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It was a beautiful spring day on the riverfront. Pleasant temperatures, white puffy clouds floating in a bright blue sky, and the bright sunshine gleaming off of the enormous arch made it seem the perfect day and spot for a picnic. There were a lot of people there, enjoying the weather, walking, having picnics.

        Everything changed in an instant. An automobile leaped off the ground and came crashing down on another car, narrowly missing the Smiths, who were on their way from

        Another car went flying, and of course everyone was running and screaming in panic – but the cause of all the bent metal and broken glass was a mystery.

        Bob Capone, a sergeant in the St. Louis police force, was there on duty, talking with his friend John Jennings of the National Parks Service. Both whipped out their radios, calling for help.

        Another car leaped into the air and crashed down on a different one, and both burned when the sparks from the collision ignited the gasoline that had spilled out of several.

        The cars then stopped pretending to be frogs. Five minutes later a car driving north on interstate 44 stopped suddenly in front of the Old Cathedral Museum and bounced back, the front of the auto smashed, as if it had struck an invisible and immobile object.

        The destruction continued down Market Street for an hour, and stopped abruptly at Seventh as National Guard helicopters swooped in.

        The aircraft hovered for an hour or two, but there was no further damage.

        The local news media had a field day. This was Big, big with a capital B. The national and world news would be covering this, and the local news men and women all thought “This is it! My career is going to skyrocket!”

        The next day, General Ferguson (whose name was uncomfortably the same as a town in the greater metropolitan area) was in an incredibly bad mood, so of course all of his underlings were, as well.

        “Well, Colonel? What happened? Who has it and how did he get it?”

        “Well, sir, the investigation is underway. We're not sure what happened but... well, sir, we believe a unit was stolen. We don’t know who stole it, but it was probably an inside job”

        “Terrorists?”

        “Unknown, sir, but improbable. It appears that there was no loss of life and few injuries, the worst being broken bones. It’s mostly property damage.”

        “Do we know who has it and where it is?”

        “No, sir, not yet. Should I alert the civilian authorities to what they're up against?”

        “Under no circumstances will that happen unless the President himself orders it. This is top secret and will remain that way.”

        “Yes, sir.”

        “What are we doing about the situation?”

        “We’re loading firefighting helicopters with paint. When it strikes again we'll have an idea where it is, and when it’s painted we'll be able to see it. We have men manning the two other units, they should be able to stop it.”

        “Very well, Colonel. Make sure no one without a top secret clearance sees it when it’s painted. Dismissed.” The Colonel saluted and left.

        The next day, Sergeant Capone was back down by the waterfront. The entire metropolitan area was on alert, and the President had declared martial law in Missouri and Illinois. People were ordered to stay in their homes, as if their homes would protect them from something that could throw cars.

        His radio came on – he was being ordered back to the station. Curious. As he walked towards his squad car it suddenly left the ground and was hurling straight at him, barely missing.

        Helicopters swooped down, and the invisible monster disappeared. Sergeant Capone radioed that his squad car had been totaled, and was informed that another car would come to pick him up. A couple of hours later the helicopters departed.

        “Well, Colonel?”

        “We’re pretty sure we know who it is, sir. Corporal George Smith is AWOL, called in sick yesterday and didn’t show up for work this morning. We checked his quarters, he wasn't home and his car was on-base.

        “And we think we know what made him snap – his brother was an undercover narcotics officer and was accidentally killed in a gun battle with an off-duty St. Louis police officer. Neither knew the other was a law enforcement officer.

        “We think he's out for revenge, sir. Twice he’s struck the same area, an area where the other law enforcement officer has his beat. So we have helicopters standing by at LaClede's Landing, camouflaged, of course.

        “Unfortunately, we had a fatality yesterday. A police officer got in a gun battle with troops clearing the street and was killed.”

        “Unfortunate, indeed. How long until Smith runs out of food or water, or the unit runs out of power?”

        “Power will last about a week, food and water longer.”

        “I want you to get with engineering, when we get it back we need to find a way to keep this from happening again. Is that all, Colonel?”

        “Yes, sir.”

        “Okay, you’re dismissed.”

        Things were quiet the next two days, and social media started to grumble.

        The General got a missive from the President himself, he was to meet with one of the President’s people.

        General Ferguson called the St. Louis Chief of Police. “We need your help. We know what it is, but we can’t tell you. I'd like to have Sergeant Capone on the waterfront today.”

        “I’m sorry, General, but I don't think you have the authority to give me that order. You’re going to have to speak to the mayor.”

        “Sgt. Capone, can I see you in my office?”

        “Of course.”

        “Close the door, would you?”

        “What’s this about, Lieutenant?”

        “Damn it, Bob, don’t give me that ‘Lieutenant’ crap, we’ve been friends since high school. What the hell is going on?”

        Capone was puzzled. “Joe, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What the hell are you talking about?”

        “Damn it, Bob, what the hell did you do? Why does the mayor want to talk to you?”

        “What? Why would he want to talk to me? Come on, Joe, tell me what this is all about.”

        “His assistant wouldn’t say. Anyway, you need to get down there right now, the guy from the mayor’s office sounded scared. Let me know what’s going on. I hope you ‘re not in trouble.”

        “Me, too, but I don’t know what I would be in trouble for. I’ll let you know.”

        “Okay, get your ass down there!”

        “Can I help you, Sergeant?

        “I was told the mayor wanted to see me. I...”

        “Sgt. Capone?”

        “Yes, ma’am.”

        “Oh, please follow me, he’s waiting for you.”

        The mayor was with an Army general in uniform. He stood quietly as the mayor spoke. “Sergeant, the president called me.”

        Bob was puzzled but silent. The mayor continued hesitantly. “Sergeant, all I know is it’s vital for national security that you do whatever General Ferguson asks. Will you do that, Sergeant?”

        Of course he said “yes”. Only an idiot would answer otherwise. The general looked at the mayor. The mayor said “Excuse me” and left.

        “You were in the service?” the general asked.

        “Yes, sir. Air Force.”

        “Why didn't you re-up?”

        “I didn’t want to be a bubble chaser, I wanted to be a cop.”

        “A bubble chaser? What's that?”

        “A hydraulics technician. We were ‘bubble chasers’, electricians were ‘spark chasers', the...”

        “Did you have any kind of clearance?”

        “Clearance?”

        “Security clearance.”

        “Oh, yes, sir. I worked on some of the stealth aircraft. I thought you fellows would have looked that up.”

        “What kind of aircraft?”

        “I'm sorry, sir, I can't discuss them.”

        The general grinned broadly. “Excellent. Yes, we did look it up. All of this is on a ‘need to know’ basis. We’re dealing with some top secret gear.

        “I can't tell you what's going on, of course, but you need to know we need you as bait.”

        “Bait? For what, sir?”

        “I can't tell you. All you need to know is that we’re going down to the riverfront and you need to stick as close to me as possible.”

        A knock came from the door and the general answered it, and was given a sheet of printed paper. He glanced at it, and said “Please wait here, Sergeant. I’ll be back shortly.”

        He walked down the hall, where an aide told him “The units are ready, sir.”

        “Thank you, Lieutenant.” He changed into a police officer's uniform and collected Sgt. Capone. They drove to the riverfront in a police cruiser, got out, walked a few yards and stopped.

        Capone noticed the general's strange weaponry, but knew better than to ask about it. It looked to him like a paintball gun. Laser? Maybe. This whole experience was very strange, he thought.

        The day was uneventfully boring.

        It was far from boring at the police station; all hell was breaking loose. Several squad cars were destroyed, and the police were close to panic. It lasted for maybe twenty minutes, and the destruction stopped when the helicopters showed up.

        The mayor appeared on the television news that night, assuring residents that the next day the police would all be on their normal assigned duties but the curfew was still in place until the president ordered otherwise.

        The next morning General Ferguson and Sgt. Capone were back down by the riverfront. An hour later a car became animated, hurling itself through the air at the general and the policeman. Capone ran and the general kept firing his paint gun.

        His fourth shot splattered in the air, becoming an animated blob the general could see flying through the air. He kept firing until his gun was out of paint.

        There was an awful racket coming from the flying blobs, the sound of heavy steel on heavy steel.

        “Capone!” the general ordered. “Back to the station, I’ll take it from here.”

        The Sergeant mulled over what he had seen as he was driving back to the station. It looked to him after it was splattered with paint like it was some kind of giant headless humanoid robot. He wondered what it was, but knew he would never know for sure, but the military seemed to have found a way to make objects invisible in visible light.

        He went to see the lieutenant as soon as he got back. The lieutenant had him close the door. “So what’s going on, Bob?”

        “Sorry, Joe, it’s a military secret and I’m not allowed to talk about it.”

        “Well, at least I know you're not in trouble. The mayor called, you’re getting some kind of medal or award or something, so I guess I should say ‘good work’.”

        Down by the riverfront an Army tech Sergeant was unlocking the paint spattered, otherwise invisible machine, pistol drawn and at the ready. After looking inside he holstered his pistol and called down to the general. “He’s dead, sir. Apparently shot himself, there’s a hell of a bloody mess inside the unit.”

        The general ordered that the two invisible units put all three units in a semitrailer to be shipped back to the base.

        That evening the president was on the television news, praising the Army and police Sergeant Bob Capone, and informing everyone that the danger was passed and the curfew was lifted. The mayor came on and praised the city police force in general and Bob Capone in particular.

        “Reinlist...” Bob thought. “Nonsense, I’d far rather chase criminals than bubbles. I hate working on hydraulics!”

What a mess.

Yesterday when I turned my computer on, an old Acer Aspire One, the "Upgrade to Windows 10!" nag screen popped up. Okay, what the hell, I'll try it, since Microsoft says going back is easy.

It took four hours to download and another hour for "preparing to upgrade Windows" to finish, and I was given a choice - upgrade now, or schedule for later? I scheduled it for nine last night, since I wanted to use the computer for, you know, computing.

At nine I told it to go ahead. I probably went to bed around ten, and the computer screen was still black with a "working..." graphic.

This morning it said it was ready. It rebooted, and took a full half hour to reach the desktop, which was simply butt-ugly and primitive looking. The kids doing the designing at Microsoft really suck at what they do.

Before it got to the password box there were some user-hostile Microsoft spyware to opt out of. That, and the extreme slowness and butt-ugliness is all I could see that was changed. All of the changes seemed completely cosmetic. I found no additional features or usefulness at all.

My shortcut to Firefox on the task bar was gone. Microsoft Word and Excel were gone as well, although Open Office was still there. I went through the start menu's "other programs" or whatever it's called, and those applications were just gone.

Microsoft is just evil.

I have the flashblock extension installed, with a few sites whitelisted. Since KSHE changed their stream provider, I can't hear it on Firefox, so I set it to run IE on startup with the KSHE player as its home page. It took a full fifteen minutes before any music came out.

The new IE is called something else, I forgot what, but fortunately they didn't change the icon much or I'd never have found it. What is wrong with those people?

And I have never seen a slower computer, and my first one back in 1982 had a CPU that was over a thousand times slower than my notebook. The computer was simply unusable and extremely hard to navigate.

I was really glad I have my passwords written down, and it looked like I was going to lose all my bookmarks. I downloaded Firefox, and decided to go back to W7 before installing. I worried I'd have to buy Word, since the magazines all insist on it and Microsoft had apparently uninstalled it. Oh, magazines. I got my first rejection letter yesterday. I'll post it tomorrow.

Windows Ten is the worst operating system I've ever used. Of course, I understand that W8 was worse.

I went to uninstall it and it said I'd have to plug it in to - and it was fully charged. I figured it would take all day, so I plugged it in and set it going. Then doing something I never do, I went to facebook on my phone, and I hate typing on a phone.

Surprisingly, it only took an hour, and after it booted it seems to be like it was before the "upgrade". Firefox, Word, and Excel were back.

Tomorrow: Stealth

So, I was drinking coffee this morning and watching my twitter stream and somehow the thread count of sheets came up. Being as I didn't feel like fitting my feelings on the matter into 140 characters, it goes here.

High thread count sheets can suck it. I'd happily pay inverted prices to have to never sleep on them again. It is my firm belief that sheets should not feel like you're lying between two ultra-thin layers of cloud. They damned sure shouldn't end up wadding themselves into a ball just from one night's worth of sleeping between them.

Sheets should feel like you're sandwiched between two new dollar bills. Slightly rough and starched as stiff as you can manage. You should damned near be able to make a drum head out of them. As soon as they start feeling soft and showing signs of wadding up, they should be laundered and starched to within an inch of their lives again.

I use the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to design book covers. It's an excellent free open source program that has three weaknesses -- its menu structure is completely illogical (but can be gotten used to), I can't find a full spectrum palette, and its text handling is so poor as to be useless.

I have a workaround for the bad text. Open a word processor that will output a PDF file, choose your typeface and size, choose the text's color and write the text. Save it as a PDF and GIMP will open it as an image in as high a resolution you need. Just make the background transparent, situate it over your graphic, and merge the layers.

Speaking of books, I made a Mars, Ho! YouTube video. Yes, there is a pussy in it.

One year in as of today and still averaging over ~10K hits of the hashtag on slow days. Dead? The gaming press and SJWs should be so lucky. Gamers, we just don't quit until we win.

sic semper umbilicus

So, it's Women's Equality Day. Lot of you probably think about this time I'd be busting out with a sexist rant. Hate to disappoint but I'm all about equality. Actual equality though not this bullshit third-gen feminist version of equality where they think equality means special treatment for their tragic victimhood.

No, equality always has and always will mean equal treatment. Every single time. No exceptions for past mistreatment. No white-knighting up if someone with tits comes crying on your shoulder that people are mean to her just because she calls them misogynists, shitlords, tools of the patriarchy, etc...

In fact, no calling yourself a feminist period. If you do it as a woman it's saying you feel your entire gender has been victimized and should be given special treatment because it is incapable of taking care of itself. If you do it as a man you're saying an entire gender is in need of your protection.

You either treat a woman as if she's an adult and as capable of taking care of her own shit as you are, or you don't. There is no "yes, but" to it. Equal treatment or sexism, there are no other choices.

I slapped a Mars, Ho! video up on YouTube. You can see it here.No, there's no nudity.

I've spent the last three days working to fix the ePubs and AZW3s of Yesterday's Tomorrows. I had just ran it through Calibre and did a quick check, noting that the table of contents didn't display anything.

It took a lot of research and learning to fix the ToC, and while doing so discovered something even worse - some of the illustrations were covering up the text. Damn!

Trying to figure out the ToC I tried several things. One was installing the Write2epub extension to Open Office.

It really sucked, especially with this book. It had some ugly sans-serif typeface, and there were huge swaths large and bolded that I never told it to do. And there was still no table of contents.

While googling and reading and finding out that e'books were mostly based on HTML5, XML and a few other things, I got a little disheartened. This was going to take forever, because I had a lot I had to learn.

I ran across Google's e'book editor "Sigil" and installed it. I have no idea if it's any good, because there's no documentation and I can't make heads or tails out of it.

So I went back to Calibre and studied it some more, educated a little but not much by the internet, and saw a long string with an "and" in it, "h1 and h2" and recognised this from HTML and the rest of the garbage from programming for thirty years. Stupid Calibre was telling it to make everything part of the table!

It took a bit of trial and error to get the right parenthesis and brackets in the right spots that the conversion wouldn't crash with an error, but I finally got a working table of contents.

Now to address the obscured text. That took quite a bit of head scratching as well.

I finally just decided to make the input make the output behave, rather than trying to tweak the output itself. What finally worked was to load the offending images in GIMP and add a white space where it was covering the text. That worked.

So if you've already downloaded one of the e'books, you should delete them and download the new version.

ePub

AZW3

I think I'll take the day off tomorrow.

I just uploaded the last item in "Yesterday's Tomorrows", a futurist essay by "the father of science fiction," Hugo Gernsback. In his essay, written in 1926, he describes the year 1976. Those of you who believe the guys who say the singularity is near or that death will be conquered within your lifetime should read it.

Futurists! Where in the hell is my flying car? Why are there no bases on the moon, like the futurists said in the 1960s we'd have by now? Why did no one see digital photography coming? Or phones in your pockets? Or the internet?

Gernsback sold electronic components, some of which he designed himself, yet didn't seem to understand "electricity, the mysterious fluid." He thought we'd be able to control the weather with it, and even more nonsensical things. He seemed steeped in the cult of Tesla, who had promised wireless delivery of electricity.

Coincidentally, Soylent News just mentioned a story about transplanting porcine hearts into humans, and the company's co-founder is a futurist. Of course, I left a comment about futurists.

I go into it in detail about futurism both in the book's foreword and the introduction to the Gernsback essay.

It turned into a beautiful thing. It's full of illustrations, plus photos of the authors and covers of the magazines the stories were printed in. It has the first use of the word "astronaut", the cover story of the issue of Astounding that is said to have ushered in the "golden age of science fiction, A.E. van Vogt's first published science fiction, a few other firsts, and five stories that are printed from cleaned up scans of the magazines. There are biographies of all the writers in the book.

I usually encourage folks to read the stories online or check a copy out from their local library, but not this time. The printed book is head and shoulders better than the electronic versions.

There are stories by Isaac Asimov, John W. Campbell, Murray Leinster, Frederik Pohl, Neil R. Jones, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, Phillip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, James Blish, Lester del Rey, Jerome Bixby, and a futurist essay by "the father of science fiction" Hugo Gernsback.

It will be a little while before the HTML version is available, since they're not done yet, but I'll post them as I finish them. Meanwhile, there is a PDF, an ePub, and an AZW3 posted for free download.

Yesterday's Tomorrows