Month: May 2026

Fame and Fortune

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So yesterday I finally got my book onto Kindle Unlimited.  Huzzah!!!

An then I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.  A day later the page counter for KENP stood at zero.  This seemed unpromising.  So, I closed down the laptop and did something else.

I took a juvenile milk snake that I found hiding under the famous copper sheet and shot a photo shoot of his best profile.  And then we had lunch and worked on some other projects.  I put an air conditioning unit in one of the windows and I started weeding the raspberry patch and I helped clean some kind of ooze that had accumulated on the new fish pond.

And when I checked the KENP after all that, the counter was at one!  Now that’s not one book that’s one page.  So, if a book pays me forty cents what does a page earn me?  Well, you can do the math.  If the book is about two hundred and fifty-two pages long then that page is worth 0.15873 cents in cold hard cash.  If Jeff Bezos took a penny and a pair of tin snips (zinc snips?) and did some rudimentary trigonometric calculations he could probably nip off an arc from the edge of the coin that would somewhat represent this hefty sum.  So, I shut down the laptop again and began to recalibrate my plans to purchase that summer home on Martha’s Vineyard.

I began reading some more of “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”  You know this PKD is a very talented writer but I don’t think he spent a lot of his life smiling.  In fact, I think WWIII was probably one of the lighter topics he thought about.  He’s got the extinction of most animal species, widespread human chromosomal damage, widespread human brain damage and bizarre religious tendencies as the window dressing of his highly depressed main characters.  After a little of this I decided to take a break.  Apparently, this wasn’t going to be Harrison Ford and Daryl Hannah.  It’s going to be a lot less chirpy.  So, I got in touch with the First Selectman and arranged a special meeting to discuss my succession plan as his special assistant in charge of burying the bodies.  Unfortunately, the committee was unable to locate anyone stupid enough to agree to the position.  I came home a few hours later and checked my KENP counter.  It was seventeen pages.  That’s 2.6984 cents.  Well!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  At this rate I’ll be able to afford my favorite Dunkin Donuts donut (an old fashioned) by Fall.

And I think my addition to the Kindle Unlimited rolls has netted me my first troll.  He was pretending to be a fairly successful non-fiction author but was unaware that he wasn’t supposed to be a fiction author so his answers didn’t track with that.  I brought this to his attention and he started making incoherent sentences.  Well, what can you do?  Now that I’m on the road to fame and fortune everyone wants a piece of me.  J K Rowlings eat your heart out.

What’s KENP?

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So, there are a lot of things going on.  I reached 500 reads on Royal Road but out of those 500 reads not a single comment or review was left.  And since I wanted to sign up for Kindle Unlimited, I had to shut down any sites that had e-books other than Amazon.  So, I deleted “The Sniper” from Royal Road and BookFunnel so that I could test out Kindle Unlimited for at least ninety days.  And of course, I’ve been checking Amazon to see how many KENP (Kindle Edition Normalized Pages) of the “The Sniper” have been read.  And, of course, a watched pot never boils.  But I also wonder if Kindle Unlimited will lower the number of e-books I’ll sell on KDP.  And now I’ll also have to figure out how to set up incentives and other come-ons that Amazon has thought up for the poor confused authors out there.

I started reading “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” today.  So right from the git-go PKD’s dystopia certainly has a lot of drugs to control the emotional state of its citizens.  Also, Rick Deckard apparently has a wife that doesn’t seem to like him at all.  He also seems to have artificial sheep.  So, this isn’t exactly Blade Runner so far.  But I’m a patient man and I’ll plow my way in hoping that Roy Baty shows up and offs the founder of the Tyrell Corporation and talks about attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.  I just hope it’s that cool.

I had my weekly coffee walk zoom with the boys.  One of them was inspired by my book and is now writing several short stories.  Kudos to him.  And we were talking about how the old firm has DEI’d itself into a disaster.  They chased out all the old white guys and now the DEI hires have had to hire them back as contractors because they don’t know how the systems work.  They waited so long to upgrade some systems that the hardware is now unavailable from the manufacturers and competency will be needed to replace it with currently available equipment.  But unfortunately, these DEI hires are completely incompetent so … “contractors!”  I told the boys to drive a very hard bargain and make sure the hourly rate is ridiculously expensive.  When the project shows up as a blinking red light on the C-Suite’s monthly checklist of “problems” it will be embarrassing and hilarious when they have to admit they don’t know how their own systems are supposed to work.  And that’s not going to be easy to explain to the FDA.  Being audited by the feds isn’t fun under the best of circumstances.  When you have to admit that product was thrown away due to out of spec conditions that’s a nightmare.  Well anyway.  We laughed and laughed.  The guy who got booted used to be a good guy.  Then he became a true believer in DEI.  After that he became intolerable and we all agreed that he got what he deserved.

Well, that’s enough for now.

Space Fiction in the Modern Age

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With all the excitement about “Project Hail Mary” making a gazillion dollars at the box office I was thinking about how we get past the reality of the limitations on humans surviving space travel.  I mean what do we think about our interplanetary (not to mention interstellar) travelers bombarded with cosmic radiation and metabolically wasted away by microgravity?    Yikes!

First off, think of all the great old books and movies that have been rendered null and void by these realities.  Other than maybe the Moon, the old ideas of colonies are falsified by what we’ve learned.  No colonies on Mars and the Jovian moons.  No asteroid miners in the Belt.  All just flights of fantasy.  What’s an American boy from the baby boom to do?

Well, I guess the thing to remember is that one age’s wild guess is eventually replaced by a later age’s measured recalculation.  Jules Verne had men travel around the Moon by being shot out of a cannon.  Of course, when someone from the twentieth century crunched the numbers, they probably figured out that a cannon that could send a projectile around the Moon would reduce the occupants to a puddle of goo by virtue of the acceleration needed to reach escape velocity in just the few seconds that the “bullet” was inside the barrel of the “gun.”  And yet these twentieth century engineers didn’t just throw their hands in the air and say “Impossible.”  They invented chemical rockets.

And maybe that’s what will happen with space flight.  Even in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Frank and Dave have a rotating ring with pseudo-gravity.  Maybe a practical way to protect humans from radiation will also be perfected.

Or maybe the science fiction of the future will involve robot missions to the planets and stars but with some kind of instantaneous communication to allow humans to experience the sights and sounds of the robotic mission as if in the first person.  Or maybe they’ll fall back on good old “psionics” to allow humans to explore space-time without leaving the confines of Mother Earth.

Or maybe we go back to the suspended animation idea.  And we add to that a nice heavy duty radiation shield around the cryo-unit.  We can have a robotic autopilot and only thaw the humans at the destination.

Or how about intelligent robots whose memories can then be downloaded for humans to view or even “experience” as transferrable memories.  Or maybe we can build a wormhole in high orbit around Earth and pop out close to other planets or even exo-planets.

And none of these things have to be proven science.  They just have to be figments of our imagination that give us the framework for a story or a future that entertain us.  In a decade or a century what we know to be impossible will change again.  And so will what we find to be possible.  We are very clever monkeys and what is impossible today becomes possible in a different way tomorrow.  There’s no reason to give up our stories or our dreams.

20MAY2026 – Quote of the Day

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Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

John Ruskin

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 19MAY2026 – Politics

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Hard to call for 2026. Right now the house is held by 5 republicans plus an independent who caucuses with them. with the California redistrict vs Florida and the lame one seat win in Louisiana (which could have been 2) AND Indiana going AWOL I think it’s going to be very tight, likely slightly Democrat (5-10 seats). The big question on the Senate side is Platner vs Collins. Collins is not the best candidate from a conservative view, But probably better for us than Platner most days. Platner is such a fricking mess and there’s likely far more dirt that Collins can use that the elderly and upstate folks probably will swamp Portland and Southern Maine. The thing that would be good to do is close out Iran but resolving that such that things recover before 11/3 will take some really lucky breaks that I just don’t see happening. We HAVE to stop them from getting a nuclear weapon they make North Korea look like a calm reasonable opponent.
One race to watch is the LA mayor. If LA unblues enough to elect Pratt all then things get really odd.

2028 is a totally different situation. Likely, the major issue (Iran) will be resolved at some level. That unblocks large parts of the economy. Although the last half of the Trump administration probably gets stalled due to a blue house (and tied or slightly blue senate) they really cant do much as they haven’t got a veto proof majority and are unlikely to get one. So we get 2 years of sitzkrieg unless a miracle occurs.
Problem is the Democrats have no one that can easily steal states from the electoral coalition that Trump used. Newsome is an idiot and anathema to middle America, AOC is worse. Spanberger might have been an option but her run at the gerrymandering and the gun nonsense makes it clear she is just a traditional far left Liberal cosplaying as middie of the road. Buttigieg? Please don’t make me laugh. Shapiro from PA? If they would take him he MIGHT have a chance. Except he is never getting by the primaries because of the massive antisemitism of the democrat far left base. Kamala? She couldn’t even hardly touch Trump who had massive negatives in her base. The blue Gerontacracy that was boosted by Obama backstabbing any up and coming Pols means their bench is essentially all folks politically based in deep blue one party states. They have no clue where the middle is and any attempt to go there will get you slammed in the primaries. And because these are such lame candidates they will have basically no coattails. I’d expect things in 2028 to swing back to a more 2024 like situation with likely small Republican margins. And that takes us to 2030 where the big prize is fixing the ersatz 2020 census. That census is going to be absolutely critical, not controlling it will mean you’re headed to the edges for up to 10 years. It will already slame the blue states even if the questionable practices of 2020 are not removed. If they are removed the house might lean 20+ seats red in the 2032 elections.

The one big worry is we have 2 fairly old Supreme Court members who are the bulwarks of originalist interpretation (Thomas at 77 and Alito at 76). Should we lose them and the Senate is blue or evenly divided replacing them with other than some squishball moderate gets REAL hard. Add Roberts at 71 who although not SUPER dependable tends more to the originalist side unless he is trying to curry favor or look wise.