Heavy

Apropos Jack LaLanne and his long-time quest for health and fitness, a discussion about diet and exercise. I bring this up also because I just read another wildly popular diet and exercise book that makes me shake my head in wonder. (As a bonus, this one promises a fifteen-minute orgasm for your lady. Hey, that would be worth the cost all by itself, but it's a bait-and-switch -- the orgasm doesn't last fifteen minutes. It takes fifteen minutes to get there, and the favored position is left-handed. Sounds sinister to me.)


First, the extremes -- and why genetics surely plays a part in how healthy you are and how long you might live. 


I know a guy. He's morbidly obese -- he lugs around more than three hundred pounds, and I'm guessing his bodyfat percentage is 60%. Standing up exhausts him. Getting out of bed is probably the most exercise he gets on an average day, and that's a chore. I've known him for years, and he's always been this way -- that he is still alive has to be a testament to choosing your parents wisely, because everything about the man screams poor health.


He's a vegetarian. Has been most of his life.


Oops.


Vegetables aren't a panacea and the only road to health, of course. If you eat a lot of fresh fruit and veggies, drink a gallon of water every day, exercise well and often, there's no guarantee it will get you to five score if nobody in your family ever made it past forty. It will ameliorate some of what you get born with -- genetics loads the gun, but as often as not, it's environment and action that pull the trigger. Avoiding known risk factors for what killed your family early might not be enough, but it shades the odds your way. I know people who have done it. 


You wouldn't think I'd need to say this, but apparently there are people who either don't know or don't believe this. 


If your father died of a heart attack at forty and you live on the couch, smoke, drink too much, and chow down on bacon-wrapped bacon burgers washed down with milkshakes? If the last vegetable you had was the impression of the pickle you took off the Triple Whopper with bacon and cheese? You got nine strikes against you. It's on you if the Reaper comes to the party early. You know it, I know it, and pretending otherwise is apt to be fatal. 


If you are the kind of vegetarian who eats a football-sized baked potato laden with a pound of butter, a quart of sour cream, piled high with melted cheese under a generous dusting of crushed potato chips? Might as well go for the prime rib and not bother.  


Despite what loons like Atkins say about all fat and meat and no carbs being good for you, it's not. Empty carbs, simple sugars? Yeah, leave 'em out. Beans? Legumes? Leafy green stuff? Nothing unhealthy about those, and our crappy eating habits are turning us into a nation of fatties and type-two diabetics at an epidemic rate.Two-thirds of us are too fat, and we are not getting skinnier. 


Extremes. Too skinny is bad. Too fat is bad. If you can look in the mirror and see your six-pack, probably you don't need to lose weight. If you got that way eating nothing but steaks and eggs and the Mickey D's cholesterol special, looking good isn't the same as being healthy.


Don't say I didn't warn you. 

Jack LaLanne

Jack LaLanne and his co-star, Happy

Fitness Guru Jack LaLanne (1914-2011) passed away yesterday, at the age of 96. 

He was the first nationally-known fitness jock, he had a TV show in the 1950's, and he was into exercise and healthy diet long before anybody thought it was cool. He came from the days when coaches wouldn't allow their athletes to pump iron, because they were sure it would cause them to become muscle-bound. He dabbled in vegetarian eating when the very idea marked you as some kind of loon. People laughed at the idea that exercise and diet mattered to longevity.

He outlived all his critics.

Every year on his birthday, LaLanne would do some kind of stunt to show what shape he was in. 

In his forties, he did a thousand push-ups in twenty-three minutes.

When he was sixty, he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman's Wharf.

Handcuffed.

Shackled.

Towing a boat ...

He worked out right until the end, and died from complications of pneumonia. 

I watched the old black&white TV show when I was a kid, and his enthusiasm for fitness was infectious. Not just pumping iron, he did all kinds of things, using a towel and a chair, that you could do at home -- he was an original. The original.

A few years back, he was interviewed somewhere on the tube, and he joked about sex. 

You still having sex? he said he was asked sometimes. 

Oh, yeah, my wife and I make love almost every day.

Really?

Sure. We almost made love on Monday. Almost did it on Tuesday, almost on Wednesday ...

Adiós, Jack. 

But Wait! Now How Much Would You Pay ... ?

So, digging among the old files, I came across another backlist-out-of-print-and-reverted book, The Omega Cage, with Michael Reaves. Probably have it up at Smashwords/ Amazon.com as an ebook real soon. 


A couple of minor characters in the Matador universe first showed up in this one. 


Those of you who don't know the backstory on the book, attend, and be amused ...


In the late 1980's, Reaves and I were jockeying to get some movie work. We wrote a couple of scripts and our agent started sending them around. We had meetings on the studio lots. We were full of ourselves -- Out of the way, motherfuckers, a couple of screenwriters are comin' through ... ! 


Pretty soon, we got a bite from a small production company -- would we like to drop by and chat?


Oh, would we?!


We donned our "Power Extreme!" underwear and went to call. 


The producer, who looked all of about sixteen, had read our script based on our novel Hellstar. 


He stroked us: "Great script, wunnaful, wunnaful, you guys are terrific writers, we love ya! Got depth, got heart, got chops out the wazoo!"


Well, that wasn't hard on the ears, no sirree.


Then the catch: "We can't do this movie, of course, it would cost way too much, but we have an idea, maybe you can come up with something? We're thinking ... Escape from Alcatraz in Space? Whaddya think?"


Reaves and I didn't miss a beat: Hey, no problem. That's a great an idea! Lookit, let's say we have the baddest prison in the galaxy, last stop, nobody gets out alive, call it ... The Omega Cage, right? And we got this smuggler, who runs afoul of the space mafia, they are, um ... Black Sun, see? So he gets shipped to the Cage, which is full of the baddest, bad asses, and --


And, boy, howdy, did we commence to blue-sky, spinning a story, using my Matador universe as a background.  We rolled over that guy like a tank. We had him, we could feel it.


He loved it. 


We did the Hollywood dance -- kind of like the mating ritual of sand hill cranes, very esoteric -- and basically agreed to "jot down some notes," which is code for they-don't-have-to-pay-for-it-yet, and off we went ...


We had a theoretical agreement. Along the way, during our "note-jotting," they wondered if we could get a book deal, to drum up interest in the movie?


Sure, we could do that. 


We called our editor, told her we were about to write a big movie script, and would she be interested in doing a book which would essentially be a long treatment of the movie?


Sure. Why not?


Out of the way, motherfuckers, a couple of screenwriters are comin' through!


Except ...


The bad part came right after that: Our producer quit and went to work in TV, and our baby was orphaned. 


Orphaned scripts have about the same chance of survival as a baby harp seal in a ring of hungry polar bears.


We went from pitching it to Fox, to Dino de Laurentiis, and then straight to Troma ... and that, folks, was the end of that -- except --


-- except we had a book to write that neither of us particularly wanted to write, contract already signed. Crap-oh-dear!


So we wrote it fast and as if it were the movie. 


Ace liked it; it sold surprisingly well, earned back the advance, much better than we expected, and eventually, it went out-of-print and they gave it back to us.


Had a cover featuring a man and a woman modeled upon Arnold Schwarzenegger and Lisa Hartman (Black), and a guy in a robotic combat suit that looks a whole lot like the ones you saw in Jim Cameron's Avatar twenty-odd years later. A whole lot, but we ain't sayin' Jim got it from us -- Saberhagen beat us all to it ...


Come tomorrow, all things going well, you can get the e-version of the book, The Omega Cage ...


(Like the cover? A photo of our old baby-gate/doggie-gate, tweaked in the graphics program a bit. We are nothing if not creative ...)


Addendum: The novels I'm adding to ebook list will also be going up at FS&, Dan Moran's store, and they'll look better there, Dan'l says. He's gotten sharp on .mobi and epub files and he cleans 'em up. Plus if you send people there as customers, you get a discount on stuff you buy. Something to consider. 

Bullet Bitten

Took a bit longer to get the Smashwords edition of Spindoc converted from the old files than I figured.


The scanning part was faster -- thirty seconds a page -- and the artifacts and mis-read words in the first six chapters took a couple hours. But the other files, stored in an extinct version of AppleWorks, came across with more errors than I expected. These showed up as the little apple symbol, odd control characters where I'd used italics or other formatting, a couple of the keys like the ! and 1 swapped with each other, plus some odd spacing that needed global searches to eliminate. I pretty much had to re-read the whole thing as I went.


Still and all, I was able to get a pass done in one working day and a couple hours of the next, so, not bad. 


For a book I wrote in 1993, it held up pretty well, content-wise.


I was tempted to rewrite as I went -- but I held off. (I dunno if I'm a better writer now than I was then, but I would cast things a bit differently, and tone down the sex a bit, from NC-17 to R. Sometimes less is more.)


If I saw a typo, I fixed it, and there were a couple spots where something I thought I'd stuck in italics in the novel weren't, so I did that, but otherwise, I left it alone. It was a book of its time, and while progress went faster in some areas than I figured, I let it stand.


I'll make one more pass and then run it through the convertor for Smashwords and put it up. There will be a link over in the right hand column, as usual. 


Another day, another backlist novel sent into the electronic void ...

Bite the Bullet

One of the novels that Ace reverted to me a while back was Spindoc, the first of an SF duology starring Venture Silk. I put the second novel, The Forever Drug, up as an ebook, and it has sold pretty well so far, but I didn't offer Spindoc because, somehow in the process of going hither and yon -- this back in the day when I stored each chapter of a novel as a separate file -- I managed to lose the first six chapters. 


Nowhere to be found. 


Why did I not make it one file? Because when I first started working on a computer, the storage space was such that you couldn't do that and back it up. Floppy disks didn't hold very much, and even if you could put a book-sized file on your system, it was too big to work with -- the machine would grind and grind just opening and storing it. You young folk don't recall when the OS of a computer came on a floppy disk, and a megabyte was considered a lot. First hard drive I got was a ten-meg thing the size of a shoebox and I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven -- ten megs? Shoot, I'd never fill that up!


How I lost them? Dunno. I expect that once the book came out, I was less than diligent about the files, figuring at the time that I'd never need the electronic version again.


Who knew what the world was going to do with ebooks a mere fifteen years later?


Um. Anyway, being too lazy to sit down and retype the first six chapters, I figured that was that. My scanner didn't seem to be working, and OCR has always been such a pain to play with, so end of story, right?


Well. Maybe not. 


As it turned out, I got the scanner working. OCR -- that's optical character reading -- has improved some, and if I am willing to take apart a copy of the novel and carefully scan the pages, I can come up with files that are probably 95-98% accurate. Some of the words get garbled, and some show up as funny characters, but since I'd read the thing again anyway as I format it for epublication, that's not that much more work to fix that. Thirty-three pages into the scanner, probably an hour or so to scan and export them to a PDF I can port over to my word processor. Add in the other thirty-four chapter files that I do have, clean it all up and format it, I expect we are talking about one day's work, maybe even a long afternoon. 


So, I figured, I'd bite the bullet. All things going well, in the not-too-distant future, I'll be able to put Silk's first adventure up, for the teeming tens of fans who might be interested in reading it.


Stay tuned to this station ...

Word of the Day

Today's word is "anguish."


The word comes from  Middle English, via Old French, from the Latin angustia  "tightness," (plural) "straits, distress," (singular) angustus, "narrow."


What it means is, severe mental or physical pain or suffering. 


I remember the first time I associated the word with something I heard (and saw) somebody say aloud. 


It was the summer I was either thirteen or fourteen. We lived in a nice neighborhood in the 'burbs. I know I was younger than fifteen, because if I had been that old, I wouldn't have been hanging out on the corner with other kids in the neighborhood, I'd have been in my mother's car prowling the roads, and since I got my driver's license at fifteen, and since we didn't move there until I was thirteen, then it was one of those two years.


Many times in my life, I wish I'd kept a diary, so I could peg these events to a date. Alas, I did not. 


There were six or seven of us with nothing to do. It was hot, damp, and we were standing listlessly and talking about this and that. As I recall, the group consisted of half a dozen of us. One of my classmates, call him "Rich," his little sister, "Susan," who would have been eleven or twelve. My little brother, and a pair of brothers who were a year or two younger than I, "Ted," and "Thomas." Might have been another kid. (Names all changed, of course.)


As teen and tween conversations sometimes do when groups of them gather, at some point the subject veered into a discussion of sex. It was just talk. There weren't any of us there who knew enough about it to offer anything other than theory -- or so I figured. I mean, I had experimented as much as I could, it wasn't for lack of trying, but at that age, I'd only made it to third base a couple times, and had struck out a lot. 


Somebody brought up the f-word, to sniggering amusement. At which point Susan said, "Oh, Rich does that to me all the time. On his bed."


It so happened I was looking right at Rich when his sister tossed this little nuke into the conversation.


"Susan!" he cried. 


One word, that was it.


Both his voice and his face shined with anguish. You could feel the pain, betrayal, fear -- especially the fear -- in his single word, and his face was what I later saw demonstrated in one of those books on micro-expressions as total surprise: Eyes wide, mouth open in an O-shape, deer in the headlights. 


What he didn't do was call her a liar. What I got was that he was stunned -- that the secret had been so off-handedly revealed. It wasn't as if Susan had pointed her finger accusing him of molestation, it didn't seem all that big a deal, she was ... just sayin', you know? 


Yeah, yeah, I know, you are gonna say, well, it was Louisiana, where your uncle is your father and your sister is your mother and all, but it was quite the shock to me. Why would anybody want to do that with his sister? I could barely stand to be in the same house with my little sisters. The notion of having sex with them was beyond comprehension. Was he crazy? 


I don't know what happened to Rich and Susan. Their family moved away in the next year or so, and I never said anything about it to anybody, nor, do I think anybody else in that gathering mentioned it, at least not to any adults. But I remember the look on Rich's face and the sound of his voice as if it were yesterday. 


Anguish. Today's word. Use it in good health. 

Food

What you eat and why you eat it often sparks more than a little controversy. Some of this is easy enough to dismiss -- the Blood-Type Diet or the Astrological Diet or the Nothing-But-Brown-Rice Diet -- because there is no science connected to these. Some diets claim to be scientific, but the "science" is junk, starts from a faulty premise and goes downhill from there. 


We like quick and easy fixes, we Americans, and a new diet book almost always finds an audience.  Don't want to give up the foods you love? Here, here's a diet that lets you keep them and still get thin! 


Right. TANSTAAFL. And getting a healthy one ain't easy, either. 


Here are some things I believe, based on my own research over the years:


Most people want to live long and healthy lives, and what you put into your mouth can affect both your quality of life and your longevity. Some things are better for you than others. The main argument comes in what those things are. More on that in a bit. 


We are opportunistic omnivores -- we eat whatever we come across because that's how we are built. We have grinders and canines in the dental array, that tells you something.


Back in the day, there was feast or famine, and that's how it was. 


If the other great apes are any indication, we are grazers, and the notion of three meals a day is a recent sociological construct with no basis in biology. 


We are tropical, diurnal creatures. Our natural environment was a place where it didn't get cold, and where what we needed to eat was found within walking distance. (I define "natural environment" here as one where, if tossed naked, we would have the best chances of survival without shelter or clothing or tools. This would not be the top of Mount Everest.)


Our bodies are designed for walking on loam, under and around trees. We climb better than we run, and we can walk a long way. The further away we get from the tropics, the harder our genetic evolution has to work to keep us alive, and it isn't enough without warm clothes and heated shelter once we get into deep snow country. 


That said, we come to what I now think makes dietary sense: We should be eating more fruits, vegetables, nuts, twigs, and roots, and less meat, and less processed food.  And you know what processed food is -- anything that comes in a box or bag and will keep on a shelf. 


White -- flour, sugar, rice -- isn't the ideal color for such things as bread or cereal.


I mean, that bacon-wrapped sirloin steak and baked potato slathered in butter and sour cream tastes a lot better than an apple and a big salad, boy, howdy! but they are in no way better for you physically. Western civilization has a slew of ailments and illnesses brought on by eating too much fat and sugar. We are overweight, our arteries are plugged, and affluence is not only not a protection but sometimes the biggest problem. You don't hear about poor people in third world countries having gout or kidney stones or heart attacks at the levels we have here in the U.S. Yeah, they have other stuff that takes them out, but a lot of what kills us could be prevented, and relatively easily. 


Put down that Big Mac, Junior, and eat a pear!


I just finished reading The China Study, a book on nutrition, written by T. Colin Campbell and his son, and the conclusion Campbell -- a long-time nutritional scientist -- reaches is that we'd be a whole lot healthier across the board if we were vegans. He allows that a little animal protein in necessary -- there's that B12 thing -- but that meat or fowl or fish should be a small part of our overall diet.


The book has its flaws. He makes leaps that I don't see as warranted, with insufficient evidence to back them up. This is the major criticism offered by folks who know more about such things than do I, but even the most compelling of these critiques allows as how he's not so much completely on the wrong track as incomplete. 


With all the vested interests telling us it is okay to eat whatever it is they are selling, it's hard to tell what is true. But for me, I've come round to the conclusion that I've been porking down too much stuff that is doing me more harm than good, so I'm working on trying to do better. Just cutting way down on sugar has resulted in me losing ten pounds of body fat in a couple months, and feeling healthier. My next blood test in another month or so will reveal if how I feel is reflected in the numbers; I suspect that it will be -- I'll keep you posted. 


No, I'm not becoming a vegan or even a vegetarian; I am, however, going to try to be mindful of what I eat. 


Something you might want to consider.

With A Little Help From My Friends

I saw this TV show a while back, and enjoyed this performance. Listen for the old guy's scream on the chorus ...

Martial Memories and Steel

Here a short video of the knife that Mushtaq Ali made for me a few years back. Nice little claw, isn't it?

And here, a link to his article on his first meeting with Maha Guru Plinck -- more than a few years ago. Sera players will find this to be an interesting bit of history.


In the piece, Mushtaq references our mutual friend Steve Barnes, whom he introduced to Silat Sera. Which is fun, because it was Barnes who introduced me to the art a couple years later.


(And for Sera fans, I've posted this, and another bit of martial art-ery stuff on the Sera blog, here.)

Better Left in Memory

Syfy Channel has been running a Green Hornet marathon, and last night, I stopped in for a few episodes. I hadn't seen them since they first aired, and not all of them then -- that was the year we moved to L.A. from Baton Rouge, and we didn't have a TV set for a time. 


I think the new movie is gonna suck big-time -- Seth Rogen! -- but the old series from the 60's with Van Williams and Bruce Lee? It, um, didn't wear well. 


Bad. Silly. Made the Batman TV series from that era look like Shakespeare.


GH was better on radio. So sayeth the old guy ...

It's Official --

I am now a Registered Old Fart. Available for weddings, funerals, and general carping, as well as free-ranging "Used to be's."

"That mini-mall. Used to be a filbert orchard!"

"Dollar for a Coca Cola? Used to be a nickel!"

"Gasoline? Used to be a quarter a gallon!"

And they say memory is the second thing to go. First thing to go? Um ... Ah ... ?

Pitcher Man

Got a nice note from Nataraj Hauser, a dancer and photographer of some note, with a nice picture. Check out his work.

Them and Us

So, the Church of Loons in Kansas is supposedly going to send some of its zombies to protest at the funeral of the nine-year-old girl who was killed during the Arizona assassination.

Such a notion is mind-boggling. It is cause for instant incredulity, followed by rage.

These are the same folks who routinely screw up funerals for soldiers who died in battle, for some lunatic notions that spring from a source far from any merciful God of which I can conceive. Were there a just and hands-on God? These folks would be smoking craters on the landscape.

My immediate reaction was, as I suspect it was for many attendees here, was to consider how I'd feel if this was my little girl.

And how many of them I could pound into the ground like tent pegs before the law stopped me. Because shooting would be too good for them, too.

These folks are vile, abominations, and if the Earth opened and swallowed up their church and all its members tomorrow, I'd lead the cheers. Burning in Hell is also too good for them.

However, it's this kind of thinking is exactly what the crazy kid in Arizona was into when he opened up on the crowd at the Safeway. Reaching for a gun to solve a problem. Blinded by his insanity. He could somehow justify it in his twisted brain. That becomes a slippery slope in a hurry, rationalizing violence.

It kind of scares me that I can rationalize beating these pretend-Christians into warm jelly and grinning while I do it.  No, really. If I were grieving over the loss of my child and you stepped in front of me like that? Oh, I wouldn't want to be you. Or anybody who got between me and you.

We have become too polarized in such things. We need to step back and take a collective deep breath.

The Cape

So, yeah, I'm a sucker for comic book masked crime fighters -- not, in this case, super-heroes, and yes, there is a difference. Spider Man is a super-hero who wears a mask. Batman is but a masked crime fighter. You do see why, don't you?


Anyway, so I watched the premiere of NBC's The Cape tonight.


It had great promise ...


Didn't deliver it for me. Too on-the-nose -- scroll down a few days on the blog and you'll see what that means, if you don't already know. 


I like the Obi-wan character, the circus master, played by Keith David -- he used to do voices on a Disney toon I wrote for, Gargoyles. Good actor. But overall, I won't be putting this one on my must-watch list.


Too bad. 


I expect that Robocop, Spawn, and The Destroyer, just to name the first three that spring to mind, could call the po-lice and get The Cape's writers arrested for theft, too. If there was something in the show not swiped from one of those, I missed it.


My collaborator Reaves once wrote a duology featuring a cloak-fighter. His guy was better. Out-of-print, but if you can find copies of The Shattered World and The Burning Realm, pick 'em up. 

Keef

So, I read Keith Richards' bio, Life, in keeping with my current fascination about rock stars I grew up listening to. I mean, The Stones. Still playing together, at least now and then. How many groups have that kind of longevity in rock? 


If he doesn't reveal all the warts, Richards does offer some candid shots of a life mostly on the razored edge of disaster, and he talks about groupies and dope and Mick, and ranges all over the rock 'n' roll map. Busted here, busted there, the professional arguments, the women and kids, and oh, by the way, No, he didn't get his blood completely exchanged, thank you very much, it was a fuckin' joke, okay ... ?


The band surely got around, and still does. So, too, Keith, with and without Sir Mick. A thing Richards still hasn't forgiven Jagger for, by the by, accepting that. We're a fuckin' blues band who hit it big in rock -- a knighthood? Gimme a fuckin' break!


We all knew what a bad boy he was -- his life shows on his face, doesn't it? -- and all about the heroin and coke and assorted pharmaceuticals he downed by the barrel for most of his days. How many times he went cold turkey. Falling out of trees. 


And how he is clean now -- been off dope for years  ... 


Let's be honest here: One might be excused for not being absolutely convinced of that claim. Uh huh. Right, Keef. 


Richards details how they wrote songs, the recording sessions, and who played which instrument when. He gives a lot of credit to other folks where he sees it is due, and that includes his love/hate relationship with Jagger. On this page, Keef says Mick is a control freak and jealous of any relationship Keef has; on the next page, they are mates, brothers, and nobody is more talented than Mick Fuckin' Jagger ...


John Lennon couldn't hold his liquor or his drugs, Keef says, though he kept trying to keep up. 


Good luck with keeping up with Keef's consumption. Apparently one of the only guys who did more dope than Richards was Gram Parsons -- I reviewed his biography here -- and he ODed at twenty-six. Keef, who looks other than dirt -- he's only four years old than I am -- is still here ...


The biggest surprise is how smart Richards comes across. He's a book-reader, and even though he had help writing the bio, some of the stuff he talks about reveals that he is a bright fellow, and more talented than I had realized, Mick was the front man -- still is -- but Keef did his part, and it wasn't just playing the guitar.


Fat book, and not so exciting that I didn't fall asleep reading it a couple times late at night. If you are a Stones' fan, you pretty much have to read it to get his hit on things.

Fashion Statement

L.A.,  1970

Long ago and far away -- forty-one years and a tad under a thousand miles from here in this picture -- we lived in L.A. It was the bottom floor of a three-story place running down the side of a hill in Echo Park, and it had an avocado tree in the front yard, which, if you climbed, you could look down and see Echo Park Lake. (It was a big avocado tree. and at the time, we didn't have a clue what to do with the fruit that littered the yard. Such a waste.)


The image is of my best old ex-friend Greg, as the support guy, with me doing a four-point-shoulder stand. To the right are Greg's second wife, Jackie, holding my son, Dal.  Down on the porch, my daughter, Danelle, in the baby carrier. 


I was twenty-two and still working at an aluminum company, so the hair is short, but the clothes ... ? Ah,  hippie chic ...


I am wearing a pair of red bellbottom jeans, fringed moccasins, orange socks, and a Rit-dyed, black karate gi, already faded to a pale gray. Had a short beard, too. 


We actually used to walk around in public like that. Really. 


Peace, brother. Far out ...

Facebook Etiquette

Since we are talking about Facebook, I might as well offer my suggestions for folks with whom I interact directly upon yon social network. Not rules, but like the lyric from "Keep On Truckin' Mama," "You gotta take it slow and easy if you want to get along with me ..."


Some do's and don't's:


If I open my home page and fifteen of the thirty posts are from you, and sequentially? Chances are good that I am going to click on the "hide 'em" button. No going so far as to unfriend you, but unless there is something of substance in those posts, and not just what you had for breakfast, mid-morning snack, lunch, and dinner -- life is too short.


Unless, of course, it was really, really good, and you include the recipe. 


I don't tweet, nor do I read tweets.


If somebody takes over your Facebook account and starts spewing major spam, I will unfriend you. It's not personal -- once you get it fixed, I'm good, drop me a note, but until then, sending out a announcement that says somebody has done this to you and I should ignore it? That doesn't fix the problem. 


If one of my friends gets married, divorced, has a baby, sells a book, or does anything that is most pleasing to them, that's worth putting up a note about. If they learned something new, got sick, got well, got laid, I'm up for hearing that.


And I enjoy hearing about your anniversary, birthdays, and how you married the second-best woman in the world -- which is as high as she can possibly be, for obvious reasons. 


If you are an artist and you put up pictures? Great. If you are a writer and you put up links to stories? Cool. If you have done a video that is funny or educational, I'm down with that. Conversely, if you put up a link to every YouTube video of every group you've ever heard sing or play? Maybe not. 


My interests include writing, martial arts, playing the guitar, reading, and good movies and TV, so anything in those arenas, I am usually up for viewing. If your vid shows a small child or dog or cat getting hurt? Not interested. A good street fight or martial arts demo gone awry? Tiger leaping onto the back of an elephant to get the rider? Lemme see it.


Happy to read ads for something you are offering for sale, from music vids to books to hand-carved briar pipes -- it's all good. 


If you live in Maine and you are going to do an open mike on Friday, that's cool, pleased to hear that, too. But save yourself inviting me and looking for a response. I won't be there; probably most of the people you invite from the west coast won't make it, either. Be realistic.


I'm not a gamer, so sending me invitations to play whatever online game you like? I'll just block those. I'm okay with checking out something you thought was interesting or amusing, vis a vis an organization or activity, as long as I don't have to join it myself to get a look at it. 


All in all, my general rule is, if what anybody has to say to me on Facebook is something I'd be happy to hear if we were having coffee (and vice-versa), then have at it. If we are at a party and chatting and either of us start looking at our watches?


Maybe we could save that conversation for our blogs ...

I Got Crystal Balls

Been working on this sleight. Two versions: See which you like better ...

Old Friends

When I was a lad of twelve, I met another kid -- also named "Steve" -- who was also interested in scuba diving. We became best buds. Used to draw little stick figure cartoons of divers having various underwater adventures and pass them back and forth, and made plans for our various diving trips -- actually did a couple, though in water so murky you couldn't see your hand if you stretched your arm all the way out in front of your mask.


Louisiana waterways are not known for their crystal clarity. Mostly for snapping turtles, gar, water moccasins, and alligators, all hidden in the primordial ooze ...


Steve's dad changed jobs. He and his family moved to San Antonio, Texas, just after we turned thirteen.


Well, we were friends and I decided I wanted to go and visit him. So we set it up. I took a Greyhound bus from Baton Rouge to San Antonio that summer. It was, as I recall, about six hundred miles. I met some fun folks on the bus, some of whom were traveling all the way from Miami to L.A. and the trip, which was an overnighter, is one of my fond memories.


Fifty years ago. Considerably different times. I would no sooner put my thirteen-year-old grandson on an interstate bus trip by himself than I would try to fly by leaping off a tall building and flapping my arms. (When I was but five, my mother would stick me on an airplane to go and visit my grandmother. A short flight, but nobody thought anything of it, certainly not me. I'd read a couple comic books, and there I was. Took longer for take-off and landing than the flight itself.)


Steve and I drifted apart, went our separate ways, got married, had kids, grandkids, all like that. Eventually, he became a chemistry teacher, then a school principal. I used to wonder how he was getting on from time-to-time.  Once, I dug up an address and sent him a letter, and he wrote back, but he was in the middle of moving to a new city, and we didn't re-connect.


Then came Facebook.


The wonder of Facebook is that half the planet checks in there. So recently, I went to see if I could find my old pal.


Yep. There he was. 


We exchanged a couple of messages. We don't have a lot in common these days -- my diving career went away when I blew out an eardrum -- but it's nice to know he's still alive.


Ain't it great living here in the future? 

Workaround

Years ago, we got Conan the Hot Tub, so named for who paid for the appliance. 


Actually, that's a misnomer. Back in the day, a hot tub was a big vat full of water without any circulation vis a vis pumps or jets. You cranked up a heater (or built a fire in a metal box that extended into the water) and that was it. What CtHT was was actually a spa, since it had the bells and whistles. Or bubbles and jets.


What it didn't have was a heat governor on the top end. You could dial the water temperature up or down, and on the high side, it got far too hot to get into without burning yourself.


After a short period of acclimation, started with the pregnant-women-no-hotter-than-102º F. setting, I found I was most comfortable at 105º-106º F. I could sit for fifteen or twenty minutes at that heat and enjoy it.


105º is what nurses are taught is the maximum temperature for bathing hospitalized patients, or it used to be when I trained. 


Eventually, we passed Conan off to my son, where he sits unused in the back yard, and got a new deck and a smaller model, since it was just two of us. The advantage is that it cost less to heat, being smaller. The disadvantage is that the system is hard-wired to a maximum temperature of 104ºF. Can't get around it without jury-rigging some kind of bypass, and that's not something I'm willing to do.


Apparently that is the maximum for legal liability these days.


So, still not bad. Problem is, because there is less water, it cools off faster, and on a cold day, it drops a degree or two pretty quick, and 103º doesn't feel really warm. 


102º feels positively cool. 


Yeah, yeah, the ashtray is full in the Rolls, oh, dear, best I get a new one.


Now and again, I must add water to the tub, since some leaves with me, some evaporates, and some permeates the lid. Every week or so, I plunk the garden hose in, top it off, and there you go.


When it freezes, the garden hose is useless, so I've got a five-gallon bucket I can fill in the shower or tub or even the outside faucet for this chore.


Hey, I realized first time I did this. Here's an idea. What if I filled it from the hot water tap in the house? Would that be enough to make a difference? 


Yes. One bucket of hot-as-it-gets water from the inside bathtub is enough to kick the overall temperature up to 105º, which is ideal.


Sometimes, the solution is as easy as that.