Speculative Fiction and dreams of a life in an uncertain future.
For as long as I have been seriously interested in playing guitar (versus simply making noise) I have always been a Fender guy. My influences included players like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jeff Beck, David Gilmour, and Buddy Guy. I never understood the cult like obsession certain players seemed to have with the Gibson Les Paul. … Read more
How old does something have to be before you begin to feel nostalgic about it?
In the somewhat likely event that I will not be available for the centennial dinner, I tried to gather most of the humans I know for a half century birthday dinner. This was at Pizza Siena in Greensurg, Pennsylvania on Friday November 18th 2022. The photo includes Ashley, Lauren, David, and Myles.
Pandemic day 374 You might have noticed the numbered days in this series of pandemic-related blog posts. Recently I changed “zero day” which also required that I change the numbering on each post. Previously, I was not counting from 11 March 2020. That is the date on which the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID19 … Read more
Pandemic day 367 Although the eleventh of March is the anniversary of the day the World Health Organization classified COVID-19 as a pandemic, the thirteenth of March is the anniversary of the day most of the local schools and business began to shut down. There is some poetry then, that this should be the date … Read more
Finding and scheduling a test for COVID-19 in my area remains surprisingly difficult. Here, in a developed nation we are seemingly unable to make widespread testing available to the public after almost a year of this global pandemic. That is inexcusable. Pandemic day 272 The president of the United States equates testing with causality. Trump … Read more
We are not merely experiencing a localized health crisis, like an increase in seasonal flu along the east coast. This is a global pandemic. The United States cannot simply take that position that this is China’s problem or Europe’s problem. Bad COVID policy decisions instituted by the current administration can and will cause the death … Read more
The federal government of the United States continues to abdicate it’s responsibility to its own citizens, going as far as to deny those needs exist. The president of the United states is arguing with individual state governors over the allocation of supplies and PPE. Those who refuse to “bend the knee” seem unlikely to receive … Read more
Late 2019. A mysterious respiratory disease with symptoms similar to SARS begins spreading in and around Wuhan, the capital of the Hubei province in China. The highly contagions virus is soon identified as a novel strain of the corona virus. This new strain (SARS-CoV-2) causes coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19. Pandemic day zero Deeply concerned … Read more
Altered Carbon is the kind of gritty, post-cyberpunk science fiction series I really enjoy. Unfortunately that means it’s exactly the kind of series that rarely makes it to network television. Thankfully, this is a Netflix original series. Maybe in the near future I’ll do a full review of the series. I don’t do episode recaps … Read more