Hi Piers

 HI-

We continue here, perched in our apartment overlooking the beach at the edge of the broad Pacific Ocean. But we hardly get out, because we’re still trying to get unpacked and organized. We order deliveries galore. Meanwhile I have written the first chapter of Xanth #50, working title Limbo. That features  the protagonist Aura, introduced in the prior novel, whose vicious migraine headaches can generate auras that ignite nearby dry brush or cut into attacking dragons. She has them under control now, which helps. She’s a Lips tribe woman who can kiss a male into instant love slavery, which can also help when a rapacious troll attacks. A smart male of any species doesn’t mess with a Lips woman. She visits Limbo, where time is irrelevant, and meets Chameleon as she was in Xanth #1 A Spell for Chameleon. The two become friends, and we learn previously unknown things about Chameleon’s relationship with Doris, a ghost of Castle Roogna, who is quite a spirit in her own right. That’s just the beginning of a wild adventure involving many prior Xanth characters, including demons and Demons. As you know, the ratio of the second to the first is that of a galaxy to a grain of sand. But no need to bore you further.

 

I continue to explore my smart phone. I like some of the comics, such as Toonhole, but I think my favorite is RedDot; there’s just something about that woman with the triangular face and the naughty attitude, though I can’t claim to understand all of the punchlines, being from the wrong century. I play Free Cell and Solitaire, though turned off by the constant intrusive ads. I like some of the astronomy articles, and the indications of hidden personality traits.

 

MaryLee and I caught what feels like a common cold, not a serious illness, just a bit of sore throat, runny nose, congestion, tiredness, and coughing, but enough to dampen the holiday spirit. The thing about this one that differs from prior colds I’ve had is that it made me feel cold all the time, despite bundling up with five layers of clothing. With Covid and flu lurking, even a mild illness makes us nervous. What seems minor could be the prelude to what isn’t, especially for seniors.

 

I wrote a poem for our holiday. It isn’t much, but is what it is. “First Xmas at round Beach” “We traveled far to find our home/ And really hope no more to roam./ We like the flavor of the beach/ Is satisfaction now in reach?/ As we go MaryLee on our way/ It apPiers we’ll have our holiday.” And yes, per the holiday syndrome, I miss departed members of my household.

 

My mind constantly wanders, sometimes finding itself in odd places. As the transition of years occurred, I remembered a song from college days. It starts “I looked to the east and I looked to the west, and I saw the gray goose a-coming.” The refrain is “Take off your coat and roll up your sleeves; you’re yearning in your heart for trouble. Take of your coat and roll up your sleeves; you’re yearning in your heart for trouble I believe.” Now I’m curious what that gray goose was up to, and what the trouble was about. So I looked it up on the phone—and it’s not there. Apparently the channels of my mind are too devious for the internet. That’s par for my course; I don’t think the way real folk do.

 

Back magazines. My subscriptions have been running out, lost in the shuffle of moving, and I will have to resubscribe for the new address. Maybe then I will be able to get more current.

 

The Westonian, the magazine of Quaker Westtown School, where I graduated in 1952 as a completely undistinguished nobody. It’s possible that I later became the most successful member of my class, but that was another era. The Quakers, officially known as the Religious Society of Friends, are I think one of the better Christian sects, and I respect them though I never joined any religion. They don’t have ministers or priests, believing that God needs no middleman between him and ordinary believers. Quaker Meetings are silent until a participant, prompted by the spirit, stands to relay the message he has received. In my day older Quakers used the plain speech, with Thee and Thou, did not touch alcohol, did not smoke, gamble, swear, play cards, dance or even point directly with their fingers. I think they have liberalized a bit since; there were school dances. I don’t do many of these things. I see that one of my classmates died; we are after all older octogenarians. This issue shows the big picture I remember in the dining room, titled “The Giant,” that displays six children at the beach looking up at the clouds and seeing a maybe fifty foot tall giant with a club striding across the water, the essence of a storm that adults somehow can’t see. Children are aware of a lot that adults aren’t, from the Monster Under the Bed to the lurking Skeleton in the Closet. Only when they learn to pretend that such things don’t exist are they accepted as adults.

 

AAA Living, a magazine for traveling has pictures of scenes around the world, such as a nice river valley in Norway, tall palm trees in Palm Beach, Florida, the Vinoy Resort & Golf Club in St. Petersburg Florida, a girl running in the surf at the beach in Daytona Beach, Florida, a Wild Animal Sanctuary with tigers, a desert canyon trail, the evocative shore in Puerto Rico, a nice house in snow, and sensible articles on other subjects. I suspect they don’t yet know that I moved from Florida to California.

 

IG Living, the letters standing for Immune Globulin, which was treatment for my first wife, Carol, as she slowly declined. It enabled her to walk and function again. Editorial on “Learning to Cope with Sadness and Grief,” says that depression is one of the things that a person diagnosed with a chronic illness must handle. Yes, I remember. An article reviews the classic stages of grief, which are Denial (this can’t be true!), Anger (How could God let this happen?!), Bargaining (if only we had seen a doctor sooner), Depression (my whole life is ruined), and finally Acceptance (I can live with these limitations). I don’t believe that Carol and I went through these stages; we were more realistic. As I see it, our entire life consists of such stages. But this and the other articles are surely useful for those afflicted. It’s a good magazine.

 

THE WEEK June 30, 2023. The cover has a picture of a bull happily smelling a flower; growing optimism about the US economy. We are slowly recovering from the ravages of the pandemic. A mention of Juneteenth, honoring the freeing of the last American slaves June 19^th, 1865. It seems that Republicans generally resent it, privately wishing that the suppression of Black folk had not ended. There have even been nineteen shootings of celebrants. A University of Cincinnati student who used the term “biological woman” was given a zero for her paper. And how will we distinguish live women from realistic robot women in the future? I’d have given the zero to the one who graded that paper. Two Americans died of likely carbon monoxide poisoning at a five star resort in Mexico, where managers had disabled detectors because they were going off frequently and disturbing the guests. I stare at such items and marvel at the stupendous stupidity of such folk.  Egypt’s government went to social media to denounce an exhibit in a new Dutch museum that called Egypt “a part of Africa.” It seems they think Egypt is part of the Arab world. Affirmative action in America has not been much of a success, because it ignores class. Upper class Blacks benefit, not regular Blacks. There is a direct relationship between gun ownership and gun deaths. The New York metropolitan area, with low gun ownership, is the country’s safest region in terms of gun deaths. The Deep South, with high gun ownership, is more dangerous. There has been a spectacular decline in sexual activity in France, as folk watch online porn instead. The one sexual act that’s on the rise is masturbation. Quotes from the Wit & Wisdom feature: “I’m so old, the first time I had sex it was in the back of a chariot.” Joan Rivers. “The day you die is just like any other, only shorter.” Samuel Beckett. Construction workers in Texas are suffering heat related deaths as temperatures surpass 100 degrees. Local rules in Austin and Dallas required that they be given brief water breaks every four hours. So Governor Greg Abbot signed a bill overriding those rules. I believe I have remarked before that if Satan were to make a serious effort to incorporate the physical realm into Hell, he would work through the Republican Party. Maybe he’s already doing it. Why did Donald Trump take Top Secret documents to his Florida Mar-a-Lago estate? One theory is that he has a toddler’s conception of property, and thought that everything that passed through the White House belonged to him. So he kept the documents, even after returning to civilion life. The Supreme Court upheld the Indian Child Welfare Act, ICWA, which prioritizes placing such children within their tribe or another Native American family. That preserves their culture as well as their bodies. To gain some perspective, you might consider how you would like to see your children adopted by Chinese or African families, becoming part of their culture instead of the American culture. For their own good, of course. The Southern Baptists have banned women pastors at any level, making sure that modern liberalism won’t get a foot in the door, leading to horrors like gay marriage, premarital sex, and other forms of sexual immorality. They mean to make sure that it continues to be a man’s world and that women know their inferior place. There’s a cartoon showing children in a tree house with a sign saying NO GURLS ALLOWED, and the parents saying “Future Southern Baptists.” San Francisco is in trouble. This once thriving city is suffering a plague of homelessness, open drug use, empty streets, and rampant crime. Naturally conservatives blame this on the area’s liberalism. Now that I live in the Los Angeles region, I hope that mischief doesn’t reach here, but there are signals that it’s eyeing us. Being in space too long harms the brain by allowing the ventricles filled with cerebrospiral fluid there to get larger. Our brains, like our bodies, are designed to function in gravity. The planet’s most endangered animal, the vaquita, a type of small porpoise, is getting caught in illegal fishing gill nets and is near extinction. Then the Mexican navy dumped in 200 concrete blocks filled with hooks to snare gill nets, pretty well wiping them out. Now the vaquitas seem on the verge of survival. The Book of the Week is My Friend Anne Frank: The Inspiring and Heartbreaking True Story of Best Friends Torn Apart and Reunited Against All Odds, by Hannah Pick-Goslar. Anne Frank was a Jewish girl about four years my senior whose family went into hiding to escape the Nazis in Germany. Alas, they were betrayed, and Anne died in a concentration camp. Hannah survived, and this is her book. Such histories have potency for me, because my family was on the last ship out of Europe in 1940 as the Nazis took over. The Spanish dictatorship had “disappeared” my father, but he smuggled out a note, and they let him go on condition that he leave and never return. I don’t like dictatorships or bigoted rightists, though I’m probably better off in America than I would have been in Spain or England. Daniel Ellsberg died. He’s the one who leaked the Pentagon Papers, invoking the wrath of the Nixon administration. He was punished for telling the truth about the Vietnam War that our government wanted to hide. I like America, but it does have ugliness like this.

 

THE WEEK September 8, 2023. Black students at Florida’s Bunnell Elementary school were called into a special assembly and warned that they could end up being killed or go to jail if they got low test scores. Good thing I wasn’t there as a foreigner who took three years to make it through first grade. Hans Niemann, a US chess grandmaster, was accused of cheating by using vibrating anal beads to get messages. That’s the first I’ve heard of a literal a**hole. A computer simulation of a human settlement on Mars indicates that neurotics would fare poorly. Okay, I’ll erase that Mars visit from my bucket list. A church pastor in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, wanted to rid a neighborhood of gang members. He assembled hundreds of church members armed with sticks and machetes and marched them into a lawless shantytown to battle the criminals who controlled it. The gang opened up with machine guns, killing at least ten people. Why did God allow this? Libyan foreign minister Najla Mangoush met with her Israeli counterpart in Rome, trying to normalize relations. Libyans protested so violently that she had to flee to Turkey. Evidently Libyans don’t want to get along. In Loch Ness, Scotland, the celebrated hunt for the Monster ended with no success. Why am I not surprised? When will the astronomers admit similar failure locating Dark Matter? Women at a US scientific research center in Antarctica face persistent, sometimes violent sexual harassment. One woman was fired after she reported being sexually assaulted. More than half the women there suffer harassment or assault. If I ran the world, I’d kick out the men and make it an entirely female outpost. The Biden administration has announced a $1.2 billion investment in carbon capture. Carbon dioxide is a waste product mostly from the use of fossil fuels that is causing global warming and horrendous weather events like hurricanes and heat waves. It’s hard to stop the fossil fuel industry, as we do need to heat our houses and drive our cars and fly our airplanes, and a viable alternate fuel is not yet evident. So the focus is on getting the carbon out of the air. If we could remove it as fast as we put it in, we might achieve a balance. But removing it is expensive, costing from $250 to $600 per metric ton. If there were a breakthrough bringing it down to $100 per ton, it would still cost about $780 billion to lower the atmospheric concentration of CO by just one part per million. We need to lower it by about 400 parts per million. So it’s a challenge. They have just discovered a technique that costs only $39 per metric ton, the cheapest yet. So there is progress, but is it fast enough to prevent us from careening into the hellish fire first? The issue is in doubt. Now purported Christians are killing LGBTQ folk in the name of Jesus. As I have remarked before, I am agnostic, subscribing to no religion, but I do respect the principles Jesus espouses in the Bible. As far as I know, he had nothing against gay or sexually different folk, and certainly did not support hating even your enemies. The one who hates and kills in the name of Jesus has to be a hypocrite. A teen fishing in a Minnesota lake hooked a wallet containing $2,000 in cash. He found a business card and returned it to the owner, refusing a cash reward. I know nothing else about him, but I like that teen. Wit & Wisdom quote: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people.” Heinrich Heine. The Maldives is an Indian Ocean archipelago of more than 1,000 islands off south India. More than 80 percent of the land sits less than a meter above sea level. Climate change is causing the sea to rise. So they are constructing a city that can float on the sea with streets, playgrounds, schools, restaurants, and housing for 20,000 people. The war between AI and schools is intensifying. When I was a high school teacher the majority of my students seemed dedicated to learning nothing at all. Now with AI they can do that better. I hope that some few will realize that they can do better in life if they know something, and try to use AI to learn instead of to cheat. Stauer is advertising a Retrograde Watch where the hands travel only halfway, from top to bottom, then back to the top, covering 12 hours per sweep. Interesting. It seems that this style existed in the 1920s; I don’t know whether that’s why they crashed economically. They have finally sequenced the Y chromosome, which is the smallest of the 24 that make up a human being, but also it seems the most challenging. In the process they discovered 41 new protein coding genes. It seems that men are more complicated than supposed. Covid has long term effects on most folk who get it. They are at increased risk of fatigue, diabetes, blood clots, and lung and kidney dysfunctions two years later. They have a 250 percent higher risk of losing their sense of smell and a 27 percent higher risk of stroke. I have had Covid once or twice—I flinched on the nose poke the second time and it was inconclusive—while MaryLee never showed symptoms but has suffered long Covid since. So we’re interested, not being sure just how much of our minds remain. If readers later note a drastic decline in the quality of Xanth novels #47, #48, #49, and 50, blame Covid. I don’t believe there is any decline, but of course I might be unable to see it with a damaged brain. I can’t smell well, and MaryLee suffers surges of smelling boiling gasoline with onions cooking in it. Babies who spend too much time watching screens, such as TV, video games, tablets, and smartphones, suffer delayed communication skills. Don’t use a screen as a babysitter. Review of Wifedom, by Anna Funder, a book about George Orwell’s wife of nine years, exposes him of cheating on her and erasing her contributions from the record. She appears to have been an excellent wife, while he appears to have been a shit of a husband. I liked his novels Animal Farm and 1984, but this bothers me. I like to think of a good writer as a good person, though I know there’s no certainty. Organized crime is raiding stores, openly grabbing things off their shelves and selling them on Amazon and eBay. Authorities seem to prefer to ignore this. Stores are shutting down, unable to operate. Much of it may be internal theft done by employees. Regardless, if you like to shop, you may soon be out of luck. Silicon Valley magnates have been mysteriously buying up land. Now we know why: they have a $900 million plan to build an ideal entire city from scratch. What does Olive Garden do better than any other business? It brings people from different classes together. Normally people at the top and bottom of society don’t mix. Here they do.

 

THE WEEK September 29, 2023. Lindsey Stallworth went fossil hunting and found a 34 million year old whale skull. Who knows what you might find in your back yard, if you only look? Two librarians in the town of Sterling, Kansas, were fired for displaying rainbow colored autism acceptance signs that the library board mistook for pro LGBTQ material. They are suing. More power to them. Even if it had been for a LGBTQ theme, that’s no justification for firing. As I have remarked before, the world seems not to be run by the Illuminati, but by the Ignoranti. In Massachusetts there’s a bill to ban the sale and use of armed robots and drones. I hope they don’t also ban the sale and use of the robot wives I understand Elon Musk is developing. Would they be better than the real thing? Don’t tell my wife I asked that. Storage tanks in a distillery in the Portuguese town of Levira burst, causing a river of red wine on the streets. I passed through Portugal briefly in 1940, so I missed it by about 83 yearns. Ah, well. Robot waiters are apparently losing jobs to other robots. China produces them cheaper. A 23 year old student from India was hit by a Seattle police officer driving 63 mph in a 25 mph zone. “She is dead,” he said and burst out laughing. “She had limited value.” I have said before that I come from a prior century and don’t yet properly understand the foibles of this one. What is remotely funny about this? A hundred million dollar stealth fighter jet disappeared during a routine training flight near Charleston, South Carolina. These planes can take off and land vertically, like a helicopter. They finally found the wreckage. Maybe they should invest a few more dollars in safety features. Over 114,000 migrants have crossed the Mediterranean to Italy this year, and Italy means to do something about it. As an immigrant from Europe I sympathize with immigrants, and wish there were a way to fix their corrupt and dangerous homelands so they didn’t have to flee. Too often it is the victims of oppression that get punished, rather than the perpetrators. Yes, I made good in America, but I wouldn’t have if our family had been shipped right back to Spain, where my father would have been imprisoned by the dictatorship that evidently didn’t understand feeding hungry children, the victims of war. I think we need some sort of global reform to weed out the troublemakers, and I don’t mean the immigrants. Mexican drug lord Ovidio Guzman, was extradited to the US. He exerted his authority through murder and torture, such as throwing victims alive into a cage of tigers. That’s the kind of troublemaker I’d like to see eliminated. But I fear he will only be replaced by cohorts just as bad. In Libya dams failed, with devastating flooding, because maintenance had been deferred for years. The citizens blamed the corrupt government and burned  down the mayor’s house. Chinese Li Shangfu disappeared. When you get in trouble there, it’s serious. In Iran there were peaceful demonstrations honoring Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for wearing her hijab (headscarf) wrong and died in police custody. 500 people were killed in the past year, thousands arrested, and seven executed. Again, if you’re a woman in Iran, you’d better know your place, or else. Feral cats are mischief in Canberra, Australia—I keep wanting to spell it Cranberry—as each year they kill 1.5 billion native mammals, birds, reptiles, and frogs, decimating the wildlife. Now they must be kept indoors, and hunters will be allowed to shoot feral cats. My guess is that the problem will ease. Republican firebrand Rep Lauren Boebert got kicked out of a Denver performance of Beetlejuice for vaping and fondling her date’s groin as he groped her breasts. I don’t react with any horror or outrage, though I don’t endorse her politics; it was all perfectly normal, except that it was public. Why not show your passion in public? I think it’s society that has untenable hangups. Since the 1970s China has doubled the size of its economy every decade. 800 million Chinese have been lifted out of poverty, and the nation has been transformed into a manufacturing colossus and America’s only superpower competitor. But there are problems. China’s debt is now four times the size of its GDP—that’s Gross Domestic Product. Its unemployment rate for 16 t, 24 year olds is now a record 21.3 percent. Why is this happening? Partly because of the three year Zero Covid policy, which they finally abandoned. Lockdowns in the name of health strangled production and led to mass layoffs. Population is shrinking, which is surely good for the world but has local complications. Meanwhile in America abortion bans have struck fear in young women about getting pregnant, because if something goes wrong they won’t be able to get out of it. The child poverty rate more than doubled in 2022 when the enhanced child tax credit expired. Aid to poor families helps children grow up to be healthier, better educated, and more economically self sufficient. But politicians hardly care, as children can’t vote. “Wit & Wisdom” “It’s not the answer that enlightens, but the question.” Eugene Ionesco. The JWST—a suggested identity for the letters is Just Wonderful Space Telescope—has discovered signs of life on another planet. It is about 120 light years away and eight times the size of Earth, and has some molecules in its atmosphere that could indicate life. It could be a false alarm, and we can’t just stop by on a weekend excursion, but it does seem likely that there is life elsewhere, and this just might be viable. Sitting too long at your office desk is linked to an increased risk of dementia. Ouch! I sit long hours as I write a novel. Of course my critics would say that evidence of my dementia goes back half a century. Fortunately a subsequent study indicates that exercise, at least 22 minutes a day, does compensate. Three to five thousand years ago our brains shrank. They think that the driving force was the development of complex societies, which meant that we began relying on collective intelligence rather than individual knowledge. We seem to be as smart as ever, just more efficient, just as computers have shrunk from room size to pocket size. In the obituaries there is Lisa Lyon, 1953-2023, who became a champion body builder. Yet she lived only seventy years, so all that exercise didn’t contribute much to her longevity. I exercise for my health and longevity, hence my interest.

 

THE WEEK October 27, 2023. In Illinois six year old Wadea ran to meet the landlord for a hug as he burst into the apartment. Instead the man stabbed him 26 times screaming “You Muslims must die!” It seems he listened to conservative radio reports on the war in Israel and Gaza and grew angry enough to kill a child.      I believe in free speech, but what of the speech that causes listeners to savagely murder children? In Louisiana lawsuits have been filed to limit the Bidet administration’s authority to reduce carbon emissions. I presume that they would rather see the world end tomorrow than give up fossil fuel profits today. Massachusetts is at a breaking point, overwhelmed by about 23.000 people needing shelter, half of them children, many from Haiti. As I said above, I sympathize with immigrants, but would prefer to see the source of the mischief addressed. Former President Trump said his first Amendment rights were trampled by a gag order. But what about vilifying public servants who are simply doing their jobs? Dolly Parton is 77. She doesn’t look it. Not that I object to age, being 89 myself. Hamas has been making the news. There’s a page on it. It was founded in 1987, and now controls the Gaza Strip. It constantly attacks Israel, which retaliates. The result is that thousands of innocent people die, and Israel gets the blame, which seems to be much of the point. Beneath it lies the Metro, a network of tunnels that allows Hamas militants to to move around the territory. Israil could use “bunker buster” bombs to destroy it, but that would leave huge craters and cause mass civilian casualties, as well as killing hostages. “As bad as Gaza is aboveground, underground is much worse.” Meanwhile the war in Ukraine is another kind of mischief. The US supports Ukraine with ammunition, making 29,000 shells a month. But Ukraine is firing 6,000 shells a day. A Missouri man traveled 39 miles down the Missouri River in a hollowed out pumpkin he grew himself. It was sort of cold and slimy, but he set a new record for travel by gourd. The pumpkin was originally 1,208 pounds. A passenger brought a box holding a bunch of animals on a flight from Bangkok to Taipei. A giant albino rat and a foot long otter got out and triggered panic. The rat bit one of the flight attendants as they tried to catch the animals. Now officials are wondering how the animals were smuggled through security. High school scores on the ACT college admissions test have dropped to their lowest since 1991. I suspect that the home schooling of pandemic times is responsible; few kids really study when not supervised. Supreme Court justices interrupt female lawyers far more often than male ones. We are a sexist culture. Wit & Wisdom: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.” Stephen Hawking. In Israel and Ukraine we are getting a horrific glimpse of what a post-American world would look like, says Noah Rothman. The deliberate torture, rape and slaughter of civilians is an indication. We have heard much about long Covid; my wife MaryLee has it, and it produces passing symptoms as described above. I was perhaps lucky enough to have “short” Covid once or twice, with no apparent recurring symptoms. Now we learn that people can develop a “long cold” after catching common respiratory viruses. Common symptoms include coughing, stomach pain, and diarrhea. People can develop “long flu” too. Lady frogs don’t necessarily long to mate. Maybe one reason is the “mating ball,” where so many males pile on that she can end up drowning. She has ways to say no; usually she rolls her body in the water, making the connection difficult. Half the time she mimics the noise a male frog makes when another male tries, which might translate to “Get off my back, you pervert!” Sometimes she simply plays dead. These tricks work about half the time. I don’t know whether human ladies try similar tricks. If you come home and find your wife lying apparently dead, it may be just her way of saying “Not tonight, dear.” American median wealth—that is, when half the folk are above it and half below it—has risen to $192,900. The median for the top 10% of households is $3.8 million. Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour grossed $126 million on its opening weekend, enough to make it the top grossing concert film ever. Bachelorette party buses are now big time. Top destinations like Nashville are getting overwhelmed. Now they have sequenced the Neandertal genome. This is really a cousin species to us. Elizabeth Hand is a bestselling fantasy and horror writer I haven’t read. She lists her favorite books by other authors, and such lists generally strike me as more meaningful than traditional reviews. She recommends The Girl in a Swing by Richard Adams, among others, published in 1980. A shy Englishman falls for and marries a captivating, mysterious woman. “As a bonus, the novel features perhaps the most frightening phone call in literature.” I think I want to read that novel, preferably before I receive such a phone call.

 

THE WEEK November 3, 2023. “Belief in the Big Lie—and support for Trump’s coup—is THE litmus test for leadership in the GOP,” Just as insanity may effectively take a person out before the physical end, so may it be for a political party. In my day Republicans seemed to prefer to lose with Richard Nixon than win with a better candidate. Today they seem to want to destroy their party rather than reform it. I, for one, will be glad to witness that crash; they don’t seem to have much left that’s worth preserving. The hunter TJ Watt discovered in Flores Island, B.C. a 1,000 year old, 150 foot high, 17 foot trunk diameter red cedar tree. Belle, a 14 year old British cat, was awarded the Guinness World Record for the loudest purr. A dense super fog blanked Interstate 55 in Louisiana, causing a fiery pileup of more than 165 vehicles with 63 folk injured and at least eight dead. In my observation, Americans don’ slow down when visibility diminishes; they just plow ahead as if eager to join the deadly party. Tens of thousands of women in Iceland went on strike to protest the gender pay gap. Iceland has been talked about as if it is an equality paradise, but it has a 21 percent wage gap. Now if the job is loading hundred pound bales onto ships I can see paying men more, but if it is typing office memos it should be even. Ed Currie likes hot spice. Regular jalapeno registers at about 5,000 Scoville Heat Units, and a habanero tops 100,000; the Carolina Reaper is 1.64 million units. Currie had grown a crossbreed he calls Pepper X, at 2.69 million units. To each his own taste. Illegal child labor is rising in America. There’s a shortage of adult workers, and more than 250,000 unaccompanied minors have entered the US in the past two years. So what are the states doing? They are loosening child labor protections, mostly in GOP led states. Pro-life indeed. Antisemitic and anti LGBTQ bias crimes have jumped sharply in the US last year, along with a wider rise in hate crimes. Leftist students and professors praise the execution and rape of Israeli citizens as righteous anticolonial “resistance.” They condemn Israel’s strikes on Hamas while ignoring the murder of 1,400 Israelis. This sure as hell isn’t my brand of liberalism. Where is compassion for innocents on either side? It reminds me of a sequence on Orwell’s 1984 where the converts to the Resistance promised to do the awfullest things, to support it, like throwing acid in a baby’s face. Then later, when the interrogator asked them whether they regarded themselves as morally superior to the opposition, and they agreed that they did, he played back a recording of their horrendous promises. Point made. If you support despicable actions in the name of your cause, it’s hardly a noble cause. We need to get the H off fossil fuels, yes, but there’s another aspect: transmission. Your zero pollution power source is no good if it can’t reach the common users. As much as 50 million miles of power lines need to be built globally. Otherwise it’s like building the fastest and most beautiful car possible but forgetting to build the roads for it. Science is closer to understanding how our 170 billion brain cells work. There are 3,300 types of brain cells, ten times as many as were previously known, and far more than found elsewhere in the body. A comprehensive map is growing, and maybe soon we’ll get the picture. And they are talking to sleepers. “Lucid dreamers” can control and direct their dreams, but now it is becoming possible with regular sleepers. So if you’re sound asleep, and a man approaches and says “Joe sent me,” don’t brush him off. He may show you into fabulous dreams you wouldn’t want your wife to know about. Flu shots may reduce your risk of dementia, not to mention protecting you from the flu. The ancients ate seaweed. This may be a food of the future too, as the sea has resources that swamp those of the land. Maybe, as with Star Trek, seaweed can be fed into a converter and produce anything you want, from coffee to candy. No one would have to eat ground up cow carcasses any more. Oh, does my vegetarian agenda show? Best books chosen by Tan Eng, a Malaysian writer, includes the 1980 novel Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess. He feels it has the best opening line ever: “It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me.” I had to look up catamite; it means a boy lover. I think that man is in trouble. The average sale price of a home in Palm Beach topped $20 million, making it the most expensive market in the country. Palm Beach must consist of multi-millionaires. The average tip percentage in the US is 17.94. In California it’s 22.69 percent, the highest in the country.

 

THE WEEK November 10 2023. Generation Z, born 1998 to 2014, wants less romance and fewer sex scenes in Hollywood films. That’s certainly a change from the youth of my day, circa 1950. Britain’s Covid inquiry heard shocking testimony that former Prime Minister Boris Johnson believed older people should just accept that they might die of the virus and allow the young to continue normal, lockdown-free lives. As an 89 year old man at prime risk, I am not completely comfortable with that. Yes, human overpopulation of the world is a prime cause of mischief, but taking out the oldest would hardly suffice to cure it. Everyone over 20 would have to go. A hospice nurse, Hadley Vlahos, says “I have spent enough time around people who are close to 100, over 100, to know that once you start burying your children, you’re ready. I’ve never met someone 100 or older who still wants to be alive.” That’s a sobering thought, even for me, close to 90. I have lost two parents, one wife, and one daughter, apart from friends. I’m not altogether at ease about outliving them. But I do still want to be alive; I have things remaining to accomplish in my life. I am reminded of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which concludes “The woods are lovely, dark and deep/ But I have promises to keep/ And miles to go before I sleep/ And miles to go before I sleep.” I do indeed. Page on malaria, which remains one of the world’s most deadly diseases. It kills about 620,000 people a year, most of them children. In recent decades the death toll has been trending downward, but now it is rising. It is transmitted by mosquitoes, and is a single cell parasite that can fatally block the flow of blood to organs. Why is it increasing now? The parasites and mosquitoes that carry them do best in hot, humid, rainy climates, which are facilitated by global warming. Can we eliminate the mosquitoes? That’s hard to do, as they are evolving to bypass the measures we take, and they are a critical part of many ecosystems, pollinating flowers and providing a major food source for birds, bats, fish, frogs, and more. Politics: the MAGA movement has radicalized millions of Americans. Nearly half of Republicans believe that we need a leader who is willing to break some rules to fix what’s wrong, and are ready to resort to violence to fix it. They say that God intended America to be a white, Christian society. You can smell the lurking bigotry ready to target Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Jews, gays and others. Jesus would weep. Abortions: with the change in the law so that states are now free to ban them, you might think they would decline. No, they are increasing. “State abortion bans will never end the demand for abortions; they can only punish women who seek control over their reproductive lives.” I suspect that punishment is much of the underlying point, keeping women in their place, barefoot and pregnant. British column by a woman says “Women like me have always expected, nay hoped, that at a certain age new partners would offer us genial companionship, not athletics in bed.” Things like Viagra are ruining that. I’m an old man; I like the athletics in bed. Nigeria: Nigerian girls are being kept as slaves in “baby factories,” systematically raped, impregnated, and forced to give up their babies for sale. Taylor Swift is now worth an estimated $1.1 billion. It seems that her song are popular. Jewish and Muslim Americans have experienced a surge in harassment, intimidation, and assaults since Hamas October 7 attack on Israel. Any pretext will do for the bigots. Wit & Wisdom: “Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But I repeat myself.” Mark Twain. Cartoon shows GOP men pushing more guns with fewer restrictions, labeled “America’s mental health crisis.” Twitter: Musk’s plan was to shift away from advertising and toward paid subscriptions, but users aren’t going for it. Yes, users anywhere hate change. Too bad. It would be better if we exercised our minds and welcomed change. In Streaming Tips it recommends Pluto, calling it a stunning anime that gets deeply philosophical as it addresses the mystery of who or what is behind the killing of seven of the world’s most powerful robots. Damn! I would have liked to see that. But it was long gone before I ever saw the magazine. More than 11 percent of the world’s billionaires have held or run for political office. Americans aren’t ready for the health care crisis. Some one turning 65 today has a 70 percent chance of needing long term care, which Medicare doesn’t cover. This is mischief. Are they going to wind up on the streets? Half a century ago caimans—related to alligators and crocodiles—were brought to the US from South America for the leather. Then some of them got loose. Now the problem is getting rid of them. It reminds me of the saying “See you later, alligator,” and the response “In a while, crocodile.” To which I mentally add “Say when, caiman.”

 

So farewell to you alligators and crocodiles, from this caiman, as 2023 expires.

 

PIERS