Next week at this time, I’ll be preparing to venture OUT to an in-person book event. Wish me luck. I hope I remember to wear my street clothes.

September 11, 2001, coming this week, the 20th anniversary of a day every adult remembers.

One impressive new version of the World Trade Center stands in Manhattan. I’ve written about it and included an image in my September newsletter. There are also other formal memorials and tributes to those who found themselves drawn into what we simply refer to as 9/11.

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I’ve chosen a less formal, but poignant image as we reflect on the heroes and those we lost.

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Labor Day and who doesn’t recall her first job?

Mine was twirling cotton candy at a concession stand on Revere Beach Boulevard. I was 12 years old.

The area under the cyclone in the top photo is where Fred and Lil hired me to twirl cotton candy. Each of the following summers I was promoted to a different part of the concession. The soft drink section. The pepper steak grill. The fried clams!

Don’t look for the coaster now — it’s history, along with the rest of the amusements on the 2-mile boardwalk.

Deal of the week: Several decades later, I wrote a short short story set on the Cyclone. You can read it free if you have Kindle Unlimited. If you don’t and you pay $.99 to read it, let me know and I’ll “reimburse” you with one of my paperback mysteries!

August 26 is the anniversary of the ratification the 19th Amendment, guaranteeing women the right to vote.

August 19, 1812: The USS Constitution defeated the British frigate HMS Guerriere off Nova Scotia during the War of 1812, earning the nickname “Old Ironsides.”

The question is how did the ship get from Nova Scotia to Boston Harbor, which it has called home at least since I was a kid.

I can’t answer that, but I can attest to its presence in Boston when I was in grammar school. Remember Field Trips? This was one of ours. Not that I remember the tour, but surely the bus ride from Revere.

Too bad I didn’t appreciate history at the time, surrounded as I was by “where it all began” as our teachers tried to drill into us.

For some reason, the drills involving the multiplication tables were more interesting to me. And now it’s too late — I could never climb onto the deck for the tour, any more than I could climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument, also the object of a Field Trip.

Where did your Field Trips take you?

While everyone was glued to something called the Olympics, I decided to travel back to this month in 1950, August 11, in fact, when Boston Braves pitcher Vern Bickford pitched a no-hitter against the Brooklyn Dodgers, giving the Braves a win of 7-0.

Those were the days, my friend. Pure Sport, no soap opera behind-the-scenes tales or Vern Bickford throw mats and fragrances.

At least I thought so. A short time later, I learned about the Pure Business part, when the Braves ditched Boston for a more financially rewarding Milwaukee.

For more on this, see: www.minichino.com/OtherWorks/boston_braves.html

Some exciting news this week: reversion of rights!

I have my rights back to the last 4 Miniature Mysteries. By the end of the year, you’ll see all 9 as a set, with “matching” covers.

The first 3 have already been re-released, under my own name, with different covers from the original releases.

What’s in a name? Could mine have predisposed me to a life-long miniatures hobby and a string of mystery novels about a miniaturist? It makes as much sense as anything.

As a kid, I played with the one “toy” I had, which was a dollhouse my father built for me. Along with my favorite cousin, I turned everything into minis. We cut up old greeting cards and “framed” a bird or a flower or a bicycle to decorate the walls of my mini house. We sliced pieces of straw from a broom and made spaghetti. We covered sponges with scraps of fabric and made beds and easy chairs.

We had a whole life in miniature.

I’ve kept that hobby through my adult years. At one time or other, nearly everyone I know has received a miniature “something.” A small sewing scene for my quilt-making friend, a tiny cluttered dorm room for one stepdaughter, a miniature stable for another. In my home I have a post office, a 6-level museum, and a funeral parlor, all in miniature.

Photos on request!

In about a month, I’ll be teaching one of my favorite classes: Science, Technology, and Social Change. As you might guess from the title, the class encompasses the history and philosophy of science through the ages, as well as the ways new technology presents new questions and answers.

Topics are as ancient as the teachings of the pre-Socratics and as modern as the latest in observations of black holes.

I like to start by asking my students to place themselves on the technology spectrum between Luddite and Early Adopter.

It’s amusing enough to read anti-technology sentiments from students who are earning their degrees completely online.

But no one beats a woman I saw at a conference hotel a few years ago, as we both waited in line for an elevator. This person wore a large, obviously homemade button on her lapel: LAST LIVING LUDDITE.

I smiled. “That can’t be you,” I said.

“Yes it is,” she said, head held high. “I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t email or text. I’m not on Facebook—”

I had to interrupt. “So, you’re not in line for the elevator?”

She looked confused. “Of course I am.”

But this was a very smart lady. I could tell by her frown that she knew where I was headed.

The elevator came. The lady turned and walked away. I wondered if she used the stairs or simply took the next car.

I wish she’d stayed. I love hearing about people’s attitudes toward technology, where their thresholds are.

On July 22, 1933 (before even I was born) Aviator Wiley Post completed the first solo flight around the world. The flight took 7 days and 19 hours.

In August 1935 Wiley Post and humorist Will Rogers were flying together in a hybrid airplane when they crashed 15 miles outside of Point Barrow, Alaska.

The airport in Utqiaġvik, the largest city and borough seat of the North Slope Borough of Alaska is called the Wiley Post-Will Rogers Memorial Airport.

It seems fitting to honor Post, and others like him, after a week of edge-of-space flights.

With renewed interest in travel to outer space, I’m inclined to revisit para.

Para is all around us these days, especially with the release of the US Navy UFO videos. (Excuse me, UAP, the new name: Unidentified Arial Phenomena.)

We have paramedics, paralegals, paraprofessionals, parapsychology, and, of course, PARANORMAL. I’ve been trying to figure out what paranormal means vis a vis “normal.”

There are many possibilities.

One option is to consider it similar to what para means in paralegal. I had a brief career as a paralegal at a large law firm in San Francisco. We thought of ourselves as “almost” legals, just a few years of study away from being lawyers.  Maybe paranormal is “almost normal.”

But if you know the legal profession, you know para in this case means “subsidiary role of a lesser status.” With few exceptions, the lawyers in the firm reminded us of that hour by billable hour. I didn’t last long as a paralegal. Something about the way the law allows one to argue from two contradictory premises. That’s not my dog, but if it were my dog it didn’t bite you. But that’s another blog.

Another meaning of para is “guarding against,” as in a parasol, which guards against the sun, and a parachute, which guards against free fall.

Paranormal might mean “guarding against the normal.”

My most intense brush with paranormal came while I was teaching a course in the scientific method at a university in the SF Bay Area. The school was known at the time for its groundbreaking classes in nontraditional fields. A student could get a degree in Transpersonal Psychology, for example or Mysticism.

Really.

I taught a class with a full enrollment of mysticism majors. You have to pity them with me as an instructor.

The dean admitted outright that he’d hired me to be the Visiting Rationalist. I was to be tough on the students, force them to be scientific, to present their fields of study as “scientific, with real hypotheses and experiments.”

I had a tough choice to make: teach them classical physics rife with deterministic principles that allow no wiggle room, or confess that modern (i.e., quantum) physics seems every bit as strange as paranormal phenomena..

Some examples.

 Entanglement is the phenomenon by which two particles are inexorably linked no matter how much distance separates them. The state of one particle can be teleported to another particle far away.

String theory proposes that everything in the universe—matter, space, time—is made up of ten- (or greater) dimensional, invisible, vibrating strings.

And here’s a winner: the uncertainty principle. Essential to the foundation of quantum physics, the uncertainty principle tells us it’s impossible to make a measurement of a physical system without disturbing that system.

Hold on. Isn’t that one of the things we’ve criticized about “soft” sciences like psychology (let alone the “para” version)? That you can’t observe and make “exact” measurements of behavior because the presence of the measurer affects the result?

There’s more—so many phenomena like time travel and speeds faster than that of light are possible in the world of the very, very small. As long as you sneak the behavior in under the radar, which is on the order of 10 to the -27 (pretty small), you can do just about anything you want.

The mysticism majors? They would have preferred that I congratulate them on having observation, hypothesis, experiment.  Just like Newton.

How uninspired.

I passed them anyway.