For the Children

“What incompetence! What breathtaking ignorance!” Red Meg’s green eyes shot sparks. “And it’s not just reporters. Have you every watched Law and Order? They find a spent shell or dig a slug out of a corpse, and proclaim that it came from a Glock 17!”

“I think some gun models do have unique rifling,” Pops said. “Apparently it is possible to narrow down the type of gun by the grooves the barrel makes.”

“Yeah, maybe under a microscope, but nobody can glance at a slug and tell what kind of gun fired it. That’s a total fantasy. If you’re a high-paid network scriptwriter, shouldn’t you do a little research? These TV and movie writers think you rack a semiautomatic every few minutes to make sure it’s loaded. You’d spew shells all over. Or if you’re writing articles for newspapers, shouldn’t you know something about your topic? I can’t tell you how many articles I’ve read about gun control where the writer obviously didn’t know the difference between a bolt-action .22 and a Thompson submachine gun.”

“It’s ignorance combined with parochialism,” Pops said. “Those people base everything on what they’re familiar with—just like the rest of us. They think their laws apply to the entire country. They don’t know that most of the country doesn’t have gun registration or licensing—and is adamantly opposed to such things. In fact, they don’t know what the laws actually are. They confuse concealed carry licenses with licenses to own a gun, which most of us don’t need. If it looks scary, it’s assumed to be an ‘assault weapon,’ and ‘assault weapons’ are all machine guns in their minds. We have to face facts. Something like two thirds of the population doesn’t own a gun or live with anyone who does. They don’t know or understand guns, so they fear them. It wasn’t nearly that bad when I was growing up. There were shooting galleries at county fairs where everyone could handle and shoot a real gun.”

“When you were growing up,” I teased, “everybody still shot muskets.”

Pops grinned. “Yep, Sonny, I learned everything I know from Natty Bumppo.”

Meg wasn’t to be distracted from her topic. “Most of the reporters, actors, scriptwriters, and producers live in effete areas where self-defense is viewed as ‘vigilantism.’ They think owning a gun is not just abnormal or primitive, but criminal—that we’re all potential criminals, just waiting for our chance to kill somebody. How do we change that?”

“Well, you don’t do it by carrying ‘assault weapons’ to political meetings,” I said.

“You know the media distorted that,” Meg objected. “Those guys were a block or two away from the President. They were demonstrating for open carry—displaying their second amendment rights.”

I shook my head vigorously. “They need to understand the difference between a demonstration and a provocation. Panicking people and painting gun owners as in-your-face extremists and would-be assassins isn’t a very productive way to educate the public. You don’t give ammunition to your enemies.”

“They say they’re trying to accustom the public to the sight of firearms in civilian hands,” she explained. “To normalize guns in everyday life.”

“All they’ll do is scare people,” I said. “What’s needed is a real education campaign. Take friends to the range, show them how to safely handle firearms. Better yet, we should have firearms safety and marksmanship taught in schools. Firearms responsibility, too. If you want to normalize guns, so that they’re no more extraordinary than a chain saw or a blow torch, that’s the way to do it.”

“The Boy Scouts served that purpose years ago,” Pops said. “We got merit badges in marksmanship.”

“You’re right!” Meg said, warming to the idea. “We should have programs in every school in the country, starting in Kindergarten with Eddie Eagle. Then gradually work up to actual gun handling and shooting by middle school or high school. Use Airsoft pistols, then BB or pellet guns, then single-shot .22s. Make it part of P.E. Maybe a couple of days each quarter could be spent on it in the early years. Have intramural competitions, just like other sports. Everybody should take part. The idea would be to make everyone familiar with how to handle a gun safely and effectively. If we did that, there’d be a lot less gun phobia in this country. The subject would be demystified.”

“And crime would plummet. Many schools had rifle teams back in the old days,” Pops said, putting on his old codger voice. “It worked fine. There were never any problems, and a lot less crime. I don’t know why we got away from that.”

“Just how are you going to get the schools to go along with this?” I asked. “There are schools that won’t even allow pictures of guns in class. Students have been suspended for drawing stick guns.”

“Well,” Meg said, “the NRA has been very successful over the years in getting states to pass gun-owner-friendly legislation. The concealed carry laws are probably the best example, but they were also behind the state preemption laws—so that every little town can’t throw you in jail just because you have your gun in your car when you pass through their boundaries. They’ve passed the Castle Doctrine in a bunch of states—and Emergency Powers legislation that prevents states from confiscating weapons during emergencies, like hurricanes. This could be another item for the NRA agenda—to convince states to incorporate gun safety programs into their school curriculums.”

Meg grinned, pleased with herself. “I like that!” she continued. “The gun control people always try to clothe their evil intentions in fine sounding phrases. We can co-opt ‘gun safety’ for our side. We can say we have to do it ‘for the children.’”

“You know the critics will have heart attacks,” I said. “But even aside from them, how do you answer the person who objects that we’ll be training future criminals and murderers? As it is, most of the gang members can’s shoot straight. That’s why they scatter lead everywhere. Your plan will make them more dangerous.”

Meg grimaced. “They can’t hit anything because they hold their guns sideways.”

“Yes, but the point is valid. Trained gangsters would be a lot more dangerous than untrained gangsters. They’d hold their guns upright if they were properly trained.”

“Maybe they'd be a lot more dangerous—but it would be to each other, instead of to innocent bystanders,” Meg insisted. “They mostly shoot other gang members.”

“The people who turn into criminals almost always do poorly in school,” Pops said. “They display behavior problems early on. The marksmanship courses could be treated as a perk, something that rewards the good student. Act up and you can’t take the classes where you actually shoot weapons, even Airsoft pistols. You run laps instead. This is the sort of self discipline that the Boy Scouts used to instill, and it wouldn’t be a bad idea to impose it on our middle school students.”

“And when many people are armed, criminals become more cautious. We’ve seen that in the concealed carry states,” Meg said. “Violent crime would probably drop. If nothing else, there’d be fewer accidents with guns.”

Pop’s watch began to beep. He silenced it and stood up. “Sorry, friends, but I have to go now. ‘Early to bed, early to rise,’ as my old friend Ben Franklin used to remind me.”

Meg started to gather her belongings, too. “I have a long book waiting for me,” she explained. “But I think this is a great idea that really should be followed up on somehow.”

Before going our separate ways, we solemnly exchanged the secret NRA handshake.

________________

Links of possible interest:

NRA Institute for Legislative Action: http://www.nraila.org/

“State ‘Emergency Powers’ vs. The Right to Arms ”:
http://www.nraila.org/Issues/FactSheets/Read.aspx?ID=191

NRA Eddie Eagle program: http://www.nrahq.org/safety/eddie/

Natty Bumppo entry at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natty_Bumppo

Airsoft guns entry at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airsoft_gun

Red Meg

Red Meg leaned a black plastic rifle case against the wall, dropped her range bag and purse next to it, and slid into a chair across from me.

She’s a petite thing, somewhere in her twenties, probably about five-foot-three and just over a hundred pounds. They say that good things come in small packages, and Meg’s lithe, supple form certainly doesn’t belie that adage. She was wearing black, almost leotard-tight slacks and a loose black blouse with the tail knotted in front to display an enticing expanse of taut, bare midriff.

There’s no denying that Meg is startlingly beautiful, with a fine, symmetrical face framed by neatly styled, shoulder-length blonde hair, sparkling green eyes, and a perfectly chiseled nose. I watched Ray’s eyes traveling back and forth between her and the rifle case. Ray is an old friend. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years and had invited him to eat with me at the Bullseye Café so that we could catch up on each other. Knowing his political, philosophical, and religious beliefs as well as I did—he seemed incapable of talking for more than five minutes without bringing them up—I suspected that Meg’s unexpected appearance might turn out to be inopportune.

Pokey, the waitress, ambled over and took Meg’s order: iced tea, a salad, and baked catfish. Meg eats healthy.

“We were just talking about global warming,” Ray ventured, pointedly ignoring the odd black case and obviously intent on getting to know Meg better. I couldn’t blame him for being interested in her; he is male. But I was pretty sure I knew where his efforts would lead. I also decided to let him twist in the wind for awhile and not satisfy his curiosity by explaining that obviously, after her meal, Meg was headed for the shooting range to do a little target practice with her recently acquired AR-15.

She sniffed at Ray’s suggested topic of conversation. “I have the answer to that. In fact, I have the answer to most of the world’s problems.”

I held my breath. You see, Meg was born with a severe disability. It’s the primary reason that, although she attracts men like honey attracts flies, she disposes of them as quickly as Raid. She is constitutionally incapable of moderating what she says. If she thinks it, she says it, with no apologies. And what she thinks is—umm, shall we say “out of the mainstream”?

“The answer to everything!” Ray exclaimed, grinning. I think he thought she was joking. “A lot of people would pay money for that. You could sell it to the government.”

“No I couldn’t,” she replied, favoring him with a pleasant smile. “Those leprous toads are incapable of understanding anything but graft and votes.”

If her reply took him back, Ray managed to conceal it. “But what’s the answer to everything? I’d like to know that.”

“Most of the world’s problems are caused by too many people,” she said. “If we had a quarter of our population, we’d need a quarter as much food, a quarter as much energy, a quarter as much housing, and we’d produce a quarter as much garbage. The seas wouldn’t be overfished, or polluted with mercury. There’d be three times as much raw materials for everyone.”

“Okay,” Ray said slowly, not certain if she was serious. “But how do we do that? Should we do like China and restrict how many children a family can have?”

“Certainly not! Governments muck up everything they touch and should never be allowed to restrict human freedom. It has to be done through persuasion, by changing the culture so that stupid and defective people are too shamed to breed. With education, even dolts are capable of acting in their own best interest. We have to stop paying people subsidies for breeding.”

I started to point out that large populations produce a critical mass of scientists, engineers, and so forth, producing an explosion in technology and the arts, but decided against becoming entangled in this conversation.

“That sounds like eugenics!” Ray barely concealed his horror.

“You say that as if eugenics were a bad thing!”

Ray sat suddenly upright in his chairs, his eyes growing wider. “Of course it’s a bad thing. Think of what the Nazis did, killing thousands of disabled people, not to mention the Jews, Gypsies, and other groups.”

Pokey brought Meg her tea and salad, and Meg slipped a straw into the tall glass and took a sip before continuing. “Eugenics means ‘good genes’ or ‘good breeding.’ We use it all the time in raising animals, only we call it selective breeding. Only a fool would intentionally engage in malgenics. It’s simply a matter of getting people to think before they make children. We should have public service announcements on radio and television explaining it to the illiterate. Signs on busses, on billboards. If you’re going to have children, you should have strong, healthy children—children you can spend time with, that you can educate and make into moral, intelligent, productive, fully developed human beings. We’re taking the opposite approach—have you ever read ‘The Marching Morons’?”

Ray shook his head.

“You should.” But instead of explicating Kornbluth’s story, she turned to her salad.

“Children used to be considered an asset,” Ray objected. “More hands to work the farm. You seem to consider them a liability.”

“Too many children certainly are a liability in an industrial society, unless you’re very wealthy. Even then it’s impossible to give them enough personal attention. Parents only have so much time.”

Ray shook his head slowly, almost sadly. “I believe God loves everyone, regardless of how smart or slow they are.”

“He has a funny way of showing it.” Meg speared lettuce with her fork. “He lets millions of His little loved ones starve to death. Others struggle their entire short, miserable lives just to scrape a little food out of the ground. Still others wallow in poverty, drugs, and crime—only to end up in prison or early graves.”

“Everyone deserves a chance. Everyone is of equal value.” Ray sounded shocked.

“You’re kidding yourself if you really think everyone is equally valuable. We are an experiment of nature, each with different abilities. We’re like seeds scattered in the wind. Some land on fertile ground, take root, and blossom. Others land in the parched desert and never even germinate. Still others might get wedged inside cracks in rocks, put out a few crippled sprouts, then wither and die—or, miraculously, bloom into healthy, gorgeous plants. Some are genetically unsound from the beginning and grow into misshapen mutants. Experiments fail. That’s nature. That’s life.”

She chewed and swallowed a bite of her salad, then continued, “Equality is the great delusion of our time. In what way are you and I equal? Strength? Certainly not. Obviously you’re bigger and stronger than I am, but I’m probably a better shot. Knowledge? No, indeed! Our life experiences have been completely different. We had different parents, different families, different innate abilities. We went to different schools, read different books, and have different friends. You know things I don’t know and vice versa. You’re male and I’m female. You’re tall and I’m short. Whatever similarities there may be between us, there are hundreds or thousands of differences. I don’t believe in equality. I believe in uniqueness!”

“But we’re all equal under the law. You do believe in that, don’t you?”

“Of course. Anything else would by tyranny. The government can’t be trusted to judge people’s innate abilities. Neither can scientists. Only nature can do that. You might say, ‘Let God sort them out.’” She shot a mischievous glance at me.

“So we should just let the sick and the old die? That’s what nature would do.”

“We’re wealthy enough as a society that we don’t have to go to extremes. Education will take us a long way. It already has in some countries, where births are below replacement levels. We don’t need government bayonets, just education, time, and will.”

Ray was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Do you believe in God? What religion are you?”

“Social Darwinist—reformed.”

Ray didn’t know what to say and Meg went back to her salad.

Finally I said, “Ray, I think I failed to introduce you. This is Megan. As you’ve gathered, she’s a very unusual person. In fact, she’d be an outlier in any demographic. We call her Red Meg around here, because, like Nature, she’s ‘red in tooth and claw.’”

Red Meg bestowed one of her man-killer smiles upon the two of us.

------------------------------

Link of possible interest:

“The Marching Morons” by Cyril M. Kornbluth – entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons

A Confederacy of Dunces

The most interesting thing about A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole is probably how the book found its way into print. Toole wrote his thick manuscript in the early 1960s, basing it in large part on his personal experiences, but could not interest a publisher. Eventually he underwent what appears to have been an emotional collapse, and in early 1969 he killed himself. In most cases, the story would have ended there; but Toole’s tenacious mother became determined to see her son’s work published. She gave a copy to renowned Southern novelist Walker Percy and imposed upon him to read it. Percy fell in love with the book and convinced a local university press to issue a small edition in 1980. A year later Toole was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Subsequently the novel was translated into eighteen languages and has sold more than a million and a half copies.

This is one of those books I’ve put off reading for years. Many people have recommended it to me, usually with the comment that they know people exactly like the characters in the book. Confederacy is also reputed to include a skewed, but dead-on depiction of New Orleans in the early ’60s.

Had not so many trusted sources spoken highly of the work, I probably wouldn’t have persevered to finish it. After a fairly strong if somewhat farcical opening chapter or two, the story becomes quite dull and repetitious for nearly three quarters of its length, only perking up again in the last quarter.

Ignatius J. Reilly, the primary character (the book has no heroes, only protagonists) is an elephantine, over-educated, egotistical, sociopathic, slovenly, unemployed thirty year old living at home with his mother. He is a fool and so is everyone with whom he interacts. The book is an overlong depiction of those interactions.

For a good part of the novel, I had the feeling that I was reading cobbled-together absurdities and caricatures. I found myself struggling to figure out just what kind of insanity Ignatius suffered from. He fit no standard diagnosis—not schizophrenia, not bipolar disorder, not clinical depression. As a result, Ignatius seemed unconvincing and I began to doubt Toole’s skill at creating believable literary characters.

I’m chastened to admit that it took me until the very last chapter, as Ignatius stands cowering and blubbering before his outraged mother, to finally diagnose him: He suffers from some form of infantilism and has the emotional development of a child. He is a spoiled brat, completely self-absorbed, with no consideration or empathy for others. (All small children are sociopaths.) He thinks like a child, concerned only about his own wants and needs, his “revenge” against those who have slighted him, and his fatuous writings and “crusades.” He is self-indulgent, cramming himself with hot dogs, confections, and his favorite soft drink, almond-flavored Dr. Nut. He scorns real women for a rubber glove. Ten years in college have not provided him adequate time to grow up. He is incapable of acting like an adult and certainly can't hold down a job in the real world.

Now that I better understand what Toole was attempting to portray, I have more respect for him as a writer. Toole’s prose is good, but there is too much of it. Through most of the novel, secondary characters say the very same things over and over again, like catch phrases, so that by midway it all becomes quite tedious. I generally dislike reading dialect, but have to admit that Toole generally succeeds in capturing the speech of some segments of New Orleans. His lack of political correctness (a concept for which no term had been coined when he wrote this) gives a refreshing freedom to the dialog.

There is a major flaw in the work (if one lets reality intrude into the often cartoonish presentation): At the end the plot hinges on a defamatory letter that leads to a threatened half-million-dollar libel lawsuit. I’m pretty sure that private, uncirculated communications are not subject to libel laws and that to libel someone, you have to publish a false accusation—that is, distribute it to multiple people, not just to the party it concerns.

It’s instructive to look at Amazon’s reader reviews. Of 976 reviewers (of an earlier edition) 653 give the book five stars and 96 give it only one. This reflects a surprising disparity of opinion, with an approximate sixty-six percent considering the book excellent and about ten percent thinking it poor.

So why should anyone read this book? A lot of readers have liked it, and you may find something in it that eluded me. It presents an interesting picture of a bygone era and some of it is quite funny. It cautions against the vagaries of literary awards and gives bittersweet hope to rejected writers everywhere. One can’t help but wonder how many dusty manuscripts lie abandoned and half-forgotten in desk drawers or on closet shelves around the world, and how many of them deserve a wider audience.
______________
Links of possible interest:

Reader Reviews at Amazon

John Kennedy Toole entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kennedy_Toole

Walker Percy entry at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Percy

Dr. Nut (local New Orleans soft drink):
http://www.angelfire.com/tn/traderz/DrNut.html

The Demise of Literary Popular Culture

“What do you think of when I say ‘science fiction’?” Van asked, looking up from what was left of his side order of fries. We call him Van because of the Van Dyke-ish beard he sports. He had a dab of ketchup oozing down it, and I gestured to him to blot his chin.

The Bullseye Café is one of my regular habitats. It conveniently occupies part of the ground floor of the peculiar apartment house where I live. Due in no small part to the efforts of its proprietress, it boasts a surprisingly literate clientèle. I’ve made quite a few friends there, many of whom share my peculiar set of interests.

It was getting late, and three of us were seated around a table in a rear corner of the room. We nearly had the place to ourselves.

“Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein,” Pops answered thoughtfully. “Maybe a few current writers, too, if I’ve read one recently.”

Pops is one of my favorite people at the Bullseye. We don’t call him Pops to his face; he’d probably be offended. I’m not sure exactly how old he is—when asked, he claims to be 107—but I’d guess he’s in his late fifties or early sixties. He manages to remain reasonably spry and mentally sharp.

“Most people wouldn’t think of writers at all,” Van continued. “They think of Star Trek and Star Wars, maybe The Twilight Zone. When they say science fiction, they mean movies or TV.”

“An awful lot of Star Trek and Star Wars books have been published,” Pops observed between sips of coffee. “We’ve had an inundation of media spinoff books.”

“But the percentage of people reading them is tiny compared to the number watching movies and television,” Van said. “Do you ever listen to Coast to Coast—the late night radio program?”

“The paranormal kook show?” Pops asked.

“I’ve heard it,” I said. “I listen occasionally. Probably more often than I should, given how late it keeps me up.”

“Then you know what it’s like,” Van went on. “A very curious sort of show. It manages to combine UFO’s, crop circles, near-death experiences, bigfoot, and a host of other claptrap with probably the best science interviews I’ve ever heard. They’ll spend three hours interviewing top-of-the-line scientists about their specialties, and unlike all the political talk shows, they don’t jump in and interrupt every few seconds. They let the guests talk.”

“What’s your point?” Pops set down his cup and leaned back in his chair.

“One of their somewhat regular guests is Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist. He’s written several books. I read Hyperspace a few years ago and it was quite interesting. He has a new book out that I want to read. However, both in his interviews and in his book, Kaku’s references are mostly to media science fiction, almost never to written science fiction. Since noticing that, I’ve started paying attention to media versus literary allusions.”

“And?”

“And it looks to me like literary allusions are becoming a thing of the past. Where someone might once have quoted Shakespeare or Dickens, or Hemingway or Steinbeck, they’ll now quote a movie or TV series.”

“Movies and TV aren't déclassé anymore,” Pops observed.

“Coast to Coast is an interesting program,” I said. “They do feature fiction writers as well. Ray Bradbury was a guest, and Dean Koontz, the suspense writer.” I paused for effect. “Lionel Fanthorpe is a regular.”

“The Lionel Fanthorpe?” Pops demanded. “The man reputed to be the world’s worst science fiction writer?”

“Himself. And he seems like a nice guy, whatever you may think of his writing or his odd Fortean beliefs,” I said. “But getting back to Van's point, quoting movies goes back quite a ways. It isn’t a recent phenomenon. Remember Reagan’s ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’?”

“Some lines are too good not to quote,” Van admitted.

“I suppose Kaku is harking back to his first experiences with certain scientific or science fictional concepts. His formative encounters. Those were Star Trek or whatever,” Pops said.

“But shouldn’t those ideas be attributed to their correct sources, which would often be literary?” Van asked. “Warp drives and matter transporters must go back to at least the ’50s in the science fiction magazines, if not the ’30s.”

Pops shrugged. “Everyone can’t know everything. What really gets me is when someone cites the History Channel or Discovery Channel as an information source.”

“Here’s a more recent example,” Van continued. “During the hearings to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the supreme court, she mentioned that her interest in the law had been sparked by watching Perry Mason on television. I found the remark interesting and read several articles and commentaries about it online. It turns out a lot of lawyers of her generation were influenced by Mason. Most of the articles didn’t even mentioned Erle Stanley Gardner. How can a writer as phenomenally successful as Gardner be forgotten so easily? He wrote nearly a hundred Perry Mason novels and was the best selling author of all time for a number of years. And yet, no mention of him. . . .”

“Well,” I said, “while I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to what you say—that movies and TV have become the primary touchstones of our culture—that’s certainly not universally true. I just read Free by Chris Anderson and happened to notice the number of science fiction books and stories he mentioned—‘The Machine Stops,’ Arthur C. Clarke, Corey Doctorow, Orwell, and others.”

“I read something online about that book. How is it?” Van asked.

“Not bad. Pretty entertaining, actually, and I learned a few things. Anderson writes well. But actually I didn’t read it. I listened to the audio book. The author did the reading, and I was quite impressed with how professional he was.”

“Perhaps we should keep in mind that popular fiction actually has a pretty short history,” Pops said after a minute or two of silent thought. “It really only started in the 1800s, with the first universal education laws coming into effect.”

“Doesn’t that leave out things like Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe?” Van asked.

“I’m sure they were popular, but they predate the explosion of popular literature. That probably began with Walter Scott and the historical novel. Waverley was published in 1814, which would have been a bit early to profit from all the new readers. By the 1830s or so everyone was learning to read, even the shop girls and stable boys. The market for fiction must have expanded enormously as a result. Popular fiction really took flight with serial writers like Dickens and Dumas in the 1840s.”

“Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter is generally considered the first historical novel,” I interjected, pleased to be able to offer a bit of erudite knowledge. “And Walter Scott was a friend of her family. Makes you wonder where he got the idea of fictionalizing history. I think you're right though, that Walter Scott probably was the first true bestselling author of popular literature. His books were enormously popular long after his death.”

“Yes. And of course the penny dreadfuls started around the 1830s,” Pops continued. “Advances in printing technology must have played a part too, making inexpensive editions possible. But the main thing was that people had limited home entertainment until the 1920s and radio. Either they sang and played their own instruments, or played games of some sort, or they read. No television. No radio. Fiction became the primary form of entertainment for perhaps five generations, say from 1830 to 1930. It managed to hang on until the mid twentieth century, when electronic entertainment went portable. Before then, books and magazines were the only entertainment you could easily take with you to the bathroom—or outhouse--or carry on the bus or train. First radio, then television, then video tape and video disks and computer games, and now computer websites, mp3 players, and Ipods all clamor for our free time, not just in the living room, but everywhere we go.

“I’m afraid written fiction may be fighting a losing battle,” he continued. “It really isn’t very surprising that the sort of literary fictional touchstones you mentioned should take second or even third place to those other forms of entertainment.”

Pops paused thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Tell me, Van, what do you think of when I say ‘a western’? John Ford or Zane Grey?”

“John Wayne,” Van admitted with a rueful grin.

***************
Links of possible interest:

Coast to Coast radio program

The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter

“The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster—online text

Erle Stanley Gardner at Wikipedia

Lionel_Fanthorpe at Wikipedia

Charles Fort at Wikipedia

Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson at Amazonand Google Books

Michio Kaku website

Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension by Michio Kaku

Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel by Michio Kaku