David Carradine :(

Goodbye to an amazing actor, always with a fun roll.

This was an actor that was present in the cinema that I watched throughout my life till now. Everything from Kung Fu, to Deathrace… I will miss him.

Barking Up The Wrong Tree, pt 2

Eliot walked over to the fridge, grabbing a beer, while everyone settled in to listen.  Drew stalked over to the closet, pulling it open, and angrily started packing survival kits while Eliot lounged against the kitchen’s separator ledge.

“It was back in nineteen seventy three.  I was nineteen years old.  My pack… they were fierce warriors.  Fiercer than you can imagine.  We numbered eleven strong, all trained warriors, when we came across the Vampire.  It was… a continuation of an older fight.  In retrospect, I suppose I should start with that first fight; at the beginning of the story as I know it.

You see, three of my elders had spent time over in Germany during World War Two, and that was when the feud began.  Seven of my elders were in the war, all in the same regiment, and near the end of the war; when allied troops were pushing hard into Germany; they came across this little town up in the mountains.  Can you imagine an entire town that looks like the leftover sets from a B slasher flick?  It was a bloodbath.

This vampire, supposedly turned by Vlad Tepes himself, was openly feeding on the citizens, and those all left alive were… broken, inside the head.  They were people, but they acted like Renfield from the novel Dracula.  Eating bugs, laughing at petty cruelties, and being driven by their basest instincts; what was left was the shell of humanity.  Frothing at the brain – that’s how they talked about them.  So they challenged the vampire, tried to save what they could from that evil influence.”

Tabitha frowned. “Of seven packmates, only three walked out alive and came back from that town.”

She shook her head.  “When I was a pup that story always frightened me.  When I got a bit older…  it motivated me to train harder, though it was hard to believe.  And it’s lucky for me that it did, even though it didn’t really matter.  She caught back up with us.”

Drew motioned towards the kitchen and caught Eliot’s eye.  The younger man nodded, then tossed the lanky older fighter a can of Fosters.

Tabitha wiped a tear from her eye and continued.  “Fighting a Vampire like that is… well, its nothing you guys are ready for.  When you battle a non Feral you have to fight their willpower.  They push into you head, they rape your thoughts, and they try to turn your own minds against you.  The longer they’ve been around, the better they are at it, and the stronger their willpower is.  Ferals are weak in comparison.  You just have to fight the beast.  Well, when she caught up to us, we had no idea she was coming, and before I had even shifted, both of my brothers were dead.  We had been sitting around a beach fire, enjoying the Ocean.  There was a light mist, and then she was just there and blood was flying everywhere.”

Jenna, always empathic, was openly crying.  Josh was pale and just said.  “Jesus.”

Amber chewed her lip and raised her eyebrows questioningly towards Tabitha.

Tabitha smiled sadly.  “No Amber, I’ll finish the story.   I don’t want to relive these memories just to tell you all the story another time so you can hear the ending.  We fought her.   We fought with everything we had, every trick we knew.  And one by one we all died.  I think she left me alive because I was the youngest.  Here are the final moments I remember.  My Father, Raymond, was in front of me, attacking her.  She caught him by the muzzle, then sank her fangs into his neck while staring me in he eye.    Her eyes went this weird swirly red and violet color, and I couldn’t move a muscle while I watched her drain my dad.  Then… The world just melted away, like a Salvador Dali painting.  I felt something rip through my hands and feet, pulling me apart.  Like I was being crucified.  And then I was burning, on fire, stretched out on a cross in my mind.  I woke up from that nightmare almost a month later, in a state hospital.”

Tabitha’s voice, dripping sorrow, suddenly drew back, and like he tide revealing the beach, all at once there was steel there.  “You will DIE if you seek vengeance against the Vampires.  We are half the strength and nowhere near the skill of my elders.  What we do is clean up their messes, and keep the average people of our land safe.  This is the Lore, and the Law can be damned.  Do you understand?”

Shocked by the sudden swing in words, the pack all just nodded.  Drew grinned to himself as he polished off his beer.  Jenna twined her fingers through Josh’s and whispered to him “She’s scary.  Just when you think you’ve found the softest part of her, she turns into a rock.”

Josh rubbed her back, but watched Tabitha.   “You never even said her name, Tabs.”

“That is because you don’t need to know it.  Even if you did, it would only give you false ideas that you could research her and find a way to beat her.  Which you cannot.”

Eliot chuckled, and everyone turned to look at him.  “Don’t worry.   We’re not stupid.  Just protective of you.”

Tabitha nodded.  As usual, on the rare occasion you caught him talking, Eliot had something useful to say.  “The duty of protection is mine not yours young ones.  I am the elder, and the reader of the Lore.”  She glanced at Amber. “For now anyway.  And i will protect you.  I love you all the more, my pups, for being the way you are though.  If that suffices for everyone, I suggest we stop burning daylight and get ready to kill an undead.”

A chorus of ‘yes, mam’ reverberated around the room, and the wolf pack finished getting ready.  Each member ended up with a loose backpack on. The backpacks themselves had an odd design to accommodate for emergencies that only a werewolf would have to deal with.  The shoulder straps were segmented with several strips of elastic on each side, making them immediately flexible.  Once they were done, the whole crew piled out of the condo and headed back to the VW Bus.

Writing and wishing… the instant manuscript

Sometimes, I wish life was a little more like Harry Potter..  You know?

So that I could just tap a wan against my temple, say something like ‘Creatus Manuscriptus!”

and..  poof…   there it would be!

sigh.  Back to typing :p

North by South, a GTT character intro

North by South

From The Ian Stone Cases

The thug’s fist slammed into my jaw.  Even rolling with the punch, I felt one of my molars shatter and cut the inside of my left cheek.  The thug grinned and spit his toothpick into my face.

I looked up to him and smiled.  ‘So, why the hell are you here?’

‘Shaddup!’ he snarled and fed me another knuckle sandwich.  This time my shattered tooth cut me badly enough that I had to spit out the blood or choke on it.  I looked back up at him, working my jaw trying to stretch some of the soreness out of it.  The guy was wiry as hell, maybe six feet tall or so, and wearing a blue silk shirt with the top half of the buttons undone; the guy looked like he was right out of a 1980’s cop show.  Yeah, he thought he was a real Guido.

He was rubbing his knuckles, trying to massage some of the pain out of them.  It doesn’t matter how strong or experienced you are, shatter a guys tooth with a hit and you’re taking some damage to your fist.  His lips pulled up into a sneer. ‘Not so tough now, huh mr. private dick?’

Tilting my head up till I could look him in the eyes, I grinned and let the blood spill out of my mouth.  I love a good straight line.  ‘Thanks pal.  You just saved me the seven hundred bucks that getting a root canal was gonna cost me.  I’ve got a bad one on the other side too, think you could get that one next?’

With a snarl he smashed his heel down onto the arch of my left foot.  I felt something break, but didn’t let it show.  Time to pause for a second while I explain why a broken foot was worth it; just to get to deliver one tough guy line.  The thing about being a private eye is that you have to know how to take advantage of your timing.  No matter how much you work on cultivating that no nonsense, tougher than nails, dumb looking but smart on the inside, hard boiled gumshoe lifestyle, the simple truth is that ninety-nine percent of the work you land is boring as hell.

Skip traces, reading court records, checking websites, occasionally finding lost pets, and sneaking through bushes with a camera is most of what a P.I. does.  The majority of the work comes from one of three places – Lawyers, Courtrooms, and suburban wives with too much money and too little to do who fill their hours with unfounded suspicions.  A good P.I is fast with a computer, since their usual day is just sitting at a desk scanning files.

Which is why when you wake up to find yourself handcuffed to a chair in your own office, with a thug putting more shots into you than a sadistic E.R. doctor gives out during flu season, you have to thank your lucky stars and make the most of it.  Which I did.

So now we’re gonna play out the next few seconds nice and slowly, just so you can appreciate the finer details.  As mr. oh so clever repartee’s fist came rocketing towards my face, aimed at that same tooth, I braced both of my ankles against the chair legs and twisted my left wrist just right; which made my thumb collapse against my palm.  My first case ever was to find a lost pit-bull.  When I did find the dog, he satacked me and all but ripped my left thumb off.  It never healed quit right, and I’ve been able to do interesting and occasionally useful party tricks with it since then.  And for some reason I can’t fathom, the left side of my body tends to get a lot more torn up than the right side.

My hand slid out of the cuffs, only taking a little skin with it, right as my own personal thug straight from the set of Miami Vice dropped an a-bomb on my face – finally ripping my left cheek open.  I let the force of the blow carry me, pulling up with my ankles and whipping around, letting the inertia help me pivot the chair on one leg.  I grabbed the back of the chair with my right hand, releasing the pressure with my ankles and just slumping forward.  Ever seen a tetherball?  It goes low on one side, then rockets high on the other side.  That’s what me and the chair did.   I went low, the chair went high, with all that spinning force behind it.

I’m not even sure if I have the stomach to describe what it did to his face.  A lot of blood went flying over me.  Lets just say this – ever tried to break a piece of oak?  His face shattered the chair, and the chair took the lesser of the two beatings.  K.O.  Goons, zero, private detectives one.

I slowly pushed myself up, using the corner of my desk to help me, and carefully testing my weight on my broken foot.  Not comfy, but it’d get me around for the time being.  I’ll admit I wobbled a bit until the world stopped spinning, and then limped over to the downed thug.  I reached down, grabbed him by the shirt and hauled the dead weight over to the radiator.  I grabbed my cuffs and secured both of his wrists behind his head.

Slapping him a couple times I grinned and said ‘Hey, jerk off.  Miami Vice stopped casting twenty years ago.’  Nada.   Yeah, he was out cold.

So instead of pushing his primitive ape brain and trying to get info out of him, I limped back to the desk, picked up the phone, and dialed the local police station.

A tinny sounding female voice answered after just a couple rings. ‘District six dispatch.’

I sighed and did my best to enunciate around all the damage to my mouth.  ‘Hi.  Can you patch me through to Sergeant Haskins, please?  Tell him it’s Ian Stone with a pretty big emergency.’

There were a couple of clicks from the phone and the operator’s voice came back.  ‘He’s at his desk right now. I’ll put you right through Mr. Stone.’

‘Thanks.’ I replied.  Hey, hard boiled gumshoe or no it always pays to be polite to your local law enforcement.  You never know when you might want them to return the favor and be polite to you, after all.

‘You’re welcome, Mr. Stone.’ The line got quiet and I started hearing those background clicks again.

I only had to wait about twenty seconds or so before a gruff voice came across the line. ‘Haskins here.  What’s the matter, Stone?’

I smiled.  Haskins had spent so much time behind that desk since his promotion that even on his home line he had started answer the same way.  “Hey, Sarge.  Got a little problem here at my office.  I just had a goon who’s dressed straight from the 80’s bust into my office, taser me, cuff me to a chair, and then vent a lifetime of frustration at being born in the wrong decade all over my face.  And Haskins, the hell of it is, I’ve never met the guy before and he wouldn’t tell me why he was here.’

There was a sharp intake of breath over the line. ‘Jesus, Ian.  You okay?  Uniforms or paramedics there yet?’

Blood dripped onto the mouthpiece of the phone and sighing, I wiped it off on my shirt as I peeked out the window from behind my blinds and looked down at the street below my office.  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.  Look, I can’t waste time.  I have to figure out why this guy was on me.  So, I called you first.  I want to dodge the ambulances and the reports till I get a good grip on this.’

Haskins chuckled and I carefully watched the street.  ‘Alrighty.  I’ll grab a black and white and be there in five to ten, tops.  Can you wait that long?’

‘Not Sure.’ I replied. ‘I think I have his partner sitting in the street down here.  Looks like a two thousand and two silver Lincoln towncar.  You better come unmarked so we don’t spook him.’

‘Already on the way.  Hold tight, Ian.’  The line went dead.

Down to business.  Limping over to my medical kit, I cleaned up a bit, trying to go as quickly as possible without further injuring myself.  I glanced at the clock.  Two minutes down.

Again I pushed my broken foot.  I knew I had to move fast, no way Haskins would let me out of his sight when he saw the condition I was in.  I got down on my knees in front of the K.O.’d goon and emptied his pockets.  While there I looked a little more carefully at his hands and the way he was dressed.  On a hunch, I cleaned the blood off his hands and studied them more carefully.

Dumping the payload from his pockets onto my desk, I gratefully collapsed into my leather chair.   Here is another tip about being a private eye.  Invest in a damned good chair.  Besides the fact that you are gonna spend a lot of time in it doing the mundane jobs, you gotta be sure to have a god chair for just such situations as this.  I mean, beat to bloody hell with broken bones…  Would you want a chair that didn’t have all the goodies and about six inches of expensive padding?

Four minutes down.  I spread out the contents of his pockets and took stock.  One set of brass knuckles.  Which was odd, because this guy had calluses all over his knuckles, and brassies leaves the marks on your fingers instead.  So, fact one.  He enjoys his work.  Wallet.  Almost five hundred cash, one driver’s license, season pass to the football field, and an injury report on the local teams.

I glanced at the license and groaned.  I hate it when stereotypes are right.  His name was Antonio Guido Pazzuchi.  Well crap.

I grabbed the cash and looked at the last pieces of pocket junk.  Hey, don’t look at me like that.  I might have been cuffed to a chair, but he had engaged my services by my reckoning, and five hundred is one day plus expenses.  So, a paperclip, a pack of gum, three cents, and a folded piece of paper.  I unfolded the piece of paper and found a smudged name and address, barely readable.  It smelled like beer.  Hmm…  My name, and my address..  but not quite right.

I heard a commotion downstairs and outside.  That’d be Haskins, grabbing scumbag number two. Almost out of time.  C’mon stone, you have the edges of the puzzle, now put ‘em together.  On intuition I grabbed the phonebook out of the bottom drawer.

I swear to god, it clicked right as Haskins walked into my office, roughly pushing the other guy in front of him.  The guy couldn’t keep his balance with his hands cuffed behind his back, and fell forward onto his knees.  He looked pissed but was keeping his lips firmly sealed.  Same slicked back hair and mid eighties bad guy look as the guy I had laid out too.

Haskins took in the scene, ran a hand through his graying hair, and started to speak.  ‘Ian, holy…’

‘Wait.’ I interrupted and held up a finger.

I sighed and looked at the kneeling goon.  ‘How much does Stone owe?’

The guy looked from me to Haskins then at his partner, out cold and cuffed to a radiator; and decided communication was probably his best route.  I’m sure it didn’t hurt that as bloody and torn up as I was I must have looked like an axe murderer at that moment.  ‘Uh… You owe ten large, with fifteen points on your late fee…’

I threw the phone book at him and grabbed the piece of paper, holding in front of his face.  ‘No, I don’t, you asshole.  This is SOUTH Colorado boulevard.  Your stone is north.  NORTH.  Learn to read, moron!’

I saw Haskins get it, and he threw back his head laughing.

As it turns out, the two guys had warrants out.  I claimed a thousand dollar reward on each, walking away from the whole thing with twenty five hundred – and just over three grand in medical bills, as well as a cast for a month.  Sometimes being a P.I. is a dog’s life.

Memes, replacing the genetic model with an organic model.

I usually use myspace to blog, but I’m trying to start being more wordpress conscious

Definitions (provided by Wiki):

Meme: A meme (pronounced /meem/ – rhyming with “cream”), is a postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices that gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. The etymology of the term relates to the Greek word mimema for “something imitated”. Supporters of the concept of memes believe that they act as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate and respond to selective pressures.

Memetics: The discipline of memetics, which dates from the mid 1980s, provides an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer based on the concept of the meme. Memeticists have proposed that just as memes function analogously to genes, memetics functions analogously to genetics. Memetics attempts to apply conventional scientific methods (such as those used in population genetics and epidemiology) to explain existing patterns and transmission of cultural ideas.

Viral Growth: The buzzwords viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increases in brand awareness or to achieve other marketing objectives (such as product sales) through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, avergames, ebooks, brandable software, images, or even text messages. The basic form of viral marketing is not infinitely sustainable.

Harmonic Consonance: In music, a consonance (Latin com-, “with” + sonare, “to sound”) is a harmony, chord, or interval considered stable, as opposed to a dissonance (Latin dis-, “apart” + sonare, “to sound”) — considered unstable (or temporary, transitional). The strictest definition of consonance may be only those sounds which are pleasant, while the most general definition includes any sounds which are used freely.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts…” ~ William Shakespeare

The Great Barrier Reef is composed of over 2,900 individual reefs, created by billions of coral polyps, and it’s 1,600 mile length can be seen from outer space. The Aspen tree grows in groves connected underground by a single root system – with each tree in the grove being genetically identical. Yet as each tree grows into its microclimate it is shaped differently from each other tree in the grove and carries the appearance of individuality. The largest Honey Fungus in the world covers over 3.4 miles and is thousands of years old…

However, the oldest and largest living organism on the planet is human consciousness. Some would argue that a civilization is not a single organism, nor is a species – but I’m not talking about us as a species or a civilization. I’m speaking of the fear of what lives under the bed, the monsters hidden in the darkness of an unlit room, the tentacles and teeth swimming up for you from really deep water… The memories that live in the space behind the eyes and below the brain.

Our memes resonate with each other. Each idea propagates; and we remember the dissonances and the consonances of those ideas all too well. Much like an individual’s growth from childhood to maturity, we have lost many of the details of the human consciousness’ infancy, but the fear of the T-Rex and the joy of a fire are still there, buried as murky memories. The study of history is a racial pursuit to rediscover our childhood. Napoleon? Hitler? The Spanish Inquisition? Teen angst.

What can we look forward to as we reach the legal racial drinking age? The beginning of conceptualization of ‘mature’ and ‘sophisticated’ ideas? Will we be able to pay the racial electric bill? Or did we party too hard and wake up in an apartment filled with empty beer cans, a killer hangover, and a pink slip?

Hopefully we didn’t party too hard. Our growth is starting to show fruits, and we have to water them. A terrific example is viral marketing. As we, as polyps, are beginning to get more sophisticated in the construction of our coral reef we learn to communicate more constructively in order to build more durable structures. A Viral Product is partially defined by its shortness of life – but breadth of impact. An important concept – but somewhat lacking in the mental picture it builds. When humans thing of a virus they think of something destructive, even deadly. While it is true that Viral Market spreads rapidly, it is not inherently destructive – just the opposite, it is a creative force. Yes, some people attempt to misuse it, as with any creative force, however that does not change the nature of the force.

A Meme is an idea which is passed along and propagates, creating new Memes and evolving itself. Though a Darwinistic approach has been applied to Memetics, the musical model is much more fitting. Each ‘idea’ is a frequency, it carries through our voices till the signal peters out, and interacts with other frequencies along the way, creating new consonances and dissonances, which themselves are Memes. And the acceleration of ideas (Memes) is not viral, it is a ‘perfect’ consonances – or a consonances that is pleasing to a large number.

Darwinism does not apply to a single lifespan of a species, but rather the generational growth of a species. Looking at human consciousness as a single as the single lifespan it is makes modern communication and the growth of ideas much easier to understand, and provides a much more stable platform to grow the idea of Memetics & Communication. The world is a stage; we may repair it, or break it, but it is a single stage; and we have known it for centuries – we just haven’t realized it yet.