Cameron Bane

"I am only one, but I am one. I can't do everything, but I can do something. The something I ought to do, I can do. And by the grace of God, I will." -- Edward Everett Hale

I'm a child of the sixties/seventies (graduated HS in 1970), but it takes stuff like looking through my old annual to remind me of how utterly ridiculous the fashion sense (?) was in that benighted decade. Now that I'm an old dude past sixty, I wonder if when I'm eighty I'll likewise look at pictures of current clothing with equal horror.

 

I'm going to say yes, but qualify it with the fact that some of what today's flaming youth is sporting is downright hilarious. To wit, the blue jeans with the shortened legs, hung low so the wearer's underwear-wrapped bony hinder is paramount.

 

I see these sideways-hatted lads waddling penguin-like down the street, and two thoughts come to mind. One, I hope these kids never have to suddenly run–-say, from a cop–-because they wouldn't get two steps before doing a faceplant on the sidewalk. And two, for all their up yours, tough guy posturing, they look very much like the old "Stringbean" character from Hee Haw.

I got to thinking about movies the other day (I do that a lot), and about the market for sequels and remakes. Most films don't require a remake. Citizen Kane comes to mind, as does The Day the Earth Stood Still (although that didn't keep 'em from re-doing it … and failing miserably).

 

Sequels are bit different. A few movies--like Iron Man, the Mad Max films, and the Lethal Weapon franchise--beg for one, while others such as White Heat, Casablanca, and Red River are perfect in their singularity (yes, I know that's an astronomical term; I'm stealing it anyway).

 

And then there are the sequels that simply tick me off (I'm talking to YOU, Alien franchise). For me there are only two Alien films: the first one, and Aliens. The third installment ragged me off to no end. I simply didn't buy the fact that Newt and Hicks (and poor old Bishop) were killed of for no earthly (hah!) reason, so in my universe I changed it. Ripley made it back to Earth, she and Hicks got married, and they adopted Newt.

 

Oh yeah, they're both instructors at Starfleet Academy (I said this is my universe!), and Bishop the android is their wisecracking next-door neighbor.

 

And Vicki from Small Wonder is Newt's best pal.

 

So there.

 

 

In less than four weeks mid-term elections will be upon us, with the victors popping champagne corks while the losers eye high bridges. Lock your vaults and hide your daughters.

 

This time out it seems every politician, known and unknown, from both sides of the aisle is throwing his or her hat into the ring. Or since hats are passe, "forming exploratory committees." You know. Like a colonoscopy.

 

The run-up to these things is political Darwinism at its most elemental. "Dog eat dog" is too bland a phrase; "slash and burn" says it more plainly. And brother, does it seem to take forever, this time we're soon to enter. If farming season lasted as long we'd be harvesting green beans the size of dugout canoes. What we Americans put ourselves through every few years puts me in mind of a childhood memory.

 

When I was a boy my family would sometimes take Sunday drives. Long Sunday drives. Endless, bleak, soul-killing, waiting-for-Godot Sunday drives. There we'd be, my dad behind the wheel of our Ford Galaxy (Clark Kent hat tilted at a rakish angle), with my mom beside him. In the back seat were my little brother and yours truly.

Along about the eighteenth hour (or so it seemed) of the drive, my brother and I would grow bored, although "bored" doesn't really say it; that's like calling the firebombing of Dresden a "warmish day." Anyway, Scott would casually throw his leg over mine. I'd toss it back. He'd do it again with a bit more force. I'd toss it back. He'd stick his tongue out at me. I'd look back and pretend to eat boogers. He'd pinch me. I'd slug him. And so on.

 

The only thing that could end the fun was my dad with his eyes still on the road screaming obscenities and flailing his arm over the back of the seat, hoping to nail one of us, or both. My mom would laugh behind her hand, but I still saw it.

 

That's kind of like what election season is reminiscent of. Yeah.

We heard risk is the price you pay for opportunity. So true. 

 

What do you think?

 

 

With a shriek of tortured metal another bullet slashed by my face, tumbling end for end by the sound. Ricochet.

 

Tucking myself further back into the three-by-three steel cubbyhole at the end of the hall, not for the first time in the last ten minutes I questioned my inability to say no to pie. No doubt about it, if I got out of this alive I was going to buy a Stairmaster. Maybe two, one for each leg. In circumstances like these, inches could mean death.

 

Resisting an urge to panic, I quickly pushed it away as I glanced down and checked my weapons again. One was still hopelessly jammed, the other one empty. So much for that. I know it's weird, but rounds just don't seem to last as long as they used to; I lay the blame for that squarely at the feet of Rosie O'Donnell. It would have been sweet for a bullet fairy, Disney-like and with a soft blue neon glow, to come flitting in right about then to bring me some fresh ammunition, but truth to tell what I really needed was something with a little more authority. Like maybe a rocket launcher.

 

 

Here's an excerpt from our work-in-progress near-Earth SF novel, Full Burn.

 

Travis Walker had never seen someone dissolved alive before.

 

As an Army Ranger he'd observed men shot, stabbed, burned, drowned, garroted, crushed, and blown to flinders, but never collapsing into their primordial components while still fully conscious and aware. Given an option it wasn't something he'd care to experience again. The screams were noteworthy.

 

But he couldn't give much thought to the way the person in the softly-glowing stasis field was meeting his gruesome end as his focus right now was on the scarred, grinning, balding man slowly bobbing a large, wicked-looking Marine Corps combat knife; Travis wondered where he'd stolen it. His opponent appeared comfortable with the weapon as he made a sudden twisting lunge, going for Travis's midsection.

 

He parried the thrust with his jacket-wrapped forearm, pleased it had missed his vitals but wincing in pain as he felt the blade skitter along his rib-cage, where it opened a thin, blazing cut. The small knot of frightened observers standing close by on the cold, holiday-decked Baltimore street gasped, but none of them seem inclined to lend a hand.

 

Fleetingly Travis chided himself to stay on target as he and the killer slowly circled one another like two gladiators, each waiting for a small lapse of judgment—any opening would do—which would spell death for the other. He'd been a civilian for a few years now, presently farming a small homestead but previously putting his hand to whatever tasks required a sharp mind, quick reflexes, and a strong back, and somewhere in a preternaturally calm part of his mind he wondered how he'd ever gotten into this mess. But then again, he knew full well.

 

This is how.

Years ago when we lived in the sticks we grew our own veggies, including okra. While admittedly it's an acquired taste (the slime inside will eventually cook out), if you let the pods get no bigger than the first joint of your thumb they can add a tasty texture to soups and stews.

One summer around mid-July we had a bumper crop, and I mentioned to our two young sons that okra will get longer and more wood-like as the season goes on, soon reaching the point they become inedible. At that both my boys got the idea of letting one little okra go, just to see how long it would get.

Summer waxed and waned, and we harvested everything in that garden ... except for that mutant hell-pod. And did it change? Beyond belief. Each day it became more distended and grotesque, until I half-expected a terrified Kevin McCarthy to come up screaming and pounding on our car windows, "You're next!!"

Came October, and a couple days before a predicted killing frost, by mutual agreement we cut the thing at last. By then it was two feet long, as thick as a bratwurst, and covered with spines and knots.

We dried it, and the kids used it as a sword. Read More 

For a great piece of proto-SF, download a copy of The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. Written a hundred years before the invention of teh intertoobz, it perfectly limns a society so introverted its inhabitants can only interact with each other over television screens. And then it tells what happens when ,... well, when the machine stops. Chilling. Read More 

"All men dream, but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible."--T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom Read More