Anyway, it was nice while it lasted until President Bush screwed it all up.
"It looks like I'm going to have a lot of work to do between today and when the new president takes office," President George W. Bush said.
Why? Is there anything left standing that you haven't destroyed, sullied, tarnished or bankrupted?
Seriously, everything is going to be all right because at least my legacy is set.
]]>The Italian town of Marino, according to a BBC report, traditionally celebrates the harvest by disconnecting the water main to the fountain in the central square and running sparkling white wine through it. The fountain literally gushes champagne and every one can take a cup or glass and have a sip.
Except that this year, the town employees disconnected the wrong water main and surprised residents around the square turned on their house taps to find they had hot and cold running champagne. Sounds like those workers hit the champagne supply a bit before they got to work that day.
What a place! I'm moving.
However, having said that, I never really expected my daughter to sit up in the tent last weekend and, well, you know, puke. This was taking letting it all out a bit too far.
But that's what happened on the weekend camping trip to Patapsco State Park which is just outside Baltimore and with parts of it actually in Baltimore.
We were all sleeping soundly when about four in the morning I awoke to wretching noises. My poor daughter was in some distress and looking a bit sheepish and by the time the fog of sleep had cleared, it was pretty much all over.
"Why did you do that?"
"I don't know."
]]>I suppose I do this sort of thing to build up my meager knowledge of science since before Crichton got famous, most everything I knew about physics and the cosmos came from watching the original Star Trek series. In any case, Crichton talks a lot about Chaos Theory which, at least as it comes across in the Jurassic Park, can be boiled down to the idea it is a hubristic notion that humans can understand extraordinarily complex systems. Which isn't to say we will never get to the bottom of them, but rather that at the moment, we have about as much chance of doing this as cave men did of building a World Trade Center.
Meanwhile, our country's financial system seems to be, in the coded parlance of the upper crust leadership, under some stress. Or in the earthier words of our erstwhile national leader, who is a whiz at being simplistic,"that sucker is going down." Whether he meant Wall Street, his legacy, or both is unclear.
]]>And, apparently, ignoring it is now biting American writers right on the ass too.
Yep, Horace Engdahl, the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, the doyens that anoint winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature has announced that there is no point in giving an American writer the Nobel prize because American literature is too insular and ignorant.
"Of course there is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the center of the literary world ... not the United States," he told the AP. "The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining."
Paul Newman died today and took a bit of the country's spirit with him.
And that's progress, I suppose.
I'll probably finish the rest of the revisions this coming week which will leave me with something that is more than a rough draft, but not a finished draft which is when critiques are useful. If you wait to hand stuff off to readers when it is line edited, it's seems to be a waste of time if they offer some good point that leads to a revision.
On the other hand, having been through this once before, handing out a rough draft is a waste of time or worse. Readers lack clairvoyance and don't know what parts of the rough draft are going to be scorched and what parts they really ought to pay attention to.
After 15 months, a working draft emerges. It may not be pretty to watch, but by December it will have grown up into a finished draft.
]]>For the latest on this sort of thing, here's the link for a densely written and long article from New York Magazine.
At this point, I'm not sure what to make of all this sort of stuff. Maybe it's more accurate to say that the super behemoth's like Random House are having a fair amount of problems. Maybe books, unlike automobiles, don't easily conform to the assembly line approach which holds that if you increase inputs, you increase outputs.
Or maybe if you're going to pay mega-millions to a bunch of CEO's and lesser second echelon executives, then you've got to have blockbuster after blockbuster to support the dead wood at the top and the book world just isn't that predictable. Certainly the guys that have been giving Salman Rushdie mega-million advances just to see his stuff tank will agree that things aren't predictable.
Here's some worm's eye views on books:
Every time I go to my local library, it's hard to find a parking place in the large parking lot. It doesn't matter what day or what time, the place is always busy.
I've never gone into a Borders or Barnes and Noble and found them empty either.
(PS: I've also just remembered that either Borders or Barnes & Noble are supposed to go bankrupt shortly. I guess the smart money is on Borders going under, according to a friend who works in B&N.)
Everyone I know reads books regularly. May not be my type of book, but they are reading something. Sure, I have met people who don't read much. They generally don't believe in the written word and figure it is the work of Satan or something. But I don't take much time to get to know them. The world takes all types, including them. Always has, always will.
Schools are hot on promoting reading. Might not take with all the kids, but it's nonsense to say there is a generation coming that doesn't know how to operate a book.
We have a vice presidential candidate who has chosen some, well, unique names for her children and thus condemned them to a life of mindless ridicule so they will always have something to remember good old mom by.
Let's face it, "Track," "Twig," "Bristol," "Willow," and "Trig" aren't exactly Tom, Dick and Harry. I'm especially intrigued by the fact she has both a Twig and a Trig in same litter. It's probably a good thing Sarah Palin is a teetotaler or otherwise, there'd be no end of confusion on Saturday night when she gives the boys down at the Yee-Haw Saloon an update on family news.
But all this does leave a question. If Sarah Palin were my mother, what would she have named me. Luckily, a website called the Sarah Palin Name Generator has the answer.
Yep, plug in your actual name and see what happens. In my case, I would currently be Quarter Granite Palin, according to the web wizard which is, I suppose, better than Quarter Pounder Palin. My wife would be Claw Washout Palin.
Needless to say, we're both filling out the forms and changing our status ASAP 'cause we like to fit in. Future mail should be addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Quarter Claw. Or Granite Washout. Or... you get the idea.