The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Mark Orr:

Pardon the slight deviation into levity, but has anyone else noticed that all our presidents with one syllable surnames were, to say the least, something less than spectacular successes? Polk, whose imperialistic adventuring obtained California for us, a mixed blessing indeed. Pierce, who sat back and pretty much did nothing while the unravelling of the national fabric accellerated. Taft, whom we have to thank for the income tax and trickle-down economics (almost as big an oxymoron as compassionate conservatism), and who then went on to a career as the worst lead singer for the Supremes until Rehnquist. Ford, whose administration was a Godsend for manufacturers of WIN buttons and swine flu vaccine and no one else. Bush and Shrub, who've individually and collectively insured that their rich buddies have more than enough liquid assets to patronize a variety of offshore banking establishments, thus relieving the American economy of the burden of sufficient money for those who somehow neglected to attend Ivy League universities.

On the other hand, the best presidents, or at least the ones notable enough to get their faces inscribed on money, monuments and mountainsides, all have at least two syllable surnames. Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, a pair of Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Kennedy. I personally think some of these gents were overrated, but you can't argue with the mint or Mt. Rushmore.

Of the twelve 20th Century to present Republican presidents, (McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Shrub) four had one syllable surnames, five had two syllable surnames, two had three and one had four. Of the seven 20th Century Democrat presidents (Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton), none had a one syllable surname, five had two, two had three. The Republican average comes to exactly two syllables per surname. The Democrat average is nearly 2.3 syllables per surname. The superiority of the Democrats is, therefore, obvious, and with Dean and Clark out of the current race, is likely to continue.

Now I just wish I'd voted for Kucinich in the primary.

Allow me to second Epacris' endorsement of Tuchmann's MARCH OF FOLLY. A great book, indeed.

IIRC, the first American casuality in Vietnam was an advisor kiled in 1959, during the Eisenhower administration.

Incidentally, I've always thought the coup that displaced Diem was the result of a misunderstanding. I suspect that at some point Kennedy quoted the phrase, "Carpe Diem", which CIA director Allan Dulles misinterpreted as meaning that Diem should sleep with the fishes. And on such flukes doth history turn.

Glad I'm not the only one who thinks Buchanan was our worst pre-Bush president.

"Worst president in history? I didn't think anyone could beat Grant as worst president. No longer. "

As bad as Grant was, I rank Buchanan worse, as well as Fillmore, Arthur and Pierce. Bush has 'em all beat, singly or in combination. Even Harding had more positives than Bush does.

"We did not invade North Korea. North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, and the UN security council voted to repel this attack. The United States did not fight alone, but was part of a UN-based armed force to repel this invasion. "

Actually, we did, but they invaded first. After the North Koreans kicked us all the way to the tip of the peninsula, MacArthur did an end run at Inchon and pretty much had the war won. Then he got all full of himself and exceeded his orders by pursuing the North Koreans to the Yalu River, which brought China into the war, which is why Truman gave him the sack. All told, 14 nations of the UN participated on our side in achieving the war aim, which was the restoration of the Status Quo Ante-Bellum. Instead of obtaining this goal by 1951, MacArthur's adventurism prolonged it by two years and cost about 40,000 more UN lives than it should have. MacArthur, BTW, was a Republican.

"JFK did not start the Vietnamese conflict in 1962. The French tried to maintain control of Indochina following World War II, including Vietnam, but ended up having their butts kicked and having to cede North Vietnam as a separate, communist country in the 1950's. We had already started sending support at that time -- to the French, to help them in their fight. Those imperialist dogs (up freedom fries). "

We supported France in maintaining their colonies because they blackmailed us into it by threatening to let the Commies take over in France if they didn't get their way. Yes, that is an over-simplification, but there's a kernel of truth in it.

The tragedy is that Ho Chi Minh repeatedly tried to get our help in his nationalistic revolution. He only got the Communists to help him after Woodrow Wilson (my own least favorite Democrat president) refused to even see him at the Versailles Peace Treaty meetings. The American OSS trained the Viet Minh to fight the Japanese in WWII, and at the end of the war Ho modelled the Vietnamese independence movement on our own, including invoking our Declaration of Independence and flying the American Flag alongside the Vietnamese flag. Alas, his dalliance with the Comintern doomed him. Rabid anti-communism wouldn't let us cuddle up to Ho, and forced us to back the losing horse. Then, after the French gave it up as a lost cause in 1954, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, mucked things up at Geneva when he interfered with the negotiations for nation wide elections in Viet Nam. As was not unusual, every move we made in that country made things worse, despite Ho's friendly intentions towards us.

Again and again, Ho reached out to us and we spat in his hand. After the Apollo One fire, he sent a letter of condolence to LBJ. We should always be so lucky in our enemies. Ho was no saint, but he deserved better than he got from multiple American presidents of both parties.

Catie hath scrivened,

"I don't know how a house would burn through its slush (or even its solicited manuscripts) faster without accruing significantly more cost, but if there was a way, we'd all love you forever."

Hmmmm, there's an idea, burning....

Alas, as Futures takes only electronic submissions, that wouldn't work. Not that I'd ever seriously consider convening a convenient conflagration. ;{)

I'd like to add, lest the above and my previous post lead folks to believe I am terminally curmugeonly, that generally speaking the submissions I receive are in serious violation of Sturgeon's Law, falling well short of the requisite 90% crapola level. This is of course my own biased opinion; others are welcome to disagree. I've gotten some gems over the electronic transom, more than I expected when I took on the job in September. It hurts to have to let a good one go by, for whatever reason, but it does happen.

Anna writes,

"What those people at the site don't realize is that sometimes the polite form rejection is a lot nicer than what goes through your head reading the stuff. There's the ones you feel sorry for but there's also the ones you'd like to smack."

LOL Amen that. I've been senior mystery editor for FUTURES Mysterious Anthology Magazine for about four months. I used to be kind, generous, gentle, even-tempered, warm, considerate - all the things my mother always told me I ought to be. I can still be all those things, but it takes more effort now. I've had stories submitted to me that were nothing more than several hundred cliches strung together; stories so filled with elipses and dashes they looked more like Morse code than English; stories with more exclamation points than a mid-sixties issue of Spider-Man; stories that were scene for scene retellings of thirty year old television scripts; stories that read like they'd been written in Urdu, then translated into Swahili and French before making it to English; stories in every genre but the one I publish or double the word count listed in the submission guidelines.

I've developed that thousand yard stare that all editors get when the mind is benumbed by the sheer weight of the submissions, when all you want to do is get these things off of your desk or hard drive. That's when the rejection letters go out, as rapidly as possible, as simply as possible.

It's not always that you dislike the story; it's not even that you don't love the story. Sometimes it's that you just bought a story with the same theme and basic plotline. Sometimes it's that the author, let's call him Efrem Clayton (not a real name; this is a character in my as-yet unpublished novel DEAD WOMEN IN LOVE), is sending dozens of submissions at a whack, so that even if you love each and every one, you have no intention of renaming your magazine the Efrem Clayton Mystery Magazine. One story per author per issue, that's my policy, and once I get someone's work included in a solid decade's worth of issues, it's time to start suggesting they might be ready for other markets.

Okay, so, I put some serious thought and effort into that particular rejection, but that pretty much uses up whatever creativity would have been available for the other six or seven thousand stories that still need to be turned down. That's when the form letter comes out. It's not personal. It's shell-shock, it's combat fatigue, it's post grammatic stress disorder.

BTW, yes, we editors often do know one another. We do swap horror stories. We are capable of being vindictive, despite our genteel upbringings. Responding to a request to reformat your story so that half the punctuation doesn't resemble comic strip cussing with snide comments about the editor's ancestry and education will result in your name being added to a circulating list of our least favorite people.

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