... the bell tolls

 My 45 year old and youngest daughter grew up with a nice girl who became a good wife and mother. The other day this girl succumbed to cancer. It's surreal losing people my children's age. The bell tolls for us all, randomly, age-wise. The older we grow the more we must toughen to it.

EndEarthers Cheap (the price)

I wanted to price my book at ten thousand bucks a copy. That way if it sold just a few copies I would be ahead of the game. Turned out they wouldn't let me. So I sulked a while but finally allowed their pricing instead of mine. $10.99 (extremely cheap) I think I may have made an awful mistake, but will have to give it time. Hopefully they know what they are doing.

Shadow Truths

 "Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and adventures are the shadow truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes and forgotten."

— Neil Gaiman

Bumblebee Should Not Be Able to Fly

 "According to the recognized, proven principles of aerodynamics, the bumblebee cannot fly because of the shape and weight of its body in relation to the total wing area. But the bumblebee doesn't know this, so it goes ahead and flies anyway.

A lovely myth, but the reality is different:

The basic principles of bumblebee flight, and insect flight generally, have been pretty well understood for many years. Somehow, though, the idea that bees "violate aerodynamic theory" got embedded in folklore.

The story was initially circulated in German technical universities in the 1930s. Supposedly during dinner a biologist asked an aerodynamics expert about insect flight. The aerodynamicist did a few calculations and found that, according to the accepted theory of the day, bumblebees didn't generate enough lift to fly. The biologist, delighted to have a chance to show up those arrogant SOBs in the hard sciences, promptly spread the story far and wide.

Once he sobered up, however, the aerodynamicist surely realized what the problem was--a faulty analogy between bees and conventional fixed-wing aircraft. Bees' wings are small relative to their bodies. If an airplane were built the same way, it'd never get off the ground. But bees aren't like airplanes, they're like helicopters. Their wings work on the same principle as helicopter blades--to be precise, "reverse-pitch semirotary helicopter blades," to quote one authority. A moving airfoil, whether it's a helicopter blade or a bee wing, generates a lot more lift than a stationary one.

The real challenge with bees wasn't figuring out the aerodynamics but the mechanics: specifically, how bees can move their wings so fast--roughly 200 beats per second, which is 10 or 20 times the firing rate of the nervous system. The trick apparently is that the bee's wing muscles (thorax muscles, actually) don't expand and contract so much as vibrate, like a rubber band. A nerve impulse comes along and twangs the muscle, much as you might pluck a guitar string, and it vibrates the wing up and down a few times until the next impulse comes along.

— Cecil Adams

Two Copies

 Now is the time for all good bibliophiles to purchase a few copies of EndEarthers. You will wear out one copy by re-reading and need the other for the bookshelf.

Are You Responsible?

 “Most people live in almost total darkness…people, millions of people whom you will never see, who don’t know you, never will know you, people who may try to kill you in the morning, live in a darkness which...if you have that funny terrible thing which every artist can recognize and no artist can define...you are responsible to those people to lighten, and it does not matter what happens to you. You are being used in the way a crab is useful, the way sand certainly has some function. It is impersonal. This force which you didn’t ask for, and this destiny which you must accept, is also your responsibility. And if you survive it, if you don’t cheat, if you don’t lie, it is not only, you know, your glory, your achievement, it is almost our only hope.”

–James Baldwin

a cracked egg

 a cracked egg the sun

spilled on the sky in haste

lovingly sopped up

Two More Reviews of EndEarthers

 More reviews of my book.

"Gut geschriebene und ungewöhnliche Geschichten. Ich finde das Buch sehr unterhaltsam und sehr gut zu lesen."

"So much packed into one book!!"

A Review of EndEarthers:

 I'm honored to be your first review. I'm so proud of you for finishing this.

Your writing has always been impeccable and chalked full of wonderful imagery and fabulous tales. Finally having your stories bound in a book is a real treasure.

I've only skimmed a little of this so far, and I love it. I'm truly excited to be able to finally read your stories in full and not just in small posts here and there.

I'll update this as I finish it, but I'm already completely sucked in!