Firehose of Alka Seltzer

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Farmer Cthulhu in His Fields

Thursday night we had our first frost here in Dunwich.  It was light and wasn’t a killing frost, at least not completely.  There were hoverflies and dragonflies and of course bees buzzing around today.  And the remaining flowers (wolfbane and Montauk daisies) are still more or less undamaged.  But the writing, as they say, is on the wall.  And wonder of wonders, Camera Girl asked me to turn the heating system back on!  Turning the heat on before November is usually me throwing in the towel and her mocking my delicacy.  Well, it really was cold last night.  But I think the real issue is that Princess Sack of Potatoes is staying over on Sunday and she wouldn’t want to be responsible for giving our granddaughter a cold.  And tonight, we had the first butternut squash chicken soup of the season.  Ah, what can I say?  There are compensations for the end of the warm weather.  Stuffed to the gills with such splendiferous food I am happy and content.

But the sad truth is that I am on the cusp of the dreaded evil times in Dunwich.  For the next four weeks I will be a veritable captive in the thrall of First Selectman Cthulhu and his evil regime of ghouls and bureaucrats.  I will be forced to do their bidding and many days I will be incommunicado.  This year it has been decided to make up the short fall in the town budget by having a raffle.  Everyone’s name goes in First Selectman Cthulhu’s size 666 hat and whichever hundred names he draws have to make a choice; pay one hundredth of the shortfall or be summarily eaten.  If they choose ingestion then we pick another name from the hat to make up the hundred.

My job is to gather the money from those paying or alternatively, providing a firehose pumping Alka Seltzer from a nearby pond whenever the appetizers start to make the First Selectman a little verklempt.  Mine is not an easy life.  But it pays the bills.  And the retirement benefits are pretty good.  I hope most people pay.  We didn’t account for the price of Alka Seltzer going up.  If we run low, I shudder to think how I’ll get through the collection, never mind the audit.  Well, no use whining.  On with the show.

So, this means there may be some dead air here at the site.  Of course I am making accommodations.  I’ve loaded up a month’s worth of “Quotes of the Day.”  Twenty-two of those will be by Ernie Pyle in his capacity as a WWII combat reporter.  Those will be starting in four days.  And I’ll be working tomorrow to put together a month’s worth of “Photos of the Day.”  So, there will certainly be content.  But the daily column may sometimes seem substandard, as if dictated by a drowning man.  Well, they say that some people work best under pressure.  Unfortunately, nobody’s ever said that about me.  So, there it is.

And here we are a couple of days after the Gaza agreement and the Middle East hasn’t reignited.  Dare I hope?  Stay tuned.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 10OCT2025 – SF Longevity

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There have been several SciFi takes on this. Three stick out to me beyond Heinlein’s tales of Lazarus Long. These are Niven’s Boosterspice in Known Space, Blish’s antiagathics in the Cities In Flight, and Weber’s Prolong in the Honorverse.

My memory on Cities In Flight is poor, but I think the antiagathics were rare and kept only to the upper class so it has limited effect on it’s society other than envy of the upper classes.

In both Known Space and the Honorverse there is a tendency for careers to be MUCH longer. What would have been generational wealth tends to be personal wealth over time. Prolong gets you 200-300 years in very good shape.

Boosterspice is unlimited, Louis Wu is celebrating his 200th birthday at the start of Ringworld and hangs around MUCH longer(potential spoiler for a 30-50 year old series 🙂 ). There is a hint in a later Known Space story that, over time, Boosterspice also makes Humans VERY risk averse (though not quite Puppeteer risk averse).

In the Honorverse Prolong also seems to extend the period of fertility so 100+ year old couples can be seen having children much later in life. I do not know about boosterspice.

At the time of Ringworld, Earth is still run by the UN and the birthrights system, but little is said otherwise. That said Teela Brown had not yet had boosterspice when she (presumably 20 something) heads off to the Ringworld(again potential spoiler). This might suggest that although extending life the effect on fertility is either negative or irrelevant so reproduction is limited by the normal span of ~ 40 years.

Amadeus (1984) – A Movie Review

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Here’s yet another movie I haven’t seen in forty years.  Although in a sense this is the first time I’m seeing parts of it because it’s the “director’s cut” which added twenty additional minutes to a movie that was already 161 minutes long.

I’ll dispense with the idea of plot spoilers.  The whole movie is the confession by aged composer Antonio Salieri of his “murder” thirty-some-odd years before of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a man he openly admits produced music of a divine quality.  Basically, Salieri sets out to destroy Mozart as a way of taking revenge on God for giving the gift of producing sublime works of musical art to a man he judges to be obscene and undeserving instead of to himself whom he judges to be pious and deserving.

Over the course of several years, he does everything imaginable to ensure Mozart cannot make enough money to flourish including using his influence with Emperor Joseph II of Austria to discourage any patronage from the nobility.  Eventually he discovers that Mozart has a deep-seated neurosis around his father’s dissatisfaction with the way Mozart lived his life and after his father’s death Salieri impersonates Mozart’s father’s ghost by showing up as a masked figure to commission Mozart to compose a requiem mass.  Salieri knows that Mozart will assume the mass is for his father and this will further injure his physical and mental health.

Finally, because of mental stress, malnutrition, alcoholism and probably tuberculosis Mozart collapses during a performance of one of his operas.  Salieri takes advantage of Mozart’s wife Constanze’s absence to persuade Mozart to work through the night to try to complete the mass which Salieri hopes to pass off as his own during Mozart’s own funeral as his final insult to God.  But Constanze arrives just in time to take away the manuscript from Salieri and mourn for her husband as he expires.

All of this story is told as a confession by Salieri to a priest who arrives at Salieri’s room in a mental hospital where he was installed after attempting suicide on account of guilt for killing Mozart.  But at the end of the film he is unrepentant, insane and declares himself the patron saint of mediocrities, a man whose works of art are completely forgotten by the world, while Mozart’s music continuously grows more and more popular and celebrated over time.

Basically, this movie is a tour de force by F. Murray Abraham playing Salieri with Tom Hulce as Mozart coming in a close second.  But let’s face it.  No one is watching a three-hour period piece about Mozart unless he wants to hear the music.  Between the actual recordings of his chamber music and generous chunks from several of his operas this is not just a theatrical presentation.  It’s a concert too.

And for that reason, I don’t think I can recommend this movie to anyone who dislikes classical music.  I believe it would be painful to watch that much of something that doesn’t appeal to you.  I’m not sure if even the theatrical release version of the movie at 161 minutes would be short enough for the non-music lover.  But for people who don’t mind a little opera sprinkled on their corn flakes this might be a movie to consider.  I thought it was pretty good.