Jack Thompson's Blog, page 2
September 9, 2012
It's time for a Frank Capra
Here in 2012 we have reached a tipping point. Drastic times require drastic measures. So the saying goes. If it isn't the omnipresent threat of terrorism, it's the omnipresent threat of global warming.
There is the religious faction dedicated to bringing Armageddon down upon us. (What's the matter, can't you read the signs?) The great scientific minds see an ironically similar version of Armageddon on the horizon, called singularity, where we all burn in a glowing blur of rapid technological advancement racing out of control. How many versions of Windows can there be?
Or, worse than any of those, we suffer from the omnipresence of Democrats.(and Republicans--don't read anything political into that) It's either too much government or not enough government, but always the other guy's fault. Hasn't that tune gotten old? There just might be a reason that the US Congress has an approval rating that falls on the scale somewhere between Hitler and Satan.
It's time for a Frank Capra.
There comes a time in every great nation when the tipping point is reached. Where we either go sailing down into the abyss with one last insane whee, or we dig down through the bad news and blame and dust off some of the truth that makes life worth fighting for. There is a reason we all watch It's a Wonderful Life every year. (or should) There is a reason we cheer for the good guys, the decent guys to win. Deep down every one of us knows that we are good guys.
There will be those who claim a happy ending is trite, that good guys finish last, that you have to fight fire with fire and the punishment must fit the crime. But aren't those really the rants of those already on the toboggan ride down?
My appeal is to the many who are kind of heart, the forgiving and helpful many who sincerely wish themselves and others to survive and thrive. I know you are out there.
It's time for a Frank Capra.
We need someone to remind us not of the depraved or despicable few, but of the determined and decent many who provide the backbone of any great civilization. Someone who will lift our spirits above the fray, not grind them into the earth.
It's time for a Frank Capra.
There is the religious faction dedicated to bringing Armageddon down upon us. (What's the matter, can't you read the signs?) The great scientific minds see an ironically similar version of Armageddon on the horizon, called singularity, where we all burn in a glowing blur of rapid technological advancement racing out of control. How many versions of Windows can there be?
Or, worse than any of those, we suffer from the omnipresence of Democrats.(and Republicans--don't read anything political into that) It's either too much government or not enough government, but always the other guy's fault. Hasn't that tune gotten old? There just might be a reason that the US Congress has an approval rating that falls on the scale somewhere between Hitler and Satan.
It's time for a Frank Capra.
There comes a time in every great nation when the tipping point is reached. Where we either go sailing down into the abyss with one last insane whee, or we dig down through the bad news and blame and dust off some of the truth that makes life worth fighting for. There is a reason we all watch It's a Wonderful Life every year. (or should) There is a reason we cheer for the good guys, the decent guys to win. Deep down every one of us knows that we are good guys.
There will be those who claim a happy ending is trite, that good guys finish last, that you have to fight fire with fire and the punishment must fit the crime. But aren't those really the rants of those already on the toboggan ride down?
My appeal is to the many who are kind of heart, the forgiving and helpful many who sincerely wish themselves and others to survive and thrive. I know you are out there.
It's time for a Frank Capra.
We need someone to remind us not of the depraved or despicable few, but of the determined and decent many who provide the backbone of any great civilization. Someone who will lift our spirits above the fray, not grind them into the earth.
It's time for a Frank Capra.
May 26, 2012
Hangtime (short story excerpt)
Hangtime
copyright 2010 Jack Thompson
Contrary to the popular notion of the mindless, boob-tube-watching couch potato, Dr. Laslo Reingard was watching television when he made a most amazing scientific breakthrough. It had come unexpectedly, all in a rush, as those kinds of things sometimes do.
Although testing polymer-based vaccines on cultures of viruses was not his idea of cutting edge research, it’s what he did eight hours a day, five days a week. Theoretical physics was his passion, but theories didn’t pay the rent. After one particularly long and frustrating day in the laboratory at the Maryland research center where he worked, Dr. Laslo Reingard had finally gotten home. He wearily climbed the stairs to his second floor apartment, and undid the two deadbolts on the ugly gray door with the number 233 in corroded brass letters. He put some birdseed in the feeder hanging just inside the room, and whistled to Fred, his blue-green parakeet. Fred said no more and no less than he always did, which was nothing, and hopped over to the seed.
Laslo munched a cheese sandwich and slurped down a bowl of chicken barley soup, and then plopped down in his easy chair, where he liked to contemplate the pet projects he worked on during his off hours.
He also liked to watch sports, partially because his own world of books and research was so different, and partially because he found it quite relaxing to calculate force, velocity and momentum vectors of the players and balls while he watched. On this night, he was watching a sports special on ESPN2 that featured video of two basketball players named Jordan and Dr. J jumping and flying through the air with something described as hang time, which the announcer spoke of in reverent tones.
Laslo was about to start another calculation exercise when his eyes suddenly popped wide and his mouth flopped open as he leaned toward the TV screen. “That’s it!” he shouted. He began to scribble furiously in the notebook he always carried with him. While he wrote intently, his tongue stuck out the side of his mouth, much like the tongue of one of the basketball players in the video. Laslo never noticed. Every so often he would mumble to himself, and then nod as if agreeing with someone else. Sweat beaded on his brow as the gears in his head whirred at maximum speed.
He had been working for months on a theory about time. Clearly, time travel was out of the question, at least in the H. G. Wells sense. The Roman centurions of two millennia past were not still marching their men around Rome, not in this universe at least. However, he had read an account of Nikola Tesla’s experiments with time and the variations of time sense he observed. Laslo was sure there was a change to time experience, an aspect of relativity that could be consciously controlled. Dreams functioned this way, with hours or days of experience happening in seconds of real time, yet being experienced in detail and at normal time rates. The participants often described critical emergencies, such as car crashes, as happening in slow motion, but these were uncontrolled effects.
He knew the basketball players in the video moved through the air as a simple function of their upward force and their horizontal velocity. They did not defy gravity as the announcer suggested, a fact easily proven with a simple physics calculation. However, there was a mysterious and apparent time extension to their flight. This he thought was not a supernatural feat, but was a direct result of the time experience of the player himself, as compared to that of the people around him. If a player could span more consecutive “nows” simultaneously, then his own time experience would slow down allowing for a more controlled activity. In addition, while the time stream would slow for the spanner, it would accelerate for any observers.
This explained the success some sports players have, not merely through physical prowess, but also as a function of their time spanning ability. They didn’t necessarily go faster, but they appeared to go faster to those around them. Moreover, since time is relative, they were “faster.” Since their “now” included a moment ago and a moment into the future, all three moments would seem faster to the slower, single-moment observer. It was as if the spanner was pulling himself through time, while the others were themselves merely passengers, moved by the march of time itself.
Dr. Reingard had finally made the calculations he needed to test his theory. He concentrated on the glass of water standing on the table next to his chair. Then he deliberately knocked it over with a sweep of his arm, and tried to save it from falling. Instead, he managed to knock it onto the ground where it shattered. This is going to be a little difficult, he thought to himself.
After spending several hours trying, Laslo was ready to give up. In the excitement of discovery, it never dawned on him to try using something unbreakable. Two kitchen cabinet shelves were now empty of glasses, and broken glass and water covered the floor. He found one more iced tea glass in his sink. He filled it halfway with water and set it on the table. He focused on the moment and let his attention span. He felt a subtle shift in his perception. He swung his arm again knocking into the glass, but this time he was easily able to grab it and right it before anything spilled. It worked! He had spanned enough time to see exactly where the glass fell and see himself catch it. It was almost as if he had momentarily stepped outside of time. Laslo was giddy. He raced back to his notebook and wrote furiously into the wee hours of the morning.
The next day he showed up for work looking more haggard than usual, but the exuberance he felt over his discovery put a bounce in his step. He had determined to keep things to himself until he could do further testing, and decided that maintaining a business-as-usual, low profile at the lab was his best option.
“Good morning, Laslo.” It was the familiar but annoying voice of one of the lab assistants, Marion Mulroney, who had made a habit of greeting Laslo each morning.
“Good morning, Marion,” he returned with uncharacteristic enthusiasm before adding, “I’m in a bit of a hurry today,” as a pre-emptive strike against any attempt at conversation he feared might come. He hurried on to his station without further interaction.
For the next two weeks, Laslo punched in dutifully to work every day, measured out vaccines and recorded the results, as he always did. However, he thought of nothing except his time spanning discovery, and couldn’t wait to get home every evening to continue his experiments. There was still the matter of testing his theory with others observing, but first he wanted to hone his skill with time spanning. After two weeks he could throw a tennis ball at the wall and arrive there to catch it, or drop an apple off the second floor landing and beat it to the ground floor. He managed to juggle several objects easily with his eyes closed. The spanning was done with the mind’s eye. He tested it predicting traffic successfully, enabling him to walk across four lanes of traffic unharmed. He even came up with a name for it. In honor of the video he was watching when the revelation came to him, he called it Hangtime.
$0.99 at Amazon, Kobo, Apple
https://jackwrites.com/short-stories/
copyright 2010 Jack Thompson
Contrary to the popular notion of the mindless, boob-tube-watching couch potato, Dr. Laslo Reingard was watching television when he made a most amazing scientific breakthrough. It had come unexpectedly, all in a rush, as those kinds of things sometimes do.
Although testing polymer-based vaccines on cultures of viruses was not his idea of cutting edge research, it’s what he did eight hours a day, five days a week. Theoretical physics was his passion, but theories didn’t pay the rent. After one particularly long and frustrating day in the laboratory at the Maryland research center where he worked, Dr. Laslo Reingard had finally gotten home. He wearily climbed the stairs to his second floor apartment, and undid the two deadbolts on the ugly gray door with the number 233 in corroded brass letters. He put some birdseed in the feeder hanging just inside the room, and whistled to Fred, his blue-green parakeet. Fred said no more and no less than he always did, which was nothing, and hopped over to the seed.
Laslo munched a cheese sandwich and slurped down a bowl of chicken barley soup, and then plopped down in his easy chair, where he liked to contemplate the pet projects he worked on during his off hours.
He also liked to watch sports, partially because his own world of books and research was so different, and partially because he found it quite relaxing to calculate force, velocity and momentum vectors of the players and balls while he watched. On this night, he was watching a sports special on ESPN2 that featured video of two basketball players named Jordan and Dr. J jumping and flying through the air with something described as hang time, which the announcer spoke of in reverent tones.
Laslo was about to start another calculation exercise when his eyes suddenly popped wide and his mouth flopped open as he leaned toward the TV screen. “That’s it!” he shouted. He began to scribble furiously in the notebook he always carried with him. While he wrote intently, his tongue stuck out the side of his mouth, much like the tongue of one of the basketball players in the video. Laslo never noticed. Every so often he would mumble to himself, and then nod as if agreeing with someone else. Sweat beaded on his brow as the gears in his head whirred at maximum speed.
He had been working for months on a theory about time. Clearly, time travel was out of the question, at least in the H. G. Wells sense. The Roman centurions of two millennia past were not still marching their men around Rome, not in this universe at least. However, he had read an account of Nikola Tesla’s experiments with time and the variations of time sense he observed. Laslo was sure there was a change to time experience, an aspect of relativity that could be consciously controlled. Dreams functioned this way, with hours or days of experience happening in seconds of real time, yet being experienced in detail and at normal time rates. The participants often described critical emergencies, such as car crashes, as happening in slow motion, but these were uncontrolled effects.
He knew the basketball players in the video moved through the air as a simple function of their upward force and their horizontal velocity. They did not defy gravity as the announcer suggested, a fact easily proven with a simple physics calculation. However, there was a mysterious and apparent time extension to their flight. This he thought was not a supernatural feat, but was a direct result of the time experience of the player himself, as compared to that of the people around him. If a player could span more consecutive “nows” simultaneously, then his own time experience would slow down allowing for a more controlled activity. In addition, while the time stream would slow for the spanner, it would accelerate for any observers.
This explained the success some sports players have, not merely through physical prowess, but also as a function of their time spanning ability. They didn’t necessarily go faster, but they appeared to go faster to those around them. Moreover, since time is relative, they were “faster.” Since their “now” included a moment ago and a moment into the future, all three moments would seem faster to the slower, single-moment observer. It was as if the spanner was pulling himself through time, while the others were themselves merely passengers, moved by the march of time itself.
Dr. Reingard had finally made the calculations he needed to test his theory. He concentrated on the glass of water standing on the table next to his chair. Then he deliberately knocked it over with a sweep of his arm, and tried to save it from falling. Instead, he managed to knock it onto the ground where it shattered. This is going to be a little difficult, he thought to himself.
After spending several hours trying, Laslo was ready to give up. In the excitement of discovery, it never dawned on him to try using something unbreakable. Two kitchen cabinet shelves were now empty of glasses, and broken glass and water covered the floor. He found one more iced tea glass in his sink. He filled it halfway with water and set it on the table. He focused on the moment and let his attention span. He felt a subtle shift in his perception. He swung his arm again knocking into the glass, but this time he was easily able to grab it and right it before anything spilled. It worked! He had spanned enough time to see exactly where the glass fell and see himself catch it. It was almost as if he had momentarily stepped outside of time. Laslo was giddy. He raced back to his notebook and wrote furiously into the wee hours of the morning.
The next day he showed up for work looking more haggard than usual, but the exuberance he felt over his discovery put a bounce in his step. He had determined to keep things to himself until he could do further testing, and decided that maintaining a business-as-usual, low profile at the lab was his best option.
“Good morning, Laslo.” It was the familiar but annoying voice of one of the lab assistants, Marion Mulroney, who had made a habit of greeting Laslo each morning.
“Good morning, Marion,” he returned with uncharacteristic enthusiasm before adding, “I’m in a bit of a hurry today,” as a pre-emptive strike against any attempt at conversation he feared might come. He hurried on to his station without further interaction.
For the next two weeks, Laslo punched in dutifully to work every day, measured out vaccines and recorded the results, as he always did. However, he thought of nothing except his time spanning discovery, and couldn’t wait to get home every evening to continue his experiments. There was still the matter of testing his theory with others observing, but first he wanted to hone his skill with time spanning. After two weeks he could throw a tennis ball at the wall and arrive there to catch it, or drop an apple off the second floor landing and beat it to the ground floor. He managed to juggle several objects easily with his eyes closed. The spanning was done with the mind’s eye. He tested it predicting traffic successfully, enabling him to walk across four lanes of traffic unharmed. He even came up with a name for it. In honor of the video he was watching when the revelation came to him, he called it Hangtime.
$0.99 at Amazon, Kobo, Apple
https://jackwrites.com/short-stories/
August 16, 2011
Life Lessons Learned
Every young man eventually arrives at the point where he is certain that, when it comes to smarts, he has it all over any of the adults in his life, especially his parents. As a rather precocious youngster, I reached this point early, somewhere near my ninth birthday. I could not pinpoint an exact time or day of this revelation. Rather, it rose slowly out of the mist of youthful self-doubt, and formed gradually from the accumulation of irrational arguments between adults on whom I had eavesdropped. Added to the mix were liberal amounts of the classic parental arguments, “You’ll do it because I say so” or “I’m your father, that’s why,” that always sounded suspiciously like Darth Vader. By my twelfth birthday, I was so convinced of my towering intellectual superiority that I began to doubt I was related to either of my parents. Oh, the heights from which one can fall.
The events that knocked the stuffing out of my particular brand of hubris started a month past my twelfth birthday, when several of my friends from the neighborhood came over on a Saturday afternoon. We played baseball in the mowed field behind my house during the day. Somehow, the stars being in just the right alignment for a miracle, we all managed to convince our parents that we could camp out right there in the field, that there was safety in numbers, and that we could probably survive one night on our own without blinding or crippling anyone.
The first campout came off without a hitch. Soon it became a weekly routine, sometimes in the field, sometimes in the woods nearby, but always a time for a half a dozen of us young bucks to be out in the world on our own. I could tell you some of the mischief we got into, like the time we got so bored that we decided that streaking through the neighborhood might create some interest. Disappointed that no one even noticed us at all, we returned to our campsite. No one would have been the wiser, had we not set up camp right in the middle of a patch of poison ivy. It was impossible for Dale and Mike to explain being covered head to toe and all parts between with poison ivy welts. Suffice it to say we were all basically good kids, never looking for any real trouble. This story is not one of great adventure, but of finding out how to fit into the world right where one lives.
It was late springtime and the winter had broken completely. The nights had become quite balmy, and we lads would always be thirsty by the wee hours of the morning after whatever shenanigans we had pulled the night before. One night our gang, and I use that term very loosely, was cruising the neighborhood, wishing a store was open. (This was before the all night 7-Eleven.) It was still dark, and Mr. O’Brien, the milkman, was making the rounds in his delivery truck. He was just heading up a long driveway to drop milk in one of the metal boxes everyone had on their front porches. Bobby darted to the back of the truck and grabbed a quart of orange juice from one of the wire cases that held bottles from the local dairy. We all ran behind some lilac bushes, and the milkman continued on his way unaware of the missing juice. We shared the juice, and thus started a new tradition for our campouts. Sometimes we would get chocolate milk, which was always a fan favorite. However, there were nights when there was no chocolate milk or juice in sight during our commando raids on the truck. Very disappointing. Moreover, there was the very real possibility we would be seen by the milkman, who knew us all because he was a teacher at the local grade school as well. Teaching really did not pay well in those days.
That was when I came up with the master plan that solidified my position as head of our group. I would bring a small notepad from home to our campout, and I would leave a note with a custom order in some unsuspecting neighbor’s milk box. Later, after the milkman was long gone, we would come back and get whatever we wanted. It worked like a charm and I was everybody’s hero.
That status only lasted for about two months, until the day I saw Mr. O’Brien walking up to our front door late one Saturday morning. My father answered the door and stepped out onto the front porch to have a brief conversation I could not hear, but that appeared much too serious for my liking. After they shook hands, my father came back inside and called me into the den where he had his office. I stood by nervously while he finished writing a note at his desk. When he finished, he tore it off the pad and handed it to me. It read:
Dear Mr. O’Brien,
My son, Mitchell, will be paying back all the charges for all the notes he put in your milk boxes.
Sincerely,
Richard Townsend
My father told me to put it out in the milk box. I went out and did so, baffled as to how they could have known. As I placed the note in the box, I noticed the printing across the top of the paper that read “From the Office of Richard W. Townsend.” I had been using the same pad for all our special orders.
Needless to say, I mowed quite a few lawns that year before I saw any spending money of my own. Yet, it turned out to be a great summer. I learned the real meaning of exchange. Despite my intellectual humbling, I found out I was smart enough to rule out criminal mastermind as a career path. I also realized that it is the imperfections in all of us that make life much more interesting to all of us.
***
The events that knocked the stuffing out of my particular brand of hubris started a month past my twelfth birthday, when several of my friends from the neighborhood came over on a Saturday afternoon. We played baseball in the mowed field behind my house during the day. Somehow, the stars being in just the right alignment for a miracle, we all managed to convince our parents that we could camp out right there in the field, that there was safety in numbers, and that we could probably survive one night on our own without blinding or crippling anyone.
The first campout came off without a hitch. Soon it became a weekly routine, sometimes in the field, sometimes in the woods nearby, but always a time for a half a dozen of us young bucks to be out in the world on our own. I could tell you some of the mischief we got into, like the time we got so bored that we decided that streaking through the neighborhood might create some interest. Disappointed that no one even noticed us at all, we returned to our campsite. No one would have been the wiser, had we not set up camp right in the middle of a patch of poison ivy. It was impossible for Dale and Mike to explain being covered head to toe and all parts between with poison ivy welts. Suffice it to say we were all basically good kids, never looking for any real trouble. This story is not one of great adventure, but of finding out how to fit into the world right where one lives.
It was late springtime and the winter had broken completely. The nights had become quite balmy, and we lads would always be thirsty by the wee hours of the morning after whatever shenanigans we had pulled the night before. One night our gang, and I use that term very loosely, was cruising the neighborhood, wishing a store was open. (This was before the all night 7-Eleven.) It was still dark, and Mr. O’Brien, the milkman, was making the rounds in his delivery truck. He was just heading up a long driveway to drop milk in one of the metal boxes everyone had on their front porches. Bobby darted to the back of the truck and grabbed a quart of orange juice from one of the wire cases that held bottles from the local dairy. We all ran behind some lilac bushes, and the milkman continued on his way unaware of the missing juice. We shared the juice, and thus started a new tradition for our campouts. Sometimes we would get chocolate milk, which was always a fan favorite. However, there were nights when there was no chocolate milk or juice in sight during our commando raids on the truck. Very disappointing. Moreover, there was the very real possibility we would be seen by the milkman, who knew us all because he was a teacher at the local grade school as well. Teaching really did not pay well in those days.
That was when I came up with the master plan that solidified my position as head of our group. I would bring a small notepad from home to our campout, and I would leave a note with a custom order in some unsuspecting neighbor’s milk box. Later, after the milkman was long gone, we would come back and get whatever we wanted. It worked like a charm and I was everybody’s hero.
That status only lasted for about two months, until the day I saw Mr. O’Brien walking up to our front door late one Saturday morning. My father answered the door and stepped out onto the front porch to have a brief conversation I could not hear, but that appeared much too serious for my liking. After they shook hands, my father came back inside and called me into the den where he had his office. I stood by nervously while he finished writing a note at his desk. When he finished, he tore it off the pad and handed it to me. It read:
Dear Mr. O’Brien,
My son, Mitchell, will be paying back all the charges for all the notes he put in your milk boxes.
Sincerely,
Richard Townsend
My father told me to put it out in the milk box. I went out and did so, baffled as to how they could have known. As I placed the note in the box, I noticed the printing across the top of the paper that read “From the Office of Richard W. Townsend.” I had been using the same pad for all our special orders.
Needless to say, I mowed quite a few lawns that year before I saw any spending money of my own. Yet, it turned out to be a great summer. I learned the real meaning of exchange. Despite my intellectual humbling, I found out I was smart enough to rule out criminal mastermind as a career path. I also realized that it is the imperfections in all of us that make life much more interesting to all of us.
***
