Never Forget
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Gene Wilder Dead at 83
Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein (1974)
Not the sort of thing I normally write about here, but Wilder was an incredible comic talent. I became most aware of Wilder through two films, Blazing Saddles (1974) and Young Frankenstein (1974), both directed by Mel Brooks. I suppose the latter film somewhat justifies me posting my thoughts about Wilder here since it was adapted from Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.
Oddly enough, of all the film adaptations of Shelley’s novel over the years (decades), Brooks’ depiction is the most faithful to the book in terms of plot (Okay, loosely faithful).
I love trivia, so I’ll share some. The lab equipment seen in “Young Frankenstein” was the same equipment in the 1931 film directed by James Whale, who also directed The Invisible Man (1933) and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935).
Of course, none of that has to do with Wilder.
I realize that everybody and their pet snake Reggie will be blogging and otherwise bombarding social media about Wilder’s death for the next few days to a week, so my one small voice adds little.
Still, he’s responsible for making me laugh, which is increasingly necessary in this rather grim world we live in, so I’m grateful. I own both “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” as DVDs, so I may need to devote some time to watching them again.
Thanks for a life devoted to making people laugh, Gene. You’re the best.
You can read a more proper obituary at Variety.
The Machines Are Hacking The Machines
Spectators at an AI hacking duel
DARPA
I just read a story at New Scientist called Autonomous AI guards to stalk the internet fighting hackers. Apparently, earlier this month at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, with a $4 million prize hanging in the balance, different Artificial Intelligences were set up to hack each other while defending themselves from their opponent’s hacking attempts.
I know, right? The machines are hacking each other.
This has a good side and a bad side in the real world. The good side is you can configure an AI to look for vulnerabilities in your own system, patching them as they’re found. The bad side is that malicious players can set up their own AIs as autonomous hackers, scanning the web looking for vulnerable systems and exploiting them when discovered.
The New Scientist article ends with the somewhat humorous and ominous paragraph:
In a talk at Black Hat, Devost (Matt Devost of cybersecurity firm FusionX in Washington DC) joked that the competition heralded the launch of Skynet, the malevolent AI in the Terminator films. “Everyone laughed,” he says. “The humans were applauding their own demise!”
Book Review of Sigil: A Tom Regan Thriller
Wow!
When I first created this blogspot and shamelessly began to promote it, a number of people commented and followed me, including 33-year old Irish thriller author Aidan J. Reid. I followed his blog back, and by the by, I saw that he had promoted his latest novel Sigil by offering the eBook on Amazon for free (but only for a limited period of time). I hadn’t read a mystery in decades and wasn’t sure how I’d experience “Sigil,” but I decided to download it onto my Kindle Fire.
The novel starts with a bang. Really, I was hooked from the first few pages on. Sigil chronicles the activities of Catholic Priest Tom Regan, who is the Parish Priest of the small town of Ballygorm.
What appears to be a tragic suicide becomes a mystery wrapped in intrigue as Father Regan, walking in the footsteps of his favorite television detective, uncovers a conspiracy not just to hide a murder, but something much more terrifying.
One step at a time, Regan unravels years of secrecy and sinister plots, revealing that the sleepy farming community of Ballygorm is anything but the idyllic rural setting it appears to be.
When Your Sex Toy Tattles On You
Ava (Alicia Vikander) from the film “Ex Machina” (2015)
Does your sex toy phone home?
I know, a strange question, right?
If you don’t use a technological device inserted into your body to get off, then you have nothing to worry about, but if you use the We-Vibe 4 Plus, it’s a whole other matter.
I found an article at Fusion.net called This sex toy tells the manufacturer every time you use it.
According to the story, the device is…
a rubbery clamp that looks a little like the oversized thumb and forefinger of a Disneyland character pinching down. It comes in black, purple or pink and is billed as the “number one couple’s vibrator.” It has Bluetooth so that, once inserted into the desired part of your body, you can connect it to your smartphone and then use the We-Vibe app to control the intensity of its vibration.
In other words, once the device is in position, you or your partner, can use an app downloaded onto your smartphone to control the type of vibration and the intensity.
The device connects to the internet so that, in theory, you can insert the device into your body, then allow your partner to remotely control your experience.
Book Review of Echo Volume 1: Approaching Shatter
Kent Wayne’s “Echo: Approaching Shatter”
Wait! What?
I just finished reading Kent Wayne’s novel Echo Volume 1: Approaching Shatter. I knew it ended on a cliffhanger, but I didn’t realize it would be so abrupt. It was like slamming into a brick wall at sixty miles an hour.
I’ve been reading it on my Kindle Fire and the thing said I’d finished something like 86% of the book. When I swiped to turn the page at the end of a chapter, I was confronted with a message stating it was the end of the story and if I liked it, to write an Amazon review. The rest of the book is a preview of Volume 2: The Taste of Ashes.
Somewhere in the creation of my blog and writing stories, Kent Wayne took notice of some of the things I’d authored by “liking” them, and so I checked out and eventually followed his blog Dirty Sci-Fi Buddha. That’s how I became aware of his Echo series.
My understanding is that “Kent Wayne” is a pen name (Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne), and I recall reading one bio on him saying he had military experience but preferred not to give out details, making Wayne and what he did in the service a bit of a mystery. That may seem irrelevant, but I do have a point to make.
He does go more into his history on his blog’s About page, and Echo: Approaching Shatter definitely gives the impression that Wayne is mining his own professional experience.
I had a tough time getting into the novel. It’s not like I’m opposed to military based science fiction. I’ve read and thoroughly enjoyed Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War and Timothy Zahn’s Cobra, but that was decades ago. For about the first half of the book, I kept struggling for a handle or a hook and couldn’t find it. I didn’t know whether to even like the protagonist Atriya (and mentally, I kept pronouncing his name as “Attila”).
Writing for My Grandson
Image: boomerhighway.org
Most of the stories (and proposed chapters for novels) I write for this blog aren’t really good reading for my seven-year-old grandson. That’s not to say that all have “adult” language or “adult” themes (i.e. sex), but just because the stories are too sophisticated to be interesting to a child, or some of the subject matter might be too violent.
However, when I was editing The Oppressed People: From the Chronicles of the Diluvian Kings, I thought about how a story about a dragon who loved children might be right up his alley.
Every other week, when my son has his kids, we have his kids, too. Every evening, my grandson needs to read one of us a book, and in turn, we read to him.
So I chose last Sunday evening to read him “The Oppressed People.” He liked it. He seemed captivated by the story. He couldn’t say he had a favorite part, though. But it was such a thrill to actually read him a story I wrote, something I created out of my own imagination, a story he couldn’t have accessed any place else.
The opportunity for me to read to him again occurred last night, so I chose the only other tale I thought would be appropriate: The Last Warrior. It’s another fantasy tale that again, is an allegory for modern social and political issues. Of course, he didn’t get the allegory (though his Dad would), but he still enjoyed the surface details.
I was a tad surprised when he said he liked it, because there’s really no “action” as such, at least the kind of action that I thought would be attractive to a seven-year-old. In fact, he was so interested, he asked if he could read my stories on his Kindle when he’s at his Mom’s. Maybe I can send him the links via email.
I briefly toyed with the idea of reading him Walking in Glass Slippers since it’s definitely a fairy tale (along with being another allegory commenting on social issues), but it has some suggestive language, including Ella’s “enchanted lingerie,” and I didn’t want to have to explain that part to him.
I try to write a short bit of fiction every day, and not everything I write is good content for children, but hopefully, now that I’ve had this experience, I can occasionally tailor some of what I produce for him, and as she gets older, his sister.
Anyone else out there have any experience writing for children?
TV Series Review: Containment
I watched the last episode of a CW limited TV series Containment last night and it was powerful. In fact, the entire series is extremely impressive, and I don’t say that much about television anymore.
Here’s the series summary from Wikipedia:
Containment is an American limited series, based on the Belgian TV series Cordon. The show was officially ordered as a series by The CW on May 7, 2015, and debuted on April 19, 2016. The series follows an epidemic that breaks out in Atlanta, leaving a section of the city cordoned off under quarantine and those stuck on the inside fighting for their lives.
Oh, no wonder it seems original, it’s based on a television series from another country.
Actually, the Wikipedia description hardly covers it.
The show starts out at Day 13 of the containment with National Guard troops entering the cordon, the area is surrounded by barbed wire fences and stacks of cargo containers to form a solid barrier, to suppress a riot. Entry and exit to and from the cordon is controlled through certain of the containers guarded first by police, and then by soldiers as desperation escalates.
Jump back to Day One. Supposedly, patient zero, is a young Syrian man who has just arrived in Atlanta. Sick, he goes to a hospital emergency room but leaves against medical advice…but not before infecting his doctor. The doctor dies horribly hours later, hemorrhaging blood from every orifice.
Then our cast of characters are slowly introduced, a collection of individuals and families who, on the surface, seem to have nothing to do with each other, but a little at a time, how they are connected is revealed.
As the infection, supposedly a mutated flu virus that is 100% fatal in every case, spreads, Dr. Sabine Lommers (played by Claudia Black) from the Center for Disease Control (CDC) takes charge under federal jurisdiction, and orders a Cordon Sanitaire, around an area of Atlanta which includes the hospital. This traps 4,000 people inside with no way to escape, leaving them at constant risk of exposure and death. This was only supposed to last 48 hours, but then things go horribly wrong.
The Conversation
It all started with a video:
Then someone said this about the video on Facebook:
It’s nice that she can speak calmly and clearly here. The rally’s that are blocking streets with people shoving journalists etc are the problem. Just the other day, one rally was blocking a bridge where a father was needing to get his infant to the hospital. He ended up having to hand his child through the barricade where the ambulance had to take a longer detour while the father sat in traffic not being able to be with his child. This is where the #blacklivesmatter is causing problems. I’m fine with it and agree with it if it is organized and doesn’t put other lives in danger. (Emph. mine)
This is my problem with the Black Lives Matter movement as well. As I said in a previous blog post, the concept upon which the Black Lives Matter movement is based is easy to understand and I can agree with it. However, as we see in the following story, how the movement is implemented isn’t always so reasonable or pleasant. In fact, sometimes it’s downright dangerous, particularly to children.
The Memphis Black Lives Matter rally shut down the I-40 bridge Sunday night with hundreds of protesters refusing to leave. Traffic could not go across, but paramedic Bobby Harrell with Crittenden EMS was determined to get to a child who was stuck on the bridge with his family.
“We received a call there was a child needing medical attention stuck in traffic up on the bridge and due to the protest going on the bridge the family was not able to get through traffic to get him to Le Bonheur,” Harrell said.
A photo shows parents handing the child off to paramedics on the bridge.
“The sheriff’s department had to escort us up the wrong way of the interstate to the child,” he said.
Harrell said after he had the very sick child in the ambulance, the driver had to go 25 minutes out of the way.
“We had to turn around and come back to West Memphis and cross over at MLK to get over to 55.”
-Larry O’Connor
“Black Lives Matter protest blocks ambulance with sick child headed for hospital,” July 13, 2016
HotAir.com
Quoting the story from Fox Carolina News
It’s unlikely that the people participating in the protest were aware of the medical emergency involving the baby and that they were threatening the safety of that child. Perhaps if they did, they would have allowed that family through.
That’s not the most disturbing part. These comments from Facebook are.
Living in the Dystopia: When Fools Dare to Speak
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel
“Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise; When he closes his lips, he is considered prudent.”
–Proverbs 17:28 (NASB)
Every time you speak to someone you have the power to choose words that will strengthen, lift up, energize, elevate, inspire, encourage, enlighten, support, benefit, and help your listener in some way.
Misusing words to insult, hurt, belittle, slight, offend, disparage, put down, and cause needless pain to other human beings is a violation of the Torah prohibition against causing pain with words.
A lot of people don’t realize that it is an actual Torah violation to cause pain with words. Insults, putdowns, mocking, making fun of, and any form of non-verbal communication that causes emotional distress is included in this Torah prohibition.
When you use your power of words to make someone feel good, you are doing an act of kindness. You are elevating yourself spiritually and emotionally. You are making a friend or strengthening an already existing friendship. You are doing a great mitzvah. You are being a positive factor in someone’s life.
When people misuse the power of words to make someone feel bad, it is an act of meanness and even cruelty. They are lowering themselves spiritually and emotionally. They are making an enemy or strengthening hate. They are committing a serious transgression. They are being a negative factor in someone’s life.
Be careful not to cause pain with your words, and encourage other people to be careful not to cause pain with their words. This awareness is very important for parents and for teachers who serve as role models for their children. Those who utilize their power of speech in positive ways will have children who emulate their positive patterns.
-Rabbi Zelig Pliskin from
Chapter 46 of his book
Encouragement
I’ve written about this before in my short essay Living in the Dystopia: A Nation Divided. I recall the news stories and broadcasts from when I was a child, about the civil rights movement. Some stories were about peaceful marches and demonstrations, and others were about violence and riots.
And yet there was always the idea that through this process, things would eventually get better. People generally believed, especially as I graduated from high school in the early 1970s, that our nation would achieve an ever greater measure of racial equality.
Sure, it was a time of great unrest, uncertainty, and even fear, but I believed that when I became an adult, when I got married, when I had children, I would live in a time that was better for all people in our country, not just some.
What the hell happened?
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