Category: *heh*

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Culling the Herd

See other posts on my reading addiction. It’s been out of control for more than 50 years. Recently, I’ve been able to put some books down before finishing them with a hearty, “&@## no! Not worth my time!”

I’ve just recently (OK, 5 minutes ago) created another, “Nope. Not wasting my time” category under fiction reads. Picked up a real goat-gagger (something I usually enjoy: lots and lots and lots of pages of small text on very thin, high-quality–at least for this day and age–paper). It promised fair to hold my attention for a good evening’s read. . . until I got to the four pages of background timeline covering a couple hundred years of back story and another four pages of dramatis personae.

Oh, &@## no! It’s supposed to be a story! If I NEED a set of references to keep the story straight, the guy obviously can’t just tell the story and get out of the way. I’ve done that sort of thing–read books where authors just canNOT just tell the story and paint the worldscape/background into the narrative skillfully, and it’s just a PITA. If an author can’t just do his job well enough to do paint the worldscape/background into the narrative skillfully, I’m not going to waste my time on his work. He’s banned from my reading list. Period.

Moving on. . .

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Better Hope TEOTWAWKI Never Happens. . .

. . . because civilization would truly collapse. Why do I say this? Because not only are young adults–you know, the ones who would have to carry the torch, as it were–largely illiterate (or at least massively subliterate and/or a-literate), but most of them don’t even know how to hold a writing implement like a pen or pencil.

Seriously. Watch a 20-something try to write anything with pen and paper. Almost every one I see nowadays has the most awkward, cramp-inducing grip imaginable. This, of course, results in nearly unreadable penmanship in many cases and is sure to induce the dreaded “writer’s cramp” in short order. Without the ability to comprehend the millions of volumes of written “dead tree” text (no matter how laboriously they may be able to decode those funny lil squiggles on the page) and thumb-text in “pseudo-L33T” on their ubiquitous dumb phones, the transmission of information is bound to die.

In short order, what was once civilization will be back to the Dark Ages where people don’t even know what used to be possible. Though it’d still be an order of magnitude more advanced than the typical Muslim society today, it’d be back to life as “nasty, brutish and short” in a generation.

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Cool Heat

We don’t have a fireplace in our cozy lil home, and there’s not really any good place to add one, but. . .

We are considering finally replacing our old (still pretty nice) Magnavox bottle screen TV with a much larger LCD screen perhaps sometime this year. Yeh, no real hurry there, since TV isn’t really the center of our universe like it is for some (although I’ll admit watching Downton Abbey on my lil 15.6″ lappy screen positioned about 15″ from my eyes or even on my Kindle Fire (original) is pretty nice).

Still, a new, larger, wide aspect screen would let me build a faux mantle and surround for a collection of fireplace videos. . . 😉 Heck, there’s even a forced air heat duct on that wall (which I want routed UNDER the EC, away from both the piano and the HTPC, in future). Right now, it’s closed off (because its close to the piano’s best location), but routed out somewhere near where the fireplace videos would be running would be nice on a cold winter’s night. *heh* Sure, no real radiant heat (well, unless I could route the computer’s waste heat differently, too* ;-)), but still, it’d be fun: some snap, crackle, pop and other fireplace sounds and views to accompany quiet conversation, snuggling, or just side-by-side reading, as is often our habit.

Continue reading “Cool Heat”

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Good News?

With all the “must miss” new TV shows coming up, it’s heartening to hear them promo’ed with, “Premiering, FebYOUWARY XX” since there is no such month as “Feb-You-Wary”.

Well, either that or the dumbasses doing the promos are too illiterate to be able to simply read, “February.”

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Persnicketty

OK, remember this guy?

head-butt-cat

Well, we used to also serve the needs of two much older “dowager princesses” who have since left for greener, cathouses. (RIP, ladies) In the time since this guy fell heir to the two cat boxes we have retained, I’ve noticed that he’s a very persnicketty, urm, “waste disposer”. One is for liquid, the other for solid, and by gum! I’d better not let one become inconvenient for its intended purpose!

Cats. Bindmoggling.

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Prayer for 2013

“Lord, grant me the serenity to accept stupid people as they are,
The fortitude to maintain self-control,
And the wisdom to know that if I give them what they deserve, I’ll end up in jail.”

Anyone else want that on a T-Shirt?

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Oh, Come On! My Standards Aren’t That High!

Well, not an auspicious beginning to the New Year. I decided to clear out the underbrush in my ebook backlog a bit and started in reading some books I’d been meaning to get to for a while.

So far, it’s not noon, yet, and I’ve started three of ’em. Put two down. Deleted them from my devices. Not going to finish them.

An example: after wading through multiple problems in noun-verb agreement, pronoun confusion and even misuse–“their” for “its” one too many times in descriptive narrative (not dialog, where it is remotely possible I might excuse such things, depending on the character), for one, and anachronisms in a 1920s setting–I saw “balled out” used for “scolding” and just couldn’t take any more of that book.

And this was an ebook from an established publishing house, not an “indie” so there were NO possible excuses for such incompetent editing. Are there just fewer and fewer literate “proofreaders” and editors, or are publishing houses just shoving unedited “advance reader copies” out the door, thinking that ebook readers are less literate than hardcopy readers?

Maybe it’s even worse, but I don’t want to contemplate that. *sigh*

So now I’m reading a book that was touted/blurbed as sci-fi which appears to really be a “slapstick comedy sci-fi romance novel”. *sigh* Please, next time just give an accurate description. At least it’s amusing and written halfway literately.

*sigh* At least I have more than a few hardcopy books also stacked up in my “to read” list to take refuge in–books not published in these days of illiterate boob “proofreaders/editors”.

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It Makes Perfect Sense in the Bizarro Universe

So, package coming via “Fedex Smartpost” (hereafter known as Fedex Dumbpost) started 89 miles away from its destination (me), and seven hours later it’s 370 miles away from its destination. Now, Fedex has a “hub” that’s just 50 miles from the origination location, less than 40 miles from me. Yep. That makes sense. Instead of the package going to the nearest hub close to both the origination and the destination, it traveled 460 miles.

The really “smart” thing about the delivery routing is that, just like the last package from the same location, it’ll go to the hub that’s less than 40 miles from its destination, sometime early next week, then it’ll be delivered to the post office here, where it will be delayed at least another day in getting to me.

The folks in Bizarro world are all thinking, “Now, why didn’t we come up with that?”

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Post Xmas Blahs

Dec 26 and a little less so today have been devoted to cleaning out my alimentary canal. Son&Heir was inflicted with a stomach/other virus last week, and passed it to my Wonder Woman who… let me in on the fun.

So, massive joint aches, headache, fever, voiding of alimentary canal on both ends and rumbles, pains and other such usual things in between. *meh* It’s been so long since I’ve been really sick that I’d forgotten how to deal with it. *heh*

Better now, though still shaky and still emptying out the distal end of my alimentary canal. (I really didn’t know I had it in me! I guess folks who tell me I’m ‘full of “it”‘ know what they’re talking about. :-))

So, that’s why no continuation of the 12 Days of Xmas yesterday. Here, try of these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFTKwg2Oxts

Yeh, yeh, so Placido is in all of them. So? 😉

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Every Now and Then…

..or more like 3 or 20 times a day, I think, “And I actually married her!”

No, seriously: people who “know” us think she married a guy with a very strange sense of humor and sometimes express amazement that she can “handle” it, but that’s only because her even weirder sense of humor is kinda stealthed and only really comes out in the open in situations where she feels completely secure.

And that’s why I see it a LOT… and think, “Wow! I actually married her! Can’t keep up with her, but at least it keeps me on my toes.”

(The really amazing thing is that she actually married me, but let’s just let that one go for now, mmK? ;-))