David Kubicek

May 23, 2019September 25, 2021

The Celebrity Taboo Controversy

by David Kubicek

Years ago my wife, Cheryl, left her job at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for greener pastures with another company, so we threw a party to celebrate. As often happens at parties, people break off into groups to talk about different things or to do different things or to play games. My brother, John, and I found ourselves in a group with others who were playing the game Celebrity Taboo. Little did we know that we were about to instigate a minor controversy.

In Celebrity Taboo, you pair up, and the teams compete against one another. One partner draws the name of a celebrity and gives the other partner clues to his or her identity, which the partner must guess within a set amount of time to earn points. If you guess the celebrity before your time is up, your partner keeps drawing cards and giving clues until your time runs out. On the card is a list of taboo words which the clue-giving partner is forbidden to say.

After a while, we decided as a group that we were having more fun guessing the celebrities than we were playing by the game’s rules. So we opted to have one person give the clues while the rest of us guessed. John volunteered to be the clue-giver.

That’s when the trouble started. Most of the time I quickly guessed the celebrity, which irritated a friend of ours who accused John of signaling the answers to me. Of course, we denied this allegation, but our friend was not convinced. He declared that if we didn’t stop it, someone else should be the clue-giver.

The last straw was broken when John drew a card and said: “This guy’s birthday is March 6.” Immediately I said: “Michelangelo!”, which was correct.

Our friend said: “That does it!” He snatched the clue box away from John and gave it to another member of the group.

I could not convince our friend that because John knew how I thought and I knew how he thought, and because of our shared experience in many areas, he was able to give clues that clicked in my mind. Take the Michelangelo one, for example.

John and I both worked with computers on our jobs. Not long before this party, everyone who worked with computers was terrified of a virus that was set to go off on a certain day and crash any system that it had invaded. I was working with CliffsNotes at the time, and the editor told me that they weren’t even going to turn on their computer system that day.

Although this virus was mentioned in the media, it didn’t stick in the minds of people whose work lives didn’t revolve around computers–which included everyone in our Celebrity Taboo group except for John and me.

The virus was called the Michelangelo Virus because it was programmed to shut down the computing world on March 6–Michelangelo’s birthday. And since this party took place in April of that year, the Michelangelo Virus scare was still fresh in our minds.

I guess, looking back on this incident, John was signaling me in a way; he was giving clues he believed I would be able to pick up on. But isn’t that the point of Celebrity Taboo?

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

April 1, 2019September 25, 2021

Apollo 11: What the Documentary Left Out

by David Kubicek

I recently saw the Apollo 11 documentary which follows the first moon landing mission–through newly-discovered film and audio footage–from its launch on July 16, 1969, to its splashdown nine days later. It’s an excellent film. This is a part of history you won’t want to miss. But the documentary left out something about the first moon landing.

But the documentary left out something that I found exciting at the time, even if in the grand scope of the mission it was a minor glitch. There was one audio clip in the film that referred to that difficulty, but if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you’ll miss it [the exact snippet of dialogue was Armstrong referring to a crater full of boulders, or something like that].

I was a space nerd. I followed the space program feverishly throughout my school years, and I was in high school when Apollo 11 set out for the moon. After watching the launch, I listened to coverage mostly on the radio. Our TV was in the process of having a nervous breakdown, and I was afraid it would die soon, so I wanted to conserve its energy so it would be functioning at the time of the moon walk on July 20.

I don’t remember if I heard about “the incident” on the radio while the Eagle was landing, or if I found out about it later from reading and watching news coverage. I suspect it was a little of both. But here, basically, is what happened:

Long before the launch, the NASA folks had selected what looked like a good landing site, but they didn’t have the advantages of the high-resolution photography we have today, so they couldn’t get a really close look at the area.

The computer was programmed to guide the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), nicknamed Eagle, to a soft landing on the moon’s surface. For most of the descent the Eagle was tilted so that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin couldn’t see where they were going, but as the Eagle neared touchdown, it would tilt upright so it could set down on its feet. At this time, the astronauts would get their first look at the landing site out the window.

But when the landing sight came into view, they saw an area strewn with rocks and boulders. If one of the Eagle’s footpads came down on a decent-sized rock, the spacecraft could tip over, stranding the astronauts on the lunar surface–if they survived the crash at all.

So Armstrong turned off the autopilot and took control of the Eagle, basically cruising over the landing area looking for a place to set down. He didn’t have to travel far, which was good because fuel was rationed precisely, so they didn’t have enough go-juice for extended sight-seeing. The rock-strewn area was about the size of a football field. Armstrong found a parking place on the other side, and the Eagle touched down with enough fuel remaining for only 45 seconds of flying time . [For those of you who aren’t familiar with LEM construction, it looked like a four-legged spider and had two parts; the lander would serve as the launchpad for the ascent vehicle, which would return the two astronauts and their cargo to the command module where Michael Collins was orbiting above].

I think whenever the moon landing story is told, they should tell this little tale of heroism–although the late Neil Armstrong was a modest fellow and wouldn’t have considered it heroism. But it adds a little suspense and conflict to the story, and as a writer of stories I’m a fan of suspense and conflict.

And on July 20, I did get to watch the moonwalk on TV. In fact, our TV managed to limp along for several more years before it wheezed out its last breath and succumbed to old age.

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March 6, 2019December 19, 2021

No Sleep Horror Podcast Highly Recommended for Horror Fans

by David Kubicek

The Grim Reaper — Grim Reaper drawing by Joleene Naylor

If you’re a fan of horror, I highly recommend the No Sleep Horror Podcast. Each episode is a collection of horror stories by various writers, dramatized by voice actors and complete with sound effects and mood-setting music. The episode I linked to is S12E12. The second story (beginning at about the 18:20 mark) was written by Sarah Rodden, daughter of Robert Rodden II, who I published in October Dreams: A Harvest of Horror 30 years ago.

This is Sarah’s first professional sale. It is called “Recalculating”, and after listening to this story you’ll never trust your GPS again.

Just a caution, though, these stories are not for children. So send the kiddies to bed, settle down with a glass of wine, and leave the lights on.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

March 3, 2019October 30, 2021

The Devastating Midwestern Flood of 1993

by David Kubicek

In the fall of 1993, Midwest Food Service News (MFSN), a regional monthly trade newspaper, asked me to write a series of articles about the Great Midwestern flood of 1993 which would end up causing $15 billion in property damage over eight states between April and October of that year.

I wrote several stories, most of them dealing with how the flood would affect grocery prices, food processors’ reactions to the flooding, disaster planning and other topics of interest to the food producers and retailers who made up MFSN‘s primary readership. I gathered information for most of the stories through phone interviews, but there was one story I felt could not be told from a distance. I wanted to show how the flood had affected the people who lived in its path, and to do that I had to visit a floodplain.

The Platte River flows through Nebraska and empties into the Missouri River, which runs along the Nebraska-Iowa border. Since my wife, Cheryl, grew up in Plattsmouth, a town of about 6,500 which sits near the junction of these two rivers, she introduced me to former neighbors who farmed along the Platte.

We spoke to a middle aged couple who could see the Platte River from their house. Every morning they would step out onto the porch to see how much closer the flood water had crept to their home during the night. One morning they found that the water had reached the edge of their yard, perhaps a hundred feet away, and they began thinking that the time had come for them to leave. But they delayed for another day and another day after that while the waterline hugged the edge of their yard. Finally, there came a morning when they stepped out onto their porch to see that the water had receded a few feet, and day after day they watched as the water continued to pull back until it was within the banks of the river once again. The flood, for them, was over.

After we visited with this couple, Cheryl and I walked along the river’s edge, and what we saw impressed upon us how lucky those folks had been. They, like other farmers along the river, lost some good crop land because the receding flood water had left a layer of sand in its wake. But scattered along the shore, perhaps for miles, were pieces of the lives of other families who hadn’t been so lucky–the flood water had not stopped at the edge of their yards but had crept across their lawns and invaded their homes.

As Cheryl and I trudged through the sand along the river, we saw an Easy-Bake oven half buried in the sand. A lawn chair. A doll. Various household appliances and pieces of appliances. Part of a table. Articles of clothing. A basketball. A tricycle.

This is only a sampling of the destruction we saw along the shore. These items may have come from nearby farms or they may have been swept away from homes miles upriver only to be abandoned here when the water receded.

After 25 years, I have forgotten the specifics of the other stories in my series, but this experience is still lodged vividly in my memory. After the water receded, the economy bounced back, but many of the people who were at the center of the flood still carry scars.

Author’s note: Mary C. Erickson, deputy director of the National Weather Service, told the New York Times that the 2019 flooding may end up being worse than the historic floods of 1993 and 2011, with 13 million people in 25 states facing major flooding.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

February 15, 2019September 25, 2021

Procrastination For Writers in the Age of Technology

by David Kubicek

Thank God for computers, the internet, and social media. Technology has made procrastination for writers so much easier.

I started writing on a Remington portable typewriter during my senior year in high school, so I’m well aware of the hardships of working with such primitive equipment.

Procrastinating was so much more difficult then. Sure, you could sit and stare at the typewriter with the blank white paper fed through its roller flashing at you like a neon sign. But that got boring after a while, and there was always the danger of your significant other coming to check on your progress and finding you sitting at the typewriter with that blank sheet fed through the roller and a skimpy stack of completed pages on your desk .

Eventually, you’d have to get up and actually do something. Of course, your significant other might still catch you doing other things and scold you for not working, so you’d have to explain:

“I was typing away, and I remembered that I hadn’t cleaned the gutters, so I thought I’d get that out of the way so I could concentrate.”

“I was working in my office and glanced out the window, only for a moment, and saw that the lawn was looking shaggy. It was so distracting that I just had to mow it.”

“I came out for some coffee and noticed the kitchen faucet dripping, so I just had to change the washer. Save us money on our water bill, you know.”

Or when your significant other caught you sneaking into the house with an armload of books:

“I was at the library doing research.” [Of course, you would leave out the part about roaming up and down the stacks pulling out any random book that looked interesting.]

Procrastination in the good old days was exhausting. You actually had to physically get up and do something.

Today, it’s much easier to not write. You can:

–watch videos on YouTube of people doing stupid challenges

–argue about politics on Facebook

–post pictures of your lunch on Instagram or Snapchat

–read about your favorite celebrity scandals in online tabloids

–search for a wig for your pet Lab [this is actually a thing; you can get a cute doggy wig with a ponytail for under $10]

–download books to your Kindle

–and much, much more. . .

And you can do all of this at your desk. You never have to get up and actually do something. It’s much more relaxing–although the trade-off is pasty white skin from not going outside and muscles that start to atrophy for lack of activity.

You can position your desk to face the door of your office, so when your significant other comes in to check on your progress, she or he can’t see what’s on your screen, and you can say: “I’m hard at work, dear”, while you secretly “X” out of the porn website.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

January 25, 2019December 28, 2022

My Strangest Writing Job

by David Kubicek

My strangest writing job didn’t have characters and a story. It had numbers and equations.

At one time in my career I was doing lots of writing and photography contract work. I wrote brochures and newsletters for businesses and took photos for a Nebraska Department on Aging brochure. One guy hired me to write a letter of complaint to one authority or another–I forget what he was complaining about. During the 1990s I copy-edited and inserted codes (for boldface, italics, etc.) into many CliffsNotes manuscripts and even wrote a Notes on Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

The Notes editor, Gary Carey (who told me he had a brother named Harry), asked if I was interested in doing a project that was out of my wheelhouse. I would be working with another editor because this was out of Gary’s wheelhouse, too. It was an entirely different division in the company. The project would be to write the mathematics section for CliffsNotes software to help people study for their General Educational Development (GED) exam.

I met with the other editor about the project and agreed to take it on. At that time, I still had a fairly good grasp of my high school math. I’d been rather good at math (except for polynomials) and had taken it every year although it wasn’t required for my senior year. The computer people at Cliffs would create the software–all I had to do was write the questions with four or five possible answers that sounded plausible, with one of them, of course, being the correct answer.

It was actually a fun break from working with words all the time. The only part I was weak at was the polynomial section. I had almost flunked polynomials in high school algebra because I could never understand them. To this day I don’t understand them. So I asked my brother John for help. John was a math whiz, and he got me through it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t offer to share my byline with him, mainly because I don’t think I got a byline. I haven’t seen bylines on too many multiple-choice exams.

In fact, I never saw the finished product. I turned in my work, and the editor was satisfied (it has been so long, and I only worked with this fellow that one time, so I don’t remember his name), and Cliffs paid me, so I assume that my work was used for the software. And although the company was sold a few years later, the software may still be helping students prepare for their GED’s today just as my Notes on My Antonia is still out there.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

January 3, 2019December 19, 2021

The Day I Took a Fake UFO Photo

by David Kubicek

Those of you who have read the comments after my short story “Ball of Fire” in The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories know the basic inspiration for that tale. To recap, my brother John and I, while investigating UFO sightings near Wilber, Nebraska, ended up parked in a farmer’s driveway just after sunset waiting for a UFO which didn’t show up that night. But earlier in the day we had done something else for an article I was writing: we took a fake UFO photo in the name of scientific experimentation.

John was in high school at the time and was heavily into science. He and some of his friends had started a club called the Aerial Phenomena Investigation Team (APIT), which proposed scientific explanations for UFO sightings. They also examined UFO photos for possible hoaxes (such as garbage can lids thrown into the air and photographed). One of the first articles I sold (to Grit , which at that time was a weekly newspaper) was about APIT, in which the team mentioned stapling two aluminum pie pans together to make a credible UFO if it were seen in the right context. To the left is a section of the photo that Grit published showing the pie pan UFOs.

On the day John and I went to investigate the UFO sightings in southeastern Nebraska, we stopped at the farm near Crete where our Dad grew up and where one of his sisters and two of his brothers still lived. It seemed like an ideal location to create a hoax. I was working on the Grit article, and we thought it might make a good addition to the story to actually show the pie pan UFO in flight, looking like an honest to God alien spacecraft.

To create our illusion, John stood on the roof of the car and flung the “UFO” like a frisbee while I photographed it from the ground. This was before digital photography so I couldn’t see the result until the film was processed, and there was no Photoshop so we couldn’t manipulate the images later. I had to shoot lots of photos and hope for the best. I shot in black and white for two reasons: 1) If it were in color, it might be easier to see that the UFO was a fake, and 2) In those days, because of the difficulty and expense of printing color photos, most newspapers used primarily black and white, and Grit was no exception.

Luck was on our side, and we got a fairly decent UFO picture (at right is the full frame and an enlargement of the significant portion), but unfortunately Grit published only the photo of the APIT members holding the pie pan UFOs and not our fake UFO photo.

The trees along Turkey Creek are about half a mile away and the phony spacecraft is actually closer than the windmill tower in the foreground, but because of the way everything came together the spacecraft seems to be rising out of the trees. So here, for the first time in print, is the result of John’s and my dabbling in UFO trickery.

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December 28, 2018December 19, 2021

Voices From The Plains, 2nd Edition

by David Kubicek

Voices From The Plains, 2nd Edition, was published in early December, 2018. Book launches were held in Lincoln and Omaha and other events are planned around Nebraska. This anthology contains fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from more than 60 Nebraska Writers Guild members–including an excerpt from Empath, my young adult dystopian novel-in-progress. One of the oldest continuous writers organizations in the United States, the Nebraska Writers Guild was founded in 1925 and counts Mari Sandoz, Bess Streeter Aldrich, John G. Neihardt, and Willa Cather among its first members. Pick up an eBook ($4.99) or a paperback ($19.99) online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or at selected bookstores around Nebraska.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

December 5, 2018December 19, 2021

Shaving off the Mustache

David Kubicek Caricature — Caricature by Paul Zanderholm

by David Kubicek

I don’t remember when I grew my mustache, but I remember when I shaved it off–Labor Day, 2000. I’d only had it a few years, but growing it in the first place had been my wife, Cheryl’s, idea. Well, she had suggested I grow a beard, but I’d tried that once and had called it quits after three weeks because of the itching. The stache was a compromise.

After a few years I got tired of the mustache and decided to shave it off. My son, Sean, had just turned five. Since he didn’t remember me with a completely hairless face, Cheryl thought it would be a good idea if he watched me shave so the sudden change wouldn’t freak him out.

So on Labor Day morning, I laid out my shaving cream and razor and called Sean into the bathroom. He stood beside me and watched as I lathered up and made a few swipes with the razor. Then I wiped my face clean and bent down to let him see.

“How does it look?” I asked.

“Fine,” he said.

Then he tilted his head to the left, then to the right, then back to the left.

Then he said:

“Now put it back.”

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