Isherwood Williams — call me "Ish" — is a graduate student doing field research high in the remote Sierra Nevada mountains, but when he comes into town for supplies everyplace seems curiously deserted.

Yup, it looks like all of humanity has been wiped out by a new and ferocious disease, leaving one man alone against the world.

That's a very familiar scenario in books and movies, but I've never seen it told as well, and in such detail, as in the novel I've just finished reading, Earth Abides, by George R Stewart.

I'll be dead before the full brunt of climate change finishes society's slow collapse, but this book is a vivid peek at what's coming soon.

Ish was unlucky enough to survive the pandemic. For a while he believes he's the only one, but there are others. Most of those who weren't killed, though, couldn't cope with the immediate aftermath — the solitude, the silence. They went nuts.

But Isherwood Williams has the good fortune to be a natural introvert, so he's better equipped for this strangely quiet place.

He makes a few friends, and eventually finds a wife. Rather daringly for fiction written in the 1940s, she's of another race, but with so few of us left, 'human' is the only race.

And so begins the next generation, a handful of people who know nothing of our world except that food comes from tin cans, and legends of "the Americans," and have little interest in books, art, or history.

Without government and without laws, the new people make up their rules as they go, sometimes foolishly, sometimes fatally.

The detail in this book is remarkable. It spans about fifty years, and the author has considered everything — how long before the electricity begins flickering out, the faucets run dry, the rats multiply, the highways are overrun with weeds, wild animals encroach on the suburbs, the bridges collapse, lightning strikes and cities burn, etc.

Earth Abides asks and answers profound questions about the nature of our species, but it's not entirely brainy — it's also a rousing adventure. Same as it will be when the book's story basically comes true, soon.

And then, as in the book, it'll be a thousand years before there's anyone on Earth with the time and interest to again ponder such philosophical matters.

This goes on my very small shelf with a few other books, to be re-read as many times as I can before dying.

I do not at all like the recent redesign at Wikipedia. It is bizarre and wrong to have clickable items on the left, and the actual text of an article on the right.

I do not at all like the recent redesign at IMDB. Spreading information that used to be on one page across three pages is great for the click count, but not so great for the people clicking. I still mourn for the IMDB of the late 1990s, which was far more functional than the IMDB of 2023.

Same with YouTube, same with Gmail, same with Amazon, and with every site that's ever been redesigned. It's a law, like Moore's or Murphy's: Every website redesign makes everything worse.

This site, I pledge to you, will remain clunky but functional, and will never be redesigned, until I die and it fades off the internet forever.

Re-typing my old zine Pathetic Life, page by page, I've just taken a look at my copy of #21 for the first time in decades, and to my dismay, it's missing two pages.

A couple of years ago, the internet came to my rescue when I'd misplaced an entire issue of PL, so I googled, and to my surprise, I'm in my own local library.

So yesterday I took a #120 bus to downtown, escalatored up to the library's Level 7 Aviation Room (ask at the Level 8 desk), and found something called the ZAPP Zine Collection, where in a dusty folder in a locked bin, there was a copy of Pathetic Life #21. Escorted by a security guard, I photocopied two pages I'd typed and photocopied 27 years ago.

It's the closest I've ever come to feeling that I've left a mark in the world.

News you need,
whether you know it or not

• Satanic Temple opens abortion clinic named after anti-choice Supreme Court Justice Alito's mother

• Colorado River crisis so severe lakes Mead and Powell are unlikely to refill in our lifetimes

• New York City pays $121 million for police misconduct, the most in 5 years

• No immunity for cops who shot man multiple times, then searched his house for evidence of "assaulting an officer"

• Rikers reports first death in 2023 of person in custody, after deadliest year in quarter century

• Cop used traffic stops to sexually assaulted women

• LAPD officer caught saying "happy hunting" before fatal shooting gets 2-day suspension

• Cop gets one whole year in jail for shooting unarmed neighbor in the back, twice, five years ago

Mystery links
There's no knowing where you're going

• Click

• Click

• Click

Clicks ahoy

• Mississippi banned Sesame Street for showing Black and White kids playing

• How a single line of code brought down a half-billion euro rocket launch

• What is the most successful Hollywood movie of all time? Well, it depends how you look at it.

• Origami is revolutionizing technology, from medicine to space

• Gattaca is still pertinent 25 years later

• Aquatic telephones let skin divers talk under water, 1957

♫♬ Mix tape of my mind ♫

• Close Encounters of the Third Kind — John Williams

• Fishies — Cat Empire

• Incense & Peppermints — Strawberry Alarm Clock

• No Bad News — The Wiz

• Someday Soon — Judy Collins

Eventually, everyone
leaves the building

• Jacques Bloch

• Melinda Dillon

• Gwen Knapp

• Marion Meade

• Will Steffen

• Brian Tufano

2/6/2023
Tip 'o the hat to Linden Arden, ye olde AVA, BoingBoing, Breakfast at Ralf's, Captain Hampockets, CaptCreate's Log, John the Basket, LiarTownUSA, Meme City, National Zero, Ran Prieur, Voenix Rising, and anyone else whose work I've stolen without saying thanks.
Special thanks to Becky Jo, Name Withheld, Dave S, Wynn Bruce, and always extra special thanks to my lovely late Stephanie, who gave me 21 years and proved that the world isn't always shitty.