Malcolm R. Campbell's Blog, page 14

Atomic Clock ‘Glitch’ Sends Earth Back to January 1, 2023

Washington, D.C., January 1, 2023, Star-Gazer News Service

While TV viewers watching last night’s New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square weren’t allowed to see it, at the stroke of midnight, the world cycled back to January 1, 2023. Officials urged people to stay calm while the software of the Atomic Clock was checked for evidence of hackers.

According to Time Tsar James Maxwell, “Clock time is independent of historical events. It would be premature at this point to speculate on whether or not we will relive the events of 2023 or if we will experience something new.”

Atomic Clock HQ James Clerk Maxwell, “Clock time is independent of historical events. It would be premature at this point to speculate on whether or not we will relive the events of 2023 or if we will experience new events with year-old dates.”

According to informed sources, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS) that mandates when “leap seconds” are added to the official time to synchronize the earth’s rotation with with the official time, 20234 is a leap year. However, that does not mean IERS is considering adding an entire year to the clock to bring time up to what everyday people think the world’s date and time should be.

“That would be unprecedented,” said Maxwell.

Observers at IERS and the Atomic Clock HQ are closely monitoring events and are “happy to report that so far the world is not seeing a replay of the opening days of 2023.”

Joe Smith, the janitor at HQ said, that Wikipedia is correct when it reports that, “In 1968, the duration of the second was defined to be 9192631770 vibrations of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of the caesium-133 atom. Prior to that, it was defined by there being 31556925.9747 seconds in the tropical year 1900. The 1968 definition was updated in 2019 to reflect the new definitions of the ampere, kelvin, kilogram, and mole decided upon at the 2019 redefinition of the International System of Units. Timekeeping researchers are currently working on developing an even more stable atomic reference for the second, with a plan to find a more precise definition of the second as atomic clocks improve based on optical clocks or the Rydberg constant around 2030.”

“Most kids learn this math in grade school,” said Smith, “so they can keep track of time on their cell phones all of which stubbornly maintain this is 2023 all over again.”

According to Sue Campbell, head of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, people are encouraged to report deja view experiences that suggest events from 2023 are repeating themselves. “Until we sort this out, many of us will be experiencing the movie ‘Groundhog Day.'”

“Audiences enjoyed watching the movie,” said Maxwell, “so we believe folks will have fun with the strange things happening in the world of time while officials work to discover just when this moment is.”

At the crack of dawn, Congress passed legislation that mandates that all states and U.S. territories will consider the year to be 2024, prohibiting jurisdictions from “rolling their own” about the current date and time.

“Thank goodness there’s no precedent for this,” said Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, “for that would mean time has been off track for years.”

“No worries,” said President Biden, “since quantum scientists say that time is not real.”

Story Filed by Jock Stewart, Special Investigative Reporter

What’s a little E. coli among friends?

Escherichia coli

Strange to say, I’m almost relieved that after six months of tests and failures to listen to the patient, my doctors think I have Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS), a special feature of E. coli.  The relief comes from thinking it was something worse. The failure to listen to the patient comes from not hearing me say, “This is an infection, so stop testing for other stuff while the months go by without any treatment.” (It’s not like pushing for an antibiotic is like pushing for fentanyl.)

E. coli is often called the traveler’s disease since people often pick it up by eating or making market purchases at unsanitary places. So, did I get it traveling between the front door and the mailbox or from infected grocery store produce bought here in town? Nobody knows. Maybe the cat brought it into the house. (Bad kitty!)

A bottle of Xifaxan costs $270. That means insurance doesn’t cover it. Well, if it works, it’s worth it. The only problem is that IBS really has no cure so I’ll probably need to manage it with meds until the cows come home.

I wash everything from the produce department from salad greens to baking potatoes. My mother did it, so I do it.

I don’t eat at disreputable restaurants or drink bad whisky at biker bars.

Bottom line, I’ll probably never know where the E. coli came from. I envy the people who can eat weird food from off-grid places and never get sick.

So, if the diagnosis turns out to be correct and the meds work then 2024 will begin as a happy New Year.  I hope your New Year begins on a happy note as well. Maybe a new job, a new novel, an escape from prison, finding stolen money in the basement. It’s all good.

—Malcolm

What kind of 2024 do we want?

In my version of reality, what happens in the world is the total of what everyone in the population desires with enough fervor to be able to see it and taste it and experience it in their dreams and in their mind’s eyes.  We can say, then, that each of us is responsible for what we get and all of us are responsible for what our city, our state, our country, and our world experience.

The problem doesn’t just come from what the looters, shooters, and terrorists want to do, but from those who assume that the looters, shooters, and terrorists cannot be controlled. Those who think the bad guys will rule enable the bad guys to rule. This is not fate. It’s our permission.

Each of us needs to put hope and energy into what we want. That’s how what happens, happens. In our personal lives, we must be positive and expect the outcomes we desire. And yet, many people begin each week with a pessimistic, Murphy’s law expectation about what will happen. They get what they focus their energy on, so if they think things will go wrong, then things will go wrong, confirming their beliefs about how the world works.

Pessimism always seems to be in vogue, so we swear by Murphy’s Law as though it’s handed down by the Fates. In fact, by swearing by it, we create it again and again. And we smile and say, “That’s life.” Or so we presume.

If we can one day grasp what James Allen wrote years ago, “As a man thinketh in his heart so is he…A man is literally what he thinks,” we will understand that the “bad” and the “good” of life do not come from fate or Murphy’s laws but from ourselves and how we see ourselves and the world. Understanding this is the true power we have over bad things that seem to come out of nowhere.

You can, if you take the time, reduce your brain waves to the Alpha or Theta level, and meditate on the world you want in 2024.   This is more powerful than casually thinking about the best of all possible worlds because it places your consciousness at the level where it can impact reality.

I’ve written about all this before in earlier posts. We’re not corks being tossed and turned by an angry sea, but the sea itself. Seeing that is the beginning of wisdom.

–Malcolm

What’s a dead rat on a Leprchaun’s dinner table?

It’s a writing prompt. Writing prompts, which feature a potential plot scerario, are used to inspire writers to try out their skills and create a sense of adventure by writing a scene or a story based on the prompt. His works fine in a creative writing class where all the students work on the same project. The results are critiqued and/or discussed after the work is turned in.

I used a variation of the wrting prompt when teaching journalism classes. The students would be presented with a list of facts and asked to write a news story, feature story, editorial, or obituary. This allowed the class to practice the techiques and/or be tested on them.

What I don’t like are writing prompts that take over the content of a writing website or blog because they’re cheap excuses for providing meaninful content. Staff can think of dozens of these prompts with lot less effort than covering writing news, how-to discussions, book reviews, and other valuable content.

current P&W home page

Two sites that do this are the “Poets & Writers” organization’s website and the Indies Unlimited blog. The “Poet’s & Writers” site does present other valuable home page content, so the page isn’t a total loss.  I would prefer discussions there about the magazine itself or books and authors news instead of his cheap alterantive. I used to be a member of Poets and Writers membership program, so I’ve seen the website a lot.

Indies Unlimited is an authors’ blog that displays e-book deals submitted by involved small-press authors, a resource page, a knowledge base, and a flash fiction challenge based on a writing prompt. The website’s FAQ still says that it presents articles and editorials but as far as I can tell, the blog has had few, if any, of these in a long time. I believe IU is all-volunteer and that in recent years it’s gone through some staff changes and a declining number of available writers for other submitting content. However, I miss the other content and find no excitement in reading writing-prompt-based flash fiction. The site is still fun but would be more usefu without the heavy reliance and the flash fiction.

Margarita

Many other writing sites offer writing prompts, including “Writer’s Digest,” purportedly as inspiration and/or a way to combat writer’s block. Do they work? Possibly so. Personally, I’m not going to spend my time away from the work in progress writing about some BS that some staff member thought up while having a large margarita at the local watering hole.

–Malcolm

On the first day of Christmas my true love sent to me a partridge in a pear tree

Actually, if that happened they (the partridge in a pear tree) would probably end up in the garage where they would never be seen again. That’s fine. I detest pears. The cats would probably eat the partridge or vice versa.

My wife and I got books, candy, calendars, and plush throws for those chilly Georgia nights. These we can use, along with new lamps for the master and guest bedrooms. When we had multiple cats, they played in the pile of used wrapping paper. Last night when we opened gifts, our indoor/outdoor cat was asleep in the bedroom and our 25-year-old calico no longer cares about it (the paper).

Our decorations usually go up late and stay up through Twelfth Night when my wife is supposed to give me twelve drummers drumming. Well, more for the garage. Of course, it’s bad luck to leave the decorations up after Twelfth Night. Personally, I think it shows a lack of taste to throw the Christmas tree out for the trash truck late on December 25th.

I’m fairly traditional about this, following the Christmastide schedule as noted in Wikipedia: “In 567 the Council of Tours proclaimed that the entire period between Christmas and Epiphany should be considered part of the celebration, creating what became known as the twelve days of Christmas, or what the English called Christmastide. On the last of the twelve days, called Twelfth Night, various cultures developed a wide range of additional special festivities. The variation extends even to the issue of how to count the days. If Christmas Day is the first of the twelve days, then Twelfth Night would be on January 5, the eve of Epiphany. If December 26, the day after Christmas, is the first day, then Twelfth Night falls on January 6, the evening of Epiphany itself.”

One of the deathly hallows

This year, I added a new element to the Christmastide festivities called falling off the step ladder while putting up with lighted garland around the front door. That resulted in a headache and now a sore place where my head it the deck. I do not intend for this to become a new tradition.

My wife and I have sinus conditions that make us dizzy at times, so I told my wife not to put up the garland alone because she might fall off the deathly hallow. I guess it figures that I’d be the one calling off the ladder.

For your own safety, do not introduce any step ladders into your Christmas celebrations.

I hope your Christmas is happy, merry, and bright–and safe!

–Malcolm

‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch

‘From that first knock at the door, Prophet Song forces us out of our complacency as we follow the terrifying plight of a woman seeking to protect her family in an Ireland descending into totalitarianism. We felt unsettled from the start, submerged in – and haunted by – the sustained claustrophobia of Lynch’s powerfully constructed world. He flinches from nothing, depicting the reality of state violence and displacement and offering no easy consolations. Here the sentence is stretched to its limits – Lynch pulls off feats of language that are stunning to witness. He has the heart of a poet, using repetition and recurring motifs to create a visceral reading experience. This is a triumph of emotional storytelling, bracing and brave. With great vividness, Prophet Song captures the social and political anxieties of our current moment. Readers will find it soul-shattering and true, and will not soon forget its warnings.’  – Esi Edugyan, Chair, Booker Prize.

When Kirkus Reviews praises a book by saying, “An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017)” it’s certainly worth a look. Those of us who remember “The Troubles” (1960s-1990s)  will feel an eerie sense of Deja Vu to the violent world of the Irish Republican Army.

From the Publisher

“On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police on her step. They have arrived to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

“Ireland is falling apart, caught in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny. As the life she knows and the ones she loves disappear before her eyes, Eilish must contend with the dystopian logic of her new, unraveling country. How far will she go to save her family? And what—or who—is she willing to leave behind?

“The winner of the Booker Prize 2023, Prophet Song presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.”

From the Guardian

“Lynch’s message is crystal clear: lives the world over are experiencing upheaval, violence, persecution. Prophet Song is a literary manifesto for empathy for those in need and a brilliant, haunting novel that should be placed into the hands of policymakers everywhere.”

Reviewers in general are calling the book believable and plausible as well as a stunning achievement.

—Malcolm

 

Almost Christmas – are you ready?

We’re as ready as we can be. Gifts have been mailed off to out-of-town family. My wife and I have gifts for each other; I finished wrapping what I got for Lesa this afternoon.

Those of you who’ve read this blog for a while know that I drive out in the middle of the night to a nearby QuikTip, Exxon,  BP, or other nearby gas station with a mini-mart and stock up on last-minute bargains such as Pork Rinds, Tee shirts with various logos, a case of oil, and other treats that help make opening gifts a festive occasion each year.

While I would prefer opening gifts on Yule, we open them on Christmas Eve. This is a holdover from the days when we celebrated Christmas day with my parents one year and my wife’s parents the next year. Doing that just became a tradition, and we liked having our own gift exchange ourselves beneath the lights of the spruce Christmas Tree.

Neither of us has been well lately, so the indoor and outdoor decorations aren’t as lavish as usual. But they suffice. We used to send out a Christmas (Yule) letter but stopped that several years ago. We still send out a few cards, but now they’re always late if we get around to them.

My parents always had a co-called modern Yule log, i.e. one used on the mantlepiece with candles. Theirs had many years of multi-colored tallow on it before they died and my younger brother inherited the log and began adding more colorful tallow every year. With cats in the house, we avoid using candles, and after one Christmas of broken ornaments switched to the unbreakable kind.

Now that the ornaments won’t break, our cats tend to leave the tree alone. Go figure.

I tend to like the old-fashioned, Victorian-style cards even though they aren’t available in the stores. So I use them on my Facebook page. Wherever you are and whenever you celebrate, I hope you have a wonderful holiday season.

–Malcolm

‘Angle of Repose’ by Wallace Stegner

I read this novel soon after it came out in 1971 (and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972) and, if I bothered to organize my books, it would definitely belong on my shelf of favorites. The novel is about a real historian Lyman Ward and Stegner (1909-1993) based it on the letters of author Mary Hallock Foote. Some say he shouldn’t have used actual passages from her work. He says he had permission to do so. The controversy remains amongst scholars.

Wikipedia notes that “The title, seemingly taken from Foote’s writings, is an engineering term for the angle at which soil finally settles after, for example, being dumped from a mine as tailings.”

From the PublisherStegner in 1969

An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner—a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past.

Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need.  Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture, he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.

The Atlantic Monthly called the novel a  “Cause for celebration…A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.”

About the Author

“Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.” – Amazon Listing

—Malcolm

How much ‘extra’ money do you have for good causes?

Every year about this time, every charity in the known universe comes out online and in snail mail with matching deals for my consideration. In fact, there’s a tsunami of donation opportunities that will drive most Americans into bankruptcy if they give $20 here and $20 there to everyone begging for their help. How much extra money do any of us have for all the good causes asking for help?

In general, I try to support KIVA, Tibet, and the National Parks. This puts me on a list of people who would have to be rich to respond to all the projects that need funding. I support the International Campaign for Tibet because I believe that China’s illegal occupation of Tibet and its ongoing policy of erasing Tibetan culture and religion is one of the most noxious atrocities on the planet.

I support Kiva because they fund individuals with loans that are designed to help people survive on their own through small businesses and education. And I support the National Parks because Congress doesn’t provide the funds required. Things come up like Ukaine’s need for help and the help required in Gaza. Then, too, there are local causes that also need financial support.

But how much can we give, those of us living primarily on Social Security and the sales from a few books on Amazon? Not enough. And yet, there’s constant pressure to give more. In some ways, I resent this, and in some ways, I understand this. What about you? Do you have trouble keeping up with this yearly onslaught of requests?

–Malcolm

Goulash for Sunday 12-17-23

The Six-month tummy ache continues as the Gastroenterology Department runs a slew of tests. All are normal so far. This experience is pretty much like having a strong case of mono for six months (I’ve been there and done that). The adoption of the two-snake symbol for medicine is an old mistake that got engraved in stone.I’m re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It’s been a while. And I still despise the first sentence. Among other things, this novel has had a strong influence on the magical realism genre. Wikipedia says “Since it was first published in May 1967 in Buenos Aires by Editorial Sudamericana, One Hundred Years of Solitude has been translated into 46 languages and sold more than 50 million copies. The novel, considered García Márquez’s magnum opus, remains widely acclaimed and is recognized as one of the most significant works both in the Hispanic literary canon and in world literature.”Ah, “The Crown” has returned to finish out the rest of the season. In the episode we saw last night, Prime Minister Tony Blair tries to convince the queen that the monarchy is out of touch with everyday people and needs to modernize. She thinks not.  Better to get rid of it completely, but then nobody asked me. Harry Potter fans will notice that the actress who’s playing the queen, Imelda Staunton, played the nasty Dolores Umbridge in the Hogwarts films. That fits.We watched the two-night “MasterChef Junior Home for the Holidays” and, as usual, find it hard to believe these kids can cook so well. When I was ten years old, I was playing cowboys and Indians in the backyard. But these children are turning out meals that could actually be served in a high-end restaurant. Ramsay gets his family into the act as commentators and judges. I wonder if he has to pay them. As usual with their kids’ shows, somebody gets a pie in the face. Guess who?I believe I’ve read most of the James Patterson series about Alex Cross. So, I’m looking forward to Alex Cross Must Die which was released last month. Typically–as a frugal Scot–I’m waiting for the price to come down before I buy it. From the publisher: “One of the greatest fictional detectives of all time (Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child) is in the sights of the Dead Hours Killer, a serial murderer on a ruthless mission.” I’m not exactly holding my breath about the outcome, but when I find a series of novels I like, it’s hard not to sell the house to pay for the latest installment.

—Malcolm