Mark R. Hunter's Blog, page 90

He was Spock

I don’t idolize people in the entertainment industry. It’s so hard to make it to the top that most talented celebrities tend to be out of touch with the rest of the world, and for some reason the people who gain celebrity without talent seem even more vacant. By all accounts, celebrity also seems to make people … how can I say this? … dicks.

Leonard Nimoy was not, by all accounts, a dick. He was also anything but vacant. He had a Master’s degree, served as a sergeant in the U.S. Army, was an accomplished photographer, director, writer, and producer, and invented the Vulcan nerve pinch and salute. Plus, he was a Transformer.

Just the same, it wasn’t the death of Nimoy that sent me into a three day funk. It was the death of his most famous creation: Captain S'chn-T' Gaii Spock, son of S'chn-T' Gaii Sarek, son of Skon and Solkar, of Vulcan.

We’ll just call him Spock.

In his younger days Nimoy wrote a book called “I Am Not Spock”, which was true enough (although he wasn’t as negative about it as the title suggested). He corrected that twenty years later with “I Am Spock”. By that time, ironically, I had come to realize he was not just Spock.

I wanted to be Spock. Not Kirk, not Scotty, not even McCoy. I got a Spock haircut, and ankle boots that more or less resembled those from Starfleet, and I even had a blue long sleeved shirt with a little symbol thingy in the right place for Spock’s uniform. It was actually a symbol for the shirt manufacturer, but close enough for imagination to take over. I wanted to be a scientist, and an astronaut, and surely by the time I hit my mid-twenties I’d be stomping around on Mars with the rest of the crew.

None of this improved my standing at school.

But that’s the point, that’s why I empathized with Spock. As a kid I felt like I didn’t belong, like I was someone from another world. We were both out of place, misunderstood, and trying to hide emotions we didn’t want others to know we had. We were both tall and thin, and a little alien looking. Neither of us ever seemed to get the girl, because we were surrounded by charming adventurers like Kirk and Sulu. (It turns out Sulu never got the girl, either.)

We were both … different. In the rural Midwest of the 70s, that was a bad thing. But in the long run, Spock jumpstarted my interest in science fiction, writing, science, and learning in general.

To me, of all the souls I’ve ever known, his was the most human. All of this came from the creative genius of Leonard Nimoy … who lived long, and prospered.

A Free Trip Into Strange Portals

I’m late with this, but my story “Another Family” is included in the free e-book, “Strange Portals: Ink Slingers' Fantasy/Horror Anthology”. Read lots of great authors, with stories ranging from the dark to my own tale, a lighter Christmas fantasy featuring two characters from my “Storm Chaser” series.



Sure, it was originally intended to give you a holiday break, but it’s February … don’t you need a break right now? And did I mention it’s free? … so your risk is minimal! You can get it all over the place:



Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Strange-Portals...



Barnes and Noble:

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/stran...



Smashwords:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/...



Kobo:

https://store.kobobooks.com/en-US/ebo...



and iTunes:

https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/stra...



Check it out!



Twenty-two stories about fairies, vampires, werewolves, zombies, and everything in between. Visit a witch's body swap victims (Samantha's Day), find what happens when a girl is buried alive (Buried Alive), learn the origin story of Harper (from Night Touched Chronicles) and Verchiel (from the Amaranthine series), and much, much more. So kick up your feet, relax, and indulge in a short story by a new favorite author.

I don't want to build a snowman

Maybe you’ve seen “Frozen”. Maybe you’ve been frozen. Either way, I think you can relate to how I changed the song’s words, to reflect my feelings about winter. If you’re not familiar with the song, just ask any kid. If they don’t have the soundtrack or a karaoke version, they can probably still hum the tune from memory.

"I Don’t Want To Build a Snowman"
(sung to the tune of Do You Want to Build a Snowman)

I don’t wanna build a snowman.
Come on, are you crazy?
I’m not going near that frozen door
Call me a bore
I’m not going to freeze today.

I’m used to being warm
and when I’m not
I wish that I could die!

I don’t wanna get the frostbite.
I don’t want to see fingers white.

Go away, Winter.
Okay? Bye...


I don’t wanna build a snowman.
Or get hit with wet snowballs.
I think the outside may be for you,
I don’t like turning blue
and suffering from falls.

(Just hangin’ at home.)

I’ll stoke a fire or two
Staying in my room,
and at least then I won’t die.
(Brrrrrrr)

Please don’t make me go out there,
People are asking when it will end.
They say their skin has turned to ice,
Out there it’s not so nice:
Just go back in.

We’re not such a fan
Of this icy land,
But what are you gonna do?

I don’t wanna build a snowman. [sniff]

Rough Draft Meets Deadline, Roughly

We’ve finished and sent in our draft of “Images of America: Albion and Noble County”, and according to Arcadia Publishing everything looks good. The cover has been approved, and they’re reserving a spot in their production and publication schedule. (More info to come!) I’m assuming a year or so until it comes out.

I’m happy with the finished product, although I ran out of time before I could talk to some people about historical photos. My fault—much as I loved doing the research and going through all those historical photos, the last six months have been a nightmare of other things going wrong. We took dozens of pages of notes, but the book is mostly photos, and a lot of tidbits I wasn’t able to get in. Maybe that will make for extra material on the website when it comes out.

Now, on to the “Slightly Off The Mark” book I’ve been promising people since December!

Our Deflated Football Expectations‏

http://www.4countymall.com/mark-hunte...

Yes, I know all the footballs have been flattened and stacked away for the winter … I’m on a monthly schedule now, and you’re seeing this about five weeks after I wrote it. Besides, there’s no bad time to make ball jokes.



SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK


Apparently the New England Patriots are being accused of having soft balls.


This came as a shock to me. I mean, they’re tough football players. At the same time I saw the comedic possibilities of such a thing, and made it halfway through a truly hilarious column full of crude puns and various other plays on words, just to prove I’m an athletic supporter.


Then I realized they were talking about their footballs.


Well, that took all the air right out of me. But I suppose it’s for the best, as this is a family paper and that piece was turning decidedly un-family friendly. I suspect there aren’t a lot of kids who read my column. Still, any that did read it would have thrown questions at their parents, who would have to explain the concept of gutter humor, so it’s probably for the best that I dropped the ball.


Speaking of dropping the ball, I actually watched that game. I’m no expert, but it didn’t seem to me the Patriots won it at all; it seemed like the Colts lost it. It’s similar to the way the Republicans did such a bang-up job of losing the last two Presidential elections.


When I say I’m no expert, what I mean is that it was the first football game I’ve watched since 2007. So yeah, no expert. I have nothing against football the way I do against basketball, which is a horror experience straight from hades, but I have to budget my time and there are books to read. Besides, they don’t show the cheerleaders often enough.


Not to mention cheerleaders in pro sports don’t look like cheerleaders anymore; they look like showgirls backing up Wayne Newton in Vegas. Not to mention they could now be my daughters, which takes most of the fun out of it. Not to mention my wife has a sword collection, which takes the rest of the fun out of it.


So we’ve established I’m no expert. However, I do know that a little pressure can make a big difference. We own one of those inflatable beds. I’ve learned a few pounds of pressure can make the difference between sleeping well until our 85 pound dog makes his full bladder known by leaping on my chest, and hardly sleeping at all. Both usually result in blinding back pain, but never mind.


The claim is that the New England Patriots deflated their balls, so they could be gripped better by their players, and no way am I going to point out the obvious joke in that sentence. Each team is responsible to bring twelve balls, plus the home team has to bring a dozen more backup balls. I assume they have to show the officials before the game starts that they have a lot of balls.


What happens after that I’m not sure. I mean, do they switch between the regular and the deflated balls depending on whether they’re on offense of defense? And if it makes that much of a difference, how do the officials never notice? They actually check the balls before the game and then hand them all over to a ball boy, who has the most uncool job title ever.


The Patriots have a history of cheating. Apparently in 2007 their coach was fined $500,000 for filming the sideline signals of the other team, and his cameraman was fined $250,000 for filming the cheerleaders. I wonder if the New England cheerleaders look like cheerleaders? Be right back …


Nope. Showgirls. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.


Let’s keep in mind that the team is named after, well, patriots, those people who fought off the British to secure our right to drink coffee. The British were very perturbed, and in fact accused the Patriots of cheating even then:


“They hide behind trees and fences, instead of standing in a straight line across an open field and letting us fire on them! That’s just not cricket. On a related note, we might just have to replace these red uniforms with the white straps forming a cross in the middle of our chests …”


So you see, the patriots of old were accused of deflating the British soldiers.


Some people in football are saying their balls are messed with all the time. In one case, a quarterback admitted he paid ball boys to break in their balls before the Superbowl. I guess they handle better when they’re scuffed (the balls, not the ball boys), which seems to be the way a lot of drivers I’ve encountered feel about their cars.


In this time of war, government overreach, people not buying my books, and other equally important problems, I used to think sports were a good pressure relief. It took our minds off of cheating leaders, violence, commercialism, overspending …


I can’t even finish that sentence, it’s just too silly. Maybe I’ll just throw my support to a sport that’s real and honest, not staged for entertainment, not more personality than competition.


Maybe … pro wrestling.


No balls there.

Storm Chaser On Review

A new review has been posted of Storm Chaser!

http://authorstowatch.com/2015/01/14/...

Since I’m posting a link to it, it’s probably not a bad review …

How I Ruined Winter … For Almost Everyone

SLIGHTLY OFF THE MARK


I love January! Said no one, ever.


Okay, some people actually do love winter, which just goes to show you: Northern Indiana needs better mental health screening. I used to take part in winter activities, but I was young then, and young people just haven’t learned that being miserable isn’t an adventure.


When I was a kid, I loved sledding, snowball fights, and not having to pay the utility bills. Well, I liked them … I never did warm up all that much to winter. Then, one day when I was about fourteen, I came in from building a snow block fort to discover my hands and toes had themselves become snow blocks. My cheeks had taken on a white, Frosty-like sheen.


My face cheeks. Get your mind out of my insulated underwear.


Thawing out involved a process not unlike being stabbed with a thousand white-hot pins and needles, and from that time on I couldn’t stay in cold weather for long before the affected parts started to feel like they’d been shotgunned full of rock salt. It took all the fun out of it.


Today, my favorite wintertime activities involve a book and a cup of hot chocolate. So January does have an advantage: I can catch up on my reading. But that doesn’t really make up for the gas bill.


Last year, here in Indiana, we had a return to real Indiana winters. You know, the kind of stuff that leads on The Weather Channel. The kind of weather only snow plow drivers and ice fisherman like, and see above about mental health. For many previous years, our weather has largely just been miserable, instead of awful. But now we’ve returned to the kind of weather that led to the sale of T-shirts proclaiming “I survived the Blizzard of ‘78” … and if you had one of those shirts, you know “survived” wasn’t an exaggeration.


So the big question people have today is, will this winter be as bad as last winter?


Yes.


Now, this is my January column, but because of other deadlines I’m writing this early—way early. It’s December 3rd, and at the moment it’s a balmy thirty degrees and technically late fall. We’ve only had one snowstorm, so far. By the time you read this it will be mid to late January, so you’ll know whether my prediction is correct, or whether I’m blowing cold air.


I will be right, and I know this because it will be my fault.


Several weeks ago, I opened my garage door to take out the lawn mower. I know, hard to imagine mowing the lawn now, isn’t it? At the moment you’re looking at a field of white, or a sea of icy brown, dead grass in between snowstorms. But there was a time when things were green and I was out in it, enjoying my allergies.


Okay, “enjoying” might be a stretch, but I’d rather have hay fever than frostbite.


Now, a note about my garage: It’s old. As in, originally a carriage house old, with a hay loft above it. At some point it was turned into a garage big enough for, say, three quarters of a car, and I assume it was at that point that the garage door was installed. At some point after that, but before I moved in, the roof burned off. Somebody nailed tin sheets over the charred rafters.


In short, my garage has been through a lot.


Just the same, I could still park the car inside during bad weather, as long as I let the passenger side brush up against the wall so I had enough room to squeeze out of the driver’s side.


Or at least, I could park inside until the moment I started to pull the garage door shut, and the springs broke.


Suddenly, instead of me shutting the door, the door shut me. I was slammed onto the concrete at just over the speed of sound, which fortunately kept me from hearing my high pitched screech. Eventually I crawled into the house, where I decided I was done mowing for the year.


Not long after that I lost my part time job, which meant I didn’t have the money to repair the afore-mentioned door. Now, add that to the fact that I haven’t had time to winterize the house this year—winterizing in this case means putting plastic over every window, pumping caulk into every other opening, and cleaning the garage so the car can fit in. That last would have been a wasted effort, as it turns out.


In other words, I am more completely unprepared for winter than I’ve been at any point in my adult life. And that, dear readers, covers at least two or three Murphy’s Laws, guaranteeing that we are going to have one of the coldest, snowiest winters since the early eighties.


You’re welcome, snow plow drivers and ice fishermen. Make sure to wear gloves.

Working on a photo finish

I won't be blogging steadily before February, due to the upcoming deadline for Images of America: Albion and Noble County. Emily is still scanning photos, I'm working on captions and research, and we still have some people to contact about getting more old historical photos for the project.

I'm doing pretty good on Albion pictures at this point, and casting the net out for old photos from other communities, large and small, as well as special places, events, and such. My plan is to have the whole thing done by the end of January, a week ahead of deadline--in case I screw something up. So, busy busy ... but it's not like I have any desire to do outdoor stuff in January.

Here's hoping 2015 is better

I’m not going to lie to you: 2014 sucked. Everybody got sick or hurt at least once, and the world’s a train wreck. On a personal level I lost my first writing job after twenty-three years of steady work, and the book sales that might have made up for it have stagnated. On a family level I can’t even say “at least we have our health”.

But I can’t dwell on the bad stuff—there lies madness, and don’t we have enough madness? I have a new part time writing job and people are, if not healed, being taken care of as best can be. The world’s still a train wreck, but I think maybe the world’s always been a train wreck to some extent.

My intention for 2015 is to keep making people laugh, and to write. A lot of things in life I can’t control, but that I can do. And laughter is, if not the best medicine, a pretty good preventative. I should soon be done with my contracted book, then we’ll get the “Slightly Off The Mark” book out, then it’s on to more writing and, hopefully, publication. My simple goal is to make 2015 better than 2014 was. Shouldn’t be too hard.

My challenge to you is the same. Maybe you can’t change the world, fine. Then make your part of the world a little better. Cheer up yourself and others. Do good things. Think good thoughts. Be prepared. That’s the best anyone can do.
Oh, and buy my books; always be closing. Happy New Year!

All I want for Christmas is a free short story

Here’s our Christmas present to everyone: A free short story on PDF, featuring two characters from “Storm Chaser”, The Notorious Ian Grant”, and “Storm Chaser Shorts”.

“Another Family” is set before the books and features two cops, a surprise snowstorm, and a special guest who needs police assistance. Oh, and family. Merry Christmas! You’ll find it on the website at http://markrhunter.com/extras.html