Books Lying Open
¤ Dark Tower VII, Stephen King
¤ The Dilbert Principle, Scott Adams
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ Another professional sport to pay attention to.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because My First Anubis benefited greatly from superglue.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May the 1) belated and 2) very belated birthday presents you sent last week turn out to be )1 too small, and 2) too big.

usy weekend, relatively speaking. Halloween was Sunday, and while Malaya and I both supposedly love the holiday, this was the second year in a row that we didn't do a damn thing to celebrate it. There wasn't even a single trick or treater to poke at, and while I know there aren't many kids in our condo complex, there are at least a few. Perhaps their parents take them over to the areas with expensive houses, where there are more kids and the pickings are better. I would, if I had kids here. Not that I'd have kids, until I had a better place to live, but that's easier said than done.

I must bear some (all?) of the blame for the lack of Halloween stuff, since just like last year, I spent most of the day hurriedly banging out a Diablo-themed short story to post on the D2 site. I meant to do it in advance, but only managed to do most of the mental work in advance, and wrote the first page or two late Saturday night; pages I deleted and rewrote from scratch on Sunday when I woke up with a better idea where I wanted to go with the story.

I did finish it on Halloween, at least. The first draft around 8pm, which gave Malaya a chance to read it (9 pages printed out with relatively small margins, 6400 words) and offer some suggestions. I did a rewrite after dinner and a bit of TV and incorporated some of her changes and a few more of my own, and that was that. Online it went just before midnight, and you can read it here.

It's entitled Hallow's Eve in Gal Darrack, which is a crappy name until you realize the story was called "D2 Halloween 2004" until seconds before it went online, I realized I needed something to link to, and decided to go with the most straight forward and boring name possible. The link points to the version on this site since 1) it's the exact same story on BC as it is on D2, 2) it'll be a good link forever, or at least until some future site redesign when a database script comes along and breaks everything, and because 3) there are a fair amount of author notes after the story, which you can read, or not. 

As I said, it's nothing all that special, but it's a respectable tale without any glaring deficiencies, and a few nice touches. The small stuff is better than the big stuff, IMHO, but I'm never the best judge of my own work, especially not right after I've finished it.  Malaya knew the basic plot from our discussions of it over the past few days (as I used her as a sounding board for possible D2 Halloween story ideas) so the weren't really any surprises for her, and she saw the ending coming as soon as the story began.  Whether or not other people will find it as telegraphed as she did, or think the ending is a huge twisting shock remains to be seen.

Don't get me wrong; it's not supposed to be a big surprise, I mean if you've read any of my other D2 short stories you've got to be expecting something like what happens, and if it didn't happen you'd probably end the story quite disappointed. But exactly what happens and exactly how it takes place may be somewhat of a surprise to readers.

I'm least happy with the very ending; I mean the last two paragraphs, mostly since I don't think the segue from the past history to the present fable wrap up is very smooth. I initially had another paragraph or two with the people in the square in the past history (being vague here to not spoil it for anyone who might be reading this before the story), talking about what happened over the next week or two, and then that past history ended and it jumped to the present fable wrap up, which was a paragraph longer and had some more details about how things changed over time.

Malaya's suggestion was to include less summary and explanation, and I came to partially agree with her after giving it some thought. She always likes less to be said and more to be left to the reader's imagination, and my experience with posting on the Internet (especially on the D2 site) is that things left unsaid = things misunderstood.  Malaya's also worked in real jobs with intelligent, college-educated adults, while I worked for more than ten years in a glorified menial labor job at the stadium in San Diego where most of my coworkers were underachieving high school students or had criminal records. Or both. As a result I tend to over-explain things, both in real life and in my writing, and it annoys Malaya in real life and seems unnecessary to her in my writing. And sometimes it is. But sometimes it isn't.

I think this Billy Wilder quote is pretty good advice for anyone targeting anything towards a mass audience.

Whether or not I'm targeting my current (writing/novel) work towards a mass audience is open to debate. Just the fact that anyone is actually willing to read a multi-hundred page book elevates them from the common herd, in my observation, but then again there are plenty of people who think RA Salvatore and John Saul are brilliant and intellectually-challenging writers.

What do the readers think about this one? It's too soon to have much feedback, but as of 2am Monday I have one piece of email feedback, and in the interests of fairness I will quote it in its entirety. This came from Courtney:

Awsome Story!!!!!!!!!!!
Well done!

As far as four-word, twelve-punctuation mark emails go, it's not bad.

There is also one comment in the forum thread, and it's um... curiously similar.

Similar right down to the misspelled word. The user name is different, and I don't care enough to go use admin options to see what the email is for the forum poster, but I'm counting this as 1.5 units of reader feedback, until further confirmation that this is in fact two different readers.

¤ In further writing/D2 news, the second installment of my newly-returned D2 column is due today, and while I know what it's going to be about and I've done research and taken notes for it, I have not yet begun to actually write it, or compile the reader feedback to add to the previous column. I was planning on getting that done tonight, but as it's relatively late and I'm relatively tired, I may just turn in and bang that out tomorrow afternoon.  Can you sense my enthusiasm?

¤ In sports news, I watched most of a football game on Sunday, taping it so I could work on my Halloween story and watch it later with the benefit of fast forward technology. It was the late game featuring Oakland, which is one of the great curses of living in the Bay Area last year and this year: out of the five NFL games on every weekend, at least two of them feature Oakland and SF, two of the five worst teams in the entire league. And I could only watch Raiders games to root against them even if they were good.

The lucky break this week was that Oakland was visiting San Diego, my old home town team. They were just as bad as Oakland last year, and were predicted to be worse this year, but after beating Oakland yesterday they are a surprising 5-3 and tied for first place in their division.  And I can safely say that if they played Oakland eight more times this year, or play eight more games the way they played Sunday, they would finish the year without losing again. I have seen a lot of football in my life, and aside from some complete mismatch college football games (where a national power like the University of Miami plays a team like Muskogee State Poly Tech, which has a smaller enrollment than the Miami team has cheerleaders) I can not recall ever seeing a game where one team dominated the other as thoroughly as San Diego dominated Oakland.

That's not entirely true on both sides of the ball, since Oakland had some success against SD's defense, but on offense SD was virtually flawless. The final score was 42-14, but the score in the 3rd quarter was 42-7, and that was before SD made virtually no effort to do anything on offense in the 4th quarter. I literally felt pity for the Oakland defense, especially in the secondary, where they were frequently not within five yards of wide open SD receivers, and when they were close the SD QB threw such perfect passes that it didn't matter.

For the day Brees, the SD quarterback, was 22/25 for 281 yards and 5 touchdowns. Of his three incompletions, I believe one was batted down at the line, and two others were thrown out of bounds when he had to scramble away from the rush. Seriously; no Oakland defensive back made a play on the ball all day. SD completed an absurd 88% of their passes, threw for five touchdowns, didn't punt until the 4th quarter when they were no longer trying, and even worse, they had faced and converted a single 3rd down until late in the 3rd quarter. I've never seen a team score four TDs on sustained drives without even needing 3 plays to make first downs, but SD didn't. They weren't running it very well, but they completed virtually every pass, and with an average gain of 11 yards they basically got a first down every single time they threw the ball in the first three quarters. They didn't even face their second 3rd down until they had 3rd and goal from the 2, late in the 3rd quarter. They ran for one yard, then went for it on 4th and goal and Brees threw his 6th TD to the best SD receiver, who was completely uncovered in the center of the endzone.

Honestly, I can not overstate how hopelessly outmatched Oakland looked against the pass. I know SD's best player is their running back, but what's the point in scheming to stop him (and doing an acceptable job at it) when you don't even make a token effort to play a nickle defense, put some more DBs back there, and slow down the pass? So you held Tomlinson to 70 odd yards.. what does that matter when Brees threw for 5 touchdowns against inept single coverage?  It was like Oakland hadn't been briefed on the fact that SD can actually throw the ball downfield. Did they think Ryan Leaf was playing or what? It looked like a complete failure in coaching and game planning, to me, and it didn't seem that Oakland ever made any adjustments. They kept going with a 4-3, trying to cover fast tight ends with linebackers, and trying to single cover fast WRs with their lead footed defensive backs.

And it wasn't like SD was breaking tackles or scoring on long bombs when defenders slipped; it was a methodical beating. Multiple wide open receivers on every play, 10-20 yards per pass, great catches when necessary, and Oakland defenders constantly chasing and seldom catching up. I don't know if Oakland has given up on the season or what, but I've never seen such a half-hearted effort by a defense. Ray Buchanon especially was the victim on at least 3 touchdowns and innumerable other completions, and he was lucky to be close enough to push someone out of bounds or touch them after they dove for a catch and fell. He got on more touchdown highlights than most offensive players do in a season. Of course he was chasing pathetically along every time, five yards late, but hey, his name and number were prominently displayed on the screen. So he must be a star!

If SD has a weakness it's in their defensive front, since they stayed with the base four man rush all day and hardly laid a hand on the Oakland QB. They got one sack late in the game, and admittedly almost never blitzed, and really shut down Oakland's rushing game and passing game with all of their defensive backs, but it they'd switched it up a bit and blitzed one guy every now and then, done some zone blitzing and odd coverages, etc, I think it would have been much worse of a rout. As it was the SD offense had a field day while the SD defense kept forcing Oakland to punt on 3rd and 7 after a dropped pass and a nicely-defended pass that was two inches from going for a 30 yard gain. Oakland had forever to throw, and while they didn't often complete it, they didn't get sacked or fumble or throw wildly while dodging defenders either.  That seems to be SD's on both sides of the ball; they try not to beat themselves and keep it conservative and safe on offense, bend but don't break on defense, and force the other team to play a solid game to win. Since most teams will make mistakes, it often works, but can fail if the other team has flashy superstar power, as they lost 21-20 after leading 17-7 in the 4th quarter to Atlanta a few weeks ago.

As for SD's long term prospects, it's hard to say. They've looked good in both the games I've seen most of, even though they lost the first one in somewhat flukish fashion to to Atlanta, and with as much parody parity as there is in the NFL these days, any decent team that gets on a roll can go far. Look at the Panthers last year; they nearly won the Superbowl, and now they're 1-6 with basically the same team.  They certainly aren't as good as they looked Sunday, but there's not a team in the NFL that is. They're 5-3 now and will probably need to end up 10-6 to make the playoffs, but they still have to play Denver, KC home and away, and at Indy and Cleveland. None of those teams are great, all of them are very inconsistent, and the other three teams they play are pretty bad, so it's certainly possible that they could end up with 10 or 11 wins... but I wouldn't go printing the playoff tickets just yet if I were San Diego's front office.

¤ Now to the news, since I have once again failed to save time, space, or energy to blog about any of the various and wacky real life activities of late. Not that it's really news today anyway.

I suppose I should mention (somewhere other than the FotD) that the election is coming up Tuesday. I hate to make a prediction of any kind, but my admittedly biased gut feeling is that Kerry is going to win by more than all of the polls are saying. I think they've been systematically over-counting Republicans and past voters in most of the surveys, and I think voter turnout among young people and first time voters and minorities is going to be high enough to save the world from four more years of Bush's international blundering, terrorist-increasing wars, and gargantuan budget deficits.

Even if Kerry wins, the Republicans may retain control of the House and Senate, which would enable them to block virtually everything he tries to do for at least the first two years. On top of that, he may have to spend so much of his effort, political capital, and finances to clean up the messes Bushco created that he won't get anything done on his own agenda.  I've heard a lot of Bush critics say, no more than half-ironically, that it would be better if Bush won just so he'd completely go down in flames over the next four years, as all of his chickens came home to roost. The problem then is that when a real adult was elected in 2008 they'd have even worse problems than Kerry is going to have to clean up now, assuming we even made it that far with Bush stirring up terrorists and destroying the US economy and every remaining vestige of the public safety net most Americans depend on at one time or another in their lives.

he related article begins on page 4, and here it is:

The comments thread is amusing as well, with 134 comments when the usual post on Iron Circus gets maybe a dozen. The first twenty or thirty are from regular readers who join Spike in rejoicing at National Geographic throwing such a powerful punch at scientific illiteracy masquerading as religious faith, and then a bunch of new readers show up via a referral from some Christian forum and start throwing down challenges to evolution on about the level of "Well then why don't the monkeys in the zoo turn into humans!?"

As always, 99.9% of anti-evolution arguments are based in the arguer's lack of understanding of science, of theories, of natural selection, or all three. Not that that disqualifies them from trying to set the American school system further back in science and technology by forcing science teachers to waste time discussing the Christian creation myth.

I often wonder why some more charismatic preachers can't just find a way to adapt (evolve?) their version of Christianity to fit with evolution, and how much longer we'll have to continue wasting time on this sort of debate. It took the Catholic Church 400 years to admit they were wrong about wanting to burn Galileo at the stake for observing that planets orbited the sun, moons orbited planets, and that the sun itself wasn't a flawless sphere since it obviously had sunspots, since all of those things were in direct contradiction to things said in the infallible Bible. But you can at least excuse the ignorance of the common, uneducated man back in the 1500s. Today though? What sort of bottomless arrogance and ignorance does it take to continue disputing scientific truths such as evolution, the age of the earth being greater than 6000 years, and the fact that there was no worldwide freshwater flood within the last few thousand years?

I can't even imagine comparably-ridiculous beliefs to compare those to. Imagine if some other religion, Islam for instance, had a holy book that said something that could be interpreted to mean there was no such thing as electricity. Or that no animal population could grow larger (in size) over time. Or that no reptile could ever give birth to live young.

Imagine the field day Christians would have, pointing out the idiotic errors in that faith? Everyone knows the average human (not to mention types of dogs, horses, etc) are far larger today than they were 200 years ago. Everyone knows some types of snakes and lizards and frogs hatch their eggs internally and therefore give birth to live young. Etc.  Well guess what? Everyone knows the earth is a few billion years older than 6000, everyone knows the earth orbits the sun, and everyone knows that evolution is an easily-demonstrable ongoing process that has shaped and continues to shape the form of every organism on earth.

There are news stories every month about how most antibiotics no longer work, since the bacteria they used to kill have evolved into new strains that are now immune to penicillin and other common drugs that killed everything they were used against 30 and 40 years ago. How is that explained by any mechanism other than survival of the fittest and evolution? Is every doctor and lab on earth in collusion with some grand conspiracy theory to trick Christian true believers? Is Satan making new types of resistant bacteria just like he buried all of those fake dinosaur bones to make us believe in evolution?

The whole thing just makes my head hurt.

Dear Roger,

I have been disappointed to read your complaints about the former Hollinger International management. I vividly recall your avaricious negotiating techniques through your lawyer, replete with threats to quit, and your generous treatment from David Radler, which yielded you an income of over $500,000 per year from us, plus options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and your own Web site at the company's expense. You know the successful efforts we made to improve the contents of the Sun-Times, to improve industrial relations, to strengthen it with the acquisition of the Southtown, and the Gary and Copley newspapers.

It was our management that revived the newspaper and moved it to new presses, which it had urgently needed for many years. As you know, and as Sun-Times management has pointed out, none of the payments that are the subject of the present controversy are related to the compensation levels at the Sun-Times. In the light of these facts, and the many kindnesses David Radler and I showered on you, your proletarian posturing on behalf of those threatening to strike the Sun-Times and your base ingratitude are very tiresome.

Sincerely,
Conrad

... Roger Ebert answers

Dear Conrad,

One of the things I have always admired about you, and that sets you aside from the general run of proprietors, is that you so articulately and amusingly say exactly what is on your mind. I am not at all surprised by your letter to me, because I would assume that is how you would feel; what is refreshing is that you say so.

Ebert responds to most of Black's points, and I again suggest you read the original letters, but I just want to touch upon Black's incredible hypocrisy.  He argues like Ann Coulter reasons. Black criticizes Ebert for using a lawyer to bargain for a new contract (as if Black's ever signed a form in his life without 4 lawyers in matching suits beside him), then says Ebert's contract is generous (as if Ebert didn't fight tooth and nail to get it), then criticizes Ebert for threatening to quit during contract negotiations (as if management wasn't threatening to fire him), then acts like Ebert's website is some sort of perk (when it's certainly making the company money from the ad revenues), then calls Ebert ungrateful for the kindness he's been showered with a paragraph after calling Ebert's lawyer "avaricious" for negotiating those kindnesses in his contract in the first place.

What doesn't Black mention in his reply and what was Ebert polite enough not to bring up in his first letter?

Black was ousted as CEO of Hollinger International Inc. amid an internal investigation that accused him, Radler and others of systematically looting the newspaper publishing company of more than $400 million -- nearly all its profits from 1997 through 2003.

The report, prepared by a special committee of Hollinger's board, said Black had Hollinger pay for things like $8.9 million worth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorabilia while Black was writing a book about FDR. The company also financed nearly $25,000 for "summer drinks" and more than $42,000 for a birthday party for Black's wife, Barbara Amiel Black.

The internal investigators reported that Amiel Black was paid "more than $1.1 million a year in annual salary and bonus payments" even though "she performed no meaningful work in return."

Unfortunately, it seems that the whole thing is over and we won't see any more amusing open letter exchanges, since workers and management have tentatively agreed on a new contract. That article has a bit more information about the high ethics and character displayed by Mr. Black in his business dealings.

A strike would have come at a difficult time for the Sun-Times. Owner Hollinger International is dealing with lawsuits over former CEO Conrad Black, who is accused of looting the company of nearly $400 million, as well as investigations into its newspaper circulation figures.

The newspaper was ranked earlier this year as the nation's 21st largest newspaper with a circulation of 486,936, however it was recently censured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, an independent reporting group, for misstating those figures. The Sun-Times said in July that the overstatement -- roughly 16 percent of circulation -- was discovered when a new leadership team took over after Black stepped down in November.

I'm not going to get into a big discussion of it here, but corporate crime and punishment always amuses me. Some hood snatches a purse or robs a 7/11 for $40 and he might get 10 years. Longer if he uses a weapon. Yet CEOs can pillage hundreds of millions of dollars, bankrupt companies, cost thousands of employees their jobs and savings... and as punishment they get a ten-figure severance package and retire, or else step right in as CEO of some other company. If they are grossly-criminal in their theft, they might get a fine, and maybe even some community service or a couple of months in a country club jail.

I'm not suggesting that the punishment should exactly correspond to the dollar amount of damages, but it would be nice to see something approaching equality in these sorts of cases. After all, you'll be traumatized by being mugged, but would you rather lose $80 to a big guy at the ATM, or have your retirement savings wiped out so some white guy with no ethics and a Harvard MBA can buy a bigger yacht to sail to his private island?