Side note on Author Beware: Humor writer James Lileks revealed a couple of days ago that his agent— the same one he's trusted for his last eight books— has been stealing the royalties from his latest book. He's trying for a resolution but once he reveals the name I'll pass it along for you Minneapolis-area folks.
Really, that's low.
David Harmon: I'm a horrible correspondent. :D
Two notes: I've flown several times in the last decade, and it seems to me that the smaller the airport, the better and more intelligent the security. Plus the ones at the small airports make jokes about confiscating the home-baked cookies you have in your carry-on.
Second note: Before September 11th, Evil Rob would slap his lockblade knife into the key basket at screening, they'd look at it, and wave him through. (He was a warehouse guy for many years and found a lockblade much easier to cope with for opening boxes.)
Anyway, I prefer the "pack not a herd" theory of flying, which is basically to say that passengers who have an eye to their own safety can be far more effective than idiotic screening processes, as shown by cases in recent years where passengers have restrained other passengers who have gone berserk on flights.
Potato-leek soup
Slice up one medium leek and cook in butter. (If you bring the butter to room temperature before melting it and cook over low heat, you won't burn it.) Once you've softened the leek, cube a buncha potatoes and throw them in the pot. Add some salt and cover with enough chicken or vegetable stock to cover + an inch. Simmer for about 45 minutes, partially covered, until the potatoes start to fall apart. Blend with milk, salt & white pepper to taste (you can use black pepper but white's prettier.) Be careful blending as you'll have to do it in stages and if it's too thick you can break your blender. (That's what immersion blenders are for, silly girl.)
Evil Rob likes to add Tabasco.
It keeps for a couple of days but you have to be careful microwaving as the heat tends to concentrate on the outside.
Any time I want to transfer from a text editor to a word publisher I just do a select all, copy, and paste. Anything other than that is beyond me.
I work in a text editor because Microsoft Word annoys the crap out of me. To give you an example, I copy-edited a friend's text about a year ago and when fixing markup errors (tab instead of paragraph indent, too many spaces) the stupid program would, more often than not, screw up the formatting for multiple paragraphs rather than just fix the original error. In my notes to the author, I mentioned the value of typing in a text editor.
It was also obvious she'd learned to type and type well in the days of typewriters. Not only were there two spaces after every period (not graphically attractive in these days of variable-width font faces), but there were a number of other issues that came from muscle memory.
Lee @ 203: When all else fails, try clear nail polish. I had a friend whose skin was irritated by metals and she found it the best solution. (You might try sanding the roughest spots first.)
Tangential comment: I just got a link to a short article by NY Times bestselling author Lynn Viehl, in which she discusses her actual revenue stream from one bestseller. It doesn't come to much.
However, you can bet that stream is still bigger than it would be for vanity press books. Most booksellers won't accept vanity press books* because of the inability to make returns.
*The one major exception is books on local history. FWIW.
Harlequin authors, you have my sympathy. I hope your future looks better than the present does.
Caroline: The worst burnout I ever got was for college application essays*, because almost all of them are variants on a theme and, to put it bluntly, trying to make your life sound purposeful and interesting when you're seventeen can be quite a stretch.
To make matters worse, I was the first finalist my (tiny) high school had for National Merit for many years, and the principal offered to have the secretary type up my essay onto the form (as opposed to hand-writing it or gluing a dot-matrix printout to it.) She didn't like the first one. She didn't like the second one. I don't remember how many versions I turned in, but I finally took an entirely different track and handed it to her. She didn't like that one either, but I looked at her and said, "Use it." The kicker was how she told the story, because she thought it would never fly.
Of course, she told this story at the senior awards gathering and made me stand next to her the entire time. I look so very much like a tall girl trying desperately to sink into the floor in the photo...
*Later on, in college, I did one stint of reading the damned things. My advice to high school seniors is to have fun with the essay because it really shows through, and your average five-paragraph standard essay get really tiresome halfway through the first half of the first one of forty-six.
Tim Hall @ 34:
I am no longer surprised to see articles along these lines after my stint at my college paper. Aside from the annual article deriding the Honors program (which one of the article writers rather hilariously tried to mine me for ammunition) and the horrendous navel-gazing of the editorial page (which had a brief moment of glory when the student from Zimbabwe took over and actually focused on thoughtful analysis of international news), we had articles such as the one where a student hated how people "dressed up" for class (as in, not wearing torn jeans or sweats) or the one where the girl complained that other students were trying to make her feel dumb. (Oh honey, you don't need anyone's help for that.)
Mind you, this was a private college with a high standard of admission.
Recently, I came across a citation where the paper, during my years of residence, received excellence awards. This frightens me.
SylvieG, everyone copes in a different way, but I will suggest that if you start feeling depressed, make yourself go to a museum or play in your town that you've been meaning to go to but have never gotten around to. (I had to drag my mom out the day she lost her Favorite Cat because I'm someone who copes easily but she is not. Sometimes distraction helps.)
One thing I noticed is that I can avert SAD by a regular schedule of walks. Obviously this is much harder in a colder clime, but I tried very hard last winter to make it out at least once a day. (I mostly got SAD in college; not only was I at a higher latitude but class schedules often meant the morning was dark, the evening was dark, and the rest of the day I was indoors.)
I once read an inversion of Frankenstein where you get to the scene "It's alive!" and then the creature starts bawling like an infant. In that story, the scientist ends up raising the monster, having a really hard time with kindergarten and the like, through college, the monster's professorship, and his marriage (to a blind woman) and children.
At one point, he goes to a convention and overhears somebody saying, "I wondered what happened to him." At that point he's grown up enough that it doesn't bother him.
Not a deep story, but I've always been glad it existed.
About 45-60 kids here; one of the neighbors had an informal outdoor party so most of the houses had signs saying "Down the Street" and they had a table of one-stop trick-or-treating. I'd decorated up our place something fine so I still had people go over.
Only one group of teenagers who didn't try on the costumes; the rest of the taller T-o-Ters actually dressed up. I figure that the Halloween compact is that if you come to my door in costume and want candy, I'll give it to you... but the older you get, the more you have to try.
Oh, and we had An Incident... a guy in a full-head mask and black leather jacket walked down the street, stopped, stared a bit, walked on, stopped, stared, tilted his head, and walked on... he never said a word and his hands were in his pockets, so you couldn't even see his skin tone. All of my neighbors were totally creeped out. I thought it was hysterical. But then again, I'm a Theater Person, so I get it.
If I had a haunted house, I'd hire that guy in an instant.
As promised, pictures:
Carved pumpkins the first (and I really, really needed a grapefruit spoon).
Gareth's costume.
Just carved the big pumpkin, and the mini pumpkin it's eating. Boy, those mini ghost pumpkin guts are slimy. Little man is ready to tromp around the neighborhood, and I'm ready to carry his haul.
Pics tomorrow.
@Clifton: It is Kaiser. Based out of Oakland, and I know they've got some presence in Colorado as well. I gather that the reason a lot of people don't like Kaiser is the aforementioned shuttling around and the fact that they stick to "proven" treatments, which sucks if you get something that they're still doing treatment trials for.
@Jenny: Three time zones away? I'm really hoping at this point that "Islander" refers to Hawai'i, because otherwise it seems ludicrous that treatment is only available on the far coast. And the 18 week deadline is also ludicrous. Diseases don't just disappear on command.
Keep us updated.
Linkmeister @ 251: Heh. Getting my laws screwed up. It was from memory, though, so I'm surprised I spelled it correctly.
Treasure Island is a created island, dredged up for a World's Fair. It's so called because the fill has gold in it, washed down from the Sierras. Not in any amount worth recovering, but it's there.
On health insurance in general, ours is integrated with the doctors. The doctors receive a salary, and the insurance is processed in-building. One of the "downsides" is that you can have multiple doctors for the same thing (such as pregnancy); I really don't see the issue as they keep good records, and you don't have to see somebody you don't like. The major upside is that if a doctor prescribes a treatment, it's covered. No paperwork hassles or denials of coverage after the fact.
I really don't get why this style of healthcare isn't more common. Some people really hate it, but I've been in it for most of my life and have never had an issue.
albatross: The first (non-political) thing that spring to mind is the housing bubble. Waaaaay back in 2005, I was looking around at housing prices, then looking at traditional affordability standards, and thinking, "I'm missing something." A few searches turned up things like The Housing Bubble Blog, which laid out why we were in a bubble, how to tell it WAS a bubble, and so forth. (The reasons go back thirty years, actually, with every few years adding a new thing. The repeal of Sarbannes-Oxley— a law which kept traditional banks and investment banks separate— in 1996 or thereabout was the tipping point.)
At any rate, one of the continuing themes on The Housing Bubble Blog is the framing of housing stories. During the bubble, every article on housing prices would include quotes from a Realtorâ„¢ saying how housing only ever went up, "we've reached a permanently high plateau," and so forth. During the first slide, it was "Nobody saw this coming" (a blatant lie, as multiple financial experts explained in great detail what was going to happen and were scorned), and "We've reached the bottom." During the last decade, it's been "a great time to buy" (regardless of price or whatnot.)
Another thing that has been happening of late is the sob story of the person losing their home to foreclosure. The reason these are "frames" is because the reporter never seems to ask how the people involved got into the hole, when just a little digging on public records usually turns up a major refinance or a new mortgage taken out on a paid-off property. Not to take the sleazy loan sellers off the hook, but a little due diligence would be able to find the people who deserve sympathy, rather than the ones who are mentioned as driving their new cars with their new boats and "oh, why are we losing this property?"
Part of it was willful blindness, sure. But part of that is sheer laziness. As a private citizen with no more than a hunch and an internet connection, I was able to determine that the crazy-high house prices were, in fact, crazy, and would come down. With consequences. But only now are reporters seeming to wake up to the fact of the bubble and its effect on the economy.
I think the scariest part is that the timeline, recession and all, was laid out on the site back in 2006, just from a knowledge of history and human nature. Well, and ARM resets. They'll be off on that last wave because ARMs automatically adjust when the loan-to-value ratio dips below a certain point, so we won't have to wait until 2012 for the last shoe to drop. It may have dropped already.
"the MSM seemed to me to be functioning more like a propoganda organ for the consensus view among the powerful than as any kind of independent voice."
Um... yes?
I'm sorry, I've spent so many years knowing a basic truth (that the members of the MSM are, in large part, lazy) that it surprises me when anyone is surprised to find out that the media aren't, well, reporting.
You'll see it at the journalism class level. Person gets assigned story, decides how he will frame it, then goes out and gets the info he needs to write/show it. It's the same technique lazy students have been using on essays for years. It's very rare that you'll see somebody challenge their basic assumptions or work out of their comfort zone.
A good example of somebody who is actually doing reporting is Michael Totten. He's a private citizen who decided years ago, Hey, I wonder what's really going on in Iraq, got together some funds, and went over to find out. He's been over several times and the thing that impresses me with his articles is that he doesn't seem to have a frame that he's shoving his stories into; instead he seems to base each article on what he's actually seen.
Contrast that with the tale of anyone who's been featured on the news and who has said, afterwards, "But it isn't like that at all..." After a while, you just get the sense that the MSM is just a lazy bunch of folks with a worldview that they never think to challenge.*
*Anyone notice the ads for "Planet 51" lately? And notice how the astronaut is white and blond? Wanna bet they never even considered making him otherwise?
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