frosenblum

Thanks, Carlos, for the extra chapter this week. I had just watched Biden's speech when I discovered this story. I like the universe you've created in Cadet -- no pandemic, no attempted coup/insurrection -- much better than real life. BTW, a friend of mine who's an athlete is baffled by the months of challenge to the election results. "That's something everyone learns by second grade. In every game, there's a winner and there's a loser. Whether your happy with it or not or not, the score is the score."

My grands and great-grands were the immigrants. My parents grew up during the Depression. My dad was the first on either side to go to college, thanks to the free (at that time) public city colleges in NYC in the 1930s. My parents provided me and my two sisters with a whole different world of opportunities than they had had. My dad was a copy, and when NYC police unionized, we ended up joining the middle class. Even though police unions are problematical nowadays, I'm thankful for the large economic difference they made for lots of families.

It was only 50 years ago, in 1971, that the US voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 by the 26th Amendment. The drinking age varied from state to state, and even in different municipalities, until 1984. When I was growing up, the drinking age in New York was 18 and the voting age 21. Young folks from neighboring states would drive into NY to drink or buy booze -- and, being young, enough of them drove back home DUI and got into accidents that those states wanted NY to raise the drinking age. The argument back then was the reverse of what Canuck & pvtguy say now. It seemed ridiculous to me as a young man that I could drink and I could be drafted but I couldn't vote. What seems odd to me nowadays, when I'm older and hopefully wiser, is that even though we Americans highly prize our individualism, no matter whether we are conservatives or liberals, our first response when there's some behavior we don't like is to want to pass a law against it.

I'm another contemporary who got the allusion, which was particularly poignant because, as I watched today's inauguration, I was thinking about how different it was from JFK's, when I was 17 -- there wasn't even security at airports in 1961, let alone locking down Washington DC for an inauguration. And no pandemic.

Yes, late 60s, height of the Cold War. Being in my mid-twenties, I was more excited than scared to be in an environment as different as you could get from growing up in Brooklyn. It was a little scary being privy to top secret info, that the Russians were conducting missile tests from the Kamchatka Peninsula, and that the U.S. launched reconnaissance planes, which could possibly be shot down, to monitor the tests, . Shemya was as remote as you could get, so it's weird that it was the first place I ever saw porn flicks (straight porn, reel-to-reel film). I've no idea how the civilian contractor regularly smuggled them out there.

Or, as Ritch puts it in Malibu, "it was time the fathers let him spread his wings and fly."

That was unexpected. Jim is smarter than Sanford gives him credit for.

I'm one of those older folks; I like the larger font a lot. I wish more sites did that. Another nice feature is "Expand" in the quotes in the replies to a comment, because readers can get to the actual reply quickly without scrolling through long quotes. Thanks for all you do to make the site better and better for the great writers and avid readers. Fred

Thanks, Summerabbaccat, for kindly taking the time to educate us non- Aussies.

Thanks. Now it all makes sense. I didn't realize that Australia had that same nonsense going on as in the US.

Another engrossing chapter. Either you've introduced a little satire into the story, Wombat Bill, but the humor went over my head -- or else the story has wandered into the universe of alternate news. It's the Conservatives, not the Liberals, who have outsourced government functions. It's a Conservative, not Liberal, tenet that private enterprise always performs any function more efficiently than the government.

I was stationed at Eielson AFB near Fairbanks. I was an Air Weather Officer, issuing weather forecasts for pilots. I was on TDY once on Shemya Island, which is almost as far west as you can get in the Aleutian Islands. It's a place very few people can say they've visited. I lived off-base in the town of North Pole (for real) with my then wife. Our VW camper refused to start when the temperature was less than -30. I once hitchhiked to work when it was 70 below zero, another thing very few people can claim. I sometimes wonder who was that young man that did all those crazy things I remember? After Eielson, I was stationed at Ellsworth AFB near Rapid City, SD -- not all that far (as distances in the West go) from where the Benders and Melissa Petersons live. Alaska was one of the most magical places I've lived. I went back and lived in the Anchorage area for several years after leaving the Air Force.

Spreadsheets and outlines. I'd say you definitely need them in order to accomplish the task you set yourself back in mid-2019. You've somehow got to wrangle the myriad strong-willed members of CJ's family and the Squad to follow those outlines and end up exactly where your crystal bold foretold you they'd be 20 years from now. (In the story "Hail to the Chief")

Great chapter, Carlos. I dropped out of graduate school and enlisted in the Air Force. This was during the Vietnam buildup when the only choices were school, not being physically fit, or the military. Air Force Officer's Training School was only 5 or 6 weeks and a piece of cake compared to Richie's summer training. (Fortunately, the Air Force sent me to Alaska rather than Vietnam.) I've done a fair bit of copy editing. Kudos on sneaking the word "present's" past autocorrect. ("Your other birthday present’s gonna be")

Thank you for providing endless quality escapism during a trying year. May the site and its authors continue to uplift us throughout 2021. My favorite stories were all of the ones by Carlos Hazday, the CAP stories (I binged on the whole series), Mawgrim's "Gone Away, Gone Ahead," all of CJ Love's stories, and lilansui's "The Reluctant Consort."

Jaylen's orgasm must have been so powerful that it blew both of them back in time a half hour.

"Reading his papers later he was from a Moroccan family, they found out he was gay and threw him out. In their religion, they could have killed him but living in Europe they were restrained. If they were in Morocco, he would probably be dead." Death is not the legal penalty in Morocco for homosexual acts, although family members and neighbors might take matters into their own hands. Per Wikipedia, "Homosexual acts as well as pre-marital sex are illegal in Morocco, and can be punishable by six months to three years of imprisonment."

Another wonderful chapter full of Quoka's specialty: plot twists and turns. "After leaving the aquarium at Beauty Point, a light early lunch was served; as we would be arriving at our final destination, shortly after midday. As arranged, the road coach was at Low Head when we arrived, and after saying farewell to the staff, we cast off and set off for Kent Group Islands, which would be our overnight stop, and it would take us a little over seven hours to get there, arriving shortly after 3.30 pm that afternoon. " Unless I'm misreading things, the times don't add up. The yacht left Low Head midday, dropping the teachers off after a full morning agenda. If it then takes 7 hours of sailing to get to Kent Groups islands, how do they get there by 3:30 pm?

The story is definitely moving along briskly. I'm a little confused about their participation in the Royal Show. In the last chapter, Jacob said they'd missed getting a spot at the Royal Show yet now they're planning for it.

Yes, I agree. I thought the story length was fine. Your story is a truly great introduction to Colt and Woof. My badly-expressed point was that the "shortness" of a story often depends on our own expectations, including those based on the number of chapters in your other recent short stories. For example, an NBA center's "tiny" endowment might look "huge" on a jockey's body.

I enjoyed learning how Woof came to be. And how Colt's matured in the personality we know from the CJ stories. The story wouldn't feel so short if it were a chapter in a book. Then we would see it as part of the flow of Colt's life. Or of Woof's, if the book stories about the gym. It could even include CJ's times at Woof, only told from Colt's POV. It could include Sean stories, too. Or it could be from Woof's POV, like your Melvin Ford story.

Yay! I'm a fan of your dolphin shifter stories. And I wished we'd seen more of Richie's growing up in the CJ stories. I'm a happy puppy ---- okay, okay, at age 77, I probably should stop claiming to be a puppy ---- I meant to say I'm a happy seniordog.

Ah, Sean. Just hearing his name reminds me of the wonderful impact he will have on CJ's life. BTW, did you mean "max" or "mass" here: "There was a max exodus towards the sidewalk."

A delightfully different take on a first contact story.