Ravings

What’s wrong with our picture?

I didn’t know I was getting newsletter e-mails from Senator Herb Kohl until I had to fix some mail configs and dug into an account I haven’t really used in years. Suddenly there was this nice fresh one. So I read it. I’m still scratching my head at the apparent (to me) insanity. Some kind of megalomania, schizophrenic power-trip; whatever, it disturbs me. It says something terribly discomforting about the USA.

I thought this guy was relatively all right, until I read this:

“…as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, I introduced the bipartisan No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act (NOPEC). It would authorize our government, for the first time, to take action against illegal conduct of the OPEC oil cartel. The NOPEC bill would establish clearly and plainly that when a group of competing oil producers – like the OPEC nations – act together to restrict supply or fix prices, they are violating U.S. law. I recently raised the subject of increased oil prices with Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke at a Senate Banking Committee hearing to gain insight about current efforts to curb rising oil and gas prices. It is time for the U.S. government to fight back against efforts to fix the price of oil and hold OPEC accountable when it acts illegally.”

No matter what we think of them, the OPEC nations are not part of the United States, and are not subject to our laws. So what is the point of waving a provocative red flag of empty threat?

The USA must stop acting as if it owned the world and start cooperating with other nations as peers. That is called growing up. Being a playground bully and whining about the terrorism that it inspires with its careless arrogance (while indulging freely in terrorism) is not building any respect for us. You have to GIVE respect to get it.

I guess this rant should show that I am not just a knee-jerk anti-Republican. :p

Off Our Walker — Rap

Another contribution by A. Nonymous:

Knock-Rap for the Guv

Little Scotty Walker
Playun with his Raygun
Shootin down people
Who dare to be prayin
For jobs and food
For their family
He got a news slant
On the economy
The few should be great
And the many, little
To make ends meet
Just throw out the middle

Little Scotty Walker
Wanna shut down the state
If the cameras are runnin
That gonna be great
Think about winning
Politics is a game
If something not working
Just pass the blame
Keep your eye on the lens
Givin fisheye looks
Americans for Prosperity
Be Koch-in the books

Scotty flappin his flags
An wavin his bats
Got no clue people died in the past
For GI Bills
Social Security
Stuff to help him climb
His family tree
That he’d conservatively take
From you and me
He tryin to sound like a
Super smooth talker
But if you misjudge him
You off your Walker

Off Our Walker — Rant I

Guest posts by A. Nonymous, via e-mail.

Went to a Democratic Party meeting in Sturgeon Bay Thursday night — very interesting. Jon Erpenbach, the minority leader of the state senate, spoke to us by phone from Chicago and answered questions. He said morale is good among the 14 senators holding out on the budget vote and he personally would like to see the entire budget redone not just the section on unions. Walker is trying to privatize state jobs and eliminate accountability. It gives him the power to rewrite the rules for who is eligible for Medicaid and Senior Care and he is interested in selling power plants to his friends. He said the Republican senators are not happy with the Walker phone call and the cavalier tone he has adopted, and they need to hear from people who will encourage them to consider individual issues rather than be in lockstep with Walker. The minority Democrats are seriously worried about saving the American dream and the middle class from this power grab with political payoffs.

The local Democrats are staging a protest Friday on our steel bridge (make your own sign) Friday in connection with rallies on bridges all over the state. About 100,000 people are expected in Madison Saturday but you will never hear it on Fox, as they have consistently underreported numbers of previous groups except for the tea party which mysteriously swelled to thousands instead of hundreds. The bus drivers bringing people from parking areas to the downtown say the protestors have already numbered 100,000 at the Capitol, which is the goal for this weekend too. The local people who went last week said it was a very moving experience with everyone becoming very energized but staying courteous, no pushing and shoving.

Somebody researched what the Koch brothers are making their billions from and discovered it is just about everything — Angel Soft, Soft n Gentle and Quilted Northern toilet paper; Brawny towels; Dixie Cups products; Mardi Gras, Vanity Fair and Zee napkins; Stainmaster carpets; Dacron fiber; Comforel fiberfill; all the Georgia Pacific products, and that’s just for starters. They have been making donations to conservative candidates all over the country, but Walker may be the most enthusiastic in trying to pay them back.

appended from e-mail reply:

Yay for working. It’s becoming increasingly rare. Just think — with the cooperation of some business moguls who are not expanding at the moment, the US could raise the GNP by 3 or 4 points and generate enough in taxes to solve the budget shortages. For some reason said moguls are sitting on their hands until various
states use draconian measures to increase the dictatorial power of governors and reduce the options and
benefits of workers, thus generating a bigger future percentage of profit for those who need it least. Does anyone remember Teapot Dome, trustbusting, etc. at the beginning of the last century? Why do we have to replay the Greed card vs. the Fair card over and over? And in the future will anybody hear about it even once with a new crop of teachers whose boss lives in Madison?

For your entertainment:
Koch-Walker Prank Call — Part 1
Part 2

Well I’ll be dipped

I have Windows Live Writer sitting around doing nothing. So finally I decide to see if it’s good for anything. Turns out maybe it is. Smile

alienprog

Anyhoo, that’s insomnia for ya.

Oh – drat – of course the bloody thing wants to check my spelling.

Worse than that – the only browser it knows is Idiot Exploder.

No, no, not another!

I was once a fan of Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children(TM) series.

I loved Clan of the Cave Bear. It was the best cave-people novel I had ever read (unfortunately, that’s not saying too much; the competition back then was sickly).

I loved parts of Valley of Horses. Parts of it were…let’s just say, not what I was looking for.

I loved some things about The Mammoth Hunters. The rest I lived with.

I enjoyed the scenery and the characters in Plains of Passage.

I re-read all of them, more than once, and many scenes remain vividly painted in my mind despite the obstacles.

I managed to drag my ass through Shelters of Stone one time. One stinking time, and I mostly remember one very unexciting scene. All attempts to re-read have drowned in a tar-pit.

Now we have The Land of Painted Caves. Ayla’s incredible(sic) prowess is veiled in yet another stupefying mass of congealing prose. Veiled, not unveiled; that’s what I said. Rather than improving over the many years, Jean Auel’s writing style seems to have grown worse. The action, the characters, everything is buried in verbosity that defies belief. There’s hardly a paragraph, in what I have read so far, that couldn’t be reduced by a third.

Dialogue is another sore point for me. Did stone-age people really talk like cardboard cutouts? Did they care that much about perfect syntax? If people had always spoken in such an egg-walking way, language would never have evolved. I want to hear some life in the way characters interact.

Add Ayla’s know-it-all-ness, Jondalar’s wuss-ness, interminable “As you know, Bobelar” explanations, and the usual heavy-handed head-hopping, and you get a flavorless stew that sticks in the throat of any discriminating reader.

Having sampled what is available on the Web, I have no great desire to rush out and buy the book. Not even to borrow the book. I don’t think it will add a whole lot to my life experience.

I will give Jean credit where it is due, however. Because of her, I have become a much better writer. In the eight years since I kick-started myself by writing parodies of her work, I have written more and learned more about the craft of writing than in my entire life before that.

So long and thanks for all the stone knives and bearskins 😉

0-tweeple

I need a new list in Twitter: People who don’t tweet. They make me nervous when they follow me. I suspect them of having suspicious motives. Well, some people on Twitter do have very suspicious motives. A few of them are stupid, evil slimeballs. It’s harder to figure out the 0-tweeters, and they make me think of 0-post forum members, who might be lurkers…or…hackers. Makes me nervous.

The 0-tweeple can’t be evaluated by their tweets. One has to poke around and stalk their followers and friends. That is irksome and time-consuming, but I am compelled to do it. I want to know something about the people who associate themselves with me. So, I will make a list, and put all the 0-tweeple on it. Then I can keep an eye on them ;).

When is a blog not a blog?

I don’t blog often, but at least when I do it’s my own content. Unfortunately, there are a shitload of “bloggers” whose only aim is to get as much traffic as possible, by any means possible. I assume that they are doing this for the sake of some sleazy advertising on their sorry moshblogs that I can’t see because I have pretty effective ad-blocking on most of the time.

Anhwhey, their shitty little lazy trick is to dumpster-dive for content in the sump-pits of content mills, resulting in a motley mix of copycat content. Try this: go to almost any blog that is posted on with great frequency and constantly tweeted. Copy part of a sentence from any post. Take it to Google, in quotes so that the entire string is searched for, not just parts of it.

How many results do you get for that string and all of the material surrounding it? Only the original(sic) blog? Odds are good that you’ll get one or more, sometimes many more; sometimes even the true original source.

This is even more fun when you can nail a distinctive typo or usage error. Pseudo-bloggers can’t be bothered to check the verity, much less the quality, of the content-farm garbage that they post.

IMHO this kind of blogging is just another variety of SPAM, spewed out over the Internet to clog search engines rather than dumped in our inboxes, forums, or blog comments.

Wottever II

Still out of luck with excluding stuff. My best option for now is to turn off the tweet digest — I don’t really need it anyway.

Meanwhile, spam goes on. Most of it wouldn’t fool a month-old puppy, but who wouldn’t like to be flattered all to heck with:

Wow, incredible blog layout! How long have you been blogging for? you make blogging look easy. The overall look of your web site is fantastic, as well as the content!

or —

I like the valuable information you provide in your articles. I will bookmark your blog and check again here regularly. I’m quite sure I will learn many new stuff right here! Best of luck for the next!

Except, of course, that both warm-fuzzing inanities were posted by the same shitbot, linking to the same product. A useful item, perhaps, but Not On My Blog!

I was delighted to receive a nice chunk of novel to beta read a couple of days ago. The long wait was worth it; I devoured it ravenously and tossed the bones back with lots of pointy comments. Now waiting on chair’s edge for the rest of it.

That inspired me to go back to my own novel-in-waiting and make a few small edits where I can now see that I did not make things clear enough. I’m very happy with those tiny but — IMHO — important changes.

wottever

The front page excluded category plugin still isn’t working.

I am still working, but entirely behind the scenes. Actually not so bad for me, but awkward for my employer.

I’m not very talkative today; it all drains out on Twitter, I guess.

The Tree of Story

Some writers are aghast at the notion of going back for revisions before a work is finished. Fine for them, but I don’t write in a straight line. I can’t. Writing, for me, is three-dimensional, fractal.

There is a lot more to a tree than foliage. Growth takes place everywhere. Roots dig deeper and deeper for nutrients. The trunk grows wider, heals the wounds of fallen branches. Light and weather influence its shape.

My novel has roots, a trunk, branches and leaves, sap that flows two ways. There are times when the sap retreats to the roots. Growth stops, dead leaves fall, and weak branches break off. Then the sap rises again. The story lives and flourishes because it has strong roots. Its growth is a series of cycles, not jerky spurts.

I am the sap, moving all through the tree. I am also a squirrel running up and down the trunk.