Well, yesterday was a waste.

Between being woken up at 0430 by the car crash outside, and having some form of the creeping yuck, i accomplished nothing yesterday. No writing, no cleaning, no laundry. Nothing.

Hell, about 1300 I went back to bed for several hours.

We did watch The Maltese Falcon. Man, what a great movie. I swear, it gets better every time I see it. One amusing thing I noticed. Wilmar, the baby-faced gunman working for the fat man was played by Elisha Cook Jr.. He had a long career, including appearing in Star Trek as the book-loving attorney Samuel T. Cogley in the episode Court Martial

Also finally threw in the X-files Season One disk. I came to the X-files fairly late in the first season; I think my first episode was Eve. So seeing the pilot and first couple of episodes was interesting.

Still feeling off, but I'm going to post my current version of the Concordat time line later.

Getting stuff done.

Couple of hundred words on my intensely detailed outline/time line for the Concordat. isomeme will be pleased, the first ship ever to make a FTL jump was built by a team from Harvey Mudd and was named the West Dorm.

One of things sitting in my notes and ideas folder is what I'm doing with the Jews in this setting. One of the big points in my history is the Last Jihad. This sis the result of what fusion power does to oil prices, and the economies of the oil-producing states. (Can you say "crash and burn"? Knew you could!) This creates a whole new crop of frothing radicals, who go on a fifteen year rampage. Part of this, of course, is trying to destroy Israel. With bioweapons.

This is the last straw. When FTL becomes available, the Israelis are in the forefront of scouting. They find a garden world, claim it, and move there lock, stock, and Western Wall. (Yes, they take the whole thing with them.) Once they get to their new home, they convert the colony ships to war craft, and post "Stay out (unless you're Jewish, then come in.. we have cake!)" signs on all the approaches. While the rest of humanity scrambles to reach more systems, the Israelis develop their one.

By the "present day" (2466, in my concept) New Israel is still independent, restricts gentile visitors to certain sections of the planet, and is armed to the teeth.

Never again, indeed.

But something occurred to me. Here we have a world surrounded by the Concordat, yet independent. With the muscle to back it up. Know what that suggests to me? Switzerland in space. And what did the Swiss become famous for?

Banking. Yes, without intending it, I've put the Jews of the Future right into the stereotypical role of being bankers. It's not like the don't have the experience. And being a financial center for the whole of human space is certainly lucrative. I'm just amused at that image.

BTW, for my Hebrew speaking friends.. please help me with a better name for this new homeland than New Israel. I'm trying to avoid too many "New This" and "New That" in my world names.

You know you're a writer when..

You get so wrapped up in what you're doing, you forget to eat.

Or get up to use the latrine.

Or to drink the Coke you opened hours ago.

Happiness is a warm gun

The "Can I Shoot A Man" test.

Sheesh. I don't think even my mom will be surprised by this result.

( Bang Bang, Shoot Shoot )

Way too much time on their hands...

Not only have these folks posted the first 200 million digits of pi, they've made a searchable database out of it!

http://www.angio.net/pi/bigpi.cgi

For example, I did my birth date:

The string 07041966 was found at position 146,810,040 counting from the first digit after the decimal point. The 3. is not counted.

Damnit.

I want Ho-Hos. I mean, I want a whole box of them to myself.

Some I'd just devour.

Others, I'd pick off all the chocolate coating first.

A few would suffer the ultimate indignity, and be unrolled before being consumed.

But the store didn't have any.

Denied!