Speculative fiction (what some longtime readers might think of as "SciFi") can be described as the fiction of ideas.

​Even more than other fiction, SF often examines the consequences of one idea across a whole society.  For instance, what if robots became so beautifully built that they could pass for human? What if you could outsource your own memories? What if Hitler had won the war?*

So with SF on my mind, today's writing warm-up exercise:

Story 1
The eclipse was less dramatic than she'd expected. Not that she was in the cone of totality, but still, she'd never witnessed a solar eclipse before. Never mind a double.
Still, she'd taken the afternoon off, and though the cheap protective glasses had broken –– she'd forgotten them in the seat of her vehicle and then sat on the damn things when she'd slid into the seat in the cool darkness of the parking bay.
Still there it was: her first double-lunar eclipse. She watched two penumbral cones shaving the sun into a puny lozenge of light. An unseasonable breeze sprang up. She shivered and wished there was someone next to her. She hadn't considered herself in any way sentimental, but she longed now for something communal, a human companion.
The sight of the sun, even as small and cold as it was from this distance, turning just that much smaller and colder –– well, she felt for a moment that she understood primitive superstition.
And then, as quick as the remembered snap of a plastic tiddley-wink, the moons parted and the sun shone round and bright again. 

Story 2
He kept watch on the mirror-calm surface of the water, barely breathing.
He was comfortable –– or anyway about as as comfortable as anyone zipped into a breather suit and strapped bodily against the pot-bellied ventral surface of a drone hopper could expect to be. He refused to consider the blurring of the features of shore, blocked out thoughts of the hopper's speed (only a quarter-sonic, almost survivable without the suit), kept his attention on the glassy reflection of the sky.

The handful of beta-blockers he'd swallowed at the start of his shift was working to keep his blood-pressure low. He shrugged his shoulders against the petal-soft lining of the suit. He stretched the webbing between first his left and then his right hand.

Eyes open, he told himself. He was going to need to be very quick and very lucky or he was going to end up very dead. And he wouldn't be the only one. 

"Years ago," wheezed the oldster, arthritic knuckles whitening on the handle of the deluxe walker. "Years ago, artists had to use rubylith to separate each color for a color print."

Honking into a worn handkerchief, the dusty wheezer raised watery eyes and continued. "Hours I spent over a drafting table, X-Acto blade in hand, separating colors. The eye-hand coordination alone --!"

After a long pause, the lecture continued. "It took years to learn the tricks of the trade. Nowadays, all it takes is a ninety-nine cent app. Putting artists out of business. I don't know how they make a living any more."

Yeah, artists mostly don't make a living.

In honor of all of us antiquities who remember cutting ruby to separate colors, here's a timelapse video of the Rubylith process...

But those 99-cent apps are really fun:

In this highly digitized age, it's nigh on impossible to grasp the amount of work that went into, for instance, the 1939 movie The Wizard of Oz. This link describes the Technicolor process.

Such an effort to give the viewing public ruby slippers!

When the favored daughter of Zeus offers to jostle you about at a high rate of speed, should you refuse? 

A river of words is usually in flood. And while I write about nearly everything, my blogging impulse is toward humor. This spot abounds with absurdities and piffle. 

This week has thwarted me.  

Not on a personal level, but at the world-going-to-hell-in-a-handbasket level. I'm not ready to josh around with words today.

I have high hopes. The sun'll, as Annie would belt out, come out –– tomorrow. Bet your bottom dollar that tomorrow, there'll be sun... Mashed up, inevitably, with the melancholic fall "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge. Be as kind as you can be out there.

​And as if their great-grandparents didn't say the same damn thing about the egg-head scientist working on penicillin, chemo-therapy, seat-belts, gel insoles. Jupiter!

References
www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-secret-life-of-bees-99559587/
www.goldengooseaward.org/awardees/honey-bee-algorithm
www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2011/05/24/136391522/natures-secret-why-honey-bees-are-better-politicians-than-humans
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/09/22/how-honeybee-research-improved-your-internet-experience/?utm_term=.01028bb510d3

For every genuinely cheerful Christmas song, there are thirteen gruesome dirges that –– for some of us –– tend to get stuck on the internal jukebox.  

For instance, I love me some "Santa Baby," especially the Eartha Kitt version, but then there's The Pogue's "Fairytale of New York."  

Both songs embrace the material feel-goods of the season, but with such different moods. 

The other dozen miserables? Challenge accepted:  The Chieftans and Elvis Costello's The St. Stephen's Day Murders, which sounds cheerful until you listen to the actual words. Shelby Lynne's Xmas nails the dark side of the material feel-goods of the season. 

Then there's Hayes Carll's Grateful for Christmas (dare you not to get choked up over your egg nog on that one) and Robert Earl Keene's fantastic Merry Christmas from the Family, which is painfully funny with the sad.  

I vote that the most suicidal Christmas song of all time is anyone's version of  I'll Be Home for Christmas. (Because they won't. Of course they won't. Everyone's heart is going to break for Christmas. Jeesh.)  

Second runner-up in the depression sweepstakes? Of course, John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Happy X-Mas (The War Is Over). Yeah, let's hope it's a good one.

Add in the tunes that are just so irritating: even the youthful Jackson 5's version of I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus makes me claw at my ears. So does the spiteful Gramma Got Run Over By a Reindeer by Patsy and Elmo and Spike Jones' All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth. The best way to chase me out of Home Depot? Play these songs. 

I cannot be the only person who finds Wham!'s Last Christmas more than a little soul-killing. And while I am not hating on the King, seriously, who can listen to Blue Christmas without chiming in a broader, more sarcastic verson? Likewise, Brenda Lee's wonderful gappy voice just grates on me on Rocking Around the Christmas Tree.  

​Okay, uncle. I can't listen to any more.  

I close with a few seasonable choices that make me happy to deck the halls and bake cookies.

And the best song for the season...<she belts out: And given the choice between the two of you, I'd take the seasick crocodile.>

Imagine sitting in the tiered seat of a dark movie theater late at night. You are among a group of outgoing, cheerful, and odd strangers. It's a scene. Then begins a not-quite-chaotic game of call-and-response that seems a little like magic.

People in the theatre make a suggestion or ask a question, and the movie provides an answer.

"What's your favorite Ivy League?" the crowd hollers in unison and up pops the Columbia Pictures icon.

It's a giddy, cheerful experience that blurrs the line between watching a performance and becoming  the performance.

We have no particular audience cheering us on at the Would-Be Farm, and heaven knows our meals are both low-drama and Meatloaf-free, still, this tangent eventually leads to the Would-Be Farm...

Mr. Linton and I ventured North for Thanksgiving. We deep-fried a turkey, played in the snow, made pie, and visited folks we care about. 

And while we were up there, we fired up the chainsaw and did some more upkeep on the elderly apple orchards that came with the Farm. It's a long process, as these trees were left to run wild for decades. When we first found them, the trees were scraggly and snarled and over-crowded.

Three years later, they are slightly less so, but  –– evidently –– the Would-Be Farm will always call for some level of lumberjack work.

The process goes like this: I'll select a branch or a whole tree that needs to go. If I can use the loppers, I'll nip the bit off, but the big stuff I leave for Jeff and the chainsaw.

Unless my skill as a sawhorse is required, I generally watch Jeff work from a short distance away and wring my hands.  

It's not an irrational fear of power-tools. I once saw the result of a chainsaw rearing back and catching someone in the leg. Yurp.  Anyhow, each time he leans over the chainsaw to yank on the pull-cord, the phrase "Transvestites, start your engines," drifts idly across my mind. I rarely say it aloud, but it's a bit of comfort for a worrier.

We dodged disaster again this trip, and left giant piles of brush for the wildlife to enjoy over the winter. Some of the logs we made last year got hauled back to basecamp, and I only wish there were a scratch-and-sniff option on the internet to share the scent of that apple-wood as it burns in the campfire. 

Because I'm some thousand words deep into NaNoWriMo, and in lieu of writing practice, I give you...Russell Crowe. Gaze into his eyes and I believe a story will write itself. 

I remember carefully inking in the item number and the size on the paper order form from Miller's. I'd been wanting them for ages, but it took a while to save up the money.  I toted up the column of price, tax, handling, and wrote the check.
​

I used them at fancy-scmancy riding lessons in New Jersey's horse country (It does so have a horse country).

They moved with me to Florida, where they once carried me fleetly away from the kicking feet of a pair of mustangs who were –– as I learned –– not even remotely green-broke, no matter what the barn owner had promised.

Alas. I recently went to put them on.

Ye gods and small fishes! –– my wardrobe migrated from "funky," skipped "vintage," to whizz directly to "antique." 

Too late, I know, but if Buffy has taught me anything, it's that a girl can dream.