Category: Uncategorized

Before I answer that question, I need to issue an apology for commenting problems here. Ever since I did an update a while back, I’ve been forced to moderate comments. All of them, including my own. I try to approve them immediately when they pop up on my phone. Occasionally, I miss one. Sometimes, I forget to approve my own, and days later, it feels awkward to do so. According to my settings, I don’t have to approve commenters who’ve left at least one prior comment. I have no idea why moderation isn’t working according to the settings, and I don’t have time to go to my host and search around for the problem, and I updated all the widgets here already. This apology is for any comments I unwittingly left in moderation (including my own, as they were meant to be in response to yours). Normally I have no desire to moderate at all; that’s what the spam filter is for.

On to the topic of the day: that nebulous concept known as joy. What is it, exactly? I don’t know. I don’t have a strong sense for feelings, but I know it’s generally defined as a constant in the soul that isn’t defined by temporary circumstances. Some Christians define it as an enduring trust in God. In Galatians 5, it’s housed between love and peace in the fruits of the spirit. I know what love is. I know what peace is. I know when I experience love and peace in others and in myself. But I find joy to be too intangible to recognize.

To be fair, all the fruits of the spirit are intangible concepts that spill over into real life actions. Someone filled with peace will be a peacemaker, a mediator, an unbiased judge. Someone filled with love will sacrifice what they want — or even need, at times — for others. Patience is demonstrated with a steady determination through trials and setbacks, even when they are caused by others. Faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — these all have real world applications.

What are the real world applications for joy? How do we spot this trait in others? I’m asking honest questions, as I honestly don’t know the answers. However, the Christians who’ve defined “joy” as “trust” are on to something, I think. When we trust that God will always be there for us despite temporal struggles when we don’t feel his presence, we are content anyway. I know this is true; I’ve felt this kind of contentment. In fact, it usually expresses itself most fully at times when I have little or no control over a situation.

Is trust a trait that radiates from the face? Yes, and it can be seen in the eyes of small children whose parents have never dropped them, let them go, or failed to care for them. The elderly often have it too, but it looks different on them because they have lived long enough that they should have stopped trusting in humans at the very least and probably even questioned God’s hand in their lives at times, and yet a resiliency shines from their eyes. They smile at people anyway, and the smile goes all the way to the eyes.

I was inspired to explore the concept of joy after reading an inspirational book called You Gotta Keep Dancin’ by Tim Hansel. I read it some time ago but accidentally flipped it open the other day to where the author quotes Nehemiah 8:10: “…the joy of of the LORD is my strength.” I’ve read that Bible verse numerous times, and yet, its meaning never registered with me. Because I rarely sleep and have no future hope of getting adequate sleep, I tend to think of things operating the opposite way: once I have slept enough and regained my strength, I will be joyful. But that’s not what the verse says. It says strength comes from joy. Not sleep. Not good health or a perfect diet. Joy. God’s joy.

Maybe this concept isn’t as earth-shattering to you as it is to me. And obviously, you can see why I would want to define joy, pin it down, and concentrate on feeling it. After all, an intangible reality that acts on a physical reality must be able to be measured somehow. It’s measured in my days, though. It’s numbered in the fact that I get through each task of every day off 0-4 hours of sleep a night and still laugh at jokes and maintain hobbies around my erratic work schedule. If joy is a deep trust in God, then I can sense its existence without having to define it further.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. I had to dangle clickbait. This is not something I normally do, but I’m feeling wicked today. Do we really have a pandemic of the unvaccinated? Of course. That’s what happens when only unvaccinated people are required by employers and schools to be tested weekly and when the CDC only requires schools and employers to report hospitalizations and positive tests amongst the unvaccinated. It would be funny if it weren’t so manipulative and evil.

I want to make clear that I don’t doubt in the existence of Covid, or of its dangers. But take a look around you. The manipulation can’t last forever, not when it’s becoming painfully obvious to nearly everyone but the diehard believers in “science” that Covid vaccines won’t stop the spread of a very real illness. Everywhere I turn, the facts no longer support getting Covid vaccines — at least not as a way to stop the spread of Covid — which is ironic, as the diehard believers are still telling us nonbelievers that we’re irrational, fact-denying idiots engaging in temper tantrums (that’s an almost exact quote I read in a comment section the other day). And it’s not just Israel’s or Gibraltar’s data any longer; Harvard Business School, where they have a 95% Covid vax rate, has just had to take some of their classes online again due to outbreaks. Remember, though, that this is a pandemic of the unvaccinated….

What is the purpose of this post, but to alleviate frustration? I don’t know. I’m inundated with new articles to read, new facts every day. I’m on overload, as most people are. And sifting through it is a nightmare. I think that’s why so many skeptics accepted the vaccines in the first place. They wanted it all to stop: they wanted their elderly relatives to leave them alone, their bosses to leave them alone, and the shaming-blaming media and politicians to just shut up. In short, they wanted life to return to normal, and that is exactly what hasn’t happened.

Either our media and government entities are full of idealistic true believers in the vaccines, or they are monsters. There’s really not another option. And I don’t mean they are monsters because they’re pushing a vaccine that will never bring us herd immunity. I suppose they are slow-moving beasts at the best of time (except when approving Pfizer’s vaccine….) No, they are monsters because they are trying to hide or suppress data on cheap, workable medication like antihistamines. That is just the latest drug on my radar that they’ve suppressed.

If you haven’t heard that there were a couple of Spanish nursing homes that used antihistamines successfully at the outset of their patients’ Covid outbreaks, I’m not surprised. Who is going to make hand-over-fist money or control a population through Claritin passes? There is definite science behind why antihistamines work, which is why it’s even more heinous that this information is being suppressed. Can you imagine elderly people not dying of Covid because their doctors gave them allergy tabs? Not killing our elderly sounds like a great and noble thing, but instead, we stick tubes down people’s throats as a last resort before they die. I doubt most doctors and nurses enjoy seeing people die. It’s a shame, really. I talked to a nurse just the other day who told me about what a nightmare year 2020 was for her. What if she had been given better treatment options for her patients?

Imagine if our government weren’t so invested in the pharmacological tyranny that made them ignore or invent false stories about cheap drugs that effectively treat people (obviously, not everyone; there will never be a panacea. But why can’t we even look into these drugs? Why)? I’m now making up my own John Lennon lyrics. Sing along with me….

Antihistamines and azithromycin as a treatment for COVID-19 on primary health care – A retrospective observational study in elderly patients – PubMed (nih.gov)

Mast cells activated by SARS-CoV-2 release histamine which increases IL-1 levels causing cytokine storm and inflammatory reaction in COVID-19 – PubMed (nih.gov)

Writer and blog friend Jay DiNitto said something funny in the comments of my last post. He asked me if I took drugs — in jest, of course — because my blog is relaxing and exciting at the same time. For a start, I find it funny that anyone thinks my unfocused blog topics are exciting! But, yes, I try to be relaxed.

Let me tell you something about the world. Earlier, when I was taking the dog for our daily constitutional, I witnessed a man with a whip in one of Roswell’s many parks that have been let go to stickers and burs, and he was pulverizing garbage with it … and probably grass, too. Crack! Crack! Crack! That was to the right of me. To the left of me, a car whizzed by, emitting the sounds of angry rap, of which I could only hear angry obscenities before it screeched to turn a corner without reducing speed. Behind me, a speeding truck went through a stop sign, to which the car to his right responding by laying on his horn multiple times.

Maybe I’m overly sensitive, but I feel a sense of anger in the world around me that threatens to overwhelm my senses. I’ve become part of it, as I have to fight to suppress my own anger, and sometimes I’m not good at suppressing it. In short, the world is an angry place, but it’s still chockfull of fascinations. I discover the fascinations to block out the rest. No drugs are needed to throw myself into finding a new tidbit of information.

That has been a long intro and, possibly, an apology for the tidbit of information I had planned to share on my blog today. It’s not very exciting! But it’s actually very interesting to me. Due to my seeking out Spanish news articles and listening to Mexican music on my phone’s YouTube app, Google now recommends Spanish news articles to me. I would say about 50% of its recommendations to me are in Spanish. And they’re oddball news articles, too. When I seek out news to read in Spanish, I look for current events from Mexican media sources (yes, I’m slightly obsessed with Mexico, so I’m naturally going to seek those out). Google rather recommends articles about archaeology, history, and obscure language issues.

The tidbit of information I’m going to share — are you breathless in anticipation yet? On tenterhooks? — is from that last category. While that article has disappeared from my Google news stream, I found a comparable article about the subject here. What piqued my interest was the title (similar to this one): Existe una palabra en español que no se puede escribir. Wait, what? How could there be a word that you can speak but not write? As far as I know, English has no such thing because it has all the phonetic sounds from the alphabet and the normal blending of letters, and then it has exceptions to them. I know this because I’ve been teaching English phonetics for years. I have a few handy, torn-up manuals that teach all sounds in the English language. In the 19th C, if Webster had come across a peculiar word that didn’t fit the normal phonetic rules, he would have found a “best spelling” for it and put it in his dictionary. That, however, wasn’t peculiar to Webster. English had been doing that for a very long time. Webster simply wanted to streamline and regulate the spellings for a new English-speaking nation.

Apparently, there’s no such wiggle room in Spanish for such bold dealings. In this case, the word in question is the command form of salirle, which basically means get out! In order to write this, you would end up with salle, the “ll” making a “y” sound instead of an “l”. This article is actually not as comparable as I though it was; it’s much shorter. The one I read goes on for a space, talking about how this topic was discussed by the Real Academia Español, who determined that an exception couldn’t be made for this command form, or even that it could be written differently, e.g., sal le. Its recommendation was for writers to reconstruct their sentences to avoid this form. My thoughts ran to court transcriptions and the like. What then, Royal Academy? What happens then??!! What if a witness is telling the court the last conversation she had with her murderous employer, in which he is breaching her quarters and she shouts, “¡Sal-le!”? What then, I ask you? How is the court scribe supposed to type that out? I wish I could find the original article, though I don’t think it went into quite that much depth.

It did just occur to me that, in addition to forming a creative story in which a person might be forced to write an unwritable word, I could come up with a reasonable explanation for why a man was whipping garbage and grass in the park with an actual bonafide whip. Did you know a circus got stranded in Roswell during the original pandemic shutdown? For months, their tents and trucks were parked at the fairgrounds looking forlorn, not like a circus at all, but like wasted dreams. What if that man in the park wasn’t angry at all. What if he was the lion tamer, and he lost his job and became permanently trapped here? What if he was just practicing so he could find another job?

Or maybe he was a really awful lion tamer, and his bosses, clearly Spanish speakers, finally told him to “—–!” Sorry, but I don’t want the Academy after me. But the funniest part of this to me is I’ve never heard anyone use the term salirle as a command. Maybe it happens all the time in actual Spanish-speaking countries. Here, though, the circus manager would probably just shout the very transcribable ¡Váyase, señor!

And with that, I think it’s time to leave now.

Hans G. Schanz has been putting these books sales together for a while. Most of the books are $.99; some are free. I tend to grab a couple of books if I can find something that piques my interest that I haven’t already read. Unfortunately, I’ve read most of the authors I like in this group. I will highlight a few of those in a minute because you might not have. First, I’ll put up some links: Book Sale; About BasedCon.

Most of the authors in the sale are modern and currently publishing; there are a handful of classics on the list. I like most sci fi classics, such as H.G. Wells, but I’m writing this post to promote the authors trying to make a living at this gig today.

My favorite current author to read off the list, then, is Robert Kroese. I appreciate Kroese because he manages to be cerebral, absurdist and/or funny, and adventurous all at the same time. It’s my favorite tone for books, albeit I’ll go for weird in that middle slot instead of funny. And I’ll be honest, if the first two descriptors are present, adventuresome isn’t mandatory. But an author that can manage all three gets two thumbs up from me! I don’t have three thumbs….

Fenton Wood is not bad, either. He manages to be cerebral and weird and adventurous in his first book, Pirates of the Electromagnetic Waves. That book also has the heady thrill of childlike wonder, as the characters start off as children. By the next book, they are no longer children, and the plot isn’t as solid. I actually like the second book in the series simply because it’s so technical; there is wonder in that, too. But not everyone enjoys the feel of nonfiction in their fiction. Nonfiction just happens to be what I read most of the time — well, not exactly. I read it constantly, though, in between my fiction. A chapter here, a chapter there — and then I see an enticing work of fiction and will buy it and read it all at once. This entire series is worth giving a try. Fenton Wood has a unique voice, and I’m grateful for the ease of indie publishing because traditional publishing rarely chooses good weird these days.

One of my favorite author personalities on the list is Jon Del Arroz. His books are good, too, especially the series that starts with Justified (the book he has for sale at BasedCon). I’ve at the very least started most of his series of books. His latest release is The Stars Rejoined from the Aryshan War series. I purchased this book but haven’t yet read it. I admire Jon because he doesn’t just produce good books; he’s also hardworking and constantly producing content: new series, comics, and videos. He’s one of those people who would be kind and magnanimous to all people [or most, probably] … if they would allow him to. The world is full of haters, though, and can’t cope with people who are both open and conservative. Openness is a trait in the Big 5 cluster of personality traits. When I examine the world around me, I realize that the only people I really get along with well possess this trait. But it’s both sad and strange that openness, which used to cluster around oddball conservatives and people who call themselves “liberals”, is difficult to find in a world hunkering down in their black and white spaces. Have they become checker or chess pieces? I don’t know. I hate hunkering, though.

I didn’t mean to get philosophical. I apologize. Go check out the list of books for sale. There are many more authors I appreciate there, and others I won’t read due to their 17+ rating. I’m sorry. I don’t read books with explicit sexual content. I don’t find it healthy, as reading goes directly into the cerebral brain, where lust might worm its way in under the demons of intellectualism. For the record, when scrolling through, I saw only a couple that fit into 17+.

…for preorder. I’m working on being a regular author who publishes in a timely fashion and puts up books for preorder. Well, I managed this time to put it up for preorder five days ahead of the pub date. That doesn’t give me a lot of time to get ahead of the game, but I’m not that concerned about that now. It’s ready! That’s what I care about. I have made one more step toward the publishing schedule I’m aiming for, which is one book a year from now on. If I could manage it, I would do two books a year. This is like exercise to me, though. I’m going to start with the weight I can manage to bench press and not the one I can’t even lift off my chest. There will be no stress here.

This is my Amazon description:

When the Alien Peace brings nothing but war…

…it takes the world’s ragtag youth to fight it. Two of them, anyway.

Under the bright sunshine of the innocuous town of Roswell, New Mexico, the aliens landed their ships for the first time, leaving behind a virus that eventually swept the globe. The spread was curbed through a series of vaccines that also cured the Earth of violent men. This curious global stability has come to be known as the Alien Peace. Peace, that is, for all but a lonely few whose minds, damaged from the vaccines, now taunt them with unrelenting noise.

Talat is one of Roswell’s vaccine damaged. After her caretaker publishes censored information about the aliens and ends up dead, Talat flees before the authorities can force her into foster care. This lonely flight ends when an equally damaged young man, Robert, shoots a government official to protect her. Now fugitives, they escape their hometown together…and run right into the aliens’ trap. What was once noise is now clear: the aliens’ prophecies must be fulfilled.

Order of the PenTriagon is the first of a two-book alien adventure series. Get your copy today!

Here is my cover with a link to the preorder page if you click on it:

Yes, I am, and no amount of good things will cover it over. I am livid that our president is in bed with big pharma and is now enacting an executive order to force millions of people in the US to get Covid vaccines. Honestly, I normally don’t know what to do with my frustration but to work harder and longer. That’s what I’ve been doing all day, preparing my documents for the September 20th publication date and tutoring. [By the way, my pub date is still on, though I think I will only have the ebook ready. The reason for that is I need to order a proof, and I don’t yet have a cover. I can’t order a proof without one, obviously. But I can put up the cover art for the ebook in a jiffy.]

Somehow, the frustration, borne by helplessness, creeps in anyway. Do you want to know what I heard on Catholic radio this morning? A vaccine shill spouting his nonsense — it was as if the propagandists were sent out thither and yon to ensure the populace was prepared to accept their tyranny later in the day. I really believe this. The only Catholic station in Roswell is now called Relevant Radio. That should tell you all you need to know.

When I first moved here, it was Immaculate Heart Radio, and I would listen to Catholic Answers even though I was not yet Catholic, as well as a few other great shows that were cancelled when the station became “relevant”. Never — and I do mean never — trust a Christian company or organization that puts the word “relevant” in their title. It means they are not relevant to the faith and have given way to the world and now hold antichrist values. I have continued to listen to Relevant Radio, mostly for the Patrick Madrid show and the Rosary Across America. I’m not going to listen to them anymore, though, not after they put on a Covid propagandist. As an example of the many lies and distortions he told, my favorite was that the delta variant is as contagious as chicken pox. For those of you who don’t know, chicken pox is one of the most contagious diseases known to man. Even NPR wrote an article disproving this wild claim of the CDC, and yet, it was put out like a puff of hot gas on Relevant Radio.

Before I turned off the radio for good, an elderly woman called in to ask why the world around her was so different from what he was saying. “My entire family is vaccinated,” she said, “and now we all have Covid.” She went on to talk about a cousin who died of Covid after vaccination, and another one who is currently in the hospital and probably would not make it. Most people in her neighborhood were vaccinated, she said, and yet Covid was sweeping through, seemingly unaware it was supposed to skip the neighborhoods of vaccinated folks. She wanted to know how she was supposed to reconcile the discrepancy between what was happening around her and what she was being told.

Now, please believe me; I’m not one for putting stock in single anecdotal cases. But what that woman was describing is the same reality I’m experiencing. And many others are experiencing it, as well. When what the propagandists are saying becomes completely flip-flopped from observable reality, that is a sign the propagandists are lying to us, not that we’re irrationally believing in our own anecdotal experiences. See, the thing about science is that it isn’t a pure entity. Only a fool “believes in science” unless that science conforms to observable reality. If the propagandists tried to tell you they’d had a breakthrough and you can now jump off your roofs and come to no harm because gravity has been subverted, would you believe them? I wouldn’t because gravity has been observable reality my entire life, sometimes in very painful ways. That’s why I don’t ever just “believe in science.” Science is only as good as the people conducting it, which means they would have to have no ulterior motives. No profit motives. No power or control motives. No preconceived biases that cause them to dig in their heels even when the evidence does not support them.

Because that show was on at six a.m., my day started with a bad taste in my mouth. It’s as if every organization has stepped into line for our new tyranny-to-be. And then Biden* came out with new vaccine mandates, and now I am silently screaming. I want to drink or eat potato chips (it’s my thing, okay? Everybody has that one food that has to be kept out of the cupboards) or keep working and exercising like a lunatic. It did occur to me that, even if the irrelevant Catholic radio is now spewing statist garbage (they actually have been for a while, but it has never hit this close to home), I am still a Christian. And what should Christians do? Order a case of vodka online? No, they should pray and continue following God’s purpose for their lives. If it’s one thing I’m absolutely sure of, we were created to live in such a time as this. God does not make mistakes. This is our time, right now. This is the only time we have to respond to what is going on in the world and to respond to others’ needs.

*I was harder on the radio shill than Biden. What do I think of Biden? He’s pathetic. He gaslights and makes threats, veiled and otherwise, but he’s unconvincing. He’s at the point of Soviet propaganda when it was so wild nobody believed it any longer.

I was captured by clickbait! This clickbait particularly: Selena Quintanilla: el video publicado por Marco Antonio Solís donde se le ve junto a la cantante. If you don’t know Spanish, it basically translates as Marco Antonio Solís published a video where he is seen with Selena Quintanilla. That’s quite a loose translation, but I’m all about getting the quick sense of a phrase when reading. That’s how I became a fluent Spanish reader years ago, by the way. When I had to translate Sor Juana’s poetry for an honors dissertation later, I took more nuanced care, obviously. Academic work is not fluency work — remember that.

In my wildest dreams, I imagined the video was one in which they were singing together, but that was, alas, not to be. She is shown as the host of a music awards ceremony, one of which he won, and she proceeds to hand him his award. This is the sort of video that hardcore fans will collect and obsess over, especially since Solís put up a teaser before he posted the video. As the article states: Este hecho generó gran emoción entre los fanáticos de ambos famosos. This is a fairly easy translation for even non Spanish speakers, I think: This fact generated great emotion among fans of both stars.

It caused me to click on the link! Let me explain a little about these musicians. Selena is a legend. Most Americans have heard of her by this time; after all, J Lo played her in a blockbuster movie. More recently, Netflix has been making a Selena show, but it is really awful. Beautiful, voluptuous, brown-toned Selena, with her charm and stage presence, is played by a scrawny white Latina vegan who completely lacks stage presence. I only bring up the vegan part because the actress looks unusually skinny, which prompted me to look this up — as in, I guessed she was vegan by her physique. But this post is not about the show, which I do not like (it’s honestly just boring). This post is about things — or people, rather — that I like. Selena has a gorgeous voice and made all manner of interesting, catchy tunes, mixing in music from her and her siblings’ eighties’ childhoods with traditional cumbias and conjunto ballads. Although her brother was responsible for much of this innovative mixing, I’m sure she had some artistic input. And she certainly brought the songs to life with her singing and dancing.

While Selena was American, Marco Antonio Solís is a true-blue Mexican singer. For that reason, you might not have heard of him. He is also not a gen-Xer who was cut down in the prime of musicianship as Selena was; he is a boomer, which means he has decades’ worth of music out there. I don’t like all of it, as some verges on easy-listening. But his voice! Él canta como un angel. Yes, he sings like an angel with all the proper array of emotion and drama. I love him so much (as a musician, obviously)!

If you scroll all the way down in the article, you will see the video of the two singers together…not singing, much to my tristedad. I’ll let you figure that word out. Despite that it wasn’t my wildest dream, I’m sure it’s a great memory for Señor Solís. I’ll also leave you with a video of Solís singing…it’s hard to choose a song, though. He’s done everything from singer-songwriter with a guitar and/or keyboards to traditional mariachi and cumbia. Ah, well… I’ll go with a traditional mariachi because, you know, I love everything that is very Mexican:

No, I won’t be posting every day. In fact, I should be doing other work right now. But of all the things I like, these two musicians are somewhere near the top.