Free Admission

The best things in life are free.

One day a few years ago my mother and I drove up to Smethport, Pennsylvania just to see the town and to enjoy the Allegheny Plateau scenery along the way. Smethport is an interesting little town with lots of well-maintained Victorian mansions near a beautiful little lake. It’s also the McKean County seat and there’s a magnificent stone courthouse across the main street from Smethport’s unique business district that lies almost exclusively on one side of the main drag.

We were eating lunch in the old part of the Smethport Diner, the part that faces the street, when four senior citizen men walked in the front door and just stopped dead in their tracks, right in the middle of the floor. They were well-groomed and fairly well-dressed so I didn’t suspect that any kind of robbery or nastiness was forthcoming. They briefly surveyed the few diners and then they broke into song.

The song was Zippity Do Dah and they rendered it with a barbershop-quartet precision that took us both by surprise and transported me back to a yesteryear that I had only read about in books. Mom put down her cheeseburger and watched while she listened in surprised fascination. I set the spoon back into my chili bowl and gave them my full attention, enjoying every moment of their impromptu summer serenade. I felt like I 'd been transported back in time to the Swanee River on a lazy, hot summer afternoon where I might be enjoying a picnic lunch of corn on the cob and southern fried chicken.

Then the senior quartet finished singing and a hearty round of applause erupted. Mom and I joined in the applause and, before I could reach for my wallet to extract a couple of bucks in case a hat was passed around, the four gentlemen disappeared into the back of the diner for an encore performance in front of the diners there.

On the way back home to Centre County we saw a mother black bear playing with her cub in the state forest along the side of the road. It sure was a nice trip and great day that I’ll always cherish, one that will always make me think that yes, indeed, the best things in life are free.

Tripping Over a Rainbow

Yesterday UPS delivered the new business cards I ordered online. I'd been looking forward to their arrival all week with eager anticipation. These are my new, snazzy, Science Fiction for Thinkers.com business cards in full color that replace the old michaelcasher.com business cards that I now use for writing grocery lists on the back of and for marking pages in books.

It hadn't rained around here for weeks but it managed to rain for only two minutes after the UPS driver set the little box of new business cards on the wooden bench outside my kitchen door. When I spotted the box there I picked it up and noticed that it was wet.

The cards look beautiful and classy but the sudden rain storm from seemingly out of nowhere will always haunt me.

Looking Over My Shoulder

I don't do it as much as I used to but, every now and then, I still find myself looking over my shoulder to see who or what might be following me.

It could be some cobweb from the past, maybe, that I didn't quite clear away completely and that's been on my back all along, trying its best to turn into a monkey that will one day ride me down and break me. Or someone from my past, a long time persona non grata who either doesn't know it or damn well knows it but who is determined to take me down one day, mostly out of spite. Or a true enemy — and I have made many — who wants to take me out of the game altogether. Sometimes I think it's just an ill wind, pretending to be the lucky wind at my back, hoping I will not know the difference.

I'm certainly glad I don't look over my shoulder all that much anymore. Looking ahead is a lot more fun. And you don't get that nasty crick in your neck from trying to see the world around you through hindsight.

Old Dog, New Tricks

The michaelcasher.com dog-and-pony show folded up its tent this month and hit the pike.

The new show in town is sciencefictionforthinkers.com. Science Fiction for Thinkers is now the official website of science fiction author Michael Casher.

But the old michaelcasher.com is not a dead domain. It's still mine. I just trained it to point at sciencefictionforthinkers.com and to do nothing else.

Who said you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

My Life in 25 Words or Less

The books I wrote and the one I’m writing now, this place, those two geese, that cat, being there for Mom.

This is my life.

Stupid Movie Shit

Hollywood movies made since 1990 contains these three stupid scenes:

1) Gratuitous Sex Scene – This is a scene where twenty-somethings loose their tops, drop their drawers, suck face and provide eye candy for a dating audience.

2) Strip Club Scene – This is a scene where stupid twenty-something males drool over bimbos who aren’t wearing any tops or drawers or both and who wouldn't give these dorks the time of day out on the street.

3) Men Peeing Scene – This is a scene in a men’s room with men relieving themselves at urinals for people who like that kind of reality in a movie. Cops being chewed out by their precinct Captains, drugs dealers moving product, confidential informants being shaken down, etc. etc. Why anybody on God’s green earth wants to see this is totally beyond me.

My solution to this "stupid movie shit" problem is this:

Have each Hollywood movie open with a gratuitous sex scene in a restroom that is part of a strip club. Show this scene while the opening credits are rolling. No one can read them anyway these days, the letters are so damn small. This way, you’ll kill all three birds with one stone.

Homeless Dragons

I'm going to take a lot of heat for this but, after five years as a science fiction author, this has simply got to be said.

Pictured here is one of the biggest enemies of any science fiction writer. This creature belongs in the realm of Fantasy and not Sci-Fi.

Enough said.

turning readers into better people

When the owner and editor of the now-defunct ezine SelfPublisher News interviewed me via email for the October 2005 article on me (an article entitled "Mutiny on the Luminer" on page 11 of that ezine), I told him that my goal was to write books that "would make readers want to be better people". But he never quoted me on that.

But, come to think of it, that's exactly what I've done. Six times over.

Recalling "Meet Phil Donahue Day"

Back in the late 1970s I was living in downtown Atlanta and someone gave me a couple of free tickets to see Phil Donahue. Like most men, I was not a Phil Donahue fan, but I wanted to be in a TV audience. I puzzled over the ticket, wondering why the show wasn't at the television network's local affiliate. It was at Atlanta's Civic Auditorium instead. But I went anyway. By myself.

The Civic Auditorium in Atlanta was the biggest auditorium I'd ever seen before. The seating area was easily the size of a WalMart Super Center. The place was packed, mostly with women. I scooted down in my seat so no one could see me.

Finally, out came Philmeister and the women went wild. You'd have sworn that Jesus Christ had just made his second appearance on Earth. But, hell, there weren't any TV cameras. Phil Donahue looked about as big as a gnat on that huge stage.

Phil sucked up to the women in the audience right off the bat by announcing that the most beautiful women in America lived in the state of Georgia. I would have laughed at his lame attempt to milk praise from the audience except for one thing: he was right. I'd never been west of the Mississippi River but, east of that, Georgia had the highest percentage of beautiful women per capita I'd ever seen. Nine out of every ten women in Georgia was a peach. Still, I could see where his "PR Show" was going. At one point, he jumped down off the stage to shake hands. I thought he'd be mobbed to death by salivating liberal females before he managed to hop back up there. Would have served him right.

At that point, I left. When I got outside, I looked a little closer at the remaining ticket. The event was called "Meet Phil Donahue Day". It was kind of a reception, I guess, for people who weren't important enough to get a seat in the TV audience when he taped his show earlier. I tore up the ticket and tossed it into the nearest trash receptacle.

After that day I never watched the Phil Donahue Show again. And I always inspected my tickets very carefully after that. And I never accepted another free one.

Moving Van Cliburn's Piano

The closest I ever came to show business in my entire life was helping to move a concert grand piano that Van Cliburn would be playing that night. Penn State University owned the piano and the concert was scheduled for Recreation Hall on Penn State's main campus. It must have been around 1975 or thereabouts. Bryce Jordan Center didn't exist then and Eisenhower Auditorium must have been booked up, I can't really recall.

It took about a dozen guys, one large box truck with a lift gate, a lot of heavily-padded tarps, rolls of nylon strapping with ratchets, several carpeted dollies, a couple Johnson Bars, assorted hand tools and about a half a day to transfer that magnificent instrument from Schwab Auditorium to Rec Hall.

At Schwab Auditorium we had to lay the monstrosity on its side and then remove the legs and reverse that process at Rec Hall. After three or four hours of grunting, swearing, name-calling and finger-pointing the job was done but, in the end, we were all "friends" again. Apparently, we didn't do any damage to that beautiful concert grand and that's probably because we handled it like it was the Ark of the Covenant.

Hell, I wish I had gotten to see Van Cliburn play that damn thing that night.

Go Cyber for Books

Going to a bricks-and-mortar bookstore is like hooking yourself up to one of these babies. It may seem like you're tuned in to the best and the brightest and that you're getting every conceivable option. But it's just a marketing trick.

When you finally unhook yourself from the run-of-the-mill feed that the traditional publishing houses have been beaming out at us for decades and you begin exploring the exciting and unpredictable depths of independent publishing, you will set yourself free.

And your world may never look the same.

100% Rag

A year ago I wrote a letter to The Centre Daily Times, which is the only newspaper serving my area. I wasn't asking them for a review of my science fiction novels because I know they don't review self-published books. I was just making them aware of my authorship and Internet presence. There aren't many authors of any kind in my neighborhood and probably not a whole lot of authors in this area have written six science fiction thrillers. But I never even heard from The Centre Daily Times regarding my letter.

If I had been a former housewife (and especially a happily divorced woman writing her first POD book) or a member of Penn State's GLBT "community" or a physically-challenged and perhaps transgendered first-time author, I would have recieved a full-page splash in the CDT local section, regardless of what I wrote about or how it got published.

And this is not intended to disparage these minorities because I support everyone's own lifestyle choices as their personal right to their own lives, whether or not their choices coincide with mine. This is what freedom is all about. What I'm suggesting is that, because I was a 54-year-old divorced white man from Snow Shoe, I was immediately on their "we couldn't care less list".

No wonder The Centre Daily Times didn't cover the Grand Reunion 2000 of Snow Shoe High School, a huge and monumental event in the history of the entire Mountaintop Region of Centre County. A once-in-a-lifetime event that they were notified about by the Grand Reunion 2000 Committee. Maybe it's Snow Shoe the CDT doesn't like, who can say? If it's just plain snobbery, then it's catching, because WTAJ-TV Channel 10 from Altoona didn't want to cover it either. Neither did WJAC-TV Channel 6 from Johnstown. I should know. I was on the Grand Reunion 2000 Committee and I called those television stations myself.

Oh, well, I digress. This posting is really about The Centre Daily Times. As it were, the editor I wrote to didn't even have the common decency to respond. No wonder I don't subscribe to The Centre Daily Times. It should be called The Happy Valley Times or else The Penn State Times.

But that's all water under the bridge now. I just wanted to post a little history here for that day when the great and powerful Centre Daily Times asks me for an interview and I flatly decline.

2012 FAQ

How could the Mayans predict that the world would end in the year 2012?

They couldn’t. But the extraterrestrial hordes that roamed Earth during the Mayan period probably could. Somehow.

Will 2012 be a disastrous year?

It will probably be about as disastrous as Y2K was.

Will the word really end in the year 2012?

Probably not. But the world “as we know it” may very well come to a grinding halt.

How will the world end in 2012?

It probably won’t go out with much of a bang. More like “ker-flooey” than “ka-boom”.

What should I do as 2012 approaches?

As unpopular and corny as it may seem, you might try behaving yourself. If that fails, you might try running. But you can't hide.

Earth God

If you're a writer and this is your god then you do tons of market research before you write anything and then you write only what the market will bear, not what you really want to write.

That's fine for freelancers who consider themselves to be writers rather than authors. I consider myself to be an author and, specifically, a novelist who does not worship this pagan god. I write what I want to write and then I try to shape a market for it. It's a market that really exists anyway. It's just been kept under wraps by The Great and Powerful Publishing Wizards in Big Apple City.

The Wizards, incidentally, worship this pagan god more than anybody.

Rattling My Chain

One day last week I came home from grocery shopping and when I pulled into the driveway I was greeted by a brilliant white flash that left me completely dumbfounded. Outside, in broad daylight. But the brilliant white flash was confined to the inside of my house and garage. The daylight outside did not change at all. My mother and I just sat in the car, unable to comprehend what had just happened here.

I thought it was a power surge or something in the garage or the house but that would have damaged a lot of electronic gizmos that don't have surge protection. And none of the electric or electronic small appliances were damaged. The light bulbs in the house couldn't have momentarily changed in their intensity or brightness because only two fluorescent lights were on in the entire house (the kitchen counter top) and a power surge powerful enough to be a white flash would have knocked out all the light bulbs, for sure. Especially a white flash so bright that it was a blinding white light seen from outside in the middle of a sunny day. After my mother and I exchanged several What the hell? responses and wide-eyed looks, I got out of the car to unlock the house and check the damage.

Everything looked perfectly normal downstairs and in the basement. Our house has circuit breakers and none of them were tripped. And no clocks lost their time display, as with a power interruption. So, it wasn't a power surge or some weird power interruption and restoration of service. I was stumped but I let it pass. I went back outside to help my mother into the house.

Later that day I strolled into the den and, once again, a blinding white flash filled the room. It was so brilliant that it disoriented me for a moment. When I asked my mother if she saw it in the living room, she said she saw a bright white flash coming from the den only. She said it was so bright that it even lit up the living room. But none of the light bulbs flared, no clocks lost their time, no breakers were tripped, just like with the earlier flash. It was as if the air inside the house had suddenly become charged with an otherworldly power, just for a second.

Well, I'm not the least bit impressed by this "Amityville Horor" display. Years ago I would have been fascinated by this kind of crap. But now I'm just annoyed. Who needs this nonsense in their lives? I know there are a lot of people who don't believe this. Like my mother and I would even bother to make any of this stuff up. Anyway, people can scoff all they want. I don't give a shit.

About JFK's Assassination

My view on what happened on this day 43 years ago is expressed in the "Who Shot JKF?" posting at Random Retro Reviews of the 20th Century, another Blogger blog of mine. Here's the link:

Who shot JFK?