What do I do when my grandson asks for a painting for his sixth birthday?
You might ask, why does a 6-year-old American boy ask for a painting for his birthday? That would be because that boy has about every toy in the world, and he knows his grandfather is a painter, and his favorite character right now is Shadow the Hedgehog.
Voilà, here is Shadow the Hedgehog, my first painting of a cartoon or game character.
Overshadowed by the news coverage of the Republican Convention this past week, if you weren’t traveling, chances are you might not have noticed. We went through a digital pandemic. It took only a few days, but in digital time, that’s an eternity.
CrowdStrike is a cyber security company with customers in all reaches of the industry, in all countries of the world, over 29,000 of them. Microsoft is one of their customers. Some hapless programmer made a mistake in their Windows kernel software which caused Microsoft servers to come up with the famous “blue screen of death” that most users of Windows computers have experienced from time to time, particularly when our computers were getting “sick.”
Critical systems of all types went down and didn’t come up again when they rebooted. It affected airlines (hence my travel comment), emergency call centers, 911-systems, emergency services, hospitals, banks, and any other system that relies on Microsoft servers. It happened all over the world. Once they figured out the problem, it was solved quickly, the patch was updated and propagated, but it took a couple of days before the ripple effects were ironed out. Airplanes can’t just take off instantly and delayed passengers spending nights marooned in strange cities need to be sent on their way before things can get back to normal.
Ok, you might say, what’s the big deal. Another computer glitch, right?
I started my career as a firmware engineer writing kernel level code in assembly language, so I know a thing or two about machine control and operating system software. While I am not privy to the details of this particular bug, I have to tell you that it gave me pause. I am very concerned.
We just demonstrated to the hackers of the world where we’re most vulnerable. I can guarantee you that hacking shops in China, Russia and Iran, and who knows what other countries, have also learned from this event, and they are busy working on the next digital pandemic. The digital arms race just went up a notch. We know how high the stakes are, and we also know how vulnerable our entire way of life is.
I was on a trip in New York when this happened. I had less than $100 of cash in my pocket. I was dependent on airlines flying to get back home. If the phone systems are down, credit cards don’t work. If the credit card processing networks are down, credit cards don’t work. All my money is in banks. If the banking systems don’t come up, I have no access to my money and I will be insolvent within the first day a bill comes due. If the banking system does not work, the ATMs don’t work, and I can get no more cash. There isn’t enough cash in circulation anymore for anyone to shop for groceries. Within days we are reduced to bartering, but only if we have something of value to give, something to eat. Who has that?
If a rogue state figures out a way to wipe out the kernels of our computers and networks for more than a few days, society could collapse very quickly.
It is not that time yet but give it another five or ten years. Let’s say we have an artificial intelligence that went rogue. If it decided to take control of the operating systems of our machines, there would be no way for us to get ahead of them. For all the reasons I just listed above, our entire way of life has become dependent on global networks that need to work, and thousands of systems must interact for us to – put simply – eat. That means we can’t just turn the machines off. We need to keep them running to eat. And the artificial intelligence has us by the proverbial balls.
While this is going on, the leaders of our nation are preoccupied with banning books, promoting religion, restricting reproductive rights, and demonizing immigrants. Nero is fiddling while Rome burns.
Trust me, this little global digital pandemic that many of you might not even have noticed, has me frightened.
I don’t know what the solution is.
I am finding that Mad Honey is a maddeningly difficult book to review without spoiling it.
The story revolves around three teenagers going to high school in a small town in New Hampshire. Asher is a star athlete who plays varsity hockey. He is raised by Olivia, a single mom who escaped her abusive husband when he was starting to harm Asher when he was just six years old. Oliva is a beekeeper. She raises bees, rents them out to orchards and farms for pollination, and sells honey at the local markets. Lily is a bright girl and a cello player, very pretty and popular in her school, even though she is new. All the boys have their eyes on her. Her mom is Ava, a park ranger with a passion for nature and who has hiked the Appalachian Trail. Ava is also a single mom to Lily. She too left an abusive husband to protect Lily. Asher’s best childhood friend is Maya, a precocious girl who has grown up with Asher as a buddy, but there was never any romantic relationship. She and Lily have become best friends. Maya has two moms, a lesbian couple.
Mad Honey is narrated in alternating chapters by Olivia, Asher’s mom, and Lily, the teenage daughter of Ava. It tells the story from Oliva’s adult point of view, pretty much in the present tense, and from Lily, the young girl’s point of view, mostly in the form of flashbacks. This makes for a complex plotline and occasional confusion, particularly when trying to align the chronology.
In the first third of the book I was slightly confused and possibly even bored. I am not necessarily very interested in teenage romance. Olivia’s lessons on beekeeping provide a fresh framework for the story outline, but I had trouble connecting the details about the bees, and the title including honey, with the teenage love and associated heartaches.
All the main characters, and even the peripheral ones, are multi-dimensional and well-crafted. They come alive and are real people to the reader.
What I have told you so far is all I can tell you. It does not sound like much of a story you’d be interested in reading, but be assured, there is much, much more.
Mad Honey seems like a book about the birds and the bees and teenagers in love, but there are massive, almost mind-boggling plot twists that appear out of nowhere that make this story worth reading. Mad Honey is not about birds and bees, it’s about something altogether different, and I am not going to tell you what that is.
The book itself, as a novel, is so-so. I would have given it about 2 stars in my rating system of 4. Since it provoked my thinking significantly and educated me about a subject I had dismissed as unimportant all my life, I had to bump the rating to 3 stars.
Mad Honey is definitely a novel everyone in 2024 should read.
Do not read beyond this unless you are okay with spoilers or you have already read the book.
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Out of nowhere, about halfway through the story, it is revealed that Lily is transgender. She grew up knowing she was a girl, trapped in a boy’s body. Mad Honey is about the highly complex problem of transgender issues in our current society, and it illustrates the topic from the point of view of a transgender person, Lily.
I have never much occupied myself with trans rights, or issues surrounding transgender people. I remember when I was a boy in Germany, there was an old woman who we often saw walking the streets of our city. She was conservatively dressed in women’s clothes, carried a purse, and everyone in the city knew her. We knew her, recognized her and secretly made fun of her because she appeared to be a man, wearing women’s clothes. She had the body of a man, the hard features of a man’s face, stubble and an Adam’s apple. She wore longish hair, which always looked like she had cut herself. This was in the 1960s, and she probably didn’t find a barber who was willing to help her. As kids, we just didn’t know what to do with “her.” That was my only exposure to trans people, or even possibly just cross-dressers. I always thought it was a very minor problem, with very, very few individuals affected.
In our current political climate in the US in the 2020s, the matter of LGBTQ people, which I presume includes transgender people, we learn that there are many more of them than I ever realized. I actually personally know at least one (the son/daughter of a friend), I have heard of another one (the son/non-binary of another friend), and of course there are the highly visible examples, the most famous one probably being Caitlyn Jenner.
While I had the attitude of disregarding the existence of transgender people for most of my life, considering them a minority of a minority, it never really occurred to me to think much about them and what life might be like walking in their shoes. In America, we have national debates about what locker rooms and bathrooms we should allow them to use. Some states are restricting their access to health care. Some states prosecute doctors who are willing and able to help them.
Just because we happen to not have their problems or challenges, we tend to arrange our world so we can trample on their rights as humans, as citizens and as people. We rationalize that they should just fall in line. We, the majority, have the audacity to box them into our own limited worldview based on the privilege drawn out of the bodies we were randomly born into.
Per the authors of Mad Honey, during the year it took them to write this book, over 350 transgender people were killed around the world, more than a fifth of them inside their own homes.
Reading Mad Honey brought all these issues to the forefront of my awareness, and it may have shaped my thinking into directions I had not considered before. A very worthwhile read indeed.
Jerry Jeff Walker passed away on October 23, 2020. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a full moon. There is no way I can watch a full moon and not think of the moon in Luckenbach, Texas.
THE LUCKENBACH MOON
Hondo Crouch
Nuthin’ much happened in Luckenbach this month,
‘Cept the potato chip man came by.
Then there was the moon.
We try to tell folks who come by here to look at our town
What a big, mean moon we have
But nobody’ll believe it.
And last night it showed off.
The greatest ever.
It just hung there, darin’ you to look at it,
Makin’ silhouettes into things and things came alive.
It even shined plumb to the bottom of the canyon,
Under bluffs and plopped dark doughnuts ’round the bottom of trees on top of the mountain.
A kind of moon that makes haunted houses uglier
And ugly girls prettier.
And little animals see farther and feel closer together.
Brave weeds even rose up to look ’round for lawn mowers.
Grandpa sat up in bed and said, “What’s that?”
And the hair on Grandma’s legs stood on end, he said.
On moonbrite nites like this, big eyed deer
Tiptoe into larger openings and they can dance better ’cause they can see where the rocks are at.
Their prancin’ gets fancier and freer because they know mans not there to darnpen the dance.
This kind of moonshine makes you crazy if you sleep in it, they say
But I think you’re crazy not to try it.
Momma even slept with the baby to protect it and I
Flounced in bed even in a thick rock house.
And when I went outside to see what was the matter
Somethin’ scared cold chills up my back.
Everything was standin’ at attention over new shadows.
Then what was that that moved?
Probably just a Nuthin’.
You know, a big full moon like ours is kinda like a person:
It needs help to show off, and last nite
All the clouds stayed home on purpose
to create a great solo.
We can’t stand an encore!
It takes too much out of you.
Those who saw the moon said they could smell it.
One said it tasted like sin.
The quietness at the parkside road was deafenin’
And the little single couple sittin’ there touched the backs of their hands together.
` `Scare Me ! ‘ ‘
We’ve been tellin’ strangers who come to Luckenbach
`Bout our Moon,
But I know they won’t believe that
We have such a big moon
For such a small town.
Digging through some of my older writings, I found a little poem I wrote on September 26, 2004. I had just come home from dinner out with my son who was 16 at the time. I am not sure I ever shared it with him or anyone else.
Now in 2020, another 16 years later, it rings as true as ever, and it gives me inspiration about what really matters in this year of the pandemic.
Better Than That
We were alone last night, my son,
You suggested the place to eat.
Italian food, a quiet booth,
Cool outside, after a long day’s heat.
We talked of school, of growing up.
Of travels to England or France.
Thought of taking Kung Fu or Taekwondo,
I dreamt you’d go to a dance.
And then it hit me right deep in the heart,
I was there with you and so glad,
Because I knew in all of my life,
It won’t ever get — any better than that.
Remember they days when we saw the “No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service” signs in stores and restaurants ‘back in the day?’ Well, at least in the U.S. that was the case, particularly in areas near beaches and other recreational facilities. Of course, that reminds me of the shock I still remember more than 40 years later, when I was in a supermarket in Soulac-sur-Mer off Bordeaux in France, when a stark naked woman in flip flops with a shopping basket ambled toward me in the milk isle. I still wonder where she kept her wallet?
But back to the U.S. in 2020. Now we’re seeing conservatives complain that their “freedom is impeded” by the requirements of stores to wear masks. And the conservative media supports this.
Seriously?
It’s okay to require shoes in the store, but somehow it’s not okay to require a mask in the middle of a pandemic? I am not sure how I can pick up athlete’s foot if I am wearing shoes myself. But I know I can pick up a virus just from a droplet, a virus that kills 3 to 10 percent of those it infects.
And speaking about restricted freedom and individual rights: Remember when people supported the religious baker who refused to sell a cake to a gay couple? That was acceptable. Now, when a store requires masks, they say you can’t deny people service? Maybe we need to call health “religion” and we’re good?
And finally, we now have reports of establishments that do not allow masks and ask patrons to go elsewhere. WHAT? Darwin’s law will make sure those businesses don’t survive, I guess. Make a stand. Drive your customers away. Get yourself infected with a deadly virus while you’re at it. But don’t ask society to bail out your business or pay for your emergency room bills!
Hypocrisy, all!
Last week, my grandson was eight months old.
He is settling nicely into the Corona Generation.
I don’t always agree with Steve Forbes, but I usually read his Fact & Comment column in Forbes Magazine. This time I could not agree more.
I tried to find an online link, but oddly, I could not. Forbes does a very poor job opening its online presence to search engines. Maybe that’s on purpose, to get us to buy the hardcopy magazine? So I scanned the pages and published them here in PDF form.
This article is about the U.S. election system and particularly the electoral college, which is often under attack these days. It is particularly designed by the founders of our nation to be a dampener on public opinion. The founders didn’t want any old crazy political fad or outrageous politician to take over the presidency. Without the electoral college, it would not be inconceivable that a porn star could win, or a movie star, or a reality TV real estate salesman.
I do not want to minimize Steve Forbes’ article by retelling it here in this post, but I really think you should read it before you make up your mind about the electoral college. There is a lot of wisdom in it, and it keeps us from having the problem of needed awkward political coalitions like they have in Germany and many other modern countries.
Here is a link to the article.
How to Save US Politics – Steve Forbes – Forbes Magazine March 2020
I have a hardcopy subscription to Forbes, and I have had it pretty much my entire adult life. I like to read my magazines in hardcopy. Forbes has always been worth it.
Not in my wildest dreams did I think, that as a Californian, I would ever donate money to a candidate in Kentucky for the U.S. Senate. I just did. I sent $25 to Amy McGrath, a former fighter pilot, who is running against Mitch McConnell.
I watched this movie again while channel surfing HBO last night. I had forgotten most of the details, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had also forgotten that I had actually reviewed it. When I re-read this review, I thought it was spot on. I would have written exactly the same thing again.
This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through … a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.
— Lyndon Johnson, special message to Congress, 1965
Troposphere, whatever. I told you before I’m not a scientist. That’s why I don’t want to deal with global warming.
— Justice Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court hearing in the case of Massachusetts et al. v. the EPA
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.
— Philip K. Dick, science fiction author
Here is a hilarious movie review by a fellow blogger. Enjoy!
My wife is profoundly snarky. So if you’re going to have a surreal experience, she’s the one to do it with. Last weekend we had one while watching the new movie First Man. Just as Neil Armstrong and crew were preparing to embark on their historical mission, the power failed. Moments later, we wandered into […]
Michael J. Fox negotiated the deal for “Family Ties” (1982) from a phone booth outside a now defunct Pioneer Chicken restaurant in Hollywood because he had no phone at home. He was told the network would need to call, and he said he was only home between the hours of four and five. He waited for the call, and fortunately he was there to answer it and secure the “Family Ties” (1982) role.
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