May I Check Your Coat?

Tags

books, fiction, mystery, Sci-fi, science fiction, short story, short-story, writing

Many companies in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in conjunction with the North Texas Business Council for the Arts sponsor an annual Visual and Literary art competition called “On My Own Time”. This contest provides the sponsor’s employees who moonlight as amateur and professional artists/writers an opportunity to showcase their work.

The visual arts winners have their works displayed in a special gallery exhibit in Dallas’ NorthPark Center, and the Literary winners are honored at a reception hosted by Dallas College.

This year, I was recognized for several pieces that I will be sharing in the coming weeks. Hope you enjoy.

2026 Honorable Mention – Fictional Short Story (Professional)

“Remember folks, the enemy is always listening, so let’s all do our part to help the boys over there finish the job and come home. Until next week…” Lois turned off the radio with a loud click and stepped into her low-heel black pumps. One last check in the mirror and she hurried out the door.

***

“You’re late, Lois.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Grigsby.” Lois quickly unpinned her hat and stashed it behind the counter. “The bus again.”

“I see,” Grigsby brushed off the excuse. “Ellen won’t be coming in. Her husband leaves tonight.”

“Yes, sir, I’m sure I can manage.”

“See that you do,” Grigsby turned on his heel and walked away.

Lois began to take stock. Eleven coats already hung on the rack. She slid each one to the side to make sure it had a ticket stub pinned to the collar. The last one was a long navy blue double-breasted A-line wool coat with large brass buttons. Lois ran her fingers along the velvet collar. Such a beauty.

A strand of loose thread and a missing button caught her eye. Lois pushed the coats back and forth until she saw a yellowish gleam. It was the kind of button with a metal loop on the back and a decorative cap on the front. She turned it over in her hand and the front face came off, spilling several postage stamp-sized squares of film into her palm. Lois stared in shock. Is this that spy film in the newsreels?

“Miss?” A man’s voice made Lois jump.

Lois looked over her shoulder to see a tall man in his thirties waving a claim ticket. “Just a moment, sir.” She stuffed the button and film into the pocket of her uniform jacket and hurried to the counter to take the ticket. “Back in a moment, sir.” She returned to the rack and located the man’s hat and coat. “Here you are.” She handed him his coat and hat before accepting the man’s dime. “Thank you, sir. Good evening.”

An elderly couple approached the desk, “Good evening. May I take your coats?”

***

“Hi Ellen,” Lois took off her hat and hung up her coat. “Did Bill get away on time?”

Ellen looked glum, “Yeah. He’s gone.”

Lois wrapped an arm around Ellen’s shoulders, “This’ll all be over soon, and he’ll be back safe and sound.”

“Yeah,” Ellen nodded. “Oh, a man came looking for his wife’s coat. Navy blue with big buttons…”

Lois missed the rest of Ellen’s words. Her hand slipped into her pocket to make sure the button was still there. She realized Ellen had stopped speaking. “Oh! I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“The man showed me where a button was missing, and he asked if we had found it. He seemed really upset. I told him I’d ask you and have you call if you knew where it was.” Ellen passed over a slip of paper, “He left his number.”

“Oh.” Lois felt a creeping chill. “I-I’ll take care of it…”

***

“Excuse me.”

Lois looked up to see a middle-aged balding man in a rumpled gray suit with an old-fashioned watch chain stretched across too much belly. “Yes, sir?”

“I’m here about my wife’s coat. Navy blue with large brass buttons.”

“Yes, sir.” Lois nodded. “I know the one.”

The man smiled thinly, “Excellent. I picked it up earlier today, and one of the buttons is missing.”

“I have it here, sir,” Lois smiled back as she reached into her pocket and set the button on the counter. “We usually drop things like that in the pocket of the garment, so it goes back to the owner.”

Lois looked past her customer into the intense blue eyes of the square-jawed detective stepping out of the phone booth behind him. “Freeze, mister! You’re under arrest!”

The End

If you enjoyed this sample, please come back next week. In the meantime, the 2026 BasedCon Based Book Sale runs through Sept. 16th. All ebooks $0.99 or Free!

Need An Escape?

Tags

author, books, ebooks, novels, Sci-fi, science fiction, short story, stories, story, writing

The Based Books Sale is still on! All ebooks $0.99 or free!

Basede Book Sales Starts Tomorrow (9/9)!

Tags

book, book sale, books, reading

All eboooks $0.99!

https://modernhoglegs627864.substack.com/p/based-books-sale-starts-tomorrow

Forgetting Everything

Tags

AI, artificial intelligence, books, censorship, computers, corporations, politics, writing

In 1975 a prescient little film called “Rollerball” starring James Caan, Maud Adams, and John Houseman hit the theaters. It told the story of the world’s top sports hero Jonathan E (played by Caan), who was the star player of the Houston powerhouse team.

The backdrop of the story is a world firmly under the control of mega-corporations that have subsumed the various world governments and now control the planet from several specialized cities around the globe. In the case of our hero Jonathan E that is Houston presented as “the Energy City.”

In spite of the violence inherent in the sport of Rollerball, the real conflict is the contest of wills between Jonathan E and a corporate executive named Mr. Bartholomew, played by John Houseman. Mr. Bartholomew has ordered Jonathan E to announce his retirement from the game because the game is not really a game, but a means of controlling the populace and an ultimate lesson that individual greatness and accomplishment have no value in the modern society.

One particularly entertaining scene comes from Jonathan E’s visit to a “library” where he attempts to obtain books on “how corporate decisions are made” and “the corporate wars” that presumably resulted in the world he knows. The “librarian” admits she is not a librarian, but just a clerk, and there are no books any longer because they have all been “edited and summarized.”

When Jonathan E persists in his request, the woman suggests he visit the central repository in Geneva. Upon his arrival, Jonathan is introduced to the “Librarian”, played by Ralph Richardson, who confirms the clerk’s earlier assertion. During the conversation, the Librarian is fiddling with computer keyboards and punch cards and complaining about the central computer named “Zero” who keeps losing information.

All of this brings me to an experience from the 21^st century.

Earlier this week, I attempted to have our corporate AI handle a simple collation task, and I received this error:

Hmmmm.

Interesting.

AI went offline.

The same AI controlled by corporations that are buying up massive quantities of used books, chopping off the spines, and feeding them into high-speed scanners to train the AIs.

Mankind began the transfer of information through oral traditions. Old folks told stories and taught the younger generations to survive. Nothing was written down. If the older members of a tribe were lost, the history of the people and many critical skills could be lost with them, and those skills had to be relearned.

Writing solved part of this. Now knowledge was persistent and bulky, but transmission was slow because the records had to be hand-copied. Errors crept in and were perpetuated across generations.

Gutenberg solved part of this with the printing press. This one invention allowed knowledge to be preserved and spread with ease and mankind saw the benefits.

When computers emerged, mankind gained immediate access to information from around the globe. Since then, data has been pushed back behind a mostly inaccessible wall. With the exception of lingering copies of old books, the cognoscenti control the knowledge of the world. All we have is the information we are ALLOWED to see, with no ability to cross-reference anything except another electronic version of a document that might, itself, be a summarized, sanitized, and approved version instead of the real thing.

Now the cognoscenti are actively destroying old books. When these final tangible records of mankind’s knowledge and thoughts have gone into the shredder, what will be left?

More importantly, who will create the new knowledge that mankind MUST have in order to survive, much less conquer the stars?

We are already seeing a rapid decline in cognitive skills associated with the amount of screen time our young people experience. With AI to “recommend” solutions for everything, how will people know how to reason through a solution to a problem?

Rollerball was not the only warning.

John Dalmas wrote The Regiment, a philosophical treatise loosely disguised as a military science-fiction novel. In this story, the government declared that “Everything discoverable has already been discovered, and everything knowable is already known.” The society has been intellectually and spiritually stagnant for generations.

The main character is a journalist who has been embedded with a group of soldiers from a harsh, barren planet who’s only export is mercenary soldiers. His assignment is to report on the progress of an interplanetary war where the central government is employing these offworld mercenaries. Gradually, the journalist is exposed to the mercenaries’ philosophy and inducted into a conspiracy to break the “we know everything” façade that has kept humanity frozen in time.

I suggest we are at a crossroads ourselves as human knowledge is increasingly centralized and access is increasingly restricted through censorship, “editing,” paywalls, or just “lost.”

What will we do if someone “trips over the extension cord” and AI goes dark?

How will we regain our knowledge?

Will we return to being brutes living in the ruins of our civilization and wondering at the odd relics we find as we starve to death because food no longer arrives in neat plastic packaging? Could a 1970 editiion of Encytclopedia Britannica left to moulder in an attic become the salvation of an entire planet?

Hold onto your physical books. The information in them may soon be worth more than gold.

Sincerest Form of Flattery

Tags

AI, artificial intelligence, computers, digital-marketing, google, internet, keyword-research, marketing, organic-traffic, search engine, seo

The more things change…

ModernHoglegs

Aug 30, 2026

One of the few really great things about getting older is seeing something in the news and remembering something clever from your lived history that makes the new thing hysterically funny. The other is sharing the laughter with all of the whippersnappers around you, but I digress.

In 1999, I had the pleasure of opening a small Internet consulting firm called VirtualNerds Inc. We entered a niche market serving small businesses who needed to build a web-based marketing presence to capitalize on the Internet rush of the time.

One of the challenges faced by every web design firm of the early years was getting the robots (aka spiders) that “read” the Internet to properly classify and categorize a website so the search engines, and potential customers, could find it.

This started with “keywords” that were part of each webpage’s structure. This was just a list of words that described what the page contained. Then the porn industry started gaming this so a search for “auto parts” unexpectedly returned links to pages with completely different kinds of “parts.”

Google (pre-Alphabet) stepped in with an “algorithm” that compared the keywords with the actual words on the page, and the battle for eyeballs really took off.

Google became very popular because the algorithm made searches far more accurate and less prone to malicious manipulation, but there are people in the world who just can’t stand to see the other fellow win.

Enter the “Google Bomb.”

In the 2004 U.S. election, John Kerry suffered one of the most widely publicized incidents of Google Bombing when a web article was published on the topic of waffles.

At the time, the algorithm worked on a “relevance” engine that used each of a webpage’s keywords, the number of times each word appeared on the page, and the number of inbound links from other sites on the topic. Google began associating sites with specific words and phrases, making them more “relevant” to a topic, and pages with higher relevance scores were pushed to the top of the Google search results page.

In the case of Mr. Kerry, each instance of the word “waffles” was a link to John Kerry’s campaign home page. This created an artificial association between the word “waffles” and Mr. Kerry and played up a popular campaign message from his opponent G. W. Bush that Kerry was known for waffling on issues. Team Kerry’s response was to link the term “miserable failure” to Bush’s campaign site, creating a new tactic for the political eyeball wars.

So Google changed the algorithm to make bombing significantly more difficult.

Now it is 2026 and AI is all the rage. Businesses are jumping in with more feet than they have trying not to lose a competitive edge. All of this effusive enthusiasm has come with the caveat that AI can “hallucinate,” “make up,” and “infer” information that is completely wrong.

After a number of court cases and a few destroyed legal careers, the message changed to “use AI to collate and organize information, but YOU are responsible for fact-checking everything.” A few lawsuits are starting to surface asking courts to decide who is responsible if an AI agent “goes rogue,” so expect ads from personal injury attorneys specializing in “cyber-harm” to appear soon.

Just to throw some rocket fuel on the lit match, we find this little gem in the news.

A government is creating a false organization to spread false information in a way that targets the AI information-gathering process.

The Bomb is back, baby!

Shut In or Shut Out?

Tags

atlas shrugged, family, life, love, mental health, self-care, shrugging out

The family just returned from a 10-day trip to Italy that included Rome and Milan. This is not a Lost Traveler article because I am no longer physically able or psychologically willing to put myself through the “there and back again” air travel process. I’ll pass the mantle of the Lost Traveler to the Amazon, if she cares to pick it up.

While they were gone, I lived the bachelor life. I had an entire city to “terrorize” in an attempt to live up to my “Godzilla” nickname, and I really didn’t care.  I left the house a total of five times during the period. Two of those were mandatory visits to the corporate office. Two were grocery runs. The last was mandatory personal business that could not be addressed online.

Toward the end of my freedom, I began taking stock of my mental state. Other than the office, I had no pressing need to be anywhere. I could have gone to visit family or look up old friends I hadn’t seen for years. I could have seen a movie in the theater. The list went on and on. The more things I added to the list of possibilities, the more I wondered about how my attitudes toward the demands of interacting with the world have evolved.

The term “shut-in” is usually applied to a person who, due to illness, age or disability, is unable to venture out into the world. Meals on Wheels serves these folks by making sure they have a solid meal once a day and, more importantly, have the chance to enjoy a bit of human contact. When extreme weather alerts are so gleefully announced on TV, people are encouraged to check on their neighbors, especially the elderly. This is admirable human social behavior that helps keep people connected to others.

In my own case, I realized I had become a “shut-out.” With the exception of the demands of work, I had effectively disconnected from the world. The TV only came on if I was not otherwise occupied, and then only to watch a movie from my library. I was living my own “survival bunker” existence. I had no desire to go out, and even less desire for the “bother” of human interaction.

My existence was on “pause,” much like that of Henry Bemis in the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough at Last.” Burgess Meredith plays Bemis, a bank teller who loves to read. He worked in a bank and hid in the vault to read during his lunch hour. When he emerges, the world has been devastated by a nuclear war and he is alone. He realizes he is free from all of the people who were constantly pushing and pulling on him and denying him time to enjoy his passion. In his ecstasy of freedom, he rushes to the library and begins salvaging the books he wants to read. Then he breaks his prescription glasses and cannot enjoy his books.

The experience of becoming a “shut-out” was much like that. I cannot describe my feelings as loneliness or depression. It was more a case of “my cup runneth over,” and I needed some serious silence.

The world didn’t shut me out. I pushed it as far away as possible. In a way, I suddenly understood why a person might choose to leave “home” and live in a barrel, or to go on strike and totally disconnect from everything beyond the immediate needs of the moment.  I hope to find that silence again soon. Ten days was far from enough.

Somebody Is Having a Bad Day

Tags

Bill, Bill Jordan, emotional health, employment, government, history, holloway's Raiders, immigration, Jim Cirillo, law enforcement, news, police, politics, society, stakeout squad

In 1990, I passed what was then called the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards of Education, also known as TCLEOSE or “T-Close,” exam and became eligible to become a sworn peace officer in the State of Texas.

It was a very different time. Police were generally well regarded in society at large, and most urban and suburban agencies required applicants to have military service or an associate’s degree. I had neither, so my life took a different path.

My time at the police academy showed me a hint of life on the other side of the badge, and my interest in things related to law enforcement has continued to the present. It also created a deep interest in the history and psychology of the profession and its relationship to various segments of the community.

“The Moon is Always Full” by David Hunter is one of my all-time faves. Hunter writes about his time as a sheriff’s deputy and presents a very human side of the job. If you can get past the mannequin story without laughing your backside off, somebody needs to hold a mirror under your nose.

“No Second Place Winner” by Bill Jordan is a treatise on the proper employment of the police service sidearm, and it provides a window into the mind of the border patrolman of the late 1960s.

“Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights” by Jim Cirillo is a bit “technical” for the casual reader, but “Jim Cirillo’s Tales of the Stakeout Squad” recounts Cirillo’s long career as a New York City policeman. Cirillo was also a member of the New York Police Department’s “Stakeout Squad” in the 1970s. The Stakeout Squad was a highly controversial unit created to hide out in businesses that suffered from the plague of armed robberies sweeping NYC at the time. Many of their confrontations resulted in an exchange of gunfire.

This was dangerous work, and “Tales” shows the human and professional side of the men in that unit. Probably the most telling passage is, “there are limits to each man’s ability to take stress. We started getting men going sick with hypertension. Several had heart attacks, and one of my brother officers, whom I had trained and whose nerve and utmost accuracy I had lots of faith in, died in his sleep of heart failure at the age of 36.” ~ Guns, Bullets, and Gunfights p. 58.

During roughly the same period, Dallas, Texas had a unit similar to the Stakeout Squad with the same mission, to stop armed robberies and make apprehensions if possible. “Holloway’s Raiders” by Capt. E. R. Walt tells their story.

All of the books above talk about police officers putting themselves in the line of fire to protect law-abiding citizens.

What happens when the people being protected are neither law-abiding nor citizens?

I just cracked open “Lines and Shadows” by Joseph Wambaugh. Originally published in 1984, it tells the story of a special unit of San Diego Police and U.S. Border Patrol officers who patrolled the no man’s land of desert scrub and cactus-filled canyons between San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico. They were not looking for “migrants,” “wetbacks,” or “pollos”; call them what you will. They were decoys pretending to be illegal aliens crossing into America, and their targets were the bandidos and crooked Mexican cops who robbed, raped, and murdered those migrants. They were successful, but at a terrible cost to themselves.

“In 1982 three San Diego-area police officers underwent psychological counseling… the three officers in question were all convinced that disturbances in their lives were related to police service. At least two had experienced some episodes of weeping… At least two had thoughts of self-destruction, which is extremely predictable in police stress cases.” ~ “Lines and Shadows” p. 9.

Some of this might sound very similar to the PTSD experienced by so many of our active service members and veterans. It is exactly the same affliction.

The hate being directed at our first responders is unjustified. It is causing many to abandon their calling, and the replacements are often people who should never wear a uniform of any kind. Many of these replacements are the ones with something to prove to the world, the bullies, and the power hungry. I watched some of these misfits wash out of the police academy before they could become sworn peace officers. I’ve heard talk from some long-serving officers that made me wonder.

Law enforcement is a calling to serve others. Just like a firefighter or a member of the U.S. military, the good ones are there because they WANT to be. The rest, hard to say. It is a cross-section of society like any other organization. It is only as good as the standards to which they are held and the leadership they are given.

Before you hold up a sign, or scream into a megaphone, you might think about who you want to show up when your elderly mother needs help. A person who cares? Someone who is just doin’ the job and collectin’ the check? Or nobody because the job no longer exists?

On Tour Forever

Tags

blue-oyster-cult, Friendship, music, reviews, rock

On July 28, 2026 a coworker who shall remain blameless asked if I was going to see Blue Öyster Cult at the Arlington Music Hall on July 31^st.

Sadly, I had not heard my favorite band of all time was in the DFW area. Also sadly, the Amazon that used to live at my house was not due to arrive from Notre Dame until 8/1, and it was too late to change her tickets, so she could go along.

This was my first visit to the Arlington Music Hall, and even though it has a 1960’s atmosphere, it is a well maintained intimate little concert hall. They have a snack bar and a grownup bar to enjoy while you wait for the doors to open.

(The front doors are clearly marked for 30.06 and 30.07 restrictions, but they had armed security guards inside the building to make sure things stayed safe.)

I connected with my coworker. He shared another bit of information regarding the venue in that the best seats are in the balcony. I had a seat on the next to last row on the floor and there is just not a bad seat in that place. The person on the sound board knows his stuff. The performance was loud as all such bands should be, but the sound was balanced so cleanly, the distortion that comes from shoving everything to 11 and walking away was completely absent and you could actually hear the lyrics and the music beautifully.

The set was mostly Blue Öyster Cult classics like

Don’t Fear the Reaper, Godzilla with whom I have a special relationship, and a couple of songs from their COVID-era release “The Symbol Remains”.

Even though I was alone at the show, I thoroughly enjoyed the performance.

When they played “The Last Days of May” and “Golden Age of Leather, I found myself choking up because a BÖC superfan was not there in person.

We lost my long-time friend Stewart Huckaby earlier this year, and watching Buck Dharma and Eric Bloom move around the stage reminded me that they have been performing for at least 50 years. It really brought home the lyrics of “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and “Golden Age of Leather” because Reaper talks about facing one’s end, and Golden Age talks about meeting it on your own terms.

When I got home, I drank a toast to Stewart…

“He had no fear and he started to fly.”

Now he embodies the motto of the band because he’s…

“On Tour Forever.”

Who Are These People?

Tags

books, fiction, life, mental-health, parent child relationships, Parenting, quality time, writing

For some years, I have thought of myself as “happily estranged from most of my relatives.” This was the unhappy result of some family drama, the roots of which have probably been forgotten by the participants, even if they don’t seem to forget the lingering animosity.

Lately I have been seeing more and more articles about family estrangement:

The Guardian

The Ney Yorker

Medium.com

KnowableMagazine.com

The majority tend to lay the blame at the feet of therapists who advise people to cut ties “for their own mental health”. “Political extremism” seems to run a close second in the blame game.

I can’t identify the root cause in my own case except I don’t like being around unhappy people who seem to delight in bringing others down with their endless exposition of their opinions and personal miseries.

This brings me back to the notion of “mental health”, but historically, the nuclear family was supposed to the be the safe place where people could go for solace, companionship, and acceptance. No, I’m not talking about some mythological 1950s “Leave It To Beaver” fantasy land. I’m looking back a bit further to the structure of aboriginal societies. Were they ideal? Not on your life. They did have the advantage of limited alternatives.

A group of hunter-gatherers or paleo-pastoralists only had each other to lean on, and that changes the dynamic. Many fantasy idealists look at these societies and say “If I don’t like it here, I can walk away. Vote with my feet.” You could, but there is a whole lot of nothing between groups, and you will be stomping through territory claimed by somebody on your way to utopia unless something along the way reminds you of your rightful place in the food chain.

This dependency on the clan did not eliminate the strife of everyday human interaction, but it toughened people up. It made them aware of the impact each member of the clan had on the rest of the community whether the affected parties were blood kin or not. Elders usually settled disputes before blood was drawn, but it was not always the case.

We have abandoned this model of belonging and we set forth into a world of hucksters selling happiness in a bottle or an ideology. Those hucksters are nowhere to be found when what we really need a big hug and a kind word, but another huckster steps up to offer us escape from the pain instead of the support to pass through it.

I’m not sure where we got off track as a society.

Accepting people for who they are, not mocking people for their perceived limitations had been a bedrock lesson in my youth. I walked away when people I thought I knew abandoned those standards of behavior when it became politically fashionable. Debate of almost any social or political issues is no longer tolerated at gatherings. Express the “wrong” opinion and the invitations stop flowing.

Makes me wonder if this is why those few family gatherings that still occur always seem to coincide with major sports events…

*************

Reminder: The Epic Indie Summer Sale is still in full swing through July 31st.

I goofed my registration for the Epic, but the Ladies of Los Cristobol and Castaway Files: Space Junks ebooks are on sale anyway.

Three Righteous Souls – A Response to a Thoughtful Review

Tags

author, book, book review

Long ago, an author could respond to Reviews posted on Amazon, and I made a few friends and contacts from reviewers I engaged with after “The Handbook of Modern Percussion Revolvers” was released.

That function seems to have been removed, and a person going by the handle of “Man in the Middle” left the following review of my book “Three Righteous Souls”, and I feel he deserves an answer.

******************************************

Man in the Middle

4 out of 5 stars

An amazing story of how easily life as we know it could end, and how to be righteous even then

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2026

Format: Kindle

Verified Purchase

I was hooked by the title. Who were the three righteous souls, and what made them righteous? The scenario is that power has mysteriously failed, resulting in a black mother and her two kids having to knock on an old white man’s door when their food and gas ran out while trying to get from Biloxi to Toledo. The man welcomes them in, and over time explains the ways of the world in such times to his visitors, while helping them survive and adapt.

One thing that impressed me was how easily our civilization, with all its rights and conveniences, could be stripped from us, and how little even the prepared could do about it. I’m still puzzled as to which three characters the author considers righteous?

I deducted one star only because the book ended with no resolution of the problem in sight.

******************************************

Greetings Man in the Middle and thank you for taking the time to read my book and even more for taking the time to leave a review. Such things mean more to authors than we can express.

The title of “Three Righteous Souls” is inspired by the Book of Genesis in the Bible.

In Genesis, Abraham bargains with God over the salvation of the city of Sodom while the man Lot gives shelter to two strangers at the risk of his own family’s lives. Were they, themselves, righteous men? If so, two righteous souls were not enough to save the city.

The title of the book is an invitation to the reader to consider their own answer to the question of who the righteous are, and do enough of them remain to save the world?

Tom had just fought off an attack by violent looters. Blood was dripping down the living room wall. He was exhausted by the ordeal and the effort of replacing the door ruined by his assailants. Then somebody knocked on his door.

Who can hang on to their humanity under such conditions? Who will not turn away a vulnerable stranger at the risk of their own life?

The story ends as a new world is being is emerging. What kind of world it becomes is still very much in question.

Thanks again, Man in the Middle. I hope you find this explanation satisfying.