Tales of Tadeusz

2005-12-28T11:19:00.000-06:00

Why the MSM Keeps Playing Poker With the Cowboy Even Though They Already are Taking off their Shirt

I remember a scene in a Tom Clancy novel where the stock trader hero reveals the bad guy's plan which involves losing lots of money on Wall Street, and he wonders to Jack Ryan and his best bud why anyone would do that, after all, making money was the biggest game in town. But Jack and bud realize there is another bigger game...political power, international power.
I knew in the Clinton Admin that the MSM was madly protecting Clinton, and that they were spending decades of credibility to do it. And the likelihood of them winning anything back was poor. But they judged that allowing the R's to take down Clinton would be more damaging to their cause, perhaps that it would break the enchantment of invulnerability and inevitability. Or perhaps that it would break the ties of mad/insane loyalty that hangs the Modern Dem Party together.
But imagine you're a MSM hyuk-muk-muk, you've already laid your house mortage of credibility on the poker table, and you're still losing, why not push the car and the boat out there as well? Maybe, just maybe, you can turn it around with a couple big wins, and win it all back, and more.
Of course, thats a sucker play, but then its easier to do that than to get up from the table, and go out and try to do your job, your duty, your honor, and earn back what you have lost.

2005-12-28T11:15:00.000-06:00

Poetry to Pologize for Postponing the Sending of a Christmas Card by Moi

Merrie Christmas said Santa,
I got your card,
An aquarium full of a Manta
And a junk-filled yard

Got in the way of the sleigh
With the card for you
Getting out the garage before next May
Tis very sad, tis true

But then it will be in time
For a Christmas in July
How wondrous, how sublime
To have a card with a daiquiri and lime!

By Eric R. Ashley

2005-12-23T15:59:00.000-06:00

Writing Chapter Two

Chapter Two of Worldwalker is being seriously rewritten. I was not that happy with it. It did the job, but in a kind of lame, aimless way with the heroine acting pretty pathetic, and taking a real long time to do so.

I'm learning how to be more descriptive, but not all wallowing in description, and emotions is fruitful. So, a serious rewrite, and hopefully a chop of a couple thousand words with stronger, brighter descriptions, and more action. More change. More scenes.

Still need to work on scene creation. And scene transition for that chapter. I think that might be part of why it was so flaccid. It was trying to be one whole scene for the whole six thousand words.

Another side bene from this is that it shortens the novel a bit, leaving more space for some other good stuff I had planned for the fight with the plesiosaur.

2005-12-23T15:54:00.000-06:00

Science Experiments

I'm here to tell you that Magnetronix are wonderful for the kids, Mr. C makes letters of them, and they stick to the fridge to be stored, but the kid just wants to experiment...in a way her mother would not have.

Stuck it right to the monitor screen. Left a purple and blue hue on the screen corner.

We did not know what to do for a while as it seemed permanent since it reoccurred in multiple windows. Happily a click off, click on of the monitor resolved resolution in our favor.

But next time he does that, I told him, they go in the trash.

2005-12-06T10:46:00.000-06:00

Storyblogging Carnival is UP!

The link ishttp://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/12/presenting-storyblogging-carnival.html and Sheya has done it again.

Thanks.

And she wonders after reading my piece how she would react if a copy of her showed up on the doorstep. Perhaps better than my characters did...

Hopefully, I'll have more of the story next Storyblog. I'm trying to edit Worldwalker at the same time, but I need more than one outlet.

2005-12-03T21:57:00.000-06:00

Storyblogging Carnival

I, Doppleganger

By Eric R. Ashley

Prologue
My wife and toddling children wander about yardsale-ing in the early summer morning when the Appalachian heat and mugginess were still held down by the cool of the passing night, while I typed a list of planned renovations for my ninety-year-old house on the just purchased computer in our living room. Antique floors of tongue and groove oak creakily held up the latest piece of plastica electronica on top of a pressed-board desk. The computer sneers at its surroundings, but shuts up after I point out…
“Look so good when you are ninety, you will not.”
Of course, it came with the dominant word processing program, Wyrd which is my regular platform for rants on my blog, games, short stories, and novels. The list kept growing longer as I thought because the “manor” needed much more help. The house is set far back in a hollow in the Southern Appalachian mountains, and when we bought it, unsafe to walk through. Now you do not have to worry about falling through the floor. So the renovations were coming along, but much more remained to be done.
I sat knocking my teeth repeatedly with a pencil as an aid to thought until the doorbell rang startling me. Most of our neighbors do not know we are back here, hidden in the woods, let alone anyone else. My eyebrows rose, and I tried to think of who it could be, as I reluctantly got up from my planning.
A tall man could be seen in vague outline beyond the lace curtains of the antique nine-paned door, but I opened the door without worry. We lived in a safe county, and besides at two-twenty and over six foot, I’m no midget myself. I figured the man was probably a politician seeking my vote for city council or something.
“Hi.” I said and stopped in shock, my thoughts going right and left and then back again without gaining any traction. My self, my very own image, stared back from me, and leaned against the door frame of my house with a weary right arm. Six foot two-ish, blue chambray shirt, a huge duffle bag, black jeans, hiking boots, and pure blonde hair, sun-bleached with dead level eyes looking into mine scattered my wits into a hundred pieces.
“Hi, yourself.” He said in a deep voice without moving. I stared again, and then did the sane thing. Slamming the door shut, and grabbing an aluminum bat stationed behind the door for emergencies, I breathed out a quick prayer for help. Then with a quiver in my left arm, and the bat held high ready for belting in my right, I jerked the door open. Still he had not moved from his erect posture.
The other me looked into my eyes with calm patience.
“I believe hospitality to the saints is recommended.” He said with an exaggerated slowness.
“Even the devil can quote Scripture to his own ends.” I replied wondering if I was facing some sort of spirit on this Wednesday summer morning. It seemed an odd time to have such a visitation, but any time would seem an odd time I guess since I’ve never had one, at least nothing so visible.
“Yeah, but would the devil be so willing to admit he made mistakes? I’ve made plenty.” He shrugged, winced, and I noted that his muscles seemed considerably more developed than mine. Also his face looked more hard-angles, and the large nose had obviously been broken several times. We shared the massive jaw that made us square-jawed, and frightful if we yawned for then a great, gaping chasm opened up.
“Any that you’re bringing with you?” I looked out onto the porch beyond him, as if some stalker with a rifle might be coming up soon.
He grinned with a crookedness.
“No, don’t think so. I left them a long way back.” He paused. “In another universe.”
I nodded, and put down my baseball bat. I did not think he was a doppleganger cursed to kill his original, or a clone, and the only other explanation I could come up with involved multiple timelines and alternate realities.
I backed up to let him enter, and he grinned at my caution. No invitation would be extended to a potential vampire. Not that I believed in vampires or doppelgangers mind you, but five minutes ago, I did not believe in an alternate divergent of myself from some other reality. This was not the time to take wide sweeping actions based on theory which had just proven itself fundamentally flawed.
He stepped in, walking with a oiled grace that reminded me of a ballerina, and not at all like my own lumbering and thudding style of perambulation. Eyes swept over the whole living room, catching details with a swiftness and sureness, and at the same time I saw my place from a different view. It was rough, but comfortable, a working man’s home with signs of love and play tucked with a companionable neatness into the abundant bookshelves.
“Your wife is out, isn’t she?” He asked turning to me with a fixity of attention and focus that caught my attention. It was like looking into my own soul, but more compassionate, and dreadful eyes than mine stared back.
“And the tykes, as well.”
“Tykes.” He said, and there was a vibrant sadness in his voice. Obviously somewhere he had taken speech classes in abundance to have such a trained voice, but what interested me was the visceral pain washing across his face. A keen look he canted my way as I stood by the fireplace.
“Aye, I have a tyke. A fine little girl, and a wife I‘d happily end my days with. But they are very far away, and I don’t know how to get back to them.” Rubbing his face to cover the tears in his eyes that all of my blood are prone to, he raised his face again, and spoke with chill savagery.
“But I will find a way back to them. If I have to beat down the walls of the universe with my fists.”
And there for a second, I was honestly terrified of him. There is a bloody-minded ruthlessness in my soul, but untried and untested. In him, I saw it purified and exalted by pain and blood. If he set his mind to something, it would happen, or his fingers would be sheared off in the effort of holding the grindstone. Not saying anything, to allow him time to recover, and me time to swallow the lump of fear in my throat, I ushered us with a waving hand from the dim living room into the brightly lit dining room, and across it to the kitchenette.
We sat down at the sunny pinewood table bar, and like me, he drank a lot of Coke ®, and filled a chair to its limits. Two big glasses we drained in silence looking at each other in the kitchenette across the kitchen bar, and then we both went for refills.
“I’m not a time traveller. Not some future you.” He spoke at last as I refilled his glass cup, and then mine. Sitting down I nodded quietly.
“I figured. You look just slightly different. Face is altered.”
“Yeah, well some of that’s cybernetics. Changes the shape of the head a bit, and so on.”
“Cybernetics?” I gasped and choked on my Coke ®. “It’s not before breakfast.”
“You can’t believe six impossible things now.” He finished for me. Looking at me, he nodded to himself.
“Why don’t I tell you a story? You can record it if you like. I think it will help you get your mind around who and what I am.”
I nodded knowing that I needed some time to think. A story would help clear the mind.
“It starts about ten universes ago. Not the start of my story, but it’s a good place to begin. You are familiar, of course, with late twentieth century life. That’s where I started. The American Century, growing up half-expecting to see the Sovs take over America, and then watching them fold their cards with hardly a peep is my history and yours as well, I would wager from the newspaper I read over breakfast.”
I nodded in agreement as he slipped off the duffle bag. The floor creaked under its weight.
“I’ll just cover the last ten worlds because I haven’t yet written it up for my diary. So I can engage in some avian monolithic, whatever that joke was, kill two birds with one stone. You know what I mean.” He finished a bit grouchily.
Indeed I did know what he meant. This stranger in my house, already I had a rapport with him that shocked me with its rapidity and depth, but at the same time it made perfect sense, if his story was true. After all he was me. Then he took out the guns out of his duffle bag, and started to professionally clean them, and I wondered about my previous judgment. I like guns on a philosophic level, but personally, I’m a bit scared of them.
He took a sip, and began to tell me what he chose to share of his story.

2005-12-03T10:50:00.000-06:00

Tabletop vs. Computer Gaming

Perhaps Neverwinter Nights is about as good as many D&D games because many of them were pretty bad. But a good tabletop game engrosses you on a level that the computer cannot even begin to match, and it allows far more options.
I still remember playing "Nine Princes of Amber" a text game, and trying nine ways from Sunday to keep hold of an iron bar which I thought would make a useful weapon. Its gotten a lot better its true, but still the fundamental problem remains.
Speed of action, socializing, immersion, and options, a good tabletop gamemaster outshines a computer game like having your own personal French Chef outshines the best mall food.
However, I will admit, some people have a problem with visualization. For them, a computer game heavy on graphics might be better.
Now I'm a game designer part-time, so I'm an enthusiast, and a game master, but still...
Iron Dragon on the crayon-using board is just cooler than the computer. Or Risk likewise. Or Chess. So too I expect Heroscape with its heavy pieces and beautiful board on the table is going to be better than the game on the computer.
What computer games offer is convenience, and a certain minimum reliably met. In other words, they are the McDonald's of the game world. But for the true connoisseur...tabletop.
/He said with his nose tilted in the air.

2005-11-23T22:51:00.000-06:00

Nice Pic and Two Rich Data Mines

Here's a nice looking picture of a sword and a scabbard. http://www.christianfletcher.com/html/home.html

Here is a substantial list of castle-related definitions.
http://www.castlewales.com/casterms.html

Here is a set of 57 medieval clothing pictures (individual downloads).
http://romancereaderatheart.com/medieval/timeline/

2005-11-14T09:38:00.000-06:00

Kitchen as Work

A close and dear friend of mine referred to the others who worked with her as French Cooks, while she is a recipe cook. That is, they each are filled with the certainty of their knowing the right thing to do--which might work if there was just one of these--unfortunately imagine a kitchen full of fulminating French Chefs and arguing with each other, and assuming the others are going to do it their way, that is the right way.

My C&D Friend on the other hand says she just wants clear instructions that everyone follows, and she would be glad to follow them herself as she is not the type to proclaim her certainty (which is one thing I like about her). And this is what she means by being a recipe cook.

Me, I pointed out that my style in the kitchen was akin to a mad scientists doing one-off experiments, and that I would bring much of the same style to her detail-oriented workplace, and thus I was not suited for her kitch...I mean workplace.

2005-11-05T10:57:00.000-06:00

Storyblogging Entry: Sleeping Dragon

Sleeping Dragon
By Eric R. Ashley

Lee Huang cooled his feet in the Suez Canal. Since he was the highest ranking Red Army officer in the area, and possessed two decorations for bravery, he was not worried that his unmilitary actions while on duty would get him in trouble. Or at least so he told himself, until he heard a yell from behind him.
“Huang!” Rapidly he turned, grabbed his rifle, and jumped to his feet. There stood his younger cousin, U Fung. Startlement, and then sheer pleasure broke over the war hero’s face under the hot Egyptian sun. And he swung the rifle up on his shoulder, and motioned for his childhood playmate to come closer for a hug.
The visitor did so, but stiffly. Lt. First Huang asked him what was the matter.
“You, you are so unmilitary! It is a disgrace…”
Huang held up a hand to stop the new recruit.
“I am the lieutenant, war hero, governor for this pathetic city, am I not? You Fung are just a new recruit turned eighteen.”
The younger cousin nodded as his usually idolized older cousin booted himself.
“It is not like you expect, this war and occupation, cousin Fung. In truth, it is not like I expected either. I will show you. Then you will see.”
A skeptical look faded into a general back-slapping, and the two young men wandered chatting enthusiastically about family matters over to a jeep where a sleeping Egyptian driver got kicked into wakefulness by Lee Huang. He came awake with a curse, and Fung made to hit him, but then stopped. Huang nodded approval, and Fung smashed the man in the mouth. The driver began to volubly apologize while the two Chinese Army officers laughed to each other behind impassive masks perfected while gambling. Then Huang backfisted the man in the mouth again.
“You talk too much.” He barked, winking at his cousin.
After they got in, and the jeep got started back to town, to Sesra, Huang explained his action to his cousin’s questioning look.
“One must be unpredictable. They try to use their unpredictability and insanity against us. So we have to be more so.” He said this in Han which the locals did not know; indeed knowledge of Han merited the noose.
Huang started yelling at the driver as they got back into the edge of town. He wanted the jeep slowed. A man alongside the road carrying a load of what might be bags of grain in the white, wilting sun had drawn his eye. The Chinese Army officer drew his pistol, and shot the man in the chest twice. Then laughing, he smacked the driver on the head with the pistol to make him go faster.
“Calculated insanity?” Fung asked, and Huang nodded.
“Plus, they are useless. They can’t fight according to order, can’t drink because of their religion, can’t build anything without messing it up, and are generally illiterate, plus they are barbarians. They are like Subodai’s hordes without the intelligence or horsemanship or military skill.”
A look of dawning glory shone on Fung’s face.
“So we can kill anyone we want?”
“Yes, but I advise you to leave certain ones alone.”
“But, why?” Fung protested, his whole face and posture sullen. A glorious treat had just been taken away from him after being dangled in front of his nose.
Huang slapped him on the shoulder, and winked.
“You’ll see, cousin. Say, how is your effort at romancing Leikou going?”
With much agitation, Fung explained that his gifts, poetry, and even a humiliating attempt at singing a love song had failed to do more than make the lovely Leikou giggle while she went out with officers with higher ranks than his lowly Second Lieutenantmanship. It made one wonder if the Chinese government should have allowed all those baby girls to be aborted. Huang commiserated, but absently which Fung eventually noted with some bitterness. Still, Huang kept directing the driver to zip about town, until the first lieutenant spotted a clot of people in the street.
It was a group of men surrounding a smaller group of females on their way somewhere incomprehensible, and thus stupid. Huang had the driver barrel into the clot, scattering it everywhere. Then he bounced out of the jeep, dragging Fung with him.
Several of the women had the burqa on which was a new development after the Red Army had invaded, and Huang snarled something in Arabic. The women so veiled pulled back their hoods, and Fung gasped. Each was a beauty. The group of men around them rumbled, and suddenly Fung felt a sense of fear.
This would not do. He had not been in on the March across the Sands from China’s borders all the way to Libya’s outer borders like his older cousin. It was a chance to prove himself to the older veteran. So he pulled out his pistol, aimed it at the first man nearest him, looked at Huang who waved him onward, and shot the Arabic threatener full in the chest. Then he turned his gun to the next man who dove for the ground into a full face kissing the ground mode. Turning about, he saw that all the other men had done the same.
Huang nodded to him with a smile.
“Choose which girl you want.”
“But what of what they? Err, will they not knife me while I sleep?” Fung began to ask concerned for the rights of the women, but then he realized such was not the proper concern of a conqueror. So he chose a pragmatic objection. His cousin answered in kind.
“They beat their women to death if they show an ankle. Send their little girls back into the fire for not wearing a hat. Cousin, you could be the vilest jerk, and still they would think you were treating them as a princess compared to the way their own family treats them.”
Fung nodded accepting the rationale.
“Besides, it is well known that Chinese men are more, ah, vigorous. More skilled in the arts of love than any other race of men in the whole world.”
U Fung walked about among the women. None smiled at him, but he fancied he saw one with hope in her eye. He chose that one that reminded him most of Leikou, and after prompting with his pistol along her cheekbone, she kissed him in the street while the men gasped in anger. U Fung could feel her trembling, and see her conflicted face. Part of her wanted what he offered, and another part felt guilt. Guilt was a reactionary bourgeoisie notion since God or Allah or the Celestial Bureaucracy was non-existent, by order of the State. He licked his lips; she had tasted nice.
“Now that she has assured that she will be stoned to death, or knifed if she leaves you since she did not do the ‘honorable‘ thing, and get herself killed as a martyr, you need to protect her. Say these words…” Here Fung listened in dismay to a string of Arabic which he was supposed to memorize. It meant something about how he would protect his woman, and if any harm should come to her, he would burn the village down where it happened, and destroy the whole family and clan of the relatives of the killers. But Fung was bad at foreign languages, and he did not want to seem weak to the men kissing the dust in front of him.
“I say that!” Fung shouted, and shot a man near to him in the head.
Huang looked startled, and then laughed.
“I think they got the message. Now, lets drink.”
They went down to the local mosque turned bar, and ordered some Russian vodka. With his new mistress ensconced on his lap, Fung asked his very wise and wonderful cousin Huang a question.
“What shall we drink too?”
“Let us drink to Osama Bin Laden!” Huang yelled back to Fung’s horror, and then more softly he explained. “For without him launching that airplane to crash into the Peaceful Flowers Skyscraper in Beijing six months ago in September, you and I might still be in Beijing chasing unavailable girls, and toting paper for our masters. Here we are like gods.”
“It almost makes you believe in a god. Life is good!” Fung replied with a silly grin crossing his face. “To Osama Bin Laden then!”

THE END.

2005-10-30T20:56:00.000-06:00

Gaming News: My Hallowcon

I've returned from my stint as a guest and gamemaster at Chattanooga's Hallowcon. The hotel was nice, although rambling, as its a huge hotel. They sold out the convention block, and were willing to get me their one cancelled room for just one night for $83 bucks--so we went next door to Ramada Ltd. which was far more reasonable, even if they only had a continental b'fast (which did not mean doughnuts and orange juice, but was respectable, if limited--which fits the name of the hotel we stayed at.)

The first night I got there we played Savage Worlds rpg, set in the Fallout video game universe. And I got to play a religious visionary who believed the Vault Dweller was the Chosen One, which was fun, even though I was a fairly poor shot. And the dog was the best dice roller of the game. This system uses "exploding sixes", and the player kept getting them, one after the other.

This heightens my thought that SW is a quick, light system designed for universal as long as universal means "Pulp".

Helping out, the GM was dressed up as the Vault Dweller.

After that, still visiting with JS, we joined in a just starting game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill, which despite the confusing name (I'm still not sure thats the right name) was very good. The other players also helped to make it fun. The basic idea is a tile discovery game set in a haunted house, where one of the players eventually turns evil. It has a very nice set-up, and I loved the character tiles with the side counters with sliding scales for Sanity, Knowledge, Speed, and Might.

I've seen a lot of recent Southern Plantation horror, which includes one of my soon to be published settings...Plantations Present, Past, and Perilous. MJ Young, one of the Multiverser game designers, has also started using a Haunted House in his demoing.

The ending was a bit lame, and anticlimatic with the House game tho'. JS turned evil, and lost all his cool items, with that ending (others are more dangerous), and we stopped the evil even before it got in one attack.

I got home to my hotel at one, and found the Mr. C still awake watching cartoons while the others were asleep. This was a vacation for all of us of course, so that was fine. Not at all the usual practise, but once in a while it doesn't hurt a little guy to stay up late. The others got to go to the Aquarium, and watch SF and cartoons and hang out with each other while I gamed and gabbed. All of us enjoyed it, even though the some sort of sickness seemed to work through the boys from youngest to oldest with me getting a fever on Saturday night as I tried to sleep.

The next day, I got up terribly early, wandered over, wandered back. Ate some sausages btw at the con. And another BTW, the food was very good. Except for one visit to Blimpie's with JS, I ate hamburgers provided by the con. Its not your usual consuite, which isn't bad in itself, but more an actual line up and get a meal on a plate thing, which was nice indeed.

There was a scheduling mixup with my first Multiverser game skedded during my speech on Quick World Creation. Since the gaming space was so limited (although they said the gaming was four-fold larger than last year) they could not reschedule.

But JS was able to playtest more of his upcoming to be published version of Countercoup d20, the Epic Version, by High Forest Games which was enjoyed by the players, I thought. Something to be said for healing 150 hp each to the players for the cleric character, in one round...

But it was rough, the barbarian, despite his 700 plus!!!!! hp was killed. Naturally the situation was fixed since the high priestess of the land was one of the pc's...

I'm glad it was rough because thats my preference for D20. Tough but fair. No instant death traps, but no waltzing through the scenario either.

I went about this time and talked with Lawrence Barker and his cover artist Katherine, of uncertan by me last name (sorry), for an hour. He's written Renfield, about Dracula's henchman, and Victorian madhouses, and a "Southern Reconstructionist" era fantasy...He thinks the only one of its kind, rather like I think Death of a Blogger is the world's first blogger thriller. Both looked interesting, and I wish I could have spared the cash.

We discussed ideas for horror stories, and at one point, he wanted my permission to use an idea created by moi and his cover artist to use for a story. I, of course, gave it, not being a believer in the ownership of ideas. Text is a different thing. I hope he comes out with something for it.

Then it was my turn to speak. I gave my talk to an interested group at the bar after someone suggested moving over there. For this inspired suggestion--thank you. I think, judging by the enthused faces, and comments at the end, that they all enjoyed Quick World Creation. I tried to keep in informative, fast-moving, and humorous.

I'll be adding the speech to the second edition of Placeholder Worlds.

We ended up using the advice to create three separate, and interesting worlds at the end. One a Victorina post-apoc world where nuclear weapons end the Civil War, and poison the land, drawing out mutations, and the weakened state allows the forces of Europe and Asia to stick their fingers in. Another was a possibly feudalistic society where an Ice Age forces vampires to protect their herds of people, and it could actually be a symbiosis as Lawrence Barker pointed out... and then what happens when an extradimensional visitor comes who sees vamps as all evil, all the time? And then I added a comment about we could also have Polar Bear Ghouls. And there was a third world, but it slips me by this time.

One guy apologized afterwards for interrupting too much, but he hadn't, and besides, that shows the host that you're paying attention...its called audience participation. So that was good by me. Perhaps I don't mind because I'm the type of person to do just that.

Then I went off to join JS's game which I've already detailed.

Further on, I demo'd for the first time the introductory world from Placeholders, and for the Multiverser system, Green Glass Monument. Its a world where the problem of nuclear terrorist was resolved in a very few minutes as most of the Middle East was plastered. This was part of one of my concepts of Grim Futures, as well.

We played another game of House, which ended by mutual consent since the Beastmaster bad guy (the game has variable endings) was almost certain to win, if we wanted to waste enough time. That was Franklin Cain, I believe, who won that time.

Later, I played in Axis and Allies, and the Axis triumphed rather strongly. But it was a good game, even for me being on the losing side.

A game of Time's Up, an interesting variant on Charades, and while JS stayed up for Are You a Werewolf, I staggered back to my ladywife and kids, and into a fevered sleep.

The next morning did not see much gaming although I did have my RR game ready if needed.

We talked to a couple friends, and some new acquaintances, shopped in the dealer's room (and I got Serenity the RPG as a birthday present---woo hooo!), Mr. C got given a pirate pistol by an older girl and had a great time playing with some other kids, and the beautiful ladyfaire drove us home.

Now, that was my Hallowcon. They had some other speakers I would have enjoyed listening too, and they had a lot of party events along with a bar for drinking, but thats not my thing so I'm glad a party and media con was able to do a good job providing gaming, food, and an opportunity for me to play the part of guest.

It was a lot of fun, and I will seriously consider going again next year.

2005-10-24T10:32:00.000-05:00

Gaming News: Jihadi

In the Heroscape miniature figurine game, you can have warriors from all possible times.

I'd like to suggest one warrior group that I'm quite sure Milton Bradley is never going to come out with.

Jihadi.

Thats right, the bearded bigots in caves.

We need movement, life, defense dice, attack dice, special abilities, and cost for each class of these nuts.

Movement: Compared to Roman soldiers, slow...but they do have modern transport...hmm...3 spaces.
Life: They are punks...I'd give them less than one, but you can't....1
Defense dice: Here the punks aspect gets put in...0. That's right, no defense dice. If you hit them with an attack, they die.
Attack dice: Still punks...1
Special Ability: This requires changing some of the tile rules. Any tile that is a Defense tile, if a Jihadi stands on it, registers as an "innocent civilian hostage". If the attacker has at least three successes, the jihadi is killed. However, if the attacker has two successes, then the jihadi is slain, but his pschyo brother joins in at the furthest edge of the board. If the jihadi is attacked with one success, then he is fine.

Also, Jihadi lose one on a mass heal, and gain one on a mass curse.

Cost for a unit of four Jihadi: 30

Other more expensive types in this group: Suicide Bombers; Mini-truck with Machine-gun; Omars; Recruiters (even more punk than Jihadi, but able to turn any Jihadi in sight into SB's); Ayatollahs of Terror--able to issue fatwas which may freeze opponents.

2005-10-24T10:26:00.000-05:00

Gaming News: Heroscape

I played Heroscape by Milton Bradley last weekend. I'm an eccletic gamer...I love tabletop roleplaying games most, but I love board, and war, and crayon rail, and some computer games, and online text rpg-ing, and all that. Cards are fun too.

But Heroscape was a blast. Just great fun. Put aside your story worries, and your moral concerns, and kill, kill, kill...

The board is easily used, sturdy, and beautiful...and customizable. The set owner had created a very nice and well balanced terrain for us to play with.

I had the Romans, and the lady across from me had a Valkryrie, a T-rex (who fed hearty on Roman legionairres until I got the beast! Yay!), and some Agents. It was a bloody war with cheerfully unflinching grins.

And I, the player who had never played before, and the guy who had been knocked out, but revived by a clever trick in the rules design, ended up tying. So it made for a very seesaw game.

Very nice.

2005-10-24T10:18:00.000-05:00

Political Analysis: Support Science?

I like fiscal conservatism. Its a good idea. Its not my top priority however...avoiding Nashville becoming the center of a million degree fireball ranks higher on my list of things to do.

But I'm glad to see fiscal conservatives come out with this Porkbusters idea. Bravo. Well done. It only took them a couple of years of whining to finally demonstrate some positive leadership...the Dems have had far more time, and they're doing worse than whining, and demonstrating zero leadership.

However, this Instapundit led crusade hits a sour note in its trumpet charge when Insty comes out with all sorts of "lets use government to boost science!" Um, no. No way.

Government tends to corrupt what is is associated with. This is why we mostly separate church and state. Lets have a similiar level of separation.

Otherwise, I'm going to be justified in my suspicion that the Libertarian Party is not a principle founded group, but a pressure society for the interests of white, male geeks. Of which I am one, but still, I believe in something nobler than "Lets get mine!"

2005-10-14T08:35:00.000-05:00

More Spam Please! I Need Material to Post on my Blog

I just got this email, marked in the letter CONFIDENTIAL. Oh well. I'm sure Mike Charles won't be shot, but I wouldn't object much if the spam-mailer got shot, in the leg, or better yet his single typing finger...

Attn, Greeting,I solicit your confidence in this transaction that I propose to you. This is by virtue of its nature as being utterly CONFIDENTIAL. Though I know that a transaction of this magnitude will make any one apprehensive and worried but I am assuring you that all will be well at the end of the day. I have decided to contact you due to the urgency of this transaction.Your discreteness and ability to handle a transaction of this nature is of the uttermost importance. Let me start by introducing myself properly to you.My name is Mr Mike Charles Kobi, I'm the Son of late COL. JOHNSON KOBI (The assistant chief of general staff of sierra Leone’s revolutionary united front R.U.F) and at the crown Prince of kuloma village in the south – west district of sierra Leone; who died on the 29th of august 2000 with some of his colleagues during the war in my Country. I came to know of you in my “private” search on the Internet for a reliable and reputable person to handle this confidential transaction which involves the transfer of a huge sum of money to a foreign account. In brief, I have the sum of Nine million, two hundred thousands US dollars (9,200,000:00 U.S. dollars). This money was deposited by my late father in a high secured security company here in Dakar - Senegal, of which I was made the sole beneficiary along side with my aged mother.Because of the present situation in my country sierra Leone, I decided to leave the country immediately because of some security reasons and also to look for a trust worthy and reliable person(s) who can assist us to transfer this money out of Dakar Senegal based on the agreement that was signed by my late father and the security company before his death.As a Young Man, I pray that you being a kind hearted person(s)
--Nope, I'm an evil, cold-hearted conservative, or so the mass media keeps telling me, and they would never lie, right?
will surely help me to transfer this money to your country and also to assist in investing it in a profitable business which will yield more money. I feel that I can confide in you , hoping that you will not betray me.
--too late, you've been betrayed.
I have proposed twenty per cent (30%) of this money to you, so as for you to give all necessary assistance and protections we need in your country, 60% for us and 10% for the expenses which both will incurred as a result of this transaction. Please treat as highly confidential because our future depends on this money being the only thing that we have after running away from our country. All the vital documents covering this deposit in the security company are with me here in Dakar Senegal and will be faxed to you on demand after I certify that you are worthy to do business with. The reason I searched for you importantly is because, based on the agreement made by my late father and the security company that simply stipulates that in case of his death, his money should be transferred out of Africa. I would like to secure my money in your care as I have decided to order a command to the security company to transfer the money to you depending on your urgent reply to my request and my assessment of your person. Note that this transaction demands the highest trust and confidence between the two of us. Moreover, it is risk free in the sense that I have taken proper care of all formalities regarding this transaction.If this proposal is acceptable by you,

--Its not, why don't you just send me a check with a bunch of zeros on it, and I promise to give you your cut afterwards. After all, we're both trustworthy gentlemen aren't we?

please do not hesitate to contact me Mike Charles Kobi by writing to the above mail address.You can reach me with my aternative mail at(macdani500@hotmail.com) You will have to send your most confidential Telephone/Fax numbers so that I can relay confidential information - as they will come in directly to you.Thanking you in advance for your anticipated cooperation.
Expecting a reply.
--And this is my reply, m'kay?

Thank you. (I TOOK OUT HIS REFERENCE TO GOD SINCE THAT SEEMS INAPPROPRIATE FOR A SCAMMER TO INVOKE THE BLESSING OF THE ALMIGHTY)
.Yours Faithfully,
Mike Charles Kobi.

--Well now I have a name for a villain in a story, I suppose...

2005-10-12T12:58:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Storyblogging Carnival

The next Storyblogging Carnival is now up at Tales by Sheya at the following link. Some interesting stories there for the discerning reader. Go and enjoy.

Its been a while since I posted, so much so that I dropped from Adorable Rodent to my current rank, a total of two ranks. Oh well, I've been busy. More on that later.

Got to write a speech today (in part--its nearly fourty minutes long I kinda hope), and clean the house.

2005-09-28T07:38:00.000-05:00

My OKCupid Politics Result

You are a
Social Moderate
(43% permissive)

and an...
Economic Conservative
(78% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Capitalist

Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

2005-09-26T14:00:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Storyblog Updates

I've had to change a detail or two for the storyblog, ironing out the last bugs (and once all the bugs are ironed out, we'll pave the roads with flat bugs!!! Bwahahhahaha..choke, gasp...)

One recurring flaw is that I have a long stretch of empty space under my initial (or latest) date and comment lines. I use IE. I've been told in Firefox that this lands amidst the post, near the beginning of it.

Well hopefully this current post will move that empty space up with it, rather than cluttering the carnival with my trash. Not much of a solution, but oh well. I've thought about making a new blog, and this is one more straw in the balance.

2005-09-25T20:27:00.000-05:00

Starting the Second Year of Storyblogging!

This is considerably cool, IMHO. Storyblogging is simple. One story, one blog post, and then everyone emails these posts to whoever is the current host (that would be me, this bi-week), and he reads your work, puts up a kindly comment, and posts a bunch of links.

Nothing easier. And its a great way to get some quick exposure for your work.

So lets get started.

We'll go in top of my email to the bottom format. Perhaps next time I'll sort them. But this is my first time hosting any Carnival, let alone the storied storyblog carnival.

title: Scale 7 Artifact, part 12
url: http://docrampage.blogspot.com/2005_09_18_docrampage_archive.html#112759972416606467
author: Dave Gudeman
blog: Doc Rampage
blog url: http://docrampage.blogspot.com/
rating: G
word count: 1,412 of 19,937

blurb:
Oh no! Is the story devolving into blechy relational issues? Yes, but only long enough to bring up the chick rating, and then it's back to hardware and alien-blasting.

If only I had read this before I went to college, I might not have had to learn the hard way how to relate to females. But rejection builds character, right? An interesting example of how to handle digression in the story.
====================================================================

Post Title: Great Dismal, Part XI
Post URL: http://www.quibbles-n-bits.com/archives/week_2005_09_18.html#002859
Trackback: http://www.garageofxanadu.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2599
Blog Name: Quibbles-n-Bits
Submitter: J Fielek
Comments: The final installment of the long running story.
3500 words, and we're done!
R Rated
Category: (Other)
I wish I was good enough to explain how this story is good. Nice word choice with not outre' words, but not the most expected words either which gives it strength. Very good control of the flow of the story.
===================================================================
* Name of your blog Harkonnendog
* URL of your blog
http://harkonnendog.blogspot.com/

* Title of the story
*CLOWN Excerpt, Chapter 2. Work.
* URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
http://harkonnendog.blogspot.com/2005/09/clown-chapter-2-work.html
*Author's name :Theron Marshman
*R
* A word count 1866
* A short blurb describing the story

Chapter 2, in which CLOWN describes his job, and envies stupid men.

Interesting and informative descriptions of the internal life of a law office, a clueless but decent file clerk, along with his speculations as to why pretty women date jerks. If I was still single, this would sting. As it is, it will stay in my memory for some time.
I believe it was Stephen King who said that people liked to read about work, although he did not know why. IMHO, people like informative novels about professions.
===================================================================
Sheya Joie of 'Tales by Sheya' ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/ ) has added
chapters 94 ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/09/child-ninety-four.html ),

95 ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/09/child-ninety-five.html ),

96 ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/09/child-ninety-six.html ),

97 ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/09/child-ninety-seven.html ),

98 ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/09/child-ninety-eight.html ),

99 ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/09/child-ninety-nine.html ),

and 100 ( http://talesbysheya.blogspot.com/2005/09/child-one-hundred.html ) to 'the child.' These chapters total 4243 words, bringing her online novel-in-progress to 78,227 words.

Rating is G.

Author's blurb: Their lives have just been changed drastically, as some of the group become captives and the rest set out to free them. But will blood be spilled in the rescue?

I've bought fantasy novels in the bookstore that were not as good as this. A fast story with intriguing questions and hidden powers and strongly sketched characters. Also, she has a nice sentence structure ability.
===================================================================
Blog Name: Back of the Envelope
Blog URL: http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/
Post Title: Contact, Chapter 7 of Fire
Post URL: http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1127486745.shtml (Full story: http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/chain_1103045361.shtml)
Author: Donald S. Crankshaw
Word Count: 5,654 words
Rating: PG-13
Blurb: For the first time in over the century, Human and Orcish forces meet. The results are bloody.
The honorable story blogfather posts a big battle scene. The description of the battle is well done, and the use of tactical decision-making in magic-assisted war is especially good. And with a wholly different (and entertaining) style from Sheya, Donald proves there are multiple right ways to write fantasy. He struggled to find the right way to describe a battle. He found one.
===================================================================
Post Title: Return To Caddy Road
Post URL: http://jimsuldog.blogspot.com/2005/08/return-to-caddy-road.html
Blog Name: Suldog-O-Rama
Submitter: Suldog
Comments: The story of my trip to the neighborhood I grew up in. G or PG, about 1800 words.
Category: Human Interest

Suldog delivers a solemn meditation on the house he grew up in, and the passage of time. Moving and profound, without being banal or lacking in perception, and it hews strongly to the central writer's tenet---clarity.
===================================================================
* Name of your blog: Dodgeblogium
>>> * URL of your blog: www.andrewiandodge.com
>>> * Title of the story: Britannia Revives continues
>>> * URL for the blog entry where the story is posted:
>>> http://andrewiandodge.com/index.php/archives/2005/09/20/3506/
>>> Author's name: Andrew Ian Dodge
>>> * A word count: 4756
>>> * A short blurb describing the story: See above
Its the European Union of the near future, and the cyborg wife/bodyguard is having a serious problem. This is a world that Andrew is introducing you to, a place lived in by normal people who occasionally stick Welsh language chips in the backs of their heads, but surreptitiously because the future EU is not your friend.
===================================================================
Blog: Fringe
* URL : http://www.fringeblog.com/
* Title : Walk On Water
* URL for the blog entry : http://www.fringeblog.com/archives/2005/09/19/walk_on_water
* Author's name : Jeremiah Lewis
* PG-13, language, violence
* A word count: 8,211
* A short blurb: Two friends take a fishing trip that ends in tragedy.
Vivid word choices, excellent descriptive phrases, and some very good characterization, plus well-written internal struggles for the viewpoint character.
==================================================================
Post Title: Story of La Donna
Post URL: http://mensa-barbie.blogspot.com/2005/09/story-of-la-donna.html
Blog Name: Mensa Barbie Welcomes You
Submitter: mensa barbie
Comments: As I painted an image would emerge on each of the 12 canvases...
Category: (Other)
An ultra flash piece about a female figure that mysteriously appears in different paintings by the same artist. Mensa Barbie wins my vote for kewl name, but unfortunately there seems to be some sort of link decay, and I is an artiste, and not much of a computer wizard. I hope to have this fixed later. Its fixed, I've heard.
=====================================================================
Post Title: A Story's Story
Post URL: http://artificialmonkeys.blogspot.com/2005/09/story-of-story-by-sofa.html
Blog Name: this page for sublet
Submitter: Goemagog
Comments: pg, 763 words
Category: (none)
A slyly humorous piece anthromorphosizing objects such as the query letters, and story manuscripts in a writer's life. All writers should take a look, just to crack a smile.
====================================================================
* Electricity: A Novel in Increments
* URL of your blog: http://strangematter.blogspot.com/
* Title of the story: Electricity
* First Chapter: http://strangematter.blogspot.com/2004/11/1-sometime-in-august.html
*Second Chapter: http://strangematter.blogspot.com/
* Or go to: Dishwasher, Chapter 2 of Electricity ( Beginning)
*Author's name: Myke Bartlett
*Definitely somewhere between a PG-13 and an R...
*A word count: At last count I think it was about 60,000?
* A short blurb describing the story:

Aston Somerfield – 23, casual smoker and part-time alcoholic – has come to London to find himself. He knows who he's looking for, he's seen him on the cover of the NME. Drawn across oceans by fame and fate, Aston is keeping his diary empty to make sure he's available. Won't commit to anything until it's everything. But London has other plans. When a virtual stranger calls Aston a few hours before his death, fate is derailed. Amid a hundred boozy evenings and romantic deadends, a mystery unfurls. Equally assisted and hindered by tremulous accountant Tom Hensley and dedicated loafer Steven Black, Aston uncovers a different London – one of murder, ghosts, dangerous emails and the second big bang. As chaotic and random as the city it inhabits, Electricity slowly evolves into a mystery bigger than the universe itself.
Myke does a nice job in his first chapter of establishing his lead character as being a well-meaning fellow living a life of quiet desperation with enough knowledge to pity himself, but not enough to fix himself. I have a feeling from the blurb that life is not going to let this slacker keep his non-committal ways.
===================================================================
*Working Title: Spy Novel
*Post URL:(http://www.colossusblog.com/mt/archives/cat_the_spy_novel.html) Link seems to be broken, but the other Archive link works fine.
*Archive here:http://www.colossusblog.com/mt/archives/images/spynovel.htm
Cold, controlled, paranoiad, and searching speculation based on tiny clues, this story sucks you in, and grabs you. Who are your friends? Is the hero that, or simply a protagonist of questionable virtue, although undoubted skill? When will the betrayal come, and who will do it? Crisp writing style, and more questions than one can shoot with a full clip of ammo.
===================================================================
* Title of the story- Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me
*Post URL: http://asmallvictory.net/kissme.html
*Author's name: Michele Catalano
*PG
* A word count: 463
* A short blurb describing the story: A man at a bazaar's kissing booth gets more than he paid for.
Michelle means to disturb you, and she manages to do so on several levels. Combining grotesquerie with moral weakness or is it compassion or both, we then finish it off with a dose of look over your shoulder fear. And as her reward for being first, she gets to go last, which makes sense in her story universe.

Thank you everyone for sending in your stories, and adventuring out into the Etheric Sea in search of gleaming treasure. I have been surprised and pleased, and made worried by the qualities of writing of my "competition".

If you want to read my stuff, there's a button on this page to it. I'd planned to post something, but this was more work than I expected, and morning is warning of its arrival in increasingly forlorn tones.

If you need anything fixed, or have a comment, please jump in. The water is not at like the pond in Mr Lewis' story.

2005-09-22T12:26:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: The Rapture of the Geeks

That is...THE SINGULARITY (spoken in a loud, booming voice coming from a cloud near you.).

Now, I've written on this topic. One of my novel ideas, Strategic Withdrawal, has a Singularity in it. And I've designed Starsong Systems for the 4th Book of Worlds, which has superhuman intelligences in it.

And I'm working on Tech Surge: Apocalypse or Ascension which is about a Singularity occurring.

Let me add, I loved reading Vinge.

But there is a distinct element of religiosity in supposedly skeptical materialists in this stuff. Ken McCleod is supposed to have come up with the term The Rapture of the Geeks. A lot of its supporters are older middle aged, white, male, technogeeks who really don't want to end the fun by dying, and finding out for sure if there skepticism about God was well grounded.

Understandable, really. I'd be happy to live to be two or three hundred years old in good health. There is a lot of neat things I'd like to do. You could study dozens of topics, meet people (including my own great-great grand kids), and so on. Life is fun.

Because God made it that way.

Now I'm not so sure I'd like to be a superhuman intelligence a trillion times smarter than I am. I'm real sure, I don't want to be reporting to one, except for God.

But eventually, even a superhuman brain will die. Even if it requires a supernova.

Eventually. So maybe spend some of that time you speculate with for getting ready for that Last Door, hmmh?

2005-09-22T12:22:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: New Study Proves Earth is a Cube

Well, no, not actually. Instead it proves that lesbian parents are better for a boy than having a father. Go here for the rebuttal. This rebuttal is better than I could do with this kind of "my eyes are bleeding" insanity.

Someone get my 10cc's of Clue, stat!

2005-09-20T10:43:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Upcoming Storyblog Carnival

Tales of Tadeusz is hosting next week's Storyblog Carnival. If you can write up a story (short story, flash fiction, or an excerpt from a larger work like a novel or a long short story), and send me the following at ericrashley AT yahoo DOT com:

* Name of your blog
* URL of your blog
* Title of the story
* URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
* (OPTIONAL) Author's name
* (OPTIONAL) A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
* A word count
* A short blurb describing the storyEntries are due Saturday, September 24th, by 11:59 pm EDT. Further information can be found at http://www.donaldscrankshaw.com/posts/1125942198.shtml.

Then I would be happy to include you in the first storyblogging carnival of its second year. And I'd like to say a special thanks to Donald (whom you can reach at the above link) who runs this madhouse.

So what are you waiting for?

2005-09-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Bad Government Linked to Poverty

The advanced nations have spent half a trillion dollars trying to lift African nations from poverty with no appreciable effect other than to fund dictator's Swiss bank retirement accounts.

Its time and past time to try some other measures. Lets impose a little morality. Time to try democracy and economic freedom.

Link.

2005-09-19T22:50:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer

Got up to page 75 on my edit of Worldwalker. While that still means a hundred more pages to go, and some more spots behind me needing a bit, I hope this is it. And that I can get this published this year.

2005-09-19T22:46:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: War Games Near NK

Both the US and SK together; and Russia and China together are hosting war games near North Korea. However, according to Varifrank, the Chicom/Rooskie war games are downright odd. They don't look like general practise plus bluff, but more like actual practise for really doing it.

It being the amphibious invasion of North Korea.

Well, I hope it works, because Kim is a scary man. He's got nukes, and he's nuts.

2005-09-19T13:55:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Was Chile America's Fault?

The Left continually whines about Chile and Allende and Pinochet. I tend to brush it off with the thought that not everything we do is perfect, and besides Pinochet was probably a better man than would-be commie Allende.

But here's some more data to make you able to snicker at the Seek to Blame America Crowd.

Hat tip, Dean's World.

2005-09-18T23:37:00.000-05:00

More Weekly Update

We got our old Sega Genesis out today, and after I messed with it a bit, the local demigoddess of electronica, that is my wife, fixed it. Now, I can play Gauntlet IV and Mortal Kombat and some other games.

Thanks to my brother-in-law for giving this to us.

Now, I have one more thing to waste time on. Hmmh.

Also, as the Ladyfaire was watching Sledgehammer, our too young to understand it, Gigglebox decided to get the remote. So he crawls over her, and back again, and back again as she keeps moving the uber-fascinating device. After an intermission, he decides to jump her, and take her on in a wrestling match as she moves back, he charges her while smiling gleefully. The Ladyfaire was startled but laughing as well. Its rather like having a puppy leap up on you with its forepaws in effect.

I wish I could have videotaped it, but then that is part of the purpose of this blog. To remember the good times.

2005-09-18T23:34:00.000-05:00

Weekly Update: Gigglebox News

He's talking more, expanding his vocabulary, and his use of it. He's waving at people, and pointing at things. And he's trying to reach for candy bars at the store checkout aisle.

The tyke is doing good. He's responded well to some additional coaching. Got to keep that up for both of us.

2005-09-18T23:32:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Interview with a Warrior

Col. H.R. Masters gives a very good interview on operations over the last two weeks in the Iraqi city of Tall-Afar (what a beautiful name for a city!)

Go here to see.

And thats probably different from your "the world is coming to an end" Mainstream Media, hunh? Thats because it has more reality in it.

2005-09-13T21:34:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: A Parody of Bad Fantasy

The Epic Quest of Trilogia
By Eric R. Ashley
Other than the fact that I was left at the door of the monastery, the very night before, well, I cannot say it. It is too horrible. But on this night devoted to darke deeds and toothsome travails, and filled with unspeakable and unmentionable horrors such as peasant wenches from the Bar Maids Union having their throats ripped out on the King’s Highway by the light of a full moon, my swaddled self was placed on the very step where the kind and noble monk Sylvester was to see me in the morning.
Now, I was a stout sort of fellow, always have been, and a little frost did not bother me. Indeed, I slept the night away, and when Monk Sylvester Bara Mi’onk il li thuin got up to worship the Goddess of the Dawn, he was rubbing his eyes as he stepped out, and thus he tripped over me, and fell straight down the flight of stairs outside his room. Cartwheeling down the stairs, he had a moment of what I must call human weakness, for he bespoke a curse on whomever had tripped him.
And then he broke his neck upon impact at the bottom of the valley, nearly three hundred feet away. The dying curses of the Monks of Iyama are of great power, and so it was that not only was I deposited on an ill night foretold by storytellers with great enthusiasm and macabre laughs, but my first morning, I killed a good and kindly man.
I was a murderer. Naturally, the holy monks could not take me in, although they did accept custody of an item which I had with me.
To be claimed upon maturity: One gold chaised silver blade, unbreakable and unmeltable two-handed great longsword, weight seventeen pounds, length, nine feet. The receipt, printed on a pink slip of paper said, and I treasured it for this was the only clue to my real identity. Other than that, I could not read, but I had learned to spell out these words, and no more.
So, they took me to a farm family, and here I must pause. For you see, I have managed to save the world, and defeat the supreme bad guy (of which more later), but it has had some costs. I detailed my childhood in Book the First of my life, using a magic gem which I talked to, and it transcribed the strange symbols on to a piece of this strange, thin substance that Wandering Master left me. Actually, he left me a lot of them, but most of them I used up as tinder during the horrible winter of the Night’s Deragon.
During that winter, a rogue deragon had gotten loose, and the King, Harold the Hardy was unaccountably stricken down with chronic fatigue syndrome. So with an out of control and malevolent deragon on the loose, as if there were any other kind…
Pardon me, but I feel as if I ought to explain what a deragon is even though everyone in my kingdom of Trilogia would well know this. Small bats fly through the night looking for sherep, a white, wooly, and utterly stupid beast who makes no other appearance in the story, to drink the blood from, and sup. However, some sherep are not sherep. Instead, they are Demonkind taking the form of a sherep. And once the innocent, if vilely bloodthirsty creature takes a drink, it is infected with Messenger RNA of a Demon from the 22nd Plane of the Abyss.
It then grows, expands, eats a whole lot of stuff, and in the space of two weeks is over fifty feet long with gigantic bat wings, and a severe case of halitosis. And I don’t mean ‘halotoes-is’ which is what happens when a saintly person gets their halo wrapped around their toes.
These Deragons can fly, and they breathe Abyssal not-fire. For a flicker of eternity, the space of what one could imagine was a cone of fire from their mouths, if any such thing existed in Trilogia, is replaced with Abyssal cold and hunger. A rogue Deragon who frequently uses this power is enough to throw off the balance of nature, and thus kill some of the lesser deities.
Well, with minor deities falling off the Holy Calendar, right, left, and twixtwards, something had to be done. I kept on feeding the sheets of paper into the fire, trying to keep my nineteen adopted brothers and sisters alive while “Father” slept off his drunk with an all-too-willing applicant for membership in the Bar Maids Union. To this point, I had saved my first fifty pages of life, but on that cold winter night, I knew what I had to do.
Not to bother, other than my remarkable entrance into the world, and this unseemly cold thirteen years later, nothing of great note had happened in my life. I raised my brothers and sisters, milked cows, flirted with girls (okay, thought about smiling at them, but stuttered instead), and had an utterly unremarkable life in the little farm valley of Farland. So it was a round of pointless drudgery and good high spirits I fed into the fire.
That morning, which dawned cold and gleaming like a unicorn’s horn, a booming knock smashed me awake, and got the others to murmur in their sleep around me. For we had curled up like kittens before the fireplace. Father woke up enough to open one eye, find me, and grunt.
“Tell the bill collectors I’m not here.” Then he went back to sleep with an arm on the rump of a blonde girl.
I went to the door, and saw instead of Alisterion de Coultrand the Bill Collector (a former noble fallen upon hard times due to his proficiency, or lack thereof one might say at gambling) that it was, gasp, the Wandering Master! He stood tall, lean, and wrinkled with a mud-stained robe (by which I knew he must have teleported for we only had snow hereabouts.) His staff was loaded down with the skulls of all the stupid young wizards that had challenged him to duels. They talked to him at times, telling him dreadful secrets like the way he really looked after he got cleaned up to impress a young Queen in need of a Court Wizard, or even a Jester.
I opened the door with great gladness.
“You are not supposed to be here. You are supposed to be in Highaveir!” He growled at me, and for a long moment I was truly frightened.
“Why?” I bleated.
“Can’t say, kid. But its mondo important, or do you think I would have teleported from the far side of the planet to see you just for grins?”
“Um, I don’t know. You never explain why you do anything.” I pointed out reasonably.
“Very true.” He paused. “There is a prophecy about ‘The One’ who will save the world, or destroy it. I cannot explain further simply to say that it is real important for you to be in Highaveir, right now.”
“But, they will freeze…” I said flinging an arm back inside toward the kids.
His face softened from its unyielding stern expression, and for a second I thought I saw gleaming lights in his eyes, and something like superhuman compassion. He tapped his staff on the ground, and the whole valley rocked.
I looked back, and the nineteen children were all solid stone, caught in repose in the midst of our one-room cabin. Except for Hugo who had gotten up in the corner to pee in the chamber pot. He still moved, although slowly.
“Bother.” The Wandering Master muttered. “We will have to take him with us.”
He tapped his staff on the ground again, and a hole opened up under our feet, and reached out toward Hugo who tried to run away, but so slowly. It caught him, and we all plummeted toward the center of the Earth. Stone walls rushed by us, only lit by the gem on top of the Master’s staff, and we were silent except for the heads who kept yacking the entire time.
And then we popped up out of the ground in front of a seller of meat. Nearly a foot thick of manure mixed with mud lay on the streets, and suffice it to say that my life as a farmhand had not prepared me for such concentrated stink. Flies buzzed about the meat on its cart, and checked out the ground as well, debating one assumes in fly speak as to which was more tasty.
Above me, the golden towers of Highaveir gleamed in the gladsome sunlight. It felt…horrible. I mean it was beautiful, except for the mud, but the heat. Oh, the heat drove my body into a state of wildness. Mirages wavered before my eyes, and suddenly I fell over, face forward, and knew no more.
In a daze, I heard a Voice.
The One, The One, he will save the Land.
And then I awoke. I lay upon a bed, and across the room there primped a beautiful girl, with silk pantaloons, and a fine hat nearly as wide as my shoulders (and since I am at thirteen bigger than most full-grown men, you understand, I am sure that it was a really, big hat!) She squeaked when I murmured for water, and fluttering about finally mustered the cool to go order a servant to fetch water.
It turned out that she was the Crown Princess of Highaveir. Once, she had heard that I was coming to the Big City, to see the lights, and slay the Deragon, she had determined to come talk to me.
“But now that I see you, so handsome, so cute, I can hardly ask you to risk your life for little ol’ me.” She flickered her eyelashes, and I saw those green eyes, and my heart did strange things in my chest.
“I’ll help you, Princess, of course, I will.” I declared stoutly figuring that nothing could be worse than having to change eight diapers at the same time.
“It’s my Father, the King. Of course he’s not really my father, but my adopted father for do I look a Halfling?” She twirled about in her silk pantaloons while I admired her figure, and tried to understand.
“Harold the Hardy is a Halfling! Hunh? Howzat happen, Helen?” For the name of the girl was Princess Helen.
“Harold the Hardy he is indeed. He is hardy at the dinner table, never needing to chew mint leaves, or anything to settle his stomach before heading back for a dessert. A marvelous asset in court politics, but not so good in fighting Deragons.”
The disappointment was shattering. All the posters, the commemorative coins, the baked pottery showed a heroic, lean-jawed, trim-waisted man. A powerful, but a bit slow, and definitely good-hearted warrior. Not a four foot tall ball of fat with an iron stomach! My eyes filled with tears at the disillusionment.
The Princess’ eyes softened as she saw my pain. I stumbled to my feet, leaning against her, and smelling the Aphrodite flower that only grows in the far south, and never survives transport to the north where I had lived. Feeling each swelling breath helped me put aside the pain, and realize there were brighter days ahead.
“My stepfather was the man you saw on the coins, but then an evil magician came and distorted him, put him under a fowl curse.” She wept, and I saw the tears trickle off her perfect lashes, and loved her more for her kindness to one not of her blood.
“Foul curse?” I asked.
“No, fowl curse.”
“Foul?” I did not understand.
“Fowl!” She clucked out in her fury. “Made him chicken-hearted.”
“Well then, I will help you rescue him, Princess.”
“Oh, would you?” She brightened immensely. And then she produced from inside her velvet cloak my nine foot long silver bladed and gold-chaised two-handed great longsword. I yearned to pick it up for this was how I had seen it many times in my daydreams. Me, striding off to danger with a Princess’ kisses burning on my cheek with the giant seventeen pound sword in my right fist, and a giant shield composed of a sea turtle’s shell in the other hand. Unfortunately, I hadn’t yet met a sea turtle of any kind, but two out of three was not bad. I reached for the sword, still leaning on the Princess, and the door opened with a blast of cold wind.
In step the most astonishing woman I had ever seen. You have to understand, I was raised in a family with, well, untraditional morals. “Father” slept with whatever bimbo he could con into coming home with him that night. But still, they wore clothing that covered them up decently. This girl had on a slip of chain mail across her breasts, and one more between her legs, and nothing else but a cloak, and some arm bands. Oh, yes, she wore a thin sword hung from a silk rope about her hourglass waist.
She was slightly older than the Princess, but still a treat for the eyes. With my mouth open, I blinked at her.
“You, Princess!” She barked.
“My chaperone.” The Princess murmured, and already I could tell that despite this woman’s clothing style which I approved of heartily on the one hand, and abominated on the other (and wouldn’t my mind make itself up already!), that her attitude was not nearly as sweet at the Princess’.
“You’re leaning on a man. A woman is fully capable of defending herself. If you’re worried about your stepfather, then why not solve the problem yourself.”
The Princess sputtered, and I came to her rescue against this one hundred fifteen pounds of fighting fury. From my superior height, and weight, I loftily informed her that I would handle that particular detail. The Princess gave me a melting look which infuriated the Bikini Chaperone Amazon (which was a doll my younger sisters had fought over playing with…evidently it had been based on a real person. Go figure.)
So she flicked her thin sword blade out, and pointed it directly at my private area.
Ulp.
I had never had a woman get remotely that intimate with me before, and yet I did not find it a pleasant experience at all. This Amazon held a long, thin blade with a terribly sharp point right where it hovered about two inches from my groin.
“Men are useless.” The Amazon said, and then gave me a false smile. “Aren’t they, you great big pile of idiot muscles?”
I nodded in frantic agreement. She moved the sword in closer so that it rested on my linsey-woolsey farmer’s trousers. My throat was closing in on me, and I found it hard to breathe. My big hands flickered helplessly. She had all the cards, and she knew it.
“Tell me, are you going to treat women as equals to men, now?” I started to say yes, for at this point, I would have agreed to anything she wanted. Then I saw the bright red gem, not a ruby, but a flamestone wink, and then gleam as mana powered its magik. A compulsion stone. Mentally, I did not take the time to even shrug.
“Yes, ma’am. I will indeed.”
She smirked, and flourished her sword in front of my face, and then seated the three foot long blade in her long sheathe that swung out back of her.
“Men can be trained. It just takes a firm hand. Now he will be enlightened. Before, he had been trained to function in a patriarchy, but now I have made him able to function in a civilized society.”
She went on for some time, talking about how useful I could now be, and how clever she was, and I regathered my breath. Meanwhile, my Princess gave me a disappointed look or two, and then pretended to enjoy listening to the Bikini Amazon’s lecture.
I flexed my hands which finally felt normal. I looked at the Amazon. I closed my hand. I hit her. Right on the top of the cheekbone, and as hard as I could. A right jab, and as she stumbled, was propelled away, I followed it up with a left hook to the point of her cute chin. She did not even see it coming, I think because my first punch had dazed her.
The Amazon flailed back against the tapestried wall of the room, and I closed. With my face in hers, I slammed a right, and a left, and then another right to the body. Ribs broke under my hands, and she looked at me in utter shock, and agony. Then she began to so slowly that a child could have caught her, reach over for the blade that had bedeviled me.
I took her hand in my big left hand, and crumpled the wrist. Then I stepped back, measuring her for the final blow to be followed by several kicks in the ribs.
“Stop!” The Princess yelled. “You’ll kill her.”
I looked at the Princess, and saw that this was actually important to her, and held my hand. Or I tried to, but I could not. It came forward, and only a last second application of the will saved the Amazon, all one hundred fifteen pounds of fighting fury from being slammed by a farm boy who had one-handed tossed bales of hay up into the barns of more prosperous neighbors. Instead, the punch skimmed her left cheek bone, dazing her again, which was a mercy considering the pain she must be in.
“I can’t. I’m trying, but I have to treat her exactly like I would treat a man who held a knife to me like that.” And truly, a man might well survive a beating like this, but not pipestem warrior, she was doomed. They would have to send her body to the Forrest of the Doom of Men where all the bikini chicks hung out.
As I struggled futilely with my arm, watching it draw back, the Princess gasped.
“Oh!” And she darted forward, and jerked off the left arm band, the one that had glimmered with Power, and she dashed it to the stone paving of the room.
The hold over me was released, as the armband, a fragile piece of wire and gem exploded with light, but no sound. I collapsed to the floor, thankful not to have killed a girl, even if she was an idiot. The Amazon slid boneless down the wall, and began to snore.
After the Princess checked her out, and removed her other arm band, she turned to me. She then kissed me on the lips, and what strength was left in my body after the adrenalin crash succeeding combat left me. I fell to my back on the floor, and somehow took the Princess with me so that she landed stretched out atop me.
Somehow, she seemed to think this was my plan, but it was a total accident. I swear. Anyways, she felt more than nice, she felt awe strikingly wonderful on my chest, and so on. And breathing the scent of her skin was pretty sweet as well. The way her eyes glowed let me know that the feeling was mutual, although perhaps not the smell factor.
She got up, scrunching up her nose. Her hands went to her hips.
“What is that smell? Sheep? You are going to need a bath.”
I shrugged in easy acceptance, and rolled up to my seat. From there, I stood with the aid of one brawny arm.
“I am a farm boy. Of mysterious parentage. Baths were usually in the stream, or in the horse trough.”
“Oh.” She thought for a second. “Well then…” She began slowly, not wanting to offend.
“I would gladly dive in a bath of hot lava for you.”
“OH.” She blushed, looked me in the eyes to measure my seriousness, and then blushed again.
We stood there for a few moments as the connection sank in. And she muttered something about this being a far more satisfactory control technique for the masculine half of the species than a geas spell. But that was too many big words for me, and I shrugged.
“An evil magician, my sword, uh anything you need to tell me before I go and rescue your stepfather.”
“Rather a lot, dear.” She said, and headed for a room divider, which was something I had never seen before. She kept talking on the other side as she changed. Occasionally, I could see her hair which she had pinned up, and to keep myself from sprinting over there to see details I was not meant too, I collapsed into an overstuffed chair.
“You remember that an evil magician changed my stepfather to a chicken-heart? Well, the same magician also commanded the king, for the good of the realm to send his son off to be raised by monks.”
A chill ran down my back. Could it be? No, it was impossible.
“I tracked this down, and found the monks had the most darling sword. Which they would not sell. In fact, they seemed to be in the midst of trying to melt it down again to make into coinage. Now obviously, anyone with that little appreciation for art did not need it.”
She paused, and I agreed with her. I would have agreed with her about anything.
“So I had the order banned, and all their goods attached, and sent to me by ethereal mail. They claimed this was dangerous, and that their place held defenses against letting out Demons, but I foolishly did not believe them.”
She came out from behind the divider in a confection of yellow silk that glowed in the candlelight, and drooped off her shoulders so that I wondered how it held up, and her already beautiful figure seemed if anything more perfect than before. I gulped. The Princess seemed satisfied with the effect even though I had not offered her one of those flowery compliments the knights always offer to the lady of love in the stories. I guess that means this is real life.
The Princess came toward me, and stepped over, I think, the Amazon although the woman groaned suddenly, and Helen kneeled to me as I leaned forward in the chair.
“I was foolish, so foolish. My actions made it possible for the Deragon to be born, and caused great suffering across the land. And no hero would go forth to die honorably and inspire others to do likewise until the Deragon was destroyed. But I found the sword of the Hero who will enable the destruction of the Deragon.”
And she handed me the blade. Nine feet long, seventeen pounds of silver and gold with gems winking at me from the hilt. It felt light as a feather in my good right hand, for I am a bit stronger than ordinary men. It was designed to be used as a two-handed sword, but for me, it was a one-hander.
“And here. My chaperone often used this, but since you defeated her, and rescued the princess, I think you deserve it.” She placed the armband around my bicep, and then with one finger she stroked it.
Suddenly, I had the outer shell of a gigantic sea turtle strapped to my arm. I laughed in wonder at this. All my dreams were to come true. The only problem was that every story I had heard had like the first dozen knights going up against a deragon dying horribly. Oh well, I would make a first.
We walked to the door, after sharing a deep, and tender kiss. I opened the door, and stepped outside. Two guardsmen, asleep, stood there. I bashed their helmets, and left them in a deeper slumber. Down the hallway we went.
I strode down the curving staircase around the tower with seagulls flying outside which I bespied through the open windows. Guards started coming up, with weapons drawn, and unfortunately, I had to kill them. So I sat to work with a will. None could even come close to my blade, such was its reach.
And despite the several dozen I slew with great slashing and smashing of armour, I barely felt the tiredness. There is something to be said for working a whole day in the hot Augustus sun tossing hay bales around. But, at one point, my sword caught in the enemy’s chest, and his wounded body closed its muscles tight around the blade seeking to forbid blood loss, and further harm. Even yanking the blade back, with a moment to blow a kiss at the Princess did no good as the stubborn fellow’s body would not let go.
Thus encumbered, I saw another bold guard dash upward like a sprinter, and seek to run me through with a spear. If not for the great sea turtle armour, I would surely have been done for. Instead, I crouched, and thrust the shield into his face, and flung him back down the steps, also shattering his spear haft in the original calamity. Then more calmly, I booted the stubborn one from my blade with an apology to the brave opponent.
Which he accepted, and then died.
I looked to my arm, not for the new armband, but for the old one that I had always had. It glowed green, which was a good sign. The magik tested one’s hit points, and let you know how close to death you were. If it turned red, it was wise to flee with all possible haste. Evidently, I had not been seriously hurt.
We continued, making havoc until the bottom of the tower. And then it was come into more open space. The room outside the throne room was filled with courtiers holding thin blades with no cutting edge. It baffled me it did.
I had no clue how to fight a man with a thin blade. But there was no need. My Princess stepped alongside me, and spoke Words of Power.
“Arc Voltage Watt!” She cried, and lightning flared from her outstretched and quite lovely fingers. The spitting fury lanced outward, landed in the chest of the first in our path, and from there jumped to each and every one in the room who was holding steel and barring our path. Smoke drifted upwards afterwards, and the smell of dozens of carbonized bodies sickened me with its resemblance to pig roasts.
Nevertheless, we went on. Up to the giant doors with the magic red eye above them which caused the two story tall plates of maple, with a nice red varnish to swim open, and admit us to our destiny.
Here you will fulfill the Prophecy. The Voice sounded in my head.
Beyond the doors, lay the throne room. It was massive, huge, gigantic even. The rafters were so far above us in the dimness that they were only a faint suggestion of beams rather than hard-edged exemplars of resolute labor. In fact, I thought the top of the throne room might be above the height of its towers.
In the center of the room was a round table, at which reclined the king. On the table, a full host of foods waited for the enticement of the King. Even from here, I could see the kindness, and the family resemblance. This was my father, cruelly distorted by a bird-en laid on him by evil magic.
And beside him sat, at ease, the Wandering Master. My whole world collapsed. I sagged to my knees.
“Noooo!” I think I shouted, but I could not tell. For I suddenly knew that the Wandering Master was the Evil Magician. My own mentor, a vastly powerful wizard, was in the service of Darkness.
With the Princess looking at me strangely from the corner of her eye, I regained my feet. Fury settled into my bones, and I began sprinting across the throne room floor with my sword held out high above my head.
I was screaming my war cry, which I won’t tell you because its something that sounds really silly in the telling, although when screamed by an insane man with nine feet of naked steel in his hand, it still sounds silly, but in a really scary way. Seeming to drift across the floor, I found myself remembering all the good things the Wandering Master had done for me, but in the end, I had to do the right thing, and make the sacrifice.
So I sunk the sword into his chest, and the blade ran out the back, and through his chair. Then sobbing, I let it go for I knew that when I withdrew it that he would die. For I had struck true.
“Don’t weep, my hero. Please.” The Wandering Master spoke soft, kind, and reassuring. I looked up in utter astonishment. First at his graciousness, and second that he was even able to talk.
He sat there, still pinned by the blade like a butterfly on a spike like those sicko “scientists” who had come “collecting” by the village. We villagers had shown them, those that survived, what we thought of such sadism. Impaling them on a stake had been rejected as too mean, but a good fire was a nice compromise. Of course, we only got two of the ones we captured, with the last escaping, but no matter.
I looked to the King to see his response, but nothing. He had not moved a muscle since I started charging. Feeling fearful, I turned to look back at the Princess who was caught in the act of flinging a giant ball of flame at the Evil Wizard. But the flame and the Princess were still.
“What magic is this? I’ve never heard of such.”
“I’ve Paused the Universe, my boy.” The Wandering Master replied.
“Okay, I think I might could get an explanation now, perhaps?” I was bluffing because I knew the Wandering Master held secrets like no one else, even for the most trivial of reasons. One time he had confessed to me that he withheld secrets that did not need to be kept so just as practice.
“Yes, I think it is that time. Let me tell you of your true origins, my boy.”
“I am not your boy. I am the son of the king. The one you spelled.”
“Well yes, and no.”
“Which? Boy, or bespell?” I replied not sure if he was sorta affirming, sorta denying my parentage, or that he had spelled the king.
“Sigh. Look boy, be quiet. You are the son of the king, sorta. Yes, I spelled the king, but for his own good, and besides he rather enjoys it better this way.”
“Being a coward? I think not.”
“Not everyone is a stone hero like you, or like…me.” He said with some private significance.
“I’m nothing like you.” I declared with bitter vehemence.“No?” He laughed at some secret joke. “If you will be still, I will try to explain.”
He waited until I nodded.
“A long time ago, or just yesterday. Time is odd that way, a boy grew up, and became a very good computer gamer. He designed, and he gamed. But what he found out was that his design was really of a different place. He was transcribing the details of a different world.”
“So you come from some other universe. Fine.”
“Yes. Earth.” He paused, and scratched his chest where I had pierced his heart. “Anyways. He wrote himself a backdoor into the code, and used it to enter himself into the other world. Once there, he realized his mistake. The other world was a creation of his dreams, and now that he was here, he was sucking up the energy of the other world, destroying it, and after it died, he would die.”
“My heart bleeds for you.” I said coldly. “No wait, it doesn’t, but yours will…shortly.”
“Have you ever wondered why a knight practices for years, and even decades when an apprentice wizard with perhaps three months training can easily defeat one. And a moderately skilled wizard can defeat armies? I’ll tell you why. Because when I wrote the world, the game, I was a techno geek with no skill at swords, and I wanted a quick route to power. Realistically, everyone would be a mage, and no one would be a knight, but I forbad that with my power as a SysAdmin.”
Oddly enough, what he was saying made sense. There were aspects of the world that made no sense whatsoever. But then that made him not just the world’s greatest wizard, but the Creator as well. Impossible. But then I remembered a glint of superhuman compassion in his eyes as he stoned my relatives.
Okay, maybe not impossible.
“I need magic, magic of a mighty order, magic surpassing anything I had designed in the game, but consistent, at least somewhat with the precedents. So I took my earlier self…”
“I thought you said your earlier self was in another universe.” I interrupted. Already, I felt smarter.
“Yes, okay, it wasn’t fully consistent, but it was close enough. My existence here implied the possibility of my earlier existence here, and that was enough for the universe. I took my earlier self and using King Harold the Hardy as my template made a baby, a clone as it were, but with my mentality.”
“So he’s like my father, but not exactly. Ok. Hey, why are you treating him so mean?”
“I’m not. He likes it, but mostly its because I like him. He was my first character from an earlier version of the game which was more realistic in that mages usually got killed by swordfighters unless the mages had a lot of distance or time. Then mages rocked. So he was heroically brave, and when the Deragon showed up, the harbinger of the entropic end of the world, he would have gone out and died.”
“Why is that?” I asked curiously. “I mean every story I’ve heard has the knights dying like flies against Deragons.”
“There is only one Deragon, ever, but yes. Lets just say, I had a particularly vicious brainstorm right before I ported myself over. And I ‘ve cursed myself for it many times. That sword you carry you will not use in battle against the Deragon.”
I cursed in reply. After finishing him off, I meant to get another smooch in, say hi to the King, and head out on the biggest plowhorse in the city to find the monster. And then I would probably die.
“Each knight that goes forth is a willing sacrifice, and that is Magik. Mana. Power. A dozen knights is just enough to gather the requisite Magik for the wizard to clothe the Lucky Thirteenth with a strong enough shield spell to stand against the Deragon. That sword you stuck in me is a fine channel for sacrificial energy.”
Feeling creeped out, I realized my hand was resting on the hilt which I had not planned for. I tried to remove it, but it would not move. I struggled, but with no effect. It was like trying to shove a cliff.
“Those knights go forth, once a century, and provide life for another century. But there comes a time, the End of the World to be exact when that is not enough. And the Creator and the One who loves him most in the World must sacrifice.”
“But if God dies…”
“The world, or at least the outer substrate we call Reality, ends. However, you empowered by my and your sacrifice, will have more than enough power to recreate the world. And to reincarnate me as a small baby, and yourself as the mightiest wizard of the age.
You will have to live for centuries until, King Harold is reborn, grows up, and a body clone of him is born.”
“But the Princess…” I moaned.
“Mightiest wizard of the age. Time traveling is very simple spell. Level four to be exact. So is immortality gift to make her immortal. Or you can simply recreate her as immortal when you recreate the universe.”
“Oh.” I said softly.
He nodded, and unpaused the Universe. I faced the Deragon. With so much power filling me that it gushed out of my nose, I swung the sword, and spoke words of power caging entropy for another thousand years. And then the world, I remade it.
There was little I would change. The only thing I made different was I turned Hugo, the half-stoned kid into a full stone troll which he would enjoy. And my “mother“, who had put up with “father’s” antics, I gave her a marriage to a rich count. And then I returned to my body, and ducked.
The fireball sailed over my head, and incinerated the dead body of the Wandering Master. Meanwhile, I was aware that thirteen years previous, a young boy sucked his thumb on a cold stone mantel, and that a monk’s dying curse had been met.
“You will all be utterly destroyed.”
A few quick flickers of my fingers, and the Princess saw an illusion of Harold strong and free of the “curse”. And then “unexplained side effects of the wizard’s passing” threw open a gate, and thrust me and her through it and deep into the past. It also made her immortal.
So alone with her, I faced a dark wood, and with deliberation cast another spell. Not for ninety-nine years would I recall my powers. Instead, I would be the farm boy once more, and not the Creator.
I turned to her, and enraptured in love asked.
“Well, what now?”
“I guess we have lost my castle. But this looks a likely place for a cabin. Can you begin work on it?
“That I can, my love.”
She nodded, with a happy firmness. The Universe was in order.
THE END.

2005-09-12T09:21:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Dr. Mike Kraiben Visits

Last Saturday, a pschyologist visited the Hohenwald Church of Christ, not to unearth Freudian conflicts, but to explain a longitudinal study over three decades which now has twenty-three thousand participants. The study was on what makes a good family.

The methodology was they asked people who thought they had a good family to send in information.

And then they analyzed for similiarities.

Top of the list of six was Feeling Appreciated. So my advice is to go out and tell your spouse and kids that you love them, and try to show this in little actions each and every day.

I'll try to get to the others later, but I will say it was a very good seminar indeed. And the Pizza Hut za' afterwards wasn't bad either.

2005-09-12T09:18:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Why Science Reporting Fails

Basically, because the journalists are clueless, but thats the reason for all bad reporting. A clued-in journalist is almost non-existent...which offers a great market to anyone who is somewhat clueful, and can actually explain things.

2005-09-11T22:16:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Alternate Histories

I wrote one alternate history of September 11, based on a commenter at Belmont Club's idea...What if bin Laden had attacked Beijing instead of New York? Hopefully, it will get published in a few months.

Here is another fork in the tree of time, a world in which the terrorists were captured.

2005-09-11T21:59:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Yahoo Cooperating With Chicoms

Yahoo!, which I gladly use, has made me ashamed to use them. They have cooperated with the Chinese government in handing over email logs of a Chinese dissident to the Chinese Communists. Now this poor fellow is in jail for ten years.

Thanks bunches, Yahoo.

More here.

2005-09-11T15:50:00.000-05:00

Gaming Design Ideas

Since my 4th Book of Worlds text is laying up in dry dock until its recipient gets ready for it, let me record here a few ideas for possible inclusion into it.

In Starsong Systems, my "stalled just short of the Singularity" super-tech future, the governmental systems could use a bit more explication.

1. As Dr. Rudy Rummel notes, Democracies don't make war on each other. This is as close to the Law of Gravity as it gets for Sociology. And there is also a Commercial Peace effect, in that it gets extremely unlikely for a Democracy (or indeed any gov't type) to fall if its average income its 6,900 or so per year for its citizens.
2. But I contend that this will change when we get to the levels of wealth of Starsong Systems where the rich are able to, in a cartel, stellar-form a whole solar system. One of the greatest costs of a society is to change its government. But the hypothetical Starsongians will have perhaps an average wealth of ten million dollars per person.

They can afford to experiment with their wilder fantasies.

However, the more mature and sophisticated members of this society are going to deal with this in three ways. 1) A highly decentralized governmental structure, similiar to federalism, but only more so. 2) A non-negotiable, whatever the system of gov't, and more extensive than America's, Bill of Rights. 3) Certain gov't forms will be regarded as toxic, or as strange attractors likely to provoke the general society to go down well-known dead end paths. This will provoke the uber-civilized version of "War" and "Invasion" that the Starsongers practise on each other.

One such dead-end is that it is fully in the capacity of the citizens to arm everyone with power armor, and automatic fire nuclear grenade launchers with probably superfluous targetting missile capability. One such guy could unless hit with a direct hit by a large nuclear weapon, could defeat the entirety of the American armed forces in 2005.

The likely end result of building these weapons is generalized war, and absolute destruction of everything. Since that end is unacceptable, a societal taboo (along with other persuaders) is enforced against WMD, and even ranged weapons. So, while Starsongians are still the same nasty, irritable species they always were, they now get out the hi-tech swords to do unto you before you do unto them.

Another dead end is a society in which everyone is genetically inculculated from birth with a certain viewpoint, and the ability to doubt is removed. This is considered a moral perversion of the first order.

2005-09-10T13:19:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Fears for the Future

Most conservatives can come up with a list of things they don't like that Bush did. Of course, they are probably not the things that liberals don't like.
To prove:1. Steel Tariffs2. Keeping Norman Mineta3. Not invading Syria by now4. Not cracking down harder on Immigration which is a multiple area threat to the Nation5. Not putting up an avowed Original Constructionist for the Supreme Court, and then compounding that error by nominating the fellow for Chief Justice.
I could go on. Conservatives think Bush is pretty good, for a human being. Some times we defend him when perhaps we should not. But those attacking him who suffer BDS think he is the Devil Incarnate.
Its a difference of scale that amounts to a difference of kind.
So yes, most of the nuts are on the Left. And when I say "bomb-throwing" I'm being literal. I talked with one fellow who said beating up demonstrators was a-ok because they were fascists.
For the good of the Nation, the sane liberals and Left need to purge the nuts among their number. Yes, that means giving the conservatives the victory for a number of years, but as distasteful as that may be, it is the correct thing to do. The question is, sensible Lefty, will you step up to the plate, or will it require the FBI tracking down domestic terrorists ten years from now?
One way or another its going to get done, but it would be a lot less painful for everyone if the sane libs smacked the childish back into place.
And yes, I know, thats really harsh.

2005-09-07T10:06:00.000-05:00

House Renovation

Well, we've found part of the problem with our water. The drain pipe under the kitchen sink separated. Now, I have to use my inexpert services as a marriage counsellor to bring Mr. and Mrs. Pipe back together.

I can do this. Really. But a little prayer would be good too.

2005-09-07T10:01:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Lileks on the Day Before K-garten

Reading James Lileks today, the last day before his Gnat goes off to kindergarten is especially touching for me because Mr. C went off to his first day of pre-K today.

He looked very happy to see all the other kids (my little social butterfly), and I am happy for him, and yes, happy for the break, and time undisturbed with Gigglebox(who is playing with the mouse right now).

Thank you Lord for these wonderful days alongside my children.

2005-09-06T10:11:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Fiskings and Announcements Tommorrow

My source for interesting local data, and amusement is the local paper. It comes out on Wednesday which is a high point for ToT, if I can get motivated.

Been busy being sick, and doing a lot of other things. Really need to get cranking on my Worldwalker novel. And the water supply is acting iffy. I think we might have had air, or a plug in the lines. For a while there, we thought we might have to buy a new dishwasher, but its the water. It may be back too normal now, but I will have to check downstairs once the Ladyfaire gets home to care for the tykes.

2005-09-06T10:08:00.000-05:00

Blog Update

I've been a member of the Rocky Top Brigade for some time now, but did not have a link to them. Oh, the shame of it. That is now corrected.

2005-09-01T21:19:00.000-05:00

Cannonball Sneezes

I'm a bit of a sick puppy so blogging will be light.

2005-08-31T12:10:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Other Aid from the Gov't

This come from the FEMA IHP advice sheet listed in the above post. They recommend calling FEMA on their hotline for references to these other services for those disaster struck. Its in alphabetical order.

Aging Services: Services are available to meet the needs of the elderly who have been directly affected by a declared disaster (i.e., transportation, meals, home care, etc.).

Agricultural Aid: The USDA Rural Development may make emergency loans to farmers and ranchers (owners or tenants) who were operating and managing a farm or ranch at the time of the disaster. These loans are limited to the amount necessary to compensate for actual losses to essential property and/or production capacity. Farmers and ranchers may also apply for cost sharing grants for emergency conservation programs such as debris removal from crop/pasture lands, repairs to land/water conservation structures, and permanent fencing. Further information is available from the USDA Farm Service Agency (FSA). Assistance From Financial Institutions: Banks that are members of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), Federal Reserve System (FRS), or the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) may permit early withdrawal of time deposits, without penalty. Contact your financial institution to see if they have obtained a waiver from their regulatory agency.

Business Loan Program: Disaster loans through the Small Business Administration (SBA) are available to businesses to repair or replace destroyed or damaged business facilities, inventory, machinery, or equipment. The maximum loan amount is $ 1,500,000. If you have been referred to this program you will be receiving an application package in the mail. For more information or help in completing this form, refer to your SBA application package or the SBA website at www.sba.gov.

Consumer Services: Counseling is available on consumer problems such as non-availability of products and services needed for reconstruction, price gouging, disreputable business concerns and practices, etc.

Crisis Counseling: Referral services and short-term intervention counseling is available for mental health problems caused or aggravated by the disaster.

Disaster Unemployment Assistance: This assistance provides weekly benefit payments to those out of work due to the disaster, including self-employed persons, farm and ranch owners, and others not covered under regular unemployment insurance programs.

Emergency Assistance: Emergency food, clothing, shelter, and medical assistance may be provided to individuals and families having such needs as a result of the disaster. The American Red Cross (ARC), the Salvation Army, church groups, and other voluntary organizations can provide assistance.

Hazard Mitigation: You may receive funds to prevent future damage to your major utilities (i.e., furnace, water heater, electrical service) by either elevation or relocation of these utilities in your home.

Home and Personal Property Loan Program: Disaster loans through the Small Business Administration (SBA) are available to homeowners and renters for restoring or replacing disaster damaged real and personal property. The maximum real estate portion of the loan is $200,000 and for personal property is $40,000. The loan amount is limited to the amount of uninsured SBA verified losses. If you have been referred to this program you will find more information in the "Application Summary" on the back of the Disaster Assistance Application Form. Insurance Information: Help and/or counseling is available on insurance problems and questions, which may include obtaining copies of lost policies, claims filing, expediting settlements, etc. If you have not been able to resolve your problem with your insurance company you may contact your State Insurance Commissioner. For flood insurance inquiries, contact the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP).

Legal Services: Free or reduced legal services, including legal advice, counseling, and representation may be provided to low-income disaster victims.

Social Security: Help is available from the Social Security Administration (SSA) in expediting delivery of checks delayed by the disaster and in applying for Social Security disability and survivor benefits.

Federal Tax Assistance: The federal tax laws allow the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to grant relief to taxpayers who are victims of a Presidentially declared disaster. This relief includes postponing tax deadlines to provide you with extra time to file and pay before you will be assessed any penalty, additional amount, or addition to the tax, or abating your interest for periods for which you received an extension of time to file tax returns and pay taxes because you were located in a Presidentially declared disaster area. Generally, qualified disaster relief payments are not required to be reported in gross income. Qualified disaster relief payments include payments received from any source to pay reasonable and necessary personal, family, living, or funeral expenses incurred as a result of a Presidentially declared disaster. The IRS may allow casualty losses that were suffered on home, personal property, and household goods to be deducted on the income tax return if they are not covered by insurance. Taxpayers may also file an amended return to receive an early tax refund. More information, forms and publications can be found on the IRS web at http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=108362,00.html.

Other Tax Assistance: County tax assessors may provide information and assistance on possible property tax relief.

Veteran's Benefits: The Veterans Administration (VA) can expedite delivery of information about benefits, pensions, insurance settlements, and VA mortgage loans.

2005-08-31T11:16:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: FEMA Video Link

Here is a link to a video from CBS and the Mike Brown, FEMA director detailing FEMA's plans. Unfortunately, I have dial-up, so I'm not offering a review as to how helpful this is.

There are a lot of other Katrina related story links on that page.

=================================================

Here is a link to a page for applying for FEMA relief.

Here is a link to their PDF for Individuals and Homes Program.

When disasters take place, the Individuals and Households Program (IHP) provides money and services to people in the disaster area when losses are not covered by insurance ...

It states that some money is available through the IHP, but most money is in the form of loans from the Small Business Administration that must be repaid. And that applicants may be required to go through the SBA first.

This seems silly on the face of it. If we could expedite this process, and avoid going to a Business related group, for non-business needs, that would seem to be better. (editor.)

IHP will not cover all of your losses from damage to your property (home, personal property, household goods) that resulted from the disaster.

IHP is not intended to restore your damaged property to its condition before the disaster. In some cases, IHP may only provide enough money, up to the program limits, for you to return an item to service.

IHP does not cover business-related losses that resulted from the disaster.

By law, IHP cannot provide money to you for losses that are covered by your insurance.

In other words, businesses, insured and covered damage is not dealt with here. Also, the money is more focused on getting things functional, than getting stuff completely back up...

As a thought example (because I'm not sure they do cars at all.): Its as if they say...The company car isn't covered. Only the deductible on your car, and any above limits is covered, and we aren't going repaint your car, but it will run. Update: Yes, to disaster damaged vehicles.

How to apply:

(To be used by people in Presidentially declared disaster areas.) 1. Apply over the phone to FEMA: Call 1-800-621-FEMA (3362) (hearing/speech impaired ONLY—call 1-800-462-7585). In addition to having a pen and paper, please have the following information ready to give to the person who takes your call:

-Your Social Security Number.
-A description of your losses that were caused by the disaster.
-Insurance Information.
-Directions to your damaged property.
-A telephone number where you can be contacted.

You can use the FEMA money for some repairs on your house, and for some other needs as listed below.

-Disaster-related medical and dental costs.
-Disaster-related funeral and burial cost.
-Clothing; household items (room furnishings, appliances); tools (specialized or protective clothing and equipment) required for your job; necessary educational materials (computers, school books, supplies).
-Fuels for primary heat source (heating oil, gas, firewood).
-Clean-up items (wet/dry vacuum, air purifier, dehumidifier).
-Disaster damaged vehicle.
-Moving and storage expenses related to the disaster (moving and storing property to avoid additional disaster damage while disaster-related repairs are being made to the home).
-Other necessary expenses or serious needs as determined by FEMA.

Note: This is an amateur skimming through a 24 page PDF, and trying to excerpt the most useful parts, and explain it a bit. Keep that in mind. Hope this helps.

2005-08-31T11:03:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Lost and Found List for Relatives

And if that doesn't help, then drop by Instapundit.com and scroll down, or go to this link.

I don' t have any relatives in the New Orleans area, for which I am grateful at this time. Our hearts go out to those who wait in hope, and prayer.

2005-08-31T10:59:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Mudville Gazette-Military Helping Hurricane Victims

Northcom, a new Unified Command, is getting involved in Katrina's wake. This is the new group's first challenge. Wish them well.

Mudville Gazette, probably the primary Milblogger, has more on what is going on with the military. Click on over there and see.

2005-08-31T10:42:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Inland Damage

A correspondent wanted me to remember that not all the damage was on the coast. That is true. In Ivan, Pensacola got smashed hard, and Atmore, forty miles inland had their pecan crop trashed. Its a difference of scale, but it is something that needs a smaller bit of help too.

A Huntsvillian (that is Alabama, not Texas) tells me they have power, but many don't. However, in a peculiar twist, they are out of telephone service, which almost never happens, especially when they still have power.

Myself, it could have been worse, up here in Middle Tennessee, but I have some minor damage to my roof. The roofline, in one of my rooms sank about two to three inches. Not desperate, but I'm going to have to try to get that fixed soon.

2005-08-31T10:25:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Hurricane All the Time News

Today, and the next few days are going to be Hurricane Blogging, or more specifically Recovery Blogging.

Wizbang made a good plea for an end to political squabbling in the Blogosphere, and a focus on finding ways to help the victims of Katrina. I'll second that.

Here's a list of things that he thinks could help (and yes, as you'll see, he got hit hard.)

We don't know how FEMA works. Somebody read the news reports on what FEMA is doing and what it is not... Somebody read their site and distill it for those of us who don't have time for red tape.
Flood insurance? I know the feds handle it. Who do I need to talk to? What do they pay?
Every natural disaster I send the Red Cross my standard $100 donation. I have no idea how to get money from them. It is a grant or a loan?

If I don't actually cancel my phones and my bill is auto-debit do they still bill me?
If I shut off my phone will I lose my number?

Heck- Somebody make an "Evacuee survival guide" with laser precision information on how to get help without clicking 50 links or waiting on hold 2 hours. If you can save 25,000 people 5 hours of looking up the same information, think of the power in that!

Think of the simple things- Thousands of people lost their glasses. Somebody set up a website where they can coordinate donations of (known) prescription glasses from people who no longer need them. Get a freight company to donate the freight. I bet FedEx will give you an account number that will route all the glasses to some agency in New Orleans.

If you do something to help the victims, ping this post... If there is a lot of people helping out, Kevin will set up a post with the links. (I just volunteered him ;)

Think about it for a second from my chair... (I'm not whining but) I'm almost 40 years old.... Here is the sum total of all my worldly possessions: 4 pairs of shorts, 5 shirts, 2 pairs of shoes, 4 pairs of underwear, 1 pair of blue jeans, a box of family pictures, 2 flashlights, a piece of trench art my grandfather brought back from WWI and my father's hammer. (Hey, it means a lot to me!) That's it. Everything else is gone. And BTW, I'm unemployed.

I tell you that not to whine but to let you see the tree thru the forest. Multiply my situation by about a million. Stop and think about that... A million people homeless and unemployed.

If you're a blogger then (by near definition) you're a self proclaimed talented person. Prove it. They'll be plenty of time for punditry and pontification next month... In the mean time there is work to be done. Figure out how to help the victims.

A very good point, and if anyone has other ideas on how to help the victims, just email them to me, or drop them into a comment.

2005-08-30T10:47:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: More Chicken Little

While scientific literacy has doubled over the past two decades, only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are "scientifically savvy and alert," he said in an interview. Most of the rest "don't have a clue." At a time when science permeates debates on everything from global warming to stem cell research, he said, people's inability to understand basic scientific concepts undermines their ability to take part in the democratic process. . . .

Dr. Miller's data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

Where to begin with this piece o' tripe?

Lets start with first base: Activists often produce press releases aimed at telling society that the sky is falling, and you should send money. Co-ink-eh-dentistry, the Yankee Perfesser, in his Chicago ivory tower, thinks we should spend more money on teacher's salaries to bring them up to the standards of industry.

Perhaps he does not understand that then industry would raise their salaries, and still leave teachers behind. Or perhaps he does realize just that. Because then the teachers could complain again. Its hard to say. Professors often know quite a lot about a very small topic. Eventually, the pay raises would top out. Probably end up driving much of our research facilities into out-sourcing.

Sigh. Basic economics might be outside his scope of understanding. And yes, understanding basic economics is more important to being a good citizen than knowledge of science.

...............I'll get back to this later, Mr. C wants to go wander the world, and blogs come after children.................

2005-08-29T20:43:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Bill Quick Has Novel

Bill Quick, the man who named the Blogosphere, and a cranky Libertarian, has come out with an e-book novel of modern conspiracy. You can go to his website, and download the first chapter for free to see if you like it.

I think you will.

I'd been lightly sparring with him a bit, and occasionally having a more friendly exchange, never realizing that this was the guy that had written two, no I think three SF novels I've read.

Dreams of Flesh and Sand was one of the first books to pick up the torch lit by Vernor Vinge. If you've heard about post-humanity then you've had contact with Vinge. Unfortunately, Vinge's ideas were too powerful, too insightful, and still nowadays most SF writers cannot handle them. Dreams proved that at least one guy could, way back then.

And this is where I insert a plug for my Starsong Systems in the upcoming supplement, the 4th Book of Worlds. See, I place myself in the exalted company of guys who got Vinge, and could do something with it, without just gaping at him. In Starsong, I ask the question, what if all the possible advances come true, what then?

Systems is another book by Quick. Here, he ran the word "terrabyte" past this reader for probably the first time in a novel. And for some reason, this novel stayed with me. Its not my favorite, but it was interesting and thought-provoking, I guess. And its hero was not immune to fear and doubt. He seemed more of an ordinary guy who managed to achieve greatness by just working things out, and keeping at it, despite failures and fears. Perhaps that is why it is not my favorite because the hero hits too close to the bone, but at the same time thats why I remember the book.

Well, that and some pretty cool ideas.

And one commenter informed me that the next step up from terrabyte is a petabyte. Which is a measurement of how ethically the user treats his computer? Or is it a virus that PETA sends to animal owners?

Go here to see the thread, and find a link to the novel.

2005-08-29T20:38:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Hallowcon Confirmed

I'll be going to Chattanooga for Hallowcon on, of course, Halloween weekend. The plan is too run two Multiverser playtests, and an Iron Dragon board game.

In addition, I'll be doing a seminar on Quick World Creation. I'll toss out some explanation, and then ask for input from the audience, and in short order we will JOINTLY create a world suitable for use in gaming.

This was confirmed today, so that's cool. Thanks Dutch, O' Mighty Hallowmaster, and driver of the Feared and Revered Frankentruck.

2005-08-28T19:11:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Telecommuting Prospects

Michael Totten, at TCS Station, is a liberal, but a sane and intelligent one which is why I read him with interest. Here he evaluates a couple trends, and forecasts a possible resurgence of small-town America.

I think he is right.

Most people don't want to live in large cities. Oh, they tell you they do. But a lot of it is whistling past the graveyard. They don't like crime, high taxes, and unresponsive government.

If I want to, I'm pretty sure that I could go talk to the mayor of Hohenwald tomorrow, unless he was on vacation. I don't want to, but you get the point.

People don't like paying outrageous prices for small houses. They also don't really like being at the crosshairs of a terrorist.

And while I like people, I also like a little elbow room.

And when people get the chance too, they are going to flee the big cities like a tsunami. And that means, the remants of the Blue State power base are going to be shattered. Cities are going to deplete, and the rural locations like Hohenwald, which is close enough to Nashville for necessities, but also far enough away to be cheap, are going to boom.

2005-08-28T11:23:00.000-05:00

Mythology of Multiverser

My current favorite tabletop Roleplaying game is Multiverser by Valdron Press. One of its basic rules is that every story is true somewhere.

This includes tales of Creation. So the Universe being created from Ymir the Frost Giant's body is true, and so is Evolution (punctuated equillibrium, gradualist, and pothole graded unbalanced evolution), and so is a literal Six-Day Creation by the Trinity, along with dozens of other Creation stories.

But these stories are true in one or more of the many universes of the Multiverse. So in one, the Hindu gods built the world, and in another vertical motion somehow turned to circular motion and the stars condensed. And in another, the chaos heard "Fiat Lux" ring out, and indeterminacy obeyed to allow the possibility of light existing in that Universe.

Lets look at it from the other side.

In Eternity Past, the Creator made the gods, all the gods. And He created with the help of these gods the Multiverse because one universe was not enough to contain his creativity. And He gave charge over some universes to groups of deities such as the Nordic Pantheon, and others he gave to spirits of wind and wave, and others he gave to single Masters, and to others he gave it to two Brothers, and for some He reserved to Himself, and onward into more variations than the limited Human mind can list or even comprehend.

And then some gods rose up against their Creator, and challenged him for rule of all of space and time. This is reminiscent, of course, of the Bible. These are called the Anarch powers.

Sauron is a destroyer. C.S. Lewis's Satan in the Space Trilogy is a vicious toddler without any redeeming virtue. Milton's Lucifer might be grander. White Wolf has the Wyrm. Loki schemes, never quite all the way evil, but in the end he chooses evil. Ares, according to Neal Stephen's Cryptonomicon, is a crude, talentless bully...the type of person who eschews a rifle for a nail-studded club.

Other gods stayed true to their vows, and these are called the Alliance. Still others wanted nothing to do with each side which are the Neutrals. Zeus, Athena, and most of the rest of that Pantheon; the Odinite deities even though they are convinced that the Alliance is going to lose; Mithras, Amateratsu, and the Great Spirit are on the side of the Alliance.

In Dungeons and Dragon mythology, the Neutrals are not really neutrals, but Nature deities. In Multiverser, the designers did a better job. A Neutral tends to being a hobbyist. That is, they have an obsession, and they focus on it. Nature, technology, pretty rocks, defenders of a particular country, etc, and so on are the focus of their obsession.

A Master of Technology might not care how tech was used, except with skill. A lover of green, growing things might let the sentients on his planet die off to make room for the plants. A lover of songs, or a guardian deity of particular countries also exist here. As do the Fey who exist more for wild laughter than for good or evil.

An example, and then I close.

For my twin Steampunk Universes, the backstory has Ares and Athena, both Greek gods of war, tussling over possession of two universes. Ares is a crude bully...the sort of tinhorn dictator with a chest full of medals whose only kills were unarmed civilians. Vicious, unprincipled, and chiefly terrifying to the weak. Athena is a goddess of craftiness and talent...a SpecWar soldier.

So these two deities appeal, as Greek deities do, to the nearest judge. Hephaestus, a god of technology who has no brief either way, a Neutral. He gives one world to Athena, and one to Ares, and promises to give both of the worlds to whichever one develops the most interesting technology.

2005-08-26T14:32:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Marines Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize

This is a thoroughly excellent suggestion by EU Referendum blog. After all, of the current recipients of the doubtful glory of this piece of gold-plated tin include such shadowescenses as Yassar Arafat (shadowescenses being the acronym of luminaries), and so obviously the Prize needs to be burnished clean of all the garbage attached to it, and who better to take care of garbage, in the human form, then the US Marines?

Okay, the Archangel Michael could do a better job, but non-human entities are not allowed, um, except for Arafat.

Giving this to the Marines would restore some luster to this piece of junk.

2005-08-26T10:41:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Unusual Spam

I received the following, what I assume to be fraudulent spam or just blanket spam. Because I'm not sure how a Neo-conservative, Christian, conservative, American nationalist, Sci-fi writer would attract attention from such people.

Dearest,

I am very happy to write this message to you,my name is abdulkareem sulaimon son of late alhaji salifu sulaimon who died last two years in cote d i voire in west africa.

The purpose of my message is that my father was killed because he is the only one in his family that converted to muslim because all his family they are christian.

So before his death he has a mosque which he can not complete before he die,so i need your assistance financialy to complete the mosque.

If you have intrest in assisting me i can send you the picture of the uncompleted mosque so that you can seee by yourseif.

If you want to reply try to reply me through this e mail abdulkareem_sulaimon@yahoo.com.

And you will be bless in the name of Allah.

Thanks.

Abdulkareem.

Thanks, Abdul, but no thanks. For one, while it is possible, I think the killing is much more likely to go the other way. That is, a Muslim born gets a chance at a free choice, and becomes a Christian. Then they kill the poor girl or guy for apostasy.

See, most Christians don't think that a forced conversion is a true conversion. The God of Isaac, and Jacob is not going to be impressed if I shove a shotgun in someone's throat, and make them recite the Apostle's Creed, and call on the name of the Risen Son of God, that is the Christ, the Messiah, Yeshua, the omnipotent Creator of the universe.

Fact is, I think He would be plenty irritated with me.

Now, I sympathize with you on your father's death, if such actually happened. But most of the bloodshed between religions is Christian blood at the hands of Muslim fanatics. Although militant athiests in China do a pretty good job on Christians as well, and they are not nice to Muslims either.

And seeing as I think Islam is not the way to Heaven, for they do not submit to the Risen Lord, I don't see building mosques as an unadulterated good thing. Now its better than building car bombs to blow up Israeli and Iraqi children, but since many mosques are recruitment centers for that sort of behavior, I will find it easy to restrain my enthusiasm.

2005-08-25T22:39:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Short Story

Patron Saint of Reason
By Eric R. Ashley

My gaze fell down across the body of my favorite second cousin, Stephanie Moyers. The corpse lay like a blonde-haired doll on the faux stone bricks of the Clarissdale Mall’s main concourse. Her blonde with brown lowlights hair swirled around her heart-shaped face which was tilted upwards toward the skylight beseeching God for another minute of life, and around her right hand was a further swirl of blood which looked as if someone had stepped in it, and smeared it.
Gasps from the strolling shoppers around me, as they paused, and then realized that their eyes were not lying to them. A young American girl, tartan mini-skirt, metal blue t-shirt, and despite the paleness, the almost blueness of her skin you could see that she was the type of girl that would have been the life of a party. Her beauty did not lie.

Despite my wonderful fiance’, and the five years that had separated us, I had occasionally found myself thinking a carnal thought or two about Stephanie. Worse, or perhaps better, she knew. Long experience, I suppose, since I think most guys in her presence were just a bit dazzled. She treated the whole thing as one would treat a horde of enthusiastically affectionate puppies.

Had treated, I corrected myself bitterly. The crowd started coming in closer as I stood over her, and before anything further could be disturbed, I took a closer look. I wanted to remember her which was perhaps unwise as I had many fond memories of her already, and one more of her broken body would not help, but I could not let her go yet. And then I saw in the blood near her right hand, the word scrawled.

“Rite”.

My face grew long and sadder for in death she had continued to cling to delusion, and I stepped back even as someone said something about being a doctor, and began a ritual examination which everyone knew would bear no fruit, but sorrow. But rituals have to be observed, if not for the dead who are, if prepared like my cousin, already beyond all fear, then for the living who have to continue in a world of sin and madness. For it was madness indeed that was contained in her message to me.

She chose such a spelling because of her peculiar approach to the world.

“Why spell ‘right’ when its obviously better to spell ‘rite’”, she had asked me when she was seven, for her birthday party, pigtails bouncing as she flounced up to me, her favored, I think cousin, a serious minded twelve-year-old. I had alternated between exasperation and awe in my dealings with her, and this time, like many I could not find an answer.

My life changed that birthday which was her gift to me, because I went home, and searched up the spellings in the dictionary. Then I became curious of rites and ritual, and the reasons behind such. That and the desire to actually know the answers to her odd questions so as to not look a fool eventually led me to my double major in Political Science and Theology.

I stepped further back to the edge of the gathering crowd, and saw two young fellows, perhaps eleven or nine, both looking scared, and standing by a block-sided planter island amidst the concourse hall. Clad in their tough guy costumes of rock-and-roll t-shirts, and blue jeans with one holding the requisite skateboard, yet they all but shivered. They had been standing there for a long time. I had seen them in the background from the top of my eye as I had strode up, and their horror-struck gazes had drawn mine to Stephanie’s body.

In my neat trousers, and thin tie, and felt black trench coat, I looked moderately prosperous, well-ordered, and earnest. A trustworthy chap, my clothing proclaimed to the world. Policemen usually let me off with a warning about speeding. So armored, I nodded to the boys, and gave them a card.

“If you need to talk about this…” I began. One examined my card. It was for my position as a youth pastor at a local church.

The other began to babble after chancing a glimpse at my card. Something about her stumbling up this way, and staggering, and him wondering if he should do anything.

“And then she fell before I could do anything.” His starched white hair, and pale face looked worse than Stephanie’s. Poor little fellow felt guilty, wondered if he could have done anything to save her.

“Very understandable. You did right.” And then I paused. “I’m sure the police are going to want to talk to you. Not a big deal.” I said that as much for them so that the police would also reassure them. I really doubted the police needed any further witnesses.

“Besides it was hopeless.” The other, an almost solid black-haired guy, except for one deliberately disruptive splash of white spoke, looking elsewhere, anywhere but me or the body of my beloved friend, as he palmed my card, and slid it into an overly capacious back pocket.

“Why?” I asked sitting down on the planter's rim, and inviting them to do so as well with an easy gesture. His bitter look of repressed anger interested me.

“She came from the Suicide Café.” He jerked his shoulder, his left shoulder back down the concourse toward a crowd gathering in front of the mall’s famed coffee-shop. “Bunch of ghouls.” He growled, and I saw real anguish. I looked at his friend for explanation.

“Ah, Kathy, a, ah, friend of his went in there with an overdose of sleepers. She, ah, died.” The starched blonde looked pitiful, and then went to put an arm on his friend’s shoulder who violently shrugged it off.

“They did nothing. Nothing. Just sat there, and watched as she died while sitting at a table. I ought to burn their store down.” The fact that the store was in a mall might have been the only thing that saved it from his wrath. His fingers were balled into fists, and his dark eyes were glazed with tears. Mine were as well.

I’d heard of Strengler’s Coffee Emporium. It was very popular with a certain segment of the young population, but it was also a place where people, mostly young girls, but sometimes boys as well, the rumors said, cute boys, went to have their last cup of coffee. The stories said that the house even would make up a cup of hemlock for you if asked. I didn’t believe that, but I did believe the story of Kathy. And I knew that the town had tried to shut the place down several times, but had failed.

“There’s an explanation for behavior like that, Rick, “ I said after I asked for his and Mark’s names. The black-haired Rick looked up hopefully, at me, wanting a way to understand the senseless. I had only cold comfort for him.

“Its called Evil.”

There was a shock, a moment of connection, in his eyes, and I saw that he tossed off the slack categories, and lazy equivalencies that substituted slogans for real understanding that he had been taught all his life. Some actions were wrong, no matter how much the evil-doer might have been oppressed or how bad a hair day they might have had.

He cursed fluently, and I nodded in understanding. Your first knowing glimpse of Evil often provoked such a comment.

I made certain that both boys would come and visit me, and then I straightened up, and marched down the concourse toward the Strengler’s Coffeehouse. Fury rode me much as it must have had the Christ as he confronted those who looked good on the outside, but inside only held death. Whited sepulchers, mall-side coffeehouses. I stood for life and love, and service to my Friend who embodied both.

The floor clacked under my heels, and I tried to cool off slightly so that I could conceal my rage. Otherwise, I might not get through the door. Predators have an instinct for the fury of the righteous, and avoid it if at all possible.

Stephanie had called me a few hours ago, after a hiatus of several months, for you see, I had offended her. She had found some new friends. Objectivists. I had laughed outright when she had pronounced the name. Stiffly, she had gone on, trying to patiently explain to me her new insights about the Universe.

My anger evaporated as I remembered how I had poked fun at her new friends. You see, I had wanted to get past that boy of twelve who had not understood. I had wanted to be able to answer her questions. And then when she came to me, I had all the answers, and in my pride I gave her the truth.

But nothing but foul sounds came from my ringing of the bells of truth, the carrillion in the church steeple bleated and blooped despite my best grace. So she had said goodbye, sweetly, and I had wondered if she saw her role as stumping me rather than mine as providing her answers. I went to chew on that insight, and she didn’t call back.

Thus when she called me earlier this morning, after several months in the cold, despite my efforts to win her back, I was most eager to come and meet her at the mall. My old, but paid for and oil-changed every three thousand miles car, had taken me through the crisp fall air to the city’s biggest shopping center, the biggest one in the region. I had walked in heading for the Food Court, enjoying being out in the frivolities of commerce. Not for me the hatred of modern America’s love of gaudy display, and shopping. As long as they remembered that it was the tinsel and not the living tree, I would be happy. That was a mistake Stephanie had never made I thought with some filial pride.

Then the gazes of the young fellows, and the impossibility on the floor. I still had not really processed the event. Shattering grief, and the attempt to hold to my faith that all would indeed be well for Stephanie, despite the evidence of my senses waited for me tonight. I would rock and wail in the arms of my beloved wife-to-be, who come to think of it was also blonde. Tonya would weep with me.

But I react slowly in such ways. I don’t instantly get angry, or grieve. Of course, as I stared down the concourse, hiding my face behind some gloves I pulled out of a pocket, I had been a long time coming to my rage about the Suicide Café. I’d heard of this place years ago, and my new pastor had mentioned it several times in our morning prayers. It was the only time I had ever heard him pray for an infestation of cockroaches to cause someone to lose their license to provide food due to health code violations. He had prayed for the wrath of the Almighty to fall on this place. Perhaps his prayer was about to be answered.

Thus I put my anger away behind a practiced smile, useful for both politicians and pastors, and mingled with the remainder of the crowd outside the café. Indeed, it was as my new young friend had said; a few were saddened, but most were trying to get a peek at the dead body from the distance.

In fact, one fellow had a camcorder of her leaving the bathroom with a bloody neck, and then going back in. She had left a bit later with a clean neck. He was showing it around.
Sounds like a discordant chime rang in my head as I stared at the picture. Stephanie was neat enough, and a bit vain, as most girls in my experience are (and for good reason for rare is the man who can compete with them in beauty), but I also think a bit dramatic, and too focused on the essential elements of life. She would not have gone back to ever so neatly clean her neck, not when she was barely on her feet, and not when a lurid drop of blood could have been shown to great effect. I still remember her showing off her boo-boos, even taking off the band-aid so I could gauge the full effect of whatever latest skinned knee or scratched arm, or insect welt she suffered “so nobly” under.

I went inside, and discovered that this coffee shop had a few surprises. It had a lobby, all the way across the front of the store. There were two gates in a black iron grille on either side of a stone counter. These entranceways were guarded, for there is no other word, by a man of perhaps Columbian or Salvadoran origin. He was shorter than I, but his muscles exceeded mine by several inches, especially in the biceps. Frankly, he looked more a bouncer than your typical hyper-thin coffee house caffeine addict barista.

Also, it reigned surpassingly dark with heavy timbers of smoke-blackened wood holding up the roof as joist. The floor of the entranceway, and the counter had what I recognized as a number of spells from various traditions engraven, or painted. They made me uneasy, but I reminded myself of the supremacy of the God I worshipped. No prayer to Dagon could stop me, when Dagon had bowed his statue before the Ark, which had held the Presence of the God of gods.

As to the darkness of the room, with its multi-brown toned tile floor, and its dark chestnut tables, and crimson bench covers with faint lighting in antique, redone gaslights which permitted electricity now, but only just barely did they gleam so that I could make out no detail on the back wall of the long rectangular room. It was oppressive, the kind of place where one knew in one's bones you should not go, even if the skeptical, rational mind could find no excuse to flee.

To my left, the only source of brightness gleamed over the counter, reflected on the shimmering metal and glass display cases about a fourth of the way up the room. The entranceway was not as dim, but it also had metal grating of black iron, heavy and substantial in a way that seemed out of place in a mall which is the haven of the transient and ephemeral. This grating ran all the way across the room behind the bouncer and his solid stone counter, one layer of iron, except for the doubling caused by two gates which looked like they could be easily slid to the side, and locked.

“I wasn’t aware coffeehouses got robbed so frequently.” I tried to laugh to the bouncer, who simply stared at me. I cleared my throat, and asked for a table.

It did nothing to remind me of the glamorous, golden light-filled rooms of the Viennese coffeehouses I had once (and oh yes, as soon as we married, I would show these to Tonya on our honeymoon) had the great pleasure of seeing.

Still it was an attractive, and stylish place, if one is in to heavy timbers and foreboding shadows. If I have to do this effect, I’d go with a Gothic cathedral rather than this, but each to his own. I could see how Stephanie had said there were vampires here. I deeply wondered if she had found some drug here, and perhaps a little sadistic advice from a “friend”. I tried not to think she would be so gullible, but one of her chief strengths was that she was open-minded and logical. Which sometimes meant she stuck her fingers into fires in a spirit of scientific inquiry. But some fires don’t let you go, not easily anyways.

I made to enter, and the bouncer held up his hand in front of my chest. Then he pointed, once I had stopped, at a sign above the counter.

“No praying.” I stared at the simple, unadorned sign with something approaching absolute astonishment. There are some who feel as if a quiet word with the Maker is offensive to them, but I’d never seen nor heard of such a bald-faced proclamation by a business, which is theoretically worshipping Mammon anyways. I ran my tongue around my teeth, while he watched me. No doubt my clothes, and my general manner had given me away. I looked a preacher, especially to the discerning, which a bouncer would be.

Then my eyes fell down, perhaps of chance, and I saw four young men sitting alone at a table. I say alone, because they all sat separately, each in his own little space, despite being two to a bench. Their general air of serious profundity, and social unease, with the militantly cross expression on the face of the one looking my way twigged something in my memory. And I was already speaking before one raised a book, a thick paperback, a full handful of text, with a gold and brown design on the front, one of the most recognized color schemes and designs in the Western world, but that picture only confirmed my insight.

“I’m to visit them.” I said, jabbing my finger at the table of four. “Can you get a chair please?” He looked at them, and then rather irritably got me an additional chair to sit in the aisle in front of the table. It was my small way of reminding him that the customer is always right, and I was the customer. Perhaps it was petty, but then I found to my surprise that I rather did not care. Probing deeper, I decided that I despised the man. Not for his nationality since I’m your basic American who accepts the Other with practiced ease, or for the job which was honorable labor, but for the business which he was entangled with. It was hard to think that he did not know what was happening around here, and an honorable man would not have been associated with this business.

So it was in anger, that I sat down across from the four Objectivists, noting their copies of Atlas Shrugged (two), and the Fountainhead (one), and a small pile of newsletters, and a plastic box with “Dues” inked onto the side of the gray little box with a crude notch cut in the top of it. They had backpacks, and such on the crimson benches, as well.

“I’m Stephanie’s friend.” I said, and they nodded.

“You’re early.” One said, and then I knew. They had just arrived. They did not know. Stephanie must have just left before they got here.

The little vixen had plotted to have me come out here, and would have “innocently” exclaimed that “Here is some old friends of mine. Lets eat with them.” And thus the poor pastor would have been ambushed by four of her Randbot friends.

But that left the question of her belief in vampires. She had said she wanted to talk about the existence of the undead, specifically Dracula’s kindred. Or perhaps it was Lilith’s kin, she really did not know. Seeing as such are completely fictional, either answer or neither could be right as the author of the tale chose.

“So how is she? When is she coming? I thought, ah, that she would be with you.” The club president, Jeremy, asked. I paused and made myself ready to discuss her death with these four young men. Already, I could see that it would hit hard. No doubt at least two of them had been half or more in love with her.

“Not good.” I began slowly, answering the first question as I picked up a menu the redhead to my left handed me, only to be cut off by Jeremy again.

“I know. She’s been hanging out with us. Reading Ayn Rand, going to meetings. Its been good.” He was deliberately taunting me. Thinking that when I spoke of ‘not good’, I was irritable at their doctrines of humanity.

I wanted to raise my hand. Tell the boy to stop, but then so much of the time my job is to listen. So I looked at him closely, and the other three with him. Bright, independent minded, arrogant and willful, but honestly concerned about Stephanie. That made them a better lot than some of the boys who hung out with her whose only concern was seeing if they could get her to take her blouse and bra off.

“Then last week, she tells us she came here, saw a vampire. We tell her that’s nuts as there is no such thing. The supernatural doesn’t exist.” Kyle said with worry on his face, after he made the effort to introduce himself. He sat with Jeremy to my right, but nearest the wall.
I made a small protesting noise, just enough to note my disagreement.

One of the others, the redhead, laughed, and asked if I, a (sneer) pastor believed in vampires. I assured them that I didn’t. I asked him his name. Wayne, he replied, and despite his quickness of lip, I saw genuine concern and bafflement in his eyes. He too was worried about Stephanie.
I drew a shuddering breath, and prayed a second. This would be harder than anything I had done in a long time. So I avoided it, for the moment, telling myself, I needed to understand them better before I spoke.
The last boy introduced himself, Roger.

“So you were sent here to ambush the pastor, but meanwhile you’re worried about Stephanie.” I summarized, and they nodded, a bit uneasily since I was implying an alliance to help her. And to their mind I was probably a bad person, an altruist, a statist, a theocrat bent on destroying freedom and morality. To my mind, they were a bunch of teenagers led by a bright woman who had written some books decades ago, and this long-dead woman had held the emotional maturity of a ten-year-old. Which might be why its mostly geeky guys who follow their prophetess. Not to say they were evil, just a bit limited.

I bowed my head, and then raised it as if I had not planned the whole thing. I told them that I should like to pray for the situation. I did not say Stephanie as she was dead, and in Glory, and beyond my need of prayers. Indeed, I did pray both verbally for the boys and for wisdom under the hard burden, and in my heart for them especially as I was about to tell them of her death. And I knew from glances that at least two of the boys had serious designs on her. It would break their hearts, and expose their souls to the screams of despair.

Finished, I raised my head, and the leader of the boys smiled at me. Then he began to read from his book about a fellow named Ellsworth and his evil. Some sort of religious leader who wanted people to destroy themselves. They smirked a bit, getting back at me for making them listen respectfully to a prayer. In other times, I would have enjoyed the intellectual sparring. Perhaps it is not godly, but I really do enjoy arguing with skeptics. It doesn’t hurt that I’m usually much more equipped than they expected for their arguments. I’m human enough to enjoy wiping a snotty expression off someone’s face.

I raised my hand to interrupt.

“Gentlemen, I would love to chat, but there is a matter of urgent…”

Gasp.

The boy reading almost dropped his thick book as it sagged from his fingers. The others holding their various copies of Atlas Shrugged, or the Objectivist Ideal which had been stuffed in a pocket, with fingers placed on the passage they wanted to read me, turned and looked, and paled. I raised an eyebrow, rearranged my Bible to suit in my left hand, and looked over my right shoulder to see what the matter was. Their manner had the hackles on the back of my neck rising for I had no reason to believe they were anything but serious and well-intentioned young men.

But what I saw could not be prepared for. It walked across the coffeehouse floor. I say it because even though it was clothed as a man, I could not tell its gender. And even as I thought that and spun about to look over my left shoulder as it trespassed behind me, I wondered if such as it had a gender at all. Or if that was just one more thing it had given up when it was kicked out of Heaven.

A bloody mask, with jaw hanging open to expose a row of teeth, human, but for the front canines dripped blood onto its drenched ruffled shirt, and dirty black velvet vest. Its cape was holed and ripped so that I could look through it, but those holes led to other places to screaming faces and to impressions which could not be described in words for they had no meaning in our language but of pain and madness. Bones lifted themselves out of its ribs, and I swallowed vomit.

A young woman, busty, and with her nicely tanned midriff exposed in white t-shirt with some small design on the front the way that my fiance’ had told me she liked to wear around the house when she was vacuuming stood up, and practically wiggled for joy, like a puppy before this monstrous and poor imitation of a man. Near retching, I saw him reach out, and give her a bloody kiss on the neck. I wanted to say something, to shout, but then a waitress swooped up, and scooped the Bible out of my hands.

She was cute, and firm of hand and manner, and shook her head at me reprovingly.

“No, proselytizing allowed in here, Pastor.”

I looked past the trim barista to where the puppy girl had sat, and she had a dazed look in her face even as her friends congratulated her. The monster was gone, replaced by a man, such a man, style and power and wit etched his face just lightly enough to let you know he was a bit older than most of the females, but still in the range for it to be respectable to be seen with him. His black cape, and black vest and leather boots were outre’, but so cute. Even I noted he was attractive.

“Thank you for telling me, young lady.” I smiled at the waiting girl, promising nothing. But she could hardly stand around and force me to promise something I would never do, especially after I had been so polite.

I turned back to the group after the barista left. I tried to swallow. Couldn't.

“That was a vampire.” Roger said. “Perhaps we need to recalculate our theories.” He added weakly, and I noted that the most quiet one of them was probably their thinker.
“Me too.” I said, and then breathed in. This would be hard. “Stephanie is dead.”

They stared at me in disbelief, and then in mute pleading for me to announce that it was all a joke in very poor taste. Jeremy found out, in his secret love with her, began crying immediately. The other, Kyle, went last, and for him I worried, for his tears had the look of someone who had lost all hope. No fight was left in him.

Their leader, Jeremy raised his head, full of woe, and looked at me worried for his flock, in my terms, or a club in his. And I found myself saying words I had not expected to say.

“We can fight back. Its not something I say to everyone who suffers loss. Death and indeed murder are not something we can fight and win. We all will die…”

“He won’t.” The despairing one said.

“And the police are for murder.”

They shifted, and then one smirked. Okay, I’d forgotten I was dealing with Objectivists.
“But this is a creature from Hell, Kyle, and yes, we can fight it, and successfully, I believe, Kyle.”

“This creature is a personification of the death principle that all altruists subscribe too.” Jeremy spoke, and his congregation nodded. Okay, I could work with that. Thing is, most of the people in the room obviously saw the stylish man, and not the monster. He had some sort of spell on them, that even affected me when I had lost my Bible. I wondered as I stood how come they had seen him for what he was, as I had.

I told them that I was going to be right back, promised them, begged them to stay, which I probably should not have. They were children my conscience reproached me, but my reason answered back as I walked past the counter.

Seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen year olds are not children. They were old enough to bear responsibility for life and death. But that did remind me that if anyone had to die, it had better be me. I knew where I was going when I died.

“My friends, please stay here, I will be back very soon.” I looked back into each of their eyes, and caught them with all the intensity I could channel. It was not my own desire alone for which I entreated them, but that had been given to God, and came back infused with the kind of holy fire that is charisma. They looked at me the way a drowning man looks at a life jacket. I had a certainty in a world gone suddenly mad.

I left, and before I got out the door, I saw they were engaged in furious conversation. Not angry with each other, but at a great pace, and with fervent intensity. They were dealing with the issue on their own. I prayed for them, and swept out the door past the bouncer who dared not impede my path for the speed of my steps, or the power that filled me.

Still pushed by something, ah, Someone I realized, I had made my way out of the coffeehouse, and down the concourse to the Radio Shack. Walking in, I pulled out my credit card, and headed directly toward the heaviest looking laptop. Gulping at the price, I studied it for a second to see if it was truly as sturdy as the advertising claimed. It looked like one might usefully use it as a hammer, which is what I wanted.

A clerk materialized at my elbow, and I turned to him and said softly.
“I want to buy this, right now. I want several programs put on it, and booted up. And I want it done in five minutes. If not, I’m leaving.”

The clerk gulped, and took a quick look at the sticker price which was halfway to five figures, and dashed across the threadbare carpeting, and behind the counter. He grabbed a portable card scanner, a charged battery, explained in terse fashion to the manager, and came back in a clumsy sprint, trailing the manager.

“Four and a half minutes.” I announced with deadly calm. The manager accelerated off to his right, toward the back of the store, with his face blotchy speed-walked off to get my software programs. I merely kept studying my watch as the time wore down while the two underpaid young men, the clerk and the manager ripped open packages, and booted computers with a feverish abandon.

Four minutes later, I was heading out the store with offers of selling me speakers falling away behind me, along with some very happy commissioned sales clerks.

I quick stepped back to the coffeehouse, and waved my laptop at the stout bouncer behind the front desk. He begrudgingly let me pass with a grouchy expression as if he knew I was trouble, but could not figure out how. Of course, he was right. I intended justice, an execution. All part of the pastoral duties you might say, I thought giggling madly inside my skull.

If I was wrong, no one would be hurt, except for me who would be toted off to a mental asylum which I would deserve and need. If I was right, well, we would see how monsters liked the truth. And then it hit me. Sure, at least in my view, the Randites were limited and wrong, but was I not limited compared to the Infinite?

They at least believed in the Objective Reality of Truth, and they hated death and tyranny as did I. Perhaps, that was enough for them to see clearly past the enchantment of the monster. Nodding to the quartet sitting nervously across the room, the same four who had almost jumped up as I walked in, I licked my lips. Then I breathed a short prayer. My previous career had not included any opportunities for robbing convenience stores, a defect which I was beginning to regret.

I walked up to the coffee counter‘s line of three, stuck my finger in the pocket of the trench coat, and waited until I was served.

“Your money, please.” I spoke softly, entreatingly to the barista, the same that had harassed me earlier.

She blinked, looked at me, taking in the neat tie, and the subtly understated signs of “decent citizen”, and began to shake her head in denial that this outrage would interrupt her pretty little reality. So I pulled out a bellow from my speech training to pierce her narcissistic bubble. And I shoved my finger forward over the curved glass of the doughnut containing display (alright, they weren’t doughnuts; they were the up-market cousins of doughnuts though, and probably even worse for your health.)

“Give me all your money! Now!” We pastors are well-trained in speech, and my voice bounced off the walls shattering everyone’s pleasant little dabbling in nihilism with the appearance of bloody reality. I really hoped that no member of the National Rifle Association was in the shadowy hall, and carrying despite the signs at the mall entrance’s proclaiming eternal opposition to the citizen’s right to defend themselves. Because, if so, I would soon be explaining this ill-thought out plan to my Maker.

Gulping and gabbling my least favorite barista opened her counter, and made to empty it. That was a wrinkle, I had not considered. I wanted everyone to leave me alone with Mr. Maybe I Am the Undead.

“Get out! Get out!” I screamed the words over and over again, rising to a higher and higher pitch of frenzy. Spinning about, displaying the finger in my pocket to the world as the coffeehouse rapidly emptied, I used the other arm to play at grasping for the money over the counter.

The bouncer came around the counter as a wave of teenagers swished around his rock. I grinned directly into his face with the most malevolent expression I could manage pasted on my face. The message was clear. I would shoot him down, and enjoy it.

He fled, thundering out the front like a rhino in fear.

Panting for breath, hot and red-faced, I came down from the raving fit to look across the tables at the vampire who sat perfectly still and alone like a cigar store Indian I had once seen on a back-country roadside. Only his mouth moved, and that looked as if it had never moved the moment he stopped talking.

“I’m afraid you really chose the wrong establishment to rob today.” He chuckled in a mirthless way. “You and your cohorts.” He shifted his eyes, and it was as if he had flung my gaze like a hand with a rock. Dismayed, I jerked my eyes back to see him standing almost on my toes.
“You are strong-minded for a robber.” He breathed decay and old dust into my face, and I shivered from sheer terror. Nobody and nothing could stand against this creature. “You are mere mortals.”

“Oh, yeah?” The first other person to speak, the fiery redhead Wayne, stepped out of the table’s confinement, and slid to his feet, drew a pistol and dropped into a Weaver stance. His three buddies did the same with varying degrees of success. I was changing my mind, I loved Randites.

“Y-you killed Stephanie.” The leader, Jeremy said his face working between grief and rage.

The vampire turned slowly, and smirked. Then he licked a finger and its long nail with calculated intent.
“The tasty little blonde? I suppose I did.”

And then he breathed at them. And grabbed me by the neck. A bullet stopped his passage behind me, and I felt transmitted through his hand astonishment.

“I will kill your leader. Lay down your weapons, or he will die horribly.” His hand yanked on my neck so that I would soon have a crick in the neck, and then I felt a sproing as a muscle stretched in ways it was not designed to do.

Wayne, and Jeremy laughed. Kyle and Roger stared at him confused.

“Right. Well that might have worked if we…cared!” Jeremy said coldly with just a little pause to let me know what was coming, and then with malice aforethought said. “Fire.” I prayed and lifted my feet off the ground, both at the same time. Suddenly a hundred and eighty pounds hung from his hand, and then slipped with a slap of closing fingers through his bony grasp. A few of my hairs, and some of my skin were sacrificed, and I landed hard on my bottom on the brown tiled floor.

They opened fire. In the tile long, dark room it was incredibly loud with the multi-colored tile floor, the glass display cases, and the metal coffee makers to reflect the noise. The wooden arches, and the foam ceiling, and the red drapes along the walls did their part, but it was not enough.

I rolled away, holding the laptop to my chest, protecting it, and thumped my way to relative safety on the other side of a wooden table from him. There, I looked up to study my opponent, even as my fingers quested over my skull for signs of serious damage. I found none to me or him.

For as the shells hammered him, I saw him yawn, and knew this was not the way. Yelling stop, did nothing so I grabbed a coffee cup off the counter behind me, and slung it at the enraged Objectivists.

That got them to stop. In the silence that followed, we could hear him chuckle.

“Children of Adam, you really think your technological toys can destroy something older than your pitiful planet?” His words grew longer, and breathier as shadows crept up the wall behind him, and the frost rimed the brass of the counter bar’s rail, and laced the curved glass of the eclair display, and wrapped about the biscotti jar. I made to say something, and he pointed a finger at me. The words stuck in my mouth. Fear and embarrassment had a hold of me. Who was I to get in the way of such a magnificent creature?

“Give yourself to me. I am something your pitiful minds only dream of. I am what you call a vampire. A lord of darkness and mists. A thing older than your recorded history. Sadly, because of the curse of a God whose petty laws I broke, I must take of the blood of your kind in order to live. He claims to love you, but He made me what I am to take from you the free gift that I would not, but must.”

His words had me in tears. The grandeur of living century rolling upon another and another until millenia had passed left me only wanting to ask him questions of history for which I would willingly give up my life’s blood. Was there any higher calling that I could use my life for?
But luckily, my allies were less imaginative than me. He pointed his finger at them, and one quite earnestly spoke.

“You represent the death principle. You want us to give up ourselves to you because we are afraid of our true natures.”

That described me. But then, like a Voice, I heard, and have not I given you a new nature, made you alive that were dead? Do you not belong to Me? How then are you worshipping a false god? I fell to my knees confused. How could my God deny this wonderful thing? What cruelty was this? But on the other hand, I knew Him as just and kind.

“Altruist you want us to be.” Jeremy said softly. The vampire looked puzzled, and then with a soul-creasing smile nodded in agreement.

“Why yes, I suppose you could call it that. I want you to do something altruistic.”

He then held out his hands so as to welcome them to him, and somehow I knew that was wrong.

“Altruist!” Jeremy yelled, and then the other three joined in as of one accord. “Altruist!” The first word meant nothing but a puzzled look to the vampire. The second, heated by rage, and sung in chorus smacked him on the face, and left a line of blood down his right cheek.

“What deity do you worship? Who protects you?”

“Objectivists don’t need a deity, or a saint. We just need rational decision-makers.” Kyle explained. “Like Ayn Rand.”

The vampire winced at the name.

“So, you think this saint will protect you with your magic powers? I have killed the children of many gods. You will fare no better.” He sucked in the air, and began to grow, or his shadow did. I could not be sure in the room as darkness grew and lights suddenly lost their potency.
“I am the ultimate darkness. Into me, will all powers fall and fade.”

“Yes, you are the death principle, and like Thomas Paine, I have sworn…all together now” Jeremy, their leader paused to gather them all into a chorus as his line of troops faced down the seeming entrance to the Abyss which was forming in the midst of the vampire’s enlarged chest while his head seemed to brush the ceiling. “Eternal enmity against any form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

“I shall unleash the hordes of shadow and madness upon you. You cannot stand.” The vampire howled, and indeed something inside the blackness where his chest used to be moved. And glasses on the counter cracked, but the display cases did not.

And I saw something then, and begged forgiveness while laughter trickled out of my throat.
“What rot. What utter rot.” I laughed some more as the vampire and the stern warriors facing him turned to me. “Let me show you real power.” I held up a hand, and shouted in jubilation the words spoken at the beginning of Time.

“Fiat Lux. Let there be light.” Gleaming balls of incandescence and fluorescence and bacterial luminescence floated free of my hand, driving back the shadows until nothing remained of them but a shrunken man not even as tall as I.

“The Tempter is ever fond of illusion, and fear. He could not snare you with fear for your oaths protected you, but he could have you fight that which was not there.” I told my comrades who stared at me with dawning respect for Jeremy and Wayne, jaw-gaping amazement for Kyle, and just rubbed his, Roger's own eyes trying to see if the balls of light would go away.

“All right, Pastor, what now?” Jeremy called over to me, as we paused in the combat. Both sides had reason to try to think things over, and come up with new tactics. The vampire recovered quicker.

“Let me show you a word, priest. A word not of shadow, but of bloody power.”

He spoke a dreadful word that left me feeling as if I had witnessed the murder of Stephanie by my own hand, while holding out his arms with the hands palm down and level with the floor as drops of his own blood trickled, a holy, a separate, rain from any normal rain that had blessed the Earth. This rain could only curse the grass and the tree.

The blood pooled into four crosses, upside down, and then raced along the grouting in the floor toward my four young heroes. He then reached out an arm toward me, and squeezed empty air. The air left my lungs, and black spots began to form in front of my eyes.

“You five have given me the best fight I’ve had in the twentieth century…”

“It is the twenty-first, you moron.” Wayne snapped back. Perhaps the blood loss, or inspiration, but I found myself waving an arm at the four as they backed up, and I hung in the pitiless telekinetic hold of a sorcerous monster.

Indeed, they should for the blood grew more black, and malignant as it traversed the floor. Acrid smells, and the cries of demons were heard drifting up from the blood arrows. I seemed to see, in miniature, little demons holding weapons standing by the shores of their bloody Niles, and corrosive gunk marked the path of the arrows.
Bullets did nothing to them.

Jeremy looked at me, and I pointed. But Wayne understood first what I jabbed at. Without thinking, he trusted me. And slammed his precious copy of The Fountainhead down into the path of the blood arrow that was seeking his life.

Suddenly, bright, clear water shot back up the path annihilating the arrow, and shrieked and roared like a new broken dam as it coursed back toward the vampire. Without pausing to gape, Wayne did likewise to the other three arrows. The vampire leapt to safety atop a wooden table, and in so doing let me free for my comrades in arms had broken his concentration.
I rubbed my throat, and took a great gasp of air back into my lungs.

“Hey Vampy? I’ve got a word for you.” I walked over to him, every step going against more resistance as he held out a clawed hand baring my path. But with every footfall, I seemed to gain in immensity.

“As Samson carried the gates of the city, so you cannot stop me, foul and unclean spirit. Now is the time of your judgment.” It stopped its efforts.

“So I shall break your pitiful neck if you are immune to my magics, Servant of the One God.” He laid out his hand on my shoulder as I came to the edge of the table he stood on, and I slammed the Word into his gut. The Bible in NASV, KJV, the Vulgate and Hebrew on CD running on my rather durable laptop gave him a king-sized, no a universe shattering pain in the stomach. He gasped, and the remnants of his illusion faded while faerie fires that looked to be made of avenging Tinkerbelles, all armed with bright flecks of fire like swords sparked all about him. The fires ate at him, as it, a thing more of dead flesh and skeleton than man writhed in agony.
The four Objectivists sprinted up to get close to him, which was a mistake.

Tumbling to the floor at the base of the Objectivists’ feet, he blew cold, and the fires were gone.
“Clever bringing the Logres into my haven, right under my nose. I shall have to remember that trick.”

“I would not worry about it. I’m about to stuff it down your throat.” I roared at him in my divinely strengthened fury flipping the several hundred pound table aside like a television stand toward the wall where it shattered into kindling. I then stepped over him, and raised the laptop over my head.

Really? The voice of evil spoke in my head. He suddenly was standing, and an arm wrapped about Kyle’s neck. Four feet too far. He still could move faster than thought if he wished after he had entranced me.

“Toss it down on the ground.” Groaning inside, I bit my lip looking for some way to avoid this choice. Jeremy looked at me, and winked.

I did as the vampire asked. He, for the creature now clothed itself in illusion once more, laughed like the screams of the dying making fun of my foolishness. Now he would slay us all.
Jeremy dropped his book onto the floor.

The restaurant rocked like a ship in a gale, and the vampire was flung across the room to crash into a wall. All of us were staring at Jeremy in utter shock.

“What can I say? Atlas just shrugged?” Jeremy said with a smirk.

The vampire scoffed at him.
“Atlas is a mythical being.” But he did not sound convinced.

“I wonder. I expect the Earth, the whole Earth just shook.” I replied quite seriously.
“What would John Galt say about this?” I then asked the four Objectivists. With dawning light on their face, they grabbed their copies from out-sized pockets, and a backpack while the vampire tried to get to his feet. It was not quick enough. The vampire stood, and then Roger ripped off a button on his backpack, and held it out in front of him.

"Back you spawn of statists, tyrant, evil-doer. In the name of Objective Reality, and Ayn Rand, I command you." The vampire was sagged and slowed, but then it breathed out, and the Badnarik 2004 button in Roger's hand caught fire so that he dropped it where it guttered out.

But that was enough time. Flipping open pages quickly, the others began out of synch, but soon fell in as one with Roger joining them.

The speech ran on as they turned pages, and the vampire hissed against the wall, pressed there by the words of Ayn Rand‘s protagonist hero, John Galt.

“This spell will not go on forever. Then I will shred you.”

Actually, he was right. I needed something to finish the vampire with, but no need to let him or it know that.

“Um, Mr. Vampire, not to be disagreeable, but this particular speech goes on for fifty-three pages. You’re going to be squirming on a hook for a while.”

“Fifty-three pages?” The vampire said incredulously, sparing a second to bring his head up to look at me, despite the Power of the Faithful which beamed down on him from the copies of the Fountainhead the young men held in their hands.
I just smiled, and waved at him.

Then I leapt over the lowest part of the counter with the aid of the brass counter bar, and began looking in the various items under the counter. Nothing seemed handy to my purpose until I saw a wooden ruler right under the countertop. A pair of scissors used to open coffee bags, and I had a stake, and a mangled pair of scissors.

Problem was, the stake was a thin, flexing thing. What had I been thinking of?
Then I remembered that He takes the weak things of the world to confound the mighty, and I chose to have faith in my Maker.

I took up my laptop, which despite the drop on the floor still functioned. I checked, and it still have four open windows from different sections of the Bible which detailed God’s power over the dead.

Then I walked up to him, holding the laptop in front of me for protection. Laptop-whipping him first on the right and then the left added to his pain as he sagged under the beating of John Galt’s speech (for a moment I had sympathy for the devilish thing as the speech hurt my ears too). But despite my best efforts, and the pummeling of the Word Electronic, he still lived. It shrank him, by an inch, but he seemed harder, and more insane rather than destroyed.
But then I remembered Stephanie, and rage kindled in me a determination to strike for blood.

The ruler went in where his heart should be, and it did not break, but nothing happened except it came out of its own accord with smoke curling about it. He taunted me. I laughed as I had plenty of time while he futilely weaved and wobbled against the wall. The readers were barely to page ten of the speech.

He raised a hand against me, and I swatted it aside with the strength of Samson. And then there, I saw that I had left many strong chunks of wood off to the side of the room. I could go and retrieve one, and then in safety stab the vampire.

A step to the side, and then I wondered. How had I chosen this weapon? And for what purpose, but to show the power of God? If I struck the vampire down with my own good strong stake it would be a testimony to my own power.

“That twig will burn up in the power of my blood.”

The vampire grinned in the midst of his pain at me.

“No, I will not trust to your wisdom.”

Sometimes vampires move their hearts I knew from watching horror movies. Didn’t think pastors did that, did you? So stab. Miss. Stab again. Miss. Getting irritated and fearful as the ruler kept smoking, and small chunks fell off, I stabbed again.

He fell to dust.

I prayed over the dust, and then it too was burnt up in a fire not of this earth.
I looked over at my allies. They staggered, holding their copies of the Fountainhead, and Atlas Shrugged, and a Badnarik 2004 button as relics to shield against the awfulness we had just dispatched with help.

Too bad I couldn’t have them with me when I fought off the latest attempt by the city government to close our religious school. They would be capital allies, unafraid, serious, energetic, and hardnosed enough to make a fundamentalists blanch. But instead, the police came in, and took me away to jail. I took all the blame which was part of my plea bargain deal I insisted on with the D. A.. Otherwise, I planned on imitating Paul and Silas, and asking the One for an earthquake to rescue me from prison.

I get out on good behavior after four months. I take back all the mean things I’ve said about our revolving door justice system. I love it. So does my fiance’ who is eager enough to marry me, that she offered to have a prison wedding. I opted to wait for the week after I got out. It was grand, and Jeremy was one of my best men. More than a few people claimed to me, in quiet asides, to see Stephanie standing in on the maids of honor side.

Meanwhile, I hear my new friends are preaching the Word of a new Saint with power to make the altruists and the statists and the vampires quiver in terror. Already, our city is passing laws to make medical marijuana legal, and preparing a lawsuit to challenge the Federal government’s War on Drugs. And they bought, and refurbished the coffeehouse, renamed it the Rand Brew, and decorated it in glowing marble and shining gold with a statue of Liberty flanking one door, and Reason the other door. Both look like Stephanie.

Of course, my new friends just say, whenever I twit them, that their new beliefs are the essence of rationality, to which I agree. Faith is rational after all.

THE END.

2005-08-25T22:01:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Mosul Madness

Complete with shot on the spot, in action, pictures, Michael Yon tells of a small slice of time with the Deuce Four in Mosul. A man shot in the neck goes into seizure, but is alright, and the damage only turns out to be a flesh wound. The commander and some green troops get into a wild chase through Mosul with an Opel doing above 105 miles per hour that then turns into a foot chase, and the commander getting shot, and his leg broken, but still hanging in the gun battle.

This is quite the story.

2005-08-24T15:18:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Writing Struggles

Two major issues: One, sometimes my grammar is weak in regard to tense and to run-ons.

I'm hoping to improve this by studying some online lessons.

Two: I almost never write a straight, descriptive sentence. Its hard for me, and yet its a tool that most writers use frequently on every page. This helps them place the hero in the world. Sometimes, I instead will rely on hints, but oftentimes, I think that is too subtle.

I get complaints that my ideas also aren't clear, and I think this is related. As in, yes they are clear, if you were paying attention. But, how many times have I read a book with full attention, and a keen eye to ferret out the likely implications of various facts?

Hmm, Mr. Oh so Superior Writer Man?

Umm, let me get back to you on that.

One solution is for me to go back over my pieces, and add descriptive sentences.

2005-08-22T11:07:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Something Defective

There are those who don't like children. Who don't want to be bothered with children in the museum, or in the store, or in the restaraunt, or around the gaming table.

I'm not talking about those who dislike Specific Child A because he bit their leg, and yelled obscenities in their ear. That's wholly understandable, even if one should try to rise above the lesser examples of this species (although yelling obscenities in one's ear passes beyond the requirement to be gentlemanly, and instead provokes a duty to issue some corrective wisdom.)

But there are those who simply don't like children.

Overly clever, and not wise yet fifteen year old boys, and tired eighty year old men, and all ages in between. For some, its a matter of "Look at me, I'm so clever and quick! I can't be bothered to care about anyone else." For others, its the product of a long life, and they simply don't have it in them anymore to cope with a child's energy level.

Do I say, its always bad? No. Most music does little for me. The number of concerts I've gone to completely on my own hook is less than the fingers on my hands. More tellingly, I have probably purchased less than twenty tapes and CD's in my life.

Do I disdain music? Not so much. No I simply recognize/suspect that others find something in it that I lack the ability to perceive. So yes, I am defective in that regard.

And of course, some people are really trying hard for greatness, and a child is a severe distraction. But, such ambition is often selfish and narcissistic.

Its "I want to be a Great Artist!" or "I want to make the Big Deal!" or "I want to absorb the Perfect Experience!"

Children force one to compromise, and to look beyond our own heads. For that, we ought to be grateful. Moderation in all things is not a bad rule of thumb to keep in mind (as long as one doesn't become moderate in the wrong ways, or consider this rule of thumb the frame of life instead of just an occasionally useful tool. Maybe later, I'll talk more on moderation and extremism, if I can untangle my thoughts.)

2005-08-22T10:32:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Singular Lack of Conservatism

Yesterday, Right Wing News took to task a newspaper, and some parents who brought an autistic child in to a theatre. There the child laughed loudly at a family film, but according to the mother, not much more so than the other children.

Problem is, one does not know if she is telling the truth, or if some idiot heard an extra two decibels, and was enough to set him off, and set the manager then went to work. End result, the family is kicked out, they got their money back, the manager may be in trouble (which he probably should not be...some times there are no great decisions), and the film went on.

The paper reported this as a horror for the child. Right Wing News and its commenters thought of it as a case of society protecting itself against a disruptive influence. And they invoked the sanctity of contracts.

Indeed, one fellow went so far as to support jamming cel phones in restaruants, even if the person might be an EMT or fireman, because that was just too bad, and it was the fault of the loud talkers on cel phones who made him block an EMT's cel phone.

Thats not conservatism. Thats being a well-mannered prig, but it does illustrate the problem.
Now he was chastised, but it didn't dent his narcissism. The others were less narcissist, but still an outlier can often show what the more normal have in lesser degree.

The chief logical problem I see here is that people are leaning on one singular value, the Sanctity of Contracts...aka the Movie or the Restaraunt made a contract with me, and they better fulfill it. Well, first, I don't think most Restaraunt's would agree they made a contract with you to keep some overloud boor at the next table from spouting on about his new cigarrette speed boat which he bought with a Christmas bonus. An absurd oversensitivity is at work here driving this choice of Sanctity of Contracts as mental tower of protection from any other values at work in this area.

Conservatism is not founded on one principle, but it uses multiple principles, understanding that any one principle is flawed. Those who take one principle, and push it past the point where it makes logical sense are generally considered Liberals. Those who trumpet rights over responsibilities are not usually considered Conservative either.

The Samurai had their one principle...Obedience. Even if the lord commanded one to slay one's own family, it was to be done. That is not moral to me. Nor is it conservative.

Sanctity of Contracts is not the only value in play here.

There are other more important issues.

For a society to live, it requires compromises from harsh rights. Your right of not being bothered is subject to a ton of restrictions, including Monday morning traffic jams. So grow up, and quitcher liberal whining. Show some fortitude in the face of Adversity which by another name is Life. It is not all about you.

For a society to live, it requires children. And here is the real crux. The childless don't want to be bothered by the efforts of the childed to raise the next generation while of course, they want all the benefits thereof. Selfish narcissists of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but the wails of an infant.

We don't have enough children in America as it is. Without immigration, we would be in negative population growth. Which says that our society is sick.

Let me repeat that. Negative population growth is proof of societal breakdown and maladjustment of a most severe degree.

We need to encourage more people to have more children, instead of increasing the already back-breaking burdens on a family. Make it easier to have children instead of harder.

Be a real conservative. Support your local family.

2005-08-22T10:19:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Error in Iraq?

Lump on a Blog is worried that GWB has allowed Islamic teaching too great a place in the making of the Iraqi Constitution. There are some worrying signs, but on the whole, I think it will be well.

“Iraqi Talks Move Ahead on Some Issues,” The Sunday New York Times did report, under an August 20 Baghdad deadline, that “Under a deal brokered Friday by the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, Islam was to be named “a primary source of legislation” in the new Iraqi constitution, with the proviso that no legislation be permitted that conflicted with the ‘universal principles’ of the religion. The latter phrase raised concerns that Iraqi judges would have wide latitude to strike down laws now on the books, as well as future legislation. At the same time, according to a Kurdish leader involved in the talks, Mr. Khalilzad had backed language that would have given clerics sole authority in settling marriage and family disputes. That gave rise to concerns that women’s rights, as they are enunciated in Iraq’s existing laws, could be curtailed. Finally, according to the person close to the negotiations, Mr. Khalilzad had been backing an arrangement that could have allowed clerics to have a hand in interpreting the constitution.”

That has problems, but sometimes a word means what those in power say it means aka the guys with the biggest guns which happens to be the US Army. Our job in Germany after we settled the unrest was to ensure that 1)The Sovs didn't gobble up the damaged West of Europe 2)Ensure by our very presence that no German nut rose to power because we were there as an extra-constitutional veto on any such thing.

Thats where we are heading with Iraq. It reminds one of Turkey where the Army does the same thing. They step in and step out, but only when the voters go nuts, and they wisely avoid the temptation of a military junta by stepping back out. Which on the whole is a rather remarkable thing; in its way, as remarkable as some American innovations.

2005-08-22T09:03:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Today's Goals

Send out several stories. Monkey Singularity, Vacation for a Verser, and I think Sleeping Dragon are on this list.
Clean house! General stuff aka clutter patrol, and clothes-washing beg for time. Rreconstruct the back bedroom after the shambles that painting the walls a nice Lagoon Blue created. (One can never fix something, and not create a mess.)
Wash the floor.
Read a book to Gigglebox
Exercise with Gigglebox
Try Gigglebox on crayons now that he doesn't try to eat them
Edit my second novel, Worldwalker. I need to learn how to do descriptions better.

2005-08-21T22:29:00.000-05:00

Blog Update to Come

I probably do need to add Cumberland Centre and the Shire of Delvingrim to my blog, and a few other locals.

If anyone has any suggestions, feel free to drop a note to me, and I'll check out the links offered to see if they fit my sites varied goals.

1. Promote Hohenwald and area
2. Provide News to Hohenwald and area
3. Diary about my life
4. Promote my writing and game design
5. Provide an arena to sharpen my ideas
6. Promote various cool things like the SCA, and so forth
7. Testify to Christ the Risen Redeemer.

2005-08-21T22:24:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Cumberland Centre

It is just east of I-65 at the milepost 37 exit. Granted, there's a few roads that lead this way and that that you have to follow, but then there's also signs put out before events to lead you gently by the hand to some good fun.

Here's a link.

2005-08-21T22:17:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Shire of Delvingrim Meeting

The local SCA shire, which covers a huge chunk of Middle Tennessee, had their monthly meeting at Lion Park in Columbia. A fair-sized group attended, at least by the time, I arrived, which was late.

They are planning to run Hooves and Paws, an equestrian (that means horses, folks, as in Daddy, can I have a pony?) event at Glaedenfeld, err Cumberland Center (the name has changed, but I still think of it as Gladenfeld) this fall. I'll try to get more data on it later, but it looks good.

And Update: Its November 4-6 which they told me, but I forgot. But Cumberland Centre has a very nice website.

Good food, nice and extensive site, quick access to modern conveniences if neccessary, bathrooms, campground, and entertainment all at a very reasonable price.

I've said it before, but for your entertainment dollar, an SCA event is hard to beat.

2005-08-18T12:38:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Constellation SF Con

Constellation is coming up at the beginning of October, and I plan on going to that one as well. Granted, the gaming looks thin, even if its run by Wayne Brown who does a good job, but also I'm running which should help (he said immodestly), and its a chance to see a lot of old friends.

I expect Patrick Adams of the Emergency Society will be running his usual brilliantly weird LARP. If you don't like Larp because its full of pretentious vampires, and complicated rules then you need to play one of Adams' games.

The rules are dead simple. A little too simple actually, but workable, and it avoids the hour long arguements of other larps.

And one character I played was something like the undersecretary for art from an alien planet who knew that Earth was being threatened by a giant comet. Unfortunately, the budget for the giant comet gun to protect Earth was going to come out of my art budget.

TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!!!

Art come first before some piddling little planet!!

That gives you a taste of the Emergency Society's work.

Anyways, I'll be running Multiverser, and probably a railroad game. Hopefully, I'll get to play in Mike Hurley's Twilight Imperium, and I may try Heroscape.

2005-08-18T12:32:00.000-05:00

Hohewald News: Hallowcon

Hallowcon, a horror convention, is coming up at the end of October which is also coincidentally near Halloween. Hmm, signs of a clue here as to the theme...

Anyways, with more seriousness. It will be in Chattanooga, and I hope a number of my readers can make it over there.

I'll be running two Multiverser games, and an Iron Dragon rail game.

Also, I'll be speaking for an hour. Not sure of the topic yet, as I'm still in the midst of emailing this back and forth with the director, a gent by the name of Dutch.

I'll get back to ya'll later with more details.

2005-08-15T18:58:00.000-05:00

Weekly Update: Gigglebox Just Walked!

My youngest boy, Gigglebox, just walked.

To set the scene: I'm sitting at the computer looking at Right Wing News, and Gigglebox is on my left standing, but attached to his Da. Mr. C is in the playroom just around the corner, and down a step. The boys have been having a good time playing with their toys, and I've been occasionally wondering if I should make them clean up. Gigglebox lets go of my left thigh, which is par for the course for him as he has been standing up by himself for a long time.

Then out of the corner of my eye, I see that he has taken what looks to be a step. I turn my head and look, fairly sure that I'm wrong. Another step slow and contemplative, but not all that slow. More like testing of a theory one is pretty sure is true. Another, and another both faster than the test all the way over to his high chair which he grasps. Four steps for his first voyage. We knew you had it in you, Gigglebox!

Little boy was just cautiously making sure he knew what he was doing before he charged out to take the field (unlike his pleased Da who has a tendency to charge first, question later.)

Too bad Mommy was asleep, but then she was justifiably exhausted.

This is a great day! Now where do I buy a leash to keep him under control? and Thank You, Lord for your good gifts.

2005-08-15T18:19:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Harry Potter and the GWOT

I enjoyed the book enough to finish it the same day I got it. Even if Ms. Rowling's politics don't quite agree with mine, at least we are in agreement that confronting evil is necessary.

Its evident on page one that Ms. Rowling doesn't like President Bush. I'm not sure why other than she's adopting class prejudgices. I'm sure there might be other reasons.

Its also evident on several closely following pages that she admires Tony Blair, and that she thinks the way the Opposition smirks at any misfortune to the Land, and considers it an opportunity for political gain is disgraceful. On these two points we are in agreement.

As to what Dumbledore's death represents (and in my mind, the closest person to Dumbledore is George Bush, compassionate, uncanny wisdom, offbeat, and tough as nails with a tendency to follow his own plans), well I'm not sure. I think its pretty clear that he half-expected his death, and that somehow Snape's attack is actually some means of saving him.

Indeed, there are interesting parrallels to Gandalf falling into the Abyss under the Bridge. And then rising more powerful, and wiser than before.

At one point in the story, Dumbledore points out a mechanism whereby tyrants fall. They create their own nemeses. Perhaps Dumbledore wanted to give this process a push, if it came to that. Indeed now, Harry is consumed with determination to finish Voldemort.

Verra interesting. Oftentimes artists speak truths they don't really comprehend themselves.

2005-08-15T12:00:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Work in Spurts

I got nearly four thousand words done yesterday night, along with a quite productive day, so today was a let down day. Other than a couple emails detailing some cons I plan on going to (Hallowcon and Constellation), and some more reading of Our Southern Highlanders, not much.

Perhaps tonight I'll finish Deliver in Thirty, or do some editing of Worldwalker.

I'm looking for conventions in the Mid Tenn area that need a cheap guest, anyone know of any?

2005-08-13T20:07:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Something We Should Find in School

Here is a very good skeptic's take on Evolution by a non-Creationist. Plus its pretty funny.

2005-08-12T23:51:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Mary Persnickety Perrin

Our local columnist in the weekly, Lewis County Herald, is Mary Perrin who for being a liberal isn't that bad. But she objects to Tennesseans for Tax Revolt asking for a year and a bit more in advance promises by politicians not to raise any form of taxes.

She suggests that this might look un-progressive. People might question your willingness to fund a new and needed government program. Shiver, horrors. You mean, I might not look like I was just itching to rip open your wallet to fund a program designed to get me re-elected? Oh my, someone catch me, pul-lease, I've got the vapors. I'm going to faint! (for full effect, sing-song this out loud in a wailing voice.)

How about this? If such a really necessary program comes by, we get rid of one of the wasteful and illegal pork troughs we have, and replace it with something needful. Y'know, like Mom replacing your selection of ice cream bars with hamburger when you were a little kid in a store.

Now it might seem a trifle insulting to ask Phil Bredesen to promise never, no never, but folks he is at the end of teh day, a politician. Even though I think he is probably a good politician, but still, wouldn't you feel better with a little insurance?

Sign the Pledge, Mr. Bredesen, and then urge the Democratic and Republican legislators to do likewise. And Ms. Perrin, progressive doesn't mean good, it means lefty. So yes, I think I'd prefer to look un-progressive, after all, this state needs a lot of reform, not progress toward a cliff.

2005-08-12T23:47:00.000-05:00

Weekly Update

Blogger is working again!!
Have to go dump some books and a decrepit lawnmower down at the Food Bank.
Have to go clean off the roof because something has taken root up there, and is shooting down into my roof which is not a good thing at all. Me being irresponsible, or just overwhelmed, and I thought it was clean enough up there. Guess not.
Got some more stories sent back out again, and got a nice comment from one editor about an engaging story and a smooth flow. That helps.
Just wrote up most of a rather amusing short story about a girl who runs a pizza shoppe, and uses it as her base for her detective agency as well.
Interesting Alternate Historical question: How would the US be different if we had not embarked on the Interstate Hwy building project?

2005-08-12T23:40:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Pink Cadillac

The local outdoor theatre, the Pink Cadillac will be having the regular two-fer this weekend.

Dukes of Hazzard followed by Bewitched. This looks decently interesting, but since money is short, and we got several good flicks in from Netflex (including a Tommorrow People disc which is weirdly 70's plus British), I think we will pass.

2005-08-11T12:00:00.000-05:00

Weekly Update: Less Toys, More Play

It does seem to be an inverse relationship that having less toys out, actually leads to more playing with those toys.

This should not surprise me as I've long thought we had too much stuff, and that it got in the way of enjoying life. I'm a proponent of ease of life, and fun experiences...low bills and lots of space and eating out all encourage this more than high bills, eating in (except when its fun which is most of the time--how pathetic is that? One of the high points of the day is my making dinner), and storing bundles of stuff.

I need to go through our stuff again and throw/donate more of it.

2005-08-11T11:53:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Art and Politics

Terry Teachout explains that art and politics can mix, but that in general the effect is usually boring propaganda rather than something truly interesting.

http://www.incharacter.org/article.php?article=32

2005-08-10T09:51:00.000-05:00

Weekly Update: High Scores

Let me commemorate my score of 598 on Scarab 21 on Neopets. I also, I think, ran through the deck four plus times. Considering that the Ashley La Casa had only been host to a 300 plus score, and one run-through of the deck, I felt pretty good about this, and kinda tired too...after a while, continuous decent luck gets boring.

Although, lack of luck is also boring.

2005-08-10T09:50:00.000-05:00

Blog Update: Blogger Problems

For some reason, my blog page is missing its italics and bolds and hyperlinking capability. We shall limp on ward despite our cool techie toys.

2005-08-09T23:14:00.000-05:00

Tennesse Writer: Idea Remembered

Thankfully, the idea resurfaced.

"The Summons" has a couple go off to a graveyard to do, well you know, and on top of an evil man's grave. So they summon a bratty imp, and an angel appears and tells them that they have to civilize the imp, and if they fail, it will eventually get big and strong, and then eat their hearts.

2005-08-09T22:58:00.000-05:00

Weekly Update: Vacation Breeds Vacation

Not always, but you know how people say they need a vacation to recover from their vacation? Well, I had vacation today, I got a couple hours reading a novel at a Chinese restauraunt by myself without kids or wife. Just like in the old days (which were pretty dull, and often painful, but its nice to revisit my wild party days of sitting in restauraunts peacefully reading books).

So I should be finding a site to send my stories to, or expanding my RED/BLUE Civil War game setting, or revising I, Tadeusz, or writing a story...instead, I'm going to play a card game on Neopets. May get a little work done, but not much.

2005-08-09T22:33:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Idea Lost

I had a good idea for a short story earlier today, and it seems to have floated off, but perhaps some quiet listening will bring it back.

Also, I read most of Mountain Magic, a collection of short stories, with Henry Kuttner's Hogban family of mutants in Appalachia, and David Drake's Old Nathan the Witch.

Need to clean house tommorrow, and send some stories out. And track down the USA Today I bought since it had a lot of silly things in it that could be blogged.

2005-08-08T12:48:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Constitutional Debates in Iraq Look Good

While the birthing pains of a democracy truly are traumatic, and at times a bit scary, it looks good in Iraq.

2005-08-08T12:23:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Canada as Threat

Is Canada a danger to America? Not in the sense of an invasion, or even with its trivial sneers, but with its attempt to bind America's military power? Sapolsky thinks so.

He claims that the Land Mine treaty (which should allow US timed and self-detonating mines, but doesn't), and the International Criminal Court are attempts led by Canada to hinder US military forces, and thus puts our soldiers in danger.

Good points, and although I'm not mad at the Canadians for it, I hope they won't be mad when I suggest messing with them a bit until they learn better behaviour.

Hat tip, Dean's World.

2005-08-08T12:18:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: The Blog's Big Picture

Vyk Rubenfield of the Big Picture lays out the difference between the Mainstream News Media and the Blogosphere. It is, the difference between the investigator, and the analyst he claims correctly.

I think he has a point. Following the rule that stupidity explains more than malice one is confronted with the MSM's terribly bad analytical work. Most bloggers assume this is partisan reporting, and bias, which no doubt much is. But there is so much of it, that one is reminded of the rule of Stupidity Explains more than Malice in Human Affairs, and one has to assume that the MSM just doesn't know what its doing.

Luckily, the Blogs are here to analyze. And for more analysis, go here.

2005-08-07T13:19:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Need to Send out Some Stories

Need to send out Square Rules, Treachery in the Blood, and Vacation for a Verser on Monday. Plus, clean the house.

And start working on Grim Futures, my AH settings for Multiverser. Its almost done, but I need to finish it. After that, Worldwalker, I think.

Course, there's going to be other stuff stuck in there as I don't function too well on a straight pattern. I need to improvise. Sometimes I get tired of doing one thing, and really need to shift. So, I have learned a bit to allow myself some flexibility. Of course, that can be an excuse to avoid finishing what one started...

2005-08-07T13:12:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Embryonic Cold Fusion

The Wide Awakes takes that darling of the Liberals, the embryonic stem cell project out, and spanks the little brat good.

2005-08-07T13:09:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Let Freedom Ring!

The Berlin Wall is coming down again. NOW, the "National Organization of Very Few Women" got $44,000 dollars in donations last year. Which should pay for one round of lattes for their management....and one self-congratulatory dinner with lobster and steak with a small caulflower mashed replacement for baked potato.

It will be about how they did good, but now they are closing.

Hat tip, Dean's World.

2005-08-05T11:28:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: How to Tell if You're a Poseur
--Humor

To be a poseur, as I understand it, is to be a fake. Especially to be one that goes on about how great they are, with little or no skill to back up the song. I like to think that with my natural inclination to honesty (naive beliefs in sweet reason, and that I am in possession of correctitude), plus parents who tended toward the theory of "I'll spank you twice as hard for lying." or some such thing, and despite my self-delusions, I think I'm less of a poseur than most.

Does that make me a certified poseur checker, and a good person to do this list? No. Such an attitude would be a sign of a poseur. I'm just going to do the list anyways.

You tell your boyfriend, later husband, how much you love football, but you always end up cleaning the rugs in the other room when IT is on. This is a poseur, but they are cute so we forgive them.
You interview some poor author on the radio, not telling everyone that you never even opened the book. This is a poseur. Look folks, if you're going to provide an Air Sandwhich with a side helping of Vacuum Salad, you might want to tell people. Otherwise, bzzz. Its just dead air.
You tell your friends how ultra-hot you are at the latest game, and that you've beat it at Killer Level when you really only trounced it with cheats on Newbie Level. This is poseur-hood. Look simple honesty creates more dignity than wildly inflated claims.
You tell your friends how you got to third base with the girl you got a crush on. Who doesn't even remember your name half the time. Dude this is stupid too. You think she's not going to hear the rumors, and hate your guts? At least she'll remember your name, right?
You tell your customer that you will surely be done by Tuesday fixing his car. Its Friday, and he's waiting in the car lot to make sure you actually do the job, and then later he finds you messed it up. Poseurhood. Plus a customer that will never go back to you again. Properly managing expectations is key, and if you totally lack the time, or the skill then say so!
You yell at your kids in the store "If you don't come right now! I'm going to ..." This is the fifth time you've said this. Very loudly. Consider A)Actually spanking the insubordinate rascal in a calm and consistent manner B)Giving up, since you're doing no good anyways. Might as well let him burn the store down quietly. This is a poseur. Or a really tired parent. If consistent behavior then a poseur, or someone who has no clue.
You care about animals so much, you send them to the pound where they are A)Released after someone pays a large fee--Not happening folks. B)Executed. But we are so much more merciful than the farmer who drowned kittens in a sack. Or perhaps, we're just poseurs.
You claim to care about homosexual rights, so you ignore the way Islamofascists tip walls over on them. Me, I don't care about homosexual rights. I care about human rights. Yes, you're a poseur.
You're an Islamofascist who screams out death threats and raves of jihad, but when greater security threatens your hobby, you blame it for your actions. Oops, thats not a poseur, that's a self-serving idiot. Lets' see, you, Islamofascist, shopper at Tyrants-r-us, scream hate and blood, but then shut up and act real peacable when the wrath of the Americans makes itself known. Yes, you're a poseur. A bully too. Like a tenth grader beating up a third grader, and then whimpering when the principal shows up. Poseur.
You're GWB who is standing for a war on terror, and has democratized against great strain twenty-five million people. So far, so good. You're messing with Dr. Mad Kimchee's head. Also good. You're letting Iranians get nuclear weapons. You're not dropping bombs on the nuke sites. You're not invading Iran. I'm starting to wonder if the omnipresent strain (which would break most men like a twig) is getting to you, and you're slipping into poseurhood. Remember the Texan saying, All hat, and no cattle. You don't want that. Remember another saying or two...Do you want to live forever? Lets string them buzzards up. (After a proper war crimes tribunal, of course.)

2005-08-05T11:22:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Jump Onto the Future

Michael S. Malone of ABC news has a very impressive summary of the past thirty years, with a look at Moore's Law. He then points out that miracles happen when Moore's Law (semiconductor performance doubles every eighteen to twenty-four months) kicks in for an industry. And that it is now kicking in for the Blogosphere.

Hang on to your hat folks. Hat tip, Insty.

Sides, this comments of one new blog being added every second remind me of the end of my novel, Death of a Blogger. Its an old SF staple that when a certain density of neurons is achieved...

2005-08-05T00:35:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: BLEEP!!--A Short Story on Vulgarity

BLEEP!!
By Eric R. Ashley

I agree with people way too much. Its part of my job, and my nature, but its also why I got this new job which I’m not suited for. Here I am, walking off a jump gate ring ramp, ready to jump into a low meta-cycles distortion engine starship for the last ten lightyears of my trip to the wrong side of the galaxy. I’m supposed to be going to Tau Ceti’s Grandmaster Level Marketing University, but instead Ceres Corp wants me to check out why the miners of Dolor Four aren’t producing in proper quantity.

Did I say “Bleep, bleep, NO!” or even a polite and definite “No.”; of course not, I’m always trying to negotiate a way for everyone to leave the table happy with me being the happiest. So I got bum-rushed into doing a job no one wanted to do, and I have to wait another year, at least for another opening in the very exclusive school. It makes me want to curse, but I won’t because I’m focused on my mission.

Ten hours later, and I walk down another ramp to be met by the local management of the mining colony on Dolor IV. It is a gray, dusty world, even before the mining mechs started to chew it apart, and the skyhooks began to tote its substance into orbit where it can be properly managed in the ubiquitous micro-gravity factories of Settled Space.

My driver, the first thing he does is to start telling me about the weather. But its not a quick report. No, every other word is a curse word. Let me summarize his paragraph for you. Its dusty today, will be so tomorrow. I did not correct his speech to my standards for my great skill is to fit in with other people, even if those people have ways that are considerably out of the norm for the mainstream of galactic society. Besides, other than it being slower than my typical driver, it was sort-of entertaining. Already I could see entertainment being in short supply here.
I met the management again at the hq. The briefed me on the situation. Vingardian Flynson Clan miners had taken over from the Sondu Family miners after Sondu tried to strike too hard for more pay. So the Vingardians were using equipment not to their precise specs, but it was reasonably standard stuff, still. But the Vingardians were not producing as much as the Sondu. The Ceres Corp was unhappy thinking they might have to go crawling back to the Sondu to finish the job in time.

Enter me, the all-powerful and wise troubleshooter. Who did not have a clue what he was doing. The local management complained of a number of problems with a great deal of colorful vulgarities which shocked my ears a bit, and so I saw it was a Vingardian thing, a mainstay of their culture was just how good you were at swearing. I shrugged, and did a mental switch, and accepted it. No more shocking or outrageous than the Kithi who insist on nakedness in public, or the Tak who really, really, really like the color red.

Most of the problems they complained about did not seem serious. Little things which might cause a hiccup, but not a general slowdown. So I politely, and as indirectly as possible inquired into the miners qualifications for running the equipment.

After a bit, they understood what I meant, and that I was not trying to insult them, but that I really had to know if perhaps the miners were a bunch of dumb galoots who could not handle the job. So they took me out to a mech control unit, and inside. Let me choose one at random. Inside I saw a dazzling array of controls, and a busy operator playing them with virtuosity.

It turned out that it took three years to learn to run one, and since I already knew that it takes four years to learn to be a starship pilot (and twenty-five years of study to be a Certified Marketing Genius like me which skill was wasted here), I understood that these were highly skilled and trained individuals.

I talked to the man, and found out further that he had read several of my books on marketing including my most difficult text, which assured me of his intelligence. Of course, like all the Vingardians, he interspersed all this display of skill and grace with dozens of swear words. But by now, I had ceased to notice it, and in fact, I had begun to imitate it with a fair amount of skill. Too bad, I did not have a harder time assimilating, because then I might have noticed things earlier.

I went out and talked to the robot mechs as well. They have shallower personalities than men, more fragile, more simple, and sometimes there is a strange echo like there is a hollow space in their mind. But, they explicitly claimed to be working as hard as they could. And a robot cannot lie about something like that. In fact, robots lie very poorly at all.

I went back, unpacked, and studied things more. Ate dinner with the management, and other than getting a headache from all the loud cursing, and being unable to hold onto a logical thread with anyone else in the midst of the noise, I decided next time to eat with a smaller group in a separate room. Perhaps then, I could find some suspicions in a more relaxed atmosphere.

Thus I began wandering about, studying the data, and “holding court”. I’d invite groups of men from each section as a whole to eat with me in private, and we would talk about the problems. They were smart guys, and in small groups of five or four the noise problem was bearable, and I could actually hold a speculative brainstorming session. The men, at first thought I was trying to be royal, or that I was trying to intimidate them, but they soon saw that I wanted to fix the problem. They did too, so we got on pretty well.

Except for Hardison. He had a chip on his shoulder, and I think was bound to be soon fired anyways. I invited Section S-14 to dinner, three weeks after I arrived, still stumped, and fretted for Home Office was wondering when I was going to produce a miracle. Hardison came with them. Immediately, he started debating my points, and jumping up and down.

I am really amiable as I say, but I was tired. So I snapped at him to sit down. Instead, he jumped up, and began advancing on me with every word a vile curse word, and his face twisted in fury. I was born on Lakarga, and Hardison was a big guy, a tough guy, and I was a little marketing wizard. He would break me in half.

So I panicked, and did as we would have done on Lakarga. Lakargans don’t swear at each other except for the prelude to some dreadful violence. And even then, a lot of times we don’t even say anything, and we just do it. Yes, as a talker, a jaw-jaw type person, I was dreadfully out of place in the grim austerity of the blood feuds of my native planet.

I slipped out my neural destabilizer pistol which was up my sleeve, and pointed it at him. Two seconds later, I realized I’d made a dreadful mistake. Hardison stared at me in utmost astonishment. He had never intended violence. Instead, he planned to get in my face, and yell at me for ten minutes.

I apologized of course, but the story was soon going to be over the whole planet, and then back home, and I might be relieved in disgrace. Especially considering I had not solved the problem yet. I had perhaps, two days.

Then one stat of the many I saw in my now gloomy studies of numbers jumped out at me. The safety stats for the interaction of men without control chambers, and robots (aka robots rolling over men’s feet, and such) was almost exactly identical to the slowed productivity rate. It was probably a meaningless pattern in the data, but it was all I had.

So I asked the men about safety. They admitted that the Sondu machines had slightly different safety specs than their regular machines, but no big deal. Granted a few people had gotten feet crushed, and the repair logs showed higher levels, much higher levels of repair time for safety functions in the robots than was at all reasonable.

Now I was convinced I was on to something. So I asked about two dozen men to climb outside their control chambers, and direct the robots from outside. It was more inefficient, they grumpily pointed out, but I was the boss, so I got what I wanted. Then I watched.
One at a time, it was not obvious, but with two dozen robot mechs, giant machines capable of chewing down a mountain in hours, in a small area, it took me a minute to see it, and three minutes to be sure. Each and every time one of the men swore, which they did with great faculty and volume and amount, the robot mech would make a small jerk in their direction.
I asked the robots about this.

They informed me that a swear word was a sign of danger, or of actual physical harm. So they had to investigate before going back to regular work to make sure that their human operators were not in trouble or damaged. I laughed, and of course, all these little jerks off course made them more likely to actually damage the humans. But most obviously, it threw them off their groove.

And the men thought that Sondu machines were just naturally not as smooth as Vingardian. Instead, it was their repeated cries of “Danger!” that were throwing the big machines out of whack. If the Vingardians had been like the Sondu, or had used their own machines this would not have been a problem.

To double-check, I searched the planet for a Vingardian who did not swear like a sailor, whatever a sailor is. Some type of hyper-spatial rudder I think. There were a few. Their machines ran fine, and here I learned a valuable lesson. I should have been looking at the guys who were doing it right to search for differences.

So I had them show others on the others machines, and while it was better, it still was not up to speed. Now I had two data points. Non-swearers on their own machines did okay. Non-swearers on others machines did far better, but still not good enough.

So I inquired of the machines as to the problem. I asked them what was the difference. After a bit the machines hesitantly pointed out that they like to be like their operators assistants. I nodded. It is a well-known phenomenon. A robot will tend to mimic the humans in its vicinity.
They told me they spoke to each other like the humans did.

It took me a second to understand, but then I saw it. Each and every one of the billions of sentences of programming code that these machines exchanged within themselves was larded with the fat of unnecessary vulgarities. Each one by itself hardly slowed them down, but by the billions, it actually made a measurable difference in how fast they reacted.
I told them to stop it.

They refused. I snarled threats of unemployment. They pointed out relevant sections in the robotic employment manual which basically allowed robots to mimic humans to the degree the robots felt was necessary to avoid emotional hardship.
I did the only thing I could do.

I started cursing, and only stopped intermittently to search the galactic want adds for employment. Unfortunately, I found I was out of practise with using Standard English, and since that was my primary job skill, that hurt.

THE END.

2005-08-04T12:38:00.000-05:00

Blog Update: Classic Movies Gets New Digs

Jay Moffitt, an eccletic book reader (who is reading my novel Death of a Blogger), and a genial fountain of knowledge about movies (past and present although he seems to prefer past) has moved into some new digs at Classic Movies.

Update your hyperlinks with http://classicmovie.blogspot.com/.

I hope I can convince him to add stills to his new site, and hey, what about videos? That would be too cool. Stills you might be able to get from Picassa. Videos, you might want to talk to Rhyanne Hodgson of freevlog.

I've also added Right Wing News to my blogroll as a news source.

Now I really need to write the end of the "Saint Ayn, Save Me!" humorous jab at Objectivists short story, and resend out Generation Gap. But its hard to get motivated when I've done so much short story writing in the last week. I guess I should finish this story, and then go to work on editing Worldwalker. Oops, I'm really wandering off topic here.

2005-08-04T11:11:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Souter = Roberts

Powerline thinks that Ann Coulter may be faking it, trying to protect Roberts on the right. I don't understand. Perhaps they are trying to say that if Ann doesn't like him maybe the liberals will give him a pass since Ann plus liberals equals body parts scattered just all over the dining room rug.

OTOH, Ann's objections to John Roberts seem quite reasonable, and all too drearily likely. Apparently its too much to ask to have a Supreme Court Justice we know is conservative. We have to rely on intuition and faint hopes.

2005-08-04T11:04:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Intelligent Design and the President

Hugh Hewitt has a few good words about the President's comments on Intelligent Design (which most people believe in), and Instapundit, who's usually pretty good has a few words representing the out of touch establishment.

Folks, to use Insty's idea, there is a preference cascade waiting to happen, its like an avalanche. Most people don't really buy Evolution. Even most of them that buy it aren't that happy with it. But people are intimidated into thinking that its unscientific to try to use the scientific method. But when enough people come out and say..."hey, the Emperor has no clothes" there comes a tipping point, and suddenly everyone is saying it.

2005-08-03T21:39:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Books Read Recently

Melody's Pre-Owned Books has taken some more of my money. I've just read Fire in the Mist, by Holly Lisle, which is a pretty decent story, not her best, but enjoyable.

Have dipped into an anthology entitled Mountain Magic so as to help me write some stories about my home country.

Also took a look at Eyes of the Calculor which looks to be satisfying with a fairly weird future setting.

I've been catching up on my reading, also at the local library with Act of War by Dale Brown which is his attempt to start a new series. I like the robo-suit, but its not as good as Flight of the Old Dog which set off his first series. But in ways, one reads Brown for the tech, and for the interpersonal struggles between the Americans, and not so much for the story.

I feel like it had potential, and then it wilted a bit.

I'm reading a non-fiction on Sherman's March by somebody, I'll have to post on this again. Its good even though it covers much of the same ground that Ripples of Battle with Hansen covered. Of course, this is an older book.

It makes the point, no doubt unpopular, in the South (although I'm not sure about my highlander neighbours) that Sherman's cruelty was calculated to end a crueler war.

And I'm still slowly making my way, not for lack of excellence in the book, which is very cool, but for the sake of other books, and to let this one sink in...Our Southern Highlanders.

Yah, I've been doing quite a bit of reading lately.

2005-08-03T21:34:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Lileks Shows the UN All the Respect It Deserves
--Humor & Government

The terrifically funny James Lileks, a daily read for the author of this blog, postulates a hypothetical...A Day at the Office for John Bolton. Link here, hat tip, Insty.

8:03 -- Security makes Bolton go through the metal detector six times, convinced he's hiding brass knuckles somewhere. He leaves, grasping the detachable metal handle of his briefcase, smiling privately.

2005-08-03T11:19:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Blogger Murdered

This is just sickening, but hardly surprising. The blogosphere is taking point against the Islamofascists, and the fascists respond by murder. Stephen Vincent, author and blogger, was murdered by gunmen dressed up as police in Basra, Iraq.

He was a supporter of the war, but wanted more forceful indoctrination in democracy by the British and the Americans. His death seems to have proved his point that we are letting the religio-fascists out of control. We need to stomp on Basra hard after this incident.

I begin to think we need to outlaw the hejab just to annoy the fascists. In any case, it does not seem the time to argue over strategy, but to mourn a decent and wise man whose service to America and Iraq was cut short by his inferiors.

May God keep him in perfect peace, and bring His wrath down on the wicked who did this. Let them know the terror of the Just One. Let their days be filled with fear so that they shiver where they creep, and their nights with sleeplessness and visions of horror until the murder of a decent man is repaid in their own blood.

For more, go here.

2005-08-01T11:44:00.000-05:00

Weekly Update: Two Birthdays At Once

This last weekend, we went to the Rocket City, and its Chuck-e-Cheeses to have a birthday party for Mr. C and for P.

My brother (who makes my 6,2 and 240 pound self look small) and I got a chance to catch up, and to talk theory of this and that which we dearly love to do. He's on a kick about pschyological heresies influencing Christianity. The notion that Pschyology is a religion is interesting.

We ended up agreeing that if you trimmed some of the self-promotion, and the hype from pschyology and the incorect premises (like humans are basically good) you might end up with some useful common sensical advice. Of course, few people would pay a hundred bucks an hour for that....

He also made a very interesting comment to me that I should not assume everyone acts from strictly self-interested motives although thinking such is a temptation at times. Very insightful of him as I am pretty cynical at times.

The Party, you want to hear about the party, and not about two guys gabbing, hunh?

The gifts filled the table like a mountain of heighth and steepness that would require a bold ant mountaineer to scale. We've added a near cube of construction paper for Mr. C to cut up wiht his prized scissors (and for Da to clean up afterwards), and a new bike for our 4yr. old.

The other boys all got gifts as well since one cannot just give gifts to one toddler and have the rest understand. We gave them balls to bounce with, and one globe ball so that they could point out where there home is.

The other birthday boy, a fine little fellow, got a spin itself ball that fascinated the child in me, and will hopefully spend much time bouncing its random path around their living room floor as the boys try to jump on it.

OK, enough random blatherings...really, I do sometimes write better than this.

Oh, yeah, the next day, Mr. C is burning up with a fever, so we kept him quiet, dosed him, and today, he seems mostly well, but he's staying home anyways.

2005-08-01T11:37:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: Anchor Babies

An illegal immigrant pregnant mother enters California, has her baby via the emergency room, and her baby is now an American citizen. Then she has to stay here, as well, and other relatives too.

The anchor baby keeps the rest of its family in the US of A.

Its a problem.

I'm for immigration as it is a practical necessity, and an act of generosity.

But 1) Legal immigrants only please. Lets stop insulting those honest people who wait years to enter, and usually get badly treated. 2)Assimilation is a requirement. You don't come to America to recreate Mexico, okay? Mexico is messed up. We don't want it here.

There's lots more on the problems illegal immigrants are causing California here at the Tall Glass of Milk's hangout.

2005-08-01T11:27:00.000-05:00

Hohenwald News: All Hail Our Robed Masters

In Ohio, the State at the Center of America to hear them speak, a decidedly off-center, off-kilter judge has ....

Stop writing and we’ll reduce your charges, an Ohio prosecutor has told an editor, in essence now publicly admitting that the criminal charges lodged against the website writer are direct retaliation for his exercise of First Amendment rights.

That’s illegal.

That is worse than illegal if I understand this right. Its treason to the Constitution.

Julie Maxam writes more.

Although, she does at the end of her piece have a troubling bit of illegality herself where her copyright claims that no one can reproduce any of her piece. I trust she has hear of Fair Use which I believe my excerpt falls into.

2005-07-30T22:08:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Man in a Black Trenchcoat

Ellen de Jarvis was desperate in her small suburban home. The walls stifled her, and her breath trembled and throttled in her lungs. Now it gusted out like some stark nor'easter wind.

Pacing about, in the half-dark living room and fluttering her arms while insubstantial shadows roamed outside her darkened windows and looked for a way to peep inside to the De Jarvis family's homestead took a couple minutes. Then she resorted to cursing her husband's absence. Just because he had his job during these hours was no excuse for him to be separate from her when she needed him the most.

Choking and gasping, she made her decision. They could throw her under the jail cell, they could put her in those awful orange jumpsuits, and they could even take away her soaps, but she was leaving right now. It made her feel better, stand prouder, until the reality of what she was risking sank home into her stomach.

Holding her stomach against the acid, she went straight forward down the hall until sher reached Macy's room, and got her ready which was not hard for Mach was a very docile child.

====ok, that's enough for now. I gotta go to bed.

2005-07-30T22:06:00.000-05:00

Tennessee Writer: Posting Flash Fiction to ToT

For various reasons, which I may go into later, I'm going to try to post a piece of flash fiction to my blog...Man in a Black Trenchcoat is the story's title. I hope you enjoy.