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Addicted to the Internets

I think part of the reason I’m so hopelessly addicted to the internet right now is that I am constantly searching for some good news, for some relief from the horrible, morally-draining, depressing situation this country finds itself in.

Every time I log in, I hope to be greeted with some screaming headline like:

or

or

Or any number of other things that only fear for my own karma prevent me from publicly stating. But sadly, it seems every login only brings more news of the America we know and love being systematically destroyed by the Russian Puppet, one of his cloven-hoofed minions, or the Republican Congress (a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Russian Federation) all while the media is spewing BULLSHIT with absolutely no push-back happening whatsoever.

And what’s worse is it feels like we are powerless to stop it.

John Ossoff’s loss last night to Karen Handel didn’t help matters. So many of us had viewed that as a bellwether of the 2018 mid-terms and in fact, despite the initially demoralizing loss, it may still be. GA06 was a deep red district that went overwhelmingly to Trump and whose last Republican handedly won over his Democratic challenger by 21%. Handel won by only 4%. If that can happen in a red district, imagine what could happen in a purple one…

Surprisingly perhaps, I still save faith in our system and that the country will eventually wake from this nightmare; we’ve endured worse and have come through a better people because of it—but I am impatient and I want it to be over with now. I want to be able to go back to sleeping soundly at night. I don’t want to be walking around in a continual cloud of depression. I don’t want to have to think about what the President is doing, because I know he’s an adult, and has this country’s best interest at heart.

In short, I want to see that illegitimate bastard currently occupying the White House and every one of his associates dragged away in chains. But thanks to the likes of The Palmer Report (whose every lede and bit of reporting has been borne out as factual) and others, I know the wheels of justice are turning; just not as quickly as I’d like. But impeachment is not something to be rushed. It takes time; all the i’s must be dotted and the t’s crossed if we are to rid ourselves of the criminal cabal currently dismantling our country and destroying our place in the world.

When I finally shuffle off this mortal coil I want the ferret-wearing, cheeto-faced shitgibbon and his willfully ignorant, red-capped lunatic followers to be but a distant memory, a cancer was successfully eradicated from the body politic, and if that takes a longer than I’d like, it will be worth it.

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American Gods Went Out With a Bang

Season One of American Gods wrapped up last night, and while it answered many of the questions it’s posed, it has also left me wanting so much more. Only 8 episodes? That seems like just a prologue! Really STARZ?

Okay, I get it. This wild, crazy, visually stunning show is an expensive undertaking. The sets, constuming, and special effects are absolutely cinematic. But only 8 episodes and we have to wait how long for Season Two?

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Quote of the Day

Oh, there are a lot of lousy people in the world. Also, a lot of terrific people. You’ve gotta remember that, and you’ve got to move in the right circles. I have days where I just want everyone to go fuck themselves or walk off a cliff, but I only say that to myself, and I smile and I walk home and I have some tea, I talk to Garson [Kanin, her husband], I might take a nap. Then I wake up and I write, and in writing, I wipe away all the unpleasantness of the day, of the people, of the city, whatever. We have it in our power to overcome assholes, and I think we have them thrown into our path to see if we have the chops to handle them. Handle them.” ~ Ruth Gordon, American Actress, 1984

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Shower Thoughts

I lived a musically sheltered life, so I’m just now realizing that quite a few of the disco tunes I loved and shook my booty to in my teens and twenties were nothing more than covers of songs done in the 50s and 60s.

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Gratuitous Sam Elliott

Because he came up in conversation the other day and the 72 year old still-studly actor has a new movie coming out.

Mr. Elliott, do you even know how many hours of masturbatory fodder you provided for gay boys growing up in the 70s with Lifeguard? DO YOU?

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Just Think…

…it only would’ve taken one to prevent our current national nightmare.
And yet I can’t help thinking if not Trump, it would’ve been someone else, equally vile. The current occupant of the White House is merely indicative of a lesson this country—and indeed all of humanity—needs to learn.

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Canon Jesus is Better Than Fandom Jesus

While historical scholars are increasingly doubting the fact he even existed, this is an interesting take on one JC:

Jesus Christ was a brown Jew in the Middle East, conceived out of wedlock in an arguably interracial if not interspecies (deity and human) relationship, raised by his mother and stepfather in place of his absent father.  He may not have had a Y chromosome.  He spent his early youth as a refugee in Egypt, where his family no doubt survived initially on handouts from the wealthy (You think they kept that gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the wise men?  Hell no, they sold that stuff for food and lodging).  He later returned with his parents to their occupied homeland and lived in poverty.

The religion of Jesus’s people has no concept of a permanent hell and instructed its priests on how to induce miscarriages.  Jesus explicitly rejected the concept of disability as a divine punishment.  He spoke out against religious hypocrites.  He had enough respect for women to let his mother choose the time of his first miracle.  He blessed a same sex couple.  He told a rich man that he must give up his wealth to get to heaven, and also told a parable about a rich man suffering in agony in presumably Gehinnom (basically Purgatory) just to hammer the point home.  He told people to pay their taxes.  He declared “love your neighbor” to be one of the two commandments on which all laws hang.  He commanded his followers to help the poor.  He commanded them to help the sick and the needy.  He spent time with social outcasts.  He healed the servant of a high priest during his arrest rather than fighting back.  He was put to death by the occupying government because he was a political radical.

Trump and his administration are xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, fear-mongering, warmongering, tax-dodging, anti-Semitic, anti-choice, anti-welfare, anti-equal pay, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, support tax cuts for the rich, support Citizen’s United, want to keep refugees out of this country, want to limit our ability to speak against the government, plan to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and they wrap all of that up behind a banner of “Christian family values.”  If you support them, you have no right to call yourself a follower of Christ.

(Source)

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Flip Or Flop

One of our favorite “unscripted” home renovation programs over the years has been HGTV’s Flip or Flop. Unlike most of the shows of this genre—especially Flipping Vegas—the hosts, Tarek and Christina El Moussa, seemed to have the least amount of on-screen drama of any of them. (What we’ve subsequently learned about their off-screen drama is another matter entirely however.) They always seemed to know what they were doing, didn’t act too surprised when they encountered unexpected expenses during the renovations, and generally speaking, Christina’s taste wasn’t half bad (the same cannot be said of the hosts of HGTV’s current offshoot program, Flip or Flop Las Vegas (Maybe it’s just a Las Vegas thing?) but those ruminations are better left to a subsequent post.

Anyhow…

While this house on Cerecita Drive in Whittier, California itself is architecturally butt-ugly, I do like what Tarek and Christina did with it—and I especially like the colors, finishes, and the final staging. Of all the houses they’ve done, I think this is actually one of my all-time favorites. I could easily see us living there.

I like the turquoise, gray and white color scheme. The only thing I would’ve done differently is to continue to wrap it (and the horizontal siding and molding) around the garage as well so the garage didn’t look like so much of an afterthought.

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Shower Thoughts

Why has no flat earther ever decided to mount an expedition to the edge of the earth and take a picture to prove their point once and for all?

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Quote Of The Day

Always ahead of his time.

The far right cannot discount the fact that sitting in their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.” ~ Rod Serling, 1960

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Some Things Never Change

So I was visiting the Wayback Machine today to see if they’d managed to archive anything of importance from my pre-2012 blog—you know, the one I wiped out in an impulsive fit prior to moving to Denver because I’d sent out emails to several recruiters there with a link to it in my signature. (Lesson Learned and to be filed under: How not to make a good first impression.)

While obviously all the salacious graphics are unavailable and overall the captures are spotty (lots of pages from the end of months, but nothing from the beginnings), I am finding that there’s some interesting stuff stored there that is worth pulling back into this blog retroactively.

One post I ran across had me giggling. It’s seven years old now, but some things never change:

Dear Employee:

First of all, I have no idea how you got hired for the technology-intensive position you occupy. I can understand not being familiar with some of the specialized applications we use here, but with it being 2010 and not 1980, I would have thought that demonstrating at least a basic understanding of how Windows and Microsoft Office operate would be a requirement for employment at this organization. Obviously I was mistaken.

Secondly, many of your issues (at least the ones concerning your computer equipment) can be solved by simply rebooting.  Oh wait, “rebooting” is one of those complicated “techie” words.  Let me rephrase: “Turn your computer off and turn it back on.”  No, not the display; I’m talking about the tower that’s on the floor.

Thirdly, your CD drive will not play a DVD, and whining about it won’t change that fact.  I don’t care if it is work related and you have to see it NOW.  Am I supposed to pull a DVD drive out of my ass? Your director needs to request a quote and if he approves the purchase it normally takes about a week to receive it.

Fourth, all requests for assistance MUST go through the Help Desk, regardless of how incompetent they really are over there. (Something I think we can both agree on.) This is drummed into you folks from your very first new hire orientation, yet you still think that by calling me directly, emailing, or stopping me in the hall your problem will get looked at quicker.  It won’t.  And don’t send me an email at 10pm because your mouse isn’t working and then get all snarky the next morning because I didn’t respond. I do not check email after I leave work.  If you followed procedure and called the frigging Help Desk like you should have, your problem might have been solved then and there, as unlikely a scenario as that is. At the very least they would’ve had the on-call tech get in touch with you.

And lastly, the volume of whining you do has a direct inverse effect on the priority I place on your problem.  Despite what you may believe, yours is not the most important job in this organization and business will not come to a grinding halt because you can’t VPN from home.  If what you need to do is that important, get off your ass and come into the office like the rest of us.

Thank you, and you have yourself a great day!

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The Future of High Fidelity

I was cleaning stuff out over the weekend and ran across a file folder full of clippings I’d kept from various sources over the years.  I was a big hi-fi geek in high school and college, and one of the articles I kept that I’d always loved was a bit of fiction from the mind of Larry Klein, published July 1977 in the magazine Stereo Review, describing the history of audio reproduction as told from a future perspective.  Since the piece was written many years in advance of the personal computer revolution, the author was wildly off-base with some of his ideas, but others have manifested so close in concept—if not exact form—that I can’t help but wonder if many young engineers of the day took them to heart in order to bring them to fruition.

And I would be very surprised indeed if one or more of the writers of Brainstorm had not read the section on neural implants, if only in passing…

Two Hundred Years of Recording

The fact that this year, 2077, is the Bicentennial of sound recording has gone virtually unnoticed. The reason is clear: electronic recording in all its manifestations so pervades our everyday lives that it is difficult to see it as a separate art or science, or even in any kind of historical perspective.  There is, nevertheless, an unbroken evolutionary chain linking today’s “encee” experience and Edison’s successful first attempt to emboss a nursery rhyme on a tinfoil-coated cylinder.

Elsewhere in this Transfax printout you will find an article from our archives dealing with the first one hundred years of recording. Although today’s record/reproduce technology has literally nothing in common with those first primitive, mechanical attempts to preserve a sonic experience, it is instruction from a historical and philosophical perspective to examine the development of what was to become known as “high fidelity.”

Primitive Audio

It is clear from the writings of the time that the period just after the year 1950 was the turning point for sound reproduction. For a variety of sociological, economic, and technological reasons, the pursuit of accurate sound reproduction suddenly evolved from the passionate pastime of a few engineers and Bell Laboratories scientists into a multimillion-dollar industry. In the space of only fifteen years, “hi-fi” became virtually a mass-market commodity and certainly a household term. In the late 1970s, the first primitive microprocessors (miniature computer type logic-plus-memory devices) appeared in home audio equipment. These permitted the user to program was was known as an “FM tuner,” record player,” or “tape recorder” to follow a certain procedure in delivering broadcast or recorded material.

For those who are not collectors of those antique audio devices, which employed “records” or “tapes,” such terms require explanation. From its earliest beginning, recording employed an analog technique. This means that whatever sound was to be preserved and subsequently reproduced was converted to an equivalent corresponding mechanical irregularity on a surface. When playback was desired, this irregularity was detected or “read” by a mechanical sensing device and directly (later, indirectly) reconverted into sound. It may be difficult to believe, but if, say, a middle-A tone (which corresponds to air vibrating at a rate of 440 times per second) was recorded, the signatl would actually consists of a series of undulations or bumps which would be made to travel under a very fine-pointed stylus at a rate of 440 undulations per second. Looking back from a present-day perspective, it seems a wonder that this sort of crude mechanical technique worked at all—and a veritable miracle that it worked as well as it did.

The End of Analog

Magnetic recording first came into prominence in the 1950s. Instead of undulations on the walls of a groove molded in a nominally flat vinyl disc, there were a series of magnetic patterns laid down on very long lengths of of thin plastic tape coated on one side with a readily magnetized material. However, the system was still analog in principle, since if the 440-Hz tone was magnetically recorded, 440 cycles of magnetic flux passed by the reproducing head in playback. All analog systems—no matter what the format—suffered the same inherent problem (susceptibility to noise and distortion), and the drive for further improvement caused the development of the digital audio recorder.

Simply explained, the digital recording technique “samples” the signal, say, 50,000 tiles a second, and for each instant of sampling it assigns a digitally encoded number that indicates the relative amplitude of the signal at that moment. Even the most complex signal can be assigned one number that will totally describe it for an instant in time if the “instant” chosen is brief enough. The more complex the signal, the greater the number of samples needed to represent it properly in encoded form.

In the late Seventies and earl Eighties, digital audio tape recording proliferated on the professional level, and slightly later it also became standard for the home recordist. Many of the better home videotape recording systems were adaptable for audio recording; they either came with built-in video-to-audio switching or had accessory converters available.

The video disc, first announced in the late 1960s, progressed rapidly along its own independent path, since it benefited from many of the same technical developments as the other home video and digital products. B the mid 1980s a variety of video-disc player were available that, when fed the proper disc, could provide both large-screen video programs with stereo sound or multichannel audio with separate reverb-only channels. The fat semiconductor RV screen that was available in any size desired appeared in the early 1980s. It was the inevitable outgrowth of the light-emitting diode (LED) technology that provided the readouts for the electronic watches and calculators that were ubiquitous during the early 1970s. Later in the decade, giant-screen home video faced competition from holographic recording/playback technique. Whether the viewer preferred a three-dimensional image than was necessarily limited in size and confined (somewhat) in spatial perspective or a life-size two-dimensional one ultimately came down to the specifics of the program material. In any case, the two non-compatible formats competed for the next twenty years or so.

LSI, RAM, and ROM

By the late 1980s, the pocket computer (not calculator) had become a reality. Here too, the evolutionary trend had been clearly visible for some time. The first integrated circuits were built in the late 1950s with only one active component per “chip.” By the end of the Seventies, some LSI (large-scale integrated circuit) chips had over 30,000 components, and RAM (random-access memory) and ROM (read-only memory) microprocessor chips became almost as common as resistors in the hi-fi gear of the early 1980s. ADC’s Accutrac turntable (ca. 1976) was the first product resulting from (in their phrase) “the marriage of a computer and an audio component.” The progeny of this miscegenation was the forerunner of a host of automatic audio components that could remember stations, search out selections, adjust controls, prevent audio mishaps, monitor performance, and in general make equipment operation easier while offering greater fidelity than ever before. As a critic of the period wrote, “This new generation of computerized audio equipment will take care of everything for the audiophile except the listening.” Shortly thereafter, the equipment did begin to “listen” also, and soon any audiophile without a totally voice-controlled system (keyed, of course only to his own vocal patterns) felt very much behind the times. One could also verbally program the next selection—or the next one hundred.

“Resident” Computers

The turn of the century saw LSI chips with million-bit memories and perhaps 250 logic circuits—and the eruption of two controversies, one major and one minor. The major controversy would have been familiar to those of our ancestors who were involved in the cable-vs-broadcast TV hassles during the 197os and later. The big question in the year 2000 was the advantage of “time sharing” compared with “resident” computers for program storage.

Since the 1950s the need for fast out put and large memory-storage capacity had drien designers into ever more sophisticated devices, most of them derived from fundamental research in solid-state physics. The late 1970s, a period of rapid advances, saw the primitive beginnings of numerous different technologies, including the charge-transfer device (CTD), the surface acoustic-wave deivce (SAW), and the charge-coupled device (CCD), each of which had special attributes and ultimately was pressed into the service of sound reproduction processing and memory. The development of the technique of molecular-beam eipitaxy (which enabled chips to be fabricated by bombarding them with molecular beams) eventually led to superconductor (rather than semiconductor) LSIs and molecular –tag memory (MTM) devices. Super-fast and with a fantastically large storage capacity, the MTM chips functioned as the heart of the pocket-size ROM cartridge (or “cart” as it was known) that contained the equivalent of hundreds of primitive LP discs.

The read-only memory of the MT carts could provide only the music that had been “hard-programmed” into them. This was fine for the classical music buff, sicne it was possible to buy the complete works of, say, Bach, Beethoven, and Carter in a variety of performances all in one MT cart and still have molecules left over for the complete works of Stravinsky, Copland, Smythe, and Kuzo. However, anyone concerned with keeping his music library up to date with the latest Rama-rock releases or Martian crystal-tone productions obviously needed a programmable memory. But how would the new program get to the resident computer and in what format?

By this time, every home naturally had a direct cable to a master time-sharing computer whose memory banks were contantly being updated with the latest compositions and performances. That was just one of its minor facilities, of course, but music listeners who subscribed to the service needed only request a desired selection and it would be fed and stored in their RAM memory units. Those audiophiles who derived no ego gratification from owning an enormous library of MT carts could simply use the main computer feed directly and avoid the redundance of storing program material at home. Everyone was wired anyway, directly, to the National Computer by ultra-wide-bandwidth cable. The cable normally handled multichannel audio-video transmissions in addition to personal communication, bill-paying, voting, etc., and, of course, the Transfax printout you are now reading.

Creative Options

The other controversy mentioned, a relatively minor one, involved a question of creative aesthetics. The equalizers used by the primitive analog audiophiles provided the ability to second-guess the recording engineers in respect to tonal balance in playback. This was child’s play compared with the options provided by computer manipulation of the digitally encoded material. Rhythms and tempos of recorded material could easily be recomposed (“decomposed” in the view of some purists) to the listeners’ tastes. Furthermore, one could ask the computer to compose original works or to pervert compositions already in its memory banks. For example, one could hear Mongo Santamaria’s rendition of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony or even A Hard Day’s Night as orchestrated by Bach or Rimsky-Korsakov. The computer could deliver such works in full fidelity—sonic fidelity, that is—without a millisecond’s hesitation.

Since Edison’s time, the major problems of high fidelity have occurred in the interface devices, those transducers that “read” the analog-encoded material from the recording at one end of the chain or converted it into sound at the other. Digital recording, computer manipulation of the program material, and the MT memory carts solved the pickup end of the problem elegantly; however, for decades the electronic-to-sonic reconversion remained terribly inexact, despite the fact that it was known for at least a century that the core of the problem lay in the need to overlay a specific acoustic recording environment on a nonspecific listening environment. Techniques such as time-delay reverb devices, quadraphonics, and biaural recording/playback, which put enough “information” into a listening environment to override, more or less, the natural acoustics, were frequently quite successful in creating an illusion of sonic reality. But it continued to be very difficult to establish the necessary psychoacoustic cues. The problem was soluble, but it was certainly not easy with conventional technology. And the necessary unconventional technology appeared only in the early years of this century.

Brain Waves

It has long been known that all the material fed to the brain from the various sense organs is first translated into a sort of pulse-code modulation. But it was only fifty years ago that the psychophysiologists  managed to break the so-called “neural code.” The first applications of the neural-code (NC) converters were, logically enough, as prosthetic devices for the blind and deaf. (The artificial sense organs themselves could actually have been built a hundred years ago, but the conversion of their output signals to an encoded form that the brain would accept and translate into sight and sound was a major stumbling block.)

The NC (encee) converter was fed by micro-miniature sensors and then coupled to the brain through whatever neural pathways were available. Since rather delicate surgery was required to implant and connect the sensory transducer/converter properly, the invention of the Slansky Neuron Coupler was hailed as a breakthrough rivaling the original invention of the neural code converter. The Slansky Coupler, which enabled encoded information to be radiated to the brain without direct connection, took the form (for prosthetic use) of a thin disk subcutaneously implanted at the apex of the skull. Micro-miniature sensors were also implanted in the general location of the patient’s eyes or ears.  Total surgery time was less than one hour, and upon completion the recipient could hear or see at least as well as a person with normal senses.

What has all this to do with high-fidelity reproduction? Ten years ago a medical student “borrowed” a Slansky device and with the aid of an engineer friend connected it to a hi-fi system and then taped it to his forehead. Initially, the story goes, the music was “translated”—”scrambled” would be more accurate—into color and form and the video into sound, but several hundred engineering hours later the digitally encoded program and the Slansky device were properly coupled and a reasonable analog of the program was direcly experienced.

When the commercial entertainment possibilities inherent in the Slansky Coupler became evident, it was only a matter of time before special program material became available for it. And at almost every live entertainment or sports event, hi-fi hobbyists could be seen wearing their sensory helmets and recording the material. When played back later, the sight and sound fed directly to the brain provided a perfect you-are-there experience, except that other sensory stimuli were lacking. That was taken care of in short order. Although the complete sensory recording package was far too expensive for even the advanced neural recordist, “underground” cartridges began to appear that provided a complete surrogate sensory experience. You were there—doing, feeling, tasting, hearing, seeing whatever the recordist underwent. The experience was not only subjectively indistinguishable from the real thing, but it was, usually, better than life. After all, could the average person-in-the-street ever know what it is to play a perfect Cyrano before an admiring audience or spend an evening on the town (or home in bed) with his favorite video star?

The potential for poetry—and for pornography—was unlimited. And therein, as we have learned, is the social danger of the Slansky device. Since the vicarious thrills provided by the neural-code-converter/coupler are certainly more “interesting” than real life ever is, more and more citizens are daily joining the ranks of the “encees.” They claim—if you can establish communication wit them—that life under the helmet is far superior that that experienced by the hidebound “realies.” Perhaps they are right, but the insidious pleasures of the encee helmet has produced a hard core of dropouts from life far exceeding in both number and unreachablility those generated by the drug cultures of the last century. And while the civil-liberties and moral aspects of the matter are being hotly debated, the situation is worsening daily. It is doubtful that the early audiophiles ever dreamed that the achievement of ultimate high-fidelity sound reproduction would one day threaten the very fabric of the society that made it possible.

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It’s Official: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Donald Trump for Felony Obstruction of Justice

The rabbit hole just got much, much deeper for Donald Trump. After it was seemingly confirmed by last week’s testimony from former FBI Director James Comey, it’s now been made official this evening: Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating Trump for obstruction of justice, a felony.

The news is coming in from multiple sources this evening, including the Washington Post (link). The news is potentially devastating for Donald Trump, and it likely means that his narrow window for trying to get away with preemptively firing Mueller has now closed.

Mueller will be interviewing everyone involved, including the NSA Director and the Director of National Intelligence, as Trump is suspected of having tried and failed to lean on all of them in an effort to derail the FBI’s investigation of the Russia scandal.

Notably, the WaPo report asserts that Donald Trump has been under investigation since shortly after he fired Comey. So while that confirms that Comey was being truthful when he told Trump he wasn’t being investigated at the time, Comey’s demise has now changed things dramatically.

The fact that Donald Trump is now under investigation for obstruction of justice is crucial, because that’s the same charge that forced Richard Nixon out of the presidency. Trump hasn’t yet had a public response to the news.

(Source)

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Shower Thoughts

North Korea can never send spies to other countries because once there the spies will realize they’ve been lied to all their lives.

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You Learn Something New Every Day

My longtime friend Michael sent me a copy of They Live (one of our favorite b-movies and something that’s been on my Amazon Wish List forever) for my birthday a couple weeks ago. While watching it the other day I realized that as much of a favorite as it is, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the entire thing from beginning to end—or that I just didn’t remember all of it. (Just as likely.)

Ben had never seen it before, but he was not impressed when he did. “It’s awful!” To which I responded, “That’s part of it’s charm!”

Anyhow, I did a quick internet search to see if I could find any info on the film beyond the basics, and imagine my surprise when I discovered after all these years that the entire premise of the movie was based off a short story called Eight O’Clock In The Morning by Ray Nelseon.

Since it’s apparently in the public domain and can be found in its entirety on multiple websites, I’m gonna go ahead and pass it on here for your edification. It’s a rather short read, but as one site said, “Even though it’s supposed to be a work of science fiction, the story holds many analogies to our current situation.” More than ever, I’d say.

So without further ado, I present:

Eight O’Clock in the Morning

by Ray Nelseon

At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, “Awake.”

Something unusual happened.

One of the subjects awoke all the way. This had never happened before. His name was George Nada and he blinked out at the sea of faces in the theatre, at first unaware of anything out of the ordinary. Then he noticed, spotted here and there in the crowd, the non-human faces, the faces of the Fascinators. They had been there all along, of course, but only George was really awake, so only George recognized them for what they were. He understood everything in a flash, including the fact that if he were to give any outward sign, the Fascinators would instantly command him to return to his former state, and he would obey.

He left the theatre, pushing out into the neon night, carefully avoiding any indication that he saw the green, reptilian flesh or the multiple yellow eyes of the rulers of the earth. One of them asked him, “Got a light buddy?” George gave him a light, then moved on.

At intervals along the street George saw the posters hanging with photographs of the Fascinators’ multiple eyes and various commands printed under them, such as, “Work eight hours, play eight hours, sleept eight hours,” and “Marry and Reproduce.” A TV set in the window of a store caught George’s eye, but he looked away in the nick of time. When he didn’t look at the Fascinator in the screen, he could resist the command, “Stay tuned to this station.”

George lived alone in a little sleeping room, and as soon as he got home, the first thing he did was to disconnect the TV set. In other rooms he could hear the TV sets of his neighbors, though. Most of the time the voices were human, but now and then he heard the arrogant, strangely bird-like croaks of the aliens. “Obey the government,” said one croak. “We are the government, ” said another. “We are your friends, you’d do anything for a friend, wouldn’t you?”

“Obey!”

“Work!”

Suddenly the phone rang.

George picked it up. It was one of the Fascinators.

“Hello,” it squawked. “This is your control, Chief of Police Robinson. You are an old man, George Nada. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, your heart will stop. Please repeat.”

“I am an old man,” said George. “Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, my heart will stop.”

The control hung up

“No, it wont,” whispered George. He wondered why they wanted him dead. Did they suspect that he was awake? Probably. Someone might have spotted him, noticed that he didn’t respond the way the others did. If George were alive at one minute after eight tomorrow morning, then they would be sure.

“No use waiting here for the end,” he thought.

He went out again. The posters, the TV, the occasional commands from passing aliens did not seem to have absolute power over him, though he still felt strongly tempted to obey, to see things the way his master wanted him to see them. He passed an alley and stopped. One of the aliens was alone there, leaning against the wall. George walked up to him.

“Move on,” grunted the thing, focusing his deadly eyes on George.

George felt his grasp on awareness waver. For a moment the reptilian head dissolved into the face of a lovable old drunk. Of course the drunk would be lovable. George picked up a brick and smashed it down on the old drunk’s head with all his strength. For a moment the image blurred, then the blue-green blood oozed out of the face and the lizrd fell, twitching and writhing. After a moment it was dead.

George dragged the body into the shadows and searched it. There was a tiny radio in its pocket and a curiously shaped knife and fork in another. The tiny radio said something in an incomprehensible language. George put it down beside the body, but kept the eating utensils.

“I can’t possibly escape,” thought George. “Why fight them?”

But maybe he could.

What if he could awaken others? That might be worth a try.

He walked twelve blocks to the apartment of his girl friend, Lil, and knocked on her door. She came to the door in her bathrobe.

“I want you to wake up,” he said

“I’m awake,” she said. “Come on in.”

He went in. The TV was playing. He turned it off.

“No,” he said. “I mean really wake up.” She looked at him without comprehension, so he snapped his fingers and shouted, “Wake up! The masters command that you wake up!”

“Are you off your rocker, George?” she asked suspiciously. “You sure are acting funny.” He slapped her face. “Cut that out!” she cried, “What the hell are you up to anyway?”

“Nothing,” said George, defeated. “I was just kidding around.”

“Slapping my face wasn’t just kidding around!” she cried.

There was a knock at the door.

George opened it.

It was one of the aliens.

“Can’t you keep the noise down to a dull roar?” it said.

The eyes and reptilian flesh faded a little and George saw the flickering image of a fat middle-aged man in shirtsleeves. It was still a man when George slashed its throat with the eating knife, but it was an alien before it hit the floor. He dragged it into the apartment and kicked the door shut. “What do you see there?” he asked Lil, pointing to the many-eyed snake thing on the floor.

“Mister…Mister Coney,” she whispered, her eyes wide with horror. “You…just killed him, like it was nothing at all.”

“Don’t scream,” warned George, advancing on her.

“I won’t George. I swear I won’t, only please, for the love of God, put down that knife.” She backed away until she had her shoulder blades pressed to the wall.

George saw that it was no use.

“I’m going to tie you up,” said George. “First tell me which room Mister Coney lived in.”

“The first door on your left as you go toward teh stairs,” she said. “Georgie…Georgie. Don’t torture me. If you’re going to kill me, do it clean. Please, Georgie, please.”

He tied her up with bedsheets and gagged her, then searched the body of the Fascinator. There was another one of the little radios that talked a foreign language, another set of eating utensils, and nothing else.

George went next door.

When he knocked, one of the snake-things answered, “Who is it?”

“Friend of Mister Coney. I wanna see him,” said George.

“He went out for a second, but he’ll be right back.” The door opened a crack, and four yellow eyes peeped out. “You wanna come in and wait?”

“Okay,” said George, not looking at the eyes.

“You alone here?” he asked as it closed the door, its back to George.

“Yeah, why?”

He slit its throat from behind, then searched the apartment.

He found human bones and skulls, a half-eaten hand.

He found tanks with huge fat slugs floating in them.

“The children,” he thought, and killed them all.

There were guns too, of a sort he had never seen before. He discharged one by accident, but fortunately it was noiseless. It seemed to fire little poisoned darts.

He pocketed the gun and as many boxes of darts he could and went back to Lil’s place. When she saw him she writhed in helpless terror.

“Relax, honey” he said, opening her purse, “I just want to borrow your car keys.”

He took the keys and went downstairs to the street.

Her car was still parked in the same general area in which she always parked it. He recognized it by the dent in the right fender. He got in, started it, and began driving aimlessly. He drove for hours, thinking–desperately searching for some way out. He turned on the car radio to see if he could get some music, but there was ntohing but news and it was all about him, George Nada, the homicidal maniac. The announcer was one of the masters, but he sounded a little scared. Why should he be? What could one man do?

George wasn’t surprised when he saw the road block, and he turned off on a side street before he reached it. No little trip to the country for you, Georgie boy, he thought to himself.

They had just discvered what he had done back at Lil’s place, so they would probably be looking for Lil’s car. He parked it in an alley and took the subway. There were no aliens on the subway, for some reason. Maybe they were too good for such things, or maybe it was just because it was so late at night.

When one finally did get on, George got off.

He went up to the street and went into a bar. One of the Fascinators was on the TV, saying over and over again, “We are your friends. We are your friends. We are your friends.” The stupid lizard sounded scared. Why? What could one man do against all of them?

George ordered a beer, the it suddenly struck him that the Fascinator on the TV no longer seemed to have any power over him. He looked at it again and thought, “It has to believe it can master me to do it. The slightest hint of fear on its part and the power to hypnotize is lost.” They flashed George’s picture on the TV screen and George retreated to the phone booth. He called his control, the Chief of Police.

“Hello, Robinson?” he asked.

“Speaking.”

“This is George Nada. I’ve figured out how to wake people up.”

“What? George, hang on. Where are you?” Robinson sounded almost hysterical.

He hung up and paid and left the bar. They would probably trace his call.

He caught another subway and went downtown.

It was dawn when he entered the building housing the biggest of the city’s TV studios. He consulted the building director and then went up in the elevator. The cop in front of the studio recognized him. “Why, you’re Nada!” he gasped.

George didn’t like to shoot him with the poison dart gun, but he had to.

He had to kill several more before he got into the studio itself, including all the engineers on duty. There were a lot of police sirens outside, excited shouts, and running footsteps on the stairs. The alien was sitting before the the TV camera saying, “We are your friends. We are your friends,” and didn’t see George come in. When George shot him with the needle gun he simply stopped in mid-sentence and sat there, dead. George stoond near him and said, imitating the alien croak, “Wake up. Wake up. See us as we are and kill us!”

It was George’s voice the city heard that morning, but it was the Fascinator’s image, and the city did awake for the very first time and the war began.

George did not live to see the victory that finally came. He died of a heart attack at exactly eight o’clock.

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