Our house in Westport is 9/10ths of a mile from the Westport stop. I think they let people get off momentarily there. If they let you, look inside the Westport station. The currently have a show of very good landscape paintings be an artist named Kevin Raines.
Good thing Gregory Benford is British, otherwise I'd say this guy is stealing pretty much his whole argument from those dirty savages in the American Colonies.
Jet packs will be here when we no longer have heads to injure. Get cracking on the head replacement technology.
(All those willing to decapitate themselves now will receive free jet packs. 1 to a customer.)
Just happened across a site with the strange headline: "Important for Swine Flu Epidemic: Homeopathy Successfully Treated Flu Epidemic of 1918"
Yeah, right. It goes on to say:How do they know that a virus caused the flu epidemic of 1918, when the first virus was not isolated until 1933?Here's the author bio on the article:
They don`t. In fact, many believe that the epidemic was actually a vaccine reaction.
When Army vaccinations became compulsory in 1911, the death rate from typhoid vaccination rose to the highest point in the history of the US Army. US Secretary of War Henry L Stimson reported that seven men dropped dead after being vaccinated. He also reported 63 deaths and 28,585 cases of hepatitis as a direct result of yellow fever vaccination during only six months of WW1. According to a report in the Irish Examiner, "The report of the Surgeon-General of the US Army shows that during 1917 there were admitted into the army hospitals 19,608 men suffering from anti-typhoid inoculation and vaccinia. When army doctors tried to suppress the symptoms of typhoid with a stronger vaccine, it caused a worse form of typhoid paratyphoid. But when they concocted an even stronger vaccine to suppress that one, they created an even worse disease Spanish flu.Melanie Grimes is a writer, screenwriter, journal editor, and adjunct faculty member at Bastyr University.I've probably bought shoes from the author, since I used to shop at that store.
A trained homeopath, she also raises alpacas and is an avid spinner, having won nine ribbons for her handspun yarns in recent years.
She is the editor of the homeopathic journal, Simillimum, and runs an eBay store selling alpaca fiber.
She has been a medical editor for 15 years, won awards as a screenwriter, taught creative writing, founded the first Birkenstock store in the USA (www.mjfeet.com) and authored medical textbooks.
#s 19 & 20: Ah. Now we all know the secret of getting TNH to answer the phone: write to her in all caps in the comment section.
I wish I had a technique like that for my husband who only turns on his cell phone when he wants to call me.
I suspect that the odds of dying of a garden variety case of the flu are still higher in Westchester County, NY than of dying of Swine Flu. (It may be more virulent but the odds of catching it are so much lower.)
Of course, Ballard never met any SF folks. Charles Platt writes in NYRSF 236:At the end of February, 1965, I threw a party in my tenement. Science-fiction fans came from as far away as Liverpool. Former school friends showed up. Mike Moorcock, Langdon Jones, J. G. Ballard, John Brunner, Graham Hall, and other New Worlds contributors were there. The lowlifes on the ground floor were smoking hashish (a novelty, in those days). A couple of them were shooting heroin, which was even more of a novelty. On the floor above, there was heavy drinking and vigorous dancing, making the floor flex disconcertingly.
After a couple of hours someone on the top floor vomited into an empty punch bowl, and someone else dumped it out of the window onto the heads of people who were arriving on the steps outside. I knew, then, that I had succeeded in my goal of hosting a truly memorable event. Anyone who gets vomit poured over his head while arriving at a party just has to know that he’s going to have a good time.
Ballard lurked in one corner, looking uneasy, clutching a copy of my fanzine that I had thrust into his hands. Much later I realized that I had made the mistake of reading his work far too literally. Despite his traumatic childhood in Shanghai, he was an upper-middle-class family man who lived in the suburbs and preferred an uneventful life. His books were clearly labeled fiction, but I half expected him to discard the trappings of civilization and go wandering in search of his own Terminal Beach.
I use kitty litter for two household purposes: absorbing oil on the garage floor and next to an oil furnace when the tubing hadn't been tightened enough. And also I keep it on hand for freeing cars stuck in ice in the driveway: our it where you want the tires to get traction on ice.
(I buy cheap clay litter for these purposes, and buy expensive clumping litter for use with actual cats.)
#408 Abi
She quotes you approvingly on letting a 4-year-old go to the park. I think your section is about 2/3rd of a page.
I'm reading Freerange Kids by Lenore Skenazy, which just came out, and I note one Abi Sutherland who lives in the Netherlands is quoted on page 85.
Whether Amazon's control of how books are sold online comes as a rude shock (as in #amazonfail), or whether one has for a long time had a bad feeling about the way they do business and this new controversy just doesn't seem like that big a deal, it seems to me that what is called for is lists of other places to buy books. There are many good reasons to buy from vendors other than Amazon.
Sending Amazon customers over to Borders.com because of AmazonFail would be just stupid and counter-productive. I challenge people to come up with good lists of online bookselers. You can take it from the perspective of specialty dealers, or general booksellers. Note that some of the portals of indepentdent booksellers such as ABEbooks are owned by Amazon.
Powells, The University Bookstore, L.W. Currey, Inc., Wonder Book, Genre Ink, . . . name more.
#242 will: You read my mind. I was just going to suggest googling "googlebomb amazon". "Googlebomb" is an Internet mobbing keyword. If they collectively googlebomb, then they are a mob.
#230 albatross It *is* creepy to see how quickly an online conversation can go from somewhat angry to red-hot rage.
My personal estimate is that there is a sognificant chance that Amazon board members and execs come in for some serious and damaging personal harassment from this mob and that is a very bad thing.
#195 Patrick: I think you or your source is a little out of date on this. I remember when this was a common industry line on Amazon, but that was some years ago. They sell quite a few more books than that now.
Okay, so I hadn't talked to my source about this in several years. My source just came in on the train and I picked his brain on Amazon sales figures. So Amazon sells a higher percentage than they used to. On the top end, Source sayeth that Amazon can make up 20% of the sale for a bestseller; might be say 10% of the distribution for a 10,000 copy print run, taking say 1000 copies when Borders & B&N each take 3000. And on books by smaller sf authors, they might take 200 copies, or they might take 5 copies. Or they might start out small and then sell 80% of the copies of a small book. (Old Man's War?)
The larger issue with Amazon though is the same as with B&N and Borders: that they take lots of copies of the top 100 titles in various specialties, driving specialty shops out of business: science fiction shops, and also gay bookstores, feminist bookstores, perhaps black bookstores, cookbook bookstores, etc., because the specialty stores can't give the discounts on the big books that the chains can, and what they have left to offer customers is the esoterica. With Amazon, the situation is worse because Amazon carries the esoterica, too, and doesn't universally charge sales tax.
And so the specialty shops go out of business and the publishers are at the mercy of the whims of the chains and now of Amazon, and so are the consumers. It is not unlike the situation with small local stores in the face of big box stores. If Borders comes to Mt. Kisco, NY it drives out the 50 year old Mt. Kisco Book Company, and eventually Second Story (run by the former longtime president of the ABA; it went out o f business last month) in Chappaqua, too. If Borders decides to leave, the small stores do not come back. And if the big accounts decide to ditch or selectively represent certain specialties, the specialty shops still do not come back.
The most positive response I can think of is that independent online booksellers should seize this opportunity and take over the specialties that Amazon is mishandling.
In the end, Amazon's bookselling operation is just a big bookstore which -- as I understand it -- sells about as many copies of individual titles as a Barnes & Noble or Border's superstore. They just carry a lot more titles than the superstore.
Just like any other bookstore, they are not obligated to even carry your book or anyone else's for that matter. The fuss is over the listing of books that they actually ARE offering for sale. They don't have to do that. In fact, given how the company has evolved, they don't have to sell books at all. They sell books because it pleases Jeff Bezos to do so. They could stop.
Despite the small per-title sales via Amazon, they have many influences over the book-selling market, many of which are not to the good. Of the reasons I can think of why one might want to avoid buying from Amazon, the particulars this fuss do not rank high on my list.
I buy from Amazon because I'm mostly too lazy to buy from someone else online and because I live in the suburbs. I do not love Amazon. But for Christ's sake, booksellers decide what to stock and how to sell it all the time, and some of it is based on content. (Remember the SF bookseller' John Norman boycott?)
I do not object to people complaining to Amazon about the inappropriate labeling of books as "adult" and might even complain to them myself. But I am bothered by the ferocity of the attacks on the company and the google bombing etc. They are attacking a BOOKSTORE.
Come on people. Behave better.
Unfortunately, it appears that the "Obama's goons" thing is not a joke. It is incitement from the far right. See for example The Patriotic Resistance: The network for idea-based resistance to Obama-led socialistic agenda. (The ref to goons is in the comment section, but I think the post and site contextualizes it.) Then consider the story of Richard Poplawski aka "Braced for Fate" who allegedly shot a bunch of cops, partly because of his belief that "federal authorities plan to confiscate guns owned lawfully by American citizens."
The Google ad may seem funny, but it's people like "Braced for Fate" that are targeted by that ad.
Like DonBoy #2, I am waiting for the Fail meme to go the way of Beenie Babies and ass-crack pants, Humvees, and Sarah Palin's "popularity." It's a hostile and dehumanizing way to talk about other people, especially other people in the field.
I do not disagree with Teresa that mistakes people make when writing queries, and how queries are received, needs public discussion. But the Fail meme was an unfortunate choice to structure it with.
No more Fail, please. Bye bye, Fail, bye bye.
My favorite claim from a self-defense site (in 2007) was that they could teach you how to survive your own beheading.
Everyone was strapped in, and my daughter was in an appropriate booster seat. My kids now have a _really_ vivid understanding of what seatbelts can do for them.
When we bought me a car we bought a Chevy HHR which has excellent crash test ratings. My poor car sustained over seven thousand dollars in damage, but nothing on the interior of the car was damaged, and no one was injured. (We also had 3 cats in the car, all in individual cat carriers plus a tortoise in a carrier. They seemed quite unfazed by the accident.)
I took out three guard-rail posts while avoiding plunging over the embankment. I chatted a bit with the insurance claims adjuster after the accident, who also seemed to think highly of our model of car. He said HHRs did real well in head-on collisions.
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