Memories of the 28th Century

In my, as yet, brief life I have read some thousands of books and an incalculable number of articles in newspapers, magazines, and online. I was commencing to write another short story, when I wondered something about Washington Irving. Then I realized that I didn’t know much about him, so I looked him up online, and learned that he wrote many books and was a government official at some times. He started writing professionally when he was in his 20’s with Knickerbocker's History of New York, which ...

Good Old Garlic

There are folk medicines that do no good, and there are others that are very effective. Garlic is one of the latter, and there have been clinical studies to prove its effectiveness. The antibiotic in garlic, allicin is produced from alliin when allinase acts on it, which occurs when a garlic clove is crushed or diced. Allicin’s purpose is to protect the garlic cloves from bacteria, fungi, and molds, and we take advantage of its effect.

I won’t flog ...

Recently, I self-published a book of fourteen short stories (link below), and I have mentioned that to a number of people since then. I have noticed that some people seem to want a summary of the themes and plots before they read the stories, and I was surprised to find that I think that they should read them and make their own judgments regarding the various aspects of the stories, even though I know what they mean and how people should understand them. But I have also read a lot about semiotics ...

For the last few decades the mentally ill have been treated mostly on an outpatient basis, if at all. And, as I pointed out in my post on homelessness, most homeless people in the U.S.A. have some sort of mental illness. Some mornings a guy who believes a number of conspiracy theories sits near me in Starbucks and treats me to his theories (he thinks he’s doing me a favor to talk to me). Yesterday he admitted that he hears voices, also. This morning a quiet, pleasant guy I am acquainted with was ...

The purpose of jail is twofold: to try to convince people to not commit crime again and to keep the guilty away from society for a time. Jail certainly does sequester people, but for jail to be an effective training device, the recipient of the training has to understand and remember it afterward, and for some of the people jail is not training in the sense that I mean; although inmates may learn more criminal techniques, and they barely remember it afterwards. Jail time should be effective aversive ...