I try to get these newsletters out the first of the month. This is late because I was tied up with a sudden trip I had to make to Hawaii to bring my mother home. At 88, her cognitive acuity has diminished to the point she can’t live alone. Dementia is one of the most horrible conditions I can think of. If you have read my second book, “How to Hotwire an Airplane”, you know that one of its themes is “You are your memories.” When you lose your memories, you have lost yourself, even though the body might still be alive. Read “Flowers for Algernon”—I remember sobbing when I read that book, when the narrator starts his slow, inevitable slide into senescence.
But rest assured, she is now with my brother and near other family members and is doing very well and getting the care she needs! (Didn’t want to end this part on a downer!)
One tidbit about “Hotwire”–in it, I predicted the airspace in Texas would become a shambles, owing to the inability of the FAA and the military to communicate. Sadly, that came true when the FAA recently shut down the airspace over El Paso for ten days (later rescinded) A tiff with the DoD and DHS. (If you kids can’t agree, I’m gonna take everything away…)
February was a busy month! Finished teaching the class on submarines at George Mason University. It was truncated a bit due to a weather-related cancellation of one class, but I have good faith the next one I teach, at the Fairfax campus this spring, will not be so affected.
“Submerged” went into March still the Amazon #1 Bestseller in Navy Biographies so was a bestseller for 12 months, but today was bumped to #3. It was a good run, though!
In Feb I was a guest on “Reels of Justice”, a hilarious movie review podcast created in the guise of “Law and Order” where a “prosecutor” and “Defense attorney” discuss the merits and demerits of a movie to determine whether it is “guilty” of being a bad movie. I defended “K19: Widowmaker”, a movie about a (true) atomic accident on a Soviet sub in 1961 that killed many of its crewmembers, starring Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. Did I win my case? You have to watch the episode when it comes out! (It has not yet, but here is their Facebook page Facebook
“Google Maps Handicap” is coming along. Slowly. I am on the fence about whether I need to, or shall, make a pseudonym for “Google”, I would hate to publish it and then be sued by them for defamation. That would be a stretch, but we live in a litigious country.
I will leave you with two authors I discovered this month:
“Elyse Douglas” is the pen name of a husband-wife team that writes time travel romances, which I am sucker for. I read “Time Change” but they are very prolific; tons of others. We shall see if they become repetitive.
Joe Barret writes like I do, or want to anyway. Funny, but with a social point wrapped inside the humor. Just finished “Unplugged”, which is about, among other things, the homeless, and now reading “Managed Care”, which is about other downtrodden, unnoticed people of America.
Strongly recommend reading those books (after mine, of course!)
Until next month,
Henry Rausch