funny | Funny about Money

Spinning Wheels in the Publishing Business

January 15, 2016 by funny

So the page proofs for the cookbook shipped from the new PoD vendor. When I was down at the plant the other day, they advised me to enter their address as the shipping address in the order form, and then I could just run down there and pick them up, free of shipping charges.

Heeee! The message didn’t reach the mail room. Someone actually made out a mailing label and put it in the mail! Hilarious!

Post office said it was supposed to be delivered today. The front office guys were abhorred. They offered to print a new one. I said the world’s gears were not grinding to a halt and not to worry about it.

That will add another couple of days to the cookbook production. Those of you who asked for copies: hang in there! The thing is on its way.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday I was supposed to have posted …. uhm… “published” the third and final collection of Fire-Rider stories — Books XIII through XVIII — to Amazon in Kindle format. For various reasons, that didn’t get done. Now it’s finally winging its way toward my sidekick, who has a PC on which to update the table of contents. Cutely, Kindle cannot read a TofC that has been compiled in or updated in any Mac program.

The new marketing agent had the privilege of tearing her hair (instead of me having to do it!) until she got all a set of ads posted on Facebook, plugging these fine pieces of literature.

As it develops — get this! — Facebook has the most incredibly stupid rule to the effect that an image for a Facebook Ad may not have more than 20% of its area devoted to type. See that boxed set image there? Just the byline and the title cover 24% of the image. Yes. What it means is, in effect, you can’t advertise a book on Facebook!

She finally managed to cobble something together by using one of the designer’s early iterations of the cover that had almost no coverlines on it. But…uhm…what we’re advertising, then, is not what we’re selling.

At any rate, while we await the correct table of contents, the collection’s interior can be prepared for hard copy printing. I need to get all three of the “boxed set” volumes posted at the PoD guy’s site, so copies of those can be ordered as needed.

So I was going to spend part of the day converting that thing for print format.

Instead, though, I ended up spending most of the time available laying out a client’s memoir for print publication — the interior pages, that is. I don’t have a cover image from him and so can’t do anything about that. But I think I’d rather have him see the interior first, lest he decide he’d like a different trim size. The book is fairly long, and I’m thinking the standard trade book size — 5.5 x 8.5 inches — might give us more pages than we’d like. A larger trim size will mean fewer pages. I guess.

I’ve reduced the font size and will install narrower margins once everything is flowed into the template. I’d like to keep the thing under 400 pages, which I think will happen. We’re at 233 typeset pages now; the MS is 300 pages, but he insists on typing single-spaced, so in reality it’s almost 600 manuscript pages: around 130,500 words. A lot of words.

🙂 Guy’s done a lot of living. Most of it pretty interesting…

Other parts of the day were consumed with driving a payment to mail from the post office, since my mailbox was robbed again yesterday, driving to the drugstore, running interference between the accountant and a subcontractor over W-9s, and on and endlessly on.

The new Fort Knox of a mailbox has yet to be installed. Wish WonderHandyman would get off the dime! Not that it matters for outgoing mail: henceforth everything I need to mail will have to be physically delivered to the post office — no more little red flag for the mailman. Uhm….mailperson…personperson.

And now it’s getting late at night. Nothing has gotten done — or at least, nothing has been carried through to completion, other than mailing one (count it, 1) envelope with a check in it. The dogs are conked out, and the human hopes to be so, too. Very soon.

Don’t Throw Out that Scratched-up Knife: Polish It!

January 13, 2016 by funny

Hallelujah: here’s a genuine personal finance post. Remember when this blog was a PF site? 😀 Today we’re doing “waste not, want not”: scratched-up knife department. (Notice how we got that SEO strategy in the first paragraph? Clumsy, but effective. I suppose. Thank you, dear Google, for your malign effect on our writing style…)

This morning, while trying to track down a missing kitchen knife, I found myself mourning the state of all my (expensive!) cutlery, gouged up shamefully some years ago when I tried to sharpen them on my father’s old stone. They were all pretty much ruined by that effort, but I’ve never thrown them out because of course in retirement I can’t afford to replace nine Wüsthof and Sabatier kitchen knives, plus another four Sabatier steak knives.

Even if I could, that degree of waste would frost my cookies.

My father could put a razor edge on a knife. He taught me how to do it. But apparently I didn’t learn well… Every blade that I tried to sharpen this way ended up gouged up with scratches. They still take a fine edge, but they look like the dickens.

Never did find the lost knife . But in the process of searching, it occurred to me to wonder if those scratches could be even partially polished off.

A Google search forthwith brought up this interesting post from an outfit called 100-Year Knives.

Sandpaper! says he.

Oh, yeah? My ears perked up. Sandpaper, eh?

The guy suggests polishing a scratched-up blade much as you would sand a piece of furniture, going from coarse to fine grit paper. Then finish it off with a high-grade metal polish.

I could hear my father shimmering in his funeral urn at the mere thought of this scheme.

The coarsest paper I had out in the garage was 120 grit — not very coarse, but better than nothing. The 100-Year Knives gent suggests starting with 100 grit, then going to 200, then 400 or 600, then 1,000 – 1,500 grit, then polish. The result, shown on his site, is a blade that looks practically new.

By way of experimenting, I took the 120 grit paper to a boning knife that I love but rarely use anymore. (You can, btw, save quite a lot of money on meat by purchasing large chunks of beef, pork, fish, or lamb, whole chickens, and whole turkeys and butchering them into the preferred cuts yourself.) That knife was very badly scratched. I didn’t take a shot of it before I tried my little test, but here’s how it looks now:

It ain’t perfect. But it’s a heckuva lot better than it was. Sorry about the glare — the camera won’t let me turn off the flash. Click on the image for a better view.

This knife was in worse shape than the chef’s knife and the utility knife shown above. A few scratches are still visible, but it’s much, much better than it was. It’s not polished to a high sheen, because I don’t have any real metal polish around the house — I used a little Barkeeper’s Helper, but I think some Simichrome or Flitz will do the job a lot better.

The result is good enough to convince me it’s worth dropping by the Ace and picking up a few more packages of sandpaper in the desired grades. And some metal polish. Even Brasso probably would help, but the kind of stuff guys use to polish the brightwork on their motorcycles is what you want. Simichrome is said to be available at your local Harley shop; or, if you must, from Amazon.

The process dulled the blade on the boning knife, which normally has an edge that exceeds “razor.” So I had to resharpen it. These days I’m using one of these manual sharpeners that resembles a blade-eating electric sharpener (never use an electric knife sharpener if you have a knife you’d like to keep around for a few years):

This thing puts a decent edge on your knife without eroding it into the shape of an ice pick and without scratching its sides. Mine is made by Wüsthof, but you can get them in different brands. Once you’ve sharpened the blade (left-hand slot), you hone it on a pair of ceramic sticks (right-hand side), et voila! I hone the kitchen knives after every use, and hardly ever have to do a serious sharpening job anymore. My knives all think tomatoes and raw pork are the same as room-temperature butter.

Take-away PF message: Never throw out something that you can fix.

Strange Day in FunnyFarmville

January 12, 2016 by funny

{sigh} It’s only 5 p.m. but the sun has gotta be over some yardarm somewhere. Maybe here, for all I know, because really, who knows what “over the yardarm” really means? High noon, I’d say.

So I’m having a bourbon and water while the curried fried rice simmers, and I yam NOT doing any more work!

Flew back in the house a couple of hours after my afternoon deconstructed itself. A pile of requests & orders from Honored Client are in hand. He wants Plain & Simple Press to do the heavy lifting involved in publishing his memoir, intended for family and friends. And that’s good: it’s quite a lovely book…he’s had a wonderful life. Like my father, he’s devoted his life to work that’s taken him all over the world. If my father had written a memoir like this and left it to the family, I would be beside myself with joy. What a wonderful thing to give his kids. And his friends.

It’s also of historic interest — the guy has been at the front lines of some major early 21st-century changes, internationally, and he has known huge 20th-century figures. So these books of his are of value in more ways than one.

So of course I’m delighted to have the privilege of helping him, even in a small way, to publish this latest book.

Walked in the door from this afternoon’s meeting. Sat down and turned on the computer and just then heard a deep-throated truck’s HONK outside. Looked up from the keyboard to see a fire department truck go by, one marked “Hazardous Waste Disposal.”

WTF?

Naturally, I arise and take a stroll up Feeder Street NS, looking up and down the alleys and neighborhood streets. No sign of the guys in space suits. Oh well.

But it IS gorgeous outside. The rain has died down and in the late afternoon the chilly air has finally warmed enough that one no longer needs a jacket. Dogs have been cooped up with the human for days. Stroll back in the house and lash up my furry friends for a Doggy Walk.

Painfully bored with our usual one-mile route, I decide to head up toward Conduit of Blight (which has been slightly de-blighted with the effort to make the light-rail boondoggle look respectable), where another set of turns and twists will generate a different mile-long walk.

We go across Secondary Feeder St. EW and come up on Conduit of Blight Blvd. There, a half-block to the south, we come across a bum (ahem, sorry: “homeless person”) going through a bunch of objects he’s made off with (ahem, sorry: “collected”) in his shopping cart. These appear to be CDs or possibly DVDs. Unclear whether he’s scavenged them from the garbage or stolen them — it’s even odds, one way or the other.

As we slip past him, we hear some guy on the other side of the decorative wall the city has built to gussy up Conduit of Blight, sitting on the ground next to the bus stop. (“Oh, god,” I think, “Why didn’t I get another German shepherd instead of the Short Stuff?”) He’s very stoned and he’s rambling on in a loud whiny moan about God only knows what. A woman who looks like she wishes she could figure out what to do for him is standing over him. She is saying nothing but looks confounded.

First I think, “You poor soul.” Then I think, un-Christianly, “Stay the f*** away from me!” Mother Theresa, I will never be.

So I continue down the road thinking I am a bad person, for if I were a good person I would try to do something for the suffering poor in this godforsaken city of the radically rich and the penniless. But I do not.

Seconds later, a Mrs. GotRocks shoots out of the parking lot of the fenced Montessori school. She doesn’t even slow her SUV when she crosses the sidewalk. She cannot see around the shrubbery decorating the school’s entrance, and so she does not see me and the dogs about to step in front of her. Literally — not an exaggeration — if we’d gotten there two seconds earlier she would have run us down.

We proceed, then turn back into the ’hood at the southernmost street of low-rent homes — i.e., the development I live in.

There we pass the yard where the turquoise fake grass carpeting the residents installed in the frontyard is now very, very tired, indeed. One of my neighbors wondered why the newcomers are so nosy and so vocal about minor issues such as trash in the alley and decrepitude in the front yard. Many of the Old Guard don’t understand, really, that a house is the same as money in the bank, and that when you — or your idiot neighbors — let a property deteriorate, you’re throwing money down the toilet.

It’s a cultural thing, hm?

We pass the home of the couple who have the boy who suffers some frightful crippling ailment. The father watches over his son like a kind of guardian angel. I believe he is a man who is made of steel and gold, probably the best of all possible men. But it appears the boy is not their only problem child.

From a distance we can hear another kid shrieking and screaming, fully launched into a major tantrum. The mom is moving around the open garage, trying and succeeding at appearing calm and level-headed. With an iron grip on her sanity, she issues a few motherly orders. The brat is having none of it.

The kid jumps into the car, locks the door, and LAYS ON THE HORN!

Heh heh heh… I’m sorry, it’s not funny. And it certainly was not funny for the long-suffering mom, who that point just about loses it.

After a fair amount of hollering on the part of all concerned, the kid lays off the horn. But…only because she’s figured out how to turn on the anti-theft system, causing the car to go, merrily, HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…
HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…
HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…HONK…

Hah haaaaaah! If it was my kid, I’d have whaled her little tail until she couldn’t walk, to say nothing of climb into the SUV’s driver’s seat and fiddle with the controls. But of course that would be child abuse (nevermind the wee perpetrator’s grown-up abuse), and the mom, being a creature of a more enlightened generation, manages to restrain herself.

Bless you, sister…

Moving on, we pass the home of one of our newer neighbors, a police officer and his beautiful young family. We are thrilled to have these young people here. The only flaw in the blue sky is that Dad is on the outs with the neighbor, apparently because of a misunderstanding of Brobdinagian proportions. Dad, having no insight into the history of what the local moving companies like to do to folks who move into our ’hood, believes the old dude next door is responsible for a series of post-move-in break-ins. Little does he know. But what can one say? And how can one best serve youth, eh?

But we are glad — nay, proud — to have a police officer here, the second one to move into our precincts. The next time their brothers chase some armed and violent sh!theads into our neighborhood, we can be assured that the Force will be with us.

So it goes. Here in the Naked City, one woman’s beautiful afternoon is another man or woman’s Day from Hell.

Ever wonder if you’ve blown a fuse?

January 12, 2016 by funny

Do you ever wonder if at some point along the line you’ve blown a mental fuse? Slipped a cog? Dropped off the trolley cable?

Lately, “competence” does not seem to be my middle name. I never functioned at the level of one of those astonishing admins who keeps a department together and running with Scotch tape and paper clips. But as I recall, I wasn’t a total fool.

And also lately — much more to the point — it seems to me that I’m not getting things done at the rate I used to. It’s more like I can’t get them done in the time I’m accustomed to expecting. And one interruption — just one, dammit — will throw a whole day off, insuring that absolutely positively nothing gets done.

Today the schedule looked like this:

• Collect last six Fire-Rider stories and lay them out for Kindle publication
• Obtain ISBN for the same
• Convert to Mobi format; proofread; fix; reconvert
• Post to Amazon
• Lay out first FR collection for print production at new PoD guy’s site
• Check to see if diet/cookbook proofs are ready; drive to south Phoenix, proof, approve (I hope) and order books for sale
• Walk dogs
• Try again to buy ads on SBTB
• Search for similar website for speculative fiction or sagas
• Work on establishing presence on Goodreads

But instead, here’s how it’s gone:

• Write, by email, a detailed explanation for ad manager of why I dislike and distrust Faceboook and what leads me to believe, despite her assurances to the contrary, that some risk exists for posts to any page established in my FB account to be distributed to my “friends” on the page that has nothing to do with racy books; explain why Racy Books writers and I established a “secret” page to avoid that happening
• Make a decision about what to do next in the ad campaign, if anything, now that FB has screwed us. Explain in detail to ad manager
• Write a post on the Facebook page for The Copyeditor’s Desk, which I had forgotten
• Correspond with reader who wants to buy a copy of 30 Pounds/4 months
• Correspond with accountant and with Web guru over whether Web guru needs to get a 1099
• Pick up mess before cleaning lady gets here
• File loose paperwork
• Get email from client summoning me to meet with him to kill another afternoon going over every one of my edits, and to discuss cost of P&S Press producing his book in hard copy…AT 2 P.M. TODAY
• Prepare a two-page estimate of costs, broken down by task and comparing our estimate with the going rates posted at various sites on Google
• Throw on my clothes
• Paint my face
• Set and comb my hair
• Bolt down a few bites of cold roast chicken
• Fly out the door

Nothing else is going to get done today.

Back up your data…back up back up back up!

January 11, 2016 by funny

I would type LOL but today’s adventure in computer technology was potentially not funny. This morning the editor of an academic journal we edit asked if I still had last year’s bureaucratic paperwork, a PDF time-suck that one has to fill in every. single. goddamn. year. So I go over to DropBox to retrieve the same from the journal’s “GDU Paperwork” subdirectory.

Empty.

Huh?

I start looking in the other subdirectories. “Style Guides”: Empty.

Holy sh!t. I just posted edits for FOUR full-length scholarly articles in that folder! I was in the “Style Guides” subdirectory yesterday, because the journal has a wacky mark-up system that we have to look up and study every time we work on a new issue, and the files were in there as of about 7:00 last night.

Mercifully, the edited articles were still there. I had backed up that DropBox folder to my hard disk some time back, and so the two endless, pointlessly complicated style guides were saved to the laptop. But after two days of plowing through academicese, much of it in Spanglish, I was so glad to be done that I thought nothing of posting the stuff to the editors on DropBox and stumbling away.

Madly copied the surviving files to the hard disk.

Now I’ll have to back up the laptop’s hard disk again. That takes awhile: there are over 18,000 files in the two directories I use all the time. Shee-ut. Just did that a couple days ago.

Well, it’ll have to run while I’m chasing around town today. Thanks to the mail thieves and the credit union’s clunky electronic deposit system, I now have to drive to a post office to pick up packages and to the credit union to deposit checks.

Almost $2,000 worth of Copyeditor’s Desk checks are now in hand, so those need to be schlepped up to the CU. That will keep the publishing business going a little longer, anyway. 😀

Always back everything up. An automatic online back-up such as Carbonite is ideal. Since I try to minimize the endless monthly charges — about the only way to survive on a fixed, limited income — I use Apple’s “Time Machine,” which is built into a Mac and requires only an external hard drive.

The one I have is attached to the desktop, which means anything on DropBox is being backed up automatically. But I need to get a back-up drive for the laptop…another complicated decision I don’t feel like having to figure out and another involved digital task I don’t wanna do.

Don’t computers improve our lives…

Obama Beefs Up Gun Laws… Your Thoughts?

January 6, 2016 by funny

Well, at least someone’s trying to do something, eh? The question is…are unilateral fiats to tighten gun registration and control going to do the job?

I was glad to see the President dedicate another $500 million to mental health care.

It is, alas, a drop in the bucket. Five hundred million bucks is as nothing compared to, say, the government’s $58.7 billion outlay in 2015 for something called “protection,” or the $813.9 billion in defense spending or the $149 billion for education.

And while no, of course I do not believe anyone who has a mental illness is ipso facto a menace to society, the fact is all of the mass shootings that bring our president to tears were committed by people who were suffering insanity. Our mental health care system leaves a lot to be desired…such as mental health care. Any help there is welcome, but $500 million comes under the heading of “too little, too late.”

Should people who are stark raving mad be prohibited from buying a gun? No doubt.

How about a person who, feeling a little sad, has talked with a doctor about it and now has a diagnosis of “depression” permanently inscribed in the computerized record? That’s a catch-all term applied to anything from passing sadness to profound, pathological, long-term illness endangering the sufferer’s life. Should all of us who wish not to be “regulated” avoid discussing our blues with our doctors, lest we be prohibited from ever buying a sporting firearm or ammunition?

And will this improved rule do the trick? Let’s remember that Adam Lanza, who was seriously ill and had been for quite some time, was supplied with an arsenal by his mother, a woman who seems to have been generally regarded as a normal member of an affluent community.

The people from whom we have the most to fear, in terms of gun violence, are criminals — the type who stick up pawn shops, kidnap the employees, flee into neighborhoods, and hide in little old ladies’ garages. These folks don’t buy guns from dealers; they trade on the streets, within their own gang culture. We already have gun laws that have little effect on the availability of arms on the street. While spectacularly publicized shootings by people who have gone off the rails are alarming, they actually represent a tiny portion of the violent crime in this country. Most of it is perpetrated by people for whom regulatory control is superfluous and irrelevant.

What about the figures being bandied about to justify taking guns out of the hands of the American public? Or at least, of the law-abiding portion thereof?

We’re told 500 people die in gun accidents each year, and of those, 30 are children under five years old. You know…500 people is .00015681% of the US population. And 30 children? They comprise .00000941% of the US population, or .00015175% of children under five in this country.

Those are minuscule figures, microscopic compared to the number of people who die in home accidents and car wrecks. As a matter of fact, despite all the devices we have in place now to protect us from ourselves (I couldn’t even get into a bottle of nose spray to treat the current heavy cold!), home accidents are among the top causes of injury and death.

Are we really in a crisis situation? We’re told that “mass shootings” occur almost every day in this country. But define the term: gang-bangers shooting at each other in street fights or at drunken bashes are different from lunatics shooting up movie theaters and schools. We have a large criminal class in this country. It exists because we have serious problems of poverty, inequality, and injustice. However you define it, though, the death rate for “mass shootings” is under 5 percent of all shooting deaths in the US, and the annual rate of gun-related homicide has been dropping steadily over the past twenty years.

Hysterical reportage a crisis does not make.

Will Obama’s improved gun control regulation help stop the ongoing tragedy of suicides? One wonders.

If you’re really determined to off yourself, you’re going to do it, one way or the other. Having a gun at hand is convenient, that is true. It wouldn’t be my first choice — too messy, and too much chance of missing. But it has to be allowed that easy access to a pistol makes it too easy for an impulsive teenager to harm him- or herself in a moment of adolescent distress or real depression. But shouldn’t control of that access be the family’s responsibility? Should we all have our personal choices restricted because some people fail to keep their guns locked up?

Consider the ways your deceased friends have found to take themselves out of this mortal coil…and why:

• Gunshot to head: had a second stroke, understood what was coming, and decided he didn’t want to die that way
• Tied a cinderblock to his leg and jumped into the deep end of the pool: depression, general craziness, hated his wife
• Drove a car into a concrete abutment: divorce, drunkenness
• Gunshot to head: depression, adolescent angst
• Gunshot to head: unemployment; incurable long-term debilitating disease
• Overdose: depression

This line of thought carries us straight back to the matter of mental health care, something that is sadly wanting in this country. Some people, such as the elderly guy (my father’s best friend) who shot himself after he experienced a second stroke, have good reason to bring their lives to an end. This is not a mental health issue but one of ordinary humane treatment: people suffering terminal illness or looking at a hideous downhill ride in late old age should have a right to end their lives in peace. The rest? Every one of these people needed effective mental health care, and nary a one of them got it.

The answer to the problem of suicide — and to the problem of people like Adam Lanza going on killing sprees — is to fund psychiatrists, medical doctors, antidepressants, antipsychotics, and humane mental hospitals, not to infantilize the entire adult population of the United States.

There’s a limit to how much a culture should protect its members from themselves. This aspect of the question has its parallel in other products from which we’re protected. I find myself now having to remove the caps from every bottle of household cleaner, from every OTC health nostrum, from every pool chemical, from every container of plant fertilizer, from every everything, carry them out to the garage, and break them apart with a hammer so that I can use and re-cap ordinary products that I pay for.

Child-proof caps are consumer-proof caps — they make it difficult and sometimes even impossible to use anything that they’re slapped onto, and they’re slapped onto almost every product we use today. You have to wrestle with these things whether you have a kid in the house or not. Should everyone’s life be restricted because a few people haven’t the sense to keep dangerous products out of children’s reach? Really?

Similarly, should all responsible adults’ lives be restricted because some people are irresponsible, some are criminal, and some are desperate? Or because we’re too cheap to provide universal mental health care and functional mental hospitals? Because we’re too cheap to lift the underclass out of poverty? Because we can’t be bothered to educate people in the skills of common sense?

Really?

Image: SIG Pro semi-automatic pistol. Augustas Didžgalvis. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.