Glibertarians.com 2018 Archive

Category: Fiction

  • The Glibening, Part Five: Jinkies

    The Glibening, Part Five: Jinkies

    The Glibening, Part Five:

    Jinkies!

    by Tonio

     

    Previously…

    Suddenly, Gilhooly and Kestrel found themselves in a circular domed chamber lit by tasteful indirect lighting reflecting off the underside of the dome. Protruding from the walls of the chamber were seven cocobolo wood columns, each carved into a minimalist representation of a squirrel standing on its hind legs. At the center of the chamber stood a rectangular larvikite plinth topped by a thick crystalline box; inside that box were two human brains. Each brain was floating in its own personal cube full of straw-colored fluid, with myriad strands of what appeared to be black thread connecting the stem of each brain to the bottom of the cube, perhaps to unseen machinery below. The brains still had eyes attached and the eyes were fixed looking outward in the direction from where Gilhooly and Kestrel had appeared. One brain pulsed with orange light, the other pulsed green.

    Gilhooly and Kestrel had been here before, and didn’t like it. They approached the brain aquarium with trepidation, halting a yard away from the plinth.

    “To say that the Squirrels are angry is an understatement,” said the green brain pulsating in time with the dialogue. There was no actual sound within the chamber, except for the sussuration of the life support system which kept the chamber at a perfect three hundred ten kelvins at Earth normal sea level pressure, etc. Gilhooly and Kestrel didn’t hear the brains so much as they were painfully aware that the brains were streaming directly into their auditory cortices through means unknown.

    “Dmitri Gilhooly, Regina Kestrel, you have failed us,” pulsed the orange brain.

    Gilhooly and Kestrel remained silent. They had learned the hard way that it was unwise to say anything unless directly asked by the brains.

    “But Charles, is it the Humans who have failed us, or the Fabricians,” asked the green brain.

    “A fair point, David.” conceded the orange brain.

    “But you told us to slowly ease Gilhooly and Kestrel out and replace them with younger, more millenial-friendly staffers.” Said a new, petulant voice. “I had to endure years of of baby powder and Jean Nate perfume. If you had let me ride that girl I could have kept her under control.”

    Kestrel glowered but said nothing.

    “Shut up, Xylpig. We should be grateful to the Humans for providing us with employment and purpose,” said an exasperated voice. “I thought Jane’s complaints about the Squirrels were just part of her youthful exuburance and would come to nothing. I was wrong.”

    Gilhooly tried to relax in case things went poorly. He looked at the plinth and defocused his eyes losing himself in the reflections coming from the stone. Even though he was standing still, the minute autonomic movements of his body shifted his vision just enough that the lights shimmered like stars in the night sky. He thought he could discern a familiar pattern of several bright lights, but he couldn’t quite place it.

    “Xylpig, you could learn much from the contrite example of Korb,” pulsed the green brain.

    Xylpig yelped and twitched, causing Kestrel to cough most unpleasantly.

    “Indeed, our patience wears thin with all of you,” pulsed the orange brain. “You’re going back there and you’re going to clean up the mess you made.”

    “Don’t fuck it up. We need for Thought! Magazine to remain respectable.”

    “If you do we’re going to reassign you Fabricians to duty as santorum towels for Senator Lucius Greene.

    “No taint of scandal from this. You know how long it took you to live down the intern incident.”

    “Now begone.”

    The brains flashed in unison and Gilhooly and Kestrel disappeared to the accompaniment of a bright trumpet note. The lights in the chamber dimmed at a tasteful rate until the only remaining illumination was from the brains themselves, and the shimmering reflections from the plinth.

    “You said ‘taint,’” giggled the orange brain.

    “You used ‘duty’ and ‘santorum’ in the same sentence,” snickered the green brain, “and not one of those maroons reacted.”

    “They were trying not to think about it.”

    “Except the humorless one; it didn’t even register with her.”

    “Well David, what nefarious scheme should we advance next?”

     

    You know you've seen this before.
    Stars in the night sky. The human mind, craving order and structure, groups these into patterns.

     

    Ramesh and Murphy rode in silence. Murphy turned right onto Sixteenth Street. At the next intersection Murphy came to a rolling stop before whipping across traffic to turn the wrong way onto Fifth Avenue and parked in front of a fire hydrant, nose to nose with an NYPD cruiser.

    “Buck up, kid. Your boss has a hardon for these people. That 911 call lets us waltz in there without having to get a warrant. We’ll do a little meet and greet with the Officer in Charge and get up there ASAP.” Murphy and Ramesh got out of the car.

    More government vehicles with flashing lights pulled up in front of the building. A white Dodge Sprinter van with magnetic signage for Sunshine Cleaning Services crossed behind them down Sixteenth. A uniformed officer approached them as if to shoo them away. Murphy opened his sportcoat to show his badge hanging from his belt.

    “Who’s your friend?”

    “US Attorney’s Office,” answered Murphy. “Where’s the OIC?”

    The uniformed officer pointed towards a large black man in an NYPD uniform with sergeant’s stripes huddled in the leftmost entrance of the building with his back toward the sidewalk, talking on a walkie-talkie.

    Ramesh remembered that he had a badge and pulled out the badge wallet and hung it over his belt so the badge was facing outwards, just like Murphy. This is as close as he had come to actual police work and he was kind of enjoying it.

    “And we got ‘friends’ on the way,” said the radio in the hands of the big cop.

    “State,” asked the big cop into the radio.

    “Feds. That scumbag Murphy from Liaison is escorting some fed guy.”

    “Why are the feds interested in a crazy girl?”

    “It’s the magazine they’re interested in, not the girl. I’m on my way down.”

    “Roger that, ell tee.”

    “Carmody out.”

    “Shee-it.” The big officer turned to see Murphy and Ramesh standing behind him. “Murphy,” spat the big cop.

    “Brown,” said Murphy. “this is Deputy US Attorney Ramesh Gupta. His boss has a hardon for the magazine and asked if Ramesh could come down and have a look. Ramesh, this is Sergeant Mike Brown; this is his precinct so it’s his show.”

    “‘My show,’ my ass,” thought Brown, deciding that his day couldn’t get any worse. When Liaison showed up with a fed, particularly a civilian, it meant that the mayor wanted to suck up to someone. The federal guy had ‘ivy league puke’ written all over his ass. And his boss was on the way to micromanage everything. The feds loved procedure, so he was going to give it to him good and hard, stalling him until the ell tee got there.

    “Mr. Gupta, we have two officers on their way up there now to assess the situation. If they say the scene is safe I’m going to send up the EMTs. You and Sergeant Murphy can go up if the scene remains safe and the EMTs say it’s okay. It’s a new day, Murphy – no more interfering with treatment unless someone’s life is at stake. Some new federal thing.” Getting in a jab at the feds felt good since fedboy had ruined his day by turning a routine crazy girl call into a three-ring circus.

    “They know to hold off on the thorazine, right,” asked Murphy.

    “I will request that, but you know how they can be. I don’t know this team, but one of my guys says they’re okay.”

  • What Are We Reading – November 2018

    OMWC

    I haven’t had much fiction time this past year, but some travel allowed me to read The Bear and the Dragon, by Tom Clancy, which posits a future alliance with Russia and a shooting war with China (this was written before Putin had transformed the Russian government into a one-man Mafia). Ever find yourself at home and alone, and just vegged out on the couch finishing off bags of Doritos? This is the literary equivalent- absolutely no substance, but lots of fun if you don’t get caught. Like the usual Clancy novels, the characters would have to be fleshed out quite a bit more to even reach the level of cardboard, the plot is predictable, and the tech is more interesting than the prose. It sprawls, it badly needs editing, and Clancy’s verbal tics, particularly useless foreshadowing, pepper the pages (“He would soon find out how wrong he was.”). His sex scenes are cringe-worthy. But still… mindless fun.

    SugarFree

    Getting ready to read the new Laundry Files novel from Charles Stross, The Labyrinth Index. I say getting ready because my habit with The Laundry Files is to back up a few novels and hit the new one at a run with the last couple or so fresh in my mind. I went back to The Annihilation Score this time, the one everyone seems to hate and is the jump the shark point for the series, blah blah. I like that The Annihilation Score and The Nightmare Stacks are from different POVs than Bob–it keeps the series from going stale. I’m about halfway through The Delirium Brief, so I should start the newest one this weekend.

    I’ve been spending most of my reading time this month gorging on Dracula movies since I finished rereading the novel in October. The 1931 Bela Lugosi’s version is slower than I remember, but his performance is still fantastic. (It is an adaptation of a stage version of Dracula and its yap-yap-yap origins really drag it down.) I rewatched all the Hammer Draculas as well, and their pleasures are intact. Christopher Lee will always be Count Dracula to me: haughty, snide, sadistic and bloody-eyed. He doesn’t even have any dialogue in 1966’s Dracula, Prince of Darkness–he just snarls and growls and ends up the only thing on the screen.

    Blacula is so much better than it has any right to be and even the much-derided 1979 version with Frank Langella’s disco hair is better than I remembered. Dan Curtis’ 1973 version for American television has Jack Palance as the Count and it is really enjoyable. I still have the 1977 BBC production (supposedly the most faithful adaptation of the book ever made) and Coppola to go. It has been a very long time since I have subjected myself to Keanu Reeves’ whoa, like totally Jonathan Harker, bro, and I’m not looking forward to it.

    Riven

    Over Thanksgiving weekend I read the first two Dresden Files books by Jim Butcher: Storm Front and Fool Moon. They were both fun and easy reads, which was nice because two dogs and a toddler were a huge distraction in the living room in which I was reading. They were a little formulaic, but I was sufficiently pre-warned by SF and was expecting that. In fact, I expect the rest of the Dresden Files books will follow very similar formats. I’ll be finding out soon because Grave Peril is next on my reading list. Reading these books feels a little bit like homework, since reading them was sort of a prerequisite for my rpg group’s next adventure: Your Story. (Everyone wanted a Pathfinder break.) But it’s really easy homework, and they remind me a bit of The Hollows series that I enjoyed so much last summer. If you’re looking for entertaining urban fantasy that isn’t too challenging and builds a nice world, either series would be a good fit.

    mexicansharpshooter

    Recently I found an old book titled, Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss.  Its been gathering dust as a shim for the kitchen table for the past three months, I figured I might as well actually read it to my 4 year old.

    Its a harrowing tale of a missionary named Sam, sent to an unfortunate land where nobody speaks in complete sentences, or without a form of pentameter.  I imagine it might have taken him months to adapt to the local custom in order to converse with the locals, and the story focuses on his interaction with one nameless local.  I imagine Dr. Seuss was unable pronounce the local’s name, and to be honest I doubt I would remember it either—the man is vegan, as is the standard in his culture.  I imagine his B12 deficiency is the root cause of his demeanor throughout the entire story.

    Sam is a missionary from the Church of Carnivorous Kinship (COCK) and is charged with converting a single vegan to a meat eater, thus fulfulling his destiny, and securing his place in heaven by his alien Reptilian overlords.

    I assume it begins early in the morning as the story begins while the local is reading a newspaper, and Sam offers him a simple ham and eggs breakfast.  He first tries to convince the local to eat it with a both a rodent and cannine companion, offers him a consideably large piece of real estate, and even offers the local to eat it in the location of his choice.  Much to Sam’s charign, the local then violates NAP by pushing him into oncoming traffic on a major highway, even forcing Sam to dodge an oncoming  train—WITHIN A TUNNEL.  The local’s shocking refusal would shake the convictions of the average missionary, but Sam is no average missionary.  The local eventually forces both over a seaside cliff, where he finally submits to Sam’s simple request and tries the meal.

    He loved it.  Becasue ham and eggs are delicious.

    The local, now cured of his B12 deficiency, is a much more personalble fellow, and likely continues the COCK lifestyle to this day.  It wouldn’t surprise me if the local is the missionary in the sequel Go Dog Go.

    Tune in next month.

    SP

    More Bosch. (And I started watching the series on Prime, and have some thoughts, but this post isn’t about TV shows.) Also read Scott Pratt’s latest Joe Dillard, Due Process, number 9 in the series. Enjoyable, if predictable, mind candy. Robert Dugoni’s A Steep Price, the most recent Tracy Crosswhite installment, is now the fiction in rotation on my Kindle.

    I’ve just begun the non-fiction-ish Lincoln’s Last Trial: The Murder Case That Propelled Him to the Presidency. Too soon to have formed a real opinion.

    Another book that just landed on my doorstep is Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome, penned by Venki Ramakrishnan, who shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work with the ribosome.  I purchased this one in print, as is my habit for anything I think OMWC and/or various geeky houseguests might also be interested in reading (and why we have overflowing bookshelves in our library). Haven’t read more than the introduction, but I think it will be very interesting.

    As part of an ongoing personal project building a sort of online research aid website for family history in my hometown (yes, I’m a nerd), I am re-reading the history book the two local historical societies produced 30-odd years ago and indexing the people . It’s very interesting to revisit this collection of local history and local family histories submitted by the families. This makes the book something of a cross between oral history anecdotes, verifiable facts, supposition, and wishful thinking. My family joined this community just a few years before my birth, and even having spent my entire life before college there, I’m finding all sorts of new connections and gossipy details about the place. It’s quite fun.

    jesse.in.mb

    It’s been a trying two months and I haven’t gotten much reading done. I finally (and just in the nick of time) Finished James R. Walker’s Lakota Myth. It’s been on my shelf since I visited the Crazy Horse Memorial. The editor, Elaine Jahner does the unenviable job of balancing an academic understanding of ethnography and folklore, the context that Walker brought to the stories, and showcasing the work Walker did in trying to bridge the gap between oral story-telling and a literary cycle. Some of the stories are told multiple times in the book, with each telling revealing how differently shamans, converts and entertainers told familiar tales with different emphases. I’d picked it up expecting something more like Bulfinch’s Mythology, but was pleasantly stimulated by the explanations for why certain decisions were made about the presentation of a mythology that was not already rooted into an English-speaking audience’s popular consciousness.

    Web Dominatrix

    I am currently enjoying We The Corporations by Adam Winkler. I met the author randomly some years ago at a book festival. Truthfully the book caught my eye because I recognised the author’s name.

    Winkler is a constitutional law professor at UCLA, and We The Corporations explores the complex topic of corporate personhood, and how businesses have won constitutional protections. I’m not far enough into it to give a review, so I expect I will report back next month.

    Brett L

    My big read of the month was Charlie Stross’s latest Laundry Files book The Labyrinth Index. Let me start with the good: The premise — that a Cthulonic cult has worked a mass glamor on the USA to make everyone forget the President every time they sleep was actually excellent. The group of Secret Service agents on the Presidential detail basically sleep every 4th day so enough are awake to remember why they are guarding this guy. The rest of the book is shit. Everyone and his fucking brother who isn’t currently the Eater of Souls or cohabiting with him is basically a vampire by the end. I don’t know, Stross started out emulating the styles of spy novelists in his first 2 or 3 installments. Maybe he decided to emulate Robert Jordan with this one because basically nobody remotely important dies, and I was bored by the end.

    I also tried to read The Systems Thinker: Essential Thinking Skills For Solving Problems, Managing Chaos, and Creating Lasting Solutions in a Complex World. Maybe I’ll go back to it at some point but if you’ve ever had to take any sort of process engineering or electronics course, you’ll know the systems he’s talking about. And then take a not particularly imaginative person and have them try to explain through large, complex poorly defined systems in the real-world like schools. I don’t know, maybe its because the author started with a “nuanced” view of Norman Borlaug and I have a very un-nuanced view of Norman Borlaug. I’m sure this is a revelation for people who don’t have any formal systems training, but I found it not particularly insightful and his deep thoughts not particularly deep before I gave it up about 2/3 of the way through.

  • True Thoughts and Conspiracies – A Trashy Form of Fiction

    True Thoughts and Conspiracies – A Trashy Form of Fiction

    Stephen, a rotund man with an acute case of rosacea and a few beads of sweat trickling down his face, carefully navigated his boxers over his deflating erection, visibly working hard to avoid tipping over onto the bed. He ran his fingers up the side of his wife’s still naked body, trigger her back to pucker up into pert goosebumps.

    “That was great Janice, we need to do this more often,” Stephen softly whispered, trying not to disturb her post-coital glow. She refocused her eyes on him lovingly, her smile psychically channeling her internal ecstasy into Stephen’s understanding.

    “Mmmmmm, honey, this … this was so good!” Janice purred, sensuously wriggling under the covers in a way that made Stephen want to crawl right back into bed for another round of mattress wrestling. However, his subconscious gave a pinch like a lactose intolerant rectum on a first date at an Indian restaurant. Stephen knew that he couldn’t keep up with his mid-life crisis. She was still a supple 23 with smooth skin and curvaceous volume in just the right places. He was a flabby, hairy 45 year old with a big house and a bigger checkbook. He knew he wasn’t enough to satisfy her; that’s what today was about.

    “You know, we still have enough time to catch a movie. I heard that First Man movie is good.” Stephen emerged from the requisite catatonia after an orgasmic emission. “I’ve always been fascinated by movies about the Apollo program, Apollo 13 was great!”

    “It’s all fake, you know,” a voice jarringly interjected from the chaise in the reading nook. “The moon landings were a hoax.” The voice was disturbingly earnest, with just a hint of condescension. Just the tone one would expect from the half-naked twenty-something Adonis of a man tapping away on his iPhone in the corner of the bedroom.

    “What the hell are you talking about, Brad?” Stephen shot back, launching all-out thermonuclear body language war with the man whore in his reading spot. Stephen made a mental note to bleach the hell out of that chaise before sitting there again. If only that furniture could speak…

    He snapped out of his train of thought with a realization that he couldn’t afford therapists for all of the furniture that was violated during today’s extended game of hide the pickle. Not while paying for that bitch of an ex-wife’s therapist, too. God, what a wrinkled old cunt!

    Brad had leisurely removed his thong-ridden sweaty ass cheeks from Stephen’s sacred retreat, and was slowly getting dressed while he put together a parting shot that would extricate him from the room with his payment and without fucking up next week’s scheduled romp time with Stephen and Janice. He really wanted that damned 84″ QLED TV, whether or not it meant doing the devil’s threesome with some rich geezer and his glorified whore.

    “The moon landing was a hoax. An American bluff to the Soviet space race dominance.” Brad muttered without addressing anybody in the room. He hoped beyond hope that this was the end of the conversation and he could go home and take a shower. He could feel that whore’s randy juices congealing in his beard, and he internally cringed at the thought of how much beard wax it would take to return his chin mane to its former glory.

    “Brad, you aren’t even old enough to have seen the moon landing, how would you even know?” Janice sat up in bed, any remaining aura of afterglow having been replaced with a mix of mild annoyance and reluctant curiosity. Brad noticed her perky bosoms settle into an oddly attractive asymmetry, like a cute girl with a crazy eye. Janice, following Brad’s gaze, covered her mammaries in reflexive embarrassment.

    “It’s all out there… you know, on the Internet. The videos were clearly produced in Hollywood. The artifacts are more of science fiction than science fact. I mean, you can even see the flags waving in the breeze! Who do they think that they’re fooling?” Brad felt his hackles rising, and he resigned himself to getting into this debate yet again. These ignorant fools don’t even know that the moon landing is fake… they probably think that Al Quaeda did 9/11 and Sandy Hook was done by a disturbed autist.

    “Your-” Stephen started.

    “Let me ask you a question, before you get started,” Brad interrupted, pausing for dramatic effect before continuing. “What evidence do you have that the moon landing actually happened?”

    “Well, uhh,” Stephen was caught off guard and gathered himself under the disguise of thoughtful contemplation. “There are people who claim to have gone to the moon. There is a large amount of equipment still around that was used to send people to the moon. There is video of men on the moon. Hell, I’ve even seen a moonrock.”

    “What do you find most convincing from that evidence?” Brad questioned, pretending not to notice that Stephen’s Trump-like penis was slowly retreating through the slit in his boxers into it’s fungal habitat like a snail tentacle after encountering a patch of salt.

    “Well, I guess the video is most convincing,” Stephen tried to hide his defensiveness by leaning onto the edge of the bed, unintentionally flaunting his scrunched up coin purse through the widened hole in the front of his only clothing.

    “The video?” Brad scoffed, barely reining in a condescending “harumph” that would’ve been the last nail in the coffin of his plans to continue to rock the world of that naked vixen whose cheek still showed the remnants of his primal rut. “The video could just as easily have been fabricated. In fact, it has many issues that indicate possible fabrication. If you strip away your trusting bias, you-”

    “Trusting bias? I’m the one with a bias?” Stephen shoved away from the bed, causing Janice to flinch in a way that tore her out of whatever trance was allowing her to tolerate this idiotic debate. She slid out of the sheets, and walked, intentionally seductively, to the closet to grab some clothes. Movie or no, she was going to get dolled up, if only to make Brad feel jealous and to distract Stephen from this inanity. She knew how Stephen was, he’d talk all night if somebody didn’t distract him.

    “Yes, you’re too trusting of the media and the government. Humor me for a moment and approach the moon landing from a skeptic’s point of view,” Brad was clearly enjoying this a bit too much. He could feel the blood coursing back into his flaccid meat tube.

    “Ok, I’ll play along. As a skeptic, I see a bunch of video seeming to show people in suits on a rocky surface with low gravity. I see a rock that doesn’t look like a normal rock I could find in my backyard. I’ve seen a full sized model of a rocket that could plausibly send these men into space. I’ve heard more than one person talk as though they have been to the moon.” Stephen was also enjoying this a bit too much, although not with the sexual repercussions that were stretching Brad’s thong under his sweatpants. “I guess that if I didn’t trust what I was told about these things, they could represent anything from a legitimate trip to the moon to a conspiratorial hoax. I don’t have any direct evidence that anybody has actually been on the moon.”

    Brad nodded in approval, cutting in before Stephen could assert dominance. Brad chuckled internally as he recognized the same power play he used while directing the three person play that was the violation of Janice. “But why wouldn’t you believe them? They have no reason to lie, right?”

    Brad paused, locking eyes with Stephen and not faltering when Janice sauntered back into the room, stuffed into a mini-skirt and halter top that looked like it was about to burst. “Wrong! They were losing the space race! The Soviets beat them to every major milestone, and the Americans were desperate for the upper hand. It was a pivotal time in the Cold War, and the Americans couldn’t afford to lose this one.”

    “I mean, I guess that’s plausible, but Occam’s Razor seems to suggest that it’s more likely that they actually did it rather than some massive conspiracy including thousands of people to fake a moon landing.” Stephen, unlike Brad, made no attempt to hide his notice of Janice’s provocative dress.

    “What is there to believe if we can’t trust the history books, the contemporary records, and the testimony of others?” Janice contributed, to the shock of both Brad and Stephen.

    “That’s just it!” Stephen supported “If we don’t trust the government and historians about the moon landing, what can we trust them about? What is truth when you don’t trust anything outside of your own first-hand experience?”

    “Now you’re talking! Question everything!” Brad said, betraying his love for the X-files and for pot. “How do you even know that there is a place called New Zealand? There are pictures and videos, and people pretend that they have been there, but without actually going there, I have no idea that such a place exists.”

    Stephen, obviously annoyed at this turn of conversation, pulled Janice close, pressing her soft body against his. “You’re a moron, but your point is well taken. I can’t know that something is the truth unless I’ve directly observed it. Everything else is built on some sort of social trust. It’s an assumption that people won’t collectively and casually lie to you about history and science and other things that you can’t and won’t verify.”

    “So, are we going to watch First Man?” Janice asked, sliding her hand down Stephen’s pantleg in an obvious sign of impatience.

    “See you next week, Brad,” Stephen asserted with a finality that caused Brad to turn and walk out the door.

  • The Day Civilization Fell

    …and so it began.

    It started so….simply. The CDC said to stay away from Romaine lettuce, until they figured out why it was giving the bloody flux, dropsy, the grippe or whatnot. I shrugged and headed off to work… just a couple of hours, and then I would have a nice 4 day weekend for Thanksgiving.

    On the way home, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a couple of last items for Thanksgiving. “Huh, looks like all the romaine is gone.”

    Then I noticed it. The mood was…ugly. The shoppers were already blasting adrenaline, and in a surly disposition. This didn’t help. In fact, it pushed them over the edge…

    This ain’t Black Friday, son…it is worse!

    I was surprised at the lack of response at the store. Bust a shoplifter, and usually there were three squad cars roaring in for the kill (hoping it was a hot 17 or 18 year old perp). Now…nothing. I fled the store, and that is when I found out how bad it was. The cops didn’t come, because this scene was playing out everywhere. And not just the grocery stores. Riots at various and sundry sandwich places….rioting vegetarians and vegans at salad bars. I even saw a burning Sweet Tomatoes restaurant as I tried to make my way home.

    “Go for the Arugula!”

    Never got there… had to go by too many Panera Bread locations. The primal fury of the quasi-hipster mobs was something to see. How those skinny jeaned, bearded, Planet Fitness members managed to flip over the fire truck, and tear the crew apart…. no, I don’t want to know. I cannot erase the images from my already shaky mind.

    The few of us that managed to make it to the farm (corn and soybeans, thank God it wasn’t a lettuce farm) tried to piece it all together. The cops were overwhelmed right away, and the states were collapsing before they could even think about calling out the National Guard. And what were they going to do, with their mess sections already in mutiny. Communications went next…everyone frantically checking their devices for the store that would let them get crazy Aunt Sophie’s @#$%ing salad mix. The net and the cell towers never stood a chance. Transport was impossible, as the roads became a single, extended road-rage episode. Hell, even domestic rabbits and chinchillas went straight at their owner’s throats.

    “Fluffy…I am sorry. We, we…are out of lettuce.”

    In the quieter moments, when we are not trying to scratch in the soil – hoping for one last head of butter lettuce – I marvel at how fragile our society was. A wanderer did come by and mention that he had heard a few hydroponics outfits in rural Canada may have survived. Come Spring, we may send a scout up that way….but I hold out little hope.

    Not sure why I am penning this, in the last pages of a scavenged spiral bound notebook. Vanity, I suppose. Maybe I just hope it will serve as a warning, should the survivors rebuild a civilization someday.

    Don’t shit where you grow lettuce.

  • The Glibening, Part Four: Hardboiled Dick

    The Glibening, Part Four:

    Hardboiled Dick

    by Tonio

     

    Previously: Part One, Part Two, Part Three

    Ramesh’s iPhone emitted the special chirp which meant that Google Alert had turned up a new hit from one of the websites his boss deemed troublesome. Crap. He grunted, then flinched as the cold water splashed up into his anus from the toilet bowl; he was glad he had pre-flushed and tried not to think about what germs were lurking in the water of the public toilet. Someday he hoped to have a corner office with a private toilet like his boss. Ramesh quickly cleaned himself and stood up. He raised his trousers, slid his arms into his suspenders, then buttoned and zipped his pinstriped trousers and put on his suit jacket. He pressed the flush handle with his shoe and exited the stall quickly before the toilet overflowed.

    Practicality necessitated that public restrooms should have poop knives, but the security requirements of a federal courthouse prevented it. He walked from the innermost stall to the sink nearest to the door. As he reached the sink he heard water splashing onto the tile floor from the stalls behind him. Ramesh hurried through washing his hands – he counted to twenty as always, but much more quickly than normal. His phone kept chirping, not a good sign. He reached for a paper towel and dried his hands while looking back in the mirror at the stalls to check whether a stream of water was flowing his way – fortunately not. Finally he dried his hands and exited to the public corridor before checking his phone. A livestream from the Thought! Magazine commenters mocking the boss was going viral. He was going to be livid about that.

     

    A collection of old kitchen knives such as are commonly repurposed as “utility” knives.

     

    Ramesh quickly swiped through the door into the private corridor of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. He walked down the corridor and into the conference room where the Multi-Agency Task Force on Political Subversion met. The weekly meeting was about to start and the boss was chatting with the New York State Police representative.

    “Sir?”

    “What is it, Rami?”

    “The chippertarians just put up a snarky YouTube video taunting you. It’s like a really bad Bollywood musical number. There is nudity. It’s going viral; over eight hundred views in five minutes.”

    “Well, put it up on screen.”

    “Really?”

    “We’re all friends here, and have seen far worse.”

    Ramesh sat down at the crappy old computer and brought the YouTube page up on the projector.

    “It’s like the Christmas pageant at a retard school.” Coyle from the Port Authority police was his usual charming self.

    “That reminds me of some off-off-off-Broadway crap my wife dragged me to last year,” said the state police representative. “The theater smelled like piss.”

     

    Let Preet now come with,
    Subpoenas by the pound,
    Ken shall show that mutton-
    Head the law more sound.

     

    Someone stifled a snicker, which came out like a sneeze. Ramesh suspected the state attorney general representative.

    The chorus line mooned the camera. Ramesh looked nervously at his boss who grimaced slightly but remained silent.

    “Damn.”

    “Jesus.”

    “Where is this coming from, Rami? I mean physical location?” asked the FBI man.

    “I don’t know, Agent Waters.”

    “I’ll find out. Can you text me the link?”

    “Here’s the URL.”

    “Got it.”

    The production number ended and the screen went to the static text “Fuck Off, Slavers.”

    “A human pyramid with a swastika on top. Fucking Nazis.”

    The boss looked at Ramesh and nodded ever so slightly at the NYPD man.

    “Sergeant Murphy, the swastika is an ancient Hindu symbol which pre-dates Hitler by centuries, and the gentleman wearing the swastika headgear is dressed in the traditional manner of a village shaman of Gujarat in India.”

    “Goddamn.”

    As far as Ramesh could tell, Murphy’s only job was to go to inter-agency meetings and report back to his captain on what other agencies were doing without letting the other agencies know what NYPD was doing.

    “Nice friends you have there, Preet.” The state attorney general representative hated his federal counterparts with a passion. “Seems like you could go all Meese on them because of the mooning – I bet a frame by frame analysis would reveal something other than butt cheeks. A hundred dollars says they don’t have any proof of age forms or a designated Custodian of Records.”

    “Guess what just came in to Manhattan 911?”

    “Holy Shiva,” thought Ramesh. Murphy offering up anything was like Justice Thomas asking a question during oral argument.

    “What is it, Mr. Murphy,” asked the boss.

    “A call from a distraught young woman at Thought! Magazine. Says she’s the receptionist. And she’s batshit-crazy, or drugged. Claims someone was eaten to death by squirrels.” Murphy rolled his eyes. “Dispatch sent out an ambulance and a black and white. They are en route.”

    “Today is our lucky day. Rami, get over there. If that’s okay with our NYPD friends, of course,” said the boss looking at Murphy.

    “Of course, Mr. Bharara. Our federal friends are always welcome.” The NYPD might hate the feds on their turf, but the real enemy was the state. Goddamn Albany pukes trying to tell the mayor of the greatest city in the world how to run things. The mayor had more guns than the governor, but nowhere near as many as the feds.

    “Switzerland, Mr. B,” said the FBI man looking up from his phone. “Those sons of a bitch are routing through Elektron AG. We could find out more, but then our state and local friends couldn’t come to the party.” The FBI man knew that the NYPD particularly hated being called locals.

     

    The grim facade of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan federal courthouse in Foley square.

     

     

    “Rami, why are you still here?”

    Murphy stood up. “C’mon, kid, you can ride with me, that will be quicker.”

    Ramesh got up sheepishly and headed for the door on Murphy’s heels. So, he was to have a minder to make sure he saw nothing that NYPD didn’t want him to see.

    “Where are you parked, Sergeant?”

    “Down in the LEO parking spots next to the prisoner transports.”

    “It will be faster to take the private elevator.” The courthouse had two small private elevators used by judges and prisoners alike, but you never saw anyone else; each elevator trip was direct end-to-end with no additional stops.

    Ramesh used his ID card to unlock the elevator call button. Murphy was on his cell phone.

    “Manhattan Dispatch, this is Sergeant Murphy of Liaison, badge number sierra golf tango eight six four two zero. I’m en route to the ten sixty eight at one ten Fifth Avenue. I’ve got a Deputy US Attorney with me. Instruct onsite units to have EMS hold off on the thorazine until we can talk to the caller… about ten minutes. Thanks. Bye.”

    The elevator car arrived and they boarded; Ramesh pushed button P1.

    “One ten Fifth Avenue,” said Murphy, “that’s the Vandersnatch Building, built on the foundation of the old Vandersnatch mansion that got torched back in the twenties by Frumius Vandersnatch’s crazy granddaughter.”

    “You know the city well, Sergeant.”

    “I worked security details there in the eighties. It’s a lotta snooty magazines there.” Murphy slicked his hair with his hand. “I was with Celebrity Protection Unit then, kid. Got some prime pussy. Perk of the job.”

    Ramesh fumed at being called “kid” by a man he suspected of being a braggart and a hack.

    “I used to date Morgan Fairchild back when she was just a soap opera star here,” said Murphy as he hitched his belt up. “Met her on duty.”

    Ramesh was glad when the elevator slowed down and the car doors slid open with a ding.

    Murphy exited first and strode over to the security checkpoint.

    “Hey, Chris. Here to get my pistol back.”

    “Sarge, Mr. Gupta.”

    “I’m taking Ramesh downtown to an unfolding incident,” said Murphy as he fished a key with a round metal tag out of his pocket and opened one of the deposit boxes for visitors’ guns. Murphy removed his Glock and slid it into his shoulder holster under his suit.

    “Have fun, Mr. Gupta.”

    “Thanks,” said Ramesh, already disliking Murphy’s company.

    Ramesh followed Murphy to one of the many cop cars in the deck, a white unmarked four door.

    “Buckle in and hang on once I hit Centre Street.”

    Ramesh couldn’t imagine not fastening his seatbelt, and was surprised to see that Murphy didn’t use his. Murphy started the car and backed out of the parking space and headed up the ramp and onto Pearl Street, the private street for the Manhattan court, cop and jail complex. He waited for the vehicle trap to go down and turned right on to Centre Street and activated the blue flashing lights in the front windshield of the cop car. Ramesh had always wanted to be a policeman, but Professor Gupta had other ideas so Ramesh went to Hazelwood Country Day, then Woodberry Forest, William and Mary, and finally UVA Law, all on full-ride scholarship. Deputy US Attorney was as close as he could get to police work without inciting the considerable ire of his extended, degree-heavy family.

    As they approached the intersection with Worth Street, Murphy sounded the siren. A man in a wheelchair worked his arms furiously to propel himself out of the crosswalk onto the relative safety of the sidewalk outside Thomas Paine Park.

    “Them wheelchair guys got some guns on them,” said Murphy. “Do you lift, kid?”

    “I do some reps on the machines.”

    “Better than nothing. Of course you federal prosecutors don’t collar a lot of perps. The ladies like it, though. You married?” Murphy turned left onto Leonard Street.

    “No.” Ramesh was dreading the forthcoming trip “home” to his grandparents’ village in Gujarat to marry a girl he barely knew.

    “Lucky you.”

    Murphy sped down the street with lights but no siren. A bike messenger rode in the right lane. Murphy eased off on the gas and drifted rightwards until his driver side tires were straddling the lane markers for the right lane. Twelve feet behind the cyclist he activated the siren for a brief whoop. The bike messenger raised his left hand with the middle finger already extended. Murphy simultaneously accelerated and did a quick wheel movement, swiping the cyclist with the side of the cop car and launching him curbward. Murphy then quickly swerved left, tires squealing, to move out of the curbside lane to avoid the rapidly approaching Jersey barrier closing the lane for a construction site. Ramesh turned to look at the speedometer, it was approaching forty and the needle continued moving to the right.

    Murphy looked out the rearview mirror, then the side mirror. “Smooches, punk.”

    When Ramesh could no longer see the messenger he turned and looked at Murphy. “You struck and injured the cyclist,” Ramesh said with a mixture of disbelief and loathing.

    Not just any cyclist, kid, a bike messenger – they’re like rats on wheels. And I personally know that the little anarchist punk once busted a cop car window with his bike lock. Few scratches, maybe a couple stitches – he’ll be fine. You have to consider the totality of circumstances. Not all justice is dispensed in the courtrooms.”

    “How will you explain that?”

    Murphy said nothing and reached for the Motorola radio mic, moved it to his face and mashed in the button and started talking.

    “Dispatch, this is Sergeant Murphy with Liaison, over.”

    “This is Dispatch, go ahead Murphy.”

    “I’m on Sixth between Prince and King and there’s a cyclist down. He was riding erratically and weaved into my lane as I was transporting a VIP with lights and siren… Yeah, an ambulance, too. Make sure they charge him with interference before EMS loads him up. And not wearing his helmet, poor kid …Probably. You can’t charge them if they’re not. Murphy out.”

    To be continued…

  • Rite of Passage

    Author’s Note: This is a work of fiction, complete and unabridged. Don’t expect any deep insights, philosophising, or political priciples. It’s here for entertainment. So be entertained.

    It is set in the same world as the as yet unpublished “Prince of the North Tower”, but the characters and places that appear here are not mentioned there, beyond being within the “Five Kingdoms”.

    Yes, I get the irony of turning in such a run of the mill yarn shortly after opining on the mistakes writers make.

    Alvar Lev

    Alvar was sore. Every muscle burned. His arms ached from swinging a hammer. His ears rang from the strike of steel on steel. His legs throbbed from working the treadle on the grindstone. His eyes hurt from looking into fires and at minute details. His back complained from the nights spent sleeping on the bare stone of the forge floor. He’d lost track of how long he’d been in the forge. How many meals taken in the back corner. How many restless nights. How many discarded billets and flawed blades. Hinrik Jarn had watched over Alvar’s shoulder and uttered quiet words of advice the whole time. But, the master smith had not touched a single tool. The blade had to be Alvar’s work, and the boy refused to accept anything less than perfect.

    A churl’s son undergoing the rite of manhood could make do with anything that would cut or stab, but that would not do for Alvar. He was still annoyed at himself that he’d never managed to draw out the steel to a length suitable for a sword. Settling for a blade three times the length of his hand felt like giving up. But it was straight, and the edges parallel until the point. Half the length was double-edged, but Alvar’s legs had simply not been able to work the treadle on the grindstone any more. So he’d filed saw teeth into the lower half of the back edge. To remind himself which side had the full cutting edge, Alvar had added a D-guard to the grip. The simple piece of brass had been more difficult to work than he’d expected.

    Had he simply set out to make anything, the blade would have been something to be proud of. But, all Alvar could see was where he’d fallen short of every goal he’d set. The blade was too short, too narrow, and not fully edged on both sides. The guard was too plain, too unornamented. The grip was nothing but a piece of wood with a leather wrap. The pommel was a simple lug, and he’d bent the tang while peening it. But he was too tired and sore to start over. He could barely rise and carry the blade from the forge to the great hall. Kneeling beside the throne, the youth set the implement atop a wooden pedestal. Alvar’s auburn locks were matted with sweat and streaked with soot. His handsome, boyish features were no better off, as his fatigue showed plainly. The woolen shift he wore would never be white again.

    The great hall of Skogahaugr was a long, vaulted chamber in dark granite. Each arch had a false buttress in the form of a wooden post that appeared to prop up a decorative element near the ceiling. These posts were carved with a spiral of runes containing the saga of Alvar’s family. The verses spoke of how his ancestors had wrested the lands of Snaerveldi from the Kings of Neph and withstood the sieges to drive them back. The crown thus won had found its way to Alvar’s brow when he was but six. He prayed nightly to prove worthy of his lineage and knew he could not let himself accept ‘good enough’ from his endeavors.

    Though Alvar was King, Olaf ruled. The Regent was a big man, with arms like tree trunks, and a chest like a bear’s. His beard had been black when Alvar was crowned, but was now streaked with gray. It was starting to resemble the wolf’s pelt that lined Olaf’s cloak. By custom, a man of Snaerveldi could not wear the fur of a beast he had not slain himself. The shortage of fur in Olaf’s attire merely reminded Alvar of how little time his step-father spent in the woods. The rite of manhood was no place for women or children, so Alvar’s mother and half-siblings were nowhere near the hall. Even so, the sheer number of men who hung around the court seeking the favor of Olaf Gull meant the room was far from empty. Each one of them in turn would inspect the blade and opine on its fitness. All the while, Alvar was expected to kneel in silence upon the stone, aching from the ordeal of its forging.

    By virtue of his position, Olaf was first. Alvar had the urge to snatch the blade off the pedestal. before his step-father could pick it up. But, decorum and tradition stayed his hand. He merely clenched his jaw and gripped his knees to avoid improper acts or outbursts. Olaf gently lifted the implement from its perch and ran his gray eyes over the steel. Alvar knew the older man saw every flaw and blemish in the blade. However much the youth despised Olaf, he knew the regent was no fool. The former merchant had adroitly insinuated himself into the role of ruler so smoothly, little fuss had been raised. His silvered tongue had wooed the court and the widowed queen to the point that only Alvar protested the wedding. The king had been but a child, and the protests were ignored.

    “Fine work, my son,” Olaf said.

    Alvar rankled at every word. It wasn’t fine work, it was merely ‘good enough.’ And he was very much not Olaf’s son. The sycophantic murmurs of the men at court were easier to bear. The blade would serve its purpose in the latter half of the rite, so they took the opportunity to attempt to ingratiate themselves with their king. Alvar didn’t want flattery, he wanted honesty. However acerbic Henrik Jarn had been with his words, he’d been fair in his critiques. These hangers-on didn’t even point out the obviously bent pommel. The young king was grateful when the presentation of the blade was done, and he could finally rest in a real bed.

    * * *

    The wind blowing through the forest brought fresh flurries of snow falling from the laden boughs. Often Alvar would spot what he took for a track only to discover it was merely the mark of a clump off the branches above. So he pulled his cloak tighter about his shivering frame and kept going. The snow swallowed sound, meaning all that reached Alvar’s ears was the susurration of the breeze and the subtle creak of three limbs. Dark enough to look stark black against the snow, the trunks surrounded the youth, cutting short vision in every direction. There was plenty of space to move between them, and the snow was not deep. Alvar’s boots only sank to the ankles with each step. A trail appeared before him, but it was only that of a hare.

    For a churl, a hare was a fine catch, but if Alvar wanted to wrest his throne from Olaf’s clutches, he could not have a churlish omen. So he ignored the hare’s tracks. Puffing out mist, he continued on. Where his muscles had been sore from exertion, now they were all but numb. The first pangs of hunger twinged his gut. Alvar refused to let that distract him. The whole rite was supposed to be a test of cunning, endurance and determination. To hunt down and slay a beast of the forest with just your wits and a blade you forged yourself tested a great many qualities of a man. The type of beast taken was seen as a portent of the type of man you would be. So Alvar stepped over the fox tracks and kept going. Foxes were cunning, but duplicitous. That would not do. It was perfectly acceptable to craft additional implements once you were in the woods, like snares or spears, but Alvar was uncertain what he might need.

    Movement in the corner of his eye caught Alvar’s attention. He froze and looked. It was only a horse and rider. Olaf and several of his picked men were pacing him to ensure he didn’t cheat. Alvar found the implication galling. It was unthinkable to not do this the proper way. Another part of him wondered if the riders were scaring off the beasts. He scowled and motioned for the rider he saw to back away. The rider did not, but did sit still while Alvar gained a lead again. Grumbling and shivering, the youth nearly walked past the hoofprint. It was cloven, and it was big. The size of his palm, more or less. From the spacing relative to the other prints, he could immediately rule out swine and bovine. This was a deer, and a big one.

    To the men of Snaerveldi, a stag meant wisdom and strength, good qualities for a king. Alvar turned to follow the trail, wondering what he would do if it turned out to be a doe. That could wait until he laid eyes upon the creature. There was no way to tell how old the tracks were with any certainty, but they were still clear. It had been snowing earlier that morning, so it could not have been more than a few hours. How far could a deer walk in a few hours? Pretty far, Alvar realized as he tried to work the chill from his fingers. All he could imagine was finding the beast and being too cold and tired to strike. All the while, Olaf and his flunkies would laugh when the stag turned and gored Alvar with its antlers.

    The boy froze.

    Accidents were not unknown. With only Olaf and his chosen cadre as witnesses, who’s to say such a mishap would be at the hands of an animal? As a boy, Alvar was no threat to Olaf, indeed, he was the excuse for the older man’s post. Were Alvar to die during his rite of manhood, it would be a very small step for his step-father to take up the crown. The young king glanced suspiciously behind him, but did not see the riders. Regardless of his fears, Alvar still had a beast to take. Resuming the trail, his bright blue eyes flicked from track to woods to where he suspected the riders to be. Nothing. For all the world, it looked as though Alvar were alone with the trees.

    The sight of cleared snow heartened the youth. The deer had rooted through the accumulation to the plants underneath. Along the edges were marks that could have only been made by antlers. A smile came to Alvar’s face as he picked up the pace. He blinked against the wind and its frigid fingers scratching at his eyes. All that meant was he was downwind from the stag, and it would not pick up his scent on the approach. In an instant, all thoughts of cold, tiredness, and Olaf left his head. There, laying in a patch of cleared ground, was the stag. Patches of snow still dusted its dark brown coat, insulated from his heat by the dense fur. His antlers bore a myriad of points, and reached out wider than Alvar’s shoulders. Indeed, they were almost wide enough to span between the young man’s elbows with his arms outstretched.

    Crouching low and close to a tree, Alvar contemplated his approach. At the moment he had every advantage. The stag was upwind, at rest, and facing the other way. But, they were wary creatures, and the slightest stray noise would send him bounding off into the woods. Moving as silently as his numbed limbs could muster, Alvar stepped around his tree and advanced to the next one. Keeping his eye on the stag, his heart nearly froze when the wind stopped. The stag hadn’t noticed him, as the wind had simply died down rather than reversing. As Alvar contemplated starting forward again, he heard the breathing. It was a low, raspy growl practically over his right shoulder. At first, he thought one of the riders must have approached too close. As he turned, the young king realized the sound was nothing like a horse.

    A white blur leapt on Alvar in an angry snarl. The boy barely had time to interpose his arm between his throat and its teeth before being knocked from his feet. A massive feline with snow-white fur and a shaggy mane bowled him to the ground. As they hit, Alvar’s blade sank to the hilt in the lion’s torso. Claws raked at him as it tried to rip his arm off. Fear lanced through him as he expected his elbow to give way any second. Turning his face away from the enraged muzzle, Alvar twisted his blade in the wound. A torrent of hot blood poured over his hand as the cat’s clawing became spasmodic and flailing. His head reeled from a solid swat to the side of his face. Shoving the dying predator off himself, the youth tried to gain his feet. Falling to his knees, blood dripped from his blade and body.

    Forcing himself to his feet, Alvar snarled at the empty patch of ground where the stag had reposed just moments before. He kicked the dead lion out of frustration. Staggering forward, dripping and reeking of blood, the king made to follow the deer. He spat out a mouthful of red and blinked blood from his left eye as he appraised the tracks again. A horse interposed itself between him and the trail. “Out of my way,” Alvar snarled, motioning Olaf aside. Scarlet drops cast off his arm as he did so, and his mouth filled with iron.

    “Your hunt is over,” Olaf said.

    “I haven’t caught it yet.”

    “It doesn’t matter what you stalk, it matters what you first kill.” Olaf motioned behind Alvar at the dead lion. “Besides, you need to be stitched up before you bleed to death.”

    Spitting another mouthful of blood, Alvar looked at the tooth marks bit deep into his left forearm, and down at the rents elsewhere on his body. If not for the numbing cold, he’d have been paralyzed by agony. He wobbled unsteadily, his torn face dripping down his shirt even as it leaked into his mouth.

    Alvar crumpled backwards into the snow.

    * * *

    It was said that Alvar took the pain well. It helped that they’d sutured his face first and consequently immobilized his jaw to prevent him pulling out stitches. The worst injuries had been to the left side of his face, his left forearm and the front of his thighs. The claw marks across his torso had been long, but shallow. Unable to kneel, he sat on a stool beside the throne. Swaddled in bandages, the king set his bloodied blade on the pedestal. The Snow Lion lay upon the floor before the throne, looking for all the world as though it had lain down to take a nap. During their fight in the wild, Alvar hadn’t realized how big the cat actually was. He could have lain on its back easily. No wonder it had knocked him down so effortlessly. The great hall was cold, but Alvar welcomed the chill. The cold had saved his life in the forest, and it kept the pain down now.

    Though only the men of the court had attended the presentation of the blade, the king’s rite of manhood was of interest to any man of the kingdom. That Alvar had made his blade produced little interest in the common man. That he had slain a Snow Lion with it brought them in droves out of sheer curiosity. Few had ever seen the dangerous beasts, and many of those did not return to speak of it. So to even be able to see the remains of one brought them to the great hall of Skogahaugr. Olaf had to post guards at the door to control the crowds and to keep the women and children outside. It was not their place to attend the presentation of the kill and attest to the suitability of the beast. Women had their own rites, from which men were excluded. From both, children could only wait in futile frustration until their time came.

    It was not appropriate for Alvar to speak, so it was of little consequence that he could not. With that last bat to the head, the lion had dug its claws in deep. There was no way the king’s face would not bear scars from the wound. It was the last thing on Alvar’s mind. He was annoyed at the lion for having interrupted his hunt, and confused at Olaf’s behavior. To be rid of Alvar, and the last obstacle to fully claiming the crown, he had merely needed to act slow. The lion had done most of the work. Instead, he’d done everything to make sure the king lived. Now all the churls and thanes gawked at the dead lion and the wounds their king had sustained fighting it. Such a move would surely weaken Olaf’s hold on Snaerveldi. Alvar the boy was a useful tool. Alvar the man could dispose with his regent.

    It didn’t make sense the the young man.

    The king’s eyes went to where his step-father was observing the line of curiosity seekers pretending to be interested in the rite. He actually looked proud. Proud of what?

    Alvar didn’t understand.

  • What Are We Reading – October 2018

    OMWC

    Geek books and real books. My fun real book this past month was by H.L. Mencken, who was incapable of writing anything uninteresting. Although we love him for his short and cynical essays, chock full of quotable and meme-able sentences, his scholarly work is equally enjoyable. The American Language is a study on how our version of English developed and on the taxonomy of American vocabulary, grammar, and usage. It delights my inner geek, amuses and informs on every page, and gives a fascinating insight into Mencken’s inner thoughts on the language that he used so brilliantly and effectively. I was less thrilled with a lot of the updates added by editors after Mencken’s stroke and eventual death, but at least they were kind enough to set their portions off in brackets.

    My geek book for the month is High Fidelity Circuit Design, by Norman Crowhurst and George Cooper. This is a book from the 1950s that has recently been reprinted. If you want to understand Nyquist stability criteria, feedback, and the finer points of tube amplifier design (I told you it was a geek book!), look no further. These days, engineers use computer modeling to determine gain and phase margins for stability and sims to predict performance, but back in the stone ages, they actually plotted stuff on graph paper and used rulers and protractors. I confess that reading this covered my with waves of anachrophilia.

    SugarFree

    October is the month for horror. I went back to the classics: Dracula, Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde. Old friends to cuddle up with.

    If you’ve never, Frankenstein plays out far differently that pretty much every movie adaption. The Monster is made over just a few pages of grave robbing and surgery, no electricity and no cackling, and Frankenstein is young, only about 21, and while full of hubris, he isn’t a mad scientist, just a mildly full-of-himself student. It would be interesting to see a film adaptation actually tackle the book.

    SP

    Let’s see, what have I been reading this month. I’ve just started The Pattern of Evolution by Niles Eldredge, which our European guest had selected from our library for bedtime reading and left laying on the table upon his departure. (One of the great benefits of marrying another extreme reader is that there are always books that I haven’t read, and I don’t even have to venture out to the library or pay Amazon.)

    I’m revisiting The Drunken Botanist by Amy Stewart. Stewart has put together a pretty comprehensive look at the major plants, herbs, spices, that are made into various potent potables. There are interesting historical notes about the discovery and use of the different ingredients, and some geeky botany stuff, too. Oh, and recipes for drinks. This isn’t really a book one reads straight through, although I am. But I also read cookbooks cover to cover just for fun.

    Just picked up the book mexican sharpshooter has recently reviewed, Data in Decline: Why Polling and Social Research Miss the Mark by Steve Wood. I expect a throughly interesting read.

    In fiction, I’m still working my way through the Harry Bosch series by Michael Connelly on Kindle. I haven’t viewed the series which is based on the character, but I might add it to my watchlist.

    In audio, I was listening to A Dangerous Fortune by Ken Follett, but I’ve kind of lost interest about halfway through. Plot: Horrible people do horrible things. Less horrible people also sometimes do horrible things. Especially in 19th century banking empires, British politics, and banana republics run by thugs. Eh. Probably won’t finish it unless I end up having another long, tedious drive alone.

    jesse.in.mb

    I don’t have much to report. I went on a bit of a binge of buying cookbooks including Mormioto’s Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking which is accessible enough and got me to make my own dashi from scratch (god damn did my kitchen stink of fish for days, but it was very tasty). I found the content personal, but I was hoping for more…I dunno, context for the food I was preparing. I also grabbed Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking more to kick money her way than anything as I’ve been scraping recipes from her website for years (The Boyfriend does not approve of how much I gravitate to her more gochugaru-centric offerings).

    I burned through the available issues of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina which started off with just the right level of twisting to the character I was first introduced to by Melissa Joan Hart, but I’m not sure it is living up to its promise so far.

    Started but not finished: I circled back to The Lies of Locke Lamora, and pushed through until it found its groove. I’m a little more than half-way done at this point so maybe by next WAWR I’ll have a final opinion. I’ve been chipping away at just the introduction to James R. Walker’s Lakota Myth, which has been unskippably interesting, but also too academic for the naked-poolside-reading I was hoping the main contents would be while Iwas in Palm Springs…perhaps next time I’ll have more.

    JW

    A wise man once screamed “NO! You must not read from the book!“and I have followed that advice ever since.

    A Leap At The Wheel

    Books on Audiobook:

    The Wizard of Oz: Or so I thought.  It was actually a 2 hour radio broadcast will a full cast.  Not recommended.

    Till We Have Faces: I didn’t realize this was fiction, based only on the name I assumed it was non-fiction.  But it was one of the few Lewis books left that I hadn’t read so I threw a hold on it in the library’s audiobook application.  It is in fact fiction, and it is fantastic.  In addition to being written by an expert craftsman, this is a novel that would be pretty impossible to write in this day and age.  The concept of having a female protagonist who takes up some masculine role in society would inevitably become bogged down in the current simple-minded discussion of gender issues.  But being written in the 50s actually allows Lewis to write a stronger, more interesting female character that provides a clearer analysis of gender roles.  Nothing turns me off of fiction faster than weak women, and between this book and That Hideous Strength, its nice to see my literary hero doesn’t fall into my literary pet peeve. Also, this not really a book about gender roles.  Its not a book about any one thing, because it is about nine or so different things.  If I had to pick one thing it was about the most, it would be about how you would get along in a world where the divine is real and doesn’t really love us.  Highest Recommendation.

    Democracy in America: Ufda.  I find historical books about history and political economy really interesting, but they require a lot of concentration because you need to both consider the words on the page and the frame of reference that they were written in.  Kind of like the Screwtape Letters.  In any case, 34 hours of that is just too much for me this month, when I’ve either been too sick to do productive work (fucking strep, fucking high-false-negative strep tests), or working 7 days a week to catch up.  Only made it through about the first third, I’ll come back later.  Incomplete.

    Whitepapers: I don’t normally list all the whitepapers and journal articles that I read, but there were some interesting ones that might be of interest here

    Why Suburban Districts Need Public Charter Schools

    Honestly, there isn’t much groundbreaking here, but it lays out the argument for charter schools in the suburbs.  Just the kind of thing you would expect to find from some shitlord conservative think-tank like… *needle scratch* the Progressive Policy Institute?  Interesting for that reason alone.

    Hidden Tribes

    You know all those people saying “80% of the US is opposed to political correctness?”  This is the research that they are pulling from.  Its generally a pretty interesting look at the electorate, though I think it has some shortcomings.  It’s interesting because the categorization they propose feels truthy, and it seems to be a better signal than party affiliation for predicting opinions of the tribes.  It’s limited because it doesn’t spend a lot of time on meeeeeeee and my tribe.  Political opinion is a high dimensional space, and this projects that space onto a single axis.  It puts me in the moderate camp, which is probably right in that I’m pretty close to center on the left-right axis.  But I’m a huge outlier on a bunch of other axes on the political space.  A model is only as good or bad as its predictive power, and this seems predictive for a lot of people.  “Bad for outliers” is hardly a reason to reject a model.  And I found it to be very helpful to see the divisions within the right wing and within the left wing.  Its not news that the right and left disagree, but disagreements within the wings are pretty important these days.  Highly Recommended.

    Truth Decay

    The truest thing I’ve ever read was the argument that Killmonger was the protagonist in Black Panther, which is an Alt-Right parable.  The second truest thing I’ve ever read was this paper.  This paper documents and discusses the reduction in faith in information provided by institutions like media, government, and academia.  The interesting thing though is that this paper is *incredibly* careful to present the case in a way that doesn’t turn off anyone from any political orientation.  One of my hangups is that a lot of this distrust is the result of these institutions becoming untrustworthy because they are becoming self serving, partisan, and/or low-quality shitholes.  Guess what, it talks about that (maybe using different terminology…)  One of the hang-ups of a friend of mine is that the Right has a financial incentive in developing an ecosystem of alternative news outlet and those with the biggest financial incentive are the loudest talking about how you can’t trust the MSM.  Guess what, it talks about that too.  It is pretty clear that this has been heavily edited to take into considerations the thoughts and objections of reviewers with a very wide array of intellectual orientations, and its a very, very strong document because of that.  I told this friend that this is exhibit A for why educational institutions need intellectual heterogeneity.  While this progressive friend is not yet ready to admit that academia is a stifling monoculture, this paper is helping me change his mind. Highest Recommendation

    Podcasts: I just wanted to call this one out because it is really, really interesting

    So to Speak Podcast with Don Verrilli. Verilli was the Solicitor General in the Obama administration.  He is, quite possibly, the most skilled Supreme Court lawyer alive.  I probably don’t agree with him on anything policy-wise, but when the guy talks about how to argue in front of the Supreme Court, there aren’t too many living people with more to say.  And when he makes an admission against interest, well, that’s worth taking a note of.  He makes two here.

    First, Verilli says that he thinks the Roberts Court really does support the 1st amendment because they have an ideological commitment to it.  Its not just a tool for achieving a partisan end of being pro-business or owning the libs.  I think this too, but its nice to hear it confirmed like this.

    Second, an more importantly, Verilli comes out and says that there’s not an Originalist argument for campaign finance laws.  He talks about how the Founders had a broader understanding of corruption that the modern court does.  But even if that’s true, they didn’t think that there was an exception to the 1A to combat this.  I don’t think he says it, but this is consistent with the idea that it was the structure of the government that was supposed to prevent this type of corruption, not restrictions on civilian action.  Recommended if you follow the SC

  • A Path to Wellness: Part 13

    INT—CABIN HIDEOUT—DAY

    HARVEY stands in front of the TV in his tattered robes. He is freaking out.

    On the TV is news coverage of the death of TIM.

        NEWS ANCHOR(VO)
    A Missing CDC doctor has been
    found dead in a river near Atlanta,
    an apparent suicide.

        HARVEY
    That’s fuckin’ Tim!
    Oh my fuckin God!

    Just then TED enters the cabin, returning from his hunting trip.

        TED
    What the fuck are you on about?

        HARVEY(POINTING TO TV)
    It’s Tim! They got Tim!

        TED
    Shit! Is his journal still here?

        HARVEY(DROPS TO HIS KNEES)
    It’s fuckin over! We’re Fucked!
    They’re gonna find us!

        TED
    Keep your shit together! The Journal
    Is the journal still here?

        HARVEY
    Yeah it’s over there on
    The counter…Fuck! We gotta run!
    We gotta keep running!

    Ted walks over the counter and picks up the journal, leafing through it. Then he holds it up.

        TED
    Fuck that! This right here is
    how we win. Now it’s time to
    take it to them. It’s time
    we go on the hunt!

        HARVEY
    What? Do you understand what’s goin
    on here? The two of us against all
    of them?

        TED
    You’re right. We need backup. And
    I know just the guy.

    Ted walks confidently back to the door, puts his hand on the knob and turns back to Harvey.

        TED
    Now get your fat ass up. Tie yer damn
    robe shut, and get yer ass movin!

    Harvey gathers himself and rises, he foppishly arranges his clothes and ties his robe shut. He strides over to the door and huffily follows Ted out.

    INT—STRIP CLUB—NIGHT

    Ted and Harvey enter a strip club. Music blaring ‘Girls L.G.B.N.A.F.’ by Ice T. Strobe lights flash, a crowd young men crowd the stage, ogling the strippers. Many of the customers are black men, at seeing this Harvey cowardly hides behind Ted. The duo make their way through the club maneuvering around naked dancers and half naked waitresses. They make their way to a VIP booth guarded by two hulking men.

        TED
    Good evening gentlemen. I need just
    a minute with your boss back there.

        GUARD 1
    Unless you hiddin some titties and
    a vagina under your clothes I you
    ain’t getting in.

        TED
    That’s funny. Harvey, this guy is funny

    Ted smashes the giant man in the face and as the second guard moves to step in Harvey drops to the floor and starts gnawing the leg of the second guard. In the background a gunshot goes off and the fighting ceases. ICE T. emerges from the shadows surrounded by a bevy of naked women.

        ICE T.
    What in tha fuck is goin
    on out here?

    Ice T. walks up menacingly and the pistol whips his own guards.

        ICE T.
    Getcher damn hands of my man Ted.
    These some dumb ass niggers, they’re
    always fuckin up. Now what the fuck
    you want Ted?

        TED
    We’re goin huntin for some Deep
    State fucks. Figured that would
    Be something you’d be interested
    in.

        ICE T.
    Only if they’re dirty cops. Got a whole
    new image now. I’ve evolved.

        TED(POINTING TO HARVEY)
    They’re even dirtier than this fat fuck.

        ICE T.
    Damn! That’s pretty fuckin dirty.

        TED
    So, you in?

        ICE T.
    Oh hell yes.

  • What Are We Reading – September 2018

    SugarFree

    I spent the month reading The Complete Chronicles of Conan, a volume issued to celebrate the centennial of Robert E. Howard’s birth. It not only collects the published stories but also the fragments and notes from Howard’s archived papers. The stories are arranged by publication order, my preferred way to read them, and were taken from the original publications with comparisons and corrections to Howard’s final drafts where still extant.

    Re-reading the Cimmerian’s adventures is like going out drinking with an old friend: you know all the stories but the pleasure of hearing them again cannot be dismissed. I also re-watched the 1982’s Conan the Barbarian, one of my favorite movies, the terrible Conan the Destroyer and the aggressively mediocre 2011 reboot (although I thought Momoa made a pretty good Conan.) And, to complete a total Conan emmersion, I re-read all The Savage Sword of Conan issues edited by Roy Thomas. So much barbarian action…

    Web Dominatrix

    When I’m not whipping websites into shape, I am a business consultant to service providers, so most of what I read is related to business. I just finished Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, founder of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Association. The book is all about how to scale a business and what a lot of companies get wrong.

    I really like that this book draws a distinction between starting a business and scaling a business, both two very different processes, but many “business gurus” lump them together.

    There are many concepts in this book that aren’t a great fit for service providers, though the author indicates these strategies could be used for any business. For example, the author says there are four areas in which one needs to optimise their strategies and systems, and one of the areas is “routine.” As a systems strategist, I would argue that routine execution needs to be built into each strategy and system, and not treated as a separate system itself. If each system isn’t designed to be implemented, then ultimately the system won’t be as effective.

    But I digress.

    All in all I would recommend this book for any business owner to read, but keep an open mind and think about where you can improve upon these concepts instead of merely accepting them as commandments written in stone.

    SP

    I’ve generally been a fan of Michael Connelly, dipping into his work here and there over the years. I realized a couple weeks ago that I’d never read the early Harry Bosch books. So I’m correcting that with The Black Echo: A Novel (A Harry Bosch Novel Book 1). I like to read series in order, so I can only imagine I first picked up a mid-series book laying around someplace way back when and didn’t realize at the time that it was, in fact, part of a series. Now, I will, of course, proceed to binge-read the complete Bosch books (in order). (Update: I’ve just moved on to Harry Bosch Book 2.)

    In the car while driving this week, I started listening to Ken Follett’s A Dangerous Fortune. The narrator, Michael Page, has a wonderful voice, and that’s improving the story considerably.

    Also, I’ve been trying to follow jesse.in.mb’s marvelous example and pare down my physical book collection. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I crack myself up!

    This week I did manage, though, to take a box of about 3 dozen books to my Dad, from whom I received my voracious read-anything-all-the-time habit. He’s read everything in all the libraries of his county, so we try to keep him supplied with interesting works. This time he received all my Rick Riordan Tres Navarre books (all now available on Kindle if I want to revisit them periodically), along with a bunch of others.

    Oh, yeah, and I am reading my constant companion: my pharmacology textbook.

    jesse.in.mb

    Slow month for me. I put away a trio of novellas by romantic fiction author Illona Andrews (it’s actually a husband and wife effort. Their Innkeeper novels are a foray into urban fantasy without erotic content and they were breezy literary candy. The downside is that Amazon now thinks I’m a randy heterosexual hausfrau. I’ll live.

    I set aside a copy of The Lies of Locke Lamora at 1/5 of the way through, I was having a hard time maintaining interest.

    On the audiobook front I listened to Ken Lozito’s Genesis, which was entertaining enough although some sections seemed like filler. L.T. Ryan‘s Noble Beginnings is a big ol’ no for me. It’s 6 hours of uninspired fight scenes read in a clipped tone. I’m reminded of Homeric poetry in the way the author used a series of stock phrases without alteration over and over again. Various characters “hitched up [their] shoulder[s]” 27 times and shrugged once…at the end. I’d kind of assumed the author was unfamiliar with the word.

    Not Adahn

    I had thought about going on a rant abut how Catalyst Games has completely cocked up FASA’s Battletech, when I received a Mysterious Package in the post. Opening it, I discovered the following cookbook:

    I assume that this was written by UnCiv, and forwarded on to me for a review prior to a second edition, or perhaps for an additional cover blurb. It is somewhat distressing that my post box location was so easily obtained, but that was a risk of becoming known to the Glibhedrin.

    In any case, this is a wonderfully useful addition, as it allows me, through judicious variation of my orphan’s food supply to engage in carrot-and-stick motivation techniques, without the expense of obtaining carrots! My only criticism, minor as it is, is that in an effort to pad the book’s length to a full 28 pages, our UCS has engaged in excessive extravagance in his ingredients list on a few recipes. Butter, really?

     

     

     

     

     

  • A Path To Wellness: part 12

    EXT/INT—CABIN HIDEAWAY/SUPER MARKET—MONTAGE

    FRED BEAR BY TED NUGENT PLAYS

    We see TED lying in bed and HARVEY nursing him back to health.

    We see Ted chopping firewood, while Harvey cheers him on, and turns away to masturbate on a sapling, Ted notices and gives a WTF look.

    TIM takes the grocery list from Harvey.

    Ted pulls a stump from the ground and celebrates, Harvey is off on the tree line masturbating onto a sapling.

    Tim is in the grocery store, he notices he is being tailed.

    Ted takes aim with his bow at a deer.

    Tim exits the store, followed by men in black type figures.

    Ted squares his bow for the kill.

    Tim drops the groceries and starts running through the parking lot.

    Ted pulls back and draws the bow.

    Tim jumps a fence and evades his captors.

    Ted releases the arrow and the deer drops dead.

    Tim tries to cross a small creek, his pursuers take aim.

    Ted approaches the dying deer and kneels down beside it.

    Tim is shot in the back and falls into the creek in slow motion.

    FADE TO BLACK