A speculative mind

  Have you ever been on a quest? When I was in college my friends and I spent a weekend at the coast. We played games, did various touristy things, and had a good time (no, there wasn’t that much alcohol involved). We stopped in a little used bookstore in a small coastal town. It was cluttered with mismatched bookshelves and crates or boxes where there were no bookshelves. If there was any organization to it, the system was known only to the owner. That old used book smell permeated everything, a sweet musty odor that coated the back of your sinuses. In other words, it was a great bookstore. One to meander through the stacks of detritus where you might find a hidden gem. In the midst of our search, one of us found something and started to laugh. We all joined round. The object at hand was a book entitled The Platypus of Doom by Arthur B. Cover. But wait; there’s more! The back cover promised more dangerous creatures inside the book: The Armadillo of Destruction, the Aardvark of ...

  Back when I was of an age that was old enough to take on a summer job (I must have been 12 or 13) opportunity presented itself in the form of “Mrs. B.” I don’t think I ever met Mrs. B., but she bussed kids out to the fields where in early summer we would pick Strawberries, and late summer we would pick beans. We didn’t get paid a lot, but we did get paid! This was the first real money most of us had ever earned other than an allowance, and my mother didn’t believe in allowances. She had seen too many kids who expected to get paid for doing things they should have been doing anyway, and some who wanted to get paid for doing nothing. But field work was real work, and you got paid based on how much you picked. If you laid around and did nothing, you got paid nothing. I think we got 80 cents a crate for strawberries. I don’t remember how much we got paid for beans, but it was by weight. I made it through one full season of strawberry picking, but the next year I only made it a few ...

  I think I was half-way through this book before I realized I was saying the title wrong. The word in the title was “Furry” and not “Fury.” This is the first book I have read that is in the Chet and Bernie mysteries by Spencer Quinn. It is not the first book in the series, (it is actually the sixth) and after having read it, I can say that I don’t think it made any difference to me that I had not read the earlier books. I was able to grasp the characters and their relationships just fine. The book is narrated in first-person by Chet. Chet is Bernie’s dog. He has many characteristics you would expect in a dog. He is fiercely loyal to Bernie. He experiences things through his nose and his ears to a degree that humans can’t begin to fathom.   Chet can understand English words quite well (he would have to if he is the narrator) but metaphors and figures of speech throw him. Check out this example when Bernie is counting out money: “Three grand on the nose,” Bernie said, altho...

  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...