Dark Matters Radio

Already Christmas has passed, another “Black Friday” smacked us in the face with retailers pulling out all the stops in an attempt to stop the hemorrhaging of red ink from the bottom line. My wife and I hope that you and yours had a joyous holiday.

We had a very quiet Christmas crowned by a trip to the movies. Vicki and I had planned for some time to make the very first showing of the new flick “Marley and Me.” If you didn’t know, this film is based on John Grogan’s best selling autobiographical book of the same name all about his Lab doggie, Marley. Grogan’s book came out in 2005 and when Vicki and I first heard about it we made a bee-line to our local Barnes and Noble to secure our copy. Off and on over the next two weeks we often had minor turmoil over who’s turn it was to spend an evening reading this Oh-So-Engaging true take of the adventures and mis-adventures of the marvelous Marley!

Both Vicki and I are total dog lovers and we’ve had dogs during our entire life together. When I came to  California to be with Vicki I brought my Lab Budd with me. Well actually I moved to California then I had the kennel where I boarded Budd fly him down after Vicki and I got settled. My God! I loved that dog.

The 80’s are totally lost to me. Looking back at them, they seem like one unrelenting hell after another. I was married to another then, and in 1983 we lost a child, aged 9, to an illness. It came on suddenly, and days later he was gone. There is no pain in existence to compare to the death of a child. Only time and distance scar over the experience, but even with time and distance the pain never really does go away.

Like many couples, losing a child often ends with divorce and it was no different in my case. By 1985 I was divorcing and suddenly I found myself without an anchor. Little did I know but a lot more was waiting for me in the wings. I was severely injured on the job in April of 1986. I should have died but apparently the big guy upstairs had another idea in store for me. By the end of June I was finally out of the hospital and decided to visit my folks back east. I got back to my boy-hood home just in time for my dad to be diagnosed with terminal cancer. Jesus, when it rains it sometimes really pours, right?

I was back at my home when my mom called me the day before Thanksgiving 1986. She told me that if I wanted to see my old man, I better hop on a flight without delay. I hoofed it out to the airport the next morning and took off, but somewhere over Ohio my pop couldn’t wait anymore. I landed in Pittsburgh, called home and got the sad news.

After I got back to my home following the funeral I really was at wits end. I was still trying to heal up from my own almost life ending mishap, mourning my lost marriage and little boy, and now my old man was gone. My feelings were, Like why hang around? Then a few days later Chuck showed up.

My buddy Chuck was one of the reasons I was still here. He was with me when I was wounded back in April, and he was the guy that kept me from bleeding to death before they got me to the hospital. He kind of was keeping a quiet eye on me.

When Chuck showed up he had a 3 month old blond Lab puppy with him. After coming into my townhouse he handed me the pup’s leash and told me to say howdy to “Budd Light.” I looked down and the puppy was jumping up on me and my heart melted. Chuck then told me “You’ve just been adopted young Sergeant, get used to it!”

Budd Light and I had our own “breaking in” period. I was living in Boise, Idaho, in the winter time, and when I had to go somewhere I had to figure out what to do with him. It was too cold to put him in the garage, and I didn’t need him to do a “potty break” on my living room rug so I would put him in the bathroom. I would fix him a little bed, put his water bowl and food bowl in there, leave on a light and go do my business. I came back from one doctor’s appointment to find that Budd had dug a hole THROUGH my floor trying to get out!

I knew I had a project on my hands with this ball of fluff. I had decided to buy a new car and in a moment of weakness bought a sports car. Right after I got home I decided to take my newest best pal out for a drive. Budd (still a pup) immediately got car sick and threw up all over my new upholstery. Ol’ Budd and I had some getting used to each other to work thru.

I credit that dog with helping to maintain my sanity while I went through that rough patch. He preformed that job pretty damn well. During his couple of “puppy years” he kept me on my toes. After he got down here to California he thrived. We ended up adopting another lost soul we named Cookie. She was an Australian Shepherd mix (about a 5 month old puppy) that one sunny day wandered into our yard and never left. Cookie mainly became Vicki’s dog, and we figured out someone must have abused her in her early puppy days. Although she totally loved Vicki and I, she never seemed to trust anyone else.

I was lucky, there is no doubt. Budd lasted to the ripe old age of 14. I knew that last year that he was going down hill. I found it heartbreaking to see my old “best friend” start to fail. His hips started to give out and we tried to fix that by feeding him Glucosamine his last couple of years. It seemed to help but then he could no longer control his bowles and I know he was miserable. One of the hardest things I ever had to do was taking Budd to his last trip to the Vet’s. That was in August of 2002. After he was put to sleep I went through a period where I wanted nothing to do with anybody. To say I grieved would be an understatement.

Several months went by and one day Vicki came to me carrying a newspaper carrying an ad for a lady selling puppies. I didn’t want to go but she talked me into it. We called the lady and then went over to see the puppies “just to take a look.” Her dog had just had a litter of 12 puppies and after getting there I knew she was looking frazzled, she would have probably given us all 12! She opened the back yard gate and an entire HERD of pups came spilling out. One little guy ran up to me (I was sitting on the ground) and jumped right on me. Oh boy, I knew I had just been had. I picked him up and almost without thinking I said “I christen you Buckwheat!” We took him home that afternoon. It was a good thing for both of us because our Cookie, now 12 years old, left us the following month. I now think she missed Budd and decided to join him.

That first night I fixed Buckwheat a little bed right beside Vicki and I, put in a clock and hot water bottle, you know, the whole puppy thing. And he was small, just a wee little guy, but when I turned out the lights to go to sleep, it sounded like a 4 alarm fire. He made a racket like I would NEVER have believed. We were only able to get to sleep after I picked him up and positioned him between our pillows. He has ended up sleeping with us ever since. Oh, before I forget, did I mention that he grew? Oh you better believe it. Lets see, he started out about 4 or 5 pounds and now weights about 125 lbs. Yep, and he still sleeps with us, or perhaps it is more accurate to say we sleep with him.

So my bottom line is simply this, dogs make the human condition just that much more bearable. Dogs like Marley, Budd or Buckwheat have a whole lot they can teach us. They teach us things like love, absolute loyalty, patience and an existence with no guile. Like the ending of Marley and Me where Owen Wilson (as John Grogan) says “A dog has no use for fancy cars or big homes or designer clothes. Status symbols mean nothing to him. A water-logged stick will do just fine. A dog judges others not by their color or creed or class but by who they are inside. A dog doesn’t care if you are rich or poor, educated or illiterate, clever or dull. Give him your heart and he will give you his. It is really quite that simple …”

Happy New Year.

PS and an Addendum

BOY, once you hit 50 you gotta take notes! I wanted to mention something else about our boy Buckwheat, in connection with Marley & Me. In John Grogan’s book, one extremely funny episode involves a movie Marley appeared in. The name of the movie was The Last Home Run that was filmed back in the early 1990s. I was pretty impressed by that but then remembered our boy Buckwheat is an actor! Oh yes he is. Buckwheat has appeared in the following television shows. (My wife is a background actress.) Knight Rider, Sons of Anarchy, Cold Case, and Without a Trace. I couldn’t be prouder of both of them. Here is the picture proof! Now go have that fantastic New Year!

This past weekend I thought it was time to go Christmas tree shopping. My wife Vicki and I usually go out about 2 weeks before the big day and pick out our tree. There are a couple of tree lots we stop by and can find a good tree. After bringing it home I carry it inside and then the dog and I watch Vic do her magic on it. Over the years I’ve taken a number of photos of the tree decoration fiesta and we have those in our book of memories … but Alas! This year proved to be a washout.

Being short of disposable income can be a real drag when it becomes time for all those little “extras” that life sometimes demands. Going to our several lots looking for that special holiday tree was a genuine exercise in frustration. Little 4-foot to not quite 5-foot trees ended up being prohibitive in price this year. Anywhere from $50 to $80 was the asking price. They asked … I said no way! Nobody even wanted to “dicker” on prices. I got fed up and told Vic “we’re outta here!” I then did something that years ago I swore I would never do … consider buying a “phony” Christmas tree! You know, one of those artificial monstrosities made out of pipe, plastic and other crap. We moseyed over to a “Big Lots” store and wandered in to see what they had. (Hey, money is tight … ya know?) Well, I really got peeved once inside. Their phony “tree that looks like a tree”, well, the asking price was up around $100. I turned to Vicki and said “You gotta be sh*tting me, right?” They also had some pink monstrosities that Vickster pointed out to me with a twinkle in her eye! We got fed up with it and left after buying a pack of plastic disposable dinner plates. (Hey, you gotta consider the feelings of your friendly kitchen dishwasher, right?) We got home and I was totally bummed, but not my sweet wife! She wandered out back while I was checking my email and came back inside with a tomato cage, got out our lights and garlands and she MADE us a tree. Okay, it’s only about 3 feet tall but it is green and has blinking Christmas lights! And while I was feeling sorry for myself this year I suddenly had a flash of a certain Christmas past.

December 22^nd, 1971

Quang Tri

Former Republic of Viet Nam

I was stationed on the DMZ in a 9-man American team, attached to the South Vietnamese Army at a firebase where we could look inside North Vietnam. December was cold, wet and let me tell you … we did not feel very Christmasy. We were eating C rations for meals, sometimes sharing rice and other little goodies with our South Vietnamese allies. It was a very austere existence, no frills of any kind and your best friend was your M-16 rifle. The North Viet’s usually had a truce around the holidays … but not always. Every once in awhile, just to let you know they were still thinking of us … they might drop a couple of mortar rounds on us … you know … just to let us know they were thinking of us over the holidays. Then I got the call from “The Old Man” (my CO) to get my young ass down to Quang Tri. Something was cooking. I arranged transportation and got to our base at “3 Star.” The CO informed me that a member of my immediate family had just suffered a catastrophic illness, maybe they were already dead, and I was being offered an emergency leave back to the States. Did I want it? Well … Duh …

Next I had to get to Phu Bai, and the easiest way was by helicopter but none were there. I had to wait until the next day and went down by an Army Jeep. Once at my parent unit in Phu Bai, I got copies of my leave orders, took a really long hot shower, found my cleanest set of dirty jungle fatigues and got myself out to the airfield. I was looking for a “hop” down to Saigon. Saigon was where I could get a plane out of the damn country and wing my way back to the States. I finally got one that made it to Saigon but now it was Christmas eve day. Nothing was moving dude, not a damn thing. If memory serves me, I sat in the terminal in Saigon for about 12 to 14 hours waiting for any damn plane to take off to anywhere. Finally an Air Force C-130 was going out of country to Guam. I got on the flight, found a corner in it and we winged our way to Guam. Somewhere during the flight we crossed the International Dateline and I popped into December 26^th. Missed Christmas altogether … and my Christmas dinner was a baloney sandwich, potato chips and an apple. (It was an Air Force box lunch.) After landing in Guam (and now I am kind of fuzzy) I managed to get another military hop to Hawaii. Damned if I recall how long I had to wait in Guam, but did get out of there. This time it was an Air Force jet transport, so it went a little faster than the prop driven C-130.

After we landed I called home and was told without a lot of updates, my family member was in the hospital. I said the hell with it, and bought a ticket straight through to Pittsburgh, Pa. Now remember, I was dressed in jungle fatigues, I didn’t have any Class-A uniforms available. I got some very strange looks from the other civilian passengers. I won’t tell you what I was thinking about them, this might be a family reading blog, but I will say I was not feeling very charitable.

When I got into Pittsburgh I had to get another flight into my hometown in Blair County, but that was no problem. My dad was waiting for me when I climbed off the plane, and true to form … Pennsylvania weather was cold, wet, and very dreary. I was freezing my tail off.

Well, I got to see my family member prior to his death a week later. After the funeral I began to make arrangements to get back to Viet Nam and my mom freaked out. Now my dad was retired Army, so she had to know I had to go back but she wasn’t taking it so well. I was already booked on a flight back to California to depart back to SE Asia from Treasure Island, close to San Francisco. Had I delayed another day, I would have been socked in by a huge snow storm for about a week, but missed that. If I had known what awaited me back in Viet Nam I might have delayed that departure. Well Hell, hindsight is 20/20! But looking back on that Christmas (the one I missed!) this year isn’t really all that bad. I have my wife, my dog, our home AND OUR VERY OWN HOMEMADE CHRISTMAS TREE!

And here is a wish for you and yours to have a wonderful Holiday Season. May you realize all your Heart’s desires and peace and prosperity be yours.

Merry Christmas ! !

“A megabyte. In other words, a quarter of a MILLION Bytes!” Whoa.. I understood a million. A million of anything was impressive enough for me. So, if I bought more memory … my head now really started to swim. So I okayed him upping the memory to 384-K. Seems like at that point I needed something else in the computer to go all the way to 640 K and he didn’t have one. (However I did get it about a week later.) Oh yes, I also bought an external disk drive that was a 3 1/2 inch disk that handled 740-K. (Wow. Now we were talking cause that meant in the real world, 3/4 quarters of a million bytes, whatever in hell they were.) I also got talked into a printer, another Tandy Special. After all, once you had something in the computer you’ve got to have a way to get it out. Remember that this was 1987, virtually eons ago, computer-wise. The Internet was not yet around for all us home users, and I had not yet discovered BBS’s. If you don’t know what they are, plug it into a search engine. Do a little research. It is hard to believe how ancient those days are.

Oh, yes–one other item that I bought that day. And when I tell you that it changed my life, I do not exaggerate. In passing this guy mentioned a MODEM .

“A what?” I asked. Now I could start to feel the pinch of my wallet.

“A modem,” he stated emphatically.

“Okay, what is a modem?”

Now I was starting to feel just the tiniest bit taken advantage of.

“Well if you have a modem you can communicate with other computers around the world.” Then he smirked. Now, with that bit of information rattling around in my head I began to hyperventilate a little.

Well I bought one. And today with cable modems, you will fall off your chair when I tell you the price. Did I mention it was a 300 baud unit? Oh yes, a 300-baud modem for a mere $100.

I walked out of there after laying down about $1,200. Today, of course, if I had all that stuff in pristine condition I couldn’t give it away. But in the end I had a Tandy 1000 EX computer with 384-K of memory, an internal 5-1/4 inch 360 K floppy drive, an external 3-2 inch 740-K drive, a CGA Monitor, a 300-baud modem, a box of 10 floppy 5-1/4 inch 360 K disks, DOS 2.1 and a stand to put the monitor on, a dot matrix printer and assorted cables.

Now I will say this: After the Radio Shack closed he came over to my townhouse and helped me set the whole damned thing up. He also showed me how to use it to format a disk to make a copy of the DOS disk. This was WAY before Windows was on the scene; everything worked from DOS. (And even though I am embarrassed to admit it now, the only thing I could do with that computer was to format the DOS disks. I used up the whole box making DOS floppies. I just spent $1,200 on it, I had to do something with it!)

I do not want to sound sour grapes, because I really grew to love that little 1000 EX computer, but had I known what I was doing I could have done SO MUCH better with the money I spent. I learned a lesson after buying it. The reason Radio Shack had a sale (and I really didn’t save much money at all) was because they had phased out the 1000 EX. (It, by the way, sported an 8088 CPU. Totally anemic). They were going to a new 286 series and wanted to unload their stock. They burned me one more time on the next computer I bought there, but I will save that for another day.

The 300-baud modem is a story in itself. I discovered Compuserve, or as it became known among users, CI$. At $6 hour if you used a 300 baud modem. It you were fancy and had a 1,200 baud modem, that bounced you up to about $12 AN HOUR! 2,400 baud modems were (in those days) the stuff dreams were made of. Actually as time went on and I started to learn computers I began to write and modems became invaluable. However that lay in the future. And with that, I must sign off for now. All this remembering made me realize that it has been some time since I visited my old haunt … The Shack. Let me think, I told Vicki I had some errands to run, maybe if I just pop my head in for a second …

Alright, it’s time for a Re-Cap.

So, I bought my first computer all the way back in 1987. It was a Tandy Corp. (Radio Shack) 1000 EX.

Now, comparing that to computer systems today is like comparing  a stone tipped spear to a M-16 rifle. In other words, there is no comparison.

But! (And this is a big But) I ended up loving that damn thing. It was FUN dinking around on it. I first started writing on that 1000 EX, and I first GAMED on it with Starflight. Starflight, my first ever computer game that for several months “TOOK ME OVER!”

Starflight – The Game

Now in our last session I relayed to you how I bought that game for $50 at the Radio Shack computer store, brought it home and tore open the package and checked it out. I called my buddy Chuck and filled him in on it, he showed up for a couple of hours then left to go home, he came back with a BOX of wine and he and I took off to explore the whole DAMNED GALAXY! We played it all night into the next afternoon and by now we had our ship (by the way, did I mention what we named our starship? The USS Buttercup) completely tricked out! There will be a test. So on to the rest of the story!

Tis The SEASON – Part 2

The phone rang again. Guess who? Now I have not said much about my pal yet. Chuck and I were tight. We had worked together, both shared the Army and Viet Nam in our background. He, by the way, was a total straight shooter. He was a black and white kind of guy. No grey in his background. He always deferred to his wife…except this time. If he made up his mind about something, nothing, and I mean nothing would change it. He took the phone, said “Yeah?” listened for a minute and hung up. We headed back to space.

Now during our voyages we occasionally found artifacts. Little gadgets, little widgets that we didn’t have a clue about until we could get back to Starport and have it analyzed. So, somewhere along the trail we ran into a race of aliens called the Spemin. These guys were mouthy and obnoxious, but put a laser beam into their crew compartment and they would tell you everything they knew. We got some good information from them and then salvaged their stuff after we smoked them. Now it is about 5:30 PM on Saturday. We might have broke for lunch, went out and got a burger but I don’t really remember much. When we got back we knew what part of the galaxy we were heading to next. Upspin and outward.

We had heard about a mysterious artifact called The Black Egg and knew that in order to solve this entire puzzle, the Egg fitted into it somehow. We had also heard rumblings about another race that were called the Uhlek, some very-very bad dudes. No one really wanted to discuss these characters, other races were terrified of them. And … there was one place we were warned to avoid at all costs, the Uhlek Brain World. Now that sounded ominous enough that Chuck and I could not wait to find this place. After all, we had Class 5 engines, enough to outrun anything in space. We had Class 5 screens, Class 5 lasers and missiles, the works. My crew had as much training as could be purchased by anyone. We thought we were ready.

The testosterone was flowing, Chuck and I were now on our fifth or sixth pot of coffee, bathroom breaks were becoming more frequent, my vision was blurry and in the back of my head were the earliest stages of a monumental caffeine meltdown.  I looked over at Chuck and saw his eyes. His irises looked like two piss-holes in the snow. By then I felt as bad as he looked. But there was something in the air and we both felt it. We had been taking turns piloting the ship, and I happen to be at the helm at this point. I pointed the ship upspin and outward and we took off.

We had gotten some information about a planet that had the ruins of a City of the Ancients. They said a great treasure might be found there. All somewhat ambiguous, to be sure, but what the hell?  We located a star system and entered it. I (as Captain) ordered a scan of the solar system and it was either the second or third planet from the star that we found the ancient city. We landed and began to explore. Whoa! There was so much endurium that our eyes bulged! (The rarest substance in this universe!) We filled our hold and went out for more. We also found something that the ships computer identified as the Crystal Pearl. Now this was good because we had heard about this thing from contact with several other races. They promised HUGE MU’s if we found this and were willing to sell it. We also got a hint about where the Uhlek Brain World was.

My head was now in full caffeine meltdown. I noticed a definite palsy in my fingers as I attempted to work the controls on the keyboard. Chuck, sitting next to me, would occasionally twitch and jerk a little bit and I instinctively knew the caffeine was in control. The Uhlek’s were supposedly downspin and outward of our then position.  We launched.

Now remember …  back in 1987 no one had ever heard of the BORG before. Matter of fact there were no Borg back then, but later I was to figure out the Uhlek’s must have been the original template for the Borg on Star Trek. They were a hive type race and were all run from the Uhlek Brain World. The main brain called all the shots and they had a very bad attitude toward everything. Think of it like this, they were the Terminator and everything and everybody else was Sarah Connor.

We got downspin and I was checking the starchart. I was looking for a likely system to enter when our proximity alarm went off. I had raised ships screens and we started scanning. Suddenly we dropped out of hyper-drive (when you encountered a ship in deep space this was automatic) and there was just one ship out there. I ordered the science station to scan the ship and the Comm Officer to hail it. Before either order was carried out……BOOM! This guy nailed us good  with a weapon we had NEVER encountered before! We had found the Uhlek! His weapon cut through our screens like they weren’t even up. I think I screamed RED ALERT! (And I mean I REALLY DID SCREAM)  when he hit us again. My engineer’s console lit up like a Christmas Tree …. and when I looked down, the engines were knocked off line, there were hull breaches, weapons were down, we were dead in space!  There was a slight pause …. then he fired at  us one last time. The whole thing BLEW with a very sickening  yellow screen blank. The monitor went yellow, then black!  One other thing. Remember that I was a newbie computer user. That means that we had not been (as the manual suggested) saving the game periodically. We really were dead in space.

Chuck looked at me and stood up. “Uh, I’m gonna go home” he dead panned. He grabbed his cigarettes and headed out the door. I sat there a moment still rather stunned. My head was pounding with massive caffeine abuse while I removed my working disks from the drive. I powered down the computer and decided bed wasn’t a bad idea. “Uhlek bastards” I mumbled as I took four aspirin. What is really funny in hindsight is that I felt about the Uhlek then the way I felt about Al Qaeda on September 11th.  “I will be back!” I vowed as I stumbled into bed. Before I totally collapsed I was thinking “If we had only been faster on the scans and lasers..” but the headache had taken over. I lay there exhausted and finally drifted off.

Later I realized that for two days in 1987, while enjoying the cheap wine, massive overdoses of caffeine, no sleep and little food, the Interstel Company and its universe with assorted aliens, widgets and MU’s became as real to me as Bill Gates, Microsoft and Windows XP are real to you. I experienced computer psychosis at its finest.

Over the next several months Chuck and I worked on the game weekly before we finally figured it all out. (I also bought a hint book to the tune of about $20, which was the turning point, that and saving the sessions!) But after that weekend Chuck’s wife was never very nice to me again. I saw it in her eyes when she glared at me. I did say that the life of an Interstel Starship Captain had its drawbacks.

Okay, lets review the situation. Just a very short time until the big day. Which day? Why Christmas of course. Seeing as how my last post was rather dour, I thought it was time to Lighten Up a bit.

The fact of the matter is, Christmas has always been a great time of year for me. I love the Holly, love the Lights, love the Tree, Decorations and all the other stuff that goes with the Season! Of course buying Christmas gifts, receiving Christmas gifts, geeze the little boy comes out in me. Which means …I’ve been thinking. I have always been a sucker for electronic gizmos, which is how I bought my first computer way back in 1987. When I bought it from Radio Shack, (back in the day they had a big computer thing going on) I actually did not have a clue what I could do with it. The system was a Tandy 1000 EX, which meant it was composed of a keyboard with internal 360 K drive (just one) and a stand for the monitor and when the monitor was turned on you could count the pixels on the screen.

BUT I GREW TO LOVE THAT COMPUTER!

I also bought a couple of external disk drives (another 360 K and a 720 K drive) a 300 baud modem, a dot matrix printer, more memory until it had 640 K’s worth (and did you know that back then Bill Gates SAID NO ONE NEEDED MORE THAN 640 K ?) and all the assorted cables extra blank floppies, etc.

Yep, I was in Hog Heaven.

Then I did something that reverberates to this day. I bought Starflight .

It was a game. It hooked me. Let me tell you about it.

I was a rookie. In Army speak I was a FNG, a cherry and this

damn game almost took me over. For just a while it grabbed me

worse than crack gets an addict and I didn’t know any better.

Over the years I have bought a number of different computer

games. Actually I am not big gamer, and the game has to grab me

in order to keep my attention. Most of my computer time is

involved with my writing, my research and surfing the web. My

point is that today I don’t game a lot.

Back in early “87″ there wasn’t a lot to keep us science fiction

fans happy. I like to explore the concepts that good science fiction

presents. But in “87″ the only thing Sci Fi happening was the

occasional Star Trek flick coming out. Even the next Star Trek

series, The Next Generation, had not debuted yet.

I had gone over to the Radio Shack Computer Center and was

wandering around their software section. I had become good

buddies with the staff, and when I wandered into the store they

usually cleared a path for me. They knew they had a sale. I was still

learning computer-ese and carefully scanned the software on

display. I was in the game section and noticed a pretty cool looking

package. It said STARFLIGHT and it had an awesome looking

ship on the cover. The package was dark, and behind the ship was

a starfield and several planets lurking in the background. One of the

salesmen, a younger guy drifted over. “Hey, this looks kind of

cool” I began. “Oh definitely.” he said. “I have it at home and it’s a

keeper.” “Alright, so what is the deal?” I was thinking of Kirk and

Spock.

“Well, this is a mystery” he began. “It starts out at a starport where you are assigned your ship.” Oh this was almost too much! My very own Enterprise with phasers, photon torpedoes and other goodies! Well not quite… Whoever designed this game had studied (very carefully) all the important tenets of capitalism and entrepreneurship and wanted to make sure that only with hard work AND a level of failure built in, would one finally get that bad ass starship. You start with a ship that barely gets out of space dock, and had they had a kid with a slingshot, he could have knocked you out of the sky.

The idea is to go boldly where only a few (that each paid their $50) have gone before and earn lots of MU’s (that’s STARFLIGHT lingo for bucks or the long green stuff …. Monetary Units) and then you can outfit your ship with all the neat stuff. Stuff like armor for the ship, lasers NOT phasers, screens (if this were Trek that would be shields) and engines that didn’t come out of a 64 Corvair. Unfortunately the first one in my ship probably did. You see, everything came in classes, class 1 engine up to a class 5. Same with the ships screens, lasers, etc. Oh yes, one more thing. The crew (which you can pick from the recruitment center, and they are not necessarily all human) have to be trained. All this of course takes money and they don’t give you much. I guess they wanted to see just what we starship captains were really made of.

I plopped down my $50 and took it home.

The game came on two 360 K disks. They squeezed a lot on a 360 K disk back then. First order of business, make two working copies of the disks, which I did. I knew this would work on my system, it said right on the cover. I had no hard drive, so during game play you are called upon to swap disks at times. Luckily it never happened when something really good was going on.

I called my best buddy Chuck to inform him of this new development. He promised to come over.

So, here I am up to my ears in the instructions. I want to make sure I experience every second of what this thing has to offer. And there was a lot of stuff in there. A star chart, a security access code wheel (now this was interesting, what in hell do you need something like that for?) the manual, and Aquick start sheet plus the two disks. First order of business is make the working copies. For you more recent computer users, there was a time when one had to do all this prior to using a program. You had the master disks then the worker disks. Sounds kind of like a commercial for communism doesn’t it?

Anyway I got that done. I secured my master disks in a safe place just like the manual said. Now I am ready to explore the universe. Well almost…. I fired the game up and first had to tell it all about my computer. Yes I have a CGA monitor, yes I will be switching floppies, yes it is a Tandy 1000 computer. Okay, I think it is ready.

Bingo, I am on a space platform that vaguely resembled something I remembered being on my school lunch box when I was a kid. Suddenly my character beamed in! on the platform. With a kind of buzzing noise. From the computers very anemic sound thingy. This is well before sound cards were available. Okay, NOW I was hooked. I looked around at the platform and there were a number of different modules to go to conduct my business. Operations, personnel, crew assignments, a trade depot, ships configuration, and the ALL Important Bank. Now in this universe things were run by an outfit called Interstel. Kind of a cross between the Rockefellers with a touch of Bill Gates thrown in for good measure, and oh say, Blackbeard the Pirate. It seemed like Capitalism that has run amok with more than a hint of piracy. Ok, I can live with this.

The manual recommended I first go to the Op’s Center to be briefed. I wandered in and figured out how it worked and read the briefing. There were a series of personal messages along with some stuff I could use. The company, Interstel, discussed reports from ships that made it back talking about certain areas of space. Areas where ships had disappeared, places with planets that might be suitable for colonization and so on. Later when I really went where no man has gone before, I found this universe HUGE! Much bigger than two 360 K floppy disks would lead you to believe.

The ships propulsion system and the ships power all came from some stuff they called endurium. Kind of a cross between premium octane gasoline and plutonium. The most rare, expensive and powerful substance this universe had to offer!

My buddy Chuck popped through the door.

I brief him on what I got sitting on my computer desk. His eyes light up. I showed him what the starport looked like and now he is suddenly as hooked on this as I am. Oh boy is his wife Charlotte gonna be pissed…..

Anyway what you need here is money .. lots of it. Now there are a number of ways to make money. It seems like this place will pay good MU’s for minerals. Of course in order to do that you need to get out on the frontier with your ship and crew. My problem was I didn’t have a crew yet. Chuck and I wandered over to Personnel.

You need a Captain, that’s me. Well I owned the game and computer so I selected a human guy, named him after me and we’re set. I will be making all the final decisions. We need a Science Officer, (they scan planets, other ships and stuff and can tell you if anything looks good on a planet. Oh yes, they can also recommend a planet for a possible colony if it is suitable. But do not screw this one up, Interstel will fine you big-big MU’s.) We need a good Navigator to pilot the ship. He is the guy that will make sure you don’t get lost in space. And there seems to be a lot of it .. space that is. One other thing he does, in the event of combat he handles all the weapons. We need an Engineer, he will maintain all the systems and make sure they are running at optimum, plus if anything gets damaged he will (hopefully) fix it. Then we need a Comm Officer. He will talk to the different races we may encounter. Last, but certainly not least, need a Doctor to maintain the crew. (Pretty sophisticated for 1987 isn’t it?) So this is what we need. The problem is that we don’t have nearly enough money to trick out these guys.

Oh, one other thing I should mention about the ships crew. We have close to a half dozen different races to choose the crew from. Each one had their pluses and minuses. Humans, the Veloxi (a bug race, good engineers) the Thrynn (reptilians and very good at communications) the Elowan (a race of bipedal photosynthetics or in plain English, plants) and Androids. There were other races to be sure, but these stick in my mind. Another thing. In deep space not all these races get along with each other. If you do have two different races on board that don’t get along “Out There” even though they get along on board, you may run into problems if you encounter one of these races while out there. Trouble like a Class 5 laser blast into your crew compartment once they encounter you. Just another thing to keep in mind.

Now Chuck and I had been working on this for a few hours when the phone rings. Oh yea, it’s his wife. I put him on, he mumbled for minute and hung up. “Uh, I got to go” he informed me. He left out the front door and I figured I wouldn’t be seeing him again for a couple of days. Two hours later he showed back up with a box of the very finest grape adult beverage and we proceeded.

In the solar system, not too far from the starport, was a planet that had been listed as being mineral rich. Like I may or may not have said, one way to earn MU’s was mining. Get out there after getting a crew, training them as much as you could and launching your ship with your 1964 Corvair engine. Get to this planet, land and deploy your rover to explore and mine. Now here is where the navigator comes in handy. Get too far from the ship and if your guy isn’t trained, well Pal, you can get lost. Run out of fuel and you end up walking back. The problem is now you don’t have that rover and you will have got to buy another one. Kind of like working for the company store back in the coal fields of West Virginia.

But if you do land okay, and the planets gravity doesn’t crush you, or you are not killed by planetary wide storms (and this happened to me.) and you mine a bunch of minerals to sell, this is just the beginning.

Back to the starport to sell this stuff and gas up again. Go to the bank and see how much is in the old account. Can I train my guys, buy a new class of engine, upgrade the screens, put on a laser that will do more than warm a TV dinner? I tell you the life of an Interstel Starship Captain is not an easy one.

By now it is about 4:00 AM on Saturday morning. Chuck and I emptied the box of wine some time before and I had put on the coffee. We discovered what the mystery was. We didn’t know what caused it but we knew what it was. It seemed that this entire section of space had become unstable. Stars were going nova. In other words they were blowing up! And no, I do not recommend you or your ship be in the solar system when it happened.

Besides mining we discovered another way of making a lot of MU’s. This, by the way, only worked if you had good ship screens and powerful lasers. If one had an unpleasant encounter with an alien race that resulted in a weapons discharge, and of course, providing that you smoked them, you could salvage their fuel and materials. Instant spending cash. Now we could really train our guys and upgrade everything! (And some of these arrogant alien scum had it coming. We had been taking it in the ear from some of these green scum for too long now. Groveling every time we ran into some of these guys. Just because they had more powerful ships and weapons. Things were changing!)

I looked at my watch. It was close to noon. Chuck and I had been on my computer since the afternoon before. A box of wine, 3 pots of coffee, no sleep, hot smoking lasers, Baby! we was wired.

Stay tuned for the EXCITING CONCLUSION, Part 2, TO THIS EXCITING STORY ! Oh yeah, and a very HEARTY MERRY CHRISTMAS to You and Yours !

MUMBAI, INDIA, Nov. 26–Unfolding Atrocity by 7^th Century Savages Leave an International City Drenched in Blood

The pitfall I seem to be undergoing is that in my 50-plus years of life, I have seen and experienced many tragedies. Some of those tragedies have been of the natural variety, and others were … well, I guess I would have to say … man made. I have seen and experienced earthquakes, typhoons, aircraft crashes, shootings, war, criminal murders–hell, you name it. There isn’t one hell of a lot you can do about the natural events, or as some pundits call it, “Acts of God.”

The others, however, maybe you can.

Back in the day, when I was much younger, lean and mean, I was a troop in Viet Nam. My little corner of that war was in intelligence operations, special ops, as it were. We were running operations directed at the North Vietnamese, and in those days the NVA were a tough and nasty bunch. It didn’t take me very long to realize that if those guys were playing “games,” then we guys had to play games, too. If they ambushed a patrol of GIs and then carved them up after they were dead, then we would carve up some of theirs. The whole idea: You want to play games? Okay, we will double-down, assholes! Did it deter anyone? I don’t know, but sometimes you simply have to feel like you are at least even, if not ahead.

War is a bitch.

Over the years since I left the Army, I have been active in veterans affairs. I know and I knew a bunch of vets who served in every corner of the world and in all the wars going back even before WW II. The Pacific theater in WW II was BRUTAL, period. As any former Marine or Army troop who served in that war will reveal–if you can get them to talk, not an easy thing to do–they will tell you things that you do not want to know. I met guys who fought on Tarawa, Okinawa, Iwo Jima, and Guadalcanal, and while fascinating, many of those guys would leave you with a queasy stomach. War is dealing death and destruction with the idea that if you deal enough of it, the bad guys will decide it is time to quit. That, by the way, is how WW II finally ended.

Somewhere between WW II and Viet Nam, we Americans forgot how to win a war. Korea was a 3-year slugfest with no clearcut winners. Viet Nam was lost not on the battlefield, but here in the U.S. And somewhere in all that carnage someone figured out we had to learn how to fight our wars more HUMANLY. No doubt that person or persons never heard a shot fired in anger. What I am about to say will not be understood by anyone who never wore a uniform or went into harms way. So be it. But this came from hard-learned experience. In combat, one kills without thought, one kills without mercy. Killing is done to protect one’s self and one’s buddies. In war there are NO SECOND PLACE WINNERS, only dead bodies.

We Americans didn’t want a war with radical Islamic elements. I sure didn’t want a war in the Middle East with all the problems that such a war represents. My attitude was if those people want to revert back to the 7^th or 8^th Century, hey, that’s their deal. Let’s face it, we don’t have many friends there, anyway. Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Iran–hell, most of those people wouldn’t give a damn if the entire U.S. dropped into the sea. That is, until they realized that the all-so-mighty dollar quit flowing over there. And if you ask them why, many would tell you it’s because of our support of Israel. Yeah, tiny little Israel with its what–6 million people or so? Sitting in a sea of hundreds of millions of Muslims? It’s funny, but when I try to think of how many times Israel went out of its way to start a war with someone, I can’t come up with any. (Although the Palestinians might stridently disagree.)

So, now we wake up on Thanksgiving day here in the U.S., and all the news is agog about a group of terrorist killers (did I mention Islamic terrorist killers?) invading Mumbai, India, killing innocents in tourist hotels, restaurants, train stations and in a Orthodox Jewish Center. ( Oh yes, here we go: must have been Jewish fault. Remember, when those same Islamists tried to convince us that 9-11 was a Israeli provocation?) The battles raged for almost four days, and the one Muslim terrorist captured alive told his captors that they wanted to kill at least 5,000 people! At least they didn’t achieve that. They only managed to viciously MURDER about 200 innocents. Yeah, nice work you savage bastards.

There was a time when I could have suggested how we might curtail such acts in the future, but then I might be accused of hate speech and inciting violence in this politically correct age. But allow me to make a prediction before I sign off this little rant. I fear that the day will come (and not a far-off day) when the majority of people in the U.S. will demand this certain type of action. I fear that savage happenings similar to those in Mumbai will once again visit us here in America.

If my prediction becomes fact, … then we will see.

May God bless the United States of America.