A speculative mind

  A few months ago I read the intelligent fantasy The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett and enjoyed it. Now I have finished A Drop of corruption which is the second book in the series. The narrator is Dinios (Din) Kol. He works for Ana Dolabra. Together they are the equivalent of a police detective unit. But this takes place in a very different world than ours. They work for the empire of Khanum. It is a powerful empire, but it is beset each year during the wet season with enormous creatures, called leviathans or titans, that wander ashore from the sea and destroy everything in their path. Or they did before gigantic sea walls were erected. These sea walls have to be maintained and armed and manned by the legion to keep the leviathans at bay. The blood of the leviathans is useful to produce drugs and augmentations to the people of Khanum that imbue them with specific powers. Some have heightened analytical abilities, some have increased sensory abilities, etc. Our narrator,...

  As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...

  I have been much disappointed by Aurora Borealis performances over my life. Each time they predict one might be visible in our latitudes, I waited up and saw nothing. To be fair, auroras (aurorae?) are kind of fickle. They are created by solar storms that send charged particle into Earth’s upper atmosphere where they interact the atoms there. The timing has to be right. The direction of the charged particles has to be right. That can all be a bit hard to predict. Also, I live close to the 45 th parallel. Not a great spot to watch auroras from. We rarely get any this far south. Still, sometimes they predict when it is possible, and I go out and look to no avail. Last year there was a great aurora that lots of people who live where I do, saw. I didn’t, not for want of trying. My wife and I drove around to places where there was not a lot of light pollution, but no dice. The next morning we saw lots of posts from people who had seen it, even from places I would not think would be...

  My wife is the poet, not me. I do wish sometimes that I was a bit more poetical. It would make my writing better, more artistic. Art is about evoking emotion, and nothing evokes emotion like poetry (except music, which is itself a kind of poetry). Through metaphor and symbology, poetry reaches not just the brain, but the heart, the soul. That being said, I must confess that poetry sometimes loses me. I get lost in the words and the imagery befuddles me. If I am really going to get it, I have to read it multiple times. I don’t think I am alone in this. “Getting” poetry requires an effort. But so does “getting” a painting or a sculpture. You have to let the work, work on you. The reason some people have trouble with Shakespeare is not just that he uses archaic language or refers to events that were only known in his day. The main reason people have problems with it is that his language is poetical, symbolic. It is meant to take the listener on an artistic journey, not just convey...

  In The Body by Stephen King (which became the movie Stand by Me ), King writes “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 . . . did you?” I first met my friend Richard when I heard a knock on our door. I was 8 years old. We had moved to Salem, Oregon a month or so before, and I had made a friend named Dick. Dick had told me about his other friend, Richard, but I had not yet met him. When I answered the door, Dick was there along with some other kid with strawberry jam stain on his sweatshirt (gross). This other kid was Richard. Dick asked if I wanted to go out and do something with them. I was in the middle of watching a Twilight Zone rerun and I declined. Richard and I were not impressed with each other. He was a jock (as much of a jock as you can be at 8 years old) and I was a nerd. Over the next few weeks, the three of us would occasionally do things together. Richard and I barely tolerated each other. We were just so different, and on top of that...

  For twenty years I was engaged in a project to remap our county. I redrew all 1200 Assessor’s maps from scratch, every lot, and every street. While there were many challenges in this project, probably the biggest one was the mapping of roads. Many of the county roads were created over a hundred years ago. This poses two challenges: 1. Roads tend to move over time. Drivers cut corners eventually moving the roadbed. Also, things like floods and landslides make the road as it existed impassable, so drivers cut new routes around the obstacle, often without any formal action to change the road. 2. Surveying techniques and equipment were not as sophisticated a hundred years ago as they are today. The original survey and formal order that went with it, established the legal location of the road, but it is not uncommon to find errors in the original surveys. In fact, some of the original legal descriptions of the roads are so poorly written that there is no way of determining the locatio...