his parole was denied for the 14th time.

Over at the Florida Marine Mammal Penitentiary, an inmate killed a warden in species-appropriate fashion yesterday.

Now, I’m not a tree-hugging hemp wearer, but I know that orcas are highly intelligent animals with fairly complex social structures.  Putting a bunch of them into a little tank to spend the rest of their lives in there would be like chucking a human into a clear-walled version of ADX Florence supermax.  Actually, it’s even worse than that, because the inmates at SeaWorld are trained to perform.

I know that if you locked me in a transparent room for the rest of my life, fed me the same three things every week, and made me perform five shows a day for chunky tourists from Wisconsin, it wouldn’t take me very long to snap like a stale pretzel.

barely made it to the first marker.

Hooray! Winter’s back in the Snow Belt, where it belongs.

I cleared the driveway for the wife in the morning with Mr. Snowblower, and scraped it just about down to the hardpack.  Then I left at eight o’clock sharp to run some errands with the kids.  When I returned two hours later, I couldn’t get up the driveway again, in forward or reverse.  Now I need to time the next snowblowing pass for the wife’s return from work, lest I have to wrestle that huge lump of somewhat-self-propelled steel up and down the driveway three times in a day.

White death! You have returned! Oh, how much we have missed you.  Did you have fun playing with the locals in Pittsburgh and Dee Cee?

monday search term safari LXXXV.

dog washing machine

I’m sure those dog grooming salons have professional dog washing machines.  When I read the term, I think of Remy’s rat pals in “Ratatouille”…he just runs the lot of them through the Hobart steam dish washer before letting them go to their cooking stations.

16 ounces cocaine

You have a pound of Bolivian Marching Powder?  Whoa.  You either have a serious drug habit, or you have one hell of a party planned.  Good God, that amount of cocaine would be enough to get Keith Richards high for a little while.

rights violated by mandated sterilization

Well, the Constitution doesn’t say anything about the right not to get your reproductive organs snipped by the agents of the state…but that fine document is a permission slip for the government, and I also fail to find a section in there that says the government has the right to cut someone’s wires or tie their tubes.

(That’s where Scalia gets it sorta-kinda wrong when he says the Constitution doesn’t grant anyone the right to an abortion.  The Constitution doesn’t grant rights, period.  The Constitution lays out what government may do, and the Bill of Rights lays out what government may not ever do, under any circumstances.  Nowhere in there does it “grant” any rights to the citizenry…not even in the Bill of Rights, which merely recognizes certain individual rights.)

is it ok to rape a tease

Wow…I can’t even work up good snark this morning in the face of such a wildly spinning moral compass.  If you have even the shadow of a doubt as to the moral permissibility of rape in any circumstances, please remove your DNA from the gene pool.

According to our old pal Rusty, this disturbed individual must be one of them amoral and childish libertarians, who refuse have either celestial guidance or state coercion play a role in establishing morality.  Because without God or Father State telling me that it’s not OK to rape, how will I ever figure it out for myself?

44 magnum derringers

…are a stupid idea.  They kick like mules, and are just as big and heavy as, say, a baby Glock (which is a infinitely more useful self-defense implement.)  Even if the recoil from the first shot doesn’t rip the gun from your hand and send it to Paraguay on a ballistic trajectory, it’ll take you roughly three National Geographic subscription cycles to get the gun back on target for a follow-up shot.

staples eco friendly bagasse

I love the bagasse paper they sell at Staples.  It’s smooth, and holds up to fountain pen ink really well.  I also like the unobtrusive brown lines, and the parchment-y feel of the paper.  Staples bagasse is my go-to paper for anything that doesn’t go into the Piccadillys.

assualt levergun

Assault is a behavior, not a device.  Stupid “scary black gun/shoulder thing that goes up” laws aside, there’s nothing you can bolt to a firearm that’ll magically make it an assault pistol/rifle/whatever.  It may make it more scary-looking to the average hoplophobe, but it’s not going to make it more assaulty.

"writing sweater"

I know some writers like to wear their special writing clothes while sitting down at their special writing table with a cup of their special writing tea…but in my experience, the more ritual you attach to the act, the harder you make it on yourself.  Writing is work, like making sausage or building houses, and you don’t ever see a carpenter looking for his special nail-hammering cardigan.  Pick the tool that suits you best, and get on with it.

mount a machine gun in your wrangler

That’s the optional accessory package called “Waziristan Safari”.  They also make one called “Detroit”, but that one involves armor plating and grenade launchers.

 

Is Monday! Is Monday Search Term Safari!  Thank you for your patronage, and remember to tip the waitstaff.  (And stay away from the “Seafood Surprise”.)

what i did with my saturday.

Hello, Internet.  How was your Saturday?  Mine was fine, thanks for asking.

I took Quinn down for a little road trip back to Cambridge Typewriter in Boston, where I picked up the two machines the owner serviced and fixed for me.  On the way back home, I had lunch with the kid, and then took him to Toys ‘R Us in Manchester, where they have about eleven hundred running feet of Thomas the Tank Engine merchandise shelves.  Quinn scored two new trains, Daddy has two fixed typewriters, and we had a nice drive through an unseasonably warm New Hampshire.  (It was 50 degrees in Manchester today.)

Typewriters tend to multiply, by the way.  Here’s the current fleet:

Going from top to bottom and left to right, we have:

• A green Olympia SM4, made in 1960, with wide carriage and Typestyle 69 cursive typeface.  This one always reminds me of a 1960s Mercedes Benz, with its sparse chrome trim and top-notch construction.  It makes the most satisfying “snick” sound when you smack down a key.
• A battleship-gray Smith-Corona Galaxie Twelve, probably from the late 1960s.  Not much to look at, but it has a great feel to it—sharp, precise, and responsive. 
• A Royal KHM, circa 1935, given to me by my lovely wife for my 36th birthday back in 2007.  This was one of the machines I took down to Cambridge Typewriter as it needed some TLC, but it’s fit as a fiddle now.  It’s a big, heavy tank of a typewriter, a desktop model without any concessions to portability, and a rock-solid typer.
• A white Olympia SM9, the Writer’s Typewriter.  Sheet-metal cover that lifts up like the hood of a car, basket shift, and bulletproof construction.  Of all the machines I own, this is probably the one I’d pick if I had to pound out a million words in a year.  The SM9 was made in 1966.
• A Royal DeLuxe Portable made in 1936, a lovely little machine I inherited from a good friend who passed away over a year ago.  It’s small, but substantial, and almost as smooth as its desktop counterpart.  This one had a slightly sticky Y key, and a few other minor issues, and its heirloom status meant that it got to go on the trip to Cambridge Typewriter as well.

Those all live in Analog City, the office on the other end of the house where the WiFi won’t reach, and the only computer (Apple eMac) is only for transcription duties and doesn’t even have a wireless network card fitted.  I use them for different things as the mood strikes, mostly short stories.  The single-purpose typewriter is a help when it comes to priming the creative pump because—like the fountain pen—it can only be used for creating new material, not research or other distracting business.  I’ve come to believe that the biggest drain on productivity is writing with (or near) a device that can connect to the Internet.

All five of those machines were made before I was born, and two of them were made almost ten years before my father was born.  That’s not a bad record for durability and longevity.  In contrast, the computer on which I am typing this is just a few months old, and will be in a landfill before the end of this decade.

Now it’s time to give the kids a bath, and then we’ll seamlessly transition to the part of the evening where we consume some Parenting Juice and kill stuff for profit and experience in World of Warcraft.  I hope you folks are having a pleasant weekend, too.

the crazy just keeps piling on.

Wow…the story on the nutcase professor who dusted her colleagues in a faculty meeting is just getting stranger by the day.

Let’s recap:

• Blows her brother away with a shotgun, and tries to carjack someone at gunpoint right after, but is never prosecuted.  Incidentally, her Mom’s on the personnel board of the local PD, and the Chief calls the jail to get her released on the day of the incident.  DA never files charges.
• Her supervising professor at Hahvahd gets a pipe bomb in the mail, coincidentally a few days after an argument with the little bowl of Froot Loops in question.  Incidentally, she was worried he’d give her a bad review.
• Gets into an altercation with a woman at an IHOP in Massachusetts over a high chair, slugs the woman in front of her kids.  Charges brought, unsupervised probation and anger management classes ordered.
• Finally, pulls out a heater at the aforementioned faculty meeting, kills three and wounds three more.

Can you say missed warning signals?  I knew you could. 

Now, I know it’s a natural reaction for friends and family of a mass murderer to believe in their Loved One’s innocence, and say stuff like, “We had no idea how this could have happened”…but be honest with yourselves here.  If you knew your spouse had shot her brother when she was a kid, and then she goes off on someone over a stupid high chair in a restaurant and slugs the other person in the face, it’s pretty clear that the family member in question has a few critical inhibitors missing in her brain.

Here’s where the Great Divide in the gun control debate happens between liberal and conservative/libertarian types.  One group claims that this proves the need for gun restrictions, so fruitbats like Dr. Bishop can’t get their hands on guns when they flip out.  The other group says that these cases prove gun control doesn’t work.  (Dr. Bishop shouldn’t have been able to acquire a firearm legally, not with her prior record…and she chose to ignore the law regarding homicide and A&B as well, so what’s another felony on top of that?)

Me, I’m tired of the debate.  The lines are pretty much drawn, and conversion of someone from one side to the other in the gun control debate is a rare event indeed.  I do know, however, that this is precisely why I carry a gun—because I don’t want to end up taking a bullet in front of my kids because some basket case decides to get pissed off at me for taking the last booster seat at the IHOP.  Of course, those who support disarming everyone claim that my gun makes me more likely to be that person going ballistic at the IHOP.  (They inevitably call me paranoid for being mindful of the fact that I may be in the wrong place at the wrong time.)  In the end, everyone’s got to make their own call on that issue, but I always wonder who’s more paranoid—the person who wants to be able to protect themselves against the (thankfully rare) homicidal loons out there…or the person who wants to disarm everyone instead?

Here’s why I favor the “carry a gun” approach.  If you use the “Ban All Guns” method, you treat all your fellow citizens as potential killers, and impose preemptive restrictions on them as if they are.  You use prior restraint, and reduce everyone’s rights to those of the least responsible members of society.  If you use the “Carry A Gun” approach, it may be true that you treat all your fellow citizens as potential killers, too….but you don’t infringe on the rights of those who have no desire or ability to do you harm (which in both cases is the vast majority of the population.)  Which approach is the more ethical and moral one?

snow, and other random observations.

So it’s finally snowing outside again.  We’re supposed to get 6-10 inches by tomorrow morning, which will give me a chance to dust off the poor snowblower.

Boskone was fun.   I reconnected with some VP pals, and met a bunch of new people.  In the end, I was bummed to have to leave on Saturday evening already.  The next con in the area will be Readercon, and half a dozen of my fellow VPXII alumni will be there, so I’m planning on going there in July, and maybe staying overnight.

Readercon is on the weekend after Independence Day, which gives me a perfect deadline for two different projects I am currently tackling.  The first is the MilSF novel I’m writing, which stands at 45,000-ish words right now.  My plan is to have it finished and edited into good shape by the time I go to Readercon.  The other project is the reduction of my gravity footprint–at my current rate of shrinkage, I should be at my target weight by then.  (I left behind 13 pounds in the first six weeks of the year, and I continue to shed about two pounds a week.)  So that’s the goal: show up at Readercon slim and trim, with Book Two of Three in the Space Kablooie series under my arm.  (Not the actual title of the series, mind you.)  The con weekend in Burlington will be my reward for meeting both targets.

In other news in the Social Events category, we’ll have another Northeast Blog Meet dinner on March 1st, which will have me trekking down into (or near) Menino’s Mordor again.  There are also two German Stammtisch evenings coming up in the next two months.  I have to watch this “hanging out with adults” business, lest I develop a social life…

monday search term safari LXXXIV.

teflon spray for snowblowers

Our snowblower repair dude suggests spraying some cooking spray onto the auger and impeller to keep the snow from sticking to the metal blades.  I suspect teflon spray would work, too. 

why is literature written in present tense

Some literature is written in present tense.  Properly used, it’s an effective way to get the reader pulled into the story, and convey a sense of immediacy.  Badly used, it reads horribly like a transcribed subway conversation.

better to buy alphasmart neo without battery

They sell the Neo with a rechargeable battery pack, but I’ve never really seen the need for it.  I mean, the thing lasts for the better part of a year on three AA batteries, so why bother with a charger  you have to pull out of the desk drawer maybe once per season?

"company laptop" fired porn downloading

Your company gave you a computer to do, you know, business-related work on it.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that unless you work in the adult entertainment industry, looking at porn isn’t strictly a business-related activity.

ibm clicky model m usb cable

The Model M works with a PS/2-to-USB converter, but not all of those work equally well.  I’ve had good luck with the model sold by Radio Shack, catalog number 26-723.

munchkin wrangler piccadilly

Piccadilly notebooks make up 75% of my notebook stash.  Moleskine clones at less than half the price + conveniently stocked by my local Borders = a shelf full of them in my office.

ship caudill came to america on

That would be the RMS Copycat.  The Caudills then settled in the region of Plagiary, which is somewhere in Appalachia.

j-frame vs lcp for pocket carry

As an LCP owner who has carried many a J-frame in the past, I’ll say that the LCP makes a much better pocket gun.  It’s considerably flatter, lighter than even the Scandium mule kicker models, and less obvious in the pocket because it lacks the fat cylinder in its middle.  I loves me some J-frames, but for that particular job, the LCP is as good as it gets.

do russians shovel their driveways

Russians don’t have driveways, silly.  It’s a well-known fact that in the Soviet Union days, people had to wait 20 years for their Ladas and Dacias, so when they finally got to take delivery, they didn’t risk exposing the car to weather.  Instead, they’d just put their cars under their arms and carry them into their houses at night.

swords don’t run out of ammo

And guns don’t require a trenchcoat for concealment.  Also, the guy with the gun has a reach advantage over the guy with the sword, and will look less like a fucking loon in court.  Seriously: sword and knife are lethal force implements, and while carrying one may be less restricted than carrying a gun in some places, pulling one on a person is just like pulling out a gun.  You go all Highlander on some fool, said fool would be justified to draw a gun in self-defense.

 

Is Monday Morning! Is Search Term Safari!  With my recurring obligation out of the way, I shall now tackle my second cup of Go Juice, and write me some fiction…

the boy who would always have chocolate on his birthday.

There once was a boy so special that on the anniversary of his birth, people would give each other chocolate and flowers to commemorate it.

Five years…don’t they go by in a blink.  Happy birthday, little bear.

southward ho!

I’m going into East Berlin by the Bay tomorrow, to attend my very first SF convention.   I hear that Boskone is a particularly good con for a noob writer like myself, and there will be quite a few VP instructors and former students there, so I’m looking forward to it.  On the way in, I’ll finally take the opportunity to stop at Cambridge Typewriter, our regionally famous typing machine shop, to drop off a Royal Deluxe Portable for overhaul and ogle the machines they have for sale there.  And if I find that I have an hour or so to spare around lunchtime, I’ll stop by Bromfield Pen Shop for a bottle of Noodler’s ink or two, which will make the day thoroughly writing-themed. 

I really should bring a camera, or better yet, buy one of those Flip video cameras, so I can bore the lot of you not just with written recollections of my thoroughly mundane outings, but present moving pictures as well.  But don’t hold your collective breath for video blogs…that would require me to shave on a regular basis, and come to work in something other than my regular office wear, which is usually from the Whatever’s Clean line of writer couture.  (“Irons in the dryer!  Now With Some Matching Colors!”)

Anyway: extended Dadcation tomorrow, for the sake of networking and socializing with fellow writer types and skiffy geeks (and there is a lot of overlap in that particular Venn diagram.) 

government beer: the only thing that would make me reach for the bud light instead.

Came across the following headline this morning:

Washington’s Dulles Airport Reopens; National Still Closed

My first thought was, “We have a national still?”, and I got all excited.  Then I remembered that we’re talking about the federal government here, which couldn’t make a profit running a whorehouse in Nevada.  Hooch produced by the National Still would have a 2% alcohol content, and come in three flavors, carefully determined by a Congressional committee.  It would also cost $45 for a fifth, and you’d be limited to one bottle a month.