Zombies

The term "zombie," I am given to understand, originally was a snake deity from West Africa which found its way to Haiti with the slaves. Eventually, the term came to mean one who had died but had been recalled to life, generally under the control of an evil witch using forms of gris-gris and ju-ju, and then put to bad purpose. (There is some evidence that drugs were used to give the illusion of death, and to maintain control of the stoned folks after they got dug up, even a pretty bad movie -- The Serpent and the Rainbow -- made using this premise. Of course, that's pretty much rendundant isn't it, "Zombies" and "bad movie ... ?")

But whilst reading an article in The New Yorker on, of all things, contemporary artists doing stained glass windows for churches, written by Peter Schjeldahl, I came across this about one of the churches, a very old one found in Zurich:

"The Grossmünster was built as a Catholic church on the site of a fancy miracle: in the year 286, St. Felix, St. Regula,and St. Exuperantius, decapitated for clinging to their faith, picked up their heads and climbed to the top of a hill, where they dug graves and buried themselves."

That's a pretty neat trick.

Not being a Catholic and knowing very little about such things, I do seem to recall that to be canonized by the Church and to get the "Saint" honorific before your name, you had to have performed a miracle or two and they had to be witnessed and verified.

I certainly think this would beat turning water to wine all hollow. More, I believe that, had I been the Emperor Maximian and word got back to me after I'd had people of the Christian faith beheaded, I would have serious doubts about continuing such a policy, since the Roman gods couldn't compete with that kind of mojo, no way, no how ...

Guitar Music

Those of you who are Michael Chapdelaine fans will be interested to know, if'n you don't already, that his new CD, Guitar Man, is now available from his site. People who don't know his material can log onto the site and hear partials of most of the cuts.

Guitar Man

There are a handful of acoustic guitarists that I can sit and listen to whole albums and never find a piece I want to skip over -- Chapdelaine, McMeen, Pattis, Juber, like them, and this new one from Michael is most satisfying.

Fifteen tracks, and even though "You're Beautiful" was pounded into the ground, aided by that awful video that the YouTube denizens had a field day with a year or so back, even that cut is new in Chapdelaine's skilled hands. Better without the words ...

The tracks;

You're Beautiful
And I Love Her
Just Breathe
Come Away With Me
Guitar Man
Hit the Road Jack
Sittin' on the Dock of The Bay
Something
Sonny Came Home
Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough
Just Walk Way Rene
When You Say Nothing At All
Last Kiss
Marietta
Gavotte en Rondeau

Just Chapdelaine and his guitars, bare, and for a no-talent clam-hitter like me, fairly amazing just to sit and wish I could live long enough to get half that good ...

Got pop, 60's rock, 50's rock, adult chords, a classical piece and a Spanish one. I particularly like "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and "Just Walk Away Renee" -- he gets a nasty bass line going with the melody and chords, and it's just not right that man can play like that and make it look so damned easy, not to mention having a high old time.

Bach on a steel string guitar sounds at times like a harpsichord. Classical purists will likely cringe, but it's the bee's knees and the cat's pajamas.

Few years back, Chapdelaine and McMeen had an intensive guitar class. I wish I'd had the chops to justify going to learn from these two.

Michael plays guitars by Kevin Muiderman, and they are cannons. He put the whole thing pretty much together by himself -- played, recorded, mixed, mastered, and the design.
(Somebody else shot the pictures.)

Gets my thumbs up. Have a listen.

Idle Hands ...

... are the devil's workshop ...

So my wife and I have gotten kinda interested in watching tournament poker. Texas Hold-'em, and if you don't know the game but saw the most recent James Bond movie, that's what they were playing.

What interests me more than the game is watching the players fiddle with their poker chips.
They twirl them, shuffle them, bounce and pop them around. All those hours at the table gives them practice time, and as an old coin magic guy, I find this more interesting than the cards.

Some of the players are celebrities -- also have a lot of time on their hands -- and the current hot player among the women is Jennifer Tilly. Impossible to spot a tell on her face. I dunno if that's because she's an actress or her face is shot up with Botox -- or both.

Anyway, I decided to get some poker chips and learn some of the tricks. I can already do the basic simple stuff, the thumb roll, the roll and twirl, with three chips, the knuckle roll, fingertip roll, like that. First of the new tricks is the shuffle, and I'm starting with six.

If you want to see some really sharp guys, check out YouTube. If my blog'll let me, here's my early attempt ...

Old and Wise Ain't Everything

Of course, to flip that coin and show that sometimes young folks can nail down a feeling that you might not think they could, consider poets and rock 'n' roll stars. Listen to some of the lyrics written by kids in their early twenties, from Rimbaud and Poe, to the Beatles to Cat Stevens to Kurt Cobain. Or watch a young-but-getting-old-fast Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company -- a bar-band that seldom played the same song twice the same way in their entire career.

Janis was twenty-five when she sang this. She died at twenty-seven, same age as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison when they shuffled off. So young. So talented.

Such a waste.

Why Men Need Post-It Notes

Now and then, while writing, I get to a place were I'm not exactly stuck, but I don't quite have a grasp of how best to say something. Doesn't feel quite right.

There are ways around it: I can brute force it -- just grind until I get to the end of a scene, knowing I will have to come back and rewrite it. Or I can skip it altogether, move ahead, and come back once I've added stuff that will suggest a better path.

The third way that works for me, when I have time, is to sic my subconscious on it. Put the whole cauldron full of sugar and yeast and water all into a warm spot in my mind's storeroom and let it ferment until, usually doing something totally unrelated, like walking the dogs, sitting in the hot tub, or just about to shut of the reading lamp and go to sleep, it bubbles up. Very often, it is a potent and almost-finished brew; a little straining, and it's ready to bottle ...

Okay, I've tortured that metaphor long enough.

Case in point: My main character in the new novel has uncovered the name of one of the bad guys and he needs to go and have a little talk with him. I know the bad guy's name, where he lives, and why he's doing what he's doing, though my hero knows only the first two and needs to know the third.

So, as I was about to finish reading a chapter in Greg Bear's new SF novel last night and shut it down for the evening, the whole chapter popped into my head. I didn't have a notepad next to the bed, so I grabbed a subscription form from the New Yorker on the floor and jotted down a few notes, so I wouldn't forget it. Here is what I wrote:

Lake Oswego
White curly hair
Jack Oliver kills Kane ---> Bardo Tinzen ---> bath tub ---> Peek
Hair dryer
Karma pass
Get-out-of-hell-free-card.

Believe it or not, that's a good ten or twelve pages of material, easy. And I'm amazed at how often, if I just put it away, my subconscious mind will continue to worry at a problem until it comes up with an answer. Sometimes it takes a while, but it almost always delivers, if I have time to wait.

On my desk, I have a little yellow (or blue or green) sticky pad, Post-It Notes, and generally these are how I outline chapters. A word or a line is enough for a scene. Four or five scenes is a chapter, and that's all I need. I don't outline every chapter, but if I am trying to move along, I will sometimes sit down and do four or five of these sticky-notes so I have that many chapters lined up.

These tricks may or may not work for you. Writers who say, "This is how I do it." and offer their advice might or might not be helpful to you. In my experience, those who say, "This is how it is done, period." cause more grief than joy. If you believe there is only one way to do it and you can't do it that way, you are stuck.

There are as many ways to get there as there are writers who take the trip. Don't forget that. Anybody who says their path is the only one is trying to sell you something.

And that includes me, of course ...

YouTube is Amazing

So, here is Broken Home's cover of Sarah Bernhard's cover of Prince's "Little Red Corvette."
(In the movie Without You I'm Nothing, it was Bernhard's encore, she came out, stripped to a bikini, wrapped herself in the American flag and sang this, and -- so I've heard -- Tori Amos was one of her back-up singers. It was, well, stunning ...

Bernhard is fairly amazing and very funny, if you are bent that way.

Two white girls and an acoustic guitarist covering her version of the song ... you gotta love YouTube ...

Might not be up long. Prince apparently gets pissy about people covering this stuff without his okay. I can understand why ...

Don't Look Back ...

There are some things better left in memory than brought back up for another pass. Some delights you recall with warm fondness that, upon reexamination, don't taste nearly as good as you remember.

Brown's Velvet Pineapple Sherbet is the lone exception from my childhood. It tastes exactly as I remembered it. Of course, said concoction was made of completely unnatural ingredients as I recall, artificial this, chemical that, no nutritional value at all, but hey, I loved the stuff. On a trip back to Louisiana a few years past, I bought and ate a half gallon of it and it was terrific. Probably as good a preservative as embalming fluid, too ...

My biggest disappointments on the don't-look-back book front could be narrowed to two: Atlas Shrugged and Stranger in a Strange Land. Ayn Rand and Robert Heinlein, respectively, the authors.

Rand, on her best day, wrote material so dense you could use it to stop X-rays, so that's maybe not such a surprise. If you are into the ideas, you tend to gloss over the expression.

Bob, however, when he was on, was a steppin' razor, so sharp was his prose. But he had his off-days.

At eighteen, I became an Objectivist, a philosophy so far to the right that it made John Birchers and Libertarians seem like commie pinkos. It was all so heroic and stolid, and that John Galt line about stopping the world's motor nailed me. Stand up and spit in the collective's eye, yessir, that was where I was going to go.

A couple years later, after living in the Real World, I let go of that pie-in-the-sky vision. I found a replacement that, while it didn't come to pass as I had hoped, at least had a heart instead of only a hard-on.

Heinlein wrote, as I recall, Stranger and Starship Troopers more or less at the same time, and they were polar opposites. Heinlein was closer to Ayn Rand in Troopers, very much Manifest Destiny and all, and that was more in line with his personal philosophy.

When I read Stranger, probably at nineteen or twenty, I was stunned. The sixties were cranking up, and although the book predates the hippie movement, having come out in '61, I didn't get to it until '67 or '68. Just in time.

The adventures of Valentine Michael Smith, the human-Martian more or less astounded me. "I am but an egg," and "Grok," and the Fair Witnesses, the sense of togetherness ... ah, a book for those of us looking for the Age of Aquarius, to be sure. Even came up with the waterbed, first of which we owned in '66, and the idea of water-brothers. I can still recall attending hippie weddings during which a silver bowl of water was passed around for all to sip from ...

Atlas Shrugged is so didactic and of such a heavy philosophical cant that it leaves the term "turgid" in the dust. There is a radio speech in the middle on economics that runs sixty pages that would have put John Maynard Keynes into a coma. Rand never offers a point but that she beats you over the head with it like John Henry swinging his nine-pound hammer, and the only reason that most people who have read the thing did so was because it was required in college philosophy classes.

Or, because they were young and dewy-eyed and actually believed it might work. Rand couldn't even do that in her own life. The first-person book accounts of what went on behind the facade, written years later by Nathaniel Brandon, and his ex-wife, Barbara, were real eye-openers to the faithful. When the woman who created the philosophy can't pull it off, that's a bad sign ...

Of course, I didn't know that until much later.

It is not surprising that, once you have given up the notion that sketching the dollar sign in the air is more spiritual than making the sign of the cross, that the book doesn't hold up. You could make it into armor-piercing shells it is so dense.

Stranger, on the other hand, is simply not nearly as well-written as I remember. Heinlein always bitched that it had been cut from his original ms by sixty thousand words, and thus made much less. Having read the "restored and uncut original" about fifteen years ago, I disagree. (Reminds me of Stephen King's novel, The Stand. When it first came out, I read that, and liked it, but thought that it could have been two or three hundred pages shorter. Later, King decided to revise the book and I thought, Great! So what did he do? He added another three hundred pages ...)

Part of this is, of course, that as a writer, I see strings where I didn't notice them before I started doing my own puppet shows. And part of it is that the utopia that Heinlein was postulating never had a prayer -- so to speak -- anymore than the hippies had of causing the Pentagon to levitate.

Part of it is that Heinlein liked to preach, and he often had a crusty old man in his story to do it for him. Jubal Hershaw offers some things that, in review, seem fairly racist and sexist, not to mention homophobic. (I believe it was in the novel Friday that Heinlein offered a dedication to a bunch of women, several of whom were writers of the day, that certainly sounded like "Here's how it's done, girls." Which was funny, since the character of Friday was never more than a man in skirts, big hooters notwithstanding ...

Um. Perhaps it's like the old joke, What is the Golden Age of Science Fiction? Answer: Twelve. It catches you then, or it misses you, and that might be the situation here: At eighteen, books about unworkable philosophies are more appealing than they will be, once you learn a little bit about how life works ...

The Horror! The Horror!

I don't think I've posted this here before ...

The Barton-Upon-Humber Horror

by

Steve Perry

The night was moonless, and a heavy, opaque, greasy fog oozed fat tendrils onto the land from the icy waters of the Humber to dampen and thicken the darkness yet more. Cold it was, and stinking, and the night and fog enveloped the woods in a dank and sodden shroud of slimy and infernal stillness.
A perfect night, perfect -- except that ...
Bhulabhula, Youngest of the Real Real Old Ones, itched -- and he had nothing with which to scratch. When you were shaped and sized somewhere between a stately pyramid and a slightly -- but handsomely so -- squashed cone without limbs to mar your geometric perfection, scratching became a problem requiring some consideration to solve.
The nearby trees would not serve. Bhulabhula had learned eons past that leaning his beauteous bulk against a tree, no matter how stout it appeared, resulted in the tree simply falling over. In short order, a mere hundred years, such a process resulted in serious deforestation, and left him resting in the middle of a most large clearing, plainly visible for miles, and his older siblings -- and naturally all of the Real Real Old Ones were older, him being the Youngest -- would smile, and if they had heads, shake them, and call him insulting names, just as they always did. What was the word he had learned from men so long ago? Ah, yes -- bastards, they were bastards, every one of his brothers and sisters!
But never let it be said that Bhulabhula had not learned a trick or two even in his short life. To avoid denuding the forests in which he preferred to rest whilst awaiting the day the Real Real Old Ones would once again Take Their Rightful Place, Bhulabhula had indeed divined other ways of dealing with physical irritants.
He gathered his forces, and began to extrude a tentacle. Such work took energies, naturally, and these forces had to be, ah, borrowed, from somewhere where they would not be missed and an accounting demanded. He routed his metamorphic request through the Seventeenth Dimension, wherein time and entropy ran backwards, into the Ninth Dimension, where the Weak Force was strong, and finally into the Twenty-Second, where it was always yesterday and generally raining, and siphoned off a fair amount of etheric power. As the nacreous and pustulent-gangrene-colored limb began to take shape upon his south side -- he could not be said to have a “front” or “back” in the ordinary sense -- he added to the filament’s tip a bit of claw-shaped diamond. Alas, it was not the fastest of processes.
Was there ever anything more irritating than an itch that could not be scratched?
COME ON, COME ON -- ! He had no voice these days to express his thoughts, but the power of his radiopathic intelligence was great, and he could broadcast it for miles if he chose, though he usually did not. Why bother? There was no one around for miles, which was, of course, why he was here. He liked his own company, and mostly disliked that of anyone else. Except, now and then, for Sheelasheela, who could sit for a hundred years without uttering a single thought, and who was comely enough -- even though Sheelasheela now preferred to spend her time with Uugahbuugah, though Bhulabhula could not for his life understand why. Uugahbuugah was loud, unkempt, and obnoxious, and why anybody would wish to be around him was a mystery, no matter how large his chwingam was supposed to be. The female gender’s motivations were beyond reason and unknowable -- everybody knew that.
The scratcher seemed to take millenia, but finally -- finally! -- it was done, and he applied it to the itch ...
Ah ... yes ... right there ...
“There it is!” came an excited human voice.
Had Bhulabhula bothered to manifest eyes this century, he would have blinked. Excreta! Men were about! He should have known! No wonder he itched -- he was allergic to men! Did one of the little pests venture within a mile, his normally clear and beautiful skin would begin to erupt in swellings whose itches were vexing in the extreme!
And unless his ears deceived him -- he did like to listen to the water lap against the nearby shore from time to time so he’d kept a few auditory organs -- the bastard humans -- and there must be more than one, for one of them to be saying “There it is!” unless, of course it was mad and talking to itself -- and it if wasn’t mad, it soon would be, once Bhulabhula turned his attention to it more fully -- were almost upon him. But where were they, exactly?
It was but the work of a moment to route a sub-etheric moibetic function through several aethers to swipe another bit of entropic juice from which to manifest some optical visualization orbs. Half a dozen were probably sufficient. When they were in place, he turned them to see the source of the voice, and of course, he could not see squat because it was so fornicating dark and blasted foggy --
No, wait. There were some dim glows, in that direction ...
He focused his eyes, and discerned that there were three humans, tramping through the woods as men did upon their stubby little appendages, heading directly toward him.
The itch got worse. Alas, he had been concentrating upon the men, and thus his lack of attention had allowed the tentacle to dissolve back into incorporeality. Damn!
Bhulabhula hated humans, as of course he should, and could not wait until the Day When The Real Real Old Ones Arose Again and wiped the irritating little bastards off the face of creation.
Itch-causing bastards, one and all!
As his eyes began to work properly, he could see that the dim glows were some kind of lighting devices, and each of the three -- trio? triad? -- carried one, the devices emitting enough of a yellowish gleam to be just barely visible through the fog, even though they were practically bumping into him.
“I say, Howard!” said one of the men. “You were right! Good Lord, look at the size of that hideous creature!”
Hideous creature? Where? He swiveled a few eyes, but saw nothing. He had been in this spot five hundred years and had never noticed a hideous creature lurking about. He had better start paying attention, lest he be surprised.
Well, he could deal with that later.
Narrowing his focus this way always difficult, but Bhulabhula attended to it with care, and as the three approached, he was able to get a clearer picture --
KILL THEM! his primary hind-brain said. QUICK! QUICK! MANIFEST SOMETHING AND SQUASH THEM INTO THE MIRE!
His primary hind-brain was called Scunthorpe, and its first reaction to anything new was to kill-it-quick. Indeed, it seemed, it was Scunthorpe’s only reaction. The organ was violent in the extreme, and had it run things, half the world would have been squashed by now, with the other half but marking time for its turn.
SHUT UP, he told the hind-brain. WHEN I WANT YOUR OPINION, I WILL ASK YOU FOR IT.
I AGREE WITH THE BOSS, said Driffield -- the secondary hind-brain.
Had Bhulabhula a head, he would have shaken it in disgust. The secondary hind-brain was such an obsequeous sycophantic suck-up. No matter what Bhulabhula said, Driffield would fall all over himself to agree. Pathetic.
BOTH OF YOU BE SILENT! I AM IN CHARGE HERE!
Although he must admit it to himself, if not to the hind-brains, that squashing the approaching three instanter was basically a good idea. They were tricky bastards, men were.
Swatting them outright was never an entirely bad way to deal with them.
Then again, any secondary hind-brain could swat somebody and be done with it, and where was the fun in that? It was ever so much more interesting and amusing to drive them mad and send them back from whence they had come, as an example of what disturbing a Real Real Old One and making it itch would get you. Over the last few thousand years, he had driven quite a few batty and babbling, and another object lesson to show the bothersome insects who was really in charge was never inappropriate, either. In fact, if he did say so himself, Bhulabhula was the most expert among the Real Real Old Ones at this particular endeavor. Sure Thuluthulu could scare the garments off anything with eyes by dint of his sheer ugliness -- Thuluthulu was exceedingly ugly -- but that took no skill. No, he might be the Youngest, but he had his talents. Driving men mad was right up there at the top. Nobody better at it.
Bhulabhula formed another radiopathic essence, having only to wend it through the Fourteenth Dimension to gather a little steam, and aimed it at the three. Yes. He would drive them mad, soon as he had a handle on their minds, which he could easily read, just so ...
The radiopathic sub-etheric two-way enthropic communication essence enwrapped the three men, then returned, bearing a somewhat-abbreviated gist of their tiny minds.
Huh. Look at that.
One of the three -- the one called “Lovecraft,” was already mad, barely able to feed and clothe himself, and able to do that only by utilizing the most basic of skills, making up stories to tell his fellows, something any moron could do. Waste of energy to try and make him more crazed -- he had so little to go to hit the bottom, and where was the challenge in that?
The second, while not mad, was dull-witted to the point whereby madness would probably not even be noticed. The “Doctor,” this one was. No joy to be gained there, either. Drat.
The third -- ah, but here was a mind! Rows upon rows of neat thoughts, catalogued, logical, bright, sharp, here was a mind wherein madness would offer a wonderful arena in which to play!
Here was a field in which a being could romp! He had never seen the like. And this one was called ... the Detective --
“Good God, have you ever seen the like?” the Doctor said.
The smart one -- the Detective -- turned to observe the Doctor. “I believe there are several in Hyde Park.”
The Doctor’s face contorted in what Bhulabhula had learned eons past mean puzzlement. “Really? Odd, I’ve never noticed any. Toward Hammersmith? Or Westminster?”
“No, Doctor. I am being ironic. The only monsters in Hyde Part stand upon speaker’s boxes prattling about the government.”
“Ah. Yes. Quite.”
The Detective turned to observe the third man. “What are you about there, Mr. Lovecraft?”
“I brought my revolver,” the Lovecraft said. He waved a device he held in one hand, pointed it at Bhulabhula, who did not recognize it, having never seen one before. Some kind of talisman, perhaps? Men set great store by these, as he recalled. He would have to delve back into its churning mad thoughts and learn more about this.
“And have you filed the front sight from the barrel?” the Detective said.
“I have not, sir,” the Lovecraft said. “Why would I?”
“So that it will not hurt as much when this creature takes it from your grasp and inserts it with some force into your nether region.”
Had he a mouth, Bhulabhula would have smiled. Ah. He got it. the Detective was informing the Lovecraft that his talisman was useless against a being of such wondrous and formidable stature. Decidedly a clever one, the Detective. It would be a delight to bring him to gibbering lunacy. Why wait? He would start now ...
“I assume you can hear and understand me,” the Detective said, addressing Bhulabhula.
Bhulabhula blinked several of his new eyes, intrigued. They usually didn’t try to talk to him, the fear was ordinarily too great. Generally, once they saw him, they tried to flee, wise, but too late. The sane ones, anyway. But, truth be known, the combination of a crazy one, a dull-witted one, and one with a mind much stronger than ordinary was outside Bhulabhula’s experience. A novelty, indeed. He could perhaps bide a moment before crushing this one’s mind.
I HEAR YOU. WHAT DO YOU WANT?
DON’T DO IT, BOSS! Scunthorpe said. KILL THEM!
THE BOSS KNOWS WHAT HE IS ABOUT, Driffield said.
HEY, WHO ASKED YOU? CONSUME EXCRETA AND PERISH, YOU MISERABLE SLACKWIT SECONDARY TOADY!
Had he lungs, Bhulabhula would have sighed. Those two had never gotten along, Scunthorpe and Driffield.
And the third hind-brain, who for whatever reason preferred to be known as “Bruce,” awoke. Bruce, who was down in the most nether regions of Bhulabhula’s most august and lovely person, generally roused himself but once or twice every thousand years or so, and then usually had nothing better to offer up than, “Mmm. What is going on?”
Bruce said, MMM. WHAT IS GOING ON?
GO BACK TO SLEEP, BOWEL-WIT, Scunthorpe said.
OH. OKAY.
ALL OF YOU WILL BE SILENT OR I WILL REPLACE YOU WITH NODES.
Scunthorpe and Driffield immediately fell quiet. Bruce had already drifted back into hibernation.
“You plan to drive me mad,” the Detective said, “is this not so?”
Startled, Bhulabhula blinked all of his eyes this time. Demonishly clever, the Detective was. He had never met the like.
YES, THAT IS THE PLAN, Bhulabhula admitted.
“I have a proposition for you. Let me offer you a riddle. If you can answer it, then you can cause me to go mad and send me on my way. If you cannot answer it, I will instead do the same to you.”
Had Bhulabhula a forehead, he would have wrinkled it, perplexed. What manner of offer was this?
I HAVE NO NEED TO ANSWER YOUR RIDDLE. I CAN MAKE YOU MAD AS I CHOOSE! YOU CANNOT DO THE SAME TO ME!
“Perhaps,” the Detective said. “Or perhaps not. But now, having heard that I have traveled here and am willing to bet my sanity on a riddle, are you not ... intrigued?”
Well, yes, Bhulabhula admitted to himself, the Detective had him there. He knew of riddles, of course. His old female friend the Sphynx had been an adept with those, offering them to humans, and then gobbling them down when they failed to answer them. Bhulabhula seemed to recall something about a human who had offered her one in return and stumped the Sphynx, but the Sphynx had not been nearly as clever as she fancied herself. Nor nearly as attractive, for that. Could not hold a candle to Sheelasheela for looks, even though she did have some moves ...
A Sphynx was not a Real Real Old One, in any event. No human mind could begin to compare with Bhulabhula’s mind. He had nothing to lose, and it might be momentarily amusing. It was something to do.
DON’T!
WHAT DID I JUST SAY TO YOU, SCUNTHORPE?
BETTER TO BE A LIVE NODE THAN A DEAD HIND-BRAIN, Scunthorpe replied.
I SHALL DEAL WITH YOU LATER. SHUT UP.
UH ... BOSS? That from Driffield.
WHAT?
SCUNTHORPE MIGHT, UH, HAVE A POINT.
Had he a jaw, it would have dropped. Not in ten thousand years had Driffield agreed with Scunthorpe about anything.
EXPLAIN.
I, UH, HAVE A FEELING ABOUT THIS, BOSS.
WELL, OF COURSE YOU DO -- YOU ARE THE EMOTIONAL COMPONENT OF THE BRAIN STEM. DO NOT TROUBLE YOURSELF WITH WORRY. I CAN HANDLE THIS PUNY HUMAN.
Bhulabhula returned his attention to the Detective: I ACCEPT YOUR OFFER. SPEAK YOUR RIDDLE.
The Detective removed from his garments a short and curved artifice. There was a hole in the wider end of the object, into which he packed some herb that had a sharp smell. Bhulabhula had kept a couple of his better olfactories active, so he could detect An old memory stirred. A ... pipe?
Indeed, the Detective caused a tiny fire to erupt from a short twig, applied the flame to the herb in the pipe, and inhaled, shortly thereafter producing a fragrant cloud of bluish-gray smoke. He smiled -- another recognizable expression that men had.
“Do you know what hands are?” he asked.
DO I LOOK LIKE I JUST FELL OFF THE ASTEROID? OF COURSE I KNOW WHAT HANDS ARE!
“And do you know what the sound produced when two hands are brought together sharply with some force is called?”
Bhulabhula considered this for a moment, but found no memory of it.
As if he had known that Bhulabhula did not know this, the Detective continued without waiting for an answer. “It is called a ‘clap,’ he said.
To show the Detective that he was paying attention, Bhulabhula stole a little poly-entropic energy from the Ninety-Seventh Dimension and quickly extruded a pair of hands from his magnificent body, extended them on short arms, and whacked them together smartly, producing a sound with sufficient volume that it had the Doctor and the Lovecraft reaching up with their own hands to cover their ears.
YOU MEAN LIKE THIS? he said, feeling quite proud of his feat.
“Precisely,” the Detective said. “That is the sound of two hands clapping. The riddle is: What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
Had he a mouth, vocal chords, and lungs, Bhulabhula would have laughed aloud.
PREPARE TO GO MAD, the Detective. THE SOUND OF ONE HAND CLAPPING IS HALF THAT OF TWO!
“No,” the Detective said. “That is incorrect.”
Bhulabhula was tempted to extrude himself a forehead so that he could frown.
YOU LIE.
“No. You may access that portion of my mind that shows if I am lying or telling the truth -- but no other portion.”
As if the Detective could stop him. But for now, he would keep it fair, so Bhulabhula did just that.
Bastard! the Detective was not lying.
ALL RIGHT. FINE. THIS IS THE SOUND! With that he waved one hand, producing a faint swishing noise in the fetid air.
“No, that is a swish, not a clap. And also incorrect.”
Without bothering to ask, Bhulabhula snuck into the Detective’ mind again. Sure enough, he was telling the truth. Damn!
What was half of a sound that had not yet been produced?
I TOLD YOU YOU SHOULD HAVE SQUASHED THEM. BUT, NOOO, YOU ALWAYS KNOW WHAT YOU ARE DOING. YOU DON’T NEED MY HELP. FINE.
NOT EVEN A NODE, Bhulabhula said. A GANGLION. A DENDRITE. THE METABOLIC WASTE OF A DENDRITE.
WHAT DO I CARE IF I’M LIVING INSIDE A MAD MIND?
Bhulabhula metaphorically waved Scunthorpe off. He worried over the riddle for a time. He noticed the the Detective take another device from his garments, a small, round, golden metal object with a chain connecting it to the recess from which it came. There were what appeared to be inscriptions upon the face of this device. The the Detective put the device back into his ... pocket? was it? Yes.
The Doctor said, “Do we have an appointment?”
“Ideed, Doctor. Our friend here is not the only one of his kind in our region. If we are to catch the packet to the steamship docked at Kingston-upon-Hull for a noon departure, we shall have to cross the Humber and be on our way by first light. We have other fish to fry.”
The Detective blew more smoke into the fog. He smiled.
The night wore on. Bhulabhula circled the riddle from every angle and he could find no way to grasp it. It slipped from him at every turn. Even in those dimensions where time ran sideways or backwards, there were no answers that seemed to fit, though he tried offering several. He grew exceedingly irritated at hearing the Detective say, “Incorrect.”
Finally, after some hours, he said, THERE IS NO ANSWER! IT IS A TRICK QUESTION!
“There is an answer,” the Detective said.
I WILL RIP IT FROM YOUR MIND!
“No need for that. I will give it to you. But it is too late. You have lost. It won’t help you now.”
TELL ME!
“Very well. Do you know what a dog is?”
YES, YES!
“And a yew?”
A KIND OF TREE! GIVE ME THE ANSWER, NOW!
“All right. The answer is, ‘The dog peed upon the yew.’”
WHAT? THIS IS NONSENSE!
“Nonetheless, it is the answer.”
YOU CANNOT TRICK ME! I WILL HAVE THE TRUTH!
With that, Bhulabhula lanced his way into the Detective’s brain, sped straight to the compartment which held the riddle’s answer, tore it open, and found therein --
The dog peed upon the yew.
Had he shoulders, they would have slumped. Had he a mouth, he would have spat. Had he a sexual organ, it would have drooped into the dirt.
Something was very wrong here ...
It made no sense! How could a domestic animal urinating upon a plant have anything at all to do with a sound not yet made? It was madness! Madness ...
The horror of that thought fell upon Bhulabhula like an comet from out of space. No!
No, no, be calm. He could do this. He had the riddle, he had the answer, if he could make sense of them, if he could see how one related to the other, he would triumph!
Something in the urine? Some chemical component, perhaps? Or maybe it was in the kind of wood produced by the yew? The noise of the urine striking the tree? But -- but how could that possibly connect to about-to-be sound from hands? There was no thread he could see, no causal way to get from here to there!
YOU SHOULD HAVE LISTENED TO ME, Scunthorpe offered.
I HAVE A BAD FEELING ABOUT THIS, Driffield added.
SHUT UP! HELP ME! WE MUST MAKE SENSE OF THIS!
But Scunthorpe and Driffield had little to offer. The puzzle of it consumed Bhulabhula. There had to be a connection! Had to be! If a mere man could devise such a puzzle and an answer, he could at least see the fornicating connection!
So deep was he in his ruminations that he noticed the men were gone only as dawn began to seep through the trees, trying vainly to burn the thick fog away -- a fog that seemed to have invaded Bhulabhula’s very mind, making his thoughts dank and slippery and hard to see. They were gone, fine. That did not matter. What mattered was the bastard riddle.
Dog. Pee. One hand?
Bhulabhula had a sudden premonition. Out there in the fog, hidden in the trees, madness slinked nearer, edging in to pounce. Coming for him, after all the times he had sent it to claim others. He could feel it! It was ... there ...
NO!
But the fear was upon him, and he knew. He would never understand the answer. Not in a million years. And yet, he had to try! All right, maybe it would take two million years.
In the wood, the madness inched closer.
STAY AWAY FROM ME! he ordered. He thought about the riddle again. One hand clapping ...
Had he hair, he would have torn it out. Bastard! Bastard!
And deep in Bhulabhula’s nether regions, the tertiary hind-brain Bruce whimpered in his sleep ...

-30-

Couple Class Pictures

From a recent silat class. First is called, "Turn your head and cough." Second is, "The bigger they are, the harder they fall ..."

Are We Having Fun Yet?

Postscript: Yep, Rotator-Cuff Syndrome, but probably not bad enough for surgery. Some more conservative treatment, visits to see the Physical Therapist, who is supposedly a sports guy, and see how it goes for a few weeks ...

Never Tempt the Gods

So, after I allowed as how I couldn't wait to try the muscle-up, it appears that I will be able to wait after all. How long, I dunno, but after tossing my grandson, a well-appointed boy who is probably seventy pounds and tall for his age, into the air a few times, it appears that my failure to warm up properly has come back to haunt me.

I pulled something in my upper back.

Not fighting off nine ninjas whilst out walking the dogs; not even in silat class doing legwork. Hoisting my grandson up for "wheee!" Worse, while I was hoping it was the trap, I don't think it is, because of where the pain is, how much it hurts, and a couple of tests one can do to narrow down which muscles might be involved. That's the curse of having a little knowledge, you can't be blissfully ignorant of some things.

What I fear is that I tore my rotator-cuff on the left side. Just a partial, and probably in the supraspinatus, one of four itty-bitty muscles you can't get to from the outside -- infraspinatus, teres minor, and subscapularis being the other three. For years, I've done shoulder exercises to prevent just this.

I hope not. I hope I am out-of-practice in diagnosing such things, that's is just referred pain from a few strained fibers in the trapezius, and in a week, why, I'll be right as rain.

But: ice, eating ibuprofen like M&Ms, rest, and wishing it into the cornfield have thus far done little to make it ease off, so I expect that I'll be calling my doctor tomorrow and seeing if she can see me any time in the next eight or ten years.

And if'n it is what I hope it ain't, the options of doing what I'm already doing, cortisone injections, or surgery will be bandied about. None of which appeal, thank you.

Ick. Ick.

Best Rings Routine Ever

You gotta love this -- especially the dismount ...

Looking for an Upper Body Exercise?

Pound-for-pound, I've always thought gymnasts were high among those with useful strength. You must be strong and flexible to do gymnastics, and you can develop this kind of power using only your own bodyweight, no iron pumping necessary. (Though strength-training with weights can help, and some do that.)

There's a strong element of gymnastics in parkour, or free-running. I think this is an activity mostly suited for the young and bulletproof -- fun to watch -- but not something a man my age is going to take up and do well. It does, however, have some good training exercises I might be able to learn, one of which is called the muscle-up. You see this in ring competition in gymnastics, and it is a lot harder than it looks.

My chinning bar at home is in a doorway, and if I could manage this, I'd punch a hole in the ceiling with my head, but it's something I am going to try at the gym next time I go ...

Theology and Politics

So, I watched Bill Moyers' Journal tonight on PBS. Barack Obama's former minister, the Reverend Wright, was on for the full hour. When you hear him speak, and see more than just the soundbites cut from his sermons -- PBS ran longer excerpts -- you get different picture than you do via YouTube and Fox News.

Wright might be abrasive and maybe he gets a tad hyperbolic, but -- unfortunately -- a lot of what he was pissed off about, he had -- still has -- good reason to be that way.

I can see why Obama didn't cut him entirely loose. The Rev calls it like he sees it.

Context makes a helluva difference. This was a man who spent six years in the Marine Corps. Between that and growing up black in fifties America, he earned the right to do a little bitching.
And a lot of what he had to say made sense to me, and I'm lily white and a redneck cracker.

Looking for Place to Spend Your Tax Rebate?

Other than maybe filling your gas tank?

Technology Flops Again

And the same vid, via YouTube. Runs slower, but a lot more artifacts.

So much for seamless flow along the information corridor ...

This is a Test

A vid I shot last year, playing with a kerambit. Just looking to see if I can upload directly to blogger instead of going through YouTube. (Still has a few glitches -- like, am I that fast ? Uh huh, sure I am ... I went back in, slowed the speed by half, and reposted it, and this is what I got. Still buggy.)

Write Faster

I generally have a stack of books by the bed. I read less than I used to, but I'm still getting through maybe two hundred books a year, plus assorted 'zines, not counting the daily newspaper, blogs, and all like that.

As a reader, I have a gripe with my favorite writers -- they need to write faster.

If I find a book by somebody and I like it, I look to see what else they've done. If they have a series, I collect as many as I can find. Problem is, even if they have twenty books in print, I can read them all before they can get too far ahead of me. Pretty soon, I catch up, and then I have to wait on them.

There are a handful of writers that I will buy in hardback. With some of those in the $25-35 range, I can't afford too many on that list. So I go to the bookstore and prowl the aisles, waiting for one of them to come out with a new novel. Generally, this doesn't happen but once a year, sometimes longer. Sometimes way longer -- fans of George R.R. Martin's fantasy series have been drumming their fingers impatiently for several years now waiting on him.

It took two decades for Roger Zelazny to finish his Amber series.

Me, I have a dozen guys I'm waiting on at any given time.

One example: I got hooked on Robert Parker's Spencer books years ago. He now has three characters with whom he plays -- Spencer, Jesse Stone, and Sunny Randall. They are all variations on the same guy, even though Sunny is a woman, she is a lot like Spencer in a skirt. Parker is faster than most, so those characters show up more frequently, but since, if Dianne drives, I can almost finish one on the way home -- lotta dialog -- the novels are like fast-food -- quick, easy, over in a hurry.

(Gotta love that Hawk, who is the coolest dude in modern mystery novels. Bobby Crais's Elvis Cole novels give us the west coast version of the Bostonian Spencer, and his sidekick, Joe Pike, is the white trash version of Hawk. I'd love to see them in a book together. Hawk and Pike ...)

Um I digress, I digress, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers pressed ...

My gripe is that the writers I like need to write faster -- and today, I got an email from one of my fans, and, of a moment, found myself on the other side of the looking glass. You, he said, need to write faster ...

Huh. What goes around comes around. One more manifestation of karma.

F*ck 'Em If They Can't Take a Joke ...

Okay, I've never hidden it that my ethical and political suasion is mostly to the left of center.

Pigeon-holing somebody as a conservative or liberal is tricky, however, since a lot of folks don't fall completely into either category. Among my more liberal friends when I start talking about guns, their eyes go wide in horror; amongst my more conservative friends, the idea that I would pack up the American troops in Iraq and fly 'em home tomorrow gets the same kind of bug-eyed stare. Drives people crazy if you don't follow the party line unswervingly. They don't know what to do with you.

Want to screw with people's heads? Join the NRA and the ACLU at the same time ...

The New York Times hasn't been considered anything close to conservative for a long time, and I am more often in agreement with their stances than not, but, you have to give the Devil his due. Whoever came up with this one? S/he is funny:

A man is walking in the New York zoo when he sees a little girl leaning close to the lion's cage. Suddenly, the lion reaches out through the bars, grabs her by the cuff of her jacket, and tries to pull her inside!

Her parents scream, but are paralyzed. Nobody can seem to move --

The walker sprints to the cage, and without hesitation, reaches in and hits the lion square on the nose with a powerful punch.

The lion jumps back, roars, releases the girl, and the man grabs her. He delivers her to her terrified parents, who can't thank him enough.

A reporter nearby has seen the whole scene, and he comes over: "Sir, this was the most gallant and brave thing I have ever seen!"

"Why, it was nothing," the man said. "Really, I mean, the lion was behind bars, and I saw the child in danger, what else could I have done? Not like I had to have the faith of Daniel to actually walk into the cage."

"I notice a Bible in your pocket," said the journalist.

"Yes, I'm a Christian and was on my way to a Bible study group."

"Well, I'll make sure this won't go unnoticed. I'm a journalist, you know, and tomorrow's papers will have this on the front page."

The journalist leaves.

The following morning the rescuer buys the New York Times, to see if it indeed has news of his actions, and sure enough, it does, right there on the front page:

"Right Wing Christian Fundamentalist Assaults African Immigrant and Steals his Lunch ..."

Want to See Who I'm Supporting for Senate?

Kitchen Skulduggery

Sometimes on a lazy weekend afternoon, especially if it is raining and we can't do yard work, we watch cooking shows on the Food Channel. This requires little brainpower, and is amusing, and now and then, we are inspired to try a new dish we've seen presented.

One of the shows we like is called Dinner: Impossible. In it a chef, a big, bodybuilder Brit named Robert Irvine, is brought somewhere and told of this week's challenge, which involves cooking a meal from anywhere from a few to a few hundred people, given a theme he must follow, and time limit. In the past, Chef has been taken to Pixar and told he has to feed six hundred animators, and the theme is to use the Pixar movies, like Finding Nemo, Cars, and Ratatoullie. Or in Williamsburg, making a meal using only 17th century tools. Or at Hershey, PA, making a five-course meal for a hundred and fifty, each course of which had to feature chocolate ...

Silly stuff, but the chef seems a good-natured fellow, and he and his crew, mostly taken from the group he has to feed, run around like chickens with their heads cut off while trying to come up with dishes whilst missing half the ingredients they need.

Imagine my horror when -- only today! -- I found out that Irvine has been canned for lying about his resume. A month ago, he was outed, and today, his replacement announced. Hidden and murky depths in the chef ...

Oh, the humanity! Is there nothing sacred ... ?

Another Separated at Birth ... ?

My collaborator and the jester ...

Shiva Ki's Kerambits

Somebody asked for a picture of these ...

I Don't Care Who You Are, That There is Funny ...

Thanks to Larry the Cable Guy for the title.

Humor, as I have pointed out before, and I'm not the first to do so, is almost always at somebody's -- or some thing's expense. Almost always, somebody is the butt of the joke.

You don't think so, go over the ones that made you laugh out loud. Got one that wasn't making fun of somebody, pass it along. I collect them. (They'll all fit on the head of a pin, with room left over for a bunch of angels to dance ...)

Best stuff for me is when the teller makes fun of himself. Thus, a southern comedian talking about driving and getting pulled over by the Louisiana State Police: Cop swaggers up, looks at the guy. "You in a lot of trouble, boy. Here, take this ticket, and you write what I tell you ..."

Or the guy going to register to vote in Mississippi. Signs his name: X xx. Registrar says, "Well, okay, I know what X stands for, but what's with the two little xx's?"

And the guys says, "That stands for "M.D."

My best lawyer jokes come from lawyers; best doctor jokes from doctors; best actor, agent, producer jokes from among their number, too.

Politically-incorrect humor can be stretched too far, and when it steps over the line and is simply cruel, it commits the cardinal sin in comedy: It isn't funny. But one of my favorite panel cartoons, in, I recall Writer's Digest, is from years back. It was the last of three in a series, a racist toon, a sexist one, and a racist/sexist toon combo. This was the title over the toon -- a"A Racist, Sexist Cartoon."

This last one shows a white man in black face makeup kneeling on a stage, hands clutched to his belly, in obvious pain. And the caption is:

"Pre-minstrel cramps ..."

It was less a truly racist or sexist dig than it was a play on words. I laughed, what can I say?

(I don't watch South Park because for me, it's puerile. But I do like Futurama. Anybody can do fart jokes, but clever writing gets me every time. But, it's different strokes for different folks ...)

Armed Response

Another true childhood tale:

Summer I was nine -- I think, I'll speak to that later -- there was a strike at The Plant. This was a generic term for any of the companies in the petrochemical complex that sits next to the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge. This included the Esso Refinery (now Exxon-Mobil); Ethyl Corp., and Kaiser Aluminum, among others, and at the time, one of the three largest such complexes in the world. (We were #3 on the Russian's atomic bomb list, behind Washington, D.C. and New York City, and proud of it.)

Back then, the flare-stacks burned constantly, and on days when the rain was particularly heavy and they thought nobody would notice, they'd open the suckers up and pour crap into the heavens that would turn the clouds green ...

My father worked at Ethyl Corp., as an engineer, so he wasn't in the union, but considered management.

There was no way they were going to shut the plant down, and not going to hire scabs, so management decided to run things themselves. To this end, they set up cots and kitchens and everybody who wasn't in the union essentially moved into the plant and went into a rotation of twelve hours on, twelve off, for the duration. My father got to come home every few days, but then he had to go back. I don't remember exactly how long the strike lasted -- seemed like a long time.

But even then, I read the newspaper every evening -- we got the State Times, not the Morning Advocate -- and I came across an article that frightened me. Seems that some of the homes belonging to Ethyl managers had been vandalized -- rocks thrown through windows, paint sloshed on them, like that, almost certainly by disgruntled workers on strike.

Lotta kids had fathers who worked at The Plant, but on our end of the street, none of them at Ethyl Corp. save mine. So I organized a vigilante patrol. I, and several other boys my age, armed with our Daisy BB guns, marched up and down the street, or skulked in the ditches and azalea bushes, to guard against vandals, or worse.

I must have been at least nine, since I didn't get my first BB gun until the Christmas after I was eight, and the gun I carried wasn't the Daisy Pump or the blond-stock with the scope, which I didn't get until I was older ...

This was back in the day when boys wandering around a neighborhood could carry BB guns and nobody thought anything of it, as long as we didn't shoot the birds in their yards. Which, of course, we did at every opportunity.

That part of the summer passed, the strike was settled, and my father started coming home in the evenings again. We never did get visits from the angry strikers at my house, though I had secretly hoped we would so that our militia could lay them low.

Hey, we were nine. Way more guts than brains ...

Wooden Instruments

So we went to the show at Marylhurst. Lotta instrument makers there. Being a classical guitar guy, those are the makers I notice the most, and a bunch of really good ones showed up: Robert Ruck was one table down from Jeff Elliott. Woodley White, George Smith, Craig Wilson, Salvador Morales, Alan Perlman, Cyndy Burton, Keith Rhodes. Mike Doolin had his harp guitars there, others I probably missed.

Violin makers, mandolins, harps, even a marimba; flutes, lutes, wood, wax, the place smelled great, and if you like stringed instruments, you would have had a fine ole time just walking around and inhaling.

The mini-concerts this year were held in a different venue -- school was working on the grounds and the usual place was hard to get to, so it was in Flavia Hall. Not as nice a room, but you could hear everybody okay. We saw people do short stints: Mary Flower (steel-string and classical guitar); Peter Zisa and Dina Fergurgur, (classical guitar duet); Scot Mueller and Joe Majors played electric guitar and electric bass. Travis Johnson, who looked like he was all of thirteen, played an Elliot classical and did a fine job. David Franzen played a George Smith blackwood classical, after a touching story about a phone call from the wife of his guitar teacher, who is apparently dying, and who was listening to one of Franzen's CDs. Jeff Ashton did what he called his "chestnut set" on a classical by Woodley White -- started with Romanza.

Franzen used his own guitar, which was several years old, and you can really hear the difference between a spruce top that has been played and opened up, and one that is a couple weeks old.

The Morales family had a few nick-nacks on their table. My wife bought me a clock ...

Gorilla My Dreams

I may have told this story before. If not, I should have ...

Back in my childhood, exotic pets were more common than they are now. There were plenty of dogs -- most of them running loose and apt to bite -- cats, birds, of course, but you could also buy what were called tea-cup monkeys -- tiny little things advertised in the back of comic books, along with snakes, lizards, and various large cats -- I had a friend who had an ocelot. We knew a guy who had a bobcat, and one who had a panther kitten.

No licenses necessary, save for the dogs.

One bright spring day, my friend Bobby Harrison and I decided to go and steal plums. I have mentioned that such an activity was common amongst the nine- and ten-year-old boys where I lived. We located various trees, watched them from afar, and then when the fruit was just the right shade of green-turning-to-yellow, we'd hop the back yard fence -- most of the plum trees were in back yards and most of those were fenced -- fill our pillowcases, and haul ass.

What passed for crime in our day and neighborhood.

So, Bobby had found a tree not far from his house -- on Enterprise, two streets over from mine -- that we had somehow missed. We rolled by on our bikes, and it was full of just-right plums.
No time like the present, we parked the bikes, climbed the fence, and started stuffing plums into a brown paper sack, when, all of a sudden --

King Kong dropped out of the tree in front of us.

Well, okay, not really King Kong. It was, I later found out, a young chimpanzee. Wearing -- though I didn't notice it at the time -- a collar and chain that was connected to the tree.

But, picture it: Two scrawny little boys, going maybe sixty pounds each, and of a moment, beset by a swings-with-Tarzan furry monster as big as we were.

You have never seen, nor will you likely ever see, anybody move so fast. Bobby and I screamed and flew -- flew -- over the fence. I don't remember the trip home, only the end when I skidded my little Huffy into the front yard, still terrified and hardly able to breathe.

My mother was waiting at the front door. She glared at me.

"What have you been doing?"

A knee-jerk response:"Me? Nothing!"

"A woman just called me and said you were in her back yard, scaring her monkey."

I was astounded.

For two reasons: One, that anybody could possibly think that I was scaring that great ape who, I was dead certain, would have torn off my limbs had it been able to grab me.

Scaring her monkey?! Me?! It would have killed me!

And two, and more importantly -- how had that woman known who I was? How could she have called my mother in the time I tore up the streets racing home? That was the mystery.

Later, when I talked to Bobby, he swore he hadn't ratted me out, and I believed him. But to this day, I recall that event with great puzzlement. What kind of person keeps an ape in her backyard plum tree? How had she known who I was and managed to phone my mother in the five minutes it took me to flee home? Even if Bobby's mother had gotten it out of him -- and how would she have even known to ask? -- it would have taken a while to get my name and number to the woman so she could call my mother.

I didn't know the woman. Nor her monkey. But maybe she knew who I was.

One of life's unanswered questions. More proof that the universe is strange.

Over the Hill

Well, it seems that Todd is having a birthday today. Officially having crossed into middle age and now beset with forty-five years.

Happy Birthday, Todd.

They say that forty-five is the new forty-three, but it's all downhill from here ...

Art

While I'm here, a bit more about Mike Byers's art: I'm fortunate enough to own five glass pieces by him. Three are fused; one is etched and edged with neon; and the last is stained glass. (Oh, and there is a textile, Hmong, I think.)

Here are three of those pieces: Dirisha, Chromatic Sequence, and the etched/neon piece is a stylized version of our silat logo. (Fuhoni-te and In the Dreamtime are the other fused pieces.)

Dirisha is a bit weathered -- for several years, she dangled under the eaves overlooking the hot tub out back. When we re-did the deck, we had to move her inside.

High Quality Steel

One more, for those of you who missed it. If you are considering getting one of those reasonably priced -- read cheap -- "practice" katanas you see for sale? Have a look ...

P.S. You gotta love Odell ...

The Difference Between a Good Day and a Bad Day ...

Lee Barden, a master of the nunchaku -- Okinawan rice flail -- aka nunchucks, or just chux. The video is of him doing a demo with a pair of these, one end of each which is soaked in gasoline and set ablaze.

The still is what happens when you kick the pan full of gasoline you left on the floor after you soaked your chux and fired 'em up -- and the volatile fluid sloshes up onto you and turns you into the Human Torch ...

Hell of a demo. So to speak.

He survived, but he's a lot more careful where he puts his -- expensive -- petrol these days.

Need a Conversation Piece?

Check out Mike Byers's latest creation: The Mark 24 Type 3a Trinary Hazard Emission Device.

The Mark 24 Type 3a is designed to emit three modern hazards: biologicals, radiation and smiley faces, and meets or exceeds Federal Standard UD/12336-P/14b. Revision 1299f for Devices That Do Absolutely Nothing While Appearing To Be Powerful And Dangerous ...

Gotta love an artist with that wicked of a sense of humor. Byers mostly works in glass, does fine stained and fused media, and he figured out a way to mix the oddest things -- he once created a steer skull that was chrome-plated. He sometimes picks up a pen: he sold a story about a unicorn killer ...

Democratic Debate

So, I watched the debate from Philadelphia tonight, Clinton versus Obama.

Until tonight, I was leaning toward Hillary. Not any more. It's not just that she took the low road and offered material that stopped just short of slander; it was that as somebody whose family has been subject to this kind of crap for years, she had to know what it felt like, and she did it anyway.

I was disappointed. I should know better by now, but still, I was. She's a smart, capable woman, but I didn't like what I saw and heard.

I don't think either of them particularly won the debate. But Hillary lost at least one primary vote because of how she conducted herself.

A shame.

Karma

Let's talk a little bit about karma. It's a concept that runs through most major religions and deals with the ideas that you are responsible for your actions, and that such actions have a cause-and-effect relationship.

In the Christian faith, karma is probably best expressed by Galations 6:7-8: " ... whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap."

In the eastern versions, it gets a little complicated, and in those that deal with reincarnation, karma can get carried over from life to the next. If you do good deeds, they pay off; if you do bad, you get payback -- but either might not happen in this lifetime.

It is a comforting concept to somebody who has been screwed over, that whoever did it is gonna get theirs someday. I confess I'd rather see that happen sooner than later. Guy runs me off the road, I will be tickled to see him two miles up the highway pulled over and getting a big fat ticket ...

Unfortunately, gloating when somebody gets theirs only makes more bad karma for you. Actions cost more than words, and words more than thoughts, but you can get dinged for thinking, too.

Back when I was in high school, I dated a girl of whom I was much enamored. Let's call her "Linda." After half a dozen dates, I asked her to the senior prom.

Alas, she was not quite as taken with me as I was her, and her answer was, "Let me think about it."

Those of you who have been in high school know immediately what this really means: "Let me see if somebody better asks me."

Rather to hear "Piss off and die!" than "Let me think about it ..."

I was not pleased, no way, no how, no sir.

Several weeks passed, with me twisting in the wind. Linda suddenly became too busy to talk to me. Her dance card filled up, no weekends were vacant. I had been given my marching papers, and like Dylan said, you don't need to be a weatherman to know which way the winds blows ...

I was bereft.

After my dark depression lifted somewhat -- nobody likes to be dumped --I resolved to cut a swath through the best-looking -- yeah, that was me, Mr. Superficial -- best-looking girls in school, to date all who would have me. I made a list of the top ten. Most of them had boyfriends who played football, but that didn't deter me.

Fortunately, I must have earned some good karma in a previous life. The first girl I picked, the best-looking and smartest one of the bunch, said yes. And that was as far as I got on the list.

We have been married for forty-one years.

But back to karma:

The young lady who put me on hold faded in memory quickly after I hooked up with the woman who would someday own me body and soul. Poof, dust in the wind. Or down in Louisiana, perhaps mud in the swamp would be more accurate.

Shortly before the senior prom Linda called me. "So, I guess you have somebody to take to the prom, huh?"

"Oh, yes."

There was a long pause. "Oh."

I was so righteous in my thought: Hey, you had your chance. What the hell did you expect?

We hung up. I had a warm glow inside.

Come the prom, Linda showed up with a guy from another school. Happened that I knew him, and found out that she had asked him. This, of course, was simply not done back in my day, the boys always asked. Oh, now I really felt smug. See? See what you get? I didn't have clue what karma was, but I liked what it was doing for me.

During the prom, Linda came over. Asked me to dance. We did. She was on the edge of tears. "I should have said yes when you asked," she said.

I said nothing. Yes, bitch, you should have. Too bad.

Seventeen-year-old boys are, by and large, fools and ne'er-do-wells, I was no exception. I was so smug. Served her right and -- snapping his fingers -- that for you, Linda! Small cruelty, not like torturing somebody, but a cruelty nonetheless.

School ended, we went out into the world, and I didn't see Linda until our 25th class reunion. She had moved off to New England somewhere, gotten married had kids, and we had a chance to visit. I didn't bear her any ill will; after all, had she accepted my invitation in 1965, I might never have asked my wife out, and boy, wouldn't that have been a different road? If anything, I owed her, big-time. But it takes experience to see such things. I can't claim to be wise, but life has knocked a few of the sharp corners off, yessir. You live long enough, you learn stuff.

I think I've paid that particular bit of smug karma off -- there are a couple events that resonate that way, and they stung. But, given what I got?

Such a deal. Such a deal ...

Lame Jokes of the Day

For no other reason other than they roiled up in my brain as I was walking the dogs today. (Once they get started, they are hard to stop, but I held it to three:)

1. Q: If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring?
A: Pilgrims.

2. Q: What's white and goes up?
A. A retarded snowflake.

3. Q: How do you catch a unique rabbit?
A: Unique up on it ...

Living Well is the Best Revenge

I slept with a night light until I was ten years old. It was one of those little christmas-tree bulb things, plugged into the socket behind my little brother's bed headboard. Not much light, seven watts, I think, but I needed it.

I was afraid of the dark.

A vivid imagination is both curse and blessing. In the darkness, I could conjur up all manner of things to spook myself. If I saw a scary movie -- and I saw every one I could, sometimes doing a quadruple feature on Saturdays, riding my bike to the old Dalton Theater, a quarter for six hours of 50's paranoia flicks -- well, I would have nightmares. And even awake, I could imagine the creatures -- if the room was dark. Aliens, werewolves, vampires, shambling this, brain-sucking, oozing that, all just outside my window, waiting ...

Go to sleep, Steve ...

Eventually, I got past it. One day, I unplugged the light, and even though I still had bad dreams now and then, all I had to do was turn on my reading lamp to banish them.

And I really beat the monsters in the end-- because by making up stuff and writing it down and getting paid for it? There's a useful victory. That's the way to beat the crap out of a fear -- put it to work for you ...

As an aside, since I started writing, my dreams have gotten better, insofar as they have better plots, and sometimes even make sense ...