A speculative mind

  The Dog Stars by Peter Heller is set in a post-apocalyptic near future. The “apocalyptic” event in this story is a pandemic that had happened off-screen, nine years earlier. Those who survived the ‘blood sickness’ are few and far between, but most of them you don’t want to meet. It is every man for himself, as is often the case in a post apocalypse. Our main character, Hig, is a pilot. He and his partner, Bangley, have made a small airport in Colorado their home base. Bangley is fanatical survivalist. We don’t like Bangley very much, but it is probably true that his presence has kept Hig alive. Banley’s attitude is shoot first and . . . well, don’t even bother asking questions, just shoot. Bangley thinks Hig is too full of the milk of human kindness, and he is probably right. As much as we detest Bangley, without him there to teach him and to look out for him, Hig would have long ago become dog meat. Having secured this airport and setting it up so they can see people coming f...

  I had always known the Swastika to be the symbol of the Nazi’s. A symbol of hatred, racism, genocide. A symbol of evil. But it turns out, the symbol was not always so. My first bit of education that the swastika meant something else, came from watching an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker . This was a 1970’s series featuring a wonderful Darren McGavin as a crusty reporter always on the trail of a monster of the week ( a great show, by the way). Kolchak investigating some deaths starts seeing swastikas everywhere and assumes the killer is a Nazi or related to Nazi’s. but he finds out the swastikas are being put up by a potential victim as a ward against evil. We learn that the swastika is an ancient sacred symbol used in the Hindu and other religions.   My second bit of education came not long after. I was in a Social Studies class in high school and in one of our projects, we were looking at old newspapers. The newspapers we were looking through were from 1910 ...

  When I was in my second year in college, I took a class called “General Sociology Through Film.” It seemed like it would be a fun class. Watching movies was part of the curriculum. I like movies. It was a great concept, and a popular class. I am not sure how much actual sociology I learned from that class, but maybe some of it sunk in. The class met on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Monday was a one-hour lecture about some sociological principle. Wednesday was a two-hour period where we watched the film for that week. Friday was a discussion of the film. There were a couple of mid-term exams and a final exam where we could prove that this was an academic experience. As I said, I couldn’t tell you what concepts I learned in the class, but I do remember the movies. Part of the class focused on human development: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, etc.. We skipped early development. For the young-adult leaving home for the first time, we watched Next Stop Greenwich Village . ...

  One summer, while I was working for the US Forest Service, I was assigned to do stream survey. The purpose of stream survey is to assess the health of a particular stream or network of streams for the fish population. My partner Ed and I went through training in the Spring and then began our survey of the North Fork of the Yachats River and all of its tributaries. Stream survey is an odd job. Both science and art. One member of the two-person team is designated as the estimator and the other is the recorder. Each day they switch jobs. The river is divided into habitat types of which there are three basic forms: riffles, pools, and glides. A pool is just what it sounds like. The bed is deeper and there is not much vertical drop from the upper side of the pool to the downstream side. Riffles are marked by a steeper drop in elevation and tend to be longer stretches of stream than pools. The surface of the water is rougher in a riffle as the water is moving faster. Riffles can incl...