All posts by jkkblog

I'm a freelance editor and writer with a background in history and foreign languages.
Human relations, Married life

The fine art of Emergency Anniversary Present Finding

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Having taught this to enough people, I figured it’s time to write it down and help the brothers out.

A lot of men have a hard time with anniversary presents for their wives. What the hell does she want? It depends on her, obviously, and one size never fits all. My philosophy is that she doesn’t want something practical, useful or that will go away (wilt, be eaten, etc.). She also doesn’t tend to want something that isn’t specific to her. The money matters a lot less than the thought you put into it, so there are not easy outs. Flowers and candy? Throwing money at the problem. Anyone can go out and buy that. Jewelry? If you have that kind of money and it’s something that would matter mainly to her, and not to just any woman. If you’re celebrating being married to her, she isn’t just any woman. She’s your wife. She’s special. She was better than the rest, and I should hope you still think so.

Sure, tickets to her favorite concert are an option, and those go away, which could be okay. But I cling to the view that something she can keep over the years, and remember what you meant, is most likely to be treasured. Five years from now, none of her friends are going to look at concert tickets, adore them and ask where she got them.

If you have time and are handy, making something is nice. Anything that is unique–that there is only one of, and just for her–sends a very welcome message. Something you already have, in a display you made that adds to it, is a good thing. Some years you just spot the perfect thing. And some years, it’s down to the wire, and damn it, nothing has shown up, no ideas, you’re stuck. You went out and looked at all the usual places. Nada. There isn’t any more time to mess around. This is a dilemma.

When that happens, do this.

You are going to deploy the ultimate weapon: women. You won’t even know any of them, and you don’t care. This is a sure shot. All you have to do is think a little bit beforehand, and cooperate when the time comes. I’m not making this up. I have done this more than once.

First: game face. It shouldn’t be hard for you to look a little frustrated, but don’t look angry frustrated. You’re going to a place where you are somewhat out of your element, and it is important to seem a little vulnerable. Many of us don’t do vulnerable well. You must. Drop your guard. There is something about a vulnerable man that lights up the ‘I must help’ indicators in women like a Christmas tree. It’s one of the greatest reasons to value them as relatives, friends and partners–and there are so many. Not every woman, no given woman all the time, but in the main, most of them most of the time.

Second: use your brain. Look back on the last year of her life and yours together, what was major for her. A big achievement? What all did she do? Think of something to celebrate, to commemorate, something you’re proud of about her. Something where she reached a goal, finished something, conquered something. It can involve you in some way but it should center on her role. Have that stuff in mind, because you’re going to need it.

Next, game face on, go to the kind of place she likes to look around, typically an artwork or craft type of place, small business, no chains. Make sure you go at a time when there are several women in the store, including a female shopkeeper/cashier. Go in, greet the shopkeeper politely, and look around a bit. Wait for her to ask if she can help you find anything. Your finger is on the launch button; push it. Keep wandering sort of aimlessly and dumbly, and say something like: “Well, I’m having trouble. Our anniversary is coming up. I’m really proud of my wife, she’s done a lot this year, and I want to get her something that will celebrate that. I haven’t had any luck finding the right thing.” Don’t be loud, but do not make any effort not to be heard by the other shoppers. Most of all, don’t be embarrassed about it. You want to be the man who just showed that he loves his wife and isn’t one damn bit ashamed of that, doesn’t give a shit who hears him.

Ignition. Now it’s a treasure hunt. The shopkeeper will start to ask you questions. Trust that the other women heard you. What does she like? What did she accomplish or do? What colors does she like? Any flowers or animals or symbols that mean a lot to her? What’s your budget range? Be completely honest. Answer anything and everything. If it’s about what she did, let your pride shine a bit. Before you came in, the shopkeeper was bored and most of the women were just puttering around. Now they have a mission.

See, this is the women’s world. It’s different, and this must be respected. In their world, change is swift and sudden, and they tend to handle it more smoothly than we do. Now the lines between shopkeeper and customer tend to blur, even vanish. The other women are likely to ask you questions. Answer everyone. This is fun for them on a couple of levels. Not only are they helping someone who seems like a very nice man, they have a goal. Their shopping day just got better and you are the cause. They like this.

Now all you have to do is come look at stuff when summoned. They will consider your budget, everything you said. Go around and look at the stuff. Don’t be afraid to say something wouldn’t quite work, but obviously, be polite, as to any volunteer taking time to help a stranger. If it surely wouldn’t work, explain why, so that adds to what they know. Keep checking out things, and in between, you of course keep looking, or making a show of it. You won’t be the one who finds it, but you have to keep trying for appearance’s sake.

Eventually someone will find something suitable, the kind of thing you would never have thought of as fitting, because you do not see the world through your wife’s eyes. Sometimes takes only a few minutes. The women are more likely to see it as she would see it. If you think the thing sends a radically different different message than the woman who found it, it’s fine to say so, but if your helper stands her ground, be prepared. That’s the signal for the other women to come over and weigh in. They will all agree with each other about the interpretation, exactly as custom specifies. At this point, custom and good manners require you to bow to their collective wisdom and agree with them. That’s the debate you should lose, and gracefully–because if that’s how they all see it, you probably just found the perfect gift. One year I was doing this, and one lady found a statuette of a female figure in chrome, head back, holding a platter (spiked for a votive candle) high in the air. I asked: “That looks like the barmaid bringing beer. Is that what I should be saying?” The women gathered around to evaluate the piece and weigh in. They all agreed that it looked very feminine and triumphant and strong, and not like a barmaid. Of course, I followed the script, and accepted their judgment without being grumpy. (At anniversary time, my wife loved it. Later, when I told her the barmaid story, she laughed and laughed. More to the point, she agreed with my helpers, and chided me good-naturedly for the utter, sheer, egregious maleness of my own first impression.)

At some point, they find it, and you know it. Now all there is to do is thank the women for their help, tell them you’re sure your wife will love it, pay for your purchase, and head out. Everyone is happy. You’re bailed out. The shopkeeper did some business and had fun. The other shoppers had fun, and helped a nice guy do something thoughtful. They loved the romance of it, the process of it, the newness and difference.

Not much was asked of you. All you did was show up, say the right things, answer questions, be appreciative and respectful, and pay the cashier.

This is not hard. And it will save your husbandly ass from a big disappointment.

If you blow it at anniversary time, it is now officially your own damn fault.

Investing

Stopping out

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When I talk about investing with people, it’s natural that most of them don’t understand there are a lot of different types of orders. Most people know that you can place an order to buy or sell when a stock hits a certain price, but it gets more sophisticated than that. One form of sophistication is the trailing stop-loss order, which is available from any fully equipped discount brokerage.

It works like this. Suppose your shares of Baloney, Inc. (BLNY) are way up. You’re not eager to sell, but you think the markets are high, and you really don’t want to ride BLNY down the chute of a big selloff. Okay. You place a trailing stop-loss order to sell all shares, good till canceled (at Fidelity they expire after a max of six months). The trigger condition is a percentage that you choose. If you pick 1%, you must really want out, because a 1% drop in value is typical on a down market day–and isn’t even remarkable over two days or more.  If you pick 5%, it would take a very big single day of loss to trigger that, or a loss of that size spread over multiple days.

The mechanics of this are a headache for the brokerage, but that’s why they get paid. Suppose BLNY is at 100 when you place a trailing stop-loss order to sell it, trigger 5%. As of right then, the trigger price is 95. However, if BLNY goes over 100, the trigger point is recalculated (each time it gets above the high) based upon a 5% drop from the new price. So if BLNY climbs to 120, without ever declining 5% from its highest price since the order, its trigger point will be 114. That is 5% less than 120. The brokerage keeps this stuff in a separate file so it can keep updating your trigger point. When it sells, we say that it ‘stopped out.’

Seems like cheating, doesn’t it? That’s what seasoned investors do any way they can legally or practically do: cheat. Of course, you have to realize what exactly occurs with this type of order. When your shares drop to the trigger point, your order converts to a market order (and it is not going back; the die is cast). You may not get your trigger price, though it should be close. There has to be someone wanting to buy the shares for that market price. A market order, the simplest form of order, simply says ‘sell this now at what the market will pay.’ No type of order can create liquidity (investor-speak for ‘someone wants this, so I can sell it’) if liquidity doesn’t exist.

Can this hurt you? Well, there is no crying in investing. Big kid tools are for big kid investors. Most people are thinking of crash protection, but remember that once a trigger point is established for the order, it will never go down. If you aren’t serious about protecting some form of profit (or avoiding further faceplant), better not place one of these, because the smaller your % loss specified in the order, the more likely it is that a moderate market shift could trigger your sale.

My own belief on stop-loss orders is that they are for times when you think the market is stupidly high, you’ve profited handsomely from it, and you’re ready to protect the profits. I’m at that point right now. There isn’t really a good reason for the markets to be as high as they are, at least not as far as I can see; banks still aren’t lending much, interest rates on savings are an insult, there’s no big job boom, and the economy is still fought over by the macaques, gibbons, chimpanzees and ourangoutangs in Congress, who are doing nothing to help it, being too distracted by ideological feces-flinging competitions. If there’s a big long market slide, I expect to buy these stocks back at discount prices. It’s not that I don’t like the companies’ prospects; it’s just that in investing, I don’t give a damn about anything but money. I gain no emotional satisfaction from holding Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) shares; I just think they are a good investment. However, I’m not stopping out of those, because I think they are such a good investment they will weather a market decline very well. I’m not stopping out of my dividend farms (closed-end bond funds), because I didn’t buy them for capital appreciation. I bought them so they’d pay me money every month. They will still do that, by and large, regardless of what their prices do.

We–you and I–didn’t invent this game. We have the right to play it for keeps, for our own reasons, using whatever tools are available to us. For me, one of those is the stop-loss order.

Editing/writing life

Calling in sick

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First, I offer you this to make this post less of a downer: “Callin’ in Sick Today”

When you are a ‘lancer, can you really call in sick? Depends how bad it is. If you are so sick and weak you lack the mental acuity to do your work in respectable form, well, you have no choice. I was in that state Monday, with a fever probably about 104º F. For you of metric countries, much above that and you have to be hospitalized. There was no way I could work. Sitting up was hard enough.

I could postpone stuff like this, for example. While I’m heartened that people read the blog, I don’t think anyone’s going to unsubscribe if there aren’t any posts for a week. I would have to postpone or cancel on-site stuff, such as a meeting or teleconference. But some of what you have to do, if you can do–even if you have to proofread for an hour, rest for an hour, proof for another hour, etc.–you must do. And for Tuesday and Wednesday, that was what I did. Could barely even eat, nothing sounded good. Lived on mixed OJ and club soda, and cleaned out all the popsicles Deb didn’t eat.

But it got done. And that’s the big deal. If you have a long rapport with a client, proven track record, maybe it doesn’t harm you to have a crisis that delays the result. But when the project is a biography of a nonagenarian who is understandably eager to see the final product, for a first time client, well, the amount of delay one might accept is very limited.

And since you’re a ‘lancer, you do it until it’s done. Your career depends on that approach. When work is there, do the work. You can play Candy Crush or nap some other time.

Entertainment and music

Andina

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…Spanish for ‘Andean,’ is the distinctive sound of the Andes Mountains: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Chile. Sometimes sung in Native languages, sometimes in Spanish, it is the most uplifting-sounding music I know.

You probably have heard one song of Andina origin, though you may not have grasped this at the time: El Condor Pasa, sung by many but made most popular by Simon & Garfunkel. The Andean condor is, naturally, one of the emblematic birds of the Andes. If you heard it accompanied by a flute, that approximated the pan-flute or pan-pipes that punctuate so much Andina. The genre contains a lot of fingered strings (I’m no expert on the different types of guitarlike instruments), sometimes violin, moderate emphasis on drumming, and rapid changes of pacing. Rarely is it a cappella, less rarely is it purely instrumental; mostly it is both sung and played.

Andina groups I like include Ecuador Inkas, Nativo, Quichua Mashis, Savia Andina, Illapu, K’ala Marka and Los Kjarkas. It can be difficult to find for sale, so when I trip over an opportunity, I buy some.

If you’d like to give it a try, visit this video of K’ala Marka up on some ungodly height just tearing it up. In spite of the modern touches and enhancements, if you are anything like me, you will feel and hear something ancient. If I had to pick a song and setting that emblemized what I love about Andina, that one has it.

Investing, Social comment

Let’s share a victory

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Some of you might know that I’ve got serious knee trouble, for which I’m undergoing rather unpleasant but helpful physical therapy. We have GEHA as an insurance provider, and they contract with an outfit called Orthonet to review treatment programs and approve care. My PT set up a plan of eight visits, which seemed logical to me: let’s do this for a month and see where we are.

I soon got a letter from Orthonet: they approved only seven visits. This mystified me. What was the logic? I called GEHA, who basically said I’d have to call Orthonet. I did this. The minion could not provide a responsive answer to this question: “Okay. My PT says I need eight visits. Your case manager evidently disagrees, thinking seven are sufficient. Explain the logic, please. What about my case prompted this case manager, who–unlike my PT–has not actually seen either of my knees, to decide that seven were all that were necessary?”

Of course, the minion served up the standard vaguenesses and horse hockey that are designed to baffle, confuse and frustrate people into just giving up. Evidently that’s their job: to get people to give up and accept less care. I advised him that none of that had answered my question, and that if he couldn’t answer it, then I wanted to speak to the case manager. This evidently was a very irregular request: to speak to the actual individual who decided that his wisdom was superior to that of the medical professional. I insisted.

Somehow, they got a case manager–if not my own case manager–on the line. He spoke in the rapid “I’m way too busy for this sort of thing” tones of someone who also has the power to take action and needs not to be slathered in protracted conversation. I asked him the same question. He said it was a good one, and that he didn’t know why. Very quickly, he agreed to resubmit the review recommending the eighth visit. There was zero fight. I thanked him and the conversation ended, goal achieved.

Now let us deconstruct the reality of all this, because while it would seem I should be very happy with Orthonet for giving me what I wanted so quickly, that is really not so.

  • My PT recommended a course of treatment. The minion’s first response to my question had hinted that they basically always approved one less of whatever was requested.
  • As a reflex, on the logic that Orthonet is contracted by GEHA to save it GEHA money, they therefore approved one less visit. The average person, less obstinate or confrontational than myself, would simply accept the reduced care. One presumes that if my providers expected this, they’d request nine visits so that I’d get eight.
  • Orthonet’s first line of defense against pests of my ilk is to have their toll-free line answered by people with minimal power, whose work is to spout gobbledygook. Most people are nice and do not like to be confrontational, and also won’t ask such a blunt question; they also won’t insist on a real answer. This should get rid of most people. Money saved. They will get less care, of course, but that’s the whole idea.
  • If however one remains politely insistent (thus not giving the minion a valid excuse to hang up), one will be routed to someone with authentic power of decision. This person is extremely busy and will take the easiest route, which is to concede. Okay, we lost this one, but that’s okay, we expect to lose one out of twenty. Nineteen savings, one loss, duh, winning.

Why I’m not satisfied should be fairly obvious: in the first place, a lot of my time was wasted. In the second, the only logic in play was money-saving. If the physical therapist had asked for sixteen sessions, they’d have authorized perhaps fourteen or fifteen. Had the therapist requested four sessions, they’d authorize three. There was no medical value in play. So yeah, I won a victory of sorts.

Some situations are just designed to screw you. It’s not personal. They screw everyone.

A long time ago, in a small Washington county seat, I took my first driver’s test. I’d heard that everyone who went to this testing venue flunked the first time. It was so with me. For example, he directed me to parallel park in a space without markers and with a parked vehicle only on one side, and ordered me to treat the space as if there were a car behind. He could thus automatically fail me on that part, on the grounds that he could say that my parking effort required room that would not actually have been available. All he needed was to find a few other fails, and I’d have to come back later and pay for a new test. That was his racket: keeping his job by keeping testing volume and payments high. Of course, being sixteen, I didn’t really have options, which he also knew.

Our greatest social parasites are not those we support with our tax dollars. They are those who automatically put people to more trouble and expense than is necessary in the hope/belief/knowledge that most people will just swallow it. Some people wonder why I fight things like Facebook profiling, web trackers, debit cards and nearly anything Google comes up with. This is why. I can’t make anyone else fight it alongside me. I can only make sure that the fight with me–if only me–costs the other side something.

Well, that and I can make sure the world hears about this Orthonet outfit, and its actual impact.

Editing/writing life, Sports

It was only partly a labor of love…

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…I admit that part of it was motivated by the desire to generate some passive blog traffic. Not all, of course, or even most. In the main, I picked it up because I wanted the information and didn’t want to wait for someone else to provide it for me.

I’m talking about the Baseball Name Pronunciation Project, of course, which I am developing on this site with the kind consent of The Baseball Reliquary, which owns the rights to the relevant research and intellectual property of the deceased Tony Salin, the author of the best baseball book you haven’t yet read (assuming you have read Veeck–as in Wreck, obviously). I began with Salin’s work, did a good bit of my own research, opened the doors to public input, and am continuing to hunt down credible pronunciations of past players’ names.

One of the most helpful tools has been Youtube. It has some old radio broadcasts, and one can look up the lineups and boxscore for that game and see who’s on the list. While I don’t 100% trust announcers to be correct, they are likely to be close–especially for members of the team they covered.

I’m still hoping to get some stiff corrections and input from the general public, and it may be so as the word gets out. Of course, if I knew one single very old major leaguer, I could solve a whole bunch of these–but I don’t. Or if I knew even one rather greying big leaguer. But I’m just not good at bothering people.

If anyone out there knows any old ballplayer who’d be willing to help out, please let me know. It would be a deed well done.

Homeownership, Social comment, Technology

A Craigslist salesbabble and rantbabble glossary

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With the large amount of commerce and commentary that emanate from CL of late, some trends of vocabulary have arisen to accompany it. Some already existed, but some are morphing or being invented. Language is dangerous on the propaganda principle, in that when the word is repeated often enough, the human mind inclines to take it more at face value. Glance at a Red Robin menu sometime, for example, and count the uses of ‘zesty,’ ‘hearty’ and ‘tangy.’ None of those really mean anything, except that they’re trying to convince you the food is good. Yet the overall impression you take from the reading is one of energy and strong flavor, simply because of the words they repeated.

Therefore, someone has to step up and translate the CL salesbabble and rantbabble. This is the work of writers, who are supposed to contribute some of their understanding for the common good. Just plug in the real meaning for the term, and read the ad that way, and you are good to go.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or ***** or any other sprayed punctuation: “Mostly hype, move on”

Action figure: “Toy I outgrew.”

Affordable: “Desperate.”

ANYTHING IN ALL CAPS: “Uninteresting; this is my way of trying to get your attention”

As is: “Pretty sure it’s got problems.”

Athletic: “I walked last week from my car to the grocery store. And parked far away!”

BBW: “Really fat.”

Bizop: “Scam.”

Build your brand: “Marketing is all on you.”

Collectible: “No one collects this.”

Cute: “Someone’s wife once liked it.”

Detail ‘orientated’: “Can spell, unlike me.”

Distinctive: “In atrocious taste.”

Flexible hours: “At our beck and call.”

Forever home: “Hoping the crockpot won’t come into play.”

Franklin Mint: “Worthless.”

Full service: “I don’t return phone calls.”

Gorgeous: “Meh.”

‘Grammer natzi’s’: “Literate individuals.”

Great find: “Wasn’t such a great find for me, so I want it gone.”

Great view: “You can see some buildings and a farm.”

Highly collectible: “No one ever did collect this.”

Homebody: “Don’t really like doing anything.”

HP: “Highly Prone…to problems.”

HWP: “Somewhat fat.”

Inkjet: “Money sink.”

Landscaping: “You must pester me if you plan to get me to do actual work and accept your money.”

Limited edition: “Didn’t sell to begin with. Except to me.”

Make offer: “I know it’s worth very little. I hope someone will offer me too much.”

Management trainee: “Powerless toady abused by customers and manager alike.”

McAfee: “I bought a real virus scanner, so I want to dump this useless one on some sucker.”

MLM: “Much Lucre for Me.”

Must see: “Bores most people.”

Needs repair: “In ruins.”

No frame: “Wasn’t even worth framing.”

Nonprofit: “Pay sucks.”

Or best offer: “I’m desperate. Lowball me. I’ll guilt you, then I’ll take it.”

People-oriented: “Must deal well with assholes.”

Price is firm: “I know it’s not worth what I’m asking.”

Rare: “I have no idea how rare it is.”

Runs good: “Has other problems you will discover later.”

Rustic: “Plain.”

Section 8: “Get your concealed weapons permit first.”

Seafood processor: “Trawler slave.”

Shabby chic: “Old junk.”

Socially conscious: “Cheap.”

Spacious: “Will hold all your crap.”

Timeshare: “I can’t believe I fell for that.”

Vintage: “At least twenty years old (for electronics, five years).”

Works great: “Will probably work long enough for you not to sue me in small claims.”

Worth at least twice that: “Worth half that, if even that much.”

‘Your a moran/looser’: “I lack all sense of comic irony.”

Investing

Destroying the Dow

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The Dow is ‘struggling toward 15,000.’ I don’t care, for many reasons, and you also should not care. You will be a smarter investor if you banish all knowledge of the Dow from your mind. Every time you see it, you get dumber.

Here’s a radical stance: the Dow could be construed as a form of ongoing terrorism, since (much like a bomb threat) it causes panic that need never be, and works to destabilize the economic underpinnings of society. It presents a widely accepted, grossly distorted picture of the market, and unfortunately, most of us are unwise enough to validate it.

I believe that the Dow Jones Industrial Average, commonly called the DJIA or just ‘the Dow,’ needs to be suppressed on the principle that free speech does not include the right to yell “fire!” in a crowded theater, nor make obscene phone calls, nor publicly advocate terrorist acts–if your free speech would cause unnecessary harm or panic, it can be prohibited. (It should also be suppressed because it’s stupid, even though policing the propagation of damaging stupidity has never worked. It would be a blow struck for brains.)

Two objections to this come readily to mind:

  1. “But it’s useful in some ways.”
  2. “You just can’t suppress free speech like that.”

1. No, in fact, it’s worse than useless, for it is misleading. It is based purely on share price (adjusted for splits since entry into the index), which is always an arbitrary number. Don’t believe me? Suppose a company goes public with $45 billion in market cap: $45/share for 1 billion shares. The company could just as easily have gone public at $90/share, issuing only 500 million shares.  Same market capitalization, double the Dow impact. That’s just ridiculous.

In terms of day-to-day movement, imagine that Dow component BS rises from $100 to $101, a very minor 1% change. Another Dow component, FY, rises from $10 to $11–an enormous 10% gain. Dow doesn’t care about how much market value was created or lost. Dow considers both movements to have the same impact.

And this gets even worse. The Dow serves mainly as a useful tool for the financial media to get us stirred up, increasing our consumption of…financial media! This is partly because it is a Big Number. Well, it was not always a big number, but we react just as we did when it was smaller. I was alive, adult (by age if not by maturity), and losing money (buying stupid investments with money I could not afford to lose) when the market wrapped around a tree in 1987. The Dow lost 508 points, a 22.6% decline for the day. That was nearly a quarter of its value. It closed at 1738.7. We’d all agree that over 20% is massive.

If you are paying attention, and picturing the headlines of the day, you can see that a 100-point shift in the 1987 Dow would still have been a large percentage change, and a loss of over 500 would be (and was) a catastrophic decline. I will now take a bullet for you: I will look at the current value of the Dow. As I compose this, it is at 14974. Suppose it had the ‘triple-digit decline’ of which the media are so eager to shriek: a drop of 100 points. That would be a decline of less than 1%; about 0.67%, a very normal daily shift, and nothing for any investor who thinks for him or herself to freak about. Okay, now suppose we had a loss of 500. It would be about 3.3%, certainly a big day, but something that happens now and then. I was reading financial media then, as I read them now. They react to ‘triple digit Dow’ nearly the same way. It is as if your doctor treated every mole on your body as melanoma until proven otherwise, even though most moles are just brown spots. You’d live in constant terror of a horrible death which most people would not actually suffer. You’d overreact. You’d probably have them all removed, traumatizing and scarring your entire body–for nothing. The only people who would benefit would be those helping to spread the panic.

Welcome to the market.

Of course, if our precious financial media focused purely on percentage change, we would be spared this problem. It will not, and why should it? Said media are in the business of getting you worked up, getting you to read and watch and not relax. Fear is their product. Why would they change their practices in the interest of market stability, to their own detriment? Care about society over self? Are you mad? This is Wall Street’s publicity arm. Don’t talk to it about anything but purest avarice that burns with a purple fire. Talking about them caring about anything above self and profit is like talking to Kim Jong Un about caring about freedom for North Koreans to criticize his regime.

2. Let’s break that down. Can you legally suppress it? You sure as hell can. We suppress or restrict free speech all the time, generally for good reasons, from the crowded-theater example to the fact that saying “Go to hell, judge, I don’t have to take your orders” will get you jailed for contempt of court. A person using free speech to disclose national security secrets will soon learn the limits of that free speech–and sensibly so.

But is it practical to suppress the Dow? On the grand scale, surely not. I mean, any fool with a spreadsheet can easily continue the Dow math, rename the index, and post it online. Prosecuting this in full would be impossible, especially since nothing is stopping some dude in Malaysia (for example) from calculating it and posting it on his blog, in defiance of US law–which is not in force in Malaysia, any more than Malaysian law could prohibit me from posting stuff that the Malaysian government might not like. Try and get the Malaysian government to get interested in investigating and extraditing him for something that isn’t even illegal in his country, and let me know how that works out for you.

Well, what could we suppress in practice? We could certainly prohibit major domestic media from publishing it, since they are the most visible. A few examples of reporters and executives thrown in jail would cause a lot of bleating, but you can bet Marketwatch (owner of the index rights) would can it, whining the whole time about the police state. This wouldn’t apply law uniformly, but we don’t do that anyway. Tons of people cheat on taxes; they don’t audit everyone, just the ones they believe cheated big time. Tons of people pirate intellectual property; the RIAA doesn’t sue everyone, just a few people to make the point. Tons of people speed on the freeway; they don’t all get a ticket, just enough to remind of consequences.

The most powerful argument against this, I believe, is the ‘you can’t legislate intelligence’ perspective. Let me make it myself: “So what you’re saying is that this should be banned because ignorant people tend to validate and react to it, thus doing dumb things, flogged onward by media who can benefit from that. Why complain? If you yourself are not ignorant, you have an advantage and should profit from it. Why should dumbness be protected from itself? Shut up and take their money, like I do!” The rejoinder is: “First of all, Dreamboat Aynnie, it’s not all about me or you. Second, the core problem is that the psychological impact of the Dow distorts reality for enough people, helped by our adored media, to create instability which in fact doesn’t exist. The overall harm to the national economy is serious, with potential for panic which need never be. The national interest is more important than yours and my ability to profit.”

I don’t much advocate attempts to nerf Darwinism in action; if you want to ride a motorcycle without a helmet, I’m okay with you risking having your brains bashed out. Here’s the problem: it is likely to leave you in Schiavo mode, slurping up enormous resources and starting a fight over whether to withdraw your feeding tube. Indirectly, I will be billed for your choice. If there were a way for me not to pay for your foolishness, I’d say go for it. In practice, there is not, and I resist paying that bill. Anti-tobacco advocates feel the same way, and one can hardly blame them. One of the most oppressive examples of this is the homeowners’ association, in which people say ‘you can’t do that because it will lower my property value.’ I hate HOAs. And yet…I do have the choice to live somewhere without an HOA. I don’t have much practical choice about not participating in the national economy. The principle may be similar, but the difference in scope matters. Some dumbnesses can be addressed with law, to some degree, and others can’t.

Here is what outlawing it would achieve: greater public awareness of how rotten the Dow is. Instead of passively acceding to the notion that the Dow is useful, the public would hear how worse it is than useless, and might at least begin caring less about it. Sure, the public should educate itself, just as motorcyclists should wear helmets. If this did not cause needless market instability, no action would be necessary–just as if all bomb threats were spurious and false, and we ignored them all, we wouldn’t need to prohibit them. Moot point. We don’t ignore them all, they are accurate just often enough to take them all seriously, and thus anyone making a bomb threat deserves all that the law can throw at him or her. In the same way, the ongoing random bomb threat that is the Dow needs suppression insofar as the law has power to do so, and to be considered as respectable and valuable to society as a bomb threat.

Book reviews, Editing/writing life

Fetishism in writing

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Here’s an area for improvement by literary critics as well as authors: fetishism. Not only do authors need to rein it in, but reviewers need to start calling it out.

Fetishism occurs when the author displays a pattern of preoccupation with some otherwise normally hidden or forbidden aspect of life. There are reasons the author would not want to do that:

Privacy. Maybe W.E.B. Griffin really shouldn’t have so openly advertised his fascination with the young, virtuous, occupied-with-life virgin who suddenly presents the story’s rake with her ‘pearl of great price’ (WEB’s favorite term), then immediately drops everything else in life and now desires to play house and begin spawning infants. What does that say about him? His perception of women? I wouldn’t wish to speculate too much. However, if that were my kink, I’d sure as hell be unwilling to broadcast it on the endcaps. To give Griffin credit, he has seemingly heard the critics and taken action. (To give him discredit, he’s now mostly letting his son ride his coattails, and the son is not the author the father is. Brian Herbert, take note.)

Predictability. When I pick up a J.T. Edson western, I know for sure that I’ll get some British culture superimposed on the old American West, and that’s one thing. It’s minor, but it’s part of his approach, and kind of novel to be on the receiving side of cultural ignorance. I also know that, before a certain point in the book, two women will start a physical fight. And yes, bodices/blouses/etc. will be ripped. His women will care more for baring each others’ bouncy dairy tackle than for kicking their adversaries’ butts. Not only does it give us a not-necessarily-wanted view into what sharpens J.T.’s pencil, it’s predictable. Thus, when you come to it, unless that’s your own personal kink and the whole reason you bought the book, perhaps you just roll your eyes and scan through it, eager to get back to the story. Or, if it offends you–and I can think of women who would get real tired of reading a man’s descriptions of relatively uncommon and unrealistic female behavior–you might just stop buying the books. Once you are onto an author’s pet themes, and you can tell in advance a certain amount of what you are going to get, some of the discovery is certainly pre-done.

Boredom. The trouble with any fetish, in writing or acted out for real, is keeping it fresh. Suppose you continue writing. You’ve decided you don’t need editors. Your friend’s critique just didn’t grasp what was cool about your style, so what does she know anyway? And throughout all your writing, you keep coming back to the trope of restraint. Your reader knows, because you write your most evocative wording when you take her into the mind of someone who cannot move. The problem is not just that every reader with a sixth grade diploma knows that you’re drawing deep upon your own fantasies. The problem is: how do you keep tying them up tighter, more elaborately, to keep it interesting for the fans? There is a creeping human tendency to freshen by intensity. Your reader expects some new kink every time, and is bored with the old tired ones. If you keep going this direction, you’ll contract what I call Hamilton’s Syndrome. It may bring you wealth, but it won’t create good books.

Hamilton’s Syndrome is my newly coined term for fetishism ratcheted up to the point where it overshadows the story. When Hamilton first began the Anita Blake series, she was brilliant. An appealing heroine, edgy motif, interesting and credible internal conflict for the protagonist–a heel-wearing, Schnauzerlike tough gal seeking to hold onto her humanity and beliefs. The fetishism was always around the edges of the story, but was sustainable; at least, I thought so. Then, some seven books in, Hamilton cut her heroine loose from humanity, slipped all those anchor cables. Eventually the story became secondary; the main focus was on monster hurts and wounds and problems, all of which could only be remedied by increasingly kinky and elaborate forms of sex with Anita. I recall one book in which the initial monster sex crisis took up the first third of the volume. Oh, and lust became a physical hunger for her, the fifth food group. The story is no longer even the point; the question posed by Hamilton’s Syndrome is, how can the kink-o-meter continue to ratchet up? How long can Hamilton top herself?

In my own writing, I watch for fetishism with great care. For one thing, I am intensely private. Consider that since this blog began, I have experienced serious life and health problems involving crippling pain, trauma and serious psychological shock and distress from which it may take me years, even the rest of my life, to recover. I never shared them here. Some may have leaked through, but not on purpose. It’s not that I’m ashamed; it’s that I believe I’m here to entertain, provoke thought, educate, and otherwise be fun to read. I am not here to back up the personal issues dump truck on you, fishing for support. Were I diagnosed with terminal cancer (for the record, I am not), I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t blog about it. This blog is part of my work (which is why, with regret, I can’t post the video of some Texans eating surströmming–too crude for work). I go other places to pour out my real troubles. Even alluding to them in this paragraph is an uncommon show of vulnerability for me. Well, I don’t think many writers compartmentalize as well, and some I believe lack compartments to begin with: a filing cabinet consisting of a large heap of papers.

So I guess the question the writer faces with fetishism is at least twofold: just how far are you willing to invite random people to analyze your mind (as I have done to Hamilton…she asked for it), and how are you going to keep people from either being bored with you, or poking fun at your blatant fetish? The ‘I’m a badass bitch, screw everyone, I do it my way, if you don’t like me and my writing, go to hell’ reflex answer is, of course: “Who cares what they think? I am after all a complete badass! And I post at least three times a day on Facebook trying to convince myself of it!” Well, here’s the problem: if you are writing to get paid, people have to want to buy your book. Thus, while you can’t let yourself obsess about what everyone thinks, you cannot ignore and dismiss your reader’s preference. Yeah, if you get paid, you do care what your reader thinks–and you aren’t such a badass.

Such are the paths down which fetishism leads in writing. Have I convinced you that you really would rather not be there? I would be especially glad for commentary on this topic. Am I treating fetishism too harshly? Is there an effective, sustainable way to work it in? We’re always told to ‘be ourselves,’ and here I am challenging that to a degree. Can you counter my stance?

Editing/writing life

Becoming a better writer

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When I talk to people about improving their writing, I sometimes wonder if some flaws are simply hard-coded, or if anyone can improve those through effort. As Pepper Martin said to his manager Frank Frisch, after the latter’s rant during a time when the team was just bad, “You know, Frankie-boy, I got a jackass back home on my ranch, and you can run him from sunup to sundown, and he still ain’t never gonna win the Kentucky Derby.” That’s not a putdown without including myself; it may be true in some areas for all of us. I am pretty sure I’m tone-impaired, for example, because much music that some consider stunningly wondrous just sounds horrible to me, and I can’t make any decent music at all myself. I am not sure I have the physical wherewithal to improve. Likewise, I could have tried for a degree in math instead of history, but could I have comprehended even calculus? It’s doubtful, considering my struggles with pre-calculus. So some of what I suggest, I believe, might simply be outside some folks’ ken. But I can suggest it, and if people are trying to work on it, they can decide for themselves whether a flaw is innate or badly learned.

Homophones. These are words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings. A long list is here. Until you make time to differentiate ‘their’ from ‘there’ from ‘they’re,’ you will look bad. I don’t care if you mess them up in chat, but if you’re writing something people should want to read, you must get these right. A new grocery store opened just down the hill from me. It looked fairly downscale, and then I looked up to its opening day marquee: YOUR TO GOOD LOOKING TO SHOP ANYWHERE ELSE. The combination of slack-jawed, vapid flattery with such obvious lack of attention to accuracy grossed me out. I’ve still never spent a dime there. If they can’t muster a better public intro than most people’s standard chat and e-mail errors, that’s just sad.

Read a lot–and read good quality. If I write well today, it is for two reasons. The first, the technical correctness, came from heavy reading between ages three and seventeen. Even when I can’t tell you why something is incorrect, I nearly always know when it is, because I have read a great deal of correct writing. The second, refinement, also comes from lots of reading, and began when I went to college. This is where we learn to examine our statements for clarity, wean ourselves away from adverb overdose, push aside passive voice, and otherwise break the standard bad habits. Don’t assume that endcap bestsellers exemplify good writing habits; more often, they exemplify lazy pandering to a public that doesn’t know the difference and doesn’t care.

Punctuation. Look up the purpose of each mark, from the apostrophe to the hyphen. Check your writing to see if you use these correctly. Find the basics here. And if you do not, then…

Stop with ‘well, that’s just my style.’ If your style is bad, then it’s not an asset, and should be changed. Styles evolve. Don’t hug your weaknesses dearly to your heart, as if questioning them questions your validity as a person. Lots of great thinkers and people can’t write well.

If you write like you talk, stop. It’s not an asset, because people don’t read like they listen.

Never ask for critique you don’t want. Most requests for critique are actually requests for validation. These are unfair to the critic, whom you place in an impossible position. Your writing might not be very good. If it isn’t good, and you came seeking validation, your critic can’t win. If she tells you the cold truth, she just broke your dolly and crushed your dream, heartless snob that she is. If she uses all her own writing talent to find a nice way to tell you that your writing is bad, she expended much more effort than you had the right to ask of her, all for nothing, because you probably heard only the kind parts you wanted to hear. And if she lies, she was worse than useless to you, actually harmful to your development. Don’t ask for critique unless you want it for the sake of improvement, even if caustic. No worthwhile critic is needlessly cruel, but sometimes the simple truth is cruel in nature. You don’t ask a dentist to tell you that your tooth enamel and nerve will grow back, do you? Do you ask an orthopedic surgeon to tell you that your achilles will really only take three painless months to rehab, when in fact it will take a year of significant suffering?

The worst, the very worst, is when someone asks me to critique their child’s writing. Critiquing a child’s writing is an exercise in compassionate lying. The writing may be quite good for the child’s age, but it’s almost surely deeply flawed–obviously, since the child is developing English skills. Is it good for his age? I am not equipped to know; that’s the province of an English teacher (whose job is to provide age-appropriate critique), which I am not and could not be. Think about it. I have to lie. I have no other humane choice. Can we just agree, outside the child’s hearing, that asking this of me constitutes a request that I lie and say something is better than it is, for the sake of not crushing a little soul? That’s all I ask: to be relieved of the duty of honest sincerity, and that we all agree that I’m here to lie, and that by lying here, I’m helping and being a good guy. Neither you, your child nor I desire that I dissect it for real. Okay? If you want age-appropriate non-lying critique, best ask a professional educator who knows what is good for each age. I’m not qualified to do anything but lie.

Learn consistency of article, number, person and gender reference. This governs so much and weaves together. If you do not even know what this means, I’ll explain. If the subject is plural, and you later refer back to it, you cannot use the singular unless you are singling out one member of the subject group. This is why ‘they’ is an unacceptable substitute for ‘he or she,’ the eternal gender neutrality problem inherent in English, and probably the cause of more recast sentences than even passive voice addiction. If you describe an event in the future perfect tense, you can’t contradict the timing in the next sentence. Learning the tenses in English would be a good step, so here is a reference to study. Use of the right verb tense is a combination of literal common sense and knowing what the tense means.

Remember that narrative and dialogue are different. Narrative represents the storyteller’s viewpoint, or the story as seen through a character’s eyes. Dialogue is what people say, their actual words. Internal monologue (unspoken thoughts) is a form of dialogue. In dialogue, nothing has to be perfect; it simply has to sound like the speaker (or his/her thoughts). Part of crafting good dialogue is knowing how well-spoken the speaker is. The English can and should be as lousy as the speaker’s; the thoughts may be disconnected and inconsistent. It could make a travesty of this whole blog post, and be great dialogue.

Never follow any rule off a cliff. This one comes from C.J. Cherryh, one of the finest writers in print. There are times to break every rule, provided you know it well enough to break it. Here is what I tell writers: every writer gets a certain number of cheats per piece, defined as deviations from everything he or she is told not to do. Teachers instruct us to use some devices sparingly, especially adverbs, em dashes, semicolons, ellipses, passive voice, split infinitives, sentences ending with prepositions…you get the idea. When you hew blindly to a ‘don’t do this’ list, you do as badly as if you are addicted to overusage.

Cheat for a reason. Cheat for extra effect. Cheat because it will make a key phrase stand out. Any time you cheat, be sure the cheat pays its way. For example, I have used ellipses twice in this post. Under normal circumstances, I’d consider that slothful, but I believe both usages worked and paid their way. The second usage is questionable, if the definition of a cheat were ‘something I could eliminate through recasting.’ To me, that is not a definition, but a value test for most verbiage and literary devices. That is a tightening test more than it is a cheat’s value test.