Daybook

Descriptions of what I did recently; what most people think of when they imagine a “diary entry.”

Scraps: “May You Always”

I haven’t done a piece on scraps in a couple of years, so if you didn’t see it back in 2023, here’s a link to where I define it. Basically, stuff that pops into your head without a trigger or other reason. Happens to me all the time. But today I had a weird one.

While I was grocery shopping, a song popped into my head: “May You Always,” by the McGuire Sisters. It peaked on the Hot 100 on January 5, 1959. I haven’t heard for a number of years. I liked it (still do) for the Sisters’ voices and harmony. I could hear it as clearly as though it were on the radio. I had it on my college-years 8” reel-to-real off-the-radio mix tapes, and heard it a lot. So it’s no huge surprise that I remembered not only the melody and harmony but also the lyrics.

Here they are if you’re not familiar with the song. (I suspect a lot of my older readers might be.) Here’s the Sisters singing it. It’s clearly a person wishing another person well. Given who’s singing, it’s no surprise that I consider the lyric’s viewpoint singer a woman. The lyrics don’t say it out loud, but it sure sounds like a breakup song. The relationship is over, and she’s wishing him all the best.

But…why did they break up? She’s wishing for him to find someone to love as much as she loves him. So it wasn’t that he found another girlfriend. People break up for other reasons, sure. But then it hit me in the back of the head: She’s dying. They love one another deeply, but she’s on her deathbed, saying her goodbyes, with nothing but loving wishes that he continue on with his life and find someone new to love.

In reading the lyrics now, that interpretation seems obvious to me. Why?

I’m 73. A fair number of my friends have died. You get into your seventies, and that will happen. It’s part of the curve that we’re on. It’s a little odd that about as many women as men in my social circles have died. But that’s how it is. (Two of the women were, egad—murdered.)

I bring this up only as a reminder that getting old means you see others leave this world much more often than when you’re young. But young women die too—and that seems to lie at the emotional core of “May You Always.” That wouldn’t have occurred to me when I was 30 or 40. Well, it occurs to me now.

Crosstrekkin’

Feb 26th, 2026

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

Well, our poor 2001 Toyota 4Runner, which we bought new in 2001, started to fail often enough that we decided (months ago, actually) that we needed to start shopping for another second car. We did a fair amount of research, primarily because of our screwy garage door, which should have been a 16-footer but is only 15’ wide. So getting in and out of the garage can be tricky, mostly because our primary car is a 2014 Dodge Durango. The 2001 4Runner was built on a small pickup truck chassis. so it was relatively narrow but still reasonably tall. Its narrowness made slipping it in beside the Durango easier than it would be with a modern 4Runner. We looked hard for something that was no wider than the 4Runner, and as close as we could come was the Subaru Crosstrek. Ok, there were a few other candidates. Our choice was driven by what we could find.

Subaru has a good reputation for reliability. So we did what we did when we bought our Durango: drove up to CarMax to see what they had. CarMax had treated us very well when we bought the Durango there at the end of 2014. And the Durango itself has treated us very well in the 11 years that followed.

The Scottsdale CarMax had no Crosstreks on the lot. No sweat. They trucked one in from their larger facility on the west side of town, no charge. It was a white 2022 with about 15K miles on it. I brought my 25’ tape measure with me when we drove over to see it the first time. The car was within striking distance of 71” wide, mirror-edge to mirror-edge, as was our old 4Runner. So it would fit in the garage. It was a little lower than Carol would have preferred, but I doubted that anything only 71” wide would be as tall as the ‘01 Toyota.

We were offered a free 24-hour test drive. Getting the paperwork in order was an issue, especially with insurance. We basically bought a 2-day policy on the Crosstrek. Then off we went. It drove beautifully. We went back to CarMax and told them they had a buyer. A few days later (more paperwork!) we gave them a cashier’s check—and our 4Runner—and they gave us the car.

Again, it drove very well. Our problem with it was not about quality but complexity. It has a huge touch-screen control panel, as well as plenty of buttons. The stack of manuals that came with the vehicle is 2” high. Carol and I (but especially Carol) spent a huge amount of time going through the books and trying to figure out how everything worked.

There was a lot of everything.

We’re still learning. But that said, Carol loves the car. She drives it when she’s driving alone; when we go somewhere together we take the Durango. It’s an SUV with more cargo space than I would have guessed a car that small might have. Overall, a very big win. We also recommend CarMax if you’re looking for a used car. They were attentive, courteous, and had none of the weaselly arrogance that conventional car dealerships are famous for. Keep CarMax in mind if at some point you’re facing the same, um, adventure.

RIP Mass-Market Paperbacks

Feb 24th, 2026

by Jeff Duntemann.

13 comments

When I saw three articles on the death of mass-market paperbacks (MMPBs) in the last couple of weeks, I knew something was up—and the articles said what was up, if not why: ReaderLink, the largest book distributor in the US, announced that it would stop distributing mass-market paperbacks. The piece from The Guardian (an affiliate link) mentioned ebooks in passing as one factor in the collapse of the format. (The other two articles did not mention ebooks at all.) A Kindle Paperwhite is more or less the same size as an MMPB, and thinner. Furthermore, a lot of people—Carol included—now read ebooks on their smartphones.

MMPBs first appeared in the 1930s, as a means of spreading book retail sales beyond traditional bookstores. MMPBs were designed to be sold like magazines: In drugstores, grocery stores, gas stations, dime stores, train stations, and other places where casual, low-value sales occur. They were cheap to broaden the reader base beyond trade paperbacks and hardcovers. When I first began buying my own books with allowance money in high school (1966-70) MMPBs started at 60c or 75c, with fat ones (like Dune) sometimes 95c. (The obese 1970 MMPB of Blish’s Cities in Flight cost a stinging $1.25.)

How do I even know this? I still have the books. I have hundreds of MMPBs on my shelves, many going back to my high-school days. They look amazingly good for a peculiar reason: I coated most of them with my mom’s ConTact self-adhesive transparent shelf plastic. I don’t pull them off the shelf much anymore. When I have tried to read them in the past five or ten years, the yellowed and sometimes crumbly pages came loose in my hands.

I wasn’t surprised. Like the magazines that inspired them, mass-market paperbacks were intended to be read once and thrown away.

But there’s another issue that none of the articles I linked to mentioned at all: The audience is aging, and aging eyes often can’t read MMPBs comfortably. I remember when I tried to read Charles Harness’s The Ring of Ritornel two or three years ago, that I needed my strong readers to make the near-microscopic text readable. And even then, while possible, the reading was nothing anywhere near comfortable. Ink fades over time, and type contrast matters.

I’ve asked several of my contemporaries in their 70s and beyond, and they agree: The type is too small. It was small to make the books cheap. Now they’re mostly unreadable.

The answer is obviously ebooks. I don’t buy print books very often anymore, and when I do, the size of the type is often the decision hinge. I have two Samsung Galaxy Tab tablets, which I read ebooks on for a simple reason: I control the size of the type. This doesn’t work well on books containing photos/graphics or stuff like source code, but print books like that are often twice the size of MMPBs or more. And I don’t generally sit down and read print books like The Rust Programming Language from start to finish in long stretches. I read them until my eyes start to hurt.

Alas, the only serious downside to the death of mass-market paperbacks is that a lot of them haven’t made it to ebooks and probably never will. Most of the short story collections I read in high school are just gone. Groff Conklin did a lot of good anthology work. Amazon carries the crumbling print editions.

Anyway. Ebooks are the answer. My Galaxy Tab S9 is full of ebooks, many of which cost less than $5. Those old MMPB covers on my shelves remind me of being young. Sooner or later I’ll have had enough of that, and they will feed the dumpster. I just wonder what will take their places on my shelves.

“Whale Meat,” Second Edition

Feb 14th, 2026

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Amazon has just approved an update to my ebook novelette “Whale Meat,” which has been available on Kindle for 99c since 2011. Some of you have probably read it. Why did I update it? Glad you asked! There’s a story about the story. Here goes:

I was enthusiastic about Kindle since Amazon first made it available in the late oughts. I was already publishing paperbacks of things like Carl & Jerry via lulu.com, but ebooks finally seemed to be coming into their own. I needed a story to test how the Kindle system worked. I would be creating book-length ebooks soon enough, but the first one would ideally be shorter than books, and not one of my best-known works. “Whale Meat” shook a fluke at me to get my attention, and so it was that the story became my very first Kindle publication.

The story itself was not new. In fact, I wrote the first draft in early 1971, when I was still 18 years old. It was the first fantasy story that I had ever completed. I was trying to write something that didn’t reek of King Arthur or the Tolkien/Lewis canon. I made it contemporary, set in urban Chicago, and whereas it was about two witches, they were not wart-equipped elderly women in pointy hats riding brooms.

No. They were hippies. Or that’s what they wanted to look like. It was a tricky business, as they were born in the 1300s and were immortal. So in pondering what it might be like to be immortal, I hit upon a possible story gimmick: Telling the story in present tense. If you’ve been alive for centuries, maybe you see the world as a perpetual Now. And that’s how I told it.

I had not yet sold a story into a professional market, but I had a book by Writer’s Digest and knew how it was done. I sent it out to several magazines, including, sheesh, Analog. It came bouncing back from all of them with little or no delay. After five rejections, I started wondering why nobody seemed interested. Maybe it was that weird way of telling the tale in present tense. So I rewrote it in conventional past tense, and a few years later sold it for $35 to Starwind Magazine, published by Ohio State University. It appeared in their fall 1977 issue.

Now, I wasn’t the first to invent present tense in storytelling. John Updike generally gets that honor, beginning with his well-known novel Rabbit, Run. But as weird as it seemed in 1971, in 2026 it’s used by a great many authors, and sounds modern and savvy. So last summer I rewrote the story, top-to-bottom, in present tense. I cleaned it up and fleshed it out in other ways as well. My intention was to replace the 2011 “Whale Meat” on Amazon with a newer, present-tenser edition.

All I needed was a cover.

So I attempted the obvious: Get an AI to draw a cover for me. I subscribe to X, and get the Grok AI as part of the package. So one afternoon a few days ago I gave Grok a prompt: Draw a scruffy middle-aged male witch in modern Chicago, summoning a whale through hyperspace.

It drew me a scruffy man…in a black robe and pointy black hat. Heh. No sale. I took a breath and gave the prompt more thought: Draw a scruffy gray-bearded middle-aged sorcerer wearing a floppy work-cap in modern Chicago, summoning a whale through hyperspace. It drew pretty much what I’d asked for. I saved that image to disk and asked Grok to regenerate using the same prompt. I got another image much closer to what I wanted. I spent some fascinating minutes regenerating images, all of which were different, and saving them to disk until I had about 15. After a certain amount of staring, I chose the image you see above. Ok, the prompt is a spoiler, but I’m guessing whoever might have enjoyed “Whale Meat” among Contra readers has already read it.

Now, this was an experiment. I’ll gladly pay a human artist for a cover on a novel-sized book. This was a 9,000 word novelette that I sell for 99c. I wanted to see how close an AI could come to something that resonated with the story. Grok did pretty well. When I uploaded the new text and cover, Amazon asked if any part the ebook was generated by AI. I clicked Yes. Other writers I know are doing this. I think Amazon is just gathering stats, and they approved the new edition a couple of hours ago. The first edition sold 55 copies across 15 years. This one may do better. We’ll see. If you read it, please drop a review on Amazon. Thanks!

New Edition of FreePascal From Square One

May 7th, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

17 comments

[I released a new rev of the book as of 10-21-2025, and the link in this post now points to the new rev.]

Once I got The Everything Machine published on KDP this past March, I went back to a project I’ve tinkered with for almost 15 years: FreePascal from Square One, a 354-page PDF providing an introduction to programming, using the FreePascal FOSS compiler and the Lazarus IDE for editing and building. I need to mention here that the book does not go into Windows programming, OOP, software components, or the Lazarus GUI builder. I have a concept for a second book for those topics, and have written some of it, and borrowed a little from my portions of The Delphi 2 Explorer. No schedule yet, but I work on it when time permits.

FreePascal from Square One really is a free ebook. It’s a distillation of the four editions of my Pascal tutorial, Complete Turbo Pascal, which first appeared in 1985 and culminated in Borland Pascal 7 From Square One in 1993. I sold a lot of those books and made plenty of money, so I’m now giving it away, in hopes of drawing more people into the Pascal universe.

The book begins at the beginning of the beginning, and explains the ideas behind programming, drawing on metaphors from daily life, before jumping into coding. I’ve turned loose increasingly polished revisions on a regular basis since 2011 or so. This one has things none of the earlier revisions had: A new chapter on simple Pascal file I/O, and a clickable table of contents.

The TOC thing made me nuts for awhile. I tried to make it work using InDesign, but InDesign (my 2005-era copy, at least) can’t do it. I know it can be done—I have a couple of technical ebook PDFs with clickable TOCs—but needed to buy a high-end PDF editing tool to make it work. The product is PDF X-Change Pro from Tracker Software. It’s not free, but if you do any amount of work with PDFs, it’s essential. The Pro-level product comes with a 1,372-page manual—in PDF format, of course. It took me most of a day plowing through that monster manual to find out how to make clickable links in PDFs, but once I located that part, adding links to the TOC took me less than an hour.

It’s not tied to TOCs. You can define a clickable rectangle anywhere in a PDF, and specify what page that clickable rectangle will send you to. I drew rectangles all around the lines in the TOC, then right-clicked each rectangle and specified a destination page number for each line.

If you want the book, it’s right here. You’re welcome to share it around, post it on your site, or give it to anyone who might be find it useful. If you’re interested in FreePascal and Lazarus, here’s where to go to download them. They’re as close as you’ll get to Delphi in the free software universe, and it’s about the only programming environment that I use these days, unless I duck back into x64 assembly. Give it a try. It’s bogglingly good.

How Lithium Batteries Sometimes Die

Mar 31st, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

6 comments

…at least when they’re not exploding.

We bought a new living room couch several years ago, seating three, with the rightmost seat an electrical recliner with a battery-powered motor. (We could have plugged it into the floor if there were outlets in the floor here. There aren’t.) Carol and I have not used the recliner feature much. When we want to recline, we typically lie down on our bed. But whether the recliner feature was actually used or not, the battery would discharge every few weeks to the point where it wouldn’t move the seat. A week or two ago, I pulled out the battery to charge it up via the charger that came with the couch, and…I saw what you see above.

Note well that I did not unscrew or pry the case open. What you see above is exactly what I saw when I pulled the damned thing out from under the couch.

The battery consists of seven flat lithium cells in a stack, with a charger board on one side. The cells all inflated like cushions until the pressure of their expansion popped the plastic case.

When electronics die, I often pry them open to see what’s inside. Not this time. I exiled the pack to our patio just as I found it, and set it atop a thick travertine slab just in case things got…hot.

Our local Batteries & Bulbs store (where we have occasionally recycled dead 18650 lithium cells) won’t take it. So now, with a possible firebomb sitting on a fat tile on our patio, I have to scan around and find somebody who will take it. So far, nothing. I’ll add a coda to a future Odd Lots when we finally get the damned thing out of our hair. And no, we are not going to buy a replacement battery pack for the couch.

Creatine

Feb 27th, 2025

by Jeff Duntemann.

5 comments

Carol and I have done weight training almost continuously since 2004. (We dropped it during the turbulent couple of years we were moving from Colorado Springs down here to Scottsdale.) About a month or so ago, my trainer at the gym recommended a supplement called creatine, which I’d never heard of. He said it helps build muscle. That’s what we pay him for, so if there’s something that supports that goal, I’m willing to try it.

Creatine is yet another chemical that the body manufactures for its own use in keeping muscles and skeletal infrastructure healthy. And like so much else, as people get older they produce less internally. So given that we’re now in our 70s, well, like I said before: I’m willing to try it. Creatine is widely used by bodybuilders. Carol and I are not bodybuilders. We’re mostly trying to keep what muscle we have and maybe put on a little more. Some research suggests creatine improves brain health and may put off or reduce the effects of disorders like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Good if true, but evidence there is thin.

In truth, what sold me on creatine is its role in providing energy to the body. Creatine increases the body’s supply of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which is part of a complicated system for delivering chemical energy to cells. Across the last five years or so, my personal energy levels have fallen. I’m an old guy; that happens. But supplementing creatine provides more of the body’s “energy currency,” as explained in the NIH paper linked above. (Yeah, it’s a slog, but read it!) More on this shortly.

As a supplement, creatine monohydrate is a white powder that you can buy in both flavored and unflavored forms. I bought a jar of the unflavored Sunwarrior brand at the Natural Grocer store nearby. It dissolves readily in water or almost any water-based liquid. The jar comes with a scoop to measure out 5 grams. We take 5 grams daily. Carol puts it in her daily protein shake. I currently put it in sugar-free Activia liquid probiotic yogurt. (I recently had an infected tooth and had to take a course of strong antibiotics. The doc said eat probiotic yogurt for awhile to counteract whatever havoc the pills may have committed on my gut biome.)

What I’d really prefer (and will probably switch to soon) is putting my 5 grams of creatine into my daily iced coffee, which I drink about 10 AM. Many people put it in tea, but since I’m prone to kidney stones (which tea can cause) I’m going with coffee.

But…some online articles suggest that caffeine partially inhibits the effects of creatine. That bothered me until I found another Healthline article citing some solid 2017 research putting that rumor to rest. So once I run out of those cute little Activia Dailies, my creatine is going in my coffee.

As with any change in diet or meds, placebo may have something to do with it, but I <i>do</i> feel a little more energetic than in previous years. We’ll see if that continues as time goes on.

There’s one more thing about creatine that you need to be aware of, and it does bother me a little: Creatine promotes water retention in the body. In the month that I’ve been taking creatine, I’ve gained a little over four pounds. Our diet here is low-carb and I’ve hovered close to 150 for some years. Our diet hasn’t changed, so what’s with those four new pounds? Water. It makes me wonder if I’ve been a little bit dehydrated ever since we moved back to single-digit-humidity Arizona in 2015. Possible; hard to know. As with any significant supplement, it would be worth asking your doc about it. I’m just telling you that it seems to work and does not appear to have a downside if you don’t overdo it. Let me know of current or future results if you’re taking it too.

Trains 1, Transformer 0

Dec 20th, 2024

by Jeff Duntemann.

1 comment

Carol and I put the Lionel tracks around the artificial Christmas tree a few nights ago. That’s how we do it; the real tree’s position in the great room has no nearby power outlets. Power is a big deal, and never more than this year.

Basically, I connected our vintage Lionel ZW 2-control transformer to the tracks, and…nothing. Did my usual troubleshooting sequence: verify that the outlet is live, verify that the wires are properly connected and not shorted, and with that settled, put a VOM across the power terminals.

Nothing. One of the two ZW pilot lights was on (the other not) so the ZW’s line cord was delivering AC to the ZW. Moving the controls around did not reveal any intermittents. It’s dead, Jim.

The ZW worked fine in 2022 (we didn’t put the trains out last year) and has spent the last two years on a high shelf. Why it failed after sitting unmolested on a shelf remains a head-scratcher. So I went out to my workshop and lugged my 20-pound Alinco DM340MV adjustable DC power supply over to the tracks. I uncoupled the ZW and connected the Alinco to the tracks. The Alinco can deliver clean DC from 0-15 volts, at up to…30 amps. Sure, ok, overkill; the locos we have draw maybe an amp at full speed dragging all the cars behind them.

I turned the very smooth voltage adjustment knob up to about 10V. Clickety-clack went my 2010-era Rail-King Jersey Central camelback steam loco around the tree. Using the voltage control knob, I was able to speed it up and slow it down. Turned it up to 15 volts for a little more speed, and…continuous ringing of the camelback’s electronic bell and whistle. That’s how the ZW works (or worked): when you push the whistle/horn control ring, the voltage goes up a couple of volts, which tells the locos to start their sound effects. By keeping it down to about ten volts, the sound effects go away.

Carol’s 1957 Lionel steam loco makes continuous odd noises even at 10V. But my father’s 98-year-old Lionel 250 electric loco runs like a champ and emits no sound effects at any voltage. It was made in 1926; there were no sound effects in toy trains 98 years ago.

So we now have trains, mostly. It’s too late to buy another Lionel transformer this year, but I loved the ZW and will be hunting around for another in time for Christmas 2025. The Alinco does the job well enough in the meantime. Shame I don’t have any of that 1940-50s lead tinsel…I suspect my (older) readers will know exactly why, heh.

Again, merry Christmas! Get those trains running, guys!

My Christmas Story: The Camel’s Question — 99c

Dec 17th, 2024

by Jeff Duntemann.

2 comments

“Listen, young ones, for I, Hanekh, am a very old camel, and may not be alive to tell this tale much longer. Listen, and remember. If I leave nothing else behind but a spotty hide and yellow bones, I wish to leave this.”

Only 8 more days until Christmas! Please allow me to introduce (again) my Christmas fable about the camels that brought the Three Wise Men to Bethlehem. It’s a short story with a deep history: I wrote it when I was 13 as an eighth grade English assignment, in the runup to Christmas 1965. A few years later I decided to give it to my mother as a Christmas present for Christmas 1972. Problem was, I had lost the handwritten grade school manuscript, so I just sat down and rewrote it from memory. I gave Mother the typed manuscript in a duo-tang binder. She read it, wiped the tears from her eyes, and then kept it in her dresser for literally the rest of her life. My sister and I found it after Mother died in 2000. I took the story home, where it sat in a box for 22 years. In the fall of 2022 I pulled it out, OCRed it to a text file, and then did a certain amount of editing and polishing before uploading it to the Kindle store.

The story is a fable because animals are the primary characters. Two of the Magi’s camels ache for very different things. Then there is Hanekh, who is unlike most camels in that he tries to make sense of the world around him, a world shaped and ruled by human beings. He asks the Christ Child a question, hence the title. All three camels receive what they desire, but Hanekh—

—Well, read the story. It’s only 99c. And keep a Kleenex handy. Or wear long sleeves. It’s not a sad story, but a story of triumph, of both God and God’s creation, camels included. I’ve written a number of stories of triumph and affirmation. This may well be my favorite.

Spiking a Christmas Song

Dec 24th, 2023

by Jeff Duntemann.

4 comments

I was going to mess with an ancient Christmas song involving eating pig heads—surely you’ve heard of “The Boar’s Head Carol”—but that may have to wait for another day, ideally after everybody’s already had Christmas dinner.

No, this morning I want to write about something I learned just yesterday, about another Christmas song that Carol and I both like. We’ve never heard it on the radio, and we wouldn’t know about it at all if it weren’t on our very favorite Christmas CD: Christmas Portrait by the Carpenters (1978). The song is the medley “It’s Christmas Time/Sleep Well, Little Children.” It’s on none of our other numerous Christmas CDs, and my assumption has long been that Karen and Richard wrote it themselves, as it’s a little bit whimsical and in spots a little bit goofy.

I got curious yesterday and looked it up. The song was actually written by four men: Alan Bergman, Al Stillman, Victor Young, and Leon Klatzkin. It’s not new; in fact, it was first recorded in 1953. And when I read who first recorded it, I laughed out loud. It was Spike Jones!

Ok, I suspect young people will wonder who that is, and why his name made me laugh. Short form: Spike Jones (1911-1965) was the Weird Al Yankovic of the 1940s and 1950s. He took popular songs of other artists and recorded them in his own satirical style, with manic voices, gunshots, whistles, cowbells, hiccups, and other “special effects”. I came upon Spike Jones and His City Slickers when I was quite young; probably five or at most six. In that era my folks had a creaky old record player and a cabinet full of 78RPM records, including a few by Spike. His best known spoof song is probably “Cocktails for Two.” Note that the linked YouTube item is not a video of Spike and his band performing the song. It’s a sort of primordial music video, with Spike playing a bartender with many of the sound effects done by tipsy men at the bar. I’m sure sophisticates will roll their eyes, but when I was six I thought the song was hilarious.

So when I went looking for Spike’s version of “It’s Christmas Time” on YouTube, what I found is a cut from Spike’s Christmas album—and on this cut at least, Spike himself is notably absent. The song is played straight, with no silly sound effects, but rather a nice choir and lots of harmony. I imagine it’s Spike’s City Slickers band playing in the background. There’s a little bit of goofiness in some of the other cuts from that album, but for the most part it’s just Fifties Big Band vocals playing Christmas standards. Several are on YouTube; listen to a few if you’re interested.

I have to wonder what Spike thought of rock and roll, and what he might have done with it (or to it, more likely) had he not smoked himself to death at 53. He wasn’t a filker (like Bob Rivers of Twisted Christmas) and I wonder if he had imitators. If he did, I’ve never heard of them.

In the meantime, thanks to all of you for reading me in whatever form, and putting up with my occasional Spike Jones-ish metaphors like the Base Four Martians in my assembly language book. Have a fun Christmas, with good food, good wine, good friends, good music (even if it’s a little goofy in spots) and an occasional glance to the heavens, and a word of thanks to God, who gave us the ability to laugh and be silly as we make our way through His beautiful and extravagant creation!