A speculative mind

Do you have an Elcano GPS device? Perhaps you have looked up at the night sky (in the southern hemisphere) and seen the Elcanonic clouds? There are lots of things named after Ferdinand Magellan. Not many things are named after Juan Sebastian de Elcano. Elcano completed the first circumnavigation of the Earth. What? You heard that was Magellan? No. Magellan did not. He died in the Philippines. He never made it all the way around. Elcano took command of the expedition after Magellan died and he and the survivors made it home. Well, it wasn’t quite that simple . . .   Magellan gets credit for the expedition because he started it. He convinced the king of Spain that he could get to the Indies by sailing west (something Columbus had tried and failed to do). He thought that the land mass south of the Caribbean (South America) was really a projection of Asia. Just sail around that and boom, you are in the spice islands! All they had to do was go around the corner from where...

The main character in my novel Star Liner is an entertainer. He is required to come up with five acts to perform for the passengers of the star liner Webelos . One of the performances that he decides to do is the one-man play Doc Holiday and the Angel of Mercy .   This is a real play written by an acquaintance of mine, Vaughn Marlowe. The play was performed in various communities around Oregon by our theater company. It has also been performed by other theater companies around the country, but I don’t think Vaughn ever tried to interest a Broadway producer with it. And that is kind of a shame because as a play, it is really good. Doc Holiday was a real person who has kind of blended into the folklore of the old west. He fought at the famous gunfight at the OK Corral. Not being a fan of westerns when I was a kid, I never heard of Doc Holliday until I saw an episode of (what else?) Star Trek that featured a mythological Doc Holliday. That episode, ”The Specter of the Gun...

There once was a starship captain named James Kirk. I am talking about the James Kirk whose exploits were recorded in the historical documents that aired on television between 1966 and 1968.   Not only was he the “captain” of the USS Enterprise (anyone of any rank who commands a ship is called by the honorary title “captain”) but his rank was actually Captain. That is to say, one notch below Admiral (two notches if you count the rank of Commodore which was only used in one or two episodes and was not well defined). In any event, he was a high ranking officer and in command of a formidable starship. And there was no question who was in command of the ship. His crew was loyal and followed his orders without question (well except when he was acting loopy, then they might actually give a questioning look ). This captain and his crew were assigned a five year mission to explore new worlds. One might wonder why a military vessel with all those weapons was given the duty of pea...