StarFleet Carl: Blog

TL:DR - I'm apparently a heartless, uncaring, and completely insensitive bastard. I'm also tired of a threat actually being overblown. Is the Wuhan Flu Virus potentially something that can cause serious health issues, if you catch it? Yep, can't argue with that. Has this whole thing turned into a completely overblown response to evolution in action? (Or what actually was an investigation into a real virus that got out of control, and they won't admit it.)

Well ... that's for you to personally decide. I'm just going to throw a few things out here. Real, honest to goodness, hard data. Just the numbers. You draw your own conclusions.

The US had 3.75 million births in 2019.
The US had 2.85 million deaths in 2019.
The US had a population of 329.6 million in 2019.
Based upon sheer numbers, every person in the country had a 0.86% chance of dying. Yes, I know individual factors matter regarding your entire risk factor, some higher, some lower. That's irrelevant to this.
As per the CDC, on Dec 31, 2020, there were 350,616 deaths in the US due to Covid.
As per the CDC, on Dec 31, 2020, there had been 20,040,828 cases reported.
That's a 98.3% SURVIVAL rate, with it's 1.7% death rate if you got it, and a total increase in the death rate to 0.97%.

Things peaked in the middle of January. In a NORMAL year, 7,800 people die EVERY SINGLE DAY. We're right now adding 700 to that total, so 8,500 people die every day.

Now, I'm seeing huge numbers being reported from India. Holy crap, they're reporting more than 5,000 people per day are dying there from Covid. That's a number people can relate to.

India had 26,900,000 births in 2019.
India had 9,780,000 deaths in 2019.
India had a population of 1,350,000,000 in 2019. For those of you in Rio Linda, that's four times the number of people that live in the United States.

If an additional 5,000 people in India die per day, that puts them from 0.72% to 0.85%. Meaning that they'll STILL have 15 MILLION more people born every year than die, while here in the US, we'll have half a million more people born every year than die.

When exactly do we get to decide for ourselves that it's an acceptable risk and live our lives like we really don't give two shits?

I had to just skim this to see what the heck I wrote, I'm not only so far past this in the writing, I'm working my butt off. I have three closings for May, and I'm trying to earn my paycheck for June now. I have seven hours worth of houses lined up to show a client tomorrow. I just hope half of them remain on the market long enough for my client to find one to put an offer in on.

Based upon national trends, the US has a shortage of 2.5 MILLION houses. Locally, just today, we had 68 new listings, and 17 that are back on the market (they were pending and the deal fell through). Again, just today, there were 84 that changed status to pending - meaning they had someone write an offer that was accepted, and another 84 changed status to sold, meaning they closed. 85 houses became available, and twice that left the market. One of the biggest factors pushing this is actually millennials moving out of the basement, and finally adulting.

This isn't just affecting home sales. New car sales are going gangbusters, too. Except they don't have any inventory to sell. I know guys that work at stores that normally sell 200 - 300 new cars each month that have less than a dozen on the lot. If you have a car you don't need, apparently Carvana is giving brain damage - and then because people are stupid and actually BUYING cars from them, they're paying thousands more than the car is actually worth. (Example - the car I'm leasing, the payoff is $22,900. It's realistically worth $25,500 for trade-in, with clean retail of $28,000. Carvana offered me $27,700 for it - which means they'd retail it for $31,000. Mind you, it was $35,000 MSRP brand new, and I signed paperwork on it at $32,000 because I was working at the dealership. Insanity!)

Chapter 7 is in the queue for Saturday posting. There are several comments regarding skipping time versus day by day. This is a coming of age story, from someone who knows nothing about our society. Poor boy has to learn, right? Including on when to keep his mouth shut - when he doesn't seem to be able to do.

That's the polite way of saying there's some ominous foreshadowing in Chapters 5 & 6 (and maybe some more in 7 - insert evil grin here) where Cal has forgotten one minor detail. He's not operating in a vacuum.

Chapter 6 is uploaded for Saturday posting. Real life isn't slowing down as far as work is concerned, which is good. I'm still (barely) below 60 years old, so doing a job and getting paid for it is still something I do.

WARNING! WARNING! RANT BELOW! RANT BELOW! WARNING! WARNING!

I had to take an abstract to a title company today for a client. One of the notations in the original abstract was that the property would never, ever, be sold to someone of African descent, commonly called negroes. That was from 1909, with the original land grant from 1897 appended, before Oklahoma even became a state. I bring this up because I'm ready for someone to come up with a new game. The 'everything is racist today' game is getting really, really old.

Was Georgia a slave state during the Civil War? Yes. Is their new voting law bringing back Jim Crow? Not only no, but HELL no! There's a REALLY easy way to prove it, too. It's basically the SAME FUCKING LAW that Indiana passed more than 13 YEARS ago, and the Supreme Court held was constitutional then! Baseball decides to go woke, and move the All-Star game to state that has TOUGHER voting restrictions than Georgia.

Not wearing a mask is racist! How? Weren't we told 'My body, my choice'? How is this different? Hands up, don't shoot! - hey, guys - that didn't happen. I can't breathe! - guess what, he was saying that IN the car before he was taken out, AND the officer followed approved procedure for detaining a subject. People who break the law LIE about stuff all the time. Maybe he shouldn't have tried to pass a counterfeit bill in the first place. I'm not going to say there's not been bad shit happen - there has. But let's use some common sense, people!

Which is sadly lacking.

Today, I read this, from the head of the American Teachers Union. Keep in mind that I'm in Oklahoma. Schools here ARE open, kids ARE back in the classroom, four days per week. The earth is not opening up underneath our children, the sky is not falling (yet - this is Oklahoma, so we'll see a tornado or two this spring). But the President of the American Federation of Teachers union since 2008, is critical of kids going back to school. And even though she herself is Jewish, guess who she blamed?

Jews.

"American Jews are now part of the ownership class," she said. "What I hear when I hear that question is that those who are in the ownership class now want to take that ladder of opportunity away from those who do not have it. Am I saying that everything we do is right? No. Are people in Los Angeles fearful? Yes."

Who's actually being racist in this country? It's rhetorical, and it's not politically correct, but what the fuck is wrong with these people? Who the hell are you supposed to serve? Yourselves, or the kids? Why did you have to send out warnings when the schools were still closed in March about posting pictures of you, sitting on a beach somewhere and relaxing, while your students are still locked down for no good reason at all anymore? I'm just shaking my head. It's time to change the game.

I thought it would be appropriate in light of something I JUST read today to share some of the coincidences from real life that have either happened or that I found out well after I'd started writing A True History.

TL:DR - there's a lot of weird shit between real life and my book.

First, a bit of real history. I came up with the idea for this book in the middle of 2016. I had several different ways to start the book that I worked through, and I figured out where I'd want the capsule to land (meaning near Hutch) in 2018. Finally got serious and started writing it late in 2019, and you know how it's gone as far as on here is concerned.

What you don't know is how many times I've come up with something for the story, said this sounds like a good idea, start writing it, and then in the process of doing research, gone ... no shit, really?

The first coincidence was me simply using the name, Cal Lewis. I did it purposely as an homage. Cal L ... pretty simple. I hadn't planned on adding the Romany influence at all when I started writing, so finding out that CaLe - the name of the parent company of CEDEM - really is a Romany language made me go, huh. I had also stuck in the Gypsies because I figured if anyone had weird stuff, it'd be them. I had no idea they traced their roots back to India, from about 10,000 years ago, when I stuck them into the story.

That's two coincidences.

I chose Hutchinson because I thought the towns that were closer to where the illustrated novels (aka comic books) show the Blue Boy Scout (BBS) landing were too small. According to those, the BBS landed near a small town close to Salina, Kansas. I had picked the landing spot back in early 2018, and had an initial chapter done back then. The Hutchinson Wikipedia page made an addition in June of 2020 that, in honor of a convention, they officially change the name of the town during that convention to Smallville. They've been doing it for several years, but I didn't know it when I picked Hutch!

That's three.

I'd already decided that Shiva was an alien - which if you look at various Indian religions, is entirely possible anyway, but that's another topic. No, I wrote Chapter 4 of Book 3 and decided that this mountain range would be perfect for Shiva to have a home. I got a list of mountains and said, "Hey, Machapuchare sounds a lot like Machu Picchu, let's make that Shiva's home!" So I wrote the chapter. THEN - AFTER writing the whole encounter, I was doing more browsing, and added a couple of things. The mountain really IS off limits for religious purposes and has never been climbed because of that. Oh, and it's supposed to be the home of Shiva.

Yeah, I'm serious. So now, that's four.

Remember I had Cal make a great shot at Bay Hill Country Club, across the lake? I wrote that last year! Bryson DeChambeau did it this past March.

I linked Helen and Carrie as being Guardians, due to their links from history. I was planning on having another 'lost tribe' down in Peru, basically watching Machu Picchu, being wary of Shiva coming back. (That last sentence I haven't written the chapter yet, but it planned.) Then I saw a news headline today that scientists have now confirmed that Indigenous Australians are DNA related to natives in Alaska, and other natives in South America, including tribes that live in Peru near Machu Picchu.

Five and six.

People have sent me compliments on how realistic my story seems, and on how much research I've put into it. You have no idea how many times I've written something that's I've made up (so I thought), then doing a bit more research, I've just sat here going, damn!