Richard L. Pastore's Blog

(But We’re Only Helping Your Royalty)

Every so often, I hear a theory on TV or in a movie that makes me cringe. The specifics vary slightly but in essence it can summed up as, “It is impossible for humans of that period to have achieved this feat, indicating they were probably helped by extraterrestrials with advanced technology.” Often this statement is applied to the precision of blocks that were used to make the pyramids (in Mexico and/or Egypt) among other so-called unexplainable ancient mysteries.

Most recently, this proposal was referring to the Peruvian pyramids and used in a 2022 series based on Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. I had a number of problems with the series, and I may have with the book as well (the only one of his I did not read), but we can push all that aside as it’s only the latest to do this in a long, long line. It irked me so much I posted a brief lampooning of it on Bluesky. Yet afterward I felt I should push that send-up a bit higher to drive the point home more strongly.

Before I do, you might wonder why this assertion bothers me so much. Is it because I don’t believe in extraterrestrials? Do I think it impossible we may have been visited by them? Do I have a better explanation? The short answer to all three is “No.” The slightly longer answers are thusly:

No. I do, in fact, believe in the possibility – more accurately, the likely probability – that life exists elsewhere in the universe and at our level of civilization or beyond. That’s just statistics. The number of worlds in the universe is mind-bogglingly large.No. It’s possible, but I believe somewhat unlikely. Again, it’s statistics, a bit of physics, and what we know so far about planets we’ve discovered within, say, 100 light years of us. Without there being faster-than-light (FTL) travel, that’s a long, long time to make a journey here. And the possibility of FTL often runs into enough of logical paradoxes to make such technology doubtful in the least. And don’t forget relativistic effects. The species that decides to make that trek at high speeds will leave their home planet ages in the past.No, I don’t have an alternative outside of telling people to stop underestimating humans. Remember these structures were built by zealous and/or enslaved people over their entire lifetimes and beyond. Plenty of time for painstaking accuracy. (Not to mention there are early pyramids which turned out poorly by comparison, clearly showing a learning progression.) There are people who attempt to recreate what humans during those times could accomplish and they often succeed. A recent example is a study and demonstration of how people could have moved and positioned the monoliths of Rapa Nui.

So, what’s really eating me over this? It’s simple. This extraterrestrial theory flies in the face of both logic and common sense. And to illustrate, allow me to entertain you with this little parody…

Lights, please.

The time is around 1500 BCE. The place is somewhere on Earth, but it could be aboard an extraterrestrial (ET) spaceship. ETs have just finished introducing themselves to at least two of the most advanced populations of that time. And the leaders of each have been brought together by the ETs, Zaga and Paru.

Zaga: Now that we have wowed you with our advanced technology, my people decided it was time to discuss what we, the Tribians, can do for you Earthlings.

Aztec King: You have shown us such wonders. Will you teach us this technology of yours?

Zaga: Nooo. I’m afraid we have this thing called a Prime Directive. Simply put, we can’t interfere with your progress.

Egyptian Pharoah: Surely, you can help us learn ways to increase our crops and manage our herds so we can avoid periods of famine.

Zaga: Yeaaah, again, that’s a no go. That could have long term consequences for your population, so we’re smack dab into Prime Directive territory.

King: Surely, some you have ways to help us when there are plagues.

Zaga: We do… but we can’t. That old Prime Directive wall. I know, it’s a bit frustrating. But we will tell you what we can do for you, and my co-presenter Paru will now have the floor.

Paru: Thank you, Zaga. Okay so first, Aztec King – love, love, love your work. Let me tell you, you have us totally hooked with your human sacrifices. Cutting beating hearts out of living people. Whoa! Talk about intense! I mean, the blood, the screams, the cheers from the crowd. The entertainment value is through the roof. But here’s the thing. We think you can do better. And here’s how. Have you ever considered…

[Paru moves to a table with two objects, each covered by a cloth sheet. With a flourish, he yanks the sheet off of one of the objects.]

Paru: …a pyramid! Now before you say anything, let me explain a few features of this baby. First thing is the intense stairs on each side. Just think of the added suspense. Some poor helpless child held down on the altar at the top, but instead of the high priest appearing from behind, he makes a slow procession of the stairway. Can you picture it? Closer and closer. Step by step. The crowds are going to go absolutely wild. And, this is where the beauty of a pyramid shape comes in. No matter where you are on the ground, you get an unobstructed view of the whole spectacle. And all of this is echoed in the tiered structure – level by level closing in on the grand finale.

[The Aztec King thoughtfully strokes his chin and then nods.]

Paru: And Pharoah, baby, sweetheart, I haven’t forgotten you. First, just a personal comment. We are beyond impressed with your whole “obsession with death” thing you’ve got going. I mean, you’re thinking big picture. You know, the what happens next vibes. Very philosophical. Hey, big guy, I know you’ve got the giant question weighing on you every day: How can I get my people to spend their lives preparing me for an afterlife they can never even hope to attain? Am I right? I get you. There’s just so much mileage you can get from flaunting your power and wealth over common people while you’re alive. Why not extend it for eternity after death. And so for you, we have this…

[Paru yanks the sheet off the second model to reveal a smooth version of a pyramid.]

Paru: Feast your eyes on this model: the pyramid-shaped tomb.  Streamlined. It screams here’s someone who’s on the fast track to the highest heights of the great beyond. And did I mention this enormous structure is just for one person. That’s right, all of this just for you and you alone. You’ll be buried in comfort, style, and luxury in the biggest building imaginable. How’s that for a “so long, suckers” parting shot? But there’s more. This model also comes with an optional limestone coating. I know people may tell you the coating isn’t worth it but trust me, once it’s on you’re going to personally thank me.

Pharoah: You have me convinced, but not yet sold. I know my craftsmen, and this is beyond what they can accomplish.

King: I was thinking the same thing. All those tiers. The accuracy. The scale. I just can’t see how it will end up looking as good as your model.

Paru: And that’s where we come in. You mine the stone and we’ll just float it over to the job site. Then we’ll have our top stonemasons equipped with the latest laser cutters carve your stone into incredibly accurate blocks. After that, it’s just a matter of your people spending a lifetime or two to fit them into place. And just to sweeten the deal, we’re giving you both an incredible warranty. These babies are guaranteed to last a millennium – maintenance free.

Pharoah: Sold.

King: When can we get started?

And… scene.

I had a blast doing this. So – much – fun.

Here’s the YouTube link:

Wed, Oct 15 I will be doing a live interview on Booked!
(10am Central, 11am Eastern, 4:00PM GMT).

The second half focuses on audience Q&A. If you can attend, feel free to pelt me with questions. Ask anything! If I don’t know the answer, I’ll just make something up.

To join, use this YouTube link:

I’ve spend a good portion of my waking hours observing nature – all of it: fauna, flora, and humans. Most of the time this is done subconsciously. I seem to have been born with some tools making me predisposed to this, although I’m not completely certain what those tools are. I’m reasonably certain two play a significant factor. I lucked out with greater than average vision and I have a prewired sensitivity to patterns, especially when something doesn’t fit. Sometimes, I get the “something isn’t quite right here feeling” that could make me a candidate as an Agatha Christie sleuth. Consciously though, I am curious about specific aspects of natural behaviors and one of those is the behaviors of birds.

I find birds fascinating, not so much for what they do, but more so in how they differ from the conceptions we have of them, even in scientific studies. I believe there’s a tendency to think of birds as closer to us than they really are. I mean, the dinosaurs died out and that led to the rise of birds and mammals, right? So we’ve been growing together for the last 66 million years. And look at how their best and brightest have behaviors so like us: crows using tools, parrots reasoning and talking, magpies counting. Why, they’re kind of like our close cousins. But they’re not. Nope. If an octopus could read this, I bet it would chuckle knowingly.

You see, birds separated from us a long, long, long, looooong, time ago. Mammals (specifically, early mammal-like animals) branched off from the reptiles some 310 million years ago. The reptiles went on to diverge giving rise to dinosaurs some 240 million years ago and around 80 million years after that, early birds appeared. But I want to focus on that first point in time. The proto mammals are called synapsids and the line leading years later to dinosaurs then birds are called sauropsids. And that synapsid / sauropsid split was the last time you could consider us “cousins”. In fact, birds are more closely related to snakes than us. Ever watch birds eat? It looks more reptilian than our chewing. A hell of a lot happened to us between then and now.

So what we witness in respect to avian intelligence is best thought of as convergent evolution. This is when two completely different species develop a common solution to environmental conditions. Dolphins’ and Ichthyosaurs’ body forms are classic examples. We may recognize behaviors and think kinship, but we merely hold up mirrors to ourselves. Those behaviors may be the same outwardly, but the clockwork underneath can be very different.

Now for me, that separation is all levels of awesome. It means if you are fortunate to intellectually connect somehow with a bird then, despite the likely misrepresentations by both parties, you are connecting across an immense gap. That’s why I mentioned the octopus. They’re quite intelligent. Exceptionally different underlying structure, but similar thought processes emerge. So where this rambling preamble is leading is simply to make you aware of how alien birds are to us while being, at times, incredibly familiar.

I’ve happily had more free time in the last few years to make more focused observations of the behaviors of birds in my area and here are three observations you may or may not find interesting.

One: Birds of Different Feathers Flock Together.Left to right, a red-bellied woodpecker, red-winged blackbird, and a blue jay

The image above is a composite of three photos I took on a rainy winter’s day. All three birds were in my sizable fig tree as they were communally keeping tabs on each other. During winter months I observe certain species watching and learning from each other. In this case, the blue jay is one of a group of five who will look for food together and keep a watch for predators together. However, there are a few other species I’ve observed traveling and working with that group, notably three woodpeckers (a red-belly pair and a hairy woodpecker), a redwing and two cardinals. Other cardinals show up with sparrows and finches, but these two are not transient like those are. More on “my” cardinals later. The main point is that these different species adapt a more communal strategy to survive winter. Once times are plentiful, they will stake out claims and compete with each other.

Now seeing this group dynamic is a bit interesting, but what elevates it to fascinating is the learning transfer that occurs almost to the point of imprinting in the case of the blue jays. This particular group of blue jays knows me very well and has been here for years. I will, especially when temps drop below freezing, throw out some in-shell peanuts and other bird seed for them. The red-bellied woodpecker and the redwing will also grab the peanuts and, only during winter, follow the blue jays lead and will look for and not fear my presence. They learned that by watching the jays and picking up their cues. But here’s the twist. There is another group of four jays that will sometimes be with “my” five. However, this group hangs out with exceptionally skittish grackles and starlings. So when I go out with some food, they fly off in panic. It amazes me they’ll keep to the rules of their non-species buddies rather than learn from their own species and this behavioral difference between the two blue jay groups maintains throughout the rest of the year.

Two: I’m Doing the Best I Can with the Tools I’ve GotA northern cardinal

The particular behavior exhibited by this cardinal amazes me because it illustrates my earlier point of how the internal clockwork of their thought processes is different from ours. This cardinal and its mate have known me for at least three years. I give the female credit with recognizing me as not a threat and a treat source first. I’ll throw them shelled peanuts. By the way, the reason I’m using shelled and un-shelled peanuts is because it’s easy for me to limit and direct who gets the treats. If I indiscriminately put out bird seed a grackle or a starling will show up and each will then invite 50 of their closest friends to join in.

Anyway, have you ever heard a male northern cardinal’s call during mating season? Close up? It’s LOUD. Not unpleasant, just LOUD. Look it up if you haven’t. The source in that link is from a distance. The rest of the year, they limit themselves, male and female, to quiet high-pitched singular cheeps. So here’s where it gets interesting.

As I mentioned, the blue jays and cardinals know me well. If they spot me inside, they’ll look in to observe and if they’re hoping for a treat, they’ll try to get my attention. In late spring once it’s warm enough for me to keep my back doors open, they will wait in the nearby fig tree. When they’re really hungry, they’ll make calls. The blue jays have a variety and which one they opt to use seems to be based on individual preference. But the male cardinal will perch on the branch closest to the door, face towards my house then use its mating call and I can hear that even if I’m out at the supermarket doing food shopping. But here’s the neat thing, it only uses that call during mating season. The rest of the time it’s frustratingly stuck using the hard-to-hear cheep. It seems like some internal process shuts down the use of that call and he loses the ability to leverage it as a call for food. There’s your window into a different thought process.

Three: The Ugly DucksA pair of mallard ducks

Okay, I have to forewarn you this one is a bit of a downer and rather disturbing. I know it upset me. So, if you want, you can abandon here. That’s okay.

Many of us are familiar with the mallard ducks. Their range spreads across the northern hemisphere and even dips down to parts of Africa. They, along with geese, swans, eagles, puffins and a few others, are notable example of birds who mate for life. One of the most common idyllic sights I have during summer is a pair of mallards making their way down the canal with ducklings in tow. And I have to stress this is the most common mallard behavior I’ve seen during summer over the 25 years I’ve lived here. But on three occasions I have witness a behavior which was far from idyllic. All three were variants of same scenario with similar outcomes, but the worst was two years ago.

Working in the yard I was distracted by frenzied duck squawking. When I glanced up, I saw a female with five ducklings in tow. All were quacking loudly. Diving in from different angles were three different males. At first I thought some other predator was near, but one of the males flew straight for the female in an attempt to mate with her. She fought him briefly than flew forward several yards only to have another male make the same attempt. Again a brief fight and flight, this time out of the canal and onto a neighbors property. The three males repeatedly harassed her, zigzagging across this canal and over to the next as her ducklings vainly attempted to determine where she was in order to follow and they began to separate. Once a male succeeded in mating, it left leaving the other two to continue. This entire scene went on for about 20 minutes until she and the last remaining male disappeared. By that point there were only two frantic ducklings visible in the canal. The others had scattered losing their way and their mother.

As I said, it was disturbing. I felt awful for the ducklings and their mom. The similar event this year involved a lone female but no ducklings were present. In all my years watching nature shows, I’ve never seen this representation depicted in mallards. I’ve seen males competing and fighting with each other both here and in the documentaries, but always with a peaceful resolution where the couple then remain together for life. Again, it just illustrates how we sometimes impute human-based ideals on animal behavior and then take that linkage for granted, ignoring the outliers which are part of another species repertoire.

[All photos in this post are copyrighted by Richard L. Pastore 2025 and may not be distributed, nor used for AI training without the express permission of the photographer.]

There’s a lot of buzz on Bluesky the last couple of days referring to an article and search tool published by The Atlantic. In brief, there is a site, LibGen, which has pirated over 7.5 million books and research articles. It is not the only pirating site out there, but what bubbled this one to the surface is that Meta and other AI companies have used this site for AI training, in part or fully. Rather than duplicated one author’s summary (Jason Sanford) and a useful post from an advocacy group (The Author’s Guild), I will be adding the Bluesky and The Author’s Guild links to these below. You don’t need to be part of Bluesky to view Jason’s. And I should note, he is one of many author’s posting on this topic. I found his thread to have additional useful information. In addition, the article referred to in their links is behind a paywall, but The Atlantic allows viewing and use of the LibGen search box portion of said article.

If you’ve been following the topic in the news, a number of AI training companies have been lobbying governments around the world to loosen or abandon copyright laws around printed and artistic (e.g. photography and artwork) materials. Sam Altman, creator of ChatGPT, which has confirmed plans to move to a pay for use model, has repeatedly stated that his program will not be able to make a profit should existing laws remain as they are. In essence asking for theft to be allowable so he can make money. Other companies, including Meta, have been slightly less obvious as to their core motivation by pointing to countries like China who consistently ignore copyright rules and are thereby beating “us” in the AI race.

On that last point… Look, you will probably make a successful case with me regarding the importance of AI in fields such as scientific advancement, national security, and technological achievement, but you will not succeed when it comes to the applications which these companies are aggressively promulgating for profit. Specifically, the purchasing of apps and services to generate books, artwork, and music; or handholding a user writing an email or Twitter post.

As Sanford mentions, last year Meta posted a profit of $62 billion, yet claim that the cost of paying for rights would be prohibitive. Bear in mind also, that $62 billion is current profit, not the expected gains over time for use of their AI tools after their rollout. And if anyone wishes to check out the range of user output from one paid for app, I suggest you search on what people have done with the pay-for-use tool, Grok, much of which can be rated at the cesspool level. And when you do, remind yourselves that this is the kind of output that we are “loosing the race in.”

The links are as follows:

Jason Sanford’s Bluesky post (containing The Atlantic’s article and search tool): https://bsky.app/profile/jasonsanford.bsky.social/post/3lkte7equxc2s

The Author’s Guild response on their site: https://authorsguild.org/news/meta-libgen-ai-training-book-heist-what-authors-need-to-know/

We’ve been hearing probably more than we stomach about AI lately, so I figured it’s the perfect time for a pest like me to add my voice to the cacophony. And, while my title relies on an overused cheeky application derived from the classic 1966 Sergio Leone film, I feel it well warranted here. But before diving into my tripartite opinion, I’d like to start with some personal history.

AI & Me, a Like Story

I first became aware of work on Artificial Intelligence during my time in graduate school (1982-85). I was pursuing a degree in the field of Cognitive Psychology with a focus on problem-solving. At the time, AI was being revived from a couple of decades of dormancy primarily due to the growing ubiquity and computational power of computers. My goal was to study the cognitive underpinnings of problem solving using learning by metaphor. For example, at the time it was common to teach that the atom was somewhat like a solar system, giving students a recognizable model to adapt from. My research led me to have some fascinating discussions with grad students in computer science leading me to consider a joint project across the two fields. That’s when I came up to speed regarding AI and was captivated. In the end, I tossed it all aside for a job paying good money (a story for another day).

However, that was not my last waltz with AI. I returned to graduate school while working full-time (another story for yet another day), this time in the cognitive field of speech production and speech recognition. My mentor had written a study showing people can detect if speakers were smiling (without the emotional component) while listening to recorded speech samples. It boils down to facial expressions morphing our vocal apparatus which result in auditory changes to phonemes. I managed to mimic that effect in computer generated speech. Fun stuff, right? Anyway, another graduate student in computer science was interested in my work and wanted to ‘teach’ his neural net-based computer model. So my knowledge of AI broaden and I was again fascinated with the AI field due to this new angle.

All of this to say that, from the outset, I was very interested in and felt positive towards AI.

The Good

While maintaining a steady growth curve of advances, the last decade has seen AI catapulted into the public consciousness as never before. From my point of view, this isn’t due to any earth-shattering advancement in technology, so much as a shift in the goals of its use – and I’ll leave the discussion of use for the Bad and Ugly parts.

So let me make a brief list of some of the many areas AI has been used for, which are separate from this relatively recent shift. These applications went mostly unrecognized by the general population, occasionally popping up as small items on slow news days. AI had been leveraged in almost all branches of the sciences, often with highly positive impact. AI has been trained to recognize toxic chemicals on a molecular level, predict tumor-killing cells, design new drug candidate treatments for cancer and Parkinson’s, improve crop rotation schedule for increased sustainability, aid in discovering new synthetic materials, reveal structures in astronomical phenomena such as black holes, assist in answering complex mathematical problems, predict geological fault slips, facilitate both motor movements and neural receptors for prosthetic devices, and – best of all – decode dog vocalizations. (Regarding this last item, there’s a Far Side cartoon depicting a scientist decoding dog barks – all the dog’s in the neighborhood are shouting, “Hey!”)

Remember that preceding list of work in the sciences is far from exhaustive, but I think you can readily see in those fields AI is a formidable tool. And here’s where I’d like to point out a commonality in that list: AI is being used as a tool for people in the field, not replacing them. No one is being told to clear out their cryogenic chambers because their job can be done better – sorry, more cheaply – by an AI application. AI, here, is playing the same role microscopes, calculators, Bunsen burners, computers, and Igors which scientists have relied on to further their understanding of the universe. So AI good, Frankenstein’s creation, Now if only that were true across the board.

The Bad

Using data scraped from the web, AI apps were created with a predominant purpose to replace people in the creative fields. Look, it’s a good day when I can draw a reasonably decent stick figure. I have to rely on digital tools to help me create graphics and such. So I understand the appeal. Being able to say, “Make me a painting where pigs with wings are migrating north over Iowan cornfields in the style of Edward Hopper,” and nearly instantly having a professional-looking poster of said porcine tableau is undeniably cool, despite some of the pigs having more than four hooves. I can probably Photoshop that out. So, it’s difficult for me to fault the users. However, the companies behind these apps are well deserving of my scorn.

The first thing that riles me is the insulting disparity between the targets or these apps when compared to the prevalent business biases against them. The targets I’m specifically referring to are those people in the arts. And to ensure it’s understood I mean this across all of the arts, I’ll use the term creatives. I’m not fond of the term, but using artists tends to conjure images of those using a medium such as paint. So we’re talking, currently, about anyone working in a field with output that can be rendered digitally. So writers, artists, musicians, singers, animators, actors, fashion designers, etc. I also specified currently, because if you consider 3-D printers, add modelers and sculptors to a degree; and I might also say, architects are on the horizon as well.

The discrepancy I refer to is this: The artistic fields targeted by the creators of these apps are the same ones that are grossly underfunded and often ridiculed as career choices. The truth is, for the rank and file creatives, these fields are most certainly are not lucrative ones. That’s always been the case, but the combination of ridicule and educational defunding while these are the first fields targeted to make millions through job replacement is beyond insulting and demeaning. This process will make creatives a rarity. I’d like to point out, historically, when dictatorial regimes took power, the first groups they targeted were the creatives and intellects – the ones who help people’s minds expand and grow in unexpected ways. I’m not insinuating by any means this is the goal, but I am saying the end state of a population’s stunted mental growth is the same.

Also Bad, is the corporate attitude for AI. I firmly believe, both from personal experience and following major corporate decisions, the people at the highest levels in any given company (say, at least 90%) lack vision, creativity, and above average intelligence. Ironically, if anyone took the time to study exactly what they do, they’d be prime candidates to be replaced by AI – how’s that for cost savings? I am sure you’ve noticed what happens in the movie industry when someone creates a unique breakout hit often after struggling to find a single company willing to take a risk. Soon, other companies’ uninspired, dullard leadership pushes the button to the conveyor belt of clones and sequels and clone sequels. I see that happening now with the AI apps. It’s the big, hot corporate thing now, so they are going to do their best to cram it into everything they have. It doesn’t matter if it’s useful, people want it, or will lead to earnings growth, while the rest of us are left wondering, “Who asked for this?”

The last Bad thing I want to touch on is a late addition. I saw an ad for an app which basically dumbs down books for the readers by simplifying the text. While I cannot stop cringing over this and revolt at the aspect of what that entails, I will avoid passing judgement. My experience is when such things are introduced, should they flourish, it’s always a mixed bag of positives and negatives when viewed in hindsight. I can’t help wondering though, how untextured our speech would become if the conduit of literary quotes transformed into daily sayings and catchphrases were suddenly cut off. I try to avoid being the “in my day” guy, unless it’s funny.

The Ugly

There are two parts to The Ugly, the beginning and the end.

In the beginning, the apps I’ve alluded to in The Bad, were trained on data, often unfiltered, stolen, and lifted without permission of the creator, and has led to output which has been plagiaristic, biased, and racist. (Seriously, if you scrape the internet how could you not consider the sewer-level dregs you’d be swallowing?). On the plagiaristic note, I’ve had arguments online with so-called tech-bros. All of them spout the same twisted legalistic logic protecting the founders’ immoral choices for training materials. “If the source material was taken from a pirated site, well, company XYZ didn’t steal it – the information is now in the public view.” Apparently, the crime of receiving stolen goods is not a thing anymore. Or, “this is no different than a songwriter or a musician being inspired by another artist’s work.” Intentionally copying is not inspiration. And here’s the point I usually hit back with that strips away to the root: Why don’t these AI apps use source material from a paid creative? You know, hire people. Simple. The AI companies want fast and cheap (a.k.a. free) and don’t care how they get it. Make the millions first, then use some of that to pay for lawyers. After all, how would a creative (like an indie author, for example) earning a pittance be able to fight back legally? It was never about public domain or giving people tools to create, it was and is about stealing from people as an easy way to make millions.

Part two is the end and that has me a bit unsettled. I’ve focused on the arts, but AI is making rapid inroads into may other fields including programming, customer service, quality control, etc. The reason for this speed isn’t great leaps in technology, it’s because the output doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be good enough and often the good enough bar is pretty low. (Remember our overly hooved flying pigs.) Having a problematic AI program is usually far, far less expensive than paying for salaried employees along with their overhead.

So what concerns me is the potential for a tsunami of unemployment. In the past when technological leaps targeted workers, it was often in a limited field. And I don’t want to minimize the suffering those job losses caused, but when considering society broadly the hits were eventually absorbed as, theoretically, new fields opened up. But now we’re looking at broad job losses and AI itself in the corporate world doesn’t generate new jobs. What concerns me isn’t whether or not this can be halted or slowed, but that no one – to the best of my knowledge – is talking about contingency plans. I’m a firm believer in disaster planning and I’m not seeing it here.

Afterthought

You know which TV Sci-Fi series I enjoyed watching when it was first released? Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG, as they call it). The future human society will no longer be preoccupied with making money. Money will no longer exist. Individuals will focus on the betterment of themselves. I mean, that is the utopian dream, isn’t it? The underlying assumption is technology – AI, robotics, advances in physics, biology, etc. – would bring this about. I can certainly buy into that. But now I keep puzzling over one thing: How do we get there? How is the transition made from people needing to work to support themselves to people no longer needing to work? If there is a future where technology can do everything we want it to do for us, how does a planet of 8 billion or more working people make that change in economic terms?

And that brings me to my fellow authors and readers. Do any of you know of anybody, in either fiction or nonfiction, who is getting the conversation started for the everyday details regarding going from where we are to a utopian future? All I’ve ever read to date is what technology will do, not what the people, governments and other institutions involved during the transition need to do. And I feel the focus needs to be more on the here and now. Start with the premise that AI in 20 years will have the capacity (used or not) to replace 85% of the non-manual work force (potentially expand it to include a large percentage of the manual workforce if adding robotic AI). I sincerely believe we need to address this now because even if laws are in place, there is no guarantee that those laws will hold and what the impact of non-participating countries might be.

Okay, so now that I’ve ranted I feel better.

Or do I?

I’m not a big user of most social media apps, but I did settle into Twitter back in 2016, primarily to connect with other independent authors. To this day, I find the community exceptionally supportive and positive – an anomaly, but that’s another story for another day. From that time, I managed to follow and be followed by a few thousand authors. While it’s nearly impossible to interact with all of them, I do take some time to scroll through the feeds and give a like to some of their posts. Of course, as many of you can relate, there are nested spheres of people whom you end up interacting with more and more. Those individuals end up on my timeline more frequently and that provides me with a window for more detailed interactions.

Over the years, I’ve been very supportive of my fellow authors, anything from liking posts as a way to support their announced words per day accomplishments, to retweeting their new book releases along with signing and/or media events, to congratulating them on a host of milestones such as signing with a publisher or releasing a new book. In all cases, I know how important it is to receive encouragement at every stage of the process. Being an author can be extremely frustrating and your ego will take quite a bashing from time to time.

And that brings me to this little rant. When I decided to publish my first book, I took a very practical view of my life at that time. I had to consider exactly what I wanted to put into – and get out of – this endeavor. Given my phase of life (56 at the time) and the fact that my primary motivation is to share my tales in the hopes that they might brighten someone’s day (meaning, definitely not doing it for the money), I opted to become an independent author and investigated the options.

I’m not going to delve into my past research into independent publishing as it was a very different world back in the day, filled with shady characters. However, in 2016 I was surprised to find options which were as simple as sign-up, click, publish. One of those options was a company called CreateSpace, eventually subsumed by Amazon. And therein lies the problem.

A number of my fellow authors have been quite vocal regarding their hatred of Amazon, and I not only have no issue with this but can easily understand their point of view. So I’m fine with someone not wanting to buy my book because it in some way supports a company they view as evil. Please don’t. I make similar purchasing choices based on my personal views. That’s one of the few strengths we have as customers. In fact, I’ve also made my books available in other outlets which artificially raises their prices across the board – something I strongly prefer to avoid – primarily to give people who do not wish to support Amazon other alternatives.

What has been exceptionally distressing has been the public shaming and vitriol (by a small number) directed at authors, such as myself, who opted for the Amazon route. It’s exceptionally disheartening when I’ve done my best to be supportive of these very same authors. Actually, it’s quite hurtful.

It’s also a bit hypocritical. As I stated and wish to emphasize, we all should be free to take any factors into account when deciding what we wish to buy and to declare our opinions on this; but publicly shaming other authors is a bit elitist and self-centered to say the least. I would like to ask these people, do you believe the companies who made the car you chose to drive, the gas you chose to use, the clothes you chose to wear, the games you chose to play, the food you chose to eat, heck – the social media platform you chose to post this on, are all out there doing god’s work? Are these companies paragons of virtue whose business practices have been spotless? You decided to draw a line with the company hosting my books and that’s your prerogative, but consider your other life choices before throwing stones at other authors.

Being supportive means building others up and not ripping them down. We’re human. We’re engaged in a difficult field. We could all use the support. Driving your fellow supporters away won’t help you in the end.

In a recent edition of Writers Supporting Writers (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0VZVOXs9QU), we were discussing a process proposed by a script writer. Overall, our group doesn’t believe in any flat formulae for writing, but there were some merits in the proposal that I could relate to in my own (non-script) writing experience. Specifically, I have a process I will resort to when confronted with a complex action scene, or any scene where I feel a passage isn’t capturing the physical flow of the characters.

Often, when I reach a point where I have multiple characters interacting and moving through a specific location, I will just plow through. However, there are times where I will either be very disappointed with the final product, or I will reach an impasse where I fell like I’m mired in complexity. When I reach such moments, the first thing I will do is step back and shift into a more visual approach.

Set Your Stage

Step one is to set the stage. I picture the basic elements of the location as best I can in my mind. If I had the ability to draw or rapidly prototype a layout on a PC I would. The key, at this initial point, is to get a feel for the full space along with the placement of major objects within it. I don’t know. Is this a mental diorama? Whatever, it’s my theater stage. Next step is to place the characters at their starting points. I should point out that this is a broad stroke step. Could there be other characters and/or objects than the primary ones. Sure, but let’s leave them for the retakes and on-the-spot refinements.

Create Your Basic Scenes Based on Points of View

Okay, so our stage is set. Next, we need to create the action scene which will take us from the initial state to the end-goal state – say for example, only two characters who are tied to a post are left with the Ark of the Covenant once again closed. For this task, I’m fortunate to be a very visual thinker. I can play parts of the scene in my mind as if I’m watching a movie; but I’m still going to need to knit those scenes together. So I will focus on the actions from one character’s point of view, then another, and another and so on. I do this until I reach the end state and I know where all of the major players (who have not melted) are, jotting notes and making scribbles along the way so I don’t forget what I envisioned for each.

Now comes the tough part. How do I take these separate threads of sequences and weave them into a single narrative? I struggled with this early on in my writing. Sometimes I’d stumble on a reasonable outcome, but mostly the final products were better than before but still clumsy, often unnecessarily descriptive and wordy. What to do? I have an unknown friend to thank, because ages ago someone made a suggestion to me while we were discussing a completely separate topic. It had to ruminate a while and resurface long after the suggester had vanished from memory (sorry!). His comments focused on the difficulty artists encounter in crafting comic books.

Get Out of the Box

Now for those of you who have them, I ask you to temporarily (preferably permanently) place aside your biases regarding comic books. Remember that at heart you have two (at minimum) creatives – a writer and an artist – attempting to tell a visual story within the confines of a physically limited, dialogue-based, episodic format that needs to appeal to the widest range of ages possible. It’s a feat, that when pulled off properly, I am in awe of. Imagine for a moment you are an artist. The writer tells you the scene: Hero A and Hero B are fighting nine thugs in an alley. The writer generally describes the scene informs you to leverage as much of the physical elements with parkour-based movements and also provides you with the dialogue as it currently stands. Your job is to translate that into a set of individual panels that will need to elicit a sense of movement and pacing while fluidly shifting focus between Hero A and B as their dialog shifts – preferably within one page. All of this and you haven’t even factored in your own artistic style and perspectives yet. But this is what they do.

So off I went and purchased a few comic books that had the same characters I enjoyed as a child, but now viewing them from a creative perspective. I didn’t care about the plot. I focused on the scenes involving complex interactions. Sure, there are a number of visual tricks one can employ with panels, but as I stepped back, I could see how they approached the problem at hand. I’m certain this is how a director’s mind works at the most basic level, but it was quite a useful learning experience for me as a writer of short-stories and novels. I could see how the key points of action were front and center in each panel and how the dialog provided a mechanism, when needed, to shift perspective.

Connect the Dots into One Timeline

Returning to my set of threads, I was able to pick a point on one, connect to a point further along on another and so on until I had a very clear little movie scene in my mind. Yes, many details ended up deleted, but that’s a good thing. Remember, that you’re trying to take complexity and distill it down to a single simple narrative. Keep those threads handy though, we still have a couple of steps to go, but the more difficult steps are done.

Now, We Can Go Back to Writing

So now we have a single visual flow of the scene. Next step, I write it. I have less to describe and less to worry about. Things are happening off-screen, but not the essential, single timeline elements. Once written, I read it through and focus on pacing. Is it still too dense? (Hopefully not) Does it dwell on one moment by zipping past others? I can tell you that with practice, you’ll eventually find your first cut lacking these issues. Perhaps, it may be a bit staccato or lacking some punch, but you’re a writer – you’re back in your home element and you have a number of options at hand. You can relook at sections of threads you cut and maybe add one quick back and forth. But most likely, you’ll be looking to fill out your stage elements with additional props. Maybe a falling bowl of petunias can add just the right amount of levity for a comedic scene. Also, the reverse is true. Now that you know the entire mini-movie, you can eliminate anything that doesn’t move the story along and keep the pacing fresh and taut.

Final Thoughts

As I mentioned, I don’t do this often – mostly when I’m stuck or tired of cat wrangling my thoughts. There have been times, however, when I employed this technique in an otherwise simple scene. In our video discussion, I brought to mind a short story I had written that started with a relatively animated scene: a couple were splitting up and having a final discussion which was relatively civilized yet somewhat acrimonious. The two were moving through the rooms of the apartment as the person leaving was collecting the last of her things. On the first write I felt it was significantly lacking in flow and tempo, and that left some of the more humorous dialogue feeling flat. They went from room to room talking and it ended with the apartment door closing. So, I decided to map it out as an action scene. Suddenly, furniture and objects were there to navigate around or manipulate if I needed to. The best part, as the writer, was the last moment as they stood at the open doorway. She made a last check of the items in her bag, offered up some positive words, then left – closing the door behind her. But here was the sweet thing. Now, I had him standing right there, in my mind’s eye, with the room’s entire layout – never described but present if needed – and I had him perform one simple action: he reached up and locked the deadbolt. That moment defined, for me, exactly what was in his mind and changed the tone and actions I had initially planned for him. She was done – that was obviously written – but he was just as done. See, know your stage.

I wrote this around 40 years ago and decided to spruce it up (solely to refresh a few dated references) and post it here for you.

This one goes out to all the people who are the victims of easy gift giving – you know, when the people you know latch on to one thing you like and make that the sole scope of every gift you receive. This happened to me in my early twenties after I made an off-hand remark about liking penguins. Took four years to squash the penguin-themed gift giving.

The Collection

Helen’s friend Sandy squinted as she studied the details of a tiny porcelain duck. This miniature was one of a set of sixteen different animals Helen had purchased from a website which touted them as a limited edition set, each one a faithful reproduction of a handcrafted original. She received one animal every other month at the low price of only $24.95 plus shipping and handling, so that after nearly three years Helen’s set was finally complete. The last one, a Shetland pony, had just arrived and Helen had deemed it time to unveil the collection to her other twelve year-old buddies: Sandy, Lisa, and Robin.

“Helen,” Lisa said breathlessly, breaking the awe-filled silence, “these are so great. In fact, they’re greater than great.”

“They’re, like, totally great,” added Robin definitively.

“Hey, I didn’t know you liked ducks,” Sandy said, finally ending her fixation on the ceramic replica of a Mallard.

“Oh, ducks are okay, I guess,” Helen answered, not quite sure what to say.

Lisa cut in. “Helen, how ever did you keep these a secret?”

“Yeah,” added Robin, “how long has this been going on?”

“Actually, I think a duck collection would be rather cool,” threw in Sandy.

Helen didn’t know exactly how to respond to this last comment. I wish she’d drop the stupid ducks. Doesn’t she realize this is about the whole collection? What’s her problem? Well sorry, everything just can’t be about Sandy, Sandy, Sandy, she thought, and took the easy way out by ignoring both Sandy and her non-sequiturs. Answering her two other friends, she said “Almost three years, and there were a gazillion times that I wanted to burst out and tell you.”

And so, as weeks passed, Helen continued to garner many “oohs” and “ahs” from her sundry acquaintances over her figurines. Enough, in fact, that she soon lost interest in the miniatures. When her thirteenth birthday arrived she did pretty well, receiving most of the items she hoped for. There was, however, one awkward moment when she opened Sandy’s gift, revealing it to be a large ceramic duck.

During the moment’s hesitation as Helen groped for a reaction, Sandy jumped in, “It’s a duck… To go with your other duck.” Immediately, Helen remembered her collection of miniatures and suddenly this gift seemed to make sense. Unlike her figurines, this one was rather cheap-looking. Its design was cartoonish, with big rolling eyes, a bright orange beak, and a body colored in what could only be called ‘plastic yellow’. This thing was not only five times the size of her other miniatures, but it also sported a blue and white sailor’s cap. Looking up at all the people at her party, with their smile-frozen faces, Helen felt trapped by convention and responded in an appropriately graceful manner, “Oh, thanks so much Sandy! I’m sure it’ll look great with the other pieces.” She leaned forward to give Sandy a peck on the cheek, but as she sunk back into her chair, her eyes caught the hideous yellow thing once more. Ugh, I’m going to have to keep that thing on my shelf in case Sandy ever drops over, she realized. Before she moved on to the next present, she placed the duck back into its white box and closed the cover.

When Christmas arrived, Helen was rather surprised to find a plush toy duck, with a bright red bow tied around its neck, sitting amongst her gifts.

“Don’t you think it’s just the most adorable thing,” said her mother, who seemed to come from nowhere. When her daughter didn’t respond immediately, she continued. “You do like ducks, don’t you? I mean, I saw the two you have on your shelf.”

Helen thought about this for a moment. Do I like ducks? Well, I don’t hate them, but then I’m not particularly fond about them. She was about to relay these thoughts but noticed how happy her mother seemed. Well, she means well, and it is Christmas. I should be content with what I get no matter what it is, she reasoned.

“Of course I like it mother. It’s adorable.”

By the end of the next year she surveyed her new collection among the old. There was the original hand crafted duck, the yellow atrocity that Sandy gave her, a rubber ducky – the new atrocity – the plush Christmas duck, a plastic Daffy Duck, a plush Donald Duck, and a monstrous cookie jar duck.

Over the next eight years, Helen’s family relocated three times. The first two were a direct result of her father’s mid-life crisis, as he changed careers twice in one year. Along the way, Helen made new friends and lost track of old ones, yet her duck collection steadily increased. There were three from Timmy, her first crush, five from Pam her best

friend in high school, and the yearly contributions from family members. She had amassed so many in college that her dorm room was nicknamed “The Duck Pond”. In all these years she never bought one, she never asked for one, and she never really wanted one. She had, though, allowed herself to be brainwashed into believing she liked them. Indeed, they even helped her land a man she had her eye on for the entire semester.

One sunny afternoon the dark-eyed Robert, who sent shivers down Helen’s back every time he read his poetry, offered to walk her back to her dorm. When he entered the room, he was amazed not just in the shear number of ducks, but in the variety of materials. There were plush ducks, ceramic ducks, stone ducks, plastic ducks, rubber ducks, wooden ducks, pictures of ducks, news items about ducks, headlines with the word ‘duck’, paintings of duck, tiles with ducks and duck portraits made of tiles, wind-up ducks, books about ducks, a copy of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck”, cartoons and comics with ducks, a movie poster for “Howard the Duck”, and ties, blouses, sheets, pillowcases, blankets, and towels emblazoned with ducks.

“Man,” he said as he eyed the collection, ” you really love ducks don’t you?”

She suddenly felt like a geek in front of the eternally cool Robert.  Damn! He must think you’re some maladjusted woman who never grew up. Better be nonchalant. “Actually, I couldn’t possibly care less about them,” she said as she ran a finger down the spine of her copy of Leaves of Grass.

“You mean, you have all these ducks and you don’t even like them.”

“No,” and here she took a leap and hoped it wouldn’t sound too pretentious, “it’s a personal statement about counter-culture – being lost in the sameness of everything. I’m sorry if that sounds weird.”

“Don’t apologize. I think that’s really inspired.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, impressively so. Like, what can an original mind offer in a world of commercialism; and a disdain for the trappings of modern man’s desire to aggregate things of little or no value.”

She semi-faked shock and blurted out “Oh my god! That’s exactly the statement I wanted to make and no one ever got it… Until now.”

They stared into each others eyes as he reached out for her hand.

The man she eventually married was Paul Garret. She loved Paul enough to overlook – or failing that, suppress – many of his “little character flaws”. He seemed to have a roving eye, but she attributed that to the last minute panic of losing bachelorhood. He also had the irritating habit of buying her nothing but duck gifts. Assuming, as did everyone but her old flame Robert, she liked ducks. So, on their first substantial date, he gave her a duck pendant. Ever after, he bought duck “things” in remembrance of that moment. At the beginning, despite the ensuing ducks, she considered them very romantic gestures.

But it wasn’t as if Helen consistently stifled her feelings about the ducks to others, it was just that she learned early on that the effort would be in vain. Once, she explicitly told her then closest friend Rachel that she was getting quite sick of them, that she never wanted to see another again. Helen practically begged Rachel not to get her an object d’uck for her birthday. Unfortunately, Rachel passed Helen’s behavior off as modesty – just an act to keep Rachel from buying her a birthday gift. Helen even ventured to tell her fiancé Paul, but he dismissed her statement with a wave of his hand, saying, “Nonsense. Anyone, who had as large a collection of ducks as you, must like them.”

Internal frustration grew with each passing year. One of her darkest memories was of her bridal shower. Despite the hours she spent picking and registering just the right patterns, family and friends heeded not. With minds of their own, the majority managed to dig up plates, linens, silverware and even appliances adorned with the Anatidaen creatures. The crowning achievement was a set of Waterford crystal goblets, each with a hand etched escutcheon sporting a Mallard drake rampant. She began to cry, but the sentiment was taken for its opposite. It was rare thing for Helen to bring negative emotions to the surface. Perhaps it was because of the mixed feelings she felt, trying not to hurt those who meant well; or perhaps it was a sense of guilt – she felt partly responsible for letting it get so out of hand. Whatever the reason, it was one of only two times that she showed any emotion on the subject. The other time came on her day of great realization, or as Paul later referred to it, “The day my ex went freaking nuts”.

This fermentation of her hidden, inner duck angst had reached a frothy peak coinciding with her discovery of Paul’s affair. That evening, after confronting him with her accusations, they began an all-out screaming match, each hurling angry recriminations at the other. There were all the usual tirades: “You were never there for me”, “You act like I don’t exist” “You never loved me”, and so on. But the moment of her schism from reality, the moment of blinding revelation, descended when Helen demanded Paul tell her the other woman’s name.

“What difference does it make who she is?” he snapped at her.

“It make all the difference! I want to know,” she shot back.

“All right, all right, her name’s Christine Merganser. See. Big deal. You don’t know her. It changes nothing!”

Actually, it changed everything. For as any good birder or duck collector knows, a merganser is a species of duck. Suddenly, Helen’s mind lost coherence. All of her thoughts, all the words she had yet to say to Paul, shattered. Her mind filled with jumbled, random flashes of images of ducks. She careened back through time and all the doormat frustration of her life rose within her with a bitterness that blinded her with tears.

“I HATE THEM!” she screamed, piercingly holding the last word long enough for the final ‘m’ to be nearly lost in pronunciation. I HATE THEM ALL!” she screamed again and began to wail in a classic banshee fashion violently pulling at her hair.

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Paul backed away towards the front door as his instinctual survival mechanism switched and locked into the on position.

“This,” Helen spit her words out. She dropped a clump of hair in favor of the nearest, heaviest ceramic duck and hurtled it in his direction. “It has everything to do with you – everything to do with her – everything to do with everything. To hell with you both!”

She began to lash out, smashing and hurling every item of the duck collection that was in her path, punctuating each act of destruction with a statement of her consuming fury.

“I wish I never see another god-damned duck again for as long as I live!”

(splintering crash – a glass duck)

“I never, ever got anything I ever wanted!”

(bouncing thuds – a wooden duck)

“Only what people like you wanted me to have!”

(shattering smash – a ceramic duck)

“And now it’s all gone and wasted. A life wasted!”

(squeaky–squeaky – a rubber duck)

She fell to her knees and sobbed heavily – sentences being emitted between heavy intakes of air. “Right now, I could kill Christine Merganser. I could kill you. I could kill the person who introduced you to me. I could kill the person who -“

And then fell a silence made ghastly by the cacophony which had preceded it. Helen put one hand up to cover her mouth and made no further movement.

Taking her sudden silence and frozen body as an opportunity, Paul darted from the house. He considered making some parting remark, but fear got the better part of him and he fled. Let the lawyers take it from here, he thought.

Cassandra Kellogg nee Robinson woke up late one morning. Her husband Luke had taken the day off allowing the two to sleep in. They both headed downstairs in slippers and robes, bleary-eyed, feeling more tired than if they had arisen at their usual time. Luke stretched in the doorway of the house as Cassandra headed down the walk to retrieve the morning paper.

She stopped dead in her tracks as her eyes became fixated on something grisly and gruesome. At first it could only be identified as a bloody mass, but then the details of feathers and a bill helped her identify it as an eviscerated, mangled duck. Before she could call Luke, a piercing cry grabbed her attention. A wild-eyed, disheveled, unrecognizable Helen staggered from behind the hedges. Wearing a muddy, torn bathrobe embroidered with the cutest little ducks, the ungainly mess of a human being brandished a bloodied knife and began to charge straight for Cassandra. As the deranged stranger sprinted across the lawn her foot caught in the loop of a garden hose, causing her to fall and her knife to fly out and skid across the driveway, finally rested somewhere under the Kellogg’s BMW. Luke sprang, leaping across the lawn and pinned down the would-be assailant. “Honey, I’ve got a good hold on her,” he yelled to Cassandra, “go in and call the police – quickly!”

Later that evening, Cassandra had the thrill of watching herself on television, being questioned by a reporter. The assailant had no identification on her, so police had yet to come up with a motive.

“…And you’re certain, , Mrs. Kellogg ” the reporter was saying, “that you have no idea who this mad person is?”

“Well it’s hard to say. But with her dirty clothes and wild hair, we figured it must be a homeless person.”

“You must have been extremely frightened Mrs. Kellogg when -“

“Oh,” she interrupted him, “please, call me Sandy – everyone else does.”

Note: I wrote this way back in 1993. Remember, this is in the days before common use of the internet and the nascent web browser Mosaic, had just been introduced to the world. This was the time of library research and encyclopedias. A discussion on Twitter compelled me to see if I still had it around so voilà…)

So I’m sitting in front of my laptop on a dreary December day and I’m thinking, Why not write something? In classic Ray Bradbury fashion, I look around the room for a subject and my eyes are drawn to the calendar. A glaring red 25 alerts me that Christmas is on its way. I could pen a holiday remembrance, but one thing the world does not need is another Christmas story. Yes, I know, we all agree nothing brings out the joy of the holiday season quite like tales of dysfunctional families, but how to avoid the cliché of Christmas? 

Then it hit me: Why not write about December itself?  I already know that the Latin root deca means 10, and that it was originally the tenth month. From early grammar school memories, I recall that the Roman emperor Augustus wedged two extra months in the middle: one in honor of Julius Caesar (July) and one for himself (August) forever damning September, October, November, and December to misnomer hell. And that’s when it hit me: what in the heck was the calendar like before he added two whole months? July and August make up 62 days of the year and that’s a hefty chunk of days to just plop into a year without causing a few ripples. Perhaps the 10 original months were 36 days long, making for a 360-day calendar. I also vaguely remember the ancients having some problem with the year being too short, so 360 seemed likely. Was that why they divided up a circle into 360 degrees?  So I did a little research and low and behold, the ancients were possessed of a degree of intelligence on par with contemporary humans. Meaning: complete idiots. 

I don’t make this accusation lightly, I never have. Allow me to take you on an historical journey courtesy of the World Book Encyclopedia. It seems that most of the difficulty – and let me clarify, not idiocy, that will come later – started with the Babylonians who kept a lunar calendar based on the cycles of the moon (hence, month). The moon is big, it is obvious, and it repeats a cycle of phases with astonishing accuracy. Every 29 and a quarter days the moon is right back where it started. Basing their calendar on the moon, the Babylonians had 12 months of alternating 29/30-day intervals. Already the seeds of the modern day calendar were sown with its somewhat alternating month lengths. Apparently, the Babylonians and their neighbors were content with this 354-day lunar calendar until they began to notice snow in the middle of the summer. They never considered that the cycle of the moon hadn’t the tiniest connection with the length of an actual year (strictly a personal matter between Earth and Sun, and the Moon should just learn to mind her own business). Their solution: Let’s have the priests randomly, that’s right randomly, add a month 3 times over an 8-year period (huh???). According to World Book, this wreaked havoc on the population, and rightly so. Farmers were never sure exactly when to plant, when to harvest, and when to slaughter a first born. Conversations around the well (ancient water cooler) may have started with “Gee, do you think we’ll have a random month this week?” 

The Egyptians came along and – blessed with an exceptionally regular annual flooding of the Nile River – were able to construct a reasonably accurate calendar. They noticed the Nile flooded right after the early morning appearance of the bright star Sirius, which, as a side note, is best visible at night during December. Sirius is also known as the Dog Star, and its early morning visibility occurs in deep summer, hence “the dog days of summer”. And here I always thought it had something to do with the quality of the humid air having the aroma of wet dogs. Go figure. Anyway, this gave the Egyptians a calendar of 12 months, 30 days each and 5 extra “fun” days at the end of the year. So, you might be thinking, we’re getting close – 365 days and 12 months – right? Wrong. You have yet to factor in the Romans and one of the most idiotic calendars I can imagine. 

The first putative ruler of Rome, Romulus, instituted the Roman calendar: 10 months of varying lengths totaling up to 304 days. The first question you may well ask is 304? followed by, “What did they do with the missing 61 days?” I know I did. Pity. We were so close and now along comes this abomination. According to World Book, and I quote, “It seems they ignored the remaining 60 days, which fell in the middle of winter.” (It also seems the good people at World Book Encyclopedia ignored 1 day themselves). Ignored 61 days? Can you imagine that? Depending on the time of year, a simple “see ya next week” could have profound implications. And these are the people who went on to conquer the Western world. I now have little doubt that Romulus was indeed raised by wolves. Even more interesting, using names of gods from their religion they personalized the first four months (Martius, Aprilis, Maius, and Junius) then – ignoring a pantheon of their other gods – they gave up and simply counted off the rest: Quintilis (5), Sextilis (6), September (7), October (8), November (9), December (10 – Tada!).  

In 452 BC, along comes the emperor Numa. Numa decided it would be nice to have a calendar with a passing connection to reality. So, he creates two extra months (January and February – based on god’s names) 30 days each, to fill in the empty sixty-day vacancy. So far so good, but we’ve got to go three steps back now. Numa then decides to create yet another month, Mercidinus, which will have 22 or 23 days and be wedged in between February 23 and 24 every other year. (Huh??? – again) That’s right. I find it hard enough now to remember what day it is, no less whether or not there’s going to be a month of arbitrary days inserted smack dab into the middle of a month.  

This continues until 46 BC when Julius Caesar just got plain fed up with the whole thing. He asked his astronomer Sosigenes to fix the calendar. First, Sosigenes decrees that the calendar must be based on the solar year and not the cycles of the moon. That’s right, go by the sun – the big bright thing that’s always there. For those of you keeping track, it’s taken civilization only some 5000 grossly uneven, irregular years to figure that one out, with the probable exception of the Stonehenge creators. Maybe that’s why other people wiped them out. People seem adverse to things like facts and reality. To continue, Sosigenes then divides the year into 12 months of 30 and 31 days mostly alternating, except for February which would have 29 days, and 30 every fourth (leap) year. This finally puts us back to a 365 day year. Now here’s the best part. After over 300 years of ignoring some 61 days, and an additional 400 years of Mercidinus mid-month interruptions, the Romans call this year – the consistent, solar-accurate one created by Sosigenes and Julius – The Year Of Confusion. This is the God’s honest truth.  The month Quintilis was renamed Julius Caesar’s his honor, as mentioned, and later Sextilis renamed Augustus after his successor. Augustus, being vain, didn’t want his month to be smaller, so he stole a day from February and added it to his own.

To end this tale, this calendar worked until 1582 when Pope Gregory noticed that the year was about 10 days off. He discretely dropped ten days that year so that October 5 became October 15, and then decreed century years would only be leap years if divisible by 400 (1700, 1800, 1900: no – 2000: yes). This slight change has kept the calendar so accurate that the current year is only off by 26 seconds since the time of Gregory. And that, good people, is the story of why our twelfth month has the tenth name.