All posts by jkkblog

I'm a freelance editor and writer with a background in history and foreign languages.
Book reviews

Missoura

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Today I was inspired to look up my very favorite William Least Heat-Moon quote.  If you do not know who he is, he is an excellent travel author.  He’s from Missoura.  His commentary on that situation:

“A Missourian gets used to Southerners thinking him a Yankee, a Northerner considering him a cracker, a Westerner sneering at his effete Easternness, and the Easterner taking him for a cowhand.” –William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways.

Now, if I denied you links to Heat-Moon’s writings after that appetizer, I’d be a cad:

Blue Highways (circling the nation away from freeways)

PrairyErth (an intensive study of my family’s county in Kansas)

Roads to Quoz (a search for stuff out of the ordinary)

River-Horse (he boated across America, at least all but 70 miles of it)

Columbus in the Americas (historical study of the old slaver)

Heat-Moon can seriously write, and has a quirky style that comes at the situation from angles others would not see. I love editing travel narratives, have written my own, and I get how difficult they are. They are even harder to do very well.

Entertainment and music, Social comment

M*A*S*H Iraq

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How long will it take for us to see this show? It took nineteen years from the Korean armistice to the M*A*S*H premiere.  (Hogan’s Heroes took twenty, which reinforces the evidently unofficial timeline.)   With Hollywood doing more recycling (of ideas, since it has no new ones) these days than your typical granola Oregonian, it is just a matter of time.

If it’s the 1990-1991 Gulf War, the necessary time has elapsed, yet the problem there is you have months of buildup followed by about three minutes of blowing the other side to hell followed by a decade of periodic bombing–difficult to structure a show around, unlike Korea, a war whose stalemates, steady casualties and periodic cease-fires made actual dating of events in the show rather nebulous. We are, of course, well overdue for a Vietnam sitcom.  My guess is that the networks are too chicken there.  I think they don’t give Vietnam vets enough credit.  They have had, after all, thirty-five years to think about it.  Who thinks they have not done some processing?

If it’s the 2003-2009 Gulf War/occupation, of course, the necessary 19 years for society to accept comedy mixed with its tragedy have barely gotten a start.

Either way, I’m available to edit the underlying material.

Married life

Learning manhood

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My nephew lives with us while he plays juco baseball.  Naturally he has high hopes of playing at the next level, and just as naturally, I remind him unceasingly that while baseball isn’t a sure thing, academics are–and that there is no reasonable excuse for him not to hang a 3.5 on the scholastic side of things.  He is also here, in part, so that his aunt and uncle can help him acclimate to adult life:  teach him to refrain from doing really unwise things, and what will be expected of him in life.  (I think my brother-in-law should have interviewed me far more carefully for my track record in such matters, personally, but I appreciate his confidence nonetheless.)

His girlfriend, a pleasant and athletic young first basewoman on the softball team, took a ball to the face today.  Broke her nose, just about swelled her eye shut, broke a bone in her eye orbital, and filled up her nasal cavity with blood.  Ended her season, sadly, just before the playoffs.  Our nephew advised us that he wouldn’t be home tonight–he intends to look after her.

I see he’s learning.

Social comment, Technology

The decline of message boards

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While I do not think they will just go away, I think they are fading overall.  It came to me today while reading a post I thought was fairly misguided, though not offensive.  For whatever reason, I posted that the poster was missing the point.  He of course challenged me to prove my point.  I thought about it, and then I thought:  Why would I care? I don’t care to make him agree or see it my way, and I don’t care what he thinks especially to begin with, and I don’t care if anyone else on the board looks down on me because I didn’t engage him.  I simply do not care.  So I just told him it wasn’t worth my time, and left it at that.

It’s not that he was stupid, or that it wasn’t a debatable point.  It was that the whole message board environment simply has worn down my ability to care what he or anyone else says there.  And I am wondering if others sort of passed through a message board phase and lost general interest in them, as I have.  In many ways, Facepalm walls and posts and comment threads seem to have taken over, and often with even greater idiocy, though at least some greater need for circumspection how one points it out.  One never wants to hear from a liked friend, “Uh, that’s my brother-in-law, and while I agree he’s a fairly dim bulb, I’m not having fun reading you sending his BP into triple digits over triple digits.”  Or worse:  “I’m sorry about my brother-in-law.  He wasn’t always this way.  He got caught in an IED blast and has never recovered.  Before that, though, he won the Silver Star, and was the best Little League coach ever.”

I admit that editing-related message boards seem to be a little better overall, but only by degrees. They’re still places where I say little of what I really think.

Anyway.  Am I the only one out there who nowadays only bothers with message boards when he has a specific question for a specific group/subject, asks it, thanks them for the answer and then vanishes for two years?

Social comment

Business accountability

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Why do we hold mom & pop businesses more accountable than Dow 30 corporations? If a local mom & pop sent us deceptive advertising personally created for us, we’d be outraged.  Yet a major corporation may do the same, impersonally, to millions–and people just accept that as normal.

How are mom & pop more culpable? Or, for that matter, why are the largest companies not culpable at all? If mom & pop don’t return our call, they get a black mark.  If the largest companies don’t return our call, it’s “what did you expect?” If mom & pop said, “sorry, that’s our policy,” we’d hold a stupid policy against them.  If a huge company has a stupid policy, we accept that same answer in ovine fashion.

Why?

Married life

Fugitive from the menu police

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Is anyone else in this boat? It’s almost foreordained.  Any time I decide I like a menu item at a restaurant, within weeks (sometimes days) the item comes off the menu.  Discontinued.  It almost never fails.  It is as though the menu police tail me from restaurant to restaurant, carefully noting any dish I seem to enjoy–the Dining Volkspolizei.

Someone else please assuage my paranoia and tell me it’s not the Dining Vopos, that it happens to them too?

Homeownership, Married life, Technology

TV shopping

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Our TV just lays there twitching like a sarin casualty.   We need a new one.  Thank you, Samsung, for a product that only lasted six years of relatively light usage.  Of course, I wouldn’t do anything so cold as to post that fact on the Internet or anything.

We kind of have a choice between going to Worst Buy (always feel sort of sullied afterward, like having taken a dip in the Great Salt Lake, or picked up after the dog in the yard) or the local Old School Appliance/Electronics Store.  Normally that would be my top preference, but we live in the Tri-Cities, and experience has taught me that many old time local businesses really don’t earn their keeps here.  Like most of local government, they are more habits than going concerns.  This is one of the downsides of not living in a Seattle or Portland:  because consumers have fewer options, businesses can get by with greater mediocrity.  I keep telling myself that it’s better than living in constant worry of petty property crime, which is comparatively rare here.

Not sure what brand we’ll get, other than that if AT&T makes one, that’s out, and Samsung’s outside consideration.

Social comment

Thinking about Dixie

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I’ve long had a fair bit of affection for the South and its people, which is odd because I doubt I could ever live in the South in comfort except in carefully selected areas, maybe not even then.  It’s nothing by any means common to most Southerners; rather, its vocal minority is simply more vocal than would enable me to live in peace, me being not particularly prone to withstand certain things in silence.  It’s a rough situation for the vast majority, whom I find a diverse, thoughtful, friendly and self-honest bunch.  They are sick of being caught up in broad generalizations, and I completely get that because I’m a Kansas boy.  I get the same sort of crap, and by and large, Southerners seem to deal with those broad generalizations based on minority viewpoints better than I do those about Kansas.  I guess they’ve had long practice.

Thus, there’s more than one reason a son of Kansas roots watching twisters tear the living hell out of Dixie can feel pretty badly for them.  Hang tough, folks.  My condolences for your losses, which are appallingly grave.  You have a lot of good people, a lot of tough people, and you’ll rebuild.

Married life

Inexpressible joy

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I call it ‘my wife is coming home from Alaska.’  She has been up there for two weeks.  It’s really good for her; she is Alaskan, and loves her home state like I do my own (Kansas).  It is also good for our relatives up there, who benefit a lot from seeing her (one niece has a new baby and is overwhelmed, and Deb rocks in those situations).  Meanwhile, I have been doing good things down here, not just writing and editing; one of the chiefest being the Cleansing of the Homestead, a polite term for ‘picking up all the crap my nephew and I just didn’t bother messing with, doing laundry, dishes, and otherwise covering up the evidence of two weeks of exclusively male habitation.’  Needless to say, the nephew Will Be Dragooned into doing his share, and being the nephew he will be assigned the tasks I like least.  But humanely.