It’s Just a Thought

photog Current Events, Science

Asteroid 2024 YR4 is not going to hit Earth.  Yay?  It’s also not going to hit the Moon either.  Yay?  Apparently, this celestial rock which is 200 ft in length and weighs about 310,000 tons will be sliding by our orbit in a few years and will miss the moon by a couple of thousand miles.  Apparently, there are now safeguards in place to check if any known asteroids have the potential to hit Earth and also evaluate what potential damage they could do.

A2024 YR4 is considered a city killer.  It has been estimated that its impact would be the equivalent of 7.7 megatons of trinitrotoluene (TNT) detonating, which is a pretty big explosion.  Once they refined their calculations, they became convinced that it would miss Earth by a good large margin.  When a lunar impact looked more likely they began fussing because they speculated that an explosion on the Moon would throw up a lot of debris and it might destroy many satellites around Earth.  But when they used the James Webb telescope and measured the orbit more carefully even this scenario was ruled out.  It’s not going to hit anything.

The YouTube video author concluded that the investigation and analysis of the asteroid’s trajectory was a major victory for science and global cooperation.  Well, maybe.  But up until someone started checking the paths of asteroids, haven’t we been at this risk basically forever?  I guess the last sizable asteroid (or maybe comet) that collided with Earth was the Tunguska blast in 1908.  That was more than a hundred years ago.  And it took forever for anyone to even figure out what the hell happened.  Based on this track record something like this will happen less frequently than once a century.  And no one will be killed but a lot of trees will be flattened.  But something like once in 66 million years an asteroid 8 miles long will hit Earth causing a mass extinction event.  That rock was 200 times bigger than A2024 YR4.  How about if we stop worrying about anything less than 1% of the extinction rock.  So that would be twice as big as the recent rock.  So, if a 400 ft asteroid is crowding Earth, then maybe I’ll start getting nervous.  Or maybe I won’t.  We already have nuclear war, earthquakes, tsunamis, super-volcanoes, “global warming,” plagues (like COVID) and transgender mass murderers to worry about.  I don’t think I have the bandwidth to start worrying about rogue asteroids rolling into Earth or now into the Moon and destroying my wi-fi reception.

You know, maybe I’d be happy if an asteroid hit the Moon and sent a million meteors raining into the various satellites we have clogging up the sky over our heads.  Maybe that’s exactly what we need.  If cell phones stopped working and once we walk away from our desks we couldn’t be reached by every idiot on the planet maybe we’d actually be happier.  It’s just a thought.

It Could Be Huge

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , , ,

Just as I planned, we ate a late and leisurely breakfast today.  It was as warm and sunny as forecast.  Walking out in the sun by a frozen lake was very enjoyable and I even took a few photos just to prove I still remember how.  Then Camera Girl and I drove over to the big city (ha!) and had some Thai food.  Splendiferous.

I went over the communication I received from my book marketer and set up what I hope is a productive post-launch meeting where I can finalize a plan to finish off the launch with a large number of readers getting their hands on the book in the next week or so.

Apparently, there is a website called BookFunnel that will allow me to run a giveaway in exchange for the customer’s e-mail address.  This will facilitate follow-on advertising of my sequel books and other writing projects.  In conjunction with this the marketer thinks I should produce a follow-on epilog or teaser to entice the readers to sign up for some program of material that I will produce in the future.  All very interesting, but what I’m also interested in finding out is whether the traction I created with the launch is indicative of a book and sequels that will be popular or not very popular.  I basically don’t have any real knowledge about what a popular book start-up looks like.

I’ve sold a little over a hundred and twenty copies to date and that doesn’t seem to be an overwhelming response by the book buying public.  I was hoping for more like a hundred and twenty million copies or even a hundred and twenty thousand copies.  I’ve had to cancel my rental of MetLife Stadium for my book signing event.  Instead, I’ve taped together three or four of the boxes that Camera Girl gets her dog food bags delivered in and set them up in the lower driveway.  I hope it doesn’t rain soon.  That tape’s not so strong.  I’ll be giving away free key chains with the name of my local mechanic on them.  He had them out on the counter and I thought he wouldn’t mind if I took a few (or all) of them.  I don’t think he bought one of my books so I think it’ll be alright.

For my next book, maybe I’ll attempt to reach viral status using a best-seller adjacent name.  In other words, I’ll make it sound like some other popular work.  For instance, “Reacher” is a very commercially lucrative series.  So maybe I could have a series with a character named “Reached.”  He could be like Reacher only in the past tense.  So instead of being enormously large and strong I’ll make my character big but kind of old and worn out.  Sort of like Reacher in thirty years.  And he could fight crime but only in retirement villages and old age homes.  And his tag line will be, “What did you say?  Speak up you young punk!”  I think it could be huge.

09JUL2019 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

I ran this one a year and a half ago but it’s well worth running every year.

The Man in the Arena as it is called,  is part of a speech called Citizenship in a Republic made by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris, France on April 23, 1910.  It’s well known but well worth requoting.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

 

 

 

Ah, That Was a Proper 2026

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , ,

So today it got up to 66οF and tonight it’s only going to get down to 38οF.  Tomorrow I’m off from work and it’s gonna be 67 οF and sunny all day, with no wind.  So, tomorrow is the official first day of un-winter.  Camera Girl and I will officially get up a half hour later, eat a leisurely breakfast, stroll around the devastated grounds and then go for a ride and walk around a lake, take a few photographs then go into town and have something special for lunch; maybe Chinese or Thai.  Life begins again.

Except for the north side of the garage roof, all the roof snow is practically gone.  And some areas of vegetation (mangled and brown) have reappeared behind the retreating snow.  Obviously, the absurdly high piles of snow I created over the course of the last few weeks will be there well into April (and in places into May) but those will just be there as a cautionary tale about the folly of living in New England.

The west field will be soggy for weeks while the snow retreats there last.  But within a week or two I intend to go there and cut down all of the raspberry canes and spread fertilizer on that bed.  Last year that program provided a bonanza of berries and I intend to duplicate that procedure this spring.  But the truly awful production we got out of the squash, eggplants and cucumbers over there has convinced me to move all of these beds to the south field.  I’m going to dig up a good chunk of lawn over there and plant vegetables and transplant some flowers that have languished too close to the forest shade.

So, there is a plan going forward and plenty of work to do.  But it’s just so good to finally be freed from sitting around in the house staring out at a world of snow.  They talk about cabin fever and I know exactly what they mean.  It’s a depressing, nervous state where you have to invent things to do to keep your mind off of your imprisonment.  It’s a time when you try to stick to exercise regimens just to avoid becoming a pile of mush over the inactivity of the winter.  And the short days just makes it worse because darkness makes you sleepy.

Okay, I’ll put all that behind me.  Winter 2025/2026 is officially dead and buried.  Even if we have that stupid April Fools’ Day nor’easter this year, it’s just there to provide “poor man’s fertilizer” for the vegetation.  I predict 2026 will be a very productive year with interesting scientific and technological news and improvements on the economic front.  But most important I predict that summer 2026 will provide the most memorable cookouts, barbecues and grilling that will be talked about for the next decade and will become a byword for successful outdoor parties.  Like some Shire gaffer, in the future you’ll see me eating a cheeseburger smothered in onions and relish and here me declare, “Ah, that was a proper 2026!”

Coming to a Theater Near You

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , ,

I was watching a movie from the 1980s (Moonstruck) with Camera Girl tonight.  I’ve been busy with book marketing for the last month and it’s been a grind.  So, I sat down after dinner and we just enjoyed the show.  It’s a ridiculous romantic comedy with Cher and Nicholas Cage as the couple and a veteran cast of character actors with New York City as the backdrop.  It’s an absurd movie but it’s genuinely funny and it means no harm.

And I found myself enjoying the movie immensely.  Afterwards I tried to figure out why.  First off it was about 1980s America; a place where normal life proceeded and people were generally happy.  And secondly, the movie was well made.  It wasn’t deathless prose.  It wasn’t profound.  It was silly.  But it was good-hearted and the script, the acting and the production were professional and enjoyable to watch.

But why should that be such a big deal?  And then it hit me.  Nothing that has come out of Hollywood in the last five or ten years has been any good.  Everything is poorly made and poorly written and poorly acted.  Nothing makes you laugh or cry or even think.  It’s all dreck.  And that’s crazy!

And it occurred to me that this won’t go on forever.  Someone is going to step forward and make something good.  And I think what they’ll do is break the rules.

Someone is going to refuse to only hire DEI writers and DEI actors and DEI directors and instead they’ll hire the old white guys who used to make stuff in Hollywood and used to make us laugh and cry and think.  It’s a cinch those guys haven’t all died in the last ten years and I’m sure they could use the work.  I’m sure they haven’t forgotten how to ply their trades.  All it will take is someone with enough money to put together a production crew (outside of Los Angeles) and has the nerve to make a movie about the America we used to make movies about.  And it doesn’t have to be a period piece about the 1950s when everyone was white.  There can even be some immigrants in the cast.  After all the problem isn’t having non-white people in a movie.  It’s about the writer and director hating white men so hard that they have to make believe they don’t exist.

It’s a funny thing.  The eastern and southern European immigrants who came to this country at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t look like the English and northern European people who were already established here and from whom the movie characters were selected.  Blond haired, blue-eyed stars weren’t them.  But they could be stand-ins for the dreams that those immigrants had about being prosperous and happy in their adopted country.  They had enough imagination to realize that the American dream was transferrable to people who chased the American dream.  Work hard, follow the rules and dream big.  It was aspirational to watch Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne as a cowboy saving the day and winning the girl.  Hating on Anglo-Americans made no sense.

Well, that’s what needs to happen again.  Aspirational movies with Americans acting like Americans and not apologizing for being smart and successful is what we should be seeing on the screen.  And there shouldn’t be any DEI box checkers making sure there are the correct number of interracial couples or black lesbian brain surgeons in the story line.  Of course, 2026 is the year that Christopher Nolan is casting a black woman as Helen of Troy in his Odyssey.  Well at least it wasn’t a trans-woman.  But I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer.  I can wait because I know it’s coming to a theater near me soon.