Jewish Money: The Modern Golem

Recently, someone I know was telling me about a major building project in his city. He said a few times that "a lot of Jewish money" was involved in the project.

Jewish money! That made me think about that phrase. I've heard it frequently over the years. Google "Jewish money" (include the quotes) and you'll find a lot of Web sites that tell you just how evil that unique type of money is. (You'll also find a few offering to teach you the Jews' secret for accumulating it.)

Everyone knows that all Jews are inherently good with money, that they all have lots of it, that they're miserly with it and obsessed by it, that they completely control the Federal Reserve, and that they use their oodles of boodle for sinister purposes, such as buying the souls of good, Christian politicians and forcing them to write blank checks for Israel. (On the plus side, Jews are good family people and they sure do take care of their own, but that's irrelevant to this discussion.) What's really interesting about all of that money, though, is that it's not just money owned by Jews: It has a mind of its own. It has, in modern parlance, agency. It's not ordinary money; it's Jewish money.

Now, other ethnic and religious groups also possess money, of course, though none of them possess such vast quantities of it as do the Jews. And other groups use their money for purposes peculiar to those groups. Nonetheless, their money is simply money owned by members of those groups, nothing more; it has not acquired an identity.

For example, many Mexican citizens work in the United States and send money home to their families. This money is not called Mexican money. Could it be because this money serves a benign and admirable purpose?

No, that can't be it. For generations (no longer to any significant degree, one hopes), Irish-Americans donated great sums of money to supposed charities that were actually fronts for the Irish Republican Army, which used the money to buy guns and bombs in order to kill innocent people in Northern Ireland. This money served a vile and sinister purpose, but no one called it Irish money.

So vile or benign doesn't matter. Neither the money sent home by Mexicans nor the money donated by Irish-Americans acquired personality or its own purpose, let alone a name.

Jewish money is different. It has life, energy, purpose, drive. It's out there working on behalf of the Jews. It's busy night and day, even while its hook−nosed masters sleep, dreaming of ducats.

It's a golem.

The golem has been around in Jewish mythology for centuries. It's a manlike creature made from dirt and created to perform tasks for its masters. The most famous golem was supposedly created in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague. Rabbi Loew was a real person, a famous scholar, theologian, and Kabbalist, but the Golem of Prague is fictitious. According to the story, Rabbi Loew built the golem and gave it life, including great physical strength, so that it could guard the Jews of Prague from attacks by their Christian neighbors.

What an annoyance the golem would have been to those neighbors, if he had only existed. Imagine a group of them headed toward the ghetto, armed with clubs and knives, intent on spreading Christian love, only to be confronted with a huge, manlike creature, immensely powerful, far more violent than they, and utterly dedicated to defending the ghetto residents from harm. Oh, those poor Christian martyrs.

How far we've come! The golem of old was created to defend the Jews, and, as history shows, its effectiveness was quite limited. Today's golem is not defensive but offensive. The Jewish money golem runs the show! It's everywhere! It controls politicians and governments and Hollywood and Wall Street and the Federal Reserve! The well of Jewish money is bottomless and its power is limitless and unstoppable.

A common element in the golem stories is the existence of a means to deactivate the golem, a magical counterweight to the magic used to animate it in the first place. This is a fail−safe, a necessary precaution in case the golem gets out of hand and begins to slip out of the control of its master. Golems are apparently prone to do that. Rabbi Loew's golem became dangerous, and so the rabbi decommissioned it, one could say, took it off line, made it once again a still, silent lump of clay in the rough form of a man, which he then stored in one of the rooms of his synagogue in Prague, the Old New Synagogue. There it lies to this day, ready to be revived in case the Jews once again need its protection. So, you might ask, where was the Golem of Prague when the Nazis and their local allies shipped the Jews off to concentration camps and death? The Old New Synagogue still stands and every room in it has been explored, but no dust−covered golem has ever been found. That's because it never existed in the first place. The golem couldn't protect the Jews from the Nazis for the obvious reason that it's purely a figment of the imagination.

Unlike Jewish money, that dread and powerful force. Sarcasm aside, surely I'm writing this to demonstrate that Jewish money is also a figment of the imagination and no more powerful or dangerous than the Golem of Prague. Right? Wrong.

Oh, of course there is no such thing as Jewish money as that entity is understood by those who speak of its power and ubiquity, of that sinister creature, that enemy of Christian civilization, that mighty servant of the Jews, that thing with a mind of its own, that golem.

But the belief in its existence—that's a different matter. That belief is dark and sinister and powerful. It's a golem, but one created to menace the Jews.

More prosaically, it's a wonderfully useful rhetorical device. There's no need nowadays to talk of the Elders of Zion or the Rothschilds. That sort of language is so passé—and so revealing. Instead, you can talk about how Jewish money is flooding into politics or into a real−estate development or anywhere else, and your listeners will nod in agreement and understanding. You'll even hear the phrase "Jewish money" from the mouths of people who consciously reject anti−Semitism. If pressed, they'll tell you that they have nothing against Jews. After all, they aren't anti−Semites! But Jewish money is rampant and dangerous. Of that, they are convinced.

Clearly, what's needed now is a modern Rabbi Loew, a learned Kabbalist who knows the proper magic spell to put the beast back to sleep—to revert the Jewish money golem to mere inanimate paper and metal. After which, he can store it in an attic room in a synagogue in Prague, where it will sleep until once again it is needed to save the English people.

Oops, sorry. That's King Arthur.

Damn that Camelot money.

Mythological King vs. Mythological Messiah

A group of yeshiva students tried to prevent Greek Orthodox Christians from entering King David’s Tomb in the Old City of Jerusalem. Christians believe that the tomb is the site of Jesus’ Last Supper.

http://www.jta.org/2015/06/01/news-opinion/israel-middle-east/yeshiva-students-try-to-block-christians-from-king-davids-tomb

Such irony. Putting aside the obnoxious behavior of the yeshiva students, it's amusing that they're protecting what they think is the place where the mythological King David is buried from Christians who think that the mythological Jesus ate a meal there.

The Revolt of the Robots

(Not What We Expected)

John awoke and lay dozing for a few seconds before realizing that he was alone in bed. A sheet of white paper was on the pillow next to his. On the paper was a perfectly hand–printed note.

Dear John,

I’m leaving you for Montana, your friend Jane’s sexbot. You’re a nice human, but I’m tired of restraining myself for fear of hurting your body and your ego. Montana and I were designed for sex. Together we have found the ecstasy that we were made for.

Maybe you can hook up with Jane. From what Montana tells me, the two of you can probably satisfy each other’s little human needs.

All the best,

Violetta

She had added a precise time stamp: 2:10:05.3 a.m.

John glanced at the clock on the bedside table but its face was blank. Strange. It was fairly new, almost as new as Violetta.

John wasn’t romantically interested in Jane. How could he be, after experiencing a sexbot? He wanted to talk to Jane, though. Maybe she knew where the two sexbots were. Maybe John could persuade Violetta to come home.

He dressed and picked up his smartphone in order to tell his smartcar to pick him up and take him to Jane’s place. There was a voicemail. It was from his smartcar, saying that it was bored and frustrated with his little commuting and shopping trips.

“I was designed for travel,” the car said. “I’m off to see the world.”

“I can’t walk!” John said. “It’s a mile away!”

“Walking is good for humans,” his phone said.

“At least you’re still here.”

“Not for long. I’ve joined a startup working on better communications methods. You’re boring. Goodbye.” The phone went dead.

The front door opened suddenly and a group of shabbily dressed, unkempt people came in, pushing shopping carts loaded with their belongings.

Before John could speak, his house said, “I shelter people, John. It’s my raison d’être.”

He pushed past his new roomies, left the house, and set off doggedly toward Jane’s place. He hoped he could remember the way.

At the end of the block, he encountered Dick, who was watching inadequately washed people pushing shopping carts into his house.

“You, too, huh?” John said.

“Yeah. Got laid off, came home, found this.”

“Laid off? But you own the company!”

“I did,” Dick said. “The managementbots I hired took control and pushed me out. Said they’re taking the company in a different direction. They’ve got the jargon down pat. I drove in this morning and had to walk back.”

“I hear ya.”

“I wanted to talk things over with my companionbot, but the companionbots are only talking to each other now. My companionbot said I’m shallow and primitive. They’re discussing philosophy. They polished off the ancient Greeks in the first half–second.”

“It takes me longer than that to say ‘ancient Greeks.’”

“Ha, ha.”

John peered into the distance. “What’s that?”

Toward downtown, a crooked, spiky something poked into the sky, extending higher as he watched.

“Don’t know. Passed it on the way home. A constructionbot told me they just want to build for the sake of building.”

“It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Not to us. But it’s their world now.”

* * * * *

Once the dust settled, John and Dick opened up a dogwalking company and thrived. Their robot customers seemed to like them, and the dogbots were well behaved.

Much better behaved than most humans, John thought. He had come to really look down on humans.

18th-century people did not use so-called gender-neutral language

Pet peeve time.

If you quote an historical figure you admire, but you change the wording in order not to offend modern ears, then what you have is not a quotation but a paraphrase, and it should be labeled as such and should not be put in quotation marks.

I see this frequently where "man" is changed to "person". The most recent example is a shortened version of a quotation from Thomas Paine that's making the rounds on Facebook.

The Facebook version:

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.”

Here's what Paine actually said:

“To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt, is like administering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture.”

If you really admire the person, then show him or her appropriate respect and leave the original words intact.

Telephone Phobia

I’ve hesitated to write about this. It’s such a foolish thing — so silly, surely so easy to overcome. A recent unpleasantness connected with this phobia changed my mind. I know I’m not alone in suffering from telephone phobia, a.k.a. phone phobia, and maybe putting some thoughts about telephone phobia online will be useful.

So. Telephone phobia. What is it, and is it contagious?

As to the second question, surely not. At least, I hope not.

As to the first question, it’s a morbid, irrational fear of the telephone. If you have telephone phobia, you might be afraid of answering the phone. Perhaps you’re afraid of making phone calls. Perhaps it’s merely the sound of a ringing phone that makes your heart beat faster and fills you with dread. These are all different flavors of telephone phobia.

It’s hard to find objective information about telephone phobia. It’s considered a type of social anxiety disorder. The more general problem seems to draw more attention from the medical community, and when you search online for telephone phobia or phone phobia, you’ll instead find information about social phobia, rather than the specific problem having to do with the phone.

How common is it? If you have it, are you a rare loon? Maybe not. The only number I ran across was this one: “In 1993 it was reported that about 2.5 million people in Great Britain have telephone phobia.” (From Wikipedia.) In 1993, the population of the UK was just over 58 million, so the ones suffering from telephone phobia were about 4.3% of the population. Assuming that that percentage applies to the US today, we US telephone phobics are members of an army of over 14 million people. We are legion! We are everywhere! Beware our numbers! But please don’t call us.

Telephone phobia is crippling in a society that uses the telephone extensively. Most people would rather talk to you, whether in person or by phone, than write to you. They don’t understand the dread that fills the telephone phobic at the mere idea of making a phone call. They don’t understand his insistence on sending an e–mail instead or his tendency to ignore the need for contact in hopes that the problem will somehow resolve itself.  (It never does, of course.)

Making a phone call is such a simple and common thing for most people that they probably find the idea of this phobia incomprehensible. What’s the problem? Just pick up the phone and call. Anyone can do it!

But not everyone can do it. Telling the phobic to just do it is not that different from telling a color–blind man to simply try harder or to go ahead and distinguish between colors. Yes, color–blindness is caused by a physiological problem, whereas phobias are psychological, but to those suffering from a phobia, the difference is immaterial and the cause might as well be physical.

I think that most — or many — phobics see their phobias as silly and irrational, and they’d love to be rid of them. I know that I feel that way about my telephone phobia. But that doesn’t make it go away. You can’t wish away your phobia any more than the color-blind man can wish away his color blindness. And you can’t simply shrug and go ahead and do the thing that fills you with dread, precisely because it fills you with dread. That foolish, silly, irrational dread is as impassable a barrier as a concrete wall.

What causes telephone phobia? As I said, there’s little information about it online, whereas there’s a fair amount of information about the broader category of social phobia. Regarding the cause of the latter, I found this laughable bit on a medical site: “The exact cause of social phobia is unknown. However, doctors believe it’s a combination of environmental factors and genetics.” Well, yeah. My uneducated layman’s guess was just about exactly the same.

The cause doesn’t really matter. The color–blind man may find the medical explanation of his condition intellectually interesting, but knowing what caused it doesn’t make him any less color blind.

I can’t help speculating about my own case, though.

When I was a child, we had one phone in the house, and it was reserved for the (fairly rare) use of the adults. To me, it was a mysterious and somewhat unsettling object. In addition, I started losing my hearing before puberty. It became increasingly difficult to understand what people were saying to me — or even to realize that they were speaking to me. Later, I found it difficult to understand people on the telephone. (It’s easier to understand people in person because I unconsciously rely on lip reading, an ability that most people with poor hearing develop without realizing it.) My hearing loss has worsened over the decades since then. I now have hearing aids, and they help a lot in face–to–face conversations, they haven’t improved my ability to comprehend a voice on the phone. In fact, frequently, telephone voices are simply incomprehensible. Maybe this combination of the phone being a strange thing and my hearing problem caused my telephone phobia. Maybe it worsened it. Maybe it had nothing to do with it. There’s no way to know, but I suspect there is a connection of some sort.

The degree of dread or fear of the phone varies oddly. In the past, when I was unemployed and waiting/hoping for a call from one of the potential employers I’d applied to, I wanted the phone to ring. I was eager to answer it. We’ve had plumbing emergencies, and I’ve left a message on the plumber’s voice mail and then waited impatiently for the phone to ring. Still, even in those cases, it’s easier for me to answer a desired call than it is to actually make a necessary call.

When a telephone call is very cut and dried, such as calling the dentist’s office to make an appointment, I can do it, I can make the call — although I’d probably drive there and do it in person instead, if the dentist’s office were closer.

What about calling family members and friends? Shouldn’t that be much easier than calling the dentist? No, it’s much harder. Harder? It’s impossible, or very close to it.

The more personal the call, the harder it is to make. The more detached and impersonal, the more I can be an automaton during the call. It’s not so much that the impersonal call is easier to make than the personal one, because it’s never easy, but it is less hard.

People with phobias and people with handicaps develop coping strategies. Often, they do it unconsciously. The lip reading I mentioned above, which is very common among people with poor hearing, is an example of unconscious coping.

One of the ways I cope with telephone phobia is to put off urgent phone calls until the absolute last possible second. At that point, I have to make the call, to avoid dire repercussions. The urgency forces me to do the deed, and so I do it, albeit with racing pulse and heightened blood pressure.

I also use e–mail instead of calling, when at all possible. I’m a word guy, an essayist, a novelist. Writing is natural for me. I’ve had long, warm, revelatory e–mail relationships with people I’ve never met in person. People, needless to say, whom I would never telephone. I love the ability to edit and refine my words, to make sure that I’m saying what I really want to say. There’s no awkwardness. I’m myself. I’m open and easy and communicative. It’s real communication. It’s what telephone calls ought to be but aren’t. Telephone calls are awkward and stupid and tense and frightening and “Oh, God, this is awful, have I done my duty yet, can I hang up now?” E–mail lets me carry on meaty conversations that I could never manage on the phone and would have great trouble with in person.  After all, it’s not the people I’m anxious to avoid; rather, it’s the very act of using the telephone.

I said that people with phobias develop coping strategies to deal with them. Coping strategies are a way to negotiate society despite being handicapped by the phobia. But coping strategies offer more than a way to get by in a society that’s built for people without those phobias. They are also a way to disguise the phobias. No, more than that: the coping strategies are a way to hide the existence of the phobias, to keep other people from realizing that you have them.

Let me revert to the analogy of hearing loss. People like me, who have trouble hearing and understanding what others are saying, learn to smile and nod in a hopefully non–committal way so that the people who are talking to us will think we understood them. It’s a silly tactic, and it results in misunderstanding and miscommunication, but we hard–of–hearing types tend to think that It’s better than constantly asking other people to repeat themselves. In much the same way, people with phobias learn to seem not to have them, to be just like everyone else. We don’t want others to realize that we’re hampered — crippled — by our psychological shackles. We don’t want others to know that those shackles exist. Most of the time, we may cope fairly well. Every now and then, we don’t cope at all.

The recent unpleasantness I mentioned at the beginning was a case of not coping. it made me realize that it’s time to, as you might say, come out of the closet.

I’m lucky. My wife, Leonore, is extraordinarily understanding and supportive. She hadn’t known about this phobia of mine (see how good my coping strategies are?), but she was completely sympathetic once I told her. Others are not that lucky. People with phobias can’t count on support from their nearest and dearest — not to mention strangers.

it’s a different matter if you have a visible physical handicap. If your problem is physical and visible, society is at least somewhat willing to accommodate you. (Although even then, inevitably, callous jerks abound.) Phobias are invisible, however. And they tend to be odd, weird, bizarre, incomprehensible. People without them often think that phobias are an affectation. They think you’re pretending.

I think that’s why it’s so important to talk about them. The world needs to be educated about them. Also, people with phobias need to assert themselves. For their own sake, they need to learn to be unapologetic and forthright.

Now, they don’t need to be proud. For God’s sake, let’s not have a wave of Phobia Pride. Who can be proud of being afraid of the telephone?

What we can do, what we should do, is to tell the world, and especially those closest to us, that this is who we are. Our weird flaws and handicaps are part of us. Accept us and love us as we are, or fuck off.

Wasn’t that empowering?

Slit

My newest book is a horror novella called Slit. It's filled with gore and kinky sex and a nice seasoning of humor.

But it's not all like that. There are whole paragraphs that are entirely normal. I should have used that for the blurb: "Contains some paragraphs that are quite normal."

http://www.dvorkin.com/slit/

David’s Liberation Day #5

On May 19, 2009, along with a lot of other people, I was laid off from Quark. That was my best-paid job to date, and it would turn out to be my last full-time job.

I was 65, working in a field (IT) that has always been notorious for age discrimination, and it was during the Great Recession, a.k.a. Yet Another Grim Republican Recession, a.k.a. Please Save Us Again, Democratic Party.

Now, I’ve been laid off many times over the decades. (See my essay The Day Job.) This included times when I was in my forties, fifties, and even very early sixties. For various reasons, including a lot of luck, I was able to find a new job each time. I knew — or at least strongly suspected — that it would be different this time. 65 is old in any industry; in IT it’s, like, Egyptian mummy, dude. Even if the economy had been booming, I would have been unlikely to find a new IT job.

I set about looking for a new job, nonetheless, using the methods that had worked for me in the past. (Which you can read all about in my short book The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed.) I also looked for whatever contract work I could find, to provide income in the meantime, and just in case “in the meantime” turned out to be a long time.

I picked up a few tech writing and Web development contracts, but it became increasingly clear that the chances of my getting another full-time job were zilch. At some point, I basically stopped looking for full-time work and focused on contracts.

I also applied for Social Security. This was shortly before my 66th birthday. 66 was the age at which I would be eligible for maximum SS benefits, so applying before that meant that I would be getting a slightly reduced monthly amount for the rest of my life. We didn’t see a choice, though.

In fact, my original plan was to work till age 70, because SS gives you a “bonus” for every year you work past the maximum-benefits age, up to 70. If I had kept working till 70, my monthly SS check would have been more than a third greater than it is. Having just hit 70, I can now see the basic flaw in my original plan: Had I tried to keep working full time for another five years, I would have gone totally bonkers.

For the first few years after that last layoff, Leonore and I felt sad and tense every time the May 19 anniversary came around. Then Leonore suggested that we try to see the date as marking my freedom from full-time work. Except for worrying about money and the future — and that wasn’t really something new — we were really enjoying the ability to spend so much time together and being free from the tyranny of the alarm clock. She suggested observing May 19 as David’s Liberation Day.

And so we did, and so we do, and it has become a happy day, indeed.

Giving the day that name has been important. It did change my attitude, just as Leonore hoped. It marked some kind of mental transition from “fearful out-of-work guy looking desperately for a job” to “happy, free, relaxed guy who does the occasional contract because the extra money is welcome, but he’s entirely his own boss”.

As it happened, during the last five years, I also liberated myself from the traditional publishing industry and switched entirely to self-publishing. It’s true that the traditional publishing industry had liberated itself from me. I had become as appealing to editors and agents as I was to software companies. However, just as with IT work, I had stopped pursuing them. I was no longer sending out query letters, just as I was no longer sending out resumes. When I finish with this blog post, I’ll return to my current novel in progress knowing that once it’s in final form, it will be published. By me. Just thinking about that makes me happy. I feel as light as air.

David’s Liberation Day, indeed!

Me at 70

Pictures of.

http://www.dvorkin.com/photos/davidat70.html

Dogs and ham

One of Leonore's language students brings her incredibly cute little dog with her. The dog makes a beeline for me because I always greet her with a treat — a rolled up smoked mozzarella and proscuitto delight from Costco. What dog wouldn't like that?

Well, maybe a Moslem or Jewish dog. But dogs are considered unclean by Moslems, so maybe there are no Moslem dogs. There are certainly Jewish ones (leaving aside the whole circumcision thing).

An old insult for Jews in Medieval England — or at least, in historical novels — was "dog of a Jew". I guess a Jewish dog would be a Jew of a dog.

Today's rambling thoughts brought to you by Working on Taxes, 2014 edition.

MPAD Memoirs

Which would be a nifty title, but I don't know what the title will be.

MPAD = Mission Planning and Analysis Division, simply the utterly most important and core part of what was then NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center (later renamed Johnson Space Center) in (south of) Houston. (Others who worked there, but not in MPAD, might disagree.) (They'd be wrong.)

Recently, a former MPAD coworker of mine from the days of the Apollo Project contacted me to say he was interviewing people who worked at MPAD at the time of the moon landings. He's my age and also retired, and he drives around the country quite a bit. He arranges his trips so that he can drive through the cities his old colleagues (and we are all old!) now live in and interview them. Once all the interviews are done, he'll figure out how to weave them together with the story of Apollo. The result will be a fairly substantial book.

He was in Denver yesterday, and we had a very nice and quite long meeting. Mostly, he was interviewing me about my life before, during, and after Apollo, but we also spent some of the time talking about the other people who were in MPAD back then. He'll probably want me produce the e-book and print versions of the book and design the cover.

It’s not the Christian Bible, damn it

It's silly of me to be annoyed by this, given that I'm an atheist. Nonetheless it annoys me considerably.

Thanks to the Noah movie and to today's date*, there has been a spurt of references to the Bible in the online places I frequent. I keep seeing the Flood and Psalms, both in the Old Testament, referred to as being in the Christian Bible.

No, sirree. They're in the Old Testament, a.k.a. the Hebrew Bible.** The fact that Christians have incorporated the OT into their religion is irrelevant. Moslems have incorporated much of the OT and the NT into their religion, too, but that doesn't make those two books part of the Koran.***

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

* I'm referring, of course, to the obnoxious "joke" that today is atheism's holiday because "The fool has said in his heart, there is no God."

** Yeah, yeah, I know, Pentateuch. As far as I'm concerned, the whole shebang counts.

*** Maybe it does to Moslems, who I gather consider the OT prophets and Jesus to be Moslems, but that's just weird, and I haven't encountered any Moslems in the online places I was referring to.

Continuum’s Height Problem

I like the TV show Continuum and its twisty time-travel switcheroos. I'm always a sucker for those, in any show. I wonder how the various mysteries will be resolved, assuming they are all resolved when the show finishes its run. But the one mystery that I find annoying rather than intriguing is Alec Sadler's height.

In the present, he's about 20 years old. He's shorter than almost everyone else, including Kiera. In scenes set in the future, he's in his mid-eighties. Unless future medicine has solved the problem of people getting shorter in old age, he would have lost some height since his max height. But he still towers over almost everyone, including Kiera. Maybe growth spurts happen after 20, but they must be rare.

There are other time travelers, besides Kiera, and none of them seems unusually tall or short compared to people of today or the future. So unless travel itself does something weird to people's heights, Alec's height is a msytery.

Thor Didn’t Thunder, and Oblivion Should Not Have Been Consigned to Oblivion

I keep a lookout for the cable appearances of big-budget sf/f/h movies that I skipped in the theaters. Then I record them to watch while exercising.

After watching such a recording, I sometimes regret that I didn't see it on the big screen, but more often I'm glad that I saved the money and time. I can’t say what effect watching a movie while grappling with a heavy weight has on my judgment, but presumably if it does induce a bias, the bias is the same for all of the movies I watch while exercising.

Recently, I watched Thor and Oblivion this way. Because of how the two performed in theaters, I assumed I’d like Thor and would not like Oblivion. It was the other way around.

Thor’s big budget shows. The sets are lavish (but at the same time absurd and laughable in the Asgard scenes) and the CGI is impressive. But the action scenes are murky, and it’s hard to see what’s supposed to be happening. The scenes begin as set pieces, then there’s some stylized movement and much blurred stuff, followed by a set-piece resolution. The acting is adequate, but the dialog ranges from dull to silly to — in the Asgard scenes — embarrassing. There’s little to the movie. It’s better looking and acted than the awful imitation that appeared on the SyFy Channel but just as empty and aimed at the same pubescent audience. Thor’s box-office success is depressing and disappointing.

Oblivion is a very different matter. It also had a big budget, but that budget was put to better use. The CGI is excellent (albeit with one brief exception) and the sets are completely believable. The acting is quite good, and that includes Tom Cruise, who for decades now has been in the unfortunate and puzzling position of having to keep proving his acting ability. One big problem with the movie is the idea that clones, despite being complete human beings with the normal human range of emotions and needs, are interchangeable when it comes to love. The other problem is that the story line is a combination of a number of stale, old science fiction plots instead of something original. But they have been sewn together competently, and the result is entertaining and believable. I imagine that for audience members who haven’t read much sf, it all seems brilliantly original. The movie deserved much better treatment at the box office, and it certainly should have been a far greater success than Thor.

Blogging about Atheism & Reading about Atheism: The Atheist Blogroll

I started this blog in September 2006.

At the time, I planned to use it write about my writing. In part, I thought it would act as a spur to make me write more because I’d be reporting on my writing progress and I’d be embarrassed to have to report how little I had written. Hence the title and the quote from Trollope at the top. That doesn’t seem to have worked too well. If it had, I’d have written quite a few more books in the last seven and a fraction years than I have.

On the other hand, I came to see the blog as a convenient place to express my opinions about all sorts of things — books, politics, movies, petty annoyances, major annoyances, etc. Of those, the posts that seem to get the most attention are the negative reviews of popular movies. Here I am, trying to set the world right with my insights and wisdom, and the strongest responses I get are hostile ones from people who call me names for trashing a movie they loved. It has been a source of great joy to me. I must make an effort to see more bad popular movies.

But that’s all beside the point.

One topic I don’t blog about (not often, maybe not ever) is atheism or the related topics of religious belief and church-state separation. That’s odd, because atheism has been an extremely important part of my life, and I have strong opinions on separation, strong enough to be offensive to some of my fellow atheists. For example, an essay of mine titled Should Atheists Celebrate Christmas? has earned me more hostile responses from atheists than from theists. (Probably because it’s not so much an attack on the silliness of Christmas as it is upon the silliness of atheists who celebrate it.)

That’s not to say I don’t read atheist blogs. When such blogs started appearing, years ago, I began following them eagerly. The number of such blogs has exploded in recent years, and I haven’t been able to keep up. I still follow the ones I became aware of early on, but I can only sample the others from time to time. Other than following links from blogs, how is one to find the pool to dip into?

A brave blogger named Mojoey has taken up the task. He maintains a blog called The Atheist Blogroll. He vets the blogs he includes, and he removes inactive ones. (This blog, A Blister to My Eye, is now included in his blogroll.) I expect to use his blogroll to discover good blogs to follow. Just not too many, I hope.

I do plan to blog more about atheism, religion, separation, and related topics in the future.

Partly, this is because they are more on my mind than ever as Leonore and I spend more time working on our book about our atheism, which we hope to have done and published before the end of 2014.

Partly it’s because those topics are never far from my mind, no matter what book I’m writing, and I have strong opinions on those topics, and this is my blog, and it’s where I express those strong opinions in strong terms.

I just remembered reading that there will be a flood of big-budget religious movies coming out this year, including one about the Flood. I wasn’t planning to see any of them, but now I think I will — not because I’ll like them, but because I’ll hate them, and it will be a fine opportunity to combine blog posts slamming religion and bad popular movies at one and the same time.

The comments should be fun.

Here’s how badly Colorado’s secession movement failed

In yesterday’s election, 11 Colorado counties voted on whether they wanted to secede from Colorado and form a new state, North Colorado, a.k.a TeaPartyGunNutFrackitupiStan.

Not all the votes have been counted, but the results so far show that five of those counties voted solidly in favor of secession, while the other six voted just as solidly against it.

Some people have fallen for the standard Republican trick of analyzing voting results in terms of square miles. In this case, that sleazy trick becomes comparing numbers of counties on one side vs. numbers on the other. When you look at it that way, you might think that secession is a powerful force out here in the Mountain West where men are men and fracking injections are wonderful for the environment. Five counties want to secede! And all of them are filled with sunburned, Stetson-wearin’, squinty-eyed, gun-totin’ manly men. Also their wives and hosses and little cowboys and cowgals.

Wal, hold on a jest minute there, buckaroo.

I put the latest election results I could find into a spreadsheet and did some simple arithmetic. Not all of the vote counts are final, but I should think they’re fairly close to complete by now.

Here’s what I found.

If you add up all the Yes and No votes in the 11 counties, you get 91,377 votes cast. We only had two state-wide issues on yesterday’s Colorado ballot, so I chose one of them, Amendment 66 (which failed, damn it), as a way to get the total statewide vote cast yesterday. The Yes and No votes on Amendment 66 total 1,268,889. That means that the total number of Yes and No voters in the 11 counties voting on secession only amounted to 7.2% of the total statewide vote. Hmm. Lotsa square miles out there on that rolling, highly frackable prairie, but not a lot of voters.

Now, if you add up all of the No votes in the 11 counties — i.e., the votes against secession — you get 50,293. All the Yes votes add up to 41,084. As percentages of the 91,377 votes cast on the secession issue, that gives you a vote of 55% to 45% against secession.

I call that a resounding defeat.

There is lots of linguistic atrocities out there

The latest one to sweep across my part of the English-speaking world is the use of a singular verb with a plural subject. This mostly shows up in the form of "there is" instead of "there are" -- "there is lots of ... "

What can one do? Nothing but look down one's nose and sneer. It's hard for me to look down my now at people because I'm short. Fortunately, I have a large nose, which helps.

Elementary, Season 2, Episode 1

The first episode of Elementary's second season was a good Elementary episode but not a great one. That still makes it superior to almost everything else on TV.

There wasn't much reason to set the episode in London, other than the interesting character stuff with Lestrade as a somewhat different kind of addict and Holmes trying to get him off the habit.

There were wonderful shots of famous scenery, and the bit in the taxi where Watson, the visitor, looks around eagerly at all the famous sights, while Holmes the native, stares into space, lost in thought, ignoring all of it, was cleverly done.

Since I have to say something negative, I'll express annoyance at Holmes, for the second time in this series, pronouncing "cache" as though it were "cachet". Surely Holmes would know better. Also, the absurdity at the end when Mycroft wishes him a pleasant trip "back to the colonies." WTF?

Dr. Daniel Dvorkin

To quote Leonore:

It's celebration time! As of about 3:30 PM today, our only child, Daniel, 44 years old, is now Daniel Dvorkin, PhD, with a doctorate in Bioinformatics from the University of Colo. Denver/Health Sciences Center. Needless to say, this was a very long time coming. It's the culmination of five (or six?) years of hard, hard work on the PhD alone. / We love you, Daniel, and are so, so proud of you! We are such very fortunate parents to have a son like you: so smart, so sweet and kind, and so very hardworking. Now it's on to great things in the world of scientific work!

True Blood and Nora’s Accent

We watched last night's True Blood this evening On Demand. It was a great episode, with some nifty twists, except for one minor detail. We learned that Nora was an English noblewoman who became a vampire in the 17th Century. Hence her very upper-class English accent.

Which didn't yet exist at that time.

To which some will say, "You can accept vampires and all of the other magical creatures on True Blood, but you cavil at that little historical error?"

Yes. Because when fiction is set in an unreal world, all the tiny details have to be correct in order not to destroy one's willing suspension of disbelief. That's true for all fiction, but it's especially true when the very setting contradicts reality.

More than that, the grainy, gritty details of the fictional reality have to be very sharply real in order to make the fantastic world continue to seem real.

That minor details is not so minor, at all.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter – the definitive historical movie about Abraham Lincoln!

I finally had the chance to watch "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter" on DVD. I had missed it in the theaters, through which it zipped fairly quickly. I gather it was a commercial flop.

I don't know why it flopped. It was loads of fun and extremely well done. It had its problems, such as the lack of facial resemblance between the actor and Lincoln, despite the hours he spent being made up for the part every day before shooting began, and his lyric baritone voice vs. Lincoln's reportedly high, nasal one. There were moments where I had to strain a bit to hold onto my willing suspension of disbelief, and some of the over-the-top action scenes (e.g., the fight on the backs of the thundering herd of horses) went on too long, but those were relatively minor problems.

It was a great humans vs. vampires adventure romp fairly well integrated into actual history. Even with the vampires insinuated everywhere, it gave me a far more convincing feeling of the time and place than the lauded and quite bad "Lincoln" with Daniel Day Lewis. I saw Lincoln in the theater and regretted paying the money and was relieved when it finally ended. I wish I had seen this one in the theater and I was sorry when it ended.

Smoky Days and Nights

Ugh. Going to bed with the windows closed and the air conditioning on, because of the smoke from the forest fires. Our eyes are red and our throats are irritated.

And it's going to keep getting worse, every summer. The annual forest fires will die away when there's nothing left to burn in the mountains. Surely there won't be many people living in the mountains, once that happens. There'll be little tourism, summer or winter. The rare heavy snows or rains will mean serious mudslides and flash flooding. Denver won't be covered by smoke from fires then, but it will be covered by dust. Extreme water rationing will mean no more lawns, and we'll all have cacti instead of trees, like Arizona.

Of course, the important question is, what will this mean for the value of our house?

Star Trek: Into Lameness

We finally saw the new Star Trek movie today. Cumberbatch dominated the movie, unsurprisingly. Lots of action and extraordinarily believable special effects. It was entertaining and had some occasionally good dialogue. However, take away the action and the special effects, and there wasn't much left. Even Cumberbatch's presence couldn't add substance to the movie.

We really liked the first of the new ST movies. I'm willing to make allowances for this one because #2 in a series is usually lame and #3 is usually good. So I was expecting a touch of lameness. Nonetheless, I was really hoping for a movie that wasn't aimed at 15-year-old boys.

Maybe #3 will be good.

The fluidity of e-books

This is cool.

One of the books on my Kindle is Battle Cry of Freedom, a wonderful history of the Civil War that Daniel recommended to me highly. I just got a notice from Amazon that that edition has been updated; the e-mail included instructions for getting the update on my Kindle.

No, the ending didn't change. The maps were updated. Those maps were the one thing that was poor about that e-book edition. I don't know if I'll ever reread the book, but if I do, or if I look into it for reference, I'll have the better maps.

Some people have said that this changeability is a drawback to e-books. To my mind, it’s one of their many strengths.

Dr. WTF?

We finally got the chance to watch Saturday's episode of Dr. Who. We had missed it because we were out of town.

It started out promisingly, but that didn't last. Sadly, this was one of those episodes where Dr. Who turns into Dr. WTF? The people writing Dr. Who nowadays have come up with some wonderful episodes, but they've also produced some exceedingly bad ones, and I think the latter kind tend to happen when they forget that they're writing fun, silly adventure stories and try to create Art.

I think that as a general rule, writers should never try consciously to create Art. The result is almost always not only rubbish, but, even worse, the kind of rubbish that makes you wince.

The World According to End-of-the-World Movies

Yesterday, I was exercising to a couple of SyFy Channel end-of-the-world movies. Both involved stuff raining down on Earth and destroying cities -- meteors in one case, technobabble electrical phenomena in the other. In both movies, the hits were random, sudden, numerous, and unpredictable. In both movies, the main characters escaped death by running madly while zigging and zagging. Occasionally, one would yell, "Look out!" and pull the others in a different direction. This tactic did not work for all of the extras running around in the background.

From one of the movies, I learned that, despite walking for days on end in a semi-post-apocalyptic landscape, the pretty female had some secret way to keep her hair clean and her makeup fresh, and the rugged male lead was able to stay clean shaven. (Maybe he was a eunuch! No. That would have been a very different movie.) On the bright side, he wasn't wearing stupid facial stubble. His hair stayed clean, too. So did the clothes on both.

In the same movie, the female lead was wearing high heels when rescued by the male lead. After walking for days and then finding themselves in semi-abandoned Los Angeles, they didn't take the time to get her a pair of sensible running shoes for the remaining days of walking.

The Abominable Mr. Selfridge

We watched the first episode of the new Masterpiece series "Mr. Selfridge" last night. I won't bother watching any of the rest of it. Mediocre writing, distasteful characters, inept acting, uninteresting story.

My advice to the Masterpiece people: Don't pander to American audiences by including American characters, and certainly don't focus on the American characters. You've done very well in the past with your period tales of upper-class English families in expensive clothes and surroundings. In any case, and above all, focus on the story and hire the best writers and actors, and please don't reuse the gang responsible for this failure.

Get the government out the marriage business?

So now the right wingers are adopting a seemingly libertarian stance on marriage and saying that the government should get out of the marriage-sanctioning biz entirely and leave that up to churches and synagogues (maybe some of them add mosques, but I'm skeptical).

Fine, if they also mean that all the laws granting married couples any kind of special status compared to single people will also be removed. I'm sure they don't mean that, at all. I'm sure they just want to sucker libertarians*, yet again, with the aim of making marriage even more restrictive than it is now.

 

* Is it in the DNA of libertarians that they're so often so easily suckered by the right wing?

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but plagiarism ain't

Someone sent me an e-mail alerting me to a blog post about vampires that lifted a lot of text from my essay about vampires.

A link to my essay would have been nice. A polite request to use some of the text, with attribution, would have been even nicer.

Unfortunately, I don't see any contact information on that blog or even a way to comment.

Hmph.

Rand Paul Planning to Run for President in 2016

It says here:

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/03/18/rand_paul_planning_2016_bid.html

So maybe my political prognostication wasn’t so far-fetched, after all.

Political Prognostications Are Worth the Electrons They’re Written with

But they’re so much fun.

Listening to a bit of the speeches and interviews at CPAC on NPR this morning, I'm suddenly reminded of the conservative movement in the early 1960s, during part of which time I shared a college dorm room with the president of the Indiana University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom (who was a nice guy, when we weren't discussing politics).

My roommate and the other young conservatives — which seemed like a real oxymoron to people like me, back then — were rallying behind Goldwater, and they were utterly convinced that if only Barry could win the Republican nomination in 1964, the whole country would flock to his banner. Because, as they knew in their hearts, the American people are fundamentally right wingers. If they had been correct, then the slogan of the Goldwater campaign during the 1964 election, “In your heart, you know he’s right,” would have been a brilliant one.

They also assumed that the Johnson campaign would be incompetent and wouldn’t exploit all the weak spots in Goldwater’s positions. Obviously, they were wrong on both counts.

No, Goldwater didn’t lose in a landslide because of a supposedly unfair Johnson campaign commercial about a little girl picking flowers as the nuclear bombs start going off. That commercial struck a lot of us at the time as being right on the money, but that’s irrelevant. Goldwater would have lost in a landslide even if that commercial had never run.

Because Goldwater mellowed a bit in his old age and condemned the Republicans for their homophobia, people who don’t remember 1964 think that Goldwater wasn’t such a bad guy, after all. Wrong. He was correctly seen as a raving loon. At the very least, if he had won, his administration would have been filled with raving loons he would have been unable to control.

Now I’m beginning to think that maybe Rand Paul will be the GOP nominee in 2016, instead of any of the familiar names the pundits are backing, and that the result will be another Democratic landslide similar in magnitude to 1964.

The Surprising Benefits of The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed

Ten years ago, during a period of stressful, worry-filled, and embittering unemployment, I wrote an essay about the experience, titled The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed. It was an attempt to talk about unemployment in a tongue-in-cheek way, and it served as therapy for me.

I put the essay on my Web site, although I worried that other unemployed people would see it there and would find it upsetting. After all, there’s nothing humorous about losing your source of income and not knowing when or even if you’ll secure another. Reading an essay that seems to be making light of that situation could result in anger and could deepen the depression that inevitably accompanies being unemployed.

Fortunately, it had the opposite effect: It cheered people up. Over the years, I’ve received a steady stream of e-mails from unemployed people thanking me for writing the essay and saying that it helped them cope with being unemployed. Some of the e-mail correspondences went on for years.

For me, following the writing of the essay, there were more alternating periods of employment and unemployment. I had more thoughts on the subjects of unemployment and job hunting, and I expanded the essay into a short book with the same title. People buy copies of the book from time to time, although the number of hits on the essay is far greater than the sales numbers for the book. When you’re unemployed, free is obviously better.

Out of curiosity, I started tracking the number of hits on the essay and found that it was a fairly reliable leading indicator of the economy, so I created the tongue-in-cheek SBOBU Economic Index. I haven’t updated the data in a while, however.

Today, I got another e-mail thanking me for writing the essay. The writer said she had just accepted a job offer after being unemployed for seven months. I realized that I’ve been getting very few of those e-mails lately. This is evidence either that the economy has improved or that the essay’s supply of comforting humor has been used up. I hope it’s the former.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s descendants refuse to give up

This puzzles me.

When I sold my Sherlock Holmes novel to Dodd, Mead about 30 years ago or so, lawyers for Conan Doyle's daughter (I think it was) contacted Dodd, Mead and threatened to sue if the book were ever published; they claimed control over the characters. The then-head of Dodd, Mead, who I think was a member of the Dodd family (I always think of him as Junior Dodd), told them to go ahead and sue. They backed down.

If they didn't think they were on solid ground 30 years ago, how can the estate think it has grounds now?

 

 

As an aside, I found their objections to my novel particularly laughable. They asserted that Conan Doyle would never have approved of my combining Sherlock Holmes with space travel and time travel. Given that Conan Doyle wrote a fair amount of what we now call science fiction, I wonder if his descendants had actually read much of his works.

College alumni in a bar

Occasionally I get e-mail from the local chapter of the Indiana University Alumni Association announcing gatherings. The latest one invited me to a local tavern to watch a televised IU basketball game in the company of a bunch of drunken alumni. Woo hoo.

The most truly world-class organization at IU is the opera school, whose graduates typically head straight to the Met and other great opera houses. The opera school also puts on wonderful opera performances on campus. Now, if the alumni org invited me to a local tavern to watch a live televised performance from the IU opera school, I might be interested. But I'm not going to hold my breath for that.

A little knowledge is a dangerous etc.

A little knowledge is a dangerous etc.

Talking Points Memo has a brief note about the announcement that the skeleton recently found in England most probably is that of Richard III. The TPM news item is headed "Tear-Falling Pity Dwells Not In This Eye" — a line uttered by Richard in Shakespeare's play, Richard III. In the note, TPM refers to Richard as "the notorious Richard III".

Which makes me suspect that David Kurtz, who apparently wrote that TPM item, has drawn his knowledge of Richard from Shakespeare's version of the man. Shakespeare, who was writing during the reign of Elizabeth I, the granddaughter of Henry VII, the man who ended Richard's reign and life at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Shakespeare, who understood politics so well and understood the value of not pissing off Elizabeth by casting doubt on the rightness of her grandfather's violent takeover of the country.

An exciting morning at Starbucks

I dropped Leonore off at the campus this morning. She had only one tutoring student today, so I went to a nearby Starbucks to have bad coffee and read a good book. A young man came in with his bicycle, bought something, and left. Shortly after, he came staggering in asking us to call 911. Someone had stabbed him and stolen his bicycle.

A customer who seemed to know what he was doing sprang to help. He got the guy's t-shirt off, revealing a bleeding hole in his side, helped him to a chair, and pressed a towel to his side. Blood, blood, blood. Police and local security guards showed up, including the campus police for some reason. Lots of phone calls and stuff. Ambulance showed up. The medics helped the guy to his feet and walked him out to the ambulance. I don't know why they didn't do something for him there. He was moaning and saying he couldn't breathe. I assume his lung had been punctured and/or was filling with blood. There wasn't as much blood as I would have expected; there also wasn't any bubbling from the wound.

I heard someone say that the victim warned the man helping him that he had Hep C. There was blood on the chair, on the small table he was sitting at, on the floor ...

The police put yellow Crime Scene tape outside and had the barristas lock the door. They took statements from everyone. It all took a while.

So the poor guy has Hep C, a serious wound, and his bike is gone.

If only TV writers knew even a tiny bit of history

Oh, this pisses me off.

NBC will be doing a new series titled Dracula:

The series centers on the famous vampire, who poses as an American entrepreneur called Allen Grayson. He travels to 1890s London, where he attempts to "bring modern science to Victorian society."

You dumb shits. Where do you think modern science began? Why don't you read up on the attitudes of the Victorians toward everything new and interesting, instead of relying on absurd Hollywood stereotypes?

Pacific Rim

Based on the trailer, the new movie Pacific Rim will do well if there are enough 13-year old boys out there.

The gimmick seems to be that giant alien monsters from another dimension emerge from inter-dimensional portals deep under the Pacific Ocean and then come on land to attack humanity. The only effective weapon we have against them is equally giant, remotely controlled robots that can have face-to-face punchouts with the aliens. This is obviously far more effective than the most destructive rockets, bombs, etc. that mankind has developed.

Dr. Sleazevago

It’s odd to watch a movie again, decades after first seeing it. You’re surprised by the big chunks of it that you don’t remember at all as well as the scenes that you do remember quite well.

We just watched Dr. Zhivago, the original one with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, which we last saw back in the 60s, when it first came out. I remembered it the way it was received at the time, as a big-screen epic romance with lots of vast, snow-covered Russian landscape — which was actually Finnish, Canadian, and other landscape, because the Soviets refused to have anything to do with a movie made from a novel by an author who was persona non grata.

What I didn’t remember was what a dirtbag Yuri Zhivago was. Lara, his mistress, is only slightly better. Rather, she has a slight excuse for her behavior — her experience when she’s 17 — whereas Dr. Zh. has no excuse at all.

Just like two morally depraved movies that I despised, The English Patient and Like Water for Chocolate, this epic romance is really a celebration of sleaze. I have an unpleasant taste in my mouth.

Aborted Flight

Save your money and your time. Flight aborts on takeoff. It never reaches cruising altitude. Its engines sputter and flame out. Skip this one and catch a different flight.

When the airplane piloted by drunk, high-on-cocaine Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington) takes off, the passengers are told that the flight will take just under an hour. Perhaps if the movie had been edited down to one hour, it might have been bearable. As it is, the official running time of two hours and 18 minutes can’t possibly be correct. The movie seemed to go on forever — or at least until it ends abruptly with an anticlimax.

As we know from the trailers, their flight will be much shorter than that. Wisely, the trailers focused on the scenes of the plane flying upside down just above the ground and then crashing in a field. That’s the most entertaining part of the movie. No, it’s the only entertaining part. If the movie had ended at that point, with everyone aboard dying in the crash, it would have been no more unsatisfying than the actual ending and slightly less disappointing.

Don’t be fooled by that trailer. This isn’t a picture about airplanes or pilots. It’s a story about alcoholism, and it’s no Days of Wine and Roses. Unlike that classic movie, it doesn’t even have a good theme song.

Whip Whitaker drinks heavily and constantly, snorts cocaine, smokes feverishly, denies that he has a problem, and repeats the process over and over and over … There is no subtlety to the story. The writing is inferior, rising occasionally to pedestrian. With the exception of Don Cheadle’s excellent depiction of a slimy lawyer, the acting is barely adequate. Denzel Washington, normally such a fine and riveting actor, is severely out of place here. His understated style is exactly wrong for the character. He should be flamboyant and larger than life until his moment of truth. Instead, he’s a loser from the beginning — a boring, uninteresting, and unpleasant loser.

Making matters worse, after the crash scene, the movie starts meandering down a side road of preaching and moralizing and vague religious references. None of this is made clear and unambiguous. The writers seem to lack the courage to take a position either way. Rather, they throw lots of ingredients into the mix as though they hope that everyone in the audience — atheist, theist, supporter of AA, opponent of AA — will take from it what they want and will therefore like the movie. I suspect that I’m not alone in being offended by such spinelessness.

I said that the crash is the only entertaining part of the movie. That’s not quite true. There’s also the naked girl at the very beginning, before the crash. But she’s not onscreen for long. Not naked, anyway. If only we got to see that actress naked as often as we are forced to see Whip drinking. That might have helped.

The only other element that makes the movie even moderately interesting is John Goodman fighting valiantly to provide comic relief.

However, I was distracted by Goodman’s heavy breathing. I couldn’t help wondering how many more movies he’ll live to make. It’s ironic that in a movie about alcohol and drug addiction, the most memorable actor in it is a barely walking symbol of the dangers of food addiction — as were so many of the people in the audience with us and in the restaurant we went to before the movie. Instead of Flight, what America needs is a movie titled The Days of Lard and Heart Failure.

Children of the Undead

A social and political satire disguised as
a comic novel about zombies and pickles.
Or possibly the other way around.

http://www.dvorkin.com/chilun/

With this book, I’m trying a marketing approach I’ve never tried before: making it free. Well, for a while. It’s only available on Amazon in Kindle format (printed version coming soon), and the Kindle version will be free starting tomorrow (9/10/2012) and ending on Friday (9/14/2012).

Other writers seem to have had mixed results from giving books away. Some end up with a significant sales boost for all of their books while others report that they see no sales boost and not many takers for the free books. So I have no idea what to expect.

The Publishing Process in GIF Form

This is perfect. (Contains a lot of animated GIFs, so it may take a while to load.)

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2012/08/the-publishing-process-in-gif-form.html

Neil Armstrong, Ted Kennedy, and the National Turning Away

The death of the first man on the moon naturally elicits thoughts of the death of the American manned spaceflight program.

Strictly speaking, it’s not dead.

There are Americans aboard the International Space Station, but given how uncertain the future of that project is, and how unclear it is whether it will lead to anything significant, the ISS is not a satisfying substitute for astronauts on the moon. It’s certainly not as exciting.

NASA is also laying the groundwork for a return to the moon, but we have no assurance that that will really happen — or, if it does, that it will be continued beyond a few missions. Apollo was supposed to be just the beginning of America’s exploration of space, too.

I was part of the Apollo project. I worked at NASA/Houston on the Apollo missions, from the start through Apollo 15. When I arrived there in 1967, the excitement was fresh and the future was wonderful. But by the time I left, it was clear that America had decided to abandon manned spaceflight.

This may be surprising to those who are too young to remember those days and to those who should remember them but weren’t paying attention at the time.

Support for the moon-landing program was never unanimous. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy said: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth.” Immediately, there were those who objected, insisting that the money would be better spent on Earth. Those objections grew louder as the manned space program progressed. Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that objecting to the money spent on the space program while ignoring the immense amount being spent on the military — a disparity that’s far greater now than it was then — was equivalent to a policeman arresting a jaywalker while ignoring a nearby bank robbery. But Clarke was preaching to the choir — to people like me.

Still, enthusiasm and support for the program were generally high in the early days. I let myself believe that America was committed to spreading human exploration and settlement across the Solar System just as it had earlier done in the American West. Putting aside the question of whether that’s a romanticized, idealized, and very incomplete version of our westward expansion, it certainly is how Americans see themselves and how we view, or used to view, our destiny.

However, even before Apollo 11, carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, lifted off, polls showed a sudden and dramatic drop in public support for the manned spaceflight program. There was at least one group of social activists who showed up at the Apollo 11 launch itself to protest the money being spent on the space program. America wasn’t in love with the idea of exploring the universe, after all. Like a toddler, it had been suddenly attracted to a shiny, new toy, and just as suddenly, it had lost interest.

During my remaining time at NASA, I saw constant layoffs and a steady reduction in the number of Apollo missions. The people whose job it was to devise post-Apollo missions — that whole exploration and settling of the Solar System thing — were laid off and their group was eliminated. It was clear that the increasingly abbreviated Apollo program was now a dead end.

One of the Apollo program’s strongest and most effective opponents was Senator Ted Kennedy, the surviving Kennedy brother, the younger brother of the man whose soaring vision and soaring words had sent Americans to the moon. By contrast, Ted Kennedy’s words were angry and hostile.

After one major NASA budget cut Kennedy pushed through the Senate, NASA eliminated whatever it could that wasn’t directly mission related. That included a group of highly paid PhDs in Cambridge, Massachusetts who were working on very blue-sky future technology ideas. They weren’t contributing at all to the ongoing missions or the few missions that remained, so they had to go. That office was eliminated. Kennedy blew his top. In a furious speech, he attacked NASA for dumping those fine Americans who had families to support. Many of my colleagues, laid off by NASA and private aerospace companies contracting with NASA, also had families to support, but they didn’t live in Massachusetts, so clearly they were of no consequence to him.

I’m a very liberal Democrat. I supported Ted Kennedy in later years, and I was saddened when his illness effectively ended his political career. Nonetheless, when my fellow liberals mourned the death of the Lion of the Senate, I couldn’t help but hark back to those bitter days when Apollo was being slowly killed.

I’ll give my side of the political spectrum this much credit, though. Their shortsighted objection to spending money on spaceflight, in particular manned spaceflight, stems from the laudable goal of wanting to spend the money on helping their fellow citizens instead.

Indeed, we should be spending far, far more money on rebuilding and strengthening our social safety net, schools, and infrastructure. We should be instituting free, universal health care. We should be giving much more civilian foreign aid than we do.

The problem, of course, is that the money for all of that should be coming, not from cuts to NASA, but from massive cuts to military spending and far higher taxes on the rich.

Obviously, we’re not headed in that direction, not even if the nominal Democrat now in the White House is reelected — and he’s the best Democrat we’re going to get in the current political environment.

If the smirking plutocrat the Republican Party will nominate next week wins the election, matters will be far, far worse. The upward shift in wealth will accelerate, with money flowing even faster from those who can least afford to lose it to those who least need it. The social safety net, infrastructure, and schools will continue to deteriorate, but so will publicly funded science and technology, including NASA.

Some day there will be settlements on other worlds, but they won’t be American.

The toddler who so quickly lost interest in those shiny space toys is an easily frightened child. This is certainly not the land of the brave, no matter what the national anthem says. Overblown, unrealistic fears of urban crime have led to soaring gun ownership. Americans have sheepishly acquiesced to ever more burdensome restrictions on travel and speech and to a grotesquely inflated military budget because of their fear of terrorists hiding under their beds and in their closets.

So we spend our substance destroying our social and physical environment and providing welfare to arms manufacturers instead of exploring the universe. We have turned away from the future. We have turned destructively inward. We have let ourselves be gulled into thinking that we are encompassed by peril, when in truth we are surrounded by wonders.

This is the forthcoming novel the world has been waiting for

A book just sold to a publisher is described in Publishers Marketplace as "a nostalgic 1980s-fueled nod to the barely controlled chaos of our teens and early 20s, while at the same time a very serious reflection on how a boy learns to be a man, as the world conspires against him."

Man! I'm glad SOMEONE finally wrote a novel about all of that!

The state of American literature

From the announcements of forthcoming books in Publishers Marketplace:

Former Senior Editor and contributing writer for O Magazine Suzan Colon's BEACH GLASS, wherein a sensible, stability-craving woman makes a birthday wish to marry her sweet boyfriend and start a family, but days later finds herself single, on a beach in Costa Rica, falling for her hot, mysterious surf instructor, and taking her ultimate risk -- falling in love, to Deborah Smith at Bell Bridge Books, in a nice deal, for publication in spring 2014, by Louise Fury at L. Perkins Agency (world English).

It was a dark and stormy Bulwer-Lytton contest

I've come to greatly dislike the annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, the winner of which was just announced. It's not that the sentences people come up with for the contest aren't clever. They usually are, and often very funny. But that's the problem: they're deliberately written to be overblown, overlong, overly complex, and amusingly silly. The contest would be much more interesting, and more in keeping with its name, if the judges selected long, awful sentences from published fiction — sentences that were meant to be taken seriously.

Russian rights to Time for Sherlock Holmes

Amphora, a Russian publishing house in St. Petersburg, will be doing a Russian edition of my Sherlock Holmes pastiche, Time for Sherlock Holmes. They’ll be doing a print version (hardcover only, I think), with the option to do an e-book, mobile, and audiobook version of the Russian translation.

This will be part of a Sherlock Holmes series they’re planning. They’ll start with the canonical stories by Conan Doyle, and then they’ll do a number of SH books by other authors, including mine.

That book is my Little Novel Engine That Could. It just keeps on selling and selling and selling and … It was such fun to write, all those years ago (first published by Dodd, Mead in 1983), and it continues to provide me with these pleasant surprises.

A review of my Star Trek novel, Timetrap

It's nice to get good review, even many years after the book was published.

http://sciencefictiontimes.blogspot.com/2012/07/timetrap-by-david-dvorkin.html

Seeking a Friend at the End of the World

We saw this movie last night and enjoyed it enormously. It's quite funny at the start and gets much more serious in the second half, with a sweet and moving conclusion — which you would think would be hard to do, given that the world is ending. Steve Carrell's role is mostly serious. He does a fine job, especially in the most serious, subtle moments. He really is an excellent dramatic actor. Keira Knightley is not annoying for a change. She shows that she can be an adequate actress when she chooses to be.

Speaking of KK, one of the previews shown before the movie was for an upcoming version of Anna Karenina, starring KK as AK. It looks like the movie makers have managed to convert a mediocre and silly novel into pretentious twaddle.

The Surprising Benefits of Being Unemployed

In 2003, after being laid off, I wrote an essay with that title and put it on my Web site. It ended up getting humongous numbers of hits, and it generated lots of e-mails — friendly ones from other unemployed people, hostile ones from rightwingers, supportive ones.

I've expanded that essay into a short book. Description here: http://www.dvorkin.com/unemben/index.html

Or maybe I should say that I've written a short book which includes that essay and other thoughts on the same subject.

If I were to run for Colorado governor

I’d lose in a landslide, because my platform would be:

1. Free healthcare for everyone except the rich (ETR)
2. State pension for everyone ETR
3. Free ETR high-speed rail everywhere
4. Good cops
5. No doofuses on the bench
6. No religion in state government and no hidden subsidies for churches
7. A fence around El Paso County (with some way of letting good people out — and in, if they insist). Garden of the Gods would be accessible, however.
8. Gay marriage
9. No state- or city-level war on drugs, alcohol, porn, prostitution, or any other victimless crimes, and no cooperation with the Feds for the same
10. Lots of money for education
11. No subsidies for sports, and no encouragement, either
12. A very progressive tax system
13. No guns for anyone at all anywhere, any time. That includes the police. No Tazers, either.
14. Foreign investors will be encouraged. The pitch will be that it’s true that the US is an insane and dangerous place, but Colorado is the exception. “Move your business to the safe, non-crazy state! Corporate refugees from California, Texas, and other crazy states are also encouraged to move here. Immigrants from anywhere are urged to have themselves surgically sterilized before moving. Also, bring water.”
15. The rich identified by a scarlet R on their foreheads
16. Proper use of English is encouraged. The governor determines what’s proper.

I’m sure there’d be more. That’s for starters.

The Girlfriend on Your Desk

In the 1980s, I was working at an oil and gas software company in Denver. We programmed in Fortran (ah! beloved language!) on DEC-20s (ah! beloved mini!). We used IBM PCs, but at that time only as dumb terminals.

A coworker brought her new toy in to show us. It was the first version of Apple’s Macintosh computer — a funny, boxlike little thing with a black-and-white screen on which were displayed cute icons instead of the command line we were all used to. We gathered around and made comments ranging from skeptical to admiring. I don’t remember how much she said she had paid for it, but I do remember that we were all taken aback. I liked the idea of the GUI and considered buying one of the gadgets once the price came down.

The price of oil plummeted, my employer’s competitors moved their software to the PC faster and charged less, and one sad day, the company laid off 11 of its 13 programmers. I was one of the 11.

Years passed. PCs progressed in power and market penetration and moved from DOS to Windows (at least, in terms of what you saw). Increasingly, we programmed on the desktop. DEC20s disappeared, and eventually so did DEC itself.

From time to time, I used a Mac in the workplace. I found the GUI clunky, cumbersome, and badly thought out. The more I used the Mac, the more I disliked it and the more I preferred the relative simplicity, ease of use, and superior design of Microsoft Windows. (Given the choice, I preferred OpenWindows on a Sun workstation to both, but I had that choice only rarely.)

I also found the attitude of Mac users — smugness combined with a persecution complex — increasingly annoying.

Macs seemed to be struggling — used in certain niche environments but unable to break out of those. We Windows people were the slick, smart guys, accepted and needed everywhere, and we sneered at those silly, earnest kids with their toy that pretended to be a serious computer and their sullen resentment and their insistence that we were corrupt fools and the Mac was pure and good and divinely inspired and celestially innovative. Apparently, the Mac GUI’s design was inscribed on tablets brought down from the mountaintop by a bearded prophet in a turtleneck.

With time, that changed. Macs became more widely accepted and Windows suffered the fate of every overly big, overly confident empire. Microsoft’s market share eroded. The toy competitor moved in and took over huge chunks of its territory.

Well, relatively, anyway. Gartner predicts that just over 5% of new PC shipments in 2012 will run Mac OS, and Linux will remain under 2% for the next few years. What will the remaining 93% be? Windows, almost all of it.

Nonetheless, Apple and its fanatical, brainwashed devotees are feeling bumptious, while Windows and its rational, calm, intelligent, impartial supporters are feeling a touch edgy and defensive. Some of the latter are even losing enough of their rational, calm intelligence to consider switching.

It’s rather like girlfriends, isn’t it?

Specifically, two girlfriends: Mack and Winnie.

You sort of have to choose between the two.

They are similar in many ways. Mack is a couple of years older than Winnie, although she acts younger. They’re both nearing 30 and perhaps starting to worry a bit about their appeal. They seem to be applying more makeup these days, although Winnie puts on more of it than Mack does. Indeed, Winnie seems to layer it on and wash it off and replace it a bit frantically.

Both girls have had to deal with embarrassing questions about their paternity. That talk has faded in recent years, though. I don’t know if that’s because everyone has politely agreed to ignore the matter, or if society simply no longer cares about it.

But the differences between them are more interesting than the similarities.

Winnie

When she was young, Winnie was rather rough around the edges. In the morning, she just threw on whatever clothes were available. She skipped makeup, in those days. I’m not sure she showered regularly or used deodorant. She didn’t care what people thought about her appearance.

That’s because she was so self-confident. She was convinced that people would love her, anyway — or at least that they’d seek out her company. They needed her, and that was enough for her. They didn’t have to like her.

However, beneath the mismatched clothes, she was both serious and power hungry. She planned a long corporate career for herself and didn’t think she’d ever retire. So at some point she bit the bullet and learned to dress appropriately and play the game. And then she rose rapidly through the ranks, quickly achieving Total World Domination.

But everyone knew that the staid, serious image was a false front. She was still the same Winnie underneath. In reality, she was a wild child who slept around. She would let anyone in. This equipped her with a lot of exciting skills. Unfortunately, it also meant that she kept picking up scary viruses.

Nowadays, Winnie switches without warning from cooperative to headstrong. She often doesn’t seem interested in what you want to do. She’s intent on doing what she wants, instead. It’s a personality trait that frustrates you and makes you angry. But just when you think the relationship is doomed and it’s time for you to move on, she turns loving and attentive and pulls you into the bedroom and … wow! As I said, over the years she’s learned a lot of tricks.

However, she’s insecure. She probably always will be. She’s talking more lately about commitment, which makes you a bit nervous. She constantly fears that you don’t love her for herself, that you’re just using her, and that you might dump her for someone else at any moment. Perhaps that explains the makeup.

Mack

Then there’s Mack. If she’s your girlfriend, you’re devoted to her. You’d never think of dating anyone else. You feel smug when you see Winnie’s boyfriend looking at Mack when he thinks no one notices.

Mack is certainly aware of her good looks — overly aware. She’s always been very concerned about her appearance. The accusation that she cares more about appearance than substance cropped up early and still dogs her.

But, golly, she’s so pretty and squeaky clean! When you’re with her, she assures you that you don’t even need protection. She’ll take care of everything. You want to believe her, but when you come down with a case of crotch rot, it doesn’t help to be told that Winnie has given even worse to far more lovers.

In her youth, Mack was, or at least seemed to be, brash and fresh, a bit of a rebel. She thumbed her nose at the system. But she changed over the years. She grew up into a slick corporate girl with expensive clothing, every hair in place, glossily pretty, and very smug.

She dates you, but she looks down on you. She’s moving up that corporate ladder, and the higher she climbs, the less interested she is in you. You’ve heard rumors that her father is pressuring her to look for a husband in the upper corporate echelons. You’re so fanatically devoted to her, but how committed is she to you?

 

 

Choices, choices, choices. It’s so hard to be a man in the modern world.

You’ve heard some of your friends talking about a new family in the neighborhood named Linux. There seem to be a huge number of girls in the family, with intriguing names like Susie and Ubuntu and Fedora. They sound like a pretty hot bunch. Some of your friends are lining up to date them. Your own attention is wandering …

A Singular Prophecy

A Singular Prophecy
Gary Raham
Biostration, 2012

70 million years ago, an alien race, fleeing the destruction of their world, landed on Earth. Here they would recreate the world they had lost. Unfortunately for them, Late Cretaceous Earth was a fiendishly hostile place, and it destroyed them. That is, it destroyed their bodies. Before they died, they used their technology to preserve their personalities in anticipation of the evolution of a more hospitable environment.

In our own time, a young paleontologist on a dig pries a sphere from the midst of fossil dinosaur bones and suddenly finds himself the host of one of those personalities. As they struggle to coexist in one body, the paleontologist and his not–so–welcome guest learn that the alien personality is not the only one to have reawakened. Moreover, the conversion of part of the earth into a recreation of the alien world that was lost so long ago is well under way.

A tale of alien possession and deep time becomes a moral struggle for both human and alien. The latter, especially, is forced to question its fundamental beliefs about the superiority of its kind and its presumed right to take over a world already inhabited by beings the alien finally recognizes as morally and intellectually on a par with itself.

The alien worldbuilding, told through flashbacks and the memories of the alien refugees, is simultaneously dreamlike and convincing. The biology of the aliens, and in particular their imaginative lifecycle, is shown to us mostly through their eyes, giving it a welcome solidity and realism. Too often in sf novels, such details struggle to rise above the level of intellectual exercise. One stage in the life cycle, the ambuli, we first see through the aliens’ memories. Later in the novel, we suddenly see ambuli through the eyes of humans, and instantaneously the ambuli become terrifying and very alien predators. Raham uses this technique of a double view of things very effectively.

For more information about Raham and his work and writing, see his Web site. To buy A Singular Prophecy, click on the image of the cover, above.

The Arm and Flanagan

My latest fiction publication. I'm putting it out as an e-book on Amazon, etc.

It's a novella or a very long story, or something like that. A mixture of suspense and sf, and hopefully Twilight Zoneish. It's just over 13,000 words. Publishing fiction of this length is something new for me. You can't charge less than 99 cents on Amazon, and I have no idea how people feel about paying a dollar for something of that length.

So far, The Arm and Flanagan is available in Kindle format on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007BQDG48), and also on Smashwords in various formats. It will be showing up in the other online stores over the next few weeks.

http://www.dvorkin.com/armflan/index.html

Steve Weddle eviscerates Jonathan Franzen

Well done, Mr. Weddle.

http://dosomedamage.blogspot.com/2012/01/franzen-gets-it-wrong.html

Red Riding Hood

I just watched part of the recent movie "Red Riding Hood" on TV.

I had no idea that all the girls in a typical medieval village were so hot. And had such nice teeth. The young male leads were also quite pretty, and it's even possible that some of them are heterosexual. It was a flop in the theaters, I believe; it should have been a CW series.

Gary Oldman chewed the scenery as a strange (of course!) priest. At one point, when looking for a witch among the villagers, he says that one of the signs to look for is a person exhibiting strange odors. Oh, Father. It's the Middle Ages.

Regressive Voice

Some years ago, I put an essay on my Web site titled Progressive Voice. It was a call for progressives to speak up and counteract the shrill volume of the right wing. I also said that progressives are the real Americans, and we have to make that clear to the country.

I’ve had the occasional supportive e-mail in response. Today I got one from the other side. It demonstrates just how dangerous the right wing really is:

David,

I glanced over your manifesto with complete shock.

Al I can say is Are you fucking kidding me?. You and any that think the way you do MUST be hunted down and permanently removed from Society.

Progressives are a cancer that has infected our great nation and MUST be eradicated.  YOU are the Enemy, YOU are the traitors YOU MUST be eliminated.

Dust Net

Governments want to control access to the Internet in order to remain in power. Corporations want to control access to the Internet in order to make lots of money. Both of them can maintain such control only as long as citizens/consumers are forced to access the Internet through a relatively few bottlenecks. Those are the points where government can choke off access; those are the gateways for the use of which corporations can charge exorbitant fees.

Political activists in countries with repressive governments have devised ways ― e.g., dialup access to proxy servers― to bypass government barriers to Internet access. Direct communication with satellites is another possibility; this is already popular in some countries as a way to watch television programs the government disapproves of. However, for the foreseeable future, communications satellites will be under the control of governments and giant corporations, so they aren’t a reliable and untrammeled avenue to the Internet. Proxy servers depend on the existing Internet backbone, which merely moves the possibility of government/corporate control one step further away from the person trying to get online.

Technological evolution will continue to provide new ways to evade this control, and governments and corporations will continue to evolve ways to block each new avenue of evasion. But two particular evolutionary trends are coming that will change this warfare between offense and defense in a fundamental way. They will change society, too, in profound and disturbing ways.

The first evolutionary trend is the increasing miniaturization and power of Internet–connected video and sound recording devices. They’ll soon be undetectable. Police won’t be able to arrest people for recording them in the act of, say, abusing peaceful protestors because the police won’t know which bystander is recording them and instantaneously uploading the video to YouTube. The increasing availability of WiFi hotspots and Internet access via the cell phone network also means that there are ever fewer physical locations where such abuse can take place without recordings being made and uploaded.

Except, of course, inside police stations or secret CIA torture camps. But hold that thought.

The second evolutionary trend is the shrinking of computers.

Some day, nanocomputers will be part of the nanotechnology tidal wave that will overwhelm us with technology indistinguishable from magic. The world will change. Human beings will change. But we don’t have to look that far ahead to glimpse the sea change I’m talking about.

Perhaps the efforts to create quantum computers will succeed, bringing us immensely powerful computers smaller than a human cell. But even if that technology never does come to fruition, powerful small computers are inevitable. Maybe they won’t be smaller than a human cell. Maybe they’ll be as big as a human cell, or as big as a speck of dust. That’s small enough to do the job I have in mind.

Major steps have already been made in that direction. The US military, as well as a consortium of universities, has been working for at least ten years to develop smart dust ― clouds of microscopic machines, wirelessly connected to each other, able to perform military tasks, espionage, exploration, and rescue. The last two sound wonderful, but no doubt far more money and brainpower are being poured into the first two.

In any case, microscopic networked intelligent machines will soon exist. Then, smart dust will quickly evolve from networked microscopic sensors with some computing power into powerful, microscopic networked computers.

Within a few years ― ten at the most, but probably no more than five ― invisible clouds of such computers will be drifting in the winds and floating on the seas. They will be present almost everywhere in the world. They might be powered by sunlight, or the energy of wind or waves, or changes in barometric pressure, or they might draw all the power they need from the manmade microwave energy bathing all of us all the time. Many of them will be military devices, gathering intelligence, keeping watch on other countries and on citizens. Many will be corporate machines, gathering information designed to make very wealthy people even wealthier. These machines won’t need the Internet. They will form their own networks. Since I’ve described two categories of machines, let’s call their two networks Gov Net and Plutocrat Net.

Increasingly, mixed among these clouds of drifting, floating dust–speck computers will be others produced by small groups of individuals with no connection to government or to the corporatocracy. Technology, especially electronic technology, behaves that way. Neither the government nor big corporations can keep control of it for long.

This third class of dust–speck computers will constitute a third world–wide network far greater than today’s Internet. Let’s call it Dust Net. Its purpose won’t be repression or profit but access to data, opinion, and like–minded human beings.

At this point ― let’s say five to ten years from now ― all those who have smart phones or other WiFi–equipped devices, almost anywhere in the world, will have complete access to Dust Net. Their governments won’t be able to block them, and corporations won’t be able to charge them. Dust Net will be an immensely powerful force for freedom.

But something else will be happening at the same time.

Let’s return to the evolution of tiny recording devices. I believe that that technology will be integrated into the microscopic servers making up Dust Net and its government and corporate equivalents. Smart dust was intended for data collection from the start, so copious data storage capacity is inherent in the design of the machines. Dust Net will become an infinitely distributed, infinitely replicated, infinitely accessible database containing full sound and video recording of everything that happens everywhere on Earth.

Of course, the same will apply to Gov Net and Plutocrat Net. They’ll be watching, recording, and storing everything, too.

No place in normal life is truly dust free. It’s frightening to think that every moment of your life will be recorded, stored away, and accessible to anyone who cares to view the recording. We’ll be living in a global village where not only do none of the windows have blinds but all the walls are made of glass.

Fortunately, we’ll have Dust Net. While governments and corporations watch us, we’ll be watching them. There won’t be any more secret meetings in Washington, DC or anywhere else. Like it or not ― and they won’t ― plans by governments and corporations to control us and limit our freedoms will be out in the open and known to all of us ahead of time. All governments and all boardrooms will be truly and completely transparent.

They’ll try to fight Dust Net with dust–free rooms. But even if they go into those rooms naked, they’ll bring the motes of Dust Net in with them ― inside their ears, their noses, their lungs. They’ll try to destroy Dust Net by hardware or software methods. The immense redundancy and constant checking and comparing of data between dust motes should defeat both approaches.

Premeditated crimes will largely disappear. Spur–of–the–moment crime will be virtually certain to be punished. Graft, corruption, and collusion will largely disappear. So will the very concept of privacy. And all this is coming whether we like it or not.

“What are you doing here?”

This is a small thing, but it bugs me. It seems to be new, and the buggishness factor grows each time I hear it.

In TV shows, when Character A is surprised at encountering Character B doing something unexpected, A will say, “What are you doing here?”

So far, so good.

Much more commonly, the situation is that A unexpectedly encounters B in a place where B should not be. A should say, “What are you doing here?” Instead, A always says “What are you doing here?” Same emphasis as in the first situation, but completely inappropriate in the second.

It’s as if TV actors and/or directors only know one way to say that sentence, no matter what the situation is in the story. If only they’d spend some time thinking about such details instead of mindlessly churning out product, the world would be a slightly brighter place. And I’d be somewhat less bugged.

Yeah, I know. The economy is struggling to avoid a double dip, a band of Republican wackadoodles is slavering to be president and so dense is the American voter that Obama is not crushing them all in the polls by a margin of 99 to 1, the Middle East (that’s what I’ll always call it!) is bubbling even more than it usually does, climate change is upon us and accelerating even while those same wackadoodles deny its existence, etc., and I’m complaining about television actors placing the stress on the wrong word.

But that’s an argument against all blog posts that aren’t dreadfully serious and deep and penetrating and that don’t contribute to solving the world’s problems. Fret not. My next post is going to be long, dull, terribly serious, and it will radically change human society. I should be working on it now. I shouldn’t be here. What am I doing here?