Larry's Page
I decided to divide my page into various parts, so like strolling through the supermarket you at least know
whether you are in the dairy or meat section.
So here you have: Whimsy, Things From My Past, Musings, Show Biz, and "Taking on a Crooked Utility."
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Whimsy
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A shlock fiction writer boards Amtrak in the frantic hope he'll find the ending to a story that's stuck in limbo:
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Three old codgers with nothing to lose choose a life of crime with many a bizarre twist:
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A screenplay of madcap confusion: when a joke newspaper ad for a camp for only one camper, for $1,000,000, is taken seriously by a tyrant king annoyed by his son, the Middle-East conflict comes to remote Idaho in comical yet hope-inspiring ways.
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Mr. Doyle was an imaginary person my daughter Hillery invented when she was about 4 or 5. I liked to call her "Ui" (rhymes with "ooo-eee") since that was how she first pronounced her name. We made up songs about him, to her delight, and here are lyrics that survived from that time, with drawings added by this darling girl:
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A skirmish of heated letters occurs when Professor E. Allen Abardsworth, Ph.D., Chairman, Ancient Women's Studies at Bayton College, discovers that only the Preface to the draft of his latest scholarly treatise remains after an unfortunate computer mishap:
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Tension between siblings, at odds over who should inherit what when their fading father dies, increases when the son searches in the empty childhood home for the gun of a dead Nazi his wife plans to sell on E-Bay:
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Grandkids Ruby, Carson, Mitchell and Quinn with Larry
Glenna, Sarah, Larry, Hillery and Jesse
This is a work either still in progress or hopelessly sidetracked, but worth reading for the ecstatic praise the art critic Remondo lavishes on a new art form created by Graechus and his CyclopsCam:
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The Queen is addled:
Song I improvised:
A fictional breakup of a marriage and a sentimental attachment to a rug; not my divorce story, but close enough:
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Things From My Past
An article published in the King County Bar Association's Bar Bulletin about my "sabbatical" in Minnesota in 1997:
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A semi-autobiographical novelette I wrote after that "sabbatical," ca. 1997, about coming of age in the turbulent 60s:
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America's love affair with the automobile -- amazing how many memories attach to the cars we owned:
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How one little word in German, "von," became fateful for Germans in general and me in particular:
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Here is a piece I wrote about my (mis)adventures while taking a tour with Glenna through the jungles and Mayan ruins in Mexico and Central America in 2012. I am lucky I survived it to tell this tale:
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A memorable moment for my son during the week of a 1996 Mardi Gras wedding:
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An amazing set of coincidences that started in the 1960s that took me a few decades to absorb before I realized their significance:
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A Matryoshka Doll of Coincidences, or How I came into the Crosshairs of the FBI and the KGB
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Musings
Maybe the USA is so hopelessly divided we should split it in two:
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Or maybe what the body politic needs is not a divorce but an intervention:
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Lawyers Who Resort to Latin -- Making the Obscure Even More Obscure:
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Our legal system is too inefficient, slow, expensive and unfair:
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Robots and Artificial Intelligence may be an improvement:
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Quixotic? No doubt, but here's my stab at a proposal to end a bloody conflict that threatens to end the human species:
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On religion:
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Taking on a crooked utility
For the last three years I have devoted considerable time to fighting Puget Sound Energy (PSE), the electricity utility
for much of the Eastside (five cities east of Seattle: Bellevue, Kirkland, Newcastle, Redmond and Renton).
PSE proposes building a project that would entail building, through dense residential neighborhoods, 18 miles of new steel towers and high voltage lines right next to two aging gas pipelines transporting jet fuel under pressure. This dangerous project, which PSE calls "Energize Eastside," has only one real justification: to make the Australian and Canadian hedge-fund investors who own PSE fabulously richer if this $200-$300 million boondoggle is built. Independent load flow studies (used to justify projects like "Energize Eastside") conducted by a former PSE vice president for power planning and untainted by PSE influence or direction, show no need for this project.
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Citizens for Sane Eastside Energy is a group of citizens opposing the project, with its website at www.sane-eastside-energy.org. Go there to see my latest diatribe.
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Another very effective activist group fighting "Energize Eastside" is CENSE (the Coalition of Eastside Neighborhoods for Sensible Energy), at www.cense.org.
Here are video reconstructions of how PSE-sponsored consultants probably fudged computer simulation data to get the results PSE wanted to justify its boondoggle project:
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And while we're on the subject of crooks...
Here's a video I made that posits "what really happened:"
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