Month: March 2026

Various Public Relations

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So, Tuesday I have a meeting with my marketer to see how I can achieve more of my goals for the launch.  The book seems to be sustaining sales but I’m not satisfied with the visibility with respect to reviews and general profile.  As I’ve mentioned I’m going to find out just how large a giveaway I can expect to perform.  Now, I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all.  After all, as a tactic giving something away for free seems to be defeating the purpose of sales.  But my whole reason for writing this book, is to get other people to read it too.  And if you’re competing with literally millions of other books and some of them have multi-billion-dollar companies marketing them then it may take extreme methods to break out of obscurity and catch the public’s eye.  And then again, I may just be kidding myself.  But I think I’m very close to making a decision on the path forward.

And there’s not much time left before I’ll be overtaken by other responsibilities and projects.  First Selectman Cthulhu has selected me as his personal spokesman with responsibilities for communicating his agenda to both the human population of Dunwich and also the trans-dimensional realm of the Great Old Ones.  That’s right I’ll be updating his LinkedIn and TikTok pages.  Currently he’s asked me to edit out the use of words like crush, dismember, maim and devour in his recent communications.  He’s up for re-election and he needs to finesse his image quite a bit.  I’ve suggested he watch several of the recent Godzilla movies and figure out how to mimic the joie de vivre of that radioactive reptile who has managed to cultivate a laid back and avuncular style in the last few years.  I told him he might want to think about a facelift.  But then he reminded me that technically he really doesn’t have a face.  It’s more of a foot with eyes, mouth and tentacles.  Well, a rose by any other name.

On the home front, Mr. and Mrs. Mallard have returned to dismal puddle and seemed very satisfied with whatever slop has run into the swamp.  Also, a pair of wood ducks have also appeared but I notice they are much more skittish than the mallards.  Well, it takes all kinds.  So far, we haven’t seen any ducklings.  Time will tell.

And I’ve cut down all of the raspberry canes and put about five pounds of 10-10-10 fertilizer on the bed in anticipation of a bumper crop this year.  I’m hoping it will expand significantly beyond the current patch and eventually triple into the whole garden.  This is a matter of turning necessity into a virtue since nothing else seems to flourish besides raspberries in that soggy area.

The southern ice sheet has retreated back to the massive driveway pile which is now only three feet high.  At the current rate of retreat, I calculate it will disappear completely by Memorial Day.  At which point the last of it will end up in my drink cooler for that barbecue event.

Well, things are moving apace.  Excelsior!

Champion (1949) – An OCF Classic Movie Review

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Kirk Douglas stars as Midge Kelly a tough angry young man trying to hustle his way to something better than the low pay jobs he can only find.  He and his brother Connie arrive on a freight train from the east and believe they have an ownership stake in a small restaurant.  But discover they’ve been conned.  Taking jobs as waiters there, Midge becomes romantically involved with the owner’s daughter Emma but this leads to the couple being forced at gunpoint by her father into a marriage.

This prompts Midge to abandon Emma and he and Connie end up at a boxing gym where a trainer named Tommy Haley agrees to manage Midge.  Midge proves to have considerable skill in the ring but more importantly he has a killer instinct that leads him to brutalize his opponents with maniacal force whenever he gets in the ring.  Eventually Haley arranges for Midge to fight the number one contender for the middle weight crown, Johnny Dunne in New York.  But the gambling interests have only allowed Midge the fight with the understanding that he’ll take a dive to allow Dunne to capture the middle-weight crown from an aging champ.

Midge double crosses Haley and the gamblers and knocks Dunne out in the first round.  The mobsters beat Midge, Haley and Connie badly but now the reality is Midge is the leading contender for the crown.  Dunne’s platinum blonde girlfriend Grace tells Midge that the only way he’ll ever get a shot at the crown is by appeasing the gamblers.  And the only way that will happen is if he dumps Haley and signs up with Grace’s friend Jerome Harris.  And Midge does it without blinking an eye.  Seeing how Midge stabbed Haley in the back and what company he was now keeping, Connie decided to leave New York and go back to his mother’s apartment in Chicago.

Meanwhile Midge is flying high with a victory in the ring against the champ.  He’s dating Grace but sleeping with Jerome Harris’s wife Palmer.  Neither of these women know that he is still married to Emma.  But now all of Midge’s double-crossing comes due.  He has to defend his title against Johnny Dunne and he’s out of shape from living the high life.  So, he hires Haley to train him but has to agree to split 30% with him.  But Haley doesn’t really care whether Midge is up to the fight and after missing his mother’s death bed Connie and Emma despise him.  On the day before the boxing match, she tells Midge she’s divorcing him and marrying Connie.  He answers her statement by dragging her to bed to claim his conjugal rights as husband.

At the boxing arena Connie attacks Midge for what he did to Emma.  But Midge beats him down and heads for the ring.  The match is very even at the start.  Midge manages to knock Dunne to the canvas in the first round but after that the match slowly but surely shifts in Dunne’s favor.  By the twelfth round Midge has one eye closed and looks almost punch drunk.  But when he sees Grace and his other “friends” in the audience smiling at his defeat he becomes enraged and with a manic flurry of punches he beats Dunne to the canvas and wins the fight.  But he is basically dragged back to his dressing room by Haley and his trainers and after a brief ranting speech that seems to come from his angry tortured soul, he drops dead.  The movie ends with reporters asking Connie about his brother and him replying sardonically that Midge was a perfect reflection of the spirit of his sport.

This movie has some good points.  The early scenes of Midge and Connie travelling across country to make a new life for themselves and their loyalty to each other is affecting.  However, the unfolding of Midge’s personality and his general hatred of humanity is a very unpleasant experience.  As he goes from one betrayal to the next, I found him despicable.  And because of this, by the end of the movie, I wasn’t enjoying the story at all.  I was very relieved when he dropped dead and I could turn off the tv.  I can’t recommend this movie to anyone.

Vernal Equinox 2026

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According to Grok the vernal equinox occurred on Friday, March 20, 2026, at 10:46 a.m. EDT.  At that time Camera Girl and I were probably in Walmart buying eggs, coffee and chop meat.  When we got to the register the cashier was this friendly talkative old lady who wanted to tell us that if we took out one of our eggs, we could balance it on its end.  She explained that it was because of “the e-quick.”  Well, she was a very nice lady so I smiled and said, “That’s great.”

The reason I was along on this expedition was because Camera Girl’s twenty-year-old ride (Nelly) was in the shop and the surgeon wasn’t too sanguine on Nelly’s future.  The brake lines were leaking but when Dr. Steve put her up on the lift, he found metastatic rust throughout the length and breadth of poor Nelly.  Camera Girl was devastated and so was my bank account.  The surgeon asked if a mercy-killing wasn’t the best option but as a devout “right to lifer” I said, “No!!!!”  So, Dr. Steve left me with the sad news and said it would take a few days to get the parts and finish the work.

But when we got home slightly after the equinox, there was a message from Dr. Steve saying we could bring the patient home.  We rushed to find Nelly looking alive and well.  Dr. Steve said it was “a miracle.”  Nelly wasn’t as far gone as he had initially thought.  And equally importantly it hadn’t cost as much as I had feared.  So, Camera Girl and Nelly were reunited.  They drove home together and later on I celebrated this Equinox Miracle with a bowl of vanilla ice cream.

But the larger lesson I’ve learned is that nothing lasts forever.  Not even blue Toyota Corollas.  The power of New England winter road salt is existential.  The body of a car may look pristine with a bright paint job and a functional cd player in the dash board.  But the mortality that follows from chloride corrosion cracking is as final and fatal as death itself.  Nelly has served us faithfully and well.  And generations of our dogs have had their own blankets on the back seats that they relax on during trips to the vet’s office and the nail clipping place.  And decades of grandkids have sat in the back seat elbowing each other and complaining about how cramped they are.  But very soon all this will be disrupted.  They will notice that Camera Girl’s old car is no more.  And she is very sad about the whole thing.  I am too!  I have to buy another car.

Well, never look a gift horse in the mouth.  We’ve been given a reprieve and I’ll start figuring out what Nelly II will be.  And it turned out to be a nice day walking between stores and parking lots and I even had a nice review for my book on Amazon and some more sales.  So, all in all it wasn’t a bad e-quick as e-quicks go.

The Tomorrow War (2021) – A Science Fiction Movie Review

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This movie is an alien invasion/time travel movie.  Wow, that’s complicated.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

This movie is a highly confusing science fiction story.  Chris Pratt plays Dan Forester a retired special forces soldier from Iraq who now works as a high school science teacher.  He has a wife Emmy and a young daughter Muri.  So far so good.  One day while watching soccer’s world cup game on tv they witness the beginning of the future war.  In the middle of the field a “wormhole” opens up and a bunch of humans dressed in military attire carrying weapons appear.

They explain that they are from the year 2051 and their world is fighting a war against aliens called the “whitespikes.”  They are about 8-10 feet long, have four running legs two grasping legs and two tentacles that can grab but also shoot “spikes.”  And they are always ravenously hungry for human flesh.  The aliens appeared in arctic Russia and quickly spread across the world and now the human population has been decimated (total world population down to 500,000) and they are begging people from 2021 to come through a portal and help fight the aliens.

Earth agrees to send its armies into the future but barely twenty percent return alive.  After that a draft is employed and all adults (men and women) are eligible.  Eventually Dan is drafted and is sent.  Enlistment involves surviving one week of combat after which the soldier is automatically returned to the present wherever he is.

Dan goes to the future and is immediately swept up in the “run for your life” action of fighting the whitespikes.  Eventually he meets his commanding officer Colonel Muri Forester (played by Yvonne Strahovski), in other words, his daughter now grown up and become a biologist working on a toxin to kill the whitespikes before they finish off what is left of humanity.  And with Dan’s help she captures a female whitespike and they synthesize a toxin that will kill all whitepikes injected with it.

But it’s too late.  The last human outpost where Muri and Dan are located is overwhelmed by a horde of whitespikes and Dan time jumps with the toxin just as Muri falls to her death in the grips of a whitespike.  Dan reaches home and is overwhelmed with grief and anger.  Grown-up Muri had told him that back in the “present” when Dan had returned from his seven-day assignment he abandoned his wife and daughter and eventually was killed a few years later in an auto accident.

Determined to get the toxin mass produced and sent back to the future Dan reaches out to the government but finds out that the portal is gone.  The whitespikes have finished off humanity in the future.  There is no place to send the toxin.

But Emmy reasons that it makes more sense to find the whitespikes before they conquered the world and destroy them at the beginning.  With a clue from volcanic ash present on a whitespike artifact they figure out that the whitespikes must have been frozen under the ice cap in northern Russia and thawed because of “global warming” in 2051 or shortly before.  Because of global instability caused by the knowledge that the world would be coming to an end, the US refuses to help Dan go to Russia to find the whitespikes.  So, Dan goes to his Vietnam War vet estranged father (played by J. K. Simmons) who happens to have access to a large cargo plane and they mount a small expedition.

They find the alien ship by its magnetic field and use thermite to reach it through the ice.  Then they find out that the whitespikes are not the astronauts but rather a bioweapon cargo on a ship that crashed into earth long ago.  They use the toxin to kill about half the whitespikes on the ship but another five or six escape.  Two of the humans use a C4 explosive to kill the whitespikes in a suicide maneuver.  But one female escapes and after an extended chase and fight scene Dan and his father kill the monster.  The movie ends with Dan reuniting with Emmy and introducing young Muir to her grandfather.  Wow, what a mess!

Okay, what the hell do I say about this crazy mixed up movie?  From a science fiction plot perspective, this thing is a turkey.  There is no indication of how the 2051 humans in the middle of their existential alien crisis were able to create time travel.  And the workings of this time travel also seem goofy.  The 2051 people can only go back and forth thirty years.  So, they can’t go back five years and search for the whitespikes before they became overwhelmingly numerous and unstoppable.  Also, grown-up Muri tells Dan about what he was like after he came back from the future but then Dan followed a completely different course of action when he returned.  How?  Alright the plot is as full of holes as Swiss cheese.  But is the movie any good?  Well, yeah.  Chris Pratt portrays a likeable character and so does Yvonne Strahovski.  There is a good family chemistry there and the action sequences although quite a mess aren’t boring.  And it isn’t woke.  Chris Pratt is allowed to be a white man and the hero of the movie.  That’s something to be amazed at in a movie made in 2021.  It’s a silly sci-fi action movie.  But I kind of liked it.  You have to decide if it’s something you want to waste a couple of hours on.