Today’s pop culture has a way of being tomorrow’s trivial pursuit.  Does my title when spoken refer to an old sitcom or a misspelling of the name of the young man who drives tweenies crazy?  Or, a new meat in your grocery store you’ll find next to the buffalo burger?  Fiction writers today have to be knowledgeable about old and new culture—the trend is to mix them together.  The modern author needs to recognize that not all readers will recognize the words he or she uses.

An added complication is that young and old borrow from each other.  The young can be into “classic rock,” heavy metal, Tony Bennett, and Madonna.  So are the old.  Boomers enjoyed Rocky and Bullwinkle.  Their kids watch it too.  Same for I Love Lucy episodes.  Hollywood seems to remake more old films than create new ones.  It even turns old comic books I used to read into blockbusters.

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Guetapens.  Spelling this French-derived word that means ambush or trap made Snigdha Nandipati the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee.  My beef:  Each year thousands of kids win or lose spelling bee events with words that are NOT English.  While it’s true that America is a melting pot and English is the most wanton and promiscuous of the world’s languages, the Scripps organizers should be ashamed of themselves, along with the organizers of every other spelling contest that try to trip up young spellers with foreign words.

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From a line of hundreds of people trying to climb Mt. Everest or die trying, to an eighty-year-old taking a birthday parachute jump and getting more than she bargained for, to a young man that thinks that kayaks were made to go over huge waterfalls, our news media does an excellent job of portraying the active thrill seekers in our society and the world.  These recent events show that humans’ thirst for thrills and adventure is still around albeit not as common as it used to be.  After all, we have some good substitutes.  Many people will not view a movie without spiffy special effects, car chases, shootouts, and, yes, plenty of sex and violence.  Video games allow pubescent teens to chase full-breasted women and blow the heads off people, both good and bad.

There are two kinds of thrill seekers.  The first needs the physical situation to generate the adrenalin—the climbers, the jumpers, and the hobbyist stunt men.  The second survives just fine stretched out in a recliner participating more vicariously in the thrills from his home theatre system, video games…and books!  I’m a writer.  I don’t make a living writing—not yet—but I depend on the more passive thrill seekers in general and book lovers in particular.  I’m also an avid reader.  I’d rather not subject myself to situations where I might die or be physically harmed.  I’ve never rode a roller coaster even.  I can imagine the thrill people receive when doing it but I prefer to read about it.  In fact, I prefer books over movies and definitely over video games.

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#149:  Those readers who have read my Soldiers of God and, to a lesser extent, some of my other books, know I’m concerned with both kinds of terrorism, home-grown and imported.  In fact, Soldiers portrayed the dangers of the home-grown kind long before the DHS made it a priority.  In that book and elsewhere (including the articles in this blog), I have discussed the distinction between spirituality and fundamentalism.

Many people, from U.S. presidents to megachurch ministers, claim to talk to God, to have a one-on-one with the Old Lady who can explain everything science can’t possibly explain.  I always thought this was part of spirituality and, in some sense, admired people who could do it, although I knew the Old Lady had to be really good at multitasking to talk with everyone.  Now a new book by T. M. Luhrmann, When God Talks Back, paints this as something belonging to neither spirituality nor fundamentalism (by the way, the eBook breaks my price barrier since it’s priced at $14.99).  From what I understand about Mr. Luhrmann’s thesis, the person who talks with God is simply having a schizophrenic conversation with a section of his mind he or she has created and called God.

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Up to now, I’ve been confining my opinions on the lawsuit of the U.S. Justice Department versus Apple and the gang of five of the Big Six to my “News and Notices.”  While I’m definitely biased about this and my blog is basically op-ed, I started out thinking that this case is small potatoes compared to some of the bigger issues of our day.  Now I’m not so sure that the case is not a big, messy pommes de terre au gratin with lots of cheese where cleanup will be a challenge to any dishwasher, human or otherwise.

Let me elaborate on one compound word that is key here: price-fixing.  I didn’t quite understand where the government was coming from, but now I see the issues better.  Apple’s alleged behavior is ironically a 180-degree turn-around from their behavior with the music industry.  Steve Jobs’ company allegedly undercut record companies’ prices and forever changed the music industry.  What they allegedly offered to the Big Six publishers was a mechanism for the latter to avoid Amazon’s undercutting their prices—this is the agency model, where Apple agreed to sell eBooks at a publisher-determined price at their iStore as long as the publisher guaranteed that Amazon and every other online retailer couldn’t sell for less.  Amazon could sell the publishers’ eBooks (so they’re available for Kindle) but they couldn’t sell them for less (thus indirectly favoring the Kindle).

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Scott, a frequent commenter to my blog posts, stated in one of his comments, the following:  “It almost seems like you have to be a scientist or almost one to write good SF today!”  At the risk of taking him out of context, this is the theme of today’s post.  To paraphrase Scott, how do we reconcile a scientist’s no-nonsense focused pursuit of good data and elegant theories with the creativity and imagination of a master storyteller?  Is there cause and effect here?  Or, do we just have the synergistic nexus of two different personality traits.

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Einstein’s special theory of relativity differs from ordinary Galilean relativity in that the scientist who ended up looking like a beat poet made the assumption that the speed of light is constant in all inertial reference frames.  That and the key word “inertial” makes the theory “special,” as opposed to “general.”  (This is an over-simplification—the general theory is really a non-quantum theory of gravity, generalizing Newtonian gravity).  Back in September, physicists associated with the Italian Opera experiment shook the world in announcing that Einstein’s assumption was incorrect.  A sensor detected CERN-emitted neutrinos 453 miles away—the distance divided by the time lag gives a velocity.

Scientists hit the hooch, refusing to believe the results.  As an ex-scientist, I did too.  Over a century of experiments had confirmed Einstein’s assumption (it’s still true in the general theory, by the way).  I had a number of people ask me about the experiment.  Some even said, “Wow, Einstein was wrong!”  My response was, “Let’s wait and see.”  One experiment doesn’t overturn a theory—repeated experimental confirmation is required.  The lesson learned here is that, whether he was right or wrong, Eisnstein was just a very able theoretician.  Experiments determine the physics and the scientific method always prevails—theories have to be tested.  In this case, the disbelief spurred experimentalists to check the Opera results.

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[Today’s blog post is a three-peat of one about Irish writers—celebrating St. Paddy’s Day, of course!  Irish men and women have migrated to the far corners of the Earth.  Some have migrated back.  Some stayed home.  They have suffered the boom and bust of late 20^th and early 21^st century economics.  Their Church scandals involving priests and choirboys have made ours in the U.S. seem minor, yet Ireland is still the most Catholic country in Europe.  The Irish, above all, are resilient.  Their writers reflect this resiliency.]

The title quote is by George Bernard Shaw.  Saturday is St. Patrick’s Day, so I thought today was a perfect day to set the record straight: many great writers in the English language that you may have heard about are not English but Irish.

Shaw was one of them.  His plays and other writings poked fun at the English establishment, a commendable thing to do even today.  His biting wit transferred easily into words on the page and probably embarrassed everyone from royalty on down.  On the other hand, the endurance of his work over the years is proof of its quality—it is classic literature in the English language written by an Irishman.

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#121:  FULL MEDICAL NOW FREE!  If you read my novel Evil Agenda in its serialized form in my blog, or in its spruced-up re-edited eBook version, here’s your chance to see where it all began for free!  Full Medical, prequel to Evil Agenda, is now available free in three-day promotion, starting TODAY!  Promotion lasts Friday, March 2, through Sunday, March 4.

For those in the know, this means that Full Medical is in the KDP Select catalog (the first edition is still available from Xlibris only as a trade paperback), so you can also borrow it from Amazon when the promotion is over.  If you haven’t read Evil Agenda, consider the promotion as a way to get The Clones and Mutants Series for only $2.99 (Full Medical for free and Evil Agenda for $2.99).  Inexpensive spring reading…and lots of it!

#122:  If you missed it in my own blog (last December 22), see my guest post “The Eightfold Way” on Penny Sansevieri’s February 29^th Author Marketing Experts blog (thanks to Paula Krapf of AME for the posting).  It’s a list of eight don’ts for writers of novels from my perspective as reader, reviewer, and, of course, writer.  This will also appear as a guest post in AuthorU.org’s blog.  AME offers marketing tips while AuthorU focuses on its community of authors—both sites highly recommended.

In libris libertas….

Like many children, I admired various sports figures.  Roy Campanella, Brooklyn Dodgers’ catcher, was a role model.  I played that position and later admired the man for his tenacity and courage in facing his paralysis after an auto accident.  I also became a Dodgers fan and was overjoyed when they moved to L.A.   K. C. Jones and Bill Russell were favorites at the University of San Francisco and I followed their careers to the Boston Celtics where I became a fan, even though I was on the West Coast.  The historic confrontations between Russell and Chamberlain were more exciting than the gunfight between the Earps and the Clantons.

I can’t remember seeing any of these three athletes drink or smoke, or reading about their philandering ways in the national media.  A simpler, more innocent time?  Perhaps.  Steroids in baseball were far in the future.  Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant were too.  Nevertheless, I can imagine how devastating it might be for a young boy or girl to see and hear about the decline of one of their sports heroes.  It must be at least as stressful as that first kiss or that first dance.

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