Ross B. Lampert tagged posts

I’ve known, since even before I reluctantly purchased this book in the early 2000s, that it would be a difficult read. That’s why it sat, unopened, on a bookshelf in three different houses, until now. In part, the reason might be obvious from author Joan Piper’s subtitle: “The Government Cover-up of the Black Hawk Incident and the Friendly-Fire Death of Lt. Laura Piper.” The other reasons require some up-front disclosure.

• I am a retired Air Force officer.
• I was a Mission Crew Commander (MCC) on the E-3 Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) aircraft.
• On the date of the shoot-down of the two Black Hawk helicopters over northern Iraq—April 14, 1994—I was deployed to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to fly missions enforcing the southern no-fly zone over Iraq for Operation Southern ...

Last time I wrote about how we humans are terrible at comprehending really large and really small numbers. Check that: we can’t. And when we try, either the names for the numbers become just words we sling around, or our brains go TILT!

Unfortunately, scientists tend to work in arenas where they need very large and very small numbers to describe the scales of the objects they’re studying, from billions of light years to fractions of a micron.

That’s not the only obstacle science faces when trying to be relevant and understandable to the general public. Another is complexity. Here’s an example we can all relate to: the human body...

New members of a critique or writers’ group will often say, “I don’t know how to critique.” The tendency, I suspect, is to think they have to do what they did in high school or college English classes: identify and explain the symbolism in a passage, say, or compare and contrast the use of metaphor with onomatopoeia.

Nope! Nope, nope, nope. That’s not what critique or writers’ group feedback is about. It’s about helping the author get better by identifying what worked, what didn’t, and why.

How Do You Feel?

Let’s start with the easiest thing: how did the piece make you feel? Did it:

• excite you
• anger you
• make you happy
• make you sad
• confuse...

Before I get into today’s post, three updates to last week’s. First, Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has come out publicly in favor of teaching evolution and cosmology, specifically the “Big Bang” theory, which Superintendent of Public Instruction Diane Douglas wants to eliminate, in the public schools. Second, it’s important to note that Superintendent Douglas does not have the last word on this issue, the state Board of Education does, and Douglas is only one member. She does, however, control what is presented to the Board, so this is not entirely good news...

According to the biographical notes JoeSue Ruterman provides, her grandfather, Charles Gus David Faught had an interesting early life. Born in 1873 in Lincoln, Missouri, his parents, Henry and Martha, took him and his baby sister Bell to Texas by wagon train in 1876. Charles’s mother died in an accident and her heart-broken father took Charlie and his sister Bell back to his in-laws because he didn’t feel he could raise them. Five years later, at the ripe old age of eight, Charlie joined a wagon train back to Texas to try to find his father. Henry found Charlie and they spent some time together, but Henry was rumored to be involved with a gang of bank robbers and he wanted better for his son.

Years later, Charlie had moved to Arizona and was working for the Aztec Land and Cattle C...

I had pretty high hopes for David Gaughran’s latest edition of Let’s Get Digital. I’ve been following his blog for a while and have been impressed with his depth of knowledge about the worlds of digital publishing and marketing, so I expected to see a lot of that distilled into the book.

It was, and it wasn’t.

Gaughran spends a substantial amount of the book on the history of ebooks and independent publishing. That’s fine, especially for folks just getting into the business. It’s also good for these folks to know how the legacy publishing industry has responded to the advent of ebooks and indie publishing—badly—and the tactics and techniques they’ve used to try to keep these disruptive new technologies from upsetting their cozy, comfortable world.

Gaughran also spend...

I had been looking forward to reading this collection of short stories for literally over ten years. I was first introduced to it via one of its stories, “Are You Too Late or Was I Too Early,” while taking classes for my Master’s Degree in the mid-2000s. That brief story, with its never-saw-it-coming twist ending, enchanted me. And Ray Bradbury, my all-time favorite author, wrote the introduction. How could I not enjoy the other 49 stories?

Well, it turns out that the book in total, and the individual stories, were less than I had hoped. To be clear, John Collier was a very skilled writer. Even though the stories were all written in the 1930s and 1940s (the book was first published in 1951), each one is tight and clean, not a word wasted...

The premise of Invasion! The Forgotten Adventures of Dolley Madison, Book One is clever enough. Dolley Madison, wife of America’s fourth President, James Madison, had another life during the War of 1812: a turbaned crusader, along with her trusty sidekick and servant girl Sukey, harrying and perplexing the invading British Army at every turn, rallying and leading American troops, turning the tide of battle after battle. Unbeknownst to historians everywhere, or forgotten by them, she was America’s secret weapon.

A clever premise, yes. In execution, not quite so much.

In his end notes, author Neil Garra reports that at one time he built war games for a certain government agency located in Maryland (likely the National Security Agency), and that around that same time he’d become fasc...

Jeri McAndrews is a classically trained ballet dancer who ran away from the School of American Ballet in New York and the demands and discipline of ballet. She landed eventually in southwestern Colorado, where among other things, she taught dance and choreographed and performed in modern dances in wild outdoor settings including the Great Sand Dunes National Monument. The title of the book is apt: while dance is certainly a core of McAndrews’ life, so it seems is running away, getting away from… many things: teaching middle school English (to be fair, a challenge only a few people are cut out for), marriage, parenthood, big cities (can’t argue with that one).

Why did she run? We’ll never truly know...

On August 20th, the local newspaper, the Sierra Vista Herald, published an article on my house, since it’s likely to get a LEED for Homes “platinum” rating, the highest. Unfortunately, the article is behind a pay wall on the Herald’s web site, so I’ve attached a copy here. You can use either this link

Living ‘lightly on the land’ article, svherald

and then click on the image of the first page of the PDF file to download it, or you can click on this link to download it directly.