Polis - No. 1
Everyday, our world grows smaller. The speed and ease of international travel is steadily rendering borders meaningless and telecommunications advances have made the other side of the globe as accessible as the other side of town. In painful fits and starts, we are building a genuinely global society. But it won't last. Welcome to Polis, where the end of town might as well be the end of the world.

The end of the global village came swiftly and suddenly. Nearly simultaneously, thousands of missiles were launched from sites all around the world and blew out of the sky 99% of all man-made satellites, cutting off the lion's share of both personal and mass media communications. A still-reeling world was then robbed of electricity as millions of power lines were cut and thousands of power transfer stations bombed. Bridges were mined, dams were sabotaged, and people were left cut-off from the global community they'd known and loved, left in small groups of cold, hungry survivors without any knowledge of the condition of the world beyond the horizon.

But civilization would not go gently into that good night. Millions starved as the food distribution system collapsed, but millions more rallied together in the cities where vital infrastructure, more easily defended that out in the countryside, had been largely unaffected. Change is never easy and transformation never without pain, but faced with the stark reality of a world under siege the survivors holed up in their civic keeps and declared that never again would they be caught unawares, that those who had wrecked the world would take what little was left at great peril to their lives and limbs and only over the defenders' cold, dead bodies. An idea from the past was resurrected to save the future and thus each surviving metropolis became its own Polis, a city-state for the dawning twenty-second century.

To be continued...

Hat Day, After a Fashion
Last week, I was so pleased with having made up the two missed Hat Days that I completely overlooked the Hat Day right in front of me. Gah! This evening, I wore my blue knit hat, which I am looking forward to possibly needing once I am back on the sacred soil of Michigan. I may be forgetful, but I love Hat Day!