Thank you all for reading.

The newest story was great fun to write.

It started, as many stories do, from a word or phrase that jumped to mind, borrowed traits and aspects of characters and places inhabiting real life, and came to possess a reality of its own — different, but, in a strange way, not far removed from the everyday.

In other words, it is a story. It is not real life. Though, that, perhaps, is not completely sure.

Certainty is a strange concept.

Let’s explore it.

Perhaps, the greatest “certainty” quote of all times is that of the scientist-politician who liked to fly kites and sign declarations. In his private correspondence, Benjamin Franklin states: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Now, that is a mouthful. In life, it was Benjamin’s recorded observation that there are two things you are sure to lose: your life and your money. If that is so, and the experience of almost all who have lived would seem to attest so, perhaps both should be enjoyed to their fullest and not kept too close to the vest. Still, doubt can be a very healthy human quality. Should we jump too quickly to a conclusion?

Certainly not, Francis Bacon would say. Take your time. Shouldn’t a cautious individual consider all the possibilities – at least at first, when full youth and vigor? Or, as the 1^st Viscount framed his comment to that question and Mr. Franklin’s surmise: “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” Doubt can be said to be the fundamental underpinning of the scientific method, and the one human characteristic that has ensured the advance of modern thought and technology. Doubt everything, begin with crinkled eyebrows and advance with pointed finger to deeper thoughts. Death and taxes may not be so assured as stated. It may depend. Perhaps another view is warranted.

Could certainty be a hobgoblin of the male mind? Could the focused search for the definite be a directed distraction of certain one-sided hormonal prejudices not shared by all the species? Can an intuitive knowing be of equal or better stature? In the fixation on mission, have we become lost in the jungle of manly myth? The great storyteller Rudyard Kipling would seem to think there may be another path to certainty. To quote, “A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.” Wow. Death and taxes may come and go, but a woman’s guess is the way to go. I knew that, and if I didn’t, I should have. That’s for certain.

There you have it, three quotes on certainty — to paraphrase and in conclusion: 1) Death and taxes are certain; 2) Begin with doubts, then end with certainties (maybe death and taxes aren’t so certain); and 3) When in doubt, ask a girl (quit worrying so much and ask her out for sodas and a talk – no telling what you’ll learn).

And that, I think, is how stories are born.

Have no doubt about it.

Grandpa Jim

“On the Way” is the new Flash Fiction story, and it is posted on the Homepage.

It is a bit earlier in Auckland than anticipated, but I’m on my way to an engagement, and this may be my last opportunity — until later.

We hope you enjoy the story. It was a surprise to the nephew at the wedding.

Jim

When the new story is posted (I can’t wait) this Thursday at 11:00 AM Dallas, Texas, time, it will be 6:00 AM Friday in Auckland, New Zealand.

It will be the morning of the next day in Auckland.

“How can that be?” you ask. “As I travel west from Dallas,” you say, “on my super-fast rocket plane, I loose an hour for every time zone I pass. If the times zones are blinking by faster than a zone a second, shouldn’t I be going backwards in time? I know 11:00 AM, right now, is 9:00 AM in Lost Angeles. Right?”

Well, right, it is earlier there . . . but, you’re going farther and faster, at almost Internet speeds.

“OK,” you say. “But what difference does that make?”

Well, between Dallas and Auckland, there are many many time zones.

If you arrive in Auckland on your rocket sled in only seconds, it would seem you should effectively arrive many hours earlier. For example, and assuming nineteen (19) time zones between the two cities, if you launched out of Dallas at 11:00 AM on a Thursday, you might think you would arrive in Auckland at 4 PM on Wednesday, the day before you left. You would have traveled backward in time.

Like the 1993 movie “Ground Hog’s Day,” you, like Phil Connors (played by Bill Murray), would have to live the day over again. If you kept flying at that incredible speed, around and around the globe, when you eventually landed in New Zealand, it could be weeks or months before you left Dallas. Then, you, like the long-suffering, eventually resigned and finally rehabilitated Phil Connors, would be very, very confused and hoping for a change, any change — a new day.

That is why the International Date Line was invented: to straighten the days out, to prevent you from getting too far behind yourself, to help you reach a new day.

The International Date Line is an imaginary line out there, somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, between Dallas and Auckland. Traveling west from Dallas, when you cross that line, you are required, by the conventions of man and the agreements of the global societies, to add 24 hours to your clock and advance to the next day. On your lighting-fast ship, you are forced, by conformity and good manners, to add a day, even though you left Dallas seconds before.

So, you see, because of the International Date Line, you can’t get lost on an endless clock twirling backwards.

For you, there will always be a tomorrow.

I can see the smile on Bill Murray’s face.

Thank you, the inventors of and compliers with the International Date Line.

All of which is a long way of saying that when the brand new and never-been-seen-before story (and, it is not an Uncle Joe story) is published on this web site at 11:00 AM Thursday, which it is the firm intent to do, the story will arrive, almost instantaneously, by traveling on the Internet Flyer, in Auckland the next day, Friday, at 6:00 AM. It will not move backward in time and be lost. It will move forward in time and be tossed on the front porch for a quick read before the Friday morning rush hour in New Zealand.

If that doesn’t make you wonder a time or two, stop back here on Thursday or Friday, your time, and have a new read and new wonder of your own.

The story is on the way.

Almost.

Grandpa Jim

We are in a deep freeze.

The temperature outside in Dallas, Texas, is 34 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius). My handheld says, with the north wind a’blowing, it feels like 24 F (-4 C). My face almost froze on my walk earlier today.

I know I shouldn’t complain.

It is much colder up north. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, where I was born (the coldest spot in Iowa), the temperature is 25 F (-4 C), and it feels like 12 F (-11 C). In Burnsville, Minnesota, where my sister and her family are inside shivering under a mound of  blankets, even with the sun shining, the outside is only 22 F (-6 C), and it feels like 10 F (-12 C), and, to add insult to injury, its been snowing.

Ok, ok, that’s the north.

This is the south. This is Texas, not Iowa or Minnesota. South of the Red River, things are supposed to be warmer. It’s not halfway through November, and the inflatable Thanksgiving turkey on my next-door neighbor’s front lawn is flatter than a pancake with frostbite. Squirrels are in hiding beneath their hoarded nuts (the little monsters – those are our pecans), and the birds have left for the Caribbean to sun on beaches and sip from fancy bird baths floating with little colored umbrellas.

Here, on the street, no one moves. It looks like outer space.

Comet 67 P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is in outer space. Presently, it is about 316 million miles from Earth, give or take a million or so miles. I know, because we just landed on it. More precisely, the European Space Agency has placed a washing machine-sized landing craft named Philae on the surface of the comet.

I am not making this up. It was in the paper this morning. It’s all over the Internet.

This has never happened before. It has taken ten years and $1.75 billion for the Rosetta orbiter spacecraft to get close enough to launch the Philae lander onto the comet’s surface. And, it worked. Well, mission control is not sure how firmly attached Philae is to the ground, but she’s there. She’s arrived.

The ground is a 2.5-mile-wide ball of rock, ice and dust that looks like a cracked and beaten shooter from an ancient game of marbles in the sky, a leftover from when the solar system was young and forming, a shot that went wild, beyond the ring, and is now traveling at 41,000 miles per hour, searching for the other players. There may be something on that comet to help us understand how those first games went and how our planet came into its own, which is what Philae and Rosetta are hoping to measure and send back to the scientists at home.

You know, it’s really not that much colder there than here.

Data from Rosetta says the average surface temperature down on the comet, where Philae landed, is about -70 degrees Celsius (-94 degrees Fahrenheit). That seems warm for outer space. I mean the coldest recorded day in Antarctica was -89.2 C (-128.56 F). So, the surface of the Earth has been colder than the comet. Yes, it is cold there. But, for a marble in space with no fast-food restaurants or people to keep warm, is it really that cold? And, that marble is headed for the sun, so it will get warmer.

Wait. . . .

That could be an issue for Philae, who could be damaged by the hotter temperatures.

I worry for little Philae. She cared enough for us to travel all that way to get a local weather report and retrieve some lost data from the first solar games. You know, I think “Philae” means “caring one.” Well, there, we need to think more about her and less about us. She needs to stay cold and safe from the sun.

Wait!

What am I saying? I’m freezing. I’m in favor of warm. I want more sun. What’s going on here? Why am I concerned about a small robot WALL-E lost in space? Why am I becoming agitated about an extraterrestrial ET who hasn’t really called home for ten years or more?

Why don’t I even notice the temperature outside right here, right now?

You know, I don’t. I don’t even feel the cold anymore.

That’s it, all I needed was a new adventure.

Something to distract my thoughts.

Someone to help me feel —

Warm, right here at

Home.

Grandpa Jim

For 3,800 years, the tallest structure in the world was a tomb.

“Let’s write our names behind the wall here, with today’s date,” one worker said to the other.

“If Pharaoh Khufu finds out, we’ll be buried here before he will,” the other worker cautioned.

“Come on. Are you a scaredy cat?”

Well, cats were sacred to the ancient Egyptians. So, this was equivalent to jumping to the “Triple-Dog-Dare-You” from the movie “The Christmas Story.” (By the way, that movie is one of a few where the written words in the original story — in the case, Jean Shepherd wrote the book — are pretty much the same words spoken by the actors in the movie.)

Now, what could that worker do with that dare?

“Ok,” he answered. “But write farther back – there where it’s really dark and no one will ever find it.”

But, someone did, thousands of years later, and from the graffiti left by those workers, the Egyptologists determined the Great Pyramid of Khufu, the oldest and largest of the three pyramids on the Giza Necropolis in Eqypt, was finished around the year 2560 BC.

When completed, the Great Pyramid was 280 Egyptian cubits tall, which by today’s measures would be 146.5 meters or 480.6 feet (let’s round it to 481 feet), one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the tallest structure in the world.

For 3,800 years, Pharaoh Khufu rested relatively peacefully, except for the intrusion of an occasional tomb robber or absent-minded archaeologist. The Pharaoh didn’t really mind the scribbling behind the wall, and it was nice to be #1 for so long.

Then, the churches started arguing.

“My spire is 149 meters (489 feet), the tallest of all,” said Old St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England, around 1250 AD. “Nah, nah, nah.”

“Nah, nah, nah to yourself,” said Lincoln Cathedral in London. “Your spire got blasted by lighting. My spire, at 159.7 meters (524 feet), completed in 1300 AD, is the tallest of the tall.”

“No more for you, Mr. Lincoln Cathedral,” chided St. Mary’s Church in Stralsund, Germany. “Your spire collapsed in 1549. Now, I’m the highest of the high at 151 meters (495 feet).”

And so it went, back and forth, up and down, with spires collapsing, buildings burning and lightings leveling, until in 1901, the Ulm Minister in Ulm, Germany, was the last tall church standing, at 161.53 meters (530 feet).

Churches had ruled the roost from about 1250 to 1901 AD, around 850 years. And, at the finish of that rather long period of building and bickering, the height of the tallest building in the world had only increased about 50 feet. A good size flagpole could make Pharaoh’s tomb taller.

Let’s put that in perspective.

In some 4,650 years, the tallest building in the world was still only about 500 feet high.

Something needed to be done.

It was time for a great jump forward and upward.

Business and commerce huddled, clapped hands and responded to the challenge.

Leaping high into the sky, leaving ancient tombs and soaring churches below, the skyscraper was born.

To start, in 1901, the Philadelphia City Hall, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, the town that brought us the Declaration of Independence and the Crack in the Liberty Bell, declared its rights to height and rang on high at 167 meters (548 feet), the tallest structure of any kind, yet, but still not much over 500 feet, the ancestral limit of high achievement.

But, the race to reach had begun.

In rapid succession, the skyscrapers kept growing. From 1901 to 2010, just 109 years, the tallest building in the world grew from the Philadelphia City Hall at 167 meters (548 feet) to the Burg Khalifa megatall skyscraper in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, at 829.8 meters (2,722 feet), currently the tallest building in the world.

Count ’em, folks.

Over some 4,650 years, we grew about 50 feet (15 meters), from tomb top to church spire. For that period, about 5,000 years, our buildings grew at an average of 0.01 feet per year. That’s about an inch every 8 years, and that is very, very slow.

In the last 109 years, we grew 2,174 feet (663 meters), and the climb has just begun. This means that, for the past 100 years or so, our buildings have grown at about 20 feet per year. That’s 2,000 times faster than the previous 5,000 years, and that is — comparatively — very, very fast.

If you ever doubt that the pace of our global society is on a rapid increase, just look up at the building next door.

We are truly reaching to scrape the sky.

For that, there is no end in sight.

Hold tight & enjoy the ride.

Grandpa Jim