Richard V. Rupp

November 29, 2021

Good Monday morning. I'm author Richard V. Rupp, writing from Burbank, California. Welcome to RUPP'S NOTES/FBI SPECIAL AGENT HARTMAN SERIES posts.

 

On Sunday, I started writing this post right after watching "One Last Time: An Evening With Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga." I love those old songs and their understandable lyrics that provide good feelings. The show was great!!! When the old lyrics were sung, it reminded me of the novel I'm working on titled SKYWARD  - "Fly me to the moon, And let me play among the stars, Let me see what spring is like, On Jupiter and Mars . . ."

 

And as a writer's mind will do (at least mine), I thought about the appropriate type of music for my moon colonists. For its first six or seven years, the Bowman Moon Colony in SKYWARD provides very cramped living space for the colonists. Not a place where you would want to play loud music (unless you were in the metaverse room with headphones). So I can see a revival of the old classic songs. They are softer in tone and set a good mood.

 

Before watching the Bennett/Gaga show, I watched a "Midsomer Murders" show where the murder involved "confused young love" and then thought of other lyrics from the Bennett/Gaga show, "Now heaven knows, anything goes . . ." Yes, as my Bowman Moon Colony evolves and it develops its own "new normal," it will end up with "anything goes" (as long as it's safe for the overall colony). After all, it's made up of a bunch of 25 to 40-year-olds who have an expression that is kind of like "anything goes," it's "we have friends with benefits". . . "yes, anything goes."

 

Now I will move on to other lyrics from "Anything Goes" that apply to writers. They are these words, "Good authors too who once knew better words, Now only use four-letter words writing prose, anything goes." Hmmm, that seems to have lasted.

 

There's one more line in the song that applies to our world today – "The world has gone mad today, and good's bad today. . . anything goes."

 

The MERRIAM-WEBSTER DICTIONARY staff unveiled their word of the year for 2021. It is "vaccine," which is a logical follow-up to their 2020 word of the year, "pandemic." It matches the Oxford English Dictionary's word for 2021, "vax." The Associated Press reports, "Merriam-Webster bases its selection on lookup data, paying close attention to spikes and, more recently, year-over-year increases in searches after weeding out evergreens."

 

The other Websters staff selections for runners-up were "perseverance," "woke," "nomad," "infrastructure," "cicada," "Murraya," "cisgender," "guardian," and "meta."

 

On Saturday, my son Brian hosted a belated Thanksgiving dinner for his brother Matt and me. We started out with the veggie tray I brought and lots of cheese and nachos. My other participation was providing coleslaw. Ralph's was out of prepared coleslaw, but a young lady who worked for Ralph's put me on to buying a diced slaw mix from the Produce department and suggested using coleslaw salad dressing. You mix that combo together and let it sit in the frig for an hour, and voila. I will never go back to buying the Deli slaw again.

 

My boys cooked some of the best short ribs I have ever eaten. They went through quite a process, including pulling off a thin layer of fat, dry rubbing them, placing two slabs of ribs back-to-back, and wrapping them in aluminum foil. The barbeque sauce was spread on them after they were removed from the oven. They went great with corn-on-the-cob, and of course, my coleslaw.

 

While the ribs were cooking, we played with my son Brian's new 3-D printer. He was working on a new type of filter for one of his sets of movie lights. Brian is a gaffer (the chief electrician in a motion-picture or television production unit) who is often sought after because of his unique collection of movie production lights. We gave him suggestions as to its configuration as he designed the filter on the 3-D printer computer program. What an interesting process. It gave me a better feeling of how 3-D printing works. Yes, in my novel SKYWARD, most Moon Colony manufacturing will be by 3-D printing.

 

Tonight is my third round of leftover Thanksgiving turkey, and I still have portions of the sides to go with it. "How About You?" Thank you, George Gershwin, for the tune and Frank Sinatra for singing it.

 

Cheers,

 

Richard V. Rupp, Author

Website – www.richardvrupp.com

Email – rupprisk@gmail.com

Copyright©2021 by Richard V. Rupp