Cook 'em, Dan'l

The DC Sniper John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection a few minutes ago.

From a man who loves dogs and has ethical considerations about whether to eat beef or pork or not, I think as much justice was served as allowed in this case.

As soon as the Military Tribunal finds Dr. Nidal Hasan guilty of premeditated murder for his rampage at Fort Hood -- and it would certainly seem to be cut and dried that he did it -- then probably he'll be stood up in front of a firing squad and shot, too.

I hate to sound less the bleeding heart liberal than some of you think I surely am, but that one won't cause me to lose any sleep, either.

Some argument about the death penalty in some cases, especially if there is any doubt. But not for these two. I expect they could have made a small fortune selling raffle tickets to be allowed to push the plunger in the former, and a bigger one to pull a trigger in the latter. By rights, the families of the murder victims should be allowed first crack.

Yeah, I know, that's not rehabilitation, it's revenge. But it works for me.

Draw the Line

Back in my youth, I spent a while -- only a short while, thank somebody -- selling encyclopedia. I wasn't a salesman, but I didn't really need to be: We had a finely-crafted, psychologically-constructed pitch we were taught. If we could get past the door and deliver it, chances of a sale were between one-in-three and half the folks we saw.

The guys who were good at it? Seven, eight of ten, week in, week out. These guys drove new Cadillacs every year.

These were not cheap encyclopedia, my friends, they were Americana, and in today's dollars? Probably a couple grand, U.S. (Except today, you can get online and do better, faster, and waaay cheaper.)

How the pitch worked was simple: If a salesman could get the sucker -- er, customer -- to answer "yes" to the first question he asked, then they were pretty much nailed into answering "yes" to every question that followed. It was a classic example of "Slippery Slope Sales," and once a customer lost his or her footing, they would slide on their ass all the way to a commission in the salesman's pocket.

The first question? "If I gave you these books, for free, would you use them?"

Anything but "No," the sales guys were playing with a stacked deck and somewhere between a third and half of the people upon whom they ran the grift -- ah, made their sales pitch -- would be writing them a check before they left.

Couldn't do it today. Many, of not most states, have a no-questions-asked-you-can-void-the-contract period of three days or longer for such transactions, and rightfully so.

It was a con. Once I got past the ends-justifies-the-means -- hey, it's a great product! they are getting their money's worth! -- I quit, and it didn't take long. Because the next bit started out, "Okay, we are looking for folks to showcase our product in your neighborhood, and so we are going to give them to you for free ..."

After the hook, the catch, which was that the encyclopedia were free, but you had to agree to keep them current by buying a year book for ten years -- at a mere forty bucks a year, and since that was a pittance, why wouldn't you do that ... ?

Of course, you don't want to drag it out for ten years, so you can, you know, just pay it off up front ...

And if the sales guy couldn't get that to happen, he wrote it up, and later somebody from the company would call and allow as how the salesman had made an error and the deal was off.

Now back then I was just out of high school and into college and not wise in the ways of the law, but any way you slice it, that is fraud.

Draw the curtain over the young man so broke he needed to sell encyclopedia to make ends meet, but not so broke he would keep doing it at the cost of his soul. (And if you ever get a chance to see Tin Men, with Richard Dreyfus, Danny Devito, and Barbara Hershey, about aluminum siding salesmen, do so. It was pretty much just like that.)

You can also do it the other way, using a negative response. Say "no," and the slope turns to icy mud beneath your feet.

Which brings us to becoming a vegetarian.

How on Earth, you ask, is he going to make that segue?

Attend -- but forewarned -- you might not like where you wind up:

Most people in a relatively-civilized society don't practice cannibalism. Ask yourself, would you eat long pig? If you would, that pretty much makes you a monster anywhere outside a plane crash in the Andes, so probably most of you don't eat it now, and wouldn't, given a choice of it or shrimp at your neighbor's barbecue. (If you do eat people, I don't want to hear about it. Nor about your neighbor. Go away.)

Now, what other creatures would you have trouble broiling and keeping down? Chimp? Dog? Cat? At least in this country, such diets would be, um, frowned upon, and if you did it, you'd probably not be bringing it up in polite company. (If you do it, go away -- maybe the cannibals will have you, or you can get your own show on The Travel Channel: Eating Weird Shit.)

At some point, when I had German Shepherd Dogs, I looked at them and realized that they were not people in dog suits, but certainly sentient enough that I saw them as individual beings.

They had feelings. They were loyal. They were nicer to be around than a whole lot of people I knew, and I considered them my furry children. They were smart. Watch a herding competition or agility or rally. There's one border collie so bright that when asked to fetch a toy that had never been named before, figured out it by the process of elimination -- he knew the names of all the other toys, and what they wanted wasn't them, so that's what he fetched. I know people who wouldn't figure that out.

They dreamed. I could watch them running in their sleep, barking softly as they went.

I could not conceive of killing and eating one of my dogs even if I were starving. I drew the line there. If you love your dogs and accept them as I did mine, then you understand this. If you don't, I feel sorry for you.

If my dogs were sentient and intelligent critters I wouldn't eat, then I found myself in a place where I couldn't really kill and eat somebody else's dog, either. Not for them, but for the sake of the dog.

Okay, so that's fine, dog-people are still with me, probably cat-people are: We don't eat Tabby and Fido, so what? Where are we going with this?

Ah. But then we come to pigs. Pigs are as smart as some of the primates, some research contends, and as bright as a three-year-old human child, other studies offer. Easily as swift as dogs, and maybe smarter.

Pigs, like dogs, dream.

Well. If I can't eat a dog because I am of the mind that killing something relatively sentient and eating it is, well, not something I feel good about, then how can I continue to chow down on ham and bacon? They don't spring full-born from the aisles of Safeway in a shrink-wrapped plastic tray, but from animals that were shot in the head and then cut up. They aren't as cuddly as Jude and Layla and Ballou, though the pot-bellied ones are cute, but probably as smart and, uh ...

Slope. Slippery. Sliding.

Hmm. What about ... cattle? Do cows dream? Do they feel pain? Care for their young? Not up there in the IQ bracket with pigs, but warm-blooded, bearing their calves alive, suckling them, and probably not thrilled to be herded into the slaughterhouse ...

Yeah, pork chops and sirloin steak and all, and I love them, but all of a sudden, if you start thinking about shit like this, the slope, slope, holy crap, I'm sliding ...

Turkey? Chickens? Fish? The most holy of delicacies ... shrimp?

Well, okay, there the line is a little fuzzier. Having been around turkeys and chickens, we aren't talking about African Grey Parrots here, poultry are not the Einsteins of the avian world. Brain power is dim at best. I don't know if it is true that a turkey can drown looking up at the rain, but certainly the domestic versions of those and chickens are ot-nay oo-tay ight-bray.

Fish? Don't seem too swift. Shrimp. C'mon, they are good-tasting bugs, but I can see that once you start down that path, each step can lead to the next, and pretty soon you are to the don't-eat-nothing-with-a-face-on-it stage.

Which is to say, i.e., a vegetarian.

And, it gets worse. If you believe the way animals are treated to produce eggs, cheese, butter, milk, all like that is passing terrible and you don't want to support it -- and outside free-range critters, the industry is pretty damned awful, and we all know this but don't like to think about it, then you slide right on along to:

Vegan.

And it's the Thanksgiving Tofurkey ...

It's a disturbing path, I warrant you, and most of us stop after people, dogs, cats, and Tarzan's sidekick, Cheetah.

Where you draw the line is, of course, your own business. But it is -- pardon me, but I have to say it -- food for thought. And while Socrates allowed that the unexamined life is not worth living, in some cases the examined life is probably not going to taste as good.

You want fries with that?

Grief

From National Geographic

Chimpanzees, watching as one of their own, who died of heart failure, is hauled away.

Teef

Ah, another pleasant morning at the dentist, third of four visits on the schedule. Today's adventure was Indiana Jones and the Gums of Doom, wherein Our Hero's deep periodontal excavations, on the order of an archaeological dig to undercover the base of the Spinyx, involved shovels, picks, scrapers, front-loaders, and dredging to such depth that I was feeling pains in my toes ...

What I get for, ah, accidentally skipping my six-month cleanings three or four times in a row.

After the gums heal -- six weeks or so, they say -- I get to go back and see what's what. Twixt now and then, there's the new crown to be fitted ...

When it came to genetics, I got my mother's dentition. My father never had a cavity until he was past forty. Mama had full dentures by the time she was twenty-one.

My first memory of a dental exam was when I was about six, at which point I was found to have more cavities than years. In those days, we brushed our teeth once a day for about thirty seconds total, never saw a container of floss, and came from a culture wherein the mothers put Coca Cola in babies' bottles to calm them down when they were fussy.

I spent a lot of time in the dentist's chair getting drilled and filled. Later, root canals and crowns came along.

I started going by myself when I was about twelve. Dropped off, or walked. And such a horror of needles had I that for five or six years and probably ten fillings, I wouldn't allow the dentist -- kindly old Dr. LeBlanc -- to use Novacaine. It wasn't until I was in my late teens that I realized the injection up front was a whole lot less painful than withstanding the drill for half an hour.

A whole lot less painful.

Ah, well. Though I have enough metal in my mouth to set off the detectors at the airport, I still have all my own pearly whites. Well. Not so much white as old ivory-colored, and some of them gold ...

Brush 'em, kids, and floss, and get them scraped at least every year or so. Most tooth loss is not from caries but from gum disease. You need to stay ahead of it, or you'll look like that guy in the trailer park being interviewed after the tornado ...

Poor Fox News ...

Even Sesame Street lambasts Fox News ...

Live Fast Die Young

Gram Parsons was one of the main driving forces behind country rock -- what they sometimes called "hippie-billy" -- music in the late sixties and early seventies. A member of the International Submarine Band, the mid-cycle Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, he was a good-looking rich kid whose family owned big orange groves in Florida.

Raised, apparently, mostly by the servants, his alcoholic father suicided, and his mother also drank herself to death.

Bad genetics to get into drugs. Gram Parsons ODed on a combination of whiskey, downers, and morphine at the ripe old age of twenty-six, in a hotel room in Joshua, California, in 1973. It was a miracle he lasted that long; at one point, Keith Richards threw Parsons and his girlfriend out of his French mansion because he thought Gram was doing too much heroin. That ought to tell you something right there, when Keef thinks somebody is doing too much dope.

Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse.

Parsons was ambitious, but lazy. Stoned much of his life. He hung out with Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, who once allowed that Parsons had better cocaine than the Mafia. He was an inspiration for The Eagles, and would sing country music in hardcore country music bars wearing rhinestone suits and long hair, and win the rednecks over.

Because he had a trust fund that paid the bills, he never really needed to work, and when he got bored with a band or a woman, he would just stop showing up. Writer David Meyer's biography, Twenty Thousand Roads: The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music is unsparing in its overview of Parsons.

Parsons was, according to Meyer, as he traveled down the road to self-destruction, "... an unregenerate, unrepentant dick: careless of his talents, faithless to his women; heartless to his friends, and heedless of his professional responsibilities. He abandoned his wife, cheated on his girlfriends, left every band he ever started, and made certain that no one could depend on him for anything. By Gram's own admission, if his lips were moving and he wasn't singing, he was most likely lying."

Once you read that in the introduction, how could you not want to see the train wreck that follows? Morrison, Hendrix, and Joplin, they were victims of success; Parsons never quite made it to the big-time. Yes, he was the first to record the Richards-Jagger song, "Wild Horses," before Mick and Keef got around to it. And he was a pretty good singer. He loved country music. His guitar and piano chops were good enough, if not in the same class as many of the players he ran with, and that was never an impediment to becoming a rock star anyhow.

Meyer's book is heavily researched, well-written, and in spots, wickedly cutting. The opening line in the chapter entitled, "The Byrds:"

"The Byrds were a nest of vipers. Lord of the Flies with guitars."

Ouch.

(If you are an Eagles fan, Meyer likes them even less ...)

Dying young in the entertainment industry sometimes gets you more fame than you would have had if you'd lived a long life. Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and a handful of rock gods and goddesses who killed themselves with drugs or fast cars offer plenty of evidence to support this. Retiring as the unbeaten champ is different than continuing to step into the ring until you are punch-drunk and losing every round.

Parsons has a certain genius-mythology connected to him. When the Burrito Brothers's first album The Gilded Palace of Sin, came out, Bob Dylan named them his favorite country-rock group. Rolling Stone Magazine fell all over itself praising it. The British rock weekly NME spoke of the "sheer magnificence" of the music.

Despite the critical acclaim, the album tanked. Peaked at #144 on the charts, then disappeared. A&M didn't support it, mostly because Parsons and the band racked up a fortune in expenses while on the road, missed gigs, and in general behaved like a bunch of stone fuck-ups.

Partially, it was because the music was too hippie for the country crowd, too country for the hippies. Ahead of its time.

They played at Altamont -- after the Hell's Angels beat up Marty Balin of the Jefferson Airplane, and before the Angels stabbed a guy to death during the Rolling Stones set ...

They might have stayed at it and gotten another shot, but the Burrito Brothers didn't rehearse, did a lackluster follow-up album, arrived so stoned for gigs they sometimes couldn't play, and, in general, got in their own way at every turn. At points, the band would unplug Parson's amp he was so far out of tune and timing. Mostly the audiences either didn't notice or care.

Apparently the pedal steel guitar player was the only guy who ever showed up straight and it wasn't enough.

Gram Parsons was rich, handsome, talented, and ambitious. And every time he was a few steps ahead of the game and about to cross the finish line first, he would stop, pull a gun from his belt, and shoot himself in the foot ...

Gotta love rock bios.

Return of the Brass Bra

I dunno who dug this one up, but it was too good not to pass along: Behind-the-scenes shot of Carrie Fisher and her stunt double catching a few rays on the set of Return of the Jedi.

You know this is gonna fuel a few fanboy fantasies ...

Psycho's Gun

This is apparently what the religious nut opened up on his fellow soldiers with -- an FN Five-SeveN, in 5.7 X 22mm. You can get twenty-round magazines for it, and if he had a couple of those and the AP ammo that is limited to police and military, he could have easily done all that damage in three minutes.

He had apparently been practicing and planning this for a while.

Not the best gun, and if he was using the high-powered ammo, not the best choice there, either. Small bullet tends to punch a neat hole and keep going. Could have been a lot worse if he'd been shooting big bore hollowpoints.

Kudos to the woman cop who showed and shot it out with him, wounded herself, shot through both legs, but taking him down.

The Cult of Ayn Rand

Couple new biographies of Ayn Rand are out. As a former Objectivist, which for a brief point in my life had me politically and philosophically to the right of Genghis Khan, I can recall sitting up all night arguing over the truth of whether it was wrong to steal a piece of bubble gum in order to save your mother's life. (According to Objectivism, it is wrong. You'd probably do it, but it would be wrong. Been a while since I got into a beer-fueled sophomoric argument this goofy. Ah, the good old days ...)

There are no shades of gray in Objectivism. Which is why Mama Ayn liked Mickey Spillane's books. Good guys, bad guys, this side of the line or that, period.

Who is John Galt? Why, he is the man! (Kind of an intellectual version of Snake Plissken, and just as realistic. I will stop the motor of the world! Galt said. Yeah. And the good guys will all live in the valley and ride the rails of Rearden metal ...)

Objectivists thought that Libertarians were commie pinkos -- and thieves, for having swiped Mama Ayn's ideas without giving her credit, then perverting them.

I had a buddy who was deeper into it than I, and he went off to New York to join the Collective and worship at Rand's feet, back in the sixties. Said she played the role to the hilt, used to wear a cape in public, smoke her cigarettes in a long holder. He sent me a picture of her once, and she looked like an older version of Dagny Taggart, which is not a surprise. She based the character on herself.

Me, I went the other way and became a hippie. Before I did, I read all the books and manifestos, subscribed to the newsletters, and wrote poetry extolling individualism and rational self-interest and making altruists heinous villains ...

The two best known works in the canon were The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and I read and re-read them. Such is the faith of a no-faith-allowed true believer that I was able to do that, since the prose in both books is, at best, turgid, and the characters less realistic than Tinkerbelle ...

Some years back, Rand's -- born Alisa Rosenbaum, by the way -- best known senior students, Nathaniel Branden (Nathaniel Blumenthal) and his ex-wife Barbara Branden (nee Weidman) -- wrote their own autobiographies, and all of the unhappy goings-on behind the scenes revealed a somewhat irrational version of Peyton Place. Who was sleeping with whom, and who was jealous and blew right past reason to bitch-slapping and screams? Very interesting ...

If the creator and two highest-ranked proponents of a philosophy can't make it work on a day-to-day basis, then that's generally a bad sign.

Objectivism is another of those attractions that call to young idealists. And so attractive a notion that the books offering them, bad as they are written, manage to catch a new generation of readers every few year. In Atlas Shrugged, there is a radio speech on economics that runs sixty pages, one of the ultimate examples of telling and not showing. Her lead characters are so heroic you know you'll never measure up; her villains so evil they make Satan look like a choirboy ...

Um. Rand has been gone since 1982, I think, and her legacy, such that it is, still hooks a whole bunch of bright and freshly-scrubbed newbies every year. Most of them don't stay, once they get out of college and into the real world. Like pure Communism, Objectivism is one of those things that sounds fine on paper. But when you try to build a working model, it collapses under it's own weight.

Those you who dabbled in the stuff might find it interesting to read the biographies. I'd start with Nathaniel Brandon's, then Barbara Branden's, to get the flavor from folks who were there. Between his axe and hers, you get a sense of who did what to whom, and why it all fell apart.

Barbara's book became the basis for an HBO movie, The Passion of Ayn Rand, starring Helen Mirren and Eric Stoltz. Won an Emmy™.

The new books, written by folks not part of the movement, might offer a bit more, well, objectivity ...

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to say that I have retained one principle from my study of the material to this day:

Initiation of the use of force without rational justification is the cardinal sin upon which all law should be based.

If I am minding my business and you come over and throw a punch at my nose for no reason other than you feel like it, or you want my wallet, or you are pissed off because you just got fired, that's wrong. That's the primary purpose of law, to protect people from each other, and it starts when somebody points a knife or a gun at somebody without just cause.

And So Begins the Monsoon

Did I mention it was raining here? And that that hardy tomato plant about which I bragged yesterday was blown over during the wind last night?

Never a good idea to speak too soon ...

Shrink Runs Amok

So the current latest is that the shooter at Fort Hood was a major and and shrink.

How awful is that? The guy you trust to fix your broken psyche runs amok and guns down dozens of people?

Probably going to be difficult for the gun control folks to use this one -- taking the guns away from soldiers ... ?

Core Values

If you are a functional adult in our society, there are probably some core values to which you adhere, or mostly do. It is likely you have deeply-held beliefs that you have examined and decided upon, and if you have come to these by a process that you trust -- reason, faith, experience, some combination of these -- you are unlikely to change your notion without some new evidence that smacks you upside the head.

Hot-button issues usually get sifted into this category relatively early: Religion, politics, social mores, gun control, best beer ...

It is possible to change one's view on such things, but based on my own experience, I suspect that past a certain point, this doesn't happen very often. If I have come to a decision about, say, abortion, and it was a long and considered process, then chances are I have gone over most of the arguments for and against. I've weighed them, made a decision based on my values, and unless somebody comes along with something that blows my belief out of the water, am not going to flip-flop.

Older you get, the more experience you have, the less likely that somebody is going to present an argument you haven't heard before, and if you have examined that argument and found it wanting, hearing it again reworded from a new source doesn't make it any better.

Three-chord rock has been around for a long time, having come from three-chord blues. Each generation since it started has discovered it and coming grinning back to plop it down in front of their elders: Listen, listen, this is great stuff! It's primal!

Yep, and it was primal ten, twenty, fifty years back, when your older brother, your father, and your grandpaw hauled it in and laid it on the table.

Life is a passing parade, and the folks at the front of the line have been walking longer than those at the back of the line, so a lot of what is new for junior is old-hat for senior. Doesn't mean they have seen everything, but it does mean that they've seen more. Sometimes, it is cause for a knowing smile. Ah, to be young and full of fire!

This is all in service of the latest round of hoo-ha from the new guys who grew up with computers believing that anything they can download should be free, and who go to some length to try and justify it as okay.

Everybody does it, so making it illegal won't work. It's not hurting anybody, it's just electrons.

Or, The big companies are fat and greedy, so it's okay to rip them off. Or, information should be free and anybody who tries to stand in the way is just a selfish reactionary.

We can all download whatever we want and we're on the road to Shambalah, where the fresh-baked cookies are free and don't have any calories.

La, la, la, la, la ...

And the voice of rationalization is heard throughout the land ...

No. Wrong. TANSTAAFL. There ain't so such thing as a free lunch. Somebody, somewhere, has to pay for everything. And while it might be true that at the base of every old fortune there's a highwayman, or that private property is a crime against humanity, our consensus reality has demonstrated that pure systems that offer such -- be they unbridled capitalism or communism, fail to take into account human nature, and fall by the wayside.

These days, the commies are turning a profit; the capitalists are voting in regulations. The middle of the road has always called to hikers who don't want to fall off the edge. Ayn Rand's dollar sign in the air belongs in the same place as Marx's Dialectical materialism -- history's ash can of ain't-never-gonna-work philosophies -- which will have to be compacted some for them to fit, 'cause there is a lot of crap already in there.

So we muddle along as best we can. I have heard the arguments for pie-in-the-sky probably as long as most of the readers here have been alive, and I don't buy it. So, in the interests of saving us all time and energy, if that's what you believe, that from each according to his ability to each according to what he wants, then don't bother to say it here.

I'm not claiming sainthood. I am aware that this slope is slippery and that I've slid down it a time or twelve. But we draw the line where we draw it.

Like somebody said in a posting, sometimes I speed. I know I'm breaking the law when I do it, and if I get caught, I won't kick at the ticket. I'm not going to try to convince a jury that speed limits are bad ideas, and since we all speed sometimes anyhow, it's not right to enforce those laws.

Easy to be an anarchist at seventeen. Not so much at thrice that age.

We can discuss issues upon which we have disagreement and perhaps find common ground. But if you are thinking to change core issue choices? If you aren't a world-class philosopher, your A-game isn't going to be enough. I've heard it before, from people better at it, and I'm not moved.

If you are in the KKK and you want to wear your sheet and hood into the Sunday morning service down at the predominantly-black Zion Baptist church, you might want to rethink that.

Moon Jack

After five days in the balmy Oregon weather, Moon Jack.

Held up pretty well. Of course, I cheated. If, after you carve your punkin for treat-or-treat, you spray the exposed flesh liberally with hair spray, it tends to seal it pretty well.

Use this knowledge wisely.

Say What?

This one is going to stir the martial arts pot some. I'm not insinuating anything here, you understand, just passing along a link ...

Hardy Plants

Somebody at my wife's office gave her a tomato plant early in the summer, some heirloom variety of which she didn't even know the name.

The plant, in a back yard whiskey barrel pot, blossomed, and gave us tomatoes all summer long. Tasty, tart, and a salad or sandwich made with a tomato you picked two minutes before you constructed it is way better than one using a tomato that was chemically-ripened in a California hothouse weeks earlier ...

Normally, by the end of September, tomatoes from the garden are done, picked clean and the the plant is ready to be pulled up. This one, whatever it is, still has a slew of green tomatoes on it. They won't get enough sun to ripen, but we can make salsa or chutney or even fry 'em, if we get them off before the first freeze.

The plant is putting out new flowers. Apparently it doesn't know that it's November around here.

And with the rain coming down, I am sitting in my office with (what I hope is only) a cold. I do all the things one is supposed to do, hand-washing, etc., but now and then, some bug slips through. Entire time I worked at a medical clinic, with thousands of infectious patients coming through every year, I never caught the flu, not even a cold, and I got used to the idea I was invulnerable.

So much for the notion of being Immune Man ...

Ah, well. If I practice singing today, I can sing Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song and hit the low bass notes ...

Attention Catching Headline

SC man gets 3 years in prison for sex with horse

And then I thought, say ... isn't Bobbe from South Carolina? And, hmm, wouldn't it be fun to tug on his chain ... ?

But no, it wasn't him. There's a picture of the guy -- and how would you like to see that headline over your mug shot? look, it's a horse molestor! -- and the guy doesn't look like Bobbe at all.

Really. Just a coincidence they are from the same state.

Magic Fingers

So for the last eight or nine years, my wife and I have been getting deep tissue massage once or twice a month. I'm a big believer in this kind of therapy, and it has markedly alleviated aches and pains, sped healing, and given me, I believe, a sense of overall wellness I wouldn't have otherwise.

I think staying ahead of illness is better than trying to cure it once you catch it, ounce of prevention and all, and getting rid of built-up somatic stress is an altogether good thing. Not to mention that it feels great.

Our therapist is Diana Hengerer, and no, she doesn't offer "happy endings!" She is also an accomplished musician -- plays guitar, mandolin, and fiddle -- and has been in various bands over the years, including running her own. Likes dogs, too.

If you are in the Portland, Oregon, or surrounding area and you are considering having some hands-on bodywork done, Diana is absolutely top-notch.

Thieves in the Night

Been some back and forth about pirating novels here, and one notion put forth that electrons in a computer aren't "stuff," so you can't steal 'em.

Attend:

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that I sign a contract with Multinational Books to write a novel about vampire parakeets. They love the idea, and based on an outline, make an offer and send a contract. Fifty grand for a 400 pp book, delivery in a year. Half on sign, half on delivery.

(Long as I am being theoretical, might as well give myself good terms.)

So my office is paperless, and I don't print out the chapters every day. I do triple back-ups. One on the computer, another on a flash drive I lock up, a third off-premises on my server.

The year goes by. I'm done with the novel, got a finished draft, and am about to ship it to MB.

Say I've got a stalker, call him, say, Randolph.

Randolph hates me for whatever reason. So he gets into my house one night while I'm off babysitting the grandkids, lights my computer, and because he is a whiz at such things, bypasses my password and copies my novel file. Then he trashes my copy. Breaks open my lock box and finds my flash drive and wipes it. Gets online, and using my password manager, figures out what my password is there, goes into my email online, and wipes the copy of the novel there.

Now, granted, these are iffy things, but thieves have been breaking into locked places forever, and it's not beyond the realm of possibility.

Randolph goes on his merry way.

Aside from the breaking and entering, busting open my lock box, and like that, Randolph has stolen my novel, which is worth fifty grand. I've got half of the money, but since I don't have a book, I'm gonna have to give it back, and no way I'll be able to write it all from memory before defaulting on my deadline.

Randolph calls me up, says he'll shoot me the pirated file back, for ten thousand dollars.

Now, from where I sit, what he has done is the same as if he had broken into my house and stolen my wife's jewelry or my computer, none of which is worth as much as the novel script.

And holding the novel for ransom is another whole ball of wax.

If you believe that what Randolph has done is not a crime -- save for the B&E and lockbox, then we aren't on the same wavelength. And whatever your reasons, I ain't tuning in to your station.

Save your breath.

Dial Up Blues

My buddy Mike Byers lives in a place called Baliff's Hollow, and the sun sets between there and town. He's on dial-up, and the phone system is pretty much cans on a string.

Mike is a fellow of many talents -- artist, writer, singer, guitarist, flew airplanes in one of those wars we lost a while back, though it wasn't his fault.

He wrote a little blues number. I liked it, so here's my version.

(I'll have to send it to him on a disk, since it would take forever for him to download it online.

Transcend Dental Medication (Cont'd)

Went in to the dentist's last week for my exam and cleaning. He found a cracked crown and some decay, so today, I got to go back and begin the process of getting those repaired.

Dentistry has come a long way in my lifetime, but not past the injections of a local anesthetic and assorted grindings and the smell of burning enamel ...

The temporary crowns look like teeth now and not aluminum caps, and the process for casting is quicker and easier. No more spit tray next to the chair, they keep a little vacuum cleaner going next to the water jet in your mouth.

Left side of my mouth is numb, tongue feels like a block of wood. Can't tell by looking, but it feels as if I have taken a good punch in the mouth.

Beats the option, of course, having your teeth fall out, but there are a lot of ways I'd rather spend an hour than in the dentist's chair

A whooole lot of ways, yessiree ...