None Of The Above

Reader Vince posted a comment on my 74th birthday entry, asking about my strategy for retiring and getting old. Carol and I do whatever we can to grow old in style and (more to the point) functional and (most pointedly) alive. It’s complicated, but I’ll get as much of it as I can into this single (rather long) entry.

So…we’re retired. Topic #1: Stress. Do what you can to keep it at a minimum. I admit that’s harder if you raised kids, which we did not. We’ve been together now for 57 years, married for 50. We discuss all kinds of things. We laugh. We cuddle. We see to each other’s needs. We take each other very, very seriously. We go to church. We pray. Death may do us part—but not forever.

We have no debt to worry about. We don’t spend extravagantly. We use our cars until they fall apart, which for our 4Runner took 25 years. We’ve bought two lightly used cars from CarMax, and both have been big wins. We didn’t have to go through the usual BS kabuki with conventional dealerships, which is guaranteed to raise your blood pressure. We don’t buy things for the sake of buying them. We bought a Radio Shack stereo the November after our wedding…and it’s still living happily on the entertainment center fifty years later, playing music from dawn to bedtime. Our TV is now 15 years old, and (granted that we don’t watch much TV) it’s still very good at its job.

Topic #2: Brain health. I’ve seen studies suggesting that living with music playing constantly helps with brain health. As I said above, our ancient but flawless stereo plays classical music from our local classical station, KBAQ, from the time we get up until the time that we turn in. Writing helps too, and lord knows I do plenty of that. There is a study of Catholic nuns that’s been underway since 1986, indicating that the nuns who wrote emotionally positive text (often in their daily journals) were less likely to develop Alzheimer’s than nuns who didn’t write, and were more likely to live longer. Most of my writing is emotionally positive, so I have some hope that this will apply to me as well, even though I’m not a nun and don’t play one on TV.

I have no studies to support it, but my guess is that programming also contributes to brain health. I still program for fun (generally in Lazarus/Free Pascal) and read whatever current Pascal texts that I can find. I still tinker with electronics and build things, sometimes from kits, and sometimes from scratch. Ham radio helps too. I stay busy.

I teach myself things. I read books on all kinds of stuff, as those who have visited here at Fortress Duntemann may have noticed. I taught myself the Pascal-ish language Lua, though Free Pascal pretty much leaves it in the dirt by comparison. I created a spreadsheet to design solar-twin star systems with planets, which I used in writing The Cunning Blood. You get the idea. Brains matter. Use ‘em or lose ‘em.

Topic #3: Body health. I think that genetics plays more of a role in general health than most people are willing to admit. My Polish immigrant grandfather worked at grimy jobs his whole working life, and lived to just a month short of his 90th birthday. I take after that side of the family. People yell at me for saying it sometimes, but my research suggests that you can do worse than your genes, but you can’t do better. I have good genes, which helps a lot with regard to health. We never smoked or did drugs. I generally have a glass of red wine with non-fish dinners most nights, but I don’t overdo it, and will taper it if my liver numbers start drifting out of range.

Food. We eat meat, fish, eggs, dairy, and salad. We don’t have a starch course unless we have friends or family over for dinner, and when we do it’s generally polenta (i.e., corn grits). I fry one egg in butter every morning for breakfast. Lunch is usually a slice of cold meat (no bread) rolled up with a slice of cheese, plus some tree nuts. I learned back in the ‘90s that carbs make me fat, especially sugar. So I drink water instead of sodas, and keep starches (breads, pasta, potatoes, etc.) to a minimum. We do have desserts when eating with friends or family, but usually not when we’re alone.

We pay attention to ingredients lists, and avoid things with umpty ingredients that we can’t identify. (I call such foods “chemistry sets.”) We consume organic dairy. Our salads are baby spinach topped by carrot shreds, sliced radishes, diced mushrooms, olive slices (for Carol) and diced red bell pepper (for me.) We buy whatever we can in glass rather than plastic. We don’t snack much, and when we do, it’s almost always either tree nuts or sugarless snacks with only a few ingredients, and nothing freaky. Lately it’s been PopCorners. 3 ingredients: Popped corn, vegetable oil, and salt.

Exercise. We do weight training once a week at the gym, with a trainer who specializes in older people. I walk a lot, which is tricker in hot weather, but I shoot for 6,000 steps a day, and make that target three or four days out of seven.

Sleep. We’re morning people and hop out of bed at 6 or 7 AM, shooting for eight hours a night. Sleep is not optional, and we structure our lives to allow those eight hours to happen almost every night.

Topic #4: Supplements. I take 5 grams of creatine hydroxide every day, and 10 on gym day, generally in my midmorning iced coffee. There is strong evidence that creatine acts against cancer. I also take a standard multivitamin, a D supplement, quercetin/bromelain, zinc, magnesium, and until recently, a B-50. (Carol takes others as recommended by her doc.) My blood pressure is low to normal. We both get physicals once a year, with a broad blood panel and other tests. I pay close attention to my numbers, and take action when test results go out of bounds; e.g, vitamin B-6 and prostate-specific antigen (PSA).

Topic #5: Emotional health. This one is gnarly for a lot of people, but not for me. Carol and I are deeply in love, which is the powerful central element in our emotional health. I don’t do as much on social media as I used to, largely because a great deal of it is slobber-screaming about politics. I do not doomscroll. Nor do I talk about politics. As close as I come is the climate issue, which I research as science and sometimes post about but don’t get involved in tribal fights over. Allowing other people to make me angry gives them control over me, and I won’t abide that. Anger is deadly. My father’s father died of anger. I strive for an upbeat outlook on life and don’t allow current events to bring me down.

Friends. I’ve said this here many times, and I will say it again: Friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit. I have a circle of friends whom I greatly value, granting that a couple of them have followed my writing for thirty or more years without ever meeting me. They’re still friends. I value them more than they probably understand.

And that’s as good a summary as I can fit here. Yes, I will admit that life is a crapshoot, but it’s a gamble I’m willing to take—and so far I’ve done very well. What works for me may not work for you. Live an examined life, and don’t let other people control you. Watch your numbers. Have friends. Stay active. Stay busy. That’s most of it. You may be surprised by what you discover in the process. I certainly was.

74 today. Data from my family tree indicates that I’m doing all right by still breathing: I’ve lived longer than any man in my paternal line going back to one Johann Andreas Duntemann 1729-1808. He made it to 78. If I can log five more years, I’ll be the oldest guy in my paternal line going back as far as I can see, which (for now) is a man born in 1687, who died at 51. I’ve seen the names and lifespans of other, older Duntemann men here and there, but I can’t connect any of them to my own line.

That’s one way to look at a year that wasn’t…exactly…the best. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer last fall, had radiation treatment in January, and have recently been told by my oncologist that the radiation worked and my PSA is now 0.86. That was a big drop, let’s say. We need to keep an eye on it, but that’s part of what getting older entails: keeping an eye on all your various “health numbers” as I call them, to be sure nothing is severely out of line. In a blood panel some months back I found that my vitamin B-6 levels were literally off the chart on the high end. Doc told me to quit the B-50 supplements we’ve been taking for years and years. I did. Last Tuesday I gave them some more blood, and learned that my B-6 levels now are dead-center in the normal range.

Whew. (I think.) I’ve never heard of anyone overdosing on B vitamins, but a little research shows that it can happen. I have a mild neuropathy in my right foot, and I have to wonder if excess B6 (pyridoxine) had anything to do with it.

About a month ago we had to send poor little Dash back to his Creator. He was 17 and developing multiple serious symptoms all at once. He lived longer than any of the other six dogs we’ve had as a couple. So the Pack are all now in God’s green fields. We cried, sure. Who wouldn’t? We spent a lot of time with the Pack, and Dash retired from the show ring as an AKC Grand Champion. So he did very well, and we will always imagine him at his best.

There’s nothing like a cancer diagnosis to scramble your creative faculties, and I’m only just recently generating some new ideas and plot arcs for my (stalled) novel, The Molten Flesh. I did publish a new and significantly rewritten version of my 1971 short story “Whale Meat” and later on a new short story, “Morning Man,” about an AI disk jockey at a small-town AM radio station. Both are available for 99c on Amazon. The two stories were platforms to try using generative AI to create covers for short ebook fiction. Not great, not terrible, and I learned a few things in the process.

That’s all the bad stuff. Carol and I have never been closer. We bought a spectacular new car: a Subaru Crosstrek. I got a new mini-split AC installed in my garage/workshop/shack so it’s not always an oven in there. I found a bunch of ancient manuscripts at the bottom of an old box that I thought were gone forever, including parts of a story I wrote when I was 10, on the ancient typewriter my grandmother Sade gave me that year. I’ve made peace with Windows 11. We’re still doing strength training and enjoying it as much as ever.

Nonetheless, I now say 73 to 73. Forgive me if I don’t add ET CUL…

• Creatine not only helps you build muscle—new tests strongly suggest that it can help the body fight cancer cells. The tests are with mice, so there will need to be a lot of further research, but this is great news for anyone (like us) who take creatine on a daily basis.
• Lazarus Version 4.8 is now available. It’s a bugfix release, compiled with FPC 3.2.2. Free and easy to update. Go get it!
• IBM has created a 7 angstrom node for making extremely high-density chips. It’s done by stacking sheets of transistors vertically and bonding the transistors together in a way that makes logic gates etc, with potentially up to 100 billion transistors on a single chip. Screw flying cars. This is the future I had hoped for!
• A guy who’s been blogging now for 25 years lays out a fascinating history of the technology he’s used along that timeline, and how it has evolved. I knew a lot of this (my blog is now 28 years old) but he puts it all in one place in a single well-written article.
• It had to happen. I should have written an SF story about it back in the early ‘80s, but back then I didn’t drink wine. So don’t pop that cork just yet. Claude can act as your AI sommelier.
• Broadcom and OpenAI have announced Jalapeno, a custom chip designed specifically to handle AI inference logic. It’s a sort of AI accelerator, and with any luck at all it will specialize the AI chip market so that the rest of us can afford system memory and SSDs.
• Here’s a slightly weird AI-related site: In The Weights. It’s basically a leaderboard of names present in all the major AIs. I’m #148 on the leaderboard, with a score of 841. It found two hallucinations on me, one claiming that I was an American actor and comedian; the other an electronic/experimental musician. I’m dead certain (but not dead) that I’m the only Jeff Duntemann who has ever lived (yes, I have a third cousin Jeff Dunteman, one n at the end) and I have never done any acting or composing. (Thanks to Mike Bentley for the link.)
• Venezuela got hit by two violent back-to-back earthquakes, one Richter 7.2 and the second 7.5. Carol and I lived through the October 1989 Loma Prieta quake, which logged at 6.9, and the quake was one major reason we left the Santa Cruz area in 1990 for Arizona shortly thereafter.

Amazon just messaged me that my latest Kindle title was now available. “Morning Man” is a 6,300-word short story with an interesting history. It’s about an AI DJ at a small farm-town AM radio station in Wisconsin. I wrote it in 1989. I never tried to sell it, but just threw it in a box full of old manuscripts, where it sat for the next 35 years or so.

Why didn’t I try to sell it? I couldn’t make the characters work. I’ve always been good with gadgets and world-building. Characters, well, I did my best, but the people in the story just didn’t sound especially real. Part of the problem may have been the fact that in 1989 we were preparing to launch PC Techniques and move to Arizona from Scotts Valley, California. My time and energy mostly went into that megaproject. By the time I retired in the teens and returned to fiction, I had mostly forgotten the story of Rusty the AI and his bewildered owner.

So I pulled it out, read it a few times, and rewrote it heavily. Now, having five novels and a couple of intense workshops behind me, I knew what I was doing. The characters now work. And you can have your own copy for 99c.

Well, AI DJs on broadcast radio are now real, and becoming common. Here’s one piece on the state of things as of 2025. Rolling Stone has another good piece on the topic, but it’s paywalled. My brief scan showed a few more, and if the topic interests you, you can probably find plenty.

I don’t expect the general public to believe that I predicted AI DJs in 1989. Nonetheless, I did. So take a look and see what you think. Reviews and ratings are always welcome; thanks in advance. And as I’ve said here more than once, I gotta go dig around in that box and see what else I wrote and then forgot about!

I was at our Fry’s grocery a few days ago, and while looking for a decent tray of organic radishes (I’m fussy about my radishes) the normally ignorable pop music they play above the low-level grocery store hubbub caught my attention. It was one or maybe two people whistling a repetitive theme. There were vocals between the whistles, but I couldn’t make them out, and was in truth way more interested in the radishes than than the music.

On the (short) drive home, I realized that the damn whistles were still playing, this time strictly in my head. I’m prone to this mental peculiarity, generally called “earworms.” I’ve evolved a mechanism to kill my earworms: I start creating parody lyrics for them. Oddly, this makes them go away. I don’t know why. As many of my long-time readers know, I’m good at parody lyrics. Here’s a sample of what I fired at the whistling earworm:

“I’m just a dope, just a typical mope, and that is all that I’ll ever be.”

That said, I sometimes hear store/restaurant music that appeals to me. Years ago I heard a piece in a restaurant in Colorado Springs that got stuck in my head, mostly for the guitar work. The lyrics were fuzzy and I heard them wrong, so having failed to identify the song on Google by its lyrics, it was years later that I heard it again on the radio of a rental car. It was “Found Out About You” by the Gin Blossoms.

But we now have better weapons: Google search on my phone listens, and you can tap a button to tell it to identify whatever music is playing. It worked beautifully for “Because the Night” by Cascada. Ten seconds and bam! I had the title, the artist, and a link to buying it. “Because the night belongs to muggers, / Because the night belongs to blood…”

Ditto last year, when they were playing an appealing item while I was standing in the line at the UPS Store. Pulled out my phone, and a coupla taps (and a few seconds) later, I had “Shut Up and Dance” by Walk the Moon. I enjoyed it enough that I didn’t try to filk it.

Back to the whistles. Now, I struggled for decades to identify an energetic instrumental for brass that I first heard at a grade school show in 1964 or ‘65. I tried to whistle it into my cell phone, but it didn’t work. (I figured it out by sleuthing, but at least I figured it out.) I’ve since found that Google can only identify recorded music. Whistling doesn’t work…

…unless the recorded music is made of whistling.

It was a perfect experiment: When I got home with the whistling earworm in my head, I pulled up Google on my phone, hit the song button, and whistled the whistle. I was startled when Google snagged it in a few seconds. The song was “The Walker” by Fitz and the Tantrums. Not generally something I like, but it was weird enough that I added it to my collection of $1.29 Amazon tracks.

There’s not a lot of whistling in pop music. I vaguely recall a song or two (Roger Whittaker?) which I’ll whistle for Google to see if whistling is just something that Google assumes is recorded music. One has to wonder if Fitz and his gang whistled it to make it easier for people to identify on Google. Or maybe dumb luck.

I’ll go with dumb luck, heh.

I’m seeing more and more indie book covers that are startlingly good, and yet give that now-familiar impression that they were drawn by an AI. I’ve not studied prompt engineering but others have, and so I spent an hour using Musk’s Grok AI to generate a cover for my fantasy novelette “Whale Meat,” which I recently rewrote heavily and republished. Like an idiot I didn’t save the prompt that created the image. What surprised me is that by generating a second image from exactly the same prompt, I got a distinctly different image. I asked for a middle-aged homeless man with a heavy beard and a floppy work cap on a city street, summoning a whale through hyperspace. Here’s what I got:

I chose the one on the left, because it displayed more sense of menace on the man’s face. I also liked the clear indication that he’s the one doing the trick with the whale. The other image could represent a vision the man is having. (No more spoilers. It’s only 99c; if you’re curious, buy it!) The real weirdness is that both images came from exactly the same prompt. (Save your prompts—but don’t expect a given prompt to produce the same thing every time. So save each image that you create with any given prompt!)

Now I had a cover. But…is it mine? That was the first hint to me of the huge problem of how copyright law applies to the output of generative AI.

I see five big legal questions that need to be settled, probably in court:

1. Can material generated by an AI be copyrighted?
2. If material generated by an AI can be copyrighted, who owns the copyright?
3. If a piece of art created by an AI is incorporated into a larger work of art created by a human artist, does the AI art invalidate copyright on the work as a whole?
4. Does material generated by AIs trained on copyrighted material violate the copyright of the training material?
5. Is material generated by an AI trained on illegally obtained material (pirate downloads etc.) considered illegal?

There are smaller issues, but those are the important ones. #1 has supposedly been tried and resolved in the courts.  It went up to the Supreme Court, but the claim stands: Copyright requires human contribution. (H/T to Jim Strickland for sending me the link.) My problem with this is that a human crafted a prompt that created an image specified by the prompt. I consider prompt engineering a human contribution to AI art. If you use a stencil to craft letters on a sign, the stencil did not create the letters. You did. My guess is that #1 will be litigated further, and with any luck, a ruling will also answer #2. I don’t think #3 is a yes—but again, we have no decisions either way thus far.

The biggie is #4. Here’s a scenario to ponder: Suppose an artist needs to draw a picture of a bichon frise dog but has never seen one. The artist thus looks at online photos of bichons and then draws a picture of a bichon. The dog in the drawing isn’t identical to any of the dogs in the photos in terms of factors like size, pose, or hairdo. (Hairdo is a big deal with bichons, trust me. We’ve had six.) So: Is the artist violating the copyright of the photos he scrutinized before drawing the bichon? He trained himself on somebody else’s photos to get a sense for the breed, and then based on that training drew a dog not identical to any of the photos.

I think this much is clear: If you teach yourself enough about dogs to draw dogs, the dogs you draw are copyrightable, and you own the copyright. Furthermore, nobody can claim that drawing a dog violates the copyright of other pictures of similar dogs, barring methods like tracing a photo through tracing paper.

Here’s a counter argument that I’ve heard, don’t recall where: Superman is copyrighted. If you draw Superman and the drawing isn’t identical to any of the Superman copyright holder’s drawings, is your drawing a copyright violation? I’m pretty sure it is. God created dogs. Humans created Superman.

So which one applies to AI?

I’m not sure. I did some further experimenting with the Grok AI: I asked it to draw a bichon chewing on a bone. It did so, and the generated image (left) was photo-like and not cartoon-like as were the “Whale Meat” covers. I then did a Google image search on the created image, and got nothing remotely similar to the picture Grok had put together. Now, there are gazillions of photos of bichons online. Grok might have chosen one with a bone in its mouth and sent it back to me, unchanged. There’s no way I could ever know if that supposedly generated image were a literal copy or truly generated according to training.

The more I research the issue, the muddier the whole thing gets. It’s possible to copyright a recipe. However, the same steps in a recipe expressed in a different way are not a copyright violation, though the steps might be patentable. Fair use is the muddiest issue of all, made still muddier by questions of who (or what) is doing the using. Fair use still comes up in court cases, so it’s hard to know if training an AI on copyrighted material but not using the AI to precisely duplicate any of the copyrighted material is fair use. That issue may not be settled for decades.

Although it’s possible that an AI company would claim copyright on the images that its AI produces (point #2), that would light up our courtrooms in a big hurry—and possibly bring the curtain down on the company itself.

AI companies that pirate immense wads of copyrighted material for AI training should be sued into the ground, but that’s not really about AI. AI users who have no idea where the training material came from should not be held responsible for the piracy if they use the AI.

I’m just bringing up the problems here. I’m not a lawyer and even lawyers will probably admit that AI is a unique addition to the body of copyright law and that relevant law is not settled. I’m just speculating about the problems that we as writers and artists face. How well AIs can write fiction is a question I haven’t tried to answer, though I will run some experiments on that proposition as time permits.

I may or may not create another AI book cover. The “Whale Meat” cover was an experiment. I’d rather pay a human artist for science fiction / fantasy cover art and doubtless will. What happens in the greater publishing community across the next ten years or so will be fascinating. Grab your popcorn. Let’s watch.

Fifty years and some months ago, I got together with a few of my friends in the science fiction fan community, and we started a…what? Club? Fanzine? A gathering of techie nerds?

Yes. All of the above, and then some. With me as the fanzine editor. I created a zine called PyroTechnics, with its first (undated) issue appearing in late winter or early spring 1976. I worked for Xerox at the time, and that helped, since I was given free rein of the many copiers/duplicators at the downtown Xerox Chicago offices, where I ran off the newsletters.

A lot of those early years’ activities have gotten a little fuzzy in my head, but we were (mostly) a midwest phenomenon, and we attended midwestern conventions like Windycon, Chambanacon, Capricon, and doubtless others. Several of us traveled to Kansas City for the 1976 Worldcon, where I (and doubtless some of the others) stood in line to shake hands with Robert A. Heinlein, who was pro GOH that year. We stole the name “General Technics” from John Brunner’s 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar. I sometimes wonder if he knew about us, given the lack of Internet in the 1970s. (Brunner died in 1995, when the Internet was just getting out of second gear.) It wasn’t cold-hearted theft; we were honoring an excellent novel that wasn’t ishy-squishy New Wave.

Us, we wanted hard SF and lots of it. We talked about tech, we built things from blinkies to robots to much else, had fun, and wrote it up for Pyro. By 1979 we had almost a hundred members. I paid a GT member to assemble an S100 8080 CP/M machine for me in 1980, and used it for ten years. As time went on, subgroups within GT published issues of PyroTechnics themselves, with my enthusiastic blessing. I may not have all the issues that ever were, and I think my part of it faded out as Carol and I went bopping around the country while I chased jobs. I still keep in touch with a few members, though at least one of my best GT friends (and best friends generally ), George Ewing, left this world back in 2010.

Things got quiet for a long time. Then some time back, I was sent a kit by 2DKits, care of GTer physicist Bill Higgins. It was a blinkie name badge kit celebrating 50 years of General Technics, with a PIC processor and lots of LEDs. I finally finished it this afternoon, and it almost brought a tear to my eye. Fifty years, wow.

GT still exists, though I may or may not still be a member. We’ll have to see about that. As I like to say, friendship is the cornerstone of the human spirit. Time to rekindle that GT spirit if I can.

…may well be the strangest day in the entire Christian calendar. On Good Friday, Christ suffered and died on the cross. He was then buried, to rise again from the dead on Easter Sunday. So what did He do on Holy Saturday?

He harrowed hell.

You don’t hear much about the Harrowing of Hell anymore. The creeds say that “He descended into hell” but nothing about what He did there. I get reminded from time to time that “hell” once meant “the grave.” True enough. They laid Christ in a tomb. He wasn’t exactly buried as we understand the term today, though if a tomb is a burrow into a hillside as often pictured, it’s still a burial in the earth.

Later Catholic tradition holds that in harrowing hell, Christ released all the people from hell who had been there after their death, since there was not yet redemption or baptism. The tradition does not say that they were all being tortured. I’ve read of those who call this release from “the limbo of the fathers” the Harrowing of Hell. Limbo as it was later understood is something I won’t be discussing in detail here, as I’ve not heard it mentioned in a Catholic context in a good many years and am not sure of its current status. Later Catholic tradition morphed limbo into the eternal home of unbaptized infants who die, without torment but also without the Beatific Vision.

There are problems with hell generally. I’m no big fan of Bertrand Russell, but he made a salient point in asking how infinite punishment for finite transgression can be just. When I was a college freshman at a Catholic college in Chicago, the (old) priest teaching a lesson on Christ’s redemption emphasized that against an infinitely perfect God, all imperfection is infinitely evil and thus deserving of eternal torture.

Huh? What the, er, hell?

Naively assuming that college allowed for interesting discussions in class, I raised my hand and asked whether, compared to God’s infinite perfection and goodness, wouldn’t our imperfections seem so small as to vanish into the noise? In an obvious state of agitation, the priest said that made no sense. After that session, he threatened to eject me from the course for saying such things. I kept my mouth shut in later class sessions, having learned a few lessons that were not in our textbooks.

To this day, believing that God always wins, I can’t figure how I could be more merciful than God, nor that an all-powerful and all-loving God could eternally lose and torture countless people that He loved, even for dumb things like eating meat on Friday.

Anyway. Holy Saturday is clearly the day when Jesus descended into hell, preached a little (according to some traditions) and then let everybody out. Did He close the gates? Lotta arguments about that, which I won’t go into here. Tomorrow is the Big Day, in whose shadow Holy Saturday will always remain. I feel sorry for it now and then. Harrowing hell was no small victory, for God and everybody else. I raise a glass of good red wine in today’s favor. God wins, today and always!

Something’s going on in our neighborhood here that few people beyond those who grew up on the northern edge of Phoenix in the 1960s and 1970s will understand: Huge, expensive houses are popping up, every one utterly bereft of curves and roof peaks. They seemed odd when there was only one or two in our vicinity. Now that there are seven or eight—with several more under construction–what was odd became a trend, and ultimately an architectural style. I don’t know what architects call this new style. But boy, it’s popping up all over.

This past Wednesday Carol and I attended an open house at a newly completed home less than a block away. It was a broker open house, but we were invited because we live just down the street and around the corner. It’s right next to another similar house that was finished a few months ago, as the photo below shows. (The new house is the one on the left.)

We’ve watched it go up for most of a year. The landscaping has just been completed. They did something a little odd: Using a crane, they lowered a 20 foot palm tree down through a hole in the portico, its root ball going into a hole just to the left of the front door. Here’s a better view:

The house encloses 6,142 square feet, including six bedrooms and six and a half baths. There’s a fancy rectangular pool adjoining a sunken patio with a bar. Embedded in the pool are five plaster pillarettes just high enough to be bar stools. Oh—and the line of sunken bar stools is behind a linear waterfall coming down from the top of the patio roof. So you can sit on one of the stools, waist-deep in water, and sip a marguerita while the waterfall’s splashes keep your back cool when it’s 115 degrees out:

Adjoining the pool area the property includes what down here we call a casita: a separate small but complete living space including a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and living area with an electric fireplace:

I didn’t take photos of the interior because the place was a madhouse when we were there, but the right-angle convention was held throughout. Oh—and there was a 6’ tall server rack in its own closet, with a bundle of fifteen or twenty cables going into the wall. It probably already holds a NAS. If not, there’s certainly room for one.

So why this and why here? Our subdivision and a few others were platted and built in the midlate 1960s. (Old enough not to have an HOA, phew.) Our house was built in 1966, but it was very heavily remodeled in 2002. The key is the lot size. These subdivisions were intended as modest-sized homes for people who wanted to keep a horse or two in their backyards. A tack shed (storing saddles etc) was a popular option. We have one of those. The lots run from half an acre in size to a full acre. Ours is 5/8 of an acre. Only a couple of people hereabouts still have horses. So, absent horses, what can you do with half- to full-acre lots?

You build mansions, that’s what. The house Carol and I toured will be listed soon for $5,375,000. It takes up almost all of its half-acre corner lot.

The house was startling, inside and out. It has amenities, but lacks coziness. We’d pass on it even if we could afford it. In a few years the neighborhood will be an interesting mix of small-ish and huge-ish homes. I honestly wonder who all of our new neighbors will turn out to be.

• Sorry for being quiet for awhile. I’ve had some significant health problems that have slowed me down, and a few major non-writing projects to pursue, like finding a new car to replace our 25-year-old Toyota 4Runner, and replacing the dead air conditioner in our smaller garage, which is also my workshop and ham shack. Summer is acumin in, and the garage is a mess from my having to clear space around the dead unit so a handyman can remove it and install a new one. I would have called the handyman who installed it, but alas, he died a couple of years ago.
• Being a long-time cheese fan, I was pleased to see this piece of research, which associates higher dairy fat intake with lower incidence of Alzheimer’s. Read the whole thing: The article has a long list of limitations in the data upon which the study was based, meaning it may not be as predictive as originally stated.
• If you haven’t already bookmarked space.com’s Space Calendar, get on it. The site has listings for most launches, including China’s (maybe) but mostly launches from the US and other western nations. Carol and I have seen a fair number of SpaceX launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, and this is where we find most of the up-and-launchers.
• The Chichon volcano in southern Mexico killed over 2,000 people back in 1982, and buried whole towns under pyroclastic flows. The top blew off a la Mt. St. Helens, leaving an immense crater with a small lake at the bottom, and seismologists assumed it would be quiet for awhile. Well, “awhile” may be over, as the lake is picking up more volcanic sulfides and chlorides, with CO2 bubbles coming up from the lake’s bottom.
• YouTube is now blocking background play on a lot of mostly mobile browsers. Background play still works on Brave under Windows. I don’t listen to music on my phone, so I’m not sure if blocking background play is also happening on desktop OSes.
• It occurred to me recently, in these years of wildly active solar phenomena, that snow is the price we pay for auroras. Sigh. But no, I’ll take a warm climate any day of the week. I’ll only want to see snow again as a tourist.