A Variety of Thoughts About Everything

 There has been a picture and a story going around for a while that has been of very much interest to me. And it has received some very strong and emotional reactions from people. Some in support, most in condemnation. The picture was thus: A man standing over a little girl, maybe 3 or 4 years old in my judgement. And he was straddling her so that people would walk around them. This was in either a Grocery or Department store. He was not angry. Protective. He was talking with another adult while guarding his little girl. The little girl was having a massive melt down. The type that includes a lot of loud crying and yelling with tears and snot. And the adult was not trying to manage her or shush her or any of that. He was just letting her express herself in the way that she needed to express herself in that moment. And the story attached to the picture was of the father explaining to another person that she just needed to have a meltdown right then and that his only job was to prote...

 In Diane Duane's delightful book Spock's World there is a truly exceptional scene where the idea of IDIC, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, and the taking of delight in the differences that exist, came from. And it is in the middle of the Crisis of Awakening that happens to Surak. The person who saves this world from it's inhabitants. It goes as thus:    "But what do I do now? he thought.    He sat there all night, wondering that. Somehow he had to stop people from killing each other that was plain. Or rather, had to stop them hating each other the killing would take care of itself, after that. Nothing really difficult, he said to himself, finding it funny to be so earnest and dry, even sarcastic, over an impossibility … one which he was nonetheless committed to bring about. He had chosen, had chosen life, and he knew, somehow, that even the simple fact of the choice mattered; if he died right now, it would matter not a whit less. But it would matter ...

In the Star Trek Universe there is a wonderful book called Spock's World by Diane Duane. It is, in effect, two different and interconnected stories. One is a lot of the backstory, IE History, of the people of Vulcan, which in and of itself is a wonderful read, and a "current time" story about a powerful and well financed group of people on Vulcan trying to engineer it's exit from the United Federation of Planets. And there is a part that shows who Spock's parents were when they met. Meaning Sarek of Vulcan and Amanda Greyson of Earth. They had met when they were both working on the project to create an accurate translation from English to Vulcan and back. Later in the book there is this wonderful scene where they are discussing the way a word in Vulcan had been translated as Logic. And Sarek is teasing Amanda about how this had gone and her insistence that they needed to finish this and could clean it up in later times. And her embarrassment at that because the id...

In the very beginning of the United States while the nation was still trying to figure out what it really was, the Government was a very loose Confederation in which every state was an Independent Nation in Confederation with the other states, there was a big argument going on about the media. In those days Newspapers and Printing houses putting out Pamphlets. They were trying to figure out how much freedom to allow the Press and people who wrote Pamphlets. For example, Tom Paine's Common Sense and American Crisis, written during the Revolution, and The Rights of Man, written about the French Revolution, were all considered Pamphlets. They recognized that a Free Press could be very damaging, yet it could also be vital to Freedom. As that argument went on Thomas Jefferson said, in 1787, probably during the Constitutional Convention, that "were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitat...

 In 2022 I was working a fairly decent job. It paid well and had benefits. It had it's low points as well. It was a pretty standard American Job except good pay and decent bennies And one day, driving home after work, something really weird happened with my car. The rear end did some really funny things. Fortunately I was on a secondary road and not going very fast. I got out and looked and could not figure out what was going on. Fortunately I was only a few miles from my house and was just coming into town. So I threw on my hazards and taking it slowly drove back to my house. I put the back end into the air and looked and I could see that a very important piece of rear end stabilization had literally torn. Inch thick metal had corroded enough, New England after all, that the metal had deteriorated enough to tear in half. I looked it up and fixing that would have cost more than the vehicle was worth. And I did not have that much cash readily available. Ugh... So, I went and bought ...

 In 1977 I was 14 years old. I had heard about this Science Fiction movie that had come out called Star Wars. Was tangentially interested. I was a reader of Science Fiction and snobbishly felt that a Book would always be superior to a movie. In the middle of the summer I was sent up to Canada to my once yearly month long visit with my Father. I did not usually enjoy those visits. My father worked as a Taxi driver in Mississauga ON, a suburb of Toronto, and lived in Oakville, just over the border from Mississauga, in the middle of farm country. To get anywhere that had anything going on was money and a long bus ride. Bus and subway if going into Toronto. So, very boring. After I had been there a couple days my father came back to the house in the late morning and asked me what I wanted to do for the day. So I said something like I guess I'll go see that Star Wars movie. He handed me just enough to go see the movie and then catch a bus back to the corner of Winston Churchill Blvd and...