A speculative mind

  I just finished watching the second season of The Umbrella Academy . For those who don’t know, The Umbrella Academy is based on a Comic book series by Gerard Way. In the story, dozens of women around the world suddenly give birth on the same day. This in itself would not be unusual except for the fact that none of them had not been pregnant up to the time of delivery. An eccentric millionaire travels the world to adopt as many of these children as he can, believing there to be something special about these children. He is able to adopt seven of the children and it turns out that each one has their own super power. This all happens in like the first fifteen minutes of the first episode, and things just get weirder from then on as we follow the now adult children as they come to terms with their own screwed up lives, which is mostly caused by their screwed up adoptive father. I watched the first season with glee and looked forward to the second, which did not disappoint. I said ...

                                                                                              (Picture by Dina Dee)   I thought I would give you a snippet from my next novel. This is the first chapter of Renfield's Dream : Prelude Full of vexation come I -Egeus-   Something horrific had happened. She knew it. She had felt it. The blackness seeped into her mind as the car proceeded down the back roads. Too long. Too much time. Time. The car rumbled and bounced unevenly. She barely noticed as she steeled herself for what was to come. The driver took her as far as he could down the broken lane. The car came to a stop and he looked back at her, apologetically. She put on her hat and dark glasses, got out of the car and looked down the lane. ...

  This week in Oregon we have had unprecedented wildfires. On Monday night we had a hot east wind blow across the state. As the night wore on, the winds got stronger and stronger and the temperature got higher and higher. At 6:30 PM it was 61 degrees with calm winds. By 9:00 it was 81 degrees and we would have up to 45 MPH gusts the rest of the night. Thick smoke rolled in and all day on Tuesday we were in semi darkness. The street lights never went off.   It was surreal. By Wednesday it was just plain scary. Five towns were burned to the ground and many more were threatened. 500,000 people were under evacuation orders. We don’t know what the final loss of life is going to be yet. The legendary wildfire in Oregon that is in all the history books is the Tillamook Burn from 1933. Everybody in Oregon has heard about the Tillamook Burn. It burned 350,000 acres of forest land. In the past week One Million acres has burned in Oregon. This, as bad as it is, is just a sampling of wh...

Cue Juliet: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet. Juliet is saying names don’t matter. If we called this plant a dung bucket instead of a rose, it wouldn’t change anything. It would still look and smell pretty. What we call something is unimportant.   Juliet was wrong. Names are important. Names are often the first thing we learn of someone. They can help to convey an initial emotional attachment. Look at some of the names that Dickens chose for his characters: Chuzzlewit, Cratchit, Fagin, Fezziwig, Grimwig, Honeythunder, Pardiggle, Pecksniff, Scrooge, Tulkinghorn. Without knowing anything about these characters, you can get some sort of feeling about them just from their names.   One can overdo this of course, it is not good to get overly descriptive with the names unless you are aiming for farce. But names should be carefully considered. They should add to, or at least not detract from the narrative. ...

You may have heard me talk about The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal (maybe just once or twice). I have said it is my favorite novel of the past decade. That book was the first installment in her “Lady Astronaut” series. It was followed up by The Fated Sky . I have now just finished the third book in the series The Relentless Moon . The Fated Sky was a welcome sequel that fulfilled its promise, and The Relentless Moon does not disappoint. The first two novels follow the journey of Elma York as she fights her way through the prejudices of her times to be taken seriously as an astronaut. It was a journey that I was glad to follow. Even though she is completely different from me, Elma was a character that touched me. The books dealt with social issues of an alternate history (which has much the same social issues of our own history), but the books were never weighed down by lecturing. They were, in fact, fun. Remember fun? I was a little concerned as I started...

In 1999 Oregon voters decided to make all of our elections 100% vote-by-mail. Being an Oregon resident myself, I remember that I was not wild about the idea. I may have even voted against it. I can’t remember why I didn’t like the idea. Maybe I disliked the idea of change, or maybe I thought there were too many ways it could get fouled up. Whatever the reason, I didn’t like the idea. But having had vote-by mail for the past 20 years I can tell you that I do like it now (it didn’t take 20 years. After the first election or two I was a convert). I am not alone in that opinion. Almost everyone in Oregon likes our election system, Republicans, Democrats and independents. It is convenient. The results are processed quicker. There are no lines, no fraud, no problems. I say there is no fraud, but of course there is always someone trying to game the system, but what I mean is that there is no more fraud than any other system, and that amounts to a minuscule fraction of the ballots. A...

The pandemic of 2020 has been a terrible blow to many, many people. I don’t have to enumerate the ways. Everyone has been affected in one way or another. And yet, if you look for silver linings in bad times, you can usually find some. They in no way, make up for the bad aspects of pandemic, but you need to appreciate the little tokens that chance throws your way. A case in point: I am a lover of science fiction, but have never made it to (nor probably ever will make it to) the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) to see the Hugo Awards. This year it was set for New Zealand, and much as I would have like to have seen it, New Zealand was just never going to be in the cards for me. But because of Covid-19, The Hugo Awards were live streamed this year. I actually got to watch it live and hear acceptance speeches and everything. There were a few technical glitches, but that is to be expected, and they didn’t detract from the overall presentations. This year’s winner for Bes...