A speculative mind

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The Outsider

I am reading The Outsider by Stephen King. The first 150 pages or so I found disturbing. Not for the reason you might think. It is not scary, not creepy in a traditional horror way, but disturbing in a tragic way. The first hundred to 150 pages is tragedy on top of tragedy. The most disturbing thing to me (it is disturbing to me anytime I encounter it in any story) is a false accusation. A man is falsely accused and may well be convicted of a horrific crime. That kind of thing disturbs my soul. It makes the whole world seem wrong. I have always been disturbed by stories with that kind of thing. And why not? It happens in real life too. That makes it all the more horrific. In the Jim Crow South, all you had to do was make an accusation against a black man to set the lynch mob in action. No need to bother with a trial. But even if there was a trial, the outcome was a foregone conclusion, innocent or not. We see Vladimir Putin inventing charges against people and they get locked up (or

Roy Batty Figures it out

This is written with the assumption that the reader has seen the film Blade Runner . If you haven’t, you may not get much out of it. In one of the last scenes in Blade Runner , the killer android Roy Batty, who holds Deckard’s life in his hands, has a remarkable speech: “I've seen things... seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments... will be lost in time like tears in the rain. Time to die.” I am told that the speech that was written was not working very well, and Rutger Hauer was told to just improvise something. Wow. He nailed it. At this point in the film Roy Batty has been the villain throughout. We have been rooting for Deckard (Harrison Ford) to take him out, but it is not going well, and it seems like Batty is about to kill him. At the last second, Roy Batty pulls Deckard up, to keep him from falling to his death. Then he delivers this

Iron Flame (review)

Iron Flame is the second book in the Empyrean series by Rebecca Yarros. The first book was The Fourth Wing. If I had to characterize this series, I would say it is a little like Harry Potter meets Game of Thrones. As incongruous as that pairing may sound, I think it works. But like the Game of Thrones books, this series is not for children. Violet Sorrengail is a student at a military academy with dragons. Dragons are part of the training, but in this case it is more like the dragons are saying “how to train your humans”. In the first book we learned the dark secret that separates her group of friends from the rest of her classmates (from the rest of her country). But Violet is a scholar as well as a soldier, so she has to try to work out answers, not just solve them by brute force. In this book, Violet and her frustrating love interest Xaden are walking a tightrope, trying to do what they can for the cause without alerting the leadership with what they know. They are also wal

Band of Brothers

I am rewatching Band of Brothers . I first watched the miniseries 10 or 12 years ago. This time I finally convinced my wife to watch it with me. I know it is not her kind of show. Too real, too violent. But it is so good, I really wanted her to see it. It is hard to watch at times, but as a whole, it is a thing of sheer beauty. Band of brothers: In Shakespeare’s Henry V , the king is rousing his men to battle with what is known as the St. Crispin’s Day speech. He has to make them believe that he is their comrade as they are his. They will stand together or fall together. At one point Henry says, “. . . we few, we happy few, we band of brothers!” Historian Stephen Ambrose must have thought that line the perfect title for this story; the story of Easy Company, part of the 101 st Airborne Division as they made their way though the pages of World War 2. As we get to know some of the characters (all based on real soldiers who fought for Easy Company) we can imagine that they are repr

Second Wind

You have heard about athletes getting their second wind? It is not that they feel better, that they are warmed up and ready to run more easily. It is not psychological (at least, not all psychological). No. There is an actual physiological truth to a second wind. It all has to do with respiration. When I say respiration, I am not talking about breathing. Respiration is a biochemical process that happens at the cellular level. It is how the cell gets energy. There are lots of chemical processes that are constantly going on in each cell, and those processes require energy. Without a constant feed of energy, the cell will die. The more demands there are on a cell, the more energy it needs. For example, every one of your muscle cells need more energy when you are running. In fact, you won’t be able to run if the cells don’t have sufficient energy for it. The energy currency of the cell is a molecule called ATP. You may have heard that sugar is how our bodies get energy, which is tr

The Book Life

I must confess that I was not a great reader as a kid. Once I had got through the children’s literature and started reading more adult like books, I would balk at reading anything too thick. I was an avid science fiction fan, but my entertainment came mostly from TV and movies. But I do remember reading Jules Verne at an early age. I read journey to the Center of the Earth , and From the Earth to the Moon . I think I tried to read 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but it was pretty “thick” and I don’t think I made it very far. By age 11 or 12, I did not know much about contemporary science fiction. I only knew about the old classics (or things that they had made movies about). As I got older, I would occasionally try something big and impressive. I read Frankenstein , and I confess I didn’t get much out of it my first time through. It was more like I was just reading it so I could say I read it. There were several books like that. In Junior High I read Catch-22 and there were a lot of