Tag Archives: suck

The World’s Worst Writing

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I’m not a big fan of television serials, as a general rule. There was a period of several years in which I never watched a single minute of sitcom. Not counting animated shows, anyway. Over the last few years the cartoons have been able to go where no live show dares. Which isn’t saying much.

As I write this I’m sitting in Pizzeria Roma, an old haunt of mine (the black hole by the oven is still working). They have a plasma TV now, showing network programming without sound. A crime drama just concluded, and it confirmed what I have come to suspect for a long time: There’s a lot of crap coming out of Los Angeles and New York, but the worst television in the world is made in Germany.

Maybe I should qualify the title a bit. This is about the world’s worst writing that people actually get paid for (regularly!). There’s plenty of truly awful writing published on the Web and in vanity press.

The Czechs have Ulice (rhymes with “street”), and old-school low-budget urban soap opera, and they have “Kriminalka: Anděl” (rhymes with “CSI: Prague neighborhood” – Anděl means angel which adds a nice nuance to the title). I am told that this show is actually pretty good if you’re into the whole CSI thing. It might just be national pride, but the locals tell me that the show makes up for a smaller budget with writing and acting. I know the one time I watched it without sound, I found it far less silly than the American franchise that inspired it.

Then there are the German shows. After a while they’re easy to spot. And when it comes to bad, they have taken sucking to a whole new level that American television can only dream of. I know that’s hard to believe, given the state of American TV, but the writing in the German shows is so bad it is a shining beacon of suck even with the sound turned off. (Worth noting here is that I’ve never seen a Chinese television serial. They might be worse.)

The other night I was laughing out loud at the action in a German detective drama featuring a dog. (There is another that features a helicopter, and so forth. In every case the show is constructed so we can say “yay dog!” or “yay helicopter!”) One of the many Toma

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Missed it by That Much

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I’ve been working on a really cool (in my opinion) story, and for once I knew exactly where I was going to submit it. City Slab is a very pretty quarterly that shows up in major bookstores, and they specialize in urban horror, where the city is almost a character in the story. My story, “Haunted City,” fits that bill nicely. While the pace may be a little slow for some editors, I’m quite pleased with the result.

Last week I was at City Slab’s Web site, and I got all the required information and even wrote my cover letter. There were still a couple of things I wanted to check for the story, however, so I did not submit. Good thing.

Today I went back to the Web site to double-check the address, and this is what I found: http://www.cityslab.com

Bummer. If they’d only held on long enough to publish my story, I’m sure their financial woes would be over. Instead, there is one fewer magazine paying real dollars for quality fiction, and therefore another twent-four good stories will go unbought each year. The best stories (or the ones by recognizeable names) will find a home somewhere else, but life on the bubble just got a little more precarious.

The venerable Weird Tales now has my manuscript. I hope they like it. They published Lovecraft, so a slow pace shouldn’t bother them.

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Just Because I Don’t Know What They’re Saying Doesn’t Make it Not Crap

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I’m at the Budvar Bar Near Home right now. There aren’t many people here, and the plasma TV is showing an American thriller movie. Tom Clancy was mentioned in the opening credits, and it seems that Ben Affleck is the star.

It could be that Mr. Clancy bludgeons himself whenever he’s reminded of this flick. I hope so. I’ve read several books by him that I’ve enjoyed greatly. But what is happening before my eyes on the television is patently ridiculous.

A pilot is patrolling the desert wastes. He is distracted when the photo of his wife and child comes untaped from his jet fighter dashboard. While trying to recover the photo he lets his guard down and runs into a hostile missile. Words fail me. The photo on the dashboard immediately classified the guy as Dead Meat. But then I am asked to believe that a guy carrying an atomic fuckin’ bomb would be distracted that way. Or even that he would be flying without an escort.

Then I’m asked to believe that those who lost the bomb shrugged and said, “oh, well, we can make another.” Twenty-nine years later, the bomb is recovered by Bad Guys. “It’s warm!” one of the scavengers declares. I am being asked to believe (I think) that the Israelis lost an atomic bomb and didn’t try to get it back. Yeeeeaaaah, riiiight. Tom! Mr. Clancy! That wasn’t your idea, was it? I can still respect you, can’t I?

OK, and as I watch we have the silliest of all action movie conceits. The standoff where each guy is pointing a gun at the other. Only in Hollywood would someone hesitate to pull the trigger. *ahem quentin* Seriously. A standoff occurs when the person who moves first loses. Guns pointed at each other is not a standoff situation – the first to move wins. If I have a gun pointed at someone’s head, and they have a gun pointed at mine, and we’re not old chums from back in the day, I’m pulling the trigger.

It could be that there was dialog to go along with this patently ridiculous standoff to make it make sense. If I was the guard with bad teeth, things would not have got to that point. Here’s the test I give myself as a writer, for every character in every story. Would I have done that? Given that character X has limited information and even less time to make a decision, would any non-stupid human being act the way the author asked this guy to behave? You can’t base a plot on the actions of stupid people.

Nor can you depend on bad driving, but as the movie progresses they have done that too. You can’t make a really stupid driving error a plot point. OK, you can, but you shouldn’t. The car that won’t start should be reserved for crappy horror movies. Please, Mr. Clancy, tell me you’re better than this. I hunger for the reassurance that you were not responsible for what I have been watching.

Although, honestly, I know you’ve already sold out. You flog your name shamelessly, unconcerned with quality. There’s the whole series of crappy airport novels with your name on them that you can’t feel good about. But there they are. You’ve earned your laurels. Just… don’t insult me like this.

Hopefully, when I sell out, I will do it more gracefully.

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Another Brief Message to the Gatorade Marketing Team

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A while back, while on a road trip, I wrote a message to the boys at Gatorade. In a nutshell, I told them that all the flavors were silly, and many of the names of the flavors were downright stupid. To that I have this to add:

Lemon-lime and strawberry mixed together are awful. Making the result the same color as regular lemon-lime is criminal.

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A Legal Recommendation

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When a guy is trying to call his girlfriend after his Internet connection goes haywire, and he discovers that he has no signal, he should not be held responsible for damages when a “more bars everywhere” commercial comes on.

I’m just saying, is all…

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Give ’em the Razors, Sell ’em the Blades…

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I’m hanging with That Girl, and the other day we were out on the town together, shopping for a variety of techno-things for our office. One of those items was a printer. We spent time at OfficeMax looking at a variety of options, and finally settled on a competent-looking Epson for seventy bucks. I was struck by couple of observations as we lifted the black beauty from it’s packaging and set to work hooking it up:

  1. The cable to connect the printer to the computer is not included. This is mentioned in small print. Oddly, It is not possible to tell from the outside of the box what cable is required. You must get home, unwrap the printer to find no cable, then make a separate trip. Thanks, Epson. (Thanks also to the almost overly-helpful people at OfficeMax, who probably should have known about this.)
  2. The cost of a printer, including a full complement of ink cartridges: $70. The cost of a full complement of ink cartridges: $80. It is cheaper to buy a second printer and throw it away than to buy a backup set of cartridges. Wow. Just… wow.

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My Curse, Apparently, is Broken

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For several years the performance of San Diego sports teams was almost frighteningly linked to my proximity to the club. Just watching the game, even remotely, has been well-documented on these pages to be a kiss of death. (In the interest of science, I have on some occasions in advance correctly announced that I was jinxing a game.) There was a period with the Chargers when it was just downright ridiculous.

This year, I have paid almost no attention whatsoever to baseball. I knew that pundits were predicting good things for my team this year, but things have been hectic, you know? Finally I had a bit of time and I thought I’d go see how my boys were doing. There is weekly column at espn.com called the power rankings, and I started scanning the list for my team. I scanned down… and down… and down…

By just about any measure (most notably the ability to win games), the Padres are the worst team in the league, with no help from me whatsoever. If the blessing of my absence is ended, so too must be the curse of my presence. I declare the curse ended.

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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.

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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.

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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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