Excerpt. Whack 'Em and Stack 'Em, a WIP.



Morguefile.




Fairweather Nature Park Estates was located in a secluded area of southern Ontario.

Right next door to a plethora of heavily-populated bedroom communities and a nexus of highway nodes, commuting to and from the city was a snap at forty minutes or so. The sight of athletic Roscoe Burgess, looking good in the Armani suit and Gucci loafers, wearing Italian underwear and even an Italian aftershave when he thought about it, was nothing unusual in what was a pretty affluent little trailer park. He went about forty feet down the sidewalk.

Turning, he stood and watched for a moment as if waiting for the place to blow up. Not today, apparently, which was a good thing, by any rational standard. He liked to prepare himself in order to dive away from it at a climactic moment. It was this sort of thing that made reputations.

But the suspense was killing him…with a shrug, he turned and continued on his way.

“Good morning, Roscoe!”

“Good morning, Mrs. Beauvais.”

The cheerful calls rang all up and down along the sidewalk leading to Visitor Parking. The denizens, many older but with a few students and young families too, plus quite a number whose lives were complicated or they were exploring alternative lifestyles, were pretty laid-back. It seemed watering the postage-stamp of a lawn or even raking the heavily landscaped gravel terrain that some favoured was a morning ritual.

This fine Monday morning, sunny and unseasonably not snowing, the Firm had sent a car to pick him up, by which and the preceding phone call, he deduced that he was getting another assignment. He opened the door of the domestic sedan and looked in at the strange woman driving. There really was no other kind, as his father once said.

“Hi.”

“Hi.” She waited until he was belted in and the door closed before setting off.

It was better than the ones who nailed the throttle the second your left buttock hit the seat pad and drove like there was no tomorrow. She was smooth but aggressive when she got going. The way people drove said a lot about them. One intern, he recalled, took the company car on a gopher everyone else in the office while you’re out type coffee run and never came back. The car was eventually found abandoned in Sri Lanka, in the hills overlooking Trincomalee Harbour and not too far from where Arthur C. Clarke used to live.

“So.”

She looked over.

“Traffic’s light, and we’ll be there in plenty of time for the meeting.”

He nodded. The Monday briefing was a tradition, and when the workload was light, senior executives were expected to participate. That was one reason overseas assignments, no matter how short the duration, were highly prized and the stuff of contention amongst senior staff. Being at a meeting meant not just being there, but contributing. He didn’t have anything to contribute, but that had never surprised anyone before.

“Talkative, aren’t you?”

“Huh?” He gave her a blank look. “Sorry. It’s just that meetings are the bane of my existence.”

He’d been saving that line for somebody, why not use it?

She smiled knowingly, causing him to wonder just what she did know. She wasn’t bad looking in a hosey sort of a way, with long, straight, pitch-black hair, pale creamy skin like candy and those impossibly clear blue eyes. It was the fashion sense more than anything. She had black nail polish on at both ends for God’s sakes and was heavy on the mascara to boot. Her lashes were thick and attractively curly though.

“I’m Suzie.”

“Roscoe.”

They shook hands awkwardly. Her shoes had what looked like ankle cuffs and chains, with heels three or four inches long…he quite liked the wrist guards. Her aroma was spicy and enticing, like cinnamon toast and green marmalade. It looked like being one of them days, horny as a ten-peckered Billy goat and no real prospects as she was a fellow employee. Maybe he should wrangle some kind of overseas assignment…his garden was in, and the peas were coming up already.

“Yes, I hear you’re the man of action.”

She wasn’t an intern then, even with the stud in her right nostril and the multiple rings on every finger. He wondered if she had pierced her labia or anything like that. He was just about to ask when she interrupted him. Interns were like mushrooms, keep them in the dark and feed them nothing but bullshit. Yet this one clearly knew something about him.

“Can I ask a personal question?”

“What? Oh, sure. Fire away, young lady.” If this was the sort of thing graduating from the training schools these days then the world was just in a whole heap of trouble.

“What’s with all the naked people?” She gave him a long look of assessment as they cruised down the 401 at a steady one hundred fifty or so k’s per hour.

He approved of that much. The girl could drive.

“What, you mean my place? Well, for one thing, no concealed weapons.” It made it difficult for even a Ninja to approach him, what with the constant surveillance from Mr. and Mrs. Brixton across the way and that gaily-lecherous old crackpot Pillbody over the back fence….and of course there was the well-known Ninja fear, an absolute overriding horror more like it, of being seen naked by Gaijin, (outsiders.)

She gave tight grin and a shake of her head.

“The grounds are beautifully kept, and you can’t even put up a garden shed without going through the Covenant Committee. No mini-bikes, no chainsaws…” No parties, no unnecessary noise after eleven or before six a.m.

Not too many children and half the dogs on Valium. A no brainer, really, which suited him just fine.

She looked over.

“You’re not as dumb as you look. Why, I’ll bet you even like playing volleyball naked and stuff like that, eh?”

He grinned in a feral fashion, causing a little shiver of something to go down her spine.

“You would love the pool.”

She alternately nodded and shook her head as she focused on a clump of traffic up ahead. Her eyes came around again.

“Yeah, I probably would. What do they think of you coming and going all dressed up like anything?”

“Everyone has to have a job. I cut my lawn once in a while and don’t gossip unless they already hate them—or if they’ve already heard it somewhere else.” It made sense, the key to a successful evasion.

She looked over.

“Yeah. I suppose you’re right.” She was quiet for a moment. “I could go for that.”

“Say what?” No!

She drove for a while and then turned again.

“We could barbecue some steaks and do a little swimming, you know, a little sun-bathing.”

Roscoe was sweating now in spite of the air conditioning and his expensive Italian deodorant. He thought very carefully about what he might say. That fair skin had rarely seen the sun and had suffered nothing from the loss. He could imagine its alabaster perfection.

“That would be very nice, young lady.”

Her low, throaty chuckle did nothing to lower his stress levels one iota, for all of this could only mean one thing. Suzie must, in all probability, be his new partner. Gorman had been threatening him with a partner for months, years even, and she was due for retirement very, very soon now.

This might just be the perfect revenge for a lifetime of personal torment.

She couldn’t possibly have meant it seriously.

End

Arts and Culture Grants

Michelangelo's 'David.' - Ricoh Heil

by Louis Shalako





Do arts grants subsidize people’s hobbies?

In this Huffington Post article by Peter Worthington, he asks and answers that very question.

My chief objection to arts grants, both provincial and federal, is that if a client of the Ontario Disability Support Program received a cultural grant, it would be treated as income.

I wrote then-Minister the Right Honourable Margaret Meilleur in 2006 and asked, ‘What would happen if I received a cultural grant of $12.000?’

The lady never got back to me on that one. If she couldn’t answer the question, who could?

Here’s what I think.

The province would allow them the first $100 free and clear and then claw back fifty percent from of their benefits. And she didn’t want to put that in writing. Howeer, if someone very much like Mr. Worthington were to ask the present Ontario Minister of Community and Social Services, or the Minster of Culture, and ask them that question, I'm sure they understand the issues very well indeed and would be more than happy to assist him.

It is theoretically possible to operate a business under ODSP guidelines. Publishing is a business. Writing can be a hobby or a way of life. We subsidize people's way of life all the time. Don't we, Mr. Worthington?

Here's how it works for Ontario's disabled:

One, their benefits are already thirty or thirty-five percent below the poverty line. Two, a police officer twenty-three years old and starting off at $78,000 a year can get a grant, and receive the full benefit of that grant—even though they arguably don’t need financial support to write a book, create some new artwork, or to make or study music.

A provincial arts grant, a ‘book-writing grant’ can go up to $12,000 here in Ontario. The recipient can only receive $20,000 in any two-year period. You would be applying year to year. It makes no sense to go off an approximately $12,000 a year disability pension (for a single adult with no dependents) to go on a grant which can never be anything other than temporary, for the illusory notion of living on grants. With all of the free time available to the disabled—over fifty percent of whom are unemployed at the best of times, surely they have a good chance of making it as best-selling writers. After all, any asshole can write a book these days.

I don’t have serious moral issues with a teacher, a construction worker, a single mom with two kids getting cultural grants, and for the most part, writing books that don’t sell more than five hundred copies. I don’t care if they get $2,000 to make a quilt celebrating local history that will ultimately hang in the town hall. It buys goodwill for the government that provides the support. The government taxes you, but look at all the benefits it provides to regular Canadians, ‘real’ Canadians, and real Canadian culture, too.

Does it encourage ‘art?’ In some limited sense I think it does. It probably doesn’t generate too much world class fine art, but that’s not the entire spectrum of art.

But because I can’t share in that bounty, the whole thing smacks of unfairness. It looks like discrimination.

We all accept that governments stay in power by the judicious use of patronage.

Spread it around a little—a little more. Spread some of that this way. I have no idea of how ‘professional’ writers, that is to say as defined by Mr. Worthington, those who are ‘making a living at it’ feel on this issue, but I can take a quick guess or two. Because they can’t apply either as far as I know—because they don’t need it to ‘develop’ their art.

Maybe it’s unfair competition. Maybe it takes up space on bookstore shelves that might have gone to another product. Maybe it saturates a tight market with too much unprofessional and unwanted competition.

What would be of most benefit to further advance my career, my development as an artist, and who knows, maybe even be fiscally successful enough to get me off of disability?

I don’t know, but it ain’t a cultural grant. It simply doesn’t meet my needs.

Anyway, I would like to thank Mr. Worthington for his perspicuousness.

Incidentally, I’ve written ten books without any help from grants whatsoever. You might want to have a look at them here on Smashwords.


END

Personal Space Craft.

In the Lensman series of science fiction books, E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith created a character named Rob Kinnison, who was a member of the Galactic Patrol. He was entrusted with The Lens of Truth. One of the stories I read involved Kinnison being abandoned or marooned on an asteroid or moonlet of low mass.

Somehow or other, and that part is a little vague in my memory, Kinnison leapt or propelled himself off that little rock at escape velocity, enough so that a little additional thrust from a gun or a small gas bottle or something, gave added impetus to his trajectory and he was captured by the gravity of a bigger planet, and one I think where he found additional resources. From the story telling point of view, let’s say it was the base, the hideout of some space pirates or other bad guys—the ones who had dumped him there in the first place.

So he sneaks up on them, arrests or subdues them, and uses their ship to bring them to justice.

While I don’t remember much about that book, novel-length as it was, the idea of a person with nothing but a spacesuit and some imagination, going from one body in a system to another sort of stuck in my mind. I probably read that book when I was in my late teens. I’m fifty-three now.

That was thirty-five years ago.

When we see people flying in suits that inflate and give them control in a free-fall jump, or when a guy flies across the English Channel with a wing strapped to his back successfully, then we have to ask what comes next?

I’m thinking the Personal Space Craft can’t be too far behind. The total mass of Vostok 1, in which Yuri Gagarin made one orbit of the planet, was about 10,420 lbs. With modern technology, much of that mass could be fuel, and it doesn’t even have to stay with the pilot. I see a high-altitude aircraft launching a booster that expends ‘x’ amount of energy and propels a man, probably a daredevil the first time or two, out into space and ejecting him in a suit designed for the limited duration of his flight. The booster descends by parachute, and the radio-control mother ship is landed like any other aircraft on some desert strip somewhere in the boonies.

There was a guy in Southern Ontario, years ago, who was designing a small conventional chemical rocket. He hoped to ride it up, jump out and parachute down…or something like that. The chute might have been on the machine, although he would have worn one as well.

He might have made it into the stratosphere, but maybe not into space. If my suit only weighed five hundred pounds with me in it, it takes a lot less energy to get into space compared to the Vostok. I wouldn’t have to achieve high orbit to enjoy the thrill and the joys of personal space flight. It’s like jumping out of a helicopter with a surfboard and a parachute…and a camera strapped to your head. I wouldn’t have to achieve 17,000 miles per hour or escape velocity, and I wouldn’t have to worry about re-entry. If I’m sitting inside the machine, the cabin can be low-pressure air, that’s for comfort, and my suit would be skin-tight and all life-support strapped to my backside. There would be a quick-release hatch out of the cabin in an emergency to be used at low altitudes. We’re coming down in something akin to a big model airplane.

Here’s a similar news story from Oregon.

The first buyers would be young, of course—the kind of guys that jump off of cliffs with parachutes on their asses and cameras on their heads, with no real thought of commercial development or even fame. It will be more for the thrill of doing it, doing it before anyone else, and maybe having a few good friends along that understand what it’s all about.

We don’t necessarily have to orbit the Earth. Just launching in California and landing in Nevada, Utah, or Arizona, somewhere remote, would be quite an achievement. While the focus of the wingsuit pioneers is to fly like a bird using the human body for control, my design might be more of a lightweight airframe with simple controls and the pilot lying comfortably in the Formula One position with pedals and stick control. All controls would be simple and sturdy cranks and pushrods, operated by digital-proportional, fly-by wire electric servo-motors. That’s where my old-school sort of begins and ends! At high altitudes the air is thinner and the speed of sound is lower. The system would have to be capable of sustained Mach-plus speeds. Until we get a little closer to the ground.

The Space Shuttle and other conventional spacecraft carry a lot of mass and a lot of velocity, require a precision landing. They have a lot of momentum on re-entry, and they came in from higher in space. But a light object, subjected to the drag of the thin higher atmosphere, would begin with much less momentum, hence the drag would be more effective in slowing it down without heavy thermal protection systems or possibly even retro-firing of motors. It’s smaller because the mission is simple. A large tail, some fairly small wings, and just remember to carry enough velocity for steering control, and on board is a pair of chutes if all else fails. A few devices that are similar to automotive airbags in the cabin in case of heavy impact and Bob’s your uncle.

The ship doesn’t even need windows, although most pilots would prefer it. Pilot vision could be accomplished through simple external cameras and goggle-type hookups with selector switches and multiple cameras, and other backup systems. With proper feedback telemetry to friends on the ground, a remote control operator could take over and fly an unconscious pilot down safely in the event of an emergency.

Don’t try this at home.

Disclaimer: Personal Space Craft are dangerous and require training. Always consult an expert before attempting to design, build, test or fly a Personal Space Craft.   The author is not responsible for loss or injury resulting from attempts to build Personal Space Craft inspired by this blog post.   END

On the Nature of Consciousness.

Morguefile/FX/Louis.

by the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff




Our consciousness exists mostly inside of our own heads. It sounds either self-evident or a college entry-level rubric, but it’s obvious that when we look out on the world, we’re not aware of looking out of our foot. Our foot isn’t even aware or able to sense the ground under it. It has to send information to the brain, which sends back appropriate instructions, many of which are sub-conscious, our only conscious decision being whether we want to walk somewhere or not.

There’s plenty of information coming in from everywhere.

Our consciousness seems to be located in our head, where our thoughts are. This is located directly behind our eyes, surely the number one sensory organ in modern human beings. We process vast quantities of visual information. This is a good place to be located in our bodies, as we can see out and we have everything at our disposal…

But our consciousness is also our identity, which doesn’t change whether we’re hot or cold, running or walking. It is who we are as a person. It’s how we think of ourselves. Science fiction stories about the uploading of consciousness sometimes seem to try and preserve that sense of identity—that sense of self, although there are stories where all memories, all traces of personality are stripped away, leaving a husk, a thrall, a kind of kidnapping of the body but leaving the person out of the equation. But there is no real reason to upload a body. Only a consciousness.

I’ll go off and read other people’s work on consciousness in a minute. But I thought I would get my thoughts down first, before being influenced by some credible opinion. There are lots of studies out there, all kinds of theories and a lot of really interesting literary work.

I think consciousness arose as a defense mechanism—otherwise we would have eaten our feet on the path of evolution. Nature invests heavily in higher organisms. They shouldn’t get knocked down and eaten too easily. It’s a balance between waste and renewal. When I was a kid I saw a praying mantis that had a grasshopper in his claws and he was eating it. The grasshopper had a chunk of leaf or grass in its claws. It was eating it too. I wondered if the thing could even feel pain, or why it didn’t struggle to escape. It seemed quite unaware of its predicament.

A virus doesn’t need to be conscious to do its job. A sea anemone doesn’t need to be conscious to do its job either. The currents bring food to it, and it doesn’t grow well where there aren’t enough nutrients or currents. The reproductive cycle is simple but robust. The sea anemone is a kind of a no-brainer. As life-forms become more complex, and as they acquire more sensory organs, and the more active and varying survival strategies are demanded from them, then consciousness becomes necessary. The brain gets bigger to accommodate demands made on it. It can no longer just feel food against its lips and begin biting, but now our life form must evade predators, it must colonize, nest, migrate, predate, raise young, lay eggs, store food, make homes…the list is familiar; it’s animal behaviour in all of its complexity. And certainly the higher animals are conscious to some degree. They have to be.

Robert Fludd.

Plants can be phototropic in that they turn with the sun. They also grow faster in daylight, and slow down at night. This simplistic behaviour is purely thermodynamic in principle. In higher animals, the thermodynamics are much more complex. It’s all ruled by algorithms, with an infinite number of variables over time. We are chemical beings. Your dog will never think of himself as a chemical being ruled by thermodynamic algorithms in a complex social environment. In that sense it is a lower life form because it has a lower form of consciousness…in a kind of legalistic sense.

The ability to invent abstract ideas comes from consciousness. A subconscious entity has no reason to invent anything, for its duties will necessarily be limited, such as respiration, digestion, and glandular production, in the human body.

Who are we? Are we our body? It is the ‘habeas corpus’ of the legal men. This is my body, this must be me. My toe is a part of me. But if you cut off my toe, I doubt if I would feel as if a small part of my conscious self had somehow gone with it. All of me would remain intact in terms of consciousness. We live in our brains and not our toe.

Even as an atheist, perhaps denying the existence of the soul, could any rational person deny that most of us see our inner self—our ‘consciousness,’ as kind of riding around on top of a big biological machine, a bit like sitting in the control room of an Imperial Walker?

If we could upload my consciousness, that’s all well and good. But how would I feel anything?

I won’t argue whether all knowledge could be downloaded into our brains, or whether we could access a databank through an interface with some kind of electronic storage system. Or else it’s something akin to spiritual, and now we’re psychically beaming waves into your brain, and maybe some organic structure in there can detect and decode it. Simply reverse the process and your brain is loaded into the databanks. Right? Download my brain through wireless.

If you could hook up a computer to a body—a real, live body, with all of its sensory organs intact, including eyes, ears, nose, mouth, fingers and toes—the machine would have all of the same experiences as a human being, except we have transplanted the brain of a pig into the body of a man.

By one measure of the law, ‘brain dead is legally dead.’ This is for the benefit of the living heirs of the body. But what happens when the body won’t die, or what happens when the mind just goes away, as in the case of amnesia? Where do we stand legally there?

What if a mind is simply wiped by heavy brainwashing techniques, leaving the body free for other things, other masters, and other personalities?

What then, eh?

For more on consciousness read this article on Wiki.
Here's something on thermodynamics, important in 'cell biology' among other things.

This is interesting, a story on the film altered states and all about sensory deprivation can be found at the link.

These are used extensively for out-of-body projection by the Centralian Empire in my novel ‘The Case of the Curious Killers.’ That book asks the question, what is reality? The answer is that reality is subjective, it is what you can see. Consciousness is said to be what we see around us--essentially the same thing.

Therefore, consciousness is reality, but a very subjective one.

END

The Evil Dr. Schmitt-Rottluff appears in 'On the Nature of the Gods,' and is a regular guest on this blog.

The Wall. When Ego Writes the Cheques.

(File photo.)

by Louis B. Shalako 

On May 8, 2009 I learned a sharp lesson in humility. Setting out twenty minutes before twelve p.m. on a mild and sunny spring day, I pedaled my over-sized mountain bike out of the city. I followed Sarnia’s Howard Watson Trail, heading north and then east in the direction of Bright’s Grove and ultimately Camlachie, a small, rural, beach-front community at the south end of Lake Huron.

If it got too much for me I could turn around and go back. Within an hour and a half I was turning up the driveway. I had promised someone that I would come out and look at a small basement renovation he had on the go. We sat outside on the patio and had a Coke, and a cigarette. After an hour or so it was time to go.

The trip is about twenty-three kilometres each way. After two kilometres of pedaling homewards, I was in trouble. Deep trouble. I had no energy, and worse, the pain was burning in the large muscles of my upper thighs. My heart was okay, but it simply wouldn’t go any faster. I could feel all of my torso moist and wet with sweat, and my lungs didn’t seem to be providing enough oxygen. I kept slowing down, and cursed the developing blue band of low rain clouds on the horizon. The wind was straight in my face and gusting, but blowing at an average speed of about thirty kilometres an hour. My wrists hurt, my elbows hurt, my shoulders hurt…the trail is nothing if not level, yet even the gentlest incline seemed beyond me.

And I still had twenty-one kilometres to go. You could say I learned a little bit about suffering out there. The temperature had fallen to twelve or fourteen degrees Celsius, just enough to make the sweat uncomfortably cold. My legs burned with pain all the way home, all of it self-inflicted. The trip took about one hour and forty-two minutes.

I must have gotten off the bike a dozen times, I was so tired I couldn’t ride it. I’d walk a hundred metres while my heart slowed down, and my breath caught up to me. But as soon as I got on again, it only took fifty or a hundred metres for my energy to burn out again. I'm lucky my friend filled up my one-litre water bottle for me. The amazing thing is that I managed to average a whopping thirteen kilometres an hour, or about eight miles an hour. Twice walking speed. God, I thought I would never get home.

That last kilometre, I walked at least half of the way. It was a kind of death-march, out there. Yet I managed to ride up my own street, and put the bike away, et cetera. There was one cold beer in the fridge, in answer to all my prayers.

I learned a few lessons out there. I have more grit and determination than I often give myself credit for. I guess you could say that the margin between victory and defeat can be razor thin—although I was competing against my own stupidity. On any given day, the winners probably hurt more than the losers. The winners were the ones who dug deep, and scraped the bottom of that barrel until they came up with some spongy and discoloured oak shavings, making fuel for further efforts.

I was totally unprepared. A month of proper training might have helped. That was an Olympian ride, for me. I was walking funny for about a week. The pain and stiffness eventually went away. I can’t remember the last time I really hit the wall. It is a profound learning experience, one I won’t forget any time soon. There was just no way I was going to lay down beside the trail and patiently await rescue by passers-by. There was no way I was going to walk up to someone’s door and ask to use the phone. I just couldn’t allow myself to be humiliated like that.

Ego is not necessarily an unhealthy thing. It was my ego that wouldn’t let me quit. But that day, my ego wrote a check that just barely cleared.