Reading

Journey
My reading affair began at 12, and a Jesuit school taught me grammar and the basics of writing. College was an unhappy time, reading continued, and real-world editors taught me how to write. Following are classic poets, short story writers, and novels I recommend. Nonfiction requires basic writing and researching skills, and Google's AI is my assistant, that's all, but fiction is a thousand times harder.

classic poetry

Longfellow
Edgar Allan Poe
Robert W. Service
Robert Southwell
Rupert Brooke
Kenneth Patchen
Ogden Nash
Kipling
Coleridge
Francis Thompson
Baudelaire
Robert Browning
Hardy
Emily Brontë
Charlotte Brontë
Patrick Barrington
Emily Dickinson
Shakespeare (recusant)
Tennyson
Thackeray
Wordsworth
Kilmer
Hawthorne
John McCrae
Christina Rossetti
Belloc
Richard Crashaw
Emerson
Alan Seeger
Faulkner
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Ottis Shirk
James T. Fields
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Robert Frost
Dante Alighieri
Gerard Manley Hopkins

classic short story

Lovecraft
Ernest Bramah Smith
Edgar Allan Poe
O. Henry
Harry Harrison
Dashiell Hammett
Ray Bradbury
Philip K. Dick
Washington Irving
Hemingway
Betsy Curtis
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Kate Chopin
Stella Whitelaw
Jack Boyle
L. Frank Baum
Margery Williams
Stephen Crane
Richard Matheson
Oscar Wilde
Eudora Welty
Harry Bates
John Wood Campbell Jr
Robert Louis Stevenson
Jack London
Ambrose Bierce
Arnold Moss
M. R. James
A. J. Alan
Brett Halliday
Robert Cormier
Rod Serling
George Frederick Humphrey
John Cheever
Edward F. Benson
Robert H. Benson
Julius Long
Mary Flannery O’Connor
Roald Dahl
Aldous Huxley
Robert A. W. Lowndes
Isaac Asimov
Stephen Leacock
Richard Connell
Mark Twain
David Real
Kurt Vonnegut
Hernando Telez
Henry Slezar
Raymond Chandler

Chandler's Murder, My Sweet
ok.ru/video/1008417114804
8358 Sunset Boulevard/RKO studio
"I think he will always have a fairly shabby office, a lonely house, a number of affairs, but no permanent connection ... I see him always in a lonely street, in lonely rooms, puzzled but never quite defeated." Chandler

Two Murders
Fact is worse than fiction.

October 2000
Yolanda Olejniczak kills James Joseph Olejniczak, with whom she has two children, in a knife attack, and is convicted of voluntary manslaughter in 2004, serving 11 years before her release in 2013.

2/17/2025
Yolanda Olejniczak Marodi stabs CAL FIRE Captain Rebecca Marodi, 49, her “wife”, multiple times at their home in Ramona, San Diego County. Immediately after the stabbing, Yolanda loads items into an SUV and crosses the U.S.–Mexico border. Mexican authorities arrest her at a hotel in Mexicali, and she is extradited back to San Diego.

8/4/2026
Yolanda pleads guilty to second-degree murder just before her trial is scheduled to begin.

9/2/2026
Yolanda, now 54, is sentenced to 36 years to life in state prison.

classic novel

The Caine Mutiny
Mutiny on the Bounty
The Power and the Glory
The Heart of the Matter
To Kill a Mockingbird
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
The Woman in White
Vanity Fair
Jane Eyre
The Citadel
Lost Horizon
Kidnapped
The Grapes of Wrath
Heart of Darkness
Gulliver's Travels
The Guns of Navarone
The Return of the Native
The Moonstone
The Hound of the Baskervilles
The Old Man and the Sea
The Keys of the Kingdom
The Last of the Mohicans
The Red Badge of Courage
Treasure Island
Kim
Robinson Crusoe
The Great Gatsby
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Catcher in the Rye
Lord of the Flies
A Passage to India
The Brothers Karamazov
1984
Fahrenheit 451
Emma
The Scarlet Letter
Brave New World
The Devil's Advocate (M. West)
Animal Farm
The Call of the Wild
White Fang
McTeague


classic plays

Julius Caesar
The Merchant of Venice
Henry V

classic prose
Aristotle, son of Nicomachus

Publishing

Brook Busey writes under the pseudonym Diablo Cody. Diablo is Spanish for devil. Her publishers are Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin Group, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, and Abrams Books.

Penguin Random House is wholly owned by the German media, services, and education conglomerate Bertelsmann. Bertelsmann is primarily owned by a foundation and the founding family, Mohn. Family patriarch Heinrich Mohn made financial donations to the German SS, and Bertelsmann became the single largest book supplier to the German Army.

HarperCollins is wholly owned by News Corp, the publicly traded global media and information services conglomerate controlled by billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch and his family.

Abrams Books is wholly owned by Média-Participations, a major European entertainment and media conglomerate.

Ellen Page, aka Elliot Page, is an Oscar-nominated Canadian actor, producer, and activist known for starring in Diablo Cody’s Juno, also in Inception, and Netflix's The Umbrella Academy.

These are the irreligious folks that dictate what people read and watch today, and their fiction is inferior.

Born Providence, Rhode Island, Lovecraft wrote his story from March to August 1921, and it was first published in April 1926 in the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Born San Francisco, California, Jackson sent her story to The New Yorker, and it was published on June 26, 1948. If you read my comments before listening, you are incredibly lazy.

Noon dinner
When did the Crucifixion begin? 12 noon
Three-legged stool? SACRA SCRIPTURA SACRA TRADITIO MAGISTERIUM
In her mind, we Roman Catholics are the executioners. Summers represents the pope. I don't take communion: I receive, and not from some layperson in the crowd. Jackson did not go to her grave: she was cremated.

All right. He sees himself in the mirror. What the crowd sees is a monster, someone who is not part of the group, and he is ugly to them, but he is not ... he is just himself, the outsider.

San Francisco's Portsmouth Square, 1851, Gold Rush, early daguerreotype

A daguerreotype is the first successful, publicly available photographic process. It creates a sharp, one-of-a-kind image on a polished, silver-coated copper plate.

Telegraph Hill is behind Washington Street with signage featuring California Restaurant; Book and Job Printing; Louisiana; Sociedad; Drugs & Medicines Wholesale & Retail; Henry Johnson & Co; Alta California; Bella Union; and A. Holmes.

A wooden semaphore (an optical telegraph with movable arms) was built on top of the hill in 1849. The station operator used the semaphore to signal the types of incoming ships arriving through the Golden Gate to the businesses and residents down below. Because of this visual marine telegraph device, the location became known as Telegraph Hill well before an electric telegraph system was installed there in 1853.

Relay stations were built on hills within line-of-sight of each other, usually spaced five to 15 miles apart. Each tower had a tall pole on top equipped with a pivoting crossbar and movable indicator arms controlled by ropes and pulleys. Operators inside the tower used a telescope to watch the neighboring station. When the neighboring arms moved into different preset angles, the operator copied the position to pass the message down the line. The various positions of the arms represented specific letters, numbers, or coded words from a special dictionary. In 1850, the only standing church was Mission Dolores.

Known for entertainment, lawlessness, and vice, the new city was called the Barbary Coast from the 1860s to the 1910s. My mother, Barbara, was born in 1926.

population
1850 30,000 to 35,000 (itinerants)
1926 583,307
1950 775,357
2026 812,000 to 827,000 (the unhoused)

land area about 46.9 square miles

Mary Flannery O'Connor was born March 25, 1925, in Savannah, Georgia, and died single August 3, 1964, in Milledgeville, Georgia, at the age of 39, the cause of death systemic lupus erythematosus. Here is the only recording I could find by the author herself.

Cathedral of St. John, Savannah, GA, childhood regular communicant
St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Iowa City, IA, graduate school daily communicant
Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Milledgeville, GA, adult daily communicant

She understood the first language of the Church, though not a classical scholar or completely fluent. A Roman Catholic who attended Mass daily, she was deeply familiar with the language through her lifelong missal and regular reading of Catholic prayers.

She wrote the story from late 1952 to early 1953, drafting it while living at her family’s home in Milledgeville. The short story followed a two-step publication timeline. The story was first published in 1953 in a multi-author paperback anthology called Modern Writing I, issued by Avon. It was later published on May 12, 1955, as the title track of her landmark debut short story collection of the same name.

Church historians and literary scholars frequently debate how O’Connor would have reacted to the post-1969 Church. She was a fierce defender of dogma, absolute truth, and sacramental reality in the Bible Belt. While she generally showed disinterest or private opposition to integration—once writing that she was an "integrationist by principle & a segregationist by taste"—she acknowledged that King was doing what was necessary. She didn't know about his non-colored prostitutes, or that Jews were behind the civil rights movement, which would have developed naturally. They included 1) Rabbi Abraham Heschel; 2) Rabbi Joachim Prinz; 3) Arnold Aronson; 4) Paul Breines; 5) Andrew Goodman; 6) James Greenberg; 7) Akiva Kaplan; 8) Stanley Levinson; and 9) Michael Schwerner. Joachim was the BVM's father.

55890 equals 27, a perfect cube
3 by 3 by 3

MLK
Declassified FBI files, such as File 104-10125-10133, detailed allegations of extramarital affairs, drinking, and the presence of prostitutes at gatherings. While the full, unredacted data dump occurred in 2025, heavily redacted or specific portions of the FBI's investigation into King had been released in smaller batches in preceding decades under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. As a result of Executive Order 14176, signed by Trump, the National Archives made over 240,000 pages of digitized records public. This massive release included the FBI’s surveillance records and documents concerning King’s 1968 murder, known within the bureau as the “MURKIN” files. These records were originally under a 1977 federal court order that sealed them for 50 years, scheduling their release for 2027. However, the Justice Department successfully requested a federal judge to lift the seal early to facilitate the 2025 declassification rollout.

My Catholic first cousin had a thirty-year career as a first grade teacher in the San Francisco public schools. In the thirtieth year, she overheard two teachers in the lunchroom say, "Miss Dunn is the last 'white' teacher. We've got to find a way to get rid of her." They did. She spent the last year at a different elementary school.

The Maltese Falcon
It is a work of fiction, a 1930 hardboiled detective novel written by American author Dashiell Hammett. The story follows fictional private detective Sam Spade in San Francisco as he investigates a series of murders and searches for a jeweled 16th-century statuette of a falcon that the characters believe is worth a fortune. It is a classic example of a McGuffin. The physical object itself matters very little to the deeper meaning of the story and only exists to set the characters in motion, spark deceit, greed, and murder.

"The Rebellion"

three l's in her name

Oracle Corporation, the multi-national tech giant, was co-founded by Larry Ellison, and its current CEO is Safra Catz. Both Ellison and Catz are Jewish. Anthropic AI, the "safety" company behind Claude, was co-founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, Jews. The Centropic Oracle was an audio magazine dedicated to dystopian short stories and voice actors but is now defunct.

Israel is north of the Tropic of Cancer sitting roughly between 29° N and 33° N latitude. This places the country entirely within the northern temperate zone.

The Siemens family is an old German family whose roots can be traced back to the 14th century in Goslar, Germany. While the surname Siemens is a patronymic variation derived from the name Simon, the family was Lutheran. During the Nazi regime, the Siemens company was heavily integrated into the Third Reich’s war economy. The company operated factories near and within concentration camps, including a dedicated facility at Ravensbrück, and used 1) Jewish concentration camp inmates, 2) hundreds of thousands of forced laborers, and 3) prisoners of war.

Theodor Geisel

b. Springfield, MA 1904
d. La Jolla, CA 1991 (a very ritzy area I visited once)

Before creating his children’s books, Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) was a fierce political cartoonist who weaponized his whimsical illustration style against fascism and American isolationism. From 1941 to 1943, Geisel drew more than 400 editorial cartoons for the progressive, left-leaning New York newspaper PM, relentlessly attacking the “America First” movement and its most prominent public figure, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh.

The Anti-Fascist Campaign Against Lindbergh

Geisel viewed Charles Lindbergh not as a hero, but as a dangerous appeaser and Nazi sympathizer whose isolationism blinded America to the fascist threat. He used his characteristic menagerie of creatures to mock Lindbergh’s platform.

“Lindbergh the Ostrich”: When Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, Geisel recalled being unable to focus on his book Horton Hatches the Egg, noting, “I found myself drawing pictures of Lindbergh the Ostrich.” He frequently drew Lindbergh as an ostrich burying its head in the sand. One notable cartoon featured a fictional “Lindbergh Quarter” where an ostrich replaced the American eagle.
The Nazi Sympathizer: Geisel directly linked Lindbergh to Adolf Hitler. In one cartoon, Lindbergh is shown patting the head of a swastika-covered sea serpent bearing Hitler’s mustache.
“Spreading the Lovely Goebbel’s Stuff”: In a scathing September 1941 cartoon, Geisel depicted a creature explicitly labeled “Lindbergh” using a shovel to throw trash out of a vehicle called the “Nazi Anti-Semite Stink Wagon,” directly calling out Lindbergh’s so-called anti-Semitic rhetoric.

Geisel also targeted the broader “America First” movement. One famous cartoon depicted an American mother wearing an “America First” sweater reading a story to her children about “Adolf the Wolf” eating foreign children, dismissively telling them, “But uncle wolf orly ate the foreign children and after all it didn’t matter.”

The Aftermath and Geisel’s Wartime Paranoia

Following his stint at PM, Geisel joined the U.S. Army in 1943, serving as a captain (and later major) in the Information and Education Division’s Motion Picture Unit, where he worked on propaganda and training movies. However, Geisel’s wartime record features a stark and troubling contradiction. While he used PM to crusade against anti-Semitism and domestic racism—even drawing cartoons that criticized the military’s Jim Crow policies—he fell prey to intense wartime hysteria regarding Japan.

He drew highly offensive, racist caricatures of Japanese Americans, including an infamous cartoon depicting them lining up to receive TNT from Japan just days before the U.S. government authorized Japanese internment camps. In the decades following World War II, Geisel’s politics evolved drastically. Scholars note that he deeply regretted his wartime paranoia and used his postwar children's books to atone for his past work and continue his anti-fascist messaging in a universal format.

Geisel’s complex legacy remains a point of historical discussion. While historians celebrate his early, bold stance against fascism, his estate chose to discontinue six Dr. Seuss books in 2021 because of the lingering presence of racial stereotypes rooted in that era of his career.

Even as a child I thought his childish rhymes stank, and there will be no narrations on this website.

Diamonds

Mantle: Under extreme heat/pressure over billions of years, natural diamonds crystallize deep in the upper mantle, 93 miles to 155 miles down.
Kimberlite Pipes: Ancient volcanic eruptions carried these diamonds long upward through vertical rock channels called kimberlite pipes.
Alluvial Deposits: Weather and rivers erode kimberlite rocks, washing and depositing diamonds into riverbeds and shorelines.

The greatest and largest American detective agency in the 1890s was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. At its height from the 1870s through the 1890s, it operated as the largest private law enforcement organization in the world, at times exceeding the size of the active US Army. The agency pursued high-profile Wild West outlaws, including Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid, and the Wild Bunch, and created a massive criminal database known as the “Rogues’ Gallery” mug shot collection.

The agency gained widespread notoriety for acting as armed guards and strikebreakers during violent labor disputes, most famously in the 1892 Homestead Strike in Pennsylvania. Their open-eye corporate logo “We Never Sleep” inspired the term private eye, and their aggressive tactics eventually led Congress to pass the Anti-Pinkerton Act of 1893.