mindful meanderings

The American economy is a mess. Again. Unemployment in America is at crippingly high levels. Again. The prices of oil-based fuel are skyrocketing, and showing no signs of slowing down. Again.

The cries of the American people are being ignored. Again.

Juxtapose all that with the big, ’spectacular’ wedding for Jenna Bush, daughter of the current U.S. President. So many distractions,…

All while the ecology of the whole world is collapsing around our ears.

But, no, the sky isn’t falling.

It’s dying.

Oh, this makes me laugh *so* hard!! Ricky Gervais is a pure and unadulterated genius! A genius, I tell you:

Now what I want to know is this –

If creationists really, really believe in the bible’s explanation of life, the universe and everything, don’t they ever worry that that their God might get a wee bit miffed at all the damage they are doing to His world?

Rather like Mom and Dad taking off for a holiday and saying, “No parties”, only to come home to all the boorish evidence of all your friends’ teen-aged debaucheries. [face it kiddies, pissing in your own salad bar is just stupid]

Being fashioned after their God, by His own hands, carries great expectations from you on His part and big responsibilities on the part of humans. [Oh, well, so much for that.]

If creationists really, really believe that their God made all humans [all of 'em, not just the white men] in His image — and I suspect that goes into the metaphorical, as well — isn’t it past time that they start living up to their own hype?

Just wondering.

WordPress is my preference for blogging, as it lends itself to my current writing style so effortlessly. At the same time, though, in the spirit of experiment and exploration I’ve recently begun an auxiliary livejournal blog –

I’ll basically be cross-posting between the two for a while, just to see how things go, to learn what the possible differences in draw and audience are, and how possibly differing groups may respond to my writings.

The problem with maxims is human arrogance. All too often they’re voiced by men who presume to speak for all of humanity. Or, worse, a god.

I love this:

“The process of plotting consists of creating problems and introducing them to your characters. Problem, meet character, character, meet problem. You’re not going to get along.”

The entire bit can be found here: Bohemian Word Werks - How To Write A Novel

Josef Fritzl began sexually abusing his daughter Elisabeth when she was eleven years old.

When she was eighteen he drugged her and imprisoned her in the cellar of her own home. Then he fooled his wife Rosemarie and his other children — Elisabeth’s mother and her siblings — into believing Elisabeth had run away to join a cult, by way of a note he forced Elisabeth to write.

And then Fritzl raped Elisabeth again and again over the following years — decades — and fathered seven children on her, seven children whose father is their rapist, incestuous grandfather.

Three of Elisabeth’s children were ‘abandoned’ by their assumed-to-have-run-away mother and taken in and raised by the rapist and his unsuspecting wife, while the other children remained in this tiny underground prison with their mother. Not only has this monster stolen and ruined Elisabeth’s life, he further defamed her as repeatedly having illegitimate and throw-away children.

How many lives has this monster named Josef Fritzl ruined?

Is there such a thing as adequate punishment for this monster?

Went looking for serendipity, today,… found something else, instead.

Go fig.

Were you ever the recipient of this lame-arsed and degrading come-on?
“If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?”

Theferret –

[Personally, his choice of screen names is an insult to ferrets everywhere, so I prefer to regard him as a weasel,... but I digress.]

Theferret went and did this irretrievably stupid can-of-worms thing:

“We all reached out in the hallway, hands and fingers extended, to get a handful. And lo, we touched her breasts - taking turns to put our hands on the creamy tops exposed through the sheer top she wore, cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell underneath, exploring thoroughly but briefly lest we cross the line from ‘touching” to “unwanted heavy petting.” They were awesome breasts, worthy of being touched.”

and

“And my God! We all reached out like zombies trying to break through a door to get to those breasts. And it wasn’t getting any worse! We weren’t degenerating into an orgy, but rather exploring the amazement of how beautiful this body was and how wonderful it was to have access to them.”

Oh, my everlovin’ gods. Are you skeeved, too?

And never before have I seen one man do so much back-pedalling on a blog. Alas, for the sake of his credibility, it came too late. The damage was done. The monkey had removed the cork from the elephant’s arse, and the shit went everywhere.

Truly it had no choice, because it was a substantial mountain of shit.

Theferret, in his juvie online boasting after the fact, has sparked a mighty firestorm.

Many, of all sexes and genders and orientations, responded. From what I was able to access, the bulk of those responses is highly critical and vociferously disapproving of Theferret’s petting project.

And then I came across the words of tablesaw:

“Women’s breasts are not magical devices for healing straight men’s psyches. Women’s bodies do not exist to make straight men feel better about themselves. Women have their own shit to deal with, and a lot of the time, that shit is us, even (sometimes especially) when we’re trying to do better. And trying to be the spokesperson for a movement without acknowledging, accepting, and fucking dealing with your position of power is just working at crosspurposes to that same movement.”

Thank you, sir, for your empathy and compassion. You give me hope for the het male portion of the western world.

I, too, posted some knee-jerks to this, ah, person’s Open Source [yes, thanks for hijacking that term and bastardising it in the same breath] ‘project’, and began writing this post several times. Each attempt, until this one, I deleted as being a tad reactionary. So I empowered myself by giving myself permission to consider the issue and write only once I was able to give it the calculated bit of mild snark it truly deserves.

Based upon the silly, sophomoronic notion of the buttons the female objects had the “right” to choose to wear — green for “Yes, you may ask” or red for “No” — in this Fandom Scandal, here is my considered response:

If the red button, when I push it, fails to make you, the Hopeful Groper, disappear — in a puff of common decency with a Karmic scream of excruciatingly abrupt enlightenment, and remove this wretched sense of degradation and violation you’ve just dumped on to my psyche with your lewd insinuations of entitlement — what damned good is the bloody thing?

Wyrdsmiths has a delightful posting on the idea of ‘plot’ as ‘car’.

I grok it. This approach is as open and as vast as the road, giving strength to the metaphor of ‘journey’ as ‘life’.

But, oh my effigy! This whole concept is spawning wildly fertile tangents, like those cute little pregnant-at-birth tribbles. [secret message here: never trust 'cute']

First there’s the car [coupe, sedan, sports?], and then the road itself –

Sealed and paved, or cobbled, or dirt [and muddy ruts in the rain]; bumpy, I’m assuming, since a smooth and straight road — for myself, at least — tends to trigger ‘highway hypnosis‘, resulting in an unforgivably boring story. Does the road run through Urban City, Suburbia, Small Town, or into the Rurals and then on into the Vast Wilderness? And let’s not forget closed roads and detours.

The passengers, are they on the Grand Tour, or a lowly milk run, or in flight from fiendish peril or the law or personal responsibility?

Then there’s the Evil Road Map that refuses to be properly refolded and thwarting all efforts at establishing or maintaining a veneer of civility, and the inevitable cries for bladder induced pit-stops.

Okay, what else?

Flat tires, blown gaskets, toll booths, hitch-hikers and homicidal tractor-trailers, the petty bickering in the back seat. Oh, and the psychotically escalating cost of fuel.

Since I don’t tolerate the presence of dead-weights in my stories [when I recognise them, that is], this is when I tell my characters to get out and push.

From SB Sarah’s field report at RT:

A reader highlighted the portions that were copied from Small’s work and sent it to her. She forwarded the book to her attorney, who contacted the counsel for the publisher of the plagiarized work,…

The other writer also had to write a letter of apology, an apology which included the line, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,… ”

Imitation, the sincerest form of flattery? The hell it is.

First, it’s a rip-off.

Second, the act itself is the thief’s admission they’re either too lazy or too stupid to come up with their own stuff.

Third, it’s a lame-assed excuse and/or license to rip-off stuff that’s better than the thief could ever possibly write.

Fourth, here’s a defintion of ‘flattery’ from wiktionary:

flattery (countable and uncountable; plural flatteries)

1. (uncountable) Insincere]] praise or approval, especially for the sake of personal gain.
2. (countable) An instance of insincere praise.

Fifth, it’s tantamount to blaming the victim, like saying, “Well, you knew you were a great writer when you left the house this morning!”

Sixth, the phrase ’sincere flattery’ is an freakin’ oxymoron.
[but any real writer would already know that]

I’d so love to raise the bar for plagiarists and flatters,… but since they’re already crawling on their low-life bellies what would be the damn point?