Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 2

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There was a lot of good discussion centering around slavery and its negative effect on technical innovation.  After all, why would you need automation to increase the effectiveness of farming or other industrial work if you can just buy another thousand or even ten thousand war slaves for use as laborers on your farm or in your copper mine?  Sure, they cost something but not much and if you keep them starved to the edge of death you don’t even need to feed them much.  Just replace them with younger, stronger slaves.

Of course, every once in a while, the slaves will produce a Spartacus who decides to burn the whole thing down but that’s what the legions are for anyway.  And crucifying a few thousand slaves along the Appian Way is a good reminder of who’s boss.

But even slavery is not the whole story.  When the majority of Romans were plebians living on family farms, and these same farmers were the citizen soldiers who were legionnaires when an enemy threatened, there was a patriotism that made the Romans the greatest military force of their age.  They might lose twenty or thirty thousand men against Hannibal and then come back and field an army just as large from volunteers who served to protect their nation, their families and their homes.

But the patricians who ran the senate were greedy and selfish and after a soldier returned home from war, he stood to lose his land because he would default on the debts that he couldn’t pay off due to his absence and loss of harvest.  These patricians would scoop up these small farms and then use their connections to obtain the defeated enemies as slaves and outcompete the remaining small farmers who couldn’t match the efficiency of the large plantations.  And in addition, the patricians eventually discontinued the practice of plebians obtaining conquered lands as colonists.  The patricians turned these foreign lands into even larger plantations for themselves.

So eventually these landless plebians ended up as a discontented rabble living on the bread and circuses that the emperors provided in Rome.  And eventually they ended up in the armies which was the profession of last resort.  So essentially the Roman elites eliminated the middle class.  And eventually that reduced the effectiveness of the legions too.  And finally, manpower was so depleted through destruction of the actual Roman citizens that the legions more and more were populated with barbarians from the fringes of the empire.  So much so that by the fourth and fifth centuries the Franks, Germans, Goths and other pastoral peoples in Gaul and the northern border were the legions.

When Atilla finally invaded the western empire, it was Frankish legionnaires and even generals who resisted him most effectively.  But at this point, the jig was up.  The barbarians realized that the empire was a paper tiger.  Its citizens were downtrodden serfs who couldn’t or maybe wouldn’t take up arms to defend their “nation.”  Being ruled by a Roman emperor or an Ostrogothic “king” was a matter of complete indifference to them.  In point of fact the barbarian could probably provide better protection and possibly the taxes would be lower if the imperial bureaucracy ceased to exist.

So, whether the Romans could have produced more defensible borders against the nomadic Eurasian pastoral peoples, whether Huns, Alans or even the westernmost tribes like the Goths and Vandals is probably immaterial.  If a nation doesn’t have a population willing to defend its homeland, then it is as good as done.

And this was known all the way back in the time of Aristotle.  Strong states had a large prosperous middle-class.  Because this is the group that produces children and believes in the value of the nation.  Not the very rich and not the desperately poor.  Rome committed slow suicide when it allowed the patricians to destroy the plebian farmer/soldiers.  Because the early Romans so thoroughly defeated the neighboring peoples it took five hundred years to produce new enemies to tear down the rotted corpse of Rome but by the time of Marcus Aurelius the damage had already been done.  It just took three hundred more years for Atilla to show up and prove to the Germans that there was nothing there to stop them.

As a footnote I think it’s interesting to see that our modern-day patricians (elites) are busy destroying the working and middle classes and importing migrants to act as cheap (slave) labor to replace them.  What a brilliant plan.  But not very original.

Thoughts on the Fall of the Roman Empire – Part 1

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I have a copy of the first volume of H.G. Wells’ “The Outline of History.”  And in a real way the Roman Empire is the center of the book.  His descriptions of the civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Greece are all sort of a set up for Rome.  And in a real way Rome is the basis for discussing Medieval Europe but also as a point of comparison, China, India and the Islamic world.  And this is not to say that Wells had a romantic or idealized conception about the Roman republic or empire.  Far from it.  He goes to great lengths to explain why even at the height of the Pax Romana; the something like two hundred years from Augustus to Marcus Aurelius that the people of Rome, with the exception of the truly wealthy, were profoundly and justifiably miserable.  And I can see his point of view.  I only have to remember that renegade Roman citizen from Greece that Priscus wrote about, who willingly joined up with Atilla the Hun, to realize how the fall of Rome was probably an improvement in the fate of Europe as a whole; though maybe not for the inhabitants of the areas that descended into chaos in the fifth century.

Among the many short comings of that civilization, Wells counts a lack of scientific curiosity as one of the most damning.  He singles out the fact that a working steam engine was created in Hellenistic times but the Romans never took this knowledge and harnessed it in the way that modern Europe did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with such inventions as the locomotive.

He further produces as evidence the Romans’ complete neglect of geography as a tool for determining the advantageous borders of their enormous empire.  For instance, if they had realized the outline of the North and Baltic seas and the distance to the Caucasus Mountains and the Caspian Sea, they might have realized that conquering Germany and the Slavic tribes would have produced a shorter and more defensible eastern border than the one that allowed the Huns to stampede the German tribes into the western empire and effectively destroy their civilization.

As for this last claim I have my doubts.  This would have required the Romans to occupy all of Eastern Europe, up to and including Poland, Ukraine along with parts of southern Russia and Iran.  In defense of my ancestors, I would remind Mr. Wells that those areas are very, very much colder than Italy.  Getting Roman colonists for these Hyperborean locales would have been a real stretch.  But let’s assume that the emperor Trajan at his height was aware of the geographical imperative to conquer these areas and that he had made it happen.  What then?

Would the Roman legions and the citizens have repelled the Huns when they came crashing into this Eastern border in the fifth century AD?  Well, that’s the question.  It has been stated that by 180 AD the empire was weakened by a series of plagues that reduced population but also because the downtrodden peasants refused to have children under the onerous conditions they lived under.  This seems to fly in the face of the archeological evidence of bustling cities and far-flung trade with India and even China that sent enormous quantities of silver and gold eastward into Asia from Roman coffers.

What is the truth?  I’ll give my opinion in the second part.  But feel free to give your ideas in the comments.

Complicated and Annoying

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So, the great retreat has begun.  On Friday the pool guys showed up and closed it down for the season.  Of course there was some drama.  I had asked the guy in charge to tell his crew to patch three liner holes that had developed above the water line.  He warned me that one of them boded ill and meant I might soon need to install a new liner at a cost of gazillions of dollars.  I told him okay, but have them patch the holes anyway.  So of course, he didn’t tell them and so they had to go back to get more glue or something.

And Camera Girl’s house plants needed to come back inside soon.  So, I moved them into one of the decks in advance of dragging them up to the top floor.  This may sound trivial but some of these things are taller than me, awkwardly shaped for the stairs, covered with huge needle-sharp spines and incredibly heavy.  So, it’s always a ticklish chore.  One day I assume it will be the cause of my death.  What I should do is set up a temporary pulley system on the top balcony and let mechanical advantage do the heavy lifting.  But I’m too lazy to design it.  Maybe next year.

I also have a bunch of plants that I need to transplant outside.  Then it will be time to stow away all of the outdoor furniture and begin the winter-proofing of the exposed wood.  To be honest, I’ve never done a decent job of this but I’ve sworn a horrible oath to do it this year.  And then I have to winterize the lawn mowers.

And finally, the biggest chore I have to shore up about eighteen posts on the pool fence.  I’ve got a few kits and I’ll buy the rest but it will be a load off my mind to have that damn thing completely reinforced.  There are also two gates that need some work but those can wait.  A gate’s not much use if the fence around it is on the ground.

So, there’s plenty to do and things will be getting busy at work soon, so I’ll be stressed and agitated while I try to publish and market my brand-new book.  But that’s what life is all about; conflicting priorities and humans choosing priorities.  It’s what separates us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans.  We choose wisely.

I have a feeling I’ll be self-publishing the book.  I watched a video where the guy said that most trad-published books get an advance of only about $5,000 – $10,000 and since the publisher doesn’t market your book for you most of the work (other than putting a cover on it) still has to be done by the author.  Well, if I’ve got to drum up the buyers myself, I might as well keep 70% of the profits instead of 10%.  And that way I have the discretion to use deceptive sales tactics like increasing and decreasing the sale price whenever it suits my devious and even diabolical plans.

Well, I need to start making a Gantt Chart of this publishing and marketing process.  It sounds complicated and annoying.  So right up my alley.  I wonder if Donald Trump has any time available in his schedule to market my book.  After all, I’ve been of invaluable help to him in his campaigns.  But how quickly people forget.

Writing’s Easy.  Selling is Hard.

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As I mentioned a day or two ago, I’ve finally finished my story about the sniper.  Of course, it still needs a spell check and another read through for errors and any “infelicities” of style that I may find.  But for the most part I’ve brought it to a close.

But now comes the really hard part.  Self-publishing versus traditional publishing.  And for me it’s especially difficult because the story is unacceptably “right wing” from the point of view of anyone in the traditional publishing industry except for one or two houses like Baen Books who cater to stories from our side of the great political divide.

I have just begun doing my research on some kind of order of operations to maximize my chances to publish the book so that the largest number of people will hear about it.  And my level of knowledge of the whole publishing process is pretty darn close to absolute zero.  I’ve only reached out to one guy I know of who writes in the same general universe with me but I think I’ll have to feel my way around by reading and watching content that is meant to educate the public about trad publishing vs. self-publishing and then get a better handle on what writers on the right generally do.

So far all I’ve read makes the whole process seem incredibly slow and painful and chock full of interactions with gatekeepers and unsympathetic literary agents who will never return any of my correspondence but will dismiss me as a talentless hack.

But maybe I’m completely mistaken and instead I’ll be embraced by the publishing world as the next Cormac McCarthy and be showered with accolades and surrounded by business agents fighting one another to get me to sign book and movie deals.  Within months I’ll be quoted by millions of readers who will flood my website with messages of delight about my brilliant writing and demands that I “take their crowdfunding money” for my next writing effort.  The millions of dollars will pile up in Camera Girl’s sewing closet (she likes cash) and I will become a recluse and start wearing outlandish clothes to reflect my new status as a global phenomenon.  I can hear it now.  The crowds chanting at DragonCon, “photog, photog, photog!”

Okay good.  Now I’ve got that out of my system.  I’ll go back to finding out whether the “hybrid” publishers I’ve read about that cater to right and libertarian authors are legit or really the infamous “vanity press” scam artists that take all your money and ship a few boxes of print-on-demand paperbacks and tell you to, “Go market the damn things yourself!”

Well, I wanted to try writing a book.  Now I’ve done it and I better find out how to get other people to know it exists without spending a million dollars doing it.  And that’s another thing.  Now that AI can draw covers maybe I can save some money by using it.  Of course, I understand that I’ll anger all of the artistic community that does book covers for a living.  Hmmm.  Maybe I should find out what it costs.  There are already so many people mad at me in the world, adding to that number sounds like a bad idea.  Well, we’ll see.

The Perfect Proportion

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I was going through my feed on X and I saw someone liked a comment I made.  As is my habit I went back to the posts from this individual to see if it was of interest.  And as I clicked, I saw a picture of what was supposed to be a pizza.  It was a thin crust but it had about two inches of what looked like chopped meat cooked onto it.  I was horrified.  But all things considered, lots of things called pizza don’t seem to resemble what was called pizza back when I was a kid in Brooklyn.  There was a pizzeria on Avenue X that served the typical Neapolitan pie.  It was a large round thin crust with marinara sauce, mozzarella and various cheeses to taste.  For meat lovers you could get pepperoni or sausage garnishing the surface.  But that was about it.  And that was plenty good.  Watching the cooks shaping the dough and twirling it in the air was an entertainment all its own.  Coming hot out of the oven and served on a piece of wax paper with a coke to wash it down was paradise.  If you were rich, you might even buy two slices.  But a slice was a nickel so one was all I could afford and no coke for me.

Later on in life I found out about rectangular pizza with thick crust.  Camera Girl’s mother was Sicilian and that’s how they made pizza.  And that was very good too.  And they had some different ideas about toppings.  They would introduce the seafood motif; anchovies, and even bluefish.  All very heretical to me.  But still delicious.

But her I am sixty years later and what do I see?  Chaos.  Pizza without tomato sauce, without mozzarella, without cheese, vegan pizza, pineapple pizza, pizza without dough!  It’s too much.  And then there are the chain pizza joints.  They stuff cheese in the crust.  What the hell is that?

Well, I guess it’s just the way of the world.  We live in a global environment.  Cuisines from everywhere exist in this world civilization and are adapted to the business environment and every other factor.  It only makes sense that a successful product will morph to expand its popularity.  After all I don’t complain that the Chinese or Thai recipes I like probably aren’t authentic cuisine but instead a version that works for a restaurant competing in an American marketplace.  Why should pizza be any different?

But then I saw that monstrosity with the mound of chopped meat on top.  That must be the sign of the end times and the four horsemen of the apocalypse must be somewhere nearby.

But one good thing came from seeing that.  It made me think back to that pizzeria on Avenue X and the perfect proportion of crust, tomato sauce, olive oil and cheeses.  On a summer afternoon after playing ball and hanging around with the boys from the neighborhood we’d go to that pizzeria and watching the pie being made and waiting for it to bake was the best feeling in the world.  Because you almost didn’t want to start eating it because it would be finished before you knew it.  The anticipation was the thing.  Good times.

The Chiropteriad

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So last night around midnight I was trying to fall asleep in bed when I heard some noise coming from a window.  In the summer this window has one of those screens with the bracing handles that snugs into the frame of the window.  I had noticed that it wasn’t completely sealed into the window frame but figured it would keep 95% of the bugs out so I didn’t bother to fiddle with it.  Anyway, it was dark so I couldn’t see anything but there was a scurrying and scratching noise.  So, I turned on the light and almost immediately a small black object fell to the floor under the window and immediately opened its wings and flitted around the room.  It was a bat.  I woke Camera Girl and like the good woman she is she ran screaming from the room.  Being a man of action, I started swatting at it with a sweatshirt I had on hand.  That proved to be less than useless.  So, I procured a kitchen broom and ran around the room swatting at it.  No go.  I opened up the door to the balcony and tried to force him out that way.  When a second bat entered the room by the door, I reconsidered this tactic and closed said door.  Now I was ineffectually swinging a broom at two bats that were swooping around the room.

Having a low tolerance for useless effort I closed the doors to our closets and bathroom and beat a hasty retreat to the hallway outside where Camera Girl confronted me on my failure as a protector of the marital bedroom.  I declared a temporary retreat but swore a terrible oath on the River Styx that in the morning I would reconquer our sacred homeland and evict the flying vermin with all of my strength and cunning.  So, we were marooned in one of the spare bedrooms and greatly was I wroth.  After a surprisingly comfortable sleep I woke up raring to settle the score with these winged interlopers.  I brought a six-foot ladder, a child’s butterfly net and a stiff piece of cardboard to trap the beasts inside the net.

After a somewhat thorough inspection of the ceiling, I couldn’t locate my enemies.  Then I looked behind the blinds of one of the other windows that was opened and found one of the critters wedged in the upper corner between the screen and the frame.  I lowered the open window as far as I could while still allowing my hands to force the screen outward and then pushed.  Now the screen was hanging below the window on the outside of the house.  I assumed the bat would fly off in fear.  I was mistaken.  The stupid creature was clinging to the screen.  I got my head and shoulders out of the window and with the leverage I now had I banged the screen against the wall and finally the bat let go and ended up on a flat roof below the window.  Apparently stunned, he later flew off.

I went back and made a closer inspection of some curtains and found the other varmint tucked between the wall and a curtain rod.  I angled the butterfly net and the cardboard as close to the critter as possible and then scraped him off the wall with the cardboard and trapped him with the net.  With Camera Girl nervously entering the room to open the balcony door (and quickly shutting it behind me!) I was able to shake the flying invader out of the net and whoosh; he winged into the woods.

Dunwich has many hazards.  Vampires, lycanthropes of various descriptions, ghouls and even Democrats haunt the swamps and graveyards of this cursed land.  But I feel that my actions today deserve some very special tribute.  Some kind of testimonial with perhaps a cash award would be reasonable, I think.  In a more creative era, the local poet laureate would dedicate an epic poem, possibly in dactylic hexameter, to immortalize my titanic struggle to make Camera Girl safe in her own boudoir.  Maybe I can get Grok or ChatGPT to put something together.

Let’s see.

Sing Muse of that hero skilled in the netting and ejecting of chiropteran monsters in all their horror

Who climbed to great heights and swung the broom to protect the goddess Camera Girl from any harm

Bring him to my mind’s eye and let me praise him with great praise.  What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man!

 

Or something like that.

What Keeps Us Human

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I’ve been reading the latest analyses of paleolithic hominin DNA and from what I’ve gathered it seems to be the case that the present human population is a non-homogeneous collection of various hybrid populations between Homo sapiens (“modern” humans) and Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisovensis and very likely Homo erectus.

Of course, human evolution is such a hot-button topic today that getting paleontologists to use words like hybrids to describe human lineages makes them squeamish and nervous.  Everyone is afraid of the accusation of racism to erupt if someone hints that human beings of different ancestries aren’t all exactly the same.  But they really should all calm down.  Hominin species have been walking the Earth for something like seven million years and during that time various groups have become isolated, evolved different characteristics and then just as easily recombined and formed hybrids that in turn become isolated and start the process all over again.

The latest information I’ve seen shows that there is a strong correlation between Neanderthal DNA and modern populations in northern Europe and northwesten Asia.  And there are strong correlations between Denisovan DNA and modern populations of Australian aborigines and Papuan New Guineans.

The ancient DNA that has been found is restricted to specimens that existed in cooler climates so the complicated story of hominin mixing and isolating in Africa and other tropical areas may never be reconstructed (although recent work with fossil protein materials may change that in the future).  But I think it’s clear that humans have in the past and will continue in the future to recombine their populations in various ways in reaction to local conditions that select for fitness.

Of course, those selection pressures have changed drastically over the geologic time our genus has existed.  Human society has also evolved and culture has as much to do with evolution now as climate had in the past.  Human behavior is now dictated by things like propaganda, government policy, industrial planning, resource scarcity and even internet influencers.

But hopefully men and women will still try to find mates that will allow their offspring to have the best chance of surviving and carrying on the race.  It still makes sense for a man to want a woman with empathy for his children and enough sense to teach her children to obey their parents and follow the simple rules written on those stone tablets that have guided our civilization for the last several thousand years.

And it makes sense for a woman to want a man who isn’t too lazy or selfish to provide for his family and who enjoys coming home from the hunt and retires to the fire in his cave and tells his little tribe about the mammoth that he hunted and the saber-tooth tiger that hunted him.  And draws a picture on the walls of his cave to celebrate that story.

And the most important trait that both men and women should be selecting their mates for is their minds.  Our brains have been our hallmark for millions of years.  Homo habilis; the tool maker.  That’s us.  We’re the monkeys that came down from the trees, stood up straight and looked at the world straight on and began changing it to our liking from day one.  Fire.  The wheel, the wagon, the chariot, the ship, the saddle, the plow, the heat engine, automobiles, airplanes, rockets. Stone weapons, saws, knives, hammers, axes, levers, firearms, lasers.  Gold, silver, copper, tin, iron, steel, uranium, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb.  Wheat, oats, millet, rice, maize, cattle, horses, sheep, goats, donkeys, chickens, ducks, white mice, guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys, yeast, mammalian cell culture, CRSPR gene editing, bioengineering.

Let’s just hope that our “civilization” never forgets what keeps us human.

A Window into Death

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This morning when I woke up the house was noticeably cooler than it’s been in a month.  It was sixty degrees or thereabouts.  So, Fall is making its entrance felt.  Lots of leaves under the maple tree and the grass is drying out.  The raspberry canes are still producing tons of berries but the lower leaves are all turning yellow.  Well, the kids go back to school on Monday and so this is the end of summer by decree and by degree.  So be it.

Well, it was a terrific summer weatherwise and we did most of the things we wanted to.  And we had a big party at the end.  So now it’s time to anticipate the good stuff that comes with Fall.  Well?  I guess the only thing about Fall that’s good is the long evenings allow us to watch old movies and plan for the holidays.  Certainly, there’s more to do than that.  Fall is when you’re supposed to do the repairs and weatherproofing that prevents winter from doing a lot of damage.  And I do plan to do that stuff.  But let’s be honest here.  I hate that stuff.  I’ve been talking about getting some tarps to cover over the woodwork on the balconies and the outside staircase for about ten years and I haven’t gotten any closer to doing it yet.  I’m just an immensely lazy man whose strong suit is dithering, waffling, vacillating and procrastination.  Of course I blame Camera Girl.  If she were half as good at nagging as she is at cooking, I’d be a model husband.  But it’s the cross I bear.

So, a couple of nights ago TCM had “Psycho” on and Camera Girl was watching it.  Well, I was busy but I noted her choice in passing.  And while I was working in the dining room, I could hear snatches of music and dialog.  And I could tell it was getting toward Marion Crane’s (Janet Leigh’s) fateful arrival at the Bates Motel.  So, I dropped what I was doing and sat through Marion’s supper with Norman and all the way through her murder and subsequent deposition in the “swamp.”  By the way, how much of Southern California actually has any swampland?

Now I’ve seen Psycho dozens of times.  And the murder scene has always struck me as well done.  It’s well staged and well shot.  And having seen it so many times allowed me to watch it this time analytically.  And I thought that the critical snatch of film is when Marion is luxuriating in the shower and the camera shifts to the room through the shower curtain and you see the door open and a silhouette appear in the doorway.

That is the moment when death has entered the frame.  The actual killing with the blood and piercing, screaming “music” is almost an anticlimax.

And then I watched Marion Crane die from loss of blood.  And it was remarkably well acted and achingly sad.  Here was a young woman whose impatience to be with the man she loved had driven her to steal an enormous amount of money.  But just as she’s figured out what she needs to do to escape from the trap she’s gotten herself into, fate steps in and feeds her into a buzz saw of insanity.

The rest of the movie is a murder mystery and a psychological horror show.  But the end of the murder scene is a tiny window into an intensely poignant moment; the death of a human being and specifically the death of a beautiful young woman.  Janet Leigh’s face conveys the reality that Marion Crane’s brain is shutting down from lack of blood and her world has shrunk down to just trying to grasp the shower curtain with her hand.  And then she dies and her body lies crumpled on the floor and her unfocussed eye stares into space.  That’s the best acting in the movie.

So, despite the spectacle from then on, the interesting part of the movie is the first forty minutes that record Marion Crane’s date with destiny.  And I’ll include her conversation with Norman.  He does communicate his pathetic version of what he thinks the world is about.  And in some sense, he provides a sounding board to allow her to think about what to do about her own private trap.

Well, anyway, it’s Fall and old movies are the thing to do.

Does Fiction Publishing Still Exist?

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Selling intellectual property has changed radically in the last thirty years.  We used to buy books at a book store.  We bought music at a record shop.  And we rented or bought movies at a video store.  And then we bought all these at a Walmart or an electronics store (well, maybe not the books).

Now we stream movies and pay by the minute or the month and listen to music more or less for free and books are just this thing that exists on Amazon as a free service or a minor expense.  And the marketing and advertising of these works is some inexplicable algorithm that somehow links up people to the things that would appeal to them.

Now, the only way a musician can make any money is by live concerts that people pay to attend.  But no one would pay to attend a reading of a chapter of a book.  So maybe very soon books will cease to exist as a commodity.

And I guess that’s just the way it will be.  Now I’ve been trying to finish up a novel (and fixing the last ten percent of the book has been much harder than writing the first ninety percent).  And when I attempt to market it, I’ll try it on some traditional publishers and if that doesn’t work, I’ll probably self-publish it on Amazon.  I have noticed that lately some authors try to start a “go fund me” campaign to drum up the support for the book before it’s released.  But I’m not sure how that would work for a new author.

I guess pretty soon I’ll know as much about it as anyone else.  But isn’t it interesting that now that technology allows for avoiding all the obstacles that the “gatekeepers” of traditional publishing provided, that the real problem would be the “needle in a haystack” reality of many millions of self-published books thrown together in an endless slush pile with no way to stand out to a jaded reading public.

Well, they say that Americans have always made the best salesmen.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that self-promotion is the real talent behind entertainment.  Hollywood was successful because they could get millions of eyes on their product.  I’m sure the same applies to selling books, movies and music.  It’s just that it’s a field I never got involved in.  Engineering is product that has to be sold but I was always just the product.  I was never one of the sellers except when I would be sent out with the marketing team to convince the buyers that we knew what we were doing and could provide them with the services and hardware that they wanted.  Books on the other hand need fancy covers with somewhat-undressed women and weapons of war and starships to attract the buyer’s attention and get him to plunk down his electronic money.

I’ve seen some marketing going on by some of the people I follow on X and YouTube and it all feels very tiring but maybe that’s because at heart I’m a very lazy guy and hawking product is hard work (at least for me).

And maybe this is all a transitory situation and eventually some more efficient way to link readers with new books that match their tastes will appear among the AI gods.

Well, just some musings.

Goodbye Summer 2025

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So, Saturday (09AUG2025) is a big family party at the Compound.  Another grandson graduates from high school and begins college.  The next, next generation become adults and have all the same decisions and experiences in front of them.  And Camera Girl and I continue our campaign to get to play with progressively more distant descendants.  The hunt for great grandchildren is now the thing.

But the main thing is that I’m just providing the infrastructure; the indoor and outdoor venue and the grill.  The graduate’s parents will bring and cook the food and organize the kids’ activities and lifeguard the pool.  I’ll just be one of the kids tomorrow.  I intend to spend a portion of the event with my brothers talking about how passing the torch to the next generation feels for them.  There has been a threat of putting on a Shatner-Khan adjacent event.  Maybe put on one of his greatest hits.  If it happens, I hope it’ll be “Terror at 20,000 Feet.”  There can be nothing more definitively Shatner than that.

But I hope to spend most of the day eating burgers and dogs and potato salad and peppers and sausage.  And then playing pool with the grandkids and shooting the breeze with family that I don’t see very often.  This will be the last get together for the summer.  And everyone is getting older and travelling even the modest distances between us becomes more challenging every year.  So, these parties become more important.

I guess most of us are on the Trump train so there will be some Trump gloating going on.  We’ll keep it sotto voce because even among my close relatives there are a few folks of the other persuasion.  And I don’t see any need to start a fight.  Family solidarity is more important than scoring political points at a party.  That’s for sure.

A couple of days ago the goofy looking weather man on the Spectrum channel (my cable provider) told us that it looks like a very nice week with temperatures in the 80’s, low humidity and plenty of sun.  But then, just to prove he’s a jerk he went into a little spiel where he defined just how much daylight we lose over the course of August.  And just to show that he was intentionally spreading misery he finished off by saying, “But most people don’t like to be reminded of this sad fact.”  What a creep.

But he’s right.  The sun is lower in the sky.  It’s cooler than a few weeks ago and the sun is down earlier than it should be.  The leaves are starting to fall from the cherry trees.  The vegetable garden is definitely looking worse for wear and the flowers are starting to exhaust.  Last week the daylilies in the sheltered corner ran out of flowers.  There are still some smaller ones (Stella de Oros and orange ones) but they’re not the same.  The cone flowers will last a good long time but there aren’t anymore new flowers growing.  The only flowers still to come are the Montauk daisies and the wolfbane in October.

So summer is wrapping up.  The kids go back to school in two weeks and pretty soon the end of season Dunwich Fair with its First Selectman dunk tank (win at your own risk) and free werewolf neutering clinic will be upon us.  Well, it’s time for the party and goodbye Summer 2025.