St Thomas Time

I can see my house in this pic.

As you might know, I've been living on St Thomas since January. For the most part I haven't said much about it—I suppose I've had other things on my mind. Well, today we're going to examine one of the most interesting things about this island. No, not the beaches. No, not the resorts. No, not the plant and animal life. No, not the deep scars of colonialism. Something much more fundamental.

St Thomas exists within a temporal anomaly I call the Tropical Time Envelope. Due to the locality and obscurity of the phenomenon, it has not been the subject of much research. Nobody can say for certain what mechanisms are responsible for the distortion field's existence, nor do we know whether the island is responsible for it or merely subject to it. Its influence upon island life, however, is plainly observable.

In the interest of science, I have cataloged some of the Tropical Time Envelope's most salient effects, and submit them for investigation by parties with more experience in these matters.

2 out of 3 and the 1%

Umberto Boccioni, Visioni simultanee

ITEM ONE

James sent me an email yesterday evening. (Perhaps you remember me recounting a conversation I had with him last month.)

Subject: wow, i didn't think it would happen like this

http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/local/story/2015/jul/16/breaking-shots-fired-tennessee-riverpark-chattanooga/314944/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-texas-jail_55a7c7d0e4b0896514d06f41

Granted the latest police assault on an African American happened a few days ago, but I don't think the story broke until today. I'm still rooting for the Pirates to win the world series

ITEM TWO

Lately I've been reading Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty as a dessert course to Karl Marx's Capital, Volume I, which I (finally) plowed through during the spring months.

Unsurprisingly, some very substantial differences stand between the nineteenth-century Capital and Capital in the Twenty-First Century. It's quite possible the very progenitor of Marxist socioeconomic analysis might have dismissed Piketty one of the "bourgeoise economists" he lambasts at least once every three pages in Capital. Piketty, by his own admission, is no Marxist: at several points he criticizes Marx and his method, and declares that capitalism is, historically, the best avenue for elevating the standard of living for the greatest number of people. (Which is not debatable in itself: twentieth-century experiments in communism tended to be concomitant with hard-handed totalitarianism and persistent poverty, which anti-capitalists and free-market skeptics frequently find themselves having to answer for in barroom debates.)

Return of the Comics Page Again

"Gasp!" he gasped. "Two new(ish) comics!"

Part Three

Part Four

I have fun making these, I really do. I wish they didn't take so damned long to produce, though. I don't keep a running count of the time from start to finish because I'm a little afraid of it. If there's a reason I prefer writing, that might be it. The total time it takes me to do one of these is probably on par with how long I'd require to write between two and four blog posts (depending on size and meatiness) or bang out the rough draft of one short story.

There's something to be said for the long-term satisfaction of watching the archive gradually grow, though.