A speculative mind

  When we were kids, we used to talk about digging a hole all the way to China. In my teens the movie The China Syndrome came out. The title comes from a hyperbolic story that if a nuclear meltdown occurs, the reactor contents could melt through the Earth all the way to China. This is clearly a fanciful notion because even if it could melt all the way through the Earth, it would only fall down to the center. It would not start falling up to China. But China is the bigger problem. The point on the opposite side of the Earth from where you are standing is called the antipodes. The antipodal point for almost anywhere in North America would be in the Indian Ocean. And since North America is in the Northern hemisphere, our antipode would be in the southern hemisphere, somewhere between the southern tip of Africa and the southern tip of Australia, and there is a lot of open ocean between those two points. Since humans live on land, we tend to be prejudiced toward land. We tend to think...

  When we take a drink of water, we trust that the water service people are doing their job so we won’t get sick. When we push the button on an elevator, we trust that it has been well maintained so we won’t go crashing to the ground. When we call 911, we trust that the dispatchers and emergency responders will do their job and help is on the way. Some of these things we don’t even think about, we just unconsciously trust. We don’t ask if the air traffic controller is a Republican or a Democrat, a Buddhist or a Muslem, white or black. We don’t think about it. We just trust them to do their job. Without trust, there is no society, there is no civilization. We would all be huddled in our caves guarding what we have with clubs. But trust seems to be in some danger. For the past few years, the tides have been not so gently eroding away the bank of trust. Trust used to be harder to break. Before the internet, before social media, if you wanted to break down trust in an institution o...

  The Midnight Dolls by Zoe Partyka is a love letter to music. Set in the early 1970’s we have a young reporter following a band on tour and "The Midnight Dolls" is the name of the band. If it sounds like the plot of the movie Almost famous, it is true that it does have a similar basic premise. But the novel takes us down the rabbit hole of insecurity. We see rock stars who seem to have everything, but they cannot manage without crutches, be those crutches alcohol, pills or adoration. It is not just the band members who have issues. Our narrator the reporter is full of self-doubt and has his own crutches. Rock stars doing drugs. Heard it all before? Perhaps, but the reporter and we, the audience, begin to see the band members as real people in a way that their fans never can. There is a drive to perform for people. If you have experienced it, you know what I mean. I have performed on stage as an actor, not a musician, but I know a little bit about wanting to share your ar...