Old Time Science Fiction writers. Robert A. Heinlein.

   Heinlein has been dead for nearly 35 years now.  I remember seeing his obituary on the front page of the Boston Globe back in 1988.  The only other writer to ever get a front page obit in the Globe was Tolkien back in the 1970s.  To get a front page obit you have to be very widely read and your writing must be considered important.  In a long active career Heinlein wrote a lot of stuff, all of it good reading.  Some of his best were Have Spacesuit Will Travel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Red Planet, and The Star Beast.  And a lot of others, all well worth reading.  Controversial is his novel Stranger in a Strange Land.  This book drops out of the hard science fiction mold into something else that is hard to describe.  It works best for older readers, into (or graduated from) high school.  I would discourage children from, reading it while they are still in grade school. 

Out of 30-30 ammunition.

 Have some friends coming up for the weekend who said they would like to go shooting.  So I drove over to the Alderbrook range just to make sure my fancy radio card still worked.  It did.  So I dropped by the Sports Shop in Littleton to buy a little ammunition.  They had .22 and 9 mm.  They did not have any 30-30 which amazed me, 30-30 is extremely popular, all the lever action rifles use it.  The only round that might compete in popularity is .223, the round used by AR15s.

Street Drugs kill. We need to tell our kids.

 Street drugs are given names of opioids and sold to people looking for the high they get from good strong opioids. At this time, the street drug makers and sellers are liberally spiking all their wares with fentanyl.  It’s cheap, it gives a rocket ship high, and it is extremely powerful, so powerful that the slightest error in manufacture adds a lethal dose of fentanyl to the pill.  They did some checking and they found that one in five pills bought off the street contained enough fentanyl to kill, right upon swallowing the pill.

 We need to tell the kids that street drugs kill.  Stick with weed or beer.

Addams family 2.

 I Netflixed it.  It is a cartoon, no live action.  Gomez comes out looking like a football wearing a striped suit.  Chester looks like a blimp.  Mortica looks like a string bean dressed in black.  Wednesday spends her time having Pugsley beaten into a pulp or thinking about changing families.  No good lines for anyone.  Best part of the flick is the Addams family RV, a rolling antique that puffs purple smoke while underway. I lost interest before the end and started doing housework. 

I cannot recommend it on account of terminal boredom.

Christian Nationalists.

 I never heard of them before yesterday when NPR ran a long 45 minute piece on my car radio trashing them.  NPR repeated the piece this morning. NPR clearly disagrees with Christian Nationalism.  I don’t know what to think.  NPR did not tell us what Christian Nationalists believe or what their ideology might be.  NR never mentioned any Christian National leaders, let along give any names.  No mention of a Christian Nationalism headquarters, or a party newspaper, web site, radio station, or just a party email list.  No mention of Christian Nationalists working in the Biden administration or the previous Trump administration

What is the tariff deal between Britain and the EU after Brexit?

Something like 1/3^rd of British exports used to go to the EU tariff free.  Boris Johnson promised to do Brexit AND keep British goods tariff free.  I never did hear how that worked out.  A quick Google didn’t tell me anything.  You would think paying tariff on 1/3^rd of your exports would hurt and we would be reading screams and cries from the wounded.  I haven’t seen any, yet.

A Ten Year old girl is pregnant.

 

 

And they won’t give her an abortion.  I fear going thru pregnancy and child birth is very dangerous at 10 years old.  I never heard of a pregnancy in a girl so young, but some helpful person posted that it happens very occasionally.  I think a girl/young woman ought to be at least 18, mostly full grown, before getting into childbirth.  I don’t know if the 10 year old story is real, but, I think any state writing an abortion law ought to have a clause authorizing abortion for the very young, no questions asked.  Young, girls can make mistakes, and I believe we ought to permit the girls to correct such mistakes.  Was I writing the law I would allow abortion for any girl younger than 19.