Rejection

I neglected to mention this last week, but Publisher Number One officially passed on The Promised King, Book One: The Welcomer. Thus, I am now in the process of readying it for Publisher Number Two.

I must admit to questioning the whole writing thing in recent weeks and months. There are times when I really want to tell more stories, but there are other times when the thought actually enters my mind: “Does the world really need another storyteller?” And I’ve also been in a reading slump, which isn’t helping. Dry spells come, and dry spells go, but this one’s been both dryer and longer than any I can remember.

All this is preamble to this: Expect a hiatus here sometime in the next few weeks, and one that perhaps could last a while. (Especially with another event in the offing sometime this month that is virtually guaranteed to shake things up in my carefully-constructed world. Let’s just say that The Wife’s weight gain, which has been going on for close to 40 weeks, should be coming to a drastic end fairly soon.)

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Child-like Observations

I don’t inflict “cuteisms” from The Daughter on my readership, but for those who want a shorter version of what Lileks dishes out, here are two things she said recently that struck me as funny:

:: On the conclusion of a movie on DVD: “You can take the movie out now. You don’t hafta rewind it, though, ’cause it’s on a DDD.” (She calls DVDs “DDDs”.)

:: On glimpsing a shot of Cyd Charisse in the movie The Bandwagon, which we watched the other night: “That’s a really beautiful woman. If I was a man I’d marry that woman.” (This one both amused and disturbed me a little. But I have to admit that The Daughter has an eye for beauty.)

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The Triumphant Return of Mozilla

I’m finally back to using Mozilla as my browser, to my immense and eternal relief. After a system restore to a point from six months ago, I ended up re-downloading and re-installing Mozilla, and so far, so good. I still have no idea what the difficulty was.

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The green, green grass….

Usually this time of year in Buffalo is marked by lawns that are starting to brown, because our summers aren’t all that wet. But this year, it seems to never stop raining. Sure, there are sunny days, but I’m not sure if there’s been a string of sunny days longer than, oh, three days yet this year.

So I got really excited when I looked at the Upcoming Week’s Forecast in the Buffalo News this past Sunday and saw virtually no rain predicted. Sure enough, there was no rain on Sunday, or Monday. There was a very brief storm yesterday morning that barreled through and out in about half-an-hour, which was followed by a gorgeous warm and sunny day.

And today?

It’s rained, all damn day.

Oy.

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Wow.

Now that I temporarily have to use Internet Explorer, I can’t believe I spent seven years online using nothing but Internet Explorer. Ye Gods, this browser stinks!

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Body Language, part II

The other day I offered a few suggestions as to how to tell if he is interested, in terms of “body language”. I closed by noting my complete ignorance as to how to tell if she is interested. But in comments, Mary Messall charged in and helped out, which I reproduce here:

Does she laugh at everything you say? And agree to almost anything you suggest? Does she lower her eyes when you look at her? Is her tone confiding — as if she’s telling secrets or confessing sins? Does she apologize a lot? When she’s expecting to see you, is she dressed better (or more revealingly) than the other women nearby? Does she hover nearby, even in a crowded room, even if you move?


God help me if I’m ever “out there” again…but then, I’m fairly certain no women ever behaved thus toward me even when I was “out there”. (The ultimate mystery, then, is why I’m not still “out there”. I’ve been puzzling over that one for years, myself.)

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The scraping of excessively thin skin, in progress

TBogg points out an article by Dennis Prager (how Tom can read crap like Prager is beyond me), in which Prager is terribly upset that some twelve-year-old girl suggested at the Democratic National Convention that Dick Cheney should get a “time out” for his bad language on the floor of the United States Senate.

Interestingly, this is the first I’m even hearing of this girl; but then, I watched far less of this year’s convention than any other since I became politically aware. But the fact that Prager can get this upset over an apparent “throwaway” moment at their convention is pretty illustrative, I think.

Two further things strike me from reading Prager. Here’s the graf in which Prager really gets hot beneath his collar:

Of course, this girl has accomplished nothing compared to Dick Cheney. She has no wisdom, no humility and no knowledge beyond the leftist platitudes spoon-fed by her parents and schools. She is a mere child, more foolish than most, in that she actually thinks she has earned the right to publicly ridicule the vice president of the United States.


Well, of course she’s accomplished nothing compared to a onetime Congressman, Secretary of Defense, White House Chief of Staff, and current Vice President of the United States. Neither have I. Neither has Dennis Prager. This is a sentence of colossal stupidity — and it’s just the lead-off hitter in the stupidest paragraph I have read in quite some time.

Then there’s the second sentence. That one’s really cute. “She’s just spouting off whatever her parents have taught her!” That’s quite the revelatory insight there, but I wonder if Prager has ever entertained similar thoughts about this political commentator from the Saved By the Bell set. I bet not. For Prager, the latter’s probably a genius, ahead of his time. No spoonfeeding of platitudes for that kid, nosiree, Bob! That boy’s got himself a fully-formed, rationally-concluded set of political beliefs!

And then Prager breaks out the big bat: “She thinks she has earned the right to publicly ridicule the Vice President of the United States!” Boy, there’s nothing like seeing a nationally-syndicated pundit reduced to pouting-in-print, almost like — dare I say? — a twelve-year-old. But in any case, Dennis, obviously she thinks she’s earned that right. And do you know why? Because the right to publicly ridicule the Vice President of the United States isn’t earned: this girl has that right just by virtue of being an American. I think I read that somewhere in that Constitution thing people are always talking about — or maybe that piece of paper they read ever July 4. Maybe even both.

Three sentences, each stupider than the next. That’s got to be a record unmatched by any piece of writing since the script of the last episode of Three’s Company.

EDIT: Link fixed.

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Help, Technofolks!

I’ve had to do three System Restore’s in one day, and I’m writing this in Internet Explorer right now because something is haywire my computer such that Mozilla won’t even run. Does anyone have any idea what in the hell is going on? Have I possibly picked up some kind of virus or something?

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Art for unnamed science fiction novel, circa 1952.

Jayme Lynn Blaschke linked this gallery of SF cover art from a line of what appear to be adventure-packed space operas published in the 1950s, and this image on the gallery’s front page especially caught my eye. I couldn’t find any information as to what book this particular image hails from, but there it is. This is the essence of the old chestnut that “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve”.

(These to be precisely the kinds of books that would feature a protagonist named “Jay Manifold”, by the way. And PZ Myers agrees with me!)

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