News and Updates

Well, the new cover for Helen On the Run, is now well known.  (I don't think the cover has enhanced sales very much!)  I think the demographic that these books are aimed at is somewhat economically disadvantaged, which would explain that the vast majority of those readers tend to download them only when they're free.  (jk; sarcasm alert: I've made no secret of the fact that I do not hold my breath waiting for sales.  But nor do I want my stories to be the lowest-hanging fruit on Smashwords, pricewise.)

Now that the dynasty of president #45 is drawing to a close, I can take up completing---or at least, continuing to write---the story of Helen's and Sita's life after the events of Concerto.

It isn't going to be quick, because each time I re-read what I've written, I'm seeing purple prose that really does not belong there, and doesn't move the story along!  Of course, what happens after a couple gets established is---well, purple prose, and all that.  But that doesn't mean that I have to put it down in black and white.  (I'm regretting the little that sneaked its way into Yraid, but if I took that out, there would be very little left.  In fact, I think I failed to describe exactly what attracted the two together, except minor details of physical appearance.  But sometimes, you know, Chemistry just can't be explained.)

Here is the image I used for my own copy of the ongoing Helen+Sita project.

Kay

Exciting News: 'On The Run' Will Get (has got) a New Cover Illustration!

Out of the several major episodes of Helen's story, only a few have the original Frankenstein covers left; our artist HALCHROMA has been steadily painting covers for them, one every couple of months.  (She puts all her requests in a queue, and now its my turn again.)

At the time I first uploaded these stories to Smashwords, I did not have any way to obtain satisfactory quality original art, and I had a really flexible piece of software that could do easily what Photoshop does, slowly and painfully.  So, I collected bits of images from everywhere, but mainly from old photographs, and sometimes advertisements, and often fragments of features of images, many of them from royalty-free sources, and so on.

The original cover for Helen On The Run: The Lost Years is at right.  At first, it was just an image of Helen in a hard hat, and looking ready to bang some nails into a stud or two.  Later, I added a background of a pregnant girl lying on a grassy meadow (something that never occurs in the story; pregnant Helen is teaching at a boarding school).  As you can see, Helen is wearing a reflective vest, something only highway workers wear, and HALCHROMA has agreed to take it off.

She showed me an image of Helen wearing a plain vest, with no reflector strips, but I requested for that to be removed, and a tool belt put in instead, and I'm waiting for her reply.  There are tool vests, which she may like better . . .

More later,

Kay

Helen, the Character

 After I had written the beginnings of the Helen story, until Lalitha happened along, I did not like the way Helen's character was developing.  I can't remember, but Lalitha had been introduced, I think, as a means whereby I could reform Helen's character, and present her as someone with at least a few saving graces.

But many of you know that I don't maintain close control over the stories; I allow them to have some sort of autonomous control over themselves, and it turned out that Helen had had amnesia and so on, and at this point, I actually left the story for a while.

I turned to Alexandra, and Jane.  Those two stories went in opposite directions; Alexandra in a serious direction (though it was superficially silly and childish, to begin with), and Jane in the direction of erotica.  But no sooner than I begin a project with the intention of making it, you know, sexy, I have second thoughts, and go in and strip out all the gratuitious sex.  (Obviously, a hyperactive superego, as they say.)

When these non-Helen stories began to work out really well, I looked at the Helen files, with great regret, because it seemed that I had lost a wonderful opportunity to write about a musician, and strayed into writing about a spoiled brat instead.  So, a year or so after the Helen story had been abandoned, and I had mostly forgotten how it went (or more accurately,  how it was supposed to go), I got this idea of writing a serious hard science fiction story.

In Science Fiction, hard science fiction is a genre in which only plausible extrapolations of known science takes place.  Soft science fiction is, in contrast, a genre where almost anything can happen, and the science is about mysterious things in the very distant future, that approach magical effects.  So, Music on the Galactic Voyager was a story--about Helen, just in case you were wondering--where I grab Helen out from around the time of Helen at Westfield, except that Erin and James have not yet come into the story.  (You should think about Voyager Helen as a different person altogether.)  This story gave me the opportunity of introducing a completely reformed, normal, well-behaved Helen, without all her over-the-top characteristics.  So, there are similarities between the two Helens, and differences.

Similarities:  Both Helens are musical geniuses; both can sing, both play the violin and the piano.  Both have well-developed libidos, and both are lesbians.  Both like to teach, and both are familiar with folk song, and both play the guitar.  Both have some skill in unarmed combat.

Both have diabetes; I think that must have been one of the last things that Helen discovered about herself, before she was abandoned by me (while I wrote Voyager).

Differences: The Helen of the Voyager has never had children.  She has never had amnesia.  She has had an unhappy affair with Lalitha, and with some other woman, I probably meant Anne, the ballerina with great allergies, or perhaps Lorna.

I have been reading Voyager, and I was struck with how serious the story was.  (Hard Sci Fi ends up being rather serious, because of the subject-matter, and because of the mindset of the authors, I believe.  Alexandra is also sci fi, but more as an alternate Earth, rather than a futuristic setting.  It is in the distant future, but not a dystopian one.)

Writing these stories enables me to be several different Kays; it is almost as if I have different personalities in each story.  Yraid is yet another new, crazy Kay.

Well, I have to go.

Kay

A Remarkable Aria

[This was originally posted to the Fiction From Kay Hemlock Brown blog, where it certainly makes sense to post it.  But it is all about Helen, so I'm also posting it here.]

A song—a classical aria, really—which is, in my mind, one of the pinnacles of Helen’s vocal performances, was a number from Handel’s Messiah, and unfortunately one that is not very well known outside the circles of die-hard Messiah fans.  It is featured in an episode in which Helen, who was deeply depressed at the time at her rejection from the circles of Baroque vocal music, and Baroque sacred vocal music, began to re-assess her own capabilities, and begin to believe in herself.  At the same time, Helen was beginning to realize how much Sita had come to love her.

The aria is: I know that my Redeemer liveth, a lovely aria, very long, very lightly accompanied, and to my mind, difficult for typical listeners to appreciate precisely because of its length, and the light accompaniment.  It has to be carried entirely by the soprano, because the accompaniment is so light.  

Back when I was a kid, and more Romantic adaptations of Messiah were still not in disrepute (as they were just a few years later), all these arias were accompanied by the full orchestra: flutes, clarinets, oboes, horns.  Wagner had shown how this could be done pianissimo—very softly—so that the vocal line was like an exquisite string of pearls on a velvet cushion.  But, to those who demanded authenticity, that was not the point; the original was only accompanied by the violins, and the lute or harpsichord, and the bass line (probably just a cello, or a couple of cellos).  That was all!  So we have the soprano singing for all she’s worth, supported only by violins and bass, and keyboard or lute.  (The Lute is basically just a guitar.)

There is yet another problem, namely the text.  The song is about physical resurrection, something that hardly anyone believes in.  Of all the things Christians believe in, and those of us who are CINOs—Christians In Name Only—this is the principle that is among the first to be rejected, together with the Virgin Birth, and the Resurrection.  We may love Jesus, and we may follow his teachings as far as we can, because they are not easy; but we cannot bring ourselves to subscribe to the mythology.   I, for one, have never believed in those magical things that we were supposed to believe.  It is a tragedy that so many jettison the teachings of Jesus along with the mythology.

So when the soprano sings that she knows that Jesus is alive, I can imagine scores of listeners shutting off their ears to the words of the delusional librettist—the Apostle Paul, in this case—and trying to obtain satisfaction in the music alone, which is so difficult, given that the entire piece is so vehement in its message.  (Here is a performance  by Eileen Farrell that is more fully accompanied.  Do not try to imagine that, when Helen sings this tune, that it sounds like this; I imagine it quite differently.  Here is another performance.  Lynn Dawson can look beautiful while she sings, something that many sopranos cannot pull off!)

Helen, the character, was not created to be a philosopher.  The only instance where she tries to think about abstract things is this one, where she struggles with the text of this song.  All the rest of the time, she was thinking of the children, about music, about her teaching, and mostly about the people around her, especially if they were struggling with something or another.  I wanted Helen to be, above all, a compassionate woman, and to some extent, that was Helen’s only, or at least her principal, saving grace.

As I have written about before, there is an interesting episode that I have left out of all of the published Helen stories, because it is difficult to squeeze into them, timewise.  At first, I had her teaching at Westfield only for two years.  But now it appears that she would have to have taught there for at least three years, to have done all that I had written about; in which case, if I were to include another Westfield story, this episode could find a place there.

The story is briefly as follows.

Helen visits friends in Philadelphia, and returns to Westfield, to hear that one of her colleagues in the Math Department has been the victim of a hit-and-run incident.  There is some suspicion that one of his students was responsible, because evidently there was severe animosity between the victim, and the students in one of his classes.  The students are suspicious of each other, and the administration is at a loss as to how to complete the semester for them.

Someone happens to have told the President that Helen had a strong background in mathematics, and it ends up that they have Helen taking over the course.  (There are several reasons for this; one being that Helen had a very light teaching load, because she was being kept free to keep up a concert schedule.  Secondly, the Dean wanted someone special to take the course, because of the extraordinary circumstances, and he felt that Helen might succeed where most of the faculty might fail.)

Helen struggles as never before, and the students struggle, and bits and pieces of information emerge from the Police murder investigation, and the course is slipping downhill, but Helen, and a couple of students manage to salvage it, and it ends much better than anyone had any right to expect.  Eventually, Helen has to teach most of the students one-on-one.  One of the students is Angie Connors, who emerges as an important character in Helen’s Concerto.

As you can see, I was preoccupied with this aria, and I think I must go listen to it sung in a version from the sixties, when the authentic performance movement did not yet have a lock on Baroque performance as it had from the Seventies onward!  If I have interested a reader to listen to that aria, I would be delighted!

Kay Hemlock Brown

A New Cover for "Helen at Westfield"

Helen at Westfield was a story that had a lot of simple living packed into it.  Helen had got her first real full-time teaching job at a small four-year college, and I found myself presenting it as a lot of fun.

As anyone who has read any of the Helen books knows already, pretty girls just naturally gravitate towards Helen!  In this story, all the women who are prospective partners for Helen are people whom she meets legitimately; not one of them is a student.

Our artist HALCHROMA has done a bang-up job with the artwork, and is responsible for representing these characters fairly accurately.  I was torn between having her paint four generic women for the cover, versus representations closer to my mental image of them.  The problem is that, as most people agree, the images readers create for themselves are just as valid, if not more valid, and the more detailed the depiction of the characters in the illustrations, the more they could clash with those in the reader's imagination.

Horror, Shame, and Anger

Many of my readers will be filled with horror, shame and anger at the events of last weekend (The George Floyd murder in Minneapolis).  My heart resonates with the feelings of those of you who feel this way.  The sheer helplessness we feel must be nothing compared with the panic that foreigners to this country must feel; at least those of them who have been attracted to the sentiment of a majority of Americans: empathy with the underdog, and with all those who suffer.

You may have read that I'm working on another segment of the Helen story; it set out to be a simple, even an idyllic, description of the lives of those in Helen's extended family.  Half of them, at least, are foreign, including Helen's beloved.  How am I to describe their lives after Helen and Sita timidly declare their love for each other?  How can anyone describe the slowly deteriorating environment in which Helen, her lover, and her several children, and her fearful friends try to settle into any sort of normal life?

I have made a strategic mistake of making all most of the protagonists in the Helen stories to be white; this makes it impossible to represent the racial dimension of the problems they face.  There is a little Indian girl (Alicia) who belongs to the group of kids who play in the dead-end in which Helen's home is located.  For the sake of brevity, I even omitted the few paragraphs in which I described her.  What sort of author am I?  I stuck to comfortable themes of music, and alternate orientation, and amnesia; only departing from them to make a brief sortie into prostitution--a very shallow look at it; narcotic addiction; the setbacks of being placed on suspension from college, and so on.  But circumstances are making it impossible to write something light-hearted and shallowly satisfying to essentially be a coda for the series.  The personalities which have already been established for Helen's friends, and her children, will not allow them to be mere spectators of the heartrending scenes they are likely to witness, in this story set in our present day.  How can they not take sides?  How can I suddenly change the lyrical mood of this book to reflect the gruesome reality of these simultaneous crises of epidemic, economic depression, racial violence--very likely incited by cynical provocateurs, and wrong-headed political leadership?

Kay

P.S.: There seems to be very little evidence that there were provocateurs. --K

The Saree, the Robe of Women of the Indian Subcontinent

I have been fascinated with the robe of Indian women (and women of the region, including Malaysia, Singapore, and Bangla Desh, I would imagine).  In the Helen story, at least in Helen and Lalitha, sarees are worn by both Helen and Lalitha.

I was tidying up my work area, and came across an old brochure, originally from India and brought to the US by friends of mine, and I realized that, unwittingly, my concept of Lalitha was based almost completely on the cover image shown here!

The brochure appears to be a 'Take One' sort of handout from a saree shop, or at least an office of the Indian government from around the late 1960's, it seems, on how to wear a saree.  I believe, historically, this was about the time when Americans were traveling to India, and the Saree Industry was eager to convince western women to try to wear sarees themselves.  As far as I can gather, Indian saree fashion of the last several decades have actually been as much influenced by Western dress, as by the development of Indian fabrics.  For instance, I have read that, in ancient times, the blouse, the garment that covers the torso of a woman, and worn under the saree, was invariably of a contrasting color.  Only lately have blouses begun to be worn in a matching color, apparently inspired by the suits of western women.  These days, fashions of all kinds are less slavishly adhered to by anyone.

Is this how I imagined Lalitha?

On the whole, yes, but in the details, I have to say no; this girl, though she wears a innocent and kindly smile, has that self-consciouness that models have!  I imagined Lalitha as a serious and awkward young woman.  I imagined her comfortable in her own skin, and sort of casually aware of her own attractiveness, and perhaps a little proud of it, but by no means impressed by it.  (I'm acutely conscious that I might be making too many--unfair--assumptions about this model, but I can't make my point without being critical of the expression on her face!)  I think our illustrator, HALCHROMA has somehow captured the essence of Lalitha a lot better in her cover art (below) than this photograph.  Moreover, she did her illustration without having seen this photograph at all.

The brochure, as I said is step-by-step instruction on how to drape a saree.  (I would very much like to give credit to the original creators of the brochure, but the information is not available.)

How to drape a Saree

To clarify: you first need to wear a petticoat (a waist-floor-slip) with a strong, non-elastic waist-band.  The waistband carries the entire weight of the saree.  You also need a dozen or so large safety-pins.  (A couple of safety-pins of the sort that you used to use for baby nappies would be great, if available; they're hard to find, these days!)

Frame 1.  Contrary to the description, you begin with anchoring the top end of the saree into your waistband in the center of your back.   (The instructions suggest that you start at your right hip.  Do it each way, and choose the method that works best for you.)

Bring it forward, going from right-to-left, and make a large pleat in front, and pin it to your petticoat.  These pleats enable you to walk!  Tuck the top edge of the saree into the petticoat.  (While you're winding the saree around yourself, leave the fabric in a pile on the floor, and turn your body; it is more difficult to be wrangling all those six yards of fabric around you.)

Frame 2.  Continue wrapping the saree around your waist, until you get to the center of your back again (where you started).  Make another large pleat, tuck it in, and, if you plan to be active with your saree on, use a safety-pin to pin the saree to the petticoat at the pleat.  (Keep tucking the top edge of the saree into the petticoat.)

Frame 3.  Now, we use the universal-one-size-fits-all feature of the saree!  All this while, the unwrapped part of the saree would lie in a puddle on the floor, as shown.  At this point, gather the end of the saree.  (This will be the part of the saree that falls gracefully over your shoulder, when you're done draping the rest of the saree.)  Leaving most of it on the floor, wind about six feet of it (1) round to your left, (2) round your back, (3) across your front, and (4) over your left shoulder.   Do this at about chest level, keeping the material bunched up.  Depending on your size, more or less of your saree will be in front of you, looking slightly pathetic!  To prevent the end of the saree sliding off, either wind it around your neck loosely, or temporarily pin it in place.

Frame 4.  Pleat the slack length of saree, as shown in the fourth illustration.  Of course, because of the end of the saree looped around you and over your shoulder, you won't look very much like the girl in the photo; there will be a lot of saree across your chest.  But pleat enough to take up the slack, so that all the material that was on the floor is pleated across your stomach.  (In the article, they tell you to pleat just as much as the girl in the photo needs, which is a lot, because she's so thin; the temporary winding of the end of the saree around you makes it clear just exactly how much pleating you need.  The end of the saree around your chest and neck will definitely be a nuisance.)

Frame 5.  Now you are a little beyond the illustration on the left above, because there is extra saree around your chest and neck.  But, if all went well, the slack will all have been pleated up, and carefully tucked into your waistband, and the pleats will be pinned onto your petticoat with the largest safety-pin you have.  (Rounded-point safety-pins are kinder to silk sarees!)  I just remembered that, because of the pin that holds the ornamental front pleats in place, you do not need to pin the front pleats in the lower layers

Frame 6.  Now, unwrap the temporary windings you did earlier; you're going to redo it neatly and properly.  The saree is wrapped from the pleats to the left, around your body, across the back, and to where the girl has it at her right hip.  All of this can be tucked-in to your petticoat waistband.  But at this point, the last few feet of the saree are draped across your front, covering up your breast, and over your left shoulder, and allowed to hang.  See the last photo above.

Frame 7.  Some girls allow this last bit of saree to be draped over the shoulder, with almost all of it falling off the shoulder.  An alternative is to pleat these last few feet lengthwise, and pin them neatly to the shoulder of your blouse.  This keeps the saree very firmly in place, and actually allows you to be a lot more active.  (I have been told of some South Indian women who would actually play tennis, wearing saree!  This was a long time ago, and I expect competition was not very fierce back then.)  That style is not common today, and it will be difficult to find a photo that illustrates that style.

It seemed to me that the model in these photographs looked excessively tall!  I shortened her, and you see the result above.  This looks a lot more like I imagined Lalitha to be, except that she would not have looked so grand except possibly at her first wedding, at which she married Suresh's father.  (For weddings, girls are dressed in a more buttoned-down version of saree; the style above is more for informal social occasions.  Some women will adopt this style for presenting in front of an audience.)

Honestly, Halchroma's cover, at left, is almost miraculously how I think Lalitha has evolved in my imagination, in the story a year or two after they settle down in Philadelphia, where Helen goes to university.  I would have expected Helen's arms to have more flesh on them than Lalitha's arms, but they're within the limits of plausibility.  I love the expressions on their faces, so different, yet so harmonious together!

I'll fine-tune this post, as I think about the process of wearing a saree more carefully!  The photos above have their own instructions, which are simpler than mine.  If you prefer, follow them, except that the end of the saree may not drape exactly as you want it to, because the amount of pleating is hard to estimate.  Go ahead and pleat exactly as much as they suggest; if the fall is too short, well, pleat less next time.  If the fall is too long, pull the end around you, like a shawl!

Kay, wishing she had a saree to play with these days!!

Elections with Pandemic!

My goodness!  I hardly had time to turn around, before all hell has broken out.

The closest thing to this pandemic that I remember is back when the AIDS virus was abroad.  At that time, it was a while before I realized that I had nothing to fear, because, well, I wasn't very promiscuous.  In fact ... let's not pursue that line of thinking!  But I remember all my friends back then, such as they were, were all upset.  At that time, having sex with almost anybody, any time you wanted, was the norm.  Almost overnight, people gave up that lifestyle.

What we have here is a much more contagious virus; you can get it from simply being sneezed on by someone who carries the virus.  On one hand, the virus is contagious, but on the other hand, it is not likely to kill someone who is, say, under the age of about fifty, unless they're prone to asthma, or some similar breathing disorder.  I have horrible, horrible allergies; they've bothered me since late January, and will bother me until at least April.  Then again, they would bother me in August, all the way until late September.  So I don't know whether that counts as having a respiratorial condition.  I almost always have a cough, which is annoying, and now, I should probably not go near anyone, for fear of scaring them half to death.

Well, I'm pretty reclusive, anyway; but I said goodbye to all the few people I usually meet face-to-face, and we're all resigned to keeping in touch via phone.  I have no classes this semester, so all I have to look forward to is watch my savings gradually disappear!  At least they're not invested in the stock market; if they were, they would be gone even more quickly!  If there really were a Helen, I could tell her that I'm her creator, and could she spare me a few dollars until I'm on my feet again!!!

I was so sad to see Elizabeth Warren close down her campaign.  I sent as much money her way as I could afford; I'm not sorry that I did, though it does seem as though it only prolonged the agony.  Bernie Sanders does not appear to have the ability to really respond to things happening outside his head; I wonder how he answers questions that these moderators put to him!  It is as if he lives in his own little world.  Joe Biden is even worse; I would think that all he wants is to be president.  There does not seem to be any sense of urgency of some sort of mission, like Bernie has.

So what do we have to look forward to?  Nothing interesting is going to happen until the National Convention sometime in the summer.  People expect the Corona-virus cases to peak within thirty days, and then the numbers will go down.  However, if it peaks sometime in June, the Convention will take place while the pandemic is still chugging along.  That's going to be very interesting indeed.  And very dangerous to older folks.  I have palmed off my own older folks on siblings and cousins, and nobody looks to me for support at times like this, thank goodness.  But I am in the habit of visiting certain friends, and their pets, and now I will have to make do with photos.

I have described to you all the various things that go on in the DeviantArt website, in particular all the would-be Anime and Manga artists, and those who aspire to providing artwork for computer games, and others who keep churning out FanArt, which is just depictions of their favorite Anime and Video and Game characters, such as Pokemon, and even Princess Peaches and Link.

Today, somebody in the administration of the website announced a competition, asking for a set of three works of art that contribute to a sense of Community.  There are a few paragraphs in Alexandra that probably hit the spot, but I don't think I can find three pieces.  Now that I think of it, Music of the Galactic Voyager is almost all about community.  And Jane is about the community of porn models!  But . . . it is too much work to put an application together!

I sincerely commisserate with those of you who feel bored when you cannot be in the company of your buds.  I especially hate it when they seem to be having a good time, without me.  And if I call my friends, and I get the distinct impression that the call was unwelcome, I quickly feel totally terrible, and try to get off the phone as quickly as I can.  I guess the most reasonable thing to do is to find out which time of day is the best to call them, and call them at that time.

I'm glad I don't drink very much alcohol, or I could easily see myself turning to it to 'keep me company.'  I do drink coffee, and it messes up my stomach!  I'm sorry to lay that on you readers, but I don't have much of an alternative.

I could always write, I suppose.  Maybe this is an opportunity to write something stronger than I have written so far!

regards,

Kay

These Confusing Times! What Does Helen Think?

I have always been something of a pessimist; I always expected the worst.  Of course, some of the time I was pleasantly surprised, and things were not so bad as I had expected.

More recently, I have given up that strategy of protecting myself, and decided to be an optimist instead.  But I insulated myself from the outcomes, by saying to myself: it isn't my problem, anyway.

This does not always work.  Political things, especially, depend on a lot of factors, none of which I can influence in a significant way, except in one way: I have a platform on the Web, and I can explain my own thinking about the facts, and try to persuade my readers to think of things my way.

Let's talk about Helen, briefly.

She was a musician, and, in her younger days, a very physical person: a ballet dancer, a tennis player, a long-distance runner (which does not emerge in any of the stories, I realize), and at various times, a carpenter.  She was also an actress in a TV series, and she had sung in opera (which is a kind of musical play of the Baroque era, which continues to the present day).

Then, she has total amnesia, but gradually re-acquires her personality, and begins to take an interest in her surroundings, and, presumably, the politics that is going on around her.

At one time, she was head of a (private) corporation, half of which was not-for-profit, and the other half pulled together all her artistic efforts: the recording company, LMN; her TV activity with Galaxy Studios, her investments in BNS, which was a book and music store chain, and the Instrument Factory, which didn't have a name.  Helen was well known as head of this corporation, and in many of the stories she was described as a very rich woman, which was a ploy, just so that Helen had the freedom to travel anywhere she wanted.

After her amnesia, of course, she doesn't really understand the extent of her financial power.  Actually, she does not have too much power; she is always nervous about spending too much, because she believes that all the money is going out, and very little is going in.  (This is actually the case; revenue is a trickle, from Galaxy and BNS, and money keeps going out, to Cindy, and Norma and Cecily---friends from her college days; a little foundation that provides financial help for poor children who need surgery, and the farm in Kansas, which is run by her step-brother Bo and his wife.  But she does not realize how much the dividends from her investments bring in; in fact, she does not know that she has major investments in Wall Street, thanks to Juliana, to whom Janet had entrusted her savings during Helen's college days.  So, though her investments are not very extensive, they manage to keep the little corporation from going into the red.

Here is a little fake interview between Helen and a friendly (and clearly liberal) newspaper or magazine.

Magazine:  Well, Miss Nordstrom, here we are in 2020!  The Iowa Caucuses are over, and the results mostly available; the Impeachment of president Trump was concluded, but the Senate acquitted him; the Stock Market is doing well, for the moment; the fires in Australia are gradually being fought successfully, and we're told that American firefighters were over there, returning the favor of the Australians who helped fight the California fires of last year.  Of course, the coronavirus is big news, and the Chinese governent is finally pulling out all the stops, but it looks as though they're more concerned with the bad PR than the problems with the epidemic itself!  What do you think?

Helen:  Wow, so many things!  I haven't thought very much about even half of these things!

Magazine:  I know for a fact that you're very concerned about the environment, and climate change, and those sorts of things!

Helen:  That's true.  I don't know what to say . . . We try, at home, to be as thoughtful as we can about, you know, environmental things; for example, we try not to use any sort of single-use plastic, and many of our friends try just as hard.  But, you know, I wonder whether each person, doing their little bit in their little corner, is enough to make a difference anymore.  But I fail to see how the government could jump in and do something dramatic!

One thing I'm hoping for, is that the government would support more environment-friendly, you know, power generation; like windmills, and those sorts of things . . .

Magazine:  Clean energy?

Helen:  Yes.  That's the most important single thing.  I don't know very much about science, and . . . those sorts of things, but I get the distinct impression that clean energy is important, and really, easy to do.

Magazine:  I think you'd get a lot of agreement there.

Helen:  And then, I read somewhere, that cars account for a huge proportion of air pollution, and, well, the Greenhouse Effect.  I don't know the details, but from what I have read, the Carbon Dioxide forms, like, a shell around the earth, that lets heat in, but does not let it radiate out.  This is bad.  This is what causes the warming climate around the earth.

Magazine:  So what do you suggest?  People must stop using cars, or use different sorts of cars, or what?  There are various possibilities, but I'd like to hear what you think!

Helen (looking a little taken aback):  Well, again, I'm not at all an expert, but . . . one thing we could do, is to use public transportation, right?  Instead of taking the car to go anywhere, we could take the bus, or the train, or . . . almost any public transport!  Not planes, though; I think that, er, Greta Thurnberg . . .

Magazine: Thunberg.  Greta Thunberg.

Helen:  Yes.  Greta, anyway; she said that planes are pretty bad.  She strikes me as someone who would know those sorts of things!  It's so terrible; I used to take planes everywhere . . . I still do, when I have an engagement anywhere outside of Philadelphia!  I even used to own a plane, I discovered recently.  At that time, time was what I was up against, and to fly was the most . . .

Magazine:  . . . Efficient?

Helen:  Well, time-efficient, for certain!