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Like I mentioned earlier, apparently my host, R4L, had an automated tool that apparently fixed it. The red line was no longer across the padlock.
        However, there was a little black dot on the image. I clicked it, and Firefox informed me that there were unprotected elements and suggested images. So I opened the index page in notepad, and the images were all in-line, no http or https;
        So I set it aside for a while. The answer would come to me, as it usually does eventually.
        It did the next morning. I make it a habit to read a chapter out of the Bible while my coffee is brewing, and remembered that all the illustrations in my online King James on my web site were actually on Wikipedia. So I opened every file; there’s one for each book, and did a global replace of http with https.
        It took quite a while. I uploaded the files, and the little black dot is still there with the same message.
        At any rate, both Opera and Chrome show the site as secure, so I’m not going to worry about it. Unless, of course, I think of something else.
        I wrote the above yesterday before I went to the bar. When I got to the bar, they told me the shuffleboard scoreboard was messing up. I looked at the old Samsung Tab 3 I had donated, and its old proprietary browser would no longer display a secure page at all!
        A week or so ago I’d tried downloading Firefox so that it could display the scoreboard fullscreen, but Google Play wouldn’t let me in; two factor authentication. Stupid. I don’t have to show ID to enter a physical store. At any rate, I’ll go back this afternoon with the notebook with email.
        As to the stupid dongle, the old phone I was using as the radio crapped out, so I was back to using Bluetooth on the tablet, which was a lousy solution, as when I changed inputs the stupid tablet started making noise; the noise of a commercial. Annoying.
        And then I realized that I’d not tried using Bluetooth with Windows 10. I wasn’t hopeful that they fixed it, Microsoft almost never fixes broken junk when they “update” their OS, they just add eye candy and move everything around so you have to learn how to use it all over again.
        But amazingly, they actually fixed it! So I have KSHE playing over Bluetooth from the tablet, and the tower plays tunes from the file server.
        So I took my laptop to the bar, and Google annoyed me no end trying to get into Google Play. Searching for Firefox returned only Chrome and Opera. Apparently Firefox won’t run on that old browser because it wasn’t in Google Play at all. So I installed Opera; Chrome showed a scary thing saying my SSL wasn’t good, but I never see that in Chrome on any other device, so it’s probably just that ancient tablet.
        I ran the browser, put the scoreboard as its home screen, and had it put a link to the page on the tablet’s home screen. I handed it back to the bartender, who came back and said the back and reset buttons were missing. They were. WTF?? There must be something wrong with the code. I told the bartender I’d have to look at the code, in Canada, when I got home. Actually it’s on my hard drive, too. She wanted me to take the tablet home and bring it back, probably not realizing I might have to adjust 44 files.
        Than Patty called crying. Her eleven year old cat that the vet had told her wouldn’t see four because it had FIV, the cat version of AIDS, had cancer. I was surprised that her talking to me cheered her up. I wonder how long the cat has? That’s why I’ll never have another animal, it hurts too bad when they die.
        I finished my second beer and took the tablet home, and started opening HTML scoreboard files. I opened B0.html, the file that displays a blue zero in notepad, and there was no back or reset!
        I looked at its backup. It was the same.
        When I had first gone to the bar there was a guy from Texas spouting Quazy antivax conspiracy theories. Maybe I was being infected by his insanity, because I started to wonder if my original code had somehow traded places with code from an alternate reality or something. It made no sense. Did somebody hack me, and my host? Both theories were equally ludicrous.
        After loading a dozen HTML files into notepad without actually looking at any of them, I noticed something—B4.html had the back and reset button, which is when the light went on. A score of zero needs no reset to bring it to zero, and there is no -1. I’m thinking of adding gray back and reset to the zeros so if something like this comes up in a couple of years, it won’t make me crazy.
        I hope nobody tries to use my site with an outdated tablet and browser now that I have SSL, because it makes old tablets and browsers freak out. But I imagine if someone has used the same tablet for ten years, they’re used to secure sites breaking.
        Whatever happened to backwards compatibility? I’m using HTML 4.1, two decades old but it still breaks with a browser newer than that hitting a secure site. It’s a little insane.

I wrote this a couple of years ago and could have sworn I posted it, but the only place I could find it was on my hard drive.
        My intention wasn’t to use HTML as a programming language—it’s a markup language. I didn’t realize what I had done until I had done it.
        I’ve been programming since 1982, but haven’t done any of what I called “real” programming since they switched from Foxpro to Access at work well over a decade ago; yes, you can build databases with Access but I didn’t consider it “programming”.
        The only coding I’ve done in years isn’t what I call “programming” unless there’s Javascript, and there’s very little on either of my sites.
        Mike Meyer bought a very old shuffleboard, older than me, for his bar, Felber’s, last year, and came up with a paperish whiteboard for a scoreboard. I was playing with my tablet a couple of weeks ago and realized that I could make a scoreboard in HTML, so I swapped the tablet for the computer and went to work.
        The first thing I needed to do was something I’d only done once before, and that was almost two decades ago—use frames.
        That first time was a joke I played with an online friend and link buddy in Canada, who was going to medical school. He often complained of the lab rats biting him.
        I often ran a contest on my site called the “Ticket to Nowhere”. The winner was a Quake or gaming webmaster who went the longest without updating their site. The winner got a no expense paid ticket to absolutely nowhere.
        Dopey Smurf (the fellow’s Quake handle) emailed me and said he was planning to close his site, because graduation was coming up and he feared it would harm his upcoming career.
        As soon as I saw the email I had a humorous idea and emailed him back. I would have another contest, and in addition to the ticket to nowhere, the winner (Smurf, of course) would get a box of voracious invisible rats that if let loose would eat a web site. I wrote a container that loaded an unlinked page from my site, which would have a screen-sized GIF of his site. Touching it got the GIF running, which showed the outlines of rats eating their way across the page leaving a dull yellow behind.
        Two or three years earlier, Joost Shoor had shut down his Quake site search engine, leaving a dull yellowish screen with a Strogg holding a sign that read “Haste does not lead to success”. What the invisible rats left was identical to Joost’s closed site, except the sign read “Out to lunch”.
        If I’d kept that code, the scoreboard would have been a lot easier, as I had some relearning to do. I’d completely forgotten how to do frames. Of course, I’d only used one in that one occasion.
        Once I had that figured out, it was a piece of cake. I just made an HTML file and a JPG for each number of each color, with arrows at the bottom to increase or decrease the number, linking to the next and previous. Dirt simple. But when I tested it I realized I needed a way to bring them back to zero, so I added a reset. That done and tested and I rolled a joint and opened a beer.
        Later that evening I thought of a big improvement—numbers from one to four at the bottom, with each number linking to the number that value higher than the present number. So I got out the computer and, half drunk and all the way stoned, backed up the working files and tried to do the modifications, but I was nowhere near sober enough. I put it away for the next morning.
        It was a lot easier, and the modifications took about an hour or two (there were 44 HTML files to change). I uploaded it to my web site, got out my tablet, and only then realized that I’d written a completely functional program using nothing but HTML 4.1 and JPGs.
        The one last thing I need to do is to name the window so I could have a single reset button. I knew how to do it when I gave Smurf the invisible rats, but have forgotten completely how. It might have used javascript, I don’t remember.
        I wish I had saved the rats!

Back in March I asked you guys if I should put SSL on my mcgrewbooks.com site, since it appeared that it would raise my hosting cost by $25 a year, and there was no technical reason to have it; there is no personal information collected whatever.
        I gave a lot of thought to the comments for months, and yesterday decided to go ahead and spend the money; I just put three grand on my mortgage principal. So I went to R4L’s web site to find where I could add SSL. I couldn’t find it.
        However, their help is actually a Canadian who helps through text chat, who informed me that paid hosting came with SSL, I simply had to turn it on.
        Well, it wasn’t that simple, as they’re upgrading their tools and I ran across a couple of 404s. But I finally found the correct widget to click, so the unnecessary lock is no longer broken.
        My other site still has a broken lock, but it’s a “free” site. Registration there is $15, but you get ten megabytes of hosting. Those are the kind of site that an extra $25 buys SSL, and you might as well pay for hosting. It isn’t much more, and it isn’t hard to fill ten megs. Almost all of the images at mcgrew.info are either on Wikipedia (which reminds me, I should donate again) or mcgrewbooks.
        I wish I would have known that five years ago! But I’m still more than happy with R4L.
        Since R4L is Canadian, whose internet laws apply? America’s? Canada’s? Both? Neither?

Apologies to Willson Meredith, The Music Man
To the tune of 76 Trombones

Seventy six broke bones at the hippie raid,
With a hundred & ten Black corpses close at hand.
They were followed by rows and rows,
Of wounded pimps and whores,
The stoned of every famous band.

Seventy six cell phones caught the morning fun,
With a hundred & ten cop cars right behind.
There were a thousand creed,
All of them smoking weed,
There were horns of every shape & size.

There were copper bottom timpani in horse platoons,
Thundering, thundering, all along the way.
Double bell euphoniums and big ass loons,
Each big loon having its big fat way.

There were fifty mounted canons in the battery,
Thundering, thundering, louder than before.
Clarions of every size,
And strumpets who'd improvise
A full scream higher than the whore!

Seventy six broke bones hit the counterpoint,
While a hundred and ten cop guns blazed away.
To the rhythm of Harch! Harch! Harch!
All the kids began to march,
And they're marching to the courthouse today!

The other day I was at a friend's bar, whose clientele had dwindled greatly, and asked where everybody was lately? He said that a lot of them had died, which was certainly true. Most were elderly. I saw one guy about my age there a few months ago who hadn't left his house for over a year, because he was a chimera. Delta probably has him locked up at home again.

Then today I log on to S/N and there aren't many comments in any story. I feel like Dr. Crusher in that Star Trek episode.

I haven’t been writing very much this year, although I do have a few things I’m working on, like this post. Instead, I’ve done a lot of reading. I’ve mentioned Obama’s fat book with small type here a while back. I re-read a few I already had, like Dune, and discovered that with Amazon Prime you not only get “free” TV and movies, you get a free to read library.
        One of the “free” (covered in the monthly cost) books was Neal Stephenson’s Cryptomonicon, which suffered from a flaw that caused my Voyage to Earth story to be rejected by F&SF: the beginning didn’t grab the junior editor. I fixed it by adding another story that did start well, what Lester del Rey called a “fix-up”. He would turn a bunch of short stories he couldn’t sell into a novel.
        I didn’t read much of the Stephenson book; after two chapters you should have a better idea of what the book is about than the book’s title hinted at, but a lot of you have recommended some of his books. I found Andy Wier’s Randomize; if I’d had to pay for it I would have been pissed, as it was a short story, not a novel. A very good short story, but three bucks for a single story when you get half a dozen, in print, from F&SF for seven is a ripoff. Beware buying Amazon ebooks!
        Then I found a book by someone I never heard of, Douglas Phillips. Wikipedia hadn’t heard of him, either, although there are others with the same name, none of whom are writers. The book was titled Quantum Space, and the book itself was as nerdy as its title. It was the science fiction equivalent of David Allan Coe’s The Perfect Country Song, with about every SF meme there is.
        Unlike Stephenson’s book, it grabbed me right away. Written in 2017 it is set in our current dystopian future, the one 20th century writers never foresaw, although the story isn’t dystopian. It starts with three astronauts in a Soyuz on their way home from the ISS, then cuts to a Russian watching for its contrail. He sees the contrail, then a bright blue flash and a loud bang, and the contrail stops. Russia has lost three astronauts, one of whom is an American.
        Later we find that they’re not just lost in outer space, but in quantum space. In this bit of fiction (with an afterword that explains the real from the imaginary), when they found the Higgs Bosun in 2012, they found that string theory was accurate, and Europe and the US have classified the information. It’s explained why, but I’m leaving no spoilers except for the space aliens hinted at early in the book.
        There are physicists, FBI agents, evil rich people giving China classified information, the military, the LHC and the collider at Fermilab (where much of the story takes place). It’s pretty much action-packed all the way through; it would make a great movie, although some of the dialogue seems like padding. Of course, I’ve never seen a movie that matched the book exactly; The Running Man shared almost nothing with the book, but The Green Mile was very close in most respects.
        Someone who knew nothing about quarks and gluons and the other particles that make up matter and energy would actually learn something reading this. There’s an illustration of the “Standard Model” with its different flavors of quarks, neutrinos, and other particles. There’s no graviton, as we haven’t found it, but in the story the aliens (who are far advanced from us) have.
        It was an excellent read, with a lot of twists and turns and surprises. I highly recommend it. It’s free to read if you have Amazon Prime or a local library card.

I discovered science fiction around 1960 when I was eight, and loved almost all of it until this century. Most of it was about trouble in paradise, whether video or literature. I read Orwell’s Animal Farm in high school, which was in the SF section of the library even though it wasn’t science fiction or speculative fiction, more like a fantasy morality tale. It was a warning about the Fascism America seems to now be marching towards.
        Because I liked that one, I found another one from Orwell, 1984. I stopped reading when the rats were biting the guy in the face, maybe halfway through that long, horrible story about the coming dystopian future that was supposed to happen forty years ago.
        There were very few of the horrible dystopias in the twentieth century, which is why 1984 stuck out so much. The only other dystopia I remember from my youth was the nineteenth century tome The Time Machine.
        Fahrenheit 451 was one I returned to the library after the first chapter. I don’t remember why I disliked it, it’s widely praised.
        Then this century I started buying SF magazines again, around 2010, and discovered that almost all of the new stuff was dystopian. F&SF didn’t have cover to cover dystopias like the rest of them, so I bought a subscription. By the time it was over I didn’t renew, because it, too, had become almost total dystopia. Facebook ads advertising SF all proudly shill how dystopian they are.
        I think I realize why all of the dystopia: This horrible century. Despite how technology has already surpassed most twentieth century speculation, there are other things making anyone born after 1984 think we’re heading towards a dystopian future: The terrorist attack on 9/11 that triggered a war that lasted twenty years; to anyone born in this century it was a lifelong war. Then two years after the Afghan war started, a second, incredibly stupid war in Iraq was started. Under the oil men Bush and Cheney, gasoline prices went from $1.05 to $4.50 at its height here in Springfield, followed by a banking crisis that very nearly put the world in a depression that could have made the Great Depression look like a mild recession in comparison. You can’t get to work without gasoline yet, and the high cost of getting to work killed budgets and mortgages. Luckily, we then elected a man who historians call the tenth best president, and catastrophe was averted.
        To a teenager or young adult then, the world just kept getting worse, especially to racists, since this president was Black.
        Then came our fourth worst president in American history, again according to historians, a very lazy man who had never had to work in his life, a multimillionaire at the age of three. In his administration’s last year, his laziness and aversion to reality and truth cost hundreds of thousands of American lives to a pandemic. I saw him as the American Nero, fiddling while America burned with Covid fever and a breathing tube down its throat.
        And the world is heating up, with people who have made fortunes selling the very thing causing the heating denying that it’s even happening, caring not that the world will be a hellish place if we don’t stop burning their poisons. I saw the same thing with the tobacco industries. These people simply don’t care about anything but wealth and power!
        To someone under about forty, the world has become worse and worse every year of their lives. Of course the future is dystopian, according to their own witness.
        The thing is, there has seldom been a real dystopian future. The past has almost always been more dystopian than almost every epoch’s present. The one time in western history that really did have a dystopian future was the Roman empire, as when it fell, the dark ages overtook the western world for centuries, until the Renaissance. Of course, the Roman empire was dystopian, far worse than most dystopian science fiction. Beheadings, crucifixions, execution by animal attack, plagues…
        Some would say that America had a dystopian future during the “roaring twenties” before the depression, but according to Grandma McGrew, who was in her twenties in the twenties, it only roared for the rich, while working class people lived in what we would consider a dystopia. Multiply that by a hundred if you weren’t White.
        Even during my own lifetime, America and most of the world’s nations have become less and less dystopian, except this century. In the previous century we had horrible institutional racism, with laws that separated White people from everyone else. I can remember seeing the first Black person I’d ever seen, when I was five or six. I was completely ignorant about race, having not been brought up as a racist, and only Whites and Hispanics (who look White to me) were on television. I said “Wow, look at the tan on that guy!” My mother turned bright red and the Black man chuckled. Most Whites were raised to be racist. Black people didn’t gain full rights until 1964, and racism today (even institutional) is far less than it was then.
        But it still exists. Most of my friends are racist and don’t even realize it.
        Once, when I was still working and smoking cigarettes, I huddled in the doorway to try to stay out of the rain, talking with a well-dressed, college educated professional Black woman, who was gesturing with her cigarette and grousing about how store employees would always follow her around to make sure she wasn’t stealing anything.
        I said I had the opposite problem: “I can never find sales people when I need them.” That’s institutional racism. When I’m pulled over, I worry I might get a ticket. When a Black person is pulled over, particularly if he’s a young man, they have to worry that the cop might murder them.
        That’s institutional racism. It’s our present dystopia, but not nearly as dystopian as when I was a child. A century earlier was far more dystopian, Black people weren’t even considered human, and were bought, sold, and worked like dogs or horses, and treated no better than dogs and horses.
        Throughout all of human history until the middle of the nineteenth century, slavery was practiced world-wide. The ultimate dystopia, gone for a century and a half. I think racism a hundred years from now will be just an ugly relic of the past, like slavery is to us today.
        Part of the dystopia of my youth was the filthy, unhealthy environment. Rivers and streams caught fire. There was no air conditioning in cars then, and driving past Monsanto you had to roll the windows up in ninety five degree heat or the air would burn your lungs! Congress started the EPA in the seventies.
        Workplaces were hellish. Grandpa McGrew fell four stories down an elevator shaft because his employer, Purina, was too cheap to put doors on the elevators. Today we have OSHA.
        If you look at history, there have always been ups and downs, with more ups than downs. Every new discovery, every new invention lessens our present dystopia and has throughout history, but people seldom read history. Some people never read anything.
        I spoke of why youth believes in a dystopian future, but what about seniors? That’s something I can’t figure out. Maybe they have bad memories.
        Of course, as mentioned, we’re already seeing the climate changes brought on by global warming, and that will obviously create a dystopia, won’t it?
        Not necessarily. One of the stories in my Yesterday’s Tomorrows compilation is Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s 2 B R 0 2 B. Like was widely feared at the time it was written, the world in Vonnegut’s future is greatly overpopulated at forty million people, and by the year 2000 people are eating seaweed. But although it was as dark as anything he wrote, it wasn’t dystopian. It starts:
                Everything was perfectly swell.
                There were no prisons, no slums, no insane asylums, no cripples, no poverty, no wars.
                All diseases were conquered. So was old age.
                Death, barring accidents, was an adventure for volunteers.
        In my preface to that story, I remarked that few writers seemed to have noticed advances in farm equipment, other farming technologies, or advances in chemistry, biology, agronomy, and other sciences needed to improve yields. The reality of his future and our present is that today there is plenty of food for everyone, and the only reason people go hungry is the politics of greed.
        I see the same happening with global warming. Evil money-worshiping men in high towers running oil wells and coal mines from a safe (to them) distance have tried to keep global warming under wraps, but it’s no longer possible for them. Their industries will die, and like the turn of the twentieth century, new industries will spring up, this time bringing clean energy. Like with farming equipment, windmills and solar panels will improve, and new technologies will spring up, particularly as new advances in science occur. Climate change is happening. We caused it, we can and will fix it.
        I don’t write dystopian SF because I simply don’t believe the future will be anywhere as dystopian as the present, and especially not as bad as the horrible past.

Note: this text was written in the summer of 2020
        When I heard of ancient Rome’s “plague emperor” who was known as a “philosopher king” I had to look into that, considering our own plague, one that’s already the leading cause of death in America that has caused over a third of a million deaths, and thrown millions out of work leaving poverty and hunger.
        Luckily for the ancient Romans, Marcus Aurelius was no Donald Trump. Or rather, unluckily for us (or stupidly for us, as unlike ancient Rome, we elect our leaders), Donald Trump is no Marcus Aurelius. More like Rome’s Emperor Nero.
        I sought out his writings, titled Meditations, and found a four hundred year old translation of the original Greek at Gutenberg. I planned to reformat and post it, but the ancient English was unreadable. I had to translate the translation, which in most cases was actually decoding; who today would see “eareh” and have a clue that it was actually “Earth”?
        I’ve been working on it for months, and as I’m now intimately acquainted with it, I realize that Gene Roddenberry probably read this book.
        The emperor’s philosophy, as a philosopher, was Stoicism, which comes in mighty handy during a deadly pandemic. It also aligns perfectly with the Vulcans, as seen in the Star Trek franchise.
        So if you want to learn how to be a Vulcan, just read the book. I just posted it at mcgrewbooks.com, and there are printed versions available and in bookstores soon.
        It isn't yet linked at my site, or anywhere else but Here.

First, I hate the idea that our national anthem is set to the tune of an old British drinking song, The Anacreontic Song. And you need a professional to sing it, because it requires an insanely huge vocal range.
        “But it was written during the Revolutionary War!”
        No, it wasn’t. It was written as a poem by an amateur during the War of 1812, the war where the British torched the White House.
        It wasn’t, in fact, until a time still in living memory, 1931, that it became our anthem. My uncle is still alive, born in 1918.
        It contains a blatant lie: “The home of the free”. In 1812 it would be decades before the Emancipation Proclamation freed America’s slaves. A nation that tolerates slavery is in no way a land of the free, but the fourth verse assumes that slavery is natural and normal. And even today, we have more prisoners than any other nation on Earth. How can we call ourselves the land of the free with a straight face?
        What’s worse, it isn’t even about America! The only American things mentioned are the flag and slavery. The entire poem is about war, and only about war. It’s a violent warmonger’s dream, and was made the anthem only half a decade after the Tulsa massacre and a decade after the first world war.
        Our national anthem is un-American.
        I’d like to see it dropped, and instead make America the Beautiful our national anthem. It just gives descriptions of our beautiful land, and is in praise of patriotism. You don't have to be a professional to sing it, and in fact you don't even need to be sober, it's that easy to sing.
        Wikipedia says “Its lyrics were written by Katharine Lee Bates and its music was composed by church organist and choirmaster Samuel A. Ward at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey. The two never met.” Professional lyrics and professional music, wholly written by Americans, unlike our current anthem, written by an amateur poet and set to the tune of a drinking song written by foreign amateur musicians.
        But what would you expect from White people in 1931, as depression roared, alcohol was illegal, and Jim Crow was in full force?

These two books are about American politics, and they are a study in contrast.
        Last year I bought the e-book version of John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened about his time in the Trump White House. I bought it out of curiosity, not usually interested in this kind of literature. I suspected it would read like a government report; I read an awful lot of them in my time working with scientists in the Illinois EPA and DHS. I only worked in the EPA for six months, but still have one of their heftier reports, a horror story about 100,000 fifty five gallon barrels of carcinogens buried in the eastern banks of the Mississippi, near Sauget about thirty years ago.
        I was right, it read like a government report. Very dry, like people who enjoy martinis say they like them. I don’t like martinis, and I didn’t like Bolton’s book. It was boring, unlike the EPA report, which gave me the willies.
        I stopped after slogging about halfway through it. I had learned nothing I didn’t already know, which is the reason one reads government reports. No insights, no wit, no reason whatever to finish reading it.
        Or start. Buying it was a waste of my money, and reading it was a waste of my time. So I kind of groaned inwardly when my daughter gave me a hardcover copy of Barack Obama’s A Promised Land, although I acted as if I was happy with the gift.
        Since it was a birthday present I felt that I should at least give a chapter or two a read. I was very pleasantly surprised! It didn’t read like a government report at all. It read like a novel. A very well written novel, Obama is a good writer, certainly better than James Patterson, if I can go by the single book of his I’ve read.
        Like most if not all women, my mom was a Patterson fan. She gave me the Patterson novel to read (I’ve forgotten its name). I had wanted to see what it was about his writing women loved so much, and found that women like murder mysteries, and they love the gratuitous sex in the middle that doesn’t move the story forward and really doesn’t fit.
        I haven’t finished the Obama book, I’m on chapter ten, about halfway done. This is the best book I’ve read since 11/22/63 and The Martain. It’s witty, intelligent, sometimes humorous, and just a really good read.
        It’s also informative. Get a copy from your local public library. Forget Bolton’s worthless book.