Author Archives: Jerry

Be the Google – updated!

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I keep telling myself that I’m not going to do this anymore, but I just can’t help it. It’s just strange what people search for, and when those strange searches lead here, well, I have to tell you about it. Sitemeter took a powder the last couple of days- we’ll never know who the true visitor 1000 was – but what it has collected is pure esoteric Web arcana!

  • Google: photo of squirrel passed out with bottle and cigarette – I wonder if he found it. Squirrels seems to avoid the paparazzi pretty well.
  • Google: pics to look at well baked – not sure who is baked
  • Google: national poetry slam ideas for
  • Google: space vehicles and what they do
  • Google: Mad Crazy Death Cults
  • Google: squirrel trainer – you know, if Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds were to happen today, perhaps the only trace of the town would be some fruitless Web search for “bird trainer”.
  • Google: regularization
  • Google: squrrel death – yeah, yeah, we’ve heard all about that before.
  • Google: half baked wallpaper – riiiiight.
  • aol: red hat pary ideas – a most brilliant convergence between the searcher misspelling “party” and me misspelling “part”.
  • Google: mythical energy
  • Google: feminine beer names – I’m hoping we have a new regular from that one
  • Google: amazon women in the avocado jungle of death – you can’t keep a good movie down
  • yahoo(?): “how to cook an egg” over easy – I hope they read it carefully

There were others even less interesting than those. Also, “jerry for president”, “I want to go to the moon”, and things like that, but they have been forever lost in the sitemeter abyss. I left out some squirrel-related search hits, and there was an “elevator ocelot rutabaga” hit but I wasn’t sure if I had already reported it last time. It’s good to know, however, that people are still concerned about classic movies and the important trends shaping our world today.

Thanks!

I want to ask Peter Jennings a question

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I came up with a question tonight, a question about freedom and responsibility – specifically, about the freedom of the press and the responsibility of the press. Most of this episode will be devoted to why I want to ask Peter Jennings this question. Precious little will be about the question itself. The question has nothing to do with 9/11, but my singling out of Peter Jennings is entirely about that day.

I had been watching football the night before. Ed McCaffery, the indestructible wide receiver for the Denver Broncos, had had his leg shattered. He was the guy that could take any hit and still catch the ball. I don’t remember whether he held on that time as his leg was being smashed into a kajillion pieces. If he caught it, and I think he did, he would have been an american legend. But that was 9/10.

Most mornings I wake up to the radio. I wake slowly. I fade in and out as the stories fill me. That morning I heard about a plane hitting the world trade center. That woke me up. I thought about the B-26(?) that had once hit the Empire State Building. Then I heard that another plane had hit the other tower. The radio reports I heard said the second plane had been a smaller one, but that didn’t matter. Two planes meant intent. I went into the other room and turned on the TV.

It was the same on every channel. Smoke billowing from the towers. Replays of a 767 smashing into the south tower from every angle. Flames billowing. Somewhere in those flames were people. People who, like me, thought of terrorism as a far-away thing. I sat on my comfy chair and watched in horror. As I did so, I found another outrage. Every station had across the bottom of the screen a graphic. They all featured a cross-hair, and said something like “America Under Attack” or “Attack On America”. The major news outlets were competing to brand the tragedy even as it happened.

There was only one exception. Peter Jennings sat at his desk, his tie a little off and his voice a little hoarse, and there were no exploitative graphics. I may be wrong, but I think the anchor still has control over that kind of thing when it really matters. Whether it was Peter or his boss, that news organization showed far more class that day than any other. So it was when the south tower fell I was listening to Peter as he saw it the same time I did. “Oh my God,” he said, or something like that, maybe one of those three words, but his voice caught and it was real and it was the full tragedy.

That day he stood in front of all with courage and compassion, without taking shelter behind slogans and marketing gimmicks. Since then I have afforded Peter Jennings with a degree of credibility I deny the rest of the breathless “journalists” of today. He could say a lot of things I disagree with, and he has, but I will never forget that day.

So that’s why Peter Jennings. I think he’s a journalist. I don’t think there are many others who make the national scene and remain journalists. So now, after that big emotional gush, I will leave you with the question, a hard intellectual nugget that you have to diagram before you digest. But it’s an important question to me.

So, Peter: Responsible journalists try hard to not tell lies. They check the veracity of the statements given them. If the president were to release a statement that research showed to be untrue, would you a) not print the story, or, b) print a story saying the president had lied?

I’m talking to a responsible journalist here, so “run the lie, it’ll sell papers” is not an option.

Thanks!

Another Czech story

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Those of you who have been around me at all have heard this story before, but it bears repeating. I first met Marianna when traveling to Prague with Triska a few years back. We had flown into Munich and after spending a day there we hopped on a train and popped on over to The Czech Republic. My brother and his girlfriend met us at the train station.

My first impression was of a very attractive woman – slender, with dark hair and blue eyes. She has an elegance to her. She was quiet, not confident enough of her english to try to make conversation right away. She was efficient, though. She had our metro tickets ready to go and herded us down the escalator, past the ticket police and onto our train. She showed us how to use the tickets and how to read the metro map.

Ahoj! Once we got settled in their little apartment, it was time to go out. Naturally, that meant having beer. The weather was beautiful and we strolled around the neighborhood. Marianna was a dutiful tour guide, pointing out the sights. “Good beer here,” she would say as we passed a bar, or “Nice to sit, but not good beer,” gesturing at another. Marianna, I realized, was a beer snob, and she took her role as beer tour guide very seriously. I was definitely starting to like this girl.

Eventually we found ourselves parked at a little beer garden, Marianna and Phil facing Triska and me. The first round of beers arrived. A nice color, a rich head, and very tasty. I had another sip. Yep, Good stuff. I set my glass down and looked around the table. Marianna’s glass was empty.

“The czechs,” My brother explained, “Use the first beer to quench their thirst. After that they slow down and sip them.” Another beer arrived unbidden. The waiter was just walking around with mugs of beer, and when it looked like someone was running low he’d just plunk another one on the table. There was no asking for another round here, it was up to you to tell them when to stop bringing more.

Marianna’s second beer lasted longer than her first one did, and before long we were all feeling jolly. Her English was plenty good enough to hold up her end of the conversation and teach us a few czech words while she was at it. Then it happened. This strikingly attractive woman who my brother has somehow managed to fool into dating him leans over and gives him a great big hug. “I’m so glad you love beer,” she said.

If you put that in a beer commercial people would laugh. Why? Because it could never, ever happen in real life. It’s a fantasy. A dream. The kind of image they use to make you buy more beer so a beautiful woman will love you. But it happened.

three troublemakers I have had the pleasure to get to know Marianna much better since then, and some of you have met her as well. I have the little book she gave me where we write in Czech phrases for me to practice. I have eaten her cooking and admired her inventive handicrafts. We have talked about politics into the night over pivo. She has been always a window onto czech culture and the music and events going on in Prague.

Now I’m heading back, for a longer stay this time, long enough that perhaps some of those language lessons will stick, and long enough so they can get really tired of me. But what can I say? I like it over there. I’ll tell you more about why some other time, but if it weren’t for Marianna I wouldn’t have seen the side of the Czech Republic I find so cool.

All of this, really, is my way of saying, “welcome to the family.” Congratulations, guys.

Thanks!

American Road Myth, part 2

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I’ve touched on this already – that solitude is a big part of the American Road Myth, so forgive me if this repeats some of what has been said before by me and by you. In part one, I described the road as a path to personal wholeness, or the myth of wholeness, at least. Implicitly, those on the road will never know that wholeness. The road is a place for the unwhole. They just keep moving. They are the drifters.

The road myth is all about the drifters; they are the frame that the myth is hung upon. People with no place. They go everywhere and belong nowhere. The heroes of American legend are drifters. The road has shaped our heroes and our old heroes did much to build the road myth itself.

It’s the classic story – a stranger comes to a troubled town. He knows no one, owes nothing to anyone, and has nothing to lose. He understands evil, though. He knows how it works and he knows what to do about it. His separateness from the rest of the people gives him a power they don’t have, a mythical energy that comes from strength of character and moral certainty. At least, that’s what the townsfolk see. We know that any American hero has demons as well, ghosts that drive him mad even as they give him strength. It is the evil he fights within himself that gives him power over the evil he meets. The road looks like the path to escape the demons, bit it isn’t. The road is where the demons live.

At the end of every story, the hero is presented with a choice – stay in town, put the demons to rest, settle down with the prettiest girl, or return to the road. Return to a life of haunted solitude. The choice is always the same. (Although there is the occasional story where they have to shoot the girl to get him back on the road). Big trouble in Little China did it best: “Aren’t you even going to kiss her?” “Nah.”

Many countries have adopted our loner-hero character, and the Australians may have improved upon it, but it is still a peculiarly American myth. A hero in a story is only allowed to have a social life if an equally prominent character demonstrably does not. Bad guys are surrounded by people, Good guys go home to empty apartments with chinese takeout cartons overflowing the trash can. They have no furniture but a lazy-boy and a small TV on a milk crate with a coathanger for an antenna. They like it that way. Jackie Chan has a family to nag him, Nick Nolte probably never even had a mother.

I have certainly embraced the idea of the hero as a loner in my writing. The main character in The Monster Within is about the most solitary person I’ve even seen written down at the start of the story. The Fish, while still in its infancy, is a story directly about the search for solitude. By disconnecting from the world, the narrator is able to see the nature of ordinary things through many different layers, and hear the stories going on around us all the time.

Which brings me back to the drifter. When he finds a new place, he sees the things that everyone who lives there has learned not to see. He sees the truth. His power is to show the truth to others. He may be the best with a gun, or perhaps Kung Fu, but his real weapon is truth. It is why the town appreciates him so much, and why they don’t try too hard to make him stay. Too much truth, all the time, would be scary. It’s better for everyone if he just… vanishes. As if he never was.

He shows them the truth and makes them free, but he never shares the truth about himself. That is for the drifter and his demons alone.

Thanks!

Pop Quiz!

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A hunter leaves his camp and walks five miles due south, then turns east and goes five miles, where he shoots a bear. He drags the bear five miles straight north back to his camp.

What time is it when he gets there?

Thanks!

Be careful what you ask for…

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Why looky over there! It’s a poll! Just like pL asked for. Well, except for the dumb question. I decided since it’s free, what the heck, I’d give it a try. Unfortunately Pollhost does not think stuffing the ballot box is cricket, so at most you can vote once a day. Remember, it’s not just a right, it’s a responsibility.

I’ll try to come up with a new question every week or so. Whenever the whim catches me, really. If you have ideas for a poll question, let me know! If you think polls are a frivolous waste of valuable Internet resources, well, be sure to let me know that, too.

Thanks!

Eggs Over Easy

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Note to visitors: I am passionate about my eggs. It’s funny how many people wind up here from searches in Google and Yahoo, looking for the Answer. Read on; the key to the perfect over-easy egg is only paragraphs away. This episode was written to entertain, but clearly there is a pent-up need in the world for advice on getting those eggs just right, and by gum I’m happy to give my opinion about anything. For that reason I have now written another episode: Eggs Over Easy – The Definitive Step-By-Step Guide. I would recommend you read here first, then go over to the step-by-step page. If you find this information helpful or entertaining, please leave a comment; I’d love to hear from you. Then you can invite me over for breakfast. Mmmmmm… breakfast.

I’m not a gourmet by any stretch of the imagination, nor does Iron Chef have to worry about being unseated by me. But I do like my eggs. Thus it is not an unusual morning when I venture out to find someone to cook some for me. Now that I no longer have a kitchen, this happens with even greater regularity. Alas, my fried chicken ova* are almost never cooked right. Oh, I eat them, and I still enjoy them, but there’s that little part of me that says, “doesn’t anyone know how to cook an egg anymore?”

I’m here to put things right. You don’t have to thank me; it’s what I do.

There are four generally recognized ways to fry an egg:
Sunny-Side Up: The egg is never flipped. The yolk is a bright yellow hemisphere sitting in the middle of the pristine white. The yolk is liquid, and some of the white around the yolk may have a jelly-like consistency.
Over Easy: The egg is flipped briefly. The yolk does not stand out as strikingly, but is still liquid. The white is no longer liquid.
Over Meduim: The white is cooked to a firmer texture, and the yolk is solid around the edges, and oozy in the middle.
Over Hard: The white is firm, the yolk is a lighter color and flakey.

Then there are those who intentionally break the yolk before the flip. We won’t talk about those people here.

Each degree of cooking is associated with a preferred texture for the white and for the yolk. Which brings me to my point. People who order their eggs over easy don’t want runny whites. If they wanted that, they would order sunny-side up. Runny yolk but solid white is why over easy was invented in the first place. It is by far the trickiest egg-frying style – it requires touch and artistry to cook one part of the egg without cooking the other. But it seems most places I go don’t even make the effort to try.

When in egg-cooking school, students must be reminded with great clarity and consistency: Don’t flip the eggs too soon. If one waits until the egg is ready to serve sunny-side, then flips it for just a few moments to sear the last of the white, it comes out perfect every time. Alas, impatient cooks do not wait for that perfect moment. They flip the egg prematurely and there’s no way that much white is going to get cooked post-flip without adversely affecting the yolk. The time to get most of the white firmed up is while the white is acting as an insulating layer between the pan and the yolk.

I have considered explaining to my waiter exactly how I want my eggs. I thought of saying “Sunny-Side Over” to convey my meaning, but I have never tried. Even if the waiter nodded and took notes, by the time it reached the cook I would probably end up with Sunny Side Rubber, so afraid would he be to flip the eggs too soon. That or it would just piss him off. No, we can but hope that future generations will take this to heart, and look with pride at the eggs sitting on the plate, seemingly in defiance of thermodynamics, the yolks jiggling, the whites not.

So mamas, tell your children, when you first hand them the spatula and the carton of eggs, as they stare wide-eyed at the pan in front of them, butter or bacon drippings faintly sizzling in the shimmering heat, that they must be patient. They must wait for the right moment to flip.

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* this used to say “fried chicken embryos”, but I got tired of people unfamiliar with the Coneheads explaining Greek to me.

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Thanks!

Jer’s Novel Writer 0.3.1.0 released

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Well, most of the changes are under the hood, a big code cleanup in preparation for beta. That means that in the last two weeks I’ve broken almost every facet of JNW at least once.

Jer’s Software Hut still needs some work, but now that I have the EULA in the product, it is no longer a password-protected download. If you have a mac, take a look!

Thanks!

They were the Googliest of times, they were the Moogliest of times.

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If only anyone else cared about this as much as I.

I’ll start with an aside. Last week was the heyday of the blog, the pinnacle of blogular traffic. The reason is simple: I started getting listed at dodmac.info, and all the regulars had to check me out. Now they’ve bitten on a coupe of lurid headlines and they know better. They have passed back into their little worlds where there is no time for discussions about which comic book heroes are best-suited for playing tag with eagles. Their loss, I say. If they don’t have the backbone to stand up on the issues that mean the most today, I have no time for their sorry asses.

Which leads me to another aside… uh, that’s going to have to be another entry. At this rate we’ll never get to to the search hits.

  • Google: aerodynamic ideas
  • Yahoo: half baked
  • Google: squirrel death – it’s pretty clear that lazy bastards too who just can’t get around to bookmarking are using this to come to the site. You’re my kind of people. Don’t ever change. Also worth mention were searches for squirrel suicide and squirrel death cult. I hope you’re not offended to be lumped together. It’s nice to know that someday when I’m promoting a book I’ll be introduced as the ‘squirrel death blog guy’.
  • Google: “great googly moogly” phrase
  • Yahoo: how do x-ray gogs work – whoever this was, I love you, man. My favorite physics professor of all times would say as he stood at the chalkboard (he was picky about his chalkboards), “Can you see the bosons moving? Put on your x-ray gogs.”
  • Google: la dolce vida
  • Google: listen to great googly moogly phrase – this from an entirely different domain than the other googly moogly search
  • Google: spyware End User License Agreement – as of this writing I rank four on Google for this topic. This is one hit where I hope the reader really read what I wrote. It’s funny (in the sense of odd), but I really believe in what I wrote that day. The whole right vs. wrong thing, and how a few words aren’t what’s really important.

I think the moral of the story is, if you write enough stuff, it’s going to match what someone is looking for. If you give it a catchy title, they’ll bite like large-mouth bass when the flies have all gone home for the holidays.

Thanks!

The books in my suitcase

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Strunk and White: The Elements of Style
Edward Gorey: The Gashleycrumb Tinies
Franz Kafka: the Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and other stories
Stephen King: On Writing
Harvard Lampoon: Bored of the Rings

Left in San Jose:
Sam Kashner: When I was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School
Jack Kerouac: On the Road

Didn’t mean to leave the Kerouac. Gonna have to get another copy of that one.

Thanks!

Shangri-la

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I’s staying in a really nice place. I’m not paying rent. I’m a “guest”. I see snow and bears and sunsets. I have my own space where I can work. My hosts feel guilty about not entertaining me more, while I feel great about getting things done. My hostess (we’ll call her Leza) recently asked if I was gong to be around mid-June to take care of the cat while they traveled. She was disappointed when I said I thought I should be going in another week or so.

There may be an ulterior motive at work here. Yesterday when I got home from a writing session (did you see just then how natural it was to say home?) and “Leza” asked – and I’m dead quoting here – “Would you be interested in a little girl?”

I was caught off guard by that one, I’ll tell you. I honestly thought for the tiniest fraction of a second that she was hoping I would adopt a little girl. The thought passed quickly, because no one would be so stupid as to entrust me with the upbringing of a child all on my own. It turns out that the “Little Girl” is Leza’s age (I can not, will not, even take a guess at that. She’s either younger than I am, or not.), and is perhaps freakishly small. So now I face the slightly lesser peril of being set up.

As a bit of background, it must be said that stories get bigger when Leza tells them. She is a storyteller at heart. I have stood by, bemused, as I hear her tell her husband (we’ll call him ‘Mark’) some minor story I told her. She can make the simplest thing sound dramatic. I wish I had that talent, and I’d wager she doesn’t even realize what she has.

Anyway, after clearing up the ‘little girl’ confusion, Leza explained to me that she had run into a friend of hers who thought I sounded ‘really nice’. So, I hear from Leza that, based on what she has told her friend about me, her friend thinks I’m nice. We’ll pass for the moment on the fact that Leza’s friend might have called me any name in the book and that would not affect what I heard back from Leza. What worries me most is what Leza told her friend. While it is likely based on fact, that still leaves a lot of room for poetic license.

So there’s a bunch of us getting together for some kind of musing thing Friday evening. I had been thinking about bolting for Bozeman this week, since the paying gig is in a lull, but I didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. So now I get to see the look on some woman’s face as she realizes the gulf between what she’s been told and what I can deliver. After that it’s Bozeman, baby, Bozeman. I’m starting to yearn for the big spaces.

Thanks!

No Pants Day

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I had a big write-up planned about all the legitimately free music I’ve found, where you can find it, and my new favorite band (eX-Girl – a frightfully strange and completely musical group out of Japan), but I’m tired. Dodging eagles and watching people shock themselves senseless has taken it out of me.

I listened yesterday to Radio Free Pants – The voice of a new fashion sense, and I enjoyed it. It was a good combination of music I knew and liked and stuff I’d never heard before. Steve Martin punctuated the evening.

Alas, today I couldn’t hook up. Hopefully that’s because everyone in the world was already listening. I hope the link above works, but I may have screwed up and I’m frankly too tired to test it. If I didn’t do it right, just visit dphc using the link in the navigation section over there.

Thanks!

Wildlife Survey

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The other day I was walking the fifty meters between the house and my car when out from under my road-trip mobile scampered a bushy-tailed gray squirrel. There are two things I must remind you at this time. 1) Bushy-tailed Gray Squirrels are tree squirrels. They usually leave the scampering around on the ground to their diminutive chip-‘n’-dale ground squirrel brethren. 2) 87% of all documented squirrel suicides are by tree squirrels.

Naturally, before I drove, I checked my brake lines. I imagine that for a suicidal squirrel the car brakes are the greatest enemy. He dashes out into the road to his certain demise only to discover that his chosen vehicle of death has ABS and remarkably sticky tires. The squirrel survives and his squirrel buddies give him hell for it. Peer pressure can be ugly, even among squirrels.

All right, so Friday I caught a squirrel sabotaging my brakes. I caught him in time, no harm done. Saturday, yesterday, I stopped short as I walked to my car. There was a bear next to it. A fine, not-yet-full-sized California Brown bear. (Although I am now in Nevada, apparently there are treaties in place allowing certain limited visitation rights.) There was a time, not so long ago, I imagine, that the bears would go down to the lake or visit one of the tributary streams much as you and I get up in the middle of the night to get a drink of water. Now I understand the paperwork is endless for a bear to get permission to take water from one of the streams. Don’t get them started about shitting in the woods.

Today as I went out to my car a golden eagle coasted overhead. It was huge. It was majestic. I’ll bet you a buck-fifty it was looking for squirrels. The raptor turned slowly, perhaps catching a draft over the release of hot air as I lowered the car’s top. It was so close I could have touched it if I had those telescoping arms like Dr. Octopus, or maybe if I was that rubber guy. You know who I mean. No, no, not the wonder Twins. They give me the creeps. There’s a few too many possibilities there, if you know what I mean. Anyway, wasn’t there some other rubber guy? He always won the arguments against Glue Guy.

Thanks!

Unscheduled Interruption

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… but there’s a guy at the bar tasering himself. He starts the taser going, filling the whole room with a sinister buzz. He slowly moves it closer to his skin until he spasms violently and shouts “Ouch! Goddamit!”

A few seconds pass, and he does it again. Buzz. Spasm. “Ouch! Goddamit!” I am… astonished.

When you start feeling romantic about bars, remember this guy. I will too.

Thanks!

Site maintennance under way

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Doing some experiments. Disregard any messages you might see about needing a new browser (unless you’re using IE for windows). Please stand by… making progress… wait for it…………………………………….

OK, I think I’m done (for now) with the changes that will really cause trouble. Any messages you see about your browser are the result of your browser not rendering graphics according to standards. Make the Web a better place; don’t use a browser that makes its own rules. If you see the message above, go post-haste to

http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

There are probably some other good alternatives as well, but that one I know is completely painless to install and works very well.

Thanks!