All posts by Janet Coburn

When You Have the Flu: Some Unsolicited Advice

etc., funny things, health, humor, , , ,

I keep revisiting this post — this time because I just tested positive for COVID, which is, after all, uber-flu. Anyway, I feel too crappy to write something new.

Say you’ve got a touch of the flu. Keep far away from me – you feel awful and I don’t want to feel awful too. I know you don’t want visitors, but here I am, and at least I’ve brought a gift: a few suggestions for entertaining things you can do while you suffer in peace and quiet, except for, you know, the coughing and sneezing and assorted other noises you’re making. Relative peace and quiet, if you know what I mean.

Drink tea. It really doesn’t matter what kind, since you can’t smell it anyway. Earl Grey will smell just like jasmine. Peppermint and English Breakfast, the same. And if you want to, you can use any variety as the base for my father’s restorative tonic, which consists of tea, bourbon, and horehound candy (tea optional), or boring old lemon and honey, if you insist, though my father would not approve.

Cuddle large, fuzzy cats. Do this even if you’re allergic to them. You’re already sneezing as much as humanly possible, so you have nothing to fear from dander. Bonus: A large, fluffy cat makes an excellent substitute for a heating pad or hot water bottle.

Read. Or pretend to. Actual reading may distract you from how miserable you are (unless you’re reading Les Miserables). Pretend-reading will encourage people to keep their voices low, plus it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep with the book elegantly displayed on your chest. (Make sure it has a classy dustjacket, even if the book inside is Fifty Shades of Gray, which I don’t recommend, unless it’s for pretend-reading. It can lead to barfing, which may be in your future anyway.)

Eat chicken soup. Tell everyone that you need it for the fluids and the electrolytes, which is true. Egg drop soup is an especially good variety – if you can’t convince someone in your household to make it and bring it to you, you can always convince the Chinese take-out down the street to do it. Nibble saltines daintily, or the little fried things that look like Chinese tortilla strips.

Hit the Nyquil. I don’t mean the non-drowsy kind – sleep through as much of the illness as possible. Warning: Do not mix Nyquil with Southern Comfort or the bourbon-horehound mixture (see above). You’ll barf and you may be doing that already. Also, don’t mix Nyquil with cough syrup, which can cause unintended psychedelic effects and more barfing.

Squash tissues. Let them blossom all around you in a protective ring that no one will want to cross. If you try the tissues with built-in lotion, don’t use them to wipe your glasses before trying to read (see above).

Call the doctor. Don’t go see the doctor. You’ve got a virus and there’s nothing she can give you for it. Just ask how long it is until you can get an appointment and rest assured that your ailment will be over before then. You may want to actually go if you start making a sucky (in both senses), moist kind of wheezing sound when you breathe. The advantage is it will keep people even farther away from you, but the downside is that you may have pneumonia, which is even less fun than flu.

Use Vick’s Vapo-Rub. You won’t be able to detect the scent because your nose is busy with something else (snot), but other people sure will, encouraging them to keep a respectful distance. If you don’t have Vapo-Rub, try Ben-Gay. Bonus: nice warm feeling on your chest. Note: If you use either Vapo-Rub or Ben-Gay, do not cuddle the large, fuzzy cats (see above), unless you want to look like Bigfoot. Just sing “Soft Kitty” instead, or insist that someone else sing it to you.

Whine. Punctuate with coughs and sneezes. Again, the goal is to get people to leave you alone. If this tactic isn’t working, move on to even more disgusting symptoms. Keep a bucket by your bed, just so people get the idea that you could use it at any moment.

P.S. I’ll give you one guess why I wrote this. If you don’t get the answer right, I’ll start whining. And coughing. And sneezing. And barfing. Just bring me some egg drop soup and leave quietly.

You wouldn’t want to catch what I’ve got.

Keep me in Nyquil!

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Buying the Past

arts and crafts, etc., family, travel, , , , , ,

No, you read that right. It’s buying the past, not burying the past. (Unless you read it wrong, of course. But it’s still buying the past, not burying the past. But I digress.)

Dan and I went on a brief vacay to Gatlinburg this week, and commerce was committed. A wonderful time was had by all, particularly the local merchants. We only had a few days in town, so we had to really focus on where we wanted to shop and what we wanted to get.

Dan is something of a history buff and loves antiques. He collects old bottles and clocks in particular. Once he even brought a large clock (I’d say about two feet by 1 1/2 feet) home from England, packing it in his luggage with clothes wadded up around it. It made it home safely. (What was ironic about it, when we got home, he looked more closely and found that the clock was made in Massachusetts. Somehow, this poor wandering clock had made it from the States to England and back again. But I digress again.)

So, when we got to Gatlinburg, he was all fired up to visit the same antiques shop we went to the last time we were there. Alas, we weren’t staying in the same place, but a number of miles away. Even with GPS, I couldn’t reconstruct how to get back there. I couldn’t even remember the name, except that it had “antiques” in it. We did find another shop, though, and Dan happily puttered around it, coming away with a beautiful cobalt blue decanter set and an old, framed print of an iris. He was satisfied, and I was satisfied that he was satisfied.

Another shop we visited was one of my favorite kinds, a rock and gem shop. Dan likes them, too, but he mostly buys tumbled rocks and carved statues, while I go for semi-precious gemstone jewelry. Dan found a vase carved from diaspore and black onyx, and I got a set of earrings and a necklace made of tanzanite, a very pretty blue mineral, set in silver.

Anyway, Dan’s interest in the past is primarily in the last 100 years or so, while mine is in the millions of years. My tanzanite was formed 585 million years ago, at an estimate, and has been waiting ever since for me to dangle it from my neck and ears. I have plenty of jewelry of similar vintage.

Now that I think about it, so has the diaspore that Dan’s newest vase was carved from. (Been around millions of years, that is. A carved diaspore vase is heavy and would both give me kyphosis and rip my earlobes off. But I digress yet again.) (Kyphosis = widow’s hump. I was showing off.)

There’s nothing wrong with new things. I have an e-reader and buy digital books all the time. I have a collection of plushies. I have souvenir mugs and shot glasses from wherever we visit. I have a Lego orchid that I’m still putting together. Dan has power tools and hand tools. He has kitchen gadgets like an egg cooker. He has modern glass and ceramics. We both have t-shirts that commemorate various people and events. (Our latest is a Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefers t-shirt.)

And we don’t forget about the future, either. The time we’ve spent at science fiction conventions has resulted in the acquisition of glass sculptures blown as we watched, prints such as the one of a cactus taking off into space, and posters of the covers of sf novels. NASA juice glasses (past and future for that).

But, in many ways, our hearts belong in the past. Not the rest of us, of course. Dan and I would both be functionally blind without glasses, and I would likely have been burned as a witch. Maybe Dan, too. Plus, there would be smallpox and bubonic plague to contend with. No, I think we’ll stay in the present and buy our pieces of the past. Safer that way.

It’s a Bargain!

Christmas, etc., family, funny things, holidays, humor, , , ,

It was the gorilla mask that did it. Sure, it was after Halloween and, sure, I’m sure he got it for a very good price. But I ask myself, as my husband obviously didn’t, Why do we need a gorilla mask?

The easy answer is, we don’t. We don’t go to Halloween parties and don’t even dress up to hand out Halloween candy. Dan has breathing problems and can’t wear a full face mask for more than a minute. I have no desire to wear a gorilla mask at all (or to hand out candy either, a chore I leave to Dan every year).

The thing is, Dan works at a big box store and is in proximity to lots of things that are on sale. And he can almost never resist. (He also has a problem resisting free things, like stuff that neighbors set out at the end of their driveways. I’ve trained him to pass them by. But he expects praise for doing so. But I digress.)

There are pet supplies (in addition to the absolutely necessary gushy food for Toby). We have three cat trees, one of which sees use as a side table facing the TV. Toby only uses one level of the big one and ignores the third. He also ignores the catnip mice (though not the catnip treats). And who wouldn’t ignore the dog toy shaped like a giant t-bone steak that Dan thought Toby might use as a pillow? (Toby. Toby did. Dan did buy a nice cat bed that Toby uses a lot, so he gets points for that.)

Some of his finds are more like presents. When a sweater or tunic in my size goes on sale, he’ll snap it up and bring it home like it’s some kind of hunting trophy. (I don’t think he ties it to the hood of his car, though.) They don’t always fit, of course, and he says he’ll take them back if they don’t, but he never does. I need a separate section in my closet for them.

He’s also fond of clearance china. He brings home large soup mugs with appropriate sayings on them, like “Official Cat Mom” or “Looney Tunes” or less appropriate ones like “Merry Christmoose.” He also likes platters and sandwich plates that don’t always go well with our china pattern. Sometimes they’re at least in the ballpark, or completely neutral white. (Yes, surprisingly, we do actually have a pattern—Pfaltzgraff Yorktowne. I chose the paint for our newly rebuilt kitchen—blue—to harmonize with it. This is something I never thought I’d ever do (have a pattern), though I never thought I’d ever get married either. Life is surprising. But I digress again.)

The bargain food tables are also irresistible. Not that he always knows what he’s getting. We’ve ended up with spices like togarashi and galangal (which I always thought were martial arts), plus pickled banana leaves. Our cooking repertoire runs to things like grilled chicken breasts and ground beef, seasoned with Mrs. Dash, garlic, and oregano. He also buys bargains that really aren’t. Olive tapenade in EVOO isn’t cheap, even at half price. We still have lots of odd culinary experiments just a-waiting for us to be brave or tipsy enough to try.

I can’t really complain, though. Last night he brought me Graeter’s black raspberry and chocolate chip ice cream, which was on sale for some unknown reason. It’s good to have someone watching out for me. I don’t even have to share (much) with him, since it’s not sugar-free. (My theory is he’s trying to keep me fat so other men don’t hit on me. My last digression for this week. I swear.)

Lest you think this all goes one way, I buy weird stuff for Dan, too, though I’m pretty much limited to shopping on the internet. One of my recent finds was a Mr. Natural Keep on Truckin’ t-shirt. I’ve also gotten him a Funko Pop Jerry Garcia. (Can you tell what era he grew up in?) We hardly ever save these surprises for Christmas. Instead, we give ourselves a treat. This year, we’re getting matching tattoos—one gift that I hope isn’t a slight irregular!

Cat Songs

cats, etc., fun and games, funny things, humor, music, pets, , , ,

My husband and I have some silly traditions, some of which I’ve mentioned in the blog. There was naked cooking with Julia Child impressions, for instance. And we make up little nonsense songs. Well, Dan makes up most of them, mostly about me. (My nickname, which no one else may use, is Bunny, so they often have titles like “When Bunny Comes Driving Home Again.” They’re silly, as mentioned, but infinitely better than the NSFW song an ex-boyfriend once wrote describing my physical charms. But I digress.)

But this post is about cat songs. Not songs the cats sing, of course — their repertoire is pretty limited. Not songs about cats either (“Year of the Cat,” “Cat Scratch Fever,” “Stray Cat Strut,” “Honky Cat,” “Nashville Cats”). No, these are songs that we’ve made up about cats we’ve owned over the years.

Shaker’s song was really more of a poem or a chant than a song. It went:

Shaker in the park

Shaker in the pool

Shaker for dessert

Shaker after school.

Shake, shake, Shaker puddin’

Puddin’, puddin’, Shaker puddin’.

(Shaker was a very dignified tuxedo cat. She didn’t approve.)

The song will make no sense unless you remember a product from the 60s and its jingle (indeed, it doesn’t really make any sense at all, whether you remember it or not). The product was called Shake-a-Pudding. It was a brown plastic cup with a lighter brown plastic lid. If you put milk in the cup and added powder, then shook vigorously, hoping the top didn’t come off, what you got was something that at least resembled pudding. An interactive dessert. At the time, we thought it was neat-o.

Toby also has a song based somewhat on a commercial. It goes like this:

His name was Toby.

He used a Flowbee.

Obviously, this requires some explanation. First of all, it’s sung to the tune of Bary Manilow’s “Copacabana.” So far, so good. The Flowbee mentioned in the second line was one of those products you used to see on after-midnight infomercials from companies like Popeil or Ronco. Exercise equipment. Beauty products. That sort of thing.

Technically, I suppose you could call the Flowbee a beauty product. It was an attachment that you put on the end of your vacuum cleaner hose. It would make your hair stand on end so you could lop an inch or two off the end. I think it was mostly used on children who were too young to know any better and was responsible for the infamous bowl cut. It’s described by the company (yes, you can still buy them) as a “Vacuum Haircut System.” Need I tell you that we’ve never used one on ourselves, much less on Toby?

Louise had a song of a sort, or at least one line of one:

Every little breeze seems to whisper: LOUISE!

Naturally, the name was shouted.

Julia, the most beautiful cat in the world (she told me so) had a whole verse. Obviously, it was ttto “Julia” by John Lennon, which was written about his mother. Our Julia’s version went:

Julia, pinky nose

Pretty fur, naughty lips.

So I sing my song of love for Julia.

(No, I don’t know how the “naughty lips” part got in there. Cats barely have lips at all, and I don’t know how they could be naughty. That’s just the way the song went. So sue me. But I digress again.)

Dushenka had a tune that should be familiar to TV cartoon aficionados:

Shenka-Shenka-Doo

Where are you?

On your little kitty adventure.

Laurel’s song was melancholy.

Pooska-wooska-pooska

Pooska-wooska-pie

Pooska-wooska-pooska

It’s Laurel’s lullaby.

I even sang it at her funeral.

Of course, all the songs are doggerel (catterel?) and make us seem like idiots. But the cats don’t care. They’re used to us talking like idiots. (Does Toby want his noms? Pet, pet, pet, the incredible pettable pet. Mama loves kitty. Does kitty love mama? Ribbit.)

The Mystic Rules of Life

cats, etc., food, humor, , , , ,

I don’t have a corner on wisdom. Indeed, I barely have a corner on learning, around the corner and down the dusty path from wisdom.

I have, however, lived mumble-murfle years, and in that time, I have learned a thing or two. Maybe three, tops. Nonetheless, I have formulated what I like to call The Mystic Rules of Life. (Actually, I didn’t so much formulate them as accumulate them. I can’t claim that any of them had their origin with me. I sort of found them under the bed, communing with the dust bunnies, and claimed them for my own. But I digress.)

Anyway, for what it’s worth, here they are.

Everything should come with too much cheese. The corollary to this is that there is no such thing as too much cheese. My husband and I are the sort who, when we’re in an Italian restaurant and a server with a Parmesan cheese grater shows up and says, “Tell me when” reply, “Just crank that thing until your arm falls off.”

This rule applies to our own cooking. I’ve known us to use Parmesan, Asiago, and five cheese Italian blend in the same recipe. (Yes, I know cheese is binding. We have prunes for dessert. Or prunes and Metamucil. But I digress again.) Speaking of five cheese blend, that’s my favorite kind of pizza, although I also like pepperoni and mushrooms. I never get it, though, as Dan insists on all the meats and veggies the crust will hold. Five cheeses would probably cause catastrophic structural failure.

(By the way, this mystic rule applies to gravy, too. With mashed potatoes, not pizza. Pizza with gravy would be messy as well as unappealing. Until someone invents a mashed potato pizza, that is. I suppose this is another digression.)

It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission. You may not get permission if you ask first. Of course, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get forgiveness after you do whatever-it-is, and that means the whatever-it-is will be an even bigger deal. But, as Kris Kristofferson noted, “I’d rather be sorry for something I’ve done than for something that I didn’t do.” (It’s amazing how often Kris is right about things. “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” “The going up was worth the coming down.” “Jesus was a Capricorn.” “Everybody’s got to have somebody to look down on.” “If you don’t like Hank Williams, you can kiss my ass.” (A musical digression.))

Pee first. No matter what the next thing is, pee first. Going to bed? Pee first. Running an errand? Pee first. Seeing a movie? Pee first. Taking a shower? Pee first. Walking the dog? Pee first. It’s always best to pee before you commit yourself to any other action. You may end up in a place where peeing is difficult or, worse, impossible. Or one where you simply don’t want to pee. I have those dreams all the time where I’m looking for a bathroom but can’t find one, or at least not one I can use. It’s disgustingly filthy, has no doors, or is just a pipe in the floor without even an outhouse around it. (I usually wake up having to pee, but (so far) I haven’t woken up to find that I’ve wet the bed. I suppose that’s one circumstance when it isn’t better to pee first. Get out of bed? Pee after. But I digress some more.)

Gravity is not our friend. Sure, gravity keeps us firmly attached to the Earth. But when you consider the many ways gravity makes us fall down, it becomes more of a hindrance than a help. And I’ve experienced most of them. This Mystic Rule only applies on Earth, however. If you can make it to the moon, the gravity is only one-sixth that of Earth. That’s a lot more friendly. (Speaking of friendly, author Mary Roach once said, “Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.” I have nothing against lust, but really, gravitation is the vacuum cleaner of the cosmos. Last digression for this week.)

You’d think that as I get older and (supposedly) wiser, I’d encounter more Mystic Rules of Life, but I haven’t found any lately. Guess I should look under the bed again, but I suspect that the dust bunnies (or, more likely by now, dust gorillas) have rules of their own that don’t apply to people.

The Latest Book Trends

books, etc., funny things, humor, literature, , , , , ,

(I shall begin with a digression. Actually, I can’t guarantee that these are actually the very latest book trends. I buy a lot of my ebooks based on newsletters from FreeBooksy and BookBub because they promote heavily discounted books, not all of which are, technically speaking, new. But most of them cost under $3 and, at the rate I buy books, I need to economize somewhere.)

That said, I have noticed what seem to be trends.

The first one is not a book trend, per se. It’s a trend in book covers. What’s hot right now (apparently) is book covers that don’t show faces. I’ve written about how men on the covers of romance novels are cut off at the neck (so to speak) or lost in the shadow of a cowboy hat, but these books feature mostly women on the covers. And they don’t have faces either.

The most common reason for this is that the woman or women are walking away from the person viewing the cover. (Bonus points awarded if the woman is wearing a red coat.) I don’t know why this trend has come to the fore, but I suspect it’s because the cover designers don’t like to draw faces or don’t want to read enough of the book to learn what the main character looks like. Or maybe the women are supposed to be all mysterious. Or the reader is supposed to imagine the woman having their own face. Like I said, I don’t know.

(A while back I noticed that there was a book cover that featured a man in a top hat walking through the rain, in the night, beside a wrought iron fence. In fact, there were two different books that had exactly the same cover. Both were terribly atmospheric mysteries or dark Victorian tales. I guess someone made the cover for one and an unimaginative art director tried to get away with using it twice. I noticed, however. But I digress again.)

Now, as to the contents of the books, I’ve noticed trends as well. When it comes to cozy mysteries, cats are perennially favorite characters or even sleuths. And Rita Mae Brown credits her cat, Sneaky Pie Brown, as co-author of her mystery series. Cats are as popular as ever, or more so. Every self-respecting woman in a modern romance novel has a cat.

Many of those romances take place in libraries and bookstores. The trope of the young woman who moves to a small town to restart her life, taking up the job of librarian or bookstore owner and meeting the love of her life, after suitable conflicts and misunderstandings, is a common plot. (Librarians are no longer portrayed as lonely spinsters—mostly. There can be an older librarian as a mentor and confidante, at least regarding the book aspects of the story. But I digress more.)

You can easily see what’s coming. The romantic heroine has both a bookstore and a cat. And the covers of the books reflect that. In fact, sometimes the cat and the books are all that appear on the cover. The woman herself is missing in (romantic) action.

One other trend that I’ve noticed in romance novels (I don’t actually read them, you understand—I learn about them through reading blurbs) is that, although traditionally the stories involve reckless, passionate, consequence-free sex (the “zipless bleep” that Erica Jong made so popular in Fear of Flying), is that increasingly, pregnancy results from the sex. (No, I’m not saying that romance novels are getting more realistic. They still involve royalty and billionaires, after all. And men from Scotland apparently are popular now, as in the book titled Too Scot to Handle. But I digress still more.) The pregnancy adds an extra layer of potential complications, such as the impending parenthood needing to be kept a secret.

If you’ve noticed any other book trends, feel free to share ’em. In the meantime, I’ll keep looking for a book that features a man in a red kilt walking through the door of a bookstore with a pregnant cat in the window.

Deep Sighs and Facepalms

etc., fun and games, funny things, humor, religion, , ,

My husband and I have any number of catchphrases that we use frequently. Some of them come from movies (Have fun storming the castle! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!), TV shows (I can’t promise I’ll try, but I’ll try to try. [humming the Jeopardy music]), songs (On the road again. Timing brought me to you.), and even books (Time is an illusion—lunchtime, doubly so.).

But not all our catchphrases are quotations. One of our traditions is that when one of us heaves a deep sigh, the other will say, “The Serenity Prayer.” (Not the whole prayer, just the phrase.) This started many years ago.

You may already know that the Serenity Prayer (“God grant me the serenity to accept what cannot be changed, the courage to change what can be changed, and the wisdom to know the difference.”), which has been attributed to St. Francis of Assisi but was actually written by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, has been a mantra of Alcoholics Anonymous and other 12-step groups. They recite it at their meetings and remind each other of it in order to ground themselves.

(Totally irrelevant digression. Once when I was a waitress, a customer complained that the coffee tasted like mud. I replied, “That’s because it was ground this morning, and then we added water.” They didn’t get it. Just looked at me funny.)

(Slightly more relevant digression. St. Francis also didn’t write the “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” prayer, as is commonly believed. It was written in 1912, long after the saint left this earthly plane.)

Anyway, Dan once worked in a facility where he had to engage with many addicts and alcoholics (no, that’s not where we met). One of them noticed that every now and then, Dan would sigh dramatically. “Why do you do that?” they asked. Dan thought quickly and replied, “It’s the Serenity Prayer. The short form.” That just seemed so apt that it has entered our own metaphoric vocabulary. We regularly say things that elicit a deep sigh from each other, so we use it all the time. We use it a lot since both of us are frequently exasperating.

Another common response to exasperation is not a quote, but a gesture: the facepalm. You see it in memes in which someone tells a really bad joke and the other one (usually Captain Picard or Commander Riker) places a hand over his face. One assumes that they also heave a great sigh at the same time, but don’t recite the Serenity Prayer, though they could, I suppose.

It isn’t only a response to a particularly appalling joke, however. There’s an AI image of the Statue of Liberty facepalming that comes around in response to some dire piece of political stupidity. You also see memes that say something to the effect that the poster’s guardian angel looks like this: [insert image of an angel, saint, or God facepalming].

Personally, I sometimes think of Jesus facepalming. The apostles said so many dopey things. Not the “Increase our faith” stuff, but at times such as when Jesus was transfigured and appeared in a vision with Elijah and Moses. “Shouldn’t we go put up three tents for the three of you?” the apostles James, John, and Peter asked, despite the unlikelihood of the long-dead Old Testament figures needing tents to rest in. That was worth a facepalm.

Then there’s the time when Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. As the account goes, Jesus delayed going to Lazarus’s house, although everyone knew he was dying. He then told the disciples that Lazarus was asleep. The apostles, puzzled, replied that if Lazarus was asleep, he would awaken. Just the time for a Jesus facepalm. The apostles just didn’t get it.

(If you think this last part of the post is blasphemous, so be it. You can take it as just another of my many digressions gone wrong. I know a sense of humor is a dangerous thing to display when it comes to religion. My sister even objects to jokes regarding someone arriving at the pearly gates and bantering with St. Peter. If you have any complaints to make, I’ll be over here, hiding under this rock.)

-Punk, -Core, and Portmanteaus

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So you thought punk was something that had its vogue years ago and has disappeared since. Or maybe you just hope it has.

It’s true that you don’t hear much about punk music anymore, but punk is alive and well in the fictional world. As long as it’s combined with something else, that is. There is, as far as I know, no strictly punk genre of stories and books. But there are cyberpunk, steampunk, and even stonepunk and solarpunk.

(All of these are “portmanteau words,” squished-together words or sounds that combine two meanings to create a new one. Think smog, webinar, bromance, brunch, or spork (which I still call a runcible spoon). Or, given the time of year, spooktacular. But I digress.)

These varieties of fiction share the sensibilities of punk such as rebellion, individualism, social inequality, and unconventional thinking. (Less screaming, feedback, and safety pin piercings, though. Thank goodness.)

Most people’s introduction to the hyphenpunk world was a 1984 (appropriately) science fiction novel, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. It presented a dark, gritty, dystopian society in which a killer AI invaded people’s brains. At the time it served as a warning, which apparently we have not heeded. (Since then, almost all -punk fiction has been sci-fi or fantasy. At least I haven’t seen any romancepunk or mysterypunk. Again, thank goodness. But I digress again.)

Cyberpunk didn’t start any fashion trends the way punk music did (using the word “fashion” loosely). But another iteration of -punk has: steampunk. Steampunk combines Victorian-era technology and problems with a sense of adventure and invention and owes a lot to the writing of Jules Verne. You’ll find air battles between pirates in blimps, steam-powered robots pieced together from spare parts, and plots involving gaslighting (the streetlamp kind, not the manipulative kind). It’s a celebration of innovation, progress, and developing technology combined with nostalgia for a time when science was exciting, not threatening, and possibilities for advancement seemed limitless. Steampunk, unlike cyberpunk, is uplifting.

Nowadays, you can see steampunk aficionados at clubs and sci-fi conventions dressing in Victorian garb, embellished with brass gears, gauges, and wheels. One trendy accessory is the top hat with welding goggles as a hatband. Women can dress as aviators (aviatrixes? aviatrices?) with, obviously, aviator goggles. One would assume that the expected reaction from those not in the know is goggling at them. (Sorry, not sorry.)

(And that stonepunk and solarpunk I mentioned? Those refer to fiction that immerses the reader in a Flintstones-like past and a back-to-the-land agrarian setting respectively, with technology based on those eras. But I digress still more.)

Now on to -core, another element used in portmanteau words related to the music scene, rather than fiction. As you might guess, the word “hardcore” is the origin of the term. But instead of referring to pornography, -core applies to an extreme expression of any kind of music. Skacore. Thrashcore. Even emocore, unlikely as that sounds. (Theoretically, you could have punkcore music, but I’ve never heard that term used. Nor punkpunk fiction, for that matter. There is a subset of country music called cowpunk, so I guess you could have cowpunkcore. But I digress even more.)

Historical note: Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass pioneered the creation of portmanteau words. (A portmanteau is “a case or bag to carry clothing in while traveling, especially a leather trunk or suitcase that opens into two halves.” So portmanteau, when it comes to words, is actually a metaphor.) Carroll’s epic poem “Jabberwocky” contained several. Slithy (as in “the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe”) is, he said, a combination of lithe and slimy; frumious, a mashing-together of furious and fuming; and chortle, a portmanteau of chuckle and snort that is still used today.

(Less historical note: Thanks to the book The Annotated Alice (annotations by Martin Gardner), which I highly recommend, I learned how to recite the first verse of “Jabberwocky” in French, a skill with no practical applications whatsoever. But I digress. My last digression for this post. I promise.)

(Just kidding. Bonus digression. Back to -punk and -core. There exists a series of books that combines steampunk, thriller, and fantasy. (A Study in Silks (The Baskerville Affair)). Steampunk-Holmes-demoncore, I guess you’d call it.)

Surfing With Sharks

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Okay, first a disclaimer. I don’t actually surf, which may come as a surprise to those of you who don’t really know me. Aside from my lack of athleticism, the fact that I live in Ohio and there isn’t any surfing that I know of on Lake Erie keeps me firmly grounded, so to speak. But I do surf the Interwebs. And I keep running into sharks there.

The sharks online don’t chew off body parts. Instead, they’re scammers and spammers. (Do sharks eat spam? Or do they hate it as much as we all hate the electronic kind? There’s no one who likes it (except for the spammers themselves). But I digress.)

Spam isn’t the only hazard to life online. (Yes, I live online. I work online. I read online. I communicate online. The only things I don’t do online are eat and poo. But I digress again.) Some online phenomena I hate, while others just puzzle me, like the memes and pass-alongs that say, “Share if you hate cancer/child abuse/nuclear war.” Who likes them? They’re just trying to boost their “shared” numbers. Similar to this is the passive-aggressive “I bet you won’t share/repost this.” You’re right. I won’t.

Boosting share numbers is a form of like-farming. This bucolic-sounding practice is often engaged in by businesses like radio stations. They post an intriguing question or celebrity photo, then wait for the “likes” and “loves” to roll in. This proves that the business has lots of “reach” or generates “impressions,” which means they can charge more, get more advertisers, or do something else that’s good for the business.

Social media is a hotbed of lies and deceptions, some harmless and some less so. In the “less so” category, there are pass-alongs that rise to the level of urban legends. Facebook is either going to start charging or has access to all your photos for their own nefarious purposes. You can address holiday cards to “Any Soldier” at Walter Reed Hospital. People are using various ruses to lure or incapacitate women for sex trafficking. Apple is practically giving away computers if you post something, forward something, or send $5. Check out such dubious claims on Snopes.com and you’ll find out the truth.

People have learned to be wary of Nigerian princes and many other lures. But online deceptions become dangerous when underhanded users find other ways to capture your personal information. One of the come-ons most often used is seemingly harmless questions that entice users to reveal sensitive information. Less blatant than merely asking for your bank card and PIN number, these questions may ask, “Do you remember your first-grade teacher’s name?” “What kind of car did you drive in high school?” or even “Your stripper name is your first pet’s name and the street you grew up on.” It’s no coincidence that the answers reveal info commonly used for security questions on bank accounts and the like.

Another ploy makes use of the “cute factor” or the “sympathy post.” There will be a post about someone who has eight adorable puppies or kittens and needs to find homes for them. Or one that shows an injured dog that’s been found and needs an owner to claim it. One of the giveaways that this isn’t legit is that the poster is really a business or wants you to respond via DM or “bump this post.” If you do that, you’re leaving yourself open to having your identity stolen, your account spoofed, or being bombarded by ads for the business.

If you want to protect yourself online, you need shark-repellent. The delete, unfriend, and unsubscribe buttons are good weapons. Clicking on the poster to see who’s really behind the message is another. Pay attention to the source. There are publications that are known for their inaccuracy or sensationalization (New York Post and Daily Mail, I’m looking at you). And, as mentioned, Snopes.com is valuable for checking lots of rumors and scare tactics. (I understand that some people feel that Snopes has a political agenda. I doubt it (I think that’s an urban legend), but even if they do, debunking urban legends isn’t what I’d call political. Is this another digression? Yes. Yes, it is.)

I don’t know how to stop the ads that appear anytime you Google something. If you do, please tell me. Google is a shark I haven’t been able to dodge. I’ve been bitten more than once.

Science Madness

education, etc., religion, , , ,

The problem these days is not so much “mad scientists” as people who are mad at science.

Where did the Mad Scientist trope come from anyway? Arguably it was Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein, published in 1818. Science fiction classics like Jules Verne’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) kept up the theme and the “Golden Age” of science fiction provided many more examples.

In these novels, scientists either tampered with things better left alone or succumbed to a lust for power. Death rays and the precursors of gene splicing abounded. The outcome was mostly dreadful, except for those few gallant hero scientists who managed to save Earth from a deadly plague/alien/monster/giant something.

While the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s were the heyday of mad scientists in fiction, those years also constituted a time when real scientists were heroes. The atomic bomb ended WWII in the Pacific. Polio was conquered. The “Space Race” that led to many scientific breakthroughs began, thanks to the Soviets and their Sputnik (1957).

Back then, scientists were revered.

Later on, not so much.

The conflict between science and religion heated up. Of course, there was conflict going way back – before Mary Shelley warned us about “playing God.” Galileo and Kepler removed us from our “God-given place” in the center of the universe, and Darwin implied that we were just another animal. The Earth suddenly became billions of years old,  circling a mediocre star.

Then there was fallout, both literal and figurative, from the atomic bomb. Medical science gave us thalidomide. NASA used up billions of dollars, with no obvious monetary payoff down the line, and some people decried the space program for spending money that could be used for problems on Earth.

And all that led to changes in the general public’s attitude toward science.

By the ’60s. medicine was under fire from those who found Eastern philosophy and natural healing just as good or better. Physicists were condemned for the same atomic bomb for which they had been lauded. Science didn’t seem like such a good deal after all.

And there’s some truth to the complaints. Many scientists believed that math, physics, and chemistry were all. If it didn’t have numbers attached to it, forget it. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and most other -ologies were “soft sciences,” barely sciences at all. Hard sciences ruled.

Slowly, the ground under science shifted. Now science has become to many people the enemy, the domain of elitists and narcissists and people who feel they are entitled by their intellect to run the world.

Of course, the stereotypes from early science fiction had something to do with that.

But the Average Man (and Woman) had a bone, or at least a fossil, to pick with science and scientists. Again, science was denying what the general public believed.

Increasingly, people believed in the efficacy of non-Western medicine, or at least the non-efficacy of Western medicine. Science believed in genetics and stem cells and cloning.

People believed in the spiritual realm. Scientists believed in the measurable.

People believed in religion. Science believed in science.

You can see where this is heading – right back to the days when people thought science meant the reanimation of corpses, invasions of bug-eyed monsters, and the creation of death rays. Because what, after all, is the distance between growing human organs and creating Frankenstein, between cloning a sheep and making a half-man-half-fly, between a laser-guided missile and a death ray?

And many scientists are arrogant, dismissive of popular opinion, and unwilling to engage in dialogue with opposing viewpoints. “Because I said so,” seems to be enough for them. “Real” scientists look down their noses at “popularizers” who look to educate the public about science.

Unfortunately, everyone is shouting and no one is listening.

Personally, I am a sometimes science geek as well as a word nerd, thanks to high school chemistry and physics, college astronomy, and lots of nonfiction reading. I don’t think science knows it all, and it’s a long way from figuring it all out. I also think that psychology and spirituality and art have a lot to teach us about the human condition and our place in the universe, STEM classes and careers notwithstanding.

But the pushback against science scares me. NASA is wasting its time chasing UFOs. Streaming channels that used to be devoted to science now feature ghost chasers and treasure hunters. I’m not saying that science never stumbles, but it provides the best answers we have to some of the problems that plague us, including plagues.

I don’t advocate returning to a time when science was the be-all and end-all of thought and education, or to the time when fictional science made scientists suspect. I just think science deserves more respect than it’s getting now.