Loan Them Smokey the Bear

photog 6 Comments Current Events, Humor, photog's Corner

So, we’re heading into day three of the yellowish/brownish/greyish-sky world.  Apparently, Canada is burning to the ground and we’ll be buried in a five-hundred-foot pile of ash by sometime around Labor Day.  Well, it’s for a good cause after all.  Once all of the Canadians have been incinerated, we can proceed to frack all the hydrocarbons out of the ground and turn the Great White North into a theme park of some sort.  Of course, the only Canadian I knew well was actually a great guy.  He was a French Canadian and he had a fantastic sense of humor and was a great fan of American pop culture.  And he was amazingly honest.  He was a great believer that Quebec should secede from Canada and was bitterly disappointed that his countrymen voted No on the referendum.  But his pride in his French identity remained strong.  Until, that is, his company transferred him to the Paris office.  It was like a dream come true.  But when he got there and tried to embrace his long-lost French brethren, they told him quite insultingly that he wasn’t French, he was “North American!”  His heart was broken.  But he rebounded and from then on, he recognized himself to be a North American.

Well, I hope he’s still living here in the States because based on the weight of ash weighing down my roof, I have to assume the only thing left uncarbonized up there is Hudson Bay.  Now I know that Canada has embraced physician assisted suicide so hopefully one of the prescribed methods is roasting because that would be relatively economical at this juncture.  I mean all you have to do is head northwest and eventually you’ll find the flame wall and after that it should be fairly simple to achieve unalive.

But I mustn’t sell Canada short.  It did give us John Candy and the SC TV troupe.  Interestingly, they always portrayed Americans in their most popular movies so I don’t know if it was their Canadian-ness that made them so funny.  And I guess we also got Mike Myers from them too.  And they have oil, coal, gas, gold, uranium and lumber so Canada used to have a lot of potential before it burned to the ground.  I’m sure Trump will figure out a way to monetize what’s left of it.  Whatever that idea will be, it will include branding the enterprise with the name “Trump” somehow.  Although maybe instead he’ll rename it West Greenland because he really liked the whole Greenland acquisition idea.

From my own point of view, if I was looking for a way to renovate a carbonized Canada, I think I’d give the whole thing back to the Indians.  Why not.  It’s enormous and loaded with valuable resources and the people living there are annoying, so give it to the people who they’re always saying they stole it from.  If they feel so bad about their theft then let them assuage their guilt and finally shut up about it.  But the deal will be that they’ll have to do a much better job of putting out forest fires.  We can loan them Smokey the Bear.  Seems fair.

Fingers Crossed Again

photog 2 Comments Current Events , , ,

Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein, Bernie Sanders, even Donald Trump.  Look at all these old decrepit people who supposedly run our country.  Shouldn’t we institute some age limits?  And we can grandfather anyone who was already in government before the law passed.  But come on!  This is ridiculous.  I mean, even if Mitch McConnell is technically alive, he’s as pathetic as Feinstein when her “handlers” had to push the voting button for her on the floor of the Senate.  Everyone has seen the video clips of when he “froze up” during an impromptu interview inside the Capitol.  He looked like an animatronic figure in Disneyland glitching on its program.  It was absurd.

Now I know it’s hard to get good people to run for Congress.  Competent people would rather work for a living but something has to be done to raise the level of these people.  Even a lot of the young ones are morons.  I mean, I know I’m just venting here.  To fix all of this will take the concerted effort of a lot of smart people who prefer to work in the private sector because it pays better and is much more interesting but if our republic is going to survive as something more than just the plaything of oligarchs and demagogues something will have to be done to bring competence and accountability to Washington.

I think the first thing that we’ll have to demand is that anyone who serves in Congress will have to forego trading in the stocks of companies whose business is affected by government policy.  That’s a minimum.  Pelosi has already made a mockery out of legal insider trading to such a degree that the law forbidding it should have her name attached to it.

But I will confess I have no idea how we’re going to fix all this.  The lobbyists run Washington and trying to remove their influence would probably get a bunch of people killed trying to do it.  But it has to be done if things are ever going to improve.  The last time large scale reform was tried was during FDR’s administration.  Now a lot of what he did was awful.  He was practically a communist himself.  But he was trying to help poor people during a terrible business collapse.  So, we don’t need a communist.  We need someone with a mandate and a supermajority in Congress to start fixing a lot of dysfunctional policies.

Unfortunately, there is just as much chance that the next populist president will be more in the shape of a Mamdani as a Trump.  So, things may get a lot worse instead of better.  But even though I’m starting to get ancient, somehow, I have the feeling that within my lifetime things may come to a head.  We’ve been vacillating back and forth between Left and Right.  For better or worse I think something happens and the country will break one way or the other.  Fingers crossed it breaks our way.

Lights, Camera, Cthulhu!

photog 2 Comments Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy ,

I was thinking about trying to start a YouTube channel.  But I’m not sure if I can do it the way I want to.  My idea is to host an animated version of First Selectman Cthulhu expounding for five minutes about whatever was on my mind that week.  So, what this will require is some kind of free animation program that can be used to present the First Selectman speaking with a voice that would be appropriate for his status and personality.  It would also be useful if from time to time he could do more than just stand there and talk.  Possibly from time to time he could extract a human from a jar on his desk and swallow him.  And I’d like to be able to make those humans recognizable images of famous people like politicians, film actors and other pompous asses.

Now I realize this is easier said than done.  First of all, I have to develop an interesting persona for Cthulhu.  Then I have to be able to produce these videos at least once a week.  So that means they can’t take too long to produce and load onto YouTube.  Also, I have to learn what rules there are on YouTube that I’m not allowed to break.  I’ve seen that there are words like rape and murder that people cannot say on YouTube.  I assume that is because using them results in demonetization.  Now I wasn’t specifically trying to make money directly from YouTube.  I wanted to use it to grow an audience for my writing but maybe demonetization goes hand in hand with throttling visibility so I need to learn all about those aspects of the site.  If the restrictions are too limiting, I may not want to bother.  After all humor can be kind of cruel and cruel seems to be the mortal sin of the woke generation.

I’m sure this will take a long time to roll out because my plate is already too full now.  But I wanted to see if it’s doable.  My website has never grown to the point where I can reach thousands of people.  So, I figure I should try other platforms to see if I can expand my audience by several orders of magnitude.  Obviously, I won’t interest the really largest segments of the population but I have seen where people who are adjacent to things I’m interested in can reach a larger audience.  So, I figure I’ll try.  Hopefully it will be fun.

Maybe I’ll have Cthulhu interview other supernatural celebrities like Dracula or the ghost of Lindsey Graham.  Who knows, my version of Donald Trump might even show up.  After all Cthulhu is a Great Old One and Trump is always talking about “great.”  Or maybe he can do a cooking show where he shows how to make a jambalaya using Democrat and Republican politicians together.  The possibilities are endless.  But of course, all of this will be in bad taste so it may never see daylight on YouTube.

Twelve Months – A Novel of The Dresden Files – by Jim Butcher – An SF&F Book Review

photog 4 Comments Book Reviews, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , , , ,

I just finished the latest (and possibly the penultimate) Dresden Files novel; “Twelve Months.”  So, what should I say about it.  I won’t do a synopsis of the plot.  You can get that plenty of places but if you haven’t read it, you don’t want the spoilers.  And since this is book 18 (or 19 or 20?) of the series you wouldn’t be reading this book if you’re not already caught up on the saga.

So, I think I’ll just give my impressions of the book as a Harry Dresden book.  First of all, this book is a reaction to the havoc that the war in the last book “Battle Ground” wreaked on Harry’s life.  He lost several close friends and the love of his life so he’s not doing too well.  And so, this book chronicles Harry’s recovery from physical, emotional and supernatural wounds that he sustained.

And I would say that this book is much more of an emotional story than most of his earlier books.  And that’s not to say that Harry Dresden has just found his humanity in this book.  He was always an emotional man but I think the author is trying to emphasize that this older, wiser Harry is less motivated by anger and more willing to use empathy to think his way out of a conflict.  He’s even able to reason with a Lovecraftian monster to avoid a lose-lose situation.

And another observation I have is that I think I can see some of the loose ends being tied together.  If the next book is the last chapter of the Dresden Files, then he’s going to have to settle the hash of about twenty major characters and a hundred minor ones.  And some of these major characters are tied to railroad tracks with locomotives within sight.  And there’s no off-ramp for Harry.  He’s slowly advanced over the course of the series from an almost comically overmatched novice at magic to one of the top ten powers in the supernatural world.  He has friendships, alliances and vendettas with virtually all of the supernatural powers that exist in his crowded and lovingly detailed urban fantasy universe.  There is the White Council of Wizards, the Summer Fey, the Winter Fey, Ghouls, Lycanthropes, a Titan, the Black Court Vampires and the White Court Vampires.  There aren’t any more Red Court Vampires because Harry killed off the whole clan in an earlier book.  How exactly Jim Butcher intends to pull the plug on Harry’s adventures is a complete mystery to me.  Killing him off doesn’t seem to make any of the subplots work better and I just don’t see how he “retires.”  Too many enormously powerful forces want him dead.

But suffice it to say, if you’ve enjoyed the earlier Dresden Files installments then you will inhale the four hundred sixty odd pages of “Twelve Months” in a couple of days and immediately wonder why Jim Butcher is leaving you hanging waiting for the conclusion.  So, who do I recommend this book to?  Why, anyone who has gotten this far in the series of course.  And for that audience I wholeheartedly recommend it.