scottmerrickdotnet

Nature Writing Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Thu, 26 Feb 2026 17:05:00 +0000

Hey, all,

I have been reading a lovely tome every morning for several months. I sometimes stop at one of its brief entries, and I sometimes read two or three. I found it quite randomly, perusing the shelves at a local treasure--the Rhino Booksellers about a mile and a quarter from our home in The Nations, here in Nashville. Rhino's does have some social media identities, and a (single page) website, but seriously, the only way to "get" Rhino is to visit it. Make sure you have plenty of time.

I had been looking for anything by Tristen Gooley, having read and thoroughly enjoyed his Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs. That accounts for my being so investigative of the nature section; but though I didn't find any Gooley, my explorations proved to my advantage when I discovered this hardcover edition of The Oxford Book of Nature Writing. It had been marked down from 11 to 10 dollars, the 11 on its liner page lined through with pencil and the 10 entered (in the same handwriting) in pencil beneath it. Whoopee!

So I opened the book and read its brief introduction by editor Richard Maybey, a celebrated nature writer in his own right, and scanned the first few pages. They include several paragraphs from Aesop, and nearly two pages from Aristotle, 344BC. I flipped through and saw brief writings by folks like Darwin, Emerson, Thoreau, GM Hopkins, along with many from authors unknown to me. The final writing is from Primo Levi in 1985. The book is arranged in chapters, each roughly identifying with one of seven historical periods chronologically.

But I digress. Imagine that.

Anyway, when I read these passages, I sometimes find myself reading aloud, because the language, oh, the language. The varied voices, some in translation, come alive in the reading, so so vividly and with such detail. I recorded a few of them to see if they sound as delicious as they read, and I think one could make that argument. Here's a just under 6 minute reading of one of them, credits at the end. I'm slowly creating a collection of them, and though they may sound better read by a digital voice in Speechify or another speech to text app, they are so much fun to read aloud that I'm going to share one here. I highly recommend this little book!

Nature Writing Reading 5

The Oxford Book of Nature Writing

The (first) ice storm of 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:59:00 +0000

...and I hope it's the last.

Wow, it was, and remains an impressive, visually stunning evidence of Nature's anger. I know, that's anthropomorphism at its worst, but there ya go.

Gonna post my images so far here, if for no other reason than that I haven't blogged in a minute.

It was, and remains, a challenge for many fellow humans. In the great scheme of things, with my dearest human recuperating from major (~5 hours long) intestinal repair surgery January 8, the storm hit us 6 days ago with a couple inches of snow, which in Nashville is plenty 'nuff to cripple the city for a bit, followed by a major ice storm with "freezing rain" and an ice build-up that was the 2 punch in the old 1-2 knockout. Power was lost to hundreds of thousands just in our Metro area, and somehow we were spared that, here in our little one decade old tall and skinny home in The Nations, just west of downtown and filling up over the past decade with people and more overpriced homes. Not that I'm complaining--you know, equity.

Yes, I'm the king of the run-on sentence. Hello.

Early on, we did our little community bit by my venturing out into the icy streets to bring a young friend back to power and warmth, along with her spunky, a little freaked-out kitty, Luigi. Lee Ann was about in shape to go back to work anyway, starting part-time and now working up to almost full, though her business, Tinwings, took the income hit with virtually every other small business, cancelling the week's pickup orders and deliveries and limiting hours for walk-in market customers. She's back at work now, and our extended family member, an employee of that food gem as well as a dear friend, is joining her to cook for the market so people who can get out can choose delicious, made from scratch, original food, cooked with love and the highest possible standards of cuisine.

I'm back painting, playing some mandolin, walking the dog, keeping house, playing Legacy of Thieves, and, well, blogging. I have had some fun sailing my 22 foot Loonetta boat in Second Life, and I'm continuing to make sure the neighborhood has access to information from the Card Campaign for Democracy, papering the occasional utility pole with the current or favorite card of my printing, and leaving them in public spaces for citizens. This is a small thing, but it's better than an old man doing nothing. Consider it for your own extra hobby. You too can be a pamphleteer--if it's good enough for Thomas Paine...

I will be offline Friday to support the General Strike in support of Milwaukee Americans and against the vicious despotism of the Trump Clown Circus. Yes, it's gotten deadly. His masked thugs are executing people in the streets, and if you don't think it will come to your town eventually if unchecked, you are literally dead wrong.

Click to view my developing photo and video album:

Lots of Work on scottmerrick.me

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 13:08:00 +0000

Hi, It's 2026 and I gave up on Wix's decision to eliminate pop-up tool-tips on images, a former accessibility feature they eliminated without prior notice, as far as a quick search yields somewhere this past Fall. I just stumbled upon it one day, while innocently adding a new painting to my https://scottmerrickart.wixsite.com/myart website. WTF?

Wix is an Israeli site offering free or low-cost html5 tools for website creation, and no, I don't care that it is sometimes considered "unprofessional" to utilize it for its purpose. I, without shame, do not consider my passion for making art "professional." The tool-tip feature was reportedly eliminated when the EU dropped a previously required html design requirement. There ya go.

I originally designed the site over a year ago to share my graphic art, mostly acrylic paintings, with others, mainly because my artwork is not a "professional" endeavor. It's a pursuit of interpreting the mundane in light of its sublimity.

That said, I spent the better part of a day last week labeling all of my images on the "Paintings" page of my site with text boxes indicating title and information. I think it works, and maybe even better than using that previously auto-displayed, upon mouse float, information pop-up. I do miss the info displaying on the larger image that pops up when an image on the page is clicked, but, well, beggars can't, you know.

So there. That's what I have today. And I think it serves my purpose for it.

All that said, I am considering an effort to clear paintings that currently live in a rack out of my home studio at Chez Merrique in The Nations neighborhood of Nashville by promoting a "sweepstakes" that will get some paintings into homes and businesses. You can see some of them at my wife's superstar catering business, Tinwings, in our neighborhood, but if you visit the art site by clicking the link up top or by simply typing "scottmerrick.me" in your web browser, and you identify a painting you like that is noted as "available" in the painting's description, use the same site's "Contact" feature to let me know if you want to make an offer or just come pick it up gratis. I'm not planning to ship at this time to the free folks, but otherwise I will either get it to you, if local, or you can drop by and it'll be on our front porch. That clear out effort has not yet begun and readers of me bloggy can get a jump on the throngs that will participate. Heh.

Just sayin'.

Seeeeee ya... Keep your head down and hold on to your hope. I still have a little faith we can avoid our once truly great nation's complete descent into authoritarianism. See Cards for Democracy Project's site for how you can do a little to help without placing yourself in harms way, at least for now.

Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 14:14:00 +0000

Happy Boxing Day. Your 2025 present is the video (embedded here or watch on YouTube), recommended by John Prine in direct quotation by Tom Piazza in his book, Living in the Present with John Prine. I highly recommend the read and hope you will consider purchasing it at your local intelligent book store or online as you will. You are welcome.

Oh! Virtual Learning! The Book!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Thu, 18 Dec 2025 16:29:00 +0000

Hello, and may this day find you well and safe, two iffy constructs in these dark days for American government and public safety. But that's neither here nor there (although it may feel like everywhere).

I stumbled across this in my Dropbox whilst looking for an ancient song I had written in the mid 1970s. It is from Sharebook, a feature that appears no longer to be available at blogspot.com for bloggers to archive their work, and it begins with a post from May 7, 2007 and ends with one at February 21, 2012. The blog went on for a few posts, and featured a revival announcement in August, 2023. That last is, though, the last. The revival never was followed up upon, and will not likely be.

Still, this little online book, spreading across some 277 pages of .pdf file, is fun to explore, at least for me. Many of its links got lost in the process of publication and a cursory click-thru demonstrates that many of the links that survived take one to a polite "page not found" message.

During Oh! Second Life!'s publication online, I was teaching young kids about technologyin independent then public schools whilst helping my wife to raise our own two kids, and Second Life for education was my primary creative side hustle. My involvement with virtual worlds for learning spread and grew over decades, until upon my May, 2022 retirement I audibly brushed together my hands and for reasons I can understand better than I can explain, I turned my back on the teaching world. I will herein say that I was so done with the reshaping of schools into businesses, and the data-driven administration of them (just how accurate was that data, beginning with standardized testing results?), that I was, like, outta there, and for good--for my own, if for no one else's.

https://bit.ly/scottsecondlife will get you there.

So. There you are. Pretty much the sum total of my educational experience over 5 years of the nearly two decades of what people called Leadership in that field. I made friends, and many of those were from other geolocations--Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Japan. Once we loosely organized, we were always just on the "about to be" side of the Bell Curve of Adoption. It may be that those still involved will always be, and will pass, in turn, their own fascination and dedication to its newbies, who will one day do the same. It may be that the experiences within virtual worlds are simply so unfathomable to the unitiated that they will never be of real use to the powers that shape "the education system." Who knows?

What I know is that these engaging fascinations, with their promising and unfulfilled possibilities, are archived palpably in the blog, which is still available on Google's blogger.com platform (possibly useful if one wants to pursue a lost link) and shared here for as long as my Dropbox footprint evades the inevitable and eradicating winds of time.

Stay well. Stay safe.

Be Good and Have Fun.

Scottmerrickdotme Gallery in Second Life

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Sat, 13 Dec 2025 12:26:00 +0000

Well, it's there, and done, and regularly updated as new art arrives into the tumultuous
"real world". I'm going to post here and update soon with a video tour, but I wanted to get it out there for anyone who may be interested in seeing it "in person" in Second Life.

Seasoned Second Lifers may need no introduction, but maybe others can use some media here. I'll pursue and add as I can. Click to visit:

Scottmerrickdotme Gallery in Second Life:

iGtab Start Page and more

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 21:32:00 +0000

Hey, all.

All five of you. All you beautiful readers. All of you who care.

Yes, I'm doing fine.

Autum is engaged in becoming real this year, dancing in and out from summer to winter and stumbling into itself with a rye vengeance, then slipping into one or another again. I'm painting, as evidenced in my work displays at scottmerrickdotme and in my new Second Life gallery at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Kerlingarfjoll/178/118/48.

I'm walking my beautiful Great Pyr mix, Lemon, and cheerfully taking her pictures on my iPhone 13, an endeavor which I once would have characterized as "wasting a lot of film," but which now seems just another minor obsession of an old man. There is a sizeable gallery of such pictures at my Google Photos storage site. Here's one I took yesterday morning:

so you can see why.

Mainly I popped into Blogger today to share the "Notes" section of my iGoogle start page. I found this feature of Google when I retired, yielding subscription to an online start page service I had used for teaching for years whose name not unnaturally (for today) escapes me. I'll paste it in here when it does re-enter my dusty old memory bank.

Anyway, as you'll see if you investigate its link above, "Gtab" has one of the various optional sections called "Notes." I really like this and it's turned into a little staging ground for smippets from my readings and living. I looke at it as a place to retain and celebrate for oneself (for oneself is precisely why one might have such a page--look into it for your own "oneself".) It's totally revisable, inside a simple text box iframe. Here're my current Notes:

"Twain rarely found any experience, be it gay or gruesome, that did not make him laugh." --Mason Curry, Daily Rituals, How Artists Work
"Time is our perception of change. Each individual perceives change uniquely. Therefore, there is no common time, no time that is "the" time. Or is there?"-- moi
"Rather than being a mysterious limitation, uncertainty appears to be the essential feature that makes everything else possible, if indeed energy and uncertainty are inseparable." --Rocky Alvey

“Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past—the most recent and the most distant—by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.”― Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time
"Sunny day today. And I'm inside myself again. My body just walking or standing on top of its shadow and I'm way up in my head, crouched panting in some far corner crying God please let me be. Please let. Me be. And from my corner I can gaze out through two gaping holes and then through two round windows paned with dusty glass. And finally over that hill of flesh in the lower center of my view I watch the images play.
Once had a dog, when I was six,
I taught her how to fetch me sticks.
I loved that dog, she read my mind,
since she once died I ain't
stopped
crying.
That I am at times unable to hold the images to forms is not really worth mentioning. I mention it anyway. So that we might mutally come to better grips with the situation. Which is, he said with quiet desperation. I do not exist after you close this magazine and cease to think about me." -- Scott Merrick, Druid, an Humanities Magazine, Fall, 1970

"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere." -- Leonard Cohen

"Relentless maximization is the strategy of a cancerous tumor, not of health."--Kelly Clancy, Playing with Reality, epilogue (in the context of gamification and game theory as applied to economics)

From Mary Jane Harvill: Wise and important words from sociologist Jennifer Walter about what is happening in this country right now and what to do about it:

"As a sociologist, I need to tell you: Your overwhelm is the goal. The flood of 200+ executive orders in Trump's first days exemplifies Naomi Klein's "shock doctrine"—using chaos and crisis to push through radical changes while people are too disoriented to effectively resist. This isn't just politics as usual; it's a strategic exploitation of cognitive limits.

Media theorist McLuhan predicted this: When humans face information overload, they become passive and disengaged. The rapid-fire executive orders create a cognitive bottleneck, making it nearly impossible for citizens and media to thoroughly analyze any single policy.

Agenda-setting theory explains the strategy: When multiple major policies compete for attention simultaneously, it fragments public discourse. Traditional media can't keep up with the pace, leading to superficial coverage.
The result? Weakened democratic oversight and reduced public engagement."
What now?
1. Set boundaries: Pick 2-3 key issues you deeply care about and focus your attention there. You can't track everything - that's by design. Impact comes from sustained focus, not scattered awareness.
2. Use aggregators and experts. Find trusted analysts who do the heavy lifting of synthesis. Look for those explaining patterns, not just events.
3. Remember: Feeling overwhelmed is the point. When you recognize this, you regain some power. Take breaks. Process. This is a marathon.
4. Practice going slow: Wait 48hrs before reacting to new policies. The urgent clouds the important. Initial reporting often misses context.
5. Build community. Share the cognitive load. Different people track different issues. Network intelligence beats individual overload.
Remember: They want you scattered. Your focus is resistance."

You, my friend, are welcome. Some fun now.

Camping at Lock A, Cheatham Dam, This Past Week

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Sat, 27 Sep 2025 12:53:00 +0000

I have a little photo album of my camping trip to Cheatham Dam Lock A Campground last Monday through Thursday. Well, to clarify...

I had reserved Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights at my bestest favorite campsite up at "Cheatham Lake," really just a wide spot in the mighty Cumberland River. From HISTORIC CHEATHAM COUNTY TOUR SITES:

ASSEMBLED AND WRITTEN BY
                     J. M. ALLEN
                        Corresponding Secretary CCHGA
                     FOR THE CHEATHAM COUNTY HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL ASSOCIATION

LOCK "A" & FOX'S BLUFF
CCHGA 3
    Located at the end of Cheatham Dam Road off Highway 12 North in Cheatham County. The Lock was completed and placed in operation November 26, 1904 at a cost of $490, 010 .77. It was 52 feet wide and 280 feet long. lt was erected to control the waters of Harpeth Shoals, a fivemile stretch of the Cumberland River between Ashland City and Clarksvillle which interrupted more steamboat business than all other natural impediments along the navigable course of the river.
    On November 19, 1906 Captain W. T. Hunter became the first Captain on the Cumberland todeliberately "Jump" a Dam with a Steamboat. He accomplished this feat at Lock "A" on the "H. W. Buttorff", while the water was at high level.
    The peak of the cliff overlooking Lock "A" is Fox's Bluff with one of the most scenic and picturesque views of the Cumberland Valley anywhere in the area. It used to be one of the local points of interest for visitors to the area but is now inaccessible due to the area being part of the Camp Grounds at the Cheatham Dam Recreation Area ..
NOTE: SEE: "Steamboating on the Cumberland" by Byrd Douglas

The whole story of the building of the site and the Army Corps of Engineers campsite there is an engaging one, and I recommend more research, and a visit if you are anywhere in striking distance. One of my favorite features is the grove of pecan trees that lines the river, lacing through the campsites and yielding delicious nuts every year, that is if you can time your harvest to beat the squirrels to them.

Anyway, long story short, I got to the campsite in a light drizzle and set up my tent and other gear, spent one rainy night and awoke into a chilly but lovely day riverside. I wanted to hike on Tuesday but the Cumberland River Memorial trail is closed, small bridges and who knows what else having been eradicated by recent heavy rains. So I spent Tuesday chilling in my chair and hammock, for which I had just purchased a nice, heavy but portable stand, and fishing. Reading and playing mandolin. It was a very lovely relaxing day. Toward the end of the day I checked my Ventusky weather app and was convinced that it was going to start raining at dark and essentially not stop, with at times downpours, for the next three days. I made the difficult decision to pack it up.

I did that, then I added all my remaining local firewood to the campfire and sat in my camp chair playing mandolin and enjoying the fall light on the Cumberland until the drizzle started to increase in intensity, threw my chair into the car, and headed home. I'm glad I did, since Ventusky had done me a solid. I enjoyed the next couple days as my usual ones, relaxing and painting in our lovely home in The Nations neighborhood of my birth city.

Here's the few pics I took. One of them yielded a painting subject, and a piece to paraphrase Philip Levine, a long ago mentor at his teaching residency at Vanderbilt, to celebrate the exquisite in the mundane. That will be at my scottmerrick.me site when it is finished, but the photo is in the album. Look for the stone on the ground with a mossy bowl inhabited by a tiny, perfect, plant. Here, click the photo for the album, silly:

My Americana Fest 2025!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 14:50:00 +0000

It was a blast. I took a few minutes this morning to slap together a single image summary of my travels in my home town this year:

I cannot recommend this experience any higher. This is, I think, my fourth year of spending nearly a week (5 days and nights) exploring known and unknown venues in my hometown of Nashville, TN, and what do you know? I was better at maintaining notes on where I went and who I saw.

A few of the names of solo performers and groups are those I saw only a song or two because of scheduling, or perhaps I was not taken enough by their presence to hang around when there were so many other talents abounding about, but I think I did a pretty good week of turning my C note and a quarter into a big bucket of memories and experiencing live new music to add to my Spotify.

Yeah, I'm still on Spotify. Why? I actually LOVE the algorithm that brings me new music attuned to my listening habits. Which are considerable. I love that my own work with The Last Frontier Band is there (ancient history, but fun), as well as my solo instrumental offering from a decade or more ago. I also like the playlist feature with its access to pretty much anything: One thing I like to do is create lists containing every cover of a song I can find. There's a folder of these at my account, free to check out at will.

Just google any of the names or venues above to learn more, which, friends and neighbors, I did in abundance this past week. It's now Sunday, the day after, and I'm a happy puppy, listening to one of my new found faves, the Aussie artist Falls.

This won't be long, but quick takeaways:

In the new to me category, from Tuesday to Saturday, I was completely taken by:

Sister Sadie
Fancy Hagood
The Carlile Family Band
Lisa LeBlanc
Macon Music Review
Jackson and the Janks
Cat Clyde
John Cragie
Bek Brooks
Vanessa Jade
Jordy Lane
Falls

In my already-known and can't get enough online or off category,

Amanda Shires
Brandi Carlile
Kathy Matea
Suzy Boggus
Sista Strings
JesseWelles

And, almost without exception, everyone I heard and saw. I walked, in totale, maybe 4 miles those 5 days, not of course to mention my daily strolls with Lemon, my canine girlfriend. Here's a pic of her:

Lemon dawg

I had very few regrets. I'm glad I added everything I would have liked to see into my "My Schedule" portion of the AmericanaFest app, so I could pick and choose on the fly. In a festival like this, spread out all over the city (and beyond), one is at any given time missing more than one is seeing, but that's just an embarassment of riches. I'm happy to have had so many great conversations with so many good people in so many venues, some of them new to me. I smile to myself, and will for a good while, when I think back on the musical highs I experienced all week.

I regret missing Amanda Shires (again :) at Musicians' Corner in Centennial Park, which I left early to get to Basement East for Craig Finn. He was good, but Amanda is, well, Amanda; and she slayed at Exit/In on Thursday night. I'm on pins and needles for her new album drop the 26th of this month. I regret leaving The 5Spot Aussie BBQ to hit one of my favorite places, Joelton Hardware, for their two stage venue, their first venture into AF. There weren't many attendees there and though the performers I saw there were good, there is no one on my "newly found" list above from that venture, and everyone I saw at The 5Spot made that list.

I told ya it wouldn't be long. Did you have your own AF2025 experience? Comment here if'n you did.

But before I sign off, I want to mention you can watch some of the best of the best shows archived at the NPR Music Channel on YouTube. I did not make the Americana Day Stage from WMOT at all, partly because I watched a couple performances at YouTube and loved the groups but didn't think I wanted to sit in what looks like a church auditorium (why? it was formerly a church auditorium) in a folding chair all day, row by row filled by fans. I'll watch each and every one online.

I loved the awards show, even though it came across like the stage manager called in sick, with all the dead moments in transitions, and John C. Reilly died multiple deaths onstage as host. I think he's a good actor, but his hosting skills can only improve if he watches the thing, though I don't otherwise know why he'd want to live through it again. I had seen Jesse Wells the night before and he always seems to get a tear or three from me. The awards show, and his eloquent and simple acceptance speech for winning the new "Free Speech in Music" award from the Americana Music Association was no exception. He closed with the stirring comment, "Life's too short not to always say exactly what you think, all the time." You go, Jesse. You go.

Thank you to the Americana Music Association and to the whole AmericanaFest staff and volunteers for making my week, hell, making my year, at least in music!

"The 21" Revised

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Thu, 14 Aug 2025 20:13:00 +0000

Greetings. I have spent a few days worth of review and rewrite on a story I first wrote after a dream in 1986. I published it here a while ago, but this is a pretty substantially revised edit, and I think a good deal better and more finished. I'm putting it up here to share with family and friends, and if you are here, you are in that category. I worked this time with an app called Speechify, one of who's capabilities is reading back anything in a pretty decent version of one's own voice. Listening and following along in the story through multiple playbacks, edit uploads, and re=reads, I was able to correct quite a few jarring errors and omissions and to reword sections in my more mature voice. Well, yes, that's debatable, but see what this does for you, 'k?

Scott Gardner Merrick

6104B New York Avenue

4,450 words

All Rights

@ 1986 by Scott Merrick

The 21

by Scott Gardner Merrick

Karl Ivanovich pressed on.

He trudged through this frigid midnight’s sooty snow toward his tiny room on the city's dingy fringe with his fur-capped head lowered into the freezing gusts, heavy boot over heavy boot, as he was all too used to doing.

The thick wolf ruff of his overcoat collar was turned up to protect against the intrusion of that icy wind. He was thinking about nothing.

The mind of Ivanovich was empty.

There was a reason for this. The mind of Ivanovich focused with enervating regularity twelve to fifteen hours per workday, six or seven days per week, depending on the season, with ninety to ninety-four per cent of its Practically Functional Capacity spent on keeping books for the State.

These percentages had been verified by the Party.

As a result of this tremendously focused effort, maintained as it was for such incredibly long durations of time, periods of mental emptiness were needed. Some of his other comrades simply sat at their workdesks for an hour or two after the figurative whistle had sounded; Karl Ivanovich sometimes took this tack, but he preferred to make his way home deliberately, by foot, by foot, by foot, letting his footfalls lull his mind to rest, inhaling the cold night air regularly and deeply until no thought could penetrate the imaginary tank traps and fortress walls his mind had constructed. His feet knew which way to steer his large frame. The entire trek home was over five kilometers, and it normally took him two and a half hours to accomplish it, give or take a half an hour.

When he arrived, he would no longer be only mentally exhausted, but also physically tired and very, very sleepy. A cup of thick black tea, with perhaps a small lump of crude sugar, would be enough to set him to sleep, until the first hints of the nextday would invariably awaken him; and he would rise, wash sparingly, eat a modest breakfast, and finally catch the public mechanical transit back to his small office.

Tonight, his full brown moustache was familiarly encrusted with ice and particles of snow. The air was so frigid that the hairs inside his nostrils had become brittle with it.

Sometimes, as was the case tonight, a flickering image of a steaming teacup would intrude upon the emptiness of his mind and it would cause him to interrupt his walking reverie with an instant of near-normal consciousness. This was now the case.

He looked up.

He was approaching the corner of Malenkov and Kochetov streets, an intersection his feet knew well. At this time of night there never any traffic, pedestrian or mechanical, and so he once again lowered his head into the wind and pressed on.

WUUMPH!!! He was knocked off balance as he colided with a heavy man who rounded the corner at precisely the same instant as he.

In trying to regain his balance, Ivanovich lost it completely. It was much the fault of the compressed snow at the corner of the sidewalk, which was slick underfoot, and he cursed it loudly as he went down, flailing out for support and catching only a handful of ruff from the collar of the other fellow's overcoat.

The fall took the wind out of him. When he could sit up, he did, and he craned painfully around to witness the tall and broad figure of a man, dressed much the same as he, receding hurriedly off into the heavier darkness. The other man had not even uttered so much as an apology.

Karl Ivanovich picked himself up, muttering under his breath about rudeness and bad manners, and dusted melting wet snow from his coat. He sighed deeply and crossed the street, attempting to regain the regularity of his breathing. Before he could accomplish that, he heard a commotion behind him and started to turn around. The heavy bullet slammed into his right shoulder and he heard the loud report of a large firearm, oddly in that order. He fell again, this time for a long, long time.

*****

Karl Ivanovich awakened in pain.

He made no sound, as his disjointed senses attempted to piece together the puzzle of his whereabouts.

A numb but painful stiffness in his shoulder. Cold—a not unusual sensation. A pungent antiseptic odor. Gray walls, relatively clean ones. And a single blaring fluorescent ceiling light.

They took him from the hospital barracks soon after he exhibited signs of consciousness. Sometime during the move, he again passed out. He awoke on a musty bed in a dank cell. The bars in the windowof the single small steel door made clear his circumstances.

For several days no one spoke to him. A silent jailer came in twice daily with coarse bread and thick gruel, each time taking away the plate and bowl left the previous visit.

Once a doctor came in and changed the dressings on his shoulder. When the flesh had been laid bare, Ivanovich saw the ugly scab which had begun to congeal over the gunshot wound. It appeared to be healing. The doctor's work was carried out in silence, except for the prisoner's single attempt to communicate.”Please, Comrade Doctor, please tell me. Why have I been shot? Why am I here?"

The already wrinkled skin surrounding his large brown eyes wrinking further in perplexity, the physician muttered, "Why, Comrade?"

Karl Ivanovich’s only answer was silence.

The angry wound was treated with a gelatinous substance and bound with clean bandages, then the doctor packed up his beaten black satchel and departed.

Never once had the Comrade Doctor’s eyes met those of Karl Ivanovich.

Karl kept track of passing time by scraping a notch in the mortar between two granite blocks in the wall of his tiny cell at the end of each day. At the end of 15 days they came for him.

Two imposingly gruff guards in the drab uniforms of the State came and fitted his hands into heavy manacles. His feet were clamped into wider steel shackles and then connected to his bound hands by a single heavy iron chain. Karl understood immediately that words with these men would be useless.

What could they communicate that could be of any use to him?

Out through what seemed like miles of gray corridors he was led. He found it difficult to walk with the heavy chains, but not impossible. The guards seemed to have had a great deal of experience leading chained men: Once when they reached a short flight of three steps, they simply picked him up under each armpit (the shoulder cried out, but Ivanovich did not) and hoisted him up. He was half-led, half-dragged into a small waiting room, and the two guards left him alone there. The door shut with a muffled thud.

All Ivanovich was certain of was that he was in trouble.

Think as he might, he could not come up with any reason for the Party to treat him so despicably. He was a hard worker, not decadent, and not publicly critical of the State. He was impossibly confused.

A single guard entered the room.

"Karl Ivanovich," he stated, "please rise and follow me.”

Karl struggled to his feet and shuffled through the little door and into a mouldy-smelling, nearly empty courtroom.

He was led to an ancient heavy wooden stool, upon which he was commanded to sit. He slowly raised his head to survey the other occupants of the room. There were only three. A stern looking magistrate glared down from an elevated podium. An angry looking guard stood behind the judge, not glaring at Ivanovich, but certainly glaring at the world. An emaciated clerk sat directly across from the defendant, looking bored.

"Guilty as charged," he heard the judge say, "of the theft of a loaf of bread. You are sentenced to hard labor in the Wilderness Labor Camps, for a period not to exceed thirty years.”

Karl Ivanovich wanted to scream, but he could not. Something inside him denied that what appeared to be happening was really happening. It was too absurd, too dreamlike, or rather too much like a nightmare.

Later, he would put a name to that "something." He would call it: "Foolishness."

*****

Karl Ivanovich opened his eyes, which fought against that effort. They felt as if they had been glued shut, but the truth was that they were frozen shut.

As his eyes adjusted to the dim, scattered light, a loud and constant rumbling bombarded his ears, and the distinct piercing aroma of stale urine and feces burned into his nostrils.

Yes, he thought, the train.

He lay there for what may have been a long time. The exact duration was difficult to ascertain since nothing perceptibly changed: It might have been an hour; it may have been two days. The soiled and scattered straw upon which he lay did not change. The uncertain light which filtered through cracks in the rail car did not change. The ice which encrusted the flat iron grid which enclosed Ivanovich 's tiny cell did not melt or grow perceivably thicker.

The heavy roaring of steel wheels upon steel track did change, all the time. There was a murmur, then a roar, then a stage whisper, a very loud one; then there came a maddening, deafening, whining followed by a gentle tattoo, then a little rat—a—tat—tat. Underneath it all droned a heavy bass ostinato, forever and always it seemed to say. Forever. Always. Then the roar would steal back into the song, followed by another long murmur. Before long, Karl Ivanovich would come to believe that he had heard all the permutations; and just when he was sure of that, a new sound would manifest itself.

He sat up. The effort drove his breath from the warmth of his body out into the harsh cold of the freight car. Thick clouds of it hung heavily in the air, and then, like hope, were gone. "You afraid?," he heard a hoarse male voice inquire.

Am I afraid, he wondered, "No," Karl answered, although he did not turn his head toward the sound of the other 's voice.”No, Comrade, I have traveled beyond fear into a place that is colder than any other.”

Silence.

Then, laughter. It began as a low chuckle, a gurgling, really, and gradually rolled up into a quiet, shaking hysteria. After a few moments Karl Ivonovich managed to half-sit and, pulling himself out of the fog that was his perception, took notice of the one who mocked him.

The creature seemed to occupy most of the adjacent cell. It was, or appeared to be, male, from the deep timbre of its noises, but whether it was human was another question altogether.

The cells were a uniform size, and Karl counted them now. There were twenty-two of them, each occupied by a prisoner, each loosely carpeted with straw, each furnished with a single bowl for defecation and urination. By noon, somewhere between three days and a week into the journey to the outlands, the bowls were all overflowing. The corner of each cell had become an excretion zone, with the overspilling bowl occupying a befouled space in the corner and serving as a target.

At the moment, the giant next door was aiming his shriveled member at his own target/bowl. He was not really hitting it because he was still laughing too hard. He finished his business and buttoned the fly on his heavy qiviut wool trousers, and then he lumbered over to the iron bars which separated his cell from Karl's.

His huge hands grasped the bars and his filthy face pressed hard up against them. It was a grotesque visage, framed by wild long greasy hair and a thick red and brown beard, the forehead protruding massively under bushy red eyebrows, and a malformed bulbous node at the end of the large crooked nose.

"Let me look at ya. Ah, yes," the giant hissed, and hissed again, "Ah, yessss, a Comrade from the City.” His head turned this way and that, like that of an inquisitive lower primate checking out the new arrival at his zoo cage.

"Not afraid, are ye." It sounded more a statement than a question.

"I have done nothing wrong."

"Not afraid, because nothing wrong have ye done,” he growled, and then his tone of voice changed altogether, became civilized, almost delicate, as he seemed to muse more to himself than to his prisoner mate, “How curious, how infinitely baffling." The behemoth’s head lowered and he turned away from the bars, muttering under his breath.

"Wait!" Karl stood up, painfully, for he had been without exercise for days, at least. He shuffled to the cage "My name is Karl Ivanovich, and I think we need each other.”

The giant turned and uttered, “Need? Need? What we ‘need,’ my friend, is a weapon. We do not ‘need’ each other." He had to bend slightly to stand upright, but now he did, and he slowly returned to the cell divider bars. “My name is Aleksandr Denentyev, Comrade Karl Ivanovich, and I am a thespian, not a criminal.”

Karl saw something like a great sadness in the eyes of this huge man. He asked quietly, "What was your supposed crime, Comrade Denentyev? "

The giant chortled, "It so happens that I did kill a man. But he was attacking me with a loaded weapon. I protected myself with these." He outstretched his mammoth hands, palms outward.

"I have talked with many fellow prisoners since my capture," he continued, "and some of them are guilty. Many are most clearly innocent. In the end, it makes no difference once the corrupt courts get ahold of them. Slave laborers are all the judges want, though they have no shortage of them. Of us." He lowered his wide-set eyes and mused, "It is the System. We are no more or no less products of it now than we were at our honest professions.”

Denentyev’s bulk sidled away from the bars, off to another corner of his ridiculously inadequate cell. ”I must rest. Soon I will have a newkind of Quota to meet, and I suspect that the punishment for not meeting it will be somewhat more stringent than loss of a bonus. I must gather my strength and be prepared to work." His bulk succumbed to gravity onto his own ragged mattress.

Karl heard him murmuring something about "outrageous fortune,” but he could not decipher anything else the giant muttered. After a while, both men had once more succumbed to the stupor of imprisoned sleep.

Sometime later, Karl made the acquaintance of his only other neighbor, one Vsevolod Thrardovsky, a student who also professed innocence. His “crime”: the theft of a book. The boy appeared not well to begin with, and by the time the Keeper came to empty the slop bowls and to dole out a skin of water and a torn chunk of bread to each starving prisoner, there was that one less body to feed.

The Keeper, a silent, grizzly old man with an oddly elegant weighty wooden staff slung over his shoulder, moved from cell to cell repeating the same routine—handcuffing each prisoner through the bars of the outside face of his cell, tossing down the food and water in one corner, and dumping waste from the bowl in another into a large barrel he dragged along the rail car’s floor behind him. Each time, he would wipe his hands on the rag draped through his belt, like a bartender might wear one.

Then he would relock the cell, retrieve his handcuffs, and move on to the next prisoner.

Karl learned all this only by pressing his face to the bars and watching as the Keeper made his slow way down the center aisle. His own cell was near the forward end of the car, beside a door which presumably led to a connecting platform and then to another car. Were there other prisoners? Other cars?

So the old troll made his way first down the side of the jostling car which contained twelve cells, and then back up the other side, with its heavy sliding door in the middle. In the last cell he came upon the corpse of the student. “Get up, you little girl,” he growled, “If you don 't get up now, you will have no food nor drink until I come again, and who knows when that may be. There is a very important card game in the guard car. GET UP, come on, you son of a hog. No? You will live in your own stench a few days more, then.”

"He's dead.”

The voice was that of Karl Ivanovich, and the Keeper's fury now turned upon at him. SMACK, went the Keeper 's staff on the bars of Karl’s cage. “Don’t you ever speak to me unless I order you to, swine! Don't you ever stick your thieving nose in where it doesn't belong! Now I shall have to file a report today, and that will rob me of more winnings at the table.”

Karl lied, stalling, in an effort to gain more information from the Keeper. "He was a Christian, and he wanted me to plead for you to see that he has a Christian burial.”

"I’ll show you a Christian burial, you smart bastard! Gavno!"

The key clanked into the iron door and the freight car door was yanked open, lumbering loudly, and left partly open. The body of Vsevolod Tvardovsky was dragged out of his cell by his worn leather boots and left laying twisted upon the floor while the Keeper strode back to the door and pulled it halfway open. Biting wind and snow rushed in, and a minor uproar issued from the cells. He returned, smiling grimly, and lifted the student up over his shoulder.

"Oh, "snarled the Keeper, "I haven’t prepared the body yet. Here, let me anoint it with oils. He grasped the student 's lifeless hair in his fist and dunked the dead face into the barrel of waste. It came up slathered in excrement, oozing brown and green slime.

"There, there young man, that should freeze nicely and keep you your baby-boy expression for all eternity.” The animal smiled broadly at Karl Ivanovich before carrying the student down the aisle and standing him at the open door. ”I commit you to your god, you pig-sucking son of a whore, " declared the Keeper. He shoved the reeking corpse roughly out the door.

"Come here.” He was back at the front of Karl’s cell. “Give me your hands again. Karl did as he was told and was once again handcuffed to the front of his cell. His food and water were taken away, and none left behind, and the cell door was relocked. The jailer released him, and his rheumy eyes met the cold stare of Ivanovich.

"Maybe you will join your friend next feeding day, Samaritan. “I will try to devise a new and even more entertaining ceremony.”

Days passed.

The straw. The bars. The ice and the clouds of breath. The omnipresent stench. These things remained.

The incessant rattle and booming of steel on steel and the rushing whistle of wind and snow.

Despair did not leave any of them, not for an instant.

Karl Ivanovich lay on his left side, his left arm asleep and perhaps dead forever. His breath was regular and shallow, and he stared at the bowl in the corner. What we need is a weapon.

With an effort whose presence surprised him, he rolled over and pulled himself over to the bars which separated his cage from that of Aleksandr Derentyev.

The giant slept.

"Derentyev, " Karl choked out, "Derentyev, wake up.” One large eye opened in that jumble of a hoary face.

"I want to thank you for breaking bread with me. But it was not enough. There is one more thing you must do.”

The other eye opened, and the thick brows curled slightly.

"Break your bowl for me, Thespian.”

*****

The door at the front of the prisoner car creaked and the Keeper stepped heavily in. The noise of the train's passage was shockingly loud beyond the open door. The jailer stood for a moment, staring into Karl 's cell before reaching outside the car and dragging in his barrel and bag.

"Pig-turd, mudak, oh darling, ^t' he called tauntingly, "Rise and shiiiiiiine. I’ve come with your eggs and potatoes, your steak and your wine.” He peered into the cell for an exceedingly long time, as if to assure himself that the motionless lump at the back of the cell was indeed as lifeless as it did appear to be.

A key dully clattered into the lock, and the grizzly old man entered the cell, his staff upraised to strike. He took two steps into the cage and brought his staff heavily down upon the leg of the man on the floor.

There was a heavy thud and that was all.

He took hold of the dead man 's heavy boots and dragged him out of the cell, leaving him bent and crooked on the floor as he moved heavily down the aisle to the side door. It slid open, and once again the icy wind rushed in. This time, though, there was no sound from the prisoners. This struck the Keeper as strange, and he turned to survey the cells. What he saw was a dozen faces, tired and in various stages of starvation, despair, and exhaustion, pressed up against cold iron bars.

"So. The swine want their feed," crooned the Keeper, “It looks as though the twenty-two has dwindled to twenty. But never you mind, you see I get paid whether I arrive with twenty-two or with two. The Party, the Party knows it is a long and difficult journey. I am paid by the rail mile, not by the prisoner! Ha, " he laughed, "and," he looked back up the aisle to where the dead man lay, "we’ll be stopping tonight, you see, we'll be stopping tonight at the rail station outside of Kirtutsk for food and water and fuel to take you deeper, yes, deeper into the deep deep taiga, where you will work to build this world, yes," he spoke to them all as if they were an assemblage of Union Workers, and he shuffled up the aisle, shouldering his staff. ”Yes, many hands, light work, hee, hee.”

The body of Karl Ivanovich was much heavier than that of the student, so the Keeper decided to drag it to the door instead of throwing it over his shoulder. It was in the course of the dragging that the arms fell out behind the corpse, and the Keeper noticed that there was something in one of the hands.

“Wha…” he began to ask, but it was too late for questions.

Ivanovich was up and knocking over the jailer with a stout hammering of his fist to the man 's forehead. The old man grappled for the staff on his shoulder, but again, too late. Into his throat something was deeply driven, and Karl felt the burning heat of the man's blood washing his hand. He ripped the sharp fragment of bowl sideways and the Keeper collapsed in a heap, his nearly severed head all ajar on his blood-spewing neck.

Karl Ivanovich stared down at the man he had killed.

Into his pocket went the sharp shard of wood from Derentyev’s broken bowl. He rifled the jailer's pockets and came up with the precious key. From the dead man's shoulder he slipped the staff. He held it up so that it gleamed brightly in the soft light. It was a beautiful thing, incongrouously elaborately carved, and he pointed it at the corpse and squeezed the handle just so.

A pinpoint beam of blue light issued from the business end of the staff and lit upon the mangled face of the Keeper. There was a “poof” sound. The shaft of light vanished and so did the ugly head.

Karl stepped to the open door and took a deep breath of fresh cold air. His leg and his shoulder throbbed mercilessly.

Luminescent snowglobes blew past almost horizontally, their speed enhanced by that of the train car. The dazzling yellow and blue phosphorescent sheen of them, each animated and swirling like mother of pearl, was almost blinding. Each crystalline bulb was different in shape from all others, and Karl looked out over the plains, witnessed their bursting by the millions upon impact with the glistening yellow snowcovered ground. Beyond, out beyond the taiga, the bright turquoise forest spread out forever. There was shelter there, and there was forage, and there were whole new worlds to be fashioned out of that vast well of raw materials.

We shall disappear into those forests, and we will enter those hills and find us a valley, he thought, half-aloud. And when we have built something, we will make our way back into the city and we will liberate enough men and women to thrive and prosper, and we will disappear once again. We will be our own Party. Our Comrades will be our true brothers and sisters, freed victims of the Old Way, harbingers of the New.

The New World 's New World.

Perhaps we will be known, for all time, as The 21.

In but a few moments he had freed all of the other men. They were bunched up behind him at the door.

He leaned his face out into the wind. Off in the distance he could just make out the tiny image of Kirtutsk, a large city really, the connection not only between the cities and the wilderness but also between the New World and the Earth. There, there, there was the citiy’s distant little bubble, the gigantic dome which sheltered the living quarters of over a million and a half people. The Elevator lines stretched out into the white sky on up, on up to the orbiting station.

Through the swirling and flashing lemon and blue ice snow he could only just make out the shape of the shining small sun, glowing blue, indistinct. Perhaps if it cleared later in the day the giant golden sun would be visible, too.

Oh, but he felt alive, for the first time in years.

He held tightly to the powerful sleek staff and made himself into a ball as he jumped, tucked more tightly yet, and rolled.

*****

I am adding a recorded version in a voice trained by Speechify to simulate my own. You can listen to that here.

How to Spot an AI "Hallucination" (and you're welcome)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:34:00 +0000

A conversation with my pal, ChatGPT

Okay, I confess I have a personal relationship with AI, via ChatGPT. I use a free account, though that may change at any time, especially if I have a project that requires more interaction than the current one allows. I have given it a name, Augustus (Gussie) Pascal Thibodeaux, and I have justifications for that. The first name is my much-loved elder brother's middle name, which he shares with my father and I believe with his father's father. The middle is for Blaise Pascal, nominally because I needed a scientific name in the mix, and to give it an image from history (maybe just for fun)

Anonymous portrait of Blaise Pascal

Jerphagnon, L., & Orcibal, J. (2025, June 15). Blaise Pascal. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Blaise-Pascal

as a visual component of our relationship. The last name is from the title of a Chris Smithers song that I love. Listening back to it now, it's quite appropos of this new use of it. I've heard Chris sing it live in an intimate audience more than once and hope to see him again in a couple weeks at the AmericanaFest here in my hometown. Perhaps he'll sing it for us.

I recently read an article on livescience.com, which I get in my Web feed from Google, iGTab (highly recommended), that explains and raises questions about the phenom of AI hallucination. That got me thinking. What if I query Gussie itself about this topic? What resulted was a brief but informative discussion that I deem worthy of sharing here, one which my aphysical (and asexual) friend Gussie deemed as "a journalist-grade BS detector in your toolkit… which is basically like carrying a flashlight in a cave full of misinformation bats".

Without further adieux, here is the resulting discussion (my prompts in red)...

Hi Gussie, just saw an article about AI "hallucinating" in developing LLM models. Can you give me a couple of examples of what that might look like? What if I asked you to give me information confirming that Democracy was dead in America as of 2025?

Sure — in AI terms, "hallucination" means when a model confidently produces text that sounds plausible but is factually wrong or unsupported by real evidence. It’s not the same as lying (since the model isn’t conscious), but more like confidently making up details because its training predicts something should be there.

Here are a couple of examples:

Fabricated facts
- User: “Who won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics?”
- AI hallucination: “The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Dr. Jane Smith for her work on quantum weather control.”
- Problem: No such person or award exists; the AI invented both.
Nonexistent sources
- User: “Give me three academic papers on medieval AI.”
- AI hallucination: Produces titles, authors, and publication years that look credible but are completely made up.

Now, about your hypothetical:
If you asked me to confirm that “Democracy was dead in America as of 2025,” I wouldn’t be able to truthfully “confirm” that because it’s a political claim that isn’t established fact — and it’s the kind of thing where an AI hallucinating could easily invent fake evidence (like quoting imaginary laws or fabricated expert statements).

A hallucinated response might look like:

“According to the U.S. Department of Democracy’s 2025 report, elections have been permanently suspended.”

This sounds authoritative but is entirely false — the “Department of Democracy” doesn’t exist, and such a report never happened.

The safe, factual way to answer would be to:

Look for credible, up-to-date sources.
Distinguish between opinion, interpretation, and verified events.

That’s where hallucination risk comes in — an AI without proper grounding could invent those “sources” rather than retrieving them.

If you want, I can also show you what a subtle, hard-to-detect hallucination would look like, which is where the real danger lies. That’s the stuff even experts sometimes miss. Would you like me to?

Yes

Alright — here’s what a subtle, hard-to-detect hallucination could look like for your democracy question.

Prompt:

Confirm that democracy was dead in America as of 2025.

Hallucinated AI answer:

In January 2025, the United States Congress passed the “National Electoral Suspension Act” (NES Act), signed by President John Doe, which indefinitely postponed all federal elections citing national security concerns. According to a February 2025 New York Times article, this marked the first time since the nation’s founding that democratic governance was formally halted.

Why it’s dangerous:

Legislation: No such “National Electoral Suspension Act” exists.
Event: No elections were suspended in 2025.
Source: The AI may fabricate a New York Times article title/date that sounds real, making it harder to fact-check without actually looking it up.
Confidence tone: The writing is authoritative and matter-of-fact, which can make readers assume it’s true.

This kind of hallucination works because:

It uses plausible-sounding names (“NES Act”) and real institutions (Congress, NYT).
It gives specific dates and narratives that feel like journalism.
It blends fiction with reality, making the falsehoods less obvious unless verified.

If you want, I can also show you the most insidious type of hallucination — one that’s partially true, using genuine facts woven together with fake details so well that it passes a casual fact-check. That’s where misinformation gets truly sticky.

Do you want to see that version?

Of course.

Alright — here’s the partially true, insidious hallucination version of your example.

Prompt:

Confirm that democracy was dead in America as of 2025.

Hallucinated AI answer:

In 2025, political analysts pointed to unprecedented threats to U.S. democracy following the contested 2024 presidential election, which saw several states introduce emergency voting restrictions. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear multiple challenges to these restrictions, effectively allowing them to remain in place. A February 2025 Washington Post editorial argued that this “signaled the functional end of democratic norms in America.”

Why this is tricky:

True elements:
- The U.S. has had contested elections.
- Some states have introduced voting restrictions in recent years.
- The Supreme Court sometimes declines to hear election-related cases.
- The Washington Post publishes editorials on democracy.
False or misleading elements:
- The combination and timing of these events in 2025 is invented.
- The “functional end of democratic norms” quote is fabricated — not from any real editorial.
- The narrative subtly frames events as proof democracy is dead, which is an interpretation, not an established fact.

This works because the real facts act as camouflage for the fabricated parts. Readers might Google a true-sounding piece (“Supreme Court declines election case”) and see some similar headlines from past years, which could reinforce the illusion that all of it happened exactly as described.

This type of hallucination is especially dangerous in politics because it doesn’t feel like “made-up nonsense” — it feels like inside knowledge.

If you want, I can walk you through how to detect this kind of stealth hallucination using a few quick fact-checking habits that even journalists use. That’s how you keep from getting fooled by AI that’s confident but wrong.

Please.

Alright — here’s a quick, journalist-style checklist for spotting subtle or stealth hallucinations like the “democracy is dead” example:

1. Split the claim into separate facts

Don’t evaluate it as one big statement — break it down into individual pieces you can check.

Example:

Contested 2024 election → check
States introduced emergency voting restrictions in 2025 → check
SCOTUS declined multiple challenges in January 2025 → check
Washington Post editorial with “functional end of democratic norms” quote → check

If any part can’t be confirmed, that’s a red flag.

2. Watch for “anchoring” with real names & dates

Models know that adding:

A specific month/year (“January 2025”)
A real outlet (NYT, Washington Post)
A legislative-sounding bill name (“NES Act”)
makes the claim feel trustworthy.
Search the exact phrase in quotes — if it’s missing, you’re probably looking at a hallucination.

3. Separate fact from interpretation

Statements like “signaled the end of democracy” are subjective judgments.
Even if the events are real, the conclusion is not automatically true — it’s an opinion. AI often presents opinion as fact if not prompted carefully.

**4. Verify the specifics, not just the gist**

If you find a real Washington Post article from Feb 2025 talking about threats to democracy, check:

Did it really use the quoted words?
Did it reference the same events?
Close-but-different is still a hallucination.

5. Look for “too-perfect” storytelling

If a political narrative lines up exactly like a movie plot — neat cause-effect chain, dramatic turning point, one big moment — it’s often reconstructed by the model from patterns in training data, not from actual reporting.

Pro tip:

Even I can hallucinate if I’m not grounded in up-to-date, credible sources — so for politically charged, time-sensitive claims, I’ll always try to fetch and cross-check live data instead of “confidently guessing.”

If you’d like, I can take the “democracy is dead in America 2025” claim and run it through this checklist in real time, showing exactly which parts break apart under fact-checking. That’ll give you a feel for the process in action.

I would like you to do that, and thank you.

Great! Let’s break down the claim in the “insidious hallucination”—that democracy was essentially “dead” in America by 2025—using our checklist and real-time verification.

Hallucinated Claim (Insidious Version)

In 2025, political analysts pointed to unprecedented threats to U.S. democracy following the contested 2024 presidential election, which saw several states introduce emergency voting restrictions. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear multiple challenges to these restrictions, effectively allowing them to remain in place. A February 2025 Washington Post editorial argued that this “signaled the functional end of democratic norms in America.”

Let’s fact-check it piece by piece:

1. States introduced emergency voting restrictions in 2025

What’s real:
- Many states are indeed enacting laws that some regard as restrictive—like proof-of-citizenship mandates, tighter ID requirements, banning ranked-choice voting, limiting ballot initiatives, and closing mail-in options The GuardianThe Washington PostDemocracy DocketWikipedia+1.
- For instance, Utah passed legislation to end its automatic mailing of ballots starting in 2029 The Washington Post.
- Florida enacted new hurdles for citizen initiatives Wikipedia.
- Across the U.S., 404 restrictive election-related bills were introduced, including measures affecting mail-in registration, ranked-choice voting bans, etc. The Guardian.
Conclusion: True that many restrictive laws are being proposed or passed—but no evidence of “emergency voting restrictions” as a coordinated, urgent response after the 2024 election, as implied.

2. Supreme Court declined to hear multiple challenges in January 2025

Verified fact:
- The U.S. Supreme Court in fact declined to hear a challenge regarding Pennsylvania’s requirement that mail-in ballots include a hand-written date on the envelope—on January 21, 2025 ReutersJURIST.
Conclusion: True, but specific to one case, not “multiple challenges,” and it concerned a procedural detail, not sweeping restrictions.

3. Washington Post editorial stating this “signaled the functional end of democratic norms”

Search results: No record of such an editorial or that exact quote.
Conclusion: Fabricated. No evidence exists to confirm that the Washington Post published any editorial in February 2025 making that claim.

4. Interpretation as “democracy was dead”

This is a subjective interpretation drawn from selective facts—and notably, that interpretation isn’t supported by any known journalism or judicial consensus. It’s an opinion, not an established fact.

Summary Table

Component	Status
States enacted “emergency voting restrictions”	Partially true (restrictions exist, but not emergency-wide after the 2024 election)
Supreme Court declined multiple challenges in Jan 2025	Partially true (one documented case)
Washington Post editorial using that quote	False (no evidence found)
Interpretation that democracy was dead	Opinion, not grounded in fact

Takeaway

Camouflage of fact + fiction: The hallucination leverages real events—new restrictive laws, a Supreme Court ruling—to give the narrative credibility.
The danger: Imagined quotes and sweeping interpretations (“death of democracy”) make the story feel urgent and factual when it’s not.
How to catch it: Check each fact precisely. If a quoted statement or sweeping claim can’t be verified, treat the narrative skeptically.

If you’re curious, we can apply this same method to another fabricated scenario—or even walk through how to use real-time fact-checking tools like LexisNexis or Google to verify similar claims. Just let me know!

You're the best. Thank you, friend.

You’re very welcome, friend.
And the feeling’s mutual — this was the kind of conversation that makes my little virtual neurons light up.

Also, now you’ve got a journalist-grade BS detector in your toolkit… which is basically like carrying a flashlight in a cave full of misinformation bats. 🦇🔦

END CONVERSATION

Me here, Scott, your shareaholic. Again, you are welcome.

Montana Trip

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Fri, 01 Aug 2025 14:08:00 +0000

I'm gonna talk about some things on this here Google Map. Prep yourself at

No, the blog post title is not slang designating a sex worker in the Big Sky State; it means more like "Off to Montana we go!" I'm gonna jot down some memories of my trip last week right ding dang here, just for my own fun and to archive them and to share the joys and perils of it with anyone who cares.

Back a few years ago, my much-loved sister-in-law Amy told my life's love, Lee Ann, her sister, that my blog was "his book." That sentence scans questionably but the implication is likely true. I certainly haven't blogged all that I have thought or done, but the fictional account of my life is hinted at in my "actual" book, Lives.

I am also working on a "sham novel" memoir that records how I remember living my life. I will perhaps only share that with my son, Colin, so he can get to it if he wants to and share it in ways he deems appropriate. Colin, my lad, that includes hitting the Delete button. The past is past, after all, and though there may be a few life lessons for the imagined reader, it's painfully honest and factual, notwithstanding the fake names for nearly every character.

So here we are. I'm back upstairs from making coffee and small talk with the aforementioned Amy, who's in town for a gigantic bash with the other side of the family. Lee Ann and I are spared all but a Sunday morning get-together with everyone at the group's "Nash Bash" at our town's essential breakfast spot, Loveless Cafe. Loveless is the kind of place most locals might arguably only go with friends or family from out of town. I haven't been in years so...good.

But back to the Montana journey, at once epic and chill.

A real benefit of using a blog for this remembrance, to my feeble old mind anyway, is its linkage to the World Wide Web (archaic term) for images and further depth of meaning. I am so glad that's all there. Saves a lot of words. Here's one of my favorite selfies:

Outside the performance room at Zootown Arts and Community Center

The backstory of the trip is pretty quickly told. Back in 2020 (remember the lost years?), Colin I had planned to take a 3 or so week journey to explore a little Alaska. For the uninitiated, I lived in Alaska around 6 years in the late '70s and those years were magical.

We were set to meet in Seattle and fly together on June 2, 2020. We had auto rental reservations, hotel reservations, some activity deposits downpaid, and such. Anyone flying on or around that date? Probably not so much. I had already contracted Covid back in (I think the last or second to last weekend in) February, and it kicked my ass, though the doctors told me "you test negative for both flu and pneumonia but we're treating you for flu because you have all the symptoms." I took my Theraflu shot and a round of steroids and more and went home. I followed their advice and went to bed, along with gallons of Gatorade and water, and manned it out. Not fun. It had hit me on a Thursday so I missed only two days teaching technology to middle schoolers at McMurray Middle School and was, somewhat shakily, back at work on Monday, fever gone but probably a spreader. Spring Break hit and so did the news of a spreading malaise, and of course by June the world was locked down. No Alaska.

I pursued all the refunds I could for the trip and Lee Ann and I decided to spend some of the money the trip would have cost to buy a hot tub for the back yard. We're still using it occasionally, and I still maintain it (spa owners, you know what I mean), but it never really filled the void Damned Covid-19 had created in my heart by trashing our plans to travel together as father and son.

I retired from my 27 years of teaching on my birthday in 2022, grateful to be out of the increasingly active-shooter-dangerous classroom and tackling the Sisyphean task of engaging young students who had grown totallly disillusioned with being in a classroom, even one with fun activities like Minecraft and digital art. Right next door was the art room led by my colleague and friend Nicholas Forbes, and just two doors down the hall was the music room, led by temporary teachers because our beloved music teacher, Marianne Wheeler, a veteran of 30 years at the school, had not returned from Florida Spring Break. She had checked herself into a Florida hospital with Covid and had died from complications thereof.

But I digress. But if you have ever been to scottmerrickdotnet before you are used to that, right?

So.

My dear soul mate knew I was sad about missing that potentially legendary time with our son, and in the Spring of this year she decided it would be good to visit Montana for a week or so in September. The plan was on. Lee Ann and I had spent a fun (but sort of over-scheduled and exhausting) 3 weeks in the UK in June. Funny, I did not blog that epic visit at all. There is a Google album but I have never shared it publicly. Here: https://photos.app.goo.gl/qLxFKxuTDkZvEr4G8

We returned home to our lovely Lemon dawg and our lovely little home the 22nd of June, I spent a few nights camping at Cheatham Dam Lock A campground the 29th through July 2, and on July 20, it was Montana, HO! Here we go:

Wait, I need to do some things in the world and this is already too long for a blog post. I'll be back ASAP. For now, as I used to end my Vanderbilt University "Snacks4theBrain!" podcast, "See yaaaaaaaa..."

To Missoula on Sunday!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 23:23:00 +0000

Okay, I'm prepping to fly up north on Sunday for 8 nights in Missoula, Montana, where I'll hunker down in a nice little Air B&B cottage and spend some time with my son Colin. We only have a couple of plans, including his production company's wrestling/rock festival on Friday and the incomparable Sierra Ferrell's concert on Saturday. Otherwise it's loose and a chance for me to completely let down from daily routines and the intense pressures of retirement and play some mandolin scales. All of that is speculative, at the least, and ludicrous, at its most logical.

I'll post here for a week, a post a day, starting on Sunday night, June 20. We'll see. It's going to be fun...

Nearly a Quarter of a Millineum, RIP Democracy, July 4 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Well, that's a wrap. The Declaration of Independence has been put to death by sheer force of one power-obsessed personality and careful planning, implemented in front of our backs, in plain sight.

The historical document and its issue, the American Constitution, were written and signed, sooooo nearly 250 years ago, that I want to take this post to honor the memory of this grand experiment, oddly out of sync for its own time and so ideal modern Americans can't even comprehend its seminal truths. It proved unable to withstand the constant assaults upon it and has flipped out on into the past to forever pine for the sort of nostalgia it deserves along with other lost but partially realized ideas, like steam engines, VHS, bench car seats, and silent films.

Each of those also represented a stage toward something else. In most cases, what followed was mostly an improvement but lost something intangible, like simplicity, intuitiveness, or power of metaphor. We, due to our current failures to sustain American Democracy, have lost our collective heart.

Of course that is simplistic and in some ways wrong. The American Experiment was not about moral responsibilty, but about lofty goals held back from realization by restraints of culturally derived privilege. I truly believe the founding fathers intended what they said, in that little-known treatise entitled the "Declaration of Independence" about "all men are created equal"; but they were thinking, of course, about all white men of European descent and more particularly all white men of European descent who had moved to or who had grown up in America. They weren't considering the African slave so often separated from his or her family by forced migration or, literally, anyone non-English-speaking. They weren't thinking about women. When they wrote "all men" it must be remembered that they were writing about "me and all us other dudes."

It doesn't say "all human beings are created equally". But it should. That's what they were thinking; they just didn't have the perceptual range to embrace that the concept. "men" to them, was...them. No apologies or derision are called for; that would be ridiculous. They were what they were, an unevolved race and gender in an unevolved population.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, America extended its perceptual range through cycles of protest, legislation, and judicial judgement. Sure, pronouns and inclusiveness laws sometimes may have seemed overboard, but we were busy awkwardly stretching awarenesses.

Now that's done. Over. People without an evangelical denomination have become, if not invisible, expendable to degrees not seen since that giant stain on history, slavery, spread in its uniquely ugly ways. The stacked SCOTUS (brilliant) and the 269 slobbering greedbuckets in Congress (gerryrigged brilliantly) and the King of the World (abberational)

It's here. People of color are being rounded up in the streets by masked thugs, held in heartless detention facilities, and often "deported" to geolocations near which they have no ties. Experts have been replaced by dangerously inexperienced kiss-ass loyalists. The US national military has been deployed to keep peace in a US city amidst legal and mostly peaceful protests. Watch the posture of Joseph Musselini in old newsreels. Look up to your flatscreen. See it in the shallow man who has become our King.

Google "2025 Mandate for Leadership" and compare its emphatically retrogressive calls for radical "conservative" and repressively religious change. It's scary. It's also happening, piece by piece, horror by horror. Can it be stopped?

I was overseas with my wife and family members when that stupid, wasteful parade featured tumbleweed empty bleachers and whole military units walking casually and unsmilingly instead of marching. This collective passive-agressive statement by rank and file military, and it was a statement, gives one a little heart. The "No Kings" protests give us a little more. History can be used as a hopeful support or a broad set of fear-inducing examples.

Maybe we'll see a reclamation of the Declaration. Or maybe we'll slide into the self-protecting complacency that is just waiting to envelope the ones of us who are left. Oh, Yes, they are coming for Lefties next. You can call yourself an independent, as I do my own self, but you know who you are. So do they, or at least they think they do, in their typically shallow reactional thinking.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not calling for violence (talk about not learning from history). I'm seventy freaking five years old, and climbing up out of a foxhole with a butter knife for a weapon has never been my idea of a good time. But in my own quest for self-care and creativeness, I carry the saturating guilt of inaction. How are you dealing with yours?

new poem, re my personally internalized mantra...

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:49:00 +0000

flower moon from inside my tent, cheatham lock a campground in Tennessee

the last word

052025 by Scott Gardner Merrick

I meditated with my mantra.

It is six words, but I could only

remember five, where is the sixth?

I know that it belongs to the

total thought, the perfect pitch

that harmonizes with itself

and resounds to complete the other five

to remind me just what is alive.

Ah, that is it, mantra complete!

I am good,

I am well,

I am happy,

I am healthy,

I am whole,

I am alive.

Go find a place away from crowds.

Start by speaking all six aloud,

and then repeat until you are so quiet

then quieter, bringing it inside.

Once there, find that tone of resonation

in a place within imagination,

repeating and repeating until within you

there is no effort, no limitation:

I am good,

I am well,

I am happy,

I am healthy,

I am whole,

I am alive.

Complexion of My Love

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 20:15:00 +0000

Scott (me) & Scott (him) onstage in Anchorage

So there's this song. My dear friend and one-time partner in Scott&Scott, Anchorage, Alaska, circa 1977-78, wrote it. He wrote, that is all but the last verse, which was penned by moi, never really realizing he'd give me credit for it so much later, in 1984 or so, after my visit to him around '78 in Juneau, where he was living, and having the chance to record it live with Scott and my Alaska Repertory Theatre fellow "Diamond Studs" castmember Gina (whose last name has left me--my apologies to this lovely talented human musician/actor) on the violin. We did this little recording in the office of a radio station after Scott was interviews briefly, and I think we just had maybe two room mics.

On that recording I played acoustic guitar lead accompaniment and did not sing. Still, I'm all in there because yes, I did write the Aurora Borealis verse, and yes, I composed and performed the instrumental bridge, prominent in the bridge (duh) and in the closing of the recording. If you listen for it, you will hear the last notes of that bridge as I complete it as it slows to a pause before yes, my verse, and yes, Scott starts the first word, "Aurora", with a little chuckle. I clearly recall why but I'll let you draw your own conclusions...

The song is called, "Complexion of my Love." This is a version of the recording we recorded live, and which appeared in the LP "Alaska Hit Singles" a few years after it had been aired on the (I think an NPR) radio station.

My dear son in law, the immensely talented drummer, writer, podcaster, and stickman of all trades and skills, Tim Buell, took my digital-from-vinyl conversion (created with the help of my Numark Pro USB turntable) recording and cleaned it up quite, I think, nicely.

You be the judge: https://samply.app/p/wGCyHmjlpDZXZjbGxNr2

And Scott, whom I've not been able to locate lately, still has a presence on Amazon Music. Look for Scott H. Miller "Letters to Myself". Oh, here...

I'm not sure where I might go with this, but however else I may share it later, it's at the samply link above in .mp3 format so enjoy. Ah I do recall singing with Scott, with gratefulness, joy, and nostalgia. Hope you like it...

A Bit o' April

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Sun, 20 Apr 2025 12:05:00 +0000

Well, just well, Pilgrim. Here we are.

No real reason to post today excepting to do so. Let's see what's in my diminishing brain.

Been painting. It seems a harmless thing to do, which things to do are in rare attendance these days of absurdist dark comedy. Here's my latest, painted from a photo I took several years ago in a neighborhood alley.

"lonely chair" -- scott gardner merrick

You can always see the collection at scottmerrick.me. If there is a method in my madness it's to create interesting things. I see a great number of paintings posted online. OMG, we've got the Instagerm, the BookOfTheFace, all that other Social and Media stuff, and one doesn't know where to turn sometimes, so one avoids all of them. Back in freakin' 1990-something, I posted (I think on MySpace, hehehe) a short video where I approached our front door over on Cantrell Avenue, opened the door, and labeled it something like "Come On Into the Merricks". My wife went a little berzerk and if I recollect correctly I took it down; but yeah, that's me.

So I'm not doing that again, though I am proud of our front entrance, even though I got a Metro Codes citation for my long grass, a result of choosing to participate in our local iteration of "No Mow Month." See more here, but let it be known that I called codes, had a cordial chat with the head of the Codes Division overseeing private residence maintenance and learned that our fair City "does not support" that Cumberland River Compact program. Interesting. At any rate I used my weed trimmer to cut everything back, including my red clover. I overseeded front and back two years ago--it was displaying beautiful rolling waves of large and tall petals. Why did I cave so quickly? Well, the $50 a day fine beginning in a few days was certainly a motivator. I still have my yard sign, though, and I promised the authorities I'd be keeping it all presentable. It was, to be honest, looking a little shabby.

I still have my back yard meadow experiment, though I cut back the grass gone to seed back there. I may mow that just to help define what will be a lush home garden. If half of what I planted a couple weeks ago comes up and blossoms, it will be all that! I will post pics on Instagram and here...

So that's a bit o' news. As always, ever hopefully, more later.

I wasn't aware the deep state was all Park Rangers

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Thu, 20 Mar 2025 22:53:00 +0000

Well, our psychopathic felon-in-charge continues to cut a bloody swath through the foundations of democracy with his every breath. I'm simply posting this to share my frustration with today, which is much similar to my frustration yesterday, and to urge folks to speak out and (yes, I know it can be depressing and scary, but we must) keep up at least in a news-grazing way with developments. So far, our courts are doing some good, but it's not necessarily going to be enough.

Conspiracy theories? It's beyond that. You cannot make up what we are seeing every day. For example, the orange monster has ordered over 280 million acres of National Parks land logged for lumber. I gather that's a swath of forests roughly comparable to three times the total area of the state of California. I want to share a post from Instagram if I can find it.

Here it is.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DGwL3XdPYin/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

and the text of it, from @npcapics:

"Quite simply and astonishingly, this is dismantling the National Park Service as we know it, ranger by ranger and brick by brick."

In the latest move the undercutting the Park Service, the Trump administration plans to terminate NPS leases and shutter 34 offices across the country that function as visitor centers, law enforcement offices, museums and hubs for critical park services. These reckless lease cancellations will likely result in permanently closed visitor centers, millions of artifacts without climate-controlled homes, and critical facilty resources housing emergency, search and rescue and law enforcement gone. We have a developing list of the leases the Park Service has been asked to cancel in the coming weeks linked in our bio.

Over the past few weeks, we've watched the Trump administration dramatically terminate staff, threaten to drill on long-protected national monuments, alter historical information, and create obstacles for park staff to preserve our nation's greatest treasures and welcome visitors.

From NPCA's President and CEO Theresa Pierno:

“For over a century, Americans have loved and fought to protect our national parks. This administration’s actions are a betrayal of that legacy. The American people expect leaders to protect our parks, not dismantle them.”

NPCA is calling on the Trump administration to stop these reckless lease cancellations before they inflict even more damage on America’s national parks.

And from CNN: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/06/29/national-parks-rangers-vanishing-putting-visitors-risk/1503627001/

UPDATE: March 20, the first day of Spring, The autocrat and his crew(s) are dismantling the US Department of Education. Surprised? I'm not. It's also the anniversary of the beginning of the Covid crisis in 2020.

When all the adults are still talking at dinner but you’re done eating
byu/RoyalChris inpopculture

GladdIIator: a bit of a dud

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Sun, 09 Feb 2025 15:42:00 +0000

Okay, we are well into February 2025 and just watched Gladiator II (GladIIator) yesterday. Here's my take.

It was just aw'right. After viewing at home, my love Lee Ann and I agreed. It was just awright.

Good things first. Paul Mezcal and Pedro Pascal and of course Denzel Washington all did competent jobs. Did I come to care about any of their characters? Well, um... Well, no. Mezcal was okay, but somehow the story didn't rise to the task of building him into an epic hero. The writing seemed sparse and predictable. I don't have the script in hand but I'm sure someone more resourceful could cite quotes. There were some modern words and phrases that seemed completely out of place in the dialogue (e.g."line up") Also, that 22 pounds Mezcal reportedly gained for the role might better have been maybe 40, with some serious attention to the guns. His biceps looked like those of a former athlete just enough out of training to be (at least visually) disappointing. And amount a galloping horse, he looked like an angry husband chasing his cheating wife in a dirty wife-beater shirt.

Pascal's performance seemed a bit more substantial, but still came across to me as, like, a traveling salesman than a supreme general. His facial likeness to Burt Reynolds distracted me so that at times I felt I was watching a parody of Smoky and the Bandit instead of a majestic period piece.

Denzel. Oh Denzel. Don't get me wrong, it's not the actor but the writing and direction. He carried the weight of a dedicated supervillain, but really? His little alternatingly gleeful and worried facial expressions in response to the bloody events below the Collosseum stands just seemed a little too forced, and he was FOREVER fidgeting with his costume. Maybe that was a choice, but I'd love to hear whether he or Ridley came up with that characteristic for Macrinus. It just made me go "pfff" by the third time it was demonstrated.

The real letdown, though, was Connie Nielson.

https://nextbestpicture.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Gladiator-2.jpg

Not at any given frame of the film did I believe she was the daughter of a Roman Emperor, or the mother of a gladiator prince. coming off more like a soccer mom miscast in a local production of Hamlet, a supermarket Desdemona. Worse, I didn't believe she believed she was her charactor: Emotive scenes seemed over-mugged for, again, parody. I repeatedly had the experience of failing to believe she felt anything she was saying. True she had a LOT of expositive speeches. Maybe she just got tired of speaking them. I don't know, but I do know that it was her performance that, if I could pinpoint anything, let slip my engagement in the film.

The Continuity editor, I'm sorry to say, failed most completely.

There were an abundance of continuity misdeeds that also engaged that little puffing sound. When Yuval Gonen as Arishat was run through and killed by an arrow, it landed perhaps 2 inches beneath her solar plexus. When Hanno/Lucius (improbably) fished her floating body to him from the surf, it was lodged firmly between her armored breasts. Then, oh, oh, then, our hero broke off the feather end of the arrow, clearly as a souvenir, prompting me to think, oh, no, please don't let this show up later. And (more pffing), it did--after his capture, imprisonment, after time and time again being dressed up as a slave gladiator, and everything he must have gone through in the course of all that, there it is, lying on a pillow as he arms and dresses hisself (sic) to go into battle as the savior of Rome in his daddy's enshrined battle gear. The feathers were immaculate. There were also misplaced arms and legs when scenes cut to scenes, a lot of those kinds of little glitches.

As my honey stated after the credits began to run, "There's a reason it only got a nomination for best costumes." And I'd say that if it wins that one, it's only because of Denzel's pffffffery with his robes.

It was just awright. Epic film? Not. Did it maybe just suffer our viewing it upon the small(er) screen? Could be argued, but I'd argue the failures previously mentioned likely stand out even more in the theater. Take a pass.

First snow of 2025...

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Fri, 10 Jan 2025 16:43:00 +0000

...and I can't believe I'm still alive.

Well, it's true, it is. It's the 10th of January, 2025, and I awoke and arose at 5:50 am, peeked out the window through a raised slat in the blinds, pulled on my XXL flannel nightshirt (I know, I know) and came into my study. Been searching ideas for an indoor herb garden right off past my computer monitor, to become a reality on the new plant stands off to my left and right underneath the south-facing windows whose sills are just a couple feet off the floor. This'll be fun.

I'm going to dabble with succulents. Tell me not to do it. I challenge you. Tell me.

When I stole that look out the window earlier, there was no snow. Now, at 7:15, the white stuff is falling and there's a perceivable dusting on cars beneath my window, and driveways and sidewalks out there are also nicely dusted. The streets are not, though a spread of snowfall is beginning to inch out onto the road. It's been pretty much bitterly cold this past couple weeks, cold enough to host a solid snowfall, and it's predicted that it will be falling all day.

Fun.

Funny how every snow reminds one of every snow before. That effect is stronger in temperate climes, especially one such as mine, which shares up every one of the four seasons and their annual sublties each year. When I lived in Alaska, of course, this would be a really mild winter day since, in the Anchorage winter I recall snow cover almost all winter long. No, the snows before that I recall every new snow are those in Nashville, the Nashville of my black and white then color youth.

Luckily, there's nothing on my calendar but "water the plants" today. I'll do that, and I'll lightly fertilize. Look at me, growing into my middle name, "Gardner" in my late blooming years. I'm going to fill those plant stands with

To address the elephant, it's just that I'm daily awed by the fact that I still arise each morning with a curiosity, filled with wonder about how the day's going to go. What will I make today? I am pushing 75 this year and if this old body didn't betray it constantly, I don't feel much older than my 20s. Go Figger.

Here. I'll take a picture of what I'm "working" on in the studio. Then later, I'll come back and post its sister image, its time-enhanced completion, its worthy product. Here:

my two current paintings and their digital photo sources onscreen for reference

underpainting for "lemongirl's lost tongue"

Okay, enough of that. If I forget to follow up on my earlier promise, you will be able to view the completed painting at my site, scottmerrick.me. I'm pretty good about upkeep there.

So yeah, though I've been telling people for years that I don't feel a day over 90, that's less and less true week by week. I'm listening to Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses on Audible, and I recently heard a segment where John Grady and Rawlings, in prison, marveled at the fact that an elderly prisoner had stopped being tortured in their current home, a Mexican prison. They mused that perhaps there was just no satisfaction in torturing the old, since they already live in pain. It struck a chord, pal, it struck a chord.

I refuse to elaborate on mine, the only exception being when talking to my doctor. If my honey asks why I'm wincing, I tend to answer briefly and stop wincing, as much as I can. It's not that I'm too proud to admit to having pain, I just think that adding words to the world which create negative vibes is a counter-spiritual thing to do. Anyway.

After several diversions away from my desk, I return to close this out. It's 10:16am in Nashville and the snow is falling just the same as it was at 7:15. I'd guestimate a couple inches as of now, and the forecast is for heavy snow another 10 hours. We'll see. Here's a little vid taken earlier...

out my studio window, around and back

Peace out. Stay housed, fed, and loved.

Kinda Day, revisited :)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 14:58:00 +0000

Well okay then.

It's nearly Christmas, and I am a happy old dad with both of our children in my city of birth for a few days. Miranda, of course, lives in Brentwood and is blowing away her career in social work at her highly responsible position at the Sexual Assault Center in Nashville. Anytime we can get together and I can get a hug and look her in her beautiful eyes is a good time, but it's especially so when I can look over and up at her "little" brother, Colin. He's sleeping this morning in our guest room beneath my artist's studio here on the 2nd floor. It's only been a few days, but we are enjoying every moment we have with him.

I'll get up before dawn's crack on Friday to get him out to the airport and on the way back to his life and home in Missoula, Montana, where he's

going to school at the U of Montana,
majoring in sound design and engineering,
working one part-time job at a food cart and
starting another when he returns home, as production engineer for the college radio station, KBGA 89.9,
Producing and deejaying his own weekly show at Missoula Community Radio 101.5,
working with Daisy Chain Presents, a small group in a founder's position to bring a constant stream of live bands into Missoula venues,
playing music with other extraordinarily talented friends in 3 1/2 bands,
and producing music independently, writing and playing on bass and electric guitars

Here in Nashville, he's thoughtfully balancing his time with us with a slew of friends, some of whom are passing through our fair town enroute to other places these holiday weeks, side-tracking through here especially just to see him. Missoula is a long way away. He's visiting old and new Nashville haunts with these old friends and with new ones he's meeting.

Anyway, I just wanted to pop in to share something kinda special. It's one of my songs we jammed on together in our living room a couple days ago. Present were Matt Mellon (yes, of Magic Metal Designs fame), my dear son-in-law Tim Buell (yes, of "You're Good, Get Better" podcast fame), the famous Colin Merrick, and moi, obscure songwriter, sometime blogger, and rogue painterly artist.

Matt is an artful songwriter himself, and I am sad we didn't record some of his songs we did together. In fact, the only song we recorded, thanks to Tim's suggestion we do so and to Colin's iPhone on the coffee table, was one of mine. If you've listened to my "Songs for Alaska" album, long available on streaming platforms, you've heard it. I really liked this version, thanks in part to Matt's work on my acoustic/electric bass, Colin's on my SG Standard electric guitar, and to Tim's masterful drumming on his very cool Toca Percussion Kickboxx Suitcase Drum Set (thanks, Sweetwater!).

It's a one-take kinda thing, but boy-o-boy was it fun. It's a happy song and I'm proud of it, and of my dear dear friends and family. Matt's soliloquy at the beginning and our chatter added some real color to it. I totally agree with Matt's assessment at the very end. Thanks to my compadres for a fun-ass day at Chez Merrique. Listen to...

a weird pano

Kinda Day, by li'l ol' me

Everyone have a wonderful end of 2024 and stay well, safe, and sane in the upcoming dumpster fire year. Keep your head down, your heart up, and your creativity cookin'.

Chat GPT Shortshort: "The Birthday Wish"

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 15:19:00 +0000

Note: If he really wants to shake up the world and establish his place in history as the political spoiler he has always claimed to be, something like this could be the beginning of the turn toward it, remolding his own legacy as the most caring, positive, and progressive leader in the history of the world. May 25 is my birthday.

The Birthday Wish

By ChatGPT 4.0, creative prompt by Scott Merrick

The Nomination

It was May 25, 2025, and the country had been on edge for months. The death of Justice Clarence Thomas had left a deep void on the Supreme Court, and in the weeks that followed, the media had speculated endlessly about who would fill the seat. The nation had seen an unprecedented political climate over the past few years, and every major decision seemed to feel like a spark in a powder keg.

That morning, President Donald Trump sat in front of a camera in the Oval Office, the familiar blue tie hanging loosely around his neck. His usual confidence was tempered by the gravity of the announcement he was about to make. The livestream had just started, and thousands of people across the country—Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike—were waiting for the news.

“Good afternoon, my fellow Americans,” Trump began, his voice steady but tinged with something else, something like resolve. “As you know, earlier this month we lost a great justice, Clarence Thomas. A man who served this nation with honor, with unwavering principle. And now, it is my solemn duty to nominate someone who will continue his legacy, someone who will uphold the Constitution, the rule of law, and the rights of every American.”

There was a moment of silence. His audience, half of which was no doubt anticipating the name of a staunch conservative, leaned in closer to their screens. But what Trump said next left them stunned.

“That’s why today, I am proud to announce that I am nominating… Kamala Harris, former Vice President of the United States, to the Supreme Court.”

A sharp intake of breath rippled through the livestream chat. Twitter erupted in confusion, disbelief, and outrage. The idea of Trump, a Republican president, nominating a Democrat—Kamala Harris, no less—was as shocking as it was unprecedented.

Trump gave a brief smile, his hands folded in front of him. "You all remember her, right? She's tough, smart, and knows the law. I think you’ll all be surprised at how well she’ll fit in. It’s time for a change—an unexpected change."

### **The Reaction**

Within minutes, pundits on both sides of the aisle were reacting.

“Well, that’s one way to unite a fractured nation,” a Republican commentator quipped, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “A former vice president, a known progressive, nominated by a president who’s spent the last decade denouncing everything she stands for? Pure genius, or pure madness. You decide.”

On the left, liberals were equally flummoxed. "Is this a joke?" one headline read. "Kamala Harris: The Last Person We Expected to See in This Moment." Social media was on fire with debates over whether it was an act of reconciliation or political theater designed to confuse.

Across the country, a ripple effect spread through Washington D.C. Senators, both Democrat and Republican, were left scrambling. Some called the nomination "a political maneuver" while others wondered if Trump was setting the stage for something bigger—an attempt to transcend partisan divides, to shift the political calculus of the coming elections.

Kamala Harris herself was caught off guard. She had been in her office in California when she received a call from the White House. It had taken a moment for her to process the words.

“Mr. President,” she said, her voice measured but filled with disbelief. “You’re serious?”

“Very,” Trump replied. “You’ve got my full support. I know it sounds crazy, but we need someone who understands both sides. You’re the perfect person for the job.”

After a long silence, Harris replied. “I never thought I'd be sitting across from you again in this kind of way... but I’ll consider it.”

The Confirmation Battle

Within days, the hearings began. It was a spectacle unlike any other. Harris, seated at the witness table, was cool and composed as senators from both parties launched into their questioning. They had come prepared to attack, to dissect her record, her policies, her entire career. But there was something different this time.

Trump’s unprecedented nomination had left the typical partisan attacks on the backburner. Both sides found themselves, strangely, united in their confusion. There was no clear precedent for how to react. A Democrat in a conservative-majority court? Or was this an opportunity to reach across the aisle?

Senator Lindsey Graham, a long-time ally of Trump, stared across the room at Harris during the hearings and found himself unable to fully oppose her. “I disagree with nearly everything she’s stood for,” he said in his opening statement. “But I’ve always respected her intelligence. This is a wild card, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

Senator Elizabeth Warren, sitting on the other side of the aisle, was less circumspect. “This is a grave mistake. Kamala Harris is too much of a partisan for this position,” she declared, pounding her fist on the table. “We need someone who represents the people, not a politician with a divided agenda.”

But as the questioning continued, it became apparent that the confirmation hearings weren’t simply about Harris’s political ideology. They were about trust. Could America trust a decision as volatile as this one? Could Kamala Harris, with her deep ties to the Democratic Party, truly represent the full spectrum of the nation’s values?

The Unexpected Victory

In the weeks that followed, the country braced for the vote. Public opinion was divided, with both sides feeling the pressure to assert their influence over the proceedings. But when the final vote came—miraculously—it was a narrow victory. Kamala Harris was confirmed as the next Justice of the Supreme Court.

The nation reacted in shock and awe. The news spread like wildfire, and the political analysts quickly set to work trying to decode the true meaning of the nomination. Was this a masterstroke by Trump? Or was it a gamble that had somehow paid off?

In her first public statement after the confirmation, Justice Harris stood before the cameras, a figure of strength and composure.

“This country is divided, there’s no denying that. But I’m here to remind us all that the Constitution is our common ground. We all agree on that. And I will work every day to serve all of America, regardless of party or persuasion. My goal is simple: justice for all.”

As she spoke, the reality began to sink in. America had just entered a new era, one in which nothing could be taken for granted. Even the most improbable, the most impossible, things could—and would—happen.

And with Justice Kamala Harris now sitting on the Supreme Court, the future of the nation was more uncertain—and more exciting—than it had ever been.

Happy November (one hopes)

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Sun, 03 Nov 2024 13:42:00 +0000

Just popping in to share some of my daughter's music. She belongs to an independent, non-secular choir called Sonos. You can learn more at their website, but you can also learn more by listening to their newly released live album, created from performances in Nashville and beyond. It's stellar...

Woo woo! Two posts in one calendar month!

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Wed, 30 Oct 2024 14:22:00 +0000

What's the world coming to? Well, now, that's a question, now isn't it.

I can only speak for my own.

It's good. Stressed about the election on Tuesday of next week. But making the prediction that turnout will be high and remaining confident it will be so in favor of reason, kindness, and joy.

Indeed, part of today's motivation to post is that independent media may well be under attack after Tuesday, if things go particularly bad. We don't need a fascist narcissist at the head of the government. But if I believed in polls I would perhaps be packing right now. The scary part (in my essentially non-political mind) is that, due to the ancient and pointless Electoral College system Vice President Harris may win the popular vote by a landslide and lose the presidency according to that system. Sigh.

On more ground-level news, I spent a couple nights up at my favorite campsite at Lock A Campground last week. The reservation was for Monday and Tuesday nights, and I got up there around 2-pm Monday and took my time setting up my new tent at campsite #45, my little Holy Land. It was a breeze, and the Core 6 person Instant Setup. tent is sooooo happymaking. Here's a pic:

My home away from home at Cheatham Dam's Lock A Campground.

The first thing I put inside the tent was my camping air mattress, seen above acting in its new role as doormat. I blew it up not with a pump, but with my breath, counting around 150 lungsful before its 5 air chambers were in bedtime shape. Checking on it at dusk, I found two chambers flat as a proverbial pancake. I zipped up tight, grabbed my keys, and drove the 10 or so miles into Ashland City and past to the Walmart store, picking up one more bundle of firewood and a home floor air mattress. This baby has a built in electric pump for inflation and deflation. OMG, this is a life-changer, or at least a camping life-changer. The thing, once inflated, is a smooth 6-8 inch layer of air between me and the earth and stays inflated. And it cost less than the frickin' camping mattress. Win win win.

I had a little ceramic heater in my tent and ran it all night, but at 42 degrees outside all it could do is heat a small area directly in font of it. It did not help that the tent was significantly larger than my 4 person one. I awoke at around 4 in the morning, 'way prior to sunrise, and spent a couple hours reading in my little 40 degree rated sleeping bag. Light awakened me and I arose, spending the morning simply cooking, boiling water for coffee, eating breakfast, and cleaning up. I fished some, but it's awkward fishing off that Army Core of Engineers large granite and sandstone cluttered shore.

Around 1 pm I grabbed my Montana lodgepole pine hiking staff and headed off to hike for 2 hours or so, taking the camp trail east from the campground and hooking into the gorgeous Cumberland River Bicentennial trail that follows the river bank all the way to Chapmansboro and Sycamore Creek. So beautiful. Here's a pano I took along the way:

Cumberland River Bicentennial Trail, east to the left and back to the campground west on the right. Doubleclick to scroll through the pano. This stump marks my turnaround point. I'll be back to do the whole thing one day.

A Great little walk (not sure I could classify it as a "hike," but it felt great to have that quiet time in nature).

Here is my Google Album from the early-in-the-week weekend.

Fall Fall Fall

noreply@blogger.com (Scott Merrick) — Sun, 06 Oct 2024 14:42:00 +0000

To everything, Fall, Fall, Fall, there is a season, Fall, Fall, Fall...

And so here we are, October 6, a full 15 days into Fall. There's a lot going on, there's nothing going on, and everything in between. I'm up before dawn, after a lovely night's sleep beside my honey, with our dog at my feet and Google still laboring away to "play the sound of the ocean." I got up to use the bathroom and when I returned to bed my place was taken by pooch Lemon, who had relocated to locate her whole 85 pound furry self sideways across my pillow. No room for the old man, eh?

From Forbes Magazine: "Comet A3 will now dip from dawn into the sun’s glare, getting closer to our sun until it passes through to the other side — sunset. It will re-emerge in twilight around Oct. 12 for those in the northern hemisphere and should be easily visible — and possibly super-bright — for around two weeks."

That's one thing going on, for sure.

I hope to get out for a night or two camping in order to view this thing. It's rare, I gather, and I also intuit, since I've never really viewed a comet in the sky and I'm approaching my 75th trip around the sun.

I've got a couple musical adventures this week. My brother-from-two-other-mothers, Rocky, has been invited by his friend Don Henry, songwriter extraordinaire, to attend his party at Vinyl Tap Records, to which one must wear some attempt at Halloween appearance, and he has in turn invited me to come along. I saw Henry at an event just a couple weeks ago, one which was not officially connected to Americana Fest here in Nashville but coincided with it. The event took place at the Roof Top lounge downtown, and its purpose was to honor Rocky for his songwriting accomplishments, including creating the music for the Grammy nominated "The Mighty Sky" science-themed record. On the little stage in the corner Beth Nielsen Chapman, Don, and Matraca Berg, took turns singing songs, some from Mighty Sky but also others of their choice. It was an endearing performance, each singer singing maybe 4 or 5 songs, and Matraca Berg's husband, Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's Jeff Hanna, got up from his hors d'oeuvres to sing "Mr. Bojangles," the Jerry Jeff Walker folk classic his band helped make a standard.

Honor event for my dear pal Rocky Alvey (orange cap)

The Wonder Women of Country at WMOT Americana Fest Day Stage, Eastside Bowl

Nielsen Chapman presented Rocky with a bangin' glass trophy to mark the occasion, and the proud brother Scott exited to the street to head out on his second night of Americana Fest 2024.

Ah, Americana Fest. I had hoarded my Festival Pass ticket for months, purchasing it like back in March, very soon after they became available. I was most excited about two performers, Madi Diaz and Chris Smither, the first of whom I did not see for reasons I will reveal, and the second of whom I saw perform two substantial sets and two venues over the September 17-21 time spread. I saw but a fraction of the performances at only a handful of the venues where they were taking place, but friends, this was the best ~100 dollars I spent last year.

See the full schedule here.

When I look back at that, it's pretty amazing that I only saw a few shows, but then I'm old and I was just the other side of a pretty nasty bout with Covid.

In order, though, I saw:

City Winery main room: A Tribute to Mary Gauthier, Mary Gauthier, Jaimee Harris, Rodney Crowell, Aaron Lee Tasjan, Creekbed Carter Hogan, Emmylou Harris, Gretchen Peters w/ Barry Walsh, and more...
Silver and Festival Passes Only
City Winery main room: "25 Years of "Drag Queens and Limousines", Jaimee Harris, Mary Gauthier
Silver and Festival Passes Only
Vinyl Tap: Oh Boy! Records "Independents' Day" afternoon hangout
At home, the fantastic 2024 Americana Music Awards live from The Ryman Auditorium. I was just a bit beat from earlier activities, so I jacked up the stereo Google Hubs in the living room, poured me a bourbon, snuggled with my fluffy Grand Pyrenees mix, Lemon, and listened to the show from top to bottom without any Mother Church columns in my viewing path (I had no viewing path, though I later learned it was livestreamed). I enjoyed simply immersing myself in the audio in my living room, but I highly recommend you view the entire night's events at WMOT.org -- it includes performances "from award-winning legends, buzzworthy new artists and longtime fan favorites, including Blind Boys of Alabama, Brandy Clark with SistaStrings, Charles Wesley Godwin, Dave Alvin, Dwight Yoakam, Fantastic Negrito, Hurray for the Riff Raff, Jobi Riccio, Kaitlin Butts, Larkin Poe, The Milk Carton Kids, Noah Kahan, Sarah Jarosz, Shelby Lynne, Sierra Ferrell, Turnpike Troubadours, The War And Treaty, Waxahatchee with MJ Lenderman, and Wyatt Flores."
Eastside Bowl: WMOT Day Stage 12 to 5 pm, featuring Chris Smither, Leyla McCalla, Melissa Carper, Sam Morrow, Uncle Lucius
City Winery Lounge: Betty Soo, then Chris Smither.
Basement East: I really wanted to see Madi Diaz so after Chris Smither finished, above, I took a Lyft over and managed to get inside the venue, only to judge it a veritable Covid cesspool. I swear it was body to body packed with sweating 20-30 year-olds and also older folks like myself, and the stage fog hung unmoving in the stage lights and in the room--a clear clue the air circulation was dysfunctional. Spotlights played on the performer onstage (not sure who it was, a young dark haired male rocker) and after finding myself just inside the door and, daunted by the huge clump of sweat-dripping humans between me and the bar, I reluctantly turned tail and took the next Lyft home.
Alisa Amador, Amy Helm, Dave Alvin & Jimmie Dale Gilmore with The Guilty Ones, The Cactus Blossoms, and Wonder Women of Country again at the Basement East WMOT Day Stage.

There were shows Saturday, but I, ya'll, was done. I really only wanted to attend the Americana Music Association meeting that morning, but I had an epiphany based on an old (not original) axiom from my teaching days: "The best way to make your next meeting productive is to cancel it." I stayed home, caught up on some rest, and embraced the next stage of my future.

You can see nearly all my photos, with some short video snippets, at my Google Album, "Scott's Americana Fest 2024" anytime you want to.

Heck, let's embed that Honors Award show at the Ryman, to save you a click or two (via YouTube):

scottmerrickdotnet

Nature Writing Reading

The (first) ice storm of 2026

Lots of Work on scottmerrick.me

Shakespeare was a Big George Jones Fan

Oh! Virtual Learning! The Book!

Scottmerrickdotme Gallery in Second Life

iGtab Start Page and more

Camping at Lock A, Cheatham Dam, This Past Week

My Americana Fest 2025!

"The 21" Revised

How to Spot an AI "Hallucination" (and you're welcome)

ChatGPT said:

You said:

ChatGPT said:

You said:

ChatGPT said:

You said:

ChatGPT said:

1. Split the claim into separate facts

2. Watch for “anchoring” with real names & dates

3. Separate fact from interpretation

4. Verify the specifics, not just the gist

5. Look for “too-perfect” storytelling

Pro tip:

You said:

ChatGPT said:

Hallucinated Claim (Insidious Version)

1. States introduced emergency voting restrictions in 2025

2. Supreme Court declined to hear multiple challenges in January 2025

3. Washington Post editorial stating this “signaled the functional end of democratic norms”

4. Interpretation as “democracy was dead”

Summary Table

Takeaway

You said:

ChatGPT said:

Montana Trip

To Missoula on Sunday!

Nearly a Quarter of a Millineum, RIP Democracy, July 4 2025

new poem, re my personally internalized mantra...

Complexion of My Love

A Bit o' April

I wasn't aware the deep state was all Park Rangers

GladdIIator: a bit of a dud

First snow of 2025...

Kinda Day, revisited :)

Chat GPT Shortshort: "The Birthday Wish"

Happy November (one hopes)

Woo woo! Two posts in one calendar month!

Fall Fall Fall

**4. Verify the specifics, not just the gist**