I’m grateful today to share here that Spillwords Press published my short poem, “Delaware Sheets.” You can find it right here.
Thanks, as always, to Dagmara K. and the other editors at Spillwords Press!
Tag Archives: Eric Robert Nolan
Throwback Thursday: Quicksand!!!
Yep. As the meme below (from Geek Club) suggests, 70’s and 80’s kids were led to believe that quicksand would be a far greater threat than it actually was. The warnings I accepted as the direst were those from the swashbuckling jungle explorers that I admired.
See Issue #7 of “The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones” below, for example. (It happened to Indy at least twice in this comic series.) And Frank Buck found himself in a similar predicament in “Bring ‘Em Back Alive,” which I’ve mentioned previously here at the blog.)
I even asked my Dad pretty earnestly once about how I should escape quicksand if I ever fell into it. (I fully planned on becoming an explorer when I grew up.) Believe it or not, the smart son-of-a-gun actually had a decent answer for me. I can only remember it vaguely, but I’m pretty sure you were supposed to tread water and try to float on the silty surface of it. You were NOT supposed to step down into the bog-like mud beneath your feet — it was the suction there that would do you in.
Resourceful man, my father.
[Yeah. This one’s terrible. I apologize.]
You guys hear the one about the Christian who conscientiously wore a mask every time he left his house?
He did not Covid his neighbor, he did not Covid his neighbor’s house, he did not Covid his neighbor’s wife, he did not Covid his neighbor’s manservants …
Please.
If you care about America — about the basic everyday freedoms that distinguish us from a totalitarian state, then I am begging you to read Michelle Goldberg’s opinion piece in today’s New York Times.
If you support Donald Trump, then I am begging you here to stop doing so.
“Trump’s Occupation of American Cities Has Begun,” Michelle Goldberg
POP QUIZ!
One of these is the President of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, at the height of a pandemic that’s killed 143,000 Americans so far.
One is Vince, selling ShamWow (TM).
Can you tell the difference?
SOROS! (And the dastardly Dr. Falci.)
“Trump’s secret police”
I feel like we’ve turned a frightening corner here. Last night was the first time I’ve read the words “Trump’s secret police” — it was a user on Twitter.
Today it appeared in a headline at The Nation.
Republican Steve Schmidt went on Twitter a little while ago and called upon the Governor of Oregon to order the State Police and the National Guard to arrest the unidentified federal forces in unmarked vans who are snatching people off the streets.
Update: Now people are saying it was The Department of Homeland Security. Also: the people were apparently all detained because they were suspected of graffiti offenses?
Catch you later.
You know what would be interesting? If technology advanced to the point where if you contracted a contagious illness, you could trace it to EXACTLY who gave it to you.
So if you faced a lifetime of lung problems from coronavirus — or maybe if you unknowingly passed it to your parents, and it killed them — you would know which neighbor’s barbecue or bar crawl directly caused that.
You could ask them if it was worth it. It would make for some interesting conversations.
It would actually make a hell of a science fiction story.
*****
Oh! One more thing!
Quick word of thanks to all the dudebros who work at Denny’s who are breaking down the finer points of the incidence, transmission, and long term effects of a new and potentially fatal respiratory disease.
I’m glad you’re here to explain this stuff. I hate getting all of my information from the CDC.
Throwback Thursday: Lincoln Logs!
Believe it or not, I had Lincoln Logs as a first grader in 1978 or so … they might have even come in a bucket like this one; I can’t quite remember. (I think there was a weird merchandising trend in the 1970’s in which toy sets and puzzles came packaged in tubes.)
The Lincoln Logs were made of wood! (God, the idea that I once owned wooden toys makes me feel as old as … Lincoln, I guess.) Here’s some weird trivia for you, if you remember these — they were invented in 1916 by John Lloyd Wright, who was the son of famed architect Frank Loyd Wright.
I’d moved on to fancier things than Lincoln Logs fairly quickly — my parents had started me on Sears’ Brix Blox by 1980 or so. (They were basically budget Legos, but they suited me just fine.)
Lincoln Logs never really went away during my early childhood, though … they would turn up in bits and pieces for years at the bottom of my toybox, my closet, my box of army men, whatever. If you gave an absent-minded kid like me anything that included dozens of small parts, then they were destined to haunt the house in perpetuity. There was sort of a permanent intermittent presence of Tinker Toys at my house too — you could sort of think of those as Legos’ surreal, cubist, crazy cousin.
Actually. let me qualify my admission above. I might have scattered my small toys a lot as a little boy, but I pretty assiduously kept my G.I. Joes and their guns together. That was a serious matter. And I’d like to think I had a fairly good track record.
Photo credit: By Jesse Weinstein (JesseW) – Own work. (ID# 4b-2f), CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=803043
Guys, things are bad.
The virus, the government and cultural response, pretty much everything — save for some encouraging news about vaccine development.
People are dividing politically over things that ought to be pretty straightforward. There isn’t any grand plan or overall strategy — we’re all arguing about components of what should be the overall strategy: masks, social distancing, reopenings, etc. No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, you’ve gotta agree that that kind of division is kinda not good.
The news just gets steadily worse. I’m worried about exactly how bad things will get before they get better again.
The last time I was this worried about the nation was 19 years ago.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 