We've all read the stories or seen them depicted on TV -- true-life accounts of a family whose pet cat disappears just as they're packed and ready to move way across the country to new digs. Kitty, of course, fails to show up, and the tearful family members are forced to depart without their precious Felis domesticus (I hope you ladies out there appreciate my nevertheless reluctant avoidance of the obvious word).
Months pass and the family, now adjusted to their new home, hundreds of miles away, had all but forgotten about the possible feline fate of their missing cat -- when, all of a sudden one morning, just as somebody opens the patio door, in walks the long-lost pet, and to everybody's amazement kitty seems hardly worse for the wear and, strangely, unburdened with either a road map or helpful change-of-address card.
Reminders of our past, both living and inanimate, don't always fade away.
This point was driven home to me when I recently explored an Internet search facility specializing in blog entries, and discovered a small social network phenomenon involving one of my old magazine articles. Apparently, a number of blog sites, maybe considered more peer-to-peer than anything, have taken to featuring a page from Argosy UFO from May, 1977. The newsstand publication vanished in the late seventies when its parent company, Popular Publications, was purchased by a foreign entity and the new folks discontinued a number of formerly established newsstand and subscription titles. Chances are, individuals populating the blogs in question weren't even born in the seventies.
Included in this very blog on a few occasions, the page heralds my article, "How to Conduct Yourself Inside a UFO." Truth be told, the article was nothing special -- the illustration prepared by the publication's art department, however, is a visual masterpiece. I came to realize this a few months after this particular Argosy UFO hit the newsstands, when the page turned up briefly as a prop in Spielberg's movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
To discover now that the bold image hatched by Popular Publications' graphics department so long ago, towering above and almost making irrelevant any trace of my name at the bottom, still makes the rounds, whether depicted as a curiosity, a badge of UFO research conviction or an historical marker of sorts intrigues me. As far as a cohesive, though small, legion of bloggers is concerned, even UFO art can be timeless.
In other words, my long-lost cat keeps coming back.
Trump and the Judge: Maybe not as cut and dried and racist as it seemed from Donald Trump's initial comments. The judge involved with the Trump University lawsuit allegedly has a connection to the organization, La Raza ("The Race"), a force dedicated to reclaiming land its followers consider was stolen from Mexico way back. Trump's poorly chosen words, satiating the media like water to a thirsty rat, may not have meant what they seemed. At any rate, think first and speak later, Mr. T.
Wading in hazardous waters: Recent news headlines do not entice us into the horrifying thought of a Hillary Clinton presidency, arguably destined to surpass the Obama bunch's evils many times over. 22 percent of refugees resettled in Minnesota tested positive for tuberculosis. New Canadian research finds an increasing number of young people suffer from hearing loss, much of it thought to be a result of loud music passing through ear buds. In Europe, the jihad-prone are accumulating and hiding explosives, according to international police agencies. The Obama bunch is spending millions of dollars to find summer jobs for refugees, so you can just forget those hopes you had for your own teenagers this season. Or maybe they can learn to speak and write Arabic, since new statistics reveal this is the fastest-growing language in the U.S. Remember when assimilation kept America American??
