Fun With Broken Arrows

“Well, I, uh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up, sir.”
–General Buck Turgidson, Dr. Strangelove

Have you ever lost something important at work? An expensive tool, a critical spreadsheet, or maybe  an entire intern? You know that sinking feeling you get when you realize how badly you screwed up? Just imagine how much worse it would be, if that intern were made of plutonium.

The U.S. military classifies nuclear weapons incidents on a scale that starts small at “Dull Sword,” indicating an event which could have become a nuclear incident under different circumstances. For example, in 1950 the crew of a B-36 Peacemaker bomber that was experiencing engine trouble decided, before bailing out, to drop their Mark 4 nuclear bomb on Canada. Because fuck Canada, right? The bomb was only loaded with a practice nuclear core, however, which made a nuclear detonation impossible.

1950, in fact, witnessed a second Dull Sword event when a B-50 also experienced engine trouble and its crew also decided to drop their Mark 4 nuclear bomb on Canada. Yeah, by 1950 the United States Air Force had already dropped as many nuclear bombs on Canada as it had on Japan. And why the hell not? It’s nothing but snow, hockey, and socialized medicine up there. It’s practically Russia already.

Here you go, Canada. Have two of these on Uncle Sam.

Next in order of severity is a Bent Spear incident, which involves a relatively minor mistake or accident which has only the smallest probability of ending civilization. The most famous of these occurred in 2007 when a B-52 that was supposed to be ferrying unarmed cruise missiles for disposal was accidentally loaded with six live nuclear warheads, each one having a maximum yield of 150 kilotons. That’s a total explosive potential around 50 times larger than the “Little Boy” bomb that killed a hundred thousand people when dropped on Hiroshima. Breaking with tradition, these cruise missiles were not fired at Canada, but were instead delivered to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, where someone finally noticed they were live weapons. By then, a full two days had passed since they were improperly removed from their secure bunker. In that time, no one at the site of origin had noticed that six nuclear warheads were missing.

Next comes Empty Quiver, which is the theft, seizure, or other inadvertent loss of a nuclear weapon. Boooooring. Wake me up when we get to…

A Broken Arrow. These are the mack daddies of nuclear weapons incidents. A Broken Arrow is any incident in which there's a risk of detonation or release of fissile warhead material. Since the 1950’s, there have been approximately a gajillion of these incidents. Taken individually, most involved no or fairly low probabilities of accidental nuclear detonation, but put all of them together and it’s a fucking miracle that we haven’t accidentally vaporized a bunch of people.

The first Broken Arrow I’m aware of happened in 1950—a real banner year for nuclear mishaps—when a nuclear-armed B-29 crashed three minutes after takeoff. The nuclear core was aboard but not installed at the time of the crash, so the fissile plutonium merely cooked in the fire until they could put it out. No big.

Not to be outdone by the Americans, a Soviet submarine in 1977 accidentally dropped a nuclear missile into the northern Pacific Ocean. There was a build-up of pressure in the launch tube and they just, you know, accidentally dropped it overboard. Woops.

In fairness to the Soviets, the ocean floor is a popular place for accidentally leaving nuclear weapons. In 1965, the U.S. Navy dropped one off an aircraft carrier while steaming south of Japan. The bomb, the pilot, and the aircraft they were both attached to rolled off an elevator and were never recovered. The loss was not revealed, however, until 1981. Apparently, someone at the Pentagon feared that Japanese people might have strong opinions about nuclear weapons for some strange reason.

God, Japan, you’re such a Canada.

My absolute favorite broken arrow, however, has to be the 1961 crash of a B-52 in Goldsboro, North Carolina. The Air Force, having learned absolutely nothing from the shenanigans back in 1950, had armed the aircraft with two Mark 39 thermonuclear bombs—both live, with their plutonium cores fully installed. During a refueling operation off the coast, the tanker crew noticed a fuel leak on the B-52’s right wing. The pilots attempted to make an emergency landing, but the bomber began to break up at around 10,000 feet and the crew ejected, leaving the live bombs in their falling aircraft.

On one of the bombs, three of four safety mechanisms completely failed on the way down and the bomb armed itself for a ground burst. Following its programming to the letter, it deployed its drag chute to slow its descent, activated its detonation triggers, and charged its firing capacitors. When it hit the ground in a muddy field, the trigger mechanism activated, sending an electrical signal to the firing capacitors. If that signal had arrived, the capacitors would have discharged and the bomb would have detonated.

If it had gone off, according to calculations I made using Nukemap, the 3.8 megaton bomb would have created a crater five hundred feet deep. The fireball would have been a mile wide. It would have leveled every building for five miles in every direction. It would have inflicted third degree burns on 100% of exposed persons within twelve miles. The cloud of radioactive fallout would have stretched four hundred miles under moderate wind conditions, reaching as far as Atlanta or Philadelphia depending on wind speed and direction. Something like 20,000 people would have died.

Only an arm/safe switch—the single safety mechanism which worked properly on that bomb—stopped this from happening.

But, you protest, that arm/safe switch couldn’t possibly have malfunctioned, right? It’s surely failsafe, right? Right? RIGHT?! For fuck’s sake, Robyn, that last switch must have been very reliable!

Actually, now that you mention it, do you remember that there were two bombs? On the second bomb, the triggers did not activate, the capacitors did not charge, and the drag chute did not open. Many of its components were never found, but they did recover the arming switch—the same switch that, on the first bomb, was all that stood in the way of a nuclear detonation.

When found, the second bomb’s switch was set to the armed position.

Sleep tight, everyone.

The Unspeakable Horror of Pee Wee's Playhouse

Have you ever wondered how Pee Wee’s Playhouse came about?

No, seriously. How do you explain a cowboy living in the same neighborhood as a member of some sort of cow aristocracy? How can furniture talk? How can early ‘90s technology produce a sentient robot? Why would the King of Cartoons deign to visit a backwoods playhouse on a weekly basis? What kind of sea captain can trek inland on such a regular schedule, leaving his ship idle at port? How can “the most beautiful woman in Puppetland” be a human being who, due merely to her species, must be a hideous abomination to most of the locals? How can fish speak while underwater? Why does a playhouse with one occasional resident need a full time lifeguard? Who the hell would be brave enough to sit in Chairy? How could such an aerodynamically compromised pterodactyl manage to fly? How could a person, even a person as shallow as Pee-Wee, waste magic wishes on such petty desires? How can a kite predict any element of the weather apart from the wind direction? Why does Pee Wee let tiny little Randy intimidate him? Why is Randy even allowed to stay in the playhouse, if he’s so abusive? Why are the ants the most typically human characters we ever see? How could someone bring themselves to eat talking food?

So many unanswered questions. It seems that it would require a vast and complex theory to explain it all.

Or perhaps not. In science, we look for simple answers. But what single factor can explain all of these strange and diverse mysteries?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have your answer. The single factor that can explain everything is Jambi.

Jambi is the only character on Pee Wee’s playhouse with the incredible power necessary to cause these paradoxes. Jambi is the only one who could create such terrible, sentient monstrosities, and at once rob them of all self-awareness of the bleak horror of their existence.

But wait, there's a problem with our theory. Jambi can’t execute his will by himself. He needs a person, a host if you will, to make wishes so that he may grant them.

But who would be sick enough to wish for such things as these?

You may be tempted to say Pee Wee, and in a way you’re right, but it isn’t as simple as that. Pee Wee may be clinically insane, but he isn’t hurtful. He would never wish a human being into furniture. In fact, he would never do harm to any living thing, except by accident.

Except by accident.

An accident such as… a misguided wish? A misguided wish, fulfilled by a genie—a mystical creature who, according to myth, is capable of evils even greater than humanity’s.

And so the picture becomes clear. Pee Wee discovered Jambi’s box, perhaps on an archeological dig. We don’t know what Pee Wee did for a living, after all. He could have been anything. Perhaps his history is less glamorous. Perhaps he was merely a janitor, cleaning the archives at a museum, when he found The Djinn’s Box.

Whatever the story, however Jambi caught hold of Pee Wee, the djinn offered him the customary wish. And Pee Wee, because he is such a kind soul, wished for something selfless, something pure, something good.

He wished for an end to world hunger. The evil djinn Jambi grinned and chanted those chilling, fateful words: “Mekka lekka high, mekka hiney ho!”

Pee Wee stared into the eyes of the powerful creature and, too late, saw the evil lurking within. “No!” he cried. “I take it back!” But it was too late.

For the only one left was Pee Wee. He ran out into the street to find that he alone was left alive in a world of the dead. A world without life, but a world that would never, ever go hungry.

“You seem like a nice boy,” Jambi the Worldkiller said to Pee Wee. “I’ll grant you another wish, so you can fix things.”

Pee Wee fell to his knees and begged, “Take back my wish! Please take it back, Jambi!”

“I can’t take back your wish, Pee Wee. But I can grant you another.”

“Then bring them back! Bring everyone back!” Pee Wee was weeping now. “Please bring them back.”

“If I bring them back,” said the evil spirit, “there will be hunger. That would be taking back your first wish.”

Pee Wee sobbed into his hands. “Then bring them back without hunger! Find a way, I beg you!”

“Granted.” This time, the magical words chilled Pee Wee to the bone, as the djinn said again, “Mekka lekka high, mekka hiney ho!”

And the dead rose. Not as living flesh, but as horrible abominations. Furniture. Windows. Clocks. Each took the form of some object, and became an animate creature of felt and stuffing.

Awaking to this nightmare and seeing what they had become, their horrible screams tore through windows and echoed through the streets. All humankind woke to find themselves transformed into creatures more ghastly and terrible than Kafka’s worst imaginings.

For they were puppets. But puppets do not feel hunger.

“Don’t despair,” said Jambi. “Not everyone’s a puppet. A few humans remain. Just enough so that there will always be enough food for them. Of course, I don’t know how they’re going to react to what’s happened. Perhaps you should find them and gather them together. I think we’ll all have lots of fun together.”

Pee Wee blinked through his tears and leveled a hateful gaze upon the djinn. He steeled himself and said, “I wish I were dead.”

Jambi smiled. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said. “Why don’t you take a walk through this new world you’ve created? Have some fun. Then, if that’s what you really want, I’ll grand you another wish in, say, one week?”

Pee Wee did not respond. He rose silently and walked through the streets. All around him, the puppet people wailed and cried out in their lamentations.

All because of him.

And Pee Wee laughed—a mad little giggle on the cusp of sanity. “Ha ha!”

Go Read a Book

Ah, summertime. It's warm, the sun is shining, and everyone's so cheerful.

I hate stupid summertime, for all those reasons and more.

But you know what makes it better? A good book. Especially because, after you're finished enjoying it, you can use it to block the sun and/or throw it forcefully at the next person who dares to be cheerful at you.

"But Robyn," you say, "with all the choices available to me, how can I possibly know which book to enjoy?"

Answer: I will tell you. I will tell you which book to enjoy. You are going to enjoy this book:

Rosemary Harper has just arrived on the Wayfarer, a wormhole tunneler ship with a colorful (both literally and figuratively) crew. Rosemary is trying to get as far as possible from her old life on Mars, and she's in luck, because Wayfarer's next job will take it straight into the distant, deadly, and war-torn heart of the galaxy. So, umm... mission accomplished?

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is a very fresh take on the pan-species starship subgenre of science fiction. The aliens are truly alien, in cultural mores as well as appearance, which adds a fun extra dimension to the personality conflicts aboard ship. Beyond the strife on Wayfarer, the galaxy too feels like a deep, rich, and complex place—the worldbuilding aspect of the novel is truly excellent. The politics, technology, and even humanity's circumstances amid the stars are a big change from what you usually see in science fiction, but it's all sold effortlessly.

Full disclosure: the author, Becky Chambers, has done some editing on one my projects, so this should be considered more of a plug than a review. If it was a review, however, I would still have nothing but good things to say about the book, and I'd still recommend you buy it.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet is only $4.99 in ebook format through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. A paperback version is also available from Amazon and Createspace.

Tips for When You're a Kid Sleuth (Part 2)

So you're back, are you? Still think you've got what it takes to be kid sleuths? Well then, let's get to it, maggots, by memorizing these important tips.

You Might Want to Put Some Aloe on That

Here’s the thing: you’re going to get knocked out a lot. Whether it’s a blackjack to the back of the head, a tranquilizer dart, or the ever-popular chloroform-soaked cloth, something’s going to render you unconscious about ten times a year.

This is, medically speaking, a really, really, really bad thing. Or “res perquam, perquam, perquam mal,” in the Latin. You see, the human brain is not a lightswitch that you can turn on and off without consequence. It’s a series of tubes. (Ordo de angustiae.)

For one thing, tranquilizer dosing is tricky. The dosage that puts me into a comfortable nap might well kill you, and it might do nothing to a larger person but make them groggy. There’s a reason that you have to spend ten years getting licensed to keep an eye on an anesthesia machine that administers sedatives with practically unfailing precision. So, do you really think the idiot thugs you’re investigating are going to get the ketamine dosage right on their first try?

Nuh-uh. You wouldn’t trust those morons to tranquilize a stray dog, let alone a person. And as a kid sleuth, you probably have a lower than average body weight, raising your risk of death-by-dart even higher. Given these risks, you might be tempted to hope for chloroform, but that’s even worse. Chloroform is just as dangerous and even harder to dose. Plus, it’s a carcinogen.

Being knocked out is even riskier. A total loss of consciousness after being hit on the head indicates a traumatic brain injury (traumaticus cerebrum owie,) which is especially damaging to children and teenagers. Given the rate at which they’re knocked out, it’s sheer luck that the average kid sleuth isn’t lying comatose with a tube up their nose, trying to solve the Mystery of the Persistent Bedsores.

So, no matter how often it happens to you or your friends, treat every loss of consciousness as a bona fide medical emergency. Immediately arrange transport to the nearest emergency pediatric snooping facility.

As a consolation, any villain who tries to knock you out is guilty of premeditated assault, so you can have the police and/or your dad add that to their rap sheet.

Some Miscellaneous Advice

Never step foot inside a lumber mill, or any industrial space that features a conveyor belt of any kind, for that matter. Just don’t, because everyone you investigate, no matter how trivial their offense, will prove to be an opportunistic murderer. The perp’s big crime could be having his car double parked, and he’d still be willing to kill you to stop you from exposing him.

You can be a kid sleuth even if you’re an idiot. Hell, some scholars argue that it could even make you better at it. Just make sure you have a highly competent friend, and unconditionally forbid them from helping you.

If you’re between cases, get a hobby. You’ll be shocked at how often it’ll be critical to solving the next case you’re on. Any hobby is fine, as long as it’s not the same hobby you had before your last case. In fact, never mention that old hobby again, because it’s against Sleuth Union rules, and you could lose your insurance coverage.

Making an adult disguise by standing on your friend’s shoulders and wearing a large trench coat is ALWAYS an option.

Purchase a pair of tactical door wedges and take them with you whenever snooping in a haunted castle, pyramid, Aztec temple, or etc. It’ll save your bacon when you inevitably get trapped in a room and the walls start closing in. Make sure you get a wedge that’s rated for both spiked and unspiked walls of doom.

Never try to figure out what state your hometown is in. You may be the world’s greatest detective in the under-15 category, but this is one mystery that no one will ever solve. Thinking about it will only give you migraines.

Office hours are critical. Have a time and a semi-public place were other kids can consult you, even if it’s your mom’s garage after school. Because, if you don’t have boundaries, you’re setting yourself up for trickery and kidnapping. And if you ever get a message from someone asking you to go to a remote location after dark, so they can hire you for an important case? That is so a trap. Immediately hand the message over to the police. Believe me, this is one time they’ll actually listen to you.

If I Listen Twice as Long, They’ll Say Something Twice as Incriminating!

Know how long to snoop. We’ve been over this already in the Superhero’s Girlfriend guide, but it bears repeating. When you come across a couple of goons who are—fortunately for you and unexplainably for them—discussing their plans in intricate detail, eavesdrop long enough to learn their plan and not a second longer. Then exit the area in a careful manner. Do not under any circumstances back blindly away from your hiding place, because perps surround their most sensitive sites with ankle-high pipes and tree roots for exactly this reason.

And One Last Thing...

I don't want any messages saying “I'm contemplating the clues.” We're not contemplating a goddamned thing. We're snooping the perpetrator constantly. We’re going to snoop him by the nose and we’re going to kick him in the ass. Our plan of operation is to sleuth and keep on sleuthing. We will sleuth through the perpetrator like crap through a goose.

Thirty years from now when you're still the same age you are now, someone will ask you, “What did you do in middle school?” You won't have to cough and say, 'Well, I shoveled bullshit on the essay portion of my history tests.”

All right, you sons of bitches. You know how I feel. I'll be proud to lead you wonderful guys in sleuthing anytime, anywhere. That's all.

The Proterozoic Eon, Part 5

You may remember that we started our journey through the Proterozoic Eon two and a half billion years ago. After a hell of a lot of Monopoly, we now arrive in the still-Proterozoic of only one billion years ago.

We've come more than half of the way home, watching 1.5 billion years of the Earth's history. The continents have shuffled around a lot, volcanoes have come and gone, and we've suffered a couple devastating meteor impacts.

Life has undergone a few major changes, all on the microscopic level. Cyanobacteria destroyed the environment. Complex cells called eukaryotes evolved, then invented sex. At some point along the way, multicellular organisms evolved—we can't say when with any certainty—but they're not much to look at. In fact, from where we're standing along the Toronto coastline, life still looks pretty much like pond scum.

"You guys had a billion and a half years to evolve, and this is the best you can do?"

Adapted from an image Copyright and CC Martyn Gorman

And if life in the oceans isn't looking all that evolved, life on dry land has gotten absolutely nowhere. The coastlines, rivers, and lakes of Earth are teeming with life, but go any distance inland and it's the same sandy regolith we saw when we got here, with nothing but the odd desert crust to prove that life exists.

Now let’s play a couple more games of Monopoly, which will bring us to an even billion years ago. Something funny is happening now. Remember the supercontinent Columbia, which broke up, just like the Eagles?

Well, it’s getting back together, just like the Eagles. The ocean off the coast of Toronto is narrowing. In fact, you can just about see Montevideo coming over the horizon. Wave! All the major plates are smashing into each other, forming the new supercontinent of Rodinia.

Life has been busy, too. Following up on their recent triumph of sex, they’ve now invented murder.

As with sex, it’s entirely possible that murder existed long before now, but it’s here, at about a billion years ago, that we see the first clear signs of it, in the form of predation. We don’t actually have a fossil of a predator eating its prey this early in history. For that matter, we don’t have a fossil of a predator at all.

But we’re pretty sure predators were around, because we can see what their prey were doing to defend against them. Because this is the era when acritarchs, an umbrella classification encompassing microscopic fossils, started to get spiky¹.

Image from PNAS cover July 2005

Other eukaryotes , around this time, also start evolving mineralized coatings that might have been a defense against predators. And stromatolites, those bulbous formations created by bacterial mats, begin to decline, perhaps because they fell victim to newly evolved predators¹.

From: Bengston. Origins and Early Evolution of Predation. The Paleontological Society Papers 8. pp 289-317

We’re going to play a couple more games of Monopoly to take us to about 800 million years ago. Here, the supercontinent Rodinia is breaking up. Yeah, again. You’re going to have to get used to it, because this shit happens a lot.

In the oceans, more crazy shit is going down. The first armored amoeba have shown up², and there’ll be no hemming and hawing this time, because we know these little bastards are predators. There is some hemming and hawing about how long amoeba have been around, though. These little armored dudes are the first to leave fossils, but amoebas may have been around for a while. They may, indeed, have been the predators we saw signs of two hundred million years earlier.

And there’ll be no hemming and hawing about animal life this time, either, because something has just shown up off the coast and no one with a lick of sense would dare deny that it’s an animal. And here it is, in all its glory. The first animal:

From: The first animals: ca. 760-million-year-old sponge-like fossils from Namibia. South African Journal of Science. Vol. 108 no. 1-2 Pretoria 2012.

Yeah, it’s a sponge. They’re animals, you know. It may seem weird, but they are definitely our ancestors, and the ancestors of every worm, fish, lizard, and human being alive today. They’re multicellular, can reproduce sexually, are made of highly specialized and differentiated cell types, have a primitive immune system, and even primitive muscles. They’re animals, and they’re here to stay.

And they’ve shown up just in time for another ice age. Sucks for them.

This ice age won’t last quite as long as the last one—only a couple hundred million years—but it’s going to be even more severe. Again, the glaciers and pack ice will come and go, because an ice age doesn’t mean that it’s always frozen, all the time. But there will be long periods, lasting from 20 to 60 million years, when most of the planet is covered in a kilometer or more of solid ice. Some of these may even have been more “Snowball Earth” events.

I told you to bring a sweater. It’s not my fault you don’t listen.

Two games of Monopoly later, and the planet is finally warming up again. We’re now at about 600 million years ago, the continental plates are coming together yet again, this time to form the supercontinent Pannotia. And, I’m sad to say, we’re only one Monopoly game away from the end of the Proterozoic Eon.

Here at the end, the oceans are warming up and conditions are ripe for life. The cyanobacterial mats are still here, and they still make up most of the biomass on Earth, but eukaryotes aren’t doing too bad.

Larger life (meaning, larger than a microorganism) from this period is hard to classify, because most species are soft-bodied and live on or above the bacterial mats. They don’t leave great fossils, unlike the hard-bodied trilobites and burrowing worms that will start to show up in force a hundred million years from now. But maybe they look something like this:

Image CC Ryan Somma

We don’t know what most of these animals evolved from, and we don’t know what they evolved into, assuming they even left ancestors to evolve into anything. We’re not even sure when they died out. We think it was at the end of the Proterozoic, but without any clear sign of an extinction event such as a meteor or extreme volcanic activity, it’s possible they survived right into the Cambrian. In the Cambrian, the paucity of bacterial mats may have made fossilization of soft-bodied creatures less likely, and so they may have disappeared from the fossil record despite living on.

What we do know is that they’re here in the last days of the Proterozoic, and there are a freaking lot of them. In modern times, you’ll find them in the fossil record all across the planet, if you know what to look for. They spread, they evolved, they covered the planet with an explosion of complex life.

And then they disappeared.

Sorry to say, but so must I. The old Monopoly board has gotten a little decrepit over the past two billion years, and you can hardly tell St. Clare’s Place from Baltic Avenue anymore. We’ve had fun, but it’s time to go. The Cambrian is coming, and we don’t want to get eaten by an anomalocaridid.

***

If you enjoyed this trip through the Proterozoic Eon, check out my other science articles in the Archives!

Citations and References

1. Bengston. Origins and Early Evolution of Predation. The Paleontological Society Papers 8. pp 289-317.
2. Porter. Testate amoeba in the Neoproterozoic Era: evidence from vase-shaped microfossils in the Chuar Group, Grand Canyon. Paleobiology 26 (3) pp. 360-385.

Tips for When You're a Kid Sleuth (Part 1)

So you’ve got yourself a notepad, a comically large magnifying glass, and maybe even a dog with unusual intelligence. You think you’re ready to be a kid sleuth?

Think again, maggot.

You are not a detective. You’re filth. You’re less than filth. You’re nothing. You couldn’t sleuth your way out of a piss-soaked paper bag if you had a trail of footprints to show the way. I bet you’re the kind of sleuth who would investigate a villain in the spooky woods and not even have the goddamn common courtesy to give him a chiding speech.

That changes today. If you finish this article, if you survive sleuth training, you will be a weapon. You will be a master of snooping, praying for mystery. You will not like me. But the more you hate me, the more you will learn. I am hard but I am fair. There is no genre bigotry here. I do not look down on bookworms, adventurers, tech geeks, or the extremely nearsighted. To me, you are all equally worthless.

Let’s begin with knots...

Knots

Learn how to tie good ones, because slipped knots are the number one cause of death for kid detectives. If you can’t tie a villain up nice and tight, you might as well hand them your magnifying glass right then and there.

And learn to tie bad knots convincingly, too. You have no idea how often you’ll need the villain to think they’ve escaped on their own, when actually it was your plan all along. But if you accidentally tie a knot they can't get out of, you're screwed.

Oh, and learn how to untie common knots with your teeth. Seriously, this will come up about three times a week.

Don’t Flounce the Landing

"Do you have a warrant for this snooping, Ms. Drew?"

How many times has this happened to you? You’ve just unmasked the bad guy. Snared in his own web of deceit, he goes into a rambling, unprompted monologue in which he ruefully confesses every detail of his crime. But then he gets a lawyer, pleads not guilty at trial, your testimony about his confession is declared inadmissible hearsay, and the case is summarily dismissed.

Don’t be embarrassed. This has happened to every kid sleuth from time to time. In fact, anytime you hear a sleuthing story that ends abruptly at, “and we got him to confess,” you can bet the bad guy either got off entirely or pleaded down to time served and 500 hours of community service. He’s probably out there right now, on the side of the highway in an orange vest, imagining a kid sleuth’s face on every Big Mac wrapper he skewers.

So how do we avoid this?

For one, tape the confession, starting from the moment you pull off the villain's mask. Juries love a good dis-masking, and the perp will find it hard to change his tune when the prosecution has the first verse on tape.

Ernesto Miranda was a Secret Yeti

But even a taped confession may be ruled inadmissible, on the grounds that the villain wasn’t aware of his or her Miranda rights. This one’s easy. Write them down and read them to the villain, before they start spilling their guts.

Carmen Too, I Think

Even if the tape is played for the jury, and especially in light of the fantastic knots you surely used to tie up the villain, the judge—wary of false confessions—may require corroborating evidence. It’s a legal principle called “corpus delecti” or “tasty dead body,” due to its origins in zombie caselaw. Because, seriously, try getting a fair trial when you’re a zombie.

Also, to be admissible, a confession must typically be made voluntarily. This has several implications where kid sleuths are concerned. First of all, while tying the villain up is permissible, you cannot hurt or coerce them in any way while getting their confession. This shouldn’t be a problem, because the villains you’ll run into are strangely eager to detail their crimes once exposed, but too many kid sleuths try to show off by making threats, and thereby ruin their confessions. Don’t fall into this trap.

The second major issue with voluntary confessions is that they must be given while of sound and rational mind. This is the thorniest problem you’ll face as a kid sleuth, because it’s hard to establish rationality when the defendant was apprehended while wearing a fluorescent ghost-pirate costume.

You can never really be rid of this problem, but you can minimize it. When you ask questions, make sure to emphasize the goals of their wicked plan, and not the individual components. Judges can find sound minded rationality in an intricate real estate scam involving straw buyers and stock manipulation through poisoned investor expectations. Not so much when we’re talking about chasing people around in a ghost costume and projecting a sea monster onto a fog bank.

I Got a Message From Johnny Tightlips. Actually, No I Don’t.

Above all, never count on a confession.

In the United States, and even in many lesser countries, the accused are not required to testify against themselves, let alone provide a detailed confession. The villain you just caught is entirely within his rights to say nothing at all. Even if you lay his entire plan out in front of him, he can just shrug and ask for a lawyer.

But you’re not going to panic, are you? You’re ready for this, because you documented the physical evidence, wrote down all the clues, and you're ready to make a compelling narrative of events which tells the story almost as well as the perp himself could.

The most important thing to remember is that you could be called to the stand, so make sure you and your dog get your stories straight before testifying.

The Thin Blue Strike Zone at the Idiot-Ball Batting Cage

Always remember that professional investigators will be stunningly unprepared to help with any investigation you find yourself in. No one knows why the real detectives in your home town are so incompetent, or how they manage to keep their jobs when no one can remember them ever actually solving a case. And yet, if you ever point this out while trying to get them to listen to you, it’ll be you that’s the asshole.

Yeah, life isn’t fair.

Interview with Ron Jockman

Ron Jockman. He’s a writer, painter, genius, and 20/20 visionary.

I recently visited Ron in the Southeast African home he built with his own hands and filled with his own watercolor landscape paintings, and asked him a few questions about the Rockman Chronicles.

ROBYN: First of all, Ron, thank you for allowing me to visit you in your Southeast African home that you built with your own hands and filled with your own watercolor landscape paintings, and thank you for letting me ask you a few questions about the Rockman Chronicles.

JOCKMAN: It’s my pleasure.

ROBYN: The first book in the Rockman Chronicles is clearly the finest work in English literature. The second book is tied for finest, but it’s also the book with the most heart. What does its heart look like?

JOCKMAN: I’ve been asked this one a lot. I always tell people it would be an exact replica of a Tyrannosaurus heart. Those animals are fierce mothers, and like the Tyrannosaurus, I’m very protective of my babies — my books.

ROBYN: Are any of your characters based on people you know? For example, I’ve always wondered if John Rockman is based on your mother.

JOCKMAN: Imagine if my mother and I had a baby; I think that would be pretty close to John Rockman’s epicenter. My mother has done a lot to raise me into a good human. Of course as I spread my metaphorical wings, I take what I’ve learned and apply it to my work. As it stands currently, I embody all that John Rockman stands for. It’s so easy to write for a character like that, because it’s not a far stretch. A character like Maria, for instance, was a little more of a challenge. I haven’t had much contact with women outside of my mother, which is very insightful in itself. I’ve done research at the public library, and I have developed a sixth sense about the female brain. I feel like, as I write more of females in my books, I fulfill any annoying human need to procreate. My mom sometimes says Maria’s my girlfriend. [chuckles] I don’t know about that...

ROBYN: Just how frustrating is it, to be infinitely smarter and more competent than those around you?

JOCKMAN: I find that it’s not really frustrating at all. For instance, I know that, just by looking at you, I’m much smarter than you. I’m the one that’s going to sleep easy tonight. You’re the one that has to live with that, you know?

ROBYN: We see a more vulnerable, damaged, man-kissing side of John Rockman in Cosmic Brain. Did you have to practice being vulnerable, damaged, and man-kissy as research for the book?

JOCKMAN: I am a staunch supporter of equal rights in sexual preference. That being said, I would never, ever kiss a man. I do like to raise awareness of sexually transmitted diseases and their effects on society in my work. You’ll see that in The Cosmic Brain of Corruption. It’s literally oozing out of every orifice, burning with meaning and thought provoking secretion.

ROBYN: Who will play John Rockman in the inevitable movie version of the Rockman chronicles?

JOCKMAN: As I’m sure you’re well aware, Robyn, I create ‘Mind Movie Masterpieces,’ as I call them. There is nothing more powerful than the imagination of a creative person. Unfortunately, not all my readers are creative types, which is fine. It’s my job as the creator to paint a scene, a character, a story so well, that my readers can see a glimpse of what I experience every day. You can’t create a big Hollywood movie that will paint a better masterpiece than that. There is no budget out there that can remotely come close to the scale and intricacy of The Rockman Chronicles. There are no actors alive or dead that could be John Rockman, to the extent that I would believe it. Probably Jon Hamm.

ROBYN: I noticed, reading John Rockman and the Cosmic Brain of Corruption, that many supposedly great writers have stolen your ideas before you even published them. Just thinking about it makes me red with sympathy rage. How are you planning to take your revenge?

JOCKMAN: I often say, ‘revenge is a dish best served warm’. I can tell you don’t understand... let me explain. By dish, I don’t mean just a plate — I mean the dish has food on it and the food is warm. Good food. Who wants to eat a cold meal on a plate? No one. Not even my enemies. That way they eat the poison I put in it. Next question.

ROBYN: If you were to become a scientist, which field would your Nobel Prizes be in?

JOCKMAN: That’s a good question. What’s your next one?

ROBYN: Do you ever feel like you’ve gone too far, written something too amazing for today’s readers? If so, how do you deal with that?

JOCKMAN: Once I went too far. I was lost in my own head for days. The only way I got out of that cavernous expanse of wonder and danger was following the call of my mother’s voice. She called to me that dinner was ready and I finally snapped out of my mind-prison. I was on my floor, naked, cold, and shivering. Next to me was a single sheet of paper and written upon it was something so deep, so perceptive, so clever, that I had to destroy it and wipe my memory of its contents. Then I went downstairs and had mac’n’cheese.

ROBYN: If you were a tree, what kind of tree would write books that are printed on murdered trees?

JOCKMAN: I don’t believe in paper. That’s why I make eBooks. Trees are nature’s people and we need to respect them. Though, my books will be available in print edition soon, as per fan request.

ROBYN: These alleged twin brothers I’ve heard of, Justin and Mitchell Lucas, what is their pitiful role in the great Ron Jockman empire?

JOCKMAN: This interview is over.

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Ron Jockman's latest book, John Rockman and the Cosmic Brain of Corruption, is available now from Amazon.