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Christmas Favorites

Well, it’s that time of the year again, but before we begin let me state I do not -- repeat, do NOT – like “The Little Drummer Boy.”

See f-ctoid above for the reasons why.

Here’s my list, kept short by putting only my top picks in four categories:

 Christmas Carol

“Adeste Fideles” -- Luciano Pavarotti My all time favorite Christmas song.  I prefer it in Latin as opposed to the English translation, “Oh, Come All ye Faithful.”  Something about the Latin version sounds more…well…sacred that the English version. Here Pavarotti knocks it out of the park, or Notre Dame in this case.

 Christmas Traditional

“White Christmas” -- Bing Crosby Oh, yeah, like this one wasn’t going to make it.  This clip is from the movie White Christmas, as schmaltzy and as kitschy and as corny as you can imagine and who gives a rat’s patootie because it’s Christmas, Mr. Scrooge, and this scene from the beginning of the picture sums up the heartbreaking loneliness and nostalgic longing so many people -- especially those in service -- experience at this time of the year.  One of my favorite musicals. Period. Full stop.

 Christmas Alternative

“Merry Christmas from the Family” -- Robert Earl Keene Why do I love this song?  It’s about a family Christmas celebration with all the ingredients for an epic dysfunctional meltdown…and it doesn’t happen because everybody decides to be filled with good will.  It’s hilarious and heartwarming at the same time.  Bonus:  Jill Sobule did a great cover.  Double Bonus:  If it’s an epic dysfunctional family Christmas you’re pining for, here’s the Dropkick Murphys with "The Season's Upon Us"

 Christmas Blues

“All I Got For Christmas Was Drunk” -- Better Off Dead This is the one I’ve been championing as the new Christmas standard.  Funny but heartbreaking but funny because it is heartbreaking. Bonus:  Better Off Dead…live

  © Buzz Dixon

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Let There Be Light [FICTOID]

There is a hospital in Brazil that will blind you the moment you set foot in it.

Not literally, of course -- after all, that would be contrary to the whole purpose of a hospital, no? -- but by dazzling your eyes with starlight.

Princess Juliana Ximenes Branco of the Tabajara tribe started the hospital when she received an omen from the gods.

Her father was the grandson of an escaped Nazi war criminal.  He used family connections to accumulate vast wealth that he used to assuage his family guilt by spending it on charitable projects for the native tribes of Brazil.

On once such project his met Juliana’s mother and one thing led to another and that’s how Juliana.

While she lacked her father’s sense of guilt over her great-grandfather’s crimes, she did grasp the virtue of using one’s wealth and power to improve the lives of those less fortunate.

While the Tabajara possess no noble class, Juliana quickly became the tribe’s unofficial princess.

Unofficial in name on; where things really mattered, she could rule by divine right if she so chose.

It stood as a credit to her character that she chose not to.

She received the omen one evening while looking across the vast Amazon.  The night felt preternaturally quiet and still -- no insects or birds or predators could be heard.

Looking across the water, she noticed how the ripples seemed to magnify and multiple the reflection of the vast stretch of stars above her.

She already planned to build a hospital, the omen showed her how to do it.

Consulting with the finest electrical engineers in Brazil, she built a hospital where the ceilings / walls / floors were permeated with millions of fiber optic cable and powered by LEDs to create the sensation of floating through the heart of the Milky Way.

When turned on, these lights overpowered unprotected vision.  The staff learned to wear heavy polarized sunglasses to treat patients; the patients themselves wore dark masks that weren’t opaque enough to prevent a warm, rosy glow from leaking through.

While the staff seemed skeptical at first, they soon came to recognize the brilliance (no pun intended) of Princess Juliana’s design.

The light provided bright illumination around all parts of the hospital, leaving nothing in shadow.  This facilitated the diagnosis and treatment of rare jungle diseases -- and Lord knows Brazil possesses more than enough of those!

The Starlight Hospital remains one of the most successful hospitals for native tribes in Brazil, but its doors never open to non-native patients.

Princess Juliana recognizes that in order to best serve the Tabajara, she must never avail herself of the miracle she delivered unto them.

She is dying now, slowly from stomach cancer, yet she refuses all treatment.

“May it end with me and this hospital,” she says, thinking back on the horrors her great-grandfather perpetrated.

 © Buzz Dixon

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Writing Report December 13, 2024

I’ve been a smidge sporadic on this blog recently, missing a couple of Friday posts due to family obligations.

Nothing serious, all good, just…time consuming.

My first scheduled 2025 project isn’t going to start on January 1st as planned…

…because I already started working on it November 18th of this year.

It was one of those things when the project just said, “It’s time!” and I found myself facing no other option than to just start writing.

Work on it has been sporadic; I’m at 7,600+ words right now but I haven’t had a real chance to write two days in a row on this project due to aforementioned family obligations.

This one is an indirect offshoot of my previous WIP, a story set in the very earliest days of the film industry in Hollywood.

When working on that novel, I needed to do some research on prostitution in the Old West since one of the supporting characters in the story is a real cowboy of mixed ancestry. 

I was pretty sure his backstory was possible based on what little I knew at that time about prostitution in the Old West, but admitted the exact circumstances of his ancestry did sound a bit farfetched.

I figured no harm, no foul since no matter how unlikely the circumstances, they weren’t flat out impossible and besides, his ancestry wasn’t a main point in my story.

But when I stumbled across a copy of Michael Rutter’s Upstairs Girls:  Prostitution In The American West at our local Open Book outlet, I figured great, now I can double check my assumptions and make sure my character’s backstory isn’t completely impossible.

Well, in the book Rutter mentions a real madam who possessed a backstory of her own that was so oddball it got me to wondering how she ended up where she ended up.

So I started noodling around ideas for a completely fiction story of a character like the real madam and how she might have found herself involved in the trade back in the day.

Originally I thought of doing this as a stage play, with most of the action taking place in the main parlor and all the shenanigans going on out of sight upstairs.

Problem : While a great set-up, I had no real story, just some interesting characters.

Again, a supporting character came to my rescue.  If I set my story in a specific year, I could place in the sporting house a then brand new technology that virtually nobody would know about except a small ground of people such as saloon keepers and madams.

If the ladies of the house didn’t know about it, it could be used to hide a crime by providing a criminal with an apparent alibi.

Great!  Now I knew my plot would be a mystery.  Act One would be my main character arriving to take charge of the sporting house, Act Three would be her figuring out how the crime was committed using the then-new technology.

What goes on in Act Two?

Well, we know the answer to that one, don’t we, boys and girls?

More research!!!

So now I’m delving into a whole bunch of books and history websites, not just on prostitution in the Old West but also on mining boom towns (because the ladies who serviced cowboys at the end of a long cattle drive were a different breed of cat from the ladies who serviced miners because the former customers would blow through town in a few days but the latter were regulars and as a result the mining town ladies needed to be something more than just passive, anonymous partners).

Rutter came to my aid again with another volume on the history of prostitution in the Old West, Boudoirs To Brothels (and dude, I am eternally grateful to you for all the detailed research you did but gawd, with a name like that you were pretty much doomed to make this topic your life’s work, no?).

And boy howdy, did Rutter ever supply me with a wealth of ideas to make Act Two work.

It mean abandoning the idea as a stage play and turning it into a novel, but by that time it was chompin’ at the bit and there was no denying it so…

…I started typing.

My previous WIP -- the Hollywood novel -- completed, I really didn’t need to do any more research on it. 

But in Boudoirs To Brothels Rutter included the story of one sex worker in the Old West that not only showed me my cowboy character’s backstory was one hundred percent plausible, but what actually happened was even more outrageous than I imagined.

And while my current WIP will not include the real historical person, I was glad to see she enjoyed a real life happy ending.

Ladies and gentlemen, meet Mrs. Polly Bemis.

  © Buzz Dixon

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Deathwatch [FICTOID]

Allo brought his grandfather’s evening meal up the long, winding mountain path to the observatory.  Bitter winter winds tugged at his clothes without effect; as a child of the mountains, Allo suffered far worse without complain.

His grandfather’s observatory sat atop the peak, long thin strains of genetically engineered goatsilk trailing out in all directions to neighboring peaks.

Allo knew many people debated the value of the observatory, but what is done is done and as long as it required to extensive repairs, his grandfather would work there.

He passed through the heavily insulated outer doors to his grandfather’s lair.  Allo always felt a thrill of the forbidden when he visited his grandfather.  While his culture did not expressly forbid electronics and computers, they did regard them with suspicion.

Only rarely did they trust someone like Allo’s grandfather to use them.

“Allo, my boy!  Come to me!  What culinary joys have you brought?”

Allo grinned at his grandfather archaic grandiloquent words.  “Same as ever, grandfather.  Hot stew in an insulated contained, fresh greens kept chilled by the night air.  Do you have enough tea?”

“Plenty, my boy, plenty,” his grandfather said before sighing, “Though I may not need a resupply.”

Allo arched an eyebrow.  His grandfather gestured for him to sit and share his evening meal.

“You know the story, don’t you?” his grandfather said between bites.  “How the world once relied on wealth and power, how the wealthiest and most powerful ravaged the planet for their own benefit, and as the world went into spasms as they pillaged it, they built great ships to sail to the stars, looking for a new paradise to plunder.”

Allo nodded, savoring the delicious taste of rat stew.

“They left a thousand years ago, abandoning us, mocking us as they departed, heading to a world so far away it takes the light from its sun almost four years to reach us.”

“I know all that, I do well in my history and science courses.”

His grandfather chuckled.  “I’m sure you do.  Hereditary and all that.  Anyway, they left us, taking flight in a fleet of two hundred and seventy ships, heading to a world they called Proxima Centauri B. “They thought they planned for every contingency, but they didn’t.  Three of their ships never left this solar system.  The rest failed, one by one.” 

“And they couldn’t return,” said Allo, “because they used half their fuel to leave our solar system and would need the other half to land on the new world.  If they turned around they’d waste all their fuel just getting back, they wouldn’t have enough to land.”

His grandfather nodded grimly.  “Sometimes the failure came mercifully, with abrupt suddenness, sparing those aboard the terror of their fate, sometimes slowly, painfully, like a child drowning under the ice.”

Allo shuddered at the thought.  “Why didn’t the other ships try to save them?”

“They did…at first,” said his grandfather.  He swept his arm over to a huge bookshelf crammed with ancient tomes going back hundreds of years.  “Those of us who manned the observatory over the centuries kept careful track of their reports and messages.  A few of the earliest ships to suffer catastrophic failure managed to get their crew and passengers transferred to other ships.

“But as more and more ships failed, the surviving ships refused any more refugees.  ‘You’ll starve us, use up all our resources,’ they said.  On occasion wars would break out among them, resulting in all ships involved suffering fatal damage.

“Now they are down to one ship.  It entered the outskirts of the new solar system just a few months ago, but they suffered a fuel line rupture.  Now they are falling in a slow spiral that eventually will plunge them into the heart of that sun.

“Not that they’ll live that long.”

Allo looked up quizzically.  “Their pressure hull is breached.  They’re trying to save themselves by sealing off interior compartments one by one, but the bulkheads eventually fail.  Now there’s just a handful of them crammed into their darkened control room, sending out messages, reporting their fate.”

Allo shiver, but not from the cold.  “It hardly seems fair.”

“Fair?”

“These people dying, they aren’t responsible.  Their ancestors plundered this world, built those ships.”

“I might agree with you if they weren’t infected with the same mental disorder that led their ancestors on such a self-destructive course.”  He checked his clock.  “We’re coming into alignment.  Listen, my boy.  Hear what they have to say.”

He turned up the single speaker in his lair.  “This message is from four years ago,” he reminded Allo.  “Whatever was going to happen has already happened.”

Allo strained to hear the tinny voice coming over the ancient speaker.  Any common language his ancestors and the surviving crew and passengers shared long since diverged from one another to the point where he couldn’t understand was the voice was saying…

…but he could certainly hear the tone accurately.

The speaker sounded terrified, yet at the same time oddly entitled.

“They’re demanding anyone who hears this to come and save them,” his grandfather translated.  Over the centuries he and his predecessors carefully noted the language shifts and could speak not only the divergent tongues but the ancient original language of departure as well.  “They’re plunging toward the sun.  They won’t fall in this time but the heat and radiation is intense.  Already several of the weakest people in the control room have died, and the survivors are eating their flesh.”

His grandfather cocked his head to listen more closely.  Allo noticed the speaker’s voice sounded more panicked.  “The bulkhead is starting to buckle,” his grandfather translated.  “They’re going to try to stop up any gaps where air might leak out -- “

Allo and his grandfather heard a short sharp whistle then a dull thud followed by a whoosh…

…and then silence.

His grandfather looked quite thoughtful, almost sad.  “And that is that,” he said wistfully.  He smiled sadly at Allo.  “I’ll finish my report, tell it to the university, but my task here is eventually done.  They can start dismantling the observatory and share the components with others who need the material.”

“What will you do?” Allo asked.

His grandfather smiled more warmly this time.  “What can I do?  I’ll live.”

  © Buzz Dixon

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The End Of An Error

AI is good for crunching large amounts of data to find patterns within it. Humans then need to analyze those patterns. For research, it might be extremely useful. However, since most of us here are creators of one stripe or another, I'll focus on what it's doing there. It's wreaking havoc among musicians who previously found some sort of steady, reliable income through Spotify and other streaming services. AI generated music crowds out all but well established acts and old standards; musicians struggling to break through find their support in live performances and merchandise. AI generated blog posts and emails are already dominating those venues, perversely causing more and more people to ignore them. In fiction writing it enables mediocre writers to hack out acceptable mediocre genre fiction at prodigious rates. There, too, it will eventually undermine itself as discerning readers look for something more original and idiosyncratic. Original writers will need to put more time into promoting / marketing themselves, and the revenues will probably dip the way they have for musicians, but the ones who weather through it will survive. Artists are already being hard hit. Top line design jobs will still go to humans who can understand the wants and needs of other humans, but for lots of lower level art jobs it will be easier to generate / steal art (full disclosure: I gleefully swipe AI generated art when I find something that fits my fictoids when I post them on my blog; unlike public domain art I post, the AI prompters get no credit or recognition). The next big sh!t hammer to fall will be AI video. Already passable short films have been made using AI generated clips skillfully edited together.

 It helps that most of these are short-shorts of a horror / sci-fi / fantasy nature since AI’s inability to remain consistent can play into the air of unreality found in those genres.  Once AI learns how to stay on model it will be a major game changer. Elsewhere I've said I have no objection against people using AI for personal amusement, creating their own music videos, mashing up art, creating political satire, etc. But doing that is going to undermine mass media by creating user-specific content. What that will do culturally is anybody's guess; what happens to cultural touchstones when there isn't one version of Gilligan's Island but a three hundred million? There's a lot of practical uses real artists can find for AI (musicians trying out different orchestrations, artists doing a variety of concepts before settling on the one they want to develop, writers creating prompts for themselves, etc.) but it's already disrupting the creative sphere.

 © Buzz Dixon

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You Are What You Are, You Am What You Am [FICTOID]

There is a hospital in Florida reserved exclusively for sick penises.

We're not talking about a clinic for STD's or ward for traumatic genitalia injuries but a hospital devoted to looking after politicians / clergy / influencers who act like big dicks and got turned into one by Phuc Ya, the karma fairy.

Nurse Gearshift looked up as the double front doors to the hospital swung open.  She recognized the near-hysterical middle-aged woman next to the giant ambulatory penis as the wife of the state governor, which presumably made said ambulatory penis said governor.

“Please!  You've got to help me!  My husband just turned into a giant prick!”

“Your husband has always been a giant prick,” Nurse Gearshift muttered under her breath.  She handed a clipboard with the standard admission form to the distraught wife.  “Fill this out, please”

“This is an emergency!” the governor's wife said.  “You must treat him immediately!”

“We can't do anything until we have his full medical history, a list of all drugs he's currently taking, any allergies he might have, his insurance information, and what religion and political party he belongs to.”

“Don't you understand?” said the governor's wife.  “This is -- ”  Here she paused, looked around, saw no one else in the lobby (because who in their right mind wants to visit a hospital filled with giant ambulatory dicks?), leaned over the counter, and whispered:  “This is the governor.”

“Yes, ma'am, I'm sure he is,” said Nurse Gearshift.  “But we can't do anything until the proper forms are filled out.  This is a regulation your husband himself pushed through the state legislature last year.”

The now furious governor's wife snatched the clipboard from Nurse Gearshift’s hand.  “I'll have your job for this,” she hissed.

“You're welcome to it,” said Nurse Gearshift.  “Personally, I don't think you'd last through your first shift, but hey, you do you.”

The governor's wife patted the side of her husband's shaft.  “Just a moment, dear, and we'll get you in.”

“Don't do that,” quote Nurse Gearshift said.

“What?”

“Pat your your husband like that.  We had one woman do it and her hubby went off like Vesuvius.  Took us the better part of a week to get the lobby cleaned.”

The governor's wife looked dubiously at Nurse Gearshift as if she really didn't believe her then remembered her husband was now a six foot tall penis so maybe the lobby story wasn't that farfetched after all.

“Let me fill this out,” she told her husband, “and we'll get a doctor to see you.”

What's to see? Nurse Gearshift wondered. He was always a giant dick; now he just looks the same on the outside as the inside.

The governor's wife hastily scribbled out answers to the form’s questions then rudely tossed the clipboard back on Nurse Gearshifts desk with a clatter.  

“There!  Admit him!”

Nurse Gearshift gave the form a perfunctory glance to make sure the governor's wife filled in all the blank spaces then hit the intercom button.  “Admission.  Stat.”

Thirty minutes later two hazmat suited orderlies rolled a gurney into the lobby.

“This is the patient?” the senior orderly asked, jerking his thumb in the direction of the only giant ambulatory penis in the lobby.

“Yeah,” said Nurse Gearshift, returning her attention to the blackjack game on her desk computer.

The orderlies picked up the now penisized governor and laid him on the gurney with far more gentleness than he was entitled to.

“Now, are you ready to come with us?” the senior orderly asked.

“Yes!” the governor's wife snapped.

“Excuse me, ma'am, but we're talking to your husband,” said the younger orderly, remembering what the governor’s wife once said about unwed teen mothers like his sister.

“You're certainly welcome to come along as we admit him,” said the older, more politic orderly.

As she followed her husband into the examining room, the governor's wife paused to say to Nurse Gearshift,  “Rest assured you haven't heard the last of this.”

“Y’know, you're about due for a visit from the karma fairy yourself,” Nurse Gearshift said. “I'm just glad I don't work at the asshole hospital.”

 © Buzz Dixon

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