Delusion for a Dragon Slayer

Harlan Ellison, one of the most prolific Fantasy writers of the 1960's and 1970's wrote a Hugo nominated story Delusion for a Dragon Slayer in 1966.  The protagonist is creamed by a construction wrecking ball at the start of the story.  Since he has never been truly tested in life, he finds himself on a quest facing a series of challenges.

Today felt like a Delusion of a Dragon Slayer day.

The Old Guy

In the story, the "Hero's" first fail was when he looked past the task-at-hand and his ship crashed on a reef resulting in the death of his entire crew.

My first fail was when I saw an old guy fiddling with his trash "dumpster" by the road as I was driving home.  Watching in him in the rear-view mirror, I saw him start to drive up his driveway, door open, holding onto the dumpster as he towed it up the driveway.  I hesitated for two seconds (at 88 feet per second).  I said "Crap" out loud.  I pulled into the next driveway and turned around.

He was half way up the driveway by the time I parked and trotted after him.  He was an old man.  His skin had that spotted, stretched, tissue paper look of a long time steroid user.  I finished the job and asked for a handshake as payment.

I score myself a "C" on this.  My actions were polluted by the political signs that festooned his yard earlier this year.  Shame on me.

The next encounter

In the story the "Hero's" second fail is when he encounters another knight.  The "Hero" sneaks up behind his 'rival' and strikes him dead.

My second encounter was at the Quality Dairy as I was filling the minivan's gas tank ($1.86/gallon).  I heard a "BOOM" like a 300 Winchester Magnum going off.  The car driving down Knight Street darted into the parking lot with a flat tire.  The driver parked on the other side of the building.

She was on her way to work.  Her right, front spring had broken and poked a hole in her tire.  I had twenty minutes before I had to pick up Kubota after school.  I suggested that she take some pictures of the flat tire with her phone and send them to her boss.  I got the tire changed and made it to the school parking lot three minutes before Kubota came out the door.  I have a little practice changing flat tires.

The third encounter

In the story the "Hero's" third failure occurs when he sees the beautiful girl in bondage in the mists of a waterfall.  He has his way with her.

My third encounter occurred as I was driving into town to pick up Mrs ERJ from her volunteer working gig.  A young lady was walking down the road, crying.  I offered her a ride into town (Eaton Rapids).  She told me she was walking to Lansing which is seventeen miles away.  She was about 5'-2" and weighed a buck-twenty.  She was wearing vinyl boots.

I offered to drive her part way to Lansing, thinking I could still pick up Mrs ERJ at the appointed time and place.  She and her boyfriend had been delivering pictures and had a falling out over a delivery address that had been written down wrong.  He kicked her out of his car.

I made an executive decision.  I called Mrs ERJ and told her I ran into a damsel-in-distress.  I dropped the girl off a block from where she lived.  I did not want her to think I was "a creeper".

The fourth encounter

In the story, the "Hero" meets the dragon.  The dragon is enormous.  The Hero realizes as the dragon bites bites off his head that the only way he could have defeated it would have been if his crew had built defenses and engines of war, if he had a powerful ally to divide the dragon's attention and if he had the "intelligence"  that could have been provided by the damsel-in-distress.

The construction crew were struck by the expression on the man's face after they pried the wrecking ball off of him.  Even though his skull was crushed, his face was frozen into a grimace of forlorn consternation, of an eternity of lost chances.

My fourth encounter was with Mrs ERJ.  I picked her up an hour later than the original plan.  I had left her a couple of messages.  We have daughters.  She understood.  She did not bite my head off.

Karma is only a bitch if you are.

Giving Blood

I earned this yesterday.

And darned if I am not just a little bit proud of it.

Missouri Face Cord

One of my "new" neighbors moved in a couple of years ago.  He is in his sixties and is very industrious.  Over the past few years I watched him build fire pits, strip down an RV trailer to make it a utility trailer and cut and split about six face cords of wood.

He got the wood from "town" after the summer wind storms.  He put a couple of hours a day into reducing it down burnable size.

Norway maple.

Today, I talked with him.  He is trying to sell it but it is not moving very fast.  I have a Craigslist account and offered to give him a hand selling it.  He agreed.

Turns out he moved here from Missouri.  He had driven around pricing the "competition".  The prices range from $40-to-$60 per face cord.  I use the term "face cord" loosely because many of these ricks are very short of a face cord.

For the uninitiated, a full cord is eight feet wide by four feet tall with the sticks being a minimum of 48 inches long.

A face cord is also eight feet wide and four feet tall.  The sticks can be any length although it is traditional to make them 16 inches long or three face cord to the full cord.

It is human nature to make the "face cord" a little less long and a little shorter. After all, cutting and stacking wood is hard work.  The FC shrinks until customers start to notice.  By eyeball, that would be 42" high by about six-and-a-half feet wide.  That shorts the customer by 30%.

Every customer knows the game.  They know they are getting screwed but they don't see that they have a choice.

Until today.  My neighbor and I invented the "Missouri Face Cord".  Missouri is "The Show Me" state.  It is a simple matter to have an eight foot and a four foot length of lumber available.  Show them what a real face cord looks like.  Mark it with a can of cheap spray paint.  Load it into the truck.

He is pricing it at $45 a "Missouri Face Cord."  It will be interesting to see how fast his stack of firewood moves.

Short School Weeks

I rarely follow things to their logical conclusion because it causes too much scar tissue for all parties involved.

Consider conversations regarding short school weeks.  I have been assured by professional educators that kids learn almost as much in a four day week as in a five day week.  By Friday, most kids are very "done" with school.

During those conversations I helpfully suggested that perhaps they learn 80% as much in a four day school week as in a five day school week.  Teachers who are not math or science teachers will often eagerly embrace this estimate.  The comment also earns me a quick, sharp nudge in the shins from Mrs ERJ.

The math and science teachers are a little harder to land.  They will contend, "No. It is more like 95% of what they would learn in a five day week."  This pronouncement is generally made with smug and condescending smiles.

A thoughtful frown clouds Mr ERJ's face (motivated, no doubt by the increasing crescendo of 'nudges' upon his shins), "Well, golly, since they learn so much more during shorter weeks, then all days off should be on Wednesday so they can have the benefit of two short 'weeks' where they will be fresh and eager learners."

Then, with arched eyebrows and an expression of excited discovery, "Wait....we should abolish five day school weeks and replace them with a double-two day week (skipping Wednesday)!  Of course, to get the required number of school days and contact hours they will have to attend year round. I mean, it is like you keep saying, it is all for the children."

Mrs ERJ and I seem to get invited to a lot fewer parties than we used to.  And she is OK if I don't attend teacher conferences.  But I do seem to be more prone to shin splints when running than I used to be.

SKS and chest colds

So far, I have been able to resist the urge to buy another firearm.  It is not all due to will power.  Rather, my resolve has been buttressed by a lack of funds.

It is amazing how often “being good” resembles being broke.

My current fascination is an SKS.  With a few modest modifications it looks like an ideal home defense weapon.  Ditch the bayonet and put it in a lightweight, synthetic stock to make it lighter and handier.  Throw on a ghost ring rear sight and load it with softpoints to prevent “over penetration” problems.  The best solution to “over penetration” is 100% center-of-mass hits and expanding bullets.

If history is any guide, I will have the hots for something else in six months or so.  I do not need anymore hardware.  I need to spend more time shooting the hardware I have.

In other news

We are still in “overage” mode with our ISP but the text messages are not as frequent.  The text messages are the ones that inform me that we have burned through another Gigabyte and will owe them another $10.

Mostly, we keep the modem turned off.  We had been using the computers while the kids were in school.  It was for low-bandwidth tasks like reading email and the few, must-read blogs and news sites.  That worked pretty good until Kubota got a chest cold.  Mrs ERJ took him to the doc who put him on a Prednisone burst and an antibiotic. 

Kubota stayed home the next day and has hardly left his bedroom since.  The kids have Monday off for Martin Luther King, Jr day.  I wonder if Dr. “character within” would approve of time out of school in his name.

That forced me into surreptitiously popping the periscope up and doing a few tasks.  I might be able to get about twenty minutes in before the response time goes into the toilet.  I would check and Kubota would be doing “something” on his phone.

“Are you on the internet?”  I would ask.

“Nope.”  He would reply. “Stop asking me.”

I would turn off the modem and about 30 seconds later I would hear him start bouncing a tennis ball against the bedroom wall.

Hmmmm.

Kubota’s cold is driving us all nuts.  I hate to say it, but guys make lousy patients.

Vegetable Garden: 2015

Plans for the 2015 garden are proceeding. 

More focus

One model for rapid-but-incremental development is to have periods of expansion followed by periods of contraction.  The periods of expansion are periods of experimentation.  The periods of contraction are times of focus; focus on the varieties that work, focus on the plots that perform well, focus on more precise execution of planting and harvesting.

I expect to buy far less garden seed this year than any year in recent memory.  And I expect to plant a far greater percentage of that seed.  More doing and less dreaming.

I will grow two varieties of potatoes this year instead of the four I grew last year.  I will not grow zucchini.  When I want zucchini we will leave the doors of the minivan unlocked when we go to church.  The plan is to grow one variety of broccoli, two types of cabbage, three tomatoes and so on.  I don’t try to grow carrots anymore as I cannot stay ahead of the weeds.  I will not buy melon seeds this year.  They grow well for me but I do not stay on top of harvesting them unless they are right in front of my eyes.

Crop rotation

One of the challenges of growing a garden is to rotate crops to avoid disease and insect populations building up.  This may be partially an old-wives’ tale.  Individual trees seem quite capable of staying in the same place for extended periods of time and still thriving.  At least, I have never seen a tree move very far of its own volition.

Rotating crops may be prudent but it can be hard to pull off in practice.  Conceptually, one must avoid planting cabbage (for instance) in the same plot for three years before planting it there again.  The plants to avoid are cabbage and her sisters: broccoli, Brussel sprouts, Chinese cabbage, collards, horseradish, kale, kohlrabi, most oriental greens, mustard, pac choi, radishes, rutabagas, turnips, and a few I probably missed.  Even if one moves the plots with religious devotion the bugs have little difficulty finding their favorite meal in the new digs even if it is a couple of hundred feet away.

Families of vegetables

The big groups are the cabbage family (aka, cole crops or brassicas), the nightshades (tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, eggplant et al), legumes (beans of all types, peas, clovers, lentils, etc.), maize (sweet corn, popcorn and field corn) and the vining vegetables (pumpkins, squash of all types, cucumbers, melons, etc.).  These families of vegetables share common diseases and insect pests within the family.

Strategies

One could go bat-dip crazy and simply grow all one family in any given year.  One year might be the year of the beans.  The next the year could be the cabbage and so on in a vegetarian version of the Chinese calendar.  Even that can fail.  Clover, nightshade and brassica species are endemic in-the-wild.  And then there is the issue of controlling your neighbor.  They might grow vegetables willy-nilly.  I do not advise bombing his garden with herbicide even if you see him as Typhoid Mary.  It is not very neighborly.

My current plan is to grow the vining vegetables next to the road.  It is a plot that is approximately 110 feet long by 25 feet across (33m x 8m).  That plot has gotten narrower because I have been planting Illini Hardy Blackberrys along the road to feed the natives and to act as poor-man’s barbed wire.  There are also some climbing roses sprinkled into the blackberries, some Dortmund, Laguna and R. canina.  Most of the vining vegetable area will be dedicated to winter squash, C. maxima (Golden Hubbard), C. pepo (Winter Luxury) and C. moschata (Dickinson). 

Sometime in July I will broadcast a brassica wildlife foodplot seed mix into the patch.  The seeds will germinate in the shade of the squash/pumpkin leaves.  The little turnip and kale plants will sulk until powdery mildew starts killing off the squash leaves and more sun hits the little seedlings.

The most efficient way to add organic material to soil is to grow it in place.  It is way easier to sprinkle two pounds of seed than to spread 12 bales of hay.  It is pretty easy to tell if you are adding organic matter (i.e., sequestering carbon in liberal-speak), a patch of ground is adding organic matter if it is green.

The fact that the turnip and kale plants are "cabbage" complicates crop rotation.  Everything comes at a price.

The nightshade species will be in the plot a bit north of the house.  That plot is about 100 feet long by 60 feet wide (30m x 17m).  The picture in my head is to plant mostly potatoes (2/3 Missaukee, 1/3 Spartan Splash) with one row of tomatoes and a half row of peppers.

The “big” garden is southwest of the house.  It is 90 feet long by 75 feet wide (27m x 22m).  This was in potatoes last year.  The east end somehow morphed into a tree nursery after a bunch of acorns were planted there. 

This year the big garden will be “everything not vining or nightshade”.   The green beans (Provider for the first planting, Jade or Derby for subsequent plantings) will be planted in increments of 20’ double-rows planted every two weeks.  A double row attempts to increase plant density while retaining a rototiller-friendly between-row distance by having two, closely spaced rows and then the normal rototiller-friendly distance.  The ground between the two closely spaced rows quickly becomes shaded and the weeds are puny and easy to pull.  The bean seeds will start going into the ground June 1.

The green beans will be followed by turnips and kale.  Green beans are sprinters.  They cannot go the distance.  So the canny gardener develops a relay-race strategy.  The bean plants will be pulled after two weeks of intensive picking (and as the next planting comes on-line) and cold, short-day loving plants will be planted in their place.  If I am really “good” I will seed the turnips and kale into the strip between the double rows of beans several weeks before I cut the bean plants down.

One of the things that tears at a gardener’s heart is the management of his main season cabbage, Brussel sprouts, beets and rutabagas patch.  These plants/seeds want to go into the ground on July 4^th weekend.  They are biologically wired to be the industrious ants of the plant kingdom, storing up carbohydrates and protein in the shortening days of late summer and autumn so they can get the jump on those slackers, the annuals.  What does one do with the plot of ground that will not receive their main crop until half way through summer?  Letting weeds grow is not a good option and there are very few crops (how many green onions can a person eat?) that will be done by then.

Extrafloral nectaries on a fava bean plant.  Nectar being harvested by ants.

The very earliest lettuces can absorb some of the ground.  Micro-greens are for sissies.  I refuse to grow anything so small that it is harvested with scissors the size of my wife’s tweezers.  So far, my best solution is to put in a “green manure” crop of red clover or fava beans.   An additional benefit of fava beans is that they "extrafloral nectaries", that is, nectar glands that are not in the flower.  Those nectar glands can feed predatory wasps and keep them on the job hunting and killing garden pests. Peas are also an option, but most modern pea varieties are tiny plants so you have to plant many pounds of peas to ensure a good canopy of leaves to suppress weeds.  If you are Biblically oriented, the legumes will be my John the Baptist crop.  They must diminish so the one(s) who come after can increase.

Miscellaneous

A couple of other changes will be to plant pole beans next to every bit of garden fencing.  I let the Captain graze his cattle on my pasture to keep it from turning to brush.  The cattle will probably eat all of the bean vines, but it is worth a try.  I also need to figure out how to add a booster pump into my line out to the big garden.  It is far enough from the house that I lose too much head to run two impulse sprinklers at a time.  I also need to refine my grass lanes to facilitate moving about the garden.

Cyber-bullies (fiction)

---Disclaimer---

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is due to laziness on the part of the author and lack of vigilance on the part of the proofreader. 

---End Disclaimer---

Jetta slammed her smartphone down on the school lunch table.  “This girl is on my last nerve….and there ain’t much left of that one, either.”

Jacob took a peek at the screen.  Arching his left eyebrow he asked, “A friend of yours?”

Scott picked up the phone and read it.  “Jetta.  Your a NASTY. SMELLY. BITCH.”  He handed it back and said, “Nice!  Pity it is anonymous. They could use a grammar lesson.”

Jetta said, “It is Paige Doe.”

Jacob said, “She graduated last year.  I thought she went off to college.”

Jetta said, “Maybe so.  But she is back now.”

Scott asked, “How do you know it is her?”

Jetta said, “I ride into school with Ricky West.  They dated last year.  She started cyber-stalking him from the University and she got extremely inappropriate.  Ricky has younger sisters.  His dad found out about it and filed a restraining order.  Now she is back and really pissed.  She thinks I have the hots for Ricky.”

Scott asked, “Well do you?”

Jetta said, “Well, do I what?”

Scott said, “Do you have a thing for Ricky?”

Jetta said, “Get real.  I mean, he is a good looking guy, he lifts weights and is nice enough…but he doesn’t have a brain in his head and he is stuck on himself.  Besides, who needs a boyfriend who has an ex as crazy as the chick in that old movie, Fatal Attraction?  I already half expect to find my pet cat in the crock-pot when I come home from school."

Scott asked, “How long has she been doing this?”

Jetta said, “She has been doing it for about a month now.  It just never ends.  They come in at all times of the day and night. She is dissing me on every social media site I belong to. It is really pissing me off.”

Jacob asked, “So what are you going to do?”

Jetta said, “I am going to have to change my phone number and all my social media accounts.  It is a royal pain.  The thing that really pisses me off is she is probably doing this to 6 other kids and there is no way we can push back.”

Jacob said, “And you would be wrong.”  He looked a couple of tables over to where the nerds sat and said, “Hey, Tony, come over here for a minute, willya.”

It had been perfectly obvious to the entire Class of 2015 that Tony had the worlds biggest crush on Jetta since 4^th grade.  The only two people who were oblivious to it were Jetta and Tony.

Tony sat down.  “What’s the problem?”

The problem was quickly explained to him.

Tony asked Jetta, “Do you know her phone number?”

Jetta replied, “Yeah, sure.  It is 555-1234”

Tony told the table, “The biggest problem with fixing this kind of problem is maintaining something called ‘plausible denyability’.  But I think I can help Jetta out if one of you guys can swing by the lost-and-found at the mall and pick up a pre-paid phone with some minutes left on it.  Just be sure the phone has a mini-USB port and at least ten minutes left on it.”

----The next day----

Scott slid a phone over to Tony and Jetta.  Tony suggested that Scott and Jacob take a walk.  Tony ran a cable from his laptop to the mini-USB port on the phone.  It took him less than 30 seconds to download the file.

He looked over at Jetta.  “When you want your pound of flesh, go to “Messages” and send the top message in “Drafts”.  Then pull the battery out of the phone and pitch the phone.”

Jetta looked at Tony.  “What is the message?”

Tony said, “The message says, 'Katy Doe phone number 555-12??: Cyber bullying has consequences.'  I also nabbed a picture of her off her Facebook page and put that in the message."

Jetta snorted, “Yeah, like that is going to do any good.”

Tony said, “It will if it goes out to the right people and is repeated enough times.”

Jetta looked interested.  “Whaddya mean.”

Tony said, “My dad told me that the guys at work used to play a lot of practical jokes on each other.  They would pimp each other by filling out the blow-in subscription cards from raunchy magazines with their co-worker’s name and address.  And then one day, a guy screwed up the address and the magazines ended up in a neighbor’s mail box.  There were LOTS of fireworks after that.”

Jetta prodded, “What are you saying?”

Tony continued, “Your message is set up to activate an automatic email program on a router that is based off-shore.  That program sends the message through changing, anonymous IP addresses. Think spam-bots. I set the message up to go to 102 phone numbers.  I figured that it would be a good thing if her family also received this message.  And since most family plans assign sequential numbers it is pretty easy to make that happen.  At while I was at it, I figured we might as well send the message to all of the phone numbers with the same, first five digits as Paige.”

Jetta dismissed the idea.  “Big deal.  Those 99 other people will just blow it off.  They will figure it was a fat-fingers mistake.”

Tony smiled a saintly, scary smile.  “They won’t blow it off if the same message is delivered every five minutes, twenty-four hours a day for the next three days.  That is over a thousand messages. It is an automated program.  And the host cannot be subpeonaed because they are not in the United States.  Somebody will call the cellphone carrier and complain.  The carrier will investigate and probably cancel the family’s plan for violation of terms-of-use.”

“Wait a minute.” Jetta exclaimed.  “You said this message was going to 102 phone numbers.  Who are the other two?”

Tony said, “There are two judges in this county who issue restraining orders. Neither one is known for their sense of humor.  You can guess what the other two numbers are.  Remember:  Plausible denyability. If you are really, really sure that Paige is the one who is harassing you, push the SEND button when nobody is looking and pitch the phone.”

“The best way to get a lot of work done is to motivate others to do it for you.  I think there will be a lot of very motivated people in the next three days.  Just remember to keep your mouth shut.  Not everybody appreciates being the hammer of Karma.”

Jetta looked Tony in the eyes and said, "Thanks Tony.  You are a prince."  Then Jetta pressed the SEND button, popped the back off the phone and pried the battery out.  She offered the battery to Tony, who took it.  A man can never have too many batteries.    Then she slid the phone, sans battery, into her backpack.

---Later that day---

One curiosity about living near the state capital is that the various dignitaries and bureaucrats shop in the same stores as "regular" folks.  It was a pure fluke that the first five digits of the Commandant of the State Police's personal cell phone number were the same as Paige Doe's.

The Commandant was beyond annoyed by the second hour.  He buzzed the Director of Cyber-Crimes and asked him to step over to his office.  "I hate asking for personal favors.  But can the lab figure out how to stop these messages from hitting my phone?"

"Sure, boss." the Director said.  He looked at the messages.  "You know police are supposed to investigate when we have evidence that a crime might have been committed.  Do you want some of my brighter techs to look into this?"

The Commandant replied, "Yeah, that is probably a good idea.  This cyber-bullying seems to be at the root of all kinds of violence.  We would look like idiots if we did not act on this and something happened."

Paige Doe moved to Arizona the next week.  She has an aunt and uncle out there.