rlfj: Blog

I’m always interested in what people have to say about some of the back story going on. Several people wrote to say that both the Bay of Pigs & Viet Nam got started under Eisenhower, not Kennedy. This is very true. Kennedy still made the major mistakes involved. In the case of Cuba, the original plan called for both Navy & Air Force support of the Cuban assault force. Kennedy cancelled this support, despite testimony that the assault would fail without said support and then ordered the assault anyway.

Viet Nam was much bigger and had a cast of characters going back to the Truman administration. We mucked it up big time over there. Kennedy’s mistake was to increase troop levels and support levels, but even worse, to change the focus from training to operations. Most of Kennedy’s contemporaries considered him a babe in the woods. If he hadn’t been assassinated and had won re-election in ‘64 (a probability) I wonder how Viet Nam would have turned out. Differently? The same?

As for Chapter 15, I had a few emails about some other great cars for dating from this time frame. Like the Galaxie 500, the Chevy Impala was full size, as was the Olds Delta 88, with that great Rocket 88 engine. Brings back some great memories!

Book 2 takes Carl through another eleven chapters. Carl is now at Towson High.

Quite a few people wrote about how Carl should be able to use his great wisdom and understanding to make his relationships with his family, specifically his brother and mother, better. That’s an interesting idea, but maybe not so realistic. A lot of Chapter 13 is about those relationships, and how they continue to deteriorate.

Not all problems can be fixed. We see that all the time, both in small personal problems and big national and international problems. What makes anybody think they can fix a family that is broken? Some things in life are simply fucked up, and all the psychobabble in the world won’t change them.

These are the last two chapters in Book 1. More fun and games with Shelley and more chemistry with the Science Fair. The next book will follow Carl to high school.

I was surprised by the number of people who wrote me and offered different versions of the cigarette tar collection system used in the Science Fair project. It was interesting to read them and remember back to those dinosaur days. That project was actually run in my school (no, not by me) and the system discussed will work. Suck a few cartons through it and you get a measurable mass of tar in the cotton balls, and it looks just god-awful! The guy who did it even took some of the tar and rubbed it on a lab mouse, which a few days later developed cancer and died. Pretty damn gruesome! On the other hand, he pretty much dorked around with it, collecting the tar in the cotton filter, but not weighing it or analyzing it. Any of the systems mentioned to me, such as water traps and more efficient cooling mechanisms, would work. I spent the better part of ten years as an industrial chemist, and I still find it interesting.

The other thing that is starting now is that Carl is getting frisky. Sex will never be the prime focus of the story, but it is an element, and it was written for an adult site. This is one of the big differences between the StoriesOnline version and the StoryRoom version. This version is the PG-13 version.

There were a number of interesting comments on this chapter, specifically the exercise involved in predicting the next Arab-Israeli war using probability theory. The complaint was that this is an example of a problem called the Gambler’s Fallacy, and also that simply because events happen every ten years, it does not mean that there is a one-in-ten chance of them happening every year. That means that I obviously don’t know anything about probability or statistics.

Well, actually I do. Remember, the reason for this entire exercise is for Carl to gain control of his money in a brokerage account in order to actively trade stocks and commodities to get returns far higher than possible otherwise. He knows the future! A passbook account would be insane. Better to come up with a slick line of horseshit and predict a war in 1973, than try and beg for a chance to play with the money Mom wants to hold for him.

Another group of people commented that the investment strategy suggested by the first broker was the best one for the average investor. It may well have been. The thing to remember is that, because of his knowledge of the future - which he can’t tell anyone - Carl is not an average investor. For him, an active strategy in specific equities and commodities will work the best. What can’t be questioned is the first broker is making more than the investors, by churning accounts and keeping the investors in high priced proprietary funds.