Giant Leap

vic fortezza
2 min readJul 20, 2024

55 years ago today an estimated 650 million people — nearly 20% of the entire human population at the time — watched the moon landing on TV, American exceptionalism in action. I had tears in my eyes. Photo from Google Images:

Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. Photo from GI:

Headline from nypost.com: “NYC rat population ‘stressed’ by heat waves — leading to lower rates of reproduction.” Poor little things. Breaks my heart — not!

I thought about changing the title of my latest book from By the Numbers to Exercising Futility, which describes much of life, but there are many similar, titles, especially a story collection titled Exercises in Futility: The Short Stories of XylonEx by Seamus M Coffey. Oh, well. I’m surprised there aren’t many that use By the Numbers alone. Many books include it, as in By the Numbers: A Guide to Buying and Running Your Dental Practice by Addison Killeen DDS and Kevin Rossen. I scanned five Amazon pages and did not spot a single work of fiction that uses By the Numbers as its title. I should finish a proofing this evening, but it will require another, as I’ve added many sentences throughout it. Even though it’s an ebook, it requires a cover. Here’s the one I’ve selected:

Another positive for AI. Headline from foxnews.com: “Artificial intelligence detects cancer with 17% more accuracy than doctors in UCLA study.” May those advances keep coming and coming.

Fortunately, cloud cover ruled the day at the Anti-Inflation Book Shop or it would have been broiling, as the humidity has returned after a one-day hiatus. My thanks to the gentleman who donated a hardcover non-fiction, and to the one who bought The Pirates of Carribbean (2003) on DVD; and to Wolf, who purchased a DVD in Russian, Lee Greenwood’s God Bless the USA CD, and The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor — the Truth and the Turmoil by Tina Brown, former editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and the founding editor in chief of The Daily Beast .

My Amazon Author page: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-Fortezza/e/B002M4NLJE

FB: https://www.facebook.com/Vic-Fortezza-Author-118397641564801/?fref=ts

Read Vic’s Stories, free: http://fictionaut.com/users/vic-fortezza

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vic fortezza

I was born in Brooklyn in 1950 to Sicilian immigrants. I’ve had more than 50 short stories published world wide. I have 13 books in print.