The costs of independence

Just since last October, more than 1,200 people have been killed and many hundreds more wounded outside Iraq and Syria in more than a dozen countries around the planet in attacks orchestrated or inspired by the Islamic State. The atrocities in Orlando, Bangladesh, and Baghdad are only the most recent in an ongoing determined slaughter in the effort of one religious group to dominate the world.  ISIS is just one of the groups wreaking havoc.  There are also Boko Haram, Al-Shabaab, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and a dozen other splinter organizations dedicated to the subjugation of others--especially women—the suppression of science, and the stifling of freedom everywhere.

Enjoy this Independence Day celebration, but maybe give a thought to all those who have won and preserved it for us over the decades, often at the cost of their lives, and for those in many countries who are continuing that battle today.

Phil

Numerous numbers

     Increasingly, our lives are documented, categorized, and controlled by numbers, which are most often coded to impart more information than you may be aware of.

     A driver’s license in New Jersey encodes name, gender, birth (month and year), and eye color.  The first six digits of a credit card indicate the card type.  Visa, for example, always starts with 4.  (You can find out if a card is legitimate by doubling every other number and adding that line of individual digits.  The total should end in zero.)  The first three numbers of a Social Security card indicate the state in which it was applied for.  ZIP stands for Zone Improvement Plan.  Numbers begin in the northeast (Manhattan is 212) and after meandering around the lower states, end in Ketchikan, Alaska (99950).  The CIA in Langley has the exclusive ZIP 20505. 

     Vertical Interstate highways are numbered from west (I-5 in CA) to east (I-95 from FL to ME) while horizontal Interstates start in the deep south (I-10 in TX) to north (I-90 through Chicago).  Exit numbers start at a state’s southern or western edges generally.  In some states an exit number is the distance from a border, rounded down.  A Vehicle Identification Number encodes the vehicle description, model, engine size, country of origin, model year, and plant of manufacture.  NFL jersey numbers indicate position (for example, 01-09 for quarterbacks and kickers, 60-69 and 90-99 for linemen, and so on).  And no player wearing 50-79 can catch passes without declaring himself eligible.

     Those mysterious bar codes you see everywhere impart much more info.  Maybe one day they’ll just auto-tattoo one on each of our foreheads at birth and dispense with all the rest.

Phil

    

City of contrasts

Naomi and I just got back from a trip north, which included a few days in New York City.  We did all the usual stuff.  Took a bus tour around lower Manhattan and a boat tour around the entire island.  Highlights included zooming to the top of the new World Trade Center on one of the planet’s fastest elevators while viewing a surround video presentation of the growth of the city from Native American times through the present.  The 360-degree view from the top was stunning, revealing the curvature of the earth and reaching out 100 miles.  The memorial near the base of the new skyscraper is moving and sobering and well-done.

We spent almost a day in the Museum of Natural History, which includes dinosaur skeletons, excellent astronomy and nature programs, and fabulous exhibits, from the two-billion-year-old Star of India—world’s largest blue star sapphire donated by J.P. Morgan—to a full-size replica of a giant blue whale, to a massive iron meteorite that’s so heavy it has a custom support system extending down to bedrock.

It’s a fascinating city of superlatives and stark contrasts.  Condos at the new super-opulent 432 Park Avenue tower near the Empire State Building start at $7 million and range up to more than $100 million, and you have to purchase an entire floor.  You can pay monthly rents as high as $50,000 for apartments in town, and a common motel room goes for $400 or more a night.  Yet there is a shadowy population of homeless people with few possessions and grim prospects occupying the same streets.  Billionaires and bums.

Only blocks from busy canyons filled with honking cabs and trucks and buses and hapless terrified tourist drivers out of their depths, there is the cool and leafy peace of Central Park.

Ethnic and social groups still tend to congregate in defined areas, Asians in Chinatown, arty types in Soho or Greenwich Village, blacks in Harlem, Italians in Little Italy, Hispanics in Spanish Harlem, and so on.  The city has a diverse population as large as the entire state of North Carolina, augmented daily by thousands upon thousands of visitors from all over the planet.

We can enjoy it for about three days before it somehow becomes too much, despite all the pleasures.  Too many people.  Too expensive.  Too much stress.

It was a nice visit, but it’s good to be home.

Phil

    

Preposterous Predictions

     There have always been scoffers, of course, those mean-spirited, short-sighted skeptics who pop up whenever somebody proposes a bold new idea.  They’re the vociferous naysayers, the critics who trumpet that it shouldn’t or can’t or won’t be done.

     Here are seven glaring naysayer blunders:

“A rocket will never be able to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.” —New York Times editorial, 1920

“X-rays will prove to be a hoax.” —Lord Kelvin, Royal Society president, 1890s

“Stock Prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.”—Irving Fisher, Yale economics professor, 1929

“Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is ridiculous fiction.” —Pierre Pachet, Toulouse physiology professor, 1872

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” —Harry Warner of Warner Brothers, 1927

“The telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communications.” —Western Union company memo, 1876

“Everyone’s always asking me when Apple will come out with a cell phone . . . probably never.”

 —David Pogue, tech columnist, New York Times, 2006

     And how many have said that Trump would never make it this far?

Phil

Horn tooting time

     Forgive me for mentioning that several of my short stories have done okay recently, if I do say so myself.  It feels pretty good.  One is called “Mister Sad” about a suicidal man and a Down syndrome child named Bianca.  I wrote that one in admiration of a real-life Bianca I had the good fortune to meet on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, and it took second place in the UK Flash 500 fiction contest.  Another titled “Pocket Dream” about a pair of aged escapees from a system that discards our elderly, was a top twenty finalist in the Doris Betts Literary Competition (out of 185 submitted stories), and a science fiction yarn called “Silent Screams” about an abused android was “highly commended” in a Writers’ Village contest.

     Short stories are great fun because you can experiment widely, trying out new genres, page-testing characters who may star in a novel one day, or just honing writing skills.  Because there is no room in a brief yarn for lengthy exposition, the writing must be concise, characterization must be limited to a sentence or two, and ideally there should not be a single word that doesn’t contribute to the story.  It must be a tightly-woven tapestry with no loose threads.

     I’ve written many over the years, and even earned modest sums when editors bought a few of them.  In fact, my first published piece of work many years ago was a short story in the Clemson University literary journal, “The Chronicle,” when I was a student there.  I moderated a short story writing workshop at the Killer Nashville writers’ conference two years ago and had great fun doing it.  My recent collection “Dagger and other tales” brings together 17 stories from various genres, including an award-winner begun by Stephen King.  Many of these tales were previously published, and each has an introductory paragraph or two explaining how that particular story came to be.  “Dagger” is available on Amazon Kindle.  Or you can buy it easily through my website.

     If you’re a writer or an aspiring writer, I know of no better way to learn the craft than tackling a few short stories.  There’s still a fairly robust market for them, including several prestigious periodical anthologies.  Google will be pleased to help you find potential markets.

Phil

Maybe it’s just me . . .

     In a recent Washington Post editorial, Department of Justice Assistant Attorney General Karol Mason said that disparaging, stigmatizing words such as “convict” and “felon” for those convicted of a crime, sentenced to prison time, and ultimately released will be officially replaced by “person who committed a crime” or “individual who has been incarcerated” in all departmental communications, because those old harsh words can “drain a person’s self-worth.”  Ms. Mason made no mention of damage suffered to the bodies or to the mental health of the victims of these convicted offenders.

     In 2013, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter proposed amending city code to replace “ex-offender” with “returning citizen” and made that language change mandatory for city employees.  Again, he made no mention of what proper terminology ought to be for “victim.”  Perhaps Nutter would accept “unfortunate individual” as appropriate?  Or how about “person affected by an unlawful act?”

     In July, 2011, Anders Breivik blew eight persons into fragments with a van bomb, then methodically stalked and shot 69 more persons on an idyllic island owned by a youth summer camp organization.  In court he smiled frequently and gave a crisp Nazi salute.  He was sentenced to 21 years, the maximum under liberal Norwegian law.  He was sent to a comfortable well-appointed detention facility.  Recently he sued for violation of his rights, claiming he has suffered isolation from the facility’s population.  And he won.  The fact that his seventy-seven victims were deprived of the rest of their lives and are forever sealed in the cold isolation of their graves apparently was irrelevant.  (Count to seventy-seven out loud and visualize a different person, many of them young, for each number.  It will take you a while.)

     During the most recent Super Bowl, Doritos aired a commercial showing an ultrasound of a fetus in a woman’s womb.  “Pro-choice” groups took extreme umbrage, accusing Doritos of “humanizing fetuses.”  Which leaves me perplexed.  What is a fetus if not human?  Sub-human?  Simian?  Maybe in their view it is simply an “organic thingy.”

     Increasingly, euphemisms are being used to avoid calling things what they really are.  “Planned Parenthood,” for example.  Or politicians simply “mis-speaking.”  Or illegal aliens being considered merely “undocumented.”  Terrorist attacks termed “man-caused incidents.”  Washington these days is rife with this.

     Do such trends in societal thinking deeply disturb anybody else?

     Or is it just me?

Phil

Brutal Barbs

     It’s always interesting reading those few grumpy one-star Net comments on products and services, and those emotional discussions on every news issue or announcement, which often degenerate into the crudest kinds of name calling and vicious put-downs.

     We’ve always had put-downs, of course, but in those much-lauded good old days they were more civilized, more intelligent and clever.  Classier.

     A few examples:

     From Beethoven after listening to a rival improvising on the piano for a half hour: “Will it be long before you begin?”

     Theodore Roosevelt about President McKinley after he refused to declare war on Spain:  “No more backbone than a chocolate eclair.”

     Abraham Lincoln on the ideas of his political opponent Stephen Douglas:  “As thin as the soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.”

     H.G. Wells on a literary work by Henry James:  “A magnificent but painful hippopotamus.”

     Winston Churchill on Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain after he supposedly convinced Hitler to leave England alone in exchange for Britain’s noninterference:  “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last.”

     Winston again on Clement Atlee:  “A modest man, who has much to be modest about.”

     Prince on a rival’s new album:  “Michael Jackson’s album was called ‘Bad’ because there wasn’t enough room on the jacket for Pathetic.”  (So-long Prince.  You were a fine musician.)

     But my favorite is one from radio and TV host Arthur Smith to a rude heckler.  I think it can be applied equally well to most of those mean-spirited losers out there who cruise the Net giving one-star reviews to everything they come across:  “Sorry, I can’t hear what you’re saying.  I’m wearing a moron filter.”

Phil