Offsite Comments

BTW, I just read "Blue Lives Matter, Baltimore Style" by Weirddave

Thanks, Weirddave.

Is it That Time already?

Guess so.

Good evening, crowd of crazies.

Christopher Taylor: ...word of mouth and reviews are what drives book sales and authors need them, badly.

I'm a non-entity who self-publishes all my articles, stories, comics, videos only on my own website. Twenty year anniversary coming up next month.

My publisher (myself) is useless at promotion - the occasional self-mention on some friendly website - meaning here, one or two other places - if there's a "hook" I can hang something on. But I don't like to clutter up nice places with self-horn-tootin'. Wouldn't know where to advertise if I even had a budget for it!

Once in a long while I'll get a comment back on the site I've mentioned something, but while I have comments open on most pages, I practically never get any. Lots and lots of spam, though!

A couple of morons and others have linked to my website in their blogrolls. One more in a crowd. Don't know that I get any traffic from any of those.

Admittedly, my site is a weird, cluttered mixed bag of stuff. I got one review a long time ago: "Please don't take it personally, but your site kinda sucks." -logprof

I treasure that.

A few times, a political video webwork has been picked up on, like, Moonbattery, and I'll get a big, sudden, but brief spike in YouTube hits, but it doesn't spill over into the website or hits on other videos.

I have PayPal donation buttons everywhere - I think they work....

Good thing I just do it all for love of doing, not a career.

Not complaining, or bragging, just saying. And I don't really know why I'm mentioning all this. But I did.

Off to help watch Milady get brunch together. Have a day, and keep on readin' ... at least "until you need glasses."

ThunderB: among the critically wounded is a 14 year old girl...

Saw a comment said she died.

Bruce w/aW!: Uber driver, 45, arrested after 'killing six people including an eight-year-old child during random shooting spree from his cab while he picked up fares in Michigan'

That kind of thing is sure to downgrade your Uber reviews....

Sugar Plum Fairy: Tutued people can still read!

I have a vision of the book thread, where all the partici-pants, not accustomed to wearing pants, are standing around the bookshelves, sitting around the reading tables, in an odd mix of attire -- parachute pants, pajama bottoms, suit pants while otherwise casually outfitted, ragged blue jeans, coveralls, capri pants, those short pants the Founding Fathers wore (what were they called? breeches?), pantaloons, riding pants, yoga pants, tights, those puffy short things worn on the outside like superhero costumes back in Shakespear's day... and tutus...

BTW, the poster I linked to earlier, No One Predicts the Future, was one page out of a month-long series I did as part of my Daily Doodles series (which lasted a year).

Not exactly a book, but with our host's indulgence...

Transport Future - Getting from here to there - is the result of a lifelong interest in transport systems in general, and my past flirtations with - and later disenchantment with - ideas about automated and mass transport.

The Doodles series was, generally, packed into one-panel cartoons, and so some of the pages are kind-of cramped. I meant to, started to, re-format Transport Future into a somewhat more readable form, but there's a lot there and I didn't get very far... yet. Sommmeday...

So, you can read the series as-was, starting at the link below. Looking back, I'd say it took a few days to get its pace, but I think it's some of my better work, which may not be saying much - still seems interesting and funny to me. Maybe will to you, too.

http://bit.ly/here2there-01

Free to read. No ads or popups or scurrilous scripts. But there's a PayPal button on every page which theoretically works, should you feel inclined to contribute to ye creator.

@votermom: Wow.
So is Go Set A Watchman pro small govt?

Now, see, here's a problem quoting a book Milady read and I didn't. She should answer that one.

Although I see others have chimed in.

Milady says, "Somewhat (pro small gov) but mostly about the main character - who I assume is somewhat autobiographical but I don't know - finding her own voice and opinions instead of her father's."

OregonMuse: Compare Donahue's style with the sound-bite shouting that goes on today...

Although Mark Levin is wont to shout down and over some of his dumber callers, he has that respectful interviewer's attitude toward his guests. Heard Dr. Carson on there not long ago, and was glad he was given his chance to speak. You could hear Levin start to say something, get half a syllable out before realizing Carson was still talking, and shut up and let Carson run.

I wish Carson's attitude toward, say, Cruz, was as calm and erudite as he seems discussing issues on Levin.

Max Rockatansky: What's just as interesting to me is what these experts didn't predict. How about a communication system of 149 characters for angry shallow people?

Ah, yes. Thanks for reminding me about / giving me a hook for this poster webwork I did back in June 2013..

No One Expects the Future
http://bit.ly/no-one-expects-the-future

Milady read aloud to me the following from "Go Set a Watchman." I thought I'd pass it along for reasons that the quote should make obvious -- sorry if it's overlong for a comment.

«

Dr. Finch got up and poured more coffee. Jean Louise watched him. Good Lord, she thought, my own grandfather fought in it. His and Atticus's daddy. He was only a child. He saw the corpses stacked and watched the blood run in little streams down Shiloh's hill....

"Now then, Scout," said her uncle. "Now, at this very minute, a political philosophy foreign to it is being pressed on the South, and the South's not ready for it - we're finding ourselves in the same deep waters. As sure as time, history is repeating itself, and as sure as man is man, history is the last place he'll look for his lessons. I hope to God it'll be a comparatively bloodless Reconstruction this time."

"I don't understand."

"Look at the rest of the country. It's long since gone by the South in its thinking. The time-honored, common-law concept of property - a man's interest in and duties to that property - has become almost extinct. People's attitudes toward the duties of a government have changed. The have-nots have risen and have demanded and received their due - sometimes more than their due. The haves are restricted from getting more. You are protected from the winter winds of old age, not by yourself voluntarily, but by a government that says we do not trust you to provide for yourself, therefore we will make you save. All kinds of strange little things like that have become part and parcel this country's government. America's a brave new Atomic world. And the South's just beginning its Industrial Revolution. Have you looked around you in the past seven or eight years and seen a new class of people down here?"

"New class?"

"Good grief, child. Where are your tenant farmers? In factories. Where are your field hands? Same place. Have you ever noticed who are in those little white houses on the other side of town? Maycomb's new class. The same boys and girls who went to school with you and grew up on tiny farms. Your own generation."

Dr. Finch pulled his nose. "Those people are the apples of the Federal Government's eye. It lends them money to build their houses, it gives them a free education for serving in its armies, it provides for their old age and assures them of several weeks' support if they lose their jobs - "

"Uncle Jack, you are a cynical old man."

"Cynical, hell. I'm a healthy old man with a constitutional mistrust of paternalism and government in large doses. Your father's the same - "

"If you tell me that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely I will throw this coffee at you."

"The only thing I'm afraid of about this country is that its government will someday become so monstrous that the smallest person in it will be trampled underfoot, and then it wouldn't be worth living in. The only thing in America that is still unique in this tired world is that a man can go as far as his brains will take him or he can go to hell if he wants to, but it won't be that way much longer."

»

FenelonSpoke: ...popping in with prayer requests for the prayers before I go church....

I foresee another regular AoS weekend thread topic. FenelonSpoke's Sunday Worship Service... believers and non-believers alike invited.

(Pets? Food? Gardening? Books? What has happened to Ace's schmardt militarious and pollitickle blog?)

Didn't get a lot of book reading done this week, but I continue to enjoy Washington Irving's Sketch Book.

The short, stand-alone articles are like reading blog posts, so I can pick it up, read a "sketch," and be done, as opposed to plowing through some novel. Fits my reading schedule lately.

Especially recommended to book threaders, readers and book-lovers, yes, but especially writers, is "The Art of Book-Making" (1819) - which has neither to do with the creation (printing) of volumes, nor the modern usage as of gambling, but with the art of writing, at least as Irving discovered it going on in the great library of the British Museum. Most amusing.

...I found that these mysterious personages, whom I had mistaken for magi, were principally authors, and were in the very act of manufacturing books....

Found a copy online here (scroll down a ways):
http://bit.ly/irving-book-making

...no fair trying to sneak by with tutus...

Oooh, O'Muse, you'll probably hear from the Sugar Plum Fairy about that one!

I actually got a "robot butler" as a gift, back in the 1980s... a remote-control platform about the size of a Roomba, with a balloon "butler" body. Came with a "tuxedo" t-shirt and a tray with two plastic cups that velcro'd to the tray stuck to the stumpy balloon "arms." Yeah, we tried using it to serve something approximately once. Wobble wobble wobble splish splash. Rosie Jetson it weren't. I might still have the t-shirt somewhere...

...managed to finagle the keys to the blog from ace.

So, "finagle" - that's what they're calling picking the pockets of a sleeping drunk these days?

I just got up, powered up the 'puter, loaded AoS, saw that there was the book thread already, and I thought, oh, shoot, how far behind am I already?

One comment. (Hi, Skip.)

Well, missed the morning thread, yeah, but, one comment? Not so far behind.

G'mornin', bookish ones.

My cup is drained
My day is done
I'm up too late
But we had fun
Good night
Good night
to everyone.

♥

The reactions of a changeless God, in the execution of his eternal purpose, may seem to vary in accordance with the changing attitude and the shifting minds of his created intelligences; that is, they may apparently and superficially vary; but underneath the surface and beneath all outward manifestations, there is still present the changeless purpose, the everlasting plan, of the eternal God.

Hank: Banana peels, nutmeg, sunflower seeds, none of that stuff worked....

You forgot duct tape.

Reminds me. Long time ago when the earth was barely formed, a friend said he knew a chemistry student at the university who could make some MDA. Dimethyltryptamine, maan! It's got "trip" right there in the name!

I never cared for chemicals, but what the hey, I was young and extra stupid that week. One long road trip and a few dollars later, we got back, and following instructions added it to some weed in a joint and lit up.

Puke! Nausea! Headache! Ruined weed!

I tried to get my friend to take the barely-smoked j home with him, but he insisted on leaving it with me.

For years, it was a running joke, he'd come by, and I'd offer him that ol' j. Noooo, thanks. Didn't matter how much we might want a hit of something, how empty the stash box, we would not touch that. I think he brought his brother by one time, and he tried it. Hilarity ensued.

Eventually, in a phit of purity, it got thrown out. Might still be burning a hole in some landfill somewhere.

Come to think of it, what the chem kid made for us was diethyl, not dimethyl. Stunk in any case.

...You know what worked? I'll tell ya what worked. A four-finger bag of Mexican ditch weed for $10. That worked.

Ain't it the truth? Or, well, used to be.

Kalamazoo killer was top o' the Fox radio news on the drive home. How long 'til we find out if it was Muhuumud, Roy-Bob on meth, Black Lice Matters, or like the Texan random road killing in Oklahoma several weeks back, just a good ol' boy on booze?

Pray for Kalamazoo

For some reason, I can't get Twitter vids to run. That was a vid, right?

I think I gathered the gist from subsequent comments, so the vid isn't vital, right?