Entertainment and music

The Alpocalypse

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No, it isn’t an invasion of South American camelids that resemble mini-llamas and produce trendy wool.  My musical main man, “Weird Al” Yankovic, has a new CD coming out very soon.  We wait years for these.  And if you’ve never seen Al in concert, you have missed an experience.  Nonstop entertainment, even during the every-number costume changes.  A hardcore trouper’s ethic (he had the flu when I saw him), great band chemistry and a total commitment to a great show.  My wife was meh over the idea, but became a concert convert.  I don’t even like concerts much and I liked it.

Here’s the track listing:

1.Perform This Way
2.CNR
3.TMZ
4.Skipper Dan
5.Polka Face
6.Craigslist
7.Party In The CIA
8.Ringtone
9.Another Tattoo
10.If That Isn’t Love
11.Whatever You Like
12.Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me

Any questions? That last, in particular, hit a resonant frequency for me. People used to constantly forward stuff to me in the belief that it was funny or important. Whether or not I had editing work on my plate, it got so irritating, and then I’d ask them to please stop, at which point they’d think I was a killjoy. That’s not how that works.

Book reviews, Social comment, Technology

Amazon’s little game

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Do you buy used books through Amazon? I do, though I’m seriously considering ending that practice.  If you’re anything like me, you have absorbed the following salient facts:

  • Any used book costs a minimum of $3.99 for shipping.
  • Often that’s the entire cost, with the book selling for $0.01.
  • If you make an order of any size at all, Amazon gives you free shipping.

Perceptive readers with business sense, and at least a little bit of avarice, have just done the mental math.  Okay.  So if I’m Amazon, here’s my game.  I’ll set up my system to adjust my price to $3.98 above whatever the best independent bookseller deal is.  And if they buy from the bookseller in spite of my undercut, since I take most of the profit anyway, I can’t lose.

The reason this offends me is that it is so scientifically designed to hose the little guy or gal, the independent bookseller in Waverly, KS who keeps a local retail store going by using the business as a net-order warehouse with retail capability.  It’s not malice, just scientific greed, and I see through it. Given that it affects books and authors, thus clients, as an editor I’m perhaps more sensitive about it. I like local bookstores and help keep them around when I can. So, I reckon, do most editors and writers.

What I have taken to doing, when I do buy used books from Amazon, is easy and inexpensive.  Buy it from the little guy or gal anyway, for the extra $0.02 or $0.50 or $2.00.  It would be great if others did so also.

Editing/writing life

Dashing through the text…

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A writer on Slate decided to have a little fun with hyperdependence upon dashes in writing.  I recommend the read.

My own besetting literary sin is the semicolon, though my guilt in the dash sector is more than it should be.  I’ve learned that, the longer it takes to edit a paragraph for clarity and flow–the more you have to move stuff around to remove this dash or that semicolon–the stronger your signal to rewrite it afresh.

If you fooled with it for fifteen minutes, you already wasted more time rewriting it than you spent writing it.  It’s fourth down; if you aren’t past midfield, punt.

Homeownership

Dismounted

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When you live in an area where a car is more or less essential for any liberty, and you have to take your truck in for three days, and your wife is out of town and your nephew is busy being 18, you are like dismounted cavalry.  Where the hell’s my horse?

My thinking is to embrace it.  I have a perfectly functional bicycle and I’m not disabled.  I should be able to walk or ride where I need to be.

And if I can’t, nephew will take time out from being 18.  One advantage to not asking a whole lot of the nephew is that when one does ask him for something, one is generally in the moral right to hope for more or less cheerful compliance.

Adventures

SCA

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For those of you who don’t know, that stands for Society for Creative Anachronism.  Put simply, they play medieval, but without the cholera epidemics.  It is on my mind today because I am shortly taking some friends to lunch after they finish up a local SCA event.  I was invited, very kindly, but declined partly due to feeling so out of place.  I am not sure how often I can say ‘forsooth’, and I’m always nervous if I don’t know the social etiquette of any situation.  Nonetheless, they seem like a group of the sort of people I nearly always like.  My friends are good examples, using many of the skills in real life agriculture and householding.  I find them hardworking, energetic, cheery and intelligent.

Is it silliness? I play Dungeons & Dragons, so if roleplay is silliness, then I guess I’m silly myself.  Sure, anyone can go overboard on pretending to be a brave knight.  One can go overboard on golf, too, or crocheting or cat ownership.  SCA seems like a very crafts(wo)manly way to have a good time roleplaying and understanding how people lived back when, thus teaching history.

You’ll get real bored and real old standing around waiting for me to utter the sentence “Teaching history isn’t worth while.”

Social comment

Spring beauty

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Spring really is glorious.  I started taking more time to appreciate it one day when I realized that someday I would see my last spring, and I doubted that on that day, I would say to myself:  “Self, one of your regrets should be all the time you wasted appreciating warm sunlight, gentle breezes, lilacs, roses, quail families, doves, freshly mown grass, cherry blossoms, apple blossoms and so on.  You should have spent more time staring at computers, berating corporations, and editing out unnecessary instances of passive voice.”

So if you are getting a spring, I suggest luxuriating.  There really is something to that.  And it is all too transitory, and you will see only so many springs in your days here.

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.

Blogging freelance editing, writing, and life in general. You can also Like my Facebook page for more frequent updates: J.K. Kelley, Editor.