Ideas are plentiful

Galleycat suggests a way to enliven these slow summer days: comb your spam email subject lines for story ideas. In fact, it's a contest being held by Weird Tales magazine.

In just a few minutes I uncovered these intriguing ideas:

Vaginas or not
No tipping please
Sex with robots. Video.
We make what is real

And my favorite: Paris Hilton wins Pulitzer Prize

technorati: spam, Galleycat

Friday night wrestling, with penetration

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Why should the devil have all the good music?

Brilliant writer Janice Erlbaum posted an amusing tale about combatting an annoying subway preacher by singing as loudly as he was ranting. Her selections included "Let's Do It," "You Do Something To Me," "When They Begin the Beguine," and "It's All Right With Me." It didn't stop the guy's ranting but did raise her spirits.

The title of this post refers to a song by a Jesus rocker, Larry Norman.

technorati: Bad Behavior, subway+preachers,Janice Erlbaum

NASA needs whiz kids

Courtesy Good Morning Silicon Valley, enjoy this NASA press release soliciting urine samples from "All Houston-SLS Associates, employees at 2200 Space Park, and any visitors to the building" at the Johnson Space Center in suburban Houston, Tex. -- just up the road from the subdivision I lived in during my high school years. The "urine collection study," for the purpose of testing some tubing meant to be used in space toilets, started yesterday and will collect several gallons of piss a day through next week.

technorati: NASA, pissing

It's Bad Behavior Tuesday™! -- Into Thin Air edition

A megachurch pastor broke his wrist when he lost control of a motorcycle onstage during a church service, and drove off the stage and into the first row of (vacant) seats. The stunt -- intended to demonstrate "how a rider becomes one with the bike" -- resembles a scene in the Barbra Streisand-Kris Kristofferson version of "A Star is Born," when Kristofferson, playing an out-of-control rock star, does the same thing.

Megachurch pastors... drunken rock stars... Not that much difference these days.

technorati: Kokomo

Definitely not me

Added to the list of the Mark Pritchards I'm not is this father of triplets, one of which was carried by his wife's sister. Since I was born in St. Louis, I suppose it's remotely possible that this Pritchard family is somehow related to me, but not that I know of.

Funny, though, I've always loved the name Darla -- it's just so down-home. I've tried to use it in several different stories, none published. The triplets' mother is not the only Darla Pritchard, though, it seems.

Clever is as clever does

I've been pretty quiet on this site this summer. There isn't much interesting going on -- I've just finished a big project at work that started at the beginning of the year, but it's just another tech writing project at an enterprise software company. It pays well but there is little to say; I wrote up a description a few months ago. I haven't worked much on my novel, I haven't been to any readings or performances, and the only travel I have in the future is to see my sick mother. My day is pretty much work, exercise, do chores around the house, and get to sleep. So, sorry for the lack of clever observations. There isn't much gas in the tank these days.

Pessoa in the NYT

A few weeks ago I started reading a remarkable book, "The Book of Disquiet" by a Portugese writer, Fernando Pessoa. It's a collection of very short pieces -- almost like journal entries -- written from a fictionalized point of view. The perspective is almost zen-like (in fact, I bought a copy of the book for a friend who practices Zen meditation) in the narrator's quality of observation and his perception of nothingness at the core of existence. But it's not correct to speak of the book's "narrator," since the author's intent was not to write a novel or even a fictionalized diary, but to filter his own perceptions through layers of personas.

Today in the New York Times there's an article about Pessoa, whom I had never heard of before a month ago. In fact, I can't remember how I heard of this book. But it's really, really great. I was happy to see that its star shot in the NYT today resulted in a big spike in sales on Amazon.com, where it's number 4016 at this moment.

technorati: Fernando Pessoa

Well, I think it's funny

I just looked on Google News -- there were 1302 news articles returned by the words "Obama" and "cover." Satire is dead, pessimists say. Perhaps the people who are freaked out about this satirical illustration -- which is entitled "The Politics of Fear," get it?? -- believe that.

It's classic coastal elitism. Not the cover itself, but the belief that people will see this cover and say "See?! This proves my point exactly! Obama really is an Islammer!" Thinking that you are smart enough to understand a joke while the hoi polloi won't, and that this could be horribly damaging -- that's the elitist belief. And the New Yorker -- the epitome of what the ignorant flyover folk are supposed to fear -- has done a good thing in giving a full-frontal dismissal of it.

Courtesy Huffington Post: The artist, Barry Blitt, defends his work. And so does the New Yorker editor.

You want a real "Satire is Dead" headline? It was on Salon today:

My wife left me when the dolphins at Sea World gave me an erection.

My God! An insult to dolphins!

technorati: New Yorker, Obama cover

Americans not the only ones freaked out by images of children

Jesse Helms may be dead, but his spirit lives on in Australia, of all places. There politicians are freaking out over a nude image of a child -- her mother is the artist -- on the cover of Art Monthly Australia. Foamers are threatening to cut support grants from the publication. Ironically, the issue contains an article exploring a previous controversy over images of children that were yanked, then restored, to a Sydney gallery after being declared "'G' or 'very mild.'"

It's no surprise that Australia is the only English-speaking country aside from the U.S. where right-wing evangelical Christianity has a foothold. Among the influential foamers down under is the Anglican bishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, and other organizations like Family First and Catch the Fire Ministries, which attempt to duplicate the influence of U.S. groups like Focus on the Family.

technorati: art, censorship,Australia,fundamentalists, nudity

Kind of a drag on things

Whee, it's almost our national day!




That graphic is from the msnbc.com home page for today, showing the general state of the business world. When I was an adolescent -- which is to say, long into my thirties -- I would have rudely jeered such news, because I thought it was only about financiers and tycoons. And indeed, until the late 70s at the earliest, there was no business reporting the way there is now. These stories about Starbucks and GM and the airlines -- no one would have cared about such things (not that there was Starbucks then).

Now I see that while it's still true that business news affects mostly tycoons and financiers, it also affects the poor saps who lose their jobs. I'm not likely to lose my job for the foreseeable future, but I've also been wrong about that before. Who among us can really be sure what's going to happen next month, much less next year or in ten years?

Remember the summer of 2001, and what the biggest news story was? The disappearance of Chandra Levy (here's Wikipedia for those who don't remember). It seemed so important! Some poor sap of a Congressman from Modesto was suspected of being (but turns out not to have been) involved in the woman's disappearance. Then something rather more dramatic happened involving some airliners, and the story of the Congressman and the missing woman vanished.

Of course, the Violet Blue-BoingBoing kerfuffle makes the Levy case look like serious news. A real woman was murdered. This week's scandale des Internets is a little less weighty, but somehow I feel we're tempting fate again and are due for another rude shock. What'll it be this time?

BoingBoing - Violet Blue - memory hole kerfuffle

I've resisted commenting on the kerfuffle in which all mentions of San Francisco blogger Violet Blue were suddenly erased last month from A-list blog BoingBoing. But today's Valleywag post by Melissa Gira Grant pretty much blows it wide open, reducing what initially seemed like a sinister case of Big Brother-type memory-holing into a jealous snit by an alleged former paramour.

The point most bloggers seem to be making -- that if this had happened anywhere else, it would have been reported with the usual mixture of glee and outrage on BoingBoing -- is hard to dispute. Pretty much every other aspect, such as Grant's parsing of BoingBoing's too-little-too-late excuse that it is entitled to be as "personal" and petty as it wants to be, is splitting the finest of hairs. There's a lot of harsh rhetoric blowing around the internets about this, including an anti-BoingBoing backlash [for example], and Grant's post will only inflame matters. What amuses me is how much it matters to everyone, making it clear that a high school hallway ethos pervades the internet and those who have become "famous" because of it. If anyone comes out ahead, it's Violet Blue, whose own comments and postings on the affair have shown admirable restraint. One thing I admire about Violet is that she always seems to remember that a few pixels one way or the other don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

technorati: Violet Blue, BoingBoing, internet censorship

Focus on the Fundies: Haggard back home, just in time for Gay Pride

Ted Haggard has left the "rehabilitation program" that was supposed to turn him into a heterosexual and has returned to Colorado Springs with a shameless appeal to former supporters:

It looks as though it will take two years for us to have adequate earning power again, so we are looking for people who will help us monthly for two years.... Between now and the end of the year, we have to find the people who want to help us transition into our future. So I am starting today to let friends like you know that we are raising money ...

The story goes on to say that Haggard is living in the same Colorado Springs mansion he lived in when running a magachurch there. And there are still five big cars in the driveway.

In an email to a "friend," Haggard admitted using drugs with male prostitute Mike Jones, whose revelations to Colorado TV stations outed him just before the 2006 election

technorati: Ted Haggard