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The Hunger Games seems to be the biggest blockbuster book series since The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. I’m currently listening to the series and finding a multitude of parallels to other books. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s  just very apparent. That Suzanne Collins borrowed ideas from other works and glued them together to make a wildly successful story shows that she’s a smart author with a knack for marketing. The language of the novel is simple – no ten dollar words, giving it an enormous possible audience.
I think the strength of The Hunger Games is how Collins’ pulls together powerful stories using a young girl (with a good name, Katniss) as the main character. This opens up dark tales to a whole new audience. Katniss in The Hunger Games is like Ice-T in the movie Surviving the . . . → Read More: The Hunger Games Success Formula: The Lottery + The Most Dangerous Game + The Truman Show
 November is Diabetes awareness month. November? The American Diabetes Association picked November instead of December? My blood sugar was so high in the late weeks of December that I needed Pixy Stix just to get to sleep.
 On second thought, November and December should both be Diabetes Awareness Month, with stages like the terror alerts at airports. November begins with Halloween leftovers and ramps up from there, right up to Thanksgiving, which is followed by more leftovers of uber-carbo quality. During this bountiful Thanksgiving leftover period, Halloween candy re-appears like manna (SweeTarts, Nerds and Runts that the kids passed over in favor of high-dose chocolate). This Hallo-Giving overlap grows bigger with the pumpkin pie brought to the office and that autumn birthday party that slips in between Thanksgiving and . . . → Read More: December is for Diabetes: New Year’s Resolution – P90X – Day 1
Another round of D’Angelo Barksdale wisdom kicks off episode three nicely – and he’s becoming something of a sage with his chicken nugget wisdom of episode two. Now he’s pitching a kinder, gentler drug-dealing approach to Poot and Wallace. Rather than showing signs of weakness, D’Angelo decries the violence for business purposes. The police don’t care about the drugs, he urges, they care about the bodies. Still, even with a business sense, D’Angelo lacks the ruthlessness of his uncle Avon. His flaw already seems to be a growing sensitivity, ever since his murder trial (and since he shot and killed a man).
 Lieutenant Daniels has to fall on his sword for his idiot subordinates. A shame to watch, because Daniels is so squared away. The guy . . . → Read More: The Wire: The Buys
 McNulty hasn’t learned anything about staying within lines of the bureaucracy, but at least the series doesn’t make him into the Dirty Harry loose-cannon hero, at least not yet. Episode two opens in a morgue where the one witness (named Gant) who testified against D’Angelo Barksdale has been murdered for playing nice with the rule of law. I forgot to mention: in episode one, the court scene has a direct parallel to the Godfather II where Frank Pentangelli “forgets” everything he knows when his Sicilian brother arrives at the court room. A clear threat is delivered by the silent presence of another in the room. The same things happens in the Wire court scene, where the presence of the Barksdale gang’s brass earns D’Angelo . . . → Read More: The Wire: The Detail
At long last, I’m watching season 1 of the HBO series, The Wire. I’m quite late to this series, but after repeated urges from friends to watch it, I’ve finally caved. Generally, I steer clear of cop dramas, since Law and Order and CSI could never keep my attention. The cop drama seems so overdone that I cannot bear to hear some well-groomed actor use the word “perp” and sigh with the invented ennui of a burned out flatfoot.
In the first episode of The Wire (The Target), I can see that the usual tropes don’t apply here. I did struggle through the first scene, however, as a kid called “snot boogie” is shot. Right away though, the gritty streets of Baltimore are apparent. . . . → Read More: The Wire: The Target
  The story of oil and energy may be the most interesting and impactful tale of modern history, and Daniel Yergin is the J.R.R. Tolkien of oil geopolitics. From a distance, this topic interests me, but once you get into the nitty gritty of pipeline geopolitics, the history of how a pipeline gets created becomes a little like reading about the Hapsburg family tree. A pipeline is erected amid the egos of politicians, the wallets of energy tycoons, the drums of war, the grudges between cultures, and the moods of macro economies. Reading about the Caspian Derby in Yergin’s book, The Quest, I began to see that the great game of geopolitics quickly becomes a Celtic Knot – a twisting, threading, winding story full of all . . . → Read More: The Celtic Knot of Pipeline Politics: Reading ‘The Quest’ by Daniel Yergin
  Kim Kardashian and company have held a monopoly on checkout aisle magazine covers for several years now, and this typically sends a chill over me, especially when I once tuned into their show to witness the family in action. Like many, I ended up with the “love-em-or-hate-em” feeling.
However, in the checkout aisle I became struck with a positive aspect of the Kardashian women.
I can’t believe I just typed that.
But suddenly, their presence seemed welcome to me because I looked at another magazine nearby with the image of a skinny woman with surfacing ribs. The Kardashians aren’t starving, and don’t look unhealthy. They look like women with good diets, and they have figures that are more realistic to the average woman. Kim and Chloe portray beauty with substance, not . . . → Read More: The silver lining in the vapid Kardashian cloud
One of the major scenes in Accelerating Returns centers on a product release that marries the mind to a device that can instantly allow people to learn any subject they desire. Not only learn the subject, but comprehend it with the ease of a Ph.D. Once again, the news keeps pace with science fiction. An article in Science released this month (Dec 2011) suggests that not only may this be possible, but a proof-of-concept already exists.
This is where my navel-gazing pursuit of writing fiction feels impotent. While I imagine wild products that could make everyone on earth an instant genius, someone in Kyoto already has enough data on the actual science to make the Matrix kind of learning possible.
Who wouldn’t like to learn Taekwondo like Neo does in the Matrix, or like Trinity (in the same movie) when she downloads the specs and . . . → Read More: Learn calculus and how to play piano instantly! Download to your head…
I thought of various science fiction ideas today when I came across an article on camera-toting beetles. From the Telegraph:
“Minute cameras and microphones mounted on the backs of beetles will help emergency services find victims trapped or buried underneath rubble…The bugs can then be released into collapsed buildings or other areas seen as too dangerous for human rescue teams.”
After my gee-whiz moment on the positive possibilities of this new technology, I experienced the usual unnerving thought that these bugs will be used in applications very different from rescue missions. For example, law-enforcement is the first thing that comes to mind, not to mention national and corporate espionage. Even football coaches would love to have a bug transmitting images of the opposing coach’s list of plays (remember the NFL version of Spygate?).
 First thing I thought of . . . → Read More: Spy bugs: Minority Report spider bots no longer far-fetched
Welcome to the official site of Peter Anthony, author of the novels A Town Called Immaculate, The Plenty, Accelerating Returns, and Drill & Sanctimony.
A Town Called Immaculate
Amazon links: Kindle Edition $8.05 | Paperback $11.66 | Hardcover $22.76
The first book in the Immaculate series. Still traumatized by his war experience, Ray Marak’s world has shrunk—to the boundaries of his small hometown of Immaculate, and the warmth of his adored family: his young sons Jacob and Ethan, and his wife Renee—the woman who waited for him. But as the snow accumulates, so do the townspeople’s stories, and the suspicions Ray has harbored for years start to resurface, along with his demons. As midnight approaches, and young Jacob vanishes into the deadly storm, Ray realizes that Josh’s generosity has been motivated by something more . . . → Read More: Welcome!
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