Author: John

Picture, if you will. . .

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I continue to struggle with my little novella The Pains. Perhaps it’s fitting that a story about a humble human of common decency but no particular kozmic talent who is evidently picked by the universe to redeem the world through his own suffering should not come easy. Or, actually, the story came mostly easy; it’s the prose, dammit, the words, that are long-dark-night-of the soul-ing me to death.

Anyway, I have written a few more chapters which will be up soon, and a few more beyond them are in the queue. I can’t believe I’m still working on this thing! But I will finish it! Oh yes! It will be mine!

Those of you who’ve read any of our story thus far have seen this illo:

The Cell of Lux

In the meantime, mostly as a prod to myself, here’s a nice little illustrated summary of the book by its illustrator Matthew, AKA Cheeseburger. Take a look.

Retroactive Immunity for Criminals? Paging Doctor Feld, stat!

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Many many moons ago, when I was just a young dad with lots of responsibilities and not very many dollars, I found myself sitting at an outdoor lunch table with a bunch of my colleagues from work who were single and evidently without the kind of financial concerns that I had. They were talking about sunglasses. Each was wearing a pair of pricey shades that cost about as much as I was spending per month on food and diapers. The whole conversation was absurd to me. Eventually somebody asked me what I kind of sunglasses I favored, to which I replied,

I dunno. Whenever I need something like that I just wait until they put it in a McDonald’s Happy Meal(tm).

Similarly, whenever I need an opinion on an issue that has to do with telecommunications policy, privacy, the First Amendment, cowardice and chickenshitosity in the Congress, or fear mongering and criminality in the Bush/Cheney administration, I generally just wait for Harold Feld to put an article up on Wetmachine/Tales of the Sausage Factory to tell me what I’m thinking. I know how I feel about an issue, more or less, but a good Feldian rant always brings it into focus — and often gets me to call or write my congresscritters.

Lately I’ve been really steamed about all this talk of passing a bill that will grant immunity to the telecommunications companies for illegally spying on their customers, Nixon-style, since way before the magical “all laws cease here” date NineEleven (peace be upon it). From what I can tell, the chickenshit Congress is making noises about going along with Lord Voldemort’s, I mean Bush’s request to make time-travelling the law of the land, at least when it comes to giant corporations spying on citizens on behalf of who-knows-who.

So, I’ve been kinda waiting for a duly appropriate, incendiary, and legally impeccable disquisition from Harold on this. The fact that he has not yet weighed in leads me to think that either yes, what I’m saying is as obvious as “water is wet” and this does not merit a TotSF article, or, perhaps, that I’m missing something.

It is worth mentioning that the week after that aforementioned conversation about sunglasses, I stopped at a McDonald’s and purchased a Happy Meal. There was a nice pair of sunglasses inside, which, moreover, almost fit.

Harold, we await your rant.

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Which one's Kramer?

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This little bloglette posting by M.J. Rosenberg in TPM Cafe asks whether the Democrats are, like Seinfeld, “about nothing.” He asks,

With the exception of the fringe candidates in both parties (Kucinich, Gravel and Ron Paul), is anyone running for any other reason than that they would like very much to be President?

As far as I can tell, the answer that question is “no”. You should read the article that Rosenberg links to, in the Politico. It’s accurate and depressing. I’ll vote for the Democratic nominee, but unless it’s Al Gore, I won’t be happy about it.

Hey Rush, in case you missed this

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I know that our friend the patriotic draft-dodging drug addict Rush Limbaugh is a busy man and doesn’t get time to read all his email or answer all his phone calls. But given the prominent position of Wetmachine in our nation’s political discourse, I daresay there is some chance he’s reading Wetmachine right now. Therefore, I’m taking this opportunity to pass along this message from another patriot (this one’s not phony, by the way), Eric Massa.

No need to thank me, Rush. But please send me a note to let me know when Eric will be a guest on your show.

Development Rights in a Carbon-Constrained World

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The good folks at environmental/social justice/global policy think tank EcoEquity have just published an intriguing policy paper about a “Greenhouse Development Rights”, which they call a

Climate protection framework designed to support an emergency climate stabilization program while, at the same time, preserving the right of all people to reach a dignified level of sustainable human development free of the privations of poverty.

More specifically, the GDRs framework quantifies national responsibility and capacity with the goal of providing a coherent, principle-based way to think about national obligations to pay for both mitigation and adaptation.

I plan to write a more in-depth synopsis of the paper soon, but in the meantime, all you people who are threatened by the climate crisis (basically all of you who live on earth), and especially you economic policy-wonk types, should check it out.

Would somebody please taze the WSJ?

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Well the so-called journalists of the Wall Street Journal are back to their usual practice of making shit up in the name of capitalism and Victory! and Freedom! and A Pony — or whatever it is they’re arguing for.

Call me a dreamer, but I kinda like the idea that editorial boards of extremely prominent media outlets would do at least rudimentary fact-checking before racing off to their foregone conclusions.

I can hardly wait until Rupert gets hid 48-point Helvetica-Bold hands on this paper. The editorial page, already the next best thing to an acid trip for those who don’t chemically imbibe, will likely become the apotheosis of truthiness, kinda like Alan Greenspan talking about geopolitics under the influence of Atlas Shrugged and some of that bad windowpane that was going around at Woodstock.

By the way, I really am not asking anybody to taze the WSJ. Nor do I want anybody to shoot the WSJ in the face. We’ll leave those kinds of things to people in uniform and Vice Presidents of the United States, respectively.

Petraeus == Betray us

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Or not, who knows, I don’t care. It’s an enlisted man’s pun, you wouldn’t understand. I just want to see if I can get the Senate of the United States of America to debate Wetmachine and maybe pass a resolution denouncing us. I’m sure that would be good for traffic, which is what it’s all about, ain’t it? Net capitalism, dude. It’s what’s for dinner.

But I don’t know why I bother, because Comcast or AT&T, the new Cellular, will edit this en route to your eyballs, and you’ll never even know I wrote it. It will be like the memory hole, only more high tech. And the bits will seal up around the absense of my message just like the metal man in Terminator Two, Judgement Day. (Remember, in Soviet Russia, Internet censors YOU!)

Hey, don’t taze me, bro. I’m just say’n what it is.

You may now go back to reading the triumphal return post, below, from our long-lost Web 3.0 boy, Howard Stearns.

How Robert and Krys Helped Destroy the Nazi Monster

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Here’s a couple of quick reviews, part of a sparsely-populated ongoing series of reviews of self-published books.

Both books under review are short memoirs of the Second World War, published in the last few years. I recommend them for very different reasons. And although each has its faults and they both clearly would have benefitted from the attentions of professional editors, to me they embody everything that’s cool about self-publishing (about which more below).

Whales of WWII, by Robert Jagers, tells of the author’s experiences as signalman on LST 351, a “Landing Ship, Tank”, during the Second World War. Starting with his enlistment at age 19 in 1942, the book takes us through boot camp, crossing the Atlantic in a slow convoy harried by German submarines, to the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Normandy, to London during the buzz-bombs and V2 rocket attacks, until demobilization in the States.

Krystyna, A Chronicle of Life and War, by Krystyna Maria Sokolowska Post, tells the story of the author’s growing up in Poland during the pre-war years in a complicated but in many ways charming family, her coming of age on the eve of the German invasion, and what happened to her when the Nazis came. It’s an astonishing tale, well told, full of innocence, villainy, tragedy, courage, evil, fate, and, ultimately, triumph, about how a young girl whose head was filled with little more than thoughts of boys, boys, boys and American movie stars became transformed, over six harrowing years, into a soldier of the resistance–adept dressing at wounds in a field hospital during the (1944) battle of Warsaw or keeping an eye out for a pregnant comrade-in-arms in a POW camp– until her ultimate liberation by, you guessed it, a handsome American GI.

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