Dave's Fiction Warehouse

The original cast of MAGA W hat happens when a rapacious, hateful and thoroughly corrupt gasbag gains complete control of a government?  Well, we’re finding out, aren’t we? But this is not specifically about Trump. It’s more about this book I just finished: “ A Fever in the Heartland .”  In it, Timothy Egan relates the sordid saga  of a Trump-like figure who managed to take over the state of Indiana in the early 1920s.  At the height of his power as Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, David C. Stephenson controlled much of the Midwest and believed he had a shot at the White House. If his depravity hadn’t escalated to an actual sex slaying, he might have. Even then it was touch and go. “Fever” is a great example of what Egan does so well: Take well-trod episodes of American history and structure them almost as novels, with villains and heroes and quite a bit of  dramatic tension.  In a lot of fiction, it’s the villain who keeps you turning the pages. You can’t...

Y ou can imagine my pride in discovering that my work is among the millions of pirated books and papers used by Meta to train their newest AI model (dubbed Llama 3).  Thus far I’ve found only three short stories out of the dozen or so I’ve written, but hey: It means I’m in good company! A lot of famous authors are justifiably pissed off. The Atlantic reported on this today. Basically, it describes how Meta employees briefly thought about licensing the material, but quickly decided it would be a lot faster and cheaper just to steal it. Especially since most of it had already been pirated and amassed online via Library Genesis, or LibGen.  Atlantic writer Alex Reisner set up an interactive database so authors can enter their names and see how much of their stuff Meta has scooped up free of charge. That’s how I ended up discovering my stories.    I’m of two minds on this. On one hand, I guess it doesn’t hurt to have my words comprise a synapse or two in the vast Meta h...

A ccording to this piece in the New York Times , more Americans are forgoing the doggy bag  –  apparently unconcerned that there are starving children in Africa who would be delighted to dine on their unfinished mac ’n cheese.   The story says the average American leaves about 53 pounds, or $329 worth, of food on their restaurant plates each year. That’s hard to credit: how many restaurants do these average Americans hit in a year? For me it’s maybe five or 10. No wonder they’re getting fatter . And that’s without cleaning their plates! But back to the takeout box. There appear to be a variety of reasons people don’t ask for them:  young dating couples don’t want to seem cheap, post-covid social stigma about sharing entrees,  the unwillingness to go clubbing with half a Cobb salad at your side.   All of which is another reminder that I have little in common with these crazy “average” Americans.  I rarely leave restaurant food on my plate. I’...

I used to live near the Canadian border. The northern boundary of the folks’ ranch was a stone’s throw from the 49th parallel. There was a switchback road you could drive up to see the border itself – a 20-foot swath in the timber that stretched out to the horizon (that’s my son and brother-in-law in the photo). Even back in the ’70s I remember thinking it was pretty incredible to have such a long, totally undefended border between two sovereign nations. Not even a fence, then. Sometimes, hiking or hunting, we’d stroll across the border just to say we had. Other days we’d drive through the border station at Roosville to pick apples or buy Labatt’s. Each way, the guards would make small talk and wave us through. Then 9/11 happened. Then, 15 years later, so did Trump. Then Covid. And now, an older, meaner and more disordered Trump, who no longer seems to be kidding when he raves about annexing our more civilized neighbor to the north. Plus the tariffs. Don’t get me started about the stup...

A mazon boycott update : Still pretty sure this is the path of wisdom, not to mention a fun way to flip Bezos the bird. Best of all, it’s proving easier than I thought. One star Yesterday our digital meat thermometer quit working. In simpler times, I would have jumped on Amazon and ordered another one. After all, that’s how I acquired the cheap piece of crap that just broke. It was only $11. What a bargain! Then I thought: Wait a minute. Maybe the low, low price has something to do with the low, low quality. It lasted a couple of years and now it’s more plastic for the landfill. Also, it was a pain in the ass that it quit working while my wife was cooking chicken. She had to check for doneness the old-fashioned way. The horror. Anyway, I looked up the best meat thermometers online, careful to ignore the sponsored ads, the cutesy soliloquies from paid influencers, and of course anything Amazon. I found three possibilities – all quite a bit more than $11. No matter; I was going for quali...

O nce again , I’m watching bald eagles with their young. The nest is 145 feet up a pine tree in California’s Big Bear Valley. It’s snowing. You can hear the wind, see the tree moving with the stronger gusts. Occasionally, an eagle will cry out; another might swoop into view with fresh killed food.  For those of us peering at our various screens, it looks bitterly cold. But eagles are creatures of air and altitude. Pretty sure they can handle most any weather. An eagle tending a winter nest is the picture of stoicism. You can almost envy them. They have no better place to be, no better thing to be doing. No concerns beyond this job at hand: keeping their young alive long enough for them to be eagles too. It’s fascinating to watch. More than you’d think. I don’t know how long the average viewing session is for these particular nest-cams, but based on my own experience, I’d say about as long as most TV episodes.  True, nothing much happens. But the same could be said of “Severan...

I s it wrong to find joy in the misfortune of others? Absolutely. Unless one of the others happens to be Leon Musk. Then it’s fine.  The precipitous slide in Tesla’s stock price , the recurring outages on X, the images of flaming and vandalized Cybertrucks: These are a few of my favorite things. Hey, sue me. Sometimes you just have to stop and smell the roses.  The only thing that keeps me from breaking into actual song is knowing that even when Leon loses $100 billion, he remains the richest man in the world. And he still has the ear of the most powerful stupid man in the world, which grants him full access to the treasury of the most wealthy nation in the world. So no matter the vagaries of the market and public opinion, Leon needn’t cut back expenses any time soon.  Also, Trump says he’s buying a Tesla as a show of support for this strange South African immigrant he’s put in charge. That should turn things around! But since it’s Trump, Leon should maybe get it in writ...

E very couple of years, I decide to join the wife in giving up something for Lent, which apparently started today. I’m not particularly religious, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to occasionally practice some self-discipline.  So, what to give up? The most obvious thing would be wine, just because I rarely go a day without a glass or two. But it says here that Lent lasts 40 days, so … no.  It’s a fine line.  You want to give up something that matters, but not something that life would be altogether meaningless without. So I think this year it will be Amazon. Makes sense because I’ve already gone six weeks without ordering anything from Amazon. That’s 42 days, right? Duration of Lent and then some!  Easy peasy. Just kidding. I’m boycotting Amazon for the next 40 days too, and I hope for a long time after that. I expect a few small benefits: a significant reduction in shoddy merchandise around the house; a lot fewer boxes piling up in the garage; the satisfaction that der...

O scar thoughts. Well, only one.  My wife first pointed this out but I tend to agree: celebrity breasts seemed much less enhanced this year. Smaller, more natural. We’ve grown used to seeing the splendid gowns draped over a couple of child-size bowling balls and there was less of that last night. What can it mean? Is it a trend? I was thinking it might be related to the rampant use of Ozempic/Wegovy among the Hollywood set. But Tess pointed out that in the past there have always been really thin women with impossibly large golden globes (my term, not hers). So I don’t know. We’ll be tracking this here at the Warehouse. Can’t comment on the various winners and losers, since (a) I saw only one of the nominated films (“Conclave”), and (b) Hulu decided late in the show that we had witnessed enough and abruptly shut down. I think it had something to do with that endless soliloquy by Adrien Brodie, which added an hour or so to the run time. Still, I hate Hulu and you should too.

K ind of feels like we should be boycotting everything these days. But it’s daunting when you look at the lengthening list of Stuff to Avoid: Anything controlled by Jeff Bezos : Amazon, the Washington Post, Blue Origin, Whole Foods, Audible, Zappos. Anything controlled by Mark Zuckerberg : Meta, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads. Anything controlled by Leon Musk : Tesla, Starlink, X, SpaceX, PayPal, OpenAI, the United States of America. That’s just the beginning. All three men control dozens of other companies I’m too lazy to list. Then you have all these other conglomerates that happily sucked up to Trump on the whole DEI question: Target, Google, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s – to name but a few.  You see the problem: Fighting back is no longer as easy as shunning Hobby Lobby or Mike Lindell’s shitty pillows. This might involve some hardship. It’s our own fault, really. We’ve been taking low-cost convenience for granted; now the oligarchs have grown so fat they can take us for gra...

Regrets, she has a few I t’s tempting to chortle when a Trump voter reaps the whirlwind. But Ryleigh Cooper, 24, was just a kid during Trump’s first time around, so I can sympathize. According to this Washington Post story, she lost her Forest Service job earlier this month, as part of the ongoing Musk/Trump vandalism of the federal government. There goes a $40,000 annual salary. There goes health insurance. There goes 12 weeks of paid maternity leave. Oops.  Ryleigh said she voted for Trump mostly because of his glib campaign pledge to make IVF treatment free. She didn’t realize Leon Musk was on the ticket. Oops again. Trump doesn't talk about IVF now. At all. He and Musk have bigger fish to fry: parasites to purge, hotels to build in Gaza.  It gets worse: Republicans just approved a budget plan that will raise her taxes, gut Medicaid and shrink all sorts of programs meant to help folks in the middle and lower tax brackets.  If there’s an upside, maybe the IVF thing see...

I applaud the Philadelphia Eagles for apparently declining to sit with Trump at the White House. Hey, it kind of stinks in there! Also, anything that gets Megyn Kelly’s panties in a wad should bring joy to all our hearts. Kelly, noted MAGA apologist and all-around mean girl, has big feelings about the rumored snub. Replying to a fan’s post expressing disgust with the team, she had this to say: “SAME. GO F YOURSELVES EAGLES… F THIS BS!” Harsh words! Which pretty much tells you that the Eagles are on the right side of history here. Like the Eagles, we should all work to erode the autocratic aspirations of the Orange One. Naturally he’ll claim he didn't want them there in the first place. But we know better, don’t we?   I really didn’t care who won the Super Bowl, and in fact didn’t watch one second of it. But if the Eagles have the stones to stick to their guns on this, I’m a fan for life. As they say in Philly: Go Birds!  (EDIT 3/11/25: To hell with the Birds. I see they...

W e all know by now that Donald Trump will do whatever Vladimir Putin tells him to do. And most of us have long suspected that his eagerness to bend over for the Russian president is not based on, say, mutual respect or the shared love of golf. So this claim from former KGB official Alnur Mussayev, reported in the Irish Star , kind of rings true. Mussayev says the KGB recruited Trump while he was visiting Moscow in 1987, on one of his many failed real estate ventures. At the time, Mussayev says, he was running a directorate charged with “recruiting businessmen from capitalist countries.” A man like Trump – clueless, vainglorious, infinitely susceptible to flattery – would have fit the bill nicely. The KGB even bestowed a code name: “Krasnov.” I’ve often pondered those pictures from Trump’s first meeting with Putin in Helsinki, in 2018. In each of them, Trump looks a little sore in the backside, while Putin wears the satisfied smirk of a man whose long game is paying off bigtime. I thou...

F or me, SNL’s 50th Anniversary special was about as good as the show gets: 50 percent  worked pretty well and 50 percent didn’t. Over the last few years, the average SNL has hit closer to 30-70. But that’s just me. I loved the two legendary Pauls as musical guests, even with their voices now abraded by age.  I loved the reel of commercial parodies (“Oops, I Crapped My Pants”) – always one of SNL’s strengths. Loved Martin Short and Steve Martin. I liked John Mulaney’s musical history of New York. I even liked the reprise of that hoary “Scared Straight” bit with Keenan Thompson and Eddie Murphy. Kristen Wiig’s return as doll-hands Dooneese was not hilarious, but Will Farrell kept it going. Don’t know if I ever want to see the alien abduction sketch again, even with Meryl Streep. Like so many SNL mainstays, this one has worn thin. Ditto with “Domingo”: funny the first time, and now just dumb. A couple other misses: Where was Bill Hader? Dan Akroyd? And if there was even a fleeti...

I f, like me, you’re running out of things to distract you from the collapse of America, you might check out “Mo,” now in its second and last season on Netflix. It’s a good antidote to the stench of cruelty and corruption wafting forth from D.C. these days.  It’s a smart and funny (and occasionally poignant) show about the trials of a Palestinian family living in Houston. The title character is played by creator Mo Amer. He and his family get by on various jobs and side hustles while trying to navigate the Orwellian hellscape that is the U.S. asylum and immigration system. (When certain blowhards go on about “open borders,” it’s clear they have no idea of the obstacles faced by immigrants not named Elon. Or Melania.)  “Mo” is an excellent show in its own right, but is even better for the way it humanizes folks who, for whatever reason, no longer have a country of their own.  It ain’t easy being a stateless refugee. Especially in Texas, a state that loathes immigrants in ...

Trump's thumb thing is catching on A fter Mitch McConnell's remarkable series of freeze-ups and falls last year , I was kind of surprised to see him back in the headlines in 2025. But of course he was, first by falling down another flight of stairs (as I foresaw), and then, most recently, by actually voting against some of Trump's worst cabinet picks: Hegseth, Patel, Gabbard and noted brain-worm host RFK Jr.  No doubt he meant it as some kind of legacy move, kind of like when John McCain did the famous thumbs-down against the GOP effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  But McCain's vote actually mattered, didn't it? Whereas the feeble McConnell was left to close out his career with the emptiest of gestures and the contempt of both Democrats and the Confederacy of Cowards he enabled for so long. I guess that's fitting.  Mitch could have made an historic difference in 2020, when Trump twice faced impeachment. America would have been the better for it. Instead...

I f you're reading this, it means I have successfully redirected my davesfiction.com domain back to this site on Google's Blogger platform. The reason being that hosting is still free here. Kind of. The last two years' worth of posts are on here now, as well as the first two or three years, starting in 2007. I'll be transferring the rest over a few at a time. Meantime, please leave a comment to let me know someone's actually seeing this site. Thanks, Dave Knadler

This better be going somewhere. T here’s a wide line between being too obvious and being too opaque. “ Severance ,” the Apple TV series now in its second season, may have strayed past the far side of that line. It’s an interesting show, but one where you have to sift through fan theories the next day to see if you’re getting it. Mostly, I’m not. “Severance” centers on this mysterious company called Lumon.  Certain Lumon employees exist in two versions: “innie,” when they’re at work, and “outie,” when they’re at home. Not two  physical bodies, I guess, just two exclusive halves of a single consciousness. They enter the elevator as one, come out as the other. The outies are unaware of what the innies do at work, and vice versa. The “work” involves sitting at 90s-era computer terminals and grouping sets of numbers to be placed in on-screen bins. Upper management consists of Mr. Milchick, his adolescent assistant Hanna and a disembodied speaker phone, all of whom are equal parts s...

  Robin Wright and Tom Hanks get an AI makeover T he Robert Zemeckis  movie “ Here ” was released in theaters last fall and has since been roundly savaged by critics. It showed up on Netflix last week, so this unqualified critic decided to have a look. My verdict: It’s not half bad. The movie’s central conceit is its static point of view. From beginning to almost the end, the camera never moves. Through it we witness an extremely brief history of time, and then a pretty long history of a single living room somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard.  Families come and go, from pre-Colonial times to the present, and their stories unfold on this single stage. During a scene from the 60s, say, a frame will pop up showing a portion of the room as it looked in the ‘30s, and then the scene will, after a few more frames, transition to that decade and that story. It’s not the most compelling narrative device, but it’s interesting even when the various stories don't quite mesh. It’s a nov...

T his is a paean to New York Times puzzles. Not sure what I’d do without them, in These Troubled Times™.  Every morning I get up, don my buffalo robe (really just heavy terry cloth), slippers and ridiculous pajama pants, and venture forth with iPad in hand. I  force myself to ignore the news or social media, pour a cup of coffee, and consider the day’s puzzles. First, Wordle . By now it’s probably my least favorite of the puzzles, since it’s going on three years old and the daily solve is starting to seem more a matter of luck than strategy. Wordle used to be based on a large, static dictionary of five-letter words, but now there is a puzzle master whose job it is to mess with your day. You get a lot of words with two sets of double letters or other rare combinations. A great victory for me is getting it in two, an average one is four, and I consider it a defeat if it takes five or six. I’ve been getting quite a few fives lately. Then Strands . It’s like those word-search book...

W e all knew that having a billion dollars grants you some say in government. But it’s surprising to learn that having almost a trillion dollars lets you BE the government. No elections required, no campaign ads or town halls or meeting stupid folks in shitty diners. You just buy your way in. Pay a couple hundred million to get a dunce elected president, and then patiently explain to said dunce how things should be. Occasionally let him think all the big changes are his idea. (For example, punishing South Africa for ending apartheid.) Leon Musk (W-South Africa) has us by the short ones now. He can do for Uncle Sam what he did for Twitter. He can reshape this country into a Cybertruck for the ages: vaguely sinister but inferior in every way that matters – and kind of prone to bursting into flames.  Hard to believe we’re here already. But no one can say we weren’t warned. 

The well-dressed sod-buster   I never read any of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, nor did I ever make it through any single episode of the hit ’70s TV show. But that doesn’t mean I can’t shit-post about Netflix’s plan to reboot the series.  On the plus side, Netflix has nowhere to go but up. The original was an overlit schmaltz-fest that didn’t tug at the heartstrings so much as percuss them like Django Reinhardt. It wasted no opportunity to impart some simplistic and saccharine lesson. It was supremely inauthentic. For a gritty, realistic portrayal of family life on the frontier, it’s right up there with “The Brady Bunch,” which ended the same year “Little House” started. At least half of the budget appears to have been spent on Michael Landon’s hair and wardrobe. The pioneer life was one of constant toil, but the TV Chuck Ingalls was always freshly shaven and decked out in pressed business-casual shirts with coordinating suspenders. Did he need the suspenders? N...

  I magine if Bob Dylan had been blessed with Timothée Chalmet’s looks and singing voice. He could have been a big star. Haha. We were getting caught up on SNL episodes the other night and finally got to this one: Timothée (not crazy about that diacritic and double e) up there covering three of Dylan’s lesser-sung tunes: “Outlaw Blues,” “Three Angels” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” He did a pretty good job – just as you’d expect from someone who’s spent the last couple of years learning to ape Dylan’s style for “A Complete Unknown.” As SNL musical guests go, you could do worse. GloRilla, for example, who was on the week before. But I found something about it kind of off-putting.  There’s the shameless movie tie-in, of course, with Oscars only a month out. But then SNL’s stylish staging and video effects made it seem that Chalmet wasn’t paying tribute to Dylan so much as inhabiting the man’s persona. Here was Dylan 2.0 (in the parlance of our times), with a cuter face and clean...

Everybody loves the Super Bowl. Right? A nd so it comes to pass that I have actually lived in both cities represented by this year’s Super Bowl contenders. That’s pretty stunning! It last happened way back in, let’s see … 2023. I forget who I was rooting for then. When I lived in Philadelphia, of course I was a big Eagles fan. When I lived in Kansas City, it was Chiefs all the way. (In Jacksonville, I was a tepid fan of the Jaguars until it became kind of embarrassing.) See, when you live in a city with an NFL team, the mood of the whole metro area waxes and wanes according to the score on any given Sunday. It’s always better when a city is happy. It’s better when even a city’s noted assholes essay a certain bonhomie.  Now that I live in a City Without a Team, I’ve been making less of an effort. NFL football, for me, has always been about pretending some knowledge of the teams to ingratiate myself with those who did care: checkout clerks and waiters and certain relatives who always...

Mean Mr. Mustard Y ou know, I keep telling myself to lay off thinking or writing about this firehose of Trump-world fecal matter.  Focus on the positive, I think; appreciate all the beauty and grace of this world. Smile at passers-by in a non-creepy way that makes them think I appreciate their day-to-day struggles. Maybe play more video games or learn origami.  But every day it’s some new outrage, some mindless new assault that makes nobody’s life better and everybody’s life (except for the uber-wealthy) at least a little bit worse. The only guiding principle here is magnifying power for a certain elderly golfer (thanks, Jeff Tiedrich), and shielding said golfer from any challenge to his pointless, Nero-esque presidency. Not sure how we got here. There are hundreds of theories, most of them probably partially right. I’m really not sure how we get out of here. Trump’s been in office for less than a week and it already seems like stately halls of government are tumbling down aro...

W hen’s the last time you read a Western? I used to devour them: Luke Short and Max Brand, mostly. Quite a few Louis L’Amour. Some Zane Grey. The last one I read was probably by Elmore Leonard, who was the best in the genre before he moved on to crime fiction.   I got to thinking about Westerns a few days ago, when Alan LeMay’s 1957 novel “The Unforgiven” showed up as a Kindle Unlimited title. (My new Kindle came with a free trial.)  It’s about a family in 1870s Texas, beset by hostile Kiowa and racist neighbors and quite a bit of bad weather. The Zachary clan raises longhorn cattle by the thousands, which must be gathered and driven to market in Wichita every year. Hell of a way to make a living, since it’s supremely unprofitable and you can’t get good help.   But cattle drives do make a great setting for Westerns. In fact, it’s hard to think of many that don’t feature moving livestock in some way or other. Which now reminds me of Larry McMurtry’s excellent “Lo...

It's porn-bot Pac-Man! B luesky update: Still better than X/Twitter, just for the reduction in MAGA bile. But, really, it’s not going to save us. It was naive to hope, during the last few months, that it might.When you think about it, how can the disaster wrought by social media be cured by more social media?  Anyway I’m up to 320 or so followers now. Normally I’d be dancing in the street with those numbers. But the pie chart above tends to dampen my enthusiasm:  Porn bots. I get half a dozen a day, profile photos of sexy women who try to establish bona fides by reposting or liking three random things. Never-Trumpers like myself, who mostly just repost anti-MAGA memes. I don’t mind that, but at this point anything that makes me madder or sadder isn’t helpful. Finally, the tiny cohort of smart people who post interesting facts and photos, or who add some original perspective to the political cataclysm that is about to overtake us.  I suppose that last group is the reason ...

  J anuary 2025, the last days of democracy in America. So of course I’ve been bingeing ancient episodes of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.” It is a way to pass the bleak winter evenings when one has decided to unfollow the bleak winter news. About the show: I’m not kidding when I say ancient. It started in 1955 and ran for seven years, meaning most of these stories are about as old as I am. Like me, some of them have not aged all that well.  But some old things can seem better just by virtue of their age, can’t they? And ’50s TV shows have the rare distinction of looking better now than when they were new. That’s because of high resolution, big-screen TVs. When I saw my first episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” (a rerun even then, of course) it was probably on a blurry 19-inch RCA. These days you can spot flaws in the sets and makeup that would have been invisible to viewers in the ’50s. Right now I’m on Season 3. Almost 200 episodes still to go! That’s another thing: Back the...