Tag Archives: suck

Já, robot

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I, Robot the film with Will Smith in it is on TV right now. I’ve never seen the movie in English, but I had heard that it wasn’t very much like the short story collection by Isaac Asimov. All I can say is that unless there’s some dialog that really doesn’t match the action on the screen, the title is the only thing the two have in common. The bit I watched was much closer to Terminator 2 than it was to anything that ever came from Asimov’s pen. Gone is the graceful economy of the writer’s storytelling style. The original stories presented a series of intellectual challenges; problems that were solved with cleverness and occasionally personal risk, but none of these ridiculous flurries of hyper-accelerated violence.

And maybe it’s the small screen, but the cinematography in the action scenes I watched was crappy too. Absurdly, forehead-slappingly over the top, which could possibly be forgivable if it weren’t so badly done. So, if there’s anyone else out there who has not seen the movie, well, don’t bother. Read the stories instead.

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Ratings System Thingie

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I have turned on a new Haloscan feature that allows you to rate the blog episodes here. Honestly I don’t know if such a feature makes sense in this context, but I thought we could give it a try together. I have a feeling that most episodes (like this one) won’t really inspire readers to give it a score, and I’m pretty sure that I won’t want ratings on the fiction episodes and the like.

But what the heck. It’s free.

Edited to Add: I voted, then when I reloaded the page, it showed no ratings again. If anyone loads the page and sees a rating, could you mention that in the comments? Thanks!

Also note that the ratings thingies are the very last thing on the page to load. That might take a while on a slow connection.

Edited again to add: I have tried to put the ratings thingie in manually, rather than depending on the automatic implementation by Haloscan. We will see if it can remember votes now, and this way I can also control where the ratings show up a little better.

Thanks!

A Bumpy Day of Travel

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I’m sitting now in a Denny’s in Selma, California. I did not plan to stop after covering such a short distance, but sometimes even plans as nebulous as mine go astray.

It all started when I bid my gracious Piker hosts goodbye and hopped in the car for a fairly routine trip down the central valley. If things went well, I’d add a couple of hours to the trip to go around Los Angeles. I turned the key and… nothing. The battery was dead, after racking up significant highway miles yesterday. One trip to the auto parts store and a jump start later, and I was on my way. Clearly, though, the months of storage and little use had taken its toll on the battery. Wherever I stopped for the night, it was a safe bet that I’d need a jump start in the morning. The auto parts store didn’t have a battery for a Miata — it’s some kind of mini-sized high-tech thing. I would need to go to a Mazda dealership.

Then the road. Highway 99 south, an easy drive despite fairly heavy traffic. Zipping along, I saw a sign by the highway. Selma Auto Mall. Mazda. Well, heck, I’m going to be buying a battery, so why wait? I pulled off at the next exit and began to work my way back to the dealership. It was not obvious how to get there and I was in a residential area when I pulled out from a stop sign and turned to see a car coming right at me. The girl driving locked up her brakes and slid on the rain-slick pavement, slowly slowing, and right up to the end I was able to hope that disaster would be averted. As she came to a stop the noses of our cars kissed. Ouch. Although a more skilled driver might have been able to avoid me, the collision was, without a doubt, my fault.

We pulled to the side of the road. I’ll say this for the flexible plastic parts at the front corners of our two cars, They really handle this sort of impact admirably. There were some scratches and paint swapping, but everything was fundamentally intact. “I’m going to call my dad,” the other driver said. While waiting for him I gave her my insurance info and whatnot.

Dad arrived, looked over the damage, and said, “I don’t think we need the police.” I readily agreed. Not knowing what else to say, I told Dad that I had already given his daughter my insurance info. “Do you want to use insurance?” he asked. “I know a guy.”

The prospect of just taking care of the repair without taking a hit to my insurance premiums was attractive, to say the least. So, we all formed a convoy, dad in the lead, and drove across town to a backyard body shop just past the city limits. They all exchanged pleasantries in Spanish, obviously old pals, and one of the guys looked over the scratched-up bumper. he named a price, less than what I expected, far less than the hit to insurance premiums would be. Now all that was left was getting to a bank machine for the cash. Dad gave me a lift in his pickup truck, and on the way we had a nice conversation. he used to live in Mexico City, but much preferred the small-town life. He had 40 acres of farmland, and had just been offered $50,000 per acre for it, but he hadn’t sold. Where would he go? He liked it where he was.

Overall, that little automotive bump could have gone a lot worse than it did. It cost me precious cash out of pocket, and time, but thanks to the fact I was dealing with reasonable, friendly people it all turned out OK. Then it was back to the original destination. I was due for an oil change, so I went ahead and had them do that while I was in the neighborhood. Once that is done I’ll hook up the new battery and I’ll be off and running once more. Let’s hope the rest of the trip is without unexpected bumps.

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Evening has arrived. The service guys were kind enough to set my clock for Pacific time; it took me a while to realize that I wasn’t experiencing a premature twilight caused by the low clouds. I could have pressed on, worked my way through LA, and arrived in San Diego late in the evening. I chose not to. LA is a big obstacle, but with planning and a little extra time, it can be avoided. Rather than plow through the hellish traffic of Los Angeles, I chose to go around. Tonight I am sitting in a place called Molly’s Pub, poised for some fine back-road driving in the morning.

Tune in tomorrow for: The Road Less Taken!

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Double Whammy

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The bartender asks, “You want another?”

“Nah. I’ve gotta go home.”

He nods knowingly. “You seem sad tonight.”

Shit. Am I that obvious? And where the hell does a pimple-faced beer slinger get off even tiptoeing over the surface of sadness? Where in your world of primal teenage lust have you ever had the chance to understand deep, permanent, sorrow? If the cure to a broken heart is a new thang, what happens when there are no more thangs? Take your whole ‘there’s always tomorrow’ platitude and choke on it.

Still, the little bastard was right. I was sad tonight. Am. Women shined me on not one but twice, chopped-liverificating me to the harshest degree. The second shine was from my favorite bartender in this country. She was intoxicated and in a hurry to get back to the party downstairs, so I will cut myself some slack. Still, there was a big hole where “it’s great to see you again” might have fit.

I probably would have passed that over with a chuckle were I not already feeling raw from a previous shine. I suspect I have only myself to blame in the end, but I wrote in these pages a while back about a woman (name rhymes with feevah!) who out of the blue started talking to me. Perhaps it was my public expression of joy over this event, or perhaps I cashed in on another opportunity to make a complete ass of myself, but she doesn’t talk to me any longer. She doesn’t even look at me. She would be more comfortable if I didn’t exist at all. Which, overall, pretty much sucks.

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NASA chief says it’s not for us to decide what the Earth’s climate should be…

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Yep, we have global warming. Yep, it’s largely due to human activity. That’s what the boss of NASA says. For a long time the current administration refuted that the earth was warming up. Then they had to admit it was, but maintained there was no evidence that it was due to human activity. Now they’ve had to accept that. The next step in the Washington stonewalling of any attempt to even contemplate doing something about it: Hey, climates change. It would be arrogant of us to decide what the climate should be.

OK, maybe. But doesn’t that make anything man does to alter his environment for greater comfort or productivity arrogant? By that definition, arrogance is one of the primary characteristics of mankind, one of the things that makes us who we are. Why shouldn’t we decide what the best climate would be? Hell, if warmer is better for for most of humanity, I’m all for global warming. Let’s heat this place up! The problem is that making the climate hotter is more likely to be negative, and has the potential to cause suffering on a scale never before witnessed in history. Not since the black death, anyway. That’s a pretty big potential downside.

No, it’s not arrogant to consider potential disasters in the coming decades, it’s just that the people getting rich off current policies risk having the cash gusher they’re sitting on slow down a bit. Energy policy is, as far as I can tell (I’m no expert), a critical element in mitigating global warming. We will not have a well-considered energy policy while oil men are in charge. We would also not have a well-considered energy policy if windmill people were in charge, but that’s not what we’re facing right now.

If Cape Canaveral is abandoned to the waves, I hope NASA puts up a plaque with this guy’s picture on it.

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Czech word for the day…

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The spelling may not be quite right, I’ve not seen it written down. The word means ‘wallet’, as in: Zapoměl jsem mou penižinku, or in English, “I forgot my wallet.”

Some lessons stick better than others. More context, you might say.

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What a night

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It was a couple of nights ago that this happened, but I’ve hesitated recording it for the world to consume. It was a night of violence at the Little Café Near Home. Violence between regulars no less, violating the somehow sacred bond between those who have leaned against the same bar for a long time. Domestic violence, brother against brother.

It turns out, these guys did not think of each other as brothers. Not at all, and for a long time.

fuego was here, and better able to understand the dialog between the two combatants, and he was getting worried. I, on the other hand, knew that these two had shared the same Little Café for a long time, and had never come to blows before. Whatever they were saying, I had no reason to believe the outcome would be different this time.

There was another incident here, not long ago, that I could have sworn I wrote about, but now there seems to be no record. Huh. Had I written that, and had you read it, you would have come to understand that there are a couple of people who frequent this place who are quite skilled at the use of fists and other tools for hurting people. In that episode I was glad they were around, as they peacefully disarmed a couple of drunks (non-regulars) with just enough force to show that there was a lot more where that came from. It was a fine bit of bouncing, and those drunks will not be coming back. One of those capable people we will call “Richard”. Richard and “Joe” have had a long-running verbal feud. Joe, it seems, has been saying a lot of inappropriate things for a long time.

I like both Richard and Joe. We had been having a good conversation with Joe, covering a wide range of subjects, and in fact tomorrow we have on tap what promises to be quite the spectacle. But that’s the future. Joe is also an archer, which is a hobby of fuego’s as well, so those two hit it off particularly well.

At some point politics entered the discussion, and Richard felt compelled to join the conversation. The subject of disagreement: George Bush. Proving that nothing is universal, Joe is only Czech I’ve ever met who likes the sitting US president. I was quite surprised to discover this. Richard really, really, doesn’t like Bush.

Of course, I was completely ignorant of the fact that they really weren’t arguing about politics. Eventually Richard stepped outside for some air, and my brother joined him. The cooling-off period didn’t work, and a couple of minutes later Richard was back, standing next to me. Bam, bam. Two swings and Joe (not a small man, quite a bit larger than Richard) was on the ground. Richard went back outside.

Joe stayed on the floor for quite a while. Eventually he gathered himself and went home.

Richard came in, and that’s when I learned some of the history of the conflict. Richard was quite upset with himself, in part because he had punched Joe while I was there, but mostly because he knew that answering words with fists crosses some sort of line.

But Richard could have done a lot worse. He was carrying a deadly weapon. I wonder, sitting here, if those two swings do stop Joe from spreading poison about others in the bar (particularly wives), if perhaps in the end Richard used the same measured and appropriate response as disarming the drunks. Fists hurt, but ill words can hurt more. Of course at the time Richard was simply pissed off, but what he did was swift, controlled, and one second after it was over he was out of the room. There was no piling on, no taunting.

It’s a complicated world, even a world as small as the Little Café Near Home.

Thanks!

Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Day 3

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Two surprises tonight. Hostel II was actually a pretty good flick if you’re into that kind of thing, and the short films sucked. Some of them had visual appeal, and there was a touch of irony here and there, but not one damn short told a story. It was all about images. I feel better about Pirates, now. It would have brought down the house tonight; the audience was hungry for something more than what they were given. They were craving the originality and offbeat humor that you get in a good short film. Maybe it’s the fault of the people who decide what to put in the show, but honestly I was fighting off sleep while I watched.

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Worst Nightmare

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For those of you who believe in karma, jinxes, and the like, you might find corroboration as you read about my trip from Dallas to Denver. Hours ago, while sitting at the terminal in Frankfurt, I wrote about how air travel is generally pretty routine these days. It took the Hand of Fate a little time to find me, but somewhere over Greenland the pilot made an announcement that at the time seemed completely irrelevant: Our plane would be arriving in Dallas early. Since I had a very long layover in Dallas anyway, getting there early just meant waiting in an airport rather than sitting on a plane.

By the time we got there, I was very enthusiastic about the prospect of getting off the plane. I was sitting next to a toothless old guy from Bombay, which could definitely have been a lot worse. (For the record, Lufthansa’s veggie meals smelled pretty good, and Hindus can drink beer.) The infant two seats over was crying during boarding, but then clammed up for the entire flight. Still, ten hours is a long time to spend in any chair. Off the plane and through immigration quickly and over to the next terminal (with the help of one security guy who went way out of his way to direct me to Frontier checkin), I was in time to hop on an earlier flight from Dallas to Denver. It meant a longer layover in Denver, but it’s always better to grab the earlier flight if you can. As the guy checking me in said, “You never know.”

No, you never do. I settled into 16F, and it looked like I’d have the row to myself. Excellent! Room to spread out!

Just before departure time, a happy-go-lucky guy came bumping down the aisle and asked the attendant, “where’s 16A?” The blonde in 16B looked up in disappointment; she was already spreading out in her row. I got the feeling she was an airline employee of some sort. Much to her relief, he did not sit in 16A, but chose 16D, on my side of the aisle instead. He sat heavily and I realized just how drunk he was. He looked over at me and said, “Dude, I’m just going to fuckin’ apologize right now. I’m fuckin’ wasted. Am I saying fuck too much? This is like your worst fuckiin’ nightmare, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t… yet.

He talked at me for a bit. It turns out he’s a rancher from Wyoming who supplies horses to rodeos. His problem these days, he says, is that his horses are too mean for the new generation of cowboys. He paused at one point to say, “Are we off the ground yet? Good. I can’t get arrested and thrown off the plane. I’m just this side of alcohol poisoning.” Throughout our discussion (he was just as interested in me as he was in telling me about himself), he said, “Just remember the code word. ‘shut the fuck up motherfucker.’ I can’t believe you haven’t used it yet.” The thing was, I was a bit curious about raising horses for rodeo. Eventually, however, I did invoke the code word and a he lapsed into silence. The attendant comped him free access to the directTV broadcast on the screen in front of him, and he lapsed into semi-consciousness.

We were on the ground here in Denver, taxiing to the gate, when he puked. He pulled out the air sick bag in front of him and filled it, and then some. Then he had trouble sealing it up. The blonde across the aisle and I offered supplemental barf bags at the same time. “Double-bag it,” the blonde said helpfully, but our cowboy just didn’t have the motor skills. He looked over at me.

“Almost made it,” I said, as the fasten seat belts sign turned off.

“Almost,” he agreed, then rose from his seat and fled in shame.

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Infinology bites.

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Infinology is the Web hosting company that carries Piker Press. More than a week ago, Piker Press stopped working. Since then the editors over there have tried through various channels to get help. Nothing. Zip. Nada. No one is answering the phones, no one is responding to the help tickets. This would to my untrained eye make the claims they make on their Web site downright fradulent.

So, to summarize: Infinology sucks. They are liars as well as bad Web hosts. Don’t even think of using them.

Thanks!

O2 SUCKS!

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O2 is my internet service provider. It used to be České Telecom, and back when I was dealing with a Czech company, things were working fine. (Note that this is contrary to all logic as we know it.) Now that ČT has been sucked into a giant pan-European company, my service has gone steadily downhill. Most of the time I’m still connected, but there is no DNS. If I happened to know the IP addresses of all the sites I wanted to visit, I’d be fine. (DNS is like a giant automatic phone book that takes text like jerssoftwarehut.com/ and looks up the string of numbers that identifies the correct machine on the Internet.)

In my setup I can enter an alternate IP address for DNS. I’d like to try that to see if it helps, but I’m not sure what to put there. Any of you techno-geek people know the IP of a reliable DNS?

Now if I could only post this…

Thanks!

Sick as a Dog

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This will be a short episode, since I have to use my eyes to write it. My eyes hurt. My head hurts. My lungs hurt. My muscles ache, especially my back. The only time my back is happy is when I’m standing up, but I’m just not up for that sort of exertion. I spent the day tossing and turning, watching the sky become gradually brighter and then watching it get darker again.

I’ve made a couple of half-hearted attempts at doing something useful, but no, there will be none of that.

I made a comment earlier that most of the time I enjoy being single. When I’m sick may be the only exception to the rule. I thought about it this afternoon and it’s not so much the pampering I miss but the sympathy. I just want someone close by who can listen to my complaining and feel sorry for me. Somehow that makes the suffering much more tolerable.

Tomorrow will be better.

Thanks!

Tý Voda!

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I learned this morning that my new neighbors are pretty cool. When the Polish family downstairs moved out, I idly hoped that a bunch of single women would move in. Alas, my wish fell one ‘wo’ short. I had seen a couple of the guys coming and going, in the last few days, but I had not had a chance to say more than ‘hello’.

Early, early this morning, before the sky had even begun to turn light, I slowly emerged from deep slumber, gradually becoming aware that someone was banging on my door. It did not occur to me right away that there might be a good reason someone was knocking. “Oh, great,” I thought. “The new guys are getting home from a bar and they’re drunk and they want to share the joy.” That thought didn’t last long. Other sounds were starting to register, but I was still a bit surprised when someone opened my front door. I stood up and — splash.

I thought of several different titles for this episode over the course of the morning, from “The great flood of ’06” to “Bad day for dust bunnies.” The title I chose is a cross between the most common phrase I heard this morning, tý vole, which is a not-very-polite word, and voda, czech for “water”. (Tý vole translates literally as “you ox”, but over the last few decades has for whatever reason become the default curse.)

Water. Lots of water. I stood in the kitchen, water covering the tops of my feet. It was dark; the only light came from the hall. The main breaker for my flat had popped. I was annoyed at that moment, not considering that my feet were in water than also had power strips floating in it. Yes, overall it’s a good thing that circuit breakers break circuits now and then. (There was little danger of me being electrocuted; the wiring would have caught on fire before I got up.)

Voda, Voda, everywhere, but not a drop of čaj. I really wanted a cup of tea at that moment.

I live on the top floor, and water, being composed mostly of matter, responds readily to the call of gravity. It is crafty in the number of paths it can find to make its way downhill. The water was flowing out my front door in waves, cascading down the stairs and pouring in delicate little waterfalls from one flight to the next. I could see paint lying on the treads of lower flights; as the water sought the center of the earth it paused to work its polar molecule magic on whatever substances it encountered, and paint and plaster were the biggest victims. Water doesn’t necessarily have to go over things to get where it wants to go; it can go through as well. By the time my landlord woke up this morning, water was dripping from his ceiling. That can’t be good.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m a big fan of water; everybody should have some. But when you just let it run loose, nothing good can come of it.

As I stood in shock, awe, and tea deprivation, the new neighbors had already sprung into action; and before long we discovered that shutting off the main to the water heater stopped the flow. About then I looked at the clock. 5:45 am. The downstairs neighbors had been getting ready to go to work when they noticed that something was amiss. I set to trying to get as much of the water down a drain, as opposed to letting it soak through the floor and into my landlord’s apartment. As I used a dustpan as a surprisingly effective water scooper, I began to appreciate the acre-foot. (For those still mired in the metric system, an acre-foot is a unit of volume — the amount of water it would take to cover an acre of land to the depth of one foot.) I was dealing with an apartment-inch. I scooped and scooped, then the neighbors hauled in towels and buckets and eventually (after emptying the large buckets several times), we got the situation under control. The bucket team headed downstairs, where the basement was getting deep. I stayed upstairs and commenced mopping-up operations.

Incidentally, when you’re dealing with a major flood, it’s a good idea to keep one towel dry through the first phase of operations. It was purely accidental in my case, but having a towel that wasn’t saturated made a big difference at the end.) By 7:30 the worst was over and a nice lady arrived to help me clean up. She chased puddles in the corners while I tipped up the furniture to see how things were underneath. The plumbers arrived at 8:00, and by 8:30 they were gone, the electricity was back on, and I had my tea.

I have yet to try any device whose power adapter was on the floor (luckily I have a spare for the laptop), and my WiFi thingie was on the floor as well. Tomorrow, perhaps, we will learn the fate of those electronics. The insurance guy comes on Tuesday.

Thanks!

I have a bad feeling about this…

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Today the words aren’t coming very quickly, so I decided to take a short break and do a little career upkeep. WritersMarket.com has a feature called Submission Tracker which allows you to follow the progress of your work, tracking where you have submitted it, where you plan to submit it next, and things like that. With a click you can see a list of all the places you are waiting to hear back from, or all the manuscripts that are sitting around gathering dust rather than out there working.

Make that “could”. It’s been a while since I logged on over at WritersMarket.com, and there have been changes. I had a few beefs with the Submission Tracker, but I wasn’t looking forward to having to figure out a new system. As I poked around, my stomach began to twist up into a little knot. There was a section called My Manuscripts. So far, so good. I clicked and got a list of the works I’ve entered into the system to track. Only — the list seemed shorter than I thought it ought to be. Nevertheless, each entry had a link to “view submissions”. Not as versatile as the old system, but — what the #@$%$!!!. All the submissions have the status “active”! I can’t tell which places have rejected the manuscript, and which were the ones I planned to submit to next! I can’t tell which manuscripts have been published, and where. I can’t tell which agents have see The Monster Within, which are still considering it, and which have rejected it.

It appears that all submissions that were not linked directly to current WritersMarket.com listings are gone. That means, for example, that all my submissions to Piker Press are missing. If that was the only submission for the piece, then the manuscript itself is also gone from the list.

Still there are twenty-four submission entries for Monster. Some of those should show as rejected, but several were there for my next round of submissions. Now I don’t know which is which. And agencies not listed on WritersMarket.com? Information on agents and agencies I’d gathered from all over and consolidated there is now gone, along with any hint that an agent may or may not have seen my work already.

Maybe I’m missing something. Maybe the information is there and I just didn’t know how to find it. Maybe the transition to the new system isn’t complete yet. Maybe. The help system just says “coming soon.” I sent a message to customer support, so maybe in a couple of work days they’ll clear things up.

Right now, I feel ill.

Follow-up:
I just got a nice note from the WritersMarket.com support team saying that my data had been carefully preserved, but would not be available online for two more weeks. They attached a spreadsheet with my info as well. That is a massive relief, as well as an excuse to slack for two weeks. They also asked me if they could contact me for feedback about the new system. I replied that I have opinions on everything, and am happy to share. So, at this time I’m guardedly optimistic that everything will turn out all right.

Thanks!

More about the itch

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This episode is one big complaint, which is not my usual style (at least, not so overtly). For those of you tuning in for the first time, I had (I hope) an allergic reaction to some cheap Czech laundry detergent and every part of me that is touched by clothing is now a mess. I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before.

I haven’t left the homestead in a while — the day I watched the Chargers lose was the only other time in a week, but today I had no choice if I wanted to eat. I’m at the little café right now, and I’m itchy.

At night, I go to bed, and often manage to fall asleep, only to wake up a short time later with one nerve somewhere on my body screaming bloody murder. In my half-awake state I will scratch it. From then on I’m no longer just half awake. Whatever I scratched burns like someone is holding a match to it. I lie awake, trying not to think about the burning, trying not to think of… the other itch, and the other one, and the one after that. I lie in bed, rigid, resolutely not scratching, chanting my “no scratching” mantra.

Must. Not. Scratch. Must. Not. Scratch.

Then there is the moment of erosion of will. A new itch will arise, angry and demanding, from a new awkward and uncomfortable location. I thought I had run out of such spots several nights ago, but no. “Oh, crap, not there too,” has become my eternal lament.

Eventually the itch becomes too powerful, and I will watch as if from a distance as one of my hands scratches the most urgent of the itches. There is a tiny moment of blessed relief before the burning starts. I try to restore discipline, but there’s no turning back now. I claw at my skin, from neck to toe, trying to draw as little blood as possible, but there is only one priority. Scratch. My mantra changes as well — last night I caught myself muttering:

Scratchy. Scratchy. Good, Good.

Eventually my brain is so flooded with endorphins that I can fall back to sleep. For while it’s painful, it’s easier to sleep through the general discomfort of ones entire epidermis burning than it is to ignore the urgent, actionable discomfort that is the itch. Once the itch is banished and there’s nothing I can do to lessen my mysery, I am released from my scratchy frenzy and sleep can come again — until the next itch starts.

If you really want, you can see my skin here, but it doesn’t really capture the purpleness or the puffiness. My hip was just an easy region to photograph. I offer this image in defense of being called a whiner.

Thanks!