Bring Up the Twelve Pounders!

Good thing nobody had a horse shot out from beneath him.

When's the air date?

Life's Little Lemonades

Ever the Eternal Optimist once sagely said, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade." Since that day, he has been quoted numerous times, often without attribution, but that's ok because he's making lemonade. You'll see his words on church signs. You'll hear it from the mouths of bootstrap-tugging Randians. He's happy, because he's making the world a better place.

This has to be one of the stupidest things Ever ever said.

What's wrong with lemons? Absolutely nothing. You can make lemonade with them, or better yet, an ice cold Tom Collins with Plymouth gin. You can make lemon icebox pie. You can clean with it. Disinfect. Pen secret messages to your 13th century monk or Russian spy.

When life hands you lemons, the proper response is "Thanks, life! A lemon is damned useful, one of nature's little wunderfroots."

Now, Ever the Eternal Optimist and his immitators often use this metaphor whenever life hands you something other than a lemon. Prolonged unemployment isn't a lemon. Neither is bankruptcy due to medical problems. Being impregnated by your rapist isn't a lemon, nor is being impregnated by your uncle, or your uncle the rapist. A lemon is a beautiful yellow fruit of many uses. Rape is not a beautiful yellow fruit.

But Ever wants you to think it is. Make the best of a bad situation, he's trying to say with his oh-so-clever lemon metaphor. Buck up, little girl. This act of violence is a great opportunity for you, if you just approach it with a positive attitude.

And therein lies the error of this false metaphor. These things aren't lemons, they're more like a rotting maggoty dog carcass. And when life locks you in a cage with a rotting, maggoty dog carcass, you know what you're gonna do? Pee yourself. Howl. Vomit. Because you're not making lemonade, Sunshine, and anybody who suggests you should try to make lemonade from a rotting maggoty dog carcass should be the first to taste your product.

Ever's problem is, Life has never handed him a rotting dog carcass. The greatest tragedy in his life was being handed a lemon grove when what he really wanted was a winery. To Ever, a tragedy is when you get something other than what you want. But Ever the Eternal Optimist, when handed a lemon grove decided to make lemonade. Then all the people in daddy's vast social and business networks stopped by and bought Ever's lemonade at two dollars a Dixie cup and Ever made a lot of money through hard work all of his own and the right attitude and now he fancies himself an entrepreneur who should have his taxes cut because without him where would this country be, huh? Huh?

From the Department of Brilliant Ideas

Looks like Obama picked a bad day to approve more offshore drilling in the Gulf.

Coast Guard to Set Fire to Oil Leaking in the Gulf

NEW ORLEANS – The Coast Guard planned to set fire to oil leaking from the site of an exploded drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday, a last-ditch effort to get rid of it before it reaches environmentally sensitive marshlands on the Lousiana coast.

Sooooo, instead of a giant oil slick washing up on the Lousiana coast, we'll get a giant flaming oil slick washing up on the Louisiana coast.

I'm sure no one could have foreseen this would happen. Much like everything else that happens.

Deep Thought

The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K. Leguin has 12 reviews, average rating of 4 stars.

The Rose and the Skull by me has 12 reviews, average rating of 4 stars.

Therefore, according to the customers of Amazon.com, these two offerings are of equal merit.

Of course, that is not true. People are stupid.

Yes, Virginia, There is a Conscience Clause

A Conscience Clause, law in many states, allows a pharmacist to refuse to fill certain prescriptions based on religious or moral reasons. The most obvious example is the pharmacist who refuses to fill a prescription for birth control pills.

So my question to Santa, CVS and Target is, would a pharmacist of a certain religion (we'll call him El Ron, for kicks) be allowed to refuse to fill a prescription for Ritalin, Adderall, Prozac, Wellbutrin, Zoloft, Cymbalta, etc.?

Or would it only be ok to refuse if it was for a female patient?

Ho Ho Ho

How to Spot a Troll

They're made extremely uncomfortable by any reference to their species.

For example, an unknown creatures challenges your passage on a bridge. You could attempt to identify it by calling it a troll.

If it objects to this label, it is most likely a troll. Proceed with caution.

Seriously?

US Marines launch Operation Cobra's Anger in Afganistan.

Cobra's Anger? Seriously, the US military needs to hire a writer.

Isn't It Amazing

No one thought this might be a bit foolish?

A city of billionaires on the edge of a barren wasteland in the middle of a political mine field? Where do I sign up?

Meet the Stupids

This is what watching too much Disney will do to you.

Note the expressions of delight on the faces of Mr. and Mrs. Stupid in the front seat. But won't they be surprised, and won't there be many questions asked, when somebody gets his happy smiling face bitten off?

The woman in the back seat has enough sense to be alarmed.

Also note - the engine and headlamps of this vehicle are valuable enought to install a screen to protect them from the wildlife. But not the passengers!

a writer's tale in second person

You send a story off to a magazine and it's rejected. Fine. Happens all the time. No big deal, you say to yourself.

The slush editor is kind enough to note some things about the story and why he rejected it. Not many do that. Good for him.

The problem is, what the slush editor describes in no way resembles the story you sent him. For example, he says, use fewer adverbs. Get right into your story, he says. He says, this is an interesting alternate history of Genghis Khan, but not really what I'm looking for.

So you go back and look at your story and you realize that the only way you could use fewer adverbs is if you used no adverbs. And somebody dies in the first paragraph. And it's not about Genghis Khan.

Where, you want to ask, are all these adverbs? How much sooner must you get into a story than the first paragraph? And Genghis Khan? Genghis H. Khan! But you dare not ask, because you don't want to get on the bad side of the editors. 

You realize this slush editor has probably spent too much time commenting on writing forums and attending workshops or (God forbid) leading workshops, and has had his head filled with all the textbook dos and don'ts that workshop leaders employ to fill time and justify the money and hope people expend attending them. He wants the monster to appear on the first page of your story. He thinks because you used Mongol-sounding names that your story is an alternate history of Genghis Khan. And he can't be bothered to overcome his lazy, mistaken first impressions because his attention span has been rotted to the thickness of a hair by texting and twitter.

But that's ok because the attention span of his readers is just as threadbare. 

And so you move along, quietly, smiling to yourself. It's a lovely day. You make ice cream and take a nap and after a while you're glad you deleted that pithy reply email before sending it. Because it's just not worth the trouble. When you argue with idiots, you always lose.

A Plea for Help

To all parents of young children (of which I am one) - please teach your children basic table manners. I'm not talking about eating with one hand in your lap or which fork to use with which course. I'm talking about disgusting mouth noises.

One day your child will lose a friend, anger a coworker (and possibly lose a job), fail in a job interview, annoy a prospective client and lose a contract, or bomb out on a date, for the simple reason that you never taught them to eat with their mouth closed. Few things are more disgusting than sitting across the table, or sharing a space like an office cubicle or a bus seat, with a person who cannot , for example, eat an apple without an accompanying symphony of sucking, smacking, grunting noises. The worst part is, this person usually has no clue that their barnyard eating habits are impacting those around them, making them want to leave at the earliest opportunity. They're just happily munching on an apple - like a horse.

And that, dear parents, is your fault and your fault alone. So please, think of your children. Think of their future. Teach them to shut their cake holes. Because if you don't, no one else will.

Peeple R Stoopid

Here is the amazing story of Charlie Brown and the German pilot who decided not to shoot him down.

I know, I know, if it had been Snoopy, the Red Baron would have blown him out of the sky. Feel free to make your own jokes.

That' s not why I'm posting this. I'm posting this because I received this story in an email. At the bottom of the email I found this inspirational observation:

THIS WAS BACK IN THE DAYS WHEN THERE WAS HONOR IN BEING A WARRIOR...THEY PROUDLY WORE UNIFORMS, AND THEY DIDN'T HIDE IN AMBUSH INSIDE A MOSQUE, OR BEHIND WOMEN AND CHILDREN, NOR DID THEY USE MENTALLY RETARDED WOMEN AS SUICIDE BOMBERS TO TARGET AND KILL INNOCENT CIVILIANS...HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED.

No, all they did was wear their uniforms while murdering 6 million Jews. All they did was plunge the world into a war in which 50-70 million people died. Lest we forget...



Ah, those were the days.

Next Book of the Month Pick

Now that this woman and her fake pregnancy and fake dead baby have been exposed as a fraud, some asshat of a publisher is bound to give her a six-figure book deal. Because that's just the way the world works.

Don't Taze Me, Sonny

When a deputy can't control a 72 year old woman without resorting to his Tazer, that deputy needs to find a new job. What was dude afraid of - breaking a nail? Granny hitting him with her purse? Maybe he could get a job as a towel boy, or something in ticket sales. Anything other than behind the wheel of a cop car and the trigger of a gun.

Don't they train these officers anymore? Or is the need for police officers so much larger than the available pool of candidates that they have to hire just about anybody, even those incapable of learning basic human relations skills like how to defuse a situation without resorting to violence?

Nuts, Did I Miss the Teabag Party?

Did they serve biscuits and wear pretty hats?

I was too busy trying on my Barack Obama Genuine Middle Class Tax Cut™. Fits great, BTW.

The Collapse of the Mayan Civilization Revealed

World Exclusive!!!

I have just discovered in my vegetable garden an ancient stone tablet that describes in detail why the Mayan civilization collapsed. Its author was an astrologer named Krugmanetlan the Shrill. Here is what he carves:

The Priests began selling assurances of rain to the farmers. If the farmers wanted rain, they had to pay the priests. As the population grew, the farmers needed to farm more land to feed the people. However, if the farmers wanted to farm more land, etc., they needed more rain. This created a natural upper limit to the amount of money the priests could generate from their assurances, which is represented by the equation I=MfkD, where I is income, Mfk is the total milk, fiber and korn that can be produced by the land, and D is beer.

Therefore, the priests began lending money to the farmers so they could farm more land and buy more assurances of rain. Some farmers discovered that by placing themselves into massive debt to the priests, they could produce enough milk, fiber and korn to become incredibly wealthy themselves, which allowed them to pay extra money to the priests to short the other farmers their portions of rain, destroying their farms and driving them out of business. Thus land became cheap. Then the farmers discovered that they could sell their own version of assurances back to the priests, with the guarantee that if in fact it didn't rain, contrary to what the priests had assured, they would pay the priests a guaranteed portion of their crop with which to offset the losses on the priest's assurances. That way the priests made money no matter what happened, thus allowing them to take on more risk and promise more rain so more land could be cleared for farming, and more loans could be taken out for more assurances of rain. Much wealth was generated in this fashion, where it had never existed before.

For many centuries, this formula worked because rain was thought to be a constant. Then one year it didn't rain. The farmers couldn't pay the priests against their losses on assurances, because they had no crop, because it hadn't rained! (see Figure of Krugmanetlan Slapping his Jaguar Forehead) The farmers sued the priests for payment on their assurances, but the priests couldn't pay because they were suing the farmers for payment on their assurances. And all their combined wealth, which had never existed, suddenly evaporated and their civilization collapsed.

Eventually, the people ate the priests and farmers until there was no one left who knew how to pray for rain or plant a crop. So they all walked off into the jungle to hunt monkeys, etlan.

Eat, Sleep, Poop, Ball, Drama - Everybody Wants Some

And so our obsessive child pornography laws run headlong into their inevitable nemesis - the very children the laws are supposed to protect. Methinks DA Skumanick doth protest too much. Maybe he finds the poses of 13 year old girls provacative because they make him horny. If so, maybe the problem is with DA Skumanick, not the girls.

People get a kick out of taking naked pictures of themselves and others and sharing them with their friends. Electronic photography, especially camera phones, makes this easy. Social networking sites make the photos easy to share. Teenagers are only different in so much as they are about a thousand times more likely to engage in this activity as adults. Parents have nightmares, yet the world keeps turning, the sun also rises. In a few years the girls turn eighteen and are featured on the next Girls Gone Wild video. Daddy weeps and daddy's friends place their orders over the phone in the dead of night.

The issue here is easily addressed, if we are willing to deal honestly with human sexuality. Teenagers are not children, and fifteen year olds shouldn't be legally lumped together with five year olds. OMFG! fifteen year olds screw like bunnies, stop the presses! They always have. They always will. You did it when you were fifteen, and if you didn't, you know you wanted to so badly you'd have given a kidney to ball ol' Mary Jane Rottencrotch. Your parents balled when they were fifteen. So did Grandma and Grandpa. So did Julius Caesar and Moses and Lao Tzu and Adam and Eve. Even if we lock them in same sex concentration camps with collars on their necks that make their heads explode if they cross the wire, they're going to risk everything to sneak out to the wire every night for a quick beej through the fence. That's what they do. That's all they do. Eat, sleep, poop, ball, drama - this is the life of the human teenager.

It's long past time we got over ourselves. But of course we never will, because some of us are still fifteen years old between the legs, always worrying about who is screwing whom, or hating the world because we're not getting some, too.

School Location Madness

So far, we couldn't be more pleased with our decision to move. My son's new school is excellent in every regard, and he is much happier.

But I do have one complaint. What idiot on the planning board thought this would be a good location to build an elementary-to-high-school campus? The Google picture isn't up to date, so you can see how it looked before construction began several years ago. The school is miles from even the closest subdivision. No child walks or rides their bikes to these schools. Every student has to arrive and depart via some sort of motorized vehicle.

Why would they do that? It's insane. Yet they did the same thing here - buidling a school in the middle of field, miles from everything.

Why not build the school here instead? Look, some kids could actually walk or ride their bikes to a school built here, yet there is plenty of open space in which to build and expand.

Or take a look at some older schools in the same district. Within this area, there are currently two elementary schools, one middle school, and one new high school (again, an old picture, but trust me, they're there). These schools were built to serve the community, thus they are located within the community - not a remote cotton field. What a novel idea - make the school a part of the community to engage the community, rather than the rabbits and owls.

In the future, would it be possible to build our new schools closer to the students who will attend them? And how about we build more schools and smaller schools, rather than giant mega schools of thousands of students and six or eight classes of every grade? I know, sounds crazy, but it's just crazy enough to work.

The Coming Apocalypse

...of Evangelical Christianity is predicted. It can't happen too fast, in my not-so-humble unpastorly opinion.

Being against gay marriage and being rhetorically pro-life will not make up for the fact that massive majorities of Evangelicals can't articulate the Gospel with any coherence. We fell for the trap of believing in a cause more than a faith.

...We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

They tried to recreate a counter culture of shallow instant gratification in Jesus in order to attract young people into the movement, not realizing that they were targeting young people most attracted to messages of shallow instant gratification. They built their house upon the sand of Stryper!

I have long been disturbed by those commercials for Christian rock band compilation CDs, where you see thousands of kids with their hands in the air and their eyes closed singing along to bad music by crappy bands who couldn't cut it in the real music industry. "My God is an Awesome God"? Teh! Like, totally, d00d. My mom won't let me go to a concert unless its a Christian band.

And do these kids have any idea why they lift their hands when they pray? Or why were they taught to pray "in Jesus name"? Because God won't answer your prayer unless you assume teh correct magical pose and recite teh correct magical phrase.

This, dear children, is paganism wrapped in WWJD shoestrings. I'd rather be an honest pagan than pretend I'm a monotheist who prays to one God in the name of another God for the blessings of a third God. But I suppose you can't build a vibrant cultural movement on a bunch of boring history and theology, especially when a good three-quarters of it contradicts or undermines your political message.

Evangelical Christianity fails not because it attached itself to conservative politics, but because it has only ever been about conservative politics. The main goal of Evangelical Christianity, often stated in various forms by its leaders, has always been to assume absolute temporal political power, to replace the Constitution with the Ten Commandments. Jesus has only ever been a message vehicle for the movement, and that's why the writer above says that they have raised a generation of useful idiots. Evangelical Christianity didn't exactly fail. It succeeded in what it set out to do.

The problem is, now they've got an army that only knows how to fight one battle. They thought they were Patton. Turns out they're McClellan.

How Many Angels Can Stand on the Head of a Pinhead?

I'm not going to be getting any invitations to join the Author Guild saying this, but their stance that the Kindle 2's text reader is a violation of copyright is bullshit.

I'm no fan of the Kindle. I think Kindle Books are ridiculously overpriced. But I have to take Amazon's side on this one.

We've already gone way too far with copyright law as it is. I'd love to see Congress dial back the excesses of the last 40 years of copyright law and return us to a 25 year copyright, renewable during the author's lifetime. If things keep going the way they're going, your children might one day have pay per view books... sorry, no, I'm wrong there, because there won't be any fucking books, because the public will figure they get more bang for the buck watching movies and playing video games. We're already halfway there.

Meanwhile the members of the Author Guild can sit around clinging to their precious, worthless books that no one will read for 150 years because of insane copyright protections.