THE FIRST DAY (October 1, 2011)

Islands, Mike Oldfield (cd) – The perfect music for an “awakening”. The first section sounds like a dawning, the middle consists of soft instrumentals, and finally we reach vocals.

Warner Brothers cartoons – “Fast & Furry-ous,” “Gee Whiz-z-z-z-,“ “”Operation: Rabbit,” and “Hook, Line, & Stinker”. Colorful, loud Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons (“Operation” actually features Bugs Bunny). Easy to follow, no dialogue (except in “Operation”), and, of course, mindless violence.

Life Story, Virginia Lee Burton (jv nature; hereafter LS) – The perfect manual for a newly awakened consciousness. It starts off with a two-page spread of solid black, representing the darkness and emptiness before the universe. On the following pages, a timescale spirals out of the Unknown. “Life Story” touches upon the beginning of the universe, the Sun, the Earth; it shows us the earliest life forms, dinosaurs, Ice Ages, Mankind, and finally ends up on Burton’s back porch at 5:33 AM on May 6. All this in a juvenile book by the author of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel!

Go, Dog, Go!, Phillip D. Eastman – Early reader; I loved all the different-colored dogs and their race cars as a preschooler, and so does Cubby.

One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, Dr. Seuss – Early reader; all the bizarre but friendly creatures are fun to see.

Animal Ghosts, edited by Claudea Clow – More dinosaurs and extinct animals, plus the first touch of cryptozoology with the suggestions that ground sloths, pterodactyls, and the like might still exist!

“Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster” poster – Why not? Greatest movie poster I ever saw. Cubby’s now interested in the monsters depicted. They look a bit like the dinosaurs in Life Story to the nth degree.

Kitsune statuette – the pseudo-ivory white fox statue I found, just because it’s pretty.

2000 S Kennedy half-dollar – have a vague idea of getting back into coin collecting. I love half-dollars, and this “Proof” one is so – shiny!

54 holiday snaps – photos from vacation trips, mostly from Farley’s Dinosaur Park in Arkansas. Life-sized concrete dinosaurs, cave men, and bison! Can’t do better than that!

Revolver, the Beatles (cd) – Soft introduction to rock’n’roll.

Classics Illustrated, “Wild Animals I Have Known,” Ernest Thompson Seton – Our first comic book shows more realistic animals. Dogs and wolves mostly, with horses, rabbits, and sheep also seen. The time period is given as the 1890s, and Victorian and cowboy clothing are seen. Prose pages give a bio of Seton, a bio of Francisco Pizarro, and Noah’s Ark from Genesis.

Victory at Sea, “Design for War” – This strange new world isn’t all beer and skittles! War sends many back to that Utter Darkness on page one. Cubby really worries about this Hitler guy.

NASA, “Freedom 7” – humanity tries to reach the stars from which all things spring. Since the date given was twenty years after “Victory”, things must have turned out all right.

Wild Kingdom, “King of the Beasts” – We see real animals here instead of anthropomorphic ones. Cubby sees a bit of the real world. Strangely, while there were narrations for “Victory” and NASA, the first person Cubby actually saw speaking was Marlin Perkins!

Red Skelton, “Lillian Martin,” “Pledge of Allegiance,” “Red at the Reno Rodeo” – A comedy to round off the first day. The “cowboys” here look a bit like the folks in “Wild Animals” – except they dance and sing. “Pledge” makes you proud of these here United States, though Cubby only has a cloudy idea of “nation”.

Observations after a single day: Cubby crammed quite a bit into one day. He has at least a vague idea of the Universe, dinosaurs, real animals, and music (lots in the background of the TV episodes as well as the two albums). Oddly, the first human being he actually heard speak was Marlin Perkins! He understands life and the beginnings of things (like his own slow awakening that morning), and death appeared as soon as Life Story got going (the end of many prehistoric species). Death, as seen in Victory at Sea, he thinks of as returning to that darkness at the beginning of Life Story.

He saw ships, planes, and vehicles in Victory and in NASA. Crowd scenes in both showed him that there are many people out there. Excepting women glimpsed in crowd scenes, his knowledge of the female of the species was limited to a photo (and self-portraits) of Virginia Burton – until we reached the Red Skelton episode with Jane Russell as a Western dance-hall singer! A brother and sister appear in One Fish . . ., so he knows children, too.

He knows there was an “Egypt”, a “Greece”, a “Rome”, and medieval times. Indians appear in a single painting of LS, then come the “settlers”. WWII began in 1939, and Alan Shepherd became America’s first man into space in 1961. Such is his grasp of history.

The World: seen in little globe-maps the size of a quarter in LS. Maps of the Atlantic Ocean seen in Victory, surrounded by lands with names: Canada, Greenland, Iceland, England. World maps seen in the background in NASA and Wild Kingdom. LS exaggerates Massachusetts when we shrink down to see life there – bear that in mind.

Dinosaurs are cool, seen in LS, Animal Ghosts, and “holiday snaps.” The monsters of Ghidrah are dinosaur-like, so he likes them, too. The first glimpse of forteana comes in Animal Ghosts, with the suggestions that some prehistoric creatures might still live – somewhere.

It’s amazing how much literature and media for young children concentrate on funny animals. More serious versions will wait for the future.

Four books read out of 4800 = 1/1200 of the way done!

THE CUBBY EXPERIMENT

Starting in the mid ‘nineties, I seemed to reboot my writing career (such as it was) about once a year. I would wait for all stories out at magazines to return (as they usually did), then I put my stories in a pile, swearing to review/edit/reprint them and start afresh.

On New Year’s Day 2000, I looked at all my shelves of books. I must have been part-way through sixty or seventy of them, and I hated picking up one halfway done, knowing I’d lost the thread of the narrative. I decided to re-boot my reading. I pretended I had never read a thing in my life, and that all the books were fresh.

This worked quite well for several years, but unfortunately 2000 onward was the beginning of the crappiest period of my life.

Which brought me to one more major reboot. I invented a younger version of myself and decided that everything he saw, heard, read, and experienced was as new to him as to a newborn infant. Oh, he could read, write, talk, and otherwise function, but all media and life had been forgotten, like a total amnesiac.

I thought of him just as “the little dude” for a long time, but he developed a personality of his own (as characters are supposed to do for novelists) and decided his name was Cubby. Obviously there’s the idea of a baby animal, but a “cub” is also defined as “a young and inexperience person.” So Cubby he was.

Of course, being a figment of my imagination, he takes after me, and the books, TV shows, music, and stories he encounters are from my own collection, thus reflecting my tastes. At first I was just hoping to experience things afresh, but now my hope is that Cubby will rekindle the freshness in my life and work that fizzled out over the last decade.

I started the Cubby project on January 1 of 2008, twice in 2009, and twice in 2010. Each time personal crises shook up my life so much, I abandoned the mental exercise after a few weeks.

However . . . Cubby sort of reappears in my head of his own accord once in a while. He wants to know about the world and his place in it. He’s decided to begin his education again, despite raging allergies with cold-like symptoms and headaches on my part. Perhaps the sixth time is the charm, especially since the Cubster initiated the project himself rather than let me launch it artificially.

An aside: I have reviewed every bibliography, scoured AbeBooks and Amazon, and I have listed nearly every book that I don’t have that I’d like to have. If I collected them all, I would own about 4800 books altogether – all I could conceivably need. So Cubby has a ways to go to read them all. He’ll keep a count and a comparison.

So: On to Cubby’s awakening into the world.

But I Don't Control the Hand -- the Hand Controls Me!

We've all listed the Great Movies, genre-related or otherwise, and our personal favorites, but sometimes my own lists ring false. Yes, sometimes I'll list a film as a favorite because everyone calls it a classic, or it was so influential, or it was a favorite growing up. Now, though, I think I've found a true measure of what my genuine loves are.

On Friday nights, it's time for my own personal sf/horror theater, and I reach for the DVD/video shelves. When I do so, unless I make some conscious decision ("Last week it was Quatermass Xperiment; this week, Quatermass II"), my hand will reach of its own accord toward the same small number of films. I'll grin like an idiot and pull out the same movies over and over unless I remind myself, "You've seen that this year already! And sit up straight!" So here's a list of movies the Hand of Fate always returns to, written as I thought of them myself, stream-of-consciousness style:

• The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas


• X -- The Unknown


• Dinosaurus!


• Monster That Challenged the World
  
• Day of the Triffids
  
• Quatermass and the Pit
  
• The Thing
  
• The Day the Earth Stood Still
  
• War of the Worlds
  
• The Andromeda Strain
  
• Legend of Boggy Creek
  
• Revenge of the Creature
  
• The Mysterious Island
  
• Journey to the Center of the Earth
  
• Duel
  
• Rodan


• Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster
  
• Destroy All Monsters
  
• THEM!
  
• The Blob
  
• Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet
  
• The Monolith Monsters
  
• Atragon


• Dogora the Space Monster
  
• War of the Gargantuas
  
• Godzilla: Final Wars
  
• The Deadly Mantis
  
• The Lost Continent
  
• Village of the Damned
  
• Raiders of the Lost Ark
  

There may be others, but this will do for a start. I personally see little rhyme or reason to this list. A lot of 50s SF, but no early Universals or other 30s-40s films; I subconsciously see those all as classics and am a bit intimidated because I should like them. RODAN, GHIDRAH, GARGANTUAS but no GOJIRA? I feel like I should pay more attention to serious films, and I guess that detracts from the sheer fun of watching. THEM!, the first "big bug" movie, and the goofy DEADLY MANTIS, but not TARANTULA? I can't explain that one. Anyway, the Hand has spoken -- or made the sound of one hand clapping -- or something.

Magazine Review -- "How It Works"

When the British magazine How It Works began appearing a couple of years ago, I cheered. I've read plenty of science magazines, but I always seemed to lag behind the curve -- far behind -- OK, flatlining. How It Works took it upon itself to explain to techno-feebs like me pretty much everything -- diagramming and identifying the inner workings of just about anything from iPads and Harrier jets to dinosaurs and the moons of Saturn. It let you understand LEDs, laptops, and nuclear submarines.

Visually, I can't complain about the 'zine. The photos, computer generated images, and artists' conceptions are vivid, large, and exciting, and quite up to date (such as an amazing image of the Sun, "taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)" on March 20, 2010, seen in the recent How It Works Book of Space. However . . .

I noticed some odd typos in this 'zine starting from the very first issue. I'm not the one to quibble over a few misspellings, but the typos were often in numerical info that, above all else, ought to be correct. Now the new Book of Space seems to be taking errors and poor grammar to a new level.

The first page with prose, "Journey through the Solar System" (page 8), ends with this line: "In addition, the solar system is home to numerous small solar system bodies*, which include all minor planets," . . . and that's it. Presumably they might have listed comets, meteoroids, and dust -- but there is no "continued" for this page.

There's a two page spread on pp. 10 and 11 devoted to the Sun and its planets. At the top of page ten we're informed that "Saturn is so light that if it could be hypothetically placed in a galactic-sized ocean of water it would float." Lower down the page, on "Map of the Solar System," we're told that "Saturn is so light - thanks to its compositon from the lightest elements - that if it could be hypothetically -" etc. And at the top of page 11, under "5 Top Facts: Solar System," we learn that "Hypothetically speaking, Saturn is so light that if it were placed in a galactic-sized swimming pool --" Well, you know.

There are lots of little "Statistics" areas that look almost like Magic: The Gathering cards. Page 10's "The Statistics -- The Sun" states: "Surface temperature: 5,500 degrees C." All well and good, but on page 12 -- another blue "The Statistics -- The Sun" card: "Average surface temperature: 1-2 million degrees." that was quite a jump in two pages!

Page 18 brings us to the Moon. "The moon does have days that last about 29.5 hours." Page 19 asks "Could We Ever Live There?", answering that colonists would have to get used to many hardships, such as "the relatively long lunar nights (15 hours)."

Whoa, whoa there! Day to night to day is marked by sunlight passing over the surface of an object. The sun's rays do pass across the moon -- in what we call phases, from new to full to new again -- a period that last approximately 29.5 days. We get the word "month" from "moon", in fact.

The above is what jumped out at me after reading only 11 pages out of nearly 170. I'm almost afraid to read further. All I can say is -- guys, you have the best-looking science/technology publication on the planet, but invest in some proof-readers!

_______

*Ya think?

Lost in Darkness and Distance

It's December -- guess I'll write a little tale for Christmas.


LOST IN DARKNESS AND DISTANCE

The Monster slogged tirelessly across the pack ice.

"I do not forget my vow to immolate myself, Victor Frankenstein," he muttered, "but firewood is scarce in this frozen clime."

He huffed a thundercloud of breath and marched on, hearing only the crunch of snow and the howl of wind. Here, at the top of the world, he could wander unchallenged and unfeared, but only because no one lived here to object.

"Perhaps it was you, not the Almighty, who made me, Victor," he said to the black sky, "but I prayed for so long that there might be a place for me somewhere in God's creation."

Ahead the jagged peaks of a small island rose over the ice. Tiny flames crackled on the shore. Intrigued, the Monster approached.

Small creatures huddled around the fire. Some resembled animals up on their hind legs. Some resembled children with malformed heads and limbs. Stitches lined their bodies as if each one had been sewn together -- badly.

"Oh!" exclaimed a girl with red yarn for hair. "You're the biggest dolly I've ever seen. You must be a misfit!"

A bear with the incongruous fan-tail of a peacock ambled up.

"If you're a misfit, you're welcome here."

A winged form passed overhead, backlit by the wavering aurorae. It was no bird, but a regal hunting beast.

The Monster smiled.

Another Death

Only three weeks after my father's passing, my uncle (Don's brother) Bruce Winkle died in Eldorado, Kansas, at the age of 73. Although Bruce had suffered a number of strokes, it was cancer that did him in. Ironically, the doctors only discovered he suffered from cancer two weeks before he succumbed.

These exposures to mortality drive home the fact that our time on this globe is finite. If I can glean anything positive out of the past few months, perhaps it will be the desire to work anew on the goals important to me, the projects that have stalled out during the past few years.

The new year is approaching. Perhaps, for 2011, you, too, should review your priorities -- before personal tragedies force them upon you.

Donald W. Winkle, 1930-2010

On October 21, 2010, after years of fighting cancer, congenital heart failure, and Alzheimer's, my father, Donald W. Winkle, passed away.

Don's health problems began nearly a decade ago, when it was determined that he needed triple bypass surgery. He has been in and out of hospitals ever since. Anesthesia and drugs never seemed to affect him as they were supposed to, and he learned to hate the doctors and hospitals stays -- I can't say I blame him. Don's increasing physical and mental problems were hard on everyone close to him, particularly so on his wife of 37 years, Sharon Stewart Winkle.

The end came with shocking swiftness. One weekend he was still quite active and talkative; two weeks later he all but stopped speaking, spending his time simply wandering around the house and yard. A week after that he collapsed, having literally (according to the hospice nurses) forgotten how to walk. A few days later, his pulse, blood pressure, and respiration simply grew weaker and weaker until they ceased altogether.

Donald Winkle was interred in Bixby Cemetery, Bixby, Oklahoma on Monday, October 25, 2010.