Gregory P. Lee's Blog: Mythology Repeats Itself

An individual who I KNOW to have at least a bachelor’s degree from a prestigious and expensive liberal arts college writes the following status:

“In response to the new Facebook guidelines, I hereby declare that my copyright is attached to all of my personal details, status updates, messages, photos, videos, and all other personal content that I post (or have posted) online (as per copyright provisions of the Berne Convention) on my personal profile page, anyone else's page, or any business page. For commercial use of the above (my copyrighted content), my written consent is needed at all times. I DO NOT CONSENT TO ANY UNILATERAL "RULES CHANGE" BY FACEBOOK CLAIMING TO REVOKE MY COPYRIGHT!

“[Translation: Screw you and your profit-gouging, Facebook!]”

Now, this person has reposted similar stuff in the past, back when the meme had ridiculous references to the Uniform Commercial Code (inapplicable to copyright law) and an international criminal treaty. A lot of people have done this. “Oh, U.C.C. 1-103! That MUST be good!”

Let’s explain this for the last time: if you don’t like Facebook’s contract of adhesion, for which you pay $0.00, and yet receive the use of its software, linkages, and massive databases of “friends” for you to connect with, REMOVE YOUR MATERIAL AND LOG OFF FOR GOOD.

I’m a pretty liberal guy, no doubt – Obama voter times two, firmly and vocally opposed to Mitt Romney, firmly and vocally in favor of gay marriage…but I also favor military action to protect the U.S. and its citizens, and the necessity that children be born to committed parents, the need for the contract of marriage to protect both parties AND the children, etc. So I think my take here is balanced. Facebook is entitled to something in return from us connectors and ranters and meme-posters in return for providing us this wonderful, giant “Town Common.”

It’s not actually a public park, it’s a private amusement park, so it has the right to charge admission. It also has the right to enforce reasonable rules and regulations on its grounds, and to change those from time to time.

Now, before folks go screaming that I don’t understand copyright, and the Berne convention, and all that…well, it happens that I have a smattering of real-life knowledge and legal education which happens to include intellectual property law. So the remainder of this, which is based on my comments to the individual who I have LEGALLY quoted above (the individual put it on Facebook WITHOUT a copyright notice, and in any event it’s probably a meme and NOT an original writing), is to try to make it clear.

Your copyright has not been revoked. You in essence executed a valid contract, one which is subject to revision. You have the right to opt out if you don't like a change, and make sure that you exercise your copyright pursuant to U.S. Law, which as I understand is operative here. This requires you to register your copyrights and, in some cases, deposit a copy of the work of art with the Library of Congress. Having done that, you may sue for actual infringement.

In return for the PRIVILEGE of using Facebook's servers, connections, and copyrighted software, you grant Facebook a LICENSE on any of your original, copyrightable (whether or not REGISTERED) material.

If you do not ASSERT your copyright on each and every item you post, U.S. Law holds that you MAY have given away your copyright.

EACH item. Not a general statement in a comment. Not a sloppy argument in all caps. You need the old "c-in-a-circle," your name, and a date, and even THEN you haven't defeated the license granted to Facebook by virtue of your USE of Facebook. In fact, unless you have complied with the registration requirement, you can’t even sue in Federal District Court to ALLEGE infringement. This is like suing for trespass to land, in most states: there FIRST has to be notice to KEEP OFF. ANd yo may need a "deed" properly "recorded" with a "registry of deeds" or "county clerk" or some such.

TANSTAAFL. Do you get the products you sell at your store for free? Do employees who aren’t desperate college interns looking for resume material not get paid for giving you time? Do you not pay something for the essential use of real estate? Electricity? Internet access? WHY IN THE WORLD does someone with a college degree not understand that there are INDEED such things as "contracts of adhesion," and that they're nonetheless often quite binding? And why would you think that you get to use Facebook without paying the freight?
In fact, WHY IN THE WORLD would a person with LESS than a college degree claim the right to do so?

“The world does not owe you a living.” I don’t know who said that FIRST, but I know who said it first to ME: Lennox N. Lee, my father, now deceased. If he had lived to see and use Facebook, he would also have said, “Facebook does not owe you a soapbox.” And Len was a self-declared Sorehead. He was free with his opinions, as was (and still is) my mother. He understood that NADA is free.

And one final point: if you really think the holiday snaps you put up here are art worth money, DON’T PUT THEM HERE. SELL THEM. If you think your great story is worth something, SEND IT TO A MAGAZINE to languish in the bin. Oh, and IF you put them here, COPYRIGHT THEM PROPERLY and PROPERLY REGISTER THEM.

P.S. The government CHARGES a fee to register. TANSTAAFL. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.”

Copyright © 2012 by Gregory P. Lee Quoted material used under Facebook License and Fair Use Doctrine.

On average, Fran and I have taken in a cat for every year that we’ve been married. This makes us sound pretty crazy, but we’ve only been married five years. Or maybe that's really, really crazy as it is. We're saying "no" to the next offer, unless it's from family, or ...no. No "or."


We adopted our first pair of older cats from the local shelter, and our second set from my kids. The last one, Tiger – well, I’ll explain later. One thing Fran and I have discovered is that each cat comes with a prior life’s habits and foibles, good and bad.


Tiger is our most recent cat. He’s part Maine Coon, part short-hair domestic. He's a mostly friendly, mostly well behaved cat. He can’t jump well, so he struggles to get onto our bed, and uses various “steps” up other furniture to get from the floor to the top of a desk. Whenever one of us is sitting at a desk working, though, he’s desperately insistent about getting there. He bleets, trills and demands attention when he gets there. He comes right to the edge, getting in the way of typing on the computer. He has to be pushed to the side, and he comes right back.


Other cats also like to get attention from computer users. Rupert (who has since passed away) and Kisa have both seen the value of a human chained to a desk. Tiger’s pushing and head-butting insistence is much more intense, though.


Tiger’s other odd habit is grabbing plastic bags and plastic sheets of any description into his mouth. He carries them around the house. He grabs anything that seems to him to be a plastic bag. He goes into the basement to get sheets of bubblewrap which still protect things I’ve never needed to unpack after moving in to Fran’s house five years ago. He grabs ziplock bags full of nuts and bolts I’ve saved from some project or another. We eventually find them in odd places.


As I’ve said, we have been acquired by five cats in total over the past five years. Rupert, a black-and-white short-hair, let me pick him up at the shelter. I smelled nasty and sweaty from a day’s hard work; he thought that was just dandy. He dug his claws into my shoulder blade to make sure I didn't put him down, something he was apparently known for at the shelter. Once home, he immediately decided that he needed to sleep on me. When he was hungry, he woke us up by kneading a corner of the bed, a habit he must have acquired before he went stray to ultimately wind up in the shelter. He liked poking holes in any taut plastic, like winter window shrink-wrap. His first human must have been patient and tolerant, like us. We wish his health had not suffered in his homeless years, but he was loved until he passed away.


Rupert came with Maggie, the all-black “mother cat” from the shelter. My stepson wanted an all-black cat. She had apparently owned by a sweet old lady who had to spend her last years in a cat-free nursing home. (Please kids, never let that happen to our cats – after you euthanize me, make sure you find a home straight-away for any of the cats who are still around.) Maggie was the "mother" of the shelter, and had apparently mothered several litters before she went to the shelter. Once she decided to be acclimated to our household, she came up from the basement and discovered where Fran slept. She may have been a little miffed that I also slept there, but got over it. She quickly became the lady of the house and owner of the primary bed. She must have been that in her prior home. She walks the entire house calling us to bed when we’re home and not already there. Bossy.


We inherited our next two cats about a year later, and they were each about a year old. They’re sisters, Kisa and Kitty. Though Kisa is a longish-hair fuzzball and Kitty a short-hair, their calico colors are the same. My daughter and sons had been adopted by these cats as kittens. Soon after, my daughter was mostly away at school and my older son joined the Air Force. My daughter is also a lot more allergic than she wanted to be. It thus became desirable that the two calicoes seek alternate housing. Ultimately, Fran and I agreed to take them in, at least temporarily. Right…there is no temporary when a cat adopts you. Kitty, the less sane of the two, was a paranoid crazy little beast, and still is. I suspect that this comes from having been taught to stay off kitchen counters by impatient boys with squirt guns. She required a lot of whispering and patience before she decided that she didn’t need to hiss at me and the other cats every time we crossed paths. Her sister, Kisa had spent so much time draped like a fur stole around my daughter’s neck that she to this day she believes that she is entitled to 100% attention. She also looks consistently sad when she is not getting her due ("All I want is what I have coming to me... all I want is my fair share").


And yet for attention-demanding, Tiger beats her, hands down, whenever Fran or I works at a desk. He gets up, makes his begging noises, pushes at our hands, head-butts us if he can, and seems to think we’re just too stupid to get his point. In retrospect, he may have been right, because it took us over a year to connect the desk-nudging and bag-carrying back to his prior slave, Harry.


We took Tiger in as a result of promising my brother Harry that we would do so should it ever be necessary. Harry had been partially paralyzed by a stroke in the early 1990s. His health had worsened over the years due to many factors, including his immobility, congestive heart issues, and other habits. He passed away in January, 2011, from a second stroke.


Tiger integrated fairly well with our brood. He was kind to Rupert, who was in his final months wasting away due to his immune issues. He was perplexed when Kitty and Kisa hissed at him. He discovered that Maggie would mother him so long as he was polite, accepted that the bed was hers, and didn't get too snitty about the younger kitties’ hissing. Fran and I joked that his weight was due to “secondhand toking,” as that was one of Harry’s recreational bad habits. Harry had lived in Maine, and his doctor had given him a prescription to smoke what he would have smoked anyway.


It took us over a year to realize how right we were – it has finally just dawned on us that Tiger must have been a pest about being on -Harry’s- desk, too. OK, maybe the plastic bags should have tipped us off, too. We're bright, but maybe clueless where recreational substances are involved.


Most of Harry’s recreational inhalations were performed at a large blocky desk in his apartment. He spent most of his waking hours at that desk, as movement was difficult. He had a television and a computer running there at all times, so that he could cruise the Internet, watch movies, and keep a close eye on the news, all at the same time. His various means of producing smoke from his prescribed dried leaves were all at that desk.


Harry accepted that he couldn’t toke in front of Fran or I when we visited. I loathe the stench, the effects, and the distress it caused in my original household, and so never picked up the habit. Fran is straight just because she's straight. Tiger liked us to hold and pet him on those visits, so we never saw him do the “desk thing.” Thus, we’re admittedly speculating. But the speculation makes sense.


One day last week, when Tiger came on top of the desk, bleated and insisted that I come close to him, I finally realized that Tiger must have done this with Harry. Moreover, he must've done this while Harry was taking advantage of his "medical marijuana" note. Knowing Harry, he probably considered it rude to refuse to share; for all his faults, Harry had a generous soul. Harry would also have been amused by a cat who liked to get a buzz on, but I'm sure that didn't enter into it.


Harry must have been exhaling his smoke directly into Tiger’s face. He was engaged in the cat-slave's version of passing the joint.


Tiger isn’t feeling merely ignored when we sit at a desk. He’s jonesing for a hit. After more than a year, he keeps hoping that we’ll finally oblige. He's almost frantic because we don't share properly with him. We’re holding out on him.


The plastic bags – well, he knows how Harry stored the stash. Tiger’s looking around, certain that we keep some leafy stuff somewhere. That bastard Harry wouldn't have abandoned him to a couple of square old farts, right? Tiger's hoping that the next baggie-like object he finds will be something we can light up and enjoy as a family – Fran, me and the cat.


Sorry, Tiger, it’s just not happening. Maybe we should get some catnip, though, and keep it in a desk drawer. That way, we can get our work done.



Gregory P. LeeLong-Remembering Harpers

On average, Fran and I have taken in a cat for every year that we’ve been married. This makes us sound pretty crazy, but we’ve only been married five years. Or maybe that's really, really crazy as it is. We're saying "no" to the next offer, unless it's from family, or ...no. No "or."


We adopted our first pair of older cats from the local shelter, and our second set from my kids. The last one, Tiger – well, I’ll explain later. One thing Fran and I have discovered is that each cat comes with a prior life’s habits and foibles, good and bad.


Tiger is our most recent cat. He’s part Main Coon, part short-hair domestic. He's a mostly friendly, mostly well behaved cat. He can’t jump well, so he struggles to get onto our bed, and uses various “steps” up other furniture to get from the floor to the top of a desk. Whenever one of us is sitting at a desk working, though, he’s desperately insistent about getting there. He bleets, trills and demands attention when he gets there. He comes right too the edge, getting in the way of typing on the computer. He has to be pushed to the side, and he coomes right back. Other cats also like to get attention from computer users. Rupert, who has since passed away, and Kisa have both seen the value of a human chained to a desk. Tiger’s pushing and head-butting insistence is at a much higher level.


Tiger’s other odd habit is grabbing plastic bags and sheets of any description into his mouth. He carries them around the house. He grabs anything that seems to him to be a plastic bag. He goes into the basement to get sheets of bubblewrap which still protect things I’ve never needed to unpack after moving in to Fran’s house five years ago. He grabs ziplock bags full of nuts and bolts I’ve saved from some project or another. We find them in odd places.


As I’ve said, we have been acquired by five cats in total over the past five years. Rupert,m a black-and-white shorthair, let me pick him up at the shelter. I smelled nasty and sweaty from a day’s hard work; he thought that was just dandy. He dug his claws into my shoulder blade to make sure I did not put him down, something he was apparently known for at the shelter. Once home, he immediately decided that he needed to sleep on me. When he was hungry, he woke us up by kneading a corner of the bed, a habit he must have acquired before he went stray to ultimately wind up in the shelter. He liked poking holes in any taut plastic, like winter window shrink-wrap. His first human must have been patient and tolerant, like us. We wish his health had not suffered in his homeless years, but he was loved until he passed away.


Rupert came with Maggie, the all-black “mother cat” from the shelter. My stepson wanted an all-black cat. She had apparently owned by a sweet old lady who had to spend her last years in a cat-free nursing home. (Please kids, never let that happen to our cats – after you euthanize me, make sure you find a home straight-away for any of the cats who are still around.) Maggie was the "mother" of the shelter, and had apparently mothered several litters before she went to the shelter. Once she decided to be acclimated to our household, she came up from the basement and discovered where Fran slept. She may have been a little miffed that I also slept there, but got over it. She quickly became the lady of the house and owner of the primary bed. She must have been that in her prior home. She walks the entire house calling us to bed when we’re home and not already there. Bossy.


Maggie, the all-Black cat who came with Rupert had been owned by a sweet old lady who ended up being brought to a nursing home. Maggie was the "mother" of the shelter, and apparently mothered at least several litters in her first home. Once she decided to be acclimated to our household, and discovered where Fran slept (unfortunately, though she eventually got over this, this was next to me), she became the lady of the house and owner of the primary bed. She must have been that in her prior home.


We inherited our next two cats about a year later, and they were each about a year old. They’re sisters, Kisa and Kitty. Though Kisa is a longish-hair fuzzball and Kitty a shorthair, their calico colors are the same. My daughter and sons had obtained these cats as kittens. My daughter was mostly away at school and my older son had joined the Air Force. My daughter is also a lot more allergic than she wanted to be. It thus became desirable that the two seek alternate housing. Ultimately, Fran and I agreed to take them in, at least temporarily. Right…there is no temporary when a cat adopts you. Kitty, the less sane of the two, was a paranoid crazy little beast, and still is. I suspect that this comes from having been taught to stay off the counters by impatient boys with squirt guns. She required a lot of whispering and patience before she decided that she didn’t need to hiss at me and the other cats every time we showed up. Her sister, Kisa had spent so much time draped like a fur stole around my daughter’s neck that she to this day she believes that she is entitled to 100% attention. She also looks consistently sad when she is not getting her due ("I only want my fair share").


And yet for attention-demanding, Tiger beats her, hands down, whenever Fran or I works at a desk. He gets up, makes his begging noises, pushes at our hands, head-butts us if he can, and seems to think we’re just too stupid to get his point. In retrospect, he may have been right, because it took us over a year to connect the desk-nudging and bag-carrying back to his prior slave, Harry.


We took Tiger in as a result of promising my brother Harry that we would do so should it ever be necessary. Harry had been partially paralyzed by a stroke in the early 1990s. His health had worsened over the years due to many factors, including his immobility, congestive heart issues, and other habits. He passed away in January, 2011, from a second stroke.


Tiger integrated fairly well with our brood. He was kind to Rupert, who was in his final months wasting away due to his immune issues. He was perplexed when Kitty and Kisa hissed at him. He discovered that Maggie would mother him so long as he was polite, accepted that the bed was hers, and stopped getting snitty about the younger kitties’ hissing. Fran and I joked that his weight was due to “secondhand toking,” as that was one of Harry’s recreational bad habits. Harry had lived in Maine, and his doctor had given him a certificate to smoke what he would have smoked anyway.


It took us over a year to realize how right we were – it has finally just dawned on us that Tiger must have been a pest about being on -Harry’s- desk, too. OK, maybe the plastic bags should have tipped us off, too. We're bright, but maybe clueless where recreational substances are involved.


Most of Harry’s recreational inhalations were performed at a large blocky desk in his apartment. He spent most of his waking hours at that desk, as movement was difficult. He had a television and a computer running there at all times, so that he could cruise the Internet, watch movies, and keep a close eye on the news, all at the same time. His various means of producing smoke from his preferred substances were all at that desk.


Harry accepted that he couldn’t toke in front of Fran or I when we visited. I loathe the stench, the effects, and the distress it caused in my original household, and so never picked up the habit. Fran is straight just because she's straight. Tiger liked us to hold and pet him on those visits, so we never saw him do the “desk thing.” Thus, we’re admittedly speculating. But the speculation makes sense.


One day last week, when Tiger came on top of the desk, bleated and insisted that I come close to him, I finally realized that Tiger must have done this with Harry. Moreover, he must've done this while Harry was taking advantage of his "medical marijuana" certificate. Knowing Harry, he probably considered it rude to refuse to share; for all his faults, Harry had a generous soul. Harry would also have been amused by a cat who liked to get a buzz on.


Harry must have been exhaling his smoke directly into Tiger’s face. He was engaged in the cat-slave's version of passing the joint.


Tiger isn’t feeling merely ignored when we sit at a desk. He’s jonesing for a hit. After more than a year, he keeps hoping that we’ll finally oblige. He's almost frantic because we don't share properly with him. We’re holding out on him.


The plastic bags – well, he knows how Harry stored the stash. Tiger’s looking around, certain that we keep some> leafy stuff somewhere. That bastard Harry wouldn't have abandoned him to a couple of square old farts. Tiger's hoping that the next baggie-like object he finds will be something we can light up and enjoy as a family – Fran, me and the cat.


Sorry, Tiger, it’s just not happening.


Maybe we should get some catnip and keep it in a desk drawer. That way, we can get our work done.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Gregory P. Lee

I don’t think I started out to write epic-length science fiction. I simply wanted to tell a story, and to justify the background.

I tend to write in scenes, rather than simple “this happened, then this, then this.” Surprise! As I worked on pieces of background, they became scenes. Soon enough, I was well beyond the 80,000-word length suggested for an “average” science fiction novel. Eventually, I had an epic.

This style can be defined as “cinematic, single-character limited omniscient viewpoint.” I limit my omniscience to the particular character’s actions, thoughts and perceptions. I am Each time I change point of view, I tell the reader more or less the way a film does so. Date, location, and point-of-view character are all set out in the heading. The reader thus knows when and where the scene is set – and whose perceptual “filters” are telling the story. The “camera” and “voice-over” are set.

This helps the reader, I hope. After all, I didn’t tell the story in a “straight line,” from the earliest date to the latest date. Thus, I give the reader a chance to consider the date and setting. It’s a good idea for the reader to pay close attention to the date in the heading, because the “main” story is set in 2395. However, large and essential pieces of background are found beginning in 2390. Background flashbacks go back as far as the 2350’s, and character flashbacks into the childhood of the main characters. The events of 2390 make for an exciting start, and open up the theme of territory, and give essential background on the conflict between humanity and the zhīzhū. In between these periods, I deal with the illegal (and immoral, in my opinion) human colonization of Tau Ceti IV.

This technique also allows me to do a “cut scene” for dramatic purposes. The climatic struggle to save the zhīzhū at the end of Demand the Debt that’s Owing moves back and forth in brief snippets, just as the final shoot-out in a movie does.

In any event, this gave me a 600-page story of epic pretensions. I made some hard decisions. I lopped off twenty or thirty thousand words of dénouement. I realized that I could shape that into at least a third book, creating a trilogy. I then cut the story into two pieces. I suspect that “To Be Continued” is the obviously missing comment at the end of All Shall Go to Wrack. The need to continue may not be so obvious at the end of Demand the Debt that’s Owing. I could leave things there and get only a few groans about loose ends. However, Book 3 is forming up, and I hope to have it done in about a year.

This technique is a little less evident in Book N+1, Long-Remembering Harpers. I wasn’t as specific about the dates in that book, which takes place primarily in 2465, secondarily in 2416. Yes, if you read that, you will find spoilers. On the other hand, my wife liked it best of the three novels so far.

Just so you know, I’ve written numerous scenes that have been put aside, either for later use or rewriting. They’re all hiding there in my hard drive, waiting to be considered relevant enough for shaping and placement into a novel. The beginning of the Zhang Dynasty has been made a separate short story in and of itself. The reasoning behind the true “cheapness” of initial fighter-pilot training (“Bicycles! Buddha Christ Almighty, bicycles?”) isn’t just because I cycle myself (but I have cycled down several mountains, and been in a car following the route to Helper, Utah); it’s because it makes sense in a world that has been forced to become more careful with resources. Say what you will about the Zhangs, who came to world power through brutal but effective biological population reduction, they certainly will make us conscious that Earth’s resources are limited.

Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


As Americans, we are required to consider "Huckleberry Finn" to be Twain's best work. It's the book in which Twain confronts racism and first proclaims that a white boy can have a black, escaped slave as a father figure. Twain confronted much of his America's foolishness in the raft trip down the river.



He also at the end provided an easy answer: Jim was not an escaped slave after all, he'd been freed. Tom Sawyer could fix things without telling this. Perhaps one shouldn't criticize Twain for loving a character based on himself, much less for writing his own vision. Huck was brave enough to decide that he would aid Jim in escape. Twain delivered that decision without consequences.



His "Joan of Arc" cannot be so delivered. He had a history book to follow. With no such option, twain focused on the humanity behind the story -- a humanity he so often despised. He begins with a story about the destruction of fairies by the adults of the village. He is already symbolically foreshadowing the tragedy of Joan's life. For doing what is right, for daring to be great, she must be destroyed.



Twain wrote this story to criticize humanity at its worst. At the same time, he allows us through his narrator to love humanity at its best. He decries ignorance through his writing, as he always does.



You have almost certainly read Huckleberry Finn, and perhaps Tom Sawyer. If you want to find out why Twain was truly great, look at some of his other novels and stories, and especially "Joan of Arc."



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In my "research" for The Laughing Lip, I found myself thinking about the mythological antecedents of Cuchulain "Murphy" O'Meath and B. P. Avinashini. Murphy is pretty obviously a 23rd-Centuy Cuchulain (Tain Bo Cuialnge, and other Irish mythology), and Avinashini is in large part Arjuna (the Mahabharata). in these books, they take roles in conflicts of expansion and of internal politics, just as their mythological archetypes do.

Even more than history, mythology repeats itself. The mythological Cuchulain is a hero, but also a prolific womanizer, and at times an angry monster. Arjuna is a bowman and fighter beyond compare, and his charioteer is the blue god Krishna himself, yet he is in anguish about the war in which he is forced to fight. These characters can be found throughout history and literature, in one place or another. thus, even before we had accurately recorded history, mythology was recording our dilemmas.

The third book of The Laughing Lip series (set well before "N+1," the somewhat separate tale of B.A. Kirthi, granddaughter of Murphy and Avi) also digs into the deeper themes of our long human history and prehistory.

I won't claim that I'm a truly profound writer. I would go with "adequate." Or maybe, "really thoughtful and just a little twisted." These books are probably best classified as "space opera," but I would like to hope that they look a little deeper into what mankind is: a territorial animal with a drive to expand, blind to the toll that expansion takes on itself and others.

Gregory P. Lee
All Shall Go to WrackDemand the Debt That's OwingLong-Remembering Harpers

The world has gone worse than mad. With the bankruptcy of Friendly's, there is no place anywhere in or near the center of Attleboro at which one can purchase an ice cream cone or an ice cream shake. This is not something I miss on a daily basis, as my stomach is far too large already. However, on the rare occasion when I want an ice cream cone costing more than a whole quart at the supermarket, there should still be a Friendly's.

Friendly’s was our childhood ice cream place. I was really local then; the headquarters was fifty miles away from Pittsfield, where I grew up. It had a walk-up take-out window. Inside, the booths and counter-stools were arranged around the stainless, spotlessly clean cooking and scooping “island.” The waitresses and cooks worked inside, and the ladies wore cute checkered dresses that showed off good legs and ample cleavage, without looking trashy. How could life get better?

Friendly’s sold hot-dogs, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, fountain soda, ice cream, and ice-cream drinks. Its “exotic” items were cole slaw and “Fribbles,” the Friendly’s answer to McDonald’s Triple-Thick Shake and some Rhode Island ice-cream drink. Standard “millk shakes” were mixed in front of you in a steel cup, and the waitress poured half into a glass for you. You got the remainder so you could pour it yourself. A five-year-old kid could do way worse for entertainment (back then, we had no “first-person shooters” to play, because we had no “game consoles” on our “black and white TVs”)

I recognize that Friendly's thought it had to compete in the global market of oversized, overzealous over-menued food places. After all, it has to compete with the first-person shooters and YouTube on the cell phone every fove-year-old carries. However, it could have survived if it stayed a little hamburger and hot dog joint that also sold ice cream.

The bastards who killed Friendly's should all be taken out and shot just like the Chinese take-out and shoot media executives.

On the other hand, being unable to go quickly to a Friendly's forced Fran and I to go to the last remaining old-fashioned Bliss Brothers dairy store in Attleboro. This is similar to Friendly’s, though a little bigger. The service was truly very good and the ice cream was excellent. Although the staff all appeared to be of high school age, whoever does the hiring seems to have very carefully avoided the large number of rude, grumpy teenagers who seem to infest so many other chain restaurants, not to mention checkout lines at major supermarkets.

Unfortunately the most ugly reality of this small but heated essay is that approves that I becoming a nasty grumpy file old man who hates change.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Gregory P. Lee
All Rights Reserved, Dammit.

The world has gone worse than mad. With the bankruptcy of Friendly's, there is no place anywhere in or near the center of Attleboro at which one can purchase an ice cream cone or an ice cream shake. This is not something I miss on a daily basis, as my stomach is far too large already. However, on the rare occasion when I want an ice cream cone costing more than a whole quart at the supermarket, there should still be a Friendly's.

Friendly’s was our childhood ice cream place. I was really local then; the headquarters was fifty miles away from Pittsfield, where I grew up. It had a walk-up take-out window. Inside, the booths and counter-stools were arranged around the stainless, spotlessly clean cooking and scooping “island.” The waitresses and cooks worked inside, and the ladies wore cute checkered dresses that showed off good legs and ample cleavage, without looking trashy. How could life get better?

Friendly’s sold hot-dogs, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, fries, fountain soda, ice cream, and ice-cream drinks. Its “exotic” items were cole slaw and “Fribbles,” the Friendly’s answer to McDonald’s Triple-Thick Shake and some Rhode Island ice-cream drink. Standard “millk shakes” were mixed in front of you in a steel cup, and the waitress poured half into a glass for you. You got the remainder so you could pour it yourself. A five-year-old kid could do way worse for entertainment (back then, we had no “first-person shooters” to play, because we had no “game consoles” on our “black and white TVs”)

I recognize that Friendly's thought it had to compete in the global market of oversized, overzealous over-menued food places. After all, it has to compete with the first-person shooters and YouTube on the cell phone every fove-year-old carries. However, it could have survived if it stayed a little hamburger and hot dog joint that also sold ice cream.

The bastards who killed Friendly's should all be taken out and shot just like the Chinese take-out and shoot media executives.

On the other hand, being unable to go quickly to a Friendly's forced Fran and I to go to the last remaining old-fashioned Bliss Brothers dairy store in Attleboro. This is similar to Friendly’s, though a little bigger. The service was truly very good and the ice cream was excellent. Although the staff all appeared to be of high school age, whoever does the hiring seems to have very carefully avoided the large number of rude, grumpy teenagers who seem to infest so many other chain restaurants, not to mention checkout lines at major supermarkets.

Unfortunately the most ugly reality of this small but heated essay is that approves that I becoming a nasty grumpy file old man who hates change.

Copyright (c) 2012 by Gregory P. Lee
All Rights Reserved, Dammit.

Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I have read and re-read this prophetic novel many times. John Brunner's "non-novel," as it was once described, has influenced my own writing. He knows how to write from a character's viewpoint, and let you as a reader in on that fact. Thus, a third-person narration is probably factually accurate, but perception is always filtered.



More to the point, Brunner was a brilliant prophet in the 1960's. He go many of the "details" wrong: we are not opressed by world-wide fanaticism over eugenics, but we certainly are feeling the effects of "Big Brother" and the "plugged in world," and "Mr. and Mrs. Everywhere" comes on every year as "Where in the World is Matt Lauer." On the other hand, Brunner got the feel and the underlying ideas correct. Population pressure causes "muckers" today (what else would you call someone who goes off his nut and blasts a schoolful of children?). We have disconnected from our roots in many ways. We fail to see the reality of how technology changes our connection to each other and the world.

In short, the desperation of his world feels right, even if the base facts are't our 2010's.



We don't yet have Shalmaneser to guide our projects (and to shake its cryogenically cooled "head" in disbelief at facts that violate its unhappy view of humanity), but we certainly have integrated computers into every aspect of our daily life.



Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" and the books that followed should be required for anyone whose work might affect the world around him or her. As that includes anyone from ditch-digger on up, we need to get him into the schools.



My final note, however, is at disappointment of the most recently published edition. The paper is one step up from newsprint -- I think they call it "pulp." The typos are glaring. My copy came with loose pages. Classics should not be printed in such conditions.



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