Hi Piers

HI-

I am backlogged on two HiPiers columns, as at present it seems to be harder to get them put on the site than it is to write them. But I’m going ahead with this one while I have time. Once I get to writing Xanth #50 my time will be squeezed. As it is, we still haven’t unpacked our boxes of household goods or even watched DVD movies together. Things just keep happening to intervene.

 

For example, MaryLee’s house in Tennessee burned down, apparently from wiring in the attic that may have been chewed by squirrels and shorted out. Fortunately most of her things had already been moved here, so were saved. Or maybe when the house realized that she was not coming back, it suicided. But it has been a distraction. She had wanted to get out of Tennessee, but she hadn’t wanted to lose the house she lived in for decades. This loss made her sick, literally, vomiting daily.

Faux Paws is an anthology of flash fiction published by Mannison Press. The introduction explains that a basic flash fiction story is roughly 1,000 to 1,500 words long. Anything below 300 words is microfiction; 750 words is sudden fiction; 100 words is a drabble; 50 words is a dribble or minisaga; and there is also a popular but challenging Six Word Story. Live and learn!

 

There are 35 stories here, ranging from Flash to Six Words, one and a half of which are mine, the half being my share of a collaboration with my wife MaryLee under her pen name Muri McCage. I won’t describe them all, but will mention most. The general theme is animals that may not be quite what they seem. Is that cat a house pet or a witch’s familiar? Thus the pun in the title, false feet. If such notions intrigue you, you can reach the publisher at their website www.MannisonPress.com.

 

“Shelly and the Hog” by Ashleigh Hatter tells of a little hedgehog that gets into Shelly’s garden. Shelly means to kill it, but his nephew persuades him to let it go. Then a quill in his shoe stabs his foot as he walks to the Post Office, making him fall, just as a stray bullet from a robbery passes where his neck would have been. His attitude toward the hedgehog reverses; it is now welcome.

 

“The Buzzing of Gnats” by Craig Crawford has a gnat speaking to a little girl, telling her to study her math. It seems it knows things she doesn’t, and she has a future that may change the world. Is it really an angel? It evades answering that.

 

“On the Street Where You Live” by Rachel Nussbaum reveals the truth about familiars, the animals associated with witches. They have their own society, and can wait a century for the right contact. The eyes on the cover, brown and blue, may relate to this story. No, they relate to all the stories.

 

“Dark Courier” by Ronald Linson. Don’t grab a homing pigeon. Not only is the message it carries not for you, the bird might be dangerous.

 

“You Got to be Kitten Me” by Angelique Fawns. She considers herself a hot kitten. She picks up a man, gives him a peak down her cleavage, quietly steals his wallet and departs the bar. Oops! He’s a warlock. Now she’s in trouble. Moral: be careful who you steal from.

 

“Kernel Cob and the Winter Solstice Miracle” by Angelique Fawns has corn plants coming to animate life after a human women sheds tears on the roots of one. But then she is afraid of it. Humans can be so thoughtless.

 

“Curse” by Muri McCage and a collaborator explains the dread Skunk Ape, the subspecies of Bigfoot, the Abominable Snowman, Sasquatch, or whatever that inhabits the central swamp of Florida. It seems that an angry witch enchants a prince, making him hairy and ugly and really stinky so that no one will ever want to get close to him, let alone try to help him. He can escape only if a pretty girl kisses him, not that any ever would. Yet there may be one lovely woman who — never mind.

 

“War of the Birds” by Rhiannon Lotze tells how the birds warred with the dinosaurs until the extinction event wiped out the dinosaurs and left the world to the birds. For a while.

 

“Whale Killer” by Nicola Kapron. Among the orcas is what appears to be a whale-sized merman. This is scary.

 

“A Bear From Kamchatka” by Chris Doerner is, well, different. If I understand correctly, a woman, Svetlana was caught in the forest, raped, and killed by Vasily, and her body was eaten by a giant bear. But her spirit carried on, and in due course took control of the bear, stalked Vasily, killed him, and ate him, chomping him repeatedly inside the bear until his physical remains got shat out. So she had her vengeance. Ugly, but it served him right.

 

“Termites” by Ashleigh Hatter tells how a couple loved each other, but termites quietly destroyed their house, and somehow their relationship got quietly eviscerated too. A neat if uncomfortable parallel.

 

“Damn Cat” by Deidre Owen is a six word humor story. I hope I’m not pirating when I quote it entirely. “This cat loves me! / Never Mind.” Yes, this strikes me as an art form. Maybe I should try it myself: “The Ghost in the Machine / Haunting.” Title it “Smartphone.” You’ve surely run afoul of that ghost yourself, just as you have encountered the attitude of cats.

 

“The Heist” by Rhiannon Lotze shows a warehouse robbery performed by trained raccoons supervised by humans. Something like this just might be possible in real life.

 

“Breaking News: Moose in a Hot Tub” by Rhiannon Lotze tells of a man finding a moose in his hot tub, sets out to shoot it, but gets ambushed by the moose, who it turns out likes a good hunt and now has his quarry.

 

“Foe Paws” by Chris Doerner does a takeoff on the volume. Arnold buys his Faux Paws from the Acme Magic Company, dons them, and becomes a dog. Other dogs resent that, and attack, but he fights them off. So they appeal to the coyotes, but he fights them off too. Then the wolves.

 

“Summer Night” by Konnor Kuntz is horror. Brian’s bike got a flat tire so he was walking home when he realizes he is being stalked. A coyote. He flees. Then a mountain lion pre-empts the coyote. Then it gets worse. Supernatural, in fact. Don’t read this before walking home alone.

 

“The Predator” by Craig Crawford is another horror. Gerald is a hunter. He hears the cry of a dying rabbit and goes deeper into the forest to check it out. He finds a giant rabbit screeching but not obviously injured. Then a bobcat comes—and the rabbit eats the bobcat. Gerald backs off nervously. Wouldn’t you?

 

“A Tiger Tale” by Gary Clifton tells of a bit over 150 years in the future, when civilization on Earth has been destroyed by nuclear war 25 years hence and America has dissolved into a number of lesser kingdoms. King Otto the Fat is invading the Kingdom of Freedonia, using a monstrous tiger to destroy opposing armies. That tiger is something else.

 

“The Net” by Piers Anthony. A child with a lethal ailment discovers a dying bunny. As she buries it she finds a net on its head. Rather than throw it away, she puts the net on her own head, and suddenly is connected to alien intelligence. Now she knows why local wild animals have been acting oddly. The story goes on from there.

 

“Balanced On the Tip of a Tentacle” by Craig Crawford is another different one. The creatures below the surface of the sea are tired of mankind’s plastic pollution of the environment. Now humanity will reform, or else. Oh, how I would like to see this happen.

 

Overall, this anthology is a collection of widely varied stories related to animals ranging from cute to savage, funny to deadly serious, inconsequential to thoughtful. I recommend it to folk with minds.

 

I read Wind In Trees by Arthur M Doweyko. This is an unusual novel, very much my type. It starts with Henry Wind-In-Trees, a college student who is an American Indian, Lakota Sioux, getting picked on by three bullies. But he can fight, and makes them look ludicrous. A nearby girl, Elizabeth, Liz for short, gets rid of them by threatening to call the police. Thus the two meet. Then it jumps fifty years, after a global disaster that makes her a seeming ghost and him a cyborg. He now has Seth, a helpful personal robot. When the authorities seek to upgrade Henry, coming across in the manner of the bullies, Seth beats them back and the two flee, along with Liz, the ghost, who is helpfully visible to Henry. They encounter weird things, such as aliens and seeming dinosaurs and menacing drones.  One alien female is Anth, whom they gradually come to trust. Something about that name I like; someday I’ll figure it out. Her father is Fierz; something about that too. Fierz Anth? Henry, Seth, and Anth flee her malign associates, guided by Liz. Who may not really be a ghost. After that, it gets complicated, with surprises and gritty action. It becomes hard for Henry to be sure of reality, but mysteries untangle and a new reality finally coalesces. The conclusion is intriguing, if I understand it correctly. If you like science fiction that is off the beaten track, this is for you.

 

One of the things getting lost in transit are my magazine subscriptions. In due course I will resubscribe with the new address. As it is, I am missing some issues. For now, here my comments on the remaining back issues.

 

FOREST NEWS Summer 2023 has an article titled “Apalachicola Friends on Fire,” by Todd Engstrom, Ph.D. Apalachicola is Florida’s largest National Forest. It starts with a quote attributed to Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” That wows me, and it may be true. FSEEE, Forest Service Employees for Environmental Ethics, who publishes this magazine, strikes me as exactly such a group. They work to truly preserve and benefit American forests, despite the sometimes opposite attitude of the Forest Service itself. This article makes the point that natural fire is essential for the welfare of the Longleaf pine ecosystem and many of the embedded wetlands. I’m interested, as Longleaf pine is my favorite pine tree, with needles eighteen inches long. The Forest Service seems to have operated on the assumption that fire in forests is evil and must be abolished, with the result that flammable materials build up until they make truly horrendous fires that take out houses and neighborhoods as well as trees. It is better to have smaller controlled fires that maintain the forest ecology, which includes many species of plants and animals that are imperiled elsewhere. “Collectively, its biological diversity makes the Apalachicola a national treasure.” But it needs fire to maintain its diversification, and fire suppression is deteriorating its condition. “If drought is the word for insufficient rain, what is the word for insufficient fire?”

 

THE WEEK for July 28, 2023 remarks on the dangerous heat that was then baking much of the USA, and says that the only thing certain is that we have to stop burning coal, oil, and natural gas. The Republicans like to pretend that climate change is not a threat, there being big profits to be made from fossil fuels. But climate change will cost us about $14.5 trillion in the coming decades, obliterating those profits, apart from the damage to the environment and our health. The first half of 2023 set a record for mass killings, mainly by guns. There are profits to be made in gun sales, too. Job growth is 13 million jobs in 30 months, the most ever in a single presidential term, and unemployment sank to a historic low of 3.6 percent, down from nearly 9 percent in 2020. Yet only 34 percent of voters say they approve of Biden’s economic stewardship. Immigrants died trying to cross into Texas and being repulsed by state troopers and razor wire; the governor blamed President Biden. China is covering up its death toll from Covid. Russia’s President Putin was indicted for war crimes in Johannesburg. Author Joyce Carol Oates has been sounding off on Twitter [now retitled X] and getting pilloried. I am not conversant with the issues but have some sympathy, as I have had thorough experience getting pilloried, and the critics don’t seem to know or care what the truth is. I have stayed the hell off internet social media, as my impression is that trying to fight anonymous liars just invites more lies. Page on “Extreme Tourism” such as those who paid a quarter million dollars apiece to die on the submersible Titan. Others pay $450,000 to experience a few minutes of weightlessness in orbit above the planet, or $750.000 to descend into the Mariana Trench. Apparently they like mortal risk, but it makes me nervous. A new political party seems to be forming, No Labels, but it is said that it’s only real agenda is to split the opposing vote and elect Donald Trump in 2024. Covid is now considered an ordinary illness. Maybe so, but I generally go masked when I leave the apartment, as at age 89 I am a prime target. A book on electricity was checked out of the New Bedford Free Public Library in Massachusetts, and returned 120 years later. Maybe that person was a slow reader? In Italy a 66 year old man shoved his hand into a 17 year old girl’s underwear and grabbed her butt as she walked between classes. A panel of judges ruled that his behavior was wholly innocent. I wonder whether any women were on that panel? Young American men are in a crisis. Submerged in video games and porn, many struggle to relate to women. They lack friends and long term goals. Maybe they should go to Italy to get an innocent feel for women. When I go out on my exercise walks I certainly notice the shapely young women, but I regard it as like bird watching: look, appreciate, remember, but don’t touch, and not just because I am married. They have a right to go where they choose and dress as they choose without getting criticized or grabbed. There is now an over the counter contraceptive pill called Opill. Let’s hope it’s affordable. 49% of Americans say democracy is not working well in the US. I agree. “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Thomas Edison. Question: is AI ripping off human authors? Several lawsuits suggest that it is. I understand that some of my material has been taken. With the tools that exist today, they should be able to distinguish original material from copied material, if they really want to. But of course most of my books have been pirated before; this is just a more sophisticated version. AI apparently ignores copyright protection. Question: have we entered the Anthropocene era? That is not a takeoff on my name; it means the age of humans. We have left the Holocene epoch, the most recent one, after 11,700 years, and jumped into the Anthropocene, rife with industrial pollution, species extinction, and devastating climate change. We are not good for the world, and apparently we won’t stop until we have destroyed it, and it won’t take long to turn the world over to the roaches feasting on the remnant. Homo sapiens means smart humans, but in the larger picture we seem to be idiots. I’m tempted to call it the Anthropo-obscene era. The Book of the Week is titled The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodall. When we run a fever of 102 or 103F we can pass out, as our body sends blood to the skin, abandoning internal organs, including the brain. Above 107 degrees things start to break down at the cellular level. The old, sick, and poor are more vulnerable, but everyone is in trouble. Best books chosen by novelist and Colgate University writing professor CJ Hauser lists Luster by Raven Leilani, calling it ferociously smart and heartbreaking about art, race, sex, power, and money. That seems interesting; maybe I’ll try to get and read it. Also Saga of the Swamp Thing by Alan Moore, which I gather is a graphic, that is, pictures, novel published in 1983. “The greatest love story ever told.” I’d better look for that one too. And an interesting movie double feature, “Barbenheimer,” about Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, and Barbie, the doll? I will watch them if I ever get the chance. Interesting statistic: there are now more NBA players with $30 million annual salaries than CEOs who get that much. If I ran the world, it might instead be original, thoughtful novelists. And a page about how striking actors shut down Hollywood. As I write this, both the writers and the actors strikes are over. How much easier it would have been if the moguls had simply been open to fair terms, without in effect having to be hit upside the head with a sledgehammer. Or maybe a movie camera.

 

THE WEEK for August 4, 2023 describes Israel in chaos as Prime Minister Netanyahu moves toward dictatorship, this time trying to limit the power of the Supreme Court to restrain him. I suspect that this will not end well. Meanwhile Leonard Leo, a right wing power broker, helped pave the way for the “conservative” majority on the US Supreme Court that overturned abortion rights, environmental protections, and affirmative action. He is adamantly opposed to same sex marriage, LGBTQ rights, abortion, and contraception. I see much mischief there. Donald Trump, if elected in 2024, plans to become an “elected king who has authority over everything but can be prosecuted for nothing.” Civil servants will be replaced by MAGA loyalists and religious crusaders who will block or limit access to abortion, abortion pills, contraception, and gender transitions. He will also cut aid to Ukraine and withdraw the US from NATO. “Americans are sleepwalking toward the end of democracy.” This makes me distinctly nervous. I am a naturalized citizen who believes in the values of the nation I joined; I’d hate to see them lost. Folk formerly housed in asylums now are homeless on the streets, committing crimes like murder. When America had slavery “…white slaveholders broke up families, raped Black women, and worked slaves so hard they had a life expectancy of 22.” Those were the good old days? Article on gay rights says the GOP embraces homophobia. Wit & Wisdom: “The history of civilization is largely the history of weapons.” George Orwell. “You fit into me / like a hook into an eye / a fish hook / an open eye.” Margaret Atwood. Cartoon titled WWJD?? (What Would Jesus Do?) shows Jesus saying to push immigrant children back in the water, let them drown, leave that pregnant woman in the razor wire, don’t give them any water, the meek shall inherit my wrath! As the immigrants suffer and die. The real Jesus, of course, would have an opposite reaction. As an agnostic, observing from outside Christianity, I feel that Jesus’ message is being horrendously abused. Folk call America a Christian nation? Many seem to have little or no notion what Jesus preached. A 125 million year old fossil catches two skeletons showing a mammal about as big as a badger biting a dino three times its size. Both were caught in the act by a volcanic eruption. So it seems that mammals were not always victims. Folk need Vitamin B12 for a healthy diet, but vegans run the risk of a deficiency because it comes from bacteria made in the digestive systems of cows and sheep. But supplements made from algae provide it. Yes, I take such supplements. Pooping regularly is good for your brain. Sigh; I poop when my system is ready for it, which may not be every day. Junk food is not only killing us, it is also destroying the planet, practicing mind control, and even making our faces smaller, according to the book Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn’t Food, by Chris van Tulleken. It says that the packaged food companies knowingly created addictive, unhealthy foods in the pursuit of profit. Yes of course; that’s the nature of contemporary business. “The food industry—by recruiting compliant scientists, funding studies, pushing clever marketing messages, and influencing policy—has been able to cook up a self-serving narrative that shifts the blame for the harm their products cause.” Now you know. There are reasons that other nations are passing the USA in the health and longevity of their citizens. And reviews of Oppenheimer and Barbie, mentioned in the prior paragraph. It seems that both are good movies. Article titled “Elon Musk kills the bird.” The gist is that Elon bought Twitter and is destroying it. But I remember decades ago when Microsoft seriously upgraded its software suite, and about two thirds of its users hated it. Why? Because it introduced a radical new feature: the Mouse. I’m not a Windows fan; I use Linux. But in retrospect it seems that Microsoft was right and its balky users were wrong. Folk seem to hate change just because it’s different.  They need to pry open their ignorant minds a bit and give new things a chance. Where Elon is taking the bird remains to be seen, but I understand he has a plan, and he has been highly successful elsewhere. I will watch from the sideline to see which side history vindicates. The concluding article is a reprint from The Atlantic titled “How democracy ends.” It seems that the state of Tennessee was a model of bipartisanship, but is now a Republican test case for how to run a one-party state. MaryLee is from Tennessee, so this interests me. I am wary of one party-ism; it smells too much like tyranny. The Republicans are keeping power via gerrymandering, evidently not caring what the voters prefer. To them the words Democrat and Pedophile are almost synonyms. They are working to silence any opposition.

 

THE WEEK for August 11, 2023 remarks on the gerontocracy: why do octogenarians run Washington? This interests me in part because I am an octogenarian, that is, a person in his eighties. Next year I’ll become a nonagenarian, a person in his nineties. So why are they there? Because they don’t want to give up power, and voters are satisfied to avoid changing the status quo. Cases of leprosy are up in central Florida. It seems we left there just in time. Singers on stage are getting pelted by Skittles, chicken nuggets, and a tampon. I wonder whether it was fresh or used? Bloody Hell. Today small towns have higher crime rates that big ones. Again, did we move to the Los Angeles area just in time? A woman at a restaurant almost choked on a large pearl in a clam she was eating. So she had it mounted on her wedding ring. If a Republican is elected president in 2024, conservative groups will hand him or her a detailed battle plan to end the government’s efforts to promote solar and wind energy, reduce emissions, and slow climate change. I belong to no political party, but don’t support that anti-environment attitude. July 2023 was the world’s hottest month on record, with water temperatures hitting 101F off Florida. Yet again, we moved just in time. Are UFO sightings being covered up? There are those who think so. “The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like, and do what you’d rather not.” Mark Twain. “The trick is to survive success. Anyone can survive failure.” Tony Bennett. Is the Gulf Stream about to stop flowing? Yes, it could happen as soon as 2025. That will be real mischief, as Europe chills. Tesla rigged its onboard software to show misleading battery-range projections. I had understood it was a good electric car; they were faking it? Maverick conservationists in Europe are trying to restore missing species without waiting for approval from bureaucrats, thus “rewilding” nature. For example, “beaver bombing” illegally releases beavers into a waterway and leaves them to do their business of improving the habitat for all kinds of other wildlife. More power to them. Isn’t it too bad when folk have to break the law to help improve the world?

 

THE WEEK for August 18, 2023. the editorial says that Republicans blew their chance to end Donald Trump’s hostile takeover of their party by voting to acquit him of inciting the attempted coup of January 6, out of fear of the MAGA base. Now he faces dozens of felony counts, and the stakes of the 2024 election will be enormous. If he loses, he will die in prison. If he wins, he will go for retribution on his many enemies, those who tried to uphold democracy and fair play. “Buckle up,” it concludes. Meanwhile Republicans are suffering losses because of the abortion issue. “With each new pro-choice victory, Republicans ‘will get angrier and more determined to block the democratic process.’” I would have thought that they would be ashamed to advertise their hostility to democracy, here in the world’s leading democracy. The city of Atlanta mixed up a zip code and mistakenly demolished a man’s house. Now it is suing him for the cost of demolition. Do the administrators have wrecking balls for brains? There has been an explosion of crimes involving ghost guns. That doesn’t mean guns wielded by ghosts, but firearms without serial numbers, so that ownership can’t be traced. AI is changing schooling by enabling cheating by generating impressive essays on any subject in seconds. As a former English teacher I appreciate the problem. Many of my students seemed to be dedicated to learning nothing at all. One university student was caught using AI to write an essay for an ethics course. How’s that for irony? Only half of surveyed students said they considered this cheating. So what the hell do they consider it? Good management? Funeral homes in Central America are offering hot pink coffins for those who want to proclaim their Barbie love even after death. In Britain, looters are running riot, openly grabbing whatever they can, making a career of it. They won’t stop until they’re forced to. Why does this remind me of AI cheaters? There is a wave of gun violence against doctors, nurses, and security staff in US hospitals that puts health care workers at greater risk than workers in any other profession, including law enforcement. Where will this end? I fear and hate the direction this is going. New York City is being overwhelmed by migrants. More than 95,000 arrived in a year. Over a billion dollars has been spent housing and feeding them in hotels, office buildings, tents, parking lots, and former jails, and they are sleeping on the streets, still arriving at roughly 500 a day. Other states have been busing them in, falsely promising them good lives. I’m an immigrant, and I don’t have an answer. The fact is, America is made of immigrants, but it seems the established ones don’t want the new ones to have the same chance. I believe that each new wave was opposed, whether from Ireland, China, Cuba, or wherever, but now they are doing well enough. I wonder if an area the size of Texas could be set aside for them? Article titled “MAGA: Are elites to blame for populism?” Anti-Trumpers assume they are the good guys, but from the perspective of the working class they are the bad guys. Less educated Americans feel under economic, political, cultural, and moral assault, and have rallied around Trump to wage war on the educated class. Ouch! I am, as I said, an immigrant, and a naturalized citizen, and my early life was not fun, but today I associate with the upper class and am anti-Trump. Am I on the wrong side? The article says that if America’s elites do bear some blame, how can we right the wrongs? To boost social mobility, we could raise the federal minimum wage, guarantee universal pre-K and paid family leave, bring back the pandemic-era child tax credit, ensure that contraception and abortion are freely available, and make college more affordable. These, the article says, are the political priorities of anti-Trumpers. It’s got me pegged. “If history tells us anything, it’s that we never learn from history.” Journalist Bob Herbert. “UFOs are somehow not photogenic.” Carl Jung. In 2020 Oregon voters passed a measure to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of hard drugs. This was supposed to reduce overdose rates and help addicts get clean. It’s not working; rates are up. They’re up in other states too. I suspect that an addict is an addict, regardless of the law. “The problem is that Oregon’s decriminalization effort has lots of ‘carrot, but no stick.’” I am chronically bemused by the way so many folk want to zonk out their minds with alcohol and drugs; I prefer to keep my mind clean and functional. But I might feel differently if I were chroqvicgally jobless and homeless. A study suggests that our ancestors didn’t have men hunting and women gathering; hunting may have been a co-ed endeavor. Women had their own weapons and tool kits. Clinton High School in east Tennesee was the first to attempt court-ordered desegregation in 1954; this triggered “relentless bigotry in action.” Atrocities were inflicted on Black children and parents by the town’s white majority. Threats were made against the school’s principal. Finally the National Guard was deployed, and the white supremacists turned to dynamite, bombing bridges, buildings, and the police chief’s house. “Desegregation was a war. We sent children to fight it.” Contrast that to the experience at Westtown Friends School in Pennsylvania, the private Quaker boarding school which I attended 9^th through 12^th grades, 1948-1952, when the first Black students were introduced. I don’t think they were treated perfectly, but there was no overt hostility, no obvious discrimination. Quakers, remember, ran the Underground Railroad that sneaked escaped slaves out of the south in the pre- Civil War years. It was too bad that they didn’t integrate sooner. Americans’ credit card balances passed $1 trillion for the first time. The FCC issued an almost $300 million fine to the robocall operation deluging folk with unwanted solicitations and sometimes threats. Way overdue, in my opinion. We no longer have a landline, in significant part because we were tired of constant junk calls. I doubt we’re alone. Yes, we were on the do-not-call list; it seemed to make no difference. Generation Z has a new idea: the Lazy Girl Job. Find yourself an at-home, low stress job paying sixty to eighty thousand dollars a year so you can enjoy a life of non-work focused safety and comfort. Nice work if you can get it, but as the article points out, if your job can be done from the beach, it probably also be done from Bangalore. I like the illustrative picture of a young woman sitting by a pool with her bare legs raised so you can see to their juncture. That suggests the type of work that can’t be done from a distance. Uri Geller, who supposedly bent a fork simply by staring at it, warred with his critics for decades. Of course it was fakery, but the point was that he was an entertainer who made a good living at it.

 

THE WEEK for August 25, 2023. “Some Trumpified evangelicals are now rejecting the teachings of Jesus as ‘weak.’” Yes, as I said in a prior column, if Jesus returned to the world and saw the things preached and practiced in his name, his tears would flow. At least these evangelicals now openly admit their contempt for Jesus. The Russian ruble, which I think was once equivalent to the US dollar, plunged to less than one cent. The Ukraine war has devastated the Russian economy. Are more shark attacks occurring? Maybe. Global warming is driving cold-water sharks north to new areas. More people are killed annually by cows and bees than by sharks. The GOP has a plan to raise the voting age from 18 to 25, in effect silencing young voters. That plan is going nowhere. An opinion in Substack is that sexism is the basis of hostility to abortion rights. “Conservative efforts to restrict reproductive freedoms are much more about denying women full citizenship than about preserving fetal life.” Yes, that is my impression. Rightist interest in a baby seems to end at birth; thereafter the baby must fend for itself. I also see it as punishment for the supposed sin of engaging in sex. Nothing limits a woman more than having a child. Almost fifty thousand people took their own lives in 2022, the highest number on record. The widening availability of guns is driving the trend. The so-called new right features blatantly racist, sexist, and homophobic speech. Evidence of the corruption of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is growing. Approval of the Supreme Court is now at a record low 40 percent. There needs to be an enforceable code of conduct. “What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is its exact opposite.” Bertrand Russell. As a long term skeptic of many things, I heartily agree. “The highest result of education is tolerance.” Helen Keller. Provided education is not stifled by things like book banning in schools. “Marriage is a fine institution, but I’m not ready for an institution.” Mae West. Cartoon showing a pregnant GOP elephant whose belly is labeled Looming Electoral Defeats. She is saying “Maybe there should be an abortion exception to protect the health of the mother.” Robotaxis are appearing in California. This seems like a good alternative to car ownership. But they are generating traffic incidents, changing course without reason, or simply stopping dead in the street. I know from my experience with my computer and my smartphone that machines can be just as arbitrary as people. But overall, I understand, the robos have a good record; it is driving itself that is dangerous. AI powered dating apps sound interesting, but it seems they aren’t delivering. Maybe human beings are too complicated for the machines to understand. I remember some time back when a sophisticated dating service matched a man with his sister. It was once thought that there were billions of rogue planets in our galaxy, unattached to host stars. No, now it is thought that there are trillions. They are mostly rocky Earth size planets. The more you walk, the better, regardless of your age or gender, up to ten miles or so. My exercise walks are about a mile and a half; should I extend them? I’ll ask my doctor, when I get one here. The cost of comfortable retirement is growing. Now it’s $1.8 million, invested so as to produce $100,000 a year to live on. Maybe I’m unduly skeptical, but I doubt the average person is in that league. No wonder homelessness is an increasing problem. The obituary page lists Alice Ladas, who died at about age 102, who started the hunt for the G-spot, that elusive erectile tissue that can prompt a woman’s orgasm. I don’t know what her own sex life was like, but she must have done something right to live to that age.

 

THE WEEK for September 1, 2023. A proposed solar farm in North Carolina was rejected because residents feared it would suck up all the energy of the sun. I don’t know the state of education in that state, but this offers a hint. Residents in a section of Chicago are asking gangs to confine gun violence to the hours of darkness, to reduce the risk of stray bullets. Maybe the residents of North Carolina should have asked the solar farm to confine its operation to the hours of darkness, to spare the sun. Word from Uganda is that those who die poor will perish in hell. What would Jesus have said to that? He lived a life of poverty. The first tropical storm to hit southern California in 84 years dumped record amounts of rain on the region. Good thing folk here didn’t know that TS Hilary followed me here from Florida, and I had to nudge it east so my new residence on the beach wouldn’t get drenched. Every storm in Florida aimed for me, but I became adept at avoiding them. Hilary should have known better. Article from The New York Times says we should stop calling prostitution sex work, as if it is just another chosen occupation. It isn’t. The vast majority of prostitutes are minors, LGBTQ, addicts, and the poor, who are there from desperation, physically and emotionally abused, and would escape it if they could. I remember enjoying the movie The Blind Side, wherein a white family rescues a Black football player, supporting him and making him a champion. Now it seems that it wasn’t quite like that, and he never received fair compensation. There’s a lawsuit. US public schools have tens of thousands of unfilled teacher positions. I was a teacher, and am not completely surprised; I was glad to leave teaching for full time writing. It wasn’t so much the matter of pay, but being required to teach what I did not believe in, like diagramming sentences, and the attitude of students resistive to learning. I tried my best to follow the rules, but lost out to teachers who knew the rules weren’t feasible for things like discipline. I suffered some traumatic stress syndrome. A record high of 25 percent of US 40-year-olds had never married, as of 2021. Sure, social norms have liberalized, but it seems romantic partnership is declining. When I lost my long-term wife in 2019 I quickly sought another female companion; is that attitude fading? I have some trouble understanding speech on TV. I thought it was hearing loss owing to old age. I pay close attention to the subtitles, but they tend to lag the spoken words by several seconds, forcing me to focus on one or the other. But it seems that many younger folk are suffering similarly, so it’s not just me. I can follow live folk well enough, and have given up trying to use hearing aids. Another problem: “The future promised by AI is being written with stolen words.” As a novelist I object to pirating, which this is. Is there a fifth fierce of nature, in addition to electromagnetism, the strong force, the weak force, and gravity? Evidence is growing that there is. In my fantasy that force is called Magic, but don’t take that seriously. Yet. I see there’s a singer named Oliver Anthony. Something about that name intrigues me. Maybe some day I’ll hear him sing.

 

THE WEEK for September 22, 2023. Forever chemicals are a class of hardy man-made compounds that can take hundreds or even thousands of years to break down. Polyflouroalkyl substances (PFAS) were introduced in the 1950s by chemical giants. They resist water, oil, corrosion, and heat, and are useful to make bacon slide off a Teflon coated frying pan, rain bounce off a Scotchguard sprayed shoe, and burger boxes resist absorption of grease. But they have seeped into our soil, drinking water, the food we eat, and the dust particles we inhale. They can cause structural damage linked to cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. They build up in the liver. Lawsuits are occurring. “Global warming aside, this is probably the most expensive environmental problem we’re ever going to face.” We need to get inventive on how to filter it out of our lives. States that have illegalized abortion are now trying to criminalize the traveling women do to get to states where abortion is legal. “It’s now clear that anti-abortion activists weren’t satisfied with ending Roe v. Wade and supposedly turning the issue over to states. Instead they’re ‘getting bolder’ and ‘taking up yet more creative ways to restrict bodily autonomy.’” Yes, as I hinted above, they seem to want to control women, in effect keeping them “in their place,” barefoot and pregnant, while men rule the world. I’m a man, but this is not my agenda. I believe in equal rights. I don’t like abortion, but don’t seek to impose my preference on others. Regardless, the abortion rate is up, not down. A Delta flight from Atlanta to Barcelona had to turn back when an ailing passenger left a trail of explosive diarrhea down the aisle. I’m glad I wasn’t on that flight; I don’t like getting pooped out. I once lived in Barcelona, when I was five years old. As I recall it was there that I encountered “pea soup fog” where it seemed I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. Fortunately it didn’t smell like poop. Nine years ago Mexican police intercepted several buses carrying students and forced 43 of them into patrol cars. They were never seen again. Now we know that they were killed and their bodies burned up. Public officials were working for a gang. The students had been mistaken for a rival gang. I understand that some USA citizens live in Mexico because it is vastly cheaper, but I’d be nervous about doing so. Donald Trump overstated his wealth by up to $3.6 billion each year from 2011 to 2021, according to a civil lawsuit. He denies any wrongdoing. Elon Musk, a free speech absolutist, has a quarrel with the Anti-Defamation League, feeling that they are responsible for the Twitter / X woes. He says that they falsely accused him and X of being anti-Semitic. I suspect the problem is that when there is absolute free speech, the Jew haters come out of the woodwork, having little regard for the truth. As I have remarked before, free speech is fine, but what about those who use it to spread lies about others? I speak as one who suffered a campaign of lies designed to wash me out as a writer and cover up the misdeeds of a publisher. I survived it, but my career did suffer. It remains a sore point with me. Mischief in Wisconsin, where it seems the GOP has relied on extreme partisan gerrymandering to control things politically despite the Democrats winning about 200,000 more votes. Now the GOP is moving to impeach the judge who survived gerrymandering if she doesn’t recuse herself in gerrymandering cases. Obviously she has a personal interest in the subject, but does that mean she should stay clear and let the will of the voters be overridden? “People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.” A A Milne. “I wonder how girls manage to fall in love. It is easy to make them do it in books. But men are too ridiculous.” George Eliot. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” Steve Jobs. “By the time you’re 80 years old, you’ve learned everything. You only have to remember it.” George Burns. Amen! Cartoons: the Virus, running after a school bus: “Wait for me!” Political surveyor: “Which party’s presumptive nominee that a majority of Americans don’t want running are you most likely to vote against in 2024?” Limestone naturally absorbs carbon, a major global warming pollutant. Now they are working on a system that accelerates that natural process so it takes days instead of years. More power to them! Patients fare better with female surgeons, who spend longer, and there are fewer complications. I hope I never need surgery again, but I’ll keep that in mind. Sand is used for many things, like concrete, glass, and replenishing eroded beaches, but sand mining is posing a significant threat to marine life. It sucks up the tiny organisms that fish and other organisms feed on. Is there an alternative? Extreme heat is a danger for everyone, but worse for schizophrenics, as schizophrenia affects the hypothalamus, which functions essentially as the brain’s thermostat. Boars eat deer truffles, which concentrate radiation, so in Europe boars can be radioactive. A Turkish court sentenced crypto exchange founder Faruk Fatih to 11,196 years in prison for aggravated fraud and money laundering. Pretty long sentence! He fled to Albania after his exchange, Thodex, collapsed. Investors may have lost as much as $2 billion. China is starting to ban Apple iPhones. This will have repercussions. A vast new lithium deposit has been discovered in a volcanic crater along the Nevada-Oregon border. How did it happen? They offered more money for this strategic metal. In the 1930s Henry Ford made a new town in the Amazon to produce rubber. Fordlandia had massive Detroit style warehouses, a clubhouse, hotel, tennis court, swimming pool, golf course, a movie theater, and stately homes. But Ford executives managed to do about everything wrong, and the project failed. Too bad; it was said to be really nice.

 

THE WEEK for October 5, 2023. Donald Trump is being found to have committed wide-ranging fraud. For example his claimed value of his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate of $600 million is a bit of an exaggeration of its $27 million appraised value. The Hollywood writers five moth strike ended with significant gains for the writers. I’m glad. I’m a novelist, not a Hollywood writer, but it’s a related business and I feel for them. Baltimore released a sex offender, and it seems he killed Pava LaPere, founder of EcoMap Technologies, a software firm known for its social impact. Why do they let dangerous criminals go? A Michigan woman dropped her Apple Watch into an outhouse toilet pit, climbed down to retrieve it, and got trapped. Fortunately bystanders heard her cries for help. Moral: don’t climb into a sh*t pit. A Mexican UFO researcher came up with two thousand year old “alien corpses” that bear no relation to human being, having among other things three fingered hands. Scientists are skeptical. So am I. I’d love to see evidence of alien visitation, but I write fantasy without believing in it. 3,000 Americans a day die from drug overdoses. If a similar number died from terrorist attacks there would be uproar, but drugs? It’s a yawn. Pope Pius XII was no saint. He led the Catholic Church from 1939 to 1958. He knew about the slaughter of six million Jews and did nothing. I suspect he feared that Nazi retaliation, if he spoke up, would be ferocious. Could he have done anything about it? I doubt it. My guess is that he hated having to keep silence, but felt he had no choice. US air quality has been improving over the past two decades, but a surge of wildfires is erasing it. 3,360 book bans were implemented in the 2022-2023 school year. More than 40 percent of them occurred in Florida. For shame, Florida! Did you go entirely wrong when I left you? Justice Clarence Thomas took a private jet to speak at a private dinner, paid for by the conservative Koch network, and did not list it on his gift disclosure forms for that year. Senator Bob Menendez, D-NJ, was found to have about half a million dollars in cash and gold bars hidden in his house. Corruption knows no party lines. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” WB Yeats, I think referring to World War Two figures, but it’s still true today. Nearly 30 percent of American children now live with only one parent or none. Compared with their two parent peers, they’re less likely to finish high school, more likely to become single parents themselves, and up to five times as likely to spend childhood in poverty. This is disproportionately hurting children of color. Authors are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement, as it gets more blatant. More power to them. Earth’s ability to sustain human life is in peril. Six of nine planetary boundaries have already been exceeded: climate change, biodiversity, freshwater availability, land use, biogeochemical balance (which measures nutrient runoff), and novel entities (which encompass microplastics and radioactive waste). Two of the remaining three, air pollution and ocean acidification, were deemed at risk of being breached. The only one out of danger was atmospheric ozone, which has recovered thanks to decades of global efforts to phase out chlorofluorocarbons. It’s not a guarantee of disaster, but it should be a wake-up call. We need to cut the risk, now, or else. Alzheimer’s kills brain cells by making them self-destruct. Flamingos now fly in many states. Hurricane Idalia blew them off course. With luck, they will become established in a wider area. They are beautiful birds. The Book of the Week is The Iliad, by Homer, a new translation of a 2,000 plus year old classic about the Greek siege of Troy, by Emily Wilson. I read an earlier translation in a high school class, then wrote a numerous parody “The Volleyballiad” which brought down the class and I think, in long retrospect, predicted my eventual success as a humorous fantasy writer. That paper is long since lost, but I remember the conclusion describing how, after the game, many were the insults that still crossed o’er the ever-silent net. Regardless, I preferred its sequel, The Odyssey. Did you knew that the warrior Odysseus, on his rambling way home to his wife after the war, dallied for twenty years with the enchantress Circe after she turned his men into swine? She must have been enchanting in bed, too. Maybe Emily Wilson will tackle that next. Modern women will surely be interested in Circe’s seductive secrets, even those who don’t regard men as swine. Another recommended book is Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close by Hannah Carlson. In the old days, both men and women carried purses. Then, roughly 500 years ago, pockets were invented, and they changed history. Sometimes women were left pocketless, to limit their ability to carry money and spend it without their husbands’ approval. Why does it occur to me that those who long for the Good Old Days may be secretly sexist? Home prices hit another record high in July. The median home price in the US is now over $400,000. About 45 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 are living with family, roughly the same level as the 1940s. Do you think they might be having trouble buying their own houses? Seized Russian yachts can cost thousands of dollars a week to maintain. One $120 million yacht has an infinity pool that transforms into a dance floor. Too bad young Americans can’t go to live there. The cost of auto insurance is ballooning. Cars, like houses, may be getting out of reach of the average family.

 

Tennessee Magazine, November 2023 relays an interesting theory about coming of age: the closer we are at age 40 to the person we were at age 14, the happier and more fulfilled we will be. That would put me at ninth grade. I graduated that grade as the shortest and smallest person in my class, male or female, and was scholastically undistinguished. By age 40 I was an undistinguished novelist with a wife and two children, being blacklisted because I had tried to protest getting cheated by a publisher. Not exactly happy and fulfilled. But in the next five years things changed, at each age, and I was on my way to vindication and best-sellerdom. I was always a slow starter, so maybe I do fit the profile. Interesting fact: the negotiated end of World War 1 occurred at the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of the 11^th month of 1918, remembered as Armistice Day, later renamed Veteran’s Day. I’m a veteran, because I served two years in the US Army, victim of the draft, but it was in peace time so it hardly counts. Still, the 14 / 40 parallel is an intriguing notion.

 

Let me conclude with an internet meme we encountered: “Two dyslexics walked into a bra.”

 

PIERS