Robert A. Black, Mathematical Storyteller

My favorite C.S. Lewis book is The Great Divorce , in which a group of people in Hell get an opportunity to visit Heaven. In the end, all but one of them choose to go back. Each one has something they need to let go of in order to enter heaven - some kind of pride or greed or hatred - and they can't bring themselves to do it. More recently, in this week's episode of the anime series Kino's Journey , Kino's fellow traveler Shizu boards a city-sized ship, where the population lives under the oppressive rule of the Tower Clan. Seeing that the ship is breaking down and falling apart, he and Kino overthrow the Tower Clan and bring the people to the safety of dry land - only to discover that they prefer the ship and don't believe his story that it's going to sink. I halfway expected the people to start shouting "Fake news! Fake news!" Just because people's lives are bad, that doesn't mean they'll automatically leap at the chance fo

I've been doing my best to avoid watching news since last November. I'm mostly successful, but that darn twosome of Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell are hard to resist. But even that is too much. Just like their counterparts at FOX News, they keep their ratings up by appealing to the revulsion people feel for the other side and the hope that their side is on the verge of turning the tables. The fact that they use real news stories to do it instead of making stuff up doesn't change the overall approach. That's just the business model. But this week, any faint hopes I had that the Trump Russia story would have a meaningful effect pretty much evaporated. Republicans have found a way to pin the "real Russia scandal" on Hillary Clinton, and that's all they'll need to shut down the Congressional investigations, and perhaps the Special Counsel's office as well. Robert Mueller may yet be able to get some people prosecuted on state charges

"The world is not beautiful. Therefore, it is." So says the gender-nonconforming title character of Kino's Journey , by far the most challenging anime show of the year. "The world is not beautiful: And that, in a way, lends it a sort of beauty." Kino shows us that world by traveling through it on Hermes, a talking "motorrad" (German for "motorcyle" - there's no other German in the story, so I have no idea why everyone calls Hermes that). It's mostly a lush, green, peaceful-looking place, but it's dotted by mostly walled city-states whose citizens can do the most awful things. Kino's visits last three days and two nights, all the time needed, supposedly, to find out the country's character. (And now I'll do the obligatory aside about pronoun usage. Kino was born a girl named Sakura - more on that in a moment - but now presents as male and is often taken to be male. On the anime discussion board I frequent,

My sixth grade teacher liked to have fun. We did improvised comedy skits, played math games and had a camp-out in the Headmaster's back yard. It was a fairly snowy winter, and on several days he took the class out to go sledding on some of the campus's hills. The whole class, except for me. I don't remember exactly why I didn't want to go at first, but I do remember why I continued staying in as the days went on. I was having too much fun reading. In particular, I'd started reading ahead in our history textbook, because I was fascinated by the story it was telling. One part I remember especially was when Cortez met the Aztecs at just the right time for them to think he was their god, Quetzalcoatl. I remember thinking how great a plot twist that would have made if the story had been fiction. I've always loved history, be it world history, family history, sports history or whatever. I've always loved digging through libraries and resource documents

You don't have to watch anime for very long to notice some things about Japanese culture that are very different from the West. It's one of the things that draws me to it, actually, and one major difference I find fascinating is the completely different spiritual world. Shinto is an "animist" religion, where everything has a kami , a "god" or spirit, roughly equivalent - by my reckoning - to a patron saint. But what struck me as particularly different from what I'm used to is the notion, presented in more than one show, that the kami depend on having believers. Ones with many believers or worshippers are big and powerful. Ones with few are small and weak, and even in danger of disappearing. Thus the kami are inclined to grant their believers' wishes, so as to keep them believing. Now, I know better than to judge an entire religion based on a few anime episodes. I'm sure they've misrepresented some things (you should see how Christi

Apologies for stating the obvious, but October has gotten off to a pretty lousy start. I feel like I should write something, but I also feel like there's nothing for me to write. Donald Trump is being a jerk to another woman and person of color who dared to criticize him. Another shooting rampage has left incomprehensible numbers of people dead and injured. We've done these things before. What new things could there possibly be to write about them? In the Quality Manager's world, we learn that in order to get a problem really and truly fixed, you've got to dig down until you find the root causes. If all you do is correct the immediate issue, the same problem is just going to happen again. But applying that principle to the world at large is tricky, especially when people are dying. Yes, we need to get as much aid to Puerto Rico as we can, but unless we dig down and address the white supremacy in our culture, the next time a largely nonwhite segment of our pop