KomanSense

Post Office Cancels Santa

2010-12-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

[Merry Christmas, everyone! To celebrate the day, here's something I wrote in 1991, but is just as timely today...]

I have a vice to admit. I collect stamps. Blame my father for introducing me to philately at an early age. I don’t have the full-bore habit, though, if you know what I mean by bore. I’ll occasionally buy plate blocks when an interesting stamp appears. So when I heard that the Post Office (nobody really calls it the United States Postal Service) had issued a booklet of five different Santa Claus stamps, I eagerly rushed out to buy them.

These stamps are lovely, all right. They even tell a little story: Santa drops down the chimney, checks off items on his list, delivers the goods, waves at us by the fireplace, and flies away in his sleigh. What wonderful stamps with which to spread holiday cheer! I rushed them home to show to my 7-year-old. Her reaction was not the one I had anticipated.

“Why do they have Santa on a postage stamp?” she asked suspiciously.

“It’s Christmas,” I said in that bewildered parental tone.

“You said someone has to be dead to be on a stamp. Is Santa Claus dead?”

That hit me from left field. I almost exposed the entire centuries-old Santa conspiracy by saying, “Well, honey, the law doesn’t cover fictional characters.”

“You mean Santa’s not dead, he just isn’t real?”

Aieee! My mind raced. “No, muffin. I mean, uh. . .” She could tell I was concocting a whopper. “I mean the, um, pictorial representation of Santa Claus--who really is a real person living at the North Pole--is an imaginative interpretation by an artist. You see, it’s OK for the Post Office to print stamps reproducing artwork, and these are stamps made from paintings of Santa.” Did it work? Had I buffaloed my little impressionable one?

Her eyes narrowed. “Every stamp,” she said in a sternly patronizing tone, “is made from artwork. Paintings of living people aren’t allowed either. The Post Office is either saying that Santa Claus never existed or that he’s dead!”

I had to come clean with the kid. Here was an agency of the federal government undoing everything Jack Albertson had done in Miracle On 34th Street when he took the sacks of mail addressed to Santa Claus and delivered them to Jimmy Stewart filibustering in the Senate chambers. (Or did Stewart fly the mail to Paris with Donna Reed? I’ve got to stop watching those Stewart/Capra marathons.)

I had to come up with an explanation. Maybe if I told her Santa had the misfortune to carry some gifts wrapped by Libyan elves. . .

“Sweetheart,” I said, sitting her down. “I want you to brace yourself for a shock.” She looked up at me with her large, innocent blue eyes. “You’re a big girl now,” I said, “and big girls have to face the truth, no matter how painful it may be.”

Her voice caught in a tearful sob. “You mean. . .?”

“Yes, Vanessa, the Post Office lied. The mean old postal commissioner, whose name, I believe, is Ebenezer-something, decided that if he couldn’t force everyone to give him an extra cent for each letter they mail, he would tell all the girls and boys that Santa was dead. Yeah, that’s it! And he didn’t get that extra cent, so he tried to ruin Christmas for all the little boys and girls. The newspapers are calling it Santagate. Garry Trudeau is drawing a few strips about it.”

She looked crushed, as if all faith had been stolen from her. She ran to her room, crying, “I’ll never ever believe in any federal agency ever again! And I’ll seriously question any statements issued at the state and local level, too!” Her door slammed. I heard sobbing.

Feeling like the grandfather of all Grinches, I half-heartedly made some eggnog and sat in front of the fireplace, staring in gloom at the gaily decorated Christmas tree desiccating by the hearth. Nothing could break my mood.

My wife finally consoled me by saying, “She may have lost her faith in the government, darling, but at least she still believes in someone who offers her something for nothing.”

That’s true! And he delivers overnight and never loses a package.

The Yoga Studio -- Episode Three

2010-12-11T09:37:00.000-08:00

And the trilogy is complete! In this episode, Caitlyn (Vanessa Koman) receives The Bus Talk from her boss Rachel (Tiffany Chandon). We've all received these pep talks before, but Caitlyn gives Rachel the backtalk we'd all like to spout. Look for the return of Leandro Cano as Bobby! (And look for Leandro on CSI: Miami this Sunday in the episode Blood Sugar!)

The Yoga Studio -- Episode Two

2010-12-11T09:00:00.000-08:00

Vanessa and I have finished Episode Two! In this one, a nerdy guy (Rob Downs) interrupts Caitlyn (Vanessa) and Miss Laura (Allison Horack) and turns the Yoga Studio upside down with his Tolkienesque antics. Hilarity ensues. Never has a squeak toy been put to better use. And, yes, she globed the video.

The Yoga Studio -- Episode One

2010-11-25T23:32:00.000-08:00

I've been working with my daughter Vanessa on her new web-series The Yoga Studio, and the first episode is now on her website. I served as the Director of Photography (i.e., it was my camera and I refused to let go of it) and the Editor. Vanessa, though, was the real powerhouse behind the project. She wrote the scripts, hired the actors, filed the SAG paperwork (including Taft-Hartley for the non-union members), and directed each episode as well as starring in them. We've taped three episodes and they will all be posted between now and Christmas. I had fun editing them with iMovie and using iDVD to create DVD versions. Check it out at WatchTheYogaStudio.com.

Anti-Capitalist Film Makes Cameron a Billionaire

2010-03-31T09:28:00.000-07:00

I finally -- reluctantly -- gave Jim Cameron, Regal Entertainment, and Imax my $16.50 to see Avatar in Imax 3D the last week before it got booted out by Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland so that I could knowledgeably explain why I knew I wouldn’t like the film before I saw it.

Let me state that I am a big fan of Cameron’s films. I love the Terminator series and think Aliens is the best of the four in that series. Whenever True Lies is on, I have to stop and watch it. And, yes, I cried at Titanic. But then again I cry at Muppet movies, so take it for what it’s worth. The man’s a brilliant master of visual storytelling. And that is the big reason why I am so upset with Avatar. I knew that I would dislike the film as soon as I learned bits of storyline as the hype began last year. Aliens are the beleaguered good guys enduring invasion. Check. Earth people (specifically, American Earth people) are the venal, rapacious invaders. Check. One man defies his people to save the aborigines. Check. Scientists always seek Truth and never twist their research for grant money or to please the government. Check. And businessmen will always opt to exterminate potential trading partners, have no respect for life or property, and are bereft of morality. Check.

Other reviewers have already made the more-than-obvious parallels with Dances With Wolves, Disney’s Pocahontas, Ferngully, and a bunch of others. And I’m probably writing this late enough that most of my coming points have already been made by others, but I think the problem with Avatar is endemic in American culture, and highly damaging.

George Lucas understood the importance of removal from reality in writing fantastic fiction. Star Wars originally took place “in the year 3000”, but moved to “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away” not merely to make it sound more like the opening of a fairy tale, but to remove it from any connection with 20^th Century Earth. In that way, the elements of the story become a template that can apply to any viewer’s outlook. What was the Empire? To one, it might be an analogy for the British Empire versus the Rebel Alliance of the 13 colonies. To another, it might be evil Corporate America vs. heroic union organizers. Roman Empire vs. Christianity. In other words, you can’t pin Lucas down to a particular current political viewpoint. He’s merely for liberty and against tyranny -- it’s up to the viewer to choose the analogues.

Cameron’s mistake (and I use the word advisedly, since Avatar is one of the highest-grossing films of all time) is an artistic one: making a fantasy film too specific. Star Wars and Lord of the Rings will be timeless because they are not bound to any specific historical matrix. James Cameron has chosen to plant Avatar squarely in a specifically 21^st-Century American matrix. In other words, the ex-Marine mercenaries we see are obviously American ex-Marines; the corporate weasel is obviously an American corporate weasel; the native-loving scientist is portrayed by Sigourney Weaver, the same actress who played ape-loving Dian Fossey. This allows viewers only one template: the film is only an analogy to American corporate rapacity, American military brutality, and 21^st-century environmental insensitivity.

In Lord of the Rings, one could look at the destruction of Isengard’s forest to build Sauron’s war machine as a critique of Nazi, Soviet, or American war economies (or insert your own government) having a deleterious effect on the environment. The choice was up to the viewer. It did not alienate anyone watching it (except maybe for foresters and arms dealers). Avatar alienates, making it less universal or lasting in its appeal (said, again, with a grain of salt, since it’s made a billion bucks plus my $16.50).

Cameron protests that his film is not anti-military. Why, he purposely made his hero a Marine to show how the finest attributes of honor and defense of the weak enabled him to defy orders and slaughter his own people. In this, though, Cameron engages in several liberal conceits.

Liberal conceit #1: The highest form of patriotism is treason. This is the theme, too, of Dances With Wolves. The liberal creed seems to be “My country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, join the other side and kill as many of your countrymen as you can.” For all the horror we are supposed to feel at the callous way the Americans kill Na’vi without any awareness of their individual sovereignty (and certainly no discussion of their property rights), Cameron’s “Good Marine” Sully (and Costner’s “Good Cavalryman” Dunbar) had no compunctions about slaying his former comrades en masse. Are we supposed to cheer that massacre? I’m reminded of the brilliant deleted scene in Goldmember where the wife of the beheaded henchman receives The Call and has to tell her son that his father has died at the hands of super-spy Austin Powers. “No one ever thinks about the henchman’s family!” she wails. Similarly, we are not supposed to feel anything but satisfaction at the mass slaughter of all those other Marines. (OK, ex-Marine mercenaries, but Sully himself says there are no ex-Marines, so he’s killing fellow Marines, Q.E.D.) (Semper fi indeed.)

Liberal conceit #2: Native populations live in wise, eternal harmony with the land; White Americans relentlessly destroy nature for short-term profit. Right. Would someone like to explain why -- shortly after the arrival of humans in North America -- all the megafauna vanished? Chinese dudes cross land bridge, look at mastodons, mammoths, giant sloths, and saber-tooth cats, and say “Get in my belly!” (pace, Fat Bastard). You could argue that they learned from their errors, I guess, but why aren’t Americans given the same indulgence? It took 10,000 years for Indians to learn to live with the land. Europeans have only been here 500 years or so (900 years for Vikings). What Cameron portrays as a Na’vi prayer acknowledging the Circle of Life (when killing an animal for food or self-defense) could just as easily be interpreted as the Na’vi version of liberal hypocrisy: acting all apologetic and spiritual (and believing it, of course, with all your heart), but still getting what one wants by killing. Hey, I didn’t hear any prayers to Eyah (meant to sound similar to Gaea or YHVH?) when the Na’vi were dispatching fighter pilots by the score with armor-piercing arrows. If the Americans prayed to Eyah while bulldozing the Tree of Souls, would that have made it better?

Liberal conceit #3: Only a white male newly minted liberal convert can get these disorganized, unfocused, superstitious ethnics to recognize the threat they face and only a white male neo-liberal possesses the wisdom and savvy to guide them into victorious battle (isn’t that how we lost the Vietnam War--a bunch of liberals telling the military how to fight?). This is the same conceit displayed by Kevin Costner in Dances With Wolves and (forgive me, Sarah Jessica) Matthew Broderick in Glory (the story had to have a white guy as the lead character to make it more “accessible”) (Hollywood code for “we want more than 12% of the population to see it”). This is the same messianic complex that leads liberals to think that they are the only ones wise enough and smart enough and pure enough to prevent destruction of the entire planet by car exhaust, the only ones who can end the business cycle by dragging us into socialism/fascism, the only ones who can tell us what to eat/drink/drive/smoke/read/think, and the only ones who can mobilize the masses to push for social change (which is why they don’t think the Tea Party people are really a grass-roots people’s movement and must be an evil corporate plot).

At least in Return of the Jedi it was the Ewoks’ own idea to run off and attack the stormtroopers, and they did it with their own skills, tactics, and weapons. They didn’t need Luke telling them what to do.

Was the decision to bash American business, slander the American military, and ignore the American conservationist tradition intentional on Cameron’s part, or is such self-loathing so endemic that it didn’t even occur to him that he was attacking the very corporate structure that made him a mega-millionaire, the military that has kept him safe both from communists who delight in slaying the wealthy and the intelligentsia after they have served their purpose and from Islamic jihadists who delight in killing everyone, and the American inclusiveness that made Hawaii a state, preserving vast swaths of its natural beauty for location filming on Avatar?

I said sympathy for your enemies was dangerous. It’s everywhere, even in children’s films. When I saw the trailer for How to Train Your Dragon, in which the young hero discovers that dragons aren’t the monsters his elders made them out to be (because naïve youngsters full of Hope and Change always know better than their elders, who actually may have experienced a few dragon attacks), I thought Yes... that’s just what the dragons want you to believe... Islamic terrorists love Americans who think that their jihad on the West is merely a reaction to American imperialism -- they are the current version of the “useful idiots” Lenin used so well to drag Russia into a tyranny worse than that of any tsarist.

I didn’t dislike the film per se. Artistically, it was superb. Pandora looks like a fun world (if you can survive the Deathworld-like fauna). The plot is tried-and-true (some might say clichéd and worn-out). And Zoë Saldana’s left breast stole every scene it was in. But the anti-American, anti-business, anti-military, anti-reason sub-text turned me off completely. It was superfluous to the basic storyline; the villains could have been anyone. They did not have to be from Earth at all. (I recall the super-hit Independence Day made the rapacious invaders non-humans and the heroes the US military.) They did not have to be capitalists at all. Didn’t fascists and communists invade the lands of native people and rape and pillage them? And wasn’t it, oh, I dunno, American military men and women who fought and died to liberate those lands? Who’s leaving Haiti after weeks of sweltering work keeping quake victims from dying, only to sail down to Chile to conduct more rescue and relief work? Would that maybe be the Marines? Hmm. Odd thing for them to do. From watching Avatar, I’d swear they’re supposed to go in there and murder everyone.

And I don’t like seeing movies disingenuously engineered to give me that utterly false impression.

Science Quibbles With Avatar

2010-03-31T09:15:00.000-07:00

Science quibbles: I’ll skip the bogus flying mountains except to say that if you grant the premise, you still have to explain how such small rocks can have huge waterfalls cascading off of them. Even if they were made of sponge, they’d drain in a few minutes at that rate.

As someone who still owns every piece of glow-in-the-dark plastic from when I was a kid, I loved the phosphorescent night life. However... I think that the only time you would have “night” on a moon orbiting a gas giant would be when the planet is between Pandora and its star. Think about how bright our own moon is at night: when it’s full, you can read by it. And it only fills half a degree of the sky. From the look of it, Pandora’s gas giant covers about 60 degrees. Imagine that much starlight being reflected from a high-albedo cloud world -- it would be as bright as day.

In the film, it’s stated that Pandora has lower gravity than Earth, and that would explain how the banshees can fly by flapping instead of soaring, but then one should be consistent: everything that falls would have to fall at a much slower rate of acceleration, yet it seems that everyone and everything falls at an earthly rate on Pandora (to be fair, it would be a much slower-paced film if they did that...). I did like the zero-G in the opening scene, though.

One thing I expected to see but didn’t: after all the talk about how all the life on Pandora was electrically connected in a gigantic neural net, I was expecting the white male neo-liberal to be the one to figure out how to harness that power into a directed-energy weapon, with plasma bolts shooting from the Tree of Souls.

An Agorist Primer Now In Paperback!

2009-11-15T08:37:00.000-08:00

Just in time for ChristmaSolstiChannuKwanzEid, the paperback edition of An Agorist Primer is now available from KoPubCo! The book is the same size as the hardcover keepsake edition, but is a third of the cover price (less, actually, because of our 20%-off Christmas Sale price). If you have wanted to read or give this amazing book but could not afford the price of the hardback, now is the time to order. Copies are at the printer and should arrive this coming week and will be shipped as soon as in hand. Give the perfect gift this season — the gift of liberty!

The book is not yet available on Amazon.com, but you can order it now from the publisher. And don't forget our Christmas With an Attitude shop on CafePress! We have bumper stickers, t-shirts, and tote bags with snarky, in-your-face (well, in-everyone-else's-face) slogans. Check it out!

Mere Americans

2009-11-10T11:03:00.000-08:00

I don't recall that, during World War II, any Christians in the U.S. Army agonized about being forced to fight other Christians in the armies of Mussolini or Hitler, or of occupying Christian land where they were not welcome. I don't remember any Japanese in the 442nd worrying that they were fighting the Axis, of which Japan was a part. We were all mere Americans fighting enemies of America.

In fact, I don't recall any Shiite Muslims having any compunctions about killing Sunni Muslims (and vice versa) during the Iran-Iraq War (the "impossible" war among Muslims). So why would anyone in the press try to excuse the mass-murderer/traitor's actions by pointing to his fear that he would be forced to fight fellow Muslims? First, as a Major and a psychiatrist, he would never be fighting anyone, and second, he was a native-born American assisting American warriors in their battle against sworn and declared enemies of America. That should be enough for anyone in the Army. What he did was treason — pure, simple, and inexcusable. Motivation is irrelevant.

Dr. K's Videobook -- Part One!

2009-10-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

Working right up to the weekend before I went in for my knee surgery, I recorded my videobook of Dr. K's Sure-Fire Instant Weight-Loss Secrets in High Definition. During my rehab and recovery, I managed to edit it in iMovie and upload it to YouTube (in three parts). The book is humorous (in case the title didn't tip you off) and I hope I've captured that in my role as "Dr. K." Here's Part One:

Goin' Cyborg -- Martin Caidin Would Be Proud

2009-10-24T19:21:00.000-07:00

Call it the advent of the .04 Million Dollar Man. This October (when Friday the 13th fell on a Tuesday), I was rendered unconscious with a Michael Jackson Propofol cocktail, taken into a darkened room, and masked men sliced my right knee open like a hock of mutton. Joints split, ligaments sundered, bone sawn, they implanted a titanium device inside my living flesh, making me 6% less human and beginning my slow assimilation into the Borg.

Heck of a body piercing!

Physical therapy is daunting, but there's no way I'm going to fail to gain the total range of motion allowed by this thing. I still want to hike the John Muir Trail one of these days!

Hey, At Least He Didn't Throw His Shoes!

2009-09-10T07:19:00.000-07:00

Sure it was a breach of protocol to shout "You Lie!" at the President as he prevaricated in front of Congress, but I thought it was a great liberal trait to "speak truth to power". Is it no longer acceptable to Question Authority? And is it not rude of a guest of Congress to lie as boldly as Barack Hussein lied to their collective faces?

I say Joe Wilson has more guts in his larynx than the entire Republican minority has in its collective body.

This should have been the Republican response. It should be the response of the American People. Well said, Joe Wilson, well said.

Secrets of Weight-Loss Revealed!

2009-08-24T01:22:00.000-07:00

Just uploaded my latest book to KoPubCo. It's a parody -- a first for me -- of weight-loss books: Dr. K's Sure-Fire Instant Weight-Loss Secrets. Check it out at http://www.kopubco.com/secrets_pb.html. If it sells well, I plan to write and publish short humor books on other topical subjects. Remember, laughter burns 78 calories an hour!

An Agorist Primer Available in PDF!

2009-07-25T09:25:00.000-07:00

In response to numerous calls within the agorist movement to create a pirate Acrobat PDF edition of the KoPubCo hardback of Samuel Edward Konkin III's classic introduction to Counter-Economics, An Agorist Primer, KoPubCo has decided to undercut those attempts by releasing the free, authorized PDF of the complete book, available here. The PDF is created directly from the original InDesign proof of the hardback and is thus the authentic, correct, and complete electronic version. It looks great, prints out cleanly, and the primary link to use is below. Accept no substitutes!

Use this link and image source in your own blogs and web pages:

<div style="width: 96px">
<a href="http://www.kopubco.com/pdf/An_Agorist_Primer_by_SEK3.pdf" style="text-decoration: none;"><img style="border: 1px solid; border-color: black; width: 96px; height: 143px;" src="http://www.kopubco.com/images/aap_96.jpg" alt="An Agorist Primer cover" title="An Agorist Primer PDF" /><br>
<p style="text-align: center; font-size: 10px; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif;">
<i>An Agorist Primer</i><br>
by SEK3 <br> <i>FREE PDF!</i></a>
</p>
</div>

An Argument for Glass Ceilings in Politics?

2009-05-15T10:13:00.000-07:00

The Weirz on Video!

2009-05-14T16:42:00.001-07:00

Just found -- the best song by the greatest band you've never heard of! From over 3 decades ago, playing Jupiter Moon, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: Estelle, Cathy, Pixie, Theresa, Maria, Joanie, Larry, Tom, and Mikey: The Weirz!

Is Bea Arthur also Jane Ross?

2009-05-02T20:19:00.000-07:00

Bea Arthur is dead. OK, I can accept that, though I hesitate to say that when I was 15 I had a slight thing for Maude. Can't explain it, but I recall that I responded to her regal self-confidence, snarky attitude, and... tallness. She'd have made a good Hera. So when other actors were interviewed about her death, Leonard Nimoy stated that he had met Bea when she had acted in an episode of Star Trek and that he remembered her as being a very nice person.

Huh? I didn't recall Maude traipsing around in the 23rd century! She was not listed in IMDB as having been on the series, so I searched the mighty Web and found an article by Joseph Stevenson at Answers.com that stated she'd acted as "Jane Ross" in Rocket Attack U.S.A. and Light Fantastic. Sure enough, IMDB states that Jane Ross was in both those movies and played Tamoon, Chekov's drill thrall, in Gamesters of Triskellion. Rushing to my complete set of pre-remastering Star Trek DVDs, I fast-forwarded to the scene where Tamoon enters Chekov's cell and talks to him.

Chekov's reaction was similar to mine (I remember the same feeling from 40 years ago: is that a chick or a dude?). Watching the scene, I noticed that her voice was even deeper, as if it had been processed or she was trying to sound weird. However, some words sounded distinctly Arthurian in their inflection. In addition, her chin and earlobes matched photos of Bea Arthur. Jane Ross's nose, though, seemed sharper in certain angles than Bea Arthur's, though I only had more recent photos of Bea by which to judge (age adds cartilage to the nose). Bea Arthur is 5'9" and Walter Koenig is 5'6", yet Tamoon appears to be shorter than Chekov in the scene (he might have been standing on an apple crate). In this photo, she appears to be shorter, but she's in flats and he's in boots and she's standing further back than he. Nichelle Nichols is 5'5" and seems to be about Tamoon's height in this phot o, but she's in her Starfleet uniform, which included very sexy high-heeled boots. (Now if you want to talk about major things, I definitely had one for Lt. Uhura!)

It's important to note that IMDB is usually very good about attributing pseudonyms to actors. If Bea Arthur were widely known to be "Jane Ross", she would have been noted in her Bea Arthur listing as having been in that episode "(as Jane Ross)". However, the Bea Arthur and Jane Ross entries are not correlated in any way. In addition, there is a date of death for Jane Ross of 6/27/85. And she's listed as being born 10 years later than Bea. Interestingly, Golden Girls premiered in 1985, so Jane Ross's date of death could be an inside joke (i.e., no need for her now that Bea had a second hit series).

So what's the story? Was Leonard Nimoy misremembering Jane Ross as being Bea Arthur? Was Answers.com mistaken? Bea Arthur denied being in Star Trek in 2001. Was she lying to protect her opinion of her reputation? I haven't been able to locate the two old movies to see if Jane Ross (sans thrall makeup) looks and sounds like Bea Arthur circa 1960-ish. I found a copy of Rocket Attack U.S.A. on eBay, but the postage from Australia is prohibitive. So until a local copy is available, the mystery continues...

New Books from KoPubCo

2008-12-17T22:35:00.000-08:00

Narrowly in time for Christmas (and well ahead of Russian Christmas!), two new books from KoPubCo: the libertarian classic An Agorist Primer and the children's novelette The Legend of Anarcho Claus.

Told with clear and concise prose, An Agorist Primer is exactly that — a primer on all the important aspects of Agorism and Counter-Economics: how they work together to enable you to free yourself and expand freedom to your friends, family, and the world!

Samuel Edward Konkin III wrote An Agorist Primer in 1986. A small number of Xerox copies were circulated to investors in the hope that they would finance the publication of a high-quality, hardcover edition. Though some money was raised, it proved insufficient to produce the book. Even though the photocopies bore text reading “First Edition”, it was meant to refer to the proposed hardback edition. This, then — the book now available in hardcover from KoPubCo — is the true first edition as SEK3 intended it.

And just for fun, there's The Legend of Anarcho Claus. Sam always loved Christmas. In both Christmas issues of New Libertarian Weekly, he wrote installments of the secret story of Santa’s rebel agorist son, Anarcho, who brings counter-economic toys to non-coercive girls and boys. I expanded the story into a full-length children's book that I hope will become a Christmas classic.

Order copies now and get 20% off! More important, sales of these books will fund the publication of SEK3's unfinished magnum opus, the appropriately titled CounterEconomics. It will be quite an effort to take the book from typewritten manuscript to published book, first because it was indeed left undone at the time of Sam's death in 2004, and second because it contained very topical examinations of late 1970s/early 1980s events that supported his counter-economic theories. More on that as it develops.

Mr. Science Fiction

2008-12-06T09:07:00.000-08:00

Forry Ackerman died Thursday, having heroically made it to his 92nd birthday Nov. 24th, despite pneumonia and congestive heart failure for which he had been hospitalized a few weeks before. I'll miss him. One of the first magazines I'd ever purchased with my own money was Famous Monsters #27, March, 1964, the one with the Cyclops on the cover (yes, I still have it -- it's one of my prized possessions).

I met Forry many times over the years, beginning in the mid 1970s at science-fiction conventions in Los Angeles. He was always the most joyous and polite of men (and that's saying a lot in fandom!), and when my daughter Vanessa was old enough to show up with me, he doted upon her like a loving grandfather. In the 1980s, I found out that he hosted Saturday tours of his Ackermansion and Vanessa and I made several pilgrimages to that sacred place.

Forry has been disparaged by many fans for somehow sullying science fiction with his childlike enthusiasm and his coining of the term "sci-fi". I -- and anyone who ever leapt with joy at the arrival of a copy of FM or Spacemen -- declare otherwise. He did more to bring science-fiction to popularity than nearly anyone else. Without Forry, would there have been a Steven Spielberg or a George Lucas? Early influence is everything in human development, and Forry caught us all as kids, at our most malleable.

His influence on generations will not be adequately gauged until decades from now. He has inspired innumerable people to enter the arts and sciences. He helped to build the future he wanted to see.

As an atheist, he did not think he would "go" anywhere when he died. Many hope he's wrong, and that somewhere he and Wendy can hang out with Bela and Boris and all the citizens of the ImagiNation. Mi amas vin Kvari.

RINOs Lose Big -- Conservatives Poised to Regain GOP

2008-11-04T22:32:00.000-08:00

John McCain's people may try to blame their embarrassing loss on Sarah Palin, but her nomination is all that kept the GOP from losing every single electoral vote. The utter failure of McCain proves the futility of reaching across the aisle. Being a "low-tax liberal" didn't work Ed Crane and it didn't work for McCain. The RINOs are in full retreat and will no doubt now re-register as Democrats to be part of the winning team again.

Here's hoping that flint-hearted, uncompassionate conservatives regain control of the party and run someone who would rather win the war and win the presidency.

The good news is that now all talk of America being a racist country will and must cease. Barack Hussein Obama, President-elect, has put the lie to that century-old canard. We look forward to the disbanding of all race-focused organizations and all race-based quotas and criteria now that the final frontier has been conquered. Affirmative action has achieved the highest possible prize and is no longer needed -- America no longer sees color, and no longer needs to. Their considerable energies can now be focused on the most important goal for America -- a return to the Moon and the settlement of Mars and beyond (OK, that was my audacious hope talking).

Let's get behind our new President and keep him focused on America.

Remember -- if you voted, you can't complain!

Palin To Pursue Schwing Vote

2008-08-29T09:02:00.000-07:00

"Why, Madam Vice President, with your glasses off and your hair down, you're..."

I think Palin is a great choice for McCain. Can't be attacked for inexperience when the Democrats have the same problem with their presidential choice. Palin's solid conservative positions force feminists to admit that they don't support women in politics per se, and will vote for an all-male ticket over a male/female ticket if the woman is not a socialist.

McCain just made the race extremely interesting. Noses around the country are no doubt being un-pinched as we speak.

A Handshake Away from Clark Rockefeller?

2008-08-09T19:47:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm watching Geraldo At Large and he's talking about how the erstwhile Christian Gerhartsreiter became Christopher Chichester and lived in San Marino with John and Linda Sohus. When they vanished, he told people that they were spies on a mission to Paris and even (allegedly) sent postcards in their names to people in the US from Paris as part of the coverup. Then he vanished to become Clark Rockefeller in Boston.

Geraldo waves around some postcards and we see images of them on the screen. One of them is clearly addressed to Lydia Marano at Dangerous Visions bookstore!

Apparently, according to the Boston Herald (Herald, Geraldo? Hmm...), Lydia said that Linda Sohus worked at DV for 3 years then just one day never showed up again. Linda allegedly sent the postcard to Lydia from Paris. Lydia turned it over to cops in the hope that perhaps Gerhartsreiter's DNA might be on the stamp.

Eerie. Seeing Lydia's name on TV felt like being told that an acquaintance of yours is embroiled in an tangled web of murder and false identities. Wait... she is!

Shameless Capitalistic Promotion, Pt. 1

2008-07-25T12:28:00.000-07:00

OK, I have to use this blog once in a while to tout what I've been doing. I've got a growing collection of really snarky, transgressional, anti-liberal bumper stickers, T-shirts, and miscellaneous stuff at Triplanetary Traders. To the left is an example. Click on it or on the link below and you'll be taken there at the speed of light!

Drill Our Way Out? Yes We Can! (Uses the positive attitude of liberals to attack one of their "No We Can't" rants.)

The Great Autograph Slaughter

2008-07-25T12:04:00.000-07:00

Autograph hunting can be a deadly business...

I was responsible for two deaths in the Tolkien family, which led to the rumor that refusing an autograph request from me can be fatal. I had a copy of Smith of Wooten Major that I thought I'd send to Tolkien for an autograph. This was in 1971. Months passed and I received the book back with a note from his agent saying that Mr. Tolkien was not signing anything right now because his wife had just passed away. I understood. So I waited a year or so, and then sent the book to him again. This time it came back with a note from his agent regretfully informing me that the book was being returned unsigned because Mr. Tolkien had, sadly, passed away.

Yikes! That's one book I'm wrapping in lead and never sending anywhere again.

Something similar happened to me and Rod Serling. I met him at a speech he gave at West Valley College in the 1973 or '74 (where I also first met Ray Bradbury, Buckminster Fuller, and Arthur C. Clarke!). I asked him for an autograph and he said in that great voice of his, "I'm sorry, I don't sign autographs."

A year or so later.... dead.

So it's unwise to refuse me an autograph or even to tarry in responding to the request....

The Plame Truth

2008-07-10T08:12:00.000-07:00

I just heard Bill Handel's interview with Valerie Plame in which she touts her new novel-- er, biography -- and claims that "99% of what the CIA redacted" from her book "had nothing to do with national security."

Gee, I thought everything she did was super-secret spy stuff. Could it logically follow that just maybe her ultra-clandestine mega-spy desk-jockey identity in reality actually "had nothing to do with national security"?

Move a Mountain? Start With a Seed...

2008-07-08T11:10:00.000-07:00

OK, however you may feel about religion, someone has come up with an Internet test of faith: mustardseedchallenge.com. A webcam is trained on a mustard seed and the goal is -- by faith alone -- to move the mustard seed from the left side to the right.

I am assuming this is a sincere experiment and that the seed is not glued down...

Hey, Geroge Noory, time to get your remote viewers and psychokinetic experts in there to nudge it!

Remember Heinlein's observation:

"If you pray hard enough, you can make water run uphill. How hard? Why, hard enough to make water run uphill, of course! [Expanded Universe]

Rush Limbaugh Plagiarizes KomanSense?

2008-06-10T15:04:00.000-07:00

Or do great minds simply think alike? On May 20th, I wrote my observation that "Barack Hussein is running for Jimmy Carter's second term, right down to promising to screw things up again with Iran." The very next day, May 21st, Rush Limbaugh observed that "It's going to be Jimmy Carter's second term. They don't care about ruining the country. We're running against people who want doom and gloom to happen."

He replayed that clip today when he noted that John McCain used the same line on MSNBC's Nightly News: "Senator Obama says that I'm running for Bush's third term. It seems to me he's running for Jimmy Carter's second."

So did McCain plagiarize Limbaugh... or me? I don't care -- a good joke deserves a wide audience!

Green: It's the New Red!

2008-05-28T11:46:00.000-07:00

Vaclav Klaus , Czech Republic president, has finally torn the mask off the environmental movement by pointing out that neo-communists have merely replaced "the environment" for "the proletariat" as the reason for our enslavement. As someone who grew up under Communism, he's hip to all their lingo, and the semantic equivalents he draws are enlightening indeed.

The ecology movement has always been a haven for leftists, so it's no surprise that their relentless quest for power over the lives of all has taken up this new Inquisition ("Are you using CFLs, unbeliever? What is your carbon footprint, knave?").

Do we now need to inquire if there are environmentalists in the State Department? Will the Neo-Coms be unopposed in their goal to establish a Dictatorship of the Climatologists?

Stay tuned.

The Great Continuation

2008-05-20T09:14:00.001-07:00

OK, so McCain is running for Bush's third term (or The Bush Dynasty's fourth term) and Hillary is running for the Clinton third term. From the sound of it, Barack Hussein is running for Jimmy Carter's second term, right down to promising to screw things up again with Iran.

Mr. Peterson for President?

2008-05-15T11:32:00.000-07:00

I've finally figured it out. That whiny, wimpy voice... John McCain reminds me of John Fiedler, the character actor who played wimpy, whiny, but sometimes angry and psychotically violent little men. He was the shy Mr. Peterson on The Bob Newhart Show and Juror #2 in 12 Angry Men. He was also Cadet Alfie Higgins in Tom Corbett, Space Cadet. It's unlikely, however, that President McCain will get America as close to outer space as Cadet Higgins did.

Lamest Choices Since Carter/Ford

2008-05-13T13:18:00.000-07:00

As much as anyone talks about 2008 being 1968, it's more like 1976. And our choices appear to be amongst Tweedledumb, Tweedledumber, and The Red Queen.

The Unspoken Assumption

2008-04-25T07:39:00.000-07:00

What I find most disturbing about B.O.'s pronouncement (and subsequent, dissembling attempts at explanation) that small-town Americans cling to guns and religion because they're frustrated with government is the implication (not noted by any pundits I've heard since) that if people were pleased with government they would gleefully surrender their guns and abandon their religion.

What does that tell you about how Obama views the power, seductiveness, and overwhelming allure of The State?

Perspective Inversion in Obama-Rama

2008-04-14T18:40:00.000-07:00

Senator Barack H. Obama spoke about how small-town folk cling to certain attitudes out of bitterness. Switching on the old tu quoque machine, let's see if we can come up with a parallel observation...

“You go into these big cities in California and, like a lot of big cities in Europe, Communism has been gone now for 16 years. And it’s not surprising, then, that they get bitter, they cling to victim disarmament or Big Government or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-citizen sentiment or anti-business sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

How many liberals do you know that fit this description?

The Chavez Doctrine

2008-03-05T11:57:00.000-08:00

So let me get this straight. Hugo Chavez is poised to invade Colombia -- a country that has not attacked Venezuela -- because of Colombia's attack on a FARC compound in Ecuador? I thought invading a country that has not attacked yours was the province of Hugo's personal El Diablo, George Bush. Perhaps Hugo is proposing a Chavez Doctrine of preemptive war?

10th Anniversary of... Nuthin'?

2008-01-15T21:20:00.000-08:00

OK, I know I promised in 2005 to be more... consistent with postings on this blog and then I promptly slacked off. Not good for a writer. I get e-mails from fans asking "Where's the next Captain Anger?" "Will there ever be Book Two of The High Pilgrimage?" "Why is there no KoPubCo edition of Death's Dimensions?" and the ubiquitous "Didn't you used to be a writer?"

I've got tonnes of excuses, but to enumerate them would be whining. I've not produced a new novel since 1998 (Millennium: Weeds, which was only published in German and Japanese)(and Captain Anger: The Microbotic Menace was published in 1999, but written earlier). So I guess 2008 is my tenth anniversary of writer's block.

The good news is, I'm weaning myself off of self-pity and am outlining a new novel, as well as working on new publications for KoPubCo. Progress is slow because of... well, that would be whining, wouldn't it?

As time goes by, I'll probably reveal some of what's going on in my life, but I've never been one for the public confessional, so expect a lot of elliptical evasiveness.

2007-12-18T13:49:00.000-08:00

Sorry — I just wanted to see this:

Rosie-Not-So-Riveting

2007-03-15T20:13:00.000-07:00

The View has its value -- it allows us to see the insane, hateful face of those who would deliver us to the enemy. ABC.com only allows 500 character e-mails, so mine was necessarily brief and far softer in its demand than I could have written:

Rosie has gone too far. She is aggressively defending a murderous terrorist and implying that he -- who granted no mercy to the 3000 dead on 9/11 -- is the VICTIM of American justice rather than the proper recipient of it. Her words go far beyond entertainment or commentary. She is a conscious apologist for an enemy who would not hesitate to kill us all, and I will boycott Disney until she publicly and SINCERELY apologizes for her hateful, traitorous support of the enemy of all that is decent.

Does she really think that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad will love her for defending him and refrain even for an instant from slaughtering her and her family along with the rest of us if he could? Does she think radical muslims would be tolerant of her and her lifestyle out of gratitude for her betraying and denouncing her fellow countrymen?

Don't liberals get it that someone who would plot to kill Jimmy Carter -- a recently professed opponent of Israel -- doesn't care what positions infidels take? They merely consider her one of what Lenin called the "useful idiots."

Tom Selene -- In the Arms of Eris

2007-03-11T18:30:00.000-07:00

This is getting depressing, writing about friends who have died. I'd been wondering about former AnarchoVillage inhabitant Tom Selene, on whom I'd based a character in my novel The Jehovah Contract. I tried ZabaSearch, but that turned up nothing (not surprising, when trying to find an anarchist). I Googled his name and found this mention of him from Rancho Todos Santos, which mentions that he passed into the waiting arms of Eris, goddess of Chaos, on June 26th, 2006.

Tom was a valuable source of information about pharmaceuticals and the Ordo Templi Orientis. In fact (if I recall correctly), it was through Tom that I first met my friends in the OTO (Lon DuQuette, et al.)

He was a colorful figure, full of joy and life, and once told me that when he worked as a perfusionist, he had the opportunity to hold a living human heart in his hands and felt the true magnificence of Life.

"Unto them from whose eyes the veil of life hath fallen may there be granted the accomplishment of their true Wills; whether they will absorption in the Infinite, or to be united with their chosen and preferred, or to be in contemplation, or to be at peace, or to achieve the labour and heroism of incarnation on this planet or another, or in any Star, or aught else, unto them may there be granted the accomplishment of their wills; yea, the accomplishment of their wills. AUMGN. AUMGN. AUMGN."

So mote it be.

Gross Gems -- Funny Forgotten Films

2007-02-25T12:48:00.000-08:00

If you view my Blogger profile, you'll see a couple of Favorite Movies listed of which you have never heard: Tarzini of the Garbanzo and Mission: Imbroglio. You won't find them listed on IMDB and (until my profile) a Google search would turn up nothing (Tarzini) or coincidental couplings of the two words "mission" and "imbroglio" (although there seems to be a foreign film trailer of that name).

The two films -- and several others -- were the creation of a "studio" called Gross Gems. What was Gross Gems? In the late 1960s/early 1970s, a bunch of high-school guys in the Los Gatos-Saratoga area (one-horse towns back then, but now "wealthy suburbs of Silicon Valley") somehow got hold of a 16mm camera and proceeded to create a handful of one-reelers that spoofed the culture of the times. While I remember Tarzini (a great take-off on every Tarzan film ever made) and Imbroglio (a dead-on satire of Mission: Impossible that predated anything the Abrahams/Zucker trio ever did), they also created Utter Confusion, Jet Car, Golfer, Scramble, and more. I had seen some of the films at our high school (I think) and then, most memorably (since I kept the program book) at Villa Montalvo, a ritzy arboretum in Saratoga.

I remember the night well (or do I? Time may have played with my memories). It was my first date with Terry Sicular, and my dad drove us there. I had overcome my shyness to ask her out because I suspected she would appreciate their wicked humor. I must have been a good judge of intelligence, because I Googled her name recently and discovered that Dr. Terry Sicular is a globe-trotting economist at the University of Western Ontario! She's written tonnes of articles about China.

The show consisted of the Gross Gems films interspersed with "Gross-Outs" -- short blackout skits with titles such as "Snake-Charmer Gross-Out" and "Rod McKurihanihanO'Clancy Gross-Out". I recall them being amusing-to-hilarious and alternating very well with the films.

(After the show was over, I tried calling my parents to pick us up, but the phone was busy -- this was long before call-waiting. So the curator of the arboretum drove us down the hill to the gate, racing at breakneck speed and honking loudly at every curve. Terry and I looked at each other as if we might become a headline in the Los Gatos Times-Observer about the fatal dangers of the Montalvo access road.)

But I digress.

The producer/writer/actor was Rick Harper; Doug Harrison played piano, acted, and did some soundtrack work; Sandy Stotzer wrote and acted; Don Langston wrote and acted; Peder Jorgensen provided production assistance; Roger Pease, also PA; Don Stewart and Lane Parker were PA's; Roquefort the Lizard engaged in Public Relations and The Ape (see photo above) provided backstage noise.

My favorite line from Mission: Imbroglio was from the opening scene in which the Jim Phelps-type is receiving his orders from the tape recorder, which reminds him that "...if you or any of your IM force is caught or killed, the secretary will miss you guys around the office."

I just wanted it on the record that the Gross Gems films ought to be resurrected, digitally restored, and made available to the world. They were that funny.

The Triumph of Feminism

2006-10-20T21:28:00.000-07:00

Well, here's I post I didn't realize was sitting around for months, so here it is a little belatedly, but just as timely...

Tammy Skinner, of Suffolk, Virginia, killed her own child by shooting herself in the abdomen as she went into labor. Just as with partial-birth abortion, a fully formed and indisputably viable baby died. This, despite the fact that she could have surrendered the child minutes after birth to a hospital or firehouse. She stood trial and was acquitted. I'm sure feminists would hail this as a victory for the constitutionally protected act of Woman's Choice. What a woman. What a choice.

As I portrayed in my novel Solomon's Knife, the pro-abortion/anti-abortion dichotomy can be resolved if we break down the act into a four-way choice:

keep the fetus in the woman (normal birth)
kill and expel the fetus (abortion)
expel the fetus without killing it (abandonment)
transfer the fetus from one woman to another (transoption)

I believe that a woman has the right to terminate her pregnancy, but not to kill the fetus, which is a genetically distinct human being from conception onward. Once you separate out terminating the pregnancy from terminating the fetus, you see that the abortion camps can be divided four ways:

People who would force a woman to continue her pregnancy to birth
People who demand the death of the fetus
People who would condone a pregnancy termination if it didn't kill the fetus
People who would accept letting the fetus live if they could freely terminate the pregnancy

It is obviously the last two groups that I think would embrace transoption (and I think constitute the majority of Americans) and the first two groups that I consider enslavers and murderers respectively.

KoPubCo gets noticed!

2006-04-10T10:48:00.000-07:00

The source for all my novels, as well as back issues of New Libertarian, has been very kindly mentioned by 2006 Chauntecleer Award-winner Wally Conger's Out of Step site and also in Freemanic's blog and Brad Spangler's.

I'm actually getting orders, too!

Licence Reviewed -- The 007 Replay

2006-01-30T20:45:00.000-08:00

I bought the complete James Bond DVD collection a few months ago and for 2006 have decided to view them in order, one every Friday night, for the next half year. I started, of course, with Dr. No. It holds up very well. I remember seeing it as a kid in our town's single theater. Nothing could be more of a religious experience than seeing Ursula Andress rise from the Jamaican waters. There's a certain claustrophic feel to the nuclear core scene that later films, with larger budgets and sets, did not possess.

I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the films, especially my favorites, such as Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice. I'll keep you informed of any insights I might have with a 40-year retrospective.

Yeah, More Resolutions

2005-12-31T23:48:00.000-08:00

OK, I'll slip in some resolutions at the end of 2005.

1. More postings. I've been remiss, I know. I've got some topics I want to cover, such as: Words Conservatives Should Never Ever Use Again and Can Intelligent Design Explain My Knees?

2. The return of KoPubCo. Koman Publishing has been acquired by The Triplanetary Corporation, a California company. With that acquisition comes a new direction: KoPubCo will bring back the currently out of print works of yours truly, as well as a new line of historical adventures for children. More on that in 2006...

3. More new writing. Look for a new Captain Anger and an updated Kings of the High Frontier.

4. Less clutter: look for lots of stuff for sale on eBay, dealer name TriplanetaryTrader.

All my best wishes for a Happy New Year!

Tookie's Last Chapter

2005-11-28T18:48:00.000-08:00

A lot has been made of quadruple murderer Tookie Williams and the children's books he has written. The implication (without any proof) is that his books may have warned a few kids away from joining gangs (such as the Crips, the gang he founded and recruited thousands of kids to join).

The idea that a few good works late in life can undo the fact of four murders (a fact never successfully challenged in 25 years of appeals) undercuts the powerful lesson sent by carrying out the death penalty: that some crimes are unforgivable. In fact, if Tookie -- who shot four people to death based on their race -- is the writer he claims to be, then he should realize that the best final chapter he could write is the one that ends with him walking to San Quentin's Comfy Chair of Oblivion, whimpering like a coward, begging for mercy.

It's what the priest in old crime movies tells the death-row inmate: his remorseful death will do more to show the kids where a life of crime leads than any number of colorful kid's books.

Asking for clemency is neither dramatic nor artistically satisfying (if your intention is to convince kids not to join gangs -- unless Tookie's insincere about that, too). And being granted clemency (especially while refusing to admit to the crime or showing any remorse -- a requirement for clemency) creates a final chapter that tells kids that mass murder is no big deal -- you can do it, refuse to admit you did it, and walk free with a Nobel Prize nomination under your belt, have an Oscar winner portray you on TV, and be the darling of the intelligentsia forevermore.

Sorry, Tookie. You're a killer four times over. Your children's books are as unconvincing a sign of your rehabilitation as finding Jesus is for other imprisoned fiends. And asking for clemency makes you a lousy writer with an abysmal sense of narrative logic.

Bad writer! Die, die!

Bernie Zuber • 1933-2005

2005-10-18T17:21:00.000-07:00

A long-time friend of mine, Bernie Zuber, passed away last Friday, October 14th, at 2:15 P.M. at Arcadia Methodist Hospital. He was the co-author of The Tolkien Quiz Book and one of the premier experts on Tolkien long before the Peter Jackson movies and even before the Hildebrant Brothers Del Rey editions of the 1970s.

He endured bipolar disorder but finally found the right mix of drugs to control it and even wrote about his experiences, becoming a local advocate for the mentally ill.

In the last few years, he started attending raves, becoming a bit of a celebrity: he told me kids would take a photo with him to prove that older people enjoyed their music, too. His gentle good humor and kind-heartedness endeared him to more than one young thing, such as bathtubgirl.

He was married for many years to Teny, and together they entertained a wide variety of Southern California fandom. I always enjoyed being in their presence because they had a sort of Nick and Nora Charles meets the Hobbits quality that I loved about them.

In the early 1980s, Bernie read a draft of my novel Death's Dimensions. Shortly after that, he was in a minor auto collision and for some reason his bipolar condition kicked in. He later told me that the novel had disturbed him at just the wrong point in his life. Happily, he was able to look back on the hell he'd been through with the cest la vie attitude of his French ancestors.

I'll miss him. Seventy-two is too young.

NASA Goes Back to the Future

2005-09-20T09:42:00.000-07:00

So NASA has revealed its plans to return to the Moon. My problem is, why will it take 13+ years? In the 1960s, we went from literally nothing to the Moon in 6 years. No computer-aided design and manufacturing, no previous experience. Why, then, when NASA plans to use mostly Shuttle-derived hardware, should it take more than twice as long to do something we've already done?

Don't get me wrong -- I desperately want America to get back to the Moon, any which way. I want to get there! So why -- after 35 years of wasted opportunity -- do we need to take another decade and a half? Why can't we do it in 3 years? Have we made no progress in rapid design between the Second Millennium and the Third?

I know, I know -- NASA's budget is 1/8th what it was during the Apollo years (.5% of the federal budget instead of 4%), but that's scant excuse -- lean manufacturing concepts weren't well-defined back then, either!

I sincerely hope that when NASA finally returns men to the Moon, they will be greeted by the residents of Luna City and taken via Virgin Moonline to the Heinlein Bar and Grill, where I'll offer them a tall one (six times taller than on Earth) and ask, "What took you so long?"

Lighting My Memory

2005-06-16T12:00:00.000-07:00

Cleaning the garage has always been a traumatic experience for me. Perhaps that's why my garage always looks like the warehouse in Citizen Kane, loaded to the rafters with junk. Actually, even the rafters are filled -- they support boxes of old model kits that I acquired with an eye toward having something to do if I am ever hospitalized. And I may be, if the rafters ever collapse under the weight of the kits.

I can't throw anything out. I read an article about obsessive-compulsive behavior, and the pack-rat syndrome (or PRS) was right up there with thoughts of violent death and persistent hand-washing. I realized that the article was about me! I suffered from PRS and could deny it no longer. Of course I immediately clipped that article out and added it to the stack of newspaper clippings in a box in the garage.

The article suggested that Clomipramine could control the pack-rat compulsion, but as much as I support better living through chemistry, I also believe that will power has become seriously underrated -- if not openly scorned and snidely mocked -- in modern America. If I am a pack rat, I reasoned, it may be due to a chemical imbalance or perhaps I'm just a lazy, sentimental slob with a latent archivist streak. When I was a kid, after all, I wanted to be either an astronaut or an archeologist (my parents would only buy the introductory first volume of encyclopedias, since they were the cheapest. My knowledge, though encyclopedic, runs generally from Aardvark to Byzantium). Actually, I wanted to be an archeologist-astronaut, uncovering ancient extraterrestrial civilizations. If my parents would have sprung for a complete set of Grolier's, I might instead have chosen to be a fireman, psychiatrist, or a xylophonist.

I have an archivist streak. Just ask my friend Sam (well, you can't now -- he's died since I first wrote this), who has published a small magazine since he was in college. I have been searching the planet for the first five issues of his magazine. I have everything I've ever written, including my first work of fiction written from the fifth grade, "Attack of the Atomic Dogs." So when I say the garage is a mess, I mean it!

In an effort to avoid the side effects of Clomipramine (stomach upset, suicide, that sort of thing) I decided to exert my will and Throw Something Out. That ought to show that the Charter Hospital mentality is flawed and that most behavioral defects are simply well-worn habits that can be broken without outside assistance!

I opened the garage door, wondering if anyone in southern California actually used garages to store their cars. Spiders skittered this way and that. Silverfish (surely Satan's spawn incarnate -- they eat books!) slithered away in search of retreating darkness. Cobwebs stretched and snapped as the hinges creaked and squealed. There it stood: the accumulated total of my life. Five sets of shelves hand-hewn of wood pried from an aged cottage in Paradise, California, piled to the rafters with boxes and file trays. Every square foot of floor space stacked high with more boxes. Bicycles hemmed in by lawnmowers and water bottles. My geriatric motorcycle covered with mummy dust and a death shroud.

My PRS panic arose as I withdrew a box marked Vic's Old Toys. This would be the place to start. Possessions from so far in the dim past that their disposal would go unnoticed.

I had lined the box with newspapers when originally packing away the toys and miscellaneous items. Yellowed and brittle, they were still readable. NIXON RESIGNS. Really? I thought she stayed with Sex in the City until the end. Well, history was always my weak suit.

I figured the best method was to dump everything on the floor and only put back in a new box what I really, truly wanted to save. After so many years, there couldn't be much that I'd want to have around. On the driveway it went.

The first thing I saw atop the pile was my old cowboy holster set. Wow! Black cowhide with red plastic rubies! Get ready to slap leather, Paladin! I'll gun ya down! Can't get rid of that (even though -- yuck! -- what is that weird green mold on it?). Just try and find a quality gun-related toy these days. This stuff should be in the Gene Autry Museum, not a trash heap!

All right. Next. Ooh -- Space Orb, a kaleidescope for space age kids. I put my eye against the exhaust nozzle of the yellow rocket (about as educational a toy as the Pez gun that shot candy if you put your mouth on the muzzle and pulled the trigger!). Twirling the nose cone of Space Orb creates an infinite number of bizarre alien creatures. Hey, this can't go. I hear that space-age toys are bringing in a fortune! Also set aside that battery-powered Cragstan astronaut robot with the ray gun.

Dump my Agent Zero-M Radio Rifle? Never!

I grasped at something silvery and was surprised to come up with a Zippo cigarette lighter. Nothing fancy. Plain polished nickel finish.

I don't smoke.

I never have (well, once in back of a pigeon coop -- had an asthma attack of a profound, attitude-imprinting proportion that made me desire never to repeat that experience). I wasn't a pyromaniac except around the fireplace. Why was this here?

I flicked open the lid and realized instantly. It was the sound it made. You can have your butane lighters, your Bics and your Scriptos, and even your James Bond Colibris. You can even have your fluid-powered Ronsinols. There is something quintessentially American about the sound a Zippo lighter makes when you flip that cover off, strike the wheel gamely, and watch a flame burst into life. Then the satisfying snap of the lid closing on the blue-and-yellow fire, extinguishing it and leaving a warm sensation in the metal.

I don't know how I came into possession of this particular lighter as a boy, but I knew instantly how I felt about it. I took the dried-out thing into the house and resuscitated it. I broke open a dead, disposable butane lighter and cannibalized its flint, pleased to discover that the diameters matched perfectly. I found some lighter fluid, which I keep around since toluene is a fine cleaning solvent.

I filled. I flicked. It fired. I watched in joy as something from my youth stirred me to think about the enduring icons of America. The simple, utilitarian, inexpensive Zippo lighter must surely be one of them. Even though I don't smoke, I now carry this bit of my past with me, for the neat sound it makes and because one never knows when one might need light in a dark archeological dig, or fire in the cold wilderness of an alien planet.

In the time since I first wrote this (1991), both my parents have passed away, so I now have my "inheritance" of their stuff (crockery, Reader's Digest 8-track tapes, four prosthetic right legs) as well as some of Sam's stuff, too. Though I've disposed of a lot over the years (including the hand-made wooden shelves), the garage is still stacked high with stuff. On eight huge GR 7201 Gorilla Racks and two palletts! I'll be going back in tomorrow morning to dig out more of my past.

Clomipramine, anyone?

Dead... All Dead!

2005-04-11T09:50:00.000-07:00

Well, Terry Schiavo is dead now. And so is the Pope. And so is chicken magnate Frank Perdue. And so is longtime fan and former AnarchoVillager John Strang. Who's next?

Where is NOW in Schiavo case?

2005-03-23T10:15:00.000-08:00

One voice we have not heard in the Terri Schiavo case is the feminists. Why? The case seems perfectly cast for the National Organization for Women: an adulterous husband who seems to care nothing for his wife, putting words in her mouth years after a suspicious "heart problem" places her in a minimally conscious state, working relentlessly to see her dead.

Where is NOW in decrying the sexist, patriarchist notion that a man can determine when a woman lives or dies simply because he is her husband? Where are the feminists lined up to demonize Michael Schiavo, to call for all women to wake up and realize that if he is allowed to starve his wife to death on the basis of his own hearsay, then any husband could do the same to any wife under similar circumstances.

I have my suspicions as to why the National Organization for Women is silent in the face of the imminent death of a sister: in some twisted way, they feel that stopping the death of Terri Schiavo could somehow be used to attack abortion.

Abortion is such an overwhelming holy grail to feminists that they will turn a blind eye to the death of a woman out of fear that any show of support for human life might be used to undermine their arguments for the worthlessness of a fetus's life.

One Missing Item

2005-03-22T09:58:00.000-08:00

I confess to a macabre streak. I collect and read disaster preparedness publications. Out here in Southern California, that usually means earthquake pamphlets and booklets and flyers. I have a fairly thick file of them. I don't think this qualifies as paranoia, though my old nemesis PRS (Pack Rat Syndrome) may explain the phenomenon.

I also like to make survival kits. They make great housewarming and baby shower gifts, though I’ve noticed that a marked gloom descends on the party whenever the hosts open up my gaily wrapped package. People begin to relate their own disaster stories: Midwest tornados, eastern power-grid failures, southern hurricanes, Indonesian tsunamis, and, of course, western quakes.

I love to read these booklets and follow their advice. It must be the latent Boy Scout in me. I never joined, mainly because I was a bit of a loner and hanging around a bunch of other guys didn’t sound like a weekend full of fun. So I would grab my toy bazooka and play Armageddon on the hill behind our house. Even then, a deep concern for survival gripped me.

I’ve made survival kits that fit in a 30 gallon garbage can (important safety note — don't include canned orange juice unless you want to turn everything into a soggy mass when the can rusts through), kits in a backpack (for cars and offices), and even a mini-kit that fits in a 35mm film canister. No food or water in that one, but fish hooks, line, matches, and a piece of cotton for tinder. I consider myself an expert on these matters.

So it was with some dismay last week that I had a friend over and our conversation turned toward earthquakes and disaster survival. He wanted to look at my collection of pamphlets, so I let him. After a few cursory glances at the supply lists, he let out a derisive snort and informed me that each of these kits had one item missing. I could not imagine what it was, since they were all comprehensive and even contained items that I thought were superfluous, such as quarters for pay phones and the number of an out-of-state contact; everyone knows that the phones won’t work after an earthquake and if they did, the same articles tell us not to use the phones so that emergency services can!

“All right, Mr. Disaster Planner,” I said. “What’s missing from my survival kit?”

He looked at me gamely. “A gun, of course! And ammo. These pamphlets keep telling you not to expect any emergency services for days after a disaster. They want you to have fire extinguishers because the fire department will be busy. They want you to have a first-aid kit because paramedics will be busy. Turn off your own gas if there’s a leak because the gas company will be busy. Well, doesn’t it follow that the cops will also be busy and unable to protect every survivor from the sort of scum that prey on misfortune?”

I sort of figured that muggers would be just as busy trying to survive a quake as anyone else, and similarly unable to perform their job, such as it is.

Perhaps true, my friend countered, but did I think that a mugger or thief had enough foresight to prepare for a disaster and have his own survival kit to keep him fed and warm for three days to two weeks? Or would such a person live a very short-sighted life and, after a disaster, decide to make up for his grasshopper's oversight by looting us ants of our carefully hoarded goods? Look at the recent tsunami — some people immediately determined that the disaster served as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to drag survivors off and rape them, when they weren't even sure if another wave might hit and kill them. There's a testament to the power of insane rapacity.

I countered that the National Guard is always sent in to prevent looting.

“How soon? Could they get to your particular house in time? And besides, you are part of the militia, too.”

He continued, telling me that I was the only person with a vested interest in protecting my family and home. In a disaster, every person is thinking of his or her own home and family, not of me and mine. Even firemen and paramedics will check out their own neighborhoods first.

What a cynic!

“If these disaster specialists want you to have the means to survive without medics or firemen,” he concluded, “they ought to be telling you to have the means to survive without cops or National Guard. Purposely and consistently refusing to advise anyone to have a gun in their survival kits reveals how deeply the anti-gun sentiment runs in the Red Cross and government agencies. They'd rather you be open to attack by looters than admit that having a gun in your home or car is a vital part of any survival plan, disaster or no.”

As wild as he sounded, my friend did start me thinking. After all, you can be pretty sure that a policeman’s home survival kit probably has a pistol tucked away amidst the bandages and calorie bars. And it is certainly legal for the rest of us to have guns in our homes and safely packed in our cars for transportation. So why, indeed, do disaster preparedness publications tell us not to expect firemen or paramedics or gas or water or electricity, but neglect to tell us not to expect police assistance? And, worse, why do they not inform us of the danger of looters that might appear before or even after the National Guard arrive (if they show up at all)?

He changed my mind about this. I’ve got my toy bazooka stashed in my home survival kit. It may not do anything, but it sure looks threatening at twenty yards.

But I’ve given up on trying to squeeze a revolver into a 35mm film pot.

“Bad News” is Good News

2005-03-13T15:07:00.000-08:00

I have often wondered why the news is so depressing. Newspapers, magazines, and television are obsessed with “bad news.” Murder, theft, rape, war, hatred — everything evil spatters across headlines and stories, usually accompanied by vivid photographs or video. News commentators occasionally tut-tut about this predilection of the media to cover the worst aspects of humankind but offer little in the way of a solution.

I have come to the conclusion that no solution is necessary. Depressing headlines are the best sign that things are mostly right with the world. Why that is so has a lot to do with what news is. News is something that is out of the ordinary. In fact, it sparks the interest of readers precisely because it is so far removed from their experience that it fascinates with its unreality.

The reason that The News is bad is that bad news is so rare, and disasters are so uncommon, that their very rarity makes them newsworthy. The flip side of this is something that is seldom stated — good news is so common that it is unnecessary to report it!

Consider murder for a moment. The news media have been accused of “glorifying” murderers by giving their crimes front page coverage. But how many people are murdered in an average day? Ten? One hundred? One thousand? On the other hand, how many people are left unmurdered each day? Billions! Which is the more unusual? Which is the more surprising? Which is news?

Think of what sort of world we would be living in where the eyegrabbing headlines would read “MAN WALKS HOME FROM WORK AND LIVES!” or “LOCAL WOMAN GOES UNRAPED FOR FIVE DAYS!” or “CITY MYSTERIOUSLY UNTOUCHED BY WAR.” Only in a world where catastrophe is the standard would such events be considered extraordinary, fascinating, and newsworthy.

The Challenger disaster was Big News because the previous two dozen flights had gone up without a perceptible hitch. Had it been the norm for spacecraft to explode and kill all passengers, then the one that lifts off with no problems would be the one to merit Second Coming headlines. And that held true again for the next 70+ flawless flights: the missions were non-events as far as the press was concerned. Until Columbia.

The truth about Bad News is that it clearly demonstrates how good life is otherwise. Certainly there is room for news about something unbelievably good that happens. That, too, is unusual and therefore News. On the whole, though, Bad News predominates because misfortune, terror, and crime are aberrations. Disaster is not a part of anyone’s everyday life. For the most part, people get along with one another. Generally, they do not rob, rape, or murder their neighbors. It takes a great deal of effort for any government to whip them into conducting war against one another. People, all in all, tend to be kind, non-interfering, productive sorts who conduct themselves peaceably and with a minimum of friction.

We are not curious about the person who can cope with day-to-day stress — nearly all of us do that every moment of our lives. What attracts our attention is the lone soul who goes off his rocker and causes a bloodbath — here is someone most people are not likely to run into every day — or ever. How often is a psychopath described as seeming “normal,” or “just like the guy next door”? Doesn’t that indicate that the “normals” outnumber the psychopaths? If we are all secretly madmen, why bother making the comparison? Rather, so few of us are murderously insane — and so few of us can be pushed in that direction — that the deviant is worthy of notice simply because of his scarcity.

So it goes with the scarcity of tragedy. We are not interested in the person who swallows a headache capsule and safely has his headache relieved — that happens to almost all of us. What is News is the rare individual who swallows a capsule and dies. What better sign do we need that medicine is generally benign?

Certainly, nothing is more abhorrent than murder, calamity, violence, and death. They are a tragic part of human existence. But they are not the primary part of human existence — not by a long shot — and they are treated properly in the news by being given coverage in inverse proportion to their prevalence.

So hail the good news of Bad News! After all, which world would you rather be living in — the world where human suffering is a rare event — News! — or one in which misery and destruction are so common that they merit no mention?

See you in the funny pages.

Mars Attacks!

2005-03-02T20:33:00.000-08:00

I admit that I was hooked at an early age. Society is not to blame, nor the dealer. Only I am responsible. I could have stopped at any time, but after I bought the first packet at the tender age of six, I wanted more. And I still can’t stop. I remember the crinkle of the wax-impregnated paper, the white powder clinging to the hard, pink slab. Most important, though, I remember when I first saw the face of a Martian.

It was the early 1960s. My parents could not afford a fallout shelter for our modest Mountain View tract home. My mother, a Russian immigrant, possessed a distinctly Dostoyevskian view of nuclear war. “If they drop the bomb,” she would often remark, “I will run outside, look up at the plane, throw out my arms and shout ‘hit me!’”

Being a native-born American, I demonstrated more of a survivalist streak. I knew, along with Herman Kahn and Edward Teller, that a nuclear war was survivable. I practiced my drop drills and kept my Civil Defense FALLOUT PROTECTION booklet close at hand. (I still have it today. In fact, I have two copies. I must have filched my sister’s in order to maintain a redundant safety mode.)

Nikita Kruschev scared me, if only because he looked like such an unimpressive little man. The awareness that the so-called “leaders” of nations possessing spacecraft and super-weapons looked less like Raymond Massey and more like Guy Kibbee put a dread of politicians into me early on. Nothing, though, prepared me for the face of true terror.

Mountain View was one of those Californian communities without a distinctive small-town feel. I only remember our home, the Monte Vista Drive-In, and a small shopping center a few blocks away. There was no downtown or main street of which I was aware. The market, however, was modern enough to stock a large array of candy goods, including baseball trading cards. In those days, we called them “bubble gum cards” because each packet of cards was wrapped in wax paper and contained a stick of pink bubble gum so hard that compared to it modern bubble gum has all the consistency of bovine cud. You kids today don’t have that anymore in your Mylar-sealed, hologram-stamped, two-dollar-a-packet trading cards.

My generation had it bare bones. The cards were printed on thick grey-brown cardboard coated on only one side. Check out a drink coaster in your local sports bar. That’s what a gum card felt like! As I later came to understand it, the presence of the gum magically transformed the entire a package into a non-taxable food item. The cards were considered a premium similar to the free prize inside a box of Cracker Jacks. This ingenious and venerable form of tax-evasion was lost on me at the age of six, though I have come to appreciate in our current hypertaxed era.

Now I was not a collector of sports cards. Baseball cards, that is; in those halcyon days, there were no other sports considered worthy of notice. No football cards, no basketball cards, and hockey was something the kids farther north did instead of rumbling. In fact, I don’t think I had ever bought or considered buying gum cards until… until I saw The Face.

I was in the market (nothing super about them in those days) with my mother, passing through the checkout line. There, by the boxful, sat bright packets of gum cards. On the wrapper, though, was not a baseball player but a glaring monster of unimaginable horror. The Face was hardly a face at all. Like a grinning death’s head it gazed with lidless eyes incapable of expression. Instead of black pupils, the deathly white eyes possessed fiery crimson spots at their center. Instead of a hard bone skull, the top of the creature’s head mushroomed into a huge exposed brain three times the size of any mere human’s. On either side of its skeleton jaw hung hideous fleshy things that might have been tendrils or just repulsive dewlaps.

It stared right at me from inside an inverted brandy snifter of a space helmet, its frightening, armored claw reaching toward me with unspeakable menace. In bloody red letters against a bilious yellow background dripped the ominous announcement: MARS ATTACKS!

I instantly fell in love.

Yes, love. In love with the sheer magnitude of the terror. I pestered my mother to buy a packet. It was only a nickel. (Take that, you self-righteous collectors who think a hundred bucks for a Nolan Ryan rookie card is some sort of bargain!) My mother acquiesced, perhaps in some moment of distraction, perhaps because I only said, “May I please buy some gum?” (In those days, mothers could not ask the inevitable modern followup: “Is it sugar-free?” It wasn’t. Nothing was.)

I ripped open the package, chipped the gum away from the top card, crumbled the noxious delicacy in my hand, and threw the pink shards into my mouth. There beneath the waxy impression of the gum slab lay a vision of Hell unparalleled in modern times; matched, perhaps, only by the demented paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. I don’t remember now what particular card it was out of the series of 55. It might have been #1, THE INVASION BEGINS, in which a Martian points toward a departing fleet of flying saucers as thousands of identical big-brained troops march to the ladders. Or it might have been #3, ATTACKING AN ARMY BASE, in which the saucers strike without warning, using blue-white death rays to roast soldiers as they try to escape their burning barracks. Men afire, one already the silhouette of a skeleton in the death ray, one still untouched, firing his carbine futilely against the impenetrable Martian spacecraft.

I like to think, though, that the first card I saw was #11, “DESTROY THE CITY.” In hues of garish yellows, reds, and oranges, a city street is aflame. In the background, a warehouse and a courthouse blaze out of control. A shadow of a figure tries to escape from a crushed and burning car. In the foreground lay a stack of smoldering corpses, some reduced to skeletons, some still half-human. Amidst the fiery devastation are four Martians in their green battle armor with red atmosphere tanks on the back (I’d say they were oxygen tanks, but God only knows what those fiends breathed. Probably carbon monoxide.)
One Martian points to his right while surveying the destruction with emotionless calm. The other three rush toward where he (it?) points, presumably to wipe out the last pockets of resistance. This was no attempt to conquer Earth, seize its industry and wealth, and subjugate its people. This was extermination. This was total destruction. This was the end of the human race.

When faced with the possibility of the annihilation of all mankind and all its works, World War III seemed much easier to handle. Other kids must have felt the same, for my friends and I hoarded, traded, and treasured these beauties with an even greater intensity than any baseball card collector could. After all, how could an action shot of Don Drysdale compete with #19, BURNING FLESH, in which a man stares down in screaming horror as a Martian laser rifle sears everything below his shoulders to charred skeleton.

The cards, for me at least, were a bizarre form of comfort. As bad as the Russians were, they were still human. They would attack us in ways that would leave something standing. (As the son of Russians, I always felt that the Russian people would at some point refuse to obey their slavemasters. I knew I would have. And I’m glad that, after more than three decades, my childhood hunch proved correct.)

After all, the feared World War III would have been just the Russians against the Americans. The rest of the world could crawl out of the ruins and rebuild. What a six-year-old saw in those cards, though, was a vision of doom overwhelmingly complete and total. Cards such as #5, WASHINGTON IN FLAMES, #8, TERROR IN TIMES SQUARE, and #26, THE TIDAL WAVE demonstrated the Biblical proportions of the slaughter.

The Martian fiends employed every possible weapon. The heat rays were a favorite, but they also blasted humanity with frost rays and shrinking rays. They turned enlarging rays on insects, releasing giant flies, spiders, and bugs to prey upon defenseless Earthlings. Sure, some humans fought back. A soldier protecting a woman from a giant green potato bug plunged his bayonet into its arm, releasing a goosh of ruby bug-juice, to no avail. Ants devoured commuter trains and a caterpillar twined up the Eiffel Tower, snapping it in half.

The Martians had still more weapons. They unleashed a giant robot operated by an impassive Martian in the cockpit. They even dropped a spiked claw-shovel out of the bottom of one saucer to scoop up fleeing pedestrians and crush them against brick walls. The monsters’ desire for total obliteration was beyond belief. They sank our ships, blasted our aircraft, burned our cattle, and — as a boy close to my age screamed in horror, fists beating uselessly against Martian armor — they even destroyed a dog!

Worst of all, the murderous creatures watched it all on video! Yes, card #13, WATCHING FROM MARS, displayed naked Martians sitting in recliners, hoisting wine glasses, leisurely observing a wall-sized TV screen as cameras mounted in saucers broadcast aerial scenes of the destruction of Washington, DC. Those unspeakable monsters gleefully cheered safely at home while high-tech weapons pounded a primitive people into blood and rubble. I knew right then that these foul invaders were not only inhuman, they were the antithesis of everything American. No human beings, no creatures with any conscience whatsoever could be so bloodthirstily cruel and insensitive.

And they had color TV, the lucky stiffs!

Most ominously, in such cards as #17, BEAST AND THE BEAUTY, and #21, PRIZE CAPTIVE, the Martians abducted Our Women, generally preferring full-figured blondes. Brunettes, on the other hand, composed the majority of female corpses. Ah, but which fate was worse? As a kid, I didn’t care. These were the mushy scenes. The war was much more interesting.

All the American victims were white. Though the saucers did make one cursory pass through China, no other races seemed to fall victim to the slaughter; this was not an equal opportunity massacre.

In the darkest hour of humanity, though, some hope glimmered, much to my youthful dismay. Flame throwers could destroy the insects. Several soldiers discovered that a bayonet could pierce Martian pressure suits. Then, at card #46, came what even this six-year-old could see was the Big Ripoff Climax.

In spite of the massive worldwide destruction, there somehow still existed military rocket bases all over the planet.
Notwithstanding the destruction of troops, ships, and aircraft, military units were still somehow able to move their ordnance onto rocket ships larger than the Empire State Building (knocked over way back in card #10). They blast off for Mars, reach it in just one card, and immediately begin nuclear saturation bombing of the Red Planet!

Even at six I could recognize a deus ex machina ending, even if I had no name for it. What about the Martian occupation force? Didn’t they put a blockade around Earth to shoot down any ascending rockets? And why couldn’t the Martian defense forces see the Earth troops coming? Every kid my age knew that it took at least six months to reach Mars via a Hohmann “S” orbit. (I did so know it. Any kid in the Space Age who didn’t was obviously wasting his time collecting baseball cards!) How could the aliens be caught unaware? Were the Martians as complacent on the home front as we were? Did their adults scoff at the need for bomb shelters? A lesson, then, to be learned by both sides.

Or perhaps something was rotten in Deep Space.

Did I care? Did I truly care at six that I had been strung along for 80% of a story into thinking that the Martians had been more powerful and thorough than they apparently were?

Nah… By then, I was eager for the Payback. And it came fast and furious. Terran forces nuked Mars, then sent in the paratroopers (thank you, strategic planners); they crashed through the domes of the cities with five-turret tanks. (#51, CRUSHING THE MARTIANS, is the most gory retaliation card and, compositionally, my favorite.) On the penultimate card, a Martian city lays in flaming ruin, dome cracked open, monorail hanging from its track, ash-grey roasted Martian head in the foreground. The Face reposes in grim death, no longer grinning its triumphant skull grin. My beloved alien race had been laid waste.

Card #54, MARS EXPLODES, must have influenced George Lucas; on it, spaceships rocket away from the shattering planet like dandelion seeds hit by the shock wave of a summer storm. For many, it was the glorious end to a nightmare. For me, it signalled the end of mankind’s unity against a common foe. I knew that Earthlings would return to their petty squabbles shortly after #55, COMPLETE CHECKLIST, turned over with the finality of a Tarot card.

I suspect that these Topps bubble gum cards (the company issued them under a pseudonym, Bubbles, Inc.) have had an impact more profound than we can imagine. The MARS ATTACKS! series must have even influenced presidential policy. I remember listening with surprise to President Reagan’s suggestion, years later, that the only threat that would truly unite humanity would be an invasion from space. Was this a warning from the highest levels of power? Should we indeed Keep Watching The Skies?

Mars is a lifeless planet. I know that now. The very space program that I supported brought me this most distressing news.
There are no Martians against which humanity will unite.

All I know now is that after a third of a century, whenever global disaster looms — whether it be Vietnam, Watergate, the greenhouse effect, Mideast war, or post-communism instability — I still occasionally turn to my carefully preserved MARS ATTACKS! collection and gaze at their images, thinking one simple, childlike thought:

I’m still missing five cards from the set and I want them!

My thoughts about Tim Burton’s movie version next time...

Hello Universe!

2005-02-28T17:03:00.000-08:00

Victor Koman here. I've been writing for a few years, but I've been out of touch for the last 7 while getting my AA, BSIS, and MBA degrees. Now that's all done and I can get back to my first love — writing. Blogs didn't exist in 1998 (at least not in the form they've achieved by 2005), but now I've got my own digital soapbox.

Back in 1996, I thought I'd use e-mail to submit articles to newspapers and magazines. I called it The Virtual Syndicate, but no one bit (or maybe my articles bit). A weblog makes more sense for what I want to do.

What you'll find here will be my thoughts about events of the day (wow, and I'm only the 8,000,000th blogger to do that), some of those very same articles I wrote for The Virtual Syndicate, and news about my upcoming novels.

For instance, did I mention that my novel The Jehovah Contract has been optioned for film by Robert Meyer Burnett, the writer/director of the William Shatner/Eric McCormack/Rafer Weigel comedy Free Enterprise? Of course not! I just started this blog! Watch here for more news about this Prometheus Award-winning novel's translation to film (using my own screenplay, too!).

So welcome to my worlds!