Pilot's Log

My 1993-dated copy of the Stuttman Military Yearbook is volume 1 of 6.

...And I Tank You!

The catalog from AutomationDirect.com is The Letter Bomb. The actual paper portion is bigger than a phone directory for Manhattan, and it also comes with a digital duplicate on DVD.

So why did I request one? They carry electronics components. A lot of which would go into the F.L.I.G.H.T.S.I.M. build if I could swing it.

I went to the library's annual book sale and got a hardback copy of Carl Sagan's Cosmos, which I'll probably spend the summer reading and re-reading.

What piqued my immediate interest are diagrams of the three main hypothetical starship designs of the Sixties and Seventies: Orion, Daedalus, and the Bussard Ramscoop. I'd first learned about Orion from The Future of Flight by Dean Ing and Leik Myrabo, a book I got when I was a Freshman in college--some twenty-five years after the program's cancellation following the imposition of the Nuclear Weapons Test Ban Treaty. The Orion program centered around a rocket whose thrust was generated by atomic bomb blasts. The U.S. Air Force had already succeeded in tests with a scale model powered by conventional explosives and had started spadework on a full-size vehicle when they were ordered to drop it and move on to other things.

The full-sized ship would have been over 100 meters long, probably weighed in the neighborhood of 100 thousand tons, and have a likely crew of 35 people. And, if the program had contined, manned missions to the planets and possibly even beyond the Solar system would have begun by 1970.

Now I'm thinking about building a model of the ship and plotting out a low-budget movie asking the question: "What if an Orion had been built and secretly launched out of the Solar system then? Where could the ship be now?"

This may or may not surprise you: while I did "go to college", I never actually "left home" and so I had a front row seat for my mother's entire literary career. She started by subscribing to Writer's Digest magazine at about the time my brother started school, and she took up the magazine's correspondence courses in creative writing. After a few short stories that never saw print, she turned to novel writing.

I LINK TO MOST OF HER COMPLETED WORKS HERE, but since that time one of her previous print-only books was re-issued as an e-book, we were attempting to get her only remaining print-only novel re-issued as well, and two other complete books had been submitted to her publisher but hadn't seen release. (I'll have to get back to her publisher[s] about that myself.) She's done a lot of work on her final book, and I hope to arrange for an author friend of hers here to complete it for her.

That still leaves a kennel full of orphaned story pups and kittens. As her assistant, I tried to keep track of them so I could help Mum stay focussed; I had a little file called the Tracker set up to log down which project was which. I'll share with you a selection of what was in it as of 2006, plus some other older concepts Jane had come upon.

ARTIST IN RESIDENCE: About a drama professor getting started at a small liberal arts college.

CELEBRITY CAMP: A reality-show inspired story about a secluded retreat where newly-rich and newly-famous people get accultured and learn to avoid the troubles of the new realities. (Previously, Jane had a similar idea called SNOB SCHOOL, about a teenage girl of a rock radio entrepreneur having to attend debutante school on the orders of her new stepfamily.)

THE CHILI POKER CLUB: A set of fast college friends try to keep their relationships alive after graduation by perpetuating a poker game club.

COMPLETE SET: A struggling young woman acquires a box of what she thinks is sewing patterns from a deceased lady's estate sale, but it turns out to be a collection of baseball cards kept in memory of her son lost in Vietnam. The discovery brings the woman into conflict with a recent widower friend of the lady and his pre-adolescent baseball fan son.

THE CONDO: A suspense tale about a woman fleeing a stalker, a private detective investigating hints of an impending cybernetic break-in at a bank, and the condo room they wind up having to share over that weekend.

CRISPY CONE: A sequel to DEARLY BELOVED set in the same town, about the family who runs a drive-in diner that is one of the social centers of the community.

THE DUCHESS: Based on the true life of Eleanora, an heir to nobility in Renaissance Italy who was at the center of many political intrigues and married the young Duke of Urbino in 1508.

THE FLIRTATION: It's been a long time since I'd seen this, so I've forgotten a lot about it. I think it's about a wager between two romantic intellectual rivals.

I'D RATHER BE IN VENICE: A very self-referential romantic suspense story about the world of art thieves and forgery.

MARRYING MAN: Set in Andrew Jackson-era Tennessee, it's about a "horse whisperer" woman who is something of a feminist--and her family's attempts to find a match for her and get her to "settle down".

THE OTHER WOMAN'S OTHER MAN: A fiancee hires a detective to verify the faith of her would-be husband...and the two determine that what looks like infidelity may in fact be blackmail.

PIECES OF THE PAST: The discovery of a quilt hidden in a wall of an old house being renovated leads to a treasure hunt--and some antics from ghosts of the house's previous occupants.

RESOLUTIONS: Three women at a New Year's Eve party are told by a psychic to write down their resolutions and the psychic promises to make them come true. The narrative follows the three over the course of the year...at the end they, and their loved ones, find that it all came true, but with changes.

SAFE AT HOME: A woman who swears off men after a break-up instead gets a break-in when a new tenant at her duplex mistakes her side for the side he's started renting. Can he make it up to her? Will she let him?

TWENTY-ONE GUN SALUTE: A young woman in a rich family turns twenty-one and gets full use of her share of the family trust fund...and she decides to start a business.

THE WIDOW SANDS: Based on true history...during the Pennsylvania Oil Boom of the late 19th Century (basically a parallel to the Wild West--and the spawning ground of much great industry wealth and robber baronies), a widow goes to the boom town and finds that the "school for girls" she inherited from her late speculator husband is a saloon and brothel. She struggles to set things right, and has difficulty riding herd over her "students", but eventually earns a respectability for the town that keeps it alive once the boom ends.

THE X.Y.Z. AFFAIR: Two law students (one named Xavier and one named Yeoman) and their professor (named Zackery) work together for the Public Defenders office when a poor landscape worker is accused of murdering a rich landowner. (This was intended to be the start of a series of mystery novels involving the same characters.)

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of January 26, 2012

Poet Elizabeth Alexander says that in order to create a novel, a writer needs a lot of uninterrupted time alone. Poems, on the other hand, can be snared in the midst of the jumbled rhythms of everyday chaos -- between hurried appointments or while riding the subway or at the kitchen table waiting for the coffee to brew. Alexander says that inspiration can sprout like grass poking up out of the sidewalk cracks. Whether or not you're a writer, Sagittarius, I see your coming weeks as being more akin to snagging poems than cooking up a novel.

I do need to finish that novel tho'.

As a Christmas gift, my sister and brother-in-law gave me a copy of the American Heritage History Of World War Two which I had never owned before, in spite of my long years of interest in the period of history.

What is sparking this particular note here is a table that was calculated by the corporate contractor that the Nazi German government had running the Holocaust death camps. (Yes, THAT Schindler. Him and his peers.) They had calculated the profit for an "average" inmate who was put to death after a mere nine months of slave labor. I won't reproduce it here, because I'm sure it's available on-line somewhere and I could probably come back and link it if I want.

I decided to interpolate the data in the table to the here and now. First, I found a site that had foreign exchange rate data, which told me how much a ReichsMark was worth in Dollars before hostilities broke with America. Then, I found another site to give me inflation figures for the last seventy years.

Care to guess? How much was a human life worth to Mr. Schindler and his kind?

$45.50 in 2012 money. Less than most of my friends pay for their TV programming per month, I imagine. About a week's worth of groceries for my household.

Would you kill somebody for $45.50? How many people on this world now would answer "Yes" to that question? The only way to guarantee that everybody answer "No" is to raise everybody's standard of living to the level that a human life is more than that figure. It is too cheap in too many places for us to say "Never Again" and mean it.