Retro Seasons Greetings

The Man Behind the Carbon Copy Mask

Satellite Soup: The Blogging Dead

This is Fred Fortune making a seasonal video broadcast from the fourth dimension using global geostationary satellites. If your feed is interrupted, it's your fault.

C'est Fred Fortune faire une vidéo diffusée saisonnière de la quatrième dimension en utilisant des satellites géostationnaires mondiaux. Si votre alimentation est interrompue, c'est de ta faute.

Dies ist Fred Glück, einen saisonalen Video-Übertragung aus der vierten Dimension über globale geostationäre Satelliten. Wenn Ihr Zufuhr unterbrochen, es ist deine Schuld.

Pie in the Sky

Red Sky Alert

What Michael Casher Saw

Read the brief 1968 "Back Story" 

The "Transitions" Art Album at Picasa

Author Gets Fingered

Blogger and Hyde

The rumor that homeless con man, intergalactic felon and stand-up comic Fred Fortune is actually science fiction author Michael Casher has never been proven. Maybe the author thought he was Fredric March or Spencer Tracy or Jack Palance. Or maybe he just WASN'T thinking. How this hideous transformation could ever become addictive is a mystery we may never fathom.

Blog Admin said on 1-30-14: "Wow. Chrome Pepper-Flash sucks lizard dick."

Halloween CO2: Who's There?

Restless Spirit

If this video has muted volume and it hangs or freezes it's not the video, it's the feed and/or the browser. For best results, use Firefox. For the worst possible video feed, use Chrome, the home of Pepper Flash and its "coitus interruptus" staccato method, a proven failure, time and time again.

It's Been Real

Good-Bye and Farewell from Thinck Tank

Greys Warn Earth!

For the rest of the story, visit the Spacecasts

page at Science Fiction for Thinkers.com

Or the Spacecasts page at Michael Casher Tube

If you need more background data (and who wouldn't) use this Junk TV link

Thinck Tank Summer Reruns

Making Stars

If I could make stars this is how I'd do it.

Painting With Ones And Zeroes

More digital paintings by science fiction author and blogger Michael Casher, arranged in alphabetical order by title and accompanied by music. For more information see the author's Picasa albums.

You can also watch this video at michaelcasher.com

Christmas Memory

I'm not a summer person and I never really was. I don't look forward to summer anymore. I look forward to winter. Summer is too hot and too humid and too noisy for me, especially now that I'm older. My favorite season is fall — and it always was — and then winter, and some of my favorite cold-weather memories are about Christmas.

There hasn't been anything under my Christmas tree except the tree stand for the past five or six years but Christmas presents are not the reasons I still put up a tree every year in the den, right in front of the big sliding-glass door that opens onto the big back "patio/porch".

The biggest reason for putting up a Christmas tree is to share the experience of looking at it with someone you care about and who needs to feel happy and cheerful about beautiful bright lights and a warm, safe home. And I get to do that every year. That's my Christmas present. Sharing the cheerful bright tree lights and feeling good about the most beautiful holiday of the year. That's why I never watch the Hallmark Channel. I like to be happy at Christmas. Not sad.

And, no, this isn't a painting by Edvard Munch. And this is not the way my hometown really looked when they strung all those big colored light bulbs back and forth across the main street downtown, when I was just a boy. This is how it looks whenever I try to remember it. The best Christmas is always the present one and then the next one.

Thinking Back

The older I get the more I discover "previously unused" sections of my brain. I'm glad I get to discover them before somebody else does. Then I can clear away the old cobwebs and see if there's something nice under there or just more dormant or dead brain cells that are better left untouched. This kind of "housework" sure beats sitting around in an old recliner drinking a glass of milk and biting the ears off discounted chocolate Easter bunnies, wishing they were a 16-oz. can of beer and a couple of chicken quesadillas instead.  

In this case, it's really not an unused section. I've used this section before. First in high school, and then I had to let it hide until the 1980s when I did some drawings and paintings with tangible media like chalk pastels, crayon pastels, charcoal, charcoal pens, pen & ink, canvas, canvas board, watercolor paper, cardboard, poster board and all kinds of paint brushes, bristle and foam rubber, using watercolors and acrylic paints.

Then this section of my brain went unused again until 1994 when I did a charcoal-and-brush self-portrait. I stowed that artwork away for a rainy day. Then I forgot all about that brain section until February 7, 2013 when I started painting with a regular computer mouse. There are still some cobwebs on that section of my brain but I try to clean house there on a regular basis now. There's no telling what I might find there. Which makes me kind of glad that this previously unused sections of my brain was just hiding and didn't go missing altogether.

The Story of 6002020206

How can an unemployed thirtysomething fork lift operator who lives in a "trailer" in the middle of the woods and who drives a pickup truck possibly save the world... from itself? Well, he had help. I wish I had.

Rain Through Window

The best thing about the "magic" of a rainy drive through the woods is that you don't get wet and you get an "enchanted" vision of nature that is absolutely real. The best things in life are always free and they're always real.

Author's Note: This isn't the way this scene would look if you took a picture of it with a camera. It isn't a photograph. It's a painting of a childhood memory. It doesn't matter if it's a pine forest or where it is. It might have been nowhere at all or just anywhere. This is not even what a boy saw. This is what he remembered seeing. There's a big difference between what the camera sees and what a childhood memory is all about. There's more of the past here than there is of the present and more feelings and expressed emotions than there is technical skill. That's why it's called art.

The Best Thing About Tomorrow

Tomorrow is at its best when you open your eyes one morning and it is today. (Excerpt from The Truth Is a Lone Assassin by Jonco Bugos).

When Art and Music Collide

Alternate Viewing Site for This Video

The Problem

The Solution

Making Space

Where Fact and Fiction Collide

Writing, publishing and promoting The Truth Is a Lone Assassin was the most difficult decision I've ever had to make as a writer. I don't write to titillate my readers and never have. I write to entertain them and to make them laugh and to make them think. This 32,000-word novella (approximate word count) is my second literary work under the pen name Jonco Bugos.

The Truth Is a Lone Assassin may or may not entertain people and, if it does, it won't feel like entertainment, unless you like to think. It will certainly make you do that. There are people who will want me dead for writing this book but that's what freedom of speech is all about. Especially when you feel as strongly as I do that there is more fact in fiction than there is in real life.

But there's nothing to laugh about in this book. This is my "literary" science fiction writer's mind at work again. I love to make people laugh for "comic relief" in my regular sci-fi novels but this isn't one of them. I didn't want to write this novella but I realized that it was a choice I had to make if I was to remain who and what I really am. A guy who still thinks the world is worth saving from itself. Somebody has to do it. In fact, I'd write it again, even if it killed me.

And it just might. But I hope not. I'm not done having my turn with words and I'm not nearly done trying to make the world clearer to us all. Especially when a lot of writers are busy muddying it up because there's a lot of money in that. But not for me. Not for all the money in the world. Not even if my life depended on it. Life is all about choices. Making choices is our job and our work as human beings. It's the only way to live when living is all we really have.

A Rainy Night in the City through the Windshield

Sometimes a work of art is about something. I've held this childhood memory in my mind's eye for half a century. Today I finally painted it so you could see what I saw from the back seat of my parents' car. Or it might have been from the back seat of my maternal grandparents' car, if the "city" was York or Lewistown, PA. Where this was or when it was, I'm not sure. My guess is that the city might have been Cleveland or Detroit but then I would have been eleven or twelve and remembered more.

But it could have been just a late shopping trip a bigger Pennsylvania town like Bellefonte, State College, Philipsburg, Clearfield or Lewistown or a small city like Lock Haven, Williamsport, Tyrone, Altoona or Dubois. I can't recall. All I remember is being a kid and being awed by bright, wet colors and the wonder of seeing a rainy night in the city through the windshield.

Primitive Urban Art

Digital Visions

Seeing Is Believing

Or something to that effect. The bigger picture might be to question whether or not the thing you're seeing is really what you're getting. But I won't elaborate because the worst thing an artist can do is to paint a picture and then tell you what it's about. More often than not, a work of art is not about anything. It simply is. Maybe you like the colors or the shades or the lines. Maybe you like the way it makes you feel or think. Or maybe you hate it or it makes you sick or afraid. Art is all of that and much more. If you look at it, even only once, then it was worth it. As for me, my sentiments are purely subjective. I paint. Therefore, I am.

Day and Night

I put this picture here because I wanted to do something with this blog today but I really had nothing to say.

Winter Rerun

Click on Picture

New Video for "Blind Fool Running"

Watch this video at michaelcasher.com

This winter I still plan to publish my second literary novella, The Truth Is a Lone Assassin, but a lot of people don't know anything about my first literary novella, Blind Fool Running. So I made a new promotional video for it in January 2013 and this is it.

I'm primarily a science fiction author but I also write "literary science fiction" under the pen name Jonco Bugos. When my second novella is out in paperback and "Live" in Amazon's Kindle Store I'll post the new video for that book on at least one of my blogs (the footer at A Portrait of the Author as an old Man) and I'll embed it on the "News" page at michaelcasher.com and on the Jonco Bugos Page at Science Fiction for Thinkers.com, from the SciFiforThinkers Channel at YouTube.

Like most book "movies", this video is good, but the book is even better. Thanks for watching. Post Updated 3-10-13 to add video links for "The Truth Is a Lone Assassin"

German News Reel

The New York Times keeps updating the original news story to make it appear more like a touchy-feely, "we are the world" kind of story each time, instead of the nightmare it really is. It's changed since I first read it today and I decided to go after the Times and Germany for lying their goddamn asses off to the entire world. Who in the hell do you think you are?

Jesus Christ! Doesn't anybody remember the 20th Century and the untold buckets of inhumane, criminal SHIT the goddamn Germans put the entire world through? Well, you'd better remember it or you'll be part of the Fourth Reich before you know it. The Germans cannot be trusted with a military role. Not now and not ever. They're lying their goddamn asses off to us just like Hitler did to them. Wake up world!

I used to respect The New York Times for its penetrating, tenacious, truth-seeking newshounds but now it's become just another liberal ass-kissing rag like all the rest (except for the L.A. Times). I'll be sure to read more of the L.A. Times and less of this Big Apple Pussy Paper.

The book,  If You Survive by George Wilson, is a MUST READ for All Americans and for everybody who thinks Germany should ever have a military role in the world again, anywhere. This true account of the horrors of war ought to be required reading in every American high school history class. If you were ever cat-fascinated by Germans in uniform, like a lot of sick, twisted freaks, read this book about the real Nazi plague and how an awful lot good people died eradicating it. Let's not subject the world to any more Germans in uniform.