Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Your little hopes and dreams."
¤ Usage: "Poor fellow, his little hopes and dreams have all be smashed."
¤ Origin: Quipped by a whore, or pre-op transgender man, or a sociopath, or some other lowlife who was engaged in a vicious verbal battle with another lowlife guest on the Jerry Springer show
¤ Notes: While the Jerry Springer show is generally pretty lacking in opportunities for intellectual improvement, you do tend to hear some funny jokes, of the personal insult type.  This was one of the best.  One loser was arguing with another loser, and when one said something about how she'd loved her husband, whom the other lowlife had stolen away, lowlife #1 replied, "Bitch, I don't care about your little hopes and dreams!"

You'll find it applicable to almost every situation in life.  It's the "little" that really makes it work, since that just so perfectly and cruelly diminishes whatever claim to importance the other person might previously have had. -- February 20, 2004

've got heaps of small news type blog items, along with a longer thing on self-publishing below, and since I need to post those at some point, and since it's late and I'm busy working on the novel, today we'll just have a bunch of miscellaneous stuff, with more coherent descriptions from the Tahoe trip tomorrow, or perhaps Friday.

We're both feeling pretty good now, after being home for three days.  Malaya has gone to the gym all three days and is back to her full routine now, and aside from my face looking somewhat fuzzy from the peeling sunburn (classic goggle/raccoon face, with a white square around my eyes and the top of my forehead burned, and then from mid-nose down to the neck) I don't feel any worse for the wear of snowboarding.  My left knee was twinging badly on Sunday, but that's pretty much gone away, and I was going to go out for a medium-length jog Wednesday, except for it being rainy and my left hip hurting randomly.  That and being out running errands with Malaya all afternoon.

I'll go jog on Thursday though, as I try to get back into exercising and doing more stretching to prepare my thighs for snowboarding.  My quads always start to cramp up about halfway through the day boarding, my left one especially, and stretching it out helps a lot, both before and during the pain.  Strong and flexible legs are a great help with various snow-related activities.

Anyway, my thoughts are on the novel and I've got nothing worth saying now (as the last two paragraphs proved), so on to the news.  There will be a bunch of reader mail in the next two days also, since several emails of interest have come in recently. Hell, I might even do a February mailbag, and end the half year drought on that front.

¤ The headline on this news article amused me, in as much as it's a demonstration of the importance of proper punctuation.

Video Games Make Kids Fat, Violent, Swedish Experts Say

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Video games can make children fat and, in the case of violent games popular among teenage and younger boys, aggressive and even criminal, Swedish experts said on Monday.

No!!! Fat and violent I can accept, but not Swedish too!

Oh wait...

¤ Lovely little Darwinian tale from the Germany.

A MAN who lived in his own “zoo” of lizards and insects was fatally bitten by a pet black widow spider — then eaten by the other creepy-crawlies.

Police broke in to Mark Voegel’s apartment to find spider Bettina along with 200 others, several snakes, a gecko lizard called Helmut and several thousand termites had gorged on his body.

Neighbours alerted police after becoming alarmed by the stink.

A police spokesman said: “It was like a horror movie. His corpse was over the sofa.

“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth. There was everything there one could imagine in the world of reptiles. Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”

The article is from the UK Sun, a tabloid, so take it with appropriate grains of salt.  I think most of it's bullshit, from what I know about reptiles.  Geckos are small insect-eaters; they couldn't bite anything off of a human.  Snakes are the same; I've never heard of any snake that could eat anything it couldn't swallow whole; they simply don't have the teeth or bodies to rip off hunks of meat, though possibly they might eat bites of meat that were lying on the ground.  And are there any such things as meat-eating termites?  They're exclusively vegetable eaters, mostly things like wood and vegetation.

I figure the guy died from a spider bite and they found his body with the various loose animals in the apartment, and the Sun did what tabloids do, and embellished wildly from there. But in any event, it's fun to pretend that it might really have happened this way. 

¤ Since I can't help myself, here's yet another damning/depressing article about Mad Cow disease in the US, and the USDA's clear desire to cover up any evidence of it, regardless of the health risks.

A beef producer in Kansas has proposed testing all its cattle for mad cow disease so it can resume exports to Japan, but it is encountering resistance from the Agriculture Department and other beef producers.

American beef exports have plummeted since Dec. 23 when a cow in Washington State was diagnosed with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or B.S.E., a fatal disease that can be passed to humans who eat infected cattle tissue. To assure the safety of its meat, the company, Creekstone Farms of Arkansas City, Kan., a subsidiary of the Enterprise Management Group, wants to use rapid diagnostic tests that are routinely used in Japan and many European nations.

But no rapid tests have been approved by the United States Department of Agriculture, and department officials pointed out yesterday that it was against the law for any company to sell or market any unapproved diagnostic test. They said they would not respond to Creekstone's request until they evaluated the legal, regulatory and trade implications raised.

So they want to use a test to insure their meat is safe, a test that's far better and faster than the ones being used now.  A test that's used all over the world in countries that really are concerned with the health of their cattle and people.  And the USDA refuses to let them use it, and is desperately stalling for time to find a way to keep such improved tests from becoming common place in the US meat industry.  It's almost enough to make you think they are trying to cover something up, isn't it?

In case you think I'm exaggerating about their delay tactics, could this make it any more clear?

According to a statement from J. B. Penn, the under secretary for farm and foreign agricultural services, the Agriculture Department will respond to Creekstone when it has completed its evaluation.

A press spokesman, Jim Rogers, said that the reply will "take some time" and that anyone interested should "check back in future."

I defy you to follow the logic Dan Murphy here throws out.

Other meat producers are upset by the company's request, saying it has broken ranks in an industry besieged by bad news. Dan Murphy, vice president for public affairs at the American Meat Industry, said American beef was so safe that widescale testing was unnecessary.

"Everybody is hurting from the export ban," Mr. Murphy said, "but their solution is not the right one." Any testing, he added, should take place under government oversight.

In other words: It's so safe that there's no need to test it to prove that it's safe.

How can this idiot not be fired for this on the spot?  Is there any way that other countries don't see this sort of thing and keep up their bans on US beef imports forever?  I hope they do, and that beef sales in the US drop about 90%. That's the only way the industry will ever get serious about this, and begin testing, and when they test they'll find tons of cows with Mad Cow, and only then (assuming the USDA and meat industry can't cover it all up) will public pressure and economic necessity force them to make industry changes to cow feed (no more cannibalism) and slaughtering techniques that will end Mad Cow disease in the US meat supply.

And no, you have no idea what I'm talking about if you never played the game.

Go to the link above, and read the instructions if you've forgotten the nuances of the game, such as they were.  I didn't remember quite why it was essential to buy a healer and beast ASAP, until moving a few times reminded me.  The interface isn't exactly perfect; the map is pretty cheesy, but it's functional.  You have to physically click on your appropriate color dot, and drag it to the next space each turn, in order to keep track of where your piece is, but it works well enough once you get used to it.

The game is still primarily luck, even if you apply your adult reasoning and strategy to it. After all, the best play means nothing if you just keep delving into the tomb/ruin and never find a key, while some other player gets silver and gold their first Move random fight each time past the Frontier, but it's fun for itself, as well as the nostalgia.  Though it mostly made me want to go play Diablo II some, for a sort of updated version of the same thing.

¤ Here's an article about self publication that my dad saw in the NYTimes and sent me the link to.  I found it pretty interesting, and though self publication costs more than I thought it did, it's not that unaffordable. 

"It's easy to publish your own book!" the "Borders Personal Publishing" leaflets proclaim. Pay $4.99. Take home a kit. Send in your manuscript and $199. A month or so later, presto. Ten paperback copies of your novel, memoir or cookbook arrive.

Fork over $499, and you can get the upscale "Professional Publication" option. Your book gets an International Standard Book Number, publishing's equivalent of an ID number and is made available on Borders.com, and the Philadelphia store makes space on its shelves for five copies.

Hardly anyone who goes this route amounts to anything, but there are the rare success stories.

At iUniverse, the "Star" program is another important hook. If a title sells more than 500 copies its first year, the company may invest in marketing the book and invite the author to become a Star.

But of iUniverse's 17,000 published titles, the authors of only 84 have been chosen as Stars, and only a half-dozen have made it to Barnes & Noble store shelves.

---

Occasionally, a P.O.D. or other self-published title is discovered by a traditional house. Philip Simmons, dying of Lou Gehrig's disease, wanted to see his words in print quickly. He turned to Xlibris, which published several thousand copies of his memoir, "Learning to Fall: The Blessings of an Imperfect Life,'' in 2000. The book was received to critical acclaim, and was republished by Bantam Books in 2002. Mr. Simmons died last July.

Mr. Feldcamp said that conventional publishers had acquired about 20 Xlibris titles. An iUniverse author, Laurie Notaro, even made the paperback best-seller list with "The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club," and received a two-book contract from Random House.

But these are far removed from the experiences of most authors. The odds are stacked against such books reaching the shelves of the chains or the attention of news media. Mr. Riggio of Barnes & Noble cautions, "Writers should have no delusions it's a fast way to get into bookstores."

Whatever method of self-publishing an author chooses, one factor is the same: the author is the only one driving the sales. "The bottom line," as Ms. Yoder has learned, "is promoting yourself. When push comes to shove, it's your money."

My interest in this is not for my whole writing "career" though I guess I shouldn't rule it out at this point.  I've been thinking more about going through the normal agent > editor > publisher channels, and assuming I would make a bunch of photo copies of a sample chapter, mail them to various agents I select from Writer's Market, and so on.  My interest in self-publishing has been in making select limited editions, such as a collection of my old (and some newer) short stories, as a promotional item or a way for site readers who want to donate to me/the site/my writing to do so and get something more than a warm happy feeling and your name on the donors page in return.

However, I was assuming I could get something like 250 copies made for about $5 a book in cost, which would be $1250 outlay. And that I could then sell them to you guys (and probably plug it from the D2 site as well) for cost plus shipping, while giving you the option of paying more as a tip/donation/whatever.  However if it costs $200 for 10 copies, that's $20 each.  I assume that as you do more copies it gets cheaper, and my $1250 for 250 estimate might not be totally out of line, but I suspect it would still be more than that unless I wanted to get like 5000 copies printed up.

I can't find any info from Borders about their program online, but checking other self publishing offers, the one from Aventine Press looks affordable on the overall price of $350, until you realize that you don't actually get any books for that.  You just get it printed up, and then they sell them through their website and give you a percentage of the royalties, and their prices are a bit steep.

Ouch. $15 or $20 per paperback is a bit more than I think ya'll would be willing to pay, no matter how much you wanted to support my career, this site, or even buy it in the hope that I really will become a successful author, and that a copy of this early limited edition thing would someday be worth $500.

As of now, this is all just conjecture and curiosity, since I don't feel pressure to get published at any cost. I have every (misplaced?) confidence in the world that my writing and stories are good enough to get published by a real publisher, for real money.  I'm not some person working in another field who keeps persistently dabbling in writing and just wants a book with his name on it, and doesn't have any realistic aspirations of making a career of it and doesn't really care about the cost or have any hope of making his money back on the deal.  Though check back in 10 years and I might be. *cough*

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