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?
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.
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.
Always empty your bladder when you get the chance. Since far more people have bladders than drink alcohol, it is almost certain that full bladders have caused more bad decisions than stiff drinks.
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.
We had that conversation today down at Les Schwab. Last fall I had to buy new studs for my wife’s car. Les Schwab put my tires on the car of a mediocre local news anchor. The only credit they earned occurred when the supervisor came out to the waiting area and enumerated this event to me. Too stunned to speak at first, I just stared at him with the you could not possibly be this stupid look. Moreover, I was in no way compensated for the extra hour and a half I had to sit around waiting for them to fetch her car back, get my tires, put them on Deb’s car, etc. Sorry. You’re screwed. You will be delayed another hour and a half; no, it is not your fault; no, you will not get that time back, nor anything for it; yes, we really do expect you to just meekly accept this.
I don’t do ‘meek’ too well. I am resolved not to let them forget it soon. If that’s the only compensation I get, besides sinking this particular banderilla, very well.
This led to today’s odd conversation as I had the studs swapped out for the regulars (required soon by law). I went to the counter, and asked how long it would be. I explained what had happened last time, and asked if she could promise they would not give someone else my tires. If she would promise, I would dare go eat some guilty pleasure lunch across the street. Otherwise I would stand there and never take my eyes off my tires. This was the part where she was supposed to show shocked disappointment and wonder what could be done to restore my confidence. I didn’t think very much of her attitude, quite frankly; she acted almost as if I were making it up. She didn’t quite eyeroll, but Les Schwab got another black mark for that.
Guess they’ll just have to wear it. It’s not like I would tell the story on the Internet or something.
Alfred Matthew Yankovic dominates the field of parody music so completely that Bob Rivers (who is very funny) is barely worthy to help set up the stage for his show. He has been doing this all my adult life. There is a combination of friendly kidding, social commentary, and an absolute performer’s ethic about Al that makes him fundamentally appealing on every level.
If you ever get to see him in concert, it’ll be a superb expenditure of your entertainment dollar. It’s not just a concert; it is start-to-finish entertainment. Al crawling around on the stage singing “Like a Surgeon” while his chunky drummer Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz stands out front topless except for a silver cone bra? If Madonna has any guts at all (and I suspect she does), she would laugh herself to tears and be in danger of wetting herself to see it.
Anyway, Al’s working on a new album. He decided to parody Lady Gaga. Evidently Her Highness did not approve. Well, it’s always worse if you don’t laugh along. So Al just put the song “Perform This Way” out on Youtube for us all to enjoy. And if you think I would deny you a link here, then you think I am very mean:
“Perform This Way” by “Weird Al” Yankovic
I believe few of my editing clients have the faintest idea how much of their work has been reviewed or edited to the sounds of Al.
I was compiling a list of the articles I authored for Myths & Misconceptions today for a friend, listening to Rex Navarrette (Pinoy comic, really funny) in the background. Looking at my originals compared to what the editors published, it got me to thinking about the sentence I hear the most from people who say ‘I want to write’:
“Oh, I don’t think I could handle being edited.”
If you can’t handle being edited, you are writing for personal enjoyment only, because not only will you be edited, you need to be edited. The author is not the whole process, nor even necessarily the most important aspect of the process. Nearly all published work has aspects of collaboration. I am not saying that one must never argue with an editor; I can and I have. You can argue for a usage or a phrase or a description if you can justify its stet (‘let stand as set’…the term for canceling an edit) in terms of making the writing better, provided you have taken into consideration the space issues the publication faces. ‘Because this turn of phrase sets up a joke later’ is a good one. ‘Because this descriptive bit will orphan a later paragraph if nerfed’ is another.
What is not a good one: ‘Because my ego is bound up in my cleverness.’
A good example would be the piece I authored for Armchair Reader: World War II on the Warsaw Ghetto Rising of 1943. It was a very difficult and painful piece for me for several reasons, difficult enough there is only one person who has ever heard the full tale, haunting even to see on the page in the printed book. I suggested two titles: Masada 1943 and “Juden Haben Waffen!” (this being what the SS cutthroats yelled out when the Jewish fighters opened up with their very limited supply of firearms). I thought the first title was brilliant, evocative, and incorporated a bit of my own soul’s blood that poured that terrible day and night of my career. I offered the second in case they didn’t like the first, knowing I was emotionally bound up in the piece.
The publisher used the second title, as I learned when I got my comps. A part of me was crushed–but that was so me! Obviously, it would have been entirely too late to complain; perhaps less obviously, it would have been very unwise of me to lobby real hard beforehand. The editors make those decisions and the author needs to either be okay with it, or get okay with it, because my emotional problems are not something the editors can be expected to own. Plus, if I really really wanted them to use my pet title, it was very foolish of me to present an alternative which they might take.
Do I still think my first title was much better? Oh, hell yes. But that is because I am emotionally bound up with it, and my judgment is deeply biased. My editors’ judgment was not.
I am not the whole process. And if I try to assert myself as though I am, I will no longer even have a place in the process.
There are dandelions.
Personally, I like them, though they also make great practice targets for the sjambok on daily walks. However, between them and the crabgrass, this place is the Amazon basin right about now. Must slay them all. Have a huge brush pile to feed to the chipper, which to me sounds like an excellent job with which to get help from the nephew. Young nephews of athletic bent should, on principle, be assigned strenuous and annoying tasks. I always was. He will get the joy of prepping this stuff for the chipper, a hot, noisy, sawdusty, cantankerous widowmaker with the basic guts of a planer, but far more persnickety. Me? I have to feed it. I’m the only one who won’t jam it every time.
So soon I’ll be walking around with a backpack spray tank, a mask (can’t hurt), and the motivation to slay any vegetation that displeases me. Think of it as editing my lawn. For the mulberry weed trees, I have a special plan: 1/2″ drilled holes with Roundup concentrate poured in. Why do I not use KNO3? Tell you what. You go to your local Cenex or Purina ag supply house and tell them you want a bag of potassium nitrate, though you can’t prove that you are in agriculture. Let me know how that works out for you, and who comes to your door.
I guess we better hope the nation’s enemies never get the idea to just start farming.
This is in August, in Spokane. For the first time, I’m putting myself forward as a possible panelist. I’m probably now going to find out why panelists go nuts when scheduled for stuff they know nothing about, or get put in rooms that swelter, etc.
While I can’t say I’m not nervous about it, a part of me is sort of looking forward to it. I’ll try it, and if it sucks, I won’t do it again. Maybe my biggest worry is that putting myself forward for this amounts to putting on airs, making myself seem more important than I really am from a literary standpoint. It is not as though I’m a famous editor or something. However, one very good aspect to it is that it gives strong support to writing off the entire trip as a necessary business expense. Put another way, that means I get a 43% discount on the whole visit. And since I’ll enjoy the con (Spocon really tries hard), and it’s not that far a trip, much good comes of this. Jane should have my Rasputin costume by then. Oh, I should probably dress professionally, but at a SF con, going steampunk is professional dress.
The Editorial Maverick 