I was this week walking to the dining room at 15 Craigside, when one of the residents walked up to me and said something to the effect:   Crichton and Patterson stole your idea about an eruption on the Big Island .  So the next day I went to my computer and found that  Eruption , by Crichton and Patterson, was #1 on the  New York Times  fiction book list. How did their book come together? Michael Crichton  was a Harvard-trained doctor who went straight into writing, creating  Jurassic Park  and other adventures. His first book under his name was  The Andromeda Strain .  All told, his books sold over 200 million copies, with a dozen adapted into films. He is the only writer to have a number one book, movie and TV show in the same year. Born in 1942 and passed away in 2008 at the age of 66.   His wife Sherri found parts of an unfinished novel centered around a huge volcanic eruption in Hawaii, and thought this should be comp...

Joe and Jill Biden came and went.  A lot of unanswered questions about the Lahaina Apocalypse.   A  Star Advertiser  article  this morning about how this all started seems to exonerate Hawaiian Electric as the cause.  The number of deaths stayed steady at 115, with a thousand or so still missing.  A horrid thought is that most of them might forever be unidentified, for the fire was so sudden and hot that it was like an incinerator, and bones were turned to ashes, then scattered by the nearly hurricane speed winds, perhaps making it impossible to determine who is who and what is what.  Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the Wagner group that revolted exactly two months ago, apparently was killed, and probably assassinated, in a plane crash near the town of Kuzhenkino today.  Putin strikes again.  Here is a  list of who he has eliminated  in suspicious ways. Surely you will want to watch live from Milwaukee the  first Republi...