Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
“Dance, monkey, dance.”
Archive for April, 2009
CopStories: You Want Sauce With That?
Friday, April 24th, 2009There were three of them.
And I’ll be honest: they scared me.
It takes more to scare me than it once did. Call it the results of dealing with drunks and crack whores and general idiots. Used to be, the thought of a physical confrontation would leave me sick to my stomach. But now, jaded veteran that I am, mostly I just get annoyed.
Except for this. This scared me.
Because there were three of them, and they were big. REAL big.
They’d been hanging out on the road for who knew how long, scaring motorists, causing all sorts of problems, and if this went bad, I was a long way from back up.
So I stopped my squad, lights flashing so that hopefully whatever traffic might run this lonely road would see us before they splattered us into road kill, and climbed out like I was the Lord of All I Surveyed.
“You guys are going back in,” I said. I kept one hand loose and free, like I wasn’t scared of anything. The other kind of floated free near my weapon. I figured if it went bad, it would go bad in a damned hurry. “Going back in. Ain’t no shit about that.”
At first they said nothing, and that dead silence unnerved me. It also left enough silence for my imagination to kick up a little. Deep in my head, I heard them, “Yeah, copper? Then let’s tee it up and see some blood.”
Finally, staring me dead in the eye, jaws moving slowly, the leader said: “Moo.”
“Don’t give me your bullshit. I’m’a Poh-leece.”
“Moo. Moo.”
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t cut any slack with me, mofo, so get your hairy asses back inside that fence.”
“Moo?”
Except it sounded like: “Or?”
“Or we’re gonna have a problem, you over-sized slab of pre-cooked barbeque.”
Evidently, from the fact that they actually ambled toward me – as well as a trio of heifers can amble – my threats cut no ice with them.
Surprised by their lunging at me – okay, less lunging than waddle – I backed up and let my hand hover a little more near my gun.
Okay, now, I don’t know much about cows, I’m a city boy, but as I suddenly wondered if that itty, bitty little .45 I had strapped to my hip would stop one of those sons a bitches if they did actually charge me. I’m guessing, when you compare the relational aspect of a 180 grain slug of lead to a 1,200 pound moving cow, the answer would probably be…uh…no.
I gave my squad horn a little blast and that stopped their forward movement, though it didn’t get them headed back the other direction.
So I glanced around, making sure there were no other cars coming, then looked back at them and –
Grunted.
Hah! I am a top notch cow herder. That’s right, bitches, I grunted and waved my arms and maybe – just maybe – threatened them again with Famous Dave’s best sauce.
For whatever reason, it worked. They turned around, though they did it slowly and contemptuously, and slowly headed back to the prison farm from which they’d desperately bolted only minutes earlier. Once they were moving, though, I realized I was now on the far side of them and the gate and if they went past the gate, I was royally screwed.
But the planets lined up, the Cow Gods made an appearance, and those giant hamburgers wandered right back inside the open gate.
Wow, I thought. How the heck’d I do that? See, ‘cause I’ve dealt with cows two or three or twenty times before and I never had any luck at all. So I’m not sure what happened, but I’ll gladly take credit.
Once they were safely inside – and they never stopped walking, just kept going further and further and further back in the field – I spent fifteen minutes ankle deep in mud and cowshit working the barbed wire gate closed.
When that was done, I gave them a quick salute, another threat about T-bone steaks – to which they answered with a “Moo” that sounded suspiciously like “Bugger off, white boy,” – and went back to work.
But it was a joyous rest of the shift because I realized that if this whole law enforcement thing didn’t work out, I was now able to go straight to Craig Johnson’s ranch in Wyoming with all my cow knowledge and get it done.
Abe Lincoln is Buffy
Friday, April 10th, 2009A $575,000.00 contract?
For an unwritten book?
Titled “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter?”
From the man who penned “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies,” which was subtagged with “The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem!” The authors listed were, of course, Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith.
Okay, the subgenre of mash-up novels has been fun, if intellectually devoid, but now it’s just getting stupid. And stupider still to throw more than half a million bucks at it. The publishing industry already is barely surviving. Burning that kind of money at a project that I suspect will not earn out ain’t as bright as it could be.
Rather than flush more than $500,000 on one book that will be a fluke and quickly forgotten, why not publish ten books at $50,000 that are actual novels? Or twenty at $25,000? Why not deepen the product line with novels that actually have a chance to earn their advance because a) they are not the latest flavor of the month trend and b) the advance is smaller, therefore the chances of earning it back are greater?
I’m all for writers making good coin, I really am. I’d like to make good coin, but if someone offered me $575,000, I’d be hard pressed to take it. Look, if the book ended up earning $750,000, then I’m good. The computers will show I’ve made them money and they’ll publish the next book.
But if it only sells $475,000 worth, then I’ve lost $100,000 and there ain’t no publisher worth a warm turd who’ll print the next book because, according to the computers, I’ve lost money.
So if I take a $100,000 advance on that same $475,000 in sales, then, according to the computers, I’ve made quite a bit of profit for the company and – hopefully – they’ll happily publish the next one (though that’s not even really a certainty).
And no, publishers don’t do anything for the love of the book anymore, so that’s not an argument. Once upon a time, it might have happened that way, though even in Stienbeck’s diary of the writing of ‘The Grapes of Wrath,’ his publisher is harping on him about money so maybe the good ol’ days weren’t so friggin’ great.
Now the mantra is: make money or get the hell out.
So why strike a match to $575,000 for a trend that’ll be gone in less than a year?
No wonder publishers are in trouble.
Lt. Col. David Grossman
Friday, April 10th, 2009Amazing eight hours with Lt. Col David Grossman today. As part of my on-going professional training, I spent a day in a seminar with the world’s foremost expert on the psychology of stress and killing and the effects of media violence on culture. He is a former soldier and, I suspect, hard to the right politically. But he and I agree on a great many things when it comes to violence and the cause and what can be done to stop it.
And, having worked for more than a decade now in education al psychology, as well as having picked up a couple Ph. Ds along the way, he is still clear-eyed and open-minded enough to understand that American is at its worst when it follows a strictly political course of action on any issue.
Right ain’t gonna fix it, left neither.
In fact, as I’ve believed for a while, no political course is going to fix what we as a nation have refused to even thus far define. We haven’t yet agreed to a plan of action because we as a nation refuse to even agree there is a problem.
There is. The latest batch of news reports – detailing ugly mass shootings across the nation – should lay that particular question to rest.
It’s going to get worse, probably, and we have to do something.
Freakin’ Bi-Polar
Friday, April 10th, 2009Okay, first he was socialist because he was taking over the banks. Now, according to some rightwing talking head I’ve never seen before, he’s a fascist because he’s taking over the banks.
Pick one particular facet of Obama Derangement Syndrome and stick with it. Either he’s a socialist or he’s a fascist. Very difficult to do both, as they are pretty much mutually exclusive.
Before you take my guns…let me kill some people.
Sunday, April 5th, 2009From an AP story April 3,
“PITTSBURGH – A gunman wearing a bulletproof vest and ‘lying in wait’ opened fire on officers responding to a domestic disturbance call Saturday, killing three of them and turning a quiet Pittsburgh street into a battlefield, police said.
Police Chief Nate Harper said the motive for the shooting isn’t clear, but friends said the gunman recently had been upset about losing his job and feared the Obama administration was poised to ban guns.”
So naturally, the only logical course of action, if you think the government is going to take your guns, is to shoot three cops. I mean, there is absolutely nothing else you can do, right?
What makes me nutty about the far-right lunatic fringe and their current hysteria about President Obama snatching up guns is that he’s said he doesn’t want to. And even if he said he wanted to, he’d have to fight it through Congress. And even if he said he wanted to, and he fought it through Congress, there’s that little pesky bit of parchment: the United States Constitution.
But according to the whackos, President Obama is going to wave a magic wand and suddenly all the guns are going to be outlawed.
This asshole in Pittsburgh is exactly what happens when that kind of foaming-at-the-mouth rhetoric is given airing in mainstream media. Once upon a time, stuff like that was the province of sheet-wearers, of Tri-Lateral Commission conspiracists, of those who were suspicious of fluoride in the water.
Does this tinfoil hat make my ass look big?
There is a person I know who, in the days after the election, walked around with his head hung low, telling anyone who was stupid enough to listen that the world for his children was over and they were as good as dead.
“Hey, Daddy, what’d you do at work today?”
“It doesn’t matter, junior, because tomorrow or next week or next month, you’ll be dead.”
These days we have Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachman and what else do we need? Bachman, especially, a member of the U.S. House and calling herself a ‘foreign correspondent behind enemy lines in Washington,’ and telling her voters she wanted them ‘armed and dangerous’ when it came to the ‘revolution,’ needs to take a long think about what she’s saying.
Maybe she should go to the Pittsburgh police funerals, just to see the effect of what she babbles.
It’ll never happen, she’s too busy on the Sunday morning news shows, being given airtime by the same media of which I was once a member. It embarrasses me. What was once a dignified and respected branch of our self-governance is now a naked and slathering chase for ratings.
I’m not saying we should censor what the nuts say. Part of a healthy democracy is nuts wiping foam from their lips. Plus, sometimes the nuts are fun to watch. What I’m saying is if you’re going to use your freedom of speech, you need to have some responsibility about it. If you’re going to call for armed rebellion (which, last time I checked, was actually treason), then you need to accept responsibility when one of you shoots and kills three public servants.
But in this country, in this particular time, personal responsibility, aside from being a hollow right-wing mantra, is nothing more than a pipe dream.
Meanwhile, three cops are dead because…because…my gosh…they’re going to take my guns!
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