From a Friend: Short Story Number 379

I am fortunate to have a very talented close friend who loves to write marvelous stories about all sorts of things.  I've always admired his ability to take the thinnest of premises and weave them into something that would rival the work of a Dickens, a Seuss, or a Carroll.  

Case in point: this wonderful - in the literal sense - short based on little more than the name of this blog and his insight into my personality!  As with all his works, it makes for a fun read!  And I have the starring role!  

I am honored to add it to the annals of the Order of the Inn.  Enjoy!

Battle Report from the 64-Square Battlefield

 

You might be wondering why I am using some Eve Online fleet battle art as a header image for a chess battle report.  Good question!  The answer is straightforward: I didn't know what image to use. 😀 However, seeing how I am in one of my autumn science fiction feeding frenzies, and also seeing how chess has a strong fleet warfare dynamic to it - perhaps no game outside of a dedicated naval wargame captures that spirit of line and support vessels as chess does - such an image tickled my fancy.  So...there.

The following correspondence game was probably one of the most enjoyable in quite some time.  My opponent was tough!

I had the black pieces.

1. e4 c5 

I went with the Sicilian Defense.  Just because.

Whither Thou Goest JazzRadio.com?

 

My First-World outrage of the day!  ClassicalRadio.com and JazzRadio.com are now both subscription-based services (they are part of the same streaming network) that, henceforth, will only offer a mere five randomly-chosen free stations per day.  I'm furious!  These are two of my favorite streaming services of all time!  And now I am expected to pay for the privilege of picking my stations?!  Never!

I'm kidding about my outrage, of course.  I understand that music services have to pay the bills just like anyone else.  And, honestly, the membership fee of $60 a year, one that unlocks all six music streaming stations - DI.FM, RadioTunes, ClassicalRadio.com, JazzRadio.com, RockRadio.com, and ZenRadio.com - that are part of Ari Shohat's music network, is not unreasonable; it comes out to $5 a month, which would make it one of the cheapest subscription services out there.  

But it comes down to this: I really enjoy JazzRadio.com, but would I pay to listen to it?  

Brief Review: Netflix's "High Score"

 

One of my favorite hobby horses is how video games, an industry that generates more revenue than the movie and music industries combined, is largely ignored by the old media.  To me, this has been a baffling exercise in willful blindness, something akin to when theater ignored the arrival of motion pictures, much to their long-term chagrin. The arrival of the video game industry has proven to be a watershed event, one that would transform the world of entertainment forevermore.  How did this happen?  At long last, someone has acknowledged the Donkey Kong gorilla in the room and attempted to answer that question by chronicling the rise of this new entertainment goliath.  Deposit a token to watch Netflix's new docu-series about the rise of video games, High Score.

Anti-Social Social Media

 

They call it "social media," but it really ain't!

(That's the extent of my daily allotment of folksy verbiage!)

Of course, that is not a new observation.  Contemporary media pundits have been making this observation for some time, so I am not saying anything new.  I guess you can consider this just my personal declaration of social media liberation.  

Well, that is my hope, anyway.  

Trump is No Nixon

There is no greater indicator of just how low President Donald Trump has sunk than to realize that he has, somehow, incredibly, made former President Richard Nixon seem like an admirable leader by comparison.   How did it come to this?

I refer, of course, to President Trump's dreadful handling of the civil unrest gripping American cities.  With the death of George Floyd at the hand of what were, at a minimum, callously stupid police officers, protests have erupted across the nation, and rightly so.  Unfortunately for the president, these protests are finding rich soil in the record unemployment rate the nation is experiencing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.  People, without jobs, without schools, and even without basic entertainment venues such as movie theaters, have more than ample free time to take to the streets and engage in some civil activism, hence the massive crowds.  Of course, as with any mass movement, opportunists - thugs, anarchists, professional troublemakers - have attempted to capitalize on the disorder, resulting in those unfortunate accounts of looting, general hooliganism, and sadly, even assaults upon the police themselves.  

In this dangerously unstable situation that America is now facing, there is an urgent need for a steady hand at the tiller of government.  Sadly, this is not what we now have.  

Reading Albert Camus' "The Plague" During a Time of Pestilence

A Plague of Dragons, by Justin Gerard

Like a lot of people, my reading list is determined by various factors.  Mood, certainly.  Passing fancies?  Absolutely.  Even current events can be the nudge that suddenly pushes a title to the top of my reading list.  Hence, Albert Camus' The Plague.  Yeah, yeah: this was the book to read during the past months of pestilence in America, so I wasn't doing anything unique.  Be that as it may, having now read it, I am much wiser for the experience as Camus description of an unremarkable town gripped by plague served to bring understanding to events I witnessed during America's trial by virus.

Hmm.  "...Past months of pestilence in America."  Those are words I never thought I would have cause to write.  What a remarkable thing to experience in the high-tech 21st Century world.  As we lounged in the comfort we conjured from our domination of the material world, we thought we were masters of all we surveyed.  Pride goeth before the fall, as the old adage warns, and indeed our pride as wizards of the biological world would in the early months of 2020 take a mighty blow.  An old enemy - mankind's oldest enemy, in fact - would reveal itself as being still fit for battle and ready to take advantage of the modern world's complacency.  Plague had returned, much to the astonishment of its soon-to-be victims.

Coincidentally, the propensity of mankind to be taken unawares by plague is precisely what Albert Camus observed in the opening moments of his novel, The Plague:

"Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of reoccurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from out of a blue sky.

Why are people always so surprised by its return?