IN my pioneering book "The Edge of Madness" by Raymond Gaynor (Aignos/Savant 2020) - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999693859, I introduced a new genre called SciFu (short for science-based futuring), an alternative to less plausible science fiction and implausible science fantasy). In the case of Sci-Fu, what makes it plausible is that it is based on contemporary scientific technologies. An example of this is "interactive holographic projection," a crux of "The Edge of Madness."

Laser Holograph...

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COUNTERPOINT to yesterday’s post entitled, “How Much Do I Deserve,” I though today’s post should be on what we don’t deserve. What we don’t deserve is what much of today’s world is desperately trying to serve everyone: Pre-COVID crowds and World War III. It all gets down to those two great illusions for which everyone is supposed to be competing: money and power. With the general acceptance of this long established, constantly resurfacing axiom, comes the increasingly inhumanity...

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SEVERAL have attempted to engage me in debate over the nature and effect(s) of the global wave of protests that seem to be attacking the heart of governance using chaos as it’s modus operandi. I say shades of Trotsky! This approach is neither new nor particularly effective, especially as it typically offers “down with the establishment” but nothing of value with which to replace other than money and/or power for the few: A story as old as humans attempting to govern — to control other...

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Actor Daniel S. Janik (aka author Raymond Gaynor/Gary Marine) here, nose to screen, typing at my computer on a fantastic sunny but pleasantly cool day. Posting about what? Film, of course.

Setsuko Tsuchiya and I have been filming scenes for Elias Perez’ 2-Liters Shady Films’ production of MOCOS, our first horror film, an especially notable film in that all is done by the actors and actresses (aliens, too?) use Elias’ script, and send their parts in to him for collating and editing. I w...

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AUTHORS like me, Daniel Janik (aka Raymond Gaynor/Gary Martine), used to call them our “readers” in a respectful voice. ACTORS like me, Daniel S. Janik, used to call them our “fans,” treating every fan like royalty with appreciation. POLITICIANS, BUSINESSPERSONS, ADVERTISERS and INFLUENCERS typically call them or at least regard them as minions, with a decidedly derogatory tone, and, unfortunately, that attitude is spreading from business to everything business touches these days. In ...

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BEING an actor quite busy this time of year, I decided it’s time for the new COVID-19 Omicron/BA.5 immunization, and, hey, why not, also flu. So yesterday I went to the local pharmacy for both. Bang! Bang!

I was, as usual, fine until about 2 hours later, when I spend the evening and night tossing and turning dealing with aches and pains. Ugh. Not bad like the real flu, but enough to recognize it as such. Trading a very mild flu for the big cachunka when it comes around later this year. As ...

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LET’S face it: The split in politics that strongly divides us is being reflected in government, foreign affairs, legislation, health care, transportation and, yes, education. But what’s with the extreme splitting at the expense of the quality of our lives? I’m going to take a big leap and say it’s not really politics (the “pop” explanation) or COVID (the shot across the bow) as so many claim, but simply lack of an effective future infrastructure from which to develop. This is, in ...

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Just to be clear, I’m not referring to that little switch that maintains a car at a select speed. I’m talking bit time cruise control here, being a cruising enthusiast and baffled about when it’s really safe to return to cruising. The answers run the whole gamut from totally safe (no COVID test needed, no masks, no special onboard infection controls necessary to its simply not safe to crowd together on a cruise ship).

According to Bloomberg — https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletter...

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ADMITTEDLY, The Lone Ranger was one of my chiildhood favorite early morning television shows, and THE LONE RANGER with Johnny Depp will remain one of my adulthood favorites for all time. But, hey, I’m talking the lone masked man these days. Oddly, most of my acquaintances are either (1) sans mask, distancing and cares; or (2) either huffing and puffing with long COVID or even departed. Odder still the yet again polarization with few folk like myself, Daniel S. Janik, in the middle, distanci...

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IS our world, as James Lovelock’s GAIA — https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/gaia-hypothesis — would have us believe, a living, breathing being? I tend to think so. Lovelock has been “right” so many times, it would be an insult to not take The Gaia Hypothesis for real. If so, surely, Gaia is letting out a long sigh, after so tumultuous a half-year. The Return (or call it the REVENGE) of COVID, Putin’s War, another year of increasing over-population an...

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IT’S hard to comment about about something that appears like “ghost” marketing (marketing an “unavailable” product), though this new approach to seems to be popping up more and more these days. You know the basic story: A product or service fails “due to COVID,” and whether the failing is real or not, public response results in a rush of demand, creating a sales boom, often with the product being offered at higher price. Clever, if, in fact, it’s all true. But whether true or ...

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YEP! The Call of the Wild (actually the call of anything and everything outside of home) is weighing increasingly heavy these freakishly undecided days, what with prices rising, a growing war underway, another wave of COVID beginning, and tons of questionable news, advertisements and social posts of dubious truthfulness being slung about. Who to believe? Who to trust? I’ve posted about my own perception regarding diminishing customer service and increasing “Fast Eddie” sales to the poin...

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IN yesterday’s post, I delved into trust, the thing, I claim, makes a business work. Today, I’d like to touch on the opposite in business of trust: namely, what I call “rust.”

Rust is defined by Oxford Lexico as “1 A reddish- or yellowish-brown flaky coating…” “1.1 A state of deterioration or disrepair resulting from neglect or lack of use” and “2 a…[state of] disease,” the latter typically in reference to plants. In summary, I would say, a “coating” (“desert va...

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READING an online CNN article today entitled, “Burnt out and frustrated, Covid-weary Americans try to accept uncertainty as their new normal” (https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/31/us/covid-19-life-disruption-california-texas-kentucky/index.html) and pondered for a moment just how difficult humans, including Americans, find uncertainty. I have a suspicion that it has something to do with our inevitable mortality. Uncertainty dredges up the “Am I really mortal, and, if so, when am I scheduled t...

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2021 saw continued pressure on publishers of books, and began a whole new era of similar pressure on filmmakers, and it all began with “self-publishing.” That’s not to blame, but simply a strong opinion, leading to an “ethos” of vanity self-publishing be it books or movies. I have always thought of COVID-19 in all it’s various iterations a “shot across the bow” of both. That is, with the loss of many support businesses, the “inflation” of prices coincident with a general d...

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WHAT was the COVID-count on 15 December 2021 here on Oahu? 278 as I recall, only to see it rising exponentially to over 700 yesterday. Today’s a “holiday” so COVID isn’t reported, or, for that matter, allowed to rise by decree. Yeah, right! So here we go again, chasing after another pandemic that we should have been preparing for instead of celebrating. What does it take to realize that yesterday’s “crowd sales,” especially when involving crowding people together, won’t work, ...

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FUN dancing on a crowded dance floor. In fact, being a dancer at heart, as well as an actor and author, partner dancing was something for which I lived. A lifelong devotion, every-other-day exercise in the studio, interspersed with weekly social dancing and the total release of rarer performances or competitions. Yep, usta is the right word, indeed.

For the past two years, there has been no social, performance or competitive dance without the risk of death by COVID. “Real” partner dancin...

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OR are we? Everyday now I hear, “The pandemic is over!” from another excited individual. Really? With the N. Y. Times reporting 98,00+ new cases and 1,216 reported COVID-related deaths in the USA yesterday, I can’t quite “grok” that the pandemic is over, hooray (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html). And with the World Health Organization reporting 527,295 new cases and close to 8,000 reported COVID-related deaths in the world yesterday, I’m not even sold o...

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JUST as COVID-19 set in, I had the good fortune to visit a nearby orchid farm and bring home six different orchids to care for and cultivate. I’m pleased to announce that, now more than a year and a half later, my orchid-friends remain health and supportive as they were throughout the worst (so far) of the pandemic. What’s more, they seemed to thrive in the quieter, less auto-exhausted air bathing them. Call me crazy if you like, but these plants seemed more than happy to experience five ...

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HERE it is mid-August 2021, and instead of slowly exiting the COVID pandemic, we’re falling quickly back into it, albeit, COVID-delta. I’ve noted over my years, that most things “natural” (e.g. liking coffee, or gender preference) seem to follow a bell-shaped “Gaussian” curve with “extremes” accounting for 10% (5% at each end). Not so with people’s thoughts about COVID, especially folks who currently decline vaccination, refuse masks and/or are residual Trump-won-the-electio...

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AS a professional author, I must admit that I look forward to those end-of-the-year royalties many of my publishers pay. However, this year — the second year of the Global COVID Plague — based on quarterly sales reports I’m seeing, I’m anticipating a number of those “your royalty for this year was less than $50 so we won’t issue a check” notices. Okay, so sales of THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos, 2020) by Raymond Gaynor (https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999693859), especially audiobook sa...

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YESTERDAY about noon I was driving on the H1 freeway in Hawaii to the North Shore for some much needed R&R. The speed limit where the freeway passes through Honolulu is 45 miles per hour. The lanes are small, the cars are big and H1 being the major East-West artery, totally crowded. What was freaky was that I was the only one going the speed limit. Not the minimum or recommended, but the speed LIMIT. My estimate was that everyone around me was going at least 55, with some easily entering the ...

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RECOGNIZE the refrain from Disney’s version of Lewis Carroll’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND? Actually, in the novel, the White Rabbit said, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” which, I believe, should be the cry of contemporary America and the world.

My newly released Science Future novel, THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor, is actually the sequel to the decidedly naughty gay novel, TOTAL MELTDOWN (Borgo/Wildside 2009) by Raymond Gaynor and William Maltese, in which the ...

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ARTIFICIAL FOOD ANYONE?

SHADES of Soylent Green (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green)! But I’m not here to post on a dystopian future where people eat their dead. Rather I’m concerned about the continuing intrusion of “artificial” substances into our foodstuffs. Okay, so a good chemist (which I am) would say that EVERYTHING’S “artificial” in that it is built of chemical atoms and molecules, whether created geologically or biologically. “Better Living Through Chemistry...

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The current COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking havoc across the world, causing untold pain, suffering and death. But there's always a silver lining to everything, even as bleak and destructive an event as this pandemic. Being forced to stay at home, cover our faces and maintain social distance leaves us with but one direction to freely look and explore: inward. One of the three maxims carved into the forecourt at the ancient Greek Oracle of Delphi, "know thyself," was followed by "nothing in exces...
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Now there's a question worthy of asking. It's not hard to agree that education today is "in trouble." But how could one begin to "fix" it?

Well, I hate to have to suggest it, but "Read my book!" -- UNLOCK THE GENIUS WITHIN (Rowman and Littlefield Education 2015). It's not about more money, or better equipment, or harder tests. It's about critically examining the very foundations of education today. For example, distance learning was always a sign of a second class college or university, or wor...
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