Mentor vs. Torment.

Discuss.

Trying a new Blog tool,  Qumana, simply to waste time. Sigh.

Tags: tech

• Have new desk.
• Have new bookshelf.
• Mom and Dad paid for them by being generous with insurance money.
• Will have six dogs in my house this weekend.
  
• Movies I care about this summer: Superman, X-men, and...uh... (just comic movies? crap.)
  
• Mowed lawn this week for first time in '06.
  
• Lawn mower out of gas.
• Thank god Kelly Pickler is off American Idol. Go Taylor.
  
• My computer hasn't shut down by itself in four days.
• I've lost 13 pounds in five weeks.
• I wish my dogs would not eat their own feces.
• I wish more that I didn't care.
• No more ant sightings in kitchen.
• Lots of dead ants appearing on basement floor.
• Alias last night was best episode in two years. (They never should have got rid of Wil.)
• Kylie, our youngest lab, loves the frisbee.
• We're psyched to find a veterinarian has come to the area that does canine chiropractic. Siren needs a back crack.
• I'm psyched for a Battlestar Galactica prequel show, but not for a Star Trek prequel movie.
  
• I've revised about 1/3 of my book.
• It was the easy 1/3.
• Thinking a lot about fictional bad-guys this week.  Who is best and why?
  

Musical blasphemy just sounds better than the regular kind.

Found this quote by a GENIUS in a story on MSNBC.com about a 101-pound man who eats 6,500 calories a day just to stay alive...

...a registered dietitian at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, said most of the people she deals with are not trying to put on weight. "Its far more common to have the opposite problem," she said.

Next up: How most people prefer breathing to drowning.

It's an old saw, "writing is rewriting," but unless you are either a talented genius or sell enough books that you can put it in your contract, that's just the way it is. In a world where 90% of everything finished is still crud, 99.99% of first drafts of anything are even cruddier.

I bring this up because, as regular readers of this blog (all three of you) will remember, I wrote a novel. I did it in three months. Luckily, that was just the first draft, which is supposed to suck like a Hoover. Tonight I will be starting in earnest on draft 2.0 because I have comments back from my trusted reader friend Josh, who went above and beyond the call. He read the book twice. I think his wife read it, too. He filled it with comments and then wrote five pages of notes. I was up until midnight last night reading, and at six a.m.  today I lay awake in bed thinking about them and got up to finish reading
what he had to say.

He claims to have liked it. I want to believe him, but when I consider the plot and character and style holes he was kind enough to point out to me, I must conclude that he's a very nice man and not to be trusted.

Luckily, I still like it. And with Josh's commentary, I feel like it's all salvagable and will be vastly improved. However, now the hard work begins. The creative part of the writing was over weeks ago. Now it's about taking all the gee-whiz-cool stuff I came up with and making it actually work. I guess it should only take another few months (seriously, there's that much to fix). Then, I'll do it again when I get some other comments, and again and again until someday it's either done or I hate it so much that I take a magnet to my hard drive.

A lot of people go through life saying "I've never won anything." I can't say that.

Whether by work or by doing nothing, I've won my fair share of stuff. First was probably the watch I got from the Cub Scouts for selling the most TomWat crap to the unsuspecting elderly of my neighborhood and family. It's amazing what you can get people to buy when you're a child. Since then I've gone on to get the occasional lottery ticket win ($10 was the most I can recall) or door prize (got a sweet Bose radio just for showing up at a shindig in Vegas once and leaving my card... they mailed it to me later and I to this day don't know who sent it to me).

The latest was a book. Hard Case Crime is a publisher that's doing it's damnedest to make sure the hard-boiled PI genre not only never dies, but continues to kick ass the way it did in its hey-day of the past. To that end, they put out reissues of lost books (like an once out of print Ed McBain I need to buy) and brand new books by classic authors, or just new stuff with a very Mickey Spillane feel to them. They do a drawing each month for people on their email list, and this Monday I was informed by the editor that I was the winner of the latest release: The Last Quarry by Max Allan Collins. He's a great author of not only several novels and a few screenplays but also of comics, most famously at this point for writing The Road to Perdition graphic novel, long before Tom Hanks ever heard of it.

Today, I got my copy of The Last Quarry -- not even a final print, but what's called an ARC, or advanced reading copy. It could be filled with typos and notes from the author for all I know (thought I doubt it). The cover looks like it should be on a drugs store spinner wrack circa 1967 or in someone's collection now with yellowed pages. Instead, it's got some of the brightest white paper I've ever seen in a book.

I just read the book's afterword -- which gave away the ending, but I'm stupid that way -- and found out why the book looks so vintage 1970's -- the cover art is by Robert McGinnis, who drew some of the classic James Bond movie posters.

There was a time that people considered books like this a throw-away after reading it, much like comics used to be (back when comics sold in the millions each month). Now look at things... comics are in mylar bags before human skin oil can soil them, and a paperback that looks like its an oldie is a classy way for an author to see his work. Everything junkie and disposable eventually becomes someone's valued antique, even if it's just in the presentation.

Check the Flickr stream for shots from the family Easter, the first co-mingling of nephews on both sides. There was no bruising, so we consider it a success.

Yesterday I did something I thought I'd never do. I colored my hair.

Or rather Juanita, the woman who cuts my hair every 6 to 10 weeks (depending on how annoying I find it) colored it for me. She said what she was using was the way to go as it wouldn't instantly make me go Goth. The problem is, it was so subtle -- and the gray still so prominent -- that the wife didn't even notice. We'll see if anyone from my family cops to it on Sunday at the big joint family Easter gathering. If they don't, then next time, I'm getting it seriously colored. Like, green.

Turns out that with only two people in a house with a relatively new (under 10 years old) septic tank, you don't generate as much as you'd think in three and a half years. The septic tank guys -- from a local outfit named Stinky's, which I hired for the name alone -- said I could have gone a long while yet. The watery layer on top was the indicator... you don't need to suck out a septic tank until its starting to crust over on top.

Never the less, they put in the hose and sucked the tank dry, then backwashed some liquid so it would have that all important water layer. All that and it only cost me $250. And knowing two people don't make for much in the poo department, I won't call them again until 2011.

[This post dedicated to my dad, who's going to absolutely love these pictures.]

Today, for the first time since we moved in 3.5 years ago, my house septic tank will be sucked clean.

I've done or participated in a lot of home-ownery type things in my day... built decks, put on roof shingles, replaced a hot water tank, cleaned floods, paved sidewalks, installed many a fence... but I've always had a sewer until this house, so this is my first septic suck. I dug out the cement plug ahead of time and lifted it for the hell of it.

Nothing quite like the stench of several years of your own feces and urine mixing with bacteria to wake you up in the morning.

The truck should be here this afternoon and I'll try to capture it all for posterity. Much to posterity's chagrin and, likely, disgust.

Here's the innards of my computer from yesterday, before I swapped out the motherboard this morning. It looks exactly the same now. But it's still broken.

I've just about had it with this computer.

So what's left? The only two major components I have NOT replaced are the Pentium chip and the power supply. Considering the kind of issue I'm having (spontaneous reboots, issues when you hit the power button) it really could be either of these things. Or neither. I may never know to my satisfaction and I'll just limp this computer along through another year?

I'm stubbornly still glad I didn't get the extended warranty.

It works so nice when it wants too though.

Evil, vicious technology. Blah.

We're getting new neighbors. Eventually. For now, the construction on four houses in the big lot next door is underway.

While not thrilled, I'm not jazzed either. I have always managed to get along with neighbors in the past (perhaps with the exception of the guy across the street from my first house, who I never spoke to, but I remember disliking intensely for some reason). Maybe it will be nice to have someone to borrow a cup of sugar from occasionally. (Do people actually do that? I seem to remember it actually happening when I was a kid, going next door for my mom to get sugar or flour or some such powder, but it's one thing to like your neighbors... do you trust their food stuffs?)

Imagine if your out-dated-as-soon-as-they-were-printed Britannica set as a child had actually been filled with information about things you were interested in. That's what the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is. It was my primary form of "research" when writing my novel and -- as you'd expect in a hyperlinked world -- you can't look up just one thing. I've been sucked into things like run-downs of Doctor Who, the work of Bob Clampett and other Warner Bros. animators; the history of the GLOCK pistol; and an exhaustive look at the society of Klingons.

So imagine my utter joy yesterday when I was trying to look up something about the statue called Rodin's Thinker, typed "Rodan" by accident, and stumbled across the entry the Japanes monster and from there got the entry for the King of the Monsters himself: Godzilla!

When I was in the third grade, I made a notebook filled with my own pictures of each and every one of the diakaiju (that's Japanese for "giant monsters"). I drew their pictures and wrote in their names and remember being disgusted with myself that I had to make up some of the names. It was hard to catch them all after only one showing of the Destroy All Monsters. (Best. Godzilla Flick. Ever.) I loved them damn movies, even the one with the whiney kid who imagined himself talking to Godzilla's son (not Godzookey, by the way) and watched them whenever WPIX would show them in the afternoon during the summer.

Wikipedia's entries on Gojira (that's Japanese for, uh, Godzilla) are fantastic. They cover not only the stories (as if they ever mattered in those films after the first one in 1955) but even bits about the Toho studios and most importantly of all, providing a complete rundown of every daikaiju that ever crossed paths with the atomic dinosaur, from King Kong to Anguirus to King Ghidorah and, my god, a few I had never heard of since I haven't seen any of the films made after 1985.

I would like to say that no one counts the 1998 Americanized crapfest with Matthew Broderick. Some call the monster in that film GINO: Godzilla in Name Only, others call him Zilla (because he was more iquana than god). But the Japanese actually acknowledged the film in continuity, and then even used Zilla as a bad-guy in the very last Godzilla last flick, Godzilla Final Wars, where the American CGI version gets his ass handed to him by the actual Godzilla done in 100% suitmation!

Needless to say, Final Wars has moved up a few notches on my Netflix queue. By all reports, it features the most daikaiju of any Toho Studios flick since Destroy All Monsters and with films like these, quantity equals quality as far as I'm concerned. Even better, now that it's on DVD I can skip past the first half of the movie where it's all just humans and occasional aliens talking and setting up the "story" and all that crap, and get right to what's important: guys in rubber suits punching each other on miniature cityscapes. Radioactive breath is just gravy when you've got that.