According To Hoyt

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM JERRY BOYD: Chicken Train (Bob and Nikki Book 50)

BSR sets off on a mission to keep the peace in their corner of the galaxy. Their first impressions of the situation turn out to be badly in error, and the their shepherd uses the opportunity to provide them with an education. Their best efforts miss the mark, until Bob turns to a new friend for help. Ride along with the fleet, while they figure it out.

FROM JOHN D. MARTIN: Charis Colony: The Battle for McGuire Point

Raj and Shirin thought they were safe. They thought their son was safe. They had fled their family home in Mondal’s Landing and to the protected enclave of McGuire Point, out of the reach of Colonial Security. But when Colonial Security attacks the Point and the cost of ending hostilities is returning the couple and their son to the Landing, what decision will Governor McGuire make? And will their newfound home stand by them or sell them out?
From the review of Charis Colony: The Landing at ricochet.com:
“Charis Colony: The Landing” offers a story that is fast-paced and cerebral. Raj Mondal is forced to confront long-held beliefs and challenge authority for the first time. Martin offers readers several competing views of society in this novel.

• Mark Lardas, at ricochet.com and at marklardas.com

From libertyisland.com;
“The novel takes up a number of themes that have been occupying my mind in the last couple of years. One is this: Suppose the answer to the Fermi Paradox is that there are no technological civilizations within 1,000 light years of Earth? Suppose the smartest life-form inhabiting the nearest Earth-like planet is about as smart as one of the great cats? Or a racoon. Well, that planet is Charis, and in the novel it’s been colonized by humans for a little over 277 local years. The next theme is the trouble resurgence of eugenics as a medical, ethical practice. The third major theme is how countries like China – and now the Netherlands and Canada- are institutionalizing a downright predatory corruption of medicine: Mandatory organ donation. The sort of thing Larry Niven was already warning about over fifty years ago in A Gift from Earth and the Gil the Arm stories. Finally, it’s all wrapped up in a struggle between a soft totalitarianism that gives citizens material comfort and security and a classically liberal free society where life is less certain and more risk-fraught. And it’s a love story between Raj and Shirin, the protagonists, and it also deals with the future of religion.”

FROM TIMOTHYWITCHAZEL: Noah and the Great Flood: A Poem in Alliterative Verse

A retelling of the story of Noah and the Ark in the style of Anglo-Saxon Alliterative Verse.

FROM DALE COZORT: All Timelines Lead to Rome

A dead woman’s cell phone chip leads to a mystery spanning the U.S. rustbelt, a surviving Roman empire and a North America without Europeans.

FROM LIANE ZANE: The Guardian Initiative (The Unsanctioned Guardians Book 3)

Prequel to the Elioud Legacy series

In the end, you don’t need a hero in the field. You need a team.

A year after high-risk missions to stop terrorists, arms dealers, and criminals, CIA officer Olivia Markham no longer operates in the field. Instead, she runs a clinic for immigrants in a backwater Balkans capital. Olivia has also found a modicum of peace—and someone to love. Her career trajectory? A safe desk job at Langley.

Until the day terrorists attack the clinic, upending Olivia’s world and sending her back into active fieldwork.

Olivia, whose protective instincts often collide with her duty, now finds herself once again walking a tightrope between pursuing Agency operations and her own. When Captain Alžběta Czerná of Czech military intelligence calls for help to free a young trafficking victim, Olivia convinces Anastasia Fiore of Italian foreign intelligence to join their unsanctioned mission.

But Olivia has made more than one enemy during her short career—inside and outside of the Agency. Shocking allegations rocket her to the top of the CIA’s most wanted list just when a terrorist targets her. And more than her career is at stake. Much more. As Olivia sets out on what could be her final mission, Stasia and Beta initiate their own operational protocol for their friend.

Set a year before THE ELIOUD LEGACY series, THE GUARDIAN INITIATIVE tells the story of how Olivia Markham, Beta Czerná, and Stasia Fiore team up to aid the victims of their intelligence targets—regardless of the consequences.

FROM ANNA FERREIRA (PERSONALLY RECOMMENDED BY SAH WHO READ IT): The Root of All Evil

When murder comes to Stockton, it brings long-buried secrets in its wake…

Kate Bereton leads a busy but unexciting life as the clergyman’s only daughter in a small Dorsetshire village. She’s grateful for the break in routine heralded by the arrival of her stepmother’s latest guests, but when Kate discovers a dead body in the parsonage one morning, she finds herself in much more danger than she could have ever anticipated. Terrified and desperate, she turns to the local magistrate for help. Mr. Reddington is eager to aid his dear friend Miss Bereton, but can they discover the murderer before it’s too late, and the secrets of the past are forgotten forever?
With a dash of romance and a generous helping of mystery, The Root of All Evil is a charming whodunit that will delight fans of Jane Austen and Agatha Christie alike.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Heisenberg’s Point of Observation

To save the future, sometimes you have to reach to the past.
Thomas Sutton was not your average fourteen year old, not even in an Ark City. Born in one of the three refuges of the last remnants of life on earth, deep underground, he knows his history. A century after an asteroid shattered and struck the earth, they have been trapped below by volcanic eruptions, toxic gasses, and radioactive dust. But what if he could…change things? What if he could reach the past, to prevent the asteroid’s impact?

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Princess Seeks Her Fortune

In a land where ten thousand fairy tales come true, Alissandra knows she is in one when an encounter with a strange woman gives her magical gifts, and another gives her sisters a curse.

And she knows that despite the prospects of enchantments, cursed dances, marvelous birds, and work as a scullery maid, it is wise of her to set out, and seek her fortune.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Shadow of a Dead God

What secrets lie beneath an alien world?

A routine archeological dig on a world once ruled by the mysterious Star Tyrants. For Moon-born Liu Shang, working on a planetary surface might be unsettling, but she could manage — until the dreams started.

Unwilling to drag others into a harebrained search, she headed out alone, contrary to mission rules. Just as she was about to give up, she found an unlikely artifact.

Handling it connects her to the mind of a long-ago rebel against the Star Tyrants’ rule. Nothing will ever be the same.

A short story.

FROM KAREN MYERS: On a Crooked Track: A Lost Wizard’s Tale

Book 4 of The Chained Adept

SETTING A TRAP TO CATCH THE MAKERS OF CHAINED WIZARDS.

A clue has sent Penrys back to Ellech, the country where she first appeared four short years ago with her mind wiped, her body stripped, and her neck chained. It’s time to enlist the help of the Collegium of Wizards which sheltered her then.

Things don’t work out that way, and she finds herself retracing a dead scholar’s crooked track and setting herself up as a target to confirm her growing suspicions. But what happens to bait when the prey shows its teeth?

In this conclusion to the series, tracking old crimes brings new dangers, and a chance for redemption.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: NOISELESS

When I was little, living where I lived, we notionally had electrical power.

Notionally because it was often more in default than not. Meaning that the electrical power was almost exclusively used for light, and that the light as such we would now here, and probably there, consider grossly inadequate (sixty watt naked light bulb in the middle of a huge room,for instance) and it went down all the time, on the regular.

It particularly went down during summer, not because of air conditioning — I think the first time I encountered air conditioning I was 17? It was a dress shop in Porto and they advertised air conditioning on the door. — but because people stayed up later/kept lights on longer, and also might run a fan or two.

So we were prepared. As in, it wasn’t a matter of “shoot, the light went down” but just going to the kitchen cabinet and getting the candles or oil lamps, etc. and lighting them up. In a deranged way, I learned to enjoy when the light went down. For one, the family would go for long walks. (Took me years to figure out that was because my parents didn’t trust me around candles, mostly because I really, really liked them. And was very clumsy.) For another, well, I could take a candle to a corner and read, and it excused me from socializing.

So, why do I bring this up? Well, first of all because there’s enough socialism in the air, and we all know what socialists used before candles. But for another because everyone I know is really, really scared.

It’s not that we think the American people want or would vote for communism. It’s that we’re seeing the fact the socialists/commies are again running a potemkin campaign, and you only do that when you know you have got it all sewn up.

Sure we hope and pray — boy do we pray — they fail, but …. you know?

And we saw the big steal go through once. And it’s reasonable to fear it will happen again. And, boy, oh boy, is their program pure communism straight up, guaranteed to immiserate everyone.

So, some hope is more that their program has been failing to take hold for four years — not for lack of trying — and that “push harder” is not likely to work any better. Some hope is that they are truly, truly stupid and some of their attempts will mar their other attempts. Like, no the invaders they enticed in won’t stay in as spiral deeper and deeper into depression.

But that is bitter hope, in both cases, and it’s impossible not to feel scared/out of it/panicked as the election draws near.

First of all, prepare. Just prepare. As much as you can. And I do realize some of us are preparing on a severely injured budget. But try anyway. And it might be stuff like “Gardening supplies and seeds for next spring” because honestly even if Trump pulls a miracle, we will go through hard hard times before things straighten out. It’s already baked in.

Second, remember you’re not alone.

I figure that second is my function. To remind you you’re not alone. Because being alone with the bad thing, in the dark, is the worst thing ever.

I promise I’ll keep the lights on in this blog as long as I’m not forcibly prevented from doing so. And even if I’m forcibly prevented from being on the net, I know several of you are keeping address lists of commenters. I’ll get those somehow, and you might get this blog once a month, on mimeographed sheets (are there still mimeographs?) or more likely printed in a 3d printed guttenbergish press, stapled together, like old style fanzines. (I figure it’s the only way to continue selling fiction too, if everything collapses.)

And if I go silent, if the really worst worst possible happens, I hope someone will pick up the pen and continue.

Because, yes, more needs to be done than talking about it. We all know that. And for Fed the Fred, I’m not even talking violence. For instance some people here have been working with TrueTheVote for years. (Though Fed, honey, you should consider how hard we’re being pushed, and incentives.)

BUT all forms of resistance, even passive, start with knowing you’re not alone.

You’re not alone. There are other people out there feeling the same. I suspect we’re the majority.

If the worst happens, keep the lights on.

Likely the light will be seen through the night and inspire others into lighting their own light. Even if it’s a little candle, or an oil lamp, it reduces the darkness overall.

And if the worst of the worst happen, the light we keep on as long as possible will be seen through the dark times to inspire generations still unborn.

Be not afraid.

Light a candle.

My brain is probably under the sofa with the cats. Look, it’s been a very weird week. So weird that “dealing with cleaning up and fixing basement flood” is a minor inconvenience and definitely not the one that’s making it hard for me to sleep and eat.

As usual, if you’re the praying kind, keep me and mine in your prayers.

Meanwhile, yes, I like messing around with AI art, and so, there follow a few visual prompts for you to play with. Or not. I’m not the boss of you.

I just need a day to regain my equilibrium and stop being salty at the world.

A lot of people here are older than I, but even I remember the ethos I grew up with: the idea that top people rose to top positions, and that “experts” in the government knew what was going on and could forecast how things should be done, and what to do for “progress.”

I never put much faith in it, but that’s probably both because of a problem with authority (A very small problem. I neither like it nor trust it. While understanding not all authority is bad, and that it’s impossible for me to verify everything for myself and trust no one. So, you know, a tiny problem about the size of the universe) and because of early experiences.

Also I suspect because of growing up in a society that recognized “given” authority derived from birth or credentials, which I always found to have a hollow sound when tested if you know what I mean. When you’re eight, in an argument with an expert, and realize he missed some great big honking discrepancies in the data, you’re going to give authority the side eye forever. Being in a society that forces you to show outward compliance just gets you very salty and low-key mad forever.

But anyway, even I seemingly gave “people in charge” far more credit than they deserved. Than they ever deserved.

Last night, and for reasons of being inexplicably and profoundly depressed, which causes me to fall down rabbit holes, and usually depressing ones, I fell into a rabbit hole about Lebensborn.

I knew about the program, which apparently puts me in a minority. In fact, I don’t remember when I first heard of it, though I have a vague, somewhat hazy idea I’ve “always known” which would mean I first heard of it in elementary school. And there’s a sense I based the upbringing of the Mules/Good Men on it.

For those too sane to follow the link, the Lebensborn homes/program were an attempt to create more babies of “good Aryan blood” and it turned out just as evil as the Holocaust, though from another perspective. I mean, one is tempted to call it opposite, because they aimed to create human lives, rather than eliminate them, but in the end it was exactly the same thing and perhaps even more arrogant.

Killing people in batch lots and attempting to eliminate an entire sub-race (of sorts. The genetics are more nebulous than that) is arrogant, but it is also to an extent understandable as a goal for a state to undertake. At least, killing off people in batch lots — normally in war, but sometimes internal minorities — has always been a thing that the state has done, even when the state was as small as a kingdom scarcely larger than a family.

But that humans would presume to breed other humans like cattle, that seemed oddly overreaching and strange.

It was of course the manifestation of a really old impulse, but now layered with “scientific.”

Some people hate it when I talk about the early 20th century, or the mid-20th century and point out it was a time of diminishing freedom, a time when people expected even less freedom in the future, a time when we expected “experts” to run every aspect of our lives in the future.

People of a conservative bend have gotten so used to blaming everything that’s wrong on the sixties/seventies, than they don’t realize that while bad and worsened by Soviet agit-prop, was a reaction to what had been happening before. (And before my unreconstructed hippie readers question the “bad” — yes, tearing down of all norms and rules, but worse, casting doubt on the very foundations of humanity is wrong and bad. Casting pair-bonding as slavery, casting having children as more slavery, and making the ideal human completely ideally isolated and self actuated was very bad and led directly to where we are, in this atomized, broken society where the species seems quite likely to not-reproduce itself into oblivium.)

It was a reaction to letting the best men run everything, and to treating humans as a sort of gadget that could be put in places, and would act in predictable ways. All at the behest of the “best” and “smartest” of people.

What we’re seeing now on the left is nothing new. It’s the reassertion of all these ideas. Part of the reason I object to saying the Nazis were “right wing” (besides their being another species of Marxist) is that they were the flowering of this idea of expert-rule and “best men in charge”.

We say current leftists look at 1984 and treat it as an how-to manual, but that’s not quite true. It’s more that that 1984 and the ideas of the left about society all come from the mass-production era where, because making widgets in bulk was cheaper, humans made the leap of thinking planning everything centrally was better.

The truth is it never worked. It’s not even a matter of it worked poorly, or it had bad side effects. The central thing itself never worked. I remember hearing about Lebensborn early enough that people assumed the kids who went came from it would be healthier, or stronger, or live longer. Sure, breeding humans like animals was wrong, and raising them in batch lots was wrong, but it got a superior product right?

Well, no. It got a bog standard product, humans like the rest of us, suffering from the same diseases and defects heirs to the same frailty. (The human genome is complicated. Even if we get to designing it, it won’t be better.)

The idea of central planning and of group guilt persisted, and in some cases was even stronger after the war. Which is why the Lebensborn children were treated so badly in so many countries, as it was presumed their “German blood” now made them naturally evil. (Many of them were actually Polish. Or other nationalities. Also, no. Germany did not fall into Nazism because it was uniquely evil. If I had to guess it was more susceptible to falling for the central planning thing because it was one of the later-united polities, and in fact a sort of empire all by itself. The shocks of WWI didn’t help.) But there it is.

And central planning never worked. Mostly because it makes it easy to fall victim to ONE PERSON’s obsessions or insanity. Like, did you know that Fauci speculated you could use face masks to avoid AIDs back in the 80s? Because he did. It seems to be his own personal idiocy. Now, he has others, and he’s far from clean, but even the best of men will have blindspots and obsessions. Giving anyone that kind of control over a country or a civilization just leads to bigger and more bizarre failures.

It always failed. The US, as far as it remained free, has propped and fed a lot of evil central-control experiments, including the European illusions of “limited socialism”.

Now it’s all falling apart. And it’s important to remember not to go back to the sort of “but we were united and there was order” society of the early twentieth century.

We have the tech and the ability to organize in many, agile, small polities. While the federal government in the US has its uses, those uses should be strictly limited to the duties appointed to it by the constitution. Everything else should devolve to the smaller possible polity, and eventually the individual.

Aim small, miss small.

Instead, the 20th century is a study in aiming huge and missing … entire countries. Look at China’s population games.

The past has a way of being covered by our memories in glossy, soft and glowing tones. Mostly because when we were young enough we imagined things worked way better.

But they never did. The ability of dissemination of information now allows us to see how poorly central planning always works.

It’s time to ensure that message sticks and we don’t careen back into the illusion that all the best men have got our back.

A couple of centuries is enough for failed — and evil — experiments.

Let’s not ride that carousel again.

A Guest Post by Orvan Taurus of https://elegantungulate.wordpress.com/

Alternative/Kerosene Lighting
Chances are a good many already know all this, but not everybody does. Also, a reminder
won’t hurt. And it’s not like I know everything, so maybe comments will provide some (pardon) enlightenment.

First, yes, electric light is superior when available. There’s no fuel that can spill, no vapors
that can explode, and the convenience of switches. Even backup, for dealing with a blackout, electric is superior at least as long as the batteries last. Add a photovoltaic (“solar”) panel and you can even recharge in daylight. Also, there won’t be the risk of a mess or fire from Fluffy or Fido or Timmy getting rambunctious and knocking a lamp or lantern over.

So why bother with anything else? There are a few possibilities. The trivial one is a desire for a particular atmosphere, much like the candlelight dinner or bath. More seriously, if you do have backup power in a blackout, especially if it’s quiet, you might not want to advertise to neighbors or passersby that you have power. Let them see the yellow of lantern flame and assume you don’t have a battery bank or a quiet generator somewhere. In the colder months, the heat they produce can be useful. It won’t be enough to heat the house, but a couple might be enough to keep a smaller room closer to livable. And a lantern can warm (not actually cook, just warm) food and drink. Warmer coffee or tea, or warm soup would be welcome if the furnace fan isn’t running.

Lamp and lantern seem to be used almost interchangeably, but a lamp is generally something set in place and left there rather than moved around and a lantern is made to be carried so it can be readily moved. Lamps can fit in as décor, Lanterns… well, the most practical have been called “barn lanterns” as they were considered more suited for use outside the outside where looks were not important.

Here’s a simple lamp:

It’s fairly obvious that this is not something practical to carry around. Its use is fairly simple, but not quite as straightforward as someone new to it might expect. To prepare for use, it is
filled to with kerosene (or Klean Heat, or an equivalent kerosene-alike).[1] The lamp is then
left for at least 20 minutes to let the fuel soak into the wick.

To light it, the glass chimney is removed and set aside. Then the wick is adjusted to have
some wick exposed just above the burner. This is lit, and the chimney put back into place.
The wick is then turned down into the burner (paradoxically, the flame will grow for a moment as this is done) until there is a low yellow flame. The lamp is left running low for several minutes to let the chimney slowly heat up. If the flame is brought high right away, there is risk of thermal shock cracking the glass. Then, after several minutes the wick can be turned up. It might be wise to do this in steps, just to be sure of slow heating. The flame will soot if it’s too high – and as things heat up the flame will grow a bit as things flow more easily. It’s best to not go for the brightest (tallest) flame, but a bit below that where the lamp can run without sooting.

To put it out, turn the wick down to get a minimal yellow flame and carefully cup a hand
behind, but NOT TOUCHING, the chimney and blow a puff across the top of the chimney. The turbulence will do the job of blowing out the low flame. Then, let the lamp cool before doing anything more with it.

If the lamp had been sooting, the chimney might need cleaning and thorough drying. Take
things slow, it is glass after all, not as thick as most drinking glasses. This is a time for hand washing, and drying, with the final drying in a drying rack or on a towel.
The flame will take the shape of the wick. That is, if the wick is cut flat, the flame will be
generally flat. If the wick is cut to a peak, the flame will have a peak. Wicks are usually cut as flat as possible or with a gentle ‘crown’ curve. Some do like the peak cut. I would say to avoid a V-cut as then the flame edges very easily become sooting peaks at surprisingly low flame.

There is a range of useful light levels. A yellow flame can be low to high. Higher is brighter, of course. It also makes for more heat and uses more fuel. It is possible to turn things very low and get a short edge of blue flame. This doesn’t provide much light as the carbon isn’t burning and incandescing. And when carbon isn’t burning in full, it’s undergoing partial combustion… which means carbon monoxide. At the low level, this isn’t very much, but it is there. At too high, there is soot and that also means incomplete combustion, and carbon monoxide. The soot is unpleasant, too. If your lamp reminds you of an older diesel, turn it down! A moderate to high yellow flame is about ideal for light production without soot or monoxide.

Lamps and lanterns come in varying wick widths. The wider the wick, the wider the flame and thus the bright the lamp or lantern. Wider wicks call for kerosene or a kerosene-alike.
Narrower wicks, and small round wicks, can use liquid paraffin but this comes at the price of brightness. The liquid paraffin will have less of an odor, but be only half as bright. The flame can only be brought about half as high before sooting.

Refueling must be done cold, and never, EVER when there is flame. Even if there is a
convenient cap so that the chimney and burner can be left in place. Why? Sure, you could
toss a lit match into a cup of kerosene (why are you doing that?) and, like with diesel, the
match would go out. But that’s liquid kerosene. That space above the liquid isn’t just air. It’s
air and kerosene vapor. The vapor can and will explode. The burner is made to keep the flame far enough away from the air-vapor mix to avoid problems. Adding fuel to running lamp or lantern means the liquid level rises. That pushes the fuel-air mix up out of the fuel reservoir and into… the flame that will set it off. BOOM!

A selection of lanterns:

These are all made by Dietz (now made in China…though “with original USA tooling” for what that’s worth). From left to right: Jupiter (#2500), Air Pilot (#8), #76, Comet (#50). Jupiter is the largest model and Comet the smallest Dietz makes. Some… more experienced… folks might recognize the Comet as what was standard for Scouting back when Scouts were still trusted with fire.

These all work the same way, with minor variation. The variation is which side the “globe lifter” lever is on, and if the burner cone rises with the globe or not. It’s not that important, all combinations work. Like with the lamps, the fuel is added to a cold lantern and given time for it to soak into the wick.

To light it, the wick is turned up just enough to be seen over the burner, the globe lifter is pressed down, moving the globe up. The wick can then be lit. A longer match or grill lighter can make this easier. The globe is lowered and the wick turned down to below the burner to get a low flame to allow the globe to slowly heat up so as to avoid thermal shock. After that, operation is similar to the lamps.

To extinguish the flame, the wick is simply turned down until the flame goes out.

All the warnings for lamps apply. NEVER refuel while burning. Take things slow and easy. Too high a flame means soot.

The advantage of this design is not just that the handle (which is NOT the ring on top) means it can be carried around or hung from a hook – which keeps it out of the way, but that the flame will not be blown out even in very windy conditions. That’s how the design got the nickname “hurricane lantern” as even severe winds wouldn’t blow out the flame. Another advantage is that if the lantern is toppled over, it goes out. You might get a mess and darkness, but that beats a fire. However, this “safety feature” is only partly true. If conditions are windy enough, even a tipped over lantern will continue to burn. I have experienced this.

Width of wick, again, determines greatest useful brightness. The Comet can put out maybe 4 candlepower, and the Jupiter up to 14.. maybe 18 if pushed.

The #76 might be the best “all rounder” with the Comet better for smaller frames and portability, the Jupiter best for the most light and heat (and burn time) at the cost of space. The Air Pilot seems a nice compromise between the #76 and the Jupiter – and being perhaps less popular, less tooling wear, and just feels a bit better than the #76. That said, if the #76 is your choice, you might wish to consider paying a few bucks more for the German-made nigh-equivalent “Baby Special” Feuerhand #276. The #276 has accessories available such as a reflector to aim more light downward, and a setup for warming (not cooking) food or beverages. I have such and water got to about 175 F and not a degree more. The globes and wicks for the Dietz #76 and Feuerhand #276 are interchangeable – though the Feuerhand globes are made of low-expansion borosilicate (less likely to crack from thermal shock) glass. There are warming plates available for other lanterns, as well. I have one for the Jupiter. Again, warming rather than cooking.

That’s the quick(?) overview for common kerosene lamps and lanterns. I’ve not covered a few things: mantle lamps, pressure lamps, a kerosene-electric (yes, really) lantern, nor butane or propane lamps or lanterns. Nor cooking oil lamps, which are older than candles.



[1] Under NO circumstance can gasoline (camp fuel, white gas) or alcohol be used – that would turn it from a lamp into a bomb – with you up close when it is lit and it will go off immediately. Despite some claims, cooking oils won’t work. They are too thick to make it up the wick in sufficiency.

I read somewhere that Obama had authorized our three letter agencies to run psy-ops on American soil.

If true — I’m not sure how one does that precisely, or why no one made a big stink about it at the time — that is not an admission they’ve got more powerful, but that they’ve got weak enough to need to use the apparatus of state for their gaslighting.

Because the gaslighting was going on before. Just more efficiently. Things like, oh, remember when they convinced the world that Ford, an athlete, was too clumsy to live? or that Nixon was the greatest crook ever to occupy the presidency and had done something so horrendous no one else had even thought about it? how about that FDR was an honest man who had only the nation’s best interests at heart?

And that’s without counting the great deceptions of my life time. There is a reason most Americans think every show should have a gay character, or that races should be represented 50/50. That is the previous gaslighting telling them that.

And sure, there are still people convinced that all illegals are coming in to work, and that they are all a kind of saint because of the gaslighting that still works.

But most of it doesn’t.

It started falling apart during Obama’s administration. Yesterday Dan was watching some movie, and there was an hagiographic comment on Obama and I realized I haven’t heard any of those. Not even that many in his second term, much less after he left office. With Clinton, the glowing comments continued for decades.

I remember they tried to make Obama into FDR, but it didn’t stick. None of it has stuck. With TV, radio, movies, everything trying to prepare for the ascension of Hillary — no? Most of those movies with Madame president? What do you think that was about — and it didn’t work. It still isn’t working. They were willing to keep Biden in place, and they tired the narrative of “he really won the debate” but it didn’t work.

So, when you hear about how popular Kamala is, or how great her polls? Remember that.

It’s all a psyops.

The psyops is in the service of making you believe there was no fraud. You must, in self preservation point out over and over and loudly that fraud is the only way they’ll win. You need to shame the “respectable right” in their attempts to hide the fraud, because, well, gentlemen (and ladies) wouldn’t believe something so uncouth. And they certainly wouldn’t protest.

Be uncouth my friends. The psyops is breaking, and our salvation lies in telling one and all that the king is naked. And he’s an ugly sight. Gigantic, indeterminate gender sibling is ugly and its parent, the state, dresses it funny.

This week they’re going to try really hard to blast the DNC at us from every angle, but already they’re treading Babylon Bee territory, with their free abortions and vasectomies. They have no clue how WEIRD they sound to normal people. Which makes the psyops hard to stick.

Be uncouth. And don’t let them get us mad at each other. They only have one thing they can do now, to try to save themselves, and that’s to get us fighting. Don’t let them.

Be not afraid. They might still fraud their way in. That’s a battle they might yet win. I have a feeling it will just be a more complicated way of losing the war, though.

We in this blog are fairly resistant to psyops, anyway. Just make sure we inoculate others.

Book Promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Origin Stories (Chronicles of the Fall Book 11)

Six stories in the Troystvennyy Soyuz on the run up to and during the Fall of the Alliance.

Young people with problems with the brutal society, and all too often their own families. Young men and women reaching for a better future, as everything changes around them.

FROM D. A. BROCK: Tales of the Texas Navy: Volume 1

This mini-anthology contains two short stories in the ‘Republic of Texas Navy’ universe, revealing heretofore unknown facets of that world.

FROM KEN LIZZI: Semi-Autos and Sorcery: The Complete Series: An Urban Fantasy (Semi-Autos & Sorcery Box Sets Book 1)

The Complete Semi-Autos and Sorcery Boxset.

FROM M.C.A. HOGARTH: Haley and the Town of Refuge (Haley and Nana Book 6)

A girl, a town… and a final choice.

Spring is just around the corner when the town of Refuge is at last asked to confront the Trial’s true challenge, an event that kicks off a furor in its population. But for Haley Landry, level 9 Questgiver, the challenge is more personal. After nine months of working with the alien system and overseeing the growth of her tiny town, a questline brings her to a crossroads, not only for herself, but for Refuge as well.

It’s the hardest decision Haley has had to make, and no one can make it for her. But her choice will shape the future, inside her heart, and out of it.

Join Haley, Nana, and the residents of Refuge for one final adventure in this cozy LitRPG apocalypse. There’s a brownie recipe in the back, because no matter how heavy the material, that’s still the kind of series this is.

FROM LIANE ZANE: The Covert Guardian (The Unsanctioned Guardians Book 1)

Prequel to the Elioud Legacy series

Every hero starts somewhere. She’s going to take the fast track from student to trained covert operative.

Six months ago, Olivia Markham testified in the grueling murder trial of her cousin Emily’s killer. When her boyfriend Jamie surprises Olivia with a trip to Ibiza, party island of the world, her family and friends urge her to go. After all, Emily had been her best friend, the one she’d planned to room with at Brown University her freshman year.

Olivia gets her chance to let loose—only not in the way anyone could foresee.

What was supposed to be a vacation dancing and drinking on the beach trying to move on from her cousin’s death turns into a nightmare terrorist attack instead. As men with automatic weapons and knives move through screaming, swimsuit-clad, and drunken tourists, Olivia can’t flee. She has to do something. Even if it kills her. So she stops and confronts a knife-wielding man who’d just slaughtered a young couple.

It was a foolhardy act.

But Olivia’s presence of mind and surprising fighting skills don’t go unnoticed—or in vain. A team from the Special Activities Division, the CIA’s ultra-clandestine paramilitary unit, miraculously intervenes. What happens next changes the course of Olivia’s life forever.

Set six years before THE HARLEQUIN & THE DRANGÙE, THE COVERT GUARDIAN narrates Olivia Markham’s genesis from idealistic college student to trained intelligence operative.

“I took the opportunity to read The Covert Guardian twice. What an intriguing plot — what interesting characters – what wonderful geographical and cultural contexts. Zane is one helluva researcher. I’m a fan!!!!” Ted Fichtl, Col. USA, Retired

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Dragon’s in the Details

Six stories of dragons hiding in today’s world:
A Friend, Indeed–A little girl meets the best friend she could ask for when she finds a dragon sleeping in her wagon.
Tempest–What do you do when you find a dragon in your favorite teacup?
Clowder–These are absolutely not cats, no matter what they look like, and will take offense at your mistake.
Back Yard Birds and Other Things–If the dragon defends your chickens, you invite it to stay.
Houdini–When the pet supplier sends the wrong kind of dragon, the pet store’s got a problem.
Hoard–Not every dragon cares for gold, gems, or cash.

FROM MARY CATELLI: Through A Mirror, Darkly

What lies behind a reflection?

Powers have filled the world with both heroes and villains.  Helen, despite her own powers, had acquired the name Sanddollar but stayed out of the fights.

When the enigmatic chess masters create a mirrored world reflecting her own home and the world about it, it’s not so easy to escape.  All the more in that the people of that world are a dark reflection of all those she knows.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Margins of Mundania

A tween boy’s Christmas gift opens a world of wonder and brings joy to a whole town fallen on hard times. A young New Englander in the early Twentieth Century discovers that some parts of human history don’t bear too close examination. A literary critic in the old Soviet Union must confront his own moral cowardice.

These stories, along with a multitude of bite-sized works of flash fiction, carry you from the most prosaic of events to the moments of awe that offer glimpses of matters larger than ourselves.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: CLIP

This past week was scheduled for over six months for a visit by my assistant, who lives across the country. We were going to go over several ongoing editing projects, better handled in person, firm up a schedule for the rest of the year, as I’ve been merrily forgetting/running over deadlines at such a speed she can’t keep up with me, and arrange for her to coordinate a website design/shop design with my web person.

For this purpose, she was going to stay in our basement guest room for a week, and we’d have plenty of time to work, even taking in account that I was trying to do the last 10k words of the very long book.

About twelve hours after she arrived, I discovered there was a huge, confused, bureaucratic snarl involving documents needed for #2 son’s religious wedding to take place in Portugal in October: meaning they were demanding a document that I’m fairly sure they don’t need for reasons that are not applicable, but since the bureaucracy there moves at the speed of glaciation, I tried to get the document they might remotely need (they can’t have the one they asked for, since son is NOT a Portuguese citizen nor am I) and ran into the fact that the representation for Portugal in the US is widespread and beyond bizarre.

Since one of the main reasons I give thanks every morning when I wake up and I’m not a Portuguese citizen is the bizarrely convoluted bureaucracy that has been worsening since the Roman Empire, if not before, my blood pressure shot up to three million over five hundred thousand (these are approximations, it might be higher) multiplying as I met each obstacle to obtaining something very simple. Each step tried to convince me to get the document the Portuguese side think they need, which is actually impossible since neither of the parties to the wedding are Portuguese citizens.

On top of which I’m VERY BAD, bordering on mentally deficient when dealing with bureaucracy of ANY KIND and my response to frustration when dealing with bureaucrats is to roll twenty for angry snark. (Which does not go well in Latin cultures.)

If at this point you have an image of me sitting in front of the computer with a little cartoon chimney protruding from my head and steam whistling out, it would be accurate, yes.

Pray for me, as that situation is ongoing.

After about six hours of this, plus trying to explain to the Portuguese side — via my mother who is 90 and VERY stubborn — that we can’t actually register the legal marriage in Portugal since neither of these people are registered in Portugal and the process for them to marry legally there (legal and religious are completely separate) will take multiple years, and is pointless since they DON’T LIVE THERE. (The process will probably necessitate their living there for some time, at that.). Also reminding mom that neither my marriage, nor that of my older son were registered in Portugal, despite which we could have a religious ceremony there all the same — I decided we probably should eat.

And because I had completely forgotten to shop, I went to the basement, which had been fine in the morning, to get food from the freezers.

At which point, at the bottom of the stairs, my feet went splish-splosh. Note that I was so out of it I went five steps before going “that sound is WRONG” and looking down…. at two inches of water. At that point I was in the FINISHED part of the basement where the guest room, electronics and musical instruments are….

Run up the stairs screaming “We have a water leak.”

Well, I was wrong. The fact is we had a massive storm go through, and what we actually had was a raw sewage backup.

Thanks to husband’s precaution of putting everything in the basement on platforms, everything but possibly ONE eiderdown and cover and a Christmas tree are PROBABLY salvageable/okay.

Call the insurance company, who sent over a mitigation company who, for reasons inexplicable, decided WE must be the ones to carry everything stored down there up the stairs (while I’m fairly mobile and fine health wise, Dan’s knees are shot, which means bringing up EVERYTHING from food storage to appliances to empty computer boxes from the storage area would take me, even with my assistant’s help about two weeks. All the while walking on raw sewage, which, btw, for some reason started my asthma going. The company meanwhile, was enthusiastically removing flooring and padding, and wanted to proceed well beyond the area of flooding, and also wanted to CUT OUT DRY WALL, despite the wall not starting until well above the flood. Oh, and they wanted to empty the basement despite the fact that most storage is on elevated impermeable shelves.

Husband got very upset and called insurance again. As of right now, the basement is clean and disinfected and drying, pending environmental testing, and getting a company in to re-floor the damaged area. Also pending is getting in a plumber to make sure this backup doesn’t happen again. (Among other things we found we had some kind of a sewer access down there we didn’t know existed, until the cap popped off under pressure. This wasn’t mentioned in our inspection; it was under a set of shelves. We had no idea it even existed. The other access was thoroughly roto-rooted, but the source of the backup was outside our property. I don’t know what to even do with that. And please don’t tell me. Tell my husband. I’m already dealing with ONE insane bureaucracy.)

Meanwhile about a hundred minor things seem to also have decided to go critical all at once, to the point I’m answering the phone with “What fresh hell is this?”

At least we seem to have pulled Havelock cat from kidney failure brink. He’s been letting us hydrate him, and is doing well, if thoroughly put out with my locking him up in the office randomly (from his perspective. Actually so hoses/vents can be run up through open doors from the basement.)

Since the Portuguese bureaucracy will shut down in an hour and a half and my assistant HAS to leave in the next couple of hours, I will be trying to sit down and finish the book shortly. Even if I don’t have any hair left.

Pray for what remains of my sanity. Even if you’re an atheist. The novelty might be enough to get the Author’s attention, or at least cause Him to laugh.

I need three days or so to finish this book and maybe catch my breath, before returning to the struggle, which is very definitely real.