Random thoughts while playing host for a week

No, I haven’t died and gone wherever you hope dead people of my sort go. I’ve just been playing host to out-of-town company for four days (3-1/2 more ahead). We’ve been out doing stuff and I haven’t had time to blog.

This will just be a quick check-in, but I’ll make up for my absence next week.

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My company is very polite and a good guest, but having someone else in the house is a serious adjustment for this hermit — especially since I’ve been diving more deeply into solitude and silence lately. (Solitude, of course, is much more than being alone and silence has more dimensions than mere lack of noise. You can go incredibly deep with these things — but not when you’re fixing breakfast for a guest and wondering if the day’s planned entertainments will entertain.)

So the timing was intriguing for coming upon this observation about one type of silence in an increasingly shouting-and-screaming world: The National Radio Quiet Zone is an area around the Green Bank Observatory where many types of tech, from cellphones to microwave ovens, are banned lest they interfere with the observatory’s mission of detecting the faint and cryptic noise of the universe.

The writer, who revels in being beyond cellphone range, visits one of the last remaining “wifi wilderness” areas in the U.S. and contemplates a future in which 5G so saturates the globe that no such radio silence will be possible.

Reading, I realized I could easily do without cellphones. But as I’ve long said, civilization didn’t exist before microwave ovens. I’m not going there. The piece made me think of so many other types of silence that are precious, but increasingly hard to maintain.

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And what do you think of the latest (and perhaps most shocking-but-not-surprising) revelation from Project Veritas? An important Google exec admits on hidden camera that The Goog is actively engaged in attempting to manipulate the 2020 presidential elections.

If accurate, this is much, much bigger news than the spurious Russian interference story. But I suspect (though I haven’t had time to check) that NPR and CNN haven’t picked it up and run with it.

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On the personal-political front, the audiobook of Basics of Resistance was published last week and you can download it for $12.99 or free with a month’s trial of Audiobooks.com.

This is an unabridged version, 4 hours and 25 minutes total, published by the wonderful people of Tantor Media, who were simply a dream to work with.

I have a couple of free download codes (equivalent to “authors’copies” from the olden days of print) that I will probably offer to bloggers or other writers who might want to review the book, but I’ll deal with that next week.

I just noticed that their version of the cover spells my name wrong. [Rolleyes] Otherwise, I’m quite impressed.

On the sadder side of personal-political, the dear anonymous friend who has been filling the Claire Wolfe fan F*c*b**k page with wisdom, snark, and snarky wisdom notified me he’s giving up the job.

His reasons are excellent. Apparently FB decided to demand even more none-of-their-damn-business personal information on him than they already required. He said no.

If anyone’s interested in taking over the page, I have permission to share his contact information. But really, the notion of “me” having a FB page (even though it’s never been the actual “me”) is such an oxymoron that I won’t be surprised if none of you privacy-loving readers want to take on the task. If you do, let me know.

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Now it’s off to a neighborhood BBQ that Neighbor J is holding in honor of my guest.