In the first few days of the coronavirus pandemic, I worried about my health. I was middle aged, overweight, diabetic, and running around the country ringing doorbells, talking to people. I read the statistics and found a person in my predicament would have roughly a 9% chance of dying if I contracted the virus. Eventually I learned to relax about it and decided to let my fairly good immune system take it on, if necessary.

My next wave of anxiety about the disease was the number of cases. I was ridiculously relieved when the number of new cases each day started to go back down and stayed level for a couple weeks. I may have even ventured forth from my musty hideout without hand sanitizer a time or two. There were parts of the country and the world that still had rampant death and illness, but things close to home were on the mend somewhat.

Then began my third wave of worry: the contrarians of the world – mostly gun-toting Americans – had banded together to demand an end to the “tyranny” of social distancing. God himself had bestowed upon them the right to live free or die, so what government had the right to stop them? My question is, does the government have the right to stop you from killing someone? Of course it does. (Making it illegal doesn’t always work, but it’s a pretty necessary step if you ever plan to prosecute someone.) In my view, if you’re just going to go stand around waving your gun and drinking Schlitz, and that is potentially going to kill thousands of people, shouldn’t that be frowned upon? Of course it should. Unless of course you are a contrarian who knows better than all the immunologists, doctors, and scientists of every kind, and happens to know, in spite of excepted wisdom, that mingling about is harmless. And this is what God surely intended when he granted you all those freedoms. Despite some evidence you could use – you live in a trailer, you can’t even spell ‘tyranny,’ you didn’t quite make it through high school – you are smarter than everyone else! Yes, everyone else is fearful because they watch too much TV, or they think all them fancy scientist fellas are telling the truth. Ha! Not you! You have decided to buck conventional sense and go it (almost) alone, on the merits of your ability to think things through, unlike the libtards and snowflakes you see around you. Surely at this point you deserve to be rescued from the slight discomfort of your confinement, damn the dying people!

One stubborn group of contrarians that has made its presence known at some of the protests demanding the country open up again is anti-vaccine people. They still cling to the idea that vaccines are linked to autism. That argument got put to bed a while ago. What happened was this: the health community got sick of hearing about vaccines causing autism, so they handed over all their data on vaccinations and autism to the anti-vaccine people, and after examining the data the anti-vaxxers were forced to admit they couldn’t find any evidence of a link either. Get this, Contrarian Nation: the scientists were telling the truth all along. Maybe that isn’t always the case, but when the government tells you to stay home, ruining the economy and forgoing trillions in income tax, you can be pretty sure this isn’t the common flu, as was repeated on Fox News and by Rush Limbaugh, King Donald and other far right nut jobs.

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I haven’t heard it linked, but if I was looking around for flat earth believers, I’ll bet you I could find some at these protests, too.

Another startling absurdity from the far right is that they say they’d rather have people die than hurt the economy. Aren’t these, by and large, the religious people who value life so much they can’t bear to hear about an abortion? These elderly should be happy to die and save America, they say. Actually, these elderly are the generation who fought wars, paving the way for you to be born safe and prosperous, and your time to shield them from harm comes and you circulate the virus and bring death to many because you’re bored of Netflix? Very heroic.

Well, well, well, nice going! I sure hope you had a good time eating that pangolin, asshole. Thousands have died, many more thousands are sick. Panic has turned ordinary people into survivalist lunatics, stuffing their minivans with toilet paper and Purell. Everything has been cancelled. Is this because of nuclear war or global climate change or alien invasion? Nope. It’s because some dipshit(s) decided to order something off the human menu and eat a pangolin. One look at it should tell you all you need to know: it’s too ugly and too covered with body armour to be edible. Besides, it is has chubby little legs and no natural athleticism, so it is bound to be a crackling little grease fire anyway. Not to mention it is on the endangered species list! Still, people traffic them for their scales which are used in medicine. Another theory that I think has been disproved, is that the virus got into humans through someone eating a bat. Eating a bat, I imagine, would be a lot like eating a leather purse or maybe a baseball mitt with some bones in it.

Our chess club is cancelled too, but then again everything is cancelled so saying it is redundant. I sure am missing hockey already. My Canucks were doing fairly well and looked poised to make the playoffs for the first time in five years. That is, right up until Mr Curious cooked up his Asian armadillo. And we’ve probably just begun being effected.

I heard of an experiment done at the University of BC in the Physics department. If you read this and know of it, please let me know how accurate what I’ve heard is. Anyway, the professor fills an empty room with mousetraps, each loaded with a ping pong ball. The experiment is about chain reactions. To start the reaction, he tosses one ping pong ball into the room and – Snap! – one trap goes off and launches a second ball in the air. After some seconds the whole room is a cacophony of mousetraps snapping and balls bouncing around. When it settles down, every trap has gone off. Think of passing an infectious disease as the mousetraps. One dumbass eats a pangolin, then that infects someone etc. Today we are at the stage where there are about two balls in the air and the world health governing bodies are trying to catch them before they land and accelerate the reaction. They might succeed, but they probably won’t completely. In some places they are already at the next phase.

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I don’t mean to be doom and gloom, there is already talk of an early vaccine being tested, and people are getting ready to hunker down and avoid others for a while. These are good signs. Can they catch those two balls before they land and set off all the traps? Time will tell and I certainly wish them well. And I hope it happens before the Stanley Cup playoffs get cancelled too!

Well the final results are in. I didn’t place among the top 10 in the writing contest. They don’t arrange the 70 participants who didn’t win in any order, so I really don’t know where I finished other than at least eleventh. The feedback from the judges was mostly positive, but their main complaint about my story was they generally didn’t care for the ending. They also made a comment or two about it being too long a story to cram into 250 words. Fair enough. I still did better than I thought I’d do, and I may go in another one and see how it goes.

To make not winning more palatable, instead of turning to beer or ice cream, I decided to seek therapy by googling the people who finished in the top five to see what sort of competition I was up against. The winner was another Canadian who has at least nine published books, mostly fantasy and children’s book. Next was a poet from the eastern USA who has been published prolifically. Third was a science writer who has, among other things, contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Fourth was a person whose bio describes him as an award winning writer and film maker. Last among the top five is another novelist who is only 25 years old and will likely write many books in her life, but so far has only nine novels published. So, being an unpublished and often grubby civic employee, I was sort of in over my head. Still, that little exercise made me feel better about how I did, as somewhere in all of this I likely finished higher than some other published novelists.

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Another odd thing that started happening during this contest was an author named Jerry Jenkins has started emailing me writing advice. At first I thought he must be a judge or someone from NYC Midnight – how else would he know I exist? The tone of the first email was “you probably have no confidence in your writing ability, and I would like to help.” I wrote him back to tell him I have enough confidence, but that if he felt that way after reading Lieber’s Report, then it must have really sucked! This was why I was so surprised when it came 4th and put me in the final. Up until I saw the results, I thought the judges were trying to console me! I googled my new pen pal Jerry, too, to see if he was a real person or some kind of literary Betty Crocker trying to lure me into a writing course or some other scheme to get in between me and my paycheque. Turns out he is real and has written over 200 books, a number that has probably increased since I started writing this post, and sold over 70 million copies. I got another email from him today. He never asks for anything, but I’m still a little skeptical.

A few days ago I heard back from the NYC Midnight people with the results from the second round of the writing contest.  For some reason, my story Lieber’s Report came in 4th in my group of 50, good enough to get me through to the final round where the final 80 writers would go head to head, with the top five winning cash prizes.  The genre was up to the writers to decide, which in a way made it more difficult.  The action we must include was holding hands, and the word was ‘secret.’  I figured about 75 of the 80 would be turning in a romance story, but they specifically said original ways of using the action would be encouraged.  After I got my assignment, my son suggested a fixed horse race.  I had nothing better, so I went with his idea.  Like the first two rounds, I’m not in love with my story, and will be surprised if it isn’t a middle of the pack entry.  Still, coming in 40th, let’s say, out of 4000 isn’t necessarily a failure.  Anyway, here is round 3, The Fix.

 

---

Swabby sat silently in the racetrack bleachers and watched the parade to post.  An atonal loudspeaker introduced the horses in a nasally drone.

He had successfully paid off only five of the nine jockeys to lose, leaving uncertainty about the fixed bet.  He popped an antacid, inhaled deeply and dug in his jacket for a cigarette.  In his view outside the grandstand stood the other two members of his gang, a young couple, watching the horses.  They had been in the locker rooms to bribe the remaining jockeys, then relay to Swabby by way of a secret cue which horse was designated to win the race.

His wife and baby girl were gone, and his share of the bet money represented selling his car and emptying his savings.

“Number Six, West End Wally,” continued the loudspeaker, “Owned by Hamilton Stables, ridden by Oscar Mendez.”  At this point the young couple reached toward each other and held hands, the signal he had waited for.
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He threw down his smoke and headed for the betting wicket.  He glanced at the tote board: number six, 28 to 1.  “$10,000, six to win,” he told the cashier and slid her the money.

He paced outside, too nervous to sit.  The tote board recalculated and flashed 15 to 1.

There was a sudden commotion near the rail to his left.  Two cops and a Racing Commission official were handcuffing his friends.  Someone had squealed.  He wasn’t arrested, but if he ever cashed the ticket he would be.  It was over.

 

---

So that’s it.  It’s not knocking my socks off, but I hope it surprises me like Lieber did.  The name of my character is a little unusual.  Swabby is a nautical nickname used mostly for deck-swabbing deck hands.  In the horse racing sense, Swabby was a small time crook who got caught fixing some races at Fort Erie racetrack in Ontario in the early 1950s.  He succeeded for a while, netting him and a couple friends around $200,000 before he got busted.  In that sense, my story might be called Historical Fiction as it is the fictionalized account, more or less, of a real guy named Swabby.  The other stuff is purely made up, and I checked to make sure.  I don’t need any lawsuits.

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Several weeks ago I wrote about a writing competition I had entered with my daughter Crystal.  I said there were 5000 entrants, but I was mistaken.  The first round only had 4000.  Anyway, to survive the first round you had to finish in the top 10 of your 50 person group.  My RomCom bit actually shocked me by finishing 3rd in my group, when I had prepared myself for failure.

Here is round 2, in which I now must finish top 5 in a group of 50, all of whom have had top 10 finishes.  My genre this time is Sci Fi, and I have to include the action of shivering, and the word never.  I have never written anything Sci Fi before, so it’s terra incognito to me.

 

---

Aboard the Exoplanet Investigator, the cryogenic system was waking up Lieber.  He shivered under the foil blanket and his eyes burned from the intensifying light.

He trembled as he stood for the first time in seventeen years and pulled on his suit. Trillions of miles away, Earth was becoming a hostile environment, and Lieber and others were tasked with helping to find mankind a new habitat.  He climbed into his landing pod and sealed the hatch.  He would never see home again.

Planet Wolf 1061c kept the same face toward its star, and half broiled mercilessly while the darkened half froze solid.  Between the hemispheres was a warm twilit band with liquid water and an oxygen rich atmosphere.  It was here his lander descended.
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Lieber’s hands shook as he wrote his log entry.  “Rocky environment.  No growing medium for crops.  Poor atmosphere, trace toxins, carcinogens in water.  Hostile native species, airborne insects.  Oppressive gravity.  Recommendation: not suitable for settlement.”

The report would reach home in 13.8 years.   Wolf 1061c would be better off without us.

---

 

Well, I’ll find out in January what the judges thought of this.  A few notes: Lieber is Kurt Vonnegut’s mother’s maiden name, and he is my writing hero and he began by writing science fiction.  Wolf 1061c is an actual planet that astronomers have identified as having the right conditions for life, and it does keep one face baking in the sun while the other half freezes.  After I submitted this story, I went to the store and basically diddled around for a while. Then for some reason I checked for an email from NYC Midnight confirming they got my story, but I didn’t get one.  I re-checked the submission form and found it had rejected my story because it had 251 words.  I chopped a word out and got it in under the wire.  The deadline for submission was 9 pm PST, and I got my confirmation email at 8:55.  Whew!

A few weeks ago I entered a writing contest along with my daughter Crystal.  It is run by NYC Midnight and is being judged by NY publishing people.  The parameters of the contest are pretty restricting: you have no more than 250 words for the entire story, and they give you a genre, an action and a word you must include.  And, you have 24 hours to complete the assignment and hand it in, so to speak.   Crystal and I wound up with exactly the same assignment, a pretty unlikely event since there were 100 different categories assigned randomly.  Our stories were Romantic Comedy, making a wish, and the word ‘bargain.’  Here is my entry in all its glory.

————————————————————————————————————————————–

The fresh snow crunched under their boots as Jeff and Ruby wandered in the park, holding gloved hands.  There, under a pale light, was a brick wishing well, awaiting their desires.

“Hey Jeff, let’s make a wish,” Ruby giggled.

“What’s the going rate? Payday isn’t until next Friday.”

Ruby took off her glove and rummaged up two quarters from her purse.  “Two bits, tightwad!”

Ruby backed up to the well, eyes shut tight.  She ached for Jeff to marry her, but it had been three years already.  She tossed her quarter.

Jeff walked over and dropped his quarter, vaguely wondering how deep it was.

“Well Jeff, what did you wish?”

“That the Broncos can make it to the Super Bowl.”

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“What’s wrong with that?” Jeff protested weakly, trudging after her.

It took Ruby several wordless moments of marching to get back to Jeff’s car, the night suddenly cold and damp, the mood shattered.  Stupid men!  She wiped her cheeks and took a moment to compose before turning to him.  There was Jeff, on one knee, holding out a little  box.  “Well?  This isn’t exactly how I pictured asking, but will you marry me?”

She laughed with relief and threw her arms around Jeff.  At last!  “Yes, you immature cheapskate, I will!”

Jeff’s long arms bundled her tight, radiating joy – fifty cents for a fiancee and a Super Bowl was a real bargain.

---

We will find out our fates on November 20.  Success in round one is being among the top 10 stories in a 50-person category, which will move the winners on to another group of 50 from which you must be among, I believe, the top 5.   I was mortified that I got rom com as a genre, but it was better than some of the other ones!  If you’re curious, Crystal’s story is published in her blog “Beauty in Life.”

 

 

 

This is a blog I started writing about six months ago.  It’s based on a game theory situation that has real world implications.  Despite the simplicity of the game, there are computer programs written to play the game, and tournaments and strategies invented to excel at it.  The blog wasn’t going very smoothly and I feel that the point I was trying to make is bigger than the sum of my explanation and examples.  I have thought about this idea every day, and I have kept trying to edit it and dress it up in my head ever since.  Time has expired, and now I will toss it out, three quarters baked, but at least out of my hair for now.

---

Prisoner’s Dilemma is a very simple game.  The idea is that two gangsters (or better yet, petty criminals who won’t have to fear being a snitch) have been arrested and put in separate rooms where they can’t communicate with each other.  The cops are pretty sure they did a big robbery (or any crime, doesn’t matter) but they can’t prove it.  Without a confession or one gangster testifying against his accomplice, the cops can only implicate them with a smaller crime.  The first gangster can either keep quiet and maintain his innocence or tell the police it was all the other guy’s doing.  The other criminal has the same two options.   So if the first criminal says he’s innocent while his accomplish tells the cops criminal #1 did the crime, then criminal #1 goes to jail for 20 years and the second criminal goes free.  If the exact opposite is true, criminal #2 goes to jail for 20 years and the first guy goes home.  If they both finger each other, they will both go to jail for 10 years.  And if they both keep quiet and claim innocence, they both get charged with the lesser crime and go to jail for two years.

The main point of this scenario is that, while cooperation seems like the right idea, no matter what the other guy tells the cops, each criminal gets a shorter sentence by ratting his buddy out.

You rat, your friend keeps quiet: go free

You rat, your friend rats: 10 years

You keep quiet, your friend keeps quiet: 2 years
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You keep quiet, your friend rats: 20 years

Where Prisoner’s Dilemma gets interesting is in its real world applications.  Nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA was one example.  Neither side could start a nuclear war because they had to fear their enemy would live and retaliate.  If either side could have guaranteed they would destroy the other, they would have done it, but they both kept missiles in hidden, untraceable places the other couldn’t be sure they’d hit.  So they spent 40 years or so cooperating.

Another example where it is better to cheat, a la PD, is steroid use in sports.  If you take steroids you will either be superior to your honest opponent, or even with a dishonest one.  Not taking steroids will assure you will not be superior, regardless of whether your opponent cheats or not.

In some cases, it’s better to be bad as long as you are in the minority.  Aggressive, impatient drivers will get where they’re going faster than most people, but only as long as only a few people drive that way.  They say if everyone shopped at Walmart, all the local stores in your town would go bankrupt, and service workers would all get minimum wage.  But you go there to save a few bucks and hope that enough other people are willing to shop elsewhere to keep the local economy moving along.

In these examples and many more, cooperating is the most common result, but cheating or choosing the non-cooperative option gets you farther ahead, just like Prisoner’s Dilemma.  Another bonus for the selective cheat is that women prefer liars and cheats to honest people, on a primitive level, because it is seen as a survival trait to be passed on to their offspring.  Being a poor schmuck stuck in traffic is appealing to no one.

 

Well, it’s Saturday night and I find myself alone at home with only the radio and a little herd of Mooseheads (a rustic beer brand from New Brunswick) to keep me company.  It is time again to ramble about nothing much to no one in particular.

In the on-going roller coaster ride that is our empty nest/adult children at home status, it looks like the last one is getting ready to fly away again.  She and her 21 month old toddler are leaving to go occupy a basement suite in Aldergrove, 15 minutes away.  This time I’m not excited to see them go.  Having a wobbly, babbling little guy at my feet has kind of grown on me.  I love all my grandchildren, and they all have totally distinct, interesting personalities, and I think of them and miss them and look forward to spending time with them all.  But the one who lived here, Kingston, whose birth I noted in a blog in September 2017, has become my little day to day buddy.  I hasten to stress that this doesn’t make him my favourite, but it does make him a part of my daily home life.  The last time I got greeted home every day from work by a midget with a big smile was when my son was that age 32 years ago or so.  Oh well, they wont be far away and I will still see them often.

The Toronto Raptors are on the brink of winning the NBA championship, and oh lord how I have tried to be excited by it.  I am not.  I have taken to watching the last five minutes or so of each game to absorb all the crucial, tense moments of the battle.  Invariably I find myself switching channels to watch a Simpsons episode from 2008 or Wheel of Fortune.  Sure, I go back and forth in case something of competitive interest occurs, but it rarely does.  I guess I’m just not a connoisseur of the sport.  And this is me watching the final moments of an NBA Finals game.  Think back to some mid winter Tuesday with two mediocre teams squaring off, and it’s early on and the score is 8-6, on its way to 100-96, and oh my god I doubt you have enough money in your pocket right now to make me watch.  If that game was happening across the street and admission was free, I’d probably shut my curtains.

The Stanley Cup Finals are on now, too, and while I obsess about hockey in general, it is a match up of one team I have zero interest in versus a team I actively dislike.  So far the team I don’t give a rip about, St Louis, has a 3-2 series lead and could end it tomorrow.  The last game did provide some comedy, as the Blues scored the winning goal after getting away with a blatant un-called trip, and the Boston Bruin’s president Cam Neely had a childish tantrum which the cameras caught and replayed many times.  The game was delayed for several minutes while the ice crew used snow shovels to clear the garbage off the ice, thrown by the seething mob.  The Boston fans, despite seeing their home teams win championships in every major sport repeatedly over the last decade or so, still manage to be angry with violent tendencies.  As the Bostonians file into the arena they are scanned for weapons with a metal detector, but they get around that by bringing in glass marbles to throw if they get provoked.  In baseball, the fans have been known to throw batteries at the opposing outfielders.  People wearing jerseys or hats from the visiting team are often physically assaulted, and being subjected to verbal assault is guaranteed.  Even their former anthem singer Rene Rancourt used to finish his patriotic song with a violent gesture of pulling out the still beating heart of his sporting enemy with an intense, teeth-clenched grimace.  YouTube it!   Yet, if someone tugs a little at the sweater of one of their heroes, the whole crowd goes into a frenzy of injustice.  Tears flow, chants start, marbles fly.  I just want it to end in St Louis’ favour – the sooner the better.
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Well the Mooseheads are beckoning, so I’ll quit ranting now.  Summer is starting any minute now, so things are looking up.  Hockey and basketball are winter distractions and it’s time for them to go away for a while.  Time to go outside and eat meat cooked on a fire.  Time to strip down and read a book in the shade.  Time to watch day slip into starry night with a beer in hand.

I haven’t written anything in a while, as I hope at least someone noticed.  I have been reading a lot though, and a lot of what I’ve read makes me nuts.

We like to think here in Canada that we are doing better as a society than our noisy neighbours to the south, but sometimes I wonder.  In their election in 2016, social media was full of memes and posts nudging voters to be angry and move toward the political right, ie vote for Trump.  The conjecture is that many of these posts were made by the Russians and that it was interference from a foreign country.  We have an election coming up in the fall, and I have seen dozens of posts on Facebook about how badly Canada is doing, how repressive the current government is, how our Prime Minister is a chicken/spoiled brat/wiener who has ruined the country etc.  Most of the time I scroll by, in the interest of preserving my sanity, but every so often I research the subject and find that it is nearly always false.

Every time I correct the facts, I get verbally assaulted for defending Trudeau and all his sins.  Fact is, I never defend him, and if someone suggests this or that about him as an opinion, I let it go.  Opinions are fine, but telling lies to sway others’ opinions is not.  I suppose if I saw a post that told some huge half truths about Andrew Scheer I would stop and correct them, too, but I never see such a thing.  The fact is that every single meme and post that is breathlessly angry and full of exaggerations comes from the right side of centre, aiming at the political left.   It is the same modus operandi and political slant that the Americans dealt with three years ago.  Do these posts originate in Russia too?  I saw warnings early on that they might interfere here, but I haven’t seen anyone connect this wave of bullshit to them yet.  Key word: yet.

A few examples of the crap I have wrestled with the pigs over:

-The Liberal government has lost its moral authority to govern based on the SNC-Lavalin scandal and the five, count ’em, five, times they have been investigated for ethics violations.  I had to remind the torch wielding mob that their hero Stephen Harper abused his power 70 times, which got me called some choice names until I actually posted all 70 for their enjoyment.

-A meme of an angry guy who writes on his tax return that millions of illegal immigrants, poor people in far away places and various criminals and drug addicts are his deductible dependents.  I crunched the numbers and found out that his numbers were hugely inflated.  Also we give less to foreign aid than we did when Harper was PM, and in fact we give the least per capita of any developed country.  Then I mentioned that Angry Meme Guy’s biggest dependents were, by far, seniors and veterans which he should be proud to support.
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-A super right wing Christian newsletter says Canada is forbidding Christians from demonstrating, and it showed a picture of that commie Trudeau.  I didn’t really set out to defend the guy, but what the site was referring to is a new piece of legislature in Ontario that prevents people with hate agendas to gather and spout nonsense. (Funny the Christians think that applies to them, isn’t it?) Doug Ford’s government came up with that Bill, but he’s conservative like they are, so they don’t want to cast him in a bad light.  Why not just post a picture of Trudeau so the person scrolling by gets another negative image of him?

-The price of gas is super high now because of the Carbon Tax, so we need to get a new government to save us from this family-killing tax.  Fact is, since 2012 the Carbon Tax has gone up 2.2 cents per litre.  I drive 112 km a day to work and back, so I figure it is bringing poverty my way at about a dollar a week.  I sure hope I can hold on!  Besides Canada is only producing 1.6% of the world’s carbon pollution, so why do we bother?  Well, that makes us the third worst polluters in the world – our carbon emissions are more than twice the per capita rate of China – so there’s that to think about.

If all these memes and posts were true, changing governments would be a great idea.  My fear is that there will be a lot of people who will vote based on this crap, and won’t bother to question anything.  Maybe we as a society are complacent about our information, assuming if it’s published it must be true.  We should either teach critical thinking or have some resource or watchdog to keep ‘facts’ factual.

I’m a little disenchanted with the government too, to be honest.  If someone comes along with something other than mudslinging and baloney, I am willing to listen.  But if your campaign strategy is character assassinations of your rivals, then no thanks.  Every candidate running must have ideas of what they’ll do when they get elected, why not spend a few advertising dollars on telling us what they are?  Rampant negativity is what got everyone sick of Harper in the end.  He wasn’t doing a terrible job, but his campaign was nothing but attack ads, which I read afterward had everyone tuning him out.

Just take this stuff with a grain of salt and don’t be afraid to do some research if the facts seem a little over the top.  Think of it as a boil water advisory for your mind.  I’d almost welcome a chance to be fair and defend Andrew Scheer and Jagmeet Singh, but so far I haven’t encountered any angry hordes calling for their heads.