Summing Up and Forging On

I've taken to watching old movies on free Youtube. Just watched Mickey Rooney go from playing Huckleberry Finn to The Hoosier Schoolboy to Babyface Nelson.

My new collection of stories, Alvin and Me, ought to be ready to publish by October of this year.

My boy (only 51 years old) came down ill in bf Oklahoma and ended in a nursing home with kidney disease. The bastards made him eat food without regard to kidney patients' needs. He slipped into stage four. They basically told him he's too poor and ill to receive advanced care. We brought him back to Houston yesterday. My daughter has money and between her and her husband should get him into a facility that cares enough to at least try to help.

Sorry to hear that. It must be a real concern. I hope he gets the medical attention he needs.

Our mercenary system is only geared to take until one becomes wealthy enough to have a free ride in every endeavor. However, my daughter is like a general in the field when she has a cause. If anyone can help him, it will be her.

Alvin, Me, and Mickey
Alvin is my dog, and Mickey is his offspring. My new book is a companion to EndEarthers, albeit with a bit more whimsy. This collection features space opera, dystopian fiction, and robot love. Should be available in October.

Changed the title to Bolder Colors.

I said hello today to my newest great granddaughter. She's beautiful, looks to have spunk, which she needed, being just over five pounds at birth. Right now she's just over nine pounds.

Anybody who has followed me for very long is aware that I use colloidal silver. I make my own for the reasons mentioned below.

A 2020 study evaluating 14 popular colloidal silver products sold on Amazon found that 70% of the products contained only ionic silver rather than silver nanoparticles, despite being marketed as "colloidal silver." Ionic silver consists of silver ions (Ag⁺) dissolved in solution, while colloidal silver should technically contain silver nanoparticles (metallic silver particles, Ag⁰). This misrepresentation is significant because ionic silver and silver nanoparticles have different mechanisms of action, efficacy, and safety profiles.

Ionic silver is often colorless, while true colloidal silver (containing nanoparticles) may have a slight yellow tint due to surface plasmon resonance, a phenomenon where larger nanoparticles absorb certain wavelengths of visible light. Smaller nanoparticles (<5 nm) may not exhibit this color.

It took a few weeks to make chapter three effortlessly simple.

It might surprise some to learn that my formal education ended with the 10th grade. In the lower classes it was possible to fake it enough to pass with reasonably good grades. Never mastered English, math, or much else. I quit faking at the end and failed the tenth miserably.

In my home were no books. I never held one in my hand before my teacher had them passed out. As I looked at all those pages of symbols it seemed to me that I could never make sense of them. Yet, within a few days I was reading with the best of them.

A teacher read The Black Stallion, by Walter Farley, to the class, which stoked my interest in reading for myself. I found out about libraries, becoming a fequent visitor. Books about boxcar children and a dog named Jinks (of Jason Vally) soon led to Dickens and Ray Bradbury.

I was intrinsically unable to grasp my studies, as I mentioned before. But I read all the time. While in the Navy I aced the GED for my honorary diploma.

One day, at age 19 I discovered Generation of Vipers, An Essay on Morals, and Opus 21, all by Philip Wylie. I had never encountered a mind whose purpose was to make us think and feel. Wylie changed my life. He made me want to seek out other authors with unique perspectives.

I tried my hand at writing, but found I had little to say. Still I persisted by writing undisciplined verses and song poems. The years were cruising by. Turmoil from personal circumstances made my effort more irrelevant than ever.

At one point I became alcohol free, after practically swimming in it for years. Ate healthy food. Suddenly I could not just begin stories. I could finish them. I did not say they were good stories.

After I retired there was time to work at it. Not knowing Strunk from Wagnals, I relied on the good books I had always read for structure, syntax - whatever - as was imprinted in my memory. I made a book with Lulu to preserve these fledgling efforts.


One day I showed my brother a draft of the first chapter of EndEarthers. He made me promise to write it out in a book. And so I wrote the first of six stories, eventully publishing with Draft2Digital. Now I am nearing completion of a companion volume which I call Bolder Colors.

At 83, my time may be short, but I intend to go as long as nature will let me.

·

Shopping groceries. I pushed my cart straight toward the roll of plastic bags in the vegetable section. A woman side stepped in front of me to grab a bag for herself. I paused and stood quietly. She must have assumed I stood there to gawk at her from behind, because just as she prepared to walk away, she wiggled her butt at me. I assure you, she was not that gorgeous.

Zipf's law (/zɪf/; German pronunciation: [tsɪpf]) is an empirical law stating that when a list of measured values is sorted in decreasing order, the value of the n-th entry is often approximately inversely proportional to n.

The best known instance of Zipf's law applies to the frequency table of words in a text or corpus of natural language:

{\displaystyle \ {\mathsf {word\ frequency}}\ \propto \ {\frac {1}{\ {\mathsf {word\ rank}}\ }}~.}

It is usually found that the most common word occurs approximately twice as often as the next common one, three times as often as the third most common, and so on. For example, in the Brown Corpus of American English text, the word "the" is the most frequently occurring word, and by itself accounts for nearly 7% of all word occurrences (69,971 out of slightly over 1 million). True to Zipf's law, the second-place word "of" accounts for slightly over 3.5% of words (36,411 occurrences), followed by "and" (28,852).[1] It is often used in the following form, called Zipf-Mandelbrot law: