John D Reinhart

Walking the Night

The nifty thing about video is that you can make a pratfall without actually taking one… there comes an age where that’s a real bonus!

I was goofing around with my cell phone, shooting the full moon through some trees, and out popped this dopey video.

Now, there’s a writer’s story in this little 16-second video.

In my head, he steps on a cat. It’s so clear – the cut to the shot of the walking feet, he’s looking straight ahead. I mean, how more clear could it be?

In my wife’s view, a cat attacks him from the tree. She saw the moon through the tree, the guy paying no attention. To her, it’s obvious.

As long as it’s clear that it’s a cat, I’m happy. I’d thought about putting a skateboard on the sidewalk, but that telegraphs the joke in a 16-second video.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this epic piece of film-noir filmmaking!

Yessss, Your Majesty

You know the writing biz, right? Like any other biz, it’s all about marketing, networking, and growing the brand.

Funny you’d mention brand.

I had a very lovely, very informative online chat over at LinkedIn this morning with a person I only just met today. She inspired me to think again about this career we call writing. Well, some of us call it that…

She pointed out that she considers herself more of a communicator. I took that to mean she’s a linker of ideas. In my head, that’s a technical writer, right? Taking the arcane and making it mundane?

Anyway, she reminded me that this is what I do, too. And it’s great fun. My favoritist thing in the world is to read something and then explain it to somebody else. My poor family. Oh, the things they’ve had to listen to!

With Lucia’s kind encouragement, I shall henceforth refer to myself as Resident Explainer. If the shoe fits…

But that’s not what this post is about.

Back in the day… no, that’s not a good start.

Once upon a time… nope. Been done. How about this:

I have a new website: Kuiper Belt Queen.

It sounds like a riverboat, I know. But it’s my way to house the planetary articles I’m just plain bent on publishing. As Resident Explainer I can scour the NASA and ESA databases for curious and fun details about the Kuiper Belt environs and relay them to you.

But why, you ask. Why? What is the matter with you?

In a year or so, see, I’m moving to New Jersey. I clearly cannot commute to my Southern California job from Southern New Jersey. So, my intent is to build an online resume of articles from which I can pitch myself as a freelance-feature writer-for-hire.

Have Word, will travel.

But, wthe Kuiper Belt?

I mean, come on. Have you seen it? (If you have, I’ll smoke what you’re smoking!) It’s an enormous donut-shaped ring of proto-planetary stuff that surrounds the sun, way out there beyond Neptune.

Evidence for its existence wasn’t even confirmed until 1992, so it’s an unexplored frontier.

YET, and I do mean yet, it most likely holds the keys to our understanding of how the sun and solar system were formed. Sun, planets, life, you and me… connect the dots.

Okay, you have to agree that’s cool.

And, the biggest body in the Kuiper Belt thus far discovered is our old friend Pluto. Pluto! Yaay! Because she’s the big kahuna, she must be the Kuiper Belt Queen!

See how it all fits together?

Another feather in the head of the Resident Explainer’s brand.

It’s all a vast plan, my friend, on the road to a WRITING EMPIRE!!!

Thanks for reading along…

A Marvelous Name

You know how the world is, right? What you call your story is almost as important as the story itself, am I right? I mean, who will ever shell out $29.95 for a book call “Stupid.” It would have to have some pretty good reviews…

I don’t know what I’m talking about. I can prove it.

I had this really cool website called CaliforniaAirMuseums.com. Don’t go bother looking for it – I killed it.

In its place I created this equally cool website called MarvelousAirMuseums.com. That one you can go looking for, because I didn’t kill it.

Marvelous is one of those words, though, isn’t it? Marvelous party! What a marvelous cocktail. You look mahvelous, dahling…

I was going for the alliteration with Museums, and Magnificent seemed too pompous. So, Marvelous it is.

The challenge is moving stuff from CalAir over to Marvelous – it’s a chore!

So, you ask, why tamper with perfection?

Easy answer. Moving day. Next year – really now only a year away, my wife and I are preparing to move to New Jersey to pester our only grandkid. As far as I can tell, there are very few California Air Museums in New Jersey. But there are sure to be some marvelous exhibits. Done. Sigh. What a mahvelous display, old man!

More as time permits! Thank you for reading along!

Back to the Front

Okay, what is it now? What preposterous, outlandishly wacky idea is sure to make a gazillion simoleans this time? Don’t get me started!

I had a revelation last week – something that just never occurred to me before in all my born years.

You’re a writer, right? You know how it goes – everybody’s a writer, yadda yadda yadda, right? The difference between a writer and a wannabe writer is that the writer is always writing.

To wit, this thing: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/three-body-problem-solved-john-reinhart-m6zjc

Not trying to prove anything or blow my own horn or you know – well, I am trying to get you to read the article so that I can make a gazillion simoleans from the advertising revenue once I get discovered….

Anyway, my revelation was this: not everyone has an inner Fred Flintstone, or Ralph Kramden, or Oscar the Shark Slayer. Maybe we’re not all searching for a get-rich-quick scheme.

In that same vein of discovery, it follows that maybe not everyone IS a writer, or even a wannabe. Maybe you and me, we’re of a rarer breed than we realize. That’s kind of a big deal, don’tcha think?

Once, three quarters of a score of years ago, I found myself underemployed and with a hankering to change my life for the better. In those days, the Internet was trying to expand, and people would publish just about anything that was three words or longer. During those few frantic, financially fraught years, I churned out over 300 articles on planetary science.

I didn’t make a fortune. Or a living.

But, in 15 months, I gotta take a career with me to New Jersey, where my six-month-old grandson patiently waits. So, for me, right now, it’s back to the Final Frontier. Back to the front! And the above article, dull though it may be, is just the vanguard. More to come!

Too Much Free Time

Sometimes free time can be the best of times. Other times, too much free time can trick you into turning out turduckens like this little treasure!

My darling bride remains in NJ, although rumor has it she’s soon to wing her way back to the West, and none too soon, if this video is any gauge of what I’ve been doing in her absence!

What am I doing making videos like this? You tell me, bub, ’cause I ain’t got no idea!

We’re back to Shakespeare’s time, my friend. All the world’s a stage, and we are but mere players upon it.

Instead of displaying my deep dismay over the direction of our democracy, or horrifiedly hollering about the impending Alien Armageddon, I’ve decided to use the soapbox on my busy streetcorner to make a jolly jape, a gentle jest, a minute minute of merriment.

I truly hope you enjoy it, and breathlessly await your feedback!

Okay, so as not to waste this entire opportunity, wouldn’t you know this also a shameless marketing stunt? See, I’m tying my empire together – first WordPress, then YouTube, and even Instagram – bwah-hahahahaha!

Just as soon as someone visits one, I mean ANY, of my sights, I’m in like Flynn, my friend. In it to win it this minute! You gotta risk it for the biscuit!

Gorilla Marketing LIVES!!!

Where the Little Cars Roam

Where the Little Cars Roam… Sounds like Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Roam, except the words are different. That’s kind of like saying Star Wars is like Titanic, only the stories are different. Well, there it is.

I met a very pleasant young woman this weekend – she sold me my new washing machine. She’s really young, like 20. That’s not a judgement, just an observation. I mean, you and I were twenty, once, right? So, there it is.

She told me she was a writer, although her first book is yet to be completed. It’s a book of poetry, and she’s been at it for the last 8 years.

Three thoughts came to mind.

First, good on you to refer to yourself as a writer! Identifying as such is a hugely powerful thing.

Second, and I told her this, the difference between a writer and someone who wants to write is that the writer writes. She agreed and promptly advised me she’s written tons of local articles and didn’t I just suddenly feel like Mr. High-and-Mighty-Hoity-Toity-stuck-up-old-fart? Rule number one in the world should be to shut your yap and ask questions, ya moron!

Thirdly, if you’re twenty and you’ve been at your tome for 8 years, doesn’t that mean you started when you were twelve? I think more than anything else, that’s massive persistence, to keep at something through the tumultuous teen years!

Well, there you go. I wished her every success, because she deserves it.

See, I’m on my own these days. My wife is on the other side of the country helping manage our very first grandchild. She’s way tougher that I am!

It’s been me, the dogs and the cat since Christmas day. The oldest dog isn’t quite in charge of his bowels, so I have frequent surprises in the hallway leading outside. The middle dog is stone deaf and sticks to me like gum to a shoe every moment I’m home. And the youngest dog ate an epic portion of the dog food I put down for them last weekend, when I flew back east to visit my wife and grandkid, so she’s a portly little beast that wants more, more, more!

So. I. Have. No. Guardrails. No one to tell me “hey, stop being snarky!” It’s not my fault!

Since Christmas I’ve had to buy a new mailbox, a new smart watch, a new dryer and just this last weekend, a new washing machine.

But, that’s how I met this nice writer girl and delivered my pearls of dim-headed wisdom.

In the mean time, in between time, I’ve been slowly using Blender to build a world for those neat little cars to drive around in.

My secret idea is this: I know of a company in New York that makes neat little cars. My guess is that they could use a neat little video to promote their neat little cars, and this is where I come into the story, because I’m moving to New York in the summer of ’26. But that’s a secret, so don’t tell anybody.

So, here I am, sitting in my lonely garret (bedroom) with no company (3 dogs and 1 cat) writing my life story (this post), wishing I hadn’t been so snarky to that nice girl.

But, well, there it is!

Mr. Nolan, You Insult Me, Sir

If you’re sitting at the car dealer, ready to put money down on that snappy red sports car and another you walks in the door and tells you that he’s from the future and you should instead buy the gray sedan because that way you’ll invent a time machine, don’t you believe him. There’s been a mistake.

I mean, with quantum mechanics maybe there’s a very, very, very tiny chance that it could happen, but it’s like a one-in-ten-trillion chance.

You see, I just finished watching Interstellar, the Christopher Nolan film. Man, am I disappointed.

He got me the first time with that movie Dunkirk. A well made, handsomely crafted film right up to that scene where the pilot sets fire to his Spitfire fighter plane to keep it from falling into German hands.

It’s a beautiful scene, the plane blazing away on the twilight beach, the German soldiers running up, the pilot standing proud and defiant.

And then you see that there is no engine in the plane. It’s clearly a plywood mockup, featuring a length of pipe in the place where the engine should be!

Mister Nolan, you insult me, sir! Palming off such shoddy filmmaking as art!

You couldn’t spend fifty bucks and just put a piece of sheet metal in there? Surely you saw the missing engine during post? Did you think no one would notice? Not even airplane nerds?

And so back to Interstellar, an intriguing movie about the nature of time. There are some heart-rending scenes – “don’t leave me, Daddy!” and “you mean there IS no plan A?”

The film begins in a farmhouse on a clearly dying earth…

Stick with me here because this is a good writer’s story.

The house seems to have a poltergeist, except the unseen ghost isn’t scary and is leaving clues instead of breaking stuff. “It’s a code!” Cooper exclaims, and figures out that the waves of dust on the floor are binary coordinates which lead him and his 10-year-old daughter to a secret NASA installation. Believe me, I’m not revealing a thing so far.

Cooper takes off with three others, including pretty Anne Hathaway trying to broaden her audience appeal (I CAN do real drama), into a wormhole and another galaxy and eventually down the maw of an ancient and evidently not-so-violent black hole.

Inside – okay – here comes the revealing. Stop reading if you don’t want know what happens. We’ll wait while you decide…

Still with us? Cool. Thanks

Inside Cooper screams and whimpers a little bit – fine acting by Mr. McConaughey – and finds himself inside a beautifully rendered tesseract of unimaginable dimensions. I mean, seriously, here the filmmaking is beyond compare. It is stunning.

And then he finds himself inside the walls of that dusty farmhouse from two hours ago. There’s his 10-year-old daughter, and there’s him. He’s gone back in time. That’s cool.

We’re still okay.

Then he starts leaving clues.

Wait, you mean, HE was the poltergeist? HE left the binary clues that made farmhouse-him drive to the NASA installation in the first place?

So, current Cooper would not have gone to NASA if he hadn’t seen the binary signals future Cooper left for him in the dust.

Doesn’t that mean that future Cooper uses the time machine he’s created to go tell past Cooper to create a time machine?

You can’t do that! From a storytelling aspect, that’s cheating! That’s like Prince Charming knowing the glass slipper was Cinderella’s all along because he secretly told the fairy godmother to give it to her.

That’s a closed loop, with no entry point!

Every time loop must have a beginning, a point of entry.

But we humans, we like to close loops and tie things up. You can imagine the writers thinking “it’d be so cool if, like, it was Cooper leaving the code…” So poetic.

Mr. Nolan, you insult me again, sir!

More insulting are the people I’ve met who tell me that’Interstelallar is the best film ever. They’re so impressed by the pompous filmmaking they never even see the flaw in the story!

Granted, it is well made and breathtakingly beautiful. I can’t unsee the thousand-foot waves.

But your wiggly lights and gussied up dancing girls do not blind me to science, Mr. Nolan. Science!

So, the pretty and thunderous Interstellar is off my list of recommended movies. The Texas-sized plot hole cannot be explained away. Like the engine missing from the Spitfire, it’s too obvious to ignore.

And, Mr. Nolan is off my list of great directors. He makes a pretty film, surely, but I find his obvious disregard for the easily-fixed-but-clearly-flawed details quite insulting. It’s as if he’s saying “nobody will notice.”

Well I, sir, am that nobody.

Cooler Heads

Following up on yesterday’s fearful diatribe, let’s us think for a minute, you and me.

IF the aliens use this hydrogen technology for fuel, they can’t be using a lot of seawater. All they use is a single hydrogen proton at a time. Seriously, how much water do they need, when, like, a teaspoon will get ’em from here back to the planet Zemnar, or wherever they live?

I mean, with global warming, the sea level is actually rising. That means they must know there’s plenty to go around.

If they were all that afraid of us, we’d be zapped back to the stone age already. That we’re not means we’re more of a sideshow than a threat.

The big WHEN of our cracking the hydrogen proton puzzle is decades away, and is still a pretty big IF.

And all of it is just theory in the first place.

So, until they land on somebody’s front lawn and say “yes, we’re using a proton-fission engine to create spacetime bubbles around our ships while we harvest droplets of your seawater for fuel and if you interfere with us we’ll zap you into non-existence,” I don’t think there’s all that much to be afraid of.

OMG, what if they land on MY lawn?!? I’ve got to go mow it right now!!!

I Have No Crackers

You know me, right? I like funny stuff, and writerly stories and stuff like that, right? Well, I just had the crackers scared right out of me. Right out.

I just finished reading Luis Elizondo’s book Imminent, you see.

It’s about UFOs, although they are now called unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAP. They changed the name because our Navy ships have reported seeing vast, glowing orbs beneath the bubbling waves. And because of the Roswell crashed ship (no longer flying).

This author is the former top CIA guy who ran the UAP program for the Department of Defense and has worked closely with guys like General Jim Mattis and Senator Harry Reid. He’s legit.

He’s now gone public because he believes UAP are an IMMINENT THREAT not just to the country, but to humanity itself.

Because. They. Are. Real.

That’s pretty creepy, but here’s what scared the crackers out of me:

We’ve all heard about UFOs darting this way and that, super fast but usually silent. If you’ve seen one, and I have, you ask yourself how could they do that?

Well, Elizondo’s scientific team figured out that alien spacecraft have an energy source so profound that it warps spacetime. They travel through our atmosphere in a spacetime “bubble,” separate from our own atmosphere, yet passing through it. The bubble warps spacetime, allowing them to dart and dash around us and travel vast, galactic-sized distances in the blink of an eye.

The only way to generate so much energy that we know of is to split the proton of a hydrogen atom – we split the atom itself to make hydrogen bombs. Splitting the proton inside the atom releases way more energy. It works out in Einsteinian physics. (In a timely aside, I was reading about our own experiments with that just last week.)

So, these spacecraft probably run on hydrogen.

That’s why they’re here: our vast oceans are huge hydrogen reservoirs.

So it’s not about us, and never has been. We’re a convenient gas station. They’ve only ever been interested in our water.

Except that the UAP have frequently been seen hovering around our nuclear facilities.

Which means that now it is about us, because we’re starting to dabble with those super-high levels of energy ourselves. When we split the hydrogen proton, we’ll be a competitor for their fuel supply.

Elizondo’s team reasons that this is why aliens have been abducting humans – to learn our physiology. It explains the crop circles and the mutilated cows – to figure out what we eat.

He tells very scary stories of UAP starting and stopping our nuclear missiles – shutting down banks of silos, and actually launching a rocket, only to shut if off the last second before it left the silo. And shadowing our aircraft carriers and charging our aircraft. All to figure out and test our military capability.

They don’t want to invade us because they don’t care about us.

They’re just learning how to wipe us out because we’ll be a competitor. An annoyance.

If that doesn’t give you the heebie-jeebies, there is one more little data point: we have utterly no defense against them.

Now, Elizondo is a security guy with 22 years in the Army and CIA. He’s got that kill-or-be-killed mindset, and that’s why he sees them as a threat. But he makes it clear that we are no longer the dominant species on this planet, and probably haven’t been for a long, long time.

Now, maybe the aliens will welcome us into their spacefaring community. Maybe it’s not dire. I keep thinking that, like the Europeans first visiting the New World, there are different nationalities, perhaps races of UAP. In that case, maybe they won’t act in concert to eliminate us.

But we have no value to them. We’re like gnats, except when we start dabbling in that level of power. Then we’ll be an annoyance. Pests.

It makes me very sad to think that this could be our fate, that you and I could somehow be zapped out of existence, rather in the blink of an eye, I would hope, over reasons we’ll never quite understand.

Normally I’d make a closing joke, but, honestly, I don’t know what to think.

Read the book – Imminent, by Luis Elizondo – and see what you think.

Thanks for staying with me all these years!

Lost in a 3D Purgatory

I would say “3D Hell” but I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice this week, and much prefer their version of H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks (because I won’t write hell.)

These times, they are a’changin’, and not so much in a way that you’d kind of expect.

My office is actually my bedroom, well, our bedroom, but it’s my office. Well, this little corner over here is my office, because, really, it’s our bedroom. My wife’s office is over there, in a former, not our, bedroom, and it really is an office. My office is this kinda cool, sorta funky desk/shelf combo we bought at Staples for $180 and I screwed together with that tiny hex wrench designed to strain your fingers… I digress.

I’m listening to zen music, a piece called E V E Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music designed to calm you down, help you destress…

You see, earlier this evening, my wife was in Ohio, heading into Indiana at 10 at night Ohio time in a snowstorm, with a plan to drive all the way to St. Louis, which was, like, another 3 hours. But she was open to staying the night in Terra Haute, Indiana.

Mr. Gallant (that’s me) got her a room in Terra Haute, on Highway 41. I texted her the address, 3300 Highway 41, like a nice guy. Turns out there are TWO 3300 Highway 41 locations, you see, and I forgot to include the word SOUTH in my text.

So she’s driving down dark, sorta scary, snow-covered roads, farther and farther away from Interstate 70, going the wrong way into the wilds of Terra Haute. Finally she calls, frustrated and cold and sort of furious, and we sort out my little oversight. oopsie.

Now I’m a little stressed. So, I thought I’d, you know, take an audio chill pill and listen to Beautiful Ethereal Ambient Music, see? But the Internet signal in our bedroom is spotty, and the freaking thing keeps shutting itself off. And I’m getting….A. Little. Frustrated.

So, the point of this whole diatribe is to tell you another of my brilliant ideas. This one’s sure fire.

I found a company that makes little cars, see? Well, I have a passion for little cars. And they don’t have any fun animations on their website.

Why, if I was to cleverly build up a nifty little world in the free Blender 3D software, I could make them a video that shows my filmmaking genius to a tee and get them to hire me.

The company’s in New York, see, and I’m moving to New York in about 18 months, so it all works out brilliantly.

Except my Internet keeps cutting out and the freaking Ethereal Music is getting on my nerves and my wife’s stuck in a snowstorm in freaking Indiana because I sent her off in the wrong direction and now she’s mad at me and my copy of Blender keeps dropping out and screwing up my carefully organized little car files and my book is crummy and I just don’t think I can do this anymore.

I can’t do this anymore.

At this moment, it all seems so darned hard. So hard.

It’s a challenge, and I come from a long line of challenge-run-away-fromers. I’ve bucked the trend so far, but sometimes the old run-and-hide routine seems mighty alluring.

My wife’d kill me, though. She’s already mad at me, so it wouldn’t be much of a step to go to flat-out murder…

Wait, what is all this nonsense?

So here’s the writer’s story for you: you are your own worst critic. When it seems time to give up, time to run away, that’s the time to sit down at your computer and bang something out, because when you’re tired or stressed, you tell yourself the dumbest things.

My book is flat like last week’s Coca Cola. I get it. I see it. There’s a way to make it unflat, I know. When I find that way, heaven help the poor sod that keeps me from the rewrite!

My wife made it to the hotel, no thanks to me, and the Internet is back on. I think I know what’s wrong with Blender, and the little car video idea is actually a good one. The picture in the header is a neighborhood I’ve been working on. Not so bad…

Maybe I’ll run away next week. You know, honor the family and all…