Words of Wisdom

  

Don’t think I posted this here before; I was going through some notes, miscellanea, and saved stuff in an old folder and found these words of wisdom. Whose lips they originated from I know not, but these pearls deserve to be blown to the wind, cast wide and far to the ends of the earth. Indeed, they probably have, since the aged ol’ gadfly gadded about those craggy, olive-treed ravines fifty decades before the Savior.

 

The Law of Individuality:

 

“Always remember you are unique. Just like everyone else.”

 

The Law of Concern for Fellow Man:

 

“Make it idiot proof and someone will build a better idiot.”

 

And the Law of Averages, applied to Mankind:

 

“The average man is just a little bit below average.”

 

That is all. Now I need to clock in eight hours of work, then it’s the Hopper family weekend of birthday bashes! Scores to follow on Monday!

 

Bee Nerds

 

I’m pleasantly meandering my way through a science fiction anthology I picked up from the local library, The 1976 Annual World’s Best SF, and each tale wows me in some little way. True, most have a doomsday vibe, but others often have little nuggets of weird awesomeness that blow me away and give me interesting bits of ephemera to tease out.

Like this one, from “The Bees of Knowledge,” written by Barrington J. Bayley, an SF author whom I have never read:

 

… the Bees are much interested in mathematics, but theirs is of a type that not even he would be able to understand (any more than I could, except intuitively when I was in the grip of the trance). What would he have made, with his obsession with numbers, of the Bees’ theorem that there is a highest positive integer! To human mathematicians this would make no sense. The Bees accomplish it by arranging all numbers radially on six spokes, centered about the number One. They then place on the spokes of this great wheel certain number series which are claimed to contain the essence of numbers and which go spiraling through it, diverging and converging in a winding dance. All these series meet at last in a single immense number. This, according to the theorem, is the opposite pole of the system of positive integers, of which One is the other pole, and is referred to as Hyper-One. This is the end of numbers as we know them. Hyper-One then serves as One for a number system of a higher order.

 

Hyper-One! I love that. This will be forever filed away in my memory as the Theorem of Hyper-One.

“The Bees of Knowledge” is a gentle, weird tale with more than a bit of existential horror tucked in. The “he” mentioned at the beginning of the above excerpt is a man-sized Fly who understands mathematical processes at least up to exponentiation.

And the Bees are ten-foot sized insects that inhabit the planet Handrea, upon which our narrator crash lands, the sole survivor in a malfunctioning life pod from an interstellar passenger ship which unexpectedly explodes. He’s seized and taken by these curious Bees to their hive, which must be something of the size of the Great Pyramid hunched atop Grand Central Station, and spends the rest of his life there. Where does he stand? What he can do to survive, and how can he communicate to these oddly intelligent Bees? We wind up very metaphysical and surreal by story’s end.

Like I stated earlier, I have never read Bayley before (nor had I heard of him). But a quick web search reveals a body of work consisting of at least 16 novels and 87 short stories stretching over a half century (1954 to 2008). His name goes on the Acquisitions List and I will definitely pick up more of his writings should I come across them in my used book store travels.

Hyper-One!

Four Days in November

  

Ever since me and my buddies hopped in a car to motor off to the movie theaters three decades ago I’ve had an on-again, off-again fascination with the JFK assassination. Or maybe that movie we motored off to see was Oliver Stone’s The Doors and not Oliver Stone’s JFK. In any event, I did see the Stone movie in theaters, and that was the first time I really encountered all the conspiracy conculabula clouding the demise of our 35th president.

I was hooked.

I have since, however, been convinced to a viewpoint about 175 degrees contrary to Mr. Stone’s.

Still, I revisit the assassination every couple of years.

Since moving to Texas fourteen months ago, to a town a half-hour north of those momentous events of November 1963, I’ve delved into it a few times. For instance, I’ve been to Dealey Plaza three times. I read an ancient New York Times compendium of Warren Commission testimonies I’ve had on the shelves forever. The Mrs. bought me tickets on Father’s Day for the Sixth Floor Museum at the Texas School Book Depository later this fall. And now I found Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days in November at a nearby bookstore and cracked it open this weekend.

After reading a half-dozen or so conspiracy books (from the respectable Six Seconds in Dallas to the literary Oswald’s Tale to the insane, off-the-wall Crossfire: The Plot that Killed Kennedy) I weeded myself from the fringe with Gerald Posner’s Case Closed and Vincent Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History. Both these latter books just made more damn sense to me than any of the conspiracy books I read or shows and movies I watched.

Posner’s book was a crisp and concise debunking of much of the myths and exaggerations of the assassination. Bugliosi’s Reclaiming History does the same, only in much, much more depth and detail. His book is at least four times as lengthy as Posner’s. He examines everything – not a Stone is unturned. As I recall, having read the book nearly a decade ago, it was so damn heavy I found that after I read one hundred page section, I was convinced of the Lone Gunman Theory and realized I needn’t strain my bracchioradiali and read any more.

Now Four Days in November sits in my hands. The back cover states it’s “drawn from Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, a monumental and historic account of the event and all the conspiracy theories it spawned.” It may well indeed be. Four Days is a moment-by-moment breakdown, in ten or twenty minute intervals, of the actions of all the principle players in the events that occurred that November in Dallas in 1963.

I started last night and am already nearly 50 pages in. About a tenth done.

It won’t change my mind one way or the other (probably will solidify the Lone Gunman Theory in my mind from about a 95 to 97 percent probability). But it will refresh my memories of the long strange cast of characters which I will come into contact again this Fall during my visit to the TSBD Sixth Floor Museum.

For the record, though I’ve purchased 12 or 15 books on the assassination, I’ve only read a handful of those and gave most of them away to the V.A. when we moved down to Texas. Most of what I know of the assassination I learned online at a variety of websites. There’s lots of cyber rabbit holes to fall down into; trust me, I’ve fallen down my share over the years.

Anyway, after Four Days in Dallas, I plan on hitting WW2 again, hard. I have a books on submarine warfare, the Battle of Kursk, high-end strategy on why the Allies won, and a compendium of mini-biographies of the major military personalities of the war. I’m also working my way through an omnibus of 1976’s best SF short stories and, after that, will throw my hat in the ring and take a swing at one of Terry Goodkind’s mega-opuses of fantasy as a first-time reader.