Four Absolutes

It had been said that there were only three absolutes in life: death, taxes, and bad liquor.
I'm sure Benjamin Franklin would have said that too – the likelihood he had not had his share (heck, more than his share) of bad liquor is amazingly low – without the benefit of Timothy Zahn's latest Star Wars novel Scoundrels (ISBN 9780345511508). Read this a few weeks ago and have wanted to work this into a blog but haven't been able to for one reason or another; essentially this story set shortly after Star Wars in which the Death Star was blown up picks up with Han Solo and Chewbacca who lost their reward for rescuing Princess Leia so they have to take on another job. But they need help going head to toe with the galaxy's biggest criminal syndicate, so they get it in this story that to me, unlike most Star Wars stories, is Iliad rather than Odyssey. (That's a Homer analogy, for in the Iliad all the action is in one general area while the Odyssey moves from place to place.) And stories where the characters don't travel, in my opinion, are the Star Wars franchise's big weakness.


But as Lando strolled across the Marblewood grounds, he decided he could add a fourth to the list.

One could do worse than consider Star Trek: Voyager a science fiction retelling of the Odyssey. In both a ship goes/went off to war, the former to the Badlands and the latter to Troy. The return voyage home is considerably longer, ten years for Odysseus and seven years for Voyager. There's many adventures and encounters along the way, lives are lost … I can go on, but there IS a point to what I'm writing today and I want to be up for another blog award soon, said with tongue in cheek. Today it is finally sunny out – we have not had sun since last Saturday when it was all rainy and couldn't go out to play in an early summer. And speaking of summer, for our schoolchildren the last day of school is tomorrow! Today Martha took the morning off from work and was one of the chaperones for Longfellow's kindergarten trip to our local zoo. Got the coolest photo of Jeffrey feeding a … llama, I think it was. Then when he got back to school, Grandma Sharon (Martha's mom) had lunch with him.


When you traveled with a Wookiee, people would move out of your way.

NO, I didn't forget our firstborn Sarah! Though sometimes you will get out of her way, particularly if she keeps up with her aspiring career – according to several classmates and myself as of this Saturday, she's quite skilled at pulling teeth! Heck with the painkiller, she just goes right in, but to tell you MY story, Saturday morning she gave me a Twizzler and apparently I bit down on it just right that I heard a distinct crack in the upper right of my mouth, where several months ago I'd chipped my tooth on a piece of ham at breakfast with a teeny tiny rock inside it (don't ask me how) and we went to the bathroom, Sarah got some tissue, and pulled out the rest of the tooth about the size of a popcorn kernel. It would be an interesting summer job for one of our kids to have; let them earn their keep! And it didn't really hurt (her pulling what was left of the tooth) nor bleed much, though I noticed it was coffee-brown enough that I probably need to take better care of my teeth. Or cut back on the coffee.

Not the coffee! David