Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Last Christmas when Santa brought me an iPad, I was thrilled. I had done quite a bit of research on this gizmo, online, at the Apple store, and asking   writer friends what it could and couldn’t do. I was trying to get some sense of how I might be able to write a book on it. The consensus was that writing a book on the iPad might be possible if you have a keyboard and Pages, but it wouldn’t be any writer’s first choice. However, the iPad, they agreed, does everything else.

“Like what?” I asked.

Your e-mail is easier to pick up

Cool apps

And, my personal favorite – you’re always connected.

But did any of that justify the price of an iPad?

Well, that depends. In the six months I’ve had  iPad2, I’ve tested that Internet connection: at the gym, in the supermarket, on road trips, while getting my hair cut. No matter where I am, I can be electronically connected to the larger world- and to the people I care about most. I can conduct business, purchase a book, read a book, edit a manuscript, write and reply to e-mail. But in the back of my mind, I have always known  the ultimate iPad test would happen during a hurricane.

In 2004 and 2005, when the hurricane season was particularly active, we invariably lost electrical power. In one of those years, we lost power for a week. In the other year, we didn’t have power for 10 days.  During the 10-day outage, we plugged into a neighbor’s generator ad at least got the fridge powered up. I used to open the door and stand in front of it just to cool down.  In both years, I notice that cell reception returned within a day or two.  I remembered this fact when I was doing my research about the iPad.

Today, May 29, two days before the official hurricane season starts, we got a taste of that power outage. A cell of thunderstorms swept in over our county, thunder, lightning, 60 mph winds, the whole Olympian tempest. Our electricity went off at 2:30. Our landline didn’t work, so I called our neighbor on my cell and asked if her electricity was off, too. Yes, it was. Okay, time to report this to Florida Power and Light, I thought, and got out my iPad.

I use ATT for my cellular connection on the iPad. I activated it, went online, reported the outage to FPL,  then used their interactive map to find out where the outages were and to keep tabs on the status of repair. I was able to check the local radar, the National Weather Service, and to answer some email.  Even though this storm was just a violent weather cell passing through, the power failed, the cell towers didn’t. I was always connected.

During a Category 3 hurricane or higher, cell reception probably would be lost because cell towers would go down. But unless those towers snapped in half, they would probably come back online more quickly than the electrical grid. So what purpose might an iPad (or iPhone, for that matter) serve during or in the aftermath of a major hurricane?

Let’s take Hurricane Andrew,  which slammed into South, Florida 20 years ago, in 1992, and decimated Homestead.  Granted, there was barely an Internet in1992, at least not for most of us. But if there had been and if the cell signal held during even part of the storm, I would have live radar that showed  where the worst cells were located, where tornadoes might be, and where the center of the storm was. I would know which side of the storm was the strongest and whether I needed to take extra precautions – like hide in my bathtub with a mattress over me, as one friend had to do. And in the aftermath, once the cell towers were back online, I would know where I could find help, food, water, and everything else I needed to know.

Of course, in the aftermath of a Cat 5 storm the cell towers probably wouldn’t come back online any faster than electrical power, which means you have to rely on battery-operated radios or TVs for news. These venues are better than nothing, but there’s something empowering about holding this iPad gizmo in your lap and hopping around at your own discretion to find useful news. While using FPL’s interactive map, I discovered that only 63 homes had power outages and one of the areas pinpointed on the map was close to the yoga studio where Rob’s meditation class that evening would be held. He used his cell to e-mail the owner of the  studio about whether she had power. She didn’t. She was using candles.

For me, this inconvenient power outage confirmed a couple of things:

–       This is NOT my parents’ world

–        I love most technology

–       I’m grateful this was  NOT a hurricane

–      I love my iPad

The place where dogs fly…

***

Okay, some of you may be getting tired of these dog park synchro/stories. But, I promise, this one isn’t about politics. By the way, that’s Nika on the ground, with the ball in her mouth, and Lily the pug leaping for another ball above her.  And oh, this picture hasn’t been photo shopped, as one man on Rob’s facebook suggested about the pic of Noah. I mean, really, these are dogs, not UFOs; who would bother or have the time to photo shop something like this?

++

So here’s what happened. With summer already here and the afternoon thunderstorms a given, we’ve been trying to get to the dog park before the skies open up. Today we got there around 4:15, not too many people there.

Karin and Colleen are sitting on a bench in the shade and their dogs are crowded around them. Hey, they aren’t fools. The sun is hot and the shade is the place to be. The dogs: Starr, a Corgie, and Cody, a husky, belong to Karin; Colleen owns Bronson, Thunder, and Rip.

Colleen has been unemployed for the last year, her unemployment just ran out, and she has been dog sitting, which means the pooches in her care come to the park twice a day and eat a lot of treats in between. Good deal for them, good deal for Colleen, whose owners pay her.

Karin inherited Cody, which was her son’s dog, and what a trickster he is, loveable and mischievous.”Hey,” Karin says. “Where’ve you been?”

“Just busy,” I reply.

“You guys off to see Megan this weekend?”

“You bet. We  want to use our free passes at Disney before her internship ends. We’re going to spend a night in Cassadaga first and ask a psychometrist to read a vial of holy water.”

Judging by the look on Karin’s face – and Colleen’s – I suddenly realize how strange this sounds. Oh hey, yeah, off with our holy water to see what a psychic says about it.Huh? What holy water? WTF are you talking about? I can see these questions on their faces. So I rapidly backtrack.

“A guy in Montreal thinks he may have been abducted. By, you know, aliens. We did some blog posts on it. He has been carrying holy water around with him for a year, as a means of protection. Anyway, we’ve put together a proposal, Aliens in the Backyard, about the abduction experience – his and those of some other individuals.”

Uh-oh. Colleen’s expression screams, HUH? Karin murmurs, “Wow, you lead an interesting life.”

And I haven’t even told them anything else about it. I suddenly realize, oh duh, that in this particular area, these kinds of ideas don’t register for most people. Maybe if we lived in Sedona or Santa Fe or San Francisco,  it would be a different story. Or maybe it’s more about mindset than about  place.

These events happened on Wednesday, May 23, the day before we met with Kathy, the Cassadaga psychometrist who read the vial of holy water that Charles Fontaine of the Quebec encounters carried for a year after his UFO encounter. We’ve written about Kathy before.  In the next couple of days, we’ll post some of Kathy’s impressions  about the vial of holy water and the Quebec encounter.

These are somewhat basic, but good reminders. Send to your friends. And don’t forget #10!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txTsbeuY5gM&feature=email

These twin stories have been around for a long time. But this one certainly drives home the point that twins may be ore connected within Indra’s net that even they suspect!

Noah, leaping for a ball!

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We’ve written about our dog park before, usually in relation to U.S. politics. Well, this entry is entirely different. Just books and authors and, of course, dogs.

When Nika was younger, we used to take her and Noah into a part of the park intended for smaller dogs. Here, they played Frisbee and catch the ball with Lily, a funny, very focused pug (that’s her to the left of Noah), and Willow, a border collie, whose partial body and tail are visible in the photo.  One afternoon, we dog people stood around and talked about stocks with Ralph, who was once a broker on Wall Street, and Cassie, who owns Willow and tends someone’s  horses.

Cassie is one of those women whose presence tells you she considers her dog, Willow, and maybe all dogs and animals, as a lot of notches above humans. She’s originally from New Jersey, and is a skilled horse person who has made horses her profession. Here where we live, she tends four horses that belong to a wealthy person, that’s’ all we know about her.

This area was built with equestrians in mind. They compete, they play polo, they are pro jumpers and Olympian trainers.  Tommy Lee Jones owns a home here – and his own polo team. Bruce Springsteen lives here part-time because his daughter is an equestrian jumper. For a while, Madonna rented a place and so did Bill Gates. I don’t know if either of them are equestrians, but it was rumored that the chopper we saw flying in over the Aero Club every afternoon belonged to Gates, who had rented a house here for the winter.   But until this particular afternoon, I didn’t know that a famous writer also lives here.

“We’re staying here this summer because my boss has another book to write,” Cassie said.

My antenna twitched.  “Your boss is a writer? Of what?”

Cassie looked embarrassed. “Hell if I know. I’ve never read any of her books.”

“What genre?” I asked. “Does she write romance, science fiction, suspense, paranormal, women’s fiction, or what?”

Cassie frowned. “Mystery and suspense, I guess.”

“What’s her name?”

“Tami Hoag.”

I nearly swallowed my tongue. Tami Hoag, like Stephen King, shines in her field. Her writing is tight, her plots are complex, her characters are people we like. “I would love to get a blurb for her for my next book, Ghost Key.” I blurt this and am, frankly, shocked and embarrassed. Never, in thirty years of writing, have I ever been so forward, blunt, and grossly obvious.  And Cassie, gem that she is, tells me to drop her an email and she’ll forward it to Tami.

So I do. And I tell my friend, writer Ed Gorman,  about it and he jokingly says that he would have held Cassie hostage until Tami had to ride to her rescue and give your book a blurb. Ed isn’t kidding and that speaks volumes about the value of a blurb from someone like Tami Hoag.

Stephen King gave The Hunger Games a glowing blurb, and that book went on to become a NYT bestseller and an enormously profitable film. Of course, it helps that the trilogy deserves accolades.

What’s interesting about Hoag is that she’s also an Olympic competitor. That’s part of the reason she employs Cassie. And being a competitor at that level obviously means  you’re serious about what you do. I emailed my request, then later gave Cassie a galley of the book. A few days  later, she came over to me at the dog park and says, “Okay, I gave Tami the galley you gave me and if she doesn’t blurb it I’ll kill her.”

Not long after, she reported that Tami looked at the galley then gestured at the pile of books next to her desk. “You see this? These are all the books my publisher asked me to blurb. I can’t read one more book. I’ve go to finish the book I’m writing.”

What I took away from this whole thing is pretty simple: writers  who are now in the upper one or two percent were once in the lower one or two percent. They are under tremendous pressure to produce something new because these writers are the ones who probably sustain the publishing industry and pay the salaries of the editors who give manuscripts a thumbs up or thumbs down.

I heard a story,  maybe a writers’ urban legend, that when Stephen King visited the office of NAL (Signet, Penguin, lots of imprints) he moved up and down the hall, pointing at this editor, that editor. “I pay your salary and yours and yours…” And this image of King, a master story teller, made me laugh so hard my ribs actually hurt. It’s not even funny. But I can envision King doing that.

The other detail I took away from this experience is that Cassie, Tami Hoag’s horse whisperer, is a really cool woman who understands horses and dogs in ways the rest of us don’t.  When we see her in the afternoons at the dog park, she and Willow, are playing with the blue ball that is the center of his existence right then, in the NOW, and I am reminded that my life isn’t just about writing and publishing. Writers write, artists paint, musicians create, singers sing,  actors act, we all have some creative compulsion that drives us.  But it’s never the sum total of who they are.

… a most amazing parrot!

We don’t see many programs on UFOs in the mainstream media. But since Anderson Cooper’s ‘360’ featured a half-hour segment in late April,  it’s worth analyzing what he presented. The segment was called “Do you Believe in Space Aliens?”

I guess the term ‘space aliens’ was used to distinguish the subject from border-crossing aliens. That’s understandable, but the term also limits the possibility of where UFOs and their alien crew are coming from. Sure, (outer) space is a possibility. But maybe they are inter-dimensional, maybe they are us coming the future. Who knows, maybe they’re from the past, a destroyed high tech culture, ie. Atlantis, that developed time travel. Maybe there is no one answer about who they are or where they are from.

Anderson Cooper’s story on April 24 focused on UFO sightings from 2008 that were witnessed outside of Philadelphia in Bucks County. Anderson invited an eyewitness who explained how she was awakened by her growling dog to discover glowing lights above her house. It was shortly followed by a sprinkling of metallic-like glitter on her tree, making her think “it was snowing in July.” Apparently, she feared being ridiculed later on so she only used her first name, Denise. Actually, the ridicule would begin within minutes while she was on national television.

But first  Cooper introduced Pennsylvania state Mutual UFO Network director John Ventre to talk about what happened to the tree.

Ventre said MUFON sent leaves from the affected tree to two different labs, both of which reported “high levels of magnesium and boron,” two to three times higher than controlled samples detected on neighboring trees. Furthermore, the leaves had produced anthocyanin, which Ventre accurately described as a plant’s natural defense from heat and radiation. But were those levels of anthocyanin excessive or unnatural? And what gives with the elevated magnesium and boron?

As one Internet critic noted: “This is the part where you bring in one of the lab analysts, right? Or a botanist, maybe?” Time to dig deeper into the physical evidence, right? Nope.

Instead, Cooper brings in a couple of abductees, who have nothing to do with the Pennsylvania story, then debunker John Nickell, who dismisses Denise as a misguided person who saw Jupiter shining in her bedroom window.

“So Jupiter dumped stuff on my tree,” Denise wondered, “is that what you’re saying?”

No, Nickell countered, “I expect the stuff on your tree was, probably, you saw some sand or something in the light.”

Right. But there were still a few minutes left, time to find out more about the hard evidence, the boron or the magnesium or the anthocyanin.  But, no, AC brings on a psychic to talk about star families.

Oh, well. Nice try. But the bottom line was–as usual with this subject in the mainstream media–keep it light and entertaining. Don’t get too serious.

All that said, I want to introduce readers to a blogger from the mainstream media, logging on the site of a daily newspaper, about UFOs. It was that log, called De Void, where I first learned about Anderson Cooper’s UFO report. De Void is a web log from the Herald Tribune of Sarasota, Florida, and is written by Billy Cox. I love the sub-title of De Void:  The Mainstream Media’s Lonely UFO Web Log.

Good going, Billy.