About Me

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No, I'm some OTHER Anthony Anderson, not the one you might have seen in movies or on Law & Order. In addition to short stories in "Twisted Dreams", "Horrotica", and "The Nubian Chronicles"; I am also the author of "The Vile, Sinister, and Most Utterly Diabolical Account of Latrina Emerson" currently available at Amazon.com or at lulu.com I'm also part of The Gothic Creatives administrated by Andrea Dean von Scoyoc.

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

More Stuff from Latrina's World

One of the biggest joys/hassles I've had with writing "Latrina 2" (nope, I don't have a real title for it yet) was writing these passages that although were helpful in fleshing out characters and situations didn't actually go anywhere narrative-wise or really fit in with the storyline. For instance, I had written more stuff about Latrina's father, Joe, as a young man; but I can't quite see where it would fit in the book.



Graduation


It was the summer of 1965. Even before Principal Clancy had laid the diploma into his palm, Joe Emerson had put some serious thought into his future. He had briefly considered college but he hadn’t really seen himself as the scholarly type. He wasn’t afraid of cracking open a book every now and then, but he preferred a more “hands-on” approach to learning. Thus, he had picked up vocational training in automobile repair during school. Unfortunately, the sole repair shop in town was a family affair and that family looked like they were all going to wait until the Alabama National Guard was camped right out in front of their business before any of them would think of hiring a Negro. His only other real job option in town was picking up a few dollars doing odd jobs for Ennis Brown but that was only good for the short term. The way he saw it, a real man shouldn’t be content to nickel-and-dime his way through his entire life like that.
Joe had his plan worked out in head. As soon as he had scraped up enough for bus fare, he’d head out to the Army recruiting center in Montgomery and enlist. The times being what they were or at least what he’d seen on Ennis Brown’s television (he and his father Henry hadn’t yet gotten one of their own) he felt it was time to assert his right as a Negro, an American, and a man to be all he could be, see the world, and make his mark in it. And he was as sure as he was born that he wasn’t going to be able to do that anything like that in some little backwards backwater town like Placid Creek.
On the evening of July 17, Joe gained even more motivation to get out of town after he cold-cocked Johnny Blackman for addressing him as “nigger” one too many times. It had been something Joe figured would happen if he’d stayed in that town too long and, lo and behold, he turned out to be right. Earlier in the day, he and a teacher’s daughter named Rosalyn Mays had been enjoying a sunny afternoon repast of moon pies, peanuts, and RC Cola. He had lost track of the whole world in her kiss, his first and what would be his only for some time afterwards. Then Johnny had sneeringly come along and spoiled the whole moment.
Joe hadn’t decked the fool in front of Rosalyn, though. She’d been a firm believer of Dr. King’s doctrine of nonviolent resistance, loving one’s enemies, and turning the other cheek; so Joe had waited until later when he found Johnny’s drunk-as-usual ass alone behind the general store and turned that fool’s cheek with a right hook.
It was only as Johnny laid out flat on his back in the dust and contemplated the new stars he was seeing did Joe come to grips with the idea that he had made a very big mistake: Johnny Blackman was the sheriff’s son. Placid Creek didn’t actually have a creek and “placid” wasn’t a fitting description for some of the town’s heavily armed “God-fearing” residents who were more concerned about nonviolent Civil Rights protesters than they were about any particular deity’s wrath. Joe was enough of a country boy to know that when dumb animals got upset they could get vicious.
He also knew from the start that running back home would be a bad idea: that would be the first place Sheriff Blackman would look once Johnny woke up and went crying for his lawman daddy. Moreover, Joe’s own father would panic and waste too much precious time yelling at him, smacking him upside the head, and calling him all sorts of stupid jackass. Instead, he ran to Ennis Brown’s home.
Ennis Brown was banker for the town’s black folks, insurance underwriter for the town’s black folks, pastor of the only black church in town, and generally the kind of man who seemed to know things. Rumor had that Pastor Brown also “knew” a few townswomen in the biblical sense. After showing the sheriff’s knuckleheaded son his Muhammad Ali impersonation, however, Joe wasn’t interested in town gossip. He was interested in town departure.
As it turned out, Ennis Brown had seen such a predicament coming a long time ago. The pastor knew Joe was not normally stupid or hot-headed; but a young man could only swallow his pride so many times. If it hadn’t been Joe who cleaned Johnny Blackman’s clock, some other black man would’ve taken a swing at that bigoted bully. Seeing the need for a clear head and decisive action; Brown gave Joe’s father a very quick phone call and explained the situation. He then gave Joe some pocket money from his office safe and drove the young man to a friend’s [Brown’s] home in Montgomery…all the while taking every opportunity to yell at Joe, smack him upside the head, and call him all sorts of stupid jackass.
Thus did Joseph Lee Emerson finally get out of Placid Creek, Alabama, just as he intended if not exactly as he planned.
*
            It only when he’d gotten on the bus to Fort Hood that Joseph felt any guilt about the affair. Not about going upside Johnny Blackman’s thick head, but about not telling anyone—even Brown—about his intent to join the Army. As far as the pastor and his father had known, he had been lying low and working in Montgomery until things back home had died down. In reality, Joe had only stayed long enough for Brown to mail him his birth certificate. If he’d been asked then why he had kept his plans secret, he couldn’t have really said. No one had known until his first letter home from boot camp.
            After boot camp, he learned how to repair helicopters and other vehicles. During that time, he received occasional letters, two of which were from Ennis Brown. In both, Joe’s father—who’d never been keen on reading and writing beyond what was absolutely necessary—had sent along the same messages: “Hello. I’m getting by here. Hope you’re doing the same.” Joe suspected his that father had also had some choice words about his fool son running off and joining the Army but Brown had opted to leave those out.
            He also wrote three letters to Rosalyn who never wrote back.
            The third message from Pastor Brown had been via a phone call. Someone had to track him down to tell that his father had been hit by a car while he’d been walking home from a friend’s house one evening. He got as many dimes as he could and called—well, he couldn’t call home: there had been nobody there but him and his father. His mother and older sister had long since been taken by cancer. His father, despite another two short relationships with women, never had any more children. Aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and family reunions had been something other black people in Placid Creek had. Joe had never heard much about his mother’s side of family. His father had two sisters, no brothers; both women had long ago, married, moved out of state, and passed away.
            So Joe called Ennis Brown’s office, received condolences, and found out that his father’s funeral had been the previous Sunday.
            “What?” Joe shouted into the phone, ignoring the looks some of the GI’s waiting in line gave him. “Why the hell didn’t somebody call me sooner?”
            “Joseph, I’m going overlook that outburst because I know you’re upset.” Brown’s tone, however, indicated that there was a limit to how much he’d overlook.
            “Look, he was all the family I had left in that town. You damn right I’m upset.”
            “Bill Blackman was there at the funeral.”
            That gave Joe pause enough to drop his voice some. The sheriff had been watching the news and thus had decided to be a little bit more careful than his son about what he said about black folks when he suspected they might be listening. Joe suspected the sheriff had done so to learn how to avoid becoming the news; he wasn’t sure the elder Blackman was actually all that concerned about justice for all races. “Okay, now what was he doing there?” Joe said.
            “Now, I see you’ve calm down a little bit and that’s good,” the pastor continued. “I shouldn’t have to remind you that you still got trouble waiting for you back here and that you do not need to go shouting about it for everyone around you on your end to hear. So I’m going tell you what happened and you are going to listen until I finish. You’re going to have to be the smart man I know you can be: ‘man’ because it’s long past time to put the ‘boy’ behind you and ‘smart’ because you can’t always expect to get away with ‘dumb’.
            “If you can hear me, don’t talk. Just nod.”
            Joe nodded.
            After a moment, the pastor continued. “The sheriff was there because it was Johnny who’d run your daddy down. The boy was drunk again. They were going to try to rule it an accident—”
            “What?”
            “I’m not finished and you’re supposed to be listening. As I was saying, the sheriff had been about to call it an accident until somebody went and called the NAACP. A reporter has already been in town asking questions. Sheriff’s going around huffing like it’ll be my fault if the President sends in the National Guard to haul his son off to jail while you get away Scot free. You think it would’ve done any good for you to come back here and get arrested?”
            “No, but—” Joe had to fight a bit to hold his tongue. Yes, he owed Brown but what right did the man have to decide whether or not he could attend his own father’s funeral?
            “No ‘buts’. Anybody with any sense should understand you’d have been there if things around here weren’t so touch and go. Thing is…I wish I could sugar-coat the situation a little more, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favors: the Blackmans wouldn’t be your only problems if you came back here. Quite a few white folks around here are grumbling about you working for Malcolm X and giving black people all sorts of ideas. Best thing for you is to stay out of Placid Creek for a while. In fact, I’d you might want to stay out of the whole state for awhile.”
“How long a while?”
“I think you know the answer to that question already.”
            Joe’s shoulders sank in resignation. He was too numb to think about revenge or to rage about Brown keeping him away from his father’s funeral when that should have been his decision or to dwell on how he had not once seen his father in the months since he’d struck Johnny Blackman. The next thing he heard was the operator asking him to deposit more money.
For a moment, he considered doing that but he couldn’t think of single thing to say or ask that wouldn’t have led to the same answer: there was nothing in Placid Creek for him to go back to. When he had fled, he hadn’t had time to go back for any keepsakes, any reminders of what had technically been home. The only vague connection he had was his birth certificate listing his place of birth as Montgomery. His past had cut him off as readily as he tried to cut it off. The operator’s voice was as good enough of a goodbye as any.
            After he hung up, he finished the day’s duties, found solitude in a base chapel and sank his head into his hands when he thought about how he could have asked about Rosalyn. A moment’s thought told him that that question too had been already answered.
He sat there with isolation for company until mess call. At dinner, he tried not to choke as the other guys talked about home.


Copyright 2010-2015 Anthony Anderson

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Attempt 2014






Anyone here remember when "blogs" used to be called "essays"? Anyone here knew that the word "essay" also meant attempt. Here's my attempt to restart this blog. It might take awhile for me to get back to my 2007-2008 level of nonfiction writing.
8/13/2014




           I occasionally experience brief waves/sensations of giddiness mixed with sadness. It’s the closest I ever come to shedding tears (except for the ones I have when chopping onions). The most likely explanation is that I’m confronting the very real reality that I am lonely and that a single life is not my ideal. My problem is that I’m reluctant to reveal that I’m “looking” for someone on any online social network because of the kinds of people and concomitant drama that would draw toward me. I’ve reached the point in my life at which I’ve learned viscerally as well as intellectually not to accept just whatever partner is available comes my way. Still, being alone hasn’t always been a lot of fun for me…and now that I’m 46 and my 50s are just a few years away, I’m forced to admit that I’ve neglected a rather important aspect of myself by regarding relationships as unimportant.
            I tell myself to be grateful for all my past instances of unrequited love because with some considerable thought I could see that I was not quite right for the women I had wanted to be with. True, I’m really grateful that I’m still friends with a lot of them and I’m truly happy that they’ve found people they’re happy with, happy for their wonderful children, etc, etc. And of course, being single means that I’m available for when the right one comes along.
            Still, being alone can suck at times. I could use a hug right now.
            That’s another thing I’ve noticed about my current life. I don’t have a lot of physical contact with other people and I’m starting to feel it like a vitamin deficiency. I’m otherwise physically healthy but I sometimes get the sense something is amiss. And I don’t mean sex either (although that is something I also miss a lot; celibacy—especially when it’s not voluntary and/or goes on long after whatever time for reflection you may have needed it for—is rather overrated as far as I’m concerned.
            In the morning, I suspect I’ll get over this and get back to working on the novel. In fact, I have to wonder what purpose sharing all this has. It’s hardly entertaining. Maybe by getting this stuff out of my system, I can keep it from seeping into the writing that would be entertaining or informative or otherwise worth reading. Maybe the Twitter/Instagram/Facebook crowd is right in that lengthy navel-gazing blogs are so last decade. But hell, last decade was the one in which I decided to get back into writing. Without succumbing too much to nostalgia, I'd take that approach to online communication over sound bites any day; so fuck ‘em if they ain’t got the attention span.

8/14/2014

Okay, I had some chocolate this morning; so I'm okay now.


Thursday, January 24, 2013

1/21/2013

Alright, I meant to post this Monday but life sort of got in the way. Anyway, I first wrote this story back on the day of Obama's first Inauguration and it appeared in Nubian Chronicles. Naturally, I got to thinking about this story last Monday and I sorta dusted it off to see how well (or how poorly) it aged. Looking back on it now, I'd say the biggest qualm I have about writing in the first place is that folks would think it's a political story or some kind of pro-Obama propaganda. I swear up and down on my subscription to Reason Magazine and until I'm blue in the face that it's neither of those but people are going to believe whatever they want to believe. With that in mind...



An Obama Tale


            It’s January 20, 2009 as I write this, the day Barack Obama is getting inaugurated.  I don’t think what I have to say is really all that different from a lot of people have said regarding the past election.  And by now, a handful of people are probably sick of hearing about it so I’ll understand if that group of folks decide to skip this altogether.
            In fact, it’s not even really my tale, but the tale of a cousin of a friend of mine.  The guy’s name was Tyrone Watkins and I don’t know exactly know what he did for a living if anything.  I first came across him while visiting that friend I just mentioned.  It was early 2008 and my friend and Tyrone, like a lot of other people, were laid off (I guess you could call me one of the lucky ones:  instead of being out of work, I got to stay up late at night wondering when the axe of unemployment would next fall onto my neck).
            It was late afternoon to early evening and we were all just yakking (it was all we could afford since we were too broke for beer and pizza).  The news was on TV but we were all trying to ignore it because we already knew the economy was bad.  My friend Steve was about to change to channel to “My Wife and Kids” when they had just announced that Obama had won the Iowa Caucus.
            We all blinked and did a double take.  Iowa?  Iowa?
            “Iowa?” Steve said.  “Do they even got black people in Iowa?”
            “Yeah, they have some, I guess,” I said.  “I saw this news story once about how they’ve been trying to get some diversity out there.”  Or at least I thought I saw a snippet of such of news story.  I wasn’t as sure as I had sounded.
            “Well, shit, it’s just a fluke, anyway,” Tyrone said.  “It’s going to be just like when Jesse Jackson ran back in ’88.”
            “You think so?” Steve asked.
            “Yeah,” said Tyrone.  “As soon as it even smells like his black ass is about to get somewhere, white folks are going to wake up and vote for Clinton.  Them folks need to let this Osama cat go and get behind someone who actually has a chance to get elected.”
            “So you think Hillary’s going to get the nomination?”
            “Yeah, with all that experience she and her husband got, they going to roll right over his rookie ass.”
            “Damn, dude, ain’t you going to give the brother no kind of credit?”
            “Look, Cuz, ain’t no way in hell this racist ass country going to put a black man in the White House.  Besides, Bill Clinton close enough to being black as it is.  We oughta be happy with that.”
            At this point, I had decided to stay out of this conversation.
            “Man, you just wrong,” Steve said to Tyrone.  “Just plain wrong.”
            “A’ight, let’s bet then.  Hillary Clinton is going wrap this nomination up before Spring and ain’t nobody ever going to hear about Osama or whatever the hell his name is again. Hell, we in the middle of a War on Terrorism and some fool with an Arabic name thinks he’s going to be President.”
            This was where the whole thing really got started.  And at this point, I should tell you that according to what Steve had told me later, Tyrone liked to gamble.  Quite a bit.  And all things considered, you can probably guess Tyrone wasn’t very good at it, either; so again, I can understand if you want to quit reading this and go fix a sandwich or something.
            Oh, okay.
            Steve and Tyrone had decided that Super Tuesday, the day when a whole bunch of states would have their primaries at once, would be the day that the bet would be settled.  I had decided not to bet and, yes, I’m still kicking myself for that one.  The day had come and gone and it was still a neck and neck race between Clinton and Obama.
            Those Obama t-shirts started sprouting up around Memphis.  They weren’t yet all the over the place like they would be during the election and all the way up to Inauguration Day.  But I could feel the slightly creepy beginnings of a cult of personality coming on and it made me seriously consider some third party come November 4.  Not that I had anything against Obama (and if I wanted to have any kind of social life in this town I’d better not have).
I had run into Tyrone down at the bus stop the day afterward and he looked absolutely sick.  I could also sniff a bit of alcohol on him.  I wasn’t about to ask him how much he had bet (and lost) because there were other people around and I hadn’t want to reduce a grown man to tears.  And I was sort of tired of hearing about the campaign but Tyrone had been the one who’d brought up Obama.
“Oh, they going to find some way to fix it so he don’t win,” he said.  “Osama done got lucky so far, but you just wait.  Those superdelegates are going to hand the nomination over to Hillary.  We going to have another damn Republican in the White House for four more damn years ‘cause ain’t no way in Hell they going to elect a woman or a black man as President.  How much you wanna bet?”
Again, I declined (yeah, I know, I know) but mentioned that I was sure somebody or other were sure to take his bet.
Apparently somebody did.
On the third of June, a whole bunch of those superdelegates that Tyrone was so certain were going to just hand the nomination to Hillary Clinton on a silver platter threw their support behind Obama instead.  Four days later, Clinton officially shut down her own campaign and endorsed her former opponent.
I didn’t see Tyrone again until the following Labor Day.  I was still hanging on to my job by a wing and a prayer.  My grill only saw two packs of hot dogs, two dozen hamburger patties, two bags worth of chicken wings, and two bottles of barbeque sauce (enhanced with a liberal amount of tap water) to cover them all.  I had regular sliced bread instead of buns, salad instead of coleslaw, and more tap water instead of soda.  Any visitors who wanted booze had to bring their own.
Tyrone had had to talk his mama into making some potato salad for him to bring since his wife had left him.  And the only reason I’d known about that at all was because Steve had told.  “I heard he lost a couple of his unemployment checks gambling with some shady characters and that’d been the last straw for her,” he’d said.  “She took the kids with her, too.”  In all honesty, I could’ve done without hearing that.  With the economy the way it was, I don’t know why Steve thought I was really interested in hearing anything more about people’s misfortunes.
And Steve and Tyrone must not have had anything else in their lives because they were talking about the campaign again.  “Damn,” he said, “Democrats done shot themselves right in the foot this time.  You see how Ol’ Osama’s numbers drop after Palin’s speech at the Convention.  He’s going up against the Republicans now and McCain’s got mad experience.  How much you wanna bet that by the time they have their first debates, this race ain’t even going to be close?  McCain’s going to be leading in the polls like 70% to 30%.  At least.”
The moment Tyrone had started seeking takers on this new bet, I made sure I stayed in whatever part of the apartment he was not for an hour or so.  Some people just refused to learn and even with cash being tight as it was, I just didn’t have the heart to take the poor man’s money so easily from him.  And everyone there at my place was tactfully forgetting how certain Tyrone had been that Obama wouldn’t even get that far.
Anyway, it’s pretty easy to guess what happened next.  On Friday, September 26, Obama and McCain had the first of their debates in Oxford, Mississippi.  And as the race was nowhere near the blowout Tyrone had predicted, he had lost his bet again.  He had also lost his some of his hair color, his once all black hair now had some very visible streaks of grey.
I found this out a week before Halloween when I ran into Tyrone at the bus stop again.  By now, Obama was damn near everywhere: t-shirts, caps, children books, even a whole satellite channel dedicated to nothing but his economic plan.  Cults of personalities were eerie enough but when you get one centered on a politician I really start getting the creeps.
“You know if Osama gets elected they going to assassinate him, right?” he said with obvious glumness and with no solicitation from me whatsoever.  “Those two skinheads they caught yesterday was like, you know, a test run.  They are just not going to let—”
“Okay, Tyrone, enough,” I cut in.  Now he was just ripping off Chris Rock and doing it badly at that.  “First, you said Iowa was a fluke.  Then you said Clinton would beat him for the nomination.  Then you said McCain was going to just blow him away in the election.  And you lost every time you took bets on those things.  And those two skinheads were a pair of high school dropouts and all-around failures at life who thought it was a brilliant idea to put on some white top hats and white tuxedoes and shoot up a predominantly black school before driving on to take out Obama and—get this part—brag about on their MySpace page first.  The idiots might as well have called the Secret Service in advance.”  Now maybe I was a little too harsh with him but the joke had run itself into the ground and was now more than six feet under.  “Why can’t you simply admit this one’s not going to be so cut-and-dried?”
Tyrone looked a little hurt but he kept right on with his spiel.  I heard some desperation in his voice.  “Look, man, I’m just trying to keep it real with all these dreamers out here.  They’re just setting themselves up for another big letdown.”
“Maybe, maybe not.  My crystal ball’s in the shop.”
“Oh, you might think this is funny but how much you want to bet—”
“No, I don’t want to bet anything, Tyrone.  And here’s our bus, by the way.”
I next saw Tyrone on the morning of November 5, day after the election.  I was headed out the door for work and he’d met me coming out of the apartment building.
“Damn, man, you still going to work?” he asked me.
“Uh, yeah, Tyrone.  It is Wednesday.”
“Mm.  Thought since your boy Osama won you’d call in black and be out celebrating.”
Who I voted for has no real bearing on this story so I won’t reveal it here.  Also, it wasn’t any real business of Tyrone so I didn’t tell him either.  “No, I went to bed halfway through McCain’s concession speech.  Bills won’t pay themselves.  What’s up?”
“Oh, I uh come to see if I could borrow a couple of dollars.”
By this, it was pretty clear to me that once again Tyrone had found a taker on whatever bet he had been about to make with me at the bus stop a few weeks before. And even if he hadn’t come to tap me for a couple of dollars, I could see he had lost that bet.
This time he’d lost a foot in height, the bass in his voice (gone from high baritone to alto), and all the brown in his eyes (they were now a ghostly light grey).  He was also translucent in the middle; I could just make out passing traffic behind him.  I really didn’t feel like seeing his internal organs so early in the morning, so I thrust a ten into his hand and kept on stepping.
And it’s January 20, 2009 and Tasha is being cute as all get out on TV.  Economic slowdown or not, a million plus people have crammed themselves into DC for the Presidential Inauguration.  Seeing the genuine tears of joy on people’s faces, like the elderly people in wheelchairs so happy to be alive on such a historical day, has (at least for the moment) made me question my initial cynicism about cult of personalities.  I think I can stand to be happy for at least one day.
As for Tyrone, he’d made some other bet about Obama the other day or so.  I don’t know (and don’t care, to be honest) who took him up on it.  This time he’d lost some important chromosomes and turned into a parrot, which his mom keeps now.
And the fool still keeps saying “Osama”.

Copyright © 2009 by Anthony Anderson
 

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

RAND AND THE APPARENT LIMITATIONS OF FORMAL LOGIC

Some time on Facebook I ago I made some meager contribution to a discussion on Ayn Rand's fiction writing style. As such, any discussion on her philosophy per se was of secondary relevance to the main topic. It did, however, get me wondering about how she would have felt about Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. It seemed that logic was so integral to her philosophy of objectivism, seeing as she had her uberman John Galt go on about during a 100+ page monologue in "Atlas Shrugged".

I'm not kidding about how long that monologue is.Go and try to read that book if you think I'm pulling your leg.

Now, seeing as how meticulously Rand was in building a logical framework for her ideas and how interested she seemed to be in philosophy in general (and logic and reason specifically), it was natural for me to wonder if what she would have made of Betrand Russell, most notably his attempt to reduce all of mathematics to logic. And with Kurt Godel's Incompleteness Theorem that pretty much proved such a feat was mathematically impossible.  Given that Rand lived until 1982, at which point Russell and Godel's work had been around for nearly 50 years; it seems likely to me that she would have heard something about them.

(Please note that Godel's Incompleteness Theorems seems generally about the limitation of formal logical systems sophisticated enough to cover and accept ordinary arithmetic. It doesn't seem to deal with formal systems that do not deal with ordinary arithmetic and it certainly doesn't seem to pertain to informal logic, the kind that most of us use in the real world anyway).

I haven't yet found much in the way of direct quotes from Rand herself (and to be honest, I'm not sure if I really WANT to read too much more of her after wading through "Atlas Shrugged"). However, it seems that at least one student of Rand have been doing some of the heavy mental lifting as far as that question is concern. In David Ross's "Foundation Study Guide: Philosophy of Mathematics", the author discusses and differentiate a formalist's approach to mathematical logic (which is concerned with the algebraic forms of logical systems without concern for their meanings) and the objectivist's approach to logic (which is concerned with meaning).  I'm only just beginning to look into kind of thing myself but I'm beginning to suspect that my search for answers will eventually lead me to  "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences" by Eugene Wigner which while obviously based on a scientist's perception, an objectivist's prerequisite stated in Ross's article, would most likely given Ms. Rand one enormously endless hissy fit with the phrase "unreasonable effectiveness" alone.

Yes, I need to get laid.  I know. I know.

Saturday, August 13, 2011

The Gothic Creatives and other updates

Okay, this is just a short note to let people know that I've joined the Gothic Creatives, an association of horror and dark fantasy writers administrated by Andrea Dean von Scoyoc. I've long ago decided to stop holding my breath until an agent or a publisher decides to bother with me, so I've banded with other independents to help promote one another.  Over on the right of this page are/will be banners which link interested readers to the websites of other members.  With Halloween coming up, now would probably be a good time to check 'em out.

Moreover, I've decided to spruce up the site with a background similar to the one I used to have over at MySpace.  I hope you likey.



Saturday, August 6, 2011

The Gods Must Be High

In "Chaos and Cyber Culture", Timothy Leary related how he liked to write letters to the editors while pretended as best he could to be a conservative and highlight some of the loonier aspects of the far right.  Note that this book came out in 1994, well over a decade before Stephen Colbert.

Just this morning, I checked out Reason's "Hit and Run" blog about Standard and Poor's Downgrading of the United States Government's credit rating and took note of the comments.  Apparently, the tactics seems to be employed by people of various political and philosophical alignment.  Who's progressive, who's conservative, who's just pretending to be on "the other side" (whatever that's supposed to mean) and who really is that plain "nutty" (whatever definition the reader chooses to use)?  As for me, I'm not 100% sure I know and not even 100% sure I care.

Timothy Leary lives, people.




 

Thursday, June 2, 2011

New Stories

Okay, I really need to get my writing going so as part of the means to that end, I have managed to get two stories accepted to two magazines.

One is "Jethro's Toxic Assets" which is now part of the June 2011 issue of "Twisted Dreams"

The other story will be in the June issue of Horrotica (and by way, this link leads to the APRIL issue which I am NOT in).

Cheers!

Monday, May 23, 2011

NO THANKS...I'LL JUST WALK TO ALPHA CENTURAI

Okay, I'm not a big Star Trek guy.  There are several episodes of the series (particularly STNG) that I've enjoyed, but when it comes to the intricacies of Trek lore I am not as well-studied as your more diehard Trekkie.  I have, however, slogged my way through a few college physics courses and there are a few aspects that have gotten the little hamster wheel in my brain spinning.  One of these is the system of teleportation portrayed on the show.  From everything I can understand, people and objects getting "beamed" get broken down to the subatomic level to facilitate their being transmitted to a receiver at their destination where a computer--which would require a STUPENDOUSLY TREMENDOUS amount of processing power--would reassemble these people and objects into their original forms.

Well, copies of their original forms, but you know what I mean.  Anyway, for the sake of today's blog, I'm going to assume that those dilithium crystals really are some badass energy sources and that computers will have gotten powerful enough by Star Trek's time.  My question is not so much a technical aspect but a somewhat social aspect that fan fiction writers might want to consider.

The Star Trek mythos or gestalt or whatever term may be more appropriate here requires that if a person is beamed from a particular origin, he/she/it has to be the same person as or near indistinguishable copy of that person upon arrival and reassembly at the destination.  Yeah, I know there have been some really nasty glitches on some episodes and movies, but they were just that--glitches.  Most everyone else comes through more or less as the same person or--to get to my point--with more or less the same identity.

Now, there is currently some debate within certain circles on what makes up someone's personality.  Is it just a particular arrangement of the molecules that make up a particular person's brain?  Something that emerges from activity of neurons?  Some special "other quality" or "spirit" like some dualist would say?  Whatever the case, it seems to me (and I just may be missing something here) that if such a technology as Star Trek's teleportation were to exists this question would likely to have been finally answered beforehand.

And until the mystery of mind is definitively solved, there's no way I'm letting Scotty beam me anywhere.

Thursday, April 21, 2011

Water Cooler Question #1: Prince songs, et al.

Okay, today I shall experiment with doing a more "mainstream" type of blog--a.k.a. the quiz--and see what kind of shape it leaves my brain in.  I shall quit if I violently expel any more gray matter out of my ears than the time I accidentally glanced at something on BET.

Question:  Which song by Prince, Morris Day & the Time, Vanity 6, or any Prince-produced/"Minneapolis Sound" artist(s) is more likely to get you in the mood?  Let's see how many of you can make some reference to any Prince album that came out before "1999" or "Purple Rain" (Then again, things might get a little creepy once someone mentions "Sister" from "Dirty Mind").