Good Stuff! The future, Service Depot, Bear Lake ice cream shops

ByJohn Brown

Huge changes are coming to our world soon.

They’re going to affect your health, wealth, and job. They’re going to take us back into space and make us live longer. They are changes that almost blow the mind. And they’ve already begun.

Michio Kaku is a world-renowned physicist that has always been fascinated with all sorts of science. And in Physics of the Future, he looks at what’s currently happening in computing, robotics, biotechnology, medicine, energy, and engineering, and explains how it’s going to affect our daily life between now and 2030, 2030 to 2070, and 2070 to 2100.

The insights are awesome. The book’s a feast. Page after page.

Did you know, for example, that there are parts of our DNA that have genes for certain traits, but those genes are turned off? For example, humans have genes for growing fur all over our bodies, but they’re turned off. Snakes have genes for legs that have been turned off. Chickens, one of the distant progeny of the dinosaurs, have genes for growing tooth buds in their beaks (imagine the grandchildren being chased by one of those bad boys). There are many more such dormant genes, and in the not too distant future, we’ll be able to turn them on.

Did you know that today we can regrow organs? So far scientists can grow skin, blood, blood vessels, heart valves, cartilage, bone, noses, and ears from your own cells. They’ve be able to grow windpipes and bladders. Imagine damaging your eye and being able to grow a new one that your body won’t reject.

Did you know that we’ve already been able to hook people up so they can move objects with their minds?

And what about computers and robots? Many futurists fear the robots will become smarter than us and take over the world. Will they? Kaku explains why this isn’t likely with the technology we currently have and what really makes up intelligence.

These are just a couple of the dozens of thrilling topics Kaku explores. And he makes it all so easy to understand and entertaining.

A new world is coming, full of perils and exciting opportunities. An Kaku gives us an intelligent sneak peek.

If you wonder what our world will be like in the near future, if you enjoy science and technology, if you want to be informed, then you will love this book. When you finish it, you can then move onto his book The Future of Humanity, which delves deeper into what we can expect in the near future in space. You can then move to The Future of the Mind, in which he explores in more detail what we can expect in understanding, enhancing, and empowering our minds.

*

I’m not a handy man. I’d like to be one. I respect folks who know how to fix things immensely. But I have a million other things on my plate and don’t have the time to learn how to be one. And so when our oven and gas range started having problems, I was staring at spending around $2,000 to replace it.

But then I found Service Depot in Logan, Utah. They do handyman, appliance, HVAC, and plumbing repairs. I called them. They send out someone all the way to Bear Lake to look at the issue and give me a bid. He was clean-cut and smiling. When I invited him in, he stopped to put booties on to make sure he didn’t track dirt into my house. We arranged an appointment, and a few days later another fellow who was equally clean-cut and pleasant to deal with showed up and fixed the range for about one-fourth of what it would have cost to replace it.

These folks were prompt to respond, friendly, and bootied. If you need repairs done around your house, my experience with them was great.

*

If you enjoy ice cream and are in the Utah Bear Lake area, I have two recommendations. For soft-serve shakes and cones, you can’t do better than Zipz in Garden City. Some soft-serve is icy and thin. Not enjoyable at all. But Zips uses a soft-serve ice cream with a higher fat content, which makes it deliciously smooth and creamy. And when you add flavors—oh baby! We recently went there as a family and got shakes. They have a lot of different flavors, but I got the Nutella and pretzel mix and floated up a bit toward heaven. If you like chocolate at all, you have to try that shake.

The other place is in Laketown. The Sinclair gas station turned their old car wash into a hard ice cream shop called, ta-dum, The Car Wash Ice Cream Shop. It’s bright and clean. The youth scooping the ice cream there are smiling and friendly. And they have a flavor called Coconut Castaway that’s scrumptious. Think of a Mounds chocolate bar, but in ice cream. More heavenly floating. What makes it even better are the reasonable prices.

If you’re in the mood for ice cream, if you want to get a bit closer to heaven, then do yourself a favor and get yourself to one of these shops.

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    Radiolab’s “Parasites”

    ByJohn Brown

    Radio and TV have incredible power. But until the last decade they were always constrained by time and signal power. You had to listen when the station broadcast it, and you had to listen where you could pick up the signal. 

    Living out in the boonies we don’t get good radio or TV reception (no I don’t subscribe to satellite). Which is why the internet is so wonderful.

    You can listen and watch almost anything when you want from almost any location–yes, even in Laketown, UT, Boonie Central. Millions listen to music, conservative talk, or libral talk (NPR) via the internet. I enjoy all three depending on my mood. But there’s so much more out there than music and blah blah blah, as much as I love it. For example, you can listen to the British BBC. You can listen to the Dutch. See what’s going on in Australia. Doesn’t matter that they are a number time zones away and all asleep when I’m working. I love the internet.  

    One of the best programs I’ve heard in the last six months is the three-part “Parasites” presented by Radiolab. In a fascinating hour they address the following questions:

    • Parasites: are they evil, or are they awesome?
    • Should you get infected with hookworms?
    • Can parasites exercise mind control over their hosts?

    Along the way they tell a number of amazing stories. Listen now. You won’t be able to stop.

    Get zinged, Baby!

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  • Good Stuff! Operation Underground Railroad

    ByJohn Brown

    WeSaveChildrenFromSlavery

    I blogged about this before.

    On February 28th, Operation Underground Railroad freed 20 kids from slavery and brought 5 slavers to justice. They are continually running operations.

    Oskar Schindler didn’t stop the killing of all Jews. But he did what he could. One of the most poignant moments of Schindler’s List was when he pulled out his pen and realized he could have saved someone with his pen. We all have a pen opportunity in front of us. Join me and my family. Become an abolitionist.

    We’ve set up a monthly amount, but even a one-time donation puts you on the team.

    I know you want more information. Here’s an awesome video where the founder explains what’s happening and what they’re doing.

    In this one, Glenn Beck interviews Cliff Graham about the organization. It’s a must-see interview.

    See how you can help.

    JumpTeamImage1-350x175

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  • The Good Guy by Dean Koontz

    ByJohn Brown

    Good_Guy_Dean_KoontzSo let’s say you’re in a bar and a guy shows up, mistakes you for someone he was meeting, and you play along. Just for fun. You’ll let him know his mistake sooner or later. But then he slides a manila envelope to you and says, “Half of it is there. Ten thousand. You’ll get the rest when she’s gone.”

    Would you say, “Sorry, dude. I’m not your hit man”? A woman’s life is on the line.

    In Dean Koontz’s The Good Guy, Tim Carrier is too astonished to react. The man leaves. Carrier opens the envelope. There’s ten thousand in cash and a 5×7 of the woman. She’s Linda Paquette who lives in Laguna Beach.

    A few minutes later the actual killer shows up. Makes the same mistake. What do you do?

    Carrier plays along, tells the man that he’s decided not to go through with it and to take the ten thousand as a “kill fee.” The man leaves. Carrier goes to alert the woman. But very soon the killer and those who hired him realize the mistake. And now they’re after both Carrier and the original target.

    The Good Guy was a wonderful story of action and suspense. It’s also a love story. Koontz portrays a deadly and frightening killer. But he also includes lots of banter between Carrier and Paquette. Both have secrets which are interesting to learn. And then at the end of the book, when you think it’s all about a kill, Koontz twists it. Then he twists it again. I loved this story and enjoyed the characters immensely. But the book went beyond mere entertainment. It’s a book that also makes you think about how you live.  

    I should be working hard on draft 3 of Curse of a Dark God. But every now and again I need a break. I’m glad I took this one with Koontz.

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  • Interview with Author Leah Cypess

    ByJohn Brown

    Leah Cypess says, “After selling my first story (Temple of Stone) while in high school, I gave in to my mother’s importuning to be practical and majored in biology at Brooklyn College. I then went to Columbia Law School and practiced law for almost two years at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, a large law firm in New York City. I kept writing and submitting in my spare time, and finally, a mere 15 years after my first short story acceptance, I sold my first novel, Mistwood, to Greenwillow Books (HarperCollins).”

    Leah lives in Brookline, Massachusetts (right outside of Boston) with her husband Aaron, a researcher and doctor at the Joslin Diabetes Center, and their two daughters. She majored in biology, minored in journalism, went to law school, worked as a lawyer, and has just started to learn about hawking and hunting. She’s published a number of short stories, which are all available for free on her website.

    I just had the opportunity to interview Leah about her writing process and books. Enjoy!

    *

    JB: MISTWOOD, published by HarperCollins in April, 2010, is your debut novel. But is it the first you’ve written?

    LC: Most definitely not. I wrote, revised, and submitted four manuscripts before Mistwood. (Technically, five; but I don’t count the first one, because it wasn’t very good, and I didn’t know what I was doing with the submissions process either. I was fifteen years old.)  In fact, after getting the offer from HarperCollins, I acquired an agent, who asked me to send him a list of my previous manuscripts and their submission histories.  The list was sixteen pages long.

    JB: Holy cow, five novels and 16 pages of submission history. That’s a lot of dedication. And faith in the face of rejection. I’m intrigued. How did the sale of this novel come about? Was it just another submission to yet another editor or did you have some connection? What was different with this book?

    LC: Both the faith and the sale were helped by the fact that I could see incremental improvements. My first novel received mostly form rejection letters, a couple of letters inviting me to submit further, and one revision request. My second received a lot of personal rejection letters, many more requests from various editors to submit future works, and one two-page revision request. The third made it to the acquisition committee at two houses. So I could tell I was getting closer, though it was still pretty dispiriting to think I might never make that final leap into publication. (After Novel #3 was turned down by both acquisition committees, even though it was being championed by senior editors in both cases, I had a couple of bad days.)

     In the end, I think what was different about Mistwood was mostly luck.

    It wasn’t my most perfect manuscript – there was a lot of revising to do after it was accepted! – but it was the one that resonated with the right editor at the right time. This was an editor who had asked me to submit future books after rejecting the query for Book #3, then requested Book #4 and written me a detailed and regretful email about why she didn’t feel it was right for her. By the time I sent her the query for Mistwood, she was obviously confident enough in my abilities to request that I email her the full manuscript, and to read it right away. After all those years, the acceptance for Mistwood came just a few months after I started submitting it.

    JB: I’m betting your persistence and work made some of that luck. Work seems to be a little bit of magic all by itself and has been used by a lot of other authors I know. Hum (grin). So let’s talk about the book. You should know you made The Top 200 YA Authors list I just published on my site. It ranks YA authors by average number of readers per book. And while the list can’t purport to be anything but a reflection of the tastes of the area’s library patrons, I think it’s probably representative of what’s going on in my region. So congrats! The book starts right off with a bang. It’s about a shape shifter. I know shape shifters have been around forever, but most fantasy these days seems to be about vampires and werewolves. Tell us a little bit about the core idea of the novel and its genesis.

    LC:  That’s awesome that I’m on the Top 200 YA Authors list – thanks for letting me know!

    I’ve been reading fantasy/science-fiction “forever” (I cut my teeth on the Edgar Rice Burroughs books my father had stored in our garage), so shapeshifters are just as familiar to me as vampires and werewolves.

    The core idea of the novel is that of an inhuman creature grappling with the fact that she seems to be turning human — while trying to figure out why, exactly, this has happened to her, and who and what she truly is. (And, of course, fending off assassins and dealing with palace intrigue.) That idea developed over the course of writing the novel – I started out with a scene of men riding into a misty forest in search of the magical creature who lived there, with no clear idea of what that creature was or why they wanted her. Then I kind of made the rest up as I went along. (This writing process is one of the reasons the novel was revised nine times before being published!)

    JB: I really liked the beginning. No wonder you felt compelled to follow the idea. And nine revisions! It sounds like you use drafts, as opposed to outlines or other tools, to help you discover your stories. Were these big revisions, almost complete rewrites?

    LC: Thanks! I’m glad you liked it

    I usually don’t rewrite scenes completely – most of my editing of already-written material consists more of snipping unnecessary parts and adding little bits and pieces. (Especially of description, which I tend to leave out entirely in the first draft.) But I do a lot of moving scenes around, deleting some scenes, and writing some new ones.

    Though I don’t use an outline when I first write, I usually create one during the revision process so I can keep track of the jigsaw-puzzle my manuscript has become.

    JB: That’s interesting. Well, I have just one more question for you. Tell us what’s coming next.

    LC: What’s next is NIGHTSPELL, a stand-alone companion novel to MISTWOOD, which will be published in May 2011. It’s about a country where an ancient spell allows murder victims to return as ghosts to seek vengeance on their killers… and if they don’t manage that, they remain ghosts forever. After a couple of hundreds of years of this, the kingdom – Ghostland – has evolved into a place where the living and the dead co-exist, albeit uneasily. My main character, Darri, is a foreigner to Ghostland; she is a barbarian princess who abhors the idea of ghosts and is only there to rescue her younger sister Callie, who was sent as a hostage four years ago. But Callie has changed in those four years, and now has secrets of her own.  In her quest to save her sister from herself, Darri will ultimately face a decision that will force her to reexamine beliefs she has never before questioned – and lead her into the heart of a conspiracy that threatens the balance of power between the living and the dead.

    JB: Oh my bleeping heck. That just gave me a case of massive author envy. I was thinking about writing a ghost story just yesterday and thought, “naw, ghosts are all played out.” Curse you, Cypess!

    Sheesh, talk about a parting shot. Well, I would ask about the next book, seeing NIGHTSPELL must be ready to go if it’s coming out in May, but I can only stand so much punishment. The good news, if I put my reader hat on, is that it looks like I get to put a tickler in my Outlook for this May. In the meantime, I going to suggest to my readers to give MISTWOOD a go. Thanks, Leah, for your time. I enjoyed the interview.

    LC: Thanks, John!

    *

    John sez: folks, I think I’m going to make interviews a regular feature. I just loved finding out more about Leah. It’s also interesting to see just how much work she’s put into this. I know that a good number of authors sell their first or second novel (see the Hines stats in the on writing section), but for a good number of others it’s later novels that sell. In either case, I think it’s clear that good old fashioned work makes up a big part of the secret sauce.

    Ah, that was fun. But, dang it, I should have asked her about her lawyer and biology background. Next time.

    LINKS

    Leah Cypess’s website

    The first three chapters of Mistwood

    Praise for Mistwood

    Codex Author Blog Tour 2011

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  • Good Stuff! The Chosen

    ByJohn Brown

    Nellie and I stumbled onto a new TV series that we are really enjoying. It’s made us laugh, think, and feel. It’s called The Chosen and is based on the life of Jesus Christ, but it’s not like any Jesus series I’ve seen before.

    Now I have to admit that when I first saw ads for this, I wasn’t interested. It’s not that I don’t like videos about scriptures. There are some I love. It’s just that the purpose of so many of them is to illustrate a scripture instead of tell a story. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that when I’m looking for a drama, I want to watch a drama.

    But this series is different. They have taken a historical fiction approach, which means that while they adhere as closely to the facts as we know them, they don’t limit the story to those facts. And so they imagine people, events, and motives that are plausible, and then tell a story. A great example of this type of storytelling is Gerald N. Lund’s bestselling The Work and The Glory series about a family in the early 1800s who join The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Or Michael Shaara’s bestselling The Killer Angels about the battle of Gettysburg in the United States Civil War.

    The Chosen focuses on stories about characters surrounding Jesus and those who plausibly could have met him. It also imagines Jesus as more than a sober Lord. He laughs, jokes, engages with children. It is a reimagining of the familiar that makes the story fresh again and leaves you wondering and pondering.

    It’s created by Dallas Jenkins, an evangelical Christian, and produced and distributed by VidAngel Studios, run by Latter-day Saints. And their love of and delight in the subject show. I can’t wait to see the next episode. You can watch it right now for free. Go to the VidAngel site or to https://studios.vidangel.com/the-chosen/. Or you can watch it on YouTube with ads.

    If you like religious fiction, if you like a good drama, if you’re interested in knowing more about the life and times of Jesus Christ, then I think you’ll love this.

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  • “Wally” by Aslyn

    ByJohn Brown

    My daughter was playing this song on her internet list. The tune and singer’s voice grabbed me. I downloaded it based on that. Then I really listened.

    Oh, man.

    I cannot tell you how much I love this song. I love the melody and phrasing, Aslyn’s voice. I love the lyrics. I love the true story behind them. Gracious Lord, this is what it’s all about.

    This youtube is of a live performance. She gives a great into to the song. She tells how her grandfather Wally, who was in the Coast Guard when he young, met his wife Fae. They were married for 55 years. Then Aslyn tells how she found Wally, a few days after Grandma Fae died, sitting in his rocking chair holding a black and white picture of his wife, his eyes wet with tears. Fae had written on the picture: “to sweetest boy I’ve ever known.” You gotta listen to that intro. Then you have to get the Lemon Love album version of the song. It’s 99 cents on Amazon.

    Here are the lyrics. I’ve added the little spoken part you get on the Lemon Love version that’s not in the live performance.

    “Wally”

    [Aslyn’s grandfather]

    Hello, I’m Wally. I’m the man that had the good fortune of one day of finding a companion that would live with me for more than 55 years. No man could have ever asked for a better wife, or better friend, than the one I found across the dance floor at the USO.

    [Song begins]  

    Dear Wally, I’m writing this letter sincerely.
    To tell you you’re the “sweetest boy I’ve ever known.”
    Remember that USO when we met.
    You almost didnt go.
    Well, me and your two sons are very glad you did.
    Cause when your eyes found me I could hardly breathe.
    I wanted you.
    Glad you wanted me.

    I never stopped falling in love with you, Wally.
    From the first day I saw you
    I was sailor-bound, I just knew.
    You had me, I was yours.
    We danced out on the floor.
    And with each passing day.
    I only loved you more.

    That night was pure magic.
    Who would have imagined.
    It would become 55 loving wonderful years.
    Your job was not all easy.
    Those last years I could hardly speak.
    But when I looked at you I knew nothing had changed.
    And when I was leaving.
    I could feel you hurting.
    But then I saw those angels and I knew your love would want this for me.

    I never stopped falling in love with you, Wally.
    From the first day I saw you
    I was sailor-bound, I just knew.
    You had me, I was yours.
    We danced out on the floor.
    And with each passing day.
    I only loved you more…more… more…more… more

    So while you’re waiting
    Know that I’m saying I love you
    I love you………

    I never stopped falling in love with you, Wally.
    From the first day I saw you
    I was sailor-bound, I just knew.
    You had me, I was yours.
    We danced out on the floor.
    And with each passing day.
    I only loved you

    You had me, I was yours.
    We danced out on the floor.
    And with each passing day.
    I only loved you more..

    Dear Wally…

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2 Comments

  1. I wasn’t super excited about my family’s reunion to be held at Bear lake next year, now I feel like I have to go. Here’s to a year of anticipation.

  2. 🙂 I do hope you have a wonderful time. Have you ever been to the Jaunito Bandito plays at the Pickleville playhouse? If not, it’s a mix of play and improv comedy, and they’re fun. A great family time for kids and adults. You might want to go to Minnetonka cave. Take a tour of the old pioneer tabernacle in Paris, ID. While you’re up that way, eat pizza at Studebaker’s in Montpelier. It’s some of the best pizza I’ve eaten. There’s horse back riding. Limber Pine trail is a must. And then the lake.

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