Well before that, as you may have noticed by the link by the QotD, the QotD archive page is live at last.  I was initially doing that as a special bonus just for my as of yet untitled Donors, but since it's not a big bandwidth hog, I figured I might as well do it for everyone.  The Donors will still get a page just for them, one with a link and quick summary to every News Images page I've ever posted (there are about 135 of them thus far), all of which contain various interesting images and various stupid captions.  Even though I announced it a week ago, and have yet to send any of them the URL, none of the Donors have pestered me about it yet.  Which is nice, since it doesn't yet exist.  It's coming though, I'm up to January, so hopefully in the next few days it will be ready, for all seven people to dig into. Assuming any of them care.  I'm taking the rush of emails about it thus far as strong evidence none really do, but I'm doing the page anyway.  Christ I need an intern.

Anyway, here's some news stuff, most of it typically unimportant and absurd.

¤ This article starts off sort of amusing, saying that women are turned on by the scent of male perspiration.  It takes a darker turn when the actual methodology is discussed.

Biologists at the University of Pennsylvania said they found male perspiration had a surprisingly beneficial effect on women's moods. It helps reduce stress, induces relaxation and even affects the menstrual cycle.

In a study to be published in the journal Biology of Reproduction, researchers collected samples from the underarms of men who refrained from using deodorant for four weeks. The extracts were then blended and applied to the upper lips of 18 women, aged 25 to 45.

The women rated their moods on a fixed scale for a period of six hours. The findings suggested something in the perspiration brightened their moods and helped them feel less tense. Blood analyzes also showed a rise in levels of the reproductive luteinizing hormone that typically surge before ovulation.

There was no sign women were sexually aroused by male perspiration. In fact, the women never suspected they had men's sweat under their noses and believed they were helping to test alcohol, perfume or lemon floor wax.

Four weeks!  A month w/o any deodorant!  Christ, I hope these were single guys.  With no sense of smell due to some sort of industrial accident.  Who live alone.  And work alone.  And don't leave the house.  Ever.

¤ In more good news, there is some new killer strain of pneumonia that is going to kill us all, leaving krill as the most advanced life form on the planet.  Or something like that.

GENEVA (Reuters) - The World Health Organisation warned on Saturday of a worldwide health threat as a mystery killer pneumonia spread from east Asia to other parts of the globe.

Releasing a rare "emergency travel advisory," the United Nations health agency said an ill passenger had been taken to an isolation unit in Frankfurt, Germany, on Saturday after being removed from a plane en route from New York to Singapore.

WHO issued its first global alert for 10 years earlier this week because of the speed at which the disease travels and because patients are not responding to the usual treatments for pneumonia, Thompson said.

"As reports of cases are confirmed, you will see that there is a very high attack rate. When they get sick, they get very sick," he said.

If anyone reading this gets it and dies, can you leave me your VCR?  Mine tends to spit out tapes after about 30 minutes of recording.  I'll put you on the donor page. Kthx.

¤ The Bush Administration, annoyed that poor old people refuse to simply curl up and die when they get sick, is taking action to change the laws and deprive sick old poor people of due process in suing to get their full Medicare benefits, because those are costing government money that could be better spent on tax cuts to the rich and new explosive devices.

WASHINGTON, March 15 — The Bush administration says it is planning major changes in the Medicare program that would make it more difficult for beneficiaries to appeal the denial of benefits like home health care and skilled nursing home care.

In thousands of recent cases, federal judges have ruled that frail elderly people with severe illnesses were improperly denied coverage for such services.

Remind me again... who the fuck voted for this asshole?

¤ A woman (whore?) who was paid to have sex with a man and 4 retarded teens has been sentenced for her "crime".

Battle faced 59 years in prison, but as a result of her plea, she received a five-year suspended sentence and six months active time in the Durham County jail. She will be under house arrest for three months and on probation for five years. Battle will then be on intensive probation, and she cannot be employed where she will be around children 17 or younger without supervision.

Battle gave a statement to Durham sheriff's Sgt. W.M. Oakley in which she described encounters May 30 and 31 with group home workers Robert Fuller Garrison, Eddie Holden and four boys ages 12, 15, 16 and 17. Battle also admitted to having sex with another man, David Thomas Blue, while the others watched.

You are welcome to join me in wondering why any of this should be illegal.  As if it wasn't the best time ever for the four guys?  You can also insert a "they should have just given her 'community service'" joke as well, if it will make you feel better.

¤ Mel Gibson has long been a raving Catholic.  If there is such a thing. He's into the whole Latin Mass, wife = baby machine, Jesus' face on a tortilla, etc stuff.  Very hardcore.  He's gotten away with it by keeping a sort of low profile, but that may be changing.  He's financing some unwatchably-long movie about Jesus which will apparently be critical of the Jews for killing Jesus.  And with his parents being interviewed, we now know where he gets his ideas.

The actor's father, Hutton Gibson, told The New York Times he flatly rejected that the terrorist group led by Usama bin Laden had any role in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Sept. 11.

"Anybody can put out a passenger list," the elder Gibson told The Times.

"So what happened? They were crashed by remote control."

He and the actor's mother, Joye Gibson, also told The Times that the Holocaust was a fabrication manufactured to hide an arrangement between Adolf Hitler and "financiers" to move Jews out of Germany to the Middle East to fight Arabs.

"Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body," Hutton Gibson told The Times. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now six million?"

Said Joye Gibson: "That weren't even that many Jews in all of Europe."

Whether it will actually ever be in paperback form is unknown.  It would require a lot of work to get the first chapter up to snuff though, as in a near total rewrite.  Malaya likes it through 4 chapters though, and says it's reasonable quality, though she likes my current writing more. But she does agree that chapter one is a mess, after about the first two pages.

Lately I've been thinking what I'm doing with my "career" such as it is.  My initial idea with this site was to get a bunch of my old short stories online, and also do various humorous writing and a short daily update (the short part went away pretty early on).  The site would get read by people, someone would read the short stories, think they were oh-so great, see that I'd done some longer stuff, they would be an agent or editor or would know someone who was, and magically I would get an offer to write a novel for $$.

That may yet happen, but it's not happened yet, and since I know from the site logs that the fiction section is one of the least-read parts of the site, it seems like a pretty hopeless hope.  Not to mention the fact that this site has been up over a year and to date I have dusted off and HTML'ed and archived exactly one (1) of my 40 or 50 old short stories.  That might be a sign that I'm not exactly killing myself on the fiction front.

However fiction is what I enjoy writing the most (I think) and it's where I see the best potential for some actual $$ for my toil.  I don't see the non-fiction stuff on this site ever earning me any money (well, that's not entirely true) or leading directly to any income, or at least never enough to live on.  Much less enough to make me rich rich rich, as I vaguely dream of being.

So lately I've been re-evaluating my priorities, and thinking that rather than clinging to vague hopes of the non-fiction stuff here somehow leading me to fictional riches, I should flip that around.  And work on the fiction, and try to get it published in the real world (something that I have a lot better idea how to go about doing than I do making money from writing oh... a syndicated humor column) and if that's a huge success all is well.  If it's a mild success then that would probably help me get a foot in the door towards doing something more with the non-fiction, in terms of income-generation from it.

In either unlikely scenario, my theory is that my main income would be from fiction, so I might as well get to work on it.  Even if some agent/editor appeared Monday and wrote to say how much he/she loved my work and was interested in evaluating some novel-length fiction for publication I would say... let me get back to you as soon as I come up with some great idea and then write it.  Bit like a beautiful woman asking you to make love to her, and then you remember that you don't actually have a penis, but have always meant to grow one just in case it was ever required.  And you'll get right to that, if she'll just wait a moment.

Anyway, this is a long and roundabout depiction of my recent thought processes, which have belated arrived at what should have been obvious to me about 5 years ago. The problem is that I don't have any clever idea for a new novel, other than some vague ideas for the types of characters I'd put into it, and a desire to write it.

So I'm going to be doing more of my old fiction stories, hoping to put up a few every week, and possibly Miss Pretty Lies, though I should really work it into a semi-passable form and work on publication of it while I write something new and brilliant.

I'm not sure if this spells doom for the D2 novel.  I hope not, since I really want to write that and it is all worked out in my head and would be great.  I say that with no hesitation or modesty, the characters are very cool, well-formed in my mind, and almost the entire plot is as well. Writing it would be easy, at least relatively speaking.  Time consuming and arduous, but it's sort of like a big dinosaur skeleton.  I know it's in the ground, I just have to dig it out.

The problem, as I've belabored in the past, is that it's entirely noncommercial and unpublishable, and while writing various fan fiction short stories is fun and useful on the D2 site and rewarding, working for months on a novel is a bit more of a project.  And it's not as if I have endless free time and nothing else to work on.  Or some great abundance of income that would allow me to (continue to endlessly) fritter my time away on huge projects of no potential monetary benefit.

Since I don't have any novel novel ideas, I'm going to spend some hours every day for the immediate future rooting through my old short stories and HTML'ing them and posting them here.  Both to add to the site, and also to get me thinking more about fiction, and hopefully stir up some interesting novel ideas in my brain.

I might post some parts of Miss Pretty Lies as well, but as I said, the fiction stuff here is about the least viewed part of the site, so a dozen of you would be interested, and everyone else would ignore it and wish I'd update some more damn Band Names pages, FFS.  And post some more crap about gay animals and porn stars while I'm at it.  And anyway, I'm not sure that posting online, for free, a novel I want to get published in actual book form is a real bright business model.  Not that anything else I do can be described in that fashion either.

The main problem with Miss Pretty Lies is that it's just not that good.  It's okay, probably publishable with some modifications, but I can't imagine that any other novel I write won't be better.  If I write 20 novels, MPL will almost certainly be #20 in quality and popularity.  And I don't really want to start off with my worst work, even if it's not really so bad, relatively speaking. And yes, I'm looking ridiculously-far down the road, when there are more pressing matters.

And yes, I say this about every 6 months, to no obvious change/effect.  It was part of my NYR this year also. *sigh*

<-- Yesterday  --  Tomorrow -->
Archives Page