October 28, 2009
Except for the progressive lessening of tensions in the Great Flash Debate and the coolest Amazon widget ever that I posted yesterday, things have been pretty quiet around here lately.
It’s not ’cause I don’t love y’all, ’cause you know I do. But I’ve been sick.
Here is the pattern of the last three days of my life: sleep, eat a little something, drink hot liquids while watching TV and checking Twitter feed, repeat.
Todd assures me that if this is, as we suspect, the garden-variety–that is to say, the non-piggy version–of the flu, then it will take about a week to run its course. The 900-ton weight of ickiness hit me last Saturday. It’s now Wednesday, and I feel a little less awful than I did at this hour last night. So I might just pull through.
October 27, 2009
Look what I found!
Booya!
October 23, 2009
I routinely read blogs about religion and politics which attract hateful comments and even, occasionally, death threats. The intertubes are chock full of nuts. Some bloggers actually regard the first crazy-person post as a badge of honor. It figures, though, that this post–which I dashed off four months ago on a day when FarmVille was acting strangely and I had nothing better to write about anyway–would be the first to attract an extended series of ranting comments.
It only makes sense, I suppose. That post is, for whatever reason, the single most viewed item on the site. Every time I look at my traffic report, I’m all, “Wow, that’s like a totally popular post, whafuck–? Oh, yeah, the Flash thing.”*
Either a lot of people hate Flash, or a secret cabal of Flash developers is plotting to take over the world, one restaurant menu at a time, and I’m on their hit list.
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October 22, 2009
The theme of the writing retreat last weekend was “the senses.” We did all sorts of related exercises–limiting ourselves to one sense at a time, examining a failure of the senses, juxtaposing sensory experiences that repel with those that attract, and so on.
Though I’m probably going to use almost all of the writing that I did over the weekend for my next project, I’m almost entirely certain that I won’t use the one in which we described an emotion solely in terms of the senses. As such, I’ll share:
Oliver’s blood surged in his ears, as noisy as surf. His breath rattled in his lungs. In the blackness of the cabinet, he could not tell for sure whether his eyes were open or shut; in any case, his vision was clotted with orange and green spots and billowing violet swirls. The skin at his temples was hot and tight, his scalp itchy and crawling with waves of heat. Touching his forehead with the tips of his fingers, he kneaded the damp skin there, willing it to slacken. He counted out a cadence for each breath. He mouthed the numbers silently. A count of five to exhale, pausing for another count of five, a count of ten to inhale. He begged his constricted throat to loosen; his breathing made such a racket, the soughing of an old boiler, the clatter of branches and leaves in a hard wind.
Five, five, ten. Five, five, ten. Five, five–What was that? Right outside, on the other side of the cabinet door, a floorboard creaked.
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October 21, 2009
I’ve just added an online press kit with info and blurbs about the book, and a longish bio of me, and so on and so forth. This sort of thing needs to happen, because just today I approved the final print proof. The book will be available for sale within a couple of weeks. Woot!
Meanwhile, I’m all stoked after a weekend writing retreat, at which I met a very engaging young man named Oliver. I think I’ll be spending quite a bit of time with Oliver in the near future.
No, Todd doesn’t need to be worried. Oliver is a fictional character, not an actual person. He appeared to me in a writing exercise and basically took over all the weekend’s writing activities. Good thing, too. NaNoWriMo is coming up.
October 12, 2009
It must really, really suck to be the President of the United States of America.* Consider: After spending the whole summer being compared to Hitler for trying to insure the uninsured, you win the Nobel Peace Prize and the next thing you know, everyone’s racing to the nearest microphone or computer keyboard to talk or write about how little you deserve it, and how winning the Nobel freakin’ Peace Prize is ZOMG!!1!1! the worst thing ever.
Even Michael Moore hastily weighed in–though he later repented in leisure.
And all of that sticks in my craw, but what reeeeaaaaally sticks in my craw is this sentence in Moore’s repent-in-leisure post:
Two months of the War in Iraq would pay for all the wells that need to be dug in the Third World for drinking water!
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October 8, 2009
I’ve been writing about politics a lot lately–even though (as I keep claiming) I don’t actually like politics, and even though I keep promising myself I’m going to try to stay away from writing about it. So this is positively … probably … possibly … my last post about politics … maybe.
I guess it all depends on whether something else gets me worked up in the near future. For the moment, I’m very cross with both of my senators. They were in the minority of male senators who voted against this perfectly sensible amendment offered by Al Franken.
The short version is this. A woman who was working for Halliburton/KBR in Iraq was gang-raped by her coworkers. She was held prisoner in a shipping container and threatened with dismissal if she sought medical treatment for her injuries. The fine print of her employment contract prohibited her from bringing criminal charges against KBR. Yes, that’s right, someone at corporate actually had the forethought to include specific contract provisions concerning sexual assault allegations.
Franken’s amendment would defund any defense contractor who similarly blocks its employees from seeking due process for sexual assault or battery that occurs in the workplace. This is perfectly sensible. No one who suffers rape or abuse should be denied the right to legal recourse. Any defense contractor who would lose its funding according to this provision has only to modify its employment contract to allow its employees the rights we all should have–the right to workplace safety and, failing that, the right to seek appropriate legal remedies.
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October 6, 2009
Our UPS driver is perfectly friendly and all, but I’m hardly ever as glad to see her as I was today.
And that’s ’cause…
(more…)
According to Poe’s Law:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.
I doubt that The Conservative Bible Project and Conservapædia are parodies, but I am certain that they prove Poe’s Law.
Consider. If a person were to set out with the express intention of underlining in a humorous way that:
- the bible has been tweaked and prodded by human hands for centuries, such that
- its supposed inerrancy is far from trustworthy, and furthermore that
- by taking, twisting, and selectively quoting bits and pieces of it, one can easily use it to bolster any argument and fortify any worldview, and finally that
- it can ideally be used to form the opinions of, and maintain control over, a willing and credulous flock,
then that person could hardly go wrong with something like The Conservative Bible Project.
On the one hand, I really would love to believe that no one is capable of commencing a project this bizarrely wrong-headed without a shred of irony. On the other hand, that would mean that all of Conservapædia is a colossal joke at the expense of conservatives and liberals, which would make it an endeavor of such unmitigated sociopathy–to say nothing of fuckwaddery–that … no, no, it’s got to be for real.
On the other, other hand, what are we to make of an entry on dinosaurs which includes an artist’s rendering of Jesus riding one of the prehistoric beasts?
October 5, 2009
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