washing the walls with some orange-scented chemical before priming and painting them. The early Spring evening was that perfect balance of warmth and wind, and I had all the windows opened. And from the very first notes I was hooked.

I loved Carmen. Yeah, I’m about as far as one can be from hot-blooded Spaniards or Frenchmen. But every song had something that grabbed me, that hooked my soul. Very quickly after that, I had to hear more.

Carmen was Bizet’s only opera – pity, but the man died of a heart attack as it was preparing to premiere. Fortunately, I followed it up with that oft-paired duo, Cavalleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci, the “Heartbreaker” and “Living Loving Maid” of Operettas. Both remain with me to this day, in the form of a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law. Yes, Pav is headlining both.

Over the next five years I listened to a little over twenty more. 2004 was a particularly fruitful year. That May we moved into our house, and that summer, working full-time and painting every single room in it by myself, I would soak in a hot tub nightly listening to each of the four operas in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. My favorite one is Das Rheingold.

Verdi is often touted as Wagner’s rival. I must confess I am a Wagnerite (my father-in-law is a Verdi man himself). But this has not kept me from exploring the Italian’s work. I listened to Rigoletto, Aida, Traviata, Il Trovatore, Falstaff, Giovanna d’Arco, Otello, and La forza del destino. Though none are true personal favorites, I absolutely loved the ending to Falstaff. Goose-bump inducing, and a triumphant finale to both the opera and the composer’s career.

There were some dead ends. Though I loved Dvorak’s Rusalka, I never did get into central European stuff. The Bartered Bride and Wozzeck did nothing for me, and, traveling a little north, the operas of Richard Strauss ditto. But I did enjoy Die Freischutz by Weber. Go figure.

Puccini … some say he’s the greatest operatic composer. I’ll say this of my personal experience with him: La Boheme, Tosca, and Madame Butterfly did nothing to me (gasp!), though I grant the right leading lady in the role of Tosca can be incendiary. That being said, my all-time favorite opera, hands-down, is Turandot. The version with Pavarotti never fails, even to this day, to send shivers up and down my spine.

There was a stretch, before children and before the house (in other words, when Mr. and Mrs. Hopper had money), where I’d see an opera every year for my birthday. It started out with a trip to the New York Philharmonic to see a symphony, then turned into a visit to the Metropolitan Opera House. There I saw Traviata and Aida; at the Julliard Theater I saw Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex, in a hypnotic and strangely riveting performance.

Soon after this the long-suffering wife put her foot down. The next year we saw Jazz at Lincoln Center while my ma watched the little baby. And soon after that there no longer was money for trips into NYC. My interest in opera waned, then dwindled, then disintegrated. The last one I listened to with any real intent to get into the work was Beethoven’s Fidelio, in May of ’06.

On the way home from work tonight, though, on a whim, I stopped in at a local library and browsed their music shelves. Ah! Begging me to take it home was a battered and torn opera by – Wagner! Parsifal! Don’t think I ever listened to that one. Hmm. Maybe tonight, after everyone’s in bed, I’ll get the headphones and crack open the libretto …

The Oscillating Electron

2012-01-02T20:46:00.003-05:00

This is currently my favorite physics “oddity” – check it out …

Why does every electron “look” exactly like every other electron?

Because there is only one electron in the entire Universe.

Huh?

Aren’t there anywheres from one to over a hundred in any given atom, and aren’t there megagazillions of atoms in the tiniest little hair poking out of your skin?

In fact, the number of atoms in the universe is guesstimated to be somewhere around

10 ^ 78

to

10 ^ 82

which are, of course, numbers with 78 to 82 zeroes after them.

That’s a lot of atoms. A hydrogen atom has only one electron, while an atom of uranium has 92. So multiply that gargantuan number by a factor of 10 or 100 or so to get an idea of how many electrons exist in the universe.

Physicist John Wheeler believed that there is only one electron in the Universe.

Now, I don’t know how far down the facetious scale Wheeler is taking us. I don’t really think it matters, for the reasoning is truly wonderful.

Most of us are aware of the Big Bang – the “birth” of the Universe in which all matter, energy, and space burst outward from a singular point. The best analogy is not an explosion, but a massive balloon being blown up at hyperspeed. We live on the surface of the balloon, so in effect the Universe is bursting outward from every single point.

There is only one thing that can stop such outbursting – and that’s gravity. Gravity from all the matter in the Universe. So the big question is, is there enough matter to slow the expansion of the Universe? Right now, observably, the answer is no; that’s why there is so much interest in dark matter (and energy), “dark” meaning not “black” but “undetectable.”

But Wheeler assumes that there is more than enough matter to slow the Universe’s expansion. In fact, there is enough to cause a reversal after 50 or so billion years. This contraction will lead to a Big Crunch, which itself ultimately leads to another Big Bang. This is the model of the Oscillating Universe.

Once upon a time, there was a Big Bang which shot forth a single electron. It traveled forward in time billions of years until – the Big Crunch, where it moves backward in time as the Universe contracts to a singularity. Then, the Big Bang again, spewing that solitary little electron, forward in time, backward in time to Crunch. Ad infinitum.

What is the difference between an object traveling in space and one traveling in time? Objects in space can not see duplicates of themselves, but objects in time can! Just think, if I go back in time a year, I can sneak around and spy on myself.

So there is this electron that lives through a series of Big Bangs and Big Crunches. How many? Oh, I don’t know … how about

10 ^ 78

to

10 ^ 82

or a similar amount by a factor of ten or a hundred? In other words, a megagigantazillion of Bang-Crunches. Now … see where Wheeler is going with this?

There is only one electron, but we experience a megagigantazillion time-copies of it.

To which I can only add: how cool is that idea? Yeah, it goes against Christian theology, yeah, it mirrors that nut-job Nietzsche’s belief in Eternal Recurrence. But It Is So Cool!

Man I wish I stuck with physics …

(Note: this neat little anecdote is better described in Michio Kaku’s excellent book, Beyond Einstein. Great for beginners or those re-introducing themselves to cutting edge physics from a 1980s point-of-view.)

New Year New Do

2012-01-01T20:06:00.000-05:00

All righty!

I do have some interesting ideas to blog about ... just simply need to find the time to sit down and write them! There's a review of the Alien "Director's Cut," there's a meeting I had with a childhood friend I hadn't seen in 30 years, there's some theological thoughts that bounce about that noggin above every morning during my commute that make me exclaim out loud: "I should blog about this!" And lots more, mostly in the form of vague and amorphous blobs of semi- and pseudo-thought.

So please check back!

Happy New Year!

2011-12-31T16:57:00.001-05:00

Ah, my favorite holiday, and yes, it can be called a holiday. It’s holy, despite the endless capacity for stupidity in the form of drinking alcoholic beverages found in many of us. It’s holy because it offers us a chance to reform, to repent, to change for the better.

I’m just like you – I’ve never kept a New Years resolution longer than a couple of weeks. The closest I came was in 2005, when Little One was a really little one, and I felt the urge to overhaul the way I lived and experienced life. Most of my resolutions that year never made it past February, but a couple made it to the summer and one or two even beyond. My biggest takeaway was not that I was a failure, but: what if I really could put these changes into effect long-term? Imagine the possibilities …

So, from me and mine to you and yours,

HAVE A SAFE AND HAPPY NEW YEAR’S EVE, AND A PRODUCTIVE AND PROSPEROUS JOY-FILLED 2012!

2011 Hopper Best-Ofs!

2011-12-31T10:53:00.005-05:00

Category: Best Fiction

Man Plus, © 1976 by Frederik Pohl

Well, The Lord of the Rings is technically disqualified, since it was a re-read. That being said, I didn’t read as much SF this past year as I normally do, primarily due to my Phases (see below). There were a handful that were all good, all worthy reads – the runner-ups: Cycle of Fire, Inherit the Stars, Casey Agonistes, The Star Diaries, Orbitsville, Big Planet, and Time for the Stars. But like a free-for-all cage match to the death, there can only be one winner. And in 2011, it was the unable-to-put-down, just-the-right-size, just-the-right-blend-of-SF-and-horror, Man Plus.

Category: Best Non-Fiction

Tertium Organum, © 1912, by Peter Ouspensky

Just wish I could finish the darn thing! A few years back I got about a hundred pages in. This summer I got about three hundred in. The book is half-a-thousand pages of philosophy – but one I find strangely compelling. Ouspensky begins with epistemology but quickly moves on to the geometry of higher dimensions, and uses that to explain everything from motion and change to love and purpose. I’ll get to it again in a couple of years.

Category: Worst Book

Nerves, © 1956 by Lester del Rey

Hated hated hated this book! If you really want to know why, see here.

Category: Best Movie

Limitless, © 2011, starring Bradley Cooper and Robert DeNiro

This movie absolutely fired my imagine! Just put the title in the little search thingie to the left to see the posts I did on it. Indeed, it’s been a subliminal undertheme in my daily existence ever since high school. The movie was a well-executed, extremely entertaining (if a bit gory in one or two scenes) flick that’ll make you think, pun intended.

Runner-Up: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, © 2011, starring James Franco and the guy who did Gollum in the Lord of the Rings movies. A great, emotional surprise with one of the best after-the-credits ending I’ve seen.

Category: Best Documentary

Deep Water, © 2006

Based on the tragedy of Donald Crowhurst and the 1969 Golden Globe around-the-world sailboating race. Nine men enter, one man finishes, one man dies, one man attains nirvana. A documentary that will give you goose bumps and choke you up. An extremely emotional punch; a study of men being tested to the edge of their sanity.

Category: Best Hopper Phase

Shakespeare! May – September 2011

Read through eight of his thirty-seven to thirty-nine plays, and pretty much enjoyed them all. Favorite, though, was Henry IV part I, least favorite was Twelfth Night, which I just couldn’t get into, visualize-wise. As a corollary, I enjoyed just about every single BBC DVD of the plays I read; a great way to enjoy the Bard.

Runners-Up:

The Donald Crowhurst tragedy, February – March 2011
Zane Grey Westerns, June – July 2011
The Civil War history, October – November 2011

* * * * * * *

Wishing you great reading for 2012!

* * * * * * *

EDIT:

Oops! Almost forgot the Hopper Official Song of 2011!

In years past the honor’s gone to such tunes as Dio by Tenacious D and Grab a Chicken by Peter Frampton. But this year –

It’s a tie!

Between –

One Rainy Wish by Jimi Hendrix

and

Heart of the Sunrise by Yes

Google and enjoy!

Happy Said I

2011-12-30T21:27:00.000-05:00

Happy I am, said I, happy with the new job, happy with the events of this holiday season. Light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel, darkest-before-dawn happy. Finally, in the immortal words of Robert Plant:

I can breathe again

Happy I am, I said, with a wink, and happier I will be, in 2012.

Christmas 2011

2011-12-30T05:27:00.002-05:00

$50

2011-12-29T21:25:00.006-05:00

As I always do every Christmas, I received a couple of gift cards from family for a large nameless retail bookseller. $50 worth, to be exact.

Needless to say, I am very excited.

Like a groom who abstains from relations with his espoused for an extended period before the wedding. That’s how excited I am, and yes, I realize how weird that makes me seem.

Way back before Thanksgiving I promised the wife no more books until the new year. As a matter of fact, I bought a pair right after I got the job I’ve been at for seven weeks now, and nothing since. Heck, I’ve only been in a library twice in that period. And to top it off, I’ve been kinda bogged down in War and Peace for over a month, though it’s not Tolstoy’s fault (it’s this damnable cough of mine that makes reading difficult).

So – what to buy, come January 2?

Oddly enough, I’m not leaning towards books.

I mean, on the shelf behind me, I have a stack of about thirty or so in my on-deck circle. Twenty SF paperbacks, and a dozen nonfiction: physics, philosophy, religion, check, check, check. So I’m not really lacking in the written word department. I feel no special passion at the moment, so no need to go on a spending spree.

What I have been doing lately is listening to a lot of music. Music that I haven’t really listened to in years. Decades, even. Everything from Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull to the Screaming Trees and the Presidents of the United States of America. Additionally, I’ve been listening again to classical music. Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Bruckner, and Copland. Might be time to buy a coupla CDs to meditate to via headphone.

I don’t know. Decisions, decisions, and indecision.

The wife decided to make it a DVD Christmas for me. Got the Alien Quadrilogy (of which I watched a bit already with my pal – more on that later in the week) and a set of a half-dozen classic movies from the 40s and 50s. So considering my normal response to “What do you want for Christmas, Daddy,” being “a book, a CD, and a DVD,” the video angle of my simple pleasures is fulfilled.

This will require some thought, some quiet-time thought, driving to and from work or laying in the dark in bed at night. I never spend money frivolously, no matter how frivolous it seems to my wife and family. Everything I buy is carefully considered. The two $25 gift cards I have will be money wisely spent. There is a method to my madness.

I guess I want to say that I’m open to suggestions. I’ll be cultivating responses from the people who know me best. And even from those who think they do, or just plain don’t. I welcome feedback on topics such as these.

Worse comes to worse, I can always manage to pick up seventeen – yes, seventeen – SF paperbacks for the $50. And that’s about two solid work-weeks of escapist fun!

Don't Open It, Buzz!

2011-12-27T22:37:00.000-05:00

THE SCROLL! said she, open The Scroll! But I remembered Father McMurphy said not to, to not unravel mysteries best left for other eyes, and I, alive, full fathom five, set square to strive to survive, I

grasped that shifty plaster o’ paris thing, crumbling into particulate dust like so many mummified mallows of marshes, I grasped it – yes, I – and grasping, glancing at she and the memory of well-coifed and well-quaffed Father McMurphy, I

opened the ggoddammedd thing – I mean, c’mon, it’s just a scroll – so yeah it happens to be a couple two-three thousand years old and

what’s the matter with my hand-head-heart growing cold as cold as stone?

Circumferences

2011-12-26T21:38:00.002-05:00

So after Christmas Eve dinner at my brother’s house, my brother poses a mathematical conundrum. He’s worked out an answer and he wants to hear mine and compare notes.

Very well! I like mathematical conundrums!

In a nutshell, he wants to know how tire wear will specifically affect his mileage.

Brand new tires on his vehicle have circumferences of 92 inches.

Since there are 5,280 feet in a mile and 12 inches in a foot, there are 63,360 inches in a mile. Divide that figure by 92 and you get about 688.7. Every mile, my brother’s tires go through 688.7 revolutions. Some gear thingy inside the motor knows this, and that’s how the odometer knows how to calculate mileage, or distance traveled.

Now say the tires wear to the point where the circumference is now 90 inches.

Divide 63,360 by 90 and you get 704. The tire needs to spin 704 times to travel a mile.

But that gear thingy doesn’t know this. It doesn’t know wear and tear. All it knows is how to count revolutions and convert that into distance.

When the worn tire spins 688.7 times, it only goes 61,983 inches, or 5,165.25 feet, or 97.8 percent of a mile. Everything decreases in efficiency by 2.2 percent. The odometer will be off, the speedometer will be off, fuel economy will be off.

So when he’s going down to Florida to Disneyworld, and Mapquest says it’ll be 1,122 miles, his tripometer will read 1146. Where did those 24 extra miles come from?

Instead of spending $135 on gas filling up on the way down, he’ll spend $138. Thus is the terrible cost of worn tires.

Actually, though, doesn’t seem all that bad.

In fact, makes me question my math …

Or the last time I actually, er, slept …

Quadrilogy

2011-12-25T16:09:00.001-05:00

One of my most intriguing gifts received this Christmas. I foresee a series of four, maybe five posts in the near future ...

Christmas 2011 recap to follow, tomorrow maybe, as we're off to yet another Christmas party / gathering / celebration. The fun never ends ...

Merry Christmas to All!

2011-12-24T20:46:00.000-05:00

Giants vs Jets

2011-12-23T18:36:00.000-05:00

Okay, big, big game tomorrow night. Almost Superbowl big. Essentially, it’s a playoff game in regular season where the winner will move forward while the loser will face elimination.

The mediocre New York Giants face off against the mediocre New York Jets, battling for a crack at the sixth Wild Card position in their respective conferences.

At 7-7, the Giants are perhaps the most crazily schizophrenic team in football. They’ll beat the Patriots in the final seconds and hang in neck-and-neck with the Packers, but will lose easily to the Seahawks and the Redskins. I’ve always said they play at the level of their opponent. This season, they play just slightly below.

At 8-6, the Jets are slightly less erratic, but only slightly less so. Every game is a toss-up; there are no sure wins with these Jets. On paper, I guess, the talent’s all there. In execution, though, it ain’t. This is the team headed by the same coaching staff that went to the AFC championships two years running? I’ve always said (of late, at least) that the Jets are still a B-level team. A-level teams determine their own fates. The Jets still haven’t reached this level. In 2011, they dropped back a bit, half-a-grade or so.

Now, I’m no NFL whiz. I know both teams have their key injuries. I know both teams faced tougher-than-normal schedules. It’s just one of my dreams that I get to experience a completely dominant New York NFL team at least once in my mature lifetime. Yes, in 86 the Giants were pretty much killer, but back then I had other things on my mind. Just like I want to see another Reagan before I die, I want to see another New York football team utterly destroy its opponents week in and week out.

So my prediction for tomorrow?

In the words of Clubber Lang: Pain.

Not physical pain, mind you. Mental pain, in the form of humiliation. But not just one team. I predict both teams will be humiliated.

Tomorrow, Saturday, will be a first in the history of the National Football League. For the first time in a game in the 80-plus years the league has been in existence, neither team will win. Now, I’m not talking a tie here. I’m talking both teams losing. I’m not sure how the heck that’s possible, but in the 2011 Giants-Jets game, it will happen.

Both teams will lose somehow.

Mark my words.

Real Stimulus

2011-12-23T18:17:00.000-05:00

Forgive Me

Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the Hopper family, I think we’ve just guaranteed the re-election of the Amateur President.

How?

By really stimulating the economy this Christmas season.

How so?

Well, as I sit here at my desk I stare at a pile of receipts – so many I can’t guesstimate their number by a simple glance alone. Twenty? Twenty-five? Thirty? And the thing is, those are only the receipts that made it to my desk. I know for a fact there are a bunch still in my wallet, still in the key drawer, still in the center console of my bad*ss 2008 Chevy Impala. Lord knows how many receipts are still in that bottomless pit known as my wife’s handbag. And there’s more than one handbag, too.

There’s your immediate family. Then there’s your larger family, in our case, parents and a single, all-encompassing gift for my nephews. Then, friends. Friends’ children, too, somehow no longer limited solely to godchildren. Your children’s friends for your children’s Christmas parties. Your children’s teachers, all eight of them. Grab bags at work. Secret Santas among the extended family. And on, and on, and on.

So, thanks to the valiant spending of me and mine here at Chateau Hopper, the economy will have grown about 7.5 percent this month as opposed to a typical, Obamaesque 1.5 – 2 percent. And the media will trumpet it all the way to Election Day, 2012.

Please forgive me.

Auto-Messiah

2011-12-21T21:33:00.002-05:00

Funny in a disturbing way ... and not too far off the mark, I think.

Solstice Bells

2011-12-20T22:00:00.002-05:00

All right, I’m unleashing the inner nerd. Heard this song a few days ago and can’t get it out of my head. Pagan or not, who cares. I’m appropriating it for Christ, for Christmas, just like so much of the pagan Classical world was subsumed in the service of the true Lord. So there. (here’s where I put that smily emoticon if I could bother to learn how to do so.)

Incidentally, I was massively into Jethro Tull as a sophomore in high school; theirs was the first concert I ever attended. And the last one, sober. Anyhoo, still think Ian has one of the best sets of pipes on the planet, and love the baroque medievalesque flavor the band brings to their music. Actually own a couple of their CDs to this day, too.

3 for 3 and counting ...

2011-12-19T20:41:00.000-05:00

Wow. Who would have imagined a year ago what a banner year 2011 would be for the threshing of the weeds. The chaff from the wheat. Good riddance to a trio of truly abhorrent monsters. Though as a Christian I cannot in good faith wish them the terrible justice their souls deserve, indeed, am called to love such vermin, I simply find I cannot be bothered to worry about where they will be spending eternity. Instead, I will pray for their countless, unnumbered victims.

Now, what are the odds it'll be 4 for 4 by New Years Eve ...

Sacraments

2011-12-18T20:05:00.002-05:00

Went to a mandatory parent meeting for Little One’s CCD class this afternoon. Turns out she’s not just receiving Holy Communion for the first time in May. Every spring scores of little ones adorned in white dresses and veils or little navy blue suits march down the aisle at our parish to receive the Body and Blood of Jesus for the first time. So we were very excited and looking forward to it. But it turns out there’s an extra Sacrament involved.

Little One will also be partaking of the Sacrament of Penance for the first time. Known by several names, such as Reconciliation or Confession, it’s where one periodically enters a private room and speaks to a priest through a screen to have one’s sins forgiven after a valid listing in order and frequency. I go two, three, or four times a year. Generally when I walk out of the church on those Saturday afternoons I feel genuine elation.

So I was somewhat surprised that Little One will have her first confession in March. I could’ve sworn I didn’t do mine until I was in fifth or sixth grade. Don’t you have to be at a minimum age of consent, to know right from wrong, to accept responsibility for your actions? Sure, she does this … most of the time. At age seven, we’re still training her in these areas. More often than not we’re successful, and we’re happy with her moral development, but there are times were we are forced to send her to her room and I need to get (perhaps a little too) loud or physical with her.

(That’s something I take into the confessional with me.)

Yet I’m not sure she’s a hundred percent knowledgeable of right and wrong. She hasn’t metaphorically and metaphysically partaken of that Tree of Knowledge yet. Or has she? The older she gets, the less I am in contact with her, especially now that I’m working again. Whereas once I and my wife were the only moral figures in her life, now she has a half-dozen public school teachers, two CCD teachers, coaches, friends’ parents, even bus drivers to influence her on how to act and behave. Whereas once I dominated her day, now I see her, on average, two-and-a-half hours a weekday.

Regardless, it’s part of the surrendering that we as parents are called to do. Yesterday, lying motionless in bed from this chest infection I can’t seem to shake, Little One came up to me and gently ran her fingers through my hair. “Wake up, Daddy,” she said softly. “It’s time for dinner.” I cracked open a bloodshot eye and saw the concern in her eyes, the tender care for this stupid fool I am, and saw her for a more mature emotional being that perhaps the Church, in her wisdom, recognizes.

Capes!

2011-12-17T21:58:00.000-05:00

(From the Too-Sick-To-Blog files …)

Man, Steve Howe is on my short-list top-five guitarists who ever lived. There was a sporadic phase, from about 1989 to 1996 or so, where I’d listen to nothing but Yes. Primarily The Yes Album but also Close to the Edge. The song below – “And You and I” – and a few others such as “Starship Trooper” and “Perpetual Change” enticed me – perhaps sadistically so – to become a better guitarist. I never reached such heights back then. Even now I can only play bits and pieces of random Yes songs.

Bands don’t wear capes on stage anyone. That’s probably a good thing. But if any band deserved to wear capes, and wear them with pride, it was Yes. No one can touch ’em when it comes to early 70s fashion. That’s because the music stares you the f down. So, capes, platform shoes, bell-bottom jeans, skin tight sparkly shirts – you can’t mess with that, or Steve will get all sustained 11th chords and unconventional time signatures all over your 4/4 a$$.

And how awesome is that pedal steel guitar Howe plays, and that double-neck Gibson SG he’s slinging. When we’re financially independent, that’s my birthday present, wife! For years I never knew how he got those sounds he did on that track, so finally seeing how it was done is tres neat. (Though I acknowledge that what they did in the studio in 1971 might be different than how they performed the song two years later.)

For anyone who can stick with it to the very end (a respectable nine-and-a-half minutes) email me and I’ll send you a cassette of me playing the acoustic part of the song on a Washburn 12-string! That and $5’ll get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks!

Lumpy Spuds Redux

2011-12-16T20:27:00.002-05:00

Confirmed!

My youngest daughter, Patch, has that rarest and most valuable of genius: that of the ability to predict cultural zeitgeist. Or at least run parallel to it. To be a predictator of the IT-ness, a prognosticator of factors labeled “X” – she has it!

Case in point –

Her lumpy spud people.

I posted about it a few days ago, here.

Now the wife, on the prowl in one of the various malls of America, spots this item at one of those ubiqituous kiosks who muscle onto the mallways around Halloween and don’t leave until Saint Pat’s. She snaps a photo on her iPhone and shoots it to me at work.

Perceptive Papa that I am, I go apoplectic with paternal pride.

May my littlest one grow up to be a mover and shaker! This, to me, gives me warm fuzzies.

(Check out the t-shirt design two-thirds down the middle of the page)

Everybody’ll be wearing sumthin’ with a lumpy spud on it! Coming Summer 2012!

Russell Hoban

2011-12-15T20:36:00.003-05:00

Those of us who grew up weaned on Cablevision in the late 70s have probably watched Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas a couple hundred times. What I did not realize (or perhaps I did and merely forgot) was that the 1977 HBO special presentation (in conjunction with Jim Henson's muppets) was based on a 1971 children's book written by Russell Hoban.

Hoban died Tuesday at the ripe old age of 86.

Another interesting fact about this author is that he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best Science Fiction Novel for his 1980 effort, Riddley Walker. Hmmm. Something else to put on the Acquisitions List. Something else ...

Codeine Dreams

2011-12-14T20:21:00.001-05:00

Last night I had a crazy dream. A crazy dream I daresay might be prophetic.

I dreamed I was a writer who dreamed he wrote a book called “The Dumbest Thing I Ever Did.” In his dream he remembered every one of its 87,435 words and each in its proper order. And better yet, he became a multimillionaire over the book, as talented Hollywood filmmakers quickly optioned it.

But the thing is, he forgot the contents of the book when he awoke. In effect, it was the dumbest thing he ever did. So he wrote a book instead about a man who forgot what his book was about – until that man remembered it was about a man who forgot what his bestselling book was about.

So I dreamed I was the man who had to write a book about a man who wrote a book about a man who forgot what his book was about.

Here’s the catch, though.

That third man, the last man in the chain, is actually the reader! Or in this case, he’s actually me!

All I need to do, is put the whole thing down on paper.

But not in a linear, traditional chronological order.

I’m going to write it in a seemingly random order. A Donnie Darko or some type of Christopher Nolan-type time frame. However, it will ultimately make sense.

If you start at the top left corner of a blank piece of paper and draw a the single image from each chapter and curl this images into a spiral adhering to a tight fibonacci curve, then hold it arms-length away from a full-length mirror, you’ll discover –

The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Or the Face of God.

It all depends on whether I decide to write the whole thing in e-Prime or not …

InFLUenza ...

2011-12-13T20:56:00.001-05:00

Sorry. Still sick. And very busy at work, and at home, with the dozens of Christmas chores that need doing. So, I’m run down. That dizziness I had Friday night has now manifested itself in a very aggressive stronghold of mucus somewhere deep in my chest. My muscles ache from the constant coughing, my throat is raw, my nerves are on edge and I’m more overtired than usual.

Sat down here for 45 minutes, and while I have two topics floating in my noggin, had neither the discipline nor strength to hash them out as blog posts. Think I’ll go upstairs and watch some Big Bang Theory with the wife, then soak in a superhot tub for an hour reading Tolstoy, if I can concentrate that long.

Gooder stuff on the horizon …

Lumpy Spuds

2011-12-12T20:08:00.002-05:00

Little One has long been an artist in our family, going on six years now. I knew she had talent when, the year before kindergarten, she started drawing “heart people.” These were hearts with faces on them, with arms and legs coming out of the appropriate areas. So very full of love.

Now Patch is following in the trail blazed by her big sister. Instead of heart people, we have … lumpy spuds. Now don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love them. I mean, look at the expression on those faces! Sublime, indescribable! After much examination I’ve come to realize it’s all in the angle of the mouth. What Leonardo did to the Mona Lisa, Patch does to her lumpy spud people.

... shy smile ...

... pondering the universe ...

... what am I here for? ...

$2 Million

2011-12-11T19:25:00.000-05:00

I’d just like to say, publically, right now, that if I ever came across a drug deal gone south on the Texas-Mexico border, with dead bodies and pick-ups laden with white powder, I would never, ever, ever try to make off with any suitcases of $2 million I should happen across.

Yes, I did just watch No Country For Old Men. And yes, I was riveted to this strange flick in my own over-the-counter drug stupor last night. Extremely well-written and well-filmed movie about an extremely repulsive subject. The gore and mental anguish you’re forced to endure is perfectly balanced with a sleight-of-hand keep-em-guessing screenplay. I give it an A, but I’ll probably never watch it again.

And Javier Bardem should make a great Bond villain. If I can’t have my Seal, he’ll do. Just don’t make him a Euroweenie (or a South American-weenie) and give him a ballsy plot to bring the world to its knees before him!

Take Two and Call Me in the Morning

2011-12-10T17:59:00.001-05:00

Why do over-the-counter medications say, take two pills every four hours? Why not just make the pills bigger and say, take one every four hours? The drugs I’m taking for this weird mental fog shouldn’t be ingested by children under 11, so there’s no option to take just one of them in their present size.

Guess it’s something like the garbage truck only coming up my street early when I forget to put out the trash. If I get the bags out by 7 am, they don’t stop by until noon …

Might Be Sick

2011-12-09T20:16:00.003-05:00

Having trouble focusing. Just put the little ones abed. Wife on the way home with burritoes, but I don’t know how enjoyable that will be. Feeling very weak, slightly dizzy, extremely exhausted. I think I’m coming down with something.

Either that, or I’m still reeling from the fact that Lie Groups could be the mathematical framework for all of reality.

Thank you, Michio Kaku!

Man, I shoulda stuck with physics back in the early 90s …

Crash! Thud!

2011-12-08T20:07:00.000-05:00

So I was sleeping nice and peaceful-like, snoring away like a baby in its crib, when – CRASH! An earth-shaking impossibly loud thud wakes me from my slumbers and sets my heart racing.

What was that? What the heck was that noise??

The first thing that races through my mind is home invasion. Where is that iron bar I keep handy for situations like these? Well, theoretically I keep it handy. Haven’t seen it since Patch was born three years’ back.

Maybe it’s not a home invasion. Maybe I can go back to sleep.

Yeah, right.

Perhaps a stack of children’s books or games or toy bins fell over. The noise did originate from that part of the house. But – what would cause it to tip over just then, at 4:30 am? A mouse? A larger critter? Something unspeakable?

No!

I have to investigate. I get up and slowly move towards the source of the noise. Slowly. Don’t want to surprise any thievery. Nothing. Nothing amiss in the darkness. I venture to turn the light switch, and the suspicion of nothing-out-of-place-ness leaves me perplexed.

It is windy outside. Could …

Wait a minute. I ease up to the door to the outside deck, throw on the outside light, and guess what I found?

A gigantic, hundred-pound tree branch, about twenty spindly feet long, has crashed onto my freshly painted deck!

The offending intruder. (Note the Christmas elf at the door.)

Another view. Imagine if that hit a window!

Most likely point of origination of the Death from the Skies! My neighbor’s back yard.

The view from my kitchen window.

Big Shoes

2011-12-07T18:56:00.006-05:00

Little One has turned out to be a huuuuuuge NFL fan. At only age 7, she knows who’s in both the Giants and Jets divisions. You know, the bad teams we root against. She’s always asking me who this team is and who that team is when highlights come on the teevee at half-time on Sunday. She’s starting to become familiar with the famous players on other teams, too.

Last Sunday the Giants were hosting the Packers. Little One couldn’t watch because she had a play date over at one of her soccer friend’s house. When I picked her up, though, she questioned me a lot, especially about Aaron Rodgers. I discovered she and her girl friend were watching the game over there.

So I talked about how good Rodgers is, probably the best quarterback in the NFL right now. I mentioned his predecessor, Brett Favre, and how he led the Packers for fifteen years, helped make them a winning team, and won a Superbowl. “Brett Favre sure left some big shoes for Rodgers to fill,” I said.

I’m asked more questions. Does Mommy like Green Bay? Most of my wife’s extended family is in Ohio. Does Mommy like the Packers? Does Mommy like Aaron Rodgers? She must’ve heard my wife during her frequent exclamations of respect for the man. Finally, the conversation returns to Brett Favre.

“Daddy,” she says to me, “why did he leave his shoes there?”

War and Peace I

2011-12-06T19:12:00.000-05:00

Last night I finished the first part of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. That puts me at about eight percent of the way to completion. Hmmm. I did start it last week, but I spent a lot of my free time finishing Hansen’s Civil War history, so I only spent about four hours reading these 96 pages. Four hours … eight percent … that means I’ll finish the big book after 46 more hours of reading. At 45 minutes a night, that’s … sometime in late January!

That’s okay, though. War and Peace is of a length comparable to The Lord of the Rings trilogy or one of George R. R. Martin’s lengthier Song of Fire and Ice epics. I’m there. I’m with it. I’m in for the long haul. And after I’m done, I have two other epic books / series I’m thinking of delving into.

Anyway, my take so far? It’s like a 19th century Russian soap opera. Sure, all the characters are interesting, multi-dimensional, breathlessly alive, and all have ulterior motives, so much so that I feel I may be in danger should that fifth wall between writer and reader be broken. But my verdict is: more war, less peace. And I think part two is going to take me straight to the Russian front to fight Napoleon.

And I caught a most Russian of expressions in my reading last night (at least, to the extent my narrow and limited reading has been in translated Russian literature) –

“ … To understand everything is to forgive everything …”

Not sure exactly all the implications that lay in that direction, but I think it’s a sentiment that was very well frequently said in various Christian communities in the first century Anno Domini.

Born of the Sun

2011-12-05T20:39:00.000-05:00

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are feted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.

- “I think continually of those who were truly great,” 1932, by Stephen Spender

The Fifth Gospel

2011-12-04T05:27:00.000-05:00

I read the other night that the Book of Isaiah could be looked at as the “Fifth Gospel.”

Not sure why, but this really struck a chord with me. I have a passing familiarity with it, having read completely through the Bible back in ’92 and sectionally many times since. Also, Isaiah serves as the first reading for the liturgy during the season of Advent, the four weeks prior to Christmas.

Why can Isaiah be viewed as the Fifth Gospel? Two reasons. First, because so many prophecies are fulfilled in the New Testament gospels, particularly Matthew. Many verses from Isaiah are quoted and referenced in that book. Second, because Christ is so personally prefigured in Isaiah, especially in chapters 40 and on.

This has made me interested in a full reading of Isaiah, especially as December 24th and 25th near.

Now, there are 66 chapters in the book of Isaiah. I could probably read the whole thing in three or four hours. So could you. The problem is … how to find the time.

I’m almost a hundred pages into War and Peace, and have a thousand more in front of me. That reading battle represents a teenage challenge to me, so I will continue putting in a half-hour or forty-five minutes a night with it. This weekend I started a pop physics book, satisfying a growing urge over the past couple of weeks, so I want to stick with that, too. (I plan on reading it during my lunch break.)

So why not a chapter or two of Isaiah every morning? I usually get to work 20 minutes early; I can sit in my car and read for 15 minutes. That should do it nicely.

I’ll keep you posted on this one. It may take a little more effort than Tolstoy or quantum mechanics …

Hansen's Civil War

2011-12-03T13:29:00.002-05:00

Just finished reading historian Harry Hansen’s 1961 opus, The Civil War: A History. At 654 pages, it goes just deep enough to give the armchair historian a well-grounded, thorough knowledge of the four-year conflict. I found it to be quite insightful and quite readable, putting away 30 to 40 pages a sitting. The author’s passion toward his subject often comes through, whether it’s praise of courage and ingenuity or sorrow at the always-grim realities of war.

My only bone of contention is his ever-present but necessary tendency to detail general after general after general in each and every skirmish and the number and types of men under his command (i.e. infantry, cavalry, artillery, even numbers of engineers and cooks and whatnot on occasion). My eyes glazed over through these parts, but I’d only place them at 1-5 % of the entire work. Usually Hansen will describe in vivid imagery the main gist and movements of a battle and conclude with these lists.

Far more numerous are the little tales the generously sprinkle the book. I’ve listed my main takeaways from this category below. * Towards the end there are whole chapters (of only a half-dozen or so pages each compared to the more lengthier ones detailing major battles such as Gettysburg and Antietam) that I felt to be so interesting as to kindle a desire in me to attempt a screenplay, of all things!

I decided to list a dozen items I took away from the book. Now, I’m not a historian and I don’t have a photographic memory, so if I err on any detail, please don’t crucify me. I encourage you to read more of this monumental struggle. As an aside, I am somewhat disappointed at the lack of American literature on the subject. You have Walt Whitman’s poetry, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. While all three truly are literary masterpieces, I’m sort of sad that there isn’t a greater volume of works about the Civil War. Maybe there is that I haven’t noted yet; I intend to revisit the subject maybe this time next year.

Anyway, here are some things that stuck with me –

1. Grant’s Astronomic Rise.

After a mediocre mid-level military career, Grant is working for his younger brother in a tannery owned by his dad at the start of the Civil War. A little over two years later he is the chief commanding officer of the military, bringing Lee to surrender a littler over a year after that. And five years after that, he’s President-Elect of the United States. I’d previously thought he was always a general or something, colonel maybe, and always had the president’s ear during the war. Not so.

2. The Union named battles after the nearest body of water; the Confederacy named them after the nearest population center.

I used to wonder why some sources called Bull Run Manassas and Second Bull Run Second Manassas. Now I know. Bull Run is a meandering stream in Virginia. Manassas is the town where Southern forces were encamped. Thus, Northern historians refer to the battles as First and Second Bull Run, while Southerners call it First and Second Manassas. Ahhhh.

3. The Union named its armies after the nearest body of water; the Confederacy named them after the largest population center.

A variation of #2. Quiz – which sides did the Army of Tennessee and the Army of the Tennessee fight for? How about the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia, armies that pretty much locked horns continuously throughout the four-years of fighting?

4. The naval aspect of the Civil War.

You all heard of the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimac. The Monitor was one of the first functioning submarines (if you define “submarine” very loosely). The Merrimac was one of the first “ironclad” ships – wooden ships with iron plating making it all but impervious to traditional artillery. The battle raged on for a day at the Battle of Hampton Roads, a port in Virginia.

But what I didn’t realize was that, by war’s end, there were over 75 ironclads and a half-dozen monitor-class ships in the Union navy. In fact, the last “monitor” was decommissioned sometime in the 1930s.

Some of the best writing in the book occurs during these naval scenes. Of particular interest was Admiral David Farragut’s victories in the ports of New Orleans in 1862 and Mobile Bay in 1864; Cushing stealthily destroying the CSS Albemarle like a WW2 espionage mission; and the battle before the USS Kearsarge and the CSS Alabama, a fearsome Confederate privateering vessel, off the coast of France.

5. Only one man was executed after the war for war crimes.

Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison, sight of thousands and thousands of deaths of Union prisoners-of-war. Deaths due to malnutrition, exposure, disease, and neglect. Now, I don’t know enough about the case to assess the man’s guilt, but I do know that at his military trial his lawyers enacted the Nuremburg Defense: “I was only following orders.”

6. The sheer brutality of the war.

Over 210,000 men died in the conflict (two-thirds of that figure Union forces; the rest Confederates). It was not uncommon for skirmishes to have hundreds killed and major battles thousands. Antietam, the bloodiest battle of the war, had over 2,100 Union soldiers killed and over 1,500 Confederate killed. (By the way, Antietam is a creek in Maryland. Sharpsburg is the nearest hamlet to the battlefield. In the south the battle of Antietam is known as the battle of Sharpsburg.)

Some of Hansen’s descriptions of the carnage are particularly nightmarish and infinitely sorrowful. The Battle of the Wilderness, where fallen soldiers, too wounded to move, were consumed by raging flames begun by artillery shells igniting the brush. Other wounded, such as those at Spotsylvania, lying in the hot sun during the day and the cold chill of night, unable to be rescued to due sharpshooters from either side. And those who were brought off the battlefield to reach the hospital often suffered much, much more. The most common “remedy” to a bullet wound was amputation. Sterilization was not practiced, and infection killed more than actual lead.

7. Lincoln as General-in-Chief.

The first two-and-a-half years of the war Lincoln desperately searched for a general who would lead Union forces to victory. A fruitless search, as he went through over a half-dozen generals – Scott, McDowell, McClellan, Halleck, Burnside, Hooker, Meade – before Grant stepped up with western victories. And throughout those two-and-a-half years Lincoln himself often had to suggest and even order various strategic and tactical objectives upon his indecisive and overly-cautious generals.

8. Novel aspects of the war –

Balloons used for reconnaissance, one of the first instances of such an application. “Torpedoes” – actually mines, which lined many Southern harbors and ports. The famous phrase “Damn the torpedoes!” is attributed to Admiral David Farragut during the naval battle of Mobile Bay, an 1864 clash that took the South’s last major open port.

I learned about “mining warfare” from the book. Apparently, in at least two battles, Vicksburg and Petersburg, Union soldiers from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, expert in mining, tunneled out 500-foot shafts underneath Southern battle lines. Hansen addresses how you do this, how you get fresh air down a hole that long, how the rebels could hear sounds of tunneling but couldn’t determine where. Then they’d send in a ton of explosives and set it off. Though the aftermath never really justified widespread use, it’s an example of war-time ingenuity that never occurred to me.

9. The sheer numbers of generals –

Wikipedia notes 1,600 (!) Union and 88 Confederate generals; Hansen’s mentions 153 generals of various stripes (determined by a quick count of names in the Index). Before I’d assume there was Grant and Sherman and a few others in the North, Lee and Stonewall Jackson plus a few others in the South. Hardly! And I was shocked to note the number of generals killed in action. You may know Stonewall Jackson shot by mistake by his own troops, but snipers, normal combat wounds, cannonballs – all claimed the lives of these high commanders.

10. The West Point fraternity of Civil War generals.

I found it strange and almost unbelievable that so many of the generals on each side knew each other – many roomed together – at the West Point Military Academy. A brief list of notable graduates: Generals Grant, Sherman, Meade, Sheridan, McClellan, Custer, Doubleday, Lee, Jackson, Longstreet, Hood, Stuart, Johnston, Johnston, Polk, Bragg, Kirby Smith. Confederate President Jefferson Davis was a graduate of the class of 1826. General Robert E. Lee was Superintendent of West Point for three years; his son was also a graduate, class of 1854, and became a Southern general himself.

I remember Hansen noting that Confederate General James Longstreet attended General U. S. Grant’s wedding before the war, and afterwards, after the surrender at Appomattox, the Confederate leader paid a visit to his long-time friend who’d been his opponent for four years. I wonder – would Longstreet put a bullet in Grant’s brain, given the opportunity, in the months before April 1865?

11. The war in the “west.”

Before, when I read about the western theater in the Civil War, I thought about California. It was a state back then, right? Right. But the war in the “west” refers to action along the Mississippi River. West of the Mississippi was mostly semi-settled territories controlled by both the North and South, plus Texas in the Confederacy and the new states of Kansas and Nebraska in the Union.

Part of the North’s strategy early on (devised by General Winfield Scott, aged hero of the War of 1812) was the “Anaconda Plan,” a plan to strangle the South. This entailed a naval blockade in the Atlantic and Gulf, and the capture and control of the Mississippi with the intention to bisect the Confederacy. Some of the most effective generals the Union produced – Grant, Sherman, Sheridan – rose to prominence in the battles of the west to wrest control of the Mississippi River from the South.

12. The whole slavery question.

Was the Civil War fought to abolish slavery? Did the South secede over the issue of States Rights? For a long time I did not know for certain. Then I read in an online forum someone smack-down the States Rights issue. The person wrote, “Yeah, the States Rights issue in question was whether one human could own another.”

It is true that Lincoln fought the war to retain the Union in its pre-1861 configuration. It is true that he said he would free all the slaves, free some of the slaves, or free none of the slaves if it would keep the Union whole. However, a majority of the North was trending toward abolition at the start of the conflict. Though it was not a majority’s majority by any stretch of the imagination. Some Union enlistees would be shocked to be asked to give their lives to “free the slaves.”

The callousness of Southern leaders, such as Jefferson Davis and John C. Breckinridge, toward the enslavement of other human beings, appalls Modern Me. Black soldiers fought on the Union side, and their lives were often forfeit to Southern hatred and atrocity were they to be captured. The Fort Pillow Massacre is one such example, though I concede that there are varying versions of the degree of “atrocity” in regards to the killing of captured black troops. Regardless, the whole issue brought to my eyes really for the first time, was quite disturbing.

* - Most of these “takeaways” are from Hansen’s Civil War, though a factoid or two or three may have been gleaned from another of the various books and sources I read and / or skimmed over the past two months.

The Bumble

2011-12-01T19:34:00.001-05:00

Terrorizing generations of toddlers ...

c. 1970 - The Hopper

c. 1974 - The Hopper's wife

2007 - Little One

and now

2011 - Patch,

the Bumble's latest late-night nightmare victim.

From the Annals of Stupidity

2011-11-30T20:29:00.000-05:00

[Don’t try this at home!]

The time: winter, late 1980s.

The place: an anonymous town in upstate New York.

The actors: me, my friend, my brother, and his friend.

Okay. This is actually pretty witty, I think, if you’re able to cut through all the stupidity.

The four of us were hanging at my parents’ weekend home sans parents. Not much to do at night except drink, so we hopped into two cars and drove a few miles down those winding, wood-lined two lane highways to the “local” bar for a few drinks. Maybe more, not sure, don’t remember, don’t want to. Anyway, I think we all had girlfriends at the time, so we weren’t looking for that. Just to get a might powerful buzz on.

After a little while we decided to head back to the house. And wouldn’t you know it, we decided to race back, of all things. In fact, it was my suggestion. Me, whose top speed was 80 on the I-95 in wide-open North Carolina (and I was still passed by other motorists).

But I had an idea. Me and my friend got to his car first and we were off sliding on the icy slushy roads before my brother and his pal. My brother is a bit of a speed demon (maybe was, I don’t know; haven’t driven with him in a while). Did I mention I had an idea?

We pulled up at an intersection which led to the two-lane highway. Roads in upstate New York are pretty much the most desolate places on earth. Maybe a car would pass by every ten or twenty minutes this neck of the woods. I told my friend to pull the car off the road, just past an outcropping of trees. “But leave your parking lights on,” I advised.

He knew exactly where I was going. My brother would race by and catch the sight – peripherally – of what would appear to him to be a police car monitoring the intersection for … speeders!

Two minutes later he zipped by. The trap was sprung. My buddy immediately pulled out behind him – just parking lights on – and accelerated. “Flash your hi-beams on and off,” I shouted.

Now, if you’ve ever been pulled over (and who hasn’t?) you notice in the rear-view mirror that police cars have alternating high and low beams for each headlight, out of sync. Obviously we couldn’t get the same effect, but I was curious to see if we could get my brother to pull over.

He didn’t.

In fact, he gunned it, his brake lights disappearing to pinpoints in front of us.

Back at the house we all had some laughs. No, he wasn’t fooled. He’s the type of guy that knows every model of car – even when he catches a glimpse of parking lights off the road – and knows every model of police vehicle. But he gave us an A for effort.

Then the drinking really began …

Game 1

2011-11-29T20:02:00.000-05:00

Enigmatically-named puzzle proposed to me by Little One ...

Brutal

2011-11-28T20:17:00.000-05:00

Colonel Butler lost his leg under unusual circumstances. He had stopped in the road to talk with Captain W. D. Farley, Stuart’s aide, and their horses’ heads were facing opposite directions. A shell struck the ground, bounced up and cut off Butler’s right leg above the ankle, passed through his horse and Farley’s horse, and carried away Farley’s leg at the knee. Farley died but Butler survived and later became a U. S. Senator.

- The Civil War: A History, pg. 362, ch. 22 “The Gettysburg Campaign,” by Harry Hansen

I never wish to glorify or romanticize war on these electronic pages. I often quote such passages as a sort of mental check, a sort of memorandum of thanksgiving. How grateful I am that I never have tasted firsthand the horrors of war, and how grateful I am that my loved ones have not, either. We can only hope and pray that my girls and other family members and friends will never experience such brutality in this lifetime. That being said, I am also deeply thankful for the men and women who serve and have served, keeping me and mine safe in our homes at night.

War and Peace: Prologue

2011-11-27T17:31:00.001-05:00

This is another item on my Unresolved Conundrums And/Or Things I Want to Do Before I Die List.

War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy.

There’s some background, as there always is when dealing with any item on the UCAOTIWTDBID List.

Way back in high school, junior year, I think, my mother and my stepfather moved us out of a crappy apartment into the bottom floor of a pretty big two family house. My room was the most forward of all the rooms, almost right on the front sidewalk. It was a neat little room, great for a high school kid.

It was also the only room with built-in shelving. As I was not quite the book hound and voracious reader I am today, those shelves were populated with the collection of books my stepfather had accumulated in his travels. Mostly contemporary hardcover fiction, if I’m remembering correctly, but there were a couple of others that stood out to me. One was a thousand-page hardcover outline of history I found immensely interesting. There were also a couple of JFK conspiracy books – I remember distinctly thumbing through Six Seconds in Dallas by Josiah Thompson. Plus, he had a worn-out hardcover edition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

That interested me. I knew just a little bit about the novel’s reputation. One of the greatest works of literature ever penned, and one of the most difficult to get through. With only those two facts in my mind, I set out to read it during the school year in my spare time.

I was not successful.

I did get about a hundred pages in, up to the end of Part I or so. Then I just stopped reading it. I don’t recall why; perhaps I put it down in favor of Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books. Seems likely; I had just become friends with a kid who lent them to me, and I was into the whole Tolkien / fantasy / alternate worlds thing at that point.

So War and Peace went back on the shelf. Eventually we moved into a house of our own and the novel was stored, along with all the other books and an encyclopedia set, underneath the stairs leading down to the basement. A year or so later, termites made their home there, and countless larvae fed upon Tolstoy’s words. My stepfather and brother threw everything out and exterminators came in a fumigated the basement.

I’ve been on a bit of a Civil War kick of late, beginning with O’Reilly’s book Killing Lincoln and culminating in Hansen’s excellent history of the conflict. Enough’s enough with that, I think. Time to move on. But in my travels around the War Between the States, I googled something like “Civil War fiction.” Peripherally I stumbled upon a list of great works of fiction set in and around war, and lo and behold, there was Tolstoy’s novel.

I blogged about it a few weeks back that should I find it in a used book store for a few bucks I’d pick it up. Well, I did, for $4. (That works out to about three pages a penny – how’s that for a bargain?) Figuring the stars were aligning in order to tell me something, I decided to move it to the front of the Reading List and last night I started it.

It is a daunting book, but I am a much more mature and seasoned reader than I was nearly thirty years ago. I’m hoping to finish it by year’s end. Additionally, once I’m done with Hansen’s Civil War history in a week or so, I have a couple of slim, personally-anticipated SF paperbacks I want to zip through and review here too before 2012.

Happy reading!

Time for the Stars

2011-11-26T15:07:00.001-05:00

What great reads Robert Heinlein’s juvenile SF novels are – even when you’re reading them for the second time a couple of decades after adolescence!

Time for the Stars is one such novel (out of a dozen written between 1947 and 1958). I first read it a little over thirty years ago, during a snow-filled holiday vacation in Binghamton, New York. There were other gifts and other books that week, but this one absorbed most of my time. Indeed, I was glued to its pages for hours in my dad’s volare sedan, cruising the slushy interstate home.

(Time for the Stars Hopper read in 1979)

One of the great things about Heinlein’s juveniles is that they introduce the young reader to some cutting edge science. In Time for the Stars, I got my first practical exposition of the Theory of Relativity. In particular, the Twin Paradox. Take two identical twin teens, leave one on earth and put the other on a rocket ship accelerating to just under the speed of light. Go out forty light years and return. The twin on earth will now be in his nineties. The traveling twin will be the age the majority of us graduate college.

Such is the Twin Paradox, and it’s used to illustrate the fact that time slows appreciably the closer the speed of light one travels. That’s the weirdity pursued in the book, the twins being Tom and Pat Bartlett, who also happen to have the advantage of being telepathic. Tom is sent out on a long-range reconnaissance starship, and we’re treated to his point of view. Throughout this compact l’il adventure there are some very cool engineering ideas in the “torchship” spacecraft, the planets (and native life) the ship visits, and telepathy itself (assuming its reality) and how that might just revolutionize even Einstein’s theories.

And all through the mirror of 1950s Americana. Though it’s written for “juveniles”, there is a bit of violence and some death. There’s also trademarked Heinleinian norm-busting erotica, although very mildly hinted at and posed as a surprise at the ending. But overall it is eminently readable, a novel that refuses to be put down, and one capable of giving as much enjoyment – and education – to a middle-aged guy as well as a twelve-year-old boy esconced firmly in the golden age of science fiction.

Grade: A+

(Time for the Stars Hopper read in 2011)

See also my review of Rocket Ship Galileo, here.

About a Decade

2011-11-25T20:23:00.002-05:00

Okay, so I didn’t have a great work experience over the summer, at the place I worked from June to September. Thinking back, there were lots of little signs that warned me of this, small little signs I brushed off.

Like this.

My first or second day there, the boss is bringing me around to all the other departments, meeting managers and other various assorted VIPs. She brings me into the General Sales Manager’s office. He’s in there, a couple other regular sales managers are there, and the owner is in there. They’re all pal’ing around, yukking it up, making mock and not-so-mock fun of each other, being good natured jerks with a thin veil of menace behind every remark. The testosterone level is approaching the room’s Schwarzschild radius.

Anyway, after I’m introduced, the owner says, “Say, I hear you worked with Mac up the street.” “Mac” is one of the sales managers at the affiliated store a few miles away.

“Yes,” I say.

“How long?”

“About a decade.”

Well, this set them off. “About a decade,” one says, doing a hoity-toity imitation of me. “Whoa,” says another, “big word!” More yuks and guffaws as I smile uncomfortably and edge out the door.

Now, this might not seem a big deal. These people are horse-traders, as my father-in-law says, and I’m basically a glorified librarian. Oil and water. But still, don’t you think their reaction was a bit … stupid? Kinda like someone dancing around loudly exclaiming, “Hey, ain’t I a doofus!”

This was only a little thing. But there were lots of little things. Like a 240 percent annual turnover rate. Like the fact that only 21 percent of employees were there over three years. Like the fact that my boss would tell me to remind her whenever X was going to happen. I’d tell her and she’d say “send me an email.” Next time I’d email her, and she’d chastise me, “you gotta tell me when this is going to happen!” And on, and on, and on.

Oh well. I’m in a much happier place now, two-and-a-half weeks into the new job. As I tell anyone who asks, that old summer job was like boot camp for this new one. If I could survive boot camp, I can survive anything.

Happy Turkey Day!

2011-11-24T10:31:00.000-05:00

Mind Checked Out

2011-11-23T22:15:00.001-05:00

Excuse me, been at the Bahamas all day today ...

... still there ...

Problem, Not Solution

2011-11-22T18:56:00.005-05:00

It’s official. I am now a libertarian. One of the sort who goes around spouting, “Government isn’t the solution. Government is the problem.”

Okay. Maybe I’m exaggerating. Maybe not. Check this out.

Sunday me and Little One spend two-and-a-half hours raking leaves. We have guest coming this Thanksgiving so we want the place to look somewhat manicured and cultured. Instead of raking the excess out to the curb I buy those five-foot tall brown paper bag thingies that hold about three or four bushels of leaves apiece and we spend thirty or forty minutes filling them. I put them in the garage so they don’t get wet with the incoming rain, then this morning I wake up a few minutes early and put all five bags out to the curb. Tuesday mornings the town DPW truck drives around picking up bagged leaves this time of year.

Except, of course, for today. So for twelve hours the five giant paper bags o’ leaves have been sitting and soaking in the pouring rain.

Thank you, local government. Good I voted anti-incumbent three weeks ago.

So now my in-laws get to see the five giant leaf bags every time they peek out the window. Not a big deal, not a huge crisis, but it ticks me off that I spent time bagging them when I could’ve just swept them out to the street. But God forbid the town figures out a way to collect street leaves in a timely fashion and more than twice a year. They’d just blow back on my lawn by the time that leaf-sucking truck gets around.

Memo to Town Government: You s*ck. And by extension, so do you, State and Federal Governments. If it is philosophically impossible for you to solve a leaf collection problem, how can you possibly solve poverty, educate our children, manage our healthcare, and spend our money wisely. You are the problem.

I said to my wife, “If I had a pick-up truck and had a personality like Darryl of The Walking Dead, I’d drop off those five bags of leaves on the lawn of the borough hall.” My wife replied, “I don’t blame you.”

Now, if a truck comes by and picks up them bags tomorrow, I’ll sure feel silly about this post, and I’d even man-up and apologize. But I’d bet turkey dinner that our town offices will be closed tomorrow, and Thursday of course, and Friday of course, and Saturday, of course.

Bold as Love

2011-11-21T22:31:00.004-05:00

Just some tune that’s been flooring me the past few days …

I boldly love the flanging / phase shifting that comes in at 2:50 and continues to the end of the song.

Anger he smiles towering in shiny metallic purple armor queen jealousy envy waits behind him her fiery green gown sneers at the grassy ground blue are the life giving waters taken for granted they quietly understand once happy turquoise armies lay opposite ready but wonder why the fight is on.

But they’re all, bold as love yeah, they’re all bold as love yeah, they’re all bold as love.

Just ask the Axis.

My red is so confident he flashes trophies of war and ribbons of euphoria orange is young full of daring but very unsteady for the first go round my yellow in this case is not so mellow in fact I’m trying to say it’s frightened like me and all of these emotions of mine keep holding me from giving my life to a rainbow like you.

But I’m a yeah, I’m bold as love, yeah yeah well, I’m bold, bold as love hear me talking I’m bold as love.

Just ask the Axis. He knows everything.

Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings

2011-11-20T17:42:00.009-05:00

On a whim I borrowed Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings from the library last week and watched it over two nights. I can’t say that it brought back memories, because I only watched it once, about twenty-five years ago. The predominant memory that did come back, though, was one of extreme disappointment.

Disappointed then, disappointed now.

However – and it’s a big however – the second time around, older, wiser, I appreciated more of what Bakshi was trying to do. Indeed, I found more than a couple things I liked about the flick, things that were buried by Young Me’s desire to see a faithful and most excellent adaptation of the original source material.

Released in 1978, the film is an experimental combination of animation with live action, the live action treated in such a way as to be rendered visually comparable to the animated sequences. The pure, traditional animation is of the quality and timbre of those old 1970s Justice League of America cartoons I watched as a youngling. The live action treatments are reminiscent of all those psychedelic SF book covers I read in grammar school. Both together don’t quite work. That’s primarily why, I think, the film fails.

But the major gripe I had the first time I watched it is the shock at the realization that the film only covers half of Tolkien’s trilogy, or three of the six books of The Lord of the Rings. That really ticked me off back then, though this time around I was grateful: the movie clocks in at two hours and fifteen minutes. And that seemed rushed.

(While the movie should have been advertised as The Lord of the Rings, part I, and I think Bakshi wanted it to be so, the studios balked, insisting that no one would pay money to see part one of anything. Gotta love that Hollywood wisdom.)

I actually think the “Justice League” animation is the weakest part. First off, the style doesn’t fit with the background matte paintings – which are, more often than not, excellent and evocative. Not as good as what Peter Jackson later did, or what I’ve seen in other Tolkien literature (such as the early 80s calendars), but alien and familiar enough to convey Middle-earth. The problem is the characters don’t mix well, stylistically and as they’re drawn. I could nit-pick, such as why is Aragorn drawn like Sitting Bull, or why do the hobbits resemble little old grannies. Boromir is quite amateurish, as are the bearded Gandalf and Saruman. The ringwraiths as animated villains are too cartoonish to be scary. Ditto especially with Smeagol.

The treated live-action figures, though, work. I think they’re the best part of the flick, and reason any Tolkien fan should see it. Particularly the scene where Frodo puts on the ring on Weathertop and enters this shadow world. “We come to take you to Mordor,” they hiss hypnotically, “take you to Mordor …” as we experience some sort of demonic acid flashback. The orcs, too, are portrayed in this evil trippy way, real men disguised as cartoon monsters, and they work in that the scenes they’re in are more interesting than the scenes dominated by straight animation, such as the Council of Elrond.

The fights scenes were well-executed, if a tad too lengthy. I enjoyed certain specific effects, such as the smoke that would appear to drift between the viewer and the scene on the screen, the desolation and destruction of war symbolized and not-so-symbolized. The weird Van Gogh-ish Starry Night kaleidoscope effects in the background as Gandalf is imprisoned atop Isengard is equally effective, though at first I resisted it. But, darn it, Ralph Bakshi, your 70s motifs won me over!

The plot and dialogue are very faithful to the books, although some scenes are edited out or severely cut short. That surprised me, but I appreciated the efforts toward fidelity. I recognized English actor John Hurt’s voice as Aragorn (Hurt was also Hazel, I believe, in the animated Watership Down). I did not recognize Anthony Daniels’, though, catching his name in the credits and only later realizing he was body and voice behind C-3PO of Star Wars. As a not-too-unimportant aside, I felt the musical score and soundtrack somewhat lacking, as if it was trying all-too-hard to get me up on my feet marching, inspired. On that note I think Peter Jackson’s movies succeeded much, much better.

So, some good, some bad. The time spent over those two nights watching it were not altogether poorly spent. I enjoyed it. The stuff I liked, I thought really cool. The stuff that I felt didn’t work, somewhat embarrassed me.

If I may be allowed to, I grade Ralph Bakshi’s The Lord of the Rings a B-minus. But only watch if you’re a Tolkien fan(atic).

Under the Sun

2011-11-19T15:36:00.002-05:00

In Ecclesiastes it is written, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

I say, O Muse, teach me of ways and modes long forgotten. Unveil the thoughts of men to mine eyes and ears, thoughts of the men who walked in the days when the earth was young.

’Tis a dangerous path you walk, O Seeker. Are you dedicated to the Path?

I am, O Muse, I am.

* * *

Then dust off your library card and power up your Internet-connected device!

EDIT:

After this pagan-prayer I went online to my various sites – archive.org, project gutenberg, online books page, etc – for an hour in search of sumthin’ weird n funky, metaphysically speaking, of course. Found nothing as outside events intervened.

Right now I’m in a cross between a strong conviction that the Reality as described by St. Thomas Aquinas is True (a conviction utterly alien and distasteful to the postmodern ear) and the philosophy described by Immanuel Kant (a philosophy which hints at alignment with what modern physics hints at when modern physics hints philosophic).

However, I have not the time, energy, and even will to delve in depth into either axes of belief, and thus retain only a shallow superficial of the teachings of both. Someday, perhaps, someday.

So instead I surf the web every now and again, hoping to come across something that causes my mind to reboot. Perhaps once a year I encounter such a something. And when I do, I post about it, here at the Hopper.

Lincoln's Words

2011-11-18T18:59:00.002-05:00

“We all declare for liberty, but using the same word we do not mean the same thing. With some the word ‘liberty’ may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men and the product of other men’s labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name, liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names – liberty and tyranny.”

(quoted on page 19 of the New American Library edition of Harry Halleck’s The Civil War: A History)

“Nor should this be a war upon property – property is desirable – is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and hence is a just encouragement to enterprise and industry. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.”

(quoted on page 365 of John Keegan’s The American Civil War: A Military History)

How relevant are the words of Abraham Lincoln to the struggles of today! I would love some media personality with courage and conviction recite these to our current President asking him simply if he agrees or not. Obama would never give a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer to such a question because the answer for him would be ‘no’, though it would be a firm ‘yes’ from about 75 percent of the American public – even the ones who think of themselves as liberals. The pleasure would be watching him squirm and hem and haw and filibuster in his valiant attempts to give a non-answer.

I Love Cats

2011-11-17T20:13:00.002-05:00

This is the exact kind of thing I’d be doing with my friends Ricardo and Mikey had we all been born twenty-five years later …

Working 101

2011-11-16T18:53:00.003-05:00

Some random thoughts from my employment odyssey over the five months at two different establishments …

* Work for a boss who has children.

Especially if you have children. When emergencies or other normal family events come up where you may be forced to take some time off – even a few minutes one day – you’ll be met with understanding. Who needs stoney steely glances and glares when you’re ten minutes late ’cuz the daycare you dropped your child off to was slightly backed up?

* Work for a business that drug tests its employees.

It’s one of the best ways, I’ve discovered, not to work with jackasses.

* Work for a place that formally trains its employees (managers at the very least).

It’s another great way not to work with jackasses.

* Work for a company with reasonable rules and regulations.

Example: pay plans. One place I worked for had every manager pay plan three or four pages long in triplicate. Employee, Manager, and Owner signature required on the bottom of each page. Another place had pay plans scrawled on the back of memo notes. Like so many things in life, the truth lies somewhere in the ’tween.

* Work for a business that is NOT owned by a Screamer or hires Screamers.

Screamers are those type-A jerks that have to have it their way yesterday or else they’ll start hollering like the immature imbeciles they’re really showing themselves to be. If the company owner is a Screamer, don’t even bother with the place. If managers are Screamers, well, all right if you can maneuver around them. But I still say, avoid them. These idiots automatically double the stress level just by being in the same room with you.

* If you’re not happy where you are, by all means, start looking elsewhere!

Look online, mail out letters and resumes. Don’t feel guilty. If it was in the company’s interest, they’d let you go with little or no warning. If you work for a Bad Place, fire them, but do it smartly.

Hush'd

2011-11-15T20:21:00.000-05:00

Hush’d be the camps to-day,
And soldiers let us drape our war-worn weapons,
And each with musing soul retire to celebrate,
Our dear commander’s death.

No more for him life’s stormy conflicts,
Nor victory, nor defeat – no more time’s dark evenets,
Charging like ceaseless clouds across the sky.

But sing poet in our name,
Sing of the love we bore him – because you – dweller in camps, know it truly.

As they invault the coffin there,
Sing – as they close the doors of earth upon him – one verse,
For the heavy hearts of soldiers.

- Walt Whitman, 1865

***

Finished Keegan’s military analysis of the Civil War today. That, plus the books by O’Reilly and Swanson, the fiction of Crane, and Burns’s documentary … read this and it brought a lump to my throat.

Poppy Bust

2011-11-14T20:25:00.001-05:00

Oh great.

For breakfast today I stopped at the deli and got a delicious poppy seed bagel with some cream cheese on it. Later, at lunch, the whole office ordered from a local restaurant. Scanning the menu, I began salivating over a pita with poppy seed paste. Mmm-mmm. Then, around three, some salesman came up to us with a humongous poppy seed cake. Boy, that sure was mouth-watering. I had two slices and, when no one was looking, I scarfed down a third piece.

Wouldn’t you know it, as I was walking out the door, briefcase in hand and light brown fall jacket all zippered up, my new boss catches me. “LE,” she says, “one thing I forgot to tell you.” She hands me this medical form that looks like one of those tests you need a number 2 pencil for. “Company policy is that all new hires need to take a drug test. I should’ve given you this on your first day last week. Do you think you can drop off a sample at this lab tomorrow morning?”

I was so shocked my mouth fell open and a poppy seed muffin dropped out.

* * *

Don’t know what the heck I’m writing about? See here.

Lumpy

2011-11-13T20:20:00.001-05:00

Poor Little One! A few days ago there was some rough-housin' on the playground and someone bumped into her while her back was turned. She went sprawling forward and her forehead connected brutally with a basketball post. Ouch!

The bruise went down within a day but has turned a greenish-purple and is migrating down to her right eye. And on top of all that, she's had a cold all weekend.

It could've been worse I suppose. Thankfully, we haven't been to the Emergency Room with her in over six years ... (knocks on wood)

I Could Write About ...

2011-11-12T20:27:00.002-05:00

It’s all quiet in the house. I sit alone in the writing office, wondering what to write.

I could write about how uninspired I am to write, considering the writing office is now a disheveled finance office. Imagine the accounting office of a Wall Street firm – or a Mom and Pop store – after a flock of OWS and other frustrated Obama supporters looking for Change have trashed and squatted here for six weeks or so. That’s what my writing office looks like.

Or I could write about my wife – fleeing me on a Saturday night for movie night with her girlfriend. Movie in question: Eclipse, one of those moody vampires versus werewolf flicks all the middle schoolers are texting about.

I could write about the movie I have on deck for later tonight: the animated Lord of the Rings, last seen in childhood. Yes, Leonard and Sheldon from Big Bang Theory are coming over later. In full Middle-earth costume.

I could write about the coolest three words in the English language, words seen in the first chapter of Heinlein’s Time for the Stars, also last seen in childhood. Words in question: pseudo-spatial calculus.

I could write about a video I almost posted here, now, instead. Yes, playing one of the greatest songs of all time, And You and I, live. And – they’re all wearing capes!

I could write about the greatest rock band in the world, on the CD player behind me: King’s X. Are they even still together? They never found mainstream audience, and they really should have.

I could write about the seven-year-old boy in hot pursuit of my seven-year-old daughter, Little One. Bright red hair, eye glasses with the elastic band wrapped around his head, and he’s completely utterly fearless. I mean, I’m walking Little One to school a few weeks ago and he comes bustling up, moves past me, and maneuvers himself between me and her. The scowl on my face does nothing to discourage his interest in my daughter.

I could write about the latest desire of my other daughter, three-year-old Patch: to be married to E. T. What’ll be the best thing about the wedding? “He’ll say my dress is beautiful,” she says shyly.

I could write about the Civil War odyssey I’m on, and all the synchronous symmetries popping up. For instance, this afternoon I read of the trial of Henry Wirz, the commandant of the notorious Andersonville prison. The Confederate officer, the only man executed for war crimes in the aftermath of the Civil War, had his military tribunal officiated by General Lew Wallace – the man who would later write my favorite religious novel, Ben Hur.

I could write about how I foiled the chipmunks (“chunks” as Patch calls them) excavating their catacombs beneath the walkway to my porch. I mean, the bricks were about to collapse a foot downward the next time a mailman with any degree of girth trod upon them. Father-in-law went to Home Depot and bought a gallon of cement, which I properly mixed and poured into the tunnels with vengeance. I am now an apprentice mason. Don’t tell Father Jim at church.

I could write about a lot of things, but I just can’t decide which one …

Job, Civil War, Robots

2011-11-11T20:21:00.003-05:00

Finished my first half-week at the new job. It seems very promising. The people there, from the owners right on down to the greeters, are extremely friendly, outgoing, and fun. The atmosphere is an odd combination of low-stress and high productivity. Weird. Something I’m definitely not used to these past five or six years.

Anyway, since my store is on a highway, I don’t really go anywhere for lunch. So I’ve been slogging through Keegan’s military history of the Civil War, much like Grant through the swamps of the upper Mississippi. Two thoughts occurred to me this afternoon.

First, being a Civil War general is not unlike a really, really, really awful and downright bad movie I saw many, many years ago: Robot Jox, I think the title was, complete with the “hip” spelling of jocks. The gist of that movie was that wars in the future were fought by gargantuan mechanical robots, tall as skyscrapers, in a gladiator-type battle that determined the winning nation. The robot was controlled by a teeny-tiny human a thousand feet up in the “brain” or control center.

When I read of Grant and Lee and Sherman and the rest controlling armies of 50,000 men and more spread out over dozen of miles, this stupid analogy comes to mind. I mean, Grant has to stand there, on the ground, in his tent, and visualize the geography and travel conditions of the terrain, the locations of his men, the location of the rebels, his logistical problems (food, clothing, ammunition), his strategy and tactics. And then, like that peon in the robot’s brain, he has to swing this arm of his forces into battle, then the other one, then both at the same time, then advance, then retreat, then go this way and that.

See what I mean?

The other thought was a brief snippet about Sherman. Seems the General was up all night planning out strategery in his tent. Next morning he decides to catch some Zzzz’s against a tree stump. Soldiers walk by, and one says, “Gee, ain’t it somethin’, us bein’ led by him,” or something to that effect. Sherman, only half-dozing, immediately wakes. Instead of tearing the young lad’s head off, he simply says, “Sir, while you were sleeping, I was awake all night planning for your welfare and a quick end to this conflict.” Then he goes back to sleep.

This nagged me, because I was certain – certain! – that something similar had happened to me. No, I never led troops. But somehow I was knocked for appearing not to be industrious and … oh yeah. The last five years of my working life. See first paragraph, above. The owner would never quite catch me doing the financial statement, or paying the mortgages and loans for the business, or helping advise employees on benefit plans, or transmitting payroll. No, he’d only walk up behind me when I was checking my email or chatting with the wife on the phone.

General Sherman, I sympathize!

Vraisemblable

2011-11-10T21:45:00.001-05:00

Ahem.

It seems extremely vraisemblable that when Monsieur Hopper uses a word like vraisemblable in a post such as this, he is at a loss for the written word.

Either that or he’s too damn tired to lift that big ol’ writer’s block off his numbed skull.

New Job Brain Fry

2011-11-09T18:41:00.002-05:00

Home from first day at new job. No real posting today. Brain fried. First-day-at-a-new-job fried, that is.

Cautiously optimistic about this one. After the schizophrenic work encounter over the summer, I guess I’m a little bit scarred. But we’ll see. On paper, this place looks like it could make the playoffs easy. I hope so, but we’ll see.

Wife’s taking me out to dinner tonight; children are at my parents for the rest of the week. Poor Little One was thrown into a basketball pole on the playground today and has a tremendous egg on her forehead. Blacked out and had to be taken to the nurse’s. And today was school picture re-take day, too, to top it all off. (But her pic was re-taken before the playground incident.)

Two-thirds through with Keegan’s biography of the Civil War. Interesting, if a tad too in-depth for me. But that’s what I wanted. Should finish it in a week or so. Then, I’d like to zip through an SF quickie, and then start an epic. We’ll see about all that, too.

Hopefully something of substance tomorrow.

PKD TV

2011-11-08T10:52:00.001-05:00

Last night I'm half-watching the news. The feeding frenzy over Herman Cain's past infidelities continues unabated. Some college assistant coach abused kids (oh, if only college assistant coaches could marry!). Now the Italian economy is teetering on the brink. The US economy trails along, heedless of any and all warnings to tighten its belt. We're fascinated with some no-talent ditz named Kardashian who is divorcing her true love seventy-some-odd days after swearing before God her undying fealty to him.

I vividly remember my PKD - that's Philip K. Dick - phase seven years ago this time of year. I read three or four paperbacks of his, a biography, a collection of short stories. There was also an essay of his I read online, whose basic idea was that we are living in the year 70 AD, and the Roman Empire still exists.

Why did this PKD flashback hit me last night?

Everything mentioned in the first paragraph above is meaningless. Yeah, each item will affect us to varying amounts for varying amounts of time, mostly short-term, I'd think. Each item we are also, when it really comes down to it, powerless to affect. Yes, we can vote, but really my vote and yours is meaningless, because in 21st century America, if an election comes down to anything close to a couple thousand vote difference, the election is settled by the courts. We are essentially powerless to affect our candidates, the economy, pop culture. Even the morality of the culture.

Or are we?

This is where PKD comes in.

Assume his essay thesis is true. For the record, obviously, I don't, at least not in the somewhat arbitrary historical form Dick believed. But if the essay's true, then we are being deceived. On what level is up for debate. But we are being decieved in some way shape form.

Decieved, in this post, means that the True Reality is masked to us.

This also implies that there is a True Reality. Part of the postmodern modus operandi is to deny any Objective Truth. For those of us belonging to the Catholic Church, at least, we believe in True, Objective Reality, that being God, Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the morality and eschatology that flows through and from Biblical revelation.

But that's not what you see and hear when you turn on the tube, is it? Do you even hear a variation of that? No. So I think PKD's facts can be twisted a bit to fit the "reality" that I was exposed to last night lazily watching teevee. Reality is what is presented to us by the makers of reality, the ones who control the media. The media controllers, and those they answer to, are the "Roman Empire" PKD writes about.

So where does our power lie?

How do you fight the Roman Empire?

Me, I turn off the teevee. Shut out the propaganda. I try to adhere to the Objective Truth that's been revealed to me. For now, that will suffice. But there will come a time, I am more and more convinced, when the Empire will not be denied. There will come loyalty oaths and persecutions. It's happened before and it will happen again and, yes, it can happen here. There are signs already in the culture: see "hate speech" legislation; see taxpayer money going to Planned Parenthood; see nurses pressured into participating in abortion procedures; see pharmacists pressured to dispense birth control. The Empire will not be denied. Watch your teevee or else.

There may be other ways to fight back against the Empire. I think humor is a great weapon; look how the late night teevee hosts savage the Republican candidates and thus subtly mold public opinion. But the Empire has a notoriously fickle sense of humor. Mockery not state-sanctioned and approved will quickly be made illegal through legislative fiat.

This message brought to you from the Frog in the Pot.

(and only partially tongue-in-cheek!)

Secessia

2011-11-07T19:01:00.001-05:00

Interesting, FWIW ...

Concerning overall Civil War strategy -

There were objective observers. Two were Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, then in exile in England, where in March 1862 they composed an analysis of the progress of the Civil War of quite remarkable prescience. Marx and Engel's interest in the Civil War was not political. As revolutionaries they hoped for nothing from the United States. It was simply that as men with a professional interest in warfare and the management of armies they could not prevent themselves from studying military events, and prognosticating based on their lessons.

Marx concluded that, following the capture of Fort Donelson, Grant, for whom he had formed an admiration, had achieved a major success against Secessia, as he called the Confederacy. His reason for so thinking was that he identified Tennessee and Kentucky as vital ground for the Confederacy. If they were lost, the cohesion of the rebel states would be destroyed. To demonstrate his point, he asked, "Does there exist a military centre of gravity whose capture would break the backbone of the Confederacy resistance?"

His answer was that Georgia was the centre of gravity. "Georgia," he wrote, "is the key to Secessia." "With the loss of Georgia, the Confederacy would be cut into two sections which would have lost all connection with each other." It would not be necessary to conquer the whole of Georgia to achieve that result, but only the railroads through the state.

Marx had foreseen, with uncanny insight, exactly how the decisive stage of the Civil War would be fought.

- The American Civil War, by John Keegan, pgs. 161-162

After the Fact

2011-11-06T14:50:00.001-05:00

© 1988 by Fred Saberhagen

I picked this up a week ago from one of my favorite used book stores for two reasons. First, it has a portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the cover, and I’m currently very heavily immersed in the whole Civil War epic. Second, it’s written by Fred Saberhagen, a minor deity in the pantheon of SF Writers but a god nonetheless, and one I have never read before.

Any historical figure on the cover of an SF book means one of two things. Either it’s an alternate history story or it’s a time travel tale. In the case of After the Fact, it’s the latter. Upon retrospection I realize I am woefully ignorant in both genres, and that’s quite disconcerting for someone who prides himself on being overall well-read in the field of science fiction literature.

So during the Great Power Outage of ’11 I cracked it open and finished it in three hours over the course of four days. Not knowing what to expect, I went into it clean, pure and virginal and wound up liking it. It’s not a classic, but it won’t keep me from exploring more Saberhagen (as a matter of fact, I bought another paperback of his yesterday).

The biggest challenge an author faces when tackling time travel is negotiating paradoxes. A Daedalian labyrinth of immovable and inpenetrable paradoxes. After the Fact, the back-cover blurbage informs us, will be about preventing the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Oh, dear; that’s a whole Moebius strip of paradoxes.

The first and most obvious one is, well, if Lincoln is saved, then the past one hundred and forty-six years of history becomes null and void. Plus, history has recorded only one individual assassin in the theater box. So our young protagonist, shanghai’d to the 19th century to foil the murder plot or else, obviously is unsuccessful in diverting Booth’s pistol shot.

I had to read it just to see what happens.

Now, reviewing the novel, I have to see if I can come up with some alternative explanations to the one proffered by Saberhagen. Think of a half-dozen or so separate branches of multiverses that opened up when Fred was at his keyboard fleshing out his outline sometime in 1986 or 87.

1. Maybe Young Protagonist does succeed, and we’re living in a temporal cul-de-sac.

2. Maybe Young Protagonist is tricked into becoming Booth in a terrible twist of fate.

3. Maybe Lincoln has to die because had he lived 2011 would be Hell-on-Earth or some such apocalytpic holocaustic disaster.

4. Maybe Young Protagonist is prevented from succeeding by some Other intelligence from the Distant Future.

5. Maybe Young Protagonist sees or is convinced or has a mental breakthrough (or breakdown) that, however unfortunate and however unjust, the Great Man has to die.

6. Maybe Young Protagonist can’t prevent the assassination because then he will cease to exist (uh-oh, there’s the Grandfather Paradox!)

7. Maybe Lincoln is saved by a temporal bubble being created in Ford’s Theater and ... ow, my head’s starting to ache.

All right, so they’re not really “explanations,” merely thoughts that need to be developed. Or not. Though one comes close to Saberhagen’s resolution which, ultimately, I felt to be satisfactorily revealed in the novel’s final pages. There was life-and-death suspense, a MacGuffin-ish watch that warps time, some psychic stuff, a bit of Deus-ex-Machina that doesn’t draw a penalty flag, and the fabric of time is not destroyed while something truly weird does happen.

That’s the good. The bad is that the novel has a “teevee-movie-of-the-week” feel to it rather than a big-screen element. That’s important to me as I’m such a visual reader. There were also a couple of nagging loose threads that were never really resolved. Life in Washington DC during the final days of the Civil War is realistically portrayed in all its stinky griminess, though I think the female characters are (natch) a little more feministically portrayed and PC-sanitized than a true reading of history would show. But Saberhagen had to do it for the story, and I think it works, so I don’t deduct too many points from the scorecard for it.

Grade: solid B. I’ll be reading at least two more of his novels in the near future.

Best idea: “ ... You see, Jerry, there are usually great, and often prohibitive, paradoxes involved in any attempt to manipulate the past. Sometimes the difficulty can be overcome by making an abstract of the past, and manipulating that ... ” (page 158, Baen paperback edition, emphasis mine).

Is that cool or what?

Success Spaghetti Style

2011-11-05T13:18:00.002-04:00

I’ve been out of work since September 14, and yesterday I interviewed for a job (my third interview in the past seven weeks) and found out I got it two hours later.

Here’s what I learned over the past 51 days:

The best way to succeed is spaghetti-style.

Without giving away too many details and at the risk of sounding undeservedly glamorous, the job I’m most qualified for usually has only one opening per business. Sales forces, for example, could have as many as twenty or twenty-five slots per company in my industry. But only one of me. So, right of the bat, I’m kinda at a disadvantage.

To get a job in my industry – the job I look for in particular – you either have to know someone or somehow be in the right place at the right time. More often the latter, but it doesn’t hurt to have both angles going. So when I found myself out of work (again) in September, I decided the best way to find work would be to utilize a spaghetti strategy.

First I needed to sell myself. I created a one-page letter that I felt balanced a formal, business-like “here’s how I can help your business” with an informal and intelligent easygoing style. Then, with the help of a recruiter I know, I rearranged my resume and redid it to sell me thoroughly for the job I was aiming at as well as make it aesthetically pleasing (at least to me, trying to be as objective as possible). I went to Staples and make about a hundred copies of the letter, the resume, and a Letter of Recommendation I had from my last long-term employer. I saved all the receipts, because they can be written off at tax-time.

Then I created my target list. Online, I was able to come up with about 65 businesses within a 25-miles radius of my home. I visited the website of each and every one and made sure I had the most current, up-to-date address. Then I bought me a big package of envelopes and stamps (keeping all receipts).

You know what I did next. Spaghetti.

There’s an expression that if you throw enough spaghetti at a wall, some will stick. That’s the essence of the Spaghetti Style of Success.

Twice a week I mailed out a handful of Me Packages to the various businesses surrounding my house. Averaged about fifteen a week, or three a day.

In the 51 days of my unemployment, I’ve sent out 90 letters, so I’ve looped and started a second lap of mail-outs. The first letters I addressed “Attn: Office Manager” and the second batch I addressed “Attn: Controller.” If there was going to be a third batch, I was planning on addressing them “Attn: General Manager.” Then back to “Office Manager” for a fourth.

Three weeks in I got a call to come in for an interview. The place was actually too small for the size company that could use me, but they liked the resume, the intro letter, and, especially, that glowing Letter of Recommendation.

Ten days ago I got a letter from someone outside my targeted radius, who got the Me Package from someone else. I’ve been trying to schedule an interview with him, but phone tag (and the power outages we recently experienced) made that difficult.

Then, Thursday, I got a call from a place who I called back and set up an interview for yesterday. An hour after the interview, they called me back with an offer I accepted.

Me Package 1, Unemployment 0.

Kudos to the Spaghetti Style of Success. Something stuck to the wall.

(Of course, I pursued other avenues during the past 51 days. I met with three recruiters and interviewed with a company in – of all places – the clothing retail industry. I checked Indeed.com on a daily basis an applied to a dozen suitable jobs. I sensed dead end from both these strategies. But I kept them up – or the wife prodded me to keep them up – because when you’re outta work, you need to pursue every angle.)

What’s exciting to me is that the Spaghetti Style of Success can be very effective to my writing career. (Perhaps “career” is too strong a word. Substitute “interests” for “career” and you’ll have a better approximation.)

With some help, I sent out a few short stories a year ago and collected around 15 rejection letters. Then, I stopped.

A year-and-a-half ago, I sent out a copy of one of my novels to a contact in the publishing business who knew a literary agent. Based on the comment, “publishers are not taking chances on new SF writers,” I left that path cold.

How might the Spaghetti Style of Success attack the problem of being an unpublished writer?

Easy. Never quit! Keep sending the stories out! Keep sending the novels out! If someone doesn’t like it, no big deal. Move on. Keep moving on. Somebody, somewhere, will like what I send them and will publish it. Something will stick.

Now I’m inspired. I have a job so I don’t have to worry about keeping that roof over my head and my family fed. Now that I have a job, I can work on succeeding at something I love.

Spaghetti-Style.

What Paradise May Be

2011-11-04T11:45:00.002-04:00

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.”

- Jorge Luis Borges

What a beautiful sentiment, no? No matter what your tastes may be or where they may run. Paradise as a library. I have always imagined that, too.

Sparafucile

2011-11-03T20:37:00.000-04:00

Okay, I’m busy, busy, busy. Wife has events, I’m watching both kids as Little One is home sick with an infection of some sorts. Have a job interview lined up for tomorrow. I’m finally relaxing, throwing a CD on I haven’t listened to in a while, and inspiration hits.

Not much of a Verdi fan, but I like Rigoletto, in particular the “Sparafucile” aria (if you call the bass’s solo an aria). Found this on youtube, to give you an idea. Listen to it; the best way I can describe it is if Verdi custom-wrote this to be performed by John Entwistle of The Who.

Galahad and the Grail

2011-11-02T17:39:00.002-04:00

I, Galahad, saw the Grail,
The Holy Grail, descend upon the shrine:
I saw the fiery face as of a child
That smote itself into the bread, and went;
And hither am I come; and never yet
Hath what thy sister taught me first to see,
This Holy Thing, fail'd from my side, nor come
Cover'd, but moving with me night and day,
Fainter by day, but always in the night
Blood-red, and sliding down the blacken'd marsh
Blood-red, and on the naked mountain top
Blood-red, andin the sleeping mere below
Blood-red.

And in the strength of this I rode,
Shattering all evil customs everywhere,
And past thro' Pagan realms, and made them mine,
And clash'd with Pagan hordes, and bore them down,
And broke thro' all, and in the strength of this
Come victor. But my time is hard at hand,
And hence I go; and one will crown me king
Far in the spiritual city; and come thou, too,
For thou shalt see the vision when I go.

- The Holy Grail, from Idylls of the King, by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

***

[Read by candlelight nine hours into our seventy-five hour ordeal of power outtage at the homestead. Thanks to my parents for hosting the Hopper clan for nearly fifty of those hours, supplying light, heat, hot water, hot food, Sunday football games and zombie teevee.]

[By the way, the only casualties suffered by at Casa Hopper was a fish, two mice, and a row of forsythias in the backyard. Rest in peace, Aqua the Betta, and field mice - stay outta our house!]

Eight Years

2011-11-01T14:00:00.000-04:00

I’m reading all this stuff about the Civil War lately, based in part on a string of really decent books that have come into my possession on the subject. So I’m really kind of a novice about all this. Sure, I studied it all in high school. But that was, like, ages ago. And we never went into such depth as these books are going, hand in hand with, uh, me.

The first thing that really, really struck me was the meteoric rise of Ulysses S. Grant (and I know his actual name is Hiram Ulysses Grant). Consider this:

At the start of the Civil War, April of 1861, Grant, having failed at a first go in the military, farming, and bill collecting, was working as a clerk in his father’s tannery shop run by his younger brother.

Just about three years later, in March of 1864, Lincoln had made Grant the commanding General of the entire Union army.

Five years after that, on March 4, 1869, Grant was sworn in as the 18th president of the United States.

Eight years from a guy not trusted to run his old man’s store to a man running the United States of America, after having decisively exercised the military muscle to keep the union whole.

The accomplishment curve doesn’t get much steeper than that. I could never, ever imagine myself as President in 2020, but the rise would be no less meteoric than Grant’s. Plus, I’d have just as troubled a presidency as he did, what with all the fish-outta-water similarities.

Anyway, this rags-to-riches angle to General Grant quite impressed me.

Power Outage

2011-10-31T12:22:00.002-04:00

Hi. We live in the American northeast, specifically the tri-state region known as Northern New Jersey. Here we have four-month summers and five-month winters. Which leaves about six weeks each for spring and fall.

True to form, we had our first snowstorm on October 29, this past Saturday. Four weeks earlier I was taking out air conditioner units from the windows and stacking them in the garage. Trees still have 75 percent of their leaves. In front of my house is a pile of leaves blown there awaiting pick-up later in November. Only now it’s covered with six to eight inches of sloppy wet snow.

Also true to form, our public service services were overwhelmed and underperformed. Yeah, the weatherman said we’d only get an inch or two when we wound up getting about five times as much. There were no plowing or salting of streets. Driving home from errands Saturday afternoon, my car fishtailed all about the local road leading up to my street.

An hour after me and Patch got home, around 1:45 pm on Saturday, the power went out. As far as we can tell (we’ve now relocated to Pennsylvania) it’s still out. Calls to PSEG give us an automated message that our area won’t get power back until Wednesday. We’re now one of the x-hundred thousand without electricity in our home.

Saturday night was a bit of an adventure, I have to admit. Before it got dark we rummaged about the house for essentials: two flashlights, ten candles, matches, and a battery operated radio (most of which we bought in preparation for Hurricane Irene at the end of August, but didn’t have to use). Fortunately the stove top worked, so I was able to cook us some tortellinis. Later, the wife read one of her birthday books and Little One read one of her Daisy Meadows fairy books. I read about a hundred pages of a Civil War Q&A book. Patch, unable to read, was at a loss on how to entertain herself in the semi-darkness, and made a mess of her toy room.

We put the girls to bed at 8 in flannel footie pajamas and under several blankets. The temperature in the house was low-60s. Though I have a gas-heated steam boiler, the thermostat is triggered electrically. So, no heat. The wife retired around 10. I stayed up past midnight listening to CDs on an old walkman and thumbing through old story printouts.

Next morning the snow had stopped and we shoveled ourselves out. Temperatures had dropped indoors to the low-50s. My mother offered to house us until our power went back up, so we quickly packed everybody and left for her place in north-east Pennsylvania. We showered and changed into clean clothes once there and watched all the football games. The wife and I even managed to squeeze in the latest depressing and stressful episode of The Walking Dead last night.

To complicate matters, Little One’s school was open. So, an absence, possibly more, for her. The wife didn’t bring her laptop, so she’ll be back-up workwise. And I have a possible prospective employer playing phone tag with me while all this is happening.

Good news is that I did read about forty pages of Keegan’s The American Civil War. And we may drive in to town where I can hit the used book store I haven’t been in to in eleven months to score some cheap but good SF paperbacks. However, the bad news outweighs all this as this is Halloween, and the little ones won’t get to do any trick-or-treating or parading. Fortunately, Little One had a brownie Halloween party on Friday when it was still Fall and not a Winter Wonderland.

Don’t know when we’ll be returning home. I’m pushing for tomorrow but the wife doesn’t want to leave until we’re certain of power back at the house.

Never, ever a dull moment.

Winter Wonderland, in October

2011-10-31T12:18:00.001-04:00

Person of Interest

2011-10-28T08:37:00.002-04:00

Ten Things I Learned Watching Last Night’s Person of Interest:

1. Pharmaceutical companies are generally EEEEEEEvil.

2. Pharmaceutical companies usually have hired killers on the payroll.

3. Entrepreneurs like to encourage their children to be as EEEEEEEvil as they are, especially once they take over the company.

4. A paperclip can stealthily unlock handcuffs in less than thirty seconds.

5. Potassium chloride (what the government uses for lethal injection executions) works instantaneously, especially on 6-foot 220-pound men.

6. Most pharmaceutical company assassins and CEOs are EEEEEEEvil to the very end.

7. Pharmaceutical companies think it’s okay to risk 30,000 lives for a half-billion dollars.

8. You can fire a gun several times out the blown out rear window of your limousine and still drive down a New York city street without crashing or killing a pedestrian.

9. Social security and cell phone numbers can predict whether you will be killed, as long as it goes through a computer that can do some math.

10. Most EEEEEEEvil pharmaceutical companies have corrupt police commissioners in their pocket.

Okay. Despite the list, Person of Interest is okay. I like the surveillance gizmos, I like the quirky characterizations and somewhat understated acting. The premise is decent, if you suspend disbelief and don’t worry too much about Number 9 above. There’s just something about it that’s a little off, something that I predict will cause it not to be renewed for a second season. Or, if it is, only with some type of drastic overhaul.

What the list above indicates, though, is LAZY LIBERAL WRITING on behalf of the “creative” people behind the show. While watching it with the wife, I pondered, “Wouldn’t it be truly surprising if a bunch of CEOs were targeted by, say, a rogue killer from Greenpeace?” Think about it. Would never happen on primetime teeveee.

Unless the rogue killer from Greenpeace suddenly found Jesus or something.

Absolute Attention

2011-10-27T13:35:00.001-04:00

I’ve had this idea for a while now. Probably first surfaced last winter when funds became dangerously low at Casa Hopper, then went dormant while I had my three-month work gig over the summer. Now it’s back. I’m not sure it makes sense, at least in practice, because I can’t seem to get it to work. But theoretically, it’s quite appealing.

One of my (few? numerous? hard to say at the moment) faults is that I tend to be a worrier. A stare-at-the-ceiling-at-two-in-the-morning type worrier. But really any time of the day. Anything can dump negative and doomsday thoughts into my mind at any moment, really. I’ve always been this way, but since my extended bout of unemployments and various health issues since 2006, it’s gotten pretty severe. I don’t get much sleep.

Which is why I’m such a voracious reader. If I’m sucked into a good book, I forget my woes. You do, too, right? Completely. Time stops. This complete absorption is, I think, quite therapeutic, especially for someone who has no dough to pay for therapy and does not want to become a drugged-out zombie. I read, on average, about 45 minutes a day, and more often than not it’s the best 45 minutes of my day because I just ain’t worried about a thing.

So naturally I want to develop this, expand on this. How to do so?

Why not attempt to read something really, really, really hard? Something that demands absolute, concentrated attention?

Sounds reasonable. And I don’t have to go out and spend any money, because, on the bookshelf right behind me, within easy reach, I can see:

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas

The Death of a President by William Manchester

The Physics of Immortality by Frank Tipler

Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein

Some philosophy, some theology, some history and science, some high lit and some sf I simply have never been able to crack. What do they all have in common? They all demand intense concentration.

Now, I don’t plan to read the whole day away. I have too much to do as a stay-at-home dad and a job seeker. But if I can swap out an extra hour of aimless web surfing or teevee watching for any of these books, I can’t see the downside.

In light of my Civil War tour of late (Killing Lincoln, Manhunt, The Red Badge of Courage, and some background web research), I borrowed military historian extraordinaire John Keegan’s book on the War between the States. It’s 432 in-depth pages and demands absolute, concentrated attention.

I think after the ladies all go to bed tonight (which isn’t too late; the house is mine after 10 pm), I’ll tiptoe over to the reading nook with this and give it a whirl.

Which will win – useless worry, or absolute attention?

Hm?

Munch

2011-10-26T09:52:00.000-04:00

My grandpa's doorbell rang. It was my little brother. "Clancy and Seamus want you to come out and play Munch with us."

Hmmm. A game of Munch. Intriguing. I looked at the television set before me. Should I finish watching The Addams Family? Get Smart would be on in ten minutes. Then The Munsters, followed by the game shows: Match Game, Card Sharks, Family Feud. There were some old musty SF paperbacks to seek out in my grandparent's old musty basement, as well as some old musty games like Broadside. Plus, grandma was a card fanatic, and I enjoyed making up card games. A typical summer day for me.

The monkey wrench were the McMadden brothers, Clancy and Seamus, who lived diagonally across the street from my grandparents. Also, my little brother. He was more outdoorsy than me, and more into sports. He and the McMaddens would get together around 10 am every morning as long as the weather was nice (and even if it wasn't, most times), and a game of handball would break out. Or street football. Or running bases. Or ... Munch.

There were other neighborhood kids, too. There was a chubby boy whose name I forgot; call him Frankie. And there was a stringy, wormy kid; his name was something like Phil or Philip. A fat girl kinda hung out around the perimeter of this impromptu neighborhood sporting club. She would pull up a chair and criticize us for this and that. When the McMadden boys weren't beating the crap out of each other, they'd verbally spar with her, and ultimately come out on the losing side, though they never realized it and never gave up.

Whenever a game among them got serious, there would be the inevitable doorbell ring. I'd answer it and my little brother would be there, and the message would always be the same: Clancy and Seamus want you to come out and play [insert name of game] with us. Another body needed, and that body's You.

Now: Munch. Munch is a simple game. Brutally simple. The object and the rules could be summed up in this one simple sentence: Use any means to tackle the guy with the ball. That's it. Someone threw a ball - usually a football - vertically up in the air and for some reason we'd all scramble to get it first. The unlucky guy who did immediately raced away with it while the remaining five or more boys chased after him. The ball carrier could go anywhere, climb on anything, run on the streets or in someone's backyard. I remember once being blindsided off a picnic table. There were no in bounds and no outta bounds. We'd all swarm on the hapless chap with the ball to administer as big a pile-on tackle as possible. In the clutches of the mob the ball carrier would throw the ball straight up in the air - if he could - and the process would repeat itself. Again and again, until we grew bored of Munch or someone got hurt (Munch's way of growing bored with us). Usually, someone got hurt, and it usually was Seamus. At the hands of Clancy.

I glanced back as the teevee sang The Addams Family theme. At this point in my life, Get Smart was the most important thing on the planet to me. But ... sensing someone unwanted and unwarranted tug, both push and pull, to the indecipherable responsibilities of adulthood, I knew I had to go out. Go out into the streets, the cold, hard, unforgiving streets, once more into the breech and play ...

MUNCH.

Munch: It's a metaphor for life, and it's as malleable in its interpretation as you want to make it.

1982 Tolkien Calendar

2011-10-25T16:55:00.000-04:00

In the winter of 1982 and 1983, as a low man on the totem pole at high school, these images were seared into my brain. My bedroom was in an uninsulated attic; my sole window overlooked snowy roofs and backyards of my neighborhood. I had just read The Lord of the Rings and constantly riffed through the two Tolkien encyclopedias by Tyler and Foster. My buddies played D&D and I ate up everything sword and sorcery, from Stephen R. Donaldson to T. H. White.

And the 1982 Tolkien Calendar, featuring the artwork of Darrell K. Sweet, a Christmas gift, hung from the rafters. The following year, I cut out the pictures and tacked them into the two-by-fours. To me, this is Tolkien, not the images most of the public knows from Peter Jackson.

Like everything under the sun, you can find these images and more online. Let me tell you, these long-forgotten paintings brought back a lot of memories for me, powerfully so.

Apples of the Moon and Sun

2011-10-24T21:50:00.001-04:00

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

– W. B. Yeats, The Wind Among the Reeds

I need to pick up an anthology of Yeats’ poetry. Borrowed one once from the library, but didn’t give it the justice it deserved.

. . .

There. Just added it to the Acquisitions List.

The Walking Dead

2011-10-23T16:43:00.002-04:00

Okay, I’m realize I’m really late to this party.

I have a friend who is gung-ho into The Walking Dead, the AMC zombie series and has been after me for a year now to check it out. Last week I finally did, renting the first season disk from a Redbox. Surprisingly, my wife wanted to watch it with me, too. My friend apparently also wore down her resistance.

Well, we watched the first four episodes in one sitting last Monday night. Then, Tuesday at lunch time, we watched the final two episodes. That’s about five hours of zombie apocalypse in an eighteen hour period. Despite some minor beefs with the storyline, we were hooked.

Last Sunday was the premiere of season two. We DVR’d it. Tonight is the second episode (of a planned thirteen). We’re inviting my pal over to watch both with us after his children and ours are put down. Looks to be a creepy and somewhat stressful night.

I think I’ll post some extended thoughts about the series and the whole zombies in our cultural entertainment phenomenon tomorrow when I have a little more time.

’Til then, don’t sleep outside in tents, circle the cars around the camp, keep at least four sentries on duty at all times (not just some old dude on top an RV), have enough shot guns for everyone, and wear at least three jackets at all times!