By Way of Goliath (a short story)

The cot had not been kind. His lower back woke before him, ushering in the morning with pain like the thrusts of a quick dagger.

“Boy! Bring salve!” he called out.

With every village and oasis they passed on the march, he sent slaves to buy ointments and medicines for the discomfort, but they all proved more worthless than sand. The worst pain, however, was not in his body, but his mind. Dark visions and nightmares filled his sleep when wine was not available in sufficient quantities. This new pain started several weeks earlier as a small nagging that surged like the tide when his unit received orders to defend a scrap of beach his king thought worth spilling blood over. It was known as The Vale of Terebirth. He had never heard of it.

“Boy! Have you fallen into a pit?”

“I am here,” said a thin youth of ten throwing back the tent’s flap. The low morning sun flooded the interior and filled its smallest corner.

“You are as subtle as a blind ox, boy,” said his master.

The boy halted and hung his head low.

“I am not yet in a mind to punish. Speak. Is this salve new?” The man carefully lifted his massive frame into a sitting position hoping it would ease the aching. It made it worse.

“Yes, master,” replied the boy. “It is unsurpassed in its soothing properties. That is what I was told.”

“Damn the women who bring these merchants into the world. Hurry and apply it before I set my anger for them upon you.”

“Yes, master,” he answered.

For forty days this had been his morning ritual: clenched-jaw sleep, waking pain, useless remedies, and the anticipation of a conflict that never came. Resigning himself to another hot and wasted day of standing, he sought escape by considering the invaders that bore him so far from home. Strangers lusting for land over which they held no claim. He often wondered why they wanted it. Who would want any part of a land that birthed a lonely, pain-filled tower like him? Alas, he sighed, the world is not a simple place. Perhaps it was in older times, but not in the present. Yet, with luck he would keep the blood of both forces well hidden, which he usually did. His size could scare an enemy’s champion into not fighting or shrink his heart enough that any combat was short lived. Either way the conflict was over quickly. Why was this time different? What was waiting to happen?

Suddenly his back turned against him with such ferocity he had to clutch one of the tent’s thick posts to keep from falling over. The pain flared in beat with his heart like a brother and he thought he might have to stop one to halt the other.

“Enough of this!” he grunted as he fought to straighten. “Today this ends.”

Today he would give the enemy his pain.

The day seemed brighter than normal as he exited his tent. The desert glare gave the camp and everything in it a harsh edge. Three older slaves immediately fell into close step bearing his weapons and armor. All camp activity slowed as he passed. They did not see a suffering giant. No one dared see that. They saw a mountain draped with deep rivers of violence. They knew today a life would end.

The soldier’s unit arrived at the designated area at mid-morning and he called to the enemy with all the hate his body could give him.

“Come, you cowards! Forty days I have called for your champion and I can wait no longer! Send him or go back to the sea. Send him or I shall cast you into the sea!” His great voice echoed off the rocks and dunes of the craggy shore.

To his surprise a boy, not a handful of seasons older than his youngest slave, came forward from their ranks. Who is this, he thought, a messenger? He looked to the faces of the trespassers for some answer, but as he watched them watch the youth he realized this was who they were sending to fight. A handsome youth with face and eyes still new to life. A boy who would one day have a woman, a home, and children. A boy who could walk among men, not above them, and who would know true companionship. A boy who could have all he was denied. His veins screamed and his hands grew cold with rage. What monsters have invaded our shores who throw their children to the slaughter? How dare they do this! Through this boy I will kill them all. I will give words to rebut and then strike him down before their lifeless eyes. I will fill the waves with the echoes of their breaking bones!

The giant stepped forward to smash this horrific injustice.

The boy calmly placed a small, cool stone in his sling.

V for Ven-Stupid

The V mask. The new Rage and Revolution icon. For those not comic versed, V for Vendetta was a 1980’s work crafted by writer Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd. The unnamed protagonist, referred to only as V, was victim and product of a fascist, post-nuclear war England who drew thematic manna from the real life person of Guy Fawkes. V gave his life opposing the abusive English regime (and by proxy all fascist/socialist/communist governments) all the while draping himself in the freeing embrace of anarchy. V’s most salient thought, to me, was his observation that anarchy is not the same as chaos. Pure anarchy is a society of mutual agreements without the necessity of a government. Pure anarchy requires maturity, thought, and the love of free existence.

 

So why am I dissing V? 

 

V, I don’t have a problem with. I like him. What bothers me is seeing his visage on the recent wave of protestors. Hypocritical? Stick with me. V, as a fictional character is, pro-individual. V, in my opinion, would FIGHT socialism. FIGHT collectivism. FIGHT the swinging fist of a mob as swiftly as fighting the swinging baton of a government thug. Swapping one collective for another is not progress or social justice. Most revolutions can be summarized as a violent cry of “We should be in charge.” and these Days of Rage strike me as nothing less. Also, can anyone guess where these social justice, freedom conscious defenders of the common man are getting their V masks? What paradise, what bastion of free thought, produces these plastic battle cries? Yup. CHINA. A country that rolls tanks to clear protestors, controls procreation, censors most everything, and runs “re-education” camps. Camps much like the one V was experimented/tortured in. Do you see my problem here? Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe not. I just can’t help wonder What Would V Do?

It’s the End of the World. Again.

The first time most in my generation experienced a media frenzy about the And of All Things was back in 1983. The planets were “aligning” guaranteeing all manner of havoc , terror, and death. Gravity fields were poised to rip my world apart just as I was learning to talk to (preferably older) girls. What a rip off! Turns out I had years of rejection in my future. This was also the first time I and many of my friends realized the news usually isn’t just that. We picked apart the facts afterward (such as the very minor tidbit that such movements of the planets happens on a regular basis, always had, and always will until our sun pops) kicking ourselves for not seeing all the inherent flaws in the logic.

Fast forward past multiple predictions of comet strikes, another “alignment” in 2000, religious raptures, nuclear war, alien invasion to May 2011. My children, nine and six, are living through their first taste of media-hyped Armageddon. This sucks. Not because the world will end their short lives, but because we never told them about it! They learned of it through friends at school. The schoolyard grapevine is an ancient device of rapid information distribution, and always will be like the aforementioned planets, but of all the questions my wife and I braced ourselves against we didn’t expect this one. Seeing fear in the face of your child is a pain that activates the deepest, most violent of protection instincts. Fortunately, we’ve both been down this road before and knew facts and truth, not simple, shallow reassurances is the best way to go. We told our children about all the times the world was supposed to end as far back in our lives as we could remember. And yet, there we were, still alive, still making sure they cleaned their rooms, still making sure they got up for school. Their fear of its likelihood dropped significantly, though the concept, like so many others to come, will now walk with them through their lives and perhaps help them talk to their own children. Could the end of the world has a silver lining?

People over the world have always predicted the end, and again like those planets in the void, they always will.

Or at least until the Sun goes pop, finally making them right.

Star Trek Ruined Me

Damn you, Gene Roddenberry. Damn you.

I’ve grown up with your techno-near-Utopian visions of the future and I’m miserable. They’ve caused me nothing but conflict. I hear people say our problems are too large. I say our thinking is too small. I hear poverty, war, and hunger will always be with us. I say we’ve never really tried to end them. I hear the Earth is running out of resources. I say let’s tap into the rest of the Universe. I hear people use artificial, divisive words like ‘race’. I say we share the same title: human. I hear people say the future is bleak. I say the future is what we make it.

Most people walk around thinking there is nothing they can do about the state of their existence, and therefore do nothing about it. Or, they actively resist all change, regardless of its merits, and therefore drag those around them backward in time. So here I stand in the midst of our wild, often tragic, world carrying an idealistic engine behind my eyes generating pictures of how much better people could live, how much untapped potential humans have, and what a brilliant adventure life can be.

So, to Gene Roddenberry and all the writers and creators and actors who made your vision possible, and in some cases, improved it: Thank You.

iVon Daniken

iVon Daniken

A word about Erich Von Daniken. I am not a supporter or critic of his Ancient Astronaut hypothesis. I challenge you, gentle reader, to come to your own opinion on that subject. I do agree with his suggestion that anthropologists and archeologists may benefit by teaming up with experts in multiple fields when formulating theories about the past and objects from it. If you have ever gazed upon a three thousand year old carving and wondered just how anthropologists know it is a deeply religious symbol then you may well agree with me. Surely not every item crafted by human hands in the past had a deep, symbolic meaning, right? Is everything created today like that? Isn’t it just possible many items featured in museum displays are the work of boredom, not spirituality? How many “Goddess figures” might be the hormonally driven impulses of teens -a prehistoric Playboy- rather than an attempt to garnish the fertility favor of the gods? I’m just asking.

The spark that ignited this rambling is the technological correlations Von Daniken crafted his novels. Von Daniken fills page after page with parallels between the shape and contour of ancient objects and modern marvels… of the late 1960’s. The charm of CHARIOTS OF THE GODS? or THE GOLD OF THE GODS today lies in reading a book filled with examples of out dated technology. For example, he writes passionately about how a humanoid figurine wears a, “…ring with a number of holes in it like those we use for dialing.” A what now? You mean a rotary phone dial? How cute! It is unfortunate Von Daniken never made the leap inherent in his own logic: that technology is constantly changing and hanging one’s hat on the standards of the day means being classified ‘out dated’ by sunset.

So where is the new Von Daniken? Where is the brave soul postulating an mp3 player in the hands of a figure on a cave wall? Where is the rebel pointing to a tablet computer in a medieval tapestry? I’m over simplifying his work, of course. Von Daniken was like Charles Fort in his ability to collect data mainstream science would rather ignore. The point is those of the Ancient Astronauts camp he helped birth have Erich to thank for weeding out the error of using current technological standards as a measuring rod of theoretical validity. Technology travels at an amazing speed. And, if Einstein taught us anything, it’s that speed makes everything relative. Thank you, Erich, for inadvertently teaching us not to think too highly of our science and for pushing the common sense approach of using more than one perspective.

Japanese Television is Evil.

I'm speechless. All I can say is this: I think he's wearing a costume and it's from a Japanese television show. For this segment and a ton of other Japanese strangeness, Star Wars or otherwise, check out

http://www.mondotees.com/pl/Super-Happy-Fun-Monkey-Bash-4/81 A part of my soul just died...

 

2020 Update. The link goes 404. Sorry. You're 11 years late.

25 Favorite Children's Titles

In no particular order, here is my current 25 favorite children’s titles. Many of these books are fun to read even if you don’t have and don’t want children. Enjoy.

The Matzo Ball Boy
Anansi The Spider
all the Olivia books
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
all the Toot & Puddle books
Don’t let the Pigeon Drive the Bus
Goodnight Moon
Oh, The Places You’ll Go!
How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night
Guess How Much I Love You
Kitten’s First Full Moon
The Happy Lion
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
Blue Hat, Green Hat
I Love You, Little One
Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears
all the Little Critter books
all the Thomas the Tank Engine books
all the Richard Scarry books
Zin! Zin! Zin! a Violin
The Relatives Came
Hey, Pancakes!
The Very Quiet Cricket
The Daddy Mountain
Muncha! Muncha! Muncha!

How Fast The Great Pyramid (updated 2024)

 

2024 update! The construction time frame still orbits twenty-years in academic circles. Not all, of course. but most I see. Just letting you know as this post from 2009 is almost as old as the pyramids. Carry on. For ankhs and giggles, let's bump the figure to 30 years and it's 210 2.5 ton stones a day. 8.75 placed an hour. One block every 6.85 minutes. Ponder that. Something is missing in our understanding of the Damned Thing.

 

According to mainstream Egyptologists, the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed roughly over a 20-year period starting in 2580 BCE. Probably on a Monday. It is comprised of approximately 2.3 million stone blocks with an average weight of 2.5 tons or 5000lbs.

 Let’s do the math:

      1.  20 years multiplied by 365 days a year = 7300 days

      2.  2,300,000 blocks divided by 7300 days = 315 blocks a day (315.068493 to be exact)

      3.  1 day = 24 hours

      4.  315 blocks divided by 24 hours = 13 blocks an hour (13.125 to be exact)

      5.  1 hour = 60 minutes

      6.  60 minutes divided by 13 blocks = One 2.5 ton block placed every 4.6 minutes (4.61538462 to be exact) 

Ponder that. I mean, really sit on the toilet and think about that. For the Great Pyramid to have been built in twenty years, laborers situated a 5000-pound stone every 4.6 minutes 24 hours a day for 7300 days straight despite errors, mishaps, or elevation. 

Plus...

Don’t let us forget it holds several shafts (can you dig it) and elaborate interior features like the King's Chamber, the Queen's Chamber, the The Grand Gallery, and that underground chamber. 2016 and 2017 non-evasive scanning programs found even MORE interior features.* The 4.6-minute speed DOES NOT INCLUDE these design features because no one knows how they were built into the midst of everything else. Plus, this does NOT include the time to quarry and move the millions of stones! Nor does it include the outer polished limestone layer that the locals (mostly) pilfered over the centuries. Nor does it include the construction of the mud bricks, which is its own process.

(Found this rendition on a number of sites in different formats, but never with a source for credit. Well done, mystery person.)

Plus...

Then we have the logistics of growing/processing/distributing food, water, beer, milk, and housing the on sight workforce while disposing of the resulting...ahem...solid waste. My exhaustive online research found an average human spawns 3-8 oz of stercore, as they say in Latin, per day. Let’s call it 5.5 oz to keep it simple. While the true size of the onsite workforce is unknown, estimates place it in the many thousands depending on the time of year. 2500 humans in a single day, for example, could grace Giza with 859.37 pounds of germ loving detritus requiring constant attention so sickness didn't sweep away the labors. Or at best, get in the way.

Then we have the logistics of sourcing/crafting/storing/repairing/replacing of thousands upon thousands of sundry tools like: stone hammers, copper chisels, ropes, saws, and coffee makers. An entire industry all on its own. And what about replacing injured, old, or killed workers? Oh wait. I just remembered how to make more humans. Never mind.

Let your mind wander around a bit on this: the support systems needed to build the pyramids might surpass, in some ways, the constructs themselves. And scholars wonder why foolish, ignorant lay persons fancy outlandish theories about the lost and distant past. Personally, I’m not implying supernatural or non-human forces were at work here. I enjoy those ideas because looking at a picture from multiple directions can sometimes yield new knowledge on the subject. It's a big Universe, after all. No, for me the suspect of choice has always been the weirdos called Humans. When we want to, we're truly amazing. That's my ultimate message here. We did this. We. Did. This. What else can we do?

Unless, of course, the ancients did have gifted anti-gravity devices. The lazy bastards...

 Be well, gentle reader.  

 

* https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hidden-chamber-pyramid-giza-180981745/ 

Visiting Hours. A true ghost(?) story.

I was seventeen years old and living in Marcy, NY in the summer of 1987. Located outside Utica, Marcy was sparsely populated and not known for much beyond Mid-State Correctional Facility, Central New York Psychiatric Center (both are situated on the same parcel of land), and Whitesboro Senior High School. I will let you ponder if mere coincidence accounts for all three resting within two miles of each other. My family moved into an old, state-owned converted farmhouse about a mile down the road from the prison the previous summer after my father became its new Deputy Superintendent of Security. What we later learned about our new surroundings was in stark contrast to their humble appearance. For example, roughly thirty yards to the right of our driveway sprawled a large, two story brick building used for storage by the prison. In fact, it was once the Marcy State Hospital, a branch of the New York State Lunatic Asylum (originally called the Utica Lunatic Asylum in the 1840’s). The old asylum, our house, the prison, and the Center were all located on 1,000 acres of land purchased in 1911 from the Crane family whose burial plot lay across the road from my front door. Two overflowing farmhouses held patients until the Marcy State Hospital was completed in the early 1900’s. I don’t have definitive proof my house was one of them, but couple the lack of any other houses in the area with its glaring proximity and age (proven by an 1861 penny that I found the driveway) and Occam’s Razor points in that direction.

Late August seemed cold that year. I mention it because my perpetually open window was closed the night something visited me in my room. It was about 1 A.M. and I was having trouble sleeping. Normally I fell asleep to the radio, so I got up and lowered the volume on the off chance it was too loud. The pale light from a passing car’s headlights caught my eye as I slipped back into bed. It flowed from right to left on the wall behind the radio, as its kind always did, and onto the wall adjacent to my bed before disappearing. A few quiet moments passed when my attention was again caught by a dim light, but this time it was coming from my overhead light fixture. Power surge? That is what I thought for the second it took me to realize the illumination was at least twelve inches to right of the fixture. The glow gradually grew in dimension and intensity until it was the size of an over-inflated football and its radiance reflected off the fixture glass and ceiling. The lower half was grayish while the upper half was the color of cream. Then, as slowly as it formed, it dimmed until it was no more. The room was dark and the moment was over. At no time did I feel shock or fright. Whatever had taken place over the prior ten to fifteen seconds left me calm and relaxed. It was the next twenty minutes that still bother me.

Immediately after the event ended, a short shaft of light, like that cast by a flashlight, reached under my closed door. Back and forth, the shaft flashed under the door before rising toward the doorknob. There it paused and disappeared only to instantly reappear under the door that separated my room from my parent’s bedroom. It performed the same erratic dance near the door’s base for a few moments and then disappeared. But, as the door was painted shut, I had no way of knowing if it was truly gone. What I did know was it was in the same room as my slumbering parents. Adrenalin erased my calmness with one overwhelming thought: there was an intruder in the house. I grabbed my bat, crept into the hallway and into my parents’ room ready to swing first and ask questions later. I found nothing. My parents were sound asleep. I woke them and explained what had happened as best as I could in my frightened state. We spent the next twenty minutes searching the house for any signs of forced entry. Every window and door was intact. My father said it was a dream and that I should go back to bed. My mother tried to reassure me by adding if I did see odd lights they were probably from the drive-in theatre down the road. I knew both explanations were wrong, but without an alternative, I decided to let the matter go and try to make sense of it in the morning.

The next day brought no answers. I tried to wrap my head around it, but as I didn’t know what ‘it’ was, I was at a loss. I might have relegated the entire episode to a waking dream or perhaps cryptonesia had my mother not confessed several years later to seeing light coming out of my room from under my closed door while she was trying to calm me, though my room was dark when I opened my door.

Our house did not own the market on strangeness, however. The old asylum produced an odd assortment of half words and unrecognizable sounds on quiet nights. Occasionally we would see light behind its barred windows. I have no theories linking the two phenomena, but a few years after we moved away prison security discovered cult paraphernalia (teen wannabes most likely) in the asylum’s basement. That could obviously account for what we saw and heard, but what about my house? Why did I associate the second light with an intruder trying to get into my room? And, what does that say about the first light and how calm I felt? I’ve never been able to answer these questions and nothing like it ever transpired again. It was a singular event and those are often the hardest to explain. Even our cat, with all its vaunted feline senses and sensitivities, showed no change in behavior before or after; nor did she shy from any corner of the house. I’ve talked to others who have experienced odd circumstances and like them, I sometimes wish I had an explanation while other times I want to forget about it. Answers are not always pleasant.

Ronald Reagan, Watchmen, and aliens.

*SPOILER ALERT* If you haven't watched the Watchmen film yet, read no further. If you haven’t read the graphic novel yet, ditto. Still with me? Good. Thousands of Watchmen reviews have already sprung up so I won't bother you with another one. You have (or will have) your own opinion which is as valid as the most erudite critic. This piece is about one of the changes made to the graphic novel in the film. The film’s final scene is set in the office of a less than mainstream, anti-Russian publisher called the Pioneer Publishing Inc. The editor belittles an employee for suggesting an article about an actor planning to run for President in '88. The editor replies, “Seymour, we do not dignify absurdities with coverage. This is still America, God damnit. Who wants to a cowboy actor in the White House?" Robert Redford is the aforementioned actor in the graphic novel. In the movie version, the actor is Ronald Reagan. Some supporters of Reagan may feel this is a slight as our charged political landscape is filled with thin-skinned partisans on both sides of the fence. For those I offer this theory: It may have been a nod to the former President and all the comic fans who knew the ending was changed. Dr. Manhattan, for those who haven't read the graphic novel, was never framed by Veidt. Veidt's plan involved fake ALIENS. Yup, an alien invasion gone bad and the murder of millions. THAT was the plot the Comedian uncovered. I don't want to spoil the specifics for those who haven't read it, but Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons presented it wonderfully. Back to Reagan. The movie's plot device was a number huge explosions killing millions. What's more believable to viewers, even a superhero movie audience, a plot to trick Earth into thinking we narrowly missed an alien invasion or a terrorist act? I think the answer is obvious. And yet... 

 

 

Yes, that's Reagan speaking about the unifying force such an alien invasion might generate. So, my take on the Reagan reference is not a necessarily a jab, but perhaps the producers' acknowledgement of a HUGE change in the story. Maybe I'm wrong. I have been accused of reading too much into things before. Yes, that's Reagan speaking about the unifying force such an alien invasion might generate. So, my take on the Reagan reference is not a necessarily a jab, but perhaps the producers' acknowledgement of a HUGE change in the story. Maybe I'm wrong. I have been accused of reading too much into things before.