Michael Kurland

Praise from one's editor is praise indeed. This from Fender Tucker, who is putting out the new edition of my 1987 novel Star Griffin:

Mike,

I really enjoyed reading STAR GRIFFIN. When I edited it I saw all the fonts and formatted areas and thought it would be one of the spacey SF experiments that (more…)

When my mother was a little girl in the 1920s she used to go to the movies on Saturday, where, in addition to the feature movie and a newsreel and maybe a cartoon, they usually showed one episode of a weekly serial. These were called Cliffhangers -"The Perils of Pauline" is the classic example, and each episode would end with the hero -- or often heroine -- in some deadly peril. Often literally hanging off a cliff. My mother used to worry about the heroine hanging there all week until the next episode, and hope that someone was bringing her sandwiches.

It occurred to me in a moment of comparative idleness, while I was running some chord progressions on my electronic zither to get the right feel for the madrigal I’m composing in medieval French about the union of a strange quark and a heavy mu boson, that the personal essay — the blog, ifyou will — of today is the historian’s mother lode of tomorrow. (more…)

“Growing Pains” actor turned Christian film star Kirk Cameron is taking issue with comments famed physicist Stephen Hawking made about the existence of heaven. “There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers,” Hawking said of the human brain to the Guardian newspaper Monday. “That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Cameron, a Christian evangelist who heads the online ministry, Way of the Master, responded on his Facebook page Wednesday, (more…)

Speaking before the Wisconsin State Convention of the NRA, lobbyist Bob Welch said that the organization would have to wait until the "Connecticut Effect" had dissipated before it could push through its agenda of loosening gun laws even further. The "Connecticut Effect" of which he speaks is, of course, the murder in Sandy Hookof 20 six and seven year old children and 6 adults who were trying to protect them. (more…)

From a post by TPM online:

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee attributed the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in part to restrictions on school prayer and religious materials in the classroom.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Well! We seldom discuss God in the supermarket. That would explain why my bananas have brown spots all over them.

On Thursday, November 21 1963, there was a program on, the Korean War, narrated by Richard Boone. In it he recited the Houseman poem:

Here dead we lie
Because we did not choose
To live and shame the land
From which we sprung.

Life, to be sure,
Is nothing much to lose,
But young men think it is,
And we were young. (more…)

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe - H.G. Wells

In a cave in Shanidar, in what is now Iraq,
A man
Of the type we call “Neanderthal”
Was buried some 60,000 years ago.
After a fatal accident.
He was placed on a bed of flowers,
And more flowers were strewn over him:
Hollyhock, bachelor's button, groundsel, and hyacinth.
Some scientists believe
That it was a sort of religious rite
I think someone loved him very much.

The SF Chronicle has a columnist named Debra Saunders who is pretty much a right-wing ideologue (I was going to say “nutcase,” but that’s impolite) . Her Sunday (9/22) column “Save the Death Penalty” was particularly factually incorrect, morally untenable and simplistic. I will expound on this because the subject is of particular interest to me — and besides I’m against killing human beings no matter who’s doing the killing. (more…)