Potpourri for 7/16/23

The first time I had ulcers, the diagnosis, tests, and treatment were handled by a GP. This time, the GP (not the same doctor) turned the whole matter over to a specialist. So now I sit and wait for an August 24th appointment to arrive. This fits a news story I saw on TV that people are experiencing longer wait times getting an appointment with a specialist. Part of the problem is using GPs for intake into the system rather than as a place of treatment. My two cents.Now that performers have joined writers, Hollywood is being shut down. As usual, the studios are claiming that the strikers are only hurting themselves. According to Fran Drescher, president of SAG-AFTRA, “I cannot believe it, quite frankly, how far apart we are on so many things. How they plead poverty, that they’re losing money left and right when giving hundreds of millions of dollars to their CEOs. It is disgusting. Shame on them. They stand on the wrong side of history.” I support the strikers in this rare instance of the writers’ and actors’ unions striking at the same time.According to USA Today, “Actress and singer Jane Birkin, who inspired fashion-forward Birkin bag, has died at 76.” Frankly, I’m tired of reading news stories about people who are more or less in my generation dying off. According to Wikipedia, “In 2001, Birkin was awarded the OBE. She was also awarded the French Ordre National du Mérite in 2004 and 2015. She won the “Best Actress” award at the 1985 Orleans Film Festival for Leave All Fair. The jury of the 1985 Venice Film Festival recognized Birkin’s performance in Dust as amongst the best of the year but decided not to award the best actress prize because all of the actresses they judged to have made the best performances were in films that won major awards. Dust won the Silver Lion prize. In 2018, she received the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun.”As TNR puts it in “The Tantalizing, Lonely Search for Alien Life”  “Scientists disagree about what life on other planets even means. Would we know it when we saw it?” “A truly alien alien is so incomprehensible that stories about them just become stories about human beings,” Jaime Green writes in her new book, The Possibility of Life: Science, Imagination, and Our Quest for Kinship in the Universe.” Maybe our neighbors come from a universe far away. How would we know? Perhaps we think those aliens will look like the Klingons or the Vulcans from “Star Trek.” If so, they wouldn’t blend in very well, would they?

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of contemporary fantasy, paranormal, and magical realism short stories and novels. The four-book set shown here combines four Kindle novels into one volume at a savings to readers