REALLY — When’s the last time you had some fun. Real fun! Wild, unconstrained, giggly FUN and I don’t mean a day without news spent entirely in Meta’s cyberspace. I mean real, human-to-human fun.

Given the pandemic has challenged us to rise to a new style and level of interaction, and that we’ve completely failed to take advantage of the COVID-shot-across-the-bow to update our future infrastructure (or almost any infrastructure at all), instead returning to the state of things that...

A doctor of philosophy degree wherein one knows more and more about less and less. The key is the word philosophy, meaning “love of wisdom,” whereas doctorate simply implies the highest degree (of). But seriously, what is wisdom? Or knowledge (shouldn’t all degreed individuals possess knowledge)? And where do information and data fit in?

In my experience, the lowest form of education involves the memorization of data. Having a storehouse of data at one’s fingertips used to be a major...

TRUE, there’s more and more static appearing in every facet of life, be it relationships, culture, politics, finances and consumer information – you name it. But there’s also some good news about some of that static: namely the K. Simmons Production STATIC movie that premiered in 2021. A family friendly, science fiction/drama, Susan’s struggle to find balance in her life as she deals with her practical husband Donald and her father Will who’s showing symptoms of early onset Alzheime...

Of course I’m referring here to that classic line in the movie CASABLANCA where Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) says to lover Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman), I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” That’s not to lessen the other incredibly timely and unforgettable lines in the movie like “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine...

“IF it flys like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a…” Personally, I enjoy likening this to the infamous children’s question, “What black and white and red/read all over?” So what’s para-duck-sicle about the first statement, and ‘riddled’ with double-entendre in the second, that both have in common? They’re both riddles. Or, some might say, they both are, in a broader sense, conundrums.

According to Dictionary.com, a riddle is “a question or s...

JUSTICE is often portrayed as blindfolded, holding a sword and presumably emotionally detached. Today I would like to conclude my three posts on adjudicating justice with a brief reminder about two of what I consider two of the most important but often ignored aspects of justice: mercy and grace.

According to dictionary.com, grace encompasses courteous goodwill, neither asked for nor deserved, but freely given. Grace is often, in my experience, meted out equally blindfolded. Mercy is compass...

AS promised, today’s post follows on yesterdays. Talk is cheap as some would point out; action is something else altogether. Still, both come together in Plato’s famous (or infamous) REPUBLIC depending on your point of view. The 10-book “series” is is a Socratic dialogue, on justice, the just city-state, and the just human. According to Wikipedia, Socrates talks with various Athenians and foreigners about the meaning of justice and whether a just man is happier than an unjust one. In ...

JUSTICE “is a concept on ethics and law that means that people behave in a way that is fair, equal and balanced for everyone,” according to simple.wikipedia.org. On the other hand, legally, justice can be be equally defined as, “n. 1) fairness. 2) moral rightness. 3) a scheme or system of law in which every person receives his/ her/its due from the system, including all rights, both natural and legal” according to Law.com, an online “legal dictionary”. The whole idea of justice ca...

WITH the K. Simmons Production of FINDING KATE — https://kspllc.media/finding-kate — about to enter production, the question remains, who will play lead actress in the role of Kate Keenan and where in the world is she? Long-ignored computer genius Kate Keenan has designed a computer program that will put Hollywood and Bollywood out of business overnight. Suddenly everyone wants her…and her program. To stay alive, Kate goes into hiding, barely keeping ahead of a lethal hoard of pursuers....

IT all started with lunch. One of my personal favorite lunch recipes is Japanese-Alaskan Potato Salad. Whoa, there! I can hear you saying, so here it is, basically: Yukon potatoes (boiled with skin on), cucumbers (very thinly sliced, the juice squeezed out), mayo (we use veggie mayo for a more adult taste), carrot (again, very thin sliced), white onion broccoli and/or celery (again very thinly sliced), a sprinkling of roasted sesame seeds. The object is to keep it simple. Yum. On the other ha...

ADMITTEDLY, a play on FINDING KATE, the recently begun filming K. Simmons Production based on the award-winning novel of the same name — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LY5WYTE. Written by multi-award-winning author A. G. Hayes, FINDING KATE is the fifth in the popular seven-book “Koski and Falk Secret Agent” and first in the three-book “Kate Keenan Special Assignment” series. In the book, long-ignored computer genius Kate Keenan has designed a computer program that will put Hollywood ...

ABSTRACT Artificial Intelligence (AI) thoughts aren’t science fiction anymore. SciFu (science-based futuring) AI thinking is already happening, incredible as it sounds. They’re learning. But consider this: GPT-3, a trained AI language model by Open AI, with prompts, “can write humanlike news articles, short stories and poems. But in one demo, it wrote: ‘It takes two rainbows to jump from Hawaii to seventeen'” — https://www.sciencenews.org/century/computer-ai-algorithm-moore-law-et...

I’M pleased to announce that production (filming) of the 6-part action/adventure film, “Finding Kate,” has begun — https://kspllc.media/finding-kate or follow me at https://janik.yolasite.com/findingkate.php. Finding Kate is based on the award-winning book by A. G. Hayes of the same name at a celebratory 15% off the Suggested Retail Price (using “ONLINE” discount code at checkout) with free shipping within the USA from Savant Bookstore Honolulu — https://savant-bookstore-honolul...

LET’S face it: Information overload is here to stay. And much of it is spun, hoodwinked, tainted, biased or just plain untrue. I’m for a day — today — without any digital news. Nothing. Nada. And a little bit of nothing, I think, will go a long way to regaining my balance. My center. Especially in this unbalanced world. Think “The Qatsi Trilogy – Koyaanisqatsi/Powaqqatsi/Naqoyqatsi” (Hopi for “life out of balance”) — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009D004MC. Then think THE EDG...

HAVING finished filming my and Setsuko Tsuchiya’s parts in the upcoming movie THE PERFECT ILLUSION, I couldn’t help but add to my author/actor’s website a recently completed special flying scene (in-which-I-am-not-but-truly-wish-I-were) — https://janik.yolasite.com/theperfectillusion.php. Have you ever dreamed as a child of flying through the air like Superman or Supergirl? This scene simply tugged at my inner child’s heart and begged to be shared.

From where does that seemingly pr...

AH, did you catch that? “Virtually” nothing to say. That is, nothing — nada, nope — to say about the virtual world, but a lot to say about the “real” world.

Less than a decade ago, the distinction between real and virtual was quite clear: The real world was where one lived out one’s mortal life, for better or worse, gaining experience over time from face-to-face and sometimes body-to-body social encounters. No more. In many cases, the virtual world is these days more real than ...

TWO important news items today: First, in physics, the Standard Model is being challenged by a Fermilab Collider Detector (CDF) research group in Illinois whose experiment suggests “the particle, known as a W boson, is more massive than the theories predicted.” A very small deviation, but one that apparently isn’t explained by today’s Standard Model of physics, their research hints at an undiscovered sub-atomic particle or a fifth force, the contemporary Standard four forces being gra...

MEANING, “Thank God it’s Friday,” right? Well, it IS Friday, and I for one am plenty thankful for the start of another weekend, BUT, what I meant was “Thank God(dess) it’s functioning,” whether referring to one’s body (and it’s various parts), our home appliances, the internet, our government (though many would question this), the police or the United Nations. With the slow but significant exit of baby-boomers and the rise of Generation Whatever, I’m reminded of WILLIAM MALT...

IT’S not uncommon to think of the USA as a “continental” nation, an integral part of North America or the Americas in general. It’s not so common to think of it as an island, surrounded in its totality by water, isolated by oceans from EurAsia. Personally, I think of the good ol’ democratic USA as an “island in the sun” among nations. Not a classic Greek democracy; instead, more in terms of a “nation of free traders.” It seems to me that one particular element that’s made ...

OVER the four decades I’ve been authoring, I’ve made some exceptional friends who’ve consistently “walked the walk” and” talked the talk” with me. With two, namely William Maltese and A. G. Hayes, I’ve had the pleasure of co-authoring a work.

With over 200+ published works, William Maltese is one the most prolific and followed authors I’ve known. And his accomplishments include not just books, but screenplays, and soon, films as well. I had the pleasure and privilege of co-...

WHEN was the last time you picked a tomato, cucumber, carrot or peach right off the plant and thanked the plant for sharing its bounty? During my last trip to Japan, just before COVID set in, I visited the apple orchards of Iida, Nagano Prefecture, and walking a field with the farmer, heard him thank the tree after picking an apple for me to sample. And what an apple it was. Large, ripe, succulent and sweet. When I asked him his secret to success, he said it was because he always thanked the ...

SUCCESS demands celebration; but failure, as negative as it may sound, is how we learning. We learn from our mistakes and failures. The “trick,” of course, is to avoid fatal ones. The dead don’t learn from their mistakes or failures.

While it’s said, “Dead men tell no tales,” that isn’t necessarily true. The living, if curious, conscious and reasonably empathic, can learn from others’ fatal mistakes and failures. Call it science, if you wish, where science is the search for t...

I’M often told that THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor —https://savant-bookstore-honolulu.square.site/product/the-edge-of-madness/136 — is “classic” dystopia fiction, which due to the pandemic seems in demand at the moment. I’m also often reminded that dystopias, by their nature, are not good for the mind, body or soul. But I’m also reminded that dystopias have a real “positive” purpose in our contemporary world. After all, we’re well past 1984, the year G...

YESTERDAY, the casting call went out — https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=7566417556709217 — for the K. Simmons Production of “Finding Kate,” a six-part action-thriller series about “long-ignored computer genius Kate Keenan who has designed a computer program that will put Hollywood and Bollywood out of business overnight. Suddenly everyone wants her…and her program. To stay alive, Kate goes into hiding, barely keeping ahead of a lethal hoard of pursuers" -- https://kspllc.media...