I'm having some difficulty getting my head around this idea.
I'm now, of course, wishing I'd managed to persevere for another 130,000 words or so -- a mere bagatelle! -- in order to outlength the entire King James Bible.
Furthermore, I wrote my book a whole lot quicker than God wrote his. And without the posse of secretaries.
And mine's illustrated.
- Current Music:Ries - Piano Quartets
I fully intend to seek charges for each and every act of sexual violence, rape, each day of kidnapping, every felonious assault, all his attempted murders, and each act of aggravated murder he committed by terminating pregnancies that the offender perpetuated against the hostages during this decade-long ordeal. . . .My office will also engage in a formal process in which we evaluate to seek charges eligible for the death penalty.
No one would dispute that, should Castro be as guilty as he seems to be, he's guilty of an astonishingly vile crime. But McGinty's response is, surely, equally vile. Without any such niceties as a psychiatric examination of Castro, he hopes to kill him. That tells me one of a couple of things is true:
McGinty is hoping a faux "tough on crime" approach will gain him re-election McGinty gets his numb and shriveled rocks off over his power to kill other people
Neither option makes McGinty look all that good. But, hey, nothing he himself has said makes him look good, either: on any ethical spectrum containing Tim McGinty and Ariel Castro, there's not much difference between the two.
- Current Music:Rietz - Dramatic ouverture in D minor Hero & Leander op 11
Leaving that aside, there's something awry with its search engine, which every now and then turns up idiotic results that no amount of manipulation of search terms can persuade it to alter.
Today I had a dramatic example.
There's a new movie on its way about Veronica Lake, Hollywood Heroine. Wanting to find out more about it (I'm mulling the possibility of a book on noir's femmes fatales), I went to IMDB and plugged the title into the search engine. Here's the complete list of results I got:
| High Heeled and Horny 4 (1996) (Video) | |
| Hilda of Heron Cove (1913) (Short) | |
| Horny Holiday (2005) (Video) | |
| Seventeen Special 20: Horny Holiday (1995) (Video) | |
| Schoolgirls Holiday 28: Horny Youngsters (2001) (Video) |
There does seem to be a certain . . . theme running through the list of suggested movies, but it has nothing to do with either Hollywood or heroines. The strangest part is that there must be about 2.6 x 1012 movies whose titles start with the word "Hollywood", yet the IMDB search engine didn't think to toss up any of those as spurious possibilities.
Also, why is High Heeled and Horny 4 deemed relevant to my search but not the others in the High Heeled and Horny series?
If anyone has a solution to these mysteries, I'd love to hear it.
In the meantime I've been to the movie's spectacularly uninformative website, found the contact address, and emailed a request for more information. Fingers crossed, etc.
- Current Music:Owel: Owel
As you've probably heard by now, Goodreads is selling out to Amazon.
To say that I'm less than 100% gruntled about this would be savagely to understate my feelings. I've put quite a lot of effort into Goodreads, including the "publishing" of hundreds of reviews there, activities I undertook in part because it suited me so to do but also in part because I wanted to contribute to the community that was Goodreads. What I wasn't aiming to do was expend my precious bodily fluids for the sake of contributing, in however minuscule a way, to Amazon's already ginormous corporate profits.
Does anyone know if there still exists an independent equivalent to Goodreads? I've done some quick searching, but without success. Well, I found one site whose lead blog was by a guy promoting his self-published "literary novel" -- that was a site I exited PDQ -- and a couple of dead ones. And then I thought I'd be better off asking around, which is what I'm doing now. Assuming I do find a Goodreads substitute, I'm currently of a mind to shift all my Goodreads content to it.
- Current Music:Respighi - Doric Quartet
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March |
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Spuds Rule 4:00 p.m. Children Celebrate National Potato Chip Day with Miss Theresa. For more |
- Current Music:Vermeulen: Symphony #2
As most will know, a measure called the Sequester went into effect last night -- a complex of spending cuts so severe that everyone sane thought that even the modern Republican Party would regard it as a Weapon Too Dreadful To Use.
That faith in humanity was ill placed. Rather than allow an extra cent of revenue to be raised by closing tax loopholes or increasing taxes on the corporations and the ultra-rich, the Republicans in the House of Congress chose to inflict quite unspeakable suffering on those Americans least able to fend for themselves -- the poor, the sick, the mentally ill, the elderly. Scientific research, including into lethal diseases, is to be savagely cut back. Education likewise. All predictions are that this will severely damage the US economy, perhaps even the global economy.
One of our guilty little secrets is that our local Congresscritter is Scott Garrett. Garrett isn't as flamboyantly nuts as Tea Party favorites like Todd Akin, Paul Broun and Michelle Bachmann, but he's every bit as vile. His record of voting against the environment is a staggering 100% -- he seems to be entirely in the pockets of the polluting industries, including the fossil-fuels industries. Natch, he's a climate-change denier. He was one of the few House Republicans to vote against New Jersey residents -- his own constituents! -- being given Federal money to help clear up in the wake of Storm Sandy. He's an NRA darling. He voted against the Violence Against Women Act the other day -- thus in effect voting for a rapists' charter. The list goes on and on. The guy was one of the Congressional Tea Partiers before the term had been invented.
It obviously takes a real special breed of scumbag to vote to persecute the poor, promote the spread of lethal diseases, cost lives, starve kids and destroy their opportunities, exacerbate poverty and work actively against America and its interests -- all the while wrapping oneself in the flag in the pretense that one's a patriot. But that seems to be what the modern Republican Party, as exemplified by Garrett, is all about.
About a decade ago, someone stuck up the website DumpGarrett.com. I don't know who was responsible (it hasn't been updated in years), but it reads less like a partisan effort from the Democrats, more like the creation of independents and moderate Republicans horrified by what they'd elected. Here's a taste:
With considerable help from the extremist Club for Growth, Scott Garrett helped drive moderate Republican Marge Roukema out of the House seat she held for decades. Since taking her seat in 2003, his first-term voting record has been driven by an ideology that is out of place in our state. Scott Garrett is the Christian Coalition’s poster-boy in New Jersey. Garrett has voted against the entire New Jersey Congressional delegation - Republicans and Democrats - an astounding 43 times! His positions are so extreme that he doesn't publish his votes on his own website.
We publish his votes here because, as concerned citizens, we believe his constituents should know the real record of Scott Garrett. We have documented the sources and specific votes Garrett cast as a freshman congressman - votes that are so at odds with his constituents that he refuses to discuss them.
We publish his votes here because, as concerned citizens, we believe his constituents should know the real record of Scott Garrett. We have documented the sources and specific votes Garrett cast as a freshman congressman - votes that are so at odds with his constituents that he refuses to discuss them.
It's the faux-patriotism that's in a way almost the hardest to swallow. If patriotism is, as Johnson said, the last refuge of the scoundrel, then it's hard to find anyone more scoundrelly than Garrett and his ilk in Congress. They're a shame to their country.
As a pacifist, I find it hard to wish ill on people, no matter how despicable they are, but I have to admit a part of me hopes that Garrett will be hoist by his own petard, that the policies he himself has promoted will one day come back and bite him, that he and his kids* will have to cope with the same kind of misery and hardship that he has so gleefully inflicted on other people and their kids. Of course, it'll never happen -- except perhaps when, like all the rest of us, he has to face up to the consequences of the climate change he so assiduously denies.
Gloomy thoughts for a gloomy, gray morning. I've got lots I have to do today, so I'd best get moving . . .
* Okay: Not his kids. It's not their fault what their father does.
- Current Music:CPE Bach: Harpsichord Concerto in A
For more info see http://www.one.org/us/shareworthy/the-r
- Current Music:Creston - Concerto for Alto Sax
. . . there was a writer called Fredric Brown. He wrote a bunch of significant hardboiled novels, of which The Screaming Mimi is the one that, for obvious reasons, comes to my mind first. He also wrote lots of f/sf stories, including many that fell into the category of short-short -- that is, he told a complete story in just a few hundred words. Probably the best known of these, "The End", is only about (from memory) fifty words long -- it may be even shorter.
These weren't flash fiction, at least according to my (admittedly fuzzy) understanding of that term. They were full-scale stories, just very short. Roger Robinson's two anthologies of drabbles contain a few extraordinarily short stories -- just 100 words -- that fall into the same category. (The John Brunner one is a classic.)
The point I'm meandering toward is that Fredric Brown was able to publish these extremely short stories. Magazines and, I assume, anthologies were prepared to publish short-shorts; he wasn't the only one doing this (remember Damon Knight's "To Serve Man"?). Yet, had Brown been writing them today, he might have had some trouble finding a market. Me, I've more than once suffered sight-unseen rejections because stories were less than -- gasp! -- 1000 words long. I'm sure that far better authors than I am must have come up against this same arbitrary barrier.
I mention this because I've been looking at a story I wrote a year or so ago, when I did a bit of quick moonlighting from the film noir encyclopedia: I had time to write the story, but not to fart around trying to find places that would let me submit it -- because, you see, it weighs in at a triumphant 780 words or so. Today, I read it and still liked it really quite a lot. I immediately went to check the guidelines of a mag I thought would be ideal for it. Forget about an under-a-thousand-words restriction: they look at nothing under two thousand words.
So what's happening to all the modern equivalents of those Fred Brown stories we love so much? Do they just get stuck up on their authors' blogs, and therefore become entirely lost by tomorrow? Quite a few years back, I recall, Stefan Dziemanowicz tried to do something about this with his "365" anthologies for Barnes & Noble Books; I think those are still in print. They're amazing bathroom books.
Today I was looking (in completely different context) at the guidelines for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. They specifically mention short-shorts as a category in which submissions are welcomed. Is f/sf missing something?
Look, Mr Shakespeare, 14-liners are out. Go back to Liverpool.
- Current Music:Badings: Capriccio for Flute 'n' Piano
. . .it's Darwin Day! A moment to pause and celebrate the slow triumph of rationality over superstition.
- Current Music:Badings: Capriccio
If you're looking for a (short: 10 minutes) movie which Carl Sagan might have applauded, a staunch rebuttal of the "demon-haunted world" -- the Santa Claus view of the universe -- you could do a whole lot worse than watch Tim Minchin's Storm -- The Animated Movie.
It's animated. It's free. It's often extremely funny. Your mom might not approve of some of the language.
We live in a universe that's vast beyond understanding and of beauty that dumbfounds. Why do so many people prefer Bronze Age myths that don't capture the imagination, but kill it?
- Current Music:Albeniz: Asturias
