Betsy and Lobop are heading to visit Phella, deep in the desert beneath many stars.

As a teenager I fully expected that by this time of life I would own and utilize a personal aircraft levitated and propelled by an antigravity drive which would be much smarter than I am. An intelligent personal aircraft specifically attuned to my needs and desires, fully equipped to be capable of always location tending one minute (or less) from wherever I might be, ready at any moment to pick me up and rapidly transport me to wherever I wanted to go to next. A sleek, quiet,

Tracking the progress of Project 2025 goals is revealing. By any measure, it clearly indicates its proponents are chronically corporophagic, choosing to defecate down their own throats. Their obsessive tendancy to consume their own feces would be puzzling if I had not learned at an early age that there are indeed a lot of people out there with a developed taste for it. I guess this is not an entirely bad trait considering how corporphagia is a necessary part of natural proces

A lifelong antagonist of the ghastly US government's compulsory public education system since being forcibly subjected to it at age six, I've been tinkering with better ways for people to learn specific subject matter than being lectured at and then having to regurgitate lecture material during totally wasteful testing sessions. It finally occured to me that human beings don't need any new way to learn, having been born with a most powerful learning machine fully aware from b

As the century turned I was fulfilling a lifelong goal to live and work along the front range of the Rocky Mountains. Having landed what seemed to be an excellent job with a dot com startup there I immersed myself in the Front Range lifestyle with glee and gusto. Mere yards from the Bear Creek Park trailhead and not much farther from Monument Creek Trail, which I frequently bicycled to and from work on when the weather was good, a feeling of having finally arrived settled in.

With only about three decades of life remaining for me (unless some life-extending biobreakthrough is discovered and developed to marketable state before the end), it seems prudent to begin planning for my demise sooner than later. Now is as good a time as any. The trick is to predict what I'll be capable of engineering before breathing my final breath. I do have a clear vision of the particular environment in which to establish this Deathstead. A high mountain valley wildern

This storm named Fern is sparking childhood memories, recalling how a spate of severe winter weather while traveling forced us into the nearest roadside diner where it was warmer. Where cigarette smoking was the fav habit of just about everyone, except hapless children. Children forced to breathe secondhand smoke, with nowhere to flee to avoid the foul space. Yeah, those were the good old days before laws were passed banning such thoughtlessness. I don't miss breathing bad ai

Halfway expecting to be munched on while surf kayaking every weekend in 1994, I told myself I wouldn't hold it against any shark that might manage to strike while I was in the water. I was, afterall, encroaching in its natural environment, and doing so unwisely. I deserved whatever nature threw at me for being so bold. And evolution has made sharks as badass as they come, while by comparison I was a soft, easy meal bobbing along on the surf. I was surely a cringeworthy sight

One thing I expect to see happening in a decade or less from now is drone deliveries to and from the food forest. This is technology I'm looking forward to but isn't essential as long as UPS and FedEx and (ugh) USPS are still operating by that time. They've all three saved me countless hours and miles driving to and fro purchasing and transporting goods and materials I used to have to hunt down at brick and mortar stores–a convenience I depend on. Whether it's pickup service

Since living in Louisiana when hurricane Camille struck the gulf coast and seeing them for the first time, then writing about them in Abbeville Pearls , I've wanted a way to enter a crawdad chimney and go down into its lair to see its builder sheltering from the storm there. Another biophilic urge I can't really explain or even guess at origins of, its intriguing anyway. Maybe it's time to get a 3D printer and Raspberry Pi components to try to build one myself.