Z is for ZERO

“What is a zero anyway?

 A zero signifies nothing, 

all it does is tell you nothing about nothing. 

Still, isn't zero also something meaningful,

 a number in and of itself? 

In jianpu notation,

 zero indicates a caesura, 

a pause or rest of indeterminate length.

 Does time that goes uncounted, unrecorded, still qualify as time? 

If zero is both everything and nothing, 

Does an empty life have exactly 

the same weight 

 as a full life? 

Is zero like the desert, 

both finite and infinite?”

- Madeleine Thien

Why Do We Make A Nothing Of Zero?

The Importance of Being Zero

Zero is an odd beast.
 

Without it, we would not have the binary code that makes our computer age possible.

Yet, it took until the 7th century for it to be recognized as a number in its own right, 

when the ancient Indians developed a numerical system that expressed zero with its own symbol. 

Since the development of this number system, which we still use today, 

zero has been instrumental in our exploration of mathematics.   

 The invention of zero represents an extremely important step 

in humankind's intellectual evolution ...

For if Nothing can come to mean Something so important,

Does that not imply that while we might feel worthless, 

we might essentially be Something beyond value if we but look at ourselves in the right light?

What Do You Think?

Y is for YouTube

“The world is your bookmark.” 

- Joel Books

Do You YouTube?

Oh, come on.  You didn't think I would talk about myself again (Yeomans), did you?

When Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawad Karim founded YouTube in 2005 

there’s no way they could have predicted that they would change the world as we know it in 12 short years.

 YouTube has revolutionized everything from entertainment to education, 

opened new doors for talented individuals looking to be discovered, 

and brought people together from all over the globe. 

1.) IT IS A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

 YouTube allows us to learn about places and cultures around the world from the actual people who live there.

From the last Shangri La, Bhutan

to the prettiest tour guide in Iceland

you can travel the globe in minutes.

2.)  YouTube IS TO BLAME FOR 

JUSTIN BIEBER!

 When Justin’s mom uploaded some videos of her son singing to YouTube 

to share with family and close friends she had no idea 

that it would lead to him singing before Obama.

3.) THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

 Take the story of Neda Agha-Soltan, 

 who was killed in protests over the Iranian election of 2009. 

The world had no idea what was going on in Iran 

until a video of Neda being killed was uploaded to YouTube. 

 It spread like wildfire and soon the entire world jumped into action, 

doing what they could to stop the troubles in Iran and show their support.

4.) HOURS OF FREE ENTERTAINMENT

You can spend hours watching movies, reviews of movies and TV shows, 

clips from Ellen DeGeneras to snippets of Game of Thrones to Supergirl. 

5.) CYBER HANDYMAN

Need to find out how to change that ink cartridge or link up a sound bar to your Smart TV?

YouTube has dozens of tutorials to show you how.

 

HOW HAS YOUTUBE CHANGED 

YOUR WORLD?

Do you watch YouTube daily?  

Weekly?  

Or not at all? 

X is for X-RAY

“Though the doctors treated him, 

let his blood, 

and gave him medications to drink,

 he nevertheless recovered.”

- Leo Tolstoy

Do You Trust Doctors?

Did you know that surgeons in the fifties looked at their hands under X-Rays while they operated?

 Yeah.  It worked out just like you think.

 Then, there is Dr. Alice M. Stewart --

 an epidemiologist who first demonstrated the link between X-rays of pregnant women 

and disease in their children in 1956. 

Never heard of her?  Not surprising.  

The medical establishment did all they could to crush her.
 

Her finding that there was danger in receiving even such a low dose of radiation 

was met with outrage by doctors and the nuclear industry,

 and Dr. Stewart had difficulties obtaining financing for other studies. 

But by the mid-1970's, other scientists (male) 

had duplicated her findings on prenatal X-rays, and the practice ended.

Want to read more of this heroic woman?  

Read ''The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the Secrets of Radiation''

by Dr. Dr. Gayle Greene of Scripps College in Claremont, California.

Do You Trust The Medical Profession?

W is for World Book Day

"A book is a dream you hold in your hands." 

- Neil Gaiman

Do You Know What 

World Book Day is?

Neil Gaiman wrote this book for World Book Day.

It is celebrated every April 23rd.

(It was started in Caledonia in 1923 to celebrate Miguel de Cervantes who died on that date.)

He and other authors wrote books for this day for nothing and publishers printed them for nothing.

They were sold for one pound each to children who had been given one pound tokens.

The whole thing exists purely to get children to read.

What a great concept, right?

Odd and the Frost Giants is one of my favorite Neil Gaiman books.

Have You Read It?

What Do You Think About World Book Day?

 

V is for VINYL

"It was so exciting to go to the record shop,

buy a piece of vinyl

 and hold it,

read the liner notes,

look at the pictures.

Even the smell of the vinyl.”

Martin Gore

(founding member of Depeche Mode

and writer of the majority of their songs)

What Does The Comeback
of Vinyl Records
Tell Us About Ourselves?

Vinyl records are said to be an old and obsolete way of listening to music.  

But no one told the millenials who have bought more than 13 million vinyl records last year!

Vinyl records have a rawer sound than the digitized "perfect music" of CD's or digital downloads.

The grooves of the disc contain all the sounds recorded ...

 and the dust and scratches give the popping sound that somehow stirs us with evocative images of bygone times.

The comeback of vinyl is rooted in its distinctive lack of audio cleanness and perfection—

what fans call the “warmth” of the vinyl sound.

Life isn't perfect.  Life has flaws.  A perfect CD lacks the very life it seeks to exude. 

What does that say about us?

Perhaps, it says we yearn for the authentic, the pulsing pop and snap of real life in our entertainment.

What do you think?

Does this parlay to modern movies which seem so full of CGI 

that they lack any pulse at all?

       

U is for Ulysses

"We define our identity always by our success against that which oppresses us."

- Ulysses

"One must be cunning indeed to survive 

the wicked of this world."

 - Sherlock Holmes

 "A society which most values intelligence 

will create men of knowledge. 

A society which most values money 

will create scoundrels." 

- Mark Twain

Does Today's Culture Value Fame More Than Brain?

When reading as a child, 

I was drawn not to Hercules but to Ulysses, 

not to Robin Hood but to Sherlock Holmes,

not to Gunda Din but to Kim,

not to Superman but to Batman.

You see, I could not be born on Krypton, 

but I could mold my mind and body to think my way out of troubles. 

So I guess it is no surprise that with my Urban Fantasies

I created a modern Ulysses/Kim 

to outwit and tweak the noses of those who prowled the shadows of the French Quarter. 

Did Your Favorite Kind of Hero/Heroine In Your Childhood

Shape The Sort of Protagonist of whom You Write?

*

What Do You Think Your Childhood Heroes Said Of You?

T is for Twain

Is Mark Twain Still Relevant?

April 21, 1910 Mark Twain died.

In my historical fantasies, his death devastated his life-long friend, Samuel McCord.

The ghost of Mark Twain visits my blog so often that I should charge him rent.

Yet, does Mark Twain still 

speak to us today?

 Samuel Clemens is the great poet of America's longest river, 

while his quotes on politics and human nature enjoy a constant half-life as staples among speech-makers.

 "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn," Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1935.

Most humor does not travel well over time, 

Yet Mark Twain's humor goes to the root of human nature which never changes really. 


Mark Twain's observations on War still resonate with many of us.

  Twain’s words in the following passage have a surprisingly familiar ring 

 to what political pundits were saying in protest to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

 “We were to relieve them from Spanish tyranny to enable them to set up a government of their own, 

and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial,” wrote Twain. 

“It was not to be a government according to our ideas, 

but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Filipinos, a government according to Filipino ideas. 
 
That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. 

But now — 

why, we have got into a mess, 

a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. 

I’m sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.”


Mark Twain also wrote a chilling piece called The War Prayer, 

illustrating how people who oppose foreign wars and government intervention are shamed into silence:

 “It was indeed a glad and gracious time,” Twain wrote, 

“and the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness 

straightway got such a stern and angry warning that for their personal safety’s sake they quickly shrank out of sight and offended no more in that way.”


I have always been more fond of his newspaper articles, essays, lectures, and personal  letters than his fiction.

Do any of you still read Mark Twain?

S is for SEX

“My fear of abandonment is exceeded 
only by my terror of intimacy.”

 - Ethlie Ann Vare

Has Casual Sex Destroyed Our Ability 

To Think Beyond Ourselves ... 

To Love?

Our generation centers more and more on an ever-expanding growth of technology.

Once girls wore letterman jackets of their boyfriends, 

exchanged love letters, and took long walks in the park hand in hand.

Now, lonely souls search Tinder, Facebook, and 

stare starry-eyed at tiny images on their iPhones, mistaking texting for touching.

So many of the young people you see staring intently at their smartphones are slightly dead inside, 

hollowed out by a complete lack of  real human interaction.

 Sigh.

Even talking on the phone has become foreign and uncomfortable to so many.  

We do not have conversations anymore.  

Texting is remote, less threatening, but ultimately less fulfilling.

To say "Good Bye" via Instagram is easy in all the wrong ways.

When couples meet, it is easier to let the hormones take over, 

engage in passion without purpose, 

and avoid the threat of true communication and its inherent danger of rejection of who we are as a person.

So many of us have become obsessed with the casual.  We don't want strings.

We want to drift where the currents of passion take us.

But a ship without a rudder soon becomes lost at sea.

Look at the faces of the models in the magazines:

Cool, Distant, Unobtainable

Those faces are icy.  

You could not imagine them uttering "I love you" and risk having another having power over them.

Funny.  

In this age of free sex so many are in chains of loneliness.

When you think of another person 

merely as an object with which you engage in external masturbation, 

you place your own desire for animal satisfaction above their dignity and worth as a person.

When you fail to see the humanity of another person, 

you lose a bit of your own humanity as well.

Do it enough times, 

and you become so hollow you start to ache inside without knowing why.

What Do You Think?

R is for Roland

"How rare it is to know who you are

and 

how you got to be there." 

- Me

Who Is This Strange Man

Asking These Stranger Questions?

That's me daydreaming with Midnight wondering what the heck we are doing on my terrace.

Thomas Mallon wrote in the New York Times --

Novelists’ lives are considerably less interesting than they used to be. 

Longer, yes, but much drier in every sense.

He obviously has not lived my life!

* Abandoned at the age of six by my alcoholic father on the roughest street in Detroit, 

I learned over 6 weeks the true meaning of horror.

*My step-father later tried to kill me twice, jealous of the love my mother had for me.

* I ran afoul of a street gang in Lafayette, Louisiana, who were terrorizing the students from their lunch money.

Being more scared of my step-father than I was of them, 

I learned it sucked to crawl home with broken ribs, nose, and little fingers. 

* I have been forcibly evacuated twice from my city due to hurricanes destroying the town.

* I spent 3 fun-filled nights on the dark streets of New Orleans after Katrina.

*In the space of two years, I lost my last remaining childhood friend, my fiancee, my mother, and my business.

Oh, Boo Hoo, right?
  

Everyone has had and is having a harder time than they appear.

Still, current theory has it that adding an author bio helps 

to connect the reader in a real way to the author.

I think the author bio gives a hint to the reader what kind of prose 

is contained in the novel if the reader turns to it first.

So this is the bio I add at the end of all my novels to say HI and tip my Stetson to browsers:

Roland Yeomans was born in Detroit, Michigan.   

But his last memories of that city are hub-caps and kneecaps since, at the age of seven, he followed the free food when his parents moved to Lafayette, Louisiana.   

The hitch-hiking after their speeding car from state to state was a real adventure. 

 Once in Louisiana, Roland learned strange new ways of pronouncing David and Richard when they were last names.  

And it was not a pleasant sight when he pronounced Comeaux for the first time.

He has a Bachelor’s degree in English Education and a Master’s degree in Psychology.   

He has been a teacher, counselor, book store owner, and even a pirate since he once worked at a tax preparation firm.

Now, he runs the roads delivering rare blood to ill patients.

So far he has written forty books.   

You can find Roland at his web page: www.rolandyeomans.blogspot.com  

  or at his private table in Meilori’s.   

The web page is safer to visit.  But if you insist on visiting Meilori’s, bring a friend who runs slower than you.

For David -

Mark Twain died on this date in 
1910 

(though his true fate will be
revealed as something quite 
different in a future story of mine.)


For the ghosts of Romulus and Remus -

On this date in 753 B.C.
the brothers founded Rome on the site
where the orphaned twins
were suckled by a she-wolf. 

  

Just Wondering:

Do You Add An Author Bio

To Your Novels?