Retrieval Artist, Clean Screen, Funny Republicans - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

There was a long stretch of time when I read and reviewed every single science fiction and fantasy short story published in the major magazines and anthologies. Then I wrote a review column for The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which likewise required that I read a lot of sci-fi.

The result is that for more than a decade I have read very little science fiction for pleasure. It was once my favorite reading, because I loved being taken to places I've never seen before and exploring societies that have never existed.

The trouble is, after reading thousands and thousands of stories and novels, I find that very few sci-fi writers can take me anywhere I haven't already been. I get three pages in and I'm recognizing everything. It takes the fun out of it.

I can still read fantasy for pleasure, because that genre is going through a huge transition, in which the fantasy worlds are as fully invented and fleshed out as in the best historical and science fiction novels of the past. But with a few exceptions -- new books by writers I have always admired and enjoyed in the past -- I just don't read science fiction very often.

But I recently made an exception. Kristine Kathryn Rusch has had a remarkable career in the field of science fiction -- and elsewhere.

She once edited The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (where she never bought a single story from me, perhaps because I don't think I ever sent her any).

She has written a free online book called Freelancer's Survival Guide, which is without doubt the best, most essential book for writers who are contemplating quitting their day jobs and doing the writing thing full time. I wish it had been around when I went freelance the first time back in 1980; I have friends who have absolutely relied on Rusch's advice and it never leads them astray. Read it at kriswrites.com.

OK, so I knew her name; I even knew some of her early work. But I hadn't read anything by her in years. Then I signed on to Audible.com and a novel of hers popped up as one of their featured books -- the most recent installment in her Retrieval Artist Series.

Since I have a "platinum" membership -- which means I pay in advance for a substantial number of books -- it feels like whatever I pick up is free. That is, it only costs me "credits" instead of money. This makes it psychologically easier to buy and download a novel just to try it out.

Yes, sometimes this attitude has left me with an audiobook that I detested. But buying audiobooks in CD form has had the same result sometimes! And far more often, those what-the-heck purchases at Audible have led me to wonderful books I would never have read otherwise.

And that's what happened with Rusch. I downloaded the new book -- but because it was part of a series, I also bought a few of the earlier titles.

Annoyingly, the books aren't numbered -- that is, the cover doesn't say anything about the order in which to read them. Nor did I find a listing that specified the order on Rusch's own website. Amazon.com doesn't have most of the series for sale, but at least they number a few of them -- and list the copyright dates as well. But what I downloaded was books 1, 3, and 6.

It didn't matter. Each book stands alone. Though it's best to start with the first book, as the foundation for all the rest, you can then read in any order.

But you won't want to. Because Rusch does a superb job of making the Retrieval Artist books work as fully satisfying standalone mysteries and as installments in a gripping saga full of love, loss, grief, hope, adventure, and discovery.

The novels are centered in the Armstrong Dome on the Moon, where the hero, Miles Flint, works to help keep people -- particularly children -- safe from the almost unbearable devil's bargain that humanity has struck with various alien races in order to maintain peaceful trade relations.

His career path makes him an ideal detective in this future world. He was a wizard computer programmer, living on the Moon with his wife, an even smarter biologist, when their daughter was "accidently" killed by a daycare worker. Miles became obsessed with making the daycare worker pay for the crime; he left his computer work and trained to become a policeman.

Not long afterward, his wife divorced him, so he begins his career with the police as a lonely, grieving man. After serving a stint with the Port of Armstrong police, he makes detective and is teamed with Noelle DeRicci, a tough, smart woman who speaks truth to power. This is not normally good for one's career, but Miles finds that she's a great detective and learns from her.

So far, this might feel like pretty ordinary backstory for a noir detective -- but I haven't told you the sci-fi stuff yet. As part of the Earth Alliance's treaty with various alien species, each species is pledged to respect the laws of the others when crimes are committed on their planets.

Here's the rub. Some of the aliens regard as crimes things that we would regard as accidents -- or not even crimes at all. And some of the punishments are unbearable to human beings. For instance, one species' law requires that a convicted criminal give up her own firstborn child to be raised as by the aliens as one of their own. If an infant is so taken, it survives the process and becomes a reasonably happy -- though no longer truly human -- adult. But children who are a little older are mentally destroyed by the process.

Other species exact blood vengeance, or forbid a convicted criminal to raise children, or other bizarre, brutal, cruel punishments -- which are nevertheless logical within the worldview of the aliens.

So what we have are legal dramas and crime stories in which the human characters have to deal with completely believable and yet unbearable alien laws and punishments. And a human cop is required to cooperate in the enforcement of laws that seem utterly unjust. A child paying for the crime of its parent?

One might suppose that the whole thing is unbelievable -- humans would never accept treaties that allow their children to be seized or destroyed by aliens. But the more you know about history, the more believable it seems. After all, only a few people are subject to such penalties -- and human governments cooperate to give them as little publicity as possible. We humans have an almost infinite capacity to ignore other people's suffering, as long as it stays at a distance.

But for Miles Flint, there is no distance. Every child he's required to hand over to aliens is an unbearable loss -- he can't forget his own lost child.

There are ways to evade these draconian sentences. Disappearance services offer -- for a steep price -- to help convicts and their children get new identities. This is far harder to bring off than in our present-day witness protection program, because the future technology makes DNA testing about as easy as a handshake. And for every Disappearance service, there are Trackers for hire, charging the aliens very high fees to locate the humans they're chasing.

There's another category, too: Retrieval Artists. They have to accomplish the same feats of detection as Trackers, finding people who have Disappeared -- but their goal is to notify them that they have been pardoned, or convey to them an inheritance, or give them news about the people they have left behind.

So the Retrieval Artist not only seeks the Disappeared, but he must also do so in such a way that no Tracker can follow in his footsteps and locate the hidden criminals.

All this makes for intricate plotting and intense moral dilemmas. What if the human really is guilty of a crime, yet the punishment seems unjust? For Miles Flint, these moral dilemmas are tortuous and torturous, but he takes them on. For he cannot continue as a detective, a job that requires him to help enforce laws that destroy children and other innocents. So he quits, buys an old woman's Retrieval agency, and begins yet a third career, skirting the edges of the law while trying to do some genuine good in the world.

Here's Rusch's genius: She doesn't confine herself to the rules of any one genre. She does world-creation and social criticism like the best sci-fi writers; she creates crime stories that would be Best Episodes on Law & Order or CSI; and she creates stories of human relationships that rank her with the finest character writers working today.

It has taken me rather a long time to give you all this set-up -- but I've barely touched the surface of any of the stories. You simply have to read them -- or listen to them -- for yourself.

But there's a problem. The early novels have gone out of print in book form. Fortunately, they're all available on the Kindle and other e-book formats. Or you can simply start with one of the books that is still available in print form -- this is truly a series in which each novel is fully self-contained.

And I can tell you from experience, having read them out of order, that knowing the things you're told in later books does not make the earlier books less enjoyable. This is because Miles Flint does not always find out everything that happened, so the later books will tell you what he thinks happened, while we readers find out key things that he cannot know and may never discover. So you can start with the most recent book, still in print, and it will be almost as good an introduction to the series as the first one.

Or you can buy and download them from Audible.com, then listen to them in the correct order.

The audiobooks are produced by Audible itself, with Jay Snyder reading. Snyder is a superb narrator, rendering all the voices differently and recognizably, with good acting. As with every reader I've ever listened to, there are occasional mispronounced or misunderstood words, but he makes no more errors than the author does.

(Authors all make mistakes, including me. Rusch, for instance, gets "whom" right most of the time, but she completely messes up subjunctive, using it in cases where it's dead wrong. My guess is that most readers won't notice the mistakes or care much if they do. As for my mistakes, let's just say that I embrace my own imperfections.)

If you love puzzle mysteries, crime novels, well-invented sci-fi worlds, or stories about characters you can believe in and care about, you owe it to yourself to give Rusch's Retrieval Artist novels a try.

First things first: My new novel, Pathfinder, comes out at Thanksgiving. It's my first official Young Adult novel, though Ender's Game, written for adults, has been embraced by many younger readers. For me, the only real difference in writing for the YA audience is that I can't indulge in long introspections -- the story has to keep moving. So that might make it more enjoyable for adult readers, as well.

I'm sure that you keep your computer screen clean ... on the outside. But what are you doing about cleaning the inside? Maybe those streaks and stains you can't get rid of are because you haven't been performing all the necessary maintenance. Check out an excellent method of screen cleaning.

They rarely show short films at the theaters these days -- after all, short films don't make the theaters a speck more money, so it's better to run the teasers (which will make money as you presumably come back to see future movies), then run the feature, then get you out of the theater, clean up, and start the next showing of the money-maker.

It's a fact, plain and simple, that Republicans just aren't as funny as Democrats. Or maybe it's just that most comedians tend to hang out with a lot of politically correct people and adopt their worldview, so only a few comics view the world from the conservative side.

This is true of comic writers, as well. These days, Republican attempts at comedy are usually too angry to be funny -- a common disease among revolutionaries. This makes it so they can be enjoyed only by people who are angry at the same things, which means fellow Republicans.

The main exception for the past few decades has been P.J. O'Rourke, who is funny no matter who you are -- and if you don't mind his coarse language, he's almost enough to make up for all the leftwing comics!

But he's not the only one. Here's a piece by Frank J. Fleming about the upcoming Congressional elections that makes perfect sense, but is also funny enough to be enjoyed by anybody with a sense of humor.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Thursday, October 28 -- Good Medicine Day

Jonas Salk was born today in 1914. We remember him because in 1953, he announced the development of a successful vaccine to prevent polio. The previous year, more than three thousand Americans died of polio, and many thousands more were left in respirators (the "iron lung") or crippled for life. Even those who seemed to recover found that polio, once inside them, could still strike crippling blows later in life.

I was only two years old when the vaccine began to be administered -- by injection, in those days. Knowing nothing of polio, I complained bitterly about having to get those shots every few years. Polio didn't scare me, because in my lifetime, polio was so rare I never knew anyone who had a new case of it in their family. So when the Sabin oral vaccine came out, I was more grateful for the vaccination-by-sugar-cube than for the Salk injections that saved so many thousands from a terrible scourge.

It's easy to complain today about medical malpractice and marginal "cures." It's true that much of medical science barely qualifies as science at all -- fads sweep through the medical profession, experimental results too often seem bent to please whoever is funding the research, and outmoded procedures and disproved theories seem to linger like a bad cold.

But with all their flaws, doctors have a far better success average than, say, economists, and the pharmaceutical companies have a better track record at finding cures for public problems than Congress. (Putting the government in charge of medicine makes as much sense as asking a drunk to drive you home because taxis are too expensive.)

Fallible though medicine may be, it stands beside modern agriculture (the "green revolution") as the primary causes of vastly increased longevity and vastly decreased infant mortality rates, worldwide, in modern times.

We dwell on the flaws of medicine because we've gotten used to a world in which antibiotics cure most infections, surgeons can restore or replace ruined joints and organs, and vaccinations prevent the majority of the world's most murderous diseases, while medications ease most pain, cure most insomnia, and allow many of the mentally ill to lead productive lives.

When you consider that all but a handful of the crucial medical discoveries came in the last hundred years (antiseptic surgery and anaesthetics are among the few great lifesavers that came earlier), for at least this one day a year, let's be glad for modern medicine instead of complaining about it.

On this day in 1886, Frederic Auguste Bartholdi's colossal sculpture, entitled "Liberty Enlightening the World," was dedicated on Bedloe's Island in New York harbor. It was a gift from France to the United States in commemoration of the anniversary of our independence, which we only won with the help of France. Little did anyone know how well and thoroughly we would repay that debt with American blood and treasure on the battlefields of France and the rest of Europe in two world wars over the next six decades.

Inside the pedestal of the statue is a sonnet by Emma Lazarus. The whole poem is an expression of America's character as a nation of immigrants, but it is the ending of the poem that still rings in the hearts of most Americans:

Send me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore:

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me.

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

Not every popular comedian of the radio era made the transition to television successfully -- but I'm grateful that Jack Benny was one of them. The master of the slow burn and the infinitely long "take," Benny's self-named TV variety show premiered on this day in 1950. With comedy that depended on wit and character, it would be hard to imagine him thriving today in this era of dirty and/or gross comedy, but no comedian since has made me laugh harder than Jack Benny did.

Friday, October 29 -- Internet Day

The first connection on what would become the Internet was made on this day in 1969, when bits of data flowed between computers at UCLA and the Stanford Research Institute. In those days it was called ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), developed by the Department of Defense to allow computer-using research institutions and the military to share data quickly and efficiently.

Networking remote computers was first proposed by computer scientist J.C.R. Licklider in a memo in August 1962 -- he called it the "Intergalactic Computer Network," showing that from the start, computers were a haven for sci-fi geeks.

Bob Taylor continued to develop Licklider's idea. He had remote terminals for three different mainframe computers in his office, and each one used a completely different set of protocols -- they not only couldn't 'talk" to each other, but a human being had a hard time keeping their languages straight. Taylor had to get up from one terminal and go sit at another in order to pass an idea between them.

Others had developed the concept of "packet switching" to allow the error-free sharing of large files between computers using different operating systems; Taylor proceeded to prepare a complete plan for a network. He asked for bids from 140 computer companies, but only a few submitted bids. The initial network was slo-o-o-ow -- only 50 kilobits per second -- but it seemed almost miraculously fast compared to mailing data cards or retyping code or data!

By the end of 1969, four sites were connected: UCLA, the Stanford Research Institute, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Utah, and by the next year there were 10 sites. Soon applications like e-mail and file transfer utilities were added to the mix, with the @ symbol quickly adopted as part of email addressing.

When home and personal computing began, new networks grew up to serve them -- CompuServe, Delphi, and others, followed by Prodigy and America Online. Finally, though, the Internet was opened up to the general public, and a new age in public communication began. ARPANET was decommissioned in 1990, and the National Science Foundations, NSFnet, took over the role of backbone of the Internet.

This day in 1929 was "Black Tuesday," the day when, with the largest volume of trading until 1968, the New York Stock Exchange crashed, leading to the Great Depression in the United States.

People like to quote President Herbert Hoover's statement, only a few days before, that "The fundamental business of the country . . . is on a sound and prosperous basis." This statement was not completely false -- at that moment -- and expert economists had recently said things like "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."

Economic history is full of proclamations that seem idiotic in hindsight. And please keep in mind that Hoover and others only made these statements because the stock market was already sliding sharply downward. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after peaking at 381.17 on 3 September, had lost 17 percent of its value over the next month.

The only way to stop an incipient stock market panic is to talk optimistically and get big institutions to provide market bailouts, restoring confidence. Those who complain about modern government bailouts should remember that giant financial institutions or very rich individuals stopped several "panics" ("depression" was a euphemism to replace "panic") by making massive buys of key stocks. Corporations today are so huge that only the government can afford to bail them out -- if it's decided that bailouts are necessary.

A bailout -- without government participation -- was attempted on 24 October 1929 by a coalition of banks. But the popularity of stock trading, and the large losses over the past seven weeks, prompted a large number of small and medium stockholders to panic and get their money out while their stocks still had most of their value.

The result, however, was larger losses than ever on 28 October, with a record single-day loss in the Dow of 13 percent. Then, amid rumors that President Hoover would allow the economy-wrecking protectionist Smoot-Hawley tariff bill to become law instead of vetoing it, the market fell another 12 percent.

But then, after a November 13^th bottom of 198.60, the market recovered for several months. It wasn't the market crash itself that "caused" the depression. It was the fact that, as with our mortgage practices in 2008, our financial rules allowed people to borrow up to two-thirds of the price of stocks they could not afford. They could only hope to repay those loans with profits from rising stock prices, so that when the stocks lost value and the borrowers defaulted, the banks were left holding the stocks.

Then, as the Smoot-Hawley Act began its steady work of destroying world trade, the real Depression set in. The stock market was the trigger, but the fundamental causes were sloppy lending practices and stupid trade-killing laws, followed by government deficit spending to create phony jobs.

Many economists now agree that both Republican and Democratic presidents, Hoover and Roosevelt, by following the advice of the two different groups of wrong economists, did almost nothing to alleviate the Depression. The major difference is that Roosevelt was far better at convincing people that he was doing something.

It's amusing but also pathetic to watch both our legislative and executive branches try to apply "stimulus" strategies that have never worked -- like raising taxes and spending borrowed money on phony projects that don't actually improve the economy. (The bailout, on the other hand, is an echo of practices that have worked to stave off panic in the past.)

Saturday, October 30 -- National Forgiveness Day

The purpose of National Forgiveness Day is for people to take time to repair, restore, rebuild and revive damaged relationships. In practical terms, that means that even if you're sure the other person was completely in the wrong, you let go of your anger and treat them normally.

Just a hint: If you begin the conversation by announcing that you "forgive" someone who thinks he was in the right, you have not healed anything -- it's just one more offense! Better to be humble enough to ask for forgiveness when you don't think you were wrong than to bestow forgiveness on someone who is utterly convinced that he was right.

Orson Welles's Mercury Players radio production of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds" was broadcast on this day in 1938, as part of a series of radio dramas based on famous novels. Listeners who missed the opening only got one disclaimer -- forty minutes into the program -- assuring people that it was a fiction program.

So it's not a surprise that some people believed there was a Martian invasion of New Jersey. And the panic spread as people phoned their family and friends -- thus demonstrating the terrible power of that evil modern network called "the phone system" to push false and damaging ideas among the ignorant masses.

The intelligentsia loves to cite this as an example of how dumb the common people are, but Welles got exactly the response he wanted -- he set out to fool people, and he succeeded. The problem is with the liars, not the people who innocently believe them.

Besides, I'm pretty sure that at least as high a percentage of our intellectual elite believes in mad scientific fantasies as the general public.

Myths among the masses: UFOs, psychics, alien abductions, your cat loves you.

Myths among intellectuals: Palestinians are innocent victims of the nefarious Jews, atmospheric carbon will end the world, religion causes nothing but evil in the world, the government knows how to raise children better than parents do.

May I point out that we science fiction writers proclaim that we're writing fiction; if people believe in our stories it's not our fault. But such scientific hoaxes as "recovered memories" of child abuse and human sacrifice, the zero-evidence claim that human-generated "global warming" is causing as-yet-undetectable disaster, the recurring claim that Earth is "over-populated," and the vile cruelties and genocides that arose from "eugenics" join with Piltdown Man, murderous Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and Freudian and Jungian psychology as examples of fake science promulgated by "experts."

The current issue of The Weekly Standard quotes Time's Joe Klein as having said, in response to the voters who plan to repudiate Democratic rule: "There is something profoundly diseased about a society that idolizes its ignoramuses and disdains its experts. It is a society that no longer takes itself seriously."

No, Mr. Klein. It is educated and free-thinking citizens who recognize the danger of letting clowns who think they're experts determine public policy without recourse to the people.

If you stop lying to people, maybe they won't believe so many crazy things.

Sunday, October 31 -- Halloween

Speaking of hoaxes, isn't it a shame that the urban legends about people poisoning candy and putting razor blades in apples have taken so much of the fun out of Halloween as a night when children can scare each other and play foolish pranks as they go about begging for candy? There is no documented case of poison or razor blades being perpetrated upon strangers.

Meanwhile, spoilsports from the Christian Right -- the only people who actually believe in malevolent satanic witches -- continue to hate Halloween on religious grounds.

As for me, I think wearing costumes and giving out candy is fun.

But I also think that churches should play no part in "haunted houses" or other macabre or frightening enterprises, and I hate horror movies and don't understand the people who like them.

I think that makes me either a moderate, a religious fanatic, or a tool of Satan.

Happy Halloween!

Car Talk had its national radio premiere on this day in 1987. Hosted by auto mechanics (and brothers) Ray and Tom Magliozzi (also known as "Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers"), the show had already been a local institution in Boston since 1977. Not only are the brothers cheerful and funny, they also teach a lot about cars.

Mount Rushmore was completed today in 1941.

This is Reformation Day -- the anniversary of the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg's Palace church, denouncing misdeeds within the Catholic Church. Eventually this led to the Protestant Reformation ... and the bloody Thirty Years War as Europe tried to figure out how -- and whether -- nations, villages, congregations, and individuals could peacefully claim to be Christian, yet have radically different beliefs and practices.

The struggle for religious toleration isn't over -- there are still plenty of people who are eager to deny the title of "Christian" to people who do, in fact, believe in Christ.

Even so, Christians have come a lot farther along the road of tolerance than some other religions which claim the right to have a monopoly on power -- like state-sponsored Islam in many nations, and politically-correct atheistic neo-Puritanism in America and Europe, the religion that claims to be "above religion."

In America, Christianity is fast becoming the only group that it's permissible to ridicule at best, and at worst deprive of rights granted to every other group.

Monday, November 1 -- National Author's Day

How fitting, that authors should be celebrated on the day that America is groaning from the huge volume of candy consumed since the day before. Some authors -- the ego-starved and under-recognized -- would like you to applaud and praise them wherever they go today. But most of us, being introverts, would rather you commemorate this glorious occasion by leaving us alone and reading our books instead.

"Give Wildlife a Brake!" Week begins today. A lot of animals are in the midst of mating season right now, making them even more daring and stupid than ever (think: teenage boys showing off for their girlfriends).

I personally have had a deer ram the side of my car when I was peacefully driving along at sixty miles an hour on US 220 in Virginia. And on the same road, as my wife and I came home from dinner with a friend in Roanoke, I counted the corpses of three deer on or beside the road.

I also remember well a friend from my teen years who was killed when a deer leapt over the hood of her moving car, shattering the windshield and killing both front-seat occupants. Hitting a deer is no joke.

I'm not sure, however, about hitting squirrels. Many of them die because they have evolved to dodge hawks -- when they sense danger, they change direction quickly. This often means that they get out of your way -- and then run right back under your wheels! If they just kept going straight, we wouldn't kill so many. But then the hawks would get them.

The main thing is that by the time you see the animal, it's often too late to stop in time to save them. Perhaps the solution is to drive a little slower. In fact, speaking as a gomered-out old man who needs to wear a driving hat to warn people that I'm going to go slow and forget to signal, I think driving a little slower year-round isn't such a bad idea.

Peanut Butter Lovers' Month begins today. Personally, I think we need to separate these two concepts, and have separate months for peanut butter and for lovers.

On Nov. 1, 1800, President John Adams and his family became the first to move into the newly completed White House, as Washington, DC, became the new capital.

Tuesday, November 2 -- Election Day

Whether you intend to vote the way I want you to or not, just do it. Don't give me any of that bobagem about how "it doesn't make any difference" or "they're all the same" or "I vote against them all by staying home." It does make a difference, and if you don't vote at all you're voting for stupid government. Sadly enough, we'll all pay the price for that vote!

This is the Mexican Day of the Dead, tied to All Saints' Day (1 November) and All Souls' Day (2 November). Though the name suggests something similar to Halloween, it's actually a time of celebration and feasting in many countries.

Plan Your Epitaph Day is dedicated to the proposition that a forgettable gravestone is a fate worse than death and that everyone can be in the same league with William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, and W.C. Fields.

Shakespeare's epitaph (with spelling modernized): "Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear / To dig the dust enclosèd here. / Blessed be the man that spares these stones / And cursed be he that moves my bones."

Winston Churchill's epitaph: "I am ready to meet my Maker. Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter."

Robert Frost: "I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

Primo Levi: "174517" -- his number in Auschwitz.

W.C. Fields's epitaph? Here's the joke -- his burial place has no epitaph, just his years of birth and death. It was an article in Vanity Fair that proposed a version of his "famous epitaph": "Here lies W.C. Fields. I would rather be living in Philadelphia." This was commonly rendered as "On the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia," and he may have said it himself from time to time.

So let's end with the epitaph Benjamin Franklin wrote for himself: "The body of B. Franklin, printer / Like the cover of an old book / Its contents torn out / And stripped of its lettering and gilding / Lies here food for worms / For, it will as he believed appear once more / In a new and more elegant edition / Corrected and improved by the Author."

OK, that's not the end. Here's an epitaph that fully expresses my reason for banning capital punishment: "Here lies George Johnson / Hanged by mistake, 1882 / He was right / We was wrong / But we strung him up / And now he's gone."

Wednesday, November 3 -- Sandwich Day

This is the birthday of John Montague, Fourth Earl of Sandwich. He served as England's First Lord of the Admiralty, Secretary of State for the northern department, and Postmaster General. He is the man for whom Captain James Cook named the Sandwich Islands in 1778 (though we have since reverted to the native name "Hawaii.")

Montague was known to be a rake (short for "rakehell", the idea being that you have to rake the ground in hell to scrape up such a lowlife -- or that he lives his life raking hell to find new sins to commit) and a gambler. He is said to have invented the sandwich as a way to dine without leaving the card table in a 24-hour-long gambling session in 1762.

Now we're searching for a meal you can eat without taking your hands from the electronic game controller.

This is Cliché Day. Remember, today's cliché is tomorrow's figure of speech. The more we use it, the faster it will become a permanent part of the language and then, for the next few centuries, baffle foreigners trying to learn English. So use every cliché you can think of today, as often as possible.

"Dewey Defeats Truman" Headline appeared today in 1948. Some eager beaver at the Chicago Tribune put the paper to press on election night before all the results were in. He trusted the pre-election polls, and so the banner headline across the top of the page heralded the election of Republican Thomas E. Dewey.

The reason you've never heard of President Dewey (or, for that matter, Huey or Louie) is that Harry Truman won in a strange four-way election, in which three candidates won electoral votes -- President Truman, Thomas E. Dewey, and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond (he carried Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina -- plus the vote of one "faithless elector" in Tennessee).

The fourth candidate, former Roosevelt Vice President Henry Wallace, carried no states but served as Truman's Ralph Nader -- bleeding off the votes of the extreme Left.

When you consider that both Thurmond and Wallace were taking traditionally Democratic votes, the election was certainly an anti-Republican landslide. Americans still blamed Republicans for the Depression and credited the Democrats with ending it -- and with winning World War II.

So firmly committed to the Democratic Party was the majority of the American people that Republicans only carried the House of Representatives twice between 1931 and 1995 -- Democrats ruled the house for 60 of those 64 years. That stock market crash nearly killed the Republican Party.

That's what can happen to the party in power when the economy falls apart and their policies only make it worse.