Coffee heat rising

Idle essays

What’s Your Favorite News Source?

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Other than Revanche’s always amazing round-ups, that is! Last September, as you’ll recall, I canceled delivery of the New York Times‘s print edition, because of the frequent nondelivery. Sometimes I do miss it, but nothing like as much as I expected.

Breakfast-time, the usual moment I have and prefer for reading print anything, occupies so few minutes that there was no way I could get through the entire paper before I had to get to work. Along the same line, my guess that a weekly edition of The Economist and a monthly New York Review of Books would suffice to entertain me over solitary meals proved to be correct. I can only get through a couple of Economist pieces before breakfast is finished. And when I’ve run out of Economist copy, the NYRofB’s more than takes up the slack.

Both periodicals contain plenty of interesting and informative copy.

Is any of it current news? Well. No. But how much current “news,” after all, do you want to fill your brain cells with? How many shootings and hit-and-runs and idiotic politicians’ utterances can one mind absorb?

I find myself searching out more news online now, though. Google News leaves much to be desired — such as, oh, say…news. The problem with Google News is that it’s uncurated: the hive mind dictates what appears on any given “page” of Google News. Apparently no real editors exist, and so no real intellect manifests itself there. The result is gestalt, unreliable, and often downright stupid.

What are your favorite news sites online?

Lately I’ve become enamored of Sci-News.com, a compendium of reasonably well educated science reporting. The site is organized by discipline. For the really good stuff, click on the top menu’s right-most link, “More.” Great stuff!

News flash! Men are more narcissistic than women, study says! No kidding?

“New Study Shows What Makes Latin American Telenovelas So Popular!” 😀 Can you spell “f-u-n”?, dear academic?

The nanotechnology section at Sci-News is eye-catching: Scientists Create Artificial Photosynthesis System!” Holy mackerel…can it hold a (heh) candle to the glowing nanocellulose paper?

Raw Story, while often undisciplined, is usually entertaining and often interesting. I like that it tends to run long-form stories. Although I prefer print for longer stories, as a practical matter I don’t get print any more, so this is as good a source as any…assuming you don’t mind a slightly yellowish tinge.

Far more polished and arguably more sophisticated is Salon. Just now they’re having quite a frenzy over the ludicrousness of the Democratic presidential candidates.

Salon, like The Atlantic, tends to skew a little too demagogically to the left for my taste. And really, the present “lite” version of The Atlantic is just fluffy enough and just ill-thought-through enough to annoy. But still: if one must have demagoguery with one’s news, I suppose left-leaning is better than what the right has to offer these days. {sigh}

BuzzFeed is amusing, but if Raw Story smacks of yellow journalism, Buzzfeed is…what? Unprintable? Is it really impossible to deliver news without benefit of click-baiting?

NPR does a halfway decent job of delivering hard news…although sometimes one wonders. “Man Plays Saxophone During Tumor Removal“? LOL! Talk about click bait!

BBC News is consistently good at reporting and interpreting events. Coverage is broad and, for a newspaper, deep.

The Washington Post, like the New York Times, provides responsibly reported, reasonably objective, and fairly thoughtful reportage. Unfortunately, both organizations limit the number of stories you can read before they start gouging you a fee-per-view, and so I tend to avoid their sites unless something urgently important is happening.

Access to local news poses a much bigger challenge than finding acceptable national and international reporting. In many parts of the country, there are no decent local news organizations. One could argue that’s the fact here in lovely uptown Arizona, where the most up-to-date and often most comprehensive local reporting is, heaven help us, on the Fox TV station. That should tell you something…

One local radio station emits a kind of news digest. But like almost all the other local news media, it reads like it was written by lower-division J-school students without benefit of editors. Often the writing is barely literate, full of cliches, factual errors, and bêtises. That leaves one doubting the veracity of anything that appears.

A local business journal produces some OK reportage, but its scope is limited. The local alternative weekly is a haven for yellow journalism, when it’s reporting news at all — mostly it covers restaurants and entertainment. The only halfway decent source of reporting on the rascals at City Hall (or at the Legislature) is solidly barricaded behind a paywall. And it’s very expensive, reinforcing the impression that only the elite can afford to be educated about government these days. Of course, what really costs the dollars is real reporting…but the impression remains.

Where are you getting your news these days?

Minutes and minutes left…

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…before SDXB and NG show up here to spirit me away from the 87 gerjillion things that need to be done today.

They want to go hiking in the McDowell Mountains, which are on the northeast side of Scottsdale. Halfway to Payson from their house; about a third of the way from mine.

Oh well. It’s a nice break, as long as they stay off the subject of politics. NG is even further to the right than SDXB, which places her at the right hand of Adolf Hitler. If it comes out of the mouth of some Tea-Partier, they think it must be true. It’s hard to stay silent in the face of such nonsense.

I’ve learned to run ’em. If they start talking stupid stuff, I start hiking as fast as I can go (which is faster than I can run…). About ten minutes of trying to keep up with me runs them out of breath, so they can’t speak and walk at the same time.

Mwa ha ha!

Meanwhile, where were we? Yeah: all the things that need to be done.

I managed to get the December Camptown Races newsletter out this morning, despite MailChimp putting up a fight. If you subscribe to FaM, you probably got that in your email, or will whenever MailChimp’s queue sends it off.

The latest Fire-Rider collection, Fire and Ice, is live at Amazon: Books VII through XII. fire book 2aiThis is the part of the saga where Kaybrel and his cousin Jag Bova make heroes of themselves. It’s fairly violent — they engage the enemy in an ambush whose consequences will echo down through the generations, and they manage to escape extermination only by wile and steel nerve.

Do download it! And please, please, PLEASE go over to Amazon and review it! Fire-Rider needs your reader reviews!

In other Plain & Simple Press news, the hard-copy cover for the new version of the cookbook is done. If and when I EVER get some time to myself today, I’ll upload that and the content to the print-on-demand guys.

A-n-n-d…here’s our boy! And so it’s off to spend the day doing essentially nothing. Hope yours is more productive.

Bye!

Slow down, you’re movin’ too fast…

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…Got to make
The mornin’ last.

Putting the brakes on the ambitious publishing enterprise, and they’re finally beginning to engage. It takes a long time to persuade an 18-wheeler to slow down…

So freaking tired of computers am I that I’ve developed a flinch reflex at the very thought of re-engaging The Machine.

Last night I mounted an entire month’s worth of Racy Books to Amazon — which is really only seven shorties but goodies. It’s the first set of books we wrote under the Roberta Stuart byline, two of them by moi and five by a writer who for a number of reasons can’t publicize her name. This lady is really a very good writer, with an actual — get this! — SENSE OF HUMOR. Her stories always have a mellow wit that makes them charming to read.

Assuming you like Racy Reading. 😉

Also got the second “boxed set” of six Fire-Rider books up. That really is a serious book; each of the three collections of six “books” apiece will be novel-length on its own.

So, with the design and bureaucracy done, all that’s left to do is click “Publish.” The plan is to “publish” (I use that work guardedly: to my mind, putting a book up on Amazon is more akin to “posting” than to “publishing”) one bookoid a week through December and into January. This gives us eight books each of which can be posted with a single click. So if I click “publish” each Tuesday, then each Wednesday a new bookoid should appear on Amazon.

In the meantime, I will try harder to figure out how to get Goodreads to work. It’s purely torture.

And I will try to mount a FaceBook advertising campaign, a prospect that makes me cringe. I may try to hire someone to do that, possibly from Problogger or Fiverr.

Hiring a pig in a poke from Fiverr also makes me cringe. But it occurred to me that there may be bloggers who know how to handle FaceBook — or at least are younger, more flexible, and techier than I am. So I think I’ll post an ad on the Problogger job board and then do a few searches at Fiverr.

If YOU know how to deploy FaceBook Ads, by the way (this will entail identifying the right demographics in technolanguage that FB can understand and use), I’m interested in talking with you! Leave a comment below with a functional email address in the little sign-in form above the comments box, and I’ll get in touch. The book that would be advertised at the outset is Fire-Rider, not the erotica.

In another few weeks, I may have a boxed set of “Family at the Holidays” available, which would then be worth putting money into for marketing. If the PoD guy comes through (he has not, so far), then we already have a print version of “Family.” Either of those could also be marketed on FaceBook, if it’s possible to identify adult audiences(!!) who want(!!) to read erotica.

How exactly you target those audiences without accidentally hitting some kids escapes me. For that reason, I’m very dubious about advertising the Camptown Races bookoids on Facebook.

At any rate, if I can hire someone to relieve me of some of the social media marketing torture, that would free up time a) to have a life, of all the outrageous things; b) to write some more copy; c) to manage design and production; and d) to take care of business, which has been sliding.

FireFox lately has been given to strange catastrophic crashes, which can on occasion crash my computer. And of course we know Wyrd loves nothing more than to crash, preferably taking your entire system down with it.

Whenever the system crashes while any Office programs are up, every file you had open at the time reloads in two versions: whatever was saved at the time the system went down, and a “recovery” file that may or may not contain the most recent data you entered. My system is set to auto-save every five minutes, so not much data is lost. However, if you have, say, seven files open on Wyrd (not unreasonable around here: I often move from file to file), you have to compare FOURTEEN files line by line to see what was lost and what can be saved. If the auto-save has more recent data, then you have to close the file you were working in and save the auto-save over it with the new filename. But sometimes this process causes the system to “forget” where the original file resides, so you have to figure that out — my computer contains literally thousands of data files, and I’ll tellya…some days it ain’t easy to find where a recovered file is supposed to go.

Well, one of the recent crashes took down the Excel file I’d built to transmit data to WonderAccountant, after QuickBooks converted itself into something I simply cannot use. Even she has a time with it — and she takes courses in Quickbooks!

So, after I realized I had neither the time nor the inclination to learn the entire new program that QuickBooks has mounted, I went back to recording credits and debits in Excel spreadsheets. This workbook I posted on DropBox for WonderAccountant’s delectation — she does my bookkeeping, and really, if the spreadsheet is set up correctly, all she should have to do is upload to the correct account.

Last night I discovered that during a recent crash, data was lost from this Excel workbook.

But SOME data was saved in another iteration of it, which resided in another directory on my terminal.

Recovering the data entailed opening both workbooks and comparing each spreadsheet, line by line by infuckingTERminable line, to determine a) which was most current and b) how to consolidate the data in one file.

And needless to say, this entailed not one but several fuckups. By 9 p.m. I was tearing my hair out by the roots! It took over four hours of this hateful process to straighten it out!

And that, my children, is why the old lady is coming to hate computers.

Really. It was so much easier when you just noted debits and credits in a real, paper book of blank spreadsheets.

And it’s why I need to find somebody else to mount and manage the marketing campaign. At this point, when I get up in the morning and think about having to wrestle with the computers again, I just cringe.

No wonder my stomach hurts!

Whenever I finish diddling away time with the hobby blog, then, I need to take the dogs for a walk; then bring them back here and go back out for another 2.6-mile tour by myself. That gets in about 3.6 miles a day (assuming I get time in a day for these hijinks), which helps a lot with the stress and is helping to bring the weight back down.

But yes…”get time in the day…” As dawn cracked, the phone rang: pool guy. He wants to come over between ten and noon to fix the leak in the pump. Let us hope Gerardo is right, that the leak is just from a gasket. Thanks to Gerardo, the guy is going to have a challenge trying to upsell  me to a new pump, which will set me back a couple thousand bucks. Not looking forward to that exchange…

Anyway, carving that chunk out of my morning means no doggy & human walks: it’s already after 9:00 a.m. Walking a mile with the dogs, who have to sniff every blade of grass and lunge at every passing dog or cat, takes a half an hour. And the 2.6-mile junket requires 45 minutes.

It was very cold this morning — by Arizona standards — and so at 6:00 a.m. I decided to wait until it warmed up. It usually takes this pool guy days to respond to a phone call, so I figured I’d have today to myself. Not so… Now we’ll have to wait until after the guy gets here and lightens my pocketbook some more before we can go out. By then I’ll be fully engaged in something else.

The roommate left before dawn to fly to New York for an audition. She’s an opera singer. So the dogs and I have the Funny Farm to ourselves for a day. That means there are quite a few things I need to do by way of cleaning up the place and making it more livable for her. Those could easily fill up the day.

Roommate: I haven’t written about the roommate because she hadn’t announced to all and sundry that she’s leaving her several jobs in town. She’s one of the paid professional singers with the choir, a very lovely mezzosoprano who sings alto in our rowdy crowd. She also teaches at the Great Desert University and is enrolled in her second master’s degree program out there. Well, her husband got a job in the Bay Area, so she’s having to drop everything and move up there.

She didn’t want to walk away from the teaching job (some day she hopes to get an academic position, and so there’s a bridge she doesn’t want to burn), nor was she happy to leave the other contract gigs she has here in town. But they realized that, given the cost of housing in and around San Francisco, even on DH’s very substantial new salary, they couldn’t afford to maintain two dwellings even for a couple of months. So they sold their house here, rented a place in the City, and she is now couch-cruising to fill in the gap.

Actually, she’s got my guest bedroom, which is a lot better than a sofa. Except there’s no bed in there, so the poor thing is sleeping on one of those blow-up mattresses. All of which makes me feel mighty guilty for not having bothered to buy a bed for that room. It would involve hiring a moving man to move the impossibly heavy TV armoire, which is no longer used for TV but is full of linens & things, and that exceeds the hassle factor that I feel like dealing with. So does purchasing and installing a bed in there, come to think of it.

Anyway, it’s kind of nice to have a human being around. I mean, dogs are charming company and all, but…well, they are dogs. She’s not around much, because she has a hectic schedule that usually keeps her out from morning till late at night. Yet a few conversations have been had, and that is nice.

If it were possible to be sure you could find a person as quiet and considerate as this one, renting out a room would seem like a very good idea. It would provide some company and obviate the need to actually work. But I’m pretty certain this one is rare as diamonds.

🙂

A Night of Mares…

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haywain-1What a weird night.

Had a great time at the Thanksgiving party yesterday afternoon and evening. Got home not very late, around 9 or 10 p.m. Fed the dogs, let them out, went to bed.

Along about 4:30 a.m., Ruby started twitching in her sleep. Pretty clearly she was having a dogmare. Eventually she settles down and I think now it’s back to sleep.

And so it seemed, for about five minutes. Then she begins to utter little hmh! noises.

This dog’s vocalizations are eerily human. They often have exactly the intonation that human speech would have, with question marks and exclamation points and periods and dot-dot-dots… This noise sounds just like the hmh! you and I would make when contemplating something that mildly surprises and interests, or some set of facts that contradicts an assumption.

Sometimes if I ignore her when she wakes in the middle of the night, she’ll go back to sleep. But no. This keeps on. Then she goes down to the end of the bed, where they get lifted on and off.

It was late when they got fed, so I figure she probably needs to go out. But once she’s on the floor, it becomes evident that “let me out” is not what “hmh!” means. The instant her feet hit the ground, she goes BATSHIT!

She roars down the hall, barking furiously. Cassie follows her. I hobble after them.

Nothing in the house. She’s at the back door. None of the motion-sensitive lights are on, so I figure it’s probably OK to open the door and let her out.

She flies out the door IN FULL HOWLING BAY!

Yes. Corgis can make a sound a lot like baying. It’s the final level before they start to scream, and this particular specimen of corgidom does scream when something gets her mad enough.

She chases into the yard in an utter frenzy, and now Cassie kicks in and she charges out there emitting her fullest-throated make-my-day! bark. They are both ready for bear, and Ruby apparently thinks the bear is in the yard.

I run barefooted into the yard behind them, thinking damn, I should’ve at least grabbed a steak knife out of the kitchen drawer. I’m unarmed and not what you’d call dressed. The only thing between me and whateveritis would be two twenty-pound shepherd dogs.

But once we rounded the corner, it became obvious that no one and nothing was in the yard. Apparently no one was in front, either, because both dogs came to call (they will not, if they’re seriously distracted) and Ruby quieted down as soon as she patrolled the side yard and found no threat.

So THAT was weird.

Back to bed. Back to sleep.

Between the waning hours of night and the waxing hours of dawn, it was my turn to have a vivid dream. Worthy of a Twilight Zone episode it was, fully plotted, set in a clearly developed scene, even filmed in color. A sort of Hieronymus Bosch color, but unimistakably not the usual dreamtime b/w.

That was even weirder. First the dog has a nightmare that persuades her something real is out there. Then I have a nightmare that persuades me I’m trapped in a 1960s television show.

It’s a great story idea, though. I may try to write it up. Very strange.

Fourth Sunday…

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There’s just one, count it (1) reason I get out of the sack at this unholy hour on a Sunday morning: the amazing music program down at the Cult HQ. Our choir director hires a passel of professional singers with whom the rest of us are privileged to sing along. This group, our “chamber choir,” also sings at least one piece unmolested by us amateurs, and the effect is awe-inspiring.

For reasons that escape my mortal comprehension, the Powers That Be have decided that once a month our entire tribe must sing at the 9 a.m. service, meaning we have to show up down there at 8 a.m. (We normally sing at a decent hour: 11:00.) I sorta hoped this would go away after they’d tried it for a year. But no. Apparently they love it! 😀

It’s not actually getting up that I could do without, because of course the dawgs are raring to go at 5 a.m., summer or winter. Well. In the summer they’re up at 4.

It’s the banging around to get dressed and get out of the house. Now that I’m old, it seems to take me an inordinately long time to get up and get going. And when you’re old, too, you’re sot in your ways and do not wish to disturb those ways once a month. Or ever.

The dogs have to be fed. When Charley the Golden Retriever is here, as he happens to be today, that project turns into a PROJECT. Two strategies can be engaged:

  1. The human locks the corgis in the back bedroom. It then prepares the corgi meals, distracts Charley briefly, grabs the food, and RUNS to the back of the house, tears into the bedroom ahead of the retriever, and slams the door behind it. Once the food is placed in front of the corgis, the human sneaks out of the bedroom, returns to the kitchen, and sets the retriever’s kibble in front of him. OR…
  2. The human prepares the corgi food, dumps a cup of kibble in the Charley bowl, locks the retriever in the backyard  with the bowl of kibble, and then sets the dishes of corgi food on the kitchen floor in something like the normal manner.

The problem with (1) is that it’s a gigantic hassle.

The problem with (2) is that Charley vacuums his food much faster than the corgis, who he believes possess BETTER food than his (he’s right about that…), and then he tries to break down the back door so as to get into the house and get their food.

As you can imagine, this is a chore I’m not in any hurry to take up. Certainly not as dawn is barely breaking.

Then of course the usual pile of e-mails has to be attended to — this morning only 50 unread messages are sitting on the server. That doesn’t count the 127 “notifications” from Twitter, the 53 from Google+, the 17 from Facebook, and the 23 automatically routed to the “trash” folder. This is not something you really want to do over morning coffee.

Cassie and Charley are having shitfits. Somebody must be prowling around out there. Apparently they’re in front: probably someone walking their dog up the front sidewalk. I’m sure my neighbor Terri is thrilled at having not one but TWO dogs barking and howling outside her windows at 7 in the morning.

Cassie just barks on general principles. She doesn’t care to go out and run around in the cold, so she stands in the kitchen and splits my ears. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to get up: she just reclines on the floor and yaps. I think she thinks it’s conversation.

When I have to wash my hair early in the morning, there’s not enough time for it to dry enough for me to set it on hot rollers. And setting my hair is the last thing I feel like doing in by the light of a sun that hasn’t cleared the horizon. So I either have to braid it, which makes me look like WT, or I have to clip it back off my face and let it cascade down my  back, which makes people wonder what I’m trying to prove.

Then I have to paint my face. I really don’t care to look in the mirror at all, and you can be damn sure I hate looking in the mirror at 6 or 6:30 in the morning! It is just too early to work up the nerve for that chore.

As usual, all the old-lady fiascos occur. None of them are things I feel like coping with the first goddamn thing in the morning.

This morning, for example, I lost my glasses. Took them off to pull a shirt over my head, put them down SOMEwhere. And then…couldn’t find them. I searched and searched and searched and hated searching and hated searching and hated searching. Believe me, THAT is a hassle I hate at any time of day, and first thing in the morning it is hated with élan.

Finally found them where I’d put them down: in a bowl I use to hold make-up.

Naturally. Who wouldn’t lay their glasses down in a make-up tray?

Well, the computer says it’s after 7:30. Gotta go find a pair of shoes (probably in the freezer, hm?), wrestle the dogs into the house, find the car keys (no doubt in the pantry), and make my way down to the church.

Halloween Hoot!

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What a great Halloween Hubbub last night!

Like other gentrifying neighborhoods, on trick-or-treat night the the ‘hood attracts families from the surrounding down-at-the-heels apartments and decrepit single-family tracts. Parents sense the area is safer for the kids, and they know the residents will hand out better candies and treats less likely to be laced with meth or razor blades. So they bring their costumed babes in by the truckload

They are SO cute!

The favorite costumes this year seem to be ninjas and (oddly) Dorothy of the Wizard of Oz. And princesses. Princesses are big. 😀

One little girl showed up in a historically perfect flapper dress, turquoise with swinging layers of fringes. It was VERY pretty and amazingly cute. Really, unless her mom made it (which would’ve taken half the year!), I can’t even imagine what the parents must have paid for it. Now if she’ll just not grow much for the next eight or ten years, she can wear it to the senior prom!

The neighbors here like to bring a table and chairs out front to greet the little spooks and fashion plates. I spent the evening across the street with the Accountants. Mr. Accountant brings out a portable firepit, the kind with a screen and lid on it, and lights up a Coleman lantern inside it. It puts out a little heat, but not enough to catch fire to any costumes.

You never SAW so many little kids in your life! They were all well-behaved, and their costumes were grand. Often the ones that were obviously home-made were the best: one little girl had on a simple sheet cut and stitched so it would flow diaphanously. It didn’t cover her head — it was more like a white, GHOSTLY floor-length tunic. It was neat.

The Accountants had made a Costco run and bought 150 candies. These ran out by 7 p.m. Since no one pays in cash anymore, we didn’t have pennies or nickels or dimes to hand out. So that kinda shut us down. Next year we’ll have to get more loot.

One nice thing about having everyone sitting out in front of their houses — besides the opportunity to socialize — is that it cuts way, WAY down on the vandalism. People are a lot less likely to smash your pumpkins, tear up your plants, or egg your cars if they think they can be seen. Plus I think it’s a lot more fun to sit outside and watch the kids frolicking around than it is to have to get up and traipse to the door every five minutes.

Halloween has gotten to be my favorite holiday. I really used to dislike it — the whole trick-or-treat meme strikes me as kind of extortionate, and I resent having to buy candy whose leftovers I’ll never eat and that I feel ethically opposed to donating to the poor. However, the idea of sitting outside to join the party changes things altogether. Instead of a nuisance, lately Halloween has become one big party.

When I was a little kid, I used to adore Halloween. My mother put the eefus on that, though. One Halloween, when I was all ready to go and amazingly excited (I was kind of an Aspergery little kid and didn’t make friends, so had a pretty isolated, boring life), my mother got mad at me for some minor thing — I don’t even remember what it was and probably didn’t understand what her problem was then. To get back at me, she announced that I would not be allowed to go trick-or-treating.

That was so upsetting that I never liked Halloween after that. I think I went out the following year, didn’t have a very good time, and then after that just stayed in my room.

So that’s probably part of the reason that as an adult I disliked having hordes of kids show up at my door demanding treats…or else.

However, now that Halloween is an old-folks’ party, it has a whole new appeal! 🙂