A speculative mind

  My first experience with pizza was not something to celebrate.   I was maybe five years old. I think our family had been out bowling. Not something we did very often. I was terrible at it, but then, I was five. I suspect the rest of my family wasn’t a whole lot better.   Like I said, we didn’t do it very often. But after bowling (I think it was bowling, but I may be confusing it with some other outing. It was a long time ago) we went out for pizza. This was the early 1960’s and the world was a very different place. Pizza was somewhat rare. I think we had only one pizza parlor in town. We were at that time, the 4 th largest city in Oregon, and only one pizza parlor (that’s what we called them back then. Pizza parlors. No, I have no idea why, when the only other thing I remember being called a parlor, was a funeral parlor. That’s not creepy at all). I recall I had some trouble with the word “pizza” as it was not a word I had ever heard before. But I must have been exci...

  I would rather be a bit naïve to trust and be disappointed than to be suspicious of everyone. I would rather expect the best even if I get burned now and then. The benefit of the doubt. Let your heart lead you Not your fears. How can you live up to your potential If I don’t give you a chance. How can I live up to my potential If I fear to give you a chance. There are good people. Let them be. Star Liner

  In my mind, one of the requirements for fantasy to work is that magic has to come with a consistent and heavy price. In the Tangled Lands, the magic does just that. Every time you perform magic, it causes “bramble” to grow. The bramble can take over and choke out everything else. It is poisonous. If you are pricked with any of the fine thorns you will get sleepy. Get pricked with a few of them and you may never wake up. I saw the parallels to Sleeping Beauty, and thought it was going to be a variation of that story. But it is not. The similarity ends there. The book is made up of four stories that all take place in the same world in and around Khaim, the last surviving city of a once great empire. This city has survived by the dictatorial enforcement of a death sentence on anyone who practices magic. Two of the stories were written by Paolo Bacigalupi and two of the stories were written by Tobias S. Buckell. They are seamlessly interwoven together and into their world. Being ...

  (Look how happy these kids are.)  Whatever generation you are: Baby Boomer, Gen-X, Millennial etc., the family road trip is a rite of passage that every child has to go through. But I would argue that the Boomers had it the worst. For one thing we tended to be in bigger families, had no air conditioning, and the cars had vinyl seats. Road trips invariably took place in the summer when school was out. Driving across the country in the heat of summer meant inevitably everyone was wearing shorts. Pealing your skin off the vinyl seats was bad enough, but then returning to the car after a burger stop meant finding a way to sit on the near molten vinyl without letting it touch your skin. Then there was the smell. That unmistakable odor of six people in a car for seven hours a day in the heat. I am not quite sure how my parents stood it. Nor how they stood the constant refrain of “are we there yet?” The reply they gave was always, “about fifteen minutes.” I swear every destinatio...

  As with all Philip K. Dick books, this is a little different. The title is not the weirdest thing about it. I think the first half and second half of the book are different animals. We begin the book with the Earth unbearably hot. He never uses the words global warming or the greenhouse effect, which were things that had been talked about in the scientific community before this book came out, but were not widely accepted yet (in 1964). Whatever the cause, the earth is hot. The UN, a much more powerful organization than it is in our world, is trying to populate other bodies in our solar system: the Moon, Mars, Ganymede, etc. There are too many people on Earth for the limited resources. The problem is, no one wants to live in a colony on another planet, where conditions are miserable. So, the UN must draft people. Our protagonist, Barney Mayerson, has received his draft notice and is trying to game the system so he doesn’t have to go. Barney is a precog and a high-ranking executi...

  I recently went for a vacation at Oregon’s Silver Falls State Park. We walked the trails and took in the splendor of a number of falls and the steep heavily forested canyons that they dropped into. While wandering one of the upper trails, we came upon a stone structure. It was something that had been built in the 1930’s as a kitchen for the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camp. It had later been restored to its more-or-less original condition. It put me in mind of when I had worked a couple of summers for the US Forest Service at the Cape Perpetua Visitor’s Center. On top of Cape Perpetua is a stone shelter and down nearer the base of the Cape are the remnants of a cookhouse. Both were built for and used by the CCC boys.   The Civilian Conservation Corps along with its brother organization, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), were part of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal policies to fight back against the great Depression. These two organizations employed millions of m...

  As a kid, I didn’t understand the complexities of the Viet Nam War. I don’t remember when it started. I just remember that at some point we were just sort of in it. President Johnson talked about it. Nixon talked about it. Lots of people talked about it. Lots of people were against it. I had no doubt we would win it, because America always won its wars. As a kid, you don’t have much of a concept of war. There were war movies and television shows like Twelve O’Clock High and the Rat Patrol . There were even comedies like Hogan’s Heroes , or McHale’s Navy . These were not the sort of things to give a kid a realistic view of warfare. No maiming, no PTSD, no dead babies.   So I was more interested in the things that kids like me were interested in: toys, astronauts, games with friends. One of those games was “war” where we would run around the neighborhood pretending to shoot each other. When my oldest brother got to draft age, he enlisted in the Coast Guard. Our communicatio...