Log of the White Owl – Debris Behind Saturn

Log of the WHITE OWL

Date: Terran – 25 August 2087

On leeward side of Saturn:
I came across cargo pods floating amongst a field of scattered debris.

Timing to and from Ma’Kluft.
Came out of warp to find myself:
In the wrong time thread;
in the wrong place;
and in the midst of shipping wreckage.

Had drones take the tug out to capture a few pods.
Brought them into a quarantine hold.

The pods are polygonal with hexagonal faces, white.
Apparently meant to interlock in cargo bays.
Odd markings on them. Recognizable, yet not.
English with unfamiliar words, spellings, and formatting.

Labels are shipping information.
Like nothing I have come across in travels within various Sol System time lines.

In the process of having nanobots examine contents without breaching.

Will add any further identification information as it is uncovered.

Addendum(s):
The debris is from a massive explosive concussion.
Low-yield nuclear traces:
Decay analysis = incident occured ~6 Terran months ago.

At least the White Owl didn’t trigger it, run over whatever the debris used to be.

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J.R. Red and I are now scrutinizing nanobot quantum navigation logs to see why we came out in that time thread.

Anything pertinent to this event will be linked to this log entry.
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Log of the WHITE OWL

Date: Terran – 09 November 2008

The bots have reconstructed one of the cargo pods’ waybills.

It was discovered within a shielded circular enclosure at the center of one of the pod’s hexagonal faces.

It was somewhat scrambled, possibly as a result of an EMP intrusion during the carrier vehicle’s destruction.

The pod is part of a cargo carried by a vessel registered to a spacing arm of American Airlines, a corporation present in my native time thread. A quite recognizable double wing logo is displayed on the form.

The name of the vessel is VALLEY FORGE.

The cargo is described as mulch, but the scanners report that it is altered, feasibly by the effects of the blast that destroyed the vessel.

Its original structure is postulated to be an artificially constructed, moisture-retaining particulate compound functionally much like the mineral perlite used as mulch in my native time thread.

J.R. Red will time the White Owl tug back out to the debris field in order to search for more information. I don’t dare send it to any point other than the one to which the White Owl’s quantum nanobots have been.

I’m curious as to the ship’s purpose and the whys/hows of its destruction. I have a theory.

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Blue Sand 02 – Bot

Tink’s cheek was still pressed against something cool and smooth, and she still thought for a split second that it felt wonderfully comfortable, but it definitely was not sand.

One greeny-bluey-gray eye reluctantly peeped from beneath thick pale lashes. Then it popped wide open and was quickly joined in its wide-open-ness by its twin on the other side of her narrow-bridged nose.

She stared along the smooth coolness upon which her cheek rested. It was blue, the same glacier blue of the sand, but this was a single highly-polished expanse of…she didn’t know. Her mind just stuck, ground its gears.

She gazed out across the surface upon which she rested, and bumped into what was stalling out her neurons. Then her brain suddenly fired. The landscape beyond the blue slab slid silently past her eyes.

She and what she lay upon were moving.

Tink sat bolt upright and looked around. She was on a long rectangular slab, facing the back of a large crawler bot, which methodically tracked toward a slowly-opening entrance at the base of a sheer cliff.

She could hear the blue sand skishing beneath the bot’s treads, but she felt no translated vibrations.

The bot was a totally different thing than JR Red. Instead of the fairly small hovering…and now missing…mechanical companion, this bot was nothing more than a silvery satin-finished mechanical cube. It was featureless, or at least the parts of it Tink could see were featureless.

It pulled the shiny blue platform via an extension which seemed to sprout from just above its lower edge, and the end connected to the slab seemed to have melted and blended into the smooth blueness.

“Ummmm . . . Hello?” she called out, just in case, like JR Red, it could interpret her vocal soundwaves and respond. “Where are you taking me?”

Nothing.

That feeling of dread under which she had cowered before dropping into exhausted sleep, roared back into her mind. What if she was being taken away for processing as some kind of beach flotsam…or for fodder in some Deathstar trash compactor or something?

In a sort of mindless semi-panic, she scrambled off the sled and ran.

About a hundred yards away she stopped, turned and looked back. Nothing was changed. The bot’s slow pulling of the rectangular blue slab toward the tunnel mouth had not altered.

She was glad that it had not apparently noticed that she had jumped from the sled, because the opening at the base of the cliff was now nearly half way open. The bot had just kept on moving in a straight line toward the gaping darkness.

I might not be trash, Tink irrationally decided, there might be something usfeul inside the cliff. So she ran to catch up with the sled jumped back onto the slab, noting that when she landed, she felt no impact.

Was she even awake?

The bot continued without detectable change toward the cliff.

She jumped back off.

The bot kept on as it had been keeping on.

It was rapidly approaching the huge opening in the rock wall now. Tink walked alongside for a short distance, but then suddenly jogged forward, to come abreast of the bot.

The bot stopped, frozen in place.

The massive door began to slide shut again.

“Uh-oh. That’s connected with me?” she wondered, aloud, as she usually did. “But which part? The bot stopping, or the cliff door freaking out?”

One nearly invisible brow raised quizzically, and she backed away from the bot. The big silvery cube remained frozen. However, the big door began to slide open again.

She was close enough now that she could hear an incongruously soft sighing sound, presumably made by whatever powered the massive stone’s movement. It seemed to come from deep within a huge tunnel, behind the cliff walls. She could feel its power thrumming through the soles of her shoes.

She walked back toward the bot…and the door stopped. She stopped.

The silver cube-shaped bot suddenly extruded an appendage from its lower edge, which immediately began snaking toward her.

“Uh-oh!” she squealed, decidedly uneasy about the mysterious ‘tools’ now sprouting from the end of the appendage.

Once again driven by the overwhelming dread, she raced inland from the the beach…away from the peculiar bot…away from that odd sheeting wash of pale liquid slipping across blue sand to finally edge the surf with pale patterns of moving colored light.

As she sprinted, she fully expected to be tripped up by the extension from the bot. She almost made it to a jumble of steel blue boulders at the edge of the blue sand.

Almost.

Twitter Snippets Chained 02

I’ve been asked a question I’ve never been asked before. Gotta say it felt kinda cool.

The question: “Where in the Tinkian timeline do these snippets fall?”

The answer: Most of ’em are just prior to the set of “White Owl Stowaway” entries on this blog. However, a couple are actually quite a while after the Stowaway incident.

The latest crop of Twitter Snippets:

——————————————————————————–

He watched her move down the White Owl’s ramp. Spacing leathers and thigh-high boots turned it into a slink. He forgot to expell his breath.

——————————————————————————–

Though still affected by lavender spacing leathers and boots, Weasel leaned into an echo terminal and watched the White Owl’s docking log.

——————————————————————————–

He watched the exchange of cargo from The White Owl to Verosheeg, when he suddenly ‘felt’ he needed to look up. Those eyes were on him.

——————————————————————————–

Weasel felt her eyes drilling into him, and thought better of staying in her direct line of sight. He’d get the info he needed another way.

——————————————————————————–

He slipped back down the docking galleries and rejoined his cronies in the crystal-walled bar. There, he brought up White Owl cargo logs.

Twitter Snippets Chained 01

Tink looked up from her nav screen…something on a peripheral screen had caught her attention. “Shit,” she breathed out loud. “He’s back.”

————————————————————————————–

Weasel: You know I’m gonna be like a bad habit…I want your boat.
Tink: Yeah, I know…but you gotta go through me to get it.
Weasel: Yep.

————————————————————————————–

Tink felt his intense scrutiny…as she always did…at the edges of her mind.
She didn’t need to look up.
“You’ll never fly us, Weasel.”

————————————————————————————–
T’nk System 20513
Many around a large round screen table followed Weasel to the huge transparent wall.
It was the White Owl.

————————————————————————————–

Weasel’s hooded dark blue eyes would not leave the big round table screen.
Even in her image her striking eyes impaled him, exposed him.

————————————————————————————–

Weasel had managed to sneak into the high-risk cargo bay where The White Owl had docked.
His knees nearly buckled when Tink appeared.

————————————————————————————–

Blue Sand 01 – Beach

from a DADUNGEON post
on the MYSTcommunity forum in the Players’ Journals subforum thread:
“Tink’s Journey through Uru and Beyond, transcriptions of journal snippets”

Note: I’ve smoothed it a bit with a pass of Ye Olde Mental English Wheel.

[clears throat…err, keyboard] Here it be, such as it is:

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The sand was blue, like those jewel-colored walls deep within thousand-year-old glaciers. Powdered glacier.

It stretched from the horizon on Tink’s left to the horizon on her right, and was of a texture so fine and regular that it flowed along with an iridiscent liquid that sheeted across the beach here and there.

The mixture of bright sand and pale liquid slithered down the smooth slope of blue sand, to join a huge body of what could have been Terran shelf waters — but for an odd phosphorescence skittering through the edges of its surf.

It was like breaking waves made of the same stuff that moved across the screens of that weird little machine she’d parked on her workbench in Dr Tinkyl’s LaBore-atory of Diet Doctor Pepper and Spanish Rice.

This whole horizon-to-horizon beach was a massive copy of a link field she often used on a huge T’nk System transporter she and TeBO had resurrected in D’ni.

Maybe that was why she ended up here.

However, as surrealistic as the light-woven edges of wave crests and bright blue beach was, the thing that stopped Tink’s brain in its tracks was the sky.

Her face fell into resigned exhaustion. She was back beneath a faceted dome, but she wasn’t sure if she back on Ma’Kluft at the right time. THAT howling thought was what was making her mind refuse to engage gears.

Then came that split second in which she felt the wheels of her mind do a sort of cerebral “Neutral Drop”, which in turn threatened the conversion of random neuron firings into her notorious stream of consciousness thought process.

It was a split second in which she had an overwhelming, formless terror engulf her normally resilient ability to adapt, to make use of what she had in hand in order to get to where she wanted to be. She stood there, headed tipped to the sky, and anxiously studied it.

There was a different pattern to its facets. A lack of certain colors, and the sky beyond the dome seemed “different”. The prism effects to which she had grown accustomed, the ones which traveled facet edges of the Ma’Kluft dome were dimmed, shifted.

It was like the giant star nursery which furnished the glows and pulsed light to color them no longer hung behind Ma’Kluft’s suns.

The landscape suddenly felt utterly alien to Tink’s consciousness, which already had a working relationship with the Twilight Zone. On autopilot she ran a hand back over her hair, a ritual effort to re-corral any gingery curls which had escaped her fat teal scrunchy.

She wanted to sink down to a cross-legged sitting position, but she was standing in one of the sheeting flows of pale liquid and glacier blue sand.

She wanted to scream out, at the top of her lungs, that she didn’t want to play any more, that she wanted to go home, but . . .

This wasn’t a game.

She was so tired. She had been jerked from strange place to strange place again and again, always being suddenly covered with those moving transporter light patterns, sealed into a time bubble, and then dumped out again in yet another odd place.

That incredibly elongated and sinuous alien she had seen studying her while lounging on a steam-riddled overhead pipe, and dragging one spaghetti-thin leg through “water” resembling the iridiscent water now filling her eyes, was long gone. She had been “greeted” by dozens of other “welcome committees”, since then. Some were sentient, others appeared not to be.

By the clock it had been only a few days since she had “lost” JR Red and The Bearded One in a thicket of orange-tipped indigo foliage. Since then, she had been skipped like a glowing paisley-covered Tink-shaped rock across time’s surfaces — so many times, that it felt like eons had passed.

Tiredness weakened her knees. Her thighs could no longer support her weight. Her head felt far too heavy for her neck to balance. She wilted, crumpled into a Tink-shaped lump which lay in the filmy flow of moving blue sand and pale liquid.

She felt so very good lying there, with one cheek against the silken coolness of blue sand and liquid. Its current gently nosed its way along contact points between Tink and the sand beneath her.

Her greeny-bluey gray eyes disappeared behind the overworked eyelids attached to a mind wishing for nothing more than a towel to wrap around its head.

In fact, Douglas Adams’ encyclopedia entry for using a towel to “… avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal …” was the last thing strung together before the welcome lack of everything sentient washed over everything.

White Owl Stowaway…snippet 06

NOTE: If you are a newcomer to this series of snippets, and would like to start from the beginning in order, click on the “White Owl Stowaway” entry in the menu to the right. That will bring up a screen listing the snippets. Click on each title to access the chunks of story.

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Tink felt the full impact of his twisted, obsessive awe over her extremely unique ship, The White Owl. She was stunned at his overwhelming need to possess the vessel.

Then she moved way into unnerved by his parallel fascination with her, too. She could feel his all-consuming need to possess both her and her hard-won ship.

That was quickly followed by his uncontrollable, unreasoning recoil from her nanobots. She felt a fear, a revulsion of them that far surpassed BiRD’s reactions long ago.

Her mind squirmed, unable to break away from his bizarre, emotional slide show — which must have escaped from a very deep place indeed. It wove in and out of various vignettes from his past, from his fantasies, from his subconscious.

They thoroughly unsettled her:

His intense interest with the way her jumpsuit stretched over her breasts when she breathed or moved: He thought it was luscious, and was sure those breasts would be a perfect fit for his big long-fingered hands;

There was a parallel preoccupation with the surfaces of her ship, mostly with those faint channels that resembled moire satin…textures he thought looked like ghostly circuitry. He was hypnotized with the way the ship morphed so smoothly into its various configurations. He longed to trigger them himself;

He puzzled constantly about the ship’s uncanny ability to perform smooth rapid jumps;

He also dwelled on her own slightly spooky ability to move the same way;

He marvelled at the way light danced in her unruly strawberry blonde hair;

He was mesmerized at the way that her warp bubbles left wispy ribbons of multi-colored light, which rapidly faded to nothingness;

He lost himself in the delicious shivers he got when looking into her constantly changing eyes;

Riding over it all was the sudden lusty feel of her against him when he had just returned to consciousness — before he sensed internal twitches which he knew had to be her nasty little no-see-ums.

That was rapidly followed by a second nearly unbearable quick onslaught:

He savored the velvety skin of her graceful fingers imprisoned by his own;

He was aroused by powerful core-thumping vibrations that some of The White Owl’s various engines sent through major structural arrays – including his own;

He came close to an orgasmic grunt from some of The White Owl’s massive thrusters as they ramped beyond mere stationkeeping.

Then she knew he just knew she had to be able to feel the heat radiating from his own engine.

That last sensory shove brought Tink’s mind back into reality, because she did indeed feel it. Feeling it from his point of view, though, started up panic feelings, and something else within her, with which she did NOT want to deal at the moment.

Thus, back in control of her own senses, she wriggled out from under him, just before his mind broke out of its sensory avalanche. She did not want to be anywhere near him when he emerged. She was afraid he might act on the debris of those tangled feelings.

However, her wriggling caused his mind to click free — and focus on the nearest of her fast-retreating boots. He managed to get a grip on it, and used her moving inertia to give him a boost up from the deck.

Tink rotated her torso, so she would land with her back on the deck, and allowed his forward-moving inertia to bend her legs, to force her knees down to her chest. Then she straightened her legs with all her might, hoping to redirect his ‘flight path’ to a higher altitude.

She did it. He sailed over her, and rolled head over heels into a bulkhead just beyond the doorway.

He bounced off it, rolled back to his feet in one fluid motion, and was lunging back toward her when she rolled to her side and slammed her fist onto a closing rail outlining the doorway.

The opening then rapidly irised shut, and she heard his body’s impact against it as a heavy thump from the other side.

“Rats!” she grunted, pulling herself back to her feet. “Bet he’s right back to where we started a little while ago.”

She circled her navigation console and pulled up a camera display from a “grape cluster” hanging outside the door. She touched the screen with movements that caused the cam to zoom to a close-up of the door’s outer surface.

There at its base was a crumpled heap of a big bushy-haired half-dressed spacer. Tink sighed in resignation.

“Yarrr…” she complained. “Ye are indeed back to dreaming up another attempt to seize me ship.”

Her head tipped slightly to one side while she scanned as much of the Terran’s surfaces as the cam could display. He seemed unharmed, just sent to lalaland for a few seconds.

“Even though you still look good enough to just swallow whole, me potential plunderer,” she remarked, “I can’t re-engage with you just yet. Not while you still want to hijack my ship, pretty man.”

She turned to another screen, sighed again, then triggered the final cross-nebulae jump to Trench.

“OK, my leedle frenz,” she then ordered, “take him back to his cargo barge and put him into the EVsuit. Fix any physical injuries you find. Anesthetize him if whatever you need to fix will be painful, but stay out of his brain.”

Then she added, “When you clear out, lock the EVsuit.” She knew being locked inside the EVsuit wouldn’t stop him, wouldn’t even slow him for long, but it would give her a good head start on Trench.

Then she leaned back, crossed her form-fitted knee-high boots up on one edge of the console, and began pulling up the series of digital hoops through which she’d have to jump before she could legally slide into Trench’s atmosphere with her barge cargo of very nasty-tempered Prevellian hummingbirds.

She knew she would also work out a clandestine way to leave her stowaway on Trench. She grinned, and began altering some shipping invoices and bills of lading.

ONE FINE DAY IN A MA’KVASSA GULLY

NOTE:
This entry is a…
Scattered Tinking Re-Gathered.

The original was parked on the MYSTcommunity forum on Dec 4 2006, 03:10 AM Post #1.

What is below has undergone a pass of my mental English wheel..

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“Ummm, TeBO, you ever see anything like that happen before?”

Tink was watching the top third of a huge canyon-rim-high hoodoo pull away from its base.

It didn’t fall crashing into a rain of boulders, to shower house-size blocks of red stone on the canyon floor, though. Instead, it rose slowly upward, like it was levitating, or riding on some invisible cushion.

She felt TeBO’s usual “presence” at the edge of her mind, where he usually fed her his emotions and impressions, even the occasional vision from his past. They slipped into her stream of consciousness as the two watched the massive chunk of strangely-formed rock move smoothly away from its former resting place.

He was quite familiar with the peculiar geologic rock formation, but she also felt an odd sense of hesitancy, unsureness as far as the hoodoo’s motion went.

Her empathic alien friend wasn’t sure. He had fuzzy impressions of something like it, but nothing that would coalesce into a coherent image. Was he trying to tell her he had dreamed of something like this? Or that he had been told of a similar phenomenon?

The overriding undercurrent in both their minds was intense curiosity, however, so they continued to watch. The pair was crouching behind some cap rocks at the top of a slightly smaller hoodoo nearest the moving one.

The two hoodoos were sort of companion ‘guards’ jutting from the ground at the opening to what seemed to be an underground leg of the gully’s channel.

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Tink and TeBO had been exploring a system of interlocking canyons, and they had emerged from a frantic journey along the bottom of a very narrow slot canyon.

While still within that cramped, tube-like dry arroyo, they had heard and felt faint shudderings in the overhanging rock walls, and had become extremely nervous.

Were these the shudders of a geological shifting? Was the terrain rearranging its rocky self to a more comfortable hang in its touchy balance of gravity and erosion?

Or had there been a rain storm far upstream of the canyons here? That could mean they had heard distant thunder echoing through the rock, heralding a sudden filling of the confined little passage which twisted its way through high overhanging rock walls.

If the noises had been tremors, they could be buried in an avalanche of falling stone. If the sounds had been lightning’s voice, they could be caught up in an avalanche of rushing water.

In either case, they needed to exit the confined trail they followed. Now. Quickly.

Thus, they had raced through dark passages lit only by tiny slivers of openings that admitted dust-speckled beams from an oddly lavendered blue sky. They raced anxiously, scrambling over already-fallen rocks along the slot canyon’s floor, hyper alert for sounds of imminent disaster, scanning the walls for an escape route up or out — until they had suddenly rounded a tight turn and found themselves in the bright light of a conjunction of canyon mouths.

Once outside the confine of the canyon, they had simply headed up the first available slope off the floor of the conjunction, the first path which appeared to promise of avoiding any fast-moving things headed along the canyons’ floors.

They were almost to its pinnacle when tremors shook the rock upon which they perched. They stopped in their tracks and grabbed for armholds. The two then warily watched the unfolding, impossible movement of the larger column’s cap rocks.

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Deep shudders continued as the the base of the elevating rocks reached a level at the rim of the canyon. Once the base rocks cleared the rim, the the whole mass began to arc away from the gully, as if it were balanced on tip of a huge swiveling, invisible boom.

It finally slowed to a halt when only the tiniest tip of its outermost, lowest rock peeked over the edge of the sheer walls which dropped to the canyon floor, where the hoodoo’s abandoned base still sat.

That was when the shuddering stopped and allowed a silence to descend over the canyon like a giant invisible sheet settling to a newly-made bed. The sudden quiet was palpable, until Tink’s voice suddenly, casually, bounced around canyon walls.

“Shoulda climbed the other hoodoo, hunh?”

Re-Visiting An Old Pleasure

While looking for an old “Tinking” which I remember parking somewhere on a Myst or Uru-themed forum, I came across an old favorite where I could spend hours just looking and comparing and letting my imagination free-fly:

It’s called Jeff Russell’s STARSHIP DIMENSIONS, and it is still mind-blowing.

Captain Mal Reynolds' mostly trusty cargo ship,
scourge of The Alliance and blue-gloved spooks.

I had originally explored the place looking for a good visual reference as to the size of Serenity, the ship used in the cult television series FIREFLY and the associated movie, SERENITY. I actually found it there, that ship.

Why would that be mind-blowing? Lemme tellya.

You can drag and drop the Serenity’s image, and really see how it dwarfs STAR WARS’ Millenium Falcon and an Imperial Class Shuttle, or that an Imperial AT-AT Walker is taller than it, or that TIE fighters would easily fit/flit into its main hold.

Serenity ummm, hides behind a Jawa Sandcrawler.

You can see that if the Serenity were parked behind a Jawa Sandcrawler, it would stick out as if it were the Sandcrawler’s jutting head and firefly butt.

You can compare it to a Vorlon fighter from BABYLON 5, and see that the fighter is about the size of Serenity’s firefly class engine section. You can see that a STARSHIP TROOPERS plasma bug would give it pause, if they met on a planetary surface … for more than one reason.

It would NEVER be able to pass through a stargate, and it would be most thoroughly SQUASHED into roadkill, if STARGATE‘s Goa’uld Ha’Tak happened to land on it. A real windshield splat possibility.

And that is why STARSHIP DIMENSIONS is such a cool site.

It would be even cooler if one could cut and paste the Serenity to see exactly how it compares to the major starships in various sci-fi universes, like Enterprise, a Klingon Bird of Prey, or Moya.

Oh, but you can, if you look hard, find Serenity on the “1x” grid, where those behemoths parade.

So, go look. Act like a draggin’ droppin’ fool. Get your mind blown, too!

T’nk System – Giraffe Nebulae

A looooong time ago, I networked a set of planets which I then terraformed…sorta…into a vast…really vast…system of service planets.

These planets are now incredibly ancient, since I had learned not only how to use my warp bubble to traverse universes, but to travel time.

These planets were located throughout a massive group of star nursery nebulae, and furnished herculean services for widely scattered planets, colonies, settlements, space stations and starships.

The nebulae swarmed with evolving star-like objects, infinite structures of gas, plasma, dark matter, etc. They seethed with energy in all its forms.

As a group they had a striking resemblance in my mindseye to…a giraffe. Thus I dubbed them…yes, The Giraffe Nebulae.

On 22 April 2010, I acquired information that pointed toward another bizarre “success” for Tink, the Oracle of the MultiUniversal Guild of Doofi…
a photo found on the Hubble Telescope site. “Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery”.

It is spectacular.

Source: Hubblesite.org

The larger the image…the more spectacular it gets. For maximum stun factor follow this link and pick a size: Release Images

Just be sitting down, or where you can drink in the details with the wondrous, imagination-driven eyes of a child, especially if you choose the “Highest Quality” download option.

Once you’ve really looked at the thing, contemplate my speculation:

Do you suppose Hubble has come across Tink’s Giraffe Nebulae?

Time to Dig Up an Old Rant…Again?

In light of general behaviors …
that are destructive to a functional society…
that are still expanding…
that are amplifying as each generation…
is further removed…
from beneficent practices…
and honorable behaviors…

I get a gut feeling…
that an old rant on my disheveled old website…
is due for a redux here.

Actually though…
I would rather it be pointed out…
not reproduced here.

That would be a gigantic overhaul…
and I would be even less bubble-centered…
than I have managed to be now.

It’s called “Erosion of Honor”…
and also offers refresher definitions…
for ummm, mission-creeped words.

EROSION OF HONOR orignially posted in 1996…
still good.