Author’s Blog

The Barnes & Noble bookstore located at Lahaina, Maui, and Talk Story Bookstore in Hanapepe, Kaua’i, hosted Phillip Douglas at successful signing events for his award winning novel, Spirit Made Smaller.  The Barnes & Noble signing took place on February 12th, two days prior to Valentine’s Day, and the Talk Story Bookstore event was integrated…

Why do we read, blog, and tweet? We hunger for connection and meaning. We crave to make sense of the world — past, present, and future. We choose to research the meaning and meaninglessness of modern existence…explore the dilemmas of our world and our place within it. Although ever-changing, our collective knowledge and the languages…

The Affordable Care Act with all its Federal and various State exchanges now available for purchasing mandated health insurance has produced the unintended consequence of priming the supplemental health insurance market for all those individuals not yet old enought to apply for Medicare. In order to control annual insurance premiums, and at the same time…

In geologic time, our planet currently is in the Holocene Interglacial period which began approximately 10,000 years ago. The preceding interglacial period, frequently called the Eemian Interglacial, had lasted from roughly 130,000 to 107,000 years ago. For the past 400,000 years, Antarctic ice has preserved a record of the variations in temperature, methane, and atmospheric…

Dr. Cashel Goodlette, PhD Oceanography, has agreed to accompany Phillip Douglas, the author of Spirit Made Smaller, on several book promotion tours over the next several months to Montana, Alaska, and around the Seattle, Washington/Puget Sound area. When not assessing the Bering Sea for the US National Geological Survey whenever aboard the NOAA maritime vessel,…

Water, not land, is the overwhelming feature of our world. 70.9% of the earth’s surface is covered by water; nearly all of it is salty and only 3% is fresh water. Of all this water, humans can directly use just 0.3%, and most goes into large scale operations such as irrigation and electric power generation.…

Over a week ago, a traveler infected with Ebola virus boarded an airplane to Lagos, Nigeria, and became ill in flight. He died five days after landing. Could he have infected others on the aircraft and later in Nigeria? That depends … First some background on Ebola virus: — It is believed that Ebola exists…

Congress finally got something done! The three-year, $17 Billion fix to the tragic holes in VA medical system should be considered only an initial step on the long journey to evolve the VA’s medical support for the great men and women who have fought America’s battles to defend our country. The most expensive part of…

What follows is a short game of Bush Pilot Trivia — the same Spirit Made Smaller game Graywood and his son, Bobby, played whenever they were flying in their airplane, Seneca.  Imagine this Q & A taking place between father and son as they approached the Seven Sisters to land Seneca on its tarn. How and why…

I have been in northern Europe for the past three weeks.  For over half that time I cruised Norway’s fjords and inlets — I could not help but compare them to those which grace Alaska’s southeastern panhandle.  A very simple description would be this: numerous waterfalls descend into Norwegian fjords while tidewater glaciers calve into…