Rome Fell

 This morning I unfriended someone on Facebook. I don't often do that. They were posting the shots from Ukraine of several notable persons including a beauty contest winner all with flack jackets etc and making sneering comments.  Possibly in an effort to be fair and balanced he posted that one of Vlad on the horse with his shirt off but the comment on that seemed slightly less negative somehow. Were they propaganda? Sure, probably. Is Miss Ukraine manning a post shooting at tanks? Who knows. 

Bottom line is it doesn't matter. You don't look down at people using what tools they have while a bully is blowing the shit out of their homeland. 

Lets talk about a book. 

Snap shots is an excellent introduction to the way my mind works. Its a novella sized, collection of very short works; flash fiction and smaller. If you hang out on line long enough you end up writing these for various web sites that post monthly contests. For example; 500 words using a different point of view top three get published. 

Near the end of last year I found I had quite a lot of them so I celebrated the end of a second year of covid by bundling them together. Most are a bit longer than originally written because I went over them and made them a bit more complete but all are still very short. 

Put the Kindle app on your phone and download it. Now that they're starting to lift mask mandates from public transit you're going to want something to hide behind. 

In the mean time someone tell the czar of all the Russias that he can't have the soviet union back. Rome fell and so did the USSR. 

ain't we got fun

 "Every morning, every evening ain't we got fun? 

Not much money oh but honey ain't we got fun?

    Its a song from the first quarter of the twentieth century. I think a guy named Eddy Cantor sang it and the times were pretty dynamic. They just figured out how to put sound on film, records were big and so was radio. Television was a long time and a world war away. 

    It was a depression. A lot of people were homeless. A lot of people were very rich. Unions were tapping companies on the shoulder and saying, "Excuse me can we talk to you about that rich poor thing?" and getting smacked down for their troubles. Frequently that smacking was literal. The Pinkertons didnt make all their money catching bad guys. They also had a bustling side line of demonizing and busting unions. 

    Back to my list; oh yeah; we'd recovered from a plague a little more than a decade before. Someone was declaring that this whole other country in actual fact belonged to his country. Wait a minute. Someone get zombie Churchill a Gravol all that spinning in his grave is making him sea sick. 

    Come to think of it the deja-vu isn't doing me much good either. Lets talk about a book. I crave some escapism.  A lot of my work would be right at home as comics. My not being able to draw tends to eliminate that outlet but I have the stories anyway. 

    This one involved a trio of people living in Toronto who discover that they are a mix of human and alien. This comes out in a growing ability to use a power that comes from their alien side. In the end they decide that they are humans with alien blood not aliens with human blood, confusing the heck out of their spooky baby daddies and outright war happens. 

    They even discover a way to fly. 

    NO CAPES! (you said that in Edna Mode's voice didn't you)

amazon.com/author/tabithabaumander     find it here   

    Remember reading to escape reality isn't rejecting reality its resting between fights. 

Winter Festival

 Some city council in some distant past decided it would be nifty if Toronto had a winter festival in Feb. This is a great idea on the surface of it. Its gray, its cold, its to far from spring, lets just make the best of things. Lets go down town and see the ice sculptures and have a hot chocolate. Great idea; top notch, it even works half the time.

Toronto is a city on the north half of lake Ontario. Because of this we have our own micro climate. This can result in, for example, everywhere around us digging out from a three foot dumping of snow and us getting out the broom to deal with a light dusting.  

February can hand us one of three different climates. Sometimes all in the same week. In general we can get at least a short, one or two day, sometimes week long, melt. It can also have reassuringly normal winter weather, brisk, sunny - nice if you dress for it- winter festival day material. Then there's the February days where the figure the artist is ice sculpting seems to say, "What the heck are you doing out here its freezing!" 

People from Montreal and Ottawa tend to laugh at our relationship to the weather. Talk to a transplanted Montrealer and you will hear in vivid details the depth of the snow drifts they walked through to get to school; in May. Its like talking to your grandparents about walking to school no matter how bad it is out they had/have it worse and coped with it better. 

Mind you Canada does in general have a thing against Toronto.

That's one of the things I played with in this one.  Aliens take Toronto down a peg and several condo buildings go splat. Of course it also has what I think are the most Canadian super hero's yet. They are alien human hybrid's who take control of the powers their alien side give them and defend earth from their army of baby daddies. What could be more Canadian than an interspecies hero flying through the sky on a snow board? 

In the mean time its raining. Which is great until it freezes turning the sidewalks to skating rinks. Tell you what you read this book I'll go write another one. 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07WF64QZ7/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p2_i1

My Saturday

 I went to the movies last Saturday. I picked a theater in the north half of the city so I would avoid the (WE DON'T WANT TO GET A NEEDLE) truck fest down town. Instead of that I ended up with a subway closure and shuttle buses. Not a big deal I thought, I'd allowed a lot of time to get there. Helping things I got a bus almost right away and it wasn't crowded. 

Annoyingly what that bus also was, besides not crowded, was a new home to my back pack. I realized it was not on my back as I was walking into the mall where the theater was located. It was empty with the exception of an old thumb drive. There was a time when I used to stuff  thumb drives in every nook and cranny just in case the worst happened. At least I'd have my work on the drive. Then I discovered the CLOUD. 

I'd brought the bag along in the interests of picking up a few things after the show. It takes a couple of days for lost items to find their way to the lost and found so I'll drop by the place Saturday and see if it turned up. In the mean time I bought a new one. Its much nicer, sturdy and was bought in an independent store.  

At any rate I had a nice Wendy's lunch and saw my movie;  The Kingsman prequel. Its well done with lots of characteristic over the top fight scenes and sets up the rest of the films very nicely. I give it a 4 our of 5 stars. 

I left the mall feeling very good in spite of my lost bag. That good mood slid straight into energetic annoyance. The mall is right across the street from a spot called North York City Center. In the days before Toronto and its surrounding cities were forcibly amalgamated by the province in the interests of saving money ( Spoiler alert it didn't.) this was the city hall for North York. The entire long block was isolated by the police and two big trucks were parked in front of the big public square. 

This meant that not only was I going to have to take a shuttle bus but I would have to walk several blocks to get said bus. I ended up walking down to the nearest subway stop and taking a different bus following a different way home. 

I'm told the big babies are going to hit us up with another display this coming weekend. Someone explain to these twits that a virus is not political and doesn't care about anyone's freedoms. Get the damn shot or kiss profitable runs across our southern border good bye. Even if we eliminated the requirements the US isn't going to drop theirs. They'd just send you home. 

The up side is since Christmas I haven't done much on my You Tube and I was able to make this. 

Stay warm. I read a thing the other day that said its only something like seven more Saturdays till spring. I am very very ready for that. 

FEB

 I think the fact that the longest night of the year is in December completely ignores the headache that is the grayest month of the year, February.  December has a whole slate of holidays. January has that dramatic "I'm the first real month of winter fear me," vibe. February is like Wednesday. Wednesday is to far away from one weekend and not near enough to the next one. February is to far away from fall and way to far away from spring. 

And its going to snow soon. Again.

Let's talk about a book. I recently got a review of a book that I really liked. It was basically; this is a great read, fun escapism that doesn't get to technical and doesn't take itself to seriously. 

I can really get behind that sort of review particularly in this gray time of the year. No one wants to think and in no one needs to much drama. There's way to much of that connected to real life these days.  In my younger days I read everything UFO I could get my hands on. I wasn't a big fan of reality back then either. Reality has never shown me much respect why should I respect reality? That reading translated in my mind into this story. 

A second generation UFO authority rethinks her life and decides to slowly transition from UFO writing to simple fiction writing. As if in protest, things begin to happen around her. People want explanations and they aren't really ready to listen to the truth. When it comes to UFOs and the paranormal most of the time there are no explanations. 

If you're interested you can find the book on my amazon page

amazon.com/author/tabithabaumander 

Oh look, my bad, its not snowing. It's raining.