one set of laws for the peons, another for the king’s men.

In my time as a gun store clerk, I would have gotten a ten-year sentence in Club Fed for knowingly letting a gun walk out of the door in the hands of a felon.

The ATF clowns in charge of “Operation Fast and Furious” let thousands of guns walk out of the door in the hands of known felons…and what’s their punishment?

They get reassigned…to a different division. Not only do they not have to eat expired hot dogs or take care not to drop the soap in the shower, they get to keep their government salaries and bennies. The same people who would jack Joe Citizen up and send him to jail for a few years for having the wrong piece of metal on the muzzle of his rifle do not have to suffer any serious consequences for letting felons walk off with weapons that were then used to kill a bunch of people.

Some animals are indeed more equal than others.

sir barks-a-lot, the training years.

Yes, these are the same puppies that comfortably fit into an open palm just eight weeks ago:

They’re still trying to nurse on occasion, but their mother is distinctly unenthusiastic about standing still for them at this point.

stormpocalypse update.

Well, the storm has passed. The roads are pretty bad, especially out here in the dirt road outskirts of Upper Cryogenica, so Robin had a bit of trouble finding a route home that wasn’t blocked.

The Castle…well, look at this harrowing image of utter devastation:

Rebuilding will begin tomorrow morning…and end about two minutes later. We have a little bit of water in the garage, and one of the windows is a little leaky, but that’s the extent of it. We never even lost power. (Not that I’m complaining, mind you.)

stormpocalypse 2011!

That hurricane what is flooding the streets in NYC right now is heading right up the Connecticut River valley. Here’s the projected track:

See that light beige storm track going through the outline of New Hampshire? Castle Frostbite sits right in the middle of it. According to the weather druids, it’ll pass over us at 6pm tonight.

Right now we have quite a bit of rain and some decently strong winds. I expect it will pick up a little as the storm gets closer. We have power (obviously), but I fully expect it to go out at some point. We have the usual stash of supplies, and at least I don’t have to keep a wood stove going during summer outages. Still, no Internet for hours may turn out traumatic.

salvaged from the shipwreck of the s.s.borders.

I know I said I wouldn’t participate in picking the bones of the local Borders clean…but then I saw that the liquidation company even put the fixtures up for sale.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been using a standing desk setup for the last few months. Right now, that setup is just a coffee table on top of my regular desk. I’ve been shopping around for proper standing desks, but they’re a.) extremely hard to find, b.) ridiculously expensive, or c.) half-assed constructions that aren’t very sturdy. I briefly considered building my own, but with my level of craftiness and power tool mastery, the result would have been likely to look like something hastily thrown together by beavers.

Luckily, my wife, smart cookie that she is, walked into Borders and checked out the furniture. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this myself, but they have those service desks all over the place–you know, the kind where employees and customers can look up books online. And they’re all <insert angelic choir background music> standing height. 

So Robin bought one, and I went back a week later and got another one. I won’t be able to pick them up until the shop closes for good (sometime in mid-September), but my temporary setup will serve until then.

The nice thing about those desks is that they’re ridiculously well built–no plywood $99 Staples furniture here. They’ve been used daily for ten years or more, and I couldn’t find a thing wrong with them. The drawers and doors are mounted with industrial-strength hinges and tracks that still work like they’re on ball bearings. There’s some finish wear at the corners, but I can sand the desks down and refinish them. Considering their build quality, we got them for pennies on the dollar–they were cheaper than anything I could have picked up in the bargain corner of the furniture section at Staples.

This is the pair, each shot from two different angles. The second desk has a non-slip black work surface which is at the same height as the keyboard shelf of the first desk, so they’ll go side by side. I’ll use the computer desk for the Mac, and the desk with the black surface inlay for longhand and typewriter work.

So there you have it–dirt-cheap standing furniture, and a sort of durable souvenir from Borders. I told the furniture manager that I should have marked and tracked down my regular seat in the cafe, because we go way back. (I wrote a significant chunk of my word count since early 2008 in that Seattle’s Best Coffee.)

brief book review: “pike”.

Benjamin Whitmer’s “Pike” is published by PM Press’ “Switchblade” imprint, but it’s not a switchblade. “Pike” is a homemade knife, made from an old file, sharpened with an angle grinder in some shack in the Ozarks, with duct tape wrapped around the grip. Calling this novel “noir”, while technically correct, doesn’t come close to accurately classifying it. It’s like calling Alaska “pretty cold in winter.”

Another reviewer compared the feel of “Pike” to “Winter’s Bone”, and that’s a fairly apt comparison. Like “Winter’s Bone”, “Pike” is full of down-and-out characters leading hardscrabble lives, with no prospect at betterment or redemption–and for the most part, no desire for either. The protagonist, Douglas Pike, is a dangerous man who has lived a dangerous life–running drugs, smuggling illegals, killing people. When his estranged daughter overdoses, he is stuck with a 12-year-old granddaughter he doesn’t know. Feeling guilt over being part of the messed-up chain of events that led his granddaughter to his doorstep, he sets out with his friend Rory to discover how his daughter died. In the course of this, Pike collides head-on with Derrick Krieger, a crooked Cincinnati cop who is every bit as hard as Pike, and possibly even less redeemable.

This is not a Spenser novel, with occasional bursts of one-sided violence sandwiched between witty banter and gourmet cooking with smart and interesting friends (and I say that as a big Robert B. Parker fan.) The violence in this novel is harsh, sudden, and shockingly intense, exactly the way it is in the real world. Whitmer’s style is terse, clipped, and honed to a razor edge, almost reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy at times. Yet among all the bleakness, there are bits and pieces of…well, not exactly hope and redemption, but little hints of hope and maybe a future for some of the characters that doesn’t involve only abject hard-scrabble misery.

“Pike” is a literary punch to the gut, razor-sharp prose telling a tale with barbs and rusty edges, and it’s honest and dark and compelling. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

(Pike at Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s.)

(The publisher has enabled lending for the Kindle version of this book. I can loan out my copy once, for 14 days. If you want to borrow “Pike”, ask me in a comment and I’ll loan you my copy. This requires a Kindle or any of the Kindle readers for the various platforms. First one to ask gets the loan.)

your mother’s basement is not a secret superhero lair.

Your assignment for the day:

Try to think up a scenario where you use this thing for self-defense…and not look like a complete wackadoo in court. All the prosecutor would have to do is to walk around the room and hold up that knife with a stern expression on his face. Slam dunk.

tablet for cheep! wurks reel gud!

If you don’t have a tablet device yet, and you don’t want to drop the $499 on an iPad, here’s a cheaper way. BestBuy is blowing out their massive stock of HP TouchPads for $99 a pop for the low-end 16GB model.

HP launched the Touchpad as an iPad competitor, but it failed to gain traction. Reportedly, BestBuy only managed to sell 10% of their stock of a quarter million TouchPads so far. Now that HP has killed the TouchPad, BestBuy is getting rid of inventory. I’ve played with the TouchPad at Best Buy before, and while it’s no iPad, webOS is actually kind of nice. And hell–for $99, it’s practically an impulse buy now.

(They’re sold out online, so you’ll have to hit your local BestBuy and see if they still have any in stock.)

good fences make something something.

I realized that I haven’t even shown off the new defensive perimeter upgrade for Castle Frostbite yet:

The backyard of the Castle is now ringed by two hundred feet of 5′ chain-link fence, with three gates of various sizes strategically placed along the perimeter. Our friend Mark donated most of the hardware–he took down his own fence a little while ago and had no further use for it. We had to buy a few extra fence posts and some hardware, but most of that fence used to be around Mark’s property seventy miles south of here.

It’s not the prettiest of fences–chain-link fences don’t ever win any prizes for beauty–but it keeps the kids and dogs safe, and it keeps most critters out. The posts have been sunk into pre-drilled holes in the granite and then cemented in, so they won’t be going anywhere. We’re planning on planting some creeping vine type plants all along the length of the fence as a sight barrier.

alternate history fantasy vertellings, now in audio format.

My short story “Ink and Blood” is now also available as an .mp3 audio download at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You know, just in case you were looking for something to listen to on the way to work tomorrow or something.