Category: OCF

16FEB2025 – OCF Update – Nuts and Bolts

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This is an explanation for the “Test” post today.  I’ve been struggling to eliminate delays in posts showing up on the front page of the site.  There’s a thing called caching that cuts down on the site server’s work and therefore makes the site quicker.  But if it delays updating the site then folks don’t see the new content quickly.  I’m fighting a war to get the cache purge to happen every fifteen minutes.  I may have succeeded but only time will tell.

And now I return you to your regularly scheduled test pattern.

12FEB2025 – No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

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If you attempted to access the site today for some period between 9am and 10 am EST you may have seen the dreaded 404 ERROR message on your screen.  And so did I!  A week or so ago I upgraded my site.  I needed more memory and resources.

And so for a day I experienced some wonky stuff where my posting disappeared and my hair fell out and I turned into a werewolf briefly.  But then everything was okay.  Well, today I was on-line and doing this and that when suddenly my connection to the site turned into that 404 ERROR message.  I tried the limited things I could think of and they were completely ineffective.  Then I went to my site host and started crying and shrieking and after about an hour of fiddling with settings it got fixed.

They never warned me this was going to happen.  To be fair it’s more complicated than that.  They didn’t check to see if I had a particular firewall arrangement that has to be aligned with any changes to the host IP address.  But as everyone knows I’m the lamest web master in the multiverse so there was no chance of me anticipating the problem that came up.

Anyway, apologies for any interruption to your viewing pleasure and back to the show.

Well, Another Time

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What is it that science fiction readers (and writers) like about the genre?  Is it that we escape the bounds of the familiar?  Does it somehow excite us more if the villain shoots a laser, or a blaster at the hero instead of a 9mm?  If the hero is driving an FTL (faster than light) cruiser instead of a BMW does that add to the interest in what he thinks to himself?  If an android or a robot murders a politician instead of an antifa terrorist, does it make the killing more psychologically significant?

Maybe it’s the sense that we can get at the heart of things if we aren’t trapped in the ordinariness of the here and now.  If the bad guys have capture not just a subway train but the whole Milky Way galaxy maybe we feel like we are dealing more with absolutes.  Stark choices cry out for decisions.  In the face of real evil, we will have clarity.

Or maybe it’s just the desire for freedom.  Advanced technology provides the writer with mechanisms that simplify and clean up the story line.  If the writer has painted himself into a corner in his narrative there’s no need to re-write the problem.  Just pull out a heaping helping of unobtanium and leap over the obstacle with perfect ease.

Of course that can lead to some cheesy results.  Probably 90+% of time travel stories fall into this category.  By the end of the story the protagonist is busy murdering a dozen temporal versions of himself on his way to reclaim his life in the here and now.  Heinlein did his “All You Zombies” short story all those years back but I’ve never gotten on board with all that jazz.

Maybe the thing I like about it as a storyteller is the way it allows you to build the story outward.  You can start with a future world that has interplanetary travel and terra-forming and then at some critical juncture an alien race possessing FTL capability can show up and upend this whole fictional world.  Or maybe it’s a species that just floats through space at galactic rotational speed but can live indefinitely in vacuum and when it reaches a new solar system it infects these new worlds and eradicates all other forms of life and then moves on to spread to the next system.  Or maybe a small black hole is drifting into the solar system and will destroy the Earth and Sun unless some new force can be brought to bear against this irresistible force of nature.  Or, or, or…

Of course, the danger is in pulling too many rabbits out of your hat.  You can’t have small black holes, cosmic plagues and FTL aliens showing up all in the same week.  At least not respectably.  The days of the cliff hanger are long past their prime and unless you’re serializing your book by the chapter, surprise technology needs to be believable and can’t be hauled on stage just in the nick of time.

The reason for this topic is that I was just considering the other day a subplot where the underground technology that my protagonist possesses could accidentally discover a space ship that was buried deep beneath the surface of the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago.  It would allow me to add new facets to the story but I’m afraid it will complicate and confuse the story too much.  I think I will leave that for a later story in the same world.  But I have to confess it’s fun to toy with what can be done with that kind of addition.  It would be amazing.

Well, another time.

Growing Pains at OCF

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I’m upgrading my plan with my site host.  Of course after I approved the plan I get a message saying it’ll take two day to implement and by the way, don’t modify the site in the interim or the changes may be lost.  If in the next couple of days you notice any monkey business this is likely being caused by “progress.”

Well, what did I expect with AI is “helping” me. I’m starting to wonder if there really are any human beings on the other side of the wire.

Now That’s Showmanship

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Ah, Groundhog Day.  When northern America as one embraces a Bill Murray movie and tries to figure out a way to survive until winter gives up.  After a remarkably mild 2023/2024 winter, cold weather has reasserted itself and I have embraced the reality that I don’t live in a rational climate.  The pattern is one day of freezing rain and the next night, zero degrees Fahrenheit.  This is an extremely unhelpful arrangement.  Almost any depth of snow can be removed.  0-4 inches is handled with a snow shovel.  2-22 inches yields, for the most part to a snowblower or plow.  After that it get trickier, but it can still be done.  And the resulting cleared surface is generally very usable for walking and driving your car on.

A quarter to a half inch of ice is a disaster.  If the ground was very cold when the rain fell and then the air temperature dropped quickly and even worse if the wind really picked up, you end up with a layer that is almost impossible to remove unless you put road salt on it.  Unfortunately, I use well water so I don’t salt my driveway.  That’s very unfortunate.  Instead, I take a garden rake or a roofer’s shovel and I abrade the surface of the ice and then I sand it and then scrape it again to lodge the sand in the surface.  This works but it is extremely labor intensive.  So, I hate rain in the winter.  And lately it has become a very frequent occurrence.

Alright, enough whining.

So, what’s new?  Well, tariffs.  Trump has tariffs for Canada, Mexico, China and I assume a lot of other places.  And I hear he’s suspending all aid to South Africa while an investigation of anti-white land seizures and other worse actions is performed.  Wow.  Trump is going full steam ahead.  Every day I ask myself, “What’s left to do?  Nothing.”  But then he does three more things.  One of the things I’m very happy about is that Trump is cutting off the money supply to the NGO’s.  These organizations are funded by the US government but work directly against the interests and sometimes against the very laws of this country.  Here we are spending billions of dollars to eject illegal aliens while charities are spending billions of tax-payer dollars to feed, house and hide these very same illegal aliens.  Cutting off their funds is the most effective and fastest method of combatting the problem.  I’ll give him credit; Trump is proving to be a force to be reckoned with.  I don’t want to get my hopes up too high but it seems to me that there is a very good chance that he’s going to “fundamentally change the United States,” but for the better.  Sort of an anti-Obama.

Kennedy, Gabbard and Patel are up for votes in the Senate this week.  If I were to guess I’d say all three will need Vance as the tie-breaking vote.  And that’s actually me being optimistic.  There are some truly terrible Republicans in the Senate.  McConnel voted against Hegseth because he gets money from defense contractors and they’re worried Hegseth and Trump will end the gravy train.  I think it’s possible he’ll vote to confirm Patel because he doesn’t get paid by any lobby associated with the FBI.  Now there are plenty of Senators that get paid by the pharma lobby.  This might cause Kenedy to be rejected.

Update: Hat Tip to Tom D for the data

top-medical-indust-receip
top-medical-indust-receip

 

 

As for Gabbard, I think she’ll get through but I think Vance will break the tie.  So, I guess I’m cautiously optimistic.  Hopefully that’s more accurate than Democrats being nauseously optimistic on Kamala’s election prospects.

We’re getting 2-4 inches of snow tonight (they say).  I’ll be up very early to clear that before going to work tomorrow.  This will be a hectic week with some travel toward the end.  But I’ll be dutifully following the news coming from the Trump White House (the Greatest Show on Earth).  I keep waiting to hear that he’s declassified the Area 51 files and that he’s going to give a tour of the flying saucer and the pickled bodies of the space aliens.  Now that’s showmanship.

I’m Still Working Out the Details

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So, which is it?  Rage against the dying of the light or serenity in the face of the inevitable and natural cycle of life and death?  I was at a funeral and I looked at my cousins and saw what time was doing to them.  All of us were proof of the inevitability of aging and death.  Each one was a slightly different take on mortality.  Some seemed to be aging gently and they exuded humor and calm.  Others looked very tired and deeply saddened by how hard the way is.  Well, that difference comes of a combination of internal and external factors.  Luck plays a part and also wisdom and also temperament.  If I’m going to guess I’d say luck and temperament play the largest parts.  I mean I guess someone like Gautama could remain tranquil in the face of fate’s onslaught against our loved ones and our selves but most people are not so stoic.  We need some luck to keep us going.  Even Job finally had enough and wanted a word with the Big Guy Upstairs about all those boils.

So, is there a correct attitude toward the Big Sleep?  I’ve always taken a somewhat legalistic attitude about what kind of deal we get from fate.  When I was a bit younger, I used to say that fifty years was somewhat the break even point.  What I meant by that was if fate gave you fifty good years you should think that you got a decent deal.  Not great but decent.  The first fifty years are the best part of a life and with any reasonable amount of effort you can get quite a bit done in a half century.  You can raise a family.  You can become an expert in your profession.  You could even have served as President of the United States by then.

It’s not really a full lifetime but if you don’t lollygag around until forty you can cram a lot of living into fifty years.  So, if you live comfortably to seventy, I think you can feel like you got a pretty sweet deal.  I’m approaching the biblical “three score and ten” mark myself.  And even though I’m not anxious to throw in the towel quite yet I can’t see myself going through the whole wailing, gnashing my teeth and shaking my fist at heaven act.  I feel it would reflect a certain amount of ingratitude.  After all, think of kids who die of cancer or some other terrible disease before they ever get their permanent teeth.  That’s where I see someone lodging a legitimate grievance against the way the universe is run.  I’ve always been repelled by the suffering of the innocents; “the problem of pain.”

So that’s my somewhat simplistic but easily explainable philosophy of life and death.  God owes us fifty good years.  And we owe it to ourselves (and Him) to use the time wisely and diligently.  And this is coming from a profoundly lazy man.  No male in my family has ever truly grown up before thirty.  We have a talent for floating above the ground for an inordinate amount of time before being forced to finally settle down and get to work.  For this reason, I feel like I have been blessed in having reached my age with all of the milestones accomplished.  Of course, all of the credit for this goes to Camera Girl.  She refused to let me stall her plans and so she had her kids while we were very young.  Which means we were desperately poor for the first ten plus years of our married lives.  Which means I was that much luckier to get the whole thing to work out.

So, seeing death and dying is a humbling experience.  But it also makes me grateful for what I’ve already been allotted.  And honestly, I’m not very excited about ending up a nonagenarian or even an octogenarian.  I’m hoping for some very lazy death.  I’ve toyed with the idea of starving myself.  But I’m afraid I might keep putting it off every time I smell something good on the stove.  I’m still working out the details.

The Human Element

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Einstein is said to have made the imaginative leap when he based his Theory of General Relativity on the notion that time (t) is just another dimension to go along with the three spatial dimensions (x, y, z).  Space-time.  When we talk about the where of a particle (or a person) we must also specify the when.

So yesterday when I travelled back to the place where I was born, I would have to travel back in time to reach my place of origin (x, y, z, t = 0, 0, 0, 0).  But Einstein also said that for matter time can only travel forward.  But maybe the mind (or the soul) isn’t composed of protons and electrons; leptons and hadrons.  Because I had an uncanny feeling I had stepped back into an earlier era.

After battling New York City traffic that defied belief, to attend a family funeral, I walked into the little Roman Catholic Church that I attended as a child and was transported into my past.  Sure, a few little things had changed.  They had freshened up the paint on the ceiling over the altar and on the bas relief stations of the cross but the stained-glass windows, the icons around the altar and the pews we sat in triggered memories that perfectly mirrored my surroundings.  And then there were my cousins and their children and their children’s children surrounding me with proof that the world I left behind decades ago still existed in a very human, very tenacious way.  God said be fruitful and multiply.  And we have.  From a tiny family that set foot on this continent less than 150 years ago there are now a whole town’s worth of descendants.

And some of the latest additions were unknown to me by name.  But just looking at their faces I could see the kinship.  And in the middle of the Mass one of the youngest made such a noisy nuisance of himself that he forced his mother to retreat to the annex to return the ceremony to dignified order.  But this outburst was of the very nature of the family.  We are noisy, somewhat spoiled, sometimes rude but genuinely good natured and extremely funny people.  And we do enjoy each other’s company.  Being surrounded by this small army of family felt so right.

One of my cousins remarked that it was a pity that only such occasions rounded us all up together again.  He spoke nostalgically about when we were all living within blocks of each other within the Italian ghetto that we all were now flocking to for this solemn occasion.  He reminisced about the parties and get togethers we used to have on a regular basis; holidays, birthdays, weddings, graduations, births.  But I reminded him that no one’s grandchildren could hope to afford the multi-million-dollar price tags that now attached to the buildings in this once humble neighborhood.  What young people could afford to buy houses here now?   I kidded that we would have to buy a whole town somewhere in the middle of nowhere if we wanted to live together in this modern and expensive age.  He ruefully nodded his head in agreement.

Quickly the ceremony ended and we said our goodbyes.  I wasn’t headed out east to the Long Island cemetery.  I was headed north toward New England through the grid-lock of the outer boroughs and onto the highways beyond.  But we made one stop before we headed home.  There was an old time Italian Bakery that specialized in Italian pastries.  They had sfogliatella riccia (seashell), coda d’aragosta (lobster tail) and various other pastries stuffed with cream that we would eat on Sunday nights when we were kids.  The only problem with this wonderful store was the old woman who had run the counter.  She was a sharp-tongued shrew who carped at everyone who entered the store.

I entered the store today and found the shelves still lined with all those Italian delicacies.  But now the store was run by a Chinese family that had bought the recipes for the pastries when they purchased the business.  And thankfully the pastries were just the same!  And even better, the young lady running the counter was entirely friendly and polite.  A miracle!

After too many hours I returned home with my small cache of desserts and told Camera Girl of my epic journey.  We’ll eat the cakes with our coffee this week.  And that will remind me of what I learned.  Einstein was wrong about not being able to go back in time.  You can.  What you can’t do is go back to the same place.  It’s always different.  But it can be worth the trip.

Circling Back

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The next couple of days will be different.  I have to attend a funeral for a close relative.  She was ninety-seven and so I’m travelling both closer to my geographical origin and back in time to my childhood.  I’ll be going back to the Catholic church I attended as a child and seeing the neighborhood I lived in.  And a lot of my cousins will be there and my siblings.  I probably will also see some old acquaintances for the last time on this Earth.  And that is a thought that gives me pause.  This is the second death of that generation in the last few weeks.  Those folks had a lot of vitality.  All of them on that side of the family have reached their nineties.  I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that legacy.  It’s not an unmixed “blessing.”

I’ll look over the old neighborhood.  Last time I was there it had become a Southeast Asian enclave of one sort or another.  I’ll be interested to see if the homeless and the illegal aliens have shown up to any degree.  I suspect things will look worse than even it looked a decade ago when I passed through.  The only thing that seems to have endured since my childhood is an old-fashioned Italian bakery that somehow has endured.  The family still runs it and from what I’ve been told they still make crumb cake and crème doughnuts that are worth buying.  So, after the wake and the mass I intend to stop by that store and buy some pastries to bring home to Camera Girl.  She’s partial to good crumb cake and I like it too.

When I get back, we’ll have some good coffee and enjoy some pastries while I tell her what the old neighborhood looks like.  And I’ll tell her who showed up for the funeral and who didn’t.  What everybody looked like and any family news for good or bad.  And hopefully, there won’t be any new feuds breaking out to report.  At this point in the cycle, I’m hoping everybody is looking to let bygones be bygones and go quietly into that good night.  But you never know.  I come from some pretty ornery stock.  There are old feuds that go back well over a hundred years that I’ve heard about and as far as I know are still being honored.  But hopefully those folks won’t be showing up for this family gathering.

And in fact, I know of at least one party who will attempt to spark a gathering of the clan for a summer party sometime in the summer.  I used to have one every summer about a decade ago at the Compound but people got older and travelling became more difficult so it subsided.  Maybe this will revive the custom.

So, I’ll see what I can do to keep this site active while I’m on the road.  At the very least there will be pictures and quotes.  I’ll see if I can get one more post scheduled after this one to fill in the gap.  But we’ll see.

Well, back I go.

Phoning it In on Friday Morning

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Thursday was just such a busy day that I didn’t get anything done on the site until late at night.  I had to process some photos and set them up.  And so late at night how can I think of a topic no less speak intelligently on it?  My mind is a spent force.  So, I’ve just watched Orson Welles’ “Chimes at Midnight.”  This was Welles’ cut and paste job from the two Henry IV plays to showcase Falstaff and his time with Prince Hal.

And it’s a brilliant idea that should be remade again.  But who could be Falstaff now?  Who’s funny enough?  Who’s fat enough.  Who can act Shakespeare?  No one.

But no reason to be gloomy.  These things will turn around.  All the nonsense that has been pushed on the kids for the last thirty years will not last.  All of it is rot that won’t last.  All those who truly believe it are self-selecting themselves for extinction and they will leave room for those who don’t.  There are plenty who make believe that they believe for self-preservation.  But when the winds change, as they already are changing, they’ll move on to where their advantage lies.

I was watching the movie “Fury” today with one of my friends.  I had never seen it.  Brad Pitt is an American tanker in WWII.  He and his men including a raw recruit are deep into German territory in 1945 and everywhere they turn they’re hip-deep in death.  The action and personal actions of the soldiers are as gritty as can be.  I won’t give away the plot but suffice it to say that the tank crew was beyond hardened.  They were approaching psychotic.  But they had a camaraderie that was stirring.  My friend told me that the movie’s ending was based on a true story although instead of an American tank in WWII it was based on a British tank in WWI.  Well, it is a rousing battle scene.

You know, YouTube is an interesting concept.  They must know I’m writing a novel because I keep finding videos on fiction-writing in my feed.  And one of them was by Vonnegut.  And I watched it and it reminded of when I met the guy by accident at the carousel in Central Park.  And it’s funny, I wasn’t a fan of his writing but he came across very friendly and normal.  And it got me thinking which other celebrities are regular people when you meet them off the cuff.  I once spoke to a car service driver who brought people in and out of the Northeast casinos.  He said Jerry Seinfeld was an arrogant jerk.  Well, I won’t say that shocked me.  The one guy I’d really like to meet completely candidly is Donald Trump.  He’s a complete enigma.  How much of the Trump we see is real and how much is make believe?  And is he crazy?  Well, I’ll never find out so I’ll just have to keep making stuff up.

I hope to catch up on the website chores tomorrow so I’m not working from behind.  I guess Dunwich is a busy mythical place where even humans find themselves trapped in warped space-time.  But this will have to do for tonight.  Good night and good morning.