Hidden Highway

The Secret Trilogy, Volume Three, is officially "in progress" - entitled 'Hidden Highway', it is a tangential "sequel" to 'Secret Sidewalk', itself a tangential sequel to 'Squatter With a Lexus'. They are loosely related in two ways: each one features at least one character from the previous, and all three are about some kind of secret, but otherwise they are completely "standalone" short novels. In Hidden Highway, a charismatic cult leader has run away from his followers and is hiding as the night manager of a remote north coast motel, but can he escape his destiny? The night shift dishwasher (Roland, from Secret Sidewalk) and the maid (Josefa) hang out, and gossip, and tell the story as only they could.

Concessionary

two weeks of incessant paper-airplane making has made a dreaded turn towards origami. This development was made possible by my bright idea of offering to do something HE wants me to do WHILE he is doing his homework (what I want HIM to do). As bad as I was at making paper airplanes, at origami I'm completely helpless. I don't even know the vocabulary. Bird sinks, valleys, bombs. It's a vague new world... The things you get yourself into!

Tumbleweed Houses

more info at their website. something we're considering as a way of adding a bit more liveable space to our own already tiny house.

The Secret Trilogy, Volume Three

coming soon (perhaps) to a website near you.

Welcome to the Motel Misto. Your night manager, Mr. Sharad LeMaster, will arrange your future life for you. Somehow he just knows which guests would get along better with each other than the person they originally came in with. He can't help himself. He has a gift that he is trying very hard not to use. After all, the former cult leader has run away from home, and is hiding from his followers. They've discovered that they literally cannot live without him. No wonder he keeps trying to pry the secret of invisibility from the ghost of Beauregaard Sweet!

Reference Chart

A catalog of Bill O'Reilly's references to African-Americans, grouped by topic, from Huffington Post

Dogosphere

Walking with my dog and noticing how she stops to smell different spots, deciding which ones to mark herself, or not; it's her own little blogosphere.

Lately I've been blaming JRR Tolkein for all of the software bugs I encounter every day (in my capacity as a software test engineer) - most programmers are the kind of people who grew up reading fantasy, and think it's perfectly acceptable to have "lore" and "magic" and to make up your own languages, to create logic-defying systems, to make it up as you go along. This whole industry is based on fantasy (whose earliest adopters were porn and gambling entrepeneurs, two other fantasy-based economies). You have to dig deep into the "lore" (a.k.a. code) to discover the hidden secret meanings. For example:

"The [negative prices in the billing system] are leftover from a workaround we had to do for [Company X]. The word for "free" [in a certain foreign language] was causing the pricing string to truncate on the UI. [So-and-so] came up with the trick that we put in a negative price,
which on the UI resulted in "0", rather than "free", and got around the truncation."

The end result of that particular "workaround" is that it's okay to charge a customer a negative amount for a free product.

This is so typical of the inner workings of software. These people - who were the weirdos in high school - are the ones who end up defining what "normal" is. I suppose we're fortunate it's not all based on Edgar Allen Poe. Tolkein will have to do.

Likely Stories

Three Conspiracy Theories:

1. Mexican immigrants are plotting to return the Southwest U.S. to Mexican control (because after all they came here just because it used to be a part of Mexico)

2. Islam will take over America through the secret hidden route of Black Muslims (who have so much power in this society, you understand)

3. The Golden Gate National Recreation Area is but one of the many tentacles of the plan to turn over the U.S. to United Nations control.

Seriously.

2short

brief review of the new Manu Chao album - La Radiolina. The songs are too short. I love them all and only wish they'd gone on longer. This album benefits from "random play" more than any other album I know.

Quote of the Day

"In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country." (Ahmadenijad)

depends on what the meaning of "like" is, I guess. After all, we're America, we're Number One, and our homosexuals are the best in the world. You can't touch that!

new words of the day

blackosphere - a term regarding the world of black bloggers that is just beginning to make an impact around the Jena 6 case, as reported by plezWorld, one of the many "black blogs" I've been reading and enjoying for quite some time now. There are a lot of worlds in this world.

I want to know how come Keith Olbermann though that his own little rant about Bush and the BetrayUs ad was more important than the Jena 6 - the issue of equal protection under the law, and its absence in so many ways in so many places in this country and the world, strikes me as being extremely important, and when a significant event draws attention to this problem, it is more important than one more self-serving diatribe by little Mr Bush-hater. Yes, we know you hate Bush. I hate him too, but there was news today and you're supposed to be doing the news. End my little rant.

execusphere - the fantasy world inhabited by too many corporate executives (coined by a colleague at work)

new word of the day

when you need a new word for something, and then you finally find it, and then you forget what it was ... we need a new word for that!

Pet Peeve of the Day

Since my boy's birthday, when he was bestowed a book of 1000 paper airplane projects, I've been doing nothing but make paper airplanes. Unfortunately, I really, really suck at making paper airplanes. He doesn't seem to mind, just hands me the next sheet and says, dad, please?

However, the pet peeve comes from the instructions, which frequently say, "turn the paper anti-clockwise 180 degrees'. If I am turning 180 degrees, it doesn't matter if it's clockwise or anti-clockwise (and anyway, don't we say counter-clockwise?)

no shows

Jesse Jackson criticizes Obama for not showing up for the Jena 6 protest in Louisiana. Okay, but where are Hillary, Edwards, Giuliani, Romney? All of those people should be there!

phone home

As i approached the post office the other day, i came by someone i first assumed to be a plumber - big and wide, short-cropped hair, baggy jeans and filthy blue shirt, mud-covered boots. As I got closer I noticed my plumber was sporting a sign on his back, a three-digit number like you see in a bicycle race. Then I noticed my plumber was a woman. She was on the pay-phone, waiting for someone to answer, and then, just as I was passing by. I heard her small, high voice say into the phone, "mom? guess what? I want the calf breakdown competition!" and I realized she was from the gay rodeo being held that day at nearby driscoll ranch. She wasn't some plumber come from a dirty job. She was a champion athlete, phoning home!

invention of the day

a computer program that randomly posts insulting comments on people's blogs: a besmirch engine

Invention of the Day

My wife says there should be jigsaw puzzles without edges

Current

When you move against the tide, that's when you feel it. Otherwise you just go along. Bigger. Better. More. More. We are constantly pushed by this tide in America. Stop yourself and say 'no, small's ok' - no one will agree. We live in a very tiny house. Everyone says, 'buy a bigger house'. No one says, 'just be thankful for what you've got'.

Face Time is Huge

reminded recently of an email from a prospective date who listed all of the things she didn't like in a guy, then asked me what my "showstoppers" were. My first thought was, people who use the word "showstoppers" in their personal life.

In my recent novel, 'Secret Sidewalk', Sharad LeMaster is a minor cult leader with charisma but without a purpose, whose group falls apart when his compound (a trailer park he'd romanced out of a decrepit former starlet) is condemned by the EPA as a toxic waste site, courtesy of a U.S. Navy shipyard that used to occupy the premises.

In a possible sequel, some of his former followers track him down, chasing a trail of clues which eventually lead them to his current life as the head of security for a failing inner city department store.

Can they force him, against his will, to be their cult leader once again? It's what happens to leaders - sometimes they become enslaved by the powers they possess.

Unbash

Everyone's bashing Britney but having just watched the video (MTV awards), to me it's just the same crap that's been passing for music and performances for years now. Same old shit. It's all bad.

What I Learned Today From RightWing Talk Radio

According to Melanie Morgan, on KSFO San Francisco:

1. We are winning the war in Iraq
2. We are already at war with Iran
3. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was responsible for 9/11
4. Liberals are insane
5. Our enemy is evil
6. We are good
7. Except for our liberals, who are insane, and are also the enemy
8. Given more time, we will win the war in Iraq, which we are already winning, except for the fact that our insane liberals want us to lose, and are making us lose, even though we are winning and they hate our troops, who are good
9. We should nuke Iran before they nuke us, even though they have no nukes and we are the only nation which has ever used nuclear weapons ...
10. We are good

A Disease by any other name ...

.. is not treated as the same. Example. You have had the flu, so you know what it's like; fever, headaches, body aches all over, such fatigue you feel you can barely move, brain working slowly and incorrectly, feeling low, blue, et cetera. Now take away one symptom - the fever - and add the fact that you don't get better after a day or two, but have all the other symptoms day after day, year after year, with no end in sight, and no available treatments, and you have CFS - Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a disease often laughed at and maybe just because of the word 'fatigue'. Call it Constant Flu Syndrome and maybe people would think of it differently. What? It's like you have the flu, but forever? Woah.

When I had it (1984-1997), it certainly seemed like forever. Thirteen years of the flu everyday.

Information

There is a new Bin Laden video and I cannot find a complete transcript anywhere. I can find Jay Leno's jokes about it. I can find snippets of it here and there. I can find people claiming he's in X or Y or Z little town in Pakistan. But I've looked at newspapers from all over the world and cannot find either the complete video or a complete transcript.

We have "freedom of the press" but sometimes we just can't get the information.

Naw Give Up

I was about to give up reading 'The Savage Detectives' by Roberto Bolano, because it starts out to be a lot of twenty-somethings writing poetry and fucking. I mean, that's fine if you're one of them, but reading about it is tiresome. So I skipped ahead and saw that this part of the book soon comes to an end, and it moves on to other characters, so I'll keep reading. Every now and then he has something arresting to say, such as : "Novels are basically heterosexual, and poetry is homosexual".

I don't believe it, but it definitely gets your attention

Making A Cut

A mild success ... my screenplay made it past the first round of cuts at an international film festival - one of a hundred out of more than thirteen hundred submitted. I'll be happy with that. I continue to come back to it, make little adjustments here and there. It's the only thing I've ever written that I was both dissatisfied with AND willing to work on some more - usually if I don't like it, I just leave it. I think the problem is I tried to compromise too much. It's not strange enough for me. I still want to make it more extreme, to set up a contrast between really crazy stuff happening all around this guy, and yet he's still mostly concerned with his little mundane "quality of life". The world is literally coming to an end, and he's fussing about clutter in the living room. He's kidnapped his little sister into the future, and he pesters her about the music she plays. The elements are all there, but it still needs some whittling away ... or maybe it will never be exactly what I want it to be.

yesterday i added something i call "mechanical rain" - in his great 'Ubik', Philip K. Dick has objects 'devolving' into their earlier forms. With mechanical rain, I have objects randomly traveling about in time, being hurtled from one era to another, where they cannot logically exist (not having been invented yet), and so they degrade into something more suitable for their destination era. For example, transistor radios turn into lace and ribbons on transition. More could be done with this ...

Grandfather

A friend of my son's, a 7-year old, is quite good at baseball, and it is important to him that his grandfather, who died of cancer, knows that he is a good baseball player. He knows this, because he is looking down at him from heaven.

My question is, why stop with the grandfather? Now, I know that the grandfather was a good baseball player himself, who would have made the majors if for injury, but wouldn't the great-grandfather be equally as proud, and just as interested? And why stop there? Why not the great-great-grandfather too?

I just wonder about the cutoff point, and the idea that in the afterlife people are hanging around watching us mortals like a TV show - and a naughty one at that. Can you imagine what your Puritan ancestors would say if they saw some of your goings on these days? And of course, the devout predecessors of every stripe. Scandalous.

Now I know it's a comfort to a lot of people, and another word for "belief" is "irrational", as much as my belief that I will make it through tomorrow without a bad thing happening, although bad things happen every day (like the fact that I just smashed a guy's car door in while I was pulling out of the parking lot at work - ouch). Still, there's got to be a limit somewhere.

Lunaria

by Jim Reswick

(and now the cover of the paperback version of 'Golden')

Hopeless Enterprises, Ltd.

Name of the public company of eight children engaged in building a "dam" across Gazos Creek, only a few feet from the Pacific Ocean, this afternoon.

Stockpile

Wondering if our neighbors who are stockpiling an immense amount of firewood will get a visit from the ATF - Beareau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firewood!