Gerald Everett Jones's Blog: Gerald Everett Jones - Author, page 17
April 26, 2024
Free eBook This Weekend
The audiobook episode releases of Preacher Finds a Corpse are complete and remain available to paid subscribers here on the Podcast tab.
Download this free ebook of Preacher Fakes a Miracle to find out what happens next.
“This is literature masquerading as a mystery. Carefully yet powerfully, Gerald Jones creates a small, stunning world in a tiny midwestern town, infusing each character with not just life but wit, charm and occasionally menace. This is the kind of writing one expects from John Irving or Jane Smiley.”
- Marvin J. Wolf, author of the Rabbi Ben Mysteries, including A Scribe Dies in Brooklyn
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, including podcasts, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
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April 25, 2024
Chapter 43 (last): Preacher Finds a Corpse - Bonus Audiobook Episode GP724
You may be surprised how the story ends. The next book in the series is Preacher Fakes a Miracle.
Thank you for your kind attention!
May you find the novel intriguing and compelling, and please don’t hesitate to leave your impressions in the Comments section of the posts.
Episode GP724 DescriptionGP724 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Chapter 43 (09:28 minutes)A final revelation discloses the real reason Bob felt he couldn't go on.
Chapter 43
Sunday Morning
First Baptist Church
Evan sat in Thurston’s office waiting for the pastor to summon him to the sanctuary. Marcus had wanted to indulge in a bit of theatrics. He wouldn’t let the congregation know who their guest speaker would be until it was time for Evan to speak.
How about: “God Is All That There Is?”
Bob had been dead for eleven days. During that time, Evan’s role in the world had changed from being an itinerant preacher who struggled to hold the attention of his listeners for scarcely an hour, to an obsessively curious investigator who drew more attention than he wanted, and from the wrong people.
And I got wrong as much as I got right.
Naomi had never liked to wear black, even though Evan was sure she’d look stunning in it. She was demure in the pastor’s guest chair, dressed in a navy-blue frock made less austere by a row of oversized buttons down the front and set off with two strands of classy pearls around her neck, with matching earrings. She had her hair done up in back, lending her the conservative hauteur of the dutiful wife of a minister.
Naomi glared at him and finally broke the silence by observing, “You know you have a death wish.”
More below the paywall…
TT024 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Audiobook - LAST CHAPTER!
A final revelation discloses the real reason Bob felt he couldn't go on.
April 24, 2024
Thoughts on Spirals
For many years in the early days of computer-generated graphics, I was a designer of charts and graphs for business presentations. My book How to Lie with Charts coopted the title of the classic text on data misrepresentation, How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff and Irving Geis.
I admit I have a high-school level familiarity with mathematics. My education sailed through trigonometry but ran aground short of calculus. I believe I do have a conceptual understanding of the differential and integral approaches to describing dynamics in equations and charts.
In my Charts book, I spend a chapter on the implied meaning of screen direction. It’s about the mental images we’ve formed as readers of Western languages (from left to right on the page implies the progress of time) and students of Mercator’s maps (up and down indicating North and South). It has always intrigued me that these paradigms influence so much of our routine perceptions and daily activities. I remark, for example, that movie directors seem to understand that a shot of an airplane flying from left to right somehow fairly portrays a journey from West to East, from Los Angeles to New York. No one needs to explain this bias to the audience, and film schools don’t need to train directors how to use it.
So I blame spatial stereotypes on Descartes and Mercator.
What bothers me, and the inspiration for this brief essay, is that, through the ages, our having to learn from the two-dimensional pages of books and drawings may have severely limited our understanding and interpretation of some essential elements of mathematics and therefore of physics.
My favorite example of what I might call 2D bias is the basis of trigonometry, as exemplified by the sine wave. The math that describes a sine wave is, to me, bizarre and needlessly complex.
How might our understanding of wave functions be different if the likes of Descartes had visualized them—not on a drawing pad—but with the aid of a 3D (virtual reality) VR workspace?
A sine wave is a flattened spiral.
A spiral is defined by circular motion (an orbit) progressing through time.
The spiral’s diminishing orbit is the effect of entropy.
A spiral orbit that loses energy uniformly over time is a conic section (think about it!).
A spiral describes the pattern of water flowing down a drain or the swirling of stars around the central black hole of the Milky Way.
What about the famous two-slit problem in physics?
A beam of spiraling photons that is slightly off center of the target (as some even in a coherent transmission might be, if only minutely) can pass through both slits, one right after the other but seeming concurrent to the observer.
The photon beam is not a 2D wave but a 3D stream of particles propagated in a spiral.
Can matrix and wave mechanics of quantum theory thus be reconciled?
Please discuss among yourselves!
Stroke survivor Clifford Clovis obsessed over spirals, but he didn’t know why.
Feed your curiosity with a paid subscription to this Thinking About Thinking blog. With a paid subscription, you’ll gain access to all the content that’s here, including podcasts, and you’ll be helping us build our worldwide community through storytelling and self-expression.
If you’re a free subscriber here, upgrade to paid for $5 per month or $30 and get access to all content, including Thinking About Thinking book reviews, thoughtful essays, podcasts, and audiobooks.
Chapter 42: Preacher Finds a Corpse - Bonus Audiobook Episode GP723
Here’s the next post in the weekday releases of the 24 episodes in the Preacher Finds a Corpse audiobook.
Episode GP724 - the last chapter! - will be posted Thursday morning at 8am Eastern / 5am Pacific and the other episodes each weekday thereafter.
May you find the novel intriguing and compelling, and please don’t hesitate to leave your impressions in the Comments section of the posts.
Episode GP723 DescriptionGP723 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Chapter 42 (26:44 minutes)Bob's memorial service does not proceed as planned. It's a surprise to almost everyone, and they seem to accept that the case is closed.
Chapter 42
Saturday Morning
Emmett Farm
The last big storm to pass through was the blizzard on the night of Evan’s luckless effort to retrieve the tin box. On this Saturday morning, the cloudless, sunny skies would persist, and the temperature would climb into the mid-forties. Like stalling the show with a coming attraction at the movies, Nature was taunting the farm folks with a preview of the spring thaw. It was not yet to be (Evan remembered a year when snow fell, however briefly, on the first day in May), but surface water began to trickle its way toward the creeks, and the wind carried the smells of rotting vegetation and last summer’s animal dung. Easter and the resurrection of the Earth’s flora and fauna were only weeks away.
Just before dawn, two Humvee troop carriers and a command car led a convoy of two bulldozers and a skip loader on flatbeds, along with three triple-trailer, bottom-dump trucks. Riding comfortably in the back of the command car was Col. Sedgewick Pryce, a man on a mission. His job was to flatten everything in sight on the Emmett farm and haul it away by Monday morning. The road graders, cement mixers, and paving crews would be taking over then.
But as the colonel’s car pulled off SR P and onto the dirt road to the farm, he was met by a single St. Clair County Sheriff’s squad car with its emergency lights flashing. Seeing the approaching vehicles, Sheriff Chet Otis stepped out of the driver’s side, and Col. Pryce strode over to meet him. Griggs was noticeably absent.
“What are you doing here, Sheriff?” the military man demanded.
Otis delivered the speech he’d rehearsed, a series of tactics Evan had mapped out for them. The preacher was still holed up with Nick, Wiley, and Josh in the house.
“I’m afraid we’ve got an impending situation here, sir,” Otis informed him.
“I have my orders, if you need to see them,” Pryce insisted. “This site was to be vacated by now, and I’ll be setting up perimeter control with armed guards to make sure it stays that way.”
More below the paywall…
TT023 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Audiobook
Bob's memorial service does not proceed as planned. It's a surprise to almost everyone, and they seem to accept that the case is closed.
April 23, 2024
Chapters 40-41: Preacher Finds a Corpse - Bonus Audiobook Episode GP722
Here’s the next post in the weekday releases of the 24 episodes in the Preacher Finds a Corpse audiobook.
Episode GP723 will be posted Wednesday morning at 8am Eastern / 5am Pacific and the other episodes each weekday thereafter.
May you find the novel intriguing and compelling, and please don’t hesitate to leave your impressions in the Comments section of the posts.
Episode GP722 DescriptionGP722 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Chapters 40 and 41 (22:05 minutes)Evan confronts Edie and tells her how Bob's last wishes are sure to be carried out. He gets a startling confession from one of his friends about what really happened the morning Bob died.
Chapter 40
Friday Evening
Taggart House
Evan chose not to announce his arrival. He found Edie in the kitchen slicing carrots. She was making vegetable stew. She’d responded courteously to his knock and welcomed him in with seeming graciousness. She poured him coffee as he sat at the counter, just as she had before. You’d think his dropping by was a usual and neighborly thing with them. She even remembered he took extra sugar.
She was trying to appear calm. “Come to pay your respects?” she asked, finally turning to face him as she wiped her hands on her apron. And she pointed in the direction of the fireplace. “He’s right over there.”
There was a gleaming rectangular hardwood case on the mantel.
“He’s not in there, you know,” he told her. “And I doubt he’s hovering around here anywhere.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It’s what I believe. When we die, we return to God, but not necessarily as individuals. What’s in the urn are endlessly borrowed and recycled molecules, shared with billions of other people — and with plants and animals — who came before us. He’s in a better place than here, it’s joyful. There’s nothing to experience and everything to know. I doubt if anyone living can understand what it’s like. There’s nothing to learn. That’s for down here, on Earth, in this world where we’ve chosen to act out our dramas.”
“I don’t know about any of that,” she said, not admitting to her starring role in this drama. “I just didn’t want him in a cardboard box in the basement.”
More below the paywall…
TT022 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Audiobook
Evan confronts Edie and tells her how Bob's last wishes are sure to be carried out. He gets a startling confession from one of his friends about what really happened the morning Bob died.
April 22, 2024
Chapters 38-39: Preacher Finds a Corpse - Bonus Audiobook Episode GP721
Here’s the next post in the weekday releases of the 24 episodes in the Preacher Finds a Corpse audiobook.
Episode GP722 will be posted Tuesday morning at 8am Eastern / 5am Pacific and the other episodes each weekday thereafter.
May you find the novel intriguing and compelling, and please don’t hesitate to leave your impressions in the Comments section of the posts.
Episode GP721 DescriptionGP721 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Chapters 38 and 39 (27:21 minutes)Evan tracks down the young attorney who helped Bob follow through with his plan.
Chapter 38
Thursday Evening
Rich Hill
Phil rented Evan an anonymous-black, all-wheel-drive Subaru Forester, which came with a dandy new set of snow tires. The preacher was pleased because here was a car with more heft and traction, much less likely to put him in a ditch.
Unless someone chases me there, that is.
He thanked Phil profusely and sent him home, an exile the fellow did not appreciate. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do,” he said hopefully, then added, “and be careful out there.”
The car had a full tank of gas, so Evan wouldn’t need to stop anytime soon to refuel. He figured the motel was still the safest place to hang out. When he got into the Subaru and fired it up, the first thing he did was plug in his phone.
Then he turned GPS tracking off on the phone, as he’d already done on Bob’s. And he punched through the soft menu on the Subaru. Sure enough, it also had a built-in location finder, so he turned it off.
He’d have to pass through Butler on his route back north on I-49 to Peculiar, but by now it would be after-hours at the law office. Not wanting to alert the lawyer about who was calling by using Bob’s phone, Evan used his own to leave voicemail, requesting an appointment first thing tomorrow at Bailey’s office. He said he wanted to discuss probate matters. He didn’t identify himself as the executor of Bob’s will, just gave his name as a prospective new client.
More below the paywall…
TT021 Preacher Finds a Corpse - Audiobook
Evan tracks down the young attorney who helped Bob follow through with his plan.
Gerald Everett Jones - Author
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