When you use a search engine, your queries are recorded for posterity. Therefore it’s possible that someday a man in a dark suit will ask me, “Why is it that on October 25 your searches were ‘tracer bullets’, ‘shelf life of cobra venom’, and ‘benzedrine’?”
To which I’ll answer, “I’m a writer.”
I haven’t done much (well, any, really) planning for my novel-in-a-month adventure this year, but I’m really hoping to restore my writing momentum with a good, hard deadline. I’m pulling out an idea for a story that my sweetie and I hashed out. After I make this awful draft, we’ll work together to make a not-awful version. The idea has a lot of potential. Here is the synopsis I tossed together this afternoon:
Step on a Hack
Penn Jetterson is a best-selling author. The thing is, he doesn’t do much of the writing anymore — the publisher assigns writers to churn out novels based on outlines Jetterson jots down between highballs. Lately, the quality of the work has suffered dramatically. For a while he’s been content to simply sit back and rake in the cash, but lately the writers assigned by the publisher to fill out the plots he dreams up have been, well, awful.
The latest stinker, pooped out by one Bennie Hamwich, opens with a couple having a marital spat while in a car, flying through the air after driving off the top of a parking structure during a high-speed shootout. She is doing her makeup. He is lighting a cigarette. The car continues its improbable arc. She tells him she’s having an affair with his partner on the force just as tracer bullets (tracer bullets!? really?) hit the gas tank, exploding the car.
That’s chapter one. Through an improbable (and unfortunate for the reader) series of events, the bickering couple is still alive in chapter two.
The excerpts from those novels would be downright funny — unless it’s your name on the cover of the book. Penn Jetterson needs a way to salvage his name.
Conveniently, the horrible co-authors are being murdered in horrible, improbable ways that only they could have dreamed up. When poor Bennie Hamwich’s body is recovered from the fiery wreckage of a car that slammed into the side of a building (three stories up), with the charred remains of an unknown woman in the passenger seat, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make a connection between the novel and the method of his demise. (Although it might take a rocket scientist to actually make it happen.)
Sales of Bennie Hamwich’s last piece-of-crap novel skyrocket on the news. Another untalented co-writer is eaten by piranha in the sewers of New York. A third meets his demise in an unlikely incident with a photocopier and a bottle of snake venom.
Who is killing the hacks? Is it Jetterson, trying to clear his name? Or is it the publisher, in a despicable attempt to boost sales? Or is it someone else, revealed at the last moment in a true crime against the mystery genre?
Only time will tell, my friends, only time will tell.
Any connection you might make to this horrible book is strictly coincidence.
The other day both my sweetie and I were hard at work in the office when the piercing sound of a smoke detector rang in our office. It was not in our place, but somewhere nearby. That happens now and then, of course, but this time the smoke detector did not stop, nor did we hear the inevitable sound of someone cursing at the thing.
The acoustics of our apartment are rather unfortunate; our unit faces another like ours, with a paved driveway between and parking directly beneath our floors. Sounds that occur nearby are amplified and injected directly through our windows. My sweetie and I have learned to be very quiet, which means that our new neighbors on the other side of the cone of loudness probably have no idea that we can hear every word they say. They should be good for a few stories…
Anyway, I went out to see if I could pinpoint the source of the still-screaming smoke alarm. Outside the sound was diminished, but eventually I established that it was indeed coming from the apartment opposite ours, unit six, where our neighbors were still settling in. While I was out there, I ran into the occupant of unit seven, who shares a wall with the screaming unit six. I tested the air and smelled like burning food.
There comes that moment of indecision – it’s probably just something in the oven overcooking. They left the house and were delayed and now dinner is turning into a blackened, crispy, not-very-tasty lump. But they’re new neighbors, and I don’t have a phone number for any of them.
The door onto their little balcony was open. I know because that’s where I first saw smoke coming out. Another of unit six’s smoke detectors joined the chorus. I mentioned that I saw smoke and both the neighbor and my sweetie called the fire department.
The firemen are stationed right around the corner; the list of questions my sweetie had to answer before the call was sent out took about as long as the deployment itself. Shortly the truck pulled up in the street and while one crew began assembling a long hose to reach back to unit six, an advance scout jogged down the driveway. “The door on the balcony is open,” I said. I imagined that if the firemen used a ladder they could spare the neighbor’s front door. (In retrospect, I realize that the fireman was not going to forego causing minor property damage if it meant not having the best possible egress from a burning building.)
The fireman jogged up the stairs and with two sharp whacks from his axe the wood splintered and he was in the apartment. The other crew had a hose laid and partially pressurized when the advance guy reemerged to shout “It’s a pot on the stove!” Then the advance guy plunged back into the smoky and loud apartment.
Then the guy reemerged with a surprise. He had with him Joe, my new neighbor, who had been inside sleeping through the whole thing. It had never occurred to me to, say, knock on the neighbor’s door before calling the fire department. I expect that anyone sleeping through two smoke detectors would not have heard my knock, but sometimes certain sounds get through where others don’t. The fireman never tried the knob to see if the door was unlocked. It probably was locked, but it’s funny the assumptions we make.
Joe was groggy, and a little sheepish. He passed me on the way to get checked out by the firemen and I introduced myself. “I had some beers earlier,” he told me. When the firemen were done with him, he chatted for a bit with the assembled neighbors. Nothing like a visit from the fire department to serve as a neighborhood icebreaker. Joe’s had brain surgery, has been stabbed a couple of times, and various other health crises over the years.
A day later I overheard him say that he had mixed up his medications, and he had put some hot dogs on the stove and fallen asleep. Let this be a lesson to all of you: If you’ve had brain surgery, stay away from hot dogs.
As I type this I hear the sirens and horns as our local firemen (who were very cool) head out on another call. Let’s hope it’s as benign as something charring in the kitchen.
My hearing isn’t what it used to be. In ideal circumstances it’s still plenty good enough; I tend to like the TV volume a bit lower than my sweetie, for instance.
Add background noise and that changes in a hurry. My ability to filter noise from signal was never that good, I think (recalling people having conversations with bursts of static on their CB radios), but thirty-five years of rock and roll and twenty-five years of highway driving with the top down have taken their toll. Now when my sweetie is by the sink with the tap running I’m lucky if I can tell she’s speaking at all. Forget about understanding her words.
Recently I was on an airplane and every time I tried to speak with the attendant I had to repeat myself. I could understand her, but she couldn’t understand me. The difference? I was wearing noise-canceling headphones. Even with the big cans over my ears I could hear her much more easily, and so naturally I responded in a lower voice than necessary. A nice reversal of the person-with-headpohones-on-talking-loudly joke.
If I wore those big-ass headphones around the house, I’d probably miss fewer things that my sweetie said. I’d hear more while driving as well, though wearing those things would undoubtedly get me pulled over.
What I need, then, are nice little inserts like a hearing aid, but while hearing aids amplify the signal, these would simply reduce the noise. My hearing without noise is plenty good enough, thank you.
I mentioned in an episode a while back that if I ran an airline, I’d have all my on-aircraft personnel fitted for items like this, both for their health and for more efficient service on-plane. So this isn’t a brand-spanking-new idea. I just can’t find a product that actually does this. I don’t even think this is a get-poor-quick scheme. I suspect the pattern of my hearing degradation is pretty dang typical, and all the technology already exists to make these things. The market could potentially be huge.
So, someone make me my earplugs already!
Santa has excellent modeling talent
This is also the most important time for many charities to raise funds, and this year my sweetie and I thought we would help. We recruited Harlean Carpenter and Santa Claus for a photo shoot, fed them sandwiches (although Santa is on a very careful diet these days), and the above image is the result. It turns out that was the very first picture we took, out of well over two hundred. Go figure. It was a fun day, for sure. (Thanks also to Rick Markus for his excellent work with the reflector.)
Now you can share in the Christmasy fun and support two worthy charities at the same time!
The charities:
You are all familiar with the Salvation Army, and they get a chunk of dough for each pack of cards sold. The other beneficiary is a group called Pinup Angels, who will use the money to send care packages to troops serving overseas.
How you can help:
The first way to help, obviously, is to buy cards. A pack of 20 cards goes for only $15 – a ridiculously low price if you ask me. All we need is a shipping address and an email address. We will bill you though PayPal (no PayPal account is necessary) and send you your cards. It’s easy!
If you’re old-fashioned or the name “PayPal” makes your head rotate 360 degrees, I’m sure we can work out alternate payment, but the system really is pretty seamless these days.
Shipping is free in the US. For Canada, add $1US for the first pack and $0.50US for each additional pack. For European shipments add $3 for the first pack and $0.90 for each additional pack.
The second way to help, the way you can be really, really cool and earn some badly needed karma after all the things you’ve done this year is to help us sell the cards. To be honest, we’re depending on help from all our friends to get word out and flog these things far and wide. So please, please, hit up your co-workers and friends with a light but persistent pitch. Collect email addresses and we will do the rest. (We will never, ever, use the emails collected this way for anything other than billing. There shall be no spam.)
Help Now!
Here’s the link to the official Web site, with contact information and whatnot. Order your super-awesome cards and start feeling good about the holidays.
If I’m going to get a draft of Munchies done by the end of October, I’m going to have to get crackin’. I am way, way behind.
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, two new kinds of banana bread out of the oven today, varieties never before imagined. Oh, yeah, life is good.
I’m trying to think of the last time I saw a movie that was advertised as an ‘event’. Maybe never.
My sweetie carries a copy of the constitution in her purse. Awesome.
I may be jumping the gun here, but word from the director is that Pirates of the White Sand is finished. What can be fixed, has been fixed. I haven’t seen the result yet, but I’m stoked.
Holy crap. More than five years for a 14-minute-long film. I’m not sure I even want to know how many hours fuego’s put in on the thing, but I suspect it’s a large number. This summer between rounds of croquet in Moravia I got glimpses of progress, and a few more tantalizing looks in Santa Fe this July, and the audio was improving steadily.
For those who don’t know, my brother and I co-wrote a script that won the Fellini Award at a screenplay competition. The seven winners were assembled for a week, given crews of uncertain capability, and after three days of shooting and four of editing the films were judges by a star-studded panel. Ours was easily the best script but was hobbled by technical difficulties. Still, we won the Audience Choice award, and our star took best actor. Several other folks donated time as well; I’ll try to put out a thank-you post when I have time to come up with a list. Everyone loves lists!
For the last several years my brother has used his film expertise and connections to gradually work away at fixing the technical flaws. Now, he says he has run out of things to fix.
If I was smart I’d wait until I talked to him to make this announcement, but I’m just too damn excited. Another step toward world domination complete!
We discovered the other night that the battery backup for our digital phone service is not working. I’d fiddled with it, without success, so I resorted to reading the instructions. Crazy, huh?
The last instruction was to unplug the unit while doing all the previous steps. That was followed by: “If you do not have a dial tone, please call us at…”
Nice.
When telling a story, it’s important to know where to begin. Do you start at the temporal beginning, the moment when, confronted with an idea so mind-bogglingly awesome, so blindingly obvious in retrospect that it must be the work of genius that you lose the power of speech? Or do you start at the other end, a day later, with the moment of truth when that idea faces reality and your own personal test begins? Or do you approach the story sideways, beginning with the thought that defines what it all means?
Or do you find three sentences, one for each of those moments, and let them tell the entire story — a tiny play in three acts:
“Peanut butter banana bread,” she said.
She set the two slices of banana bread — one chocolate, the other peanut butter — in front of me and said, “I really need you to be objective for a minute.”
I laughed and said, “I didn’t think I could love you more than I already did until you said, ‘peanut butter banana bread.'”
I am typing this with plastic rats on my fingers. They click together now and then, but they do add a certain special something to the night-blogging experience, just like the packaging said they would.
Actually, the package said they would be “perfect for raves and night blogging.” There are few things that can claim to be even tolerable in both those situations, but here we have the Finger Rats. There are five rats, five colors, each beaming a different color of light out its nose.
I don’t know how I ever got by without them.
Party Rats in Action
It’s a big milestone for me, getting back on track maintaining Jer’s Novel Writer. For those of you who are not familiar with it, JersNW is a word processor with features to help my scattered thoughts fall into some sort of coherent form. It’s based on three principles:
There are features to help with the mechanics of writing as well (drag-and-drop chapters, flexible database, and so forth), but mainly I just want to keep my momentum when the creative juices are flowing and know that when nitty-gritty time comes I’ll find the places that need attention. Man that’s liberating.
If you’re interested, you can learn more at Jer’s Software Hut. Enjoy!
Oh yeah, it’s Mac-only.
Deep below the Earth’s surface, in a steaming chamber somewhere between the Hayward and San Andreas faults, there is motion in the dancing shadows cast by the guttering torchlight. Dark, twisted creatures stir. They move slowly, their once-lean haunches soft from months of torpor. They shamble from their stony sleeping-nooks into the work chamber, and one by one they take their accustomed positions on the capstans. The great wheels resist at first, then start to turn with a shriek that slowly fades to a rumble.
From the throats of the horde comes a deep ululation punctuated by coarse barks, a sound that reverberates through the chamber until it has no source, merely presence. It is enough to weaken the knees of even the stoutest hero, a sound to chill the most stalwart heart.
The creatures are singing.
Though fearsome in sound, it is joy they express; the sublime joy of one who had no purpose being useful again. Far above them, in a peaceful neighborhood San Jose, those turning capstans once more power the forges and shrieking spark-throwing wheels of Jer’s Software Hut.
On the slab in the middle of the laboratory a figure stirs; what once was dead now breathes again.
You’ve all seen this:
1 in = 2.54cm
The only problem is, that’s wrong*. This may seem nit-picky, but understanding why the above is wrong can uncover some clever ways people deceive others (and themselves).
“But everyone knows an inch is 2.54 centimeters,” I hear you say. Hold on a second there, Sparky! Let’s back up. An inch is a measurement. Let’s say I measure a piece of wood and find that it’s 57 inches long. Now I want to know how many centimeters it is. I multiply by 2.54 and discover that the wood is 144.78 centimeters long. So where’s the problem?
The issue is that I measured my stick to the nearest inch, and now through the magic of conversion I claim that I know how long that wood is down to a tenth of a millimeter. The idea that I could get that sort of precision with my tape measure is silly, yet people do this all the time. On road signs you’ll see “Exit 4 mi (6.4 km)”. Is the sign really accurate to 100 meters? That’s a tough assumption to swallow given the first measure is only accurate to the nearest mile.
A rule to remember: when you do a unit conversion, the result is always less precise than your original measurement. Always.
Here’s what your conversion table should read (although this isn’t quite perfect either):
1.00 in = 2.54cm
What’s the difference? Remember that an inch is a measurement. The number of decimal places indicates how exact the measurement is. If I measure something down to a hundredth of an inch, I can (usually) justify claiming precision to three significant figures after I make the conversion. So, if I measure my stick to be 57.0 inches, I can reasonably represent it as 145 centimeters long. The error of a tenth of an inch in the first measure is smaller than the error of one centimeter in the second, so I’m all right. 57.00 inches = 144.8cm.
The people who put things like “1 inch = 2.54cm” into textbooks will claim, “What we actually mean is that exactly one inch equals 2.54 centimeters.” The only problem is, That’s wrong too. First, with measurements there’s no such thing as exact. Every measurement contains error. Always. 1.0000000 inches is not the same as exactly one inch. Second, for almost every comparison of measurements in different systems, the conversion factor itself is not exact. An ounce is not 29.57 milliliters. It’s not 29.5735 ml.
So why does this matter? Ask yourself, how much product is in that bottle or can of your favorite beverage? 12oz or 355ml? In this case, we hope that the more precise measure is applicable. It would be informative if the bottler used 12.0oz rather than just 12; you know the Coca-Cola bottling company knows to great precision how much less than 12oz they can put in a can and still label it 12oz. Technically (though perhaps not legally), 11.50000001 oz could be labeled as 12, but that would not be anywhere close to 355ml.
This sloppiness with units is frightfully common. Even scientific papers with measurements in them sometimes don’t include the margin of error in the measurements – which makes the number pretty meaningless.
Don’t be fooled by false precision! Often it’s harmless, but even subtly it can give the impression that the peple who made the measurements are far more diligent than they actually were. This can give their arguments extra weight, without you even realizing it.
* It turns out I picked a bad example – in 1959 they redefined the inch to make this true. Go figure — the inch is metric now. See the comments below. So, as a unit, the conversion is correct. This has no effect on how you use the conversion in real life. I may go back and change this episode to use a better example.
Congratulations to Dries Coomans for taking top honors in this spring’s Cyberspace Open. His piece bent the rules a smidge, but was a powerful bit of writing. Personally I preferred the second-place entry by Lisa Scott, but it was a tough call.
With luck maybe we’ll be seeing those names again, on the big screen!
