I woke up excited for the first time in fifty years. It was the end of the world.

This time we were certain of it. Scientists confirmed it. I saw it on the news. I got up and put on a nice shirt I stole yesterday. First time I shoplifted since I was a kid. It was a riot going on that day, too.

People have quieted down since the countdown clock has been running everywhere that still has power.

People started setting their watches to the recordings that will interrupt radio broadcasts. Where you can still get radio, that is. My clock was set and reset until scientists had calculated it down to the last second.

The end of the world will be exactly 12/21/21 at 3:33 AM GMT. My pants were pressed for the first time in twenty years. I had gotten out of the habit since my wife left me. Something about my lack of driving ambition. That and the fact she thought I was crazy.

You see, I knew this was going to happen. I told everyone but no one believed me. You wouldn't either but that's okay. At the time, I didn't either. I dreamed this. The date, the time, everything. I just didn't know what I was seeing at the time. My psychiatrist called it a prescient delusion and it wasn't anything to worry about. He said after some therapy I'd be fine. At two hundred dollars an hour, he picked fine time to be wrong.

Until newscasters started talking about it, I admit I didn't even know what a comet was.

Yes, they talked about it in school when I was a kid, but I admit science class was not someplace I admit to paying much attention to, except when we got to cut up frogs and make their legs move when we connected them to batteries. Science, I figured who ever used it anyway.

The first time I had the dream, I was a child. It was a dark, except for fires I could see burning all around me. The city was aflame. The buildings on my skyline were all dark, like a blackout in the summer. I could hear people wailing in the distance. No cars moved, and the summer air was hot, filled with stinging smoke, which would have made my eyes water, if I could dare close them. I look up. I wake up.

I put on dress shoes and tied my tie. I learned to finally tie one four years ago because I went to a job I positively loved. They required a tie and jacket. After all those years working as an unwanted project manager for ungrateful companies, I made it into lower management. That was three years before it was discovered.

My years in the workforce were as monotonous and crushing as everything in my life had ever been. Ill-used, ill-favored, no decision I ever made worked out right, and I absolutely never got the girl. I had been told every man is the hero of his own story.

Don't believe that. We are all extras in some famous person's life. Just ask them. They'll tell you.

Then I had The Dream one more time four years ago. It had been decades since I had it and I knew it immediately. I was walking the street in a nice suit. One from my new job where I was in a position to make changes I thought were important, where my voice was heard and my projects came in on time and under budget. I pushing past people on the street, running to my brownstone. They were all looking up. I knew I had to be somewhere and they were in my way.

I was running out of time. It was three AM and I promised I would be there.

Though there were no street lights, everywhere was lit, with a foxfire brilliance, light, soft, diffused, set people's faces in an eerie glow, shimmering, beautiful, except for the rictus of horror twisted in every face I saw. Mothers holding their children, lovers embracing, people running through the streets holding TVs, their cords dragging behind them.

Despite all of this, the only thing you ever hear is the wind and the weeping. It is a constant thing, the wind. Newscasters tried to explain it but no one was listening. Something about the size and mass of the Comet. People stopped listening once they learned it would strike the Earth.

Doomsday cults appeared like roaches under a kitchen sink, first jubilant their day had finally arrived; then petulant because no one believed them, they had been right. Being right has become so important to some people. Then they grew truculent, dangerous as their righteousness overwhelmed their moral imperatives and the growing realization the end of the world included them. Fortunately, most people simply killed them outright, fearing moral and judicial authorities no longer mattered.

There was surprisingly little violence after people screaming the end of the world from every corner were silenced from a populace grown tired of fear. It was a strange precipitous thing, because it was thought to have occurred all over the world within a single day. I think a subconscious shudder through the collective mind shouted back at them. We got it. The end of the world is nigh. Now shut the hell up.

People slowly tapered off from going to work in the last year. That is where I met her in my last years working, the only job I ever loved.

She was beautiful, not the classical sense of beauty, but in a way I could be comfortable with. Not the awe-full kind of beauty which makes men stupid. A quiet beauty, one that drew me inexorably to her. She was kind even in a world gone straight to hell. I learned she was married and that didn't matter much to me at the end of the world. She came to my house and eventually she took me to hers. Her husband had stopped speaking once you could see the Comet during the day. At night it dominated the sky but once it could be seen during the day, people began to do strange things. His lack of speech was far less dramatic than most. Suicide suddenly became a competition sport.

In comparison her husband Dave, just sat in his living room looking out the window at the damn comet. He didn't talk. Only got up to replenish his drink, go to the john, go outside to get food. He listened to us making love frantically, desperately, in the next room. We made love under the light of the end of the world. I wanted him to be angry. I wanted him to say something. I wanted things to be normal. I wanted to believe we had a future. He never made a sound. Never moved a muscle.

I heard the pigeons on the fire escape in front of his chair fly away. The pigeons were always there and only moved when he did. It was three months ago he got up and staggered past us. We didn't bother to close the door anymore. I can only assume he thought we were sleep, he looked in at us and then he walked out the door. He never came back.

On the last day I wanted to look my best. I told her I was going to go home and change. I didn't live too far away, I thought today would be like any other. People had started staying home, doing very little. No one picked up trash, and it was amazing we hadn't lost water over much of New York. I guess, unlike the garbage men, water treatment found someone willing to work during the apocalypse.

The power went out for the last time in New York at midnight. It was the only blackout we knew would happen. I had grown used to walking to her house, first in the dark, and now in the light at the end of the world.

The people were in place. The roving bands stealing right up to the end. We were all where we were supposed to be. Except for me. A traffic accident I didn't see in my dream slowed me down. Now I would be late. I couldn't be late. I ran. My shoes pinched my feet. I didn't remember that from the dream either. I saw people just staring up. My alarm on my watch went off at 3:20 and I was still ten blocks away. I tore off my shoes and ran barefoot, shoving the statues staring skyward out of my way. No one objected. Most of them didn't even notice me; and to be honest I didn't care either way.

Fires from nearby buildings lit the street as I ran and my eyes watered and teared but nothing was going to stop me from reaching her. My alarm sounded again at 3:30 and I saw her running down the street to me.

She was wearing my favorite white blouse. The one I met her in. So many years ago when I was certain my life had turned around. It was her sad smile that told me I would spend all my life with her. I grabbed her and the smell of honey-suckle filled my nostrils. She was warm and soft. I closed my eyes. I drank in those last seconds. The wind picked up, gusting strongly now, the cries grew louder in the distance, a collective gasp against the coming night. She squeezed me tight.

She turned me and said "Look."

My alarm went off. I looked into the light.

The Light at the End of the World  © Thaddeus Howze 2012. All Rights Reserved

Thaddeus Howze

Hub City Blues

Veni, Scribo, Vici (I came, I wrote, I conquered)

“Is the commander’s shuttle clear yet?” Lian asked, switching gazes back and forth between Grimes and the display tank.
“Not yet, XO,” replied the ops chief. “Our fighters are still tied down with the enemy. His shuttle’s in the thick of it.”
A wailing vibration from an enemy missile that impacted perilously close to the bridge shorted out a row of display screens. Images in the tank fizzled out, leaving a gaping void of black. Instantly, a redundancy kicked in reconstituting the footage.
The behemoth ship covered a third of the display. Like an encroaching storm front, the massive ship’s image soon blotted out everything else in the tank, energy bolts surging forth from its many emitters like strokes of lightning.
A much larger bolt stabbed outward from the behemoth’s center node, piercing the Far Walker’s upper bow. The enormous green-white beam bit into shielding, draining it dry, then cut into layers of super hard hull plating. A seething, powdery burst of atmosphere erupted from the ensuing breach. Like a gargantuan fire sword, the beam thrust deeply into the Far Walker, turning vast areas of its interior into a star’s core.
Two similarly destructive beams ensnared the King and the Gujarat, penetrating each missile frigate on one side and exiting out the other. Charred, blackened debris jetted out of breaches in both frigates’ hulls. The Cane received particularly harsh dosages of the massive beam. Successive bolts burrowed into the troop carrier’s outer thrusters and mid section, shattering its shield generators.

“Fall back!” Lian turned to the pilot. “Try to outflank that ship!”
“That beam ripped through fifteen levels,” Hilburn reported. “We’ve got massive internal damage!”
“I’ve sourced those beams’ output,” said Weapons Specialist Domos. “Targeting!”
The XO extended a forestalling hand. “Belay that, Fahid. I’ve got something else in mind. Prepare Judgement One missiles.”
Domos tossed the XO a wary glance. “For a J1 launch we’re going to have to put distance between us and the target.”
The pilot, Janet Kiowa, adjusted controls. “Increasing fall back speed.”
“Tell the Task Force to clear the target zone,” ordered Lian.
Domos tapped a console key with a grim finality. “J1 is online.”
“I want every ship to implement a mass launch of lower grade missiles to screen the J1’s approach.”
Grimes acknowledged and disseminated Lian’s order to the task force.
Lian stepped closer to the display tank, barely suppressing an urge to cough from the hazy acridity of damaged, overloaded consoles. She fixed pitiless eyes on the dreaded behemoth, and a spirit of vengeance coiled enticingly around her heart when she snapped the next command, “fire!”

Clouds of Flail and Terror Rod missiles from every ship in Task Force Arrow descended upon the massive Erekdenit vessel.
The behemoth threw up a howling wall of point defense fire, wiping out a host of incoming missiles. Numerous task force missiles, nevertheless, broke through a gleaming barricade of enemy fire to smash into their target. Miles upon miles of the behemoth’s hull boiled beneath a restless, gaseous ocean of multiple missile eruptions. A slower moving J1 plunged into that searing ocean, detonating upon contact.
The J1’s explosion breached the target’s hull, channeling tremendous anti-matter laced forces into its interior, before whipping outward in a secondary blast that dislodged enormous chunks of dense hull.
The behemoth listed severely, its batteries silenced as large pulses of chain reactions assaulted its mighty framework, tearing it apart.
A collective pause seemed to come over the remaining 14 Erekdenit ships as their crews witnessed the death throes of their lead ship.

Lian smelled blood and swooned in its headiness. “Target the heavies and mediums with J1s and open fire.”
Eight J1 missiles, hidden beneath a blanket of screening fire, struck the behemoth’s medium and heavy companions. Individual blast waves from eight explosions merged into a single, moon size spatial disrupting wave that swept over the Task Force ships like a tsunami. One of the heavies broke in half, one segment consumed in a blazing aura, the other plummeting toward the planetoid’s surface.
A fiery typhoon consumed a large swathe of area where the segment impacted, producing a florescent crater that marked the planetoid like a glowing red eye.

NASA: NASA Science

Unrivaled control of a robotic arm has been achieved using a paralyzed woman's thoughts, a US study says.

BBC News: Paralyzed woman's thoughts control robotic arm

The last week in December, PAnd0RA 001 returns as your Holiday gift to brighten your travels through deep space! 'A Broken Jar' sees the vivacious android confront both her growing popularity and her obsessive attraction to the strange unmarked Transport BOX secured aboard the Interstellar Transport DROMEDARY. Meanwhile forces to retrieve the BOX and insights PAnd0RA will need for her development are moving to converge on her upon the Dromedary's arrival in the HESTIA system. Questions will be raised and answers will be given but will anyone involved be able to handle them? Much will be revealed in the next episode of 'The PAnd0RA Ultimatum'!

“The Good Old Days” part 2: the world IS getting better

Every time you are shocked or dismayed by something you see people undertake to do to other people, remember that not long ago, you just wouldn’t have heard, seen or read about it. The fact that so many think the world is getting worse is a sign that it’s getting better; we’re trying harder, pulling away from the old norms, including more people in the fabric of society.

For the first time in human history, the concept of inalienable rights actually is somewhat broadly considered to apply to all categories of human being. Its application still lags well behind its ideation, but at least all draft-eligible Americans can vote now–it cannot be forgotten that that has not yet even been true for fifty years!!! We are shocked and dismayed, as more of our old assumptions are brought to the ground; this dismay represents progress, as more people are brought into the fold of basic human opportunity. The best we can do, any of us older than preschool age, is thank ourselves for every way in which we’re free from the poisonous crap that’s been drummed into us from birth. We are products of a poisoned world, a world where people are defined by ridiculous parameters and not taught to see each other as individuals; where violence as instruction is taken for granted, and wars last for astounding lengths of time: where people collude to exclude others from citizenship for reasons as preposterous as skin color, genitalia or inherited religion. Where bullying, humiliation and authoritarian punishment are rites of passage.

Fortunately, the grand scale of human-on-human atrocity is actually getting smaller, as the world shrinks and we increasingly realize that, as it was once said, ‘an explorer from another galaxy would find us all very much alike’. We have to remember that, and remember that the only hope for our wretched but brilliant species lies in its future.

Artist's impression of a protostar, with its jets of outflowing matter, protoplanetary disk, and envelope of gas and dust. NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC)

Ars Technica: Astronomers discover youngest protostar yet observed, Matthew Francis

It is hard to design a dwelling, especially to project into the future. You have to decide to embrace the present building codes and area architecture and orchestrated consumer wants or cut new turf. For instance the one room cabin soon evolved into one family room and a master bed chamber. The fireplace was the kitchen. Now each family member deserves a bedroom or mini-apartment and every room is big. Glamor, elegance, prestige, status, the display to neighbors that either I have made it or I am important is evident.

Many rooms are designed around activities. Formal dining rooms with individual eatery, ample shoulder separation and ostentatious junk jewelery chandeliers suspended like the sword of Damocles, chairs hard and straight and Emily Post worship. That was the scheme even with our crowded family table, messy kids, finger foods and more modest display. This beats eat where you sit and sleep where you drop, it's a more civilized arrangement. Africans families when I seen them in the magazines shared a pot of communal stew. Though their eating was orderly and practical they soon also succumbed to Emily Post.

Designing the future is hard because we don't often view the details like when Superman makes a potty run does his cape get in the way? He rushes to his next call with toilet paper stuck to his boot. In the Star Wars saga the young Vader has a fruit meal with his beau, so human, unlike Jar Jar Binks whose spaghetti whip tongue is faster than you can say "pass the........" Tatoone dining where Luke's Aunt swears by her nuke powered food processor, even they sit at a table. My dreams go back to "Lost in Space", where they lived in a RV and had an ATV or Space 1999 and their environmentally sound moon base on an drifting asteroid (NASA likes that episode).

So why the future, why the techno hut? Because most of us live in homes we didn't make for ourselves by people who had dreams and standards that didn't regard how we think and desire and live. We check out the place and adapt. We adapt within certain parameters and are driven to satisfy ourselves and showoff to others. National Geographic ran a photographic series that showed families sitting amongst their material possessions from different parts of the globe. That was totally interesting. Today I drive by homes and see garage doors open and packed to the hilt. We put puffy furniture in a small room and complain about no space and awkward comfort. I laughed at Thomas Edison's house (so small) and at ancient homes in Africa, we are so advanced, NOT!

The techno hut has four parts. The private space for sleeping and bath, food storage and prep, utility room and the common space. Present homes maximize everything. Eventually you can't economically support the home and each family member is isolated in their own personal compartment. The individual autonomy is exaggerated in this culture, where as in African culture both autonomy and family blend in a good proportion. This consideration reflects in the arrangement of the architecture. Talk about fractals, the individual and the family and the hood have the same look and feel. The home accommodates that in a practical way. For instance we need huge powered food storage when food is bought for the long run. Not so big when markets are local and the habit is to consume while fresh. We spend so much time working and have no time for hunting, gathering, growing and preparing, we consume ready to eat packaged meals and fast foods, so we don't need a big kitchen, do we?

The physical body is not as advanced as people think. That capsule that contains every chemical needed will fail because the body has to push through some bulk, because that is the way the body is made. Super mental means nothing to blood in the arteries and a pumping heart. A man must poop something. A home can be just a force field, but to cover the butt, can I get some privacy please? So to me the most advanced techno hut is probably the simplest that makes survival in an environment practical. First provide the basics, food, heat/cool, light, water and waste removal, then some free  space. Yeah, we can jazz it a bit.

Hey, folks.  

I'm looking for some readers for my work, so I can have some critiques.  In exchange, I can do critiques of your work.  Please let me know if anyone is interested, and I will post a few excerpts.  Thanks a million!  

-Brandon

Quality Editing Designed With Indie Authors

Q & V Affordable Editing

Physics World - How ULAS J1120+0641 may have appeared

Physics World: Ancient gas sheds light on universe's first billion years

from NASA

http://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/8246896057/

Black Marble - City Lights 2012 [hd animation]

Physics World - a 'solar energy funnel'

Physics World: Semiconductor funnel could boost solar cells

Sun Ra has always been a tough listen for me. Out from his disciples though I found vibes I could comprehend. I couldn't do John Gilmore (will have to) but Archie Shepp strikes and explodes my imagination. The album "On This Night" I play over and over again. What is crazy is when you listen so many times you submerge down into the texture of the playing. I done the same with John Coltrane. Now he said in his interviews that he had a number of musical devices that he is experimenting with. From that I tried to identify them. I listen to Coltrane play "My Favorite Things" at different periods of his life side by side. Not just his searching growth comes out, his musical devices. Now John Coltrane was on a quest and I'd say a spiritual one.

My other two favorite sax guys were different. Archie Shepp was/is an explorer, an adventurer. Eddie Harris the inventor. Archie Shepp in his most lyrical used the Sun Ra sound as the instrument. He zooms in and out of noise, texture, tune and percussion. Hisssss, growl, sing, hummm, croon.........

Now Eddie Harris was a different sort. His use of the electronic sound on sound (echo) and multi-channel effects on wind instruments was cutting edge. I wonder why musicians playing electronic wind instruments today don't pay him greater homage. He could ballad, blues and jive but to me his spacey techno grooves are the blade. He practiced with Coltrane, I heard, and he did some tunes that Trane would approve, Eddie had some skills. He also had this desire to do funk, I don't know why?

Wayne Shorter is another guy I listened to. He passed through the Art Blakey school. He has some wonderful vistas and Weather Report still haunts me. I saw them play in person.

I listen to others and because of my immersion into the aforementioned I appreciate a greater depth. 

Curiousity - AAAS Science Mag

AAAS Science Mag: The First Signs of Ancient Life on Mars?

I tried this intuit contest where I sent in my own admission. I want to create an online review that covers the work of black writers. There used to be a magazine that did that but it went out of business. I figured out that it wouldn't take more than $6000 dollars to recreate the number and even the quality of reviews that this now defunct magazine -- I think it was Black Issues -- used to do.

I was going to go the Kickstarter route which I may do eventually but this Inuit idea came up so I submitted my idea. What I didn't tell them is that I'm primarily interested in promoting the work of genre writers such as Steven Barnes or Chip Delaney. I could also use the site to review up and coming writers like the people who post here.

So if anyone here wants to help here's the link. If I understand this contest the more votes I get the more likely I'll be selected. So your votes would be appreciated.

You can vote for the idea here:

https://www.facebook.com/intuit/app_280813488703650?app_data=us_showcase_3153

Philip Shropshire
www.threeriversonline.com

PS: I'm a professional reviewer, former newspaper person and prolific freelancer. I'm probably up for the job.

Here's a review that I did that was turned into a podcast, not African American related but it shows my chops:

http://jazropo.blogspot.com/2006/11/my-review-of-thomas-friedmans-world-is.html

And here's a review of "Charisma" (and other books) that I wrote a long time ago for BET, when they gave a frak about books and such.

http://www.threerivertechreview.com/redhourdown.htm

Nature

Nature: Grim picture of polar ice-sheet loss

This is not my webinar regarding getting business credit but even if it doesn't provide everything it promises...taking a look might not be a bad idea.

I recently met a colleague with a LOT of experience helping small business owners get legitimate “unsecured” 0% interest rate business credit (useable as cash; and doesn’t require your tax returns) -- and I thought you should know about this awesome resource!
If getting funds to grow your business...
* to buy advertising * hire the right kind of help * getting the right kind of software * paying for the best quality consulting
...would be helpful for you, then I highly recommend this free webinar about how to get that kind of 0% business credit.
Same webinar -- choose the time that works better for you:
Thursday Dec 6 @ 12pm Pacific / 3pm Eastern
Thursday Dec 6 @ 4pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern
(Click one of the above)
Interestingly, using these methods can actually boost your personal credit rating, and yet, none of this business credit shows up on your credit report.  These are legitimate strategies that are unknown to most business owners.
Simply: if it would help you to have a loan or credit to grow your business, this event is a “must” attend.  It’ll save a lot of time and you'll get the latest best practices to get business credit.
If you attend and use these strategies, I’d love to hear how you’ll be spending the new funds!
Cheers, George

If you wish to stop receiving our emails or change your subscription options, please Manage Your Subscription George Kao Coaching, P.O. Box 22285, San Francisco CA, 94122