The Coconut Wireless

2011-04-14T18:18:00.000-07:00

In the Final Analysis, 23 percent of Americans believe that President Obama was born in Kenya and somebody, quite possibly his wily grandparents, inserted a fake birth announcement in the two major Honolulu newspapers. This startling statistic jumped out at me from the inside back page of the August 2010 issue of Psychology Today.

That was back when the previous poster boy for the “birther” movement, Terrance Larkin, a U.S. Army Lt. Colonel and a medical doctor faced court-marshal for refusing a second tour of duty in Afghanistan. Larkin claimed that President Obama had not produced a birth certificate and therefore could not prove he was the legitimate President. This meant that Larkin was under no obligation to follow Army orders.

In the end, after being touted on the internet as a national hero, Larkin ate crow at his own trial, pleading for leniency. The Army was no place to serve as a political platform, Larkin admitted, and the Army agreed, at which point jurors put Larkin in jail for six months and tossed him out of the service.

Donald Trump dragged up this this fake political issue in his recent bid to become the Republican nominee for President of the United States. As for those who disagree with Obama’s policies, there are plenty of reasons for legitimate debate, about real issues of substance to the nation. Too bad we have heard nothing of substance from The Donald.

Last May, during the Larkin debate, CNN Reporter Anderson Cooper flashed a Hawaiian birth certificate popped onto the screen. There I sat, staring at a familiar document issued by the State of Hawaii Health Department. Since my two sons were born on the Island of Maui, I have several certified copies of their birth certificates in the house, so, if anyone cares to ask, I’ll personally verify that the President’s birth certificate is legitimate.

State of Hawaii birth certificates for my sons have been accepted by public schools, colleges, universities, and the U.S. Government Passport Agency. I am able to order birth certificates for my sons because, as their mother, I am a person who is entitled to order one under the tests set forth under a very common sense provision of Hawaii law which excludes the general public from requesting anybody’s birth certificate and doing weird things with it, for instance passing themselves off as someone else, for instance, the president.

If Obama has no Hawaii birth certificate, just how is it that he could have gone to school in the United States, been admitted to Columbia University and Harvard, served in the United States Senate, and traveled outside the country on a United States passport?

If Obama has no Hawaii birth certificate, then my sons have no birth certificates. If the President of the United States has no personal privacy, then my sons have none, and neither do the millions of native born Hawaiians.

As for Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, I do hope that the powers-that-be in the GOP will drag The Donald into the boardroom and give him a little of his own medicine: “Donald Trump, you are fired.”

I'm looking for love in the ole' salt shaker

2011-04-08T12:09:00.000-07:00

http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/07/why-french-fries-are-good-comfort-food/?xid=newsletter-daily

Don't Miss the Naples Authors and Books Festival This Weekend

2011-04-04T08:52:00.000-07:00

http://authorsandbooksfestival.org/2010/12/book-as-event/

Here's a book festival with something for everyone, and it's coming up this weekend. Aside from a two day slate of workshops, there's a wonderful Saturday luncheon at one of Naples' premier restaurants with the lively Nancy Cohen as keynote speaker, two days of workshops, pitch sessions with editors and literary agents and an evening street fair for attending authors. There's a mystery authors panel on Sunday morning, where we're talking about the nuts and bolts of the most popular genre in the nation, and I'd love to see you there.

Even if you can't make the conference, take the virtual tour through the website which offers tips, quips and suggestions to help you make the most of your writing career.

First Day of Spring

2011-03-21T06:36:00.000-07:00

The otter slinks past my window, tail curled high, in a salute to the sky.

Southwest Florida Book Festival-- See You There!

2011-03-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

Southwest Florida Reading Festival Festival Authors

Got books? Posters? Name Badge? Reivew? Bookmarks? Tape? Oh, yes, do not forget, never forget a pen to sign copies with.

And so it goes, I'm getting ready once again for that grand book fair, the Southwest Florida Reading Festival, tomorrow, Saturday, March 18, Harborside Hall, downtown Fort Myers. I've taken a perch in the Marketplace. Do stop by and say hello where I'll be signing my suspense novels One Big Itch and The Don Juan Con--if I haven't sneaked off to hear one of my favorite authors giving a talk, that is.

Nelson DeMille and Linda Fairstein are headliners, this year a thriller writer and a mystery author, and as it happens the Gulf Coasting Magazine of the News-Press in Fort Myers thought to inquire of the lovely librarians who organize this event just how it is that they select the authors who are invited to speak. The lineup this year also includes J.A. Jance, Ridley Pearson Heather Graham, Mary Jane Clark, and our own Prudy Taylor Board.

Guess what? The Librarians look at their own checkout numbers and pick the most popular novelists available. So why is mystery at the top of the list? Because they are the most sought after books in the library, that's why.

One of the very great pleasures of a newly published author such as myself is to meet and chat with the most famous names in the business. I met Linda Fairstein a few years ago at SleuthFest in Fort Lauderdale, one of the greatest mystery writers' conferences in the nation. Fairstein is a mystery writer after my own heart. She laces her books with historical touches. One of my favorites is Entombed, about Edgar Allen Poe and the house he occupied along the Hudson River in upstate New York. "All these things intrigue me," Fairstein told Tropicalia: "I'm not interested in car chases and shootouts. I want to come away smarter. I like to learn something in the year it takes me to write a book."

Right on, Linda. Besides that, I have to confide what she whispered to me, when I first met her. "I'll buy your book she said. "I remember those days when I started out just how hard it was to sell my books."

The Caped Superintendent Myth Plagues Schools

2011-03-10T05:15:00.000-08:00

How are we going to solve the education crisis? Just throw money at the next superintendent and this talented creature will create magic in the classroom. Since I happen to be a bi-coastal bird with one webbed foot in a southwest Florida metropolis and the other on a dinky village in the San Juan Islands of Washington, I see the same story over and over in school districts I happen to know about.

Whether a large district of a small one, our communities care about education, but too often school boards fall prey to the siren song of head-hunters who cheer them on, with expensive and disasterous results. A wealthy community in Collier County, Florida home to the extravagant community of Naples is a case in point, which I felt it was worthy of attention.

I'll venture to say that you, dear reader, have seen this very thing going on on in a community you know and love and so I offer this column, which appeared in the Fort Myers News-Press this morning as a cautionary tale.

http://www.news-press.com/article/20110310/OPINION/103100362/1015/Collier-schools-pay-big-superintendent-mistake

Goodwill - the new Saks?

2011-01-09T06:53:00.000-08:00

Recession-era reverse snobbery it may be, but these days it’s just fine, thank you, to brag about the new/old tank top you snagged at the consignment shop for $4.95. Even if you are heading out for a winter cruise, you may as well skip the trip to Macy’s or Saks, for resort wear, since the hot look from designers such as Tory Burch has been filched right out of the consignment-store aisles, or so it seems to me.

Take a look for yourself at:

http://www.toryburch.com/lookbook_resort2010_runway.aspx

Wonder is our need today, not information

2010-12-22T15:11:00.000-08:00

So said Elia Kazan, actor director, playwright, and novelist. Kazan was famous for his visual daring, and so I would imagine he’d be blown away by the stellar performance of the moon, our most versatile celestial actor, pulling off a disciplined performance, a full, stately and slow lunar eclipse, the likes of which our world has not seen in some 350 years, and it happened in the wee hours Tuesday morning December 21, ushering in the winter solstice.

The best seating for the grand spectacle in our backyard was in the darkest corner, beneath the Australian pine tree, hidden away from glaring street lamps and the white reflections of Christmas decorations floating in the lake. We crept there with our chairs and passed the binoculars round and round and put out cell calls to interested parties and shot frame after frame of the action, much to the disgust of an anhinga whose single loud squawk surely meant, “down in front.”

As the silver moon turned the deep shade of an overripe tangerine, clearly visible to the naked eye, a deep orange blush, an expression of love from the world’s shyest guy.

The supporting cast was wonderful. The big dipper, usually so full of himself, lay prostrate, bowl overturned in a posture of complete and worshipful submission. Just offstage, Orion, the archer, served as a heavenly impresario saluting the moon’s greatest performance with a silent nod and a still wave of his arm.

Athlete Wannabe Dips Toe in Plasma Injection Pool

2010-12-20T08:25:00.000-08:00

There I sat in a hospital bed staring at a syringe about a third full of a fizzy pink substance; in color and texture it looked like a raspberry snow cone. The syringe was a result of what I had given consent for my podiatrist to do: I was having my own enriched blood plasma platelets injected into my foot, a cutting edge medical technology.

“Isn’t this what famous athletes do?” I asked the nurse who was tucking a heated blanket around my icy feet.

“All sorts of athletes have it done for their injuries,” she replied. “Tiger Woods had it in his knee before his big tournaments this year. Pittsburgh Steelers Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu did it before the Steelers won the Super Bowl. It’s a treatment that speeds up the healing process.”

Blood plasma taken from my arm was spun in a centrifuge right there in the Gladiolus Surgery Center in Fort Myers, FL. The enhanced blood platelets were separated out and were to be re-injected into the wound site, in my case the incision where an arthritic bunion at the base of my toe was to about to be removed. The big toe would be realigned by means of a titanium screw. The payoff for me was the stabbing pains to my foot would stop.

The plasma injection marshals the body’s natural defenses in muscles and tendons where there’s not much of a natural blood supply to begin with. The platelets, which look like tiny sponges under a microscope, catalyze tissue growth. Though more research needs to be done on this procedure, the fact that my insurance covered the procedure was an indication to me that I might hope for positive results, even though there’s been an aura of scandal attached to this procedure in the world of professional sports.

The New York Times, Scientific American, and the scandal watch website, Steroid Nation have all reported on rich plasma injections (PCP).If an athlete has PCP done in to repair an injury, as Woods did before playing The Masters Tournament at Augusta Georgia, then the procedure is legit. If an athlete has it simply to boost performance, as various Olympic runners and Tour de France cyclists have been accused of doing, then it isn’t.

Where I was concerned, I figured that a side benefit of having a rich platelet procedure was bragging rights. I hoped it might enhance the status of a laggard writer among the star athletes of my extended family. A pencil pusher who does a few yoga stretches and leisurely walks with the Intrepeds, our ladies’ hiking group in Deer Harbor can’t be taken seriously in my end of the gene pool.

Brother Dennis Kincaid climbs the major peaks in North America to keep in shape. A summer or two ago he visited me on Orcas Island after summiting the 22,841-ft Aconcagua, ‘Sentinal of Stone’, in the Andes range of Argentina,highest peak in the Americas. I just had to keep up when Dennis did a Sunday stroll up the 1519-ft Turtleback Mountain on Orcas. Next day I collapsed while Brother Dearest put in eighteen miles or so on his mountain bike.

On the Williams’ side of the family tree, ‘Jamaica Bill’ Williams of LTU Pub in Negril is a disciplined runner who was training for a 13-mile marathon when I saw him a few weeks ago. His younger sister Christine Shaw in Boston has been a competitive gymnast her whole life. Chris is now involved in rigorous training so that she can be called upon to judge in the Olympic level competitions.

The height of my own athletic endeavors was a climb of Mt. Adams in south central Washington State, waaay more years ago than I care to admit. A Mt. Adams climb is a useful brag, however. The 12,281-foot Adams is closely aligned with its more lethal Cascades Range volcanoes, Hood and Rainier, which have a nasty habit of offing experienced climbers on a regular basis.

Mt.Adams has a gentle slope, a walkers’ hike, a very long, exhausting hike, and I was an under-trained last-minute substitute among several hundred serious hikers who made a mass climb of it, in the way the Japanese gather en mass to walk up Mt. Fuji. We awakened at midnight, summited at dawn, the miners’ helmets on our heads snaking up the mountain, a magnificent sight this was.

I’ll admit right now that I never would have summited at all but for the coaching of Everest class moutaineer and expedition photographer Steve Marts, hired by my editor to see that I got off Adams alive and lived to write about it for Cascades Magazine in Seattle. Marts refused photo credits for the assignment lest his serious climber pals laugh him out of the club. My editor, as I now recall, was the guy who bailed on the hike at the last minute; he didn’t dare leave me to fend for myself on Adams.

As for the plasma injection? I slept right through it. Having this procedure, while not exactly a piece of cake, is more of a strawberry snow cone number. However, my podiatrist insisted that his traditional treatment rules still apply. Stay off the foot for 72hours, apply ice, take pain meds if necessary, remain bandaged for four to six weeks, and hobble around in a rigid boot for at least three weeks.

One Bank Robber Jailed

2010-12-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

Just why our Bank Robber was in jail by nightfall, I can't say for sure but the reverse 911 call to everyone with a land line in the area may have inspired the tip police got as to where he was hiding out.

Meanwhile the hard core News-Press followers were bitching about why the 911 call description was not more specific. "Facial hair" didn't cut it with them. I don't know what they wanted: moustache, Van Dyke?

However, since I'm new to the alerts, I have to say that just receiving a call was amazing in itself.

Here's a creative touch in policing

2010-12-09T03:59:00.000-08:00

At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday the 911 dispatch for the Lee Co. FL sheriff's department notifies us in a recorded telephone call that a B of A bank has just been robbed. Be on the lookout for a white male, glasses, facial hair, striped sweater, 30ish, ball cap, etc. Though it was unlikely any but an idiotic robber would turn down our street, which is a dead end several miles away, I rushed out and notified what neighbors I could find.

This a.m. I thumbed through the "paper" paper (yes, I still love newsprint) but the story isn't in today's version, I did find it on the News-Press website and I'm high on the sheriff's department for such an innovative move.

Uncle Sam Wants You, Mr. & Mrs. Rich

2010-12-08T07:39:00.000-08:00

In a pragmatic move that has offended many in his own party, President Obama has agreed to hold his nose and approve a measure that would ensure that the Bush tax cuts are to be extended for everyone for another two years, even to the group earning a quarter million a year and up. One would think these people could afford to pay a few taxes, since it is a fact that 70 percent of the wealth of this nation is concentrated in the hands of a mere ten percent of the population, and those making $250,000 and up are closely aligned with the richest three percent of the population who collectively control about forty percent of total wealth.

With the exception of Switzerland, no other industrialized nation on earth has a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of so few, or so says Professor William Domhoff in his exhaustive study, Who Rules America: Wealth, Income and Power. Domhoff’s website offers an exhaustive accounting of the wealth of our nation as compared with the rest of the world.

The richest people in America do collectively pull their weight where income tax is concerned, however. The top ten percent of Americans, about 1.2 million people, pay close to sixty percent of all federal taxes, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans pay around four percent. In the last decade, the upper tiers of middle class taxpayers have edged up in tax burdens, while the burden on the poor has been lightened.

From a practical standpoint, however, if you pass along a tax cut for the individuals who have been paying a chunk, then you raise the federal deficit, and it’s amazing that the Republicans who came into this latest congress, voted in on a platform of cutting the deficit, have now succeeded in raising it.

Republicans insist, however, that taxing the ultra wealthy is wrong. Wealthy people are the engineers of job creation, they insist, even though the evidence we do have suggests otherwise. In 2004, for example, where the economy was rocking along, overall income increased by 27 percent, although 33 percent of the increase went to the top one percent of the population.

When the economy crashed, by July 2009, the median wealth of the nation dropped by an astounding 37 percent, while the top one percent of households took a much smaller hit, about 11 percent.

In the battle to keep the economy from further deteriorating , the government gets two dollars back for every dollar passed along to the jobless, who must spend every dime just to keep going. The wealthy may choose to put their tax cut in a savings account. This is the mantra of the US Congressional Budget Office, which is said to be non-partisan.

Obama went along with the Republicans this time around because the tax cuts for wealthy are tied to the extension of unemployment benefits to the hard core jobless, and other measures designed to stimulate the economy, or at least prop it up. Obama is wily enough to realize that Republicans couldn’t very well hand tax cuts to the Sag Harbor set, while leaving some fifteen million people jobless in the Great Recession without a dollar to buy a doughnut.

Let’s not forget people were thrown out of work by the fiduciary recklessness of the Wall Street traders, over-leveraged hedge funds, and the lame brains in government—including those in elected offices, not the least Mr. Oracle at the Fed--who were supposed to be minding the economic store. Cut benefits to the jobless now, it’s revolution time. Suppose a few million jobless people start a march on Washington? On TV this would definitely not look good.

This tax cut extension will last for another two years, which I believe is enough time for the wealthy to prove their mettle. Rather than handing money carte blanche to the Gucci bags, tax cuts for the wealthy should be done in the form of tax credits contingent on the creation of a new business or by putting someone to work.

Extending tax benefits in the form of credits to the rich would create a statistically valid paper trail. That way voters could make rational decisions about the trickle down theory of wealth, which has its vehement detractors.

Let the wealthy have their tax cuts, so long as they prove they are spending them. Hiring is hiring, whether it’s money spent on an additional trainer for the horse farm, a captain for the yacht that’s been put in mothballs, or a personal trainer to work off the anxiety created when one’s hedge fund collapsed. Uncle Sam Needs You, Mr. & Mrs. Rich, to get out on the front lines and put America back to work.

What's Next for the Barefoot Bandi? Jailhouse Flip-flops

2010-07-11T08:49:00.001-07:00

From the San Juan Islands here in the Pacific Northwest to the Bahamas in the Caribbean is a stretch, but the Barefoot Bandit had made the trip big-time, sticking to form. Steal a plane, crash land it, break into houses, hide in plain sight, island hop in stolen boats...But this time the word was out, the police in the Bahamas had word from the FBI and the local islanders recalled seeing him bathing in the bay...lurking in the woods...buying a gal a drink in a bar...When a 40 foot boat went missing the authorities on an adjoining island had a watch out, nabbing Colton as he attempted to dock his stolen boat around 3 a.m.
Meanwhile, this wily and capable bandit enjoyed his erstwhile fame as his victims found themselves basking in a perverse sort of glory. For instance, the a.p.photo flashed around the world this morning is from the Whole Foods Market in Eastsound WA, here on Orcas Island. Whole Foods baked the blueberry cheesecake Colton loved so much he robbed the market not once but three times.

Our Town Mayor Could Prove to Be a Real Dog

2010-07-02T14:13:00.001-07:00

Orcas Island, WA—A hairy political battle for Mayor of Eastsound is being fought tooth and claw here in the San Juan Islands as candidates get in their final purrs and moos. Official voting wraps up tomorrow, following the Fourth of July Parade.

The ballot boxes around town are filling up. At the rate of $1 per vote, this is one political race where money talks. There are no bothersome residency restrictions to contend with and you may stuff the ballot box with as much cash as you want. Not one of these incorruptible candidates will ever make hay with the funds. One hundred percent of the proceeds go to a most worthy cause, the Children’s House School. Vote online at www.oich.org

From a political standpoint, the burning question is: will Eastsound go to the dogs once again? Retiring mayor Dakota, a gentle giant of a yellow lab, has put out a woof on it. The sleek black lab Clara, has a big campaign budget judging from her artful signage out on the streets. However, political pundits around the hamlet are saying that the ticket might be split among dog lovers due to the entry of the popular and well mannered border collie Lucky Lu, whose distinguished countenance and calm demeanor has graced many a previous Fourth of July Parade. Lu has it in her genes to round up the votes.

The cat people are behind Tractor. Insiders say Tractor is not nearly as ferocious as she looks; Tractor can be cute and playful, although, being a cat, she’s sure to run the town with an iron paw. Tractor is the true middle of the road candidate, her backers say, appealing to both Democats and Republifelines.

Not to be overlooked is the woolliest candidate in the race, Bossy, who is not nearly as sheepish as she appears. Bossy will give you the coat off her back and that is a fact say her defenders. Bossy’s generosity may well be what Eastsound needs. She’s the true candidate for these hard times and she’ll never pull the wool over her constituents’ eyes.

Then there’s April, a perennial favorite and also the most mature candidate in the race. For close to twenty years, April has been queen of a huge field overlooking Eastsound. April deserves the Mayor’s title because she’s the only contender who actually lives inside the city limits say the traditional voters. April is not only udderly incorruptible, but also will never milk the public. Vote April and the bull stops with her.

My feeling is, this race will remain an extremely close call unless it goes national, whereupon that huge political network might throw the race to April on the strength of her natural ability to process methane gas, which could be more cheaply turned into bio fuel than ethanol.. You know the organization I’m talking about: Mooove on.org. Haven’t decided whom to vote for? Neither have I. However, I’m not above trading favors and voting for critter in the race, so if you’d care to pick up one of my hot mystery novels at Booth 24 at the Orcas Historical Museum fair tomorrow between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. on the Eastsound Green, I’m not above trading favors.

The Barefoot Bandit Leaves Black Footprint Over Orcas

2010-05-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

Meet me at the Orcas Book Exchange, 274 A Street, Eastsound, WA from noon to whenever today, where, among other things, I’ll be signing my mystery novels and trying to solve a real mystery.

We’re taking tips as to the whereabouts of our local teen rebel outlaw, Colton Harris Moore, aka The Barefoot Bandit. This lanky 6’5” kid’s been stealing everything from eggs out from under hens to Cirrus airplanes, and leaving outsized footprints around as calling cards, so that I for one woke up the other morning viewing a very large black blot in the shadow on my ceiling, which organized itself into a footprint. This brat is invading my subconscious. This is ridiculous!

I recently arrived on island to find that my own neighborhood had been buzzed by a chopper, searched by tracking dogs and police, in a midnight raid for Moore. He made the mistake of breaking into a rental house right on Cayou Valley Road, whose owner lives across the street, and who happened to notice odd light coming from the residence. This mini shock and awe campaign yielded nothing but signs that Colton Moore had been in the house reading newspapers and eating popcorn by candlelight.

Shades of Vietnam, said the war vet in a letter to The Island’s Sounder. He’s now president of our owners’ association. While the flashing lights and barking dogs were entertaining, maybe it is overkill when we’re talking about an 18-year-old thief, and not some ax murderer, my neighbor said. What was needed, he said, was more comprehensive police work. This is not likely to happen however, since the recession has left the sheriff’s department seriously under-manned and under-funded.

Mostly the stories I’ve picked up since are in the LOL category: two kids who were trying to claim a reward for the bandit were said to have made a citizen’s arrest on two suspicious characters walking down North Beach Road in the wee hours of the night. These youngsters performed a citizen’s arrest on two armed federal agents. Could it really be true that the escaping bandit sprayed the deputy chasing him with bear spray? Is it possible that he was camping in the woods right behind the sheriff’s substation?

All we do know is that The Barefoot Bandit has a Face Book fan group some 30,000 strong, and various publications such as Outside and Rolling Stone have written up his exploits. The movie option has been sold. The Colton Moore tee shirt is available for sale online. ABC TV has interviewed the owner of The Homegrown market, who has been robbed by Colton not once but three times.

Where media attention goes, commerce follows. The blueberry cheesecake Colton ate at The Homegrown during the course of one of his robberies is now said to be the most popular cheesecake on the island. The family whose chicken coop Moore raided made a cast of the bandit’s footprint and sold it on E-Bay for a tidy sum, or so I have heard. Enterprising teens at Orcas High organized a high school business class project to sell tee shirts to raise money for victims of the Bandit’s crime. I’m sorry to say this venture raised an outcry on the island and was shut down.

The Outside article quotes Colton’s mom. She’s one proud lady, proud that Colton managed to fly expensive airplanes with no lessons but computer simulation and reading stolen flight manuals. Not to mention that said planes were crash landed, violated closed airspace, caused upwards of a half million dollars damage in at least one case, that sort of thing. Is it possible that Colton is acting out mama’s own delusions?

Moore’s the quintessential impoverished kid who fell through the cracks of the justice system, or at least slipped through the window of a halfway house where he was serving out a sentence for scores of petty crimes he committed on his home island, Comano, before moving on to Orcas, where he’s knocked over a bank ATM, repeatedly robbed a popular tavern of thousands of dollars, eluding police with a C.U. signature scrawled in his barefoot prints. Why the bare feet? I haven’t a clue, except Colton likes to get into buildings from the roof and maybe he climbs better in bare feet.

Mama Moore claims to be in touch with her son. In long conversations they share a fantasy that he’ll make it big and they’ll go off to the Bahamas or somewhere and live in the grand style. Yes, she might have been poor but she made sure Colton had all the right toys, she said. Right toys, wrong attitude. Where’s the mother’s plea to her son to turn himself in before he gets seriously hurt, if not killed?

Meanwhile, The Orcas Book Exchange is also overshadowed with a signature Barefoot Bandit footprint. Owner Don Yerly had no idea that Moore was scrambling over the top of the Main Street building Yerly was moving out of. The Bandit was a getaway run as Yearly worked below packing books prior to moving to his new location.

So what is the appeal of the Barefoot Bandit? I asked Don. Colton Harris Moore is no Robin Hood after all, he’s an outright thief, and an outsized one, enjoying his own self-aggrandizing pranks.

“The Barefoot Bandit opens up the possibility that a lower class guy with few opportunities can pull off large scale mischief and get away with it,” Yerly said. “It’s usually rich people with a lot of resources who pull off this sort of stuff,” Don said, and I believe Don has a point.

I believe The Barefoot Bandit is a Pacific Northwest homegrown version of the California celebrity wannabes who hung around with Paris Hilton and her jet set pals, followed their movements and then begin breaking into their homes and robbing them.

If you can’t be one of them, then you get even by taking their stuff and selling it so that you can live as well as they do. You are not then simply a wannabe, you’ve become an ought-to-be. Until you get caught, that is, and are retired to a jail cell, no longer a wannabe or an ought-to-be but simply forgotten, and has-been, which no doubt will be the fate of the Barefoot Bandit. Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen soon enough.

Prof Who Knows His Heat is Big on One Big Itch

2010-05-13T07:47:00.000-07:00

This is a very well written and entertaining murder mystery about a Hawaiian P.I. The “flavor” is spiced-up by the inclusion of the “Honolulu locals” perspective in the story line, colloquial language, and descriptions. You will feel like you live there – and not a tourist. Highly recommended!

Ralph L. Webb
Professor Emeritus, Penn State University
Website http://mne.psu.edu/webb

This Time the Dragon Wins

2010-05-02T11:08:00.001-07:00

As I munched on plates of fajitas with my friends the Minnesota Twins pitcher and his family who happen to staying next door, the talk, unaccountably, turned to dragons. Or maybe not so oddly at all, given a week that for me was filled with visions of a Komodo dragon in Florida—a literary nightmare.

A female Komodo dragon has made her debut on the New York Times bestseller list thanks to the recent publication of Deep Shadow by Florida novelist Randy Wayne White, starring the nerdy but resourceful marine biologist Doc Ford. Madame Komodo is accompanied in the story by a royal court of lesser monitor lizards, who at six feet or so, are startling enough, as I happen to know, having once encountered one in my own sedate Fort Myers backyard.

As I consumed more than my share of my neighbor’s wonderful fajitas, she recounted how she took her tots, ages 3 and 7, to see a very cute new DreamWorks release, “How to Train Your Dragon.” The following morning came a wire story in the Fort Myers News-Press announcing that a new monitor lizard has been identified, lurking in the canopy of the dense northern forest of the Philippine Island of Luzon.

I also happened to be working a weekend book event with my friend Sandy Lender, author of the amazing Choices Meant for Gods and Choices Meant for Kings fantasy novels where a scaly, bird-sized dragon by night turns princely lover by day. “Sometimes you just want the dragon to win,” is Sandy’s mantra of her work, and I believe Sandy has neatly pegged our passion for—and wariness of--assorted denizens of the reptile tribe. The dragons in our literature, not to mention those in our zoos and nature preserves, are at least as endearing to us as they are appalling.

On a Pacific crossing with my husband in our sailboat back in the mid-seventies, I once spent my watery weeks afloat in the deep ocean devouring In the Wake of the Sea-Serpents by the Belgian French naturalist Bernard Heuvelmans, father of the science of unknown creatures, which he dubbed ‘cryptozoology’. Heuvalmans’ compelling accounts of Komodo dragons, bizarre but documented sightings of strange creatures at sea, and the possible identity of the Loch Ness Monster, took on deep meaning; we’d had a very close encounter with a monster whale at the time, and so I very much empathized with Heuvalmans’ reasoned attempts to sort sea myths from reality. Consequently, once I realized Randy Wayne White’s novel starred put a Komodo dragon in a starring role, I lapped up his novel in a couple of all-night readathons.

Deep Shadow takes us beneath Florida’s fragile surface, honeycombed with underground rivers and unstable limestone caves. Doc Ford and his friends dive into a sinkhole of a central Florida lake in search of a plane gone missing in 1959. The B-26 in question is rumored to be loaded with Cuban gold. The lost plane is one of four cargo planes bearing the contents of the Cuban national treasury that ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista supposedly sent from Havana to Tampa, the better to finance his exile. Meanwhile Fidel Castro assumed the dictatorship of a bankrupt country. This might explain why Fidel, sans gold, has been left to dress in nothing but serviceable khakis to this day.

As for Doc Ford, the treasure hunt proves to be the least of his problems. His buddy and polar opposite the bud-addled Buddhist, Tomlinson, and a tough Native American teen with a cool head are trapped in an underwater dive accident when a limestone bridge collapses. This pair eventually claw their way to the underside of a fetid lair of a creature you definitely don’t want to meet in the dark—or the daylight for that matter, a Komodo dragon. The world’s largest lizard, known for halitosis of epic proportions and a lethal bite, is a holdover from the dinosaur era. The two desperate divers with empty air tanks take turns sucking in the stench of the Komodo’s nest, in no position to complain about air quality at that particular moment.

The Komodo dragon is named for the remote Indonesian island where its tribe thrives to the tune of some six thousand critters; all of Komodo is now a wildlife park. As White points out, a Komodo monster might well flourish in Florida’s lush and swampy countryside. Fortunately, outside the pages of White’s thriller, Floridians have yet to see a live Komodo in the wild.

We make do with such cheap thrills as a monster Burmese python some sixteen feet long, weighing in at some four hundred pounds, seized from its owner in the Central Florida city of Apopka after it got loose once too often. The town of Marathon, sprawled the length of a half dozen Florida Keys, has its own python patrol doing its best to keep down a burgeoning Burmese python population hailing from the Everglades to the north, where some 30,000 of this non-native species threatens the ecosystem, though the population may have been decimated due to the record breaking cold winter Florida suffered through.

Meanwhile, back in the menacing world of Deep Shadow, murderous characters of the human variety arrive at the dive site. As darkness falls, weird hissing noises arise. The high powered lights that the superbly equipped Ford has brought along paint a pack of carnivorous monitor lizards against a background of gnarly cypress trees. The monitors are stalking the humans, looking like “pit bulls with scales.” The eyes glittering in the dark send chills down the spines of all the two-legged observers, the good guys and the evil types alike. Not to mention the reader’s, I might add.

Monitor lizards in Florida are one of the non-native species turned loose in roadside ditches by pet owners or animal traders who perhaps tired of their feistiness, or maybe their feed bills. The monitors have multiplied, there’s no doubt about that. One such monitor that I met up close and personal was flashing his tail around our Fort Myers neighborhood last fall. Our cluster of condos situated on a narrow bridge of land between the Caloosahatchee River and a lake, is well stocked with various lap-sized pooches, which might, on a bad day, serve as a monitor’s appetizer. This is why our owners’ association sought a judicious way to get rid of him.

If you’ve ever watched a three inch gecko on the finial of a lampshade, warming himself by light bulb as I have, then blow him up a couple of dozen times, turn him as green as the lakeside cattails, that’s what our “Monty Monitor” looked like. In the peaceful daylight of a Florida morning, “Monty” appeared to be just about as menacing as a beanbag monster straight off the shelves of Toys R Us. Unfortunately, however, Monty was having a grand time flaunting condo rules. He refused to prance into the progressively larger traps set out for him.

One afternoon, an alarmed neighbor called, warning me that Monty was right outside my door. I found him lolling lakeside in broad daylight, as much at home as if he were paying the maintenance fees. A team of licensed hunters arrived in a pickup truck with the intent of moving Monty to a more suitable locale, which, I now realize, might well have been a sinkhole of a lake somewhere in Central Florida, the setting for Doc Ford’s encounter with Monty’s kin. Suppose Monty went wild and joined a pack of his ravenous cousins? By the light of our sunny morning, our Monty certainly didn’t resemble any pit bull with scales, but in the deep shadows of swampy darkness, who knows?

Monty’s thick skin warded off a tranquilizer dart that was supposed to have lulled him into submission. Monty became too agitated to let a snare loop his neck, whereupon the frustrated game handlers dispatched him with a round of shots from a light rifle, a twenty two caliber, if I recall correctly. The faces of my neighbors gathered to watch Monty’s roundup registered shock and dismay. All we wanted was our dragon to win—or at least to draw a new lease on life.

In Deep Shadow, the monitor lizard pack soon takes a backseat to a truly scary creature, a Komodo dragon, a monster of some thirteen feet that swims like a heat seeking missile, has the snaggle teeth of a shark, and a lethal bite. Madame Komodo was perhaps given her size by dint of literary license, but White is a careful researcher. Doc Ford knows that an Indonesian Komodo at ten feet is a large one; however, if I recall my Heuvelmans correctly, there is a biological rule of thumb that a given member of a species may be half again the size of its normal members and is classified as a monster.

Madam Komodo of White’s novel is a true monster, worthy of her adversaries—or at least of Doc Ford’s murderous enemies. Ford turns the Komodo’s ability to see infrared light into an asset, whereupon Madam Komodo becomes dragon turned defender, winning big time; or at least she gains a new lease on life.

As for that new Philippine dragon among us, it bears a royal sounding name: Northern Sierra Madre Forest Monitor Lizard. This six-foot black and gold lovely weighs in at about twenty two pounds. Sierra’s home at the top of the forest canopy explains how this elusive creature stayed out of the record books for so long; rumors of this new monitor’s existence swirled about in biological circles for at least a decade. Unlike the Komodo, and the common monitors such as Monty, Sierra happens to be a fruit eater. This beautiful creature is apt to show up as a cuddly beanbag on the shelves of Toys R Us, but, unlike Madam Komodo, is unlikely to star in a thriller anytime soon.

Ten Rules for Writing times Ten Fine Writers Equals...

2010-03-02T02:21:00.000-08:00

You cannot love your writing if stuck with the income tax. Get an accountant and get on with it. That's one of the rules. Oooops. The Tax Man Cometh; I'm struggling with those bloody numbers "write" now. Yes I have an accountant, but the accountant wants stuff organized. She gets hissy if you hand her a shoebox full of receipts. At any rate, this chorus of advice on writing from famous writers gathered by The Guardian, UK is a bracing tonic, I find. One writer here says never write on any computer that is connected to the internet. That's excellent advice.

Join professional writer's orgs, says another, which I also recommend, and frankly, I'm blogging this courtesy of NINC, a prestigious org for multi-published authors, in which I managed to wangle a membership on the strength of my relatively paltry production. Most of the members have around twenty or so books to their credit and they'll blog around for awhile about stuff like tipping and serving lemons, and then post something great, such as:

Want to be a writer? Read this:

http://tinyurl.com/ygzq42z

Massacre Bay Bill--Aloha to a Friend and a Reader for All Seasons

2010-02-22T14:51:00.000-08:00

Massacre Bay Bill was a fine neighbor and friend of Bill’s and mine on Orcas, one of the American San Juan Islands. Just south of Vancouver B.C., home to the Winter Olympics now splashing the grandeur of the Pacific Northwest all over TV—that’s where the San Juans happen to be, and as it happens there are so many Bills in my life that M.B. Bill’s devoted companion Anne and I couldn’t keep all the Bills straight. We took to naming our various Bills for pieces of geography. “Massacre Bay Bill,” our neighbor, was one of the “Bill” trio. The others are my husband, “Cayou Valley Bill,” and his first born son, “Negril Bill” in Jamaica.

“Massacre Bay Bill,” who passed away Friday, was a very accomplished person, who at one point arrived in California fresh out of college with a couple of buddies. Forty years ago? Fifty? M. B.Bill was a contemporary guy. He kept up with the times, and so it never occurred to me to ask. At any rate M.B. Bill and his pals were so broke when they arrived in Los Angeles that they managed to scrape together enough spare change to buy a can of soup, so they flipped a coin to decide who would eat it. I never did find out who won the toss, and now, sadly, I never will. By the time I met M. B.Bill, he’d founded a thriving business and passed it along to his sons. He enjoyed many successful real estate ventures and had successfully conquered some demons of his own along the way. What I appreciated most about M. B. Bill was that he was never far from his next read. If M.B. Bill wasn’t watching a ball game or out fishing, he could be found in his study engrossed in another book.

I’m one of those writers who thrive on input from readers and M. B. Bill was a reader of eclectic tastes, whose opinion I valued. After I finished a draft of my third novel, One Big Itch, I passed it along to him. When he didn’t volunteer anything about it, I figured I was in trouble. I finally asked him what he thought. Then came that little grin, the small laugh, and the bald statement of the facts: “I got lost in it,” he said. “There were all these suspects and I couldn’t figure out whodunnit.” That was another thing I valued about Massacre Bay Bill. He never minced words.

Well, if you’ve outsmarted a reader as sophisticated as Massacre Bay Bill, you’ve lost most of your audience, or so I concluded. I changed the story, naming the suspect early on, leaving the proof of the case as the mystery to be resolved. Now that I’m whacking away at that thicket of images that somehow has to be shaped into novel number four, I’m at a loss. Where’s Massacre Bay Bill? What would he say? Aloha, to you Bill, I’m forever grateful for your help and I pray that on those rainy days in paradise you’ll find yourself yet another great read.

Capybera Jerky - Not here in time for the Super Bowl

2010-02-03T08:05:00.000-08:00

News Flash: The Latin American nation of Bolivia plans to export capybara jerky to neighboring Venezuela, which considers the meat of the world’s largest rodent something of a delicacy.

Capybara jerky is a Bolivian export plan to find a sustainable income for indigenous communities in the country’s eastern lowlands. A group called the Friends of Nature Foundation is spearheading this project. The Friends believe that somewhere between 200 and 500 capybara can be harvested every year while maintaining a sustainable capybara herd, or tribe, or whatever you call a bunch of oversized rats, so don’t figure on finding this delicacy in the snack food section of Walmart in time for Super Bowl Sunday.

However, the story reminded me of one of the tales told to me by Kathleen
“Misti” Wilcox. Misti is one of my editors and also a friend of many years standing. I was delighted that Misti took over the cooking in our household for the summer while she helped me launch my third novel, One Big Itch.

Misti arrived at our summer home base in the San Juan Islands with a truckload of gear, including her private stash of exotic spices and kitchen paraphernalia. Soon Misti will be launch her food blog, She Drives with Knives, a blog that can’t happen soon enough as far as I am concerned. Misti is full of entertaining tales. She’s a gutsy world traveler and a fine cook and Misti happens to be the only person I know who has not only eaten capybara, but cooked one.

A mature capybara weights about 130 pounds, Misti tells me, and it resembles an enormous shaggy guinea pig. Misti, whose former husband was a project director of the World Wildlife Fund operations in Latin America, was once faced with inventing a capybara stew in order to feed a passel of hungry scientists who were working in the forbidding lowland country of Venezuela, Los Llanos, a vast rolling lowland which lies at the foothills of the Andes mountain range to the west, and is drained by the Orinoco river. In the dry season, daytime temperatures hover around 110 degrees. The whole territory has the desiccated smell of one vast bouillon cube Misti says, which strikes me as the type of metaphor only a committed chef would come up with.

The rugged llanero people, Venezuelan cowboys, also have canoes outside their huts, Misti said, which she thought was totally bizarre, until she found out that in the wet season Los Llanos floods, the primitive roads disappear in the deluge. Canoes and--not horses-become the main transportation.

As for the capybara, these huge rodents spend half of their time wallowing in ponds, where they also choose to do their mating dance, Misti said. It was for this reason that in the 16^th century, the Catholic Church ruled that the capybara is a fish, allowing capybara consumption during Lent. Possible starvation of the native population might well have had something to do with this timely decree.

How to cook a capybara? First you have to get rid of the fishy taste, Misti said. “I learned from one of the native women to rub the meat all over with lemon juice.” Misti then winged it by putting the meat into an enormous pot, filling that with liberal quantities of beer laced with every kind of spice she could find, ginger, mustard, and Chinese spices, and stewing it for hours.

What does capybara taste like?

“Not like chicken,” Misti said, laughing. “More like pork. White meat, but mostly capybara tastes like nothing else.”

Except beer?

Lost Things

2010-01-31T14:46:00.000-08:00

They’d been on the ground in Atlanta for an hour when he realized he didn’t have his wallet. There was the mad rooting through their luggage, the dash down the long concourse, clear back to the plane they arrived on. Amazingly the plane they had arrived from Seattle on was still on the ground. There was the scramble to locate a stewardess to accompany them on board, and then the long trudge down the aisle of an empty plane. Ever notice how a big a plane is when you are the last one on it?

There was slide into the window seat at aisle 31 A. The reaching into the seat pocket, which turned up…nothing. Argggg. Embarrassed apologies to the stewardess. Then, a final feel around of the crevice of his seat. And? Success! Wallet found! Nightmare avoided. This time.

We’re fifteen minutes out of SFW. I’m driving, while reliving my son’s nightmare scenario. What a pain to lose a wallet: The lost I.D.? Can’t fly home without it? The ruination of a hard fought for and much needed Florida vacation?

“Not the first time you’ve done that,” I said. “Next time, all you have to do when you get off a plane is feel around for your wallet.” Cut off your tongue, Mama. Shut your mouth. Who are you to talk? Haven’t you been there and done that? Oh yes, which is why when I board a plane I count the bags I’ve got, and count them again every so often, then count them again before I get off.

As a way of commiserating I confess how I a cell phone once noty ten minutes from boarding a flight. I still can’t figure out how I did that. What is the body count on lost cell phones? I wonder. Where do airports put them? You can’t reuse a lost cell phone after all.

His fiancee giggles. I hope she never loses that endearing little laugh, so I entertain her with another tale from my vast store of lost stuff experiences: This hunky old SUV I’m driving? I’m down to one set of very expensive keys. The set that’s lost was the one that was supposed to stay in the car. Plan was, we’d use door keys to get in and out and the ignition keys would perpetually stay in the vehicle.

My son laughs. His fiancée laughs. At least they are not like Big Brother, who lost his wallet yet again last week. What a pain. Getting the I.D. all over again. New debit card and all that.

I thought about my own recent loss of this sort. I’d lost an car! Lost it in the parking lot at Publix. My ultimate humiliation came when a couple of my friends spied me me trudging around behind a grocery cart with what must have been a disoriented bag lady type expression on my face. After three trips through the parking lot I finally found this bus of a thing (this wasn’t some kiddie car I’d lost), faced toward the store, way I always park it, except it was one lane over from the one I routinely park in. The one I hadn’t searched because it was too far over. What was I thinking? What was I losing? My mind?

No, I refuse to believe that I am any more or less forgetful than I ever was. We lose things when our thoughts race through the ten things we should be doing right this minute instead of going to the grocery store. We have so much to lose all the time. Right now we are losing the senior generation in my family. Last year my mom. Then the letter arrived. The funeral CD and the program. We’ve lost my 104 year old aunt. I can still see my aunt’s serenely sweet face from when I was six and she drew my name in the family Christmas drawing and sent me a tea set the following March.

Yes, we lose track of time. We lose weight, if we are lucky and altitude if we are not.

The things we hate losing most: motivation, direction, interest, time.

And then there’s that one thing I pride myself on never losing: hope, which brings me to the end of this woeful tale. The lost keys from the SUV? Gone since the week we bought the car off a used car lot?

The morning after the nearly lost wallet fiasco, the keys to the SUV turned up. My husband dangled them from his fingers, then teased them away, pocketing them, when I reached out.

“Where did you find them?” I said.

“You never looked,” he sneered.

Oh, but I did. I combed the entire car for them, more than once. “Where were they?”

“In the crevice where you raise the back seat.” He pocketed this new treasure, the lost keys, claiming dominion over my car. “I’ll keep them, since you lose everything,”

I wanted to hoot but restrained myself. I’d lost the battle but not the war. My husband never loses anything. Except his tools. Has anyone seen a table saw? A square bottomed spade? The electric tester? A box of screws?

Forget full Body Scans--How about a Few Brain Scans?

2009-12-30T07:11:00.000-08:00

Only luck and the intervention of a heroic passenger--that was all that saved a jetliner from being blown up as it attempted to land in Detroit on Christmas Day. Young Mr. Terrorist has blabbed how he secreted enough lethal powder in the crotch of his underwear to blow the side out of a 747. Fortunately, the powder failed to ignite. This latest close call has set off a round of soul searching about how we should all give up our privacy to step into a canister designed to reveal EVERYTHING--though masking our faces, the better to protect ourselves before we set foot on a plane.

The scanner makes front page news in the local paper, while President Obama's declaration that our supposed crack security and anti-terror system has failed us yet again is clear back on A4. Turns out young Mr. Abdulmutallab's own father, a prominent Nigerian banker, took it upon himself to warn the U.S. Embassay that he feared his own son was a potential threat to international security. This was back in NOVEMBER. Somehow, nobdody passed the word along. Ho hum. Shades of 911. Does anyone recall how the warnings from the FBI that a group of young Arabs were taking flying lessons in our own flight schools and skipping over the sections on how to land a plane. What needs to be done first is to find out why these warnings can't be taken seriously at the CIA (Central Incompetence Agency).

Before we start scanning the bodies of the rest of the airline passengers in the nation, I suggest we start scanning the brains of the powers that be in the intelligence community. Could it be that most of these people have no brains in their heads?

Sara Williams Discusses Novel "One Big Itch" | AHN

2009-12-28T15:29:00.000-08:00

Sara Williams Discusses Novel "One Big Itch" | AHN

The Ornamental Star, a Christmas Story

2009-12-24T13:37:00.000-08:00

Here's a charming Christmas Story by "cousin" Tom Williams. He's a Marco Island charter captain and scuba diver and the author of Lost and Found, a fine thriller which I thoroughly enjoyed.

The Ornamental Star

By Tom Williams

All of the ornaments knew that Christmas was coming. Most of the decorations tried to remain calm, but as autumn turned to winter, the tension in the storage boxes became unbearable. Almost every ornament could remember the housemother’s sigh when she opened the box and at least one globe had shattered with worry. It happened every year. All the decorations were packed away into the New Year whole, but as the holidays approached, someone always fractured with upcoming tension.

As every ornament knew, each year was different and full of possibilities. On some years, the elderly globes were chosen right away. They were selected first and set atop the highest branches. On other years, the housemother would be younger and the elders would not even be allowed out of the box. On some unfortunate holiday seasons, Christmas trees would end up with day-glow tinsel, or even the humiliation of fake snow flocking.

Everyone, new or old-fashioned, gilded or plain, wanted a good placement on the tree. Higher was always better, but on some years, a lower branch could be your destiny and a dreadful perch within easy reach of a toddler or the house cat on patrol. Every ornament could recall at least one acquaintance, pulled from the tree and shattered on the floor.

Of course, no one wanted to think about the end, the broom, and the dustbin, and most understood that contemplating destruction was not the right attitude when emerging from the box. Every decoration had heard the old stories about the ornaments with optimism; the more the inner glow, the easier it was to shine and capture the housemother’s eye.

This year when the boxes came down, all the decorations were optimistic for higher branches and higher status, but most of all, every ornament and every light, wanted to be near the shining star. Even the less ambitious globes wanted a good place on the tree; but every globe, no matter how large or small, wanted to be away from the lower branches, the little pulling fingers, and the easy reach of the climbing cat and the deadly paws of destruction.

From the moment the housemother opened the box, Bobsled Jangles knew he had a good chance. After all, this was the same housemother as the year before. The very same who carefully considered Bobsled and placed him well above the others.

He had clearly been a favorite, and was able to watch the shining star as she rose from her private package. He had even witnessed the coupling with the electric lights, as she gained her shining radiance.

Everyone knew that the lights thought they were special, but to Bobsled Jangles the artificial glow was no match for a good globes’ inner enthusiasm.

Suddenly, Bobsled shuddered. In the next section, an elderly globe with a blue body and a snowflake pattern was lifted out in pieces, his hanger broken, and his sparkling remains useless.

The housemother reacted in her usual way: a head tilt of regret, a sigh of disappointment, and then a move toward the inevitable dustbin.

Enthusiasm, Bobsled Jangles reminded himself, the inner glow, and the living spirit of Christmas was the true secret and strength of the holidays.

Even as he focused and tried to shine, someone from the corner of the box was lifted: an elongated shiny teardrop, golden with a new hanger. The housemother went to her tiptoes and suddenly the golden teardrop was well above Bobsled’s last position, and hanging on a branch almost at the top.

This housemother was fast, and before Bobsled could focus, another globe was chosen but to everyone’s horror, the new age silver ball was destined for the lowest branch, and a sacrificial position perfect for toddlers and cat’s paws.

Bobsled could see the broom and dustbin, and he shuddered with a little rattle. The unexpected action must have attracted the housemother’s attention, because before he could even concentrate on shining, Bobsled Jangles was out of the box and flying. His hanger held precariously, as one of the dreaded toddlers came running into the room. A hideous cry escaped from the child’s lips and destructive hands reached upward to claw at Bobsled’s bottom.

All thoughts of shining were tossed to the wayside as Bobsled and his gilded snowy path and horse-drawn sleigh dangled in the uncertain future. With an almost shattering whoosh, the housemother bent at the knees and Bobsled plunged downward. Before he could do anything but dangle near the grasping toddler’s fingers, he was up and away and pulled to safety. But not really safe, and still in turmoil, as the housemother appeared to be undecided. Then as the toddler quickly turned to approach her private package, the housemother lifted Bobsled Jangles to the tree’s very center and much higher than ever before.

For the moment, Bobsled was overwhelmed, he had never been so well placed and never so high. He was even safe from the bigger children’s clutches and he was very near the top. When he looked aloft, he could even see the highest branch, the end of the lights, and the very pinnacle where she would ultimately rest.

With typical ornamental nature, the quickened thoughts of believing his placement might be a dream, or that he was precariously hung or destined to fall, quickly evaporated. His place was here, near the top, and he was safely anchored. Only two other globes were higher than Bobsled, but none as large and easy to notice.

When all the others had found their destinies, and when the lights were on and everyone was shining, the housemother opened the package.

“It’s time again Miss Highpoint,” the protective garments rustled.

“Forget it!” the reclining star responded. “They never give me enough time, I’m not finished resting. My prongs are still sore from last year’s tree and I want nothing to do with those sleazy electric lights. Just tell me why I have to go on?”

The protective garments sighed. “Miss Highpoint, you know that Christmas isn’t the same without you. You are the most important, and the pinnacle of the holidays. All the others look up to you!”

“But I don’t want to go! I want to stay in the box. I want nothing to do with this year’s tree!”

“Miss Highpoint, you know that’s not an option.”

“Yes it is! Close this box! I’m not leaving this chamber! Besides, all those other ornaments are so common and boring. I simply can’t be bothered!

“Miss Highpoint, the housemother is coming.” The protective garments settled deeper.

“I can’t go again—not to the top. I’ve developed a fear of heights. That’s it! A fear of heights! Seal this box, I’m not going!”

Then she was out of the package and into the light. This year’s tree looked even pricklier and the odor from the pine boughs stronger than ever; enough to cause a headache even in the most senior of stars.

Again, she was rising, higher and higher, her destination assured. She passed the old, the young, the round and the engraved, the stupid lights that blinked and the ones that heaven forbid: bubbled. Past the middle, where at least, some social order existed, but the higher she rose, it was easier to look down upon the others. Everything was so boring, but just near the top when she was forced to stop and endure the dreadful “plugging in,” Her Celestial Majesty; the First Lady of Highpoint was slightly amused.

Looking at her almost eye to eye was a silly, old blue ornament with a horse-drawn sleigh. As she was being arranged, the blue globe was staring. He was staring as the sleazy electric lights were being coupled, and as the pinnacle of the tree was being prepared to accept her prongs.

“What are you looking at?” the shining star hissed.

“Pardon me Miss Highpoint,” Bobsled jangles stuttered. “But I never even hoped we would meet. I never even dreamed meeting you was possible!”

“You idiot! We haven’t been introduced! Don’t you realize that you and all the commoners are just something beneath me? I’m the true star, and the only real ornament, and—

“Oh my God,” a neighboring ornament gasped when the star was suddenly taken to the top and secured on her perch. “What did she say?” the smaller ornament whispered, “She was too far away, and when she was plugged in and her radiance came, I was star struck! Tell me older brother, what did she say?”

Bobsled Jangles looked first to the little ornament who was questioning, then across to the others who were watching, and finally down to all the less fortunate globes, lights, and lesser ornaments. He then thought about the years of tradition, of high hopes and disappointment, and then the true spirit of the holidays. After a moment, he cautiously whispered.

“She said to be careful what you wish for . . . and to be happy where you are.”

Happy Holidays!

Be sure to check out Tom Williams' Website

The Ghost Wore a Kimono

2009-12-04T16:01:00.001-08:00

She stood at the foot of the bed. I could make out her shoulder, the way her elbow was bent, her regal posture. Her face was indistinct but even so, a swirl of hair moved about her head. She was a ghost, dressed in a kimono, and I was fascinated and also thrilled to have awakened from a dream and to find her standing in my bedroom on a warm and sultry night in Florida, of all places.

It is difficult enough for an insomniac such as I am to achieve so much as a dream state, definitely not a good thing for a writer of fiction, and here I was, blessed to be seeing a ghost, a creature straight out of story and legend.

There was nothing threatening about her at all and minutes passed and though she was perfectly still, I could see various aspects of her shape shimmering in the moonlight, but I wanted more from this vision, greedy person that I am, and so I hopped out of bed the better to see her features, at which point her body faded into a lampshade.

Gruntled: Are you there yet?

2008-04-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

“Be gruntled. Start building,” screams the full-page newspaper ad by Careerbuilder.com. I’m hooked. Gruntled? What kind of word is that?

Disgruntled is a word we all know, especially in the context of the disgruntled employee who pulls a pistol at the office. Come to think of it, disgruntled doesn’t seem to be widely used in any other context. Had some copywriter coined gruntled, to mean “be satisfied,” or “be happy with your work?”

Gruntled is a word in its own right, or so I found out from my on-line dictionary. However, the closer of the two definitions given says that gruntled means “to calm,” or “still,” which doesn’t quite fit. More apt is probably the WordWeb online definition “to cause to be more favorably inclined.”

There’s also a webside, gruntle.com advertising “what you want when you need it.” Quite possibly what I really need is a softwear product called Gruntle for Windows, where the softwear reads what’s on my screen and interprets my problem, as opposed to the Windows version, where they show what some engineer thinks I should be seeing. Install this device and I would probably have fewer disgruntled moments where I want to throw my laptop through one of my windows.

Another site, gruntle.org, promotes several enticing products written in a quite possibly put-on computer language called python: Check out Madcow;IRC Bot; PyFiglet and Insub.

Gruntle is a very old word, says fantasy writer Anne Ewan, who has a degree in linguistics (http://www.esmerel.com/circle/wordlore/). Gruntle once meant “grumble.” The dis in front of it meant completely. So in a sense our disgruntled employee comes straight out of Dickens. I can see him walking around grumbling rather loudly about his or her situation. Gruntled, Ewan says, came about as a “back formation” where people created gruntled, meaning the opposite of disgruntled, but that’s okay, Ewan says, people do that all the time, so welcome to a gruntled world.

Gruntled might fit into a piece of writing suggesting ancient history or maybe some science fiction setting as in “Merlin gruntled his winged steed,” for instance, where today we would say, “The jockey gentled his mount at the starting gate.”

Who could get away using gruntle? E.L. Doctorow,maybe? Cormac McCarthy, writing about the modern wild west? Dean Koontz writing one of his misfit characters? I become disgruntled simply thinking about how to use gruntled, and so then I told myself to get a grip, as in “Gruntle yourself girl.”

However, if I were looking for a job, I can’t believe I’d sit across from a prospective employer and say that I used to be a disgruntled employee and that my aim in a new job is to gruntle myself. Not unless I was seeking a job as the sorcerer’s apprentice that is. And then I decided to the obvious. I went to Careerbuilder.com and typed “gruntle” into the job search. Nothing came up. Maybe I should try sorcerer’s apprentice?

Wordwise, '07 Was a Subprime Year

2008-02-19T10:25:00.000-08:00

“How was I?”

“Subprime.”

How was your golf game, dear?

“Subprime.”

“And what do you think of the word of the year?”

“I’d say it was a subprime pick.”

“Subprime sucks?”

“Subzero is okay. Subzero is useful. Subprime’s a fad. It’s a flaky word”

“Why do you say that?”

“Subprime’s marginal.”

“Isn’t that the meaning of the word?”

“Subprime is borderline.”

“Yes, but you can’t just go in and ask for a borderline loan.”

“In that case you would ask to see a loan shark.”

“No banker wants to be called a loan shark.”

“That’s the problem with a word like subprime. Suprime lending is a national

disgrace. It’s loansharking by another name, predatory lending at the least.”

“So how was I?”

“You were a shark, hon.”

“You were positively predatory.”
“And not subprime? I feel better already?”

“So how was the golf game.”

“I was a shark out there.”

Writers are Readers? Oh yes!

2008-01-17T15:53:00.001-08:00

Writers are readers? Yes, of course we are. That’s why I immediately answered novelist Katherine Stone’s e-mailed invitation to check out her web site, Writers are readers.com. (www.writersarereaders.com). I’m only too glad I did.

Katherine said that she and her husband, author Jack Chase, who created the site, noticed something odd about the book review process. Authors of commercial fiction were rarely involved in reviewing books, when one would think such authors would know a thing or two about the craft of writing. Stone and Chase are also aware of the decline in book reviewers in the print world as print itself shrinks while the internet expands exponentially.

As a result, these two creative types have produced what I find to be a fascinating website: authors reviewing books by other authors. The game is, the authors can handle the review any way they choose. Yes the famous names are there, and as I scanned down the list I found several whose works I know and respect: there’s Linda Fairstein whom I met at last year’s Sleuthfest and whose mystery, Entombed, is filled with little known lore about Edgar Allen Poe. John Saul whom I met at the Maui Writer’s Conference a few years ago, fulminates about his training as a playwright, before he gets down to writing a perceptive review of The Diana Chronicles, and I thought everything had already been said about Tina Brown’s book. Heather Graham has posted a review as well. I met and interviewed Heather years ago as a reporter. Why am I not surprised that this actress-turned-novelist hit the big time?

Those of us who are newbie authors are also offered the opportunity to submit reviews, after our peers vouch for us, that is. As it happened I was reading A Grave Injustice, a paranormal mystery by author Prudy Taylor Board at the time and was pleased to do a review of this exciting read. In the process, I found myself using some examples from Prudy’s book to talk about how very specific imagery is what a seasoned author uses to put real flesh on the bones of her characters, as Prudy does so aptly.

Katherine Stone loved the review and asked me to submit more of them, which I intend to do as time permits. For quality book reviews, by authors themselves, the people who know a thing or two about writing, browse through Writer’s are Readers.com. I do hope you readers who love a good mystery will check out my review of Prudy Board’s book. Author Board uses the paranormal genre as a springboard to some fascinating World War II history. My feeling is, you’ll do yourselves A Grave Injustice if you miss out on this gem of a mystery.

Boxing Day

2007-12-29T11:04:00.000-08:00

Negril, Jamaica:

Boxing Day, Dec 26

The morning sun polishes a smooth sea to a metallic sheen, a gorgeous but blinding sight, which is why the early diners take shelter under the thatched roof of the LTU Pub, the runway between the kitchen and the bar. The family straggles in.

Jamaica Bill, who does his best to keep the rest of us from running amok, arrives with a brick of the smoked marlin left from last night’s Christmas dinner and we polish this off with bagels, cream cheese and a fruit plate of pineapple, papaya, and, wonder of wonder, bananas. A hand of bananas arrived this morning by bearer, and so young Luke promptly orders LTU’s famous banana pancakes. We’ve been here a week now, and it has been Yes We Have No Bananas until this morning. Hurricane Dean earlier in the fall has been hard on the crop.

The smoked marlin has a delicate flavor all its own, by the way, and is as good an excuse as any to sojourn in Negril. Another excuse is coconut water, sucked right out of a green cocoanut via means of a straw. Coconut water is the only juice that goes straight to the heart. As any Jamaican will tell you, a glass—or a nut-full of coconut water, mon, it’s good for the blood pressure and the heart.

The Williams clan is in a triumphant mood. Yes we managed to pull off a tropical Christmas dinner at Jamaica Bill’s place, despite the fact that his beach house perched on the sea cliffs took a few hits from Dean. At least the roof stayed on the place this time, and most of the crockery remained intact. The light fixtures in the kitchen, however, were defunct, due to salt water intrusion, leaving us to cook by lamp and candle light.

There’s a tense moment early in the afternoon when the gas stove that was supposed to be roasting the oven coughed and quit. Jamaica Bill ordered everything off, all top burners. A sniff test ensued, some dials were twiddled and yes the chicken was roasted to a perfect skin crunching crisp.

Louisiana gumbo was supposed to be the main course, but had to be scratched due to the absence of a viable quantity of okra. We found a bud or two along the fence on the property at LTU Villas, but that wouldn’t do for twenty guests. Mama Nanin stepped in with a new plan. Shrimp in marinara sauce, so we chopped onion, garlic, and green pepper, but not the celery, a delicacy which Jamaica Bill had ordered for the now-defunct gumbo project, but Mama Nanin sniffed and informed us that in the wider culinary world—beyond the States—celery is a nonentity. The Parisians wouldn’t touch the stuff.

Mama Nanin brought all the makings for her famous champagne punch and then some, which is how she managed to pour a bottle of vodka into the mix, rather than triple sec, intended to substitute for peach schnapps. Oh well, the brew proved to be as powerful as it was popular.

Jamaica Bill made his famous pesto pasta, the one with the artichoke hearts. Jamaica Bill’s pesto is fresh made and he supplies it in bulk to the rest of the West End, at least the tonier establishments.

At one point a strange round object lined with what appeared to be lightening bolts appeared on the TV screen. This proved to be the interior of young Luke’s eyeball. He was trying out one of his Christmas presents, an electronic microscope, an Eyeclops, which you hook into the TV screen. The inside of an eyeball is an eerie sight indeed, especially if you’d had more than a few sips of the champagne and vodka punch.

A day which began with snorkeling, the exploration of sea caves, the sighting of jelly fish, dolphins, a thing that was probably a sea snake, and the discovery of baby coral growing in a tide pool meant an early end to the festivities.

The party ended when young Luke asked Jamaica Bill to produce the bottle containing a famous relic, the two-foot centipede. After fifteen years in a jar, the centipede has shrunk to a shadow of its vicious self. Jamaica Bill, who is six feet four inches tall, told how he managed to battle to the death this aggressive creature by standing on a kitchen stool and spraying it with an entire can of bug spray, the fumes of which nearly poisoned Jamaica Bill himself before the centipede expired.

At that point, those of us who were about to expire from the ravages of the champagne punch were driven back to our rooms at The LTU Villas, while the heartier souls retired to the pub bar to toast in Christmas.

The Twenty Somethings arrived late, wolfed their breakfast, and sped off. It’s going to be a tough day for them, what with a catamaran cruise on the Wild Thing in the morning followed by a reggae party tonight on Seven Miles beach and so they left their back-to-the States gift shopping to be done by cooler heads. Three bags of Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee and two rum creams ought to do it, Mom. Or is it two bags of the coffee and three of the rum cream? Oh dear, leave it to Mom to get it wrong.

Young Luke is off to scuba class followed by a trip to the beach, leaving his grandparents Bill Senior and Mama Nanin free to reminisce about the good old days in Havana, New Orleans, Houston, Paris, Vermont, Bloomington, and places like that.

Our friend Janice from Boston has arrived with a late bulletin: the water system has been switched over to backup so don’t drink the tap stuff, but I’m already tapped out and so far am feeling very fine, except my left leg is a bit stiff from yesterdays climb up and down the steep steps cut into the side of the West End cliffs. The stairs wind through a lava tube and end at a shelf carved into the cliffs, where we dive into the sea for a cool down before slathering on the sun oil and settle into some serious sunbathing. Nevertheless, when Janice proposes a trip to Mayfield Falls where we’ll explore a mountain spring, I’m all for it.

The Winter of the Wood Stork

2007-12-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

Fort Myers, Florida

As usual I was running late for a mundane appointment, when I glanced out on the lake. There on the point just around the bend, a vision appeared, the likes of which I never expected to see: wood storks. A pair of them had just touched down in our sedate suburban neighborhood, a cluster of low-rise villas with Hawaiian-style notched roofs the better to repel high winds, since we happen to inhabit a flood plain embarrassingly close to the Caloosahatchee River.
Yes, we’re squeezed between a mini-lake and a river, and yes, we are a small scale bird sanctuary, what with the cattle egrets cackling like a flock of exotic chickens as they march around the lake, grubbing for goodies out of the lawn. Anhingas arrive and depart daily from designated pine tree limbs with the regularity of an airport shuttle; coots, mallards and moorhens glide past the door, and red-headed woodpeckers drum on the tree trunks. Our back yard is occasionally patrolled by a very patrician great blue heron, but wood storks? An endangered species? What were they doing here?

I grabbed for one of the several pairs of binoculars we keep out for just such chance occasions as this, and consulted the Birds of Florida Field Guide. Through field glasses I watched these birds fluff their white plumage like a pair of tall feather dusters. When flashes of black appeared on their under carriage I knew they were wood storks.

About forty inches tall with the long, curved bill of a wading species, and the bald, leathery black head of a turkey, the wood storks teetering along on stilt-like legs were an ungainly pair, a comedy in feathers, so to speak.

Appointment forgotten, I crept toward the birds, hoping the sun might disappear behind a cloud. The bigger stork stretched out one enormous wing, revealing a wide black racing stripe along the trailing edge. I was enthralled. This was a gull-wing sort of move, if you’ve ever seen one of those fancy cars where the doors open from the top—only now, thanks to this sighting, I’ll think of such a movement as stork-winged.

At any rate, the demonstration of wing-power that I witnessed made me acutely aware that these storks’ wingspread seemed twice as wide as the birds were tall. This no doubt accounts for the fact that these frequent fliers don’t bother with baggage checks and airport security.
Lax photographer that I am, I had no camera in the house, so I tried for a shot off my cell phone, but I was facing into the sun and the cell phone informed me in a curt message beamed from some satellite that it could see nothing to photograph. If I managed to creep through the neighborhood and photograph the wood storks from the other side, I’d miss the action completely. Instead, I sought a witness, our friend Domingo, who had just arrived to clean out the gutters, so that he could enjoy such a rare sighting.

I also called Flora, who lives across the street in a sprawling garden compound full of native and exotic species. I asked Flora if she had ever seen a wood stork in the neighborhood. Never, she said. Not once in the twenty-five years she’d been on her beloved property. Flora couldn’t come over; she was headed out on some appointment of her own.

“They’ll be back,” she assured me, but I haven’t seen the wood storks again, and this sighting happened a week ago.

Meanwhile, I began to fear that if wood storks were showing up in my neighborhood, this was probably an ominous sign. It meant that the Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary where the storks nest must not be in good shape, and in checking up on the internet, I found my fears confirmed. The nesting season in ’07 was a disaster due to a hundred-year drought here in Florida.
During the `80s, birders and government officials discovered that the U.S. wood stork population had dwindled to some five thousand pairs. The main haven for wood storks and other species is the Corkscrew Sanctuary, the nation’s last remaining stand of native bald cypress trees, a fifty by seventy-five mile swath of old timber purchased from lumber companies by the National Audubon Society in 1954. The Corkscrew Sanctuary is open to the public, located just north of Immokalee Road in the rugged and beautiful Central Florida interior. This is primeval country, a world of flatlands, prairie marshes, and bald cypress forest about fifteen miles west of I-75 at Immokalee Road between Fort Myers and Naples (http://www.corkscrew.audubon.org).

Wood storks wade in swampy areas catching prey by feel. Since the ‘60s their habitat has been shrinking due to pressure from farming and urban development, and well before that, of course various bird species were hunted to extinction in the late eighteen hundreds.

As for the wood stork, efforts to preserve habitat and monitor the birds has paid off. The wood stork population has doubled, according to a five-year assessment recently concluded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The agency has recommended that the status of the species be upgraded from endangered to threatened.

Snowbirds such as us have nothing on wood storks, which may range from the Carolinas to Latin America. Troll around on the internet, and you’ll find studies of individual wood storks that were banded and tracked via global positioning devices. These fascinating accounts show that in a group of ten or so wood storks, one individual might have started out from a home base in South Carolina and hardly moved from its home county; another might have trekked from the Carolinas down to Key West, maybe headed down in time for the Fantasy Fest, while an even hardier or adventurous bird headed for the Yucatan peninsula and was perhaps learning to tango in Cancun.

Due to rapid development, the Florida habitat is the wood stork’s least stable nesting ground. In January, thanks to a $200,000 grant from the National Park Service, the resource manager from the Corkscrew Sanctuary is monitoring the wood stork in five southern Florida counties, looking for more places where the birds might have secured nesting grounds. Meanwhile the biologists tracking the wood storks have learned that these resourceful birds have helped themselves. Colonies of them have moved on to Mississippi and North Carolina in search of better nesting.

Meanwhile, I do hope our own neighborhood passed muster with the wood stork pair. If only they would build one of their platform nests hereabouts, wouldn’t that be a thrill? After all, a wood stork wouldn’t have to pass muster with some condo board. But I wonder? If a pair of wood storks move in, would they have to be approved by the anhinga brood? And what about the snooty great heron? Would he let them in?

To Sleep Perchance to Dream

2007-08-20T11:14:00.000-07:00

It’s bad enough I can’t get a good night’s sleep. Now my computer can’t, either. The first message I got from the Windows wizard this morning is that my laptop can’t access its sleep network. I suppose I’ve infected my electronic pal with my insomniac habits. I fear the machine will start dozing or locking me out while it takes a nap every time I try to get some work done, or, even worse, eat my address book in a binge of what sleep doctors call “sleep eating”.

I can only hope that my insomniac laptop will do with sleeplessness what I do, turn out a novel. If my computer wrote a novel in the middle of the night, perhaps I could analyze its subconscious and figure out how to put it to sleep.

My sleep habits have gotten so bad that when I woke up in the wee hours a couple of nights ago, I tried reading an article called The Secrets of Sleep in the hope of catching some zzzzz’s. It was the lead piece in a Discover Magazine devoted to various Medical Mysteries of the first (and worst) order.

Trouble was, an ominous green eye in a pallid face on the Discover’s cover was enough to keep an insomniac awake for the rest of his or her natural life. The green eye was positively reptilian, set in a sea of ghostly skin, lacking both brows and lashes. I’ve been told that my eyes have turned green already. What’s next? Will my lashes fall out and my brows disappear if I don’t get some sleep?

Frankly, the eye was so scary I’d never have bought the magazine; one of my sons brought it into the house. Unfortunately for my boys, their sleep patterns take after mine. It may be that we are the hyper types described in The Secrets of Sleep as genetically disposed to sleep problems; our only consolation is, other poor souls have it worse.

I read about a tormented woman who has tried everything: hypnosis, yoga, soothing tapes, pills. Now she has anxiety attacks because she cannot sleep. Even worse, there are people who sleep for eight hours in sleep labs and wake up to report they’ve never been asleep at all. Sad to say, I took heart from these sad stories. So what I can’t sleep? I’ve learned to cope. I’ve made insomnia work for me.

The more you obsess over a lack of sleep the less of it you’ll get. At least that’s what happens to me. So I cope by denial. I’ll go to bed early and sleep for four or five hours then be wide awake. If I’m lucky, one of my characters will be talking to me. There’s nothing like writing to tire out the brain. What I love best of all is a writing stint from two a.m. to six followed by a good solid nap from six to eight a.m.

If you can’t go for the full eight hours, then five or six hours and a nap after a burst of work is the next best thing—at least this works for me. One of the greatest geniuses of all time, the inventor Thomas Edison, was such a great nap taker that he kept a cot beside his desk in his lab. These days, or so I’ve heard, the sleep gurus are encouraging corporations to allow their employees to nap on the job.

The trouble is, my long-suffering husband hates my restlessness. He used to threaten to divorce me if I kept waking him up in the middle of the night but when he couldn’t shake me after thirty years he finally caved in and built me a writing studio two steps from my side of the bed.

Maybe he caved in because he has sleep problems of his own. I just identified him as “a sleep talker” in the Discover article. These sleepers natter on and on in their sleep and nary a word leads to a sensible conversation.

The other night I woke up to find one of my sons eating a Dagwood type meal in the middle of the night, a whopping sandwich chased by a couple of beers. He thought the booze might put him to sleep; it will, but not for long enough.

The best I could offer him was my latest method of bargaining for sleep. I don’t use the “s” word when I’m lying in bed trying to get some shuteye. I tell myself that what I’m really aiming for is an entertaining night of dreams, the kind I’ll remember in the morning.

Bed: The Most Dangerous Sport in America

2007-01-30T18:04:00.000-08:00

Falling out of bed. Haven’t we all done this, either figuratively or imaginatively?
I would venture to say that we have. Beginning in toddlerhood. Ending in second childhood. There’s nothing unusual to be said about that.

Which is why I paid scant attention when some TV pundit reported upon some newly released statistics from some government agency or public commission or nonprofit something or other. FOX? CNN? I can’t really say who brought this up. Bicycles were the most dangerous contraptions in America. Beds were a close second.

No way, I protested silently as I went about whatever the business of the moment happened to be. Was I indulging the hazardous preparation of lunch? Risking my life the better to fold the socks? About to wrench my back while dusting sconces? Whatever it was I was doing at the moment I heard the latest inane pronouncement, I was aghast and indignant.

Motorcycle riding was the most dangerous sport on earth. Bicycles had to be number two, if they ranked at all. Not that my perceptions were biased by the fact that a certain young man who had been forewarned about the evils of motorcycling had taken a flying leap off a cliff on a Kawasaki over the summer and broken every rib that God gave him, plus a few he invented as he yowled in a hospital bed. I wasn’t biased against bicycle riders, sconces, or anything equally dangerous, so why pick on beds? Those havens of sanctity? Those blissful shelters we take to when things aren’t going well? Those sources to time travel and heroic adventure? How on earth can beds be the second most hazardous means of travel we possess?

I gave no further thought to this issue until a day or two later when I got a call from Barbara Oehlbeck. Now, if you happen to be among the two or three people in the State of Florida who don’t know who Barbara Oehlbeck is, I’d be happy to introduce her.

Barbara is the author of books about Florida plants, including The Sabal Palm. She’s a well-known columnist and Florida historian, whose most recent book, The Ranch, recently won top non-fiction honors from the Florida Publishers Association.

Of course, my perspective is somewhat different, since Barbara Oehlbeck is the godmother of my novel, The Serena Scandal. At any rate, we were talking about the forthcoming release of my first novel The Don Juan Con in a new edition, which Barbara had endorsed. I called her to update her attribution, when she began to tell me her tale of falling out of bed. This made Barbara one of the toughest people on the planet and a national statistic.

Just a day or two prior to my call, Barbara admitted, she had tossed and turned one night while attempting to gain a more advantageous purchase on her pillow. She had suddenly slipped and fallen from her perch on a very high bed. “You do know how high they make mattresses these days, don’t you?” Barbara said.

Barbara banged her head on her antique iron bedstead and then, as if that were not indignity enough, she bashed her head against the floor, awakening her husband, Dr. Lou. He's a pathologist, who, if things had gone badly, could have at least supplied an explanation as to what might have befallen his dearest beloved.

By this time Barbara was laughing, describing the lumps on her head and I was commiserating--with the floor. After all, Barbara being Barbara, we were talking about serious gashes in the floor such a hard-headed woman would have left there.

So, as statistic go, I have to admit that the government (or whomever) is correct, and yes, beds are indeed not only dangerous from the standpoint of our physical safety and well-being. Then I began to realize that beds are also dangerous in psychic terms, which is where the novelist enters in.

Bed, as we all surely realize, is fraught with danger. Bed, particularly the propensity to get into it with the wrong person, is a danger I feel certain was not included in the statistics. Perfectly sensible people do this all the time. For instance, I recall the story of the woman who woke up one morning and found herself in bed with a man she barely knew; and whom she had not only slept with but had gotten married to at some point in some hazy weekend. This happened in Las Vegas, I believe.

What impressed me most about this lady’s tale was not that she was somebody I’d made up; she was a respectable person and a licensed family therapist, who very sensibly got a quickie divorce and got on with her life. And let us hope she went into counseling herself.

Beds, I now realize are profoundly dangerous, not only from the “What on earth am I doing in here with him/her?” but also, “How come I just woke up and found my hands tied to the bedposts?”

In such situations it is the duty of the novelist to supply the hero or the heroine with the psychic underpinnings or the moxie which allows this person in distress to barter, buy, manipulate or otherwise find his/or her way out of trouble.

Now, I wonder what agency is compiling this second sort of statistics about beds? If we figure in all the psychic dangers of getting a good night’s sleep, then, indeed, it must be true that the bed is by all odds the very most dangerous place in America on any given night. And so, it is with that thought, my dear readers, I wish you all the best in pursuit of that most dangerous occupation: a good night’s sleep.

A Bad Hair Day

2006-12-22T15:48:00.000-08:00

It is indeed a shock when your own hairdresser has a bad hair day, especially a a series of them. I was sitting in a salon hot seat recently, having my roots rescued, catching up on the life saga of the hairdresser I’ve had in Fort Myers for at least twenty years. She’s a formidable woman who has survived various health problems and family traumas with pluck and aplomb. Due to the fact that I had been in the San Juan Islands over the summer, I hadn’t seen my friend in awhile, and I was astounded by the fact that her business was thrown for a loop when a woman who worked at her salon had walked out and started a rival salon right across the street. This, of course, created great upheaval among her clients.

Wait a minute, I found myself thinking. This is a real-life version of a plot right out of the Bad Hair Day Mysteries by Nancy J. Cohen. In Died Blonde, the book I happen to be reading at the time, hairdresser Marla Shore is helping her detective boyfriend find out who murdered a rival salon owner who was out to ruin Marla’s business by moving into the same shopping center and pulling all sorts of nasty pranks on Marla. When the rival turns up dead, suspicion turns Marla’s way, but she’s sheltered by her lover, Detective Vail, who, fortunately for Marla, has a full head of hair which she styles on a regular basis.

I’ve met Nancy Cohen several times and always enjoy her books. I ran into her again at the Murder on the Beach Bookstore booth at the Miami Book Fair, where we were signing books. Nancy signed a copy of Died Blonde for me.

Meanwhile, Nancy gave me a ringing endorsement of The Don Juan Con which will go one the cover of a forthcoming edition. Nancy got the whole point of what I meant to do with Don Juan. I aim to raise awareness of a certain type of romantic swindle that amounts to the emotional rape of the victims. Nancy was kind enough to interview me for her blog, and I’ve posted a copy of interview in the review section of this site. Here I am, a fledgling novelist being interviewed by a famous one!

Check out Nancy’s blog for yourself:
(http://www.mysterygal.bravejournal.com)

Meanwhile, Nancy’s latest book, Perish by Pedicure, was reviewed by Jay MacDonald in the Fort Myers News-Press, Tropicalia Magazine, Dec. 17. MacDonald gave Nancy a great review and I enjoy Jay’s work because he also interviews the authors he writes about and delves into their background.

MacDonald did the best he could for Nancy, but Jay’s a guy, after all. I met Jay MacDonald last year at The Lee Reading Festival in Fort Myers. Jay’s a tall, handsome fellow and quite the speaker. He even has a reasonable amount of hair. MacDonald just has to be a barbershop type of male who never set foot in a hair salon, however. Why am I saying this? It’s because the root appeal of the Bad Hair Day Mysteries is to the millions of women like me who swap life stories with their hairdressers for years on end. What guy could figure that out, unless he’s a salon-styled male like detective Dalton Vail? For women, the hairdresser and client lead very separate lives, and so their relationship, however enduring, has a secretive, parallel universe quality to it.

The lives of the hairdressers I know are full of the same sort of mayhem that turn up in The Bad Hair Day Mysteries, and so of course, we can project a bit of our hairdressers’ lives onto the Marla Shore character. This, I believe, is what makes Nancy J. Cohen’s mysteries so cozy in the best sense of this traditional genre.

Out of Touch

2006-12-01T15:47:00.000-08:00

An old-fashioned snowstorm blew in the Monday after Thanksgiving , creating a fairytale setting, here in the San Juan Islands, a robin's egg sky, brilliant sun orchestrating a dazzling scene everywhere it touched. Every tree limb, bush and railing is covered thickly in a layer of powdery frosting. The house is filled with the smell of woodsmoke and lamp oil and the ticking of the grandfather clock. The power has been out for close to thirty hours now. There's nothing left of the twenty-first century: no internet, no telepone; the cell phone is on its dying gasp and the car is frozen solid. I've tramped up and down the neighborhood where the only news comes by word of mouth. Power has been restored in the hamlet of Eastsound. This is a major bulletin. Do I care? Not really. Tonight I'll have oil lamps to read by and propane to cook with and feather comforters for warmth, and in between there's a spectatular white world, the likes of which has not been seen here for a decade.

Notes from the North Caribe

2006-11-08T15:46:00.000-08:00

The anhinga in the front yard is flapping his soggy wings, wagging his head in time to The Cinderella Suite playing on PBS radio. Who says the wildlife doesn’t appreciate the higher culture here in the North Caribe?

Can’t find the North Caribe on the map? That’s because The North Caribe is how a climatologist, or an orchid fancier, or a Friend of the Fakahatchee Strand thinks of what the rest of us consider to be Southwest Florida, here on the Florida Gulf.

Tropically speaking, we’re in the North Caribbean eco system. So says that oracle of the natural world, Tropicalia, the Sunday Magazine of the Fort Myers News-Press (www.news-press.com) in its cover story of Sunday, Nov. 5., devoted to the rare orchids of the Fakahachee Strand and the intrepid trackers who tramp the Strand in search of some of the world’s most elusive plants. If you ever read and loved The Orchid Thief, as I did, this is what we’re talking about.

It’s the idea of being not just Southwest Floridians but North Carribeans that enlarges the perspective. We are what our climate makes of us. The exotic hothouse of the North Caribe has given bountifully, not only the hundreds of rare plants including 45 species of exotic orchids, but also the agricultural breadbasket on the flanks of the Lake Okeechobee, what I called Serenoa country, the land of the creeping palm, the Serenoa repens. It’s a tropical wild west, a place I limned as best I could in my novel, The Serenoa Scandal, which I’ll be discussing as a guest of The Friends of the Lakes Library, this coming Friday, November 10. To brown bag it with a hungry author, call 533-4000 for details, 15290 Bass Road at Gladiolus Drive. 11: 45 a.m. to 2 p.m.