Down on the Farm

When we were hippies, we decided to get back to the land. A bunch of us, mostly family, found a decrepit old house on seventeen acres, next to the river in Brusly, Louisiana. The owner would allow us to live there rent-free if we fixed the place up.


It was a big, concrete-walled house, built after the levee, on a long, narrow strip of land, and the place had been, we guessed, primarily a small ranch, cattle or horses–the acreage was mostly fenced-in grassy pasture.


So we acquired some livestock–a horse, a pair of goats, some chickens, seven dogs and a duck. Wife and I, two small children; my wife's cousin and his spouse; my sister-in-law; and a few assorted friends who came and went. We did some rude plumbing, hung paneling, built a carport, re-roofed the place.


Along the way, Cousin Jay got an old boat he worked on in the back.


I borrowed a rototiller and went to plow a garden space.  First furrow, thirty feet, I hit a buried pipe and blew up the rototiller. Went to Sears, bought parts, and fixed it, in the process learning that I was about as well-equipped to repair small engines as I was to be a farmer.


Got it fixed, tilled the space. The women planted stuff. 


Organic, of course. 


The bugs in Louisiana loved us. No spray? They ate well at our place.


We learned that you don't plant watermelon next to gourds, because they cross. You get something that looks like yellow watermelon and tastes like wood pulp. Even the insects wouldn't eat it.


Mostly what survived were carrots and green onions. We went through a fifty pound bag of brown rice that year, fried with carrots and onions, and we all turned orange.


The horse, Miso, was a stallion, insane and never ridden. A neighbor who was a cowboy offered to break him to the saddle. He stayed on three, maybe four seconds, was bucked off, and the only thing that got broken was his arm. 


The goats–Nan and Bill, of course–ran and hid every time we approached them.


The chickens didn't last long enough to have names. They escaped the coop, and one at a time, jumped into the yard where the pack of waiting dogs ate them. After the first one, we sat in the kitchen and watched. Birds that stupid deserved it, we thought.


The duck fell in love with Giesla, the mini-daschund, and followed her around everywhere.


We were probably the worst farmers who ever lived.


After the house was fixed up, the owner threw us out, and that was that. What I learned was: Never again ...


I told you that story so I could talk about this one:


A woman I know has written, under a pseudonym, Tammy Owen, a memoir of her farm days, House of Goats, and it is well-written, funny, touching, and actually useful for anybody who is considering the idea of becoming a gentleman (or lady) farmer. It's an ebook, available at Amazon.com or Smashwords. 


You should check it out. 

Raylan

Okay, some of you are fans of one of my guilty pleasures, Justified. You know who United States Marshal Raylan Givens is. And if you are a mystery reader, you might know that the guy who came up with the character upon which the TV series is based is Elmore "Dutch" Leonard. 


Leonard has been writing forever, has a slew of books, more than a couple of which have been made into movies. I'll get back to that in a minute. 


Nice guy. I caught him in a gun mistake once, or so I thought. One of his characters was waving around a .38 auto pistol and I sent him a note explaining that probably wasn't the case. As it turned out, he knew that. He'd written ".380" in his manuscript, and a helpful copy editor assumed he had mistakenly added that "O" at the end and fixed it for him.


This is why you read your galleys when they send them to you.


Um. Anyway, Leonard has written a new novel starring Raylan. If you've followed the series on the tube, the book will be a disconnect–he has a story that the series used, sort of, but told slightly differently, and with not-quite-the-same characters acting in it. Kind of like an alternate universe. Boyd Crowder is in it, but not as much fun as he is in Justified. The owner of the store down in the holler who sells 'shine and runs the marijuana biz locally is a man, and not a woman, and the two idiot sons aren't quite the same in the book as in the series. The coal miner VP woman is there, but not the same. It will be familiar, but it doesn't go where you think it will if you've seen the televised version.


Still, it's a fun read, Leonard is a master, and I had a fine old time with it.


My favorite of the diamonds strewn about is a little bit of business that won't mean anything to anybody not a Leonard fan. Here's the set-up for a short exchange that takes place early in  Chapter 8:


Long ago, Leonard wrote a novel, Valdez is Coming. The book was made into a movie starring Burt Lancaster, as a Mexican-American sheriff who tracks down and picks off bad guys who have murdered somebody and kidnapped a woman. At one point, he captures one of the villains, but turns him loose with a message for the leader of the bad guys: "Tell them, Valdez is coming."


In the novel, Raylan is talking to Loretta, a girl's whose father has been shot. She's about twelve or so:


"Before they showed," Loretta said, "Bob phoned and said to tell my dad, 'Valdez is comin.' You ever hear of anything like that?"


"I might've," Raylan said ..."


I fell out laughing when I read that. I expect Leonard's other hardcore fans will, too. 

Mo Weather

Been raining here the last couple of days, a fair amount. When we get standing water on our front walk, so you have to wade through it to get to the gate, that usually means the rest of the area is really flooded, and so it is this time. Some place in the mountains got fifteen inches of rain in twenty-four hours. We got just under three inches here, and a lot of places got a lot more. This on top of a couple inches of snow, so there was plenty of water to go around.


In Turner, just south of Salem, (home of the Enchanted Forest, along I-5) the local river jumped its banks. One guy, whose house was flooded years ago, had installed a moat around his house and it seemed to work, but a lot of houses weren't so lucky. Fourteen rivers at record flood stage. 


The bridge at the duck pond went under. Lot of tree limbs came down in the gusty winds. Welcome to Oregon in the winter.


My car's battery died, or so I thought. Turned out it was just a loose connection that got wet as I sloshed down the road. Not that I could have fixed it. In my car, to get to the alternator and voltage regulator, you have to take the front bumper off ...


And so it goes ...

Health Food

In a furtherance of my waffle experiments, behold the next one:


Waffles, chicken chunks in between the pair, smothered with chili. And delicious.


Health food? I said?


Why, yes. The waffles were buckwheat-cornmeal-flaxseed; the chicken was slow-roast rotisserie hormone-free, the skin removed; and the chili homemade, with turkey. 


And besides that, I ate an apple, too ...

Vulture Peak

Okay, here's another writer for you: John Burdett. He chronicles the adventures of Sonchai Jitpleecheep, a fairly-honest cop in Bankok, Thailand. Sonchai, the son of a whore, is a Buddhist, dope-smoker, part-time pimp for his mother's bar, and cat's paw for his boss, Colonel Vikhorn, who is one of the two biggest crooks in the country.


The latest is Vulture Peak, and there's not a whole lot I can tell you about it that will make much sense, because it, like the others in the series, is off-the-wall. Sex, violence, black comedy, I mean, it's not like any other mystery series you have ever read. Dead people, rich people, crazy people, some who are all three; Frankenstein's monster, organ-running, all in there ...


I came across the first one, Bangkok 8, a few years ago, and loved it, and have bought the ensuing novels as they came out. 


To say the books are passing strange is to damn them with faint description. Best to get and read them in order, which I think is: Bangkok 8; Bangkok Tattoo; Bangkok Haunts; The Godfather of Katmandu; and Vulture Peak.

Oops ...

Here's a surprise. Well. Maybe not if you ever watched the show ...

Weather

Got to love the weather around here. Last night, it began to snow, and by one a.m., we had a couple of inches on the ground. At one-thirty, it turned to rain, and by eight this a.m., it was mostly washed away.


My gumball trees out front? Still haven't lost all their leaves yet ...

Bedside Reading, Sorta

A quick tally on reading material and what forms it has been in at my house of late.


(According to stats I saw recently, most people in this country are not book readers, i.e., when queried, more people admit they haven't read one book in the previous year than allow they have. Of those who consider themselves readers, the average number of books they consumed in the previous year was nine. 


Nine. Sad, isn't it?)


I got my iPad in June, 2011, primarily as a reader, though it has gone from luxury to necessity in other categories since. I started uploading books, magazines, and short stories into it. However, I continued to read treeware. Fewer paper books and magazines and stories that way than before, of course. 


I've read about forty books on the iPad in the previous seven months, plus a dozen shorter works. Most of it is fiction. There are nine bios, memoirs, and technical books. Currently, I am in-progress on three novels: 11/22/63, by Stephen King; Vulture Peak, by John Burdett; and Raylan, by Elmore Leonard. 


I make it twenty-five books in paper, plus magazines, of which I read two a month treeware. (The New Yorker, I switched to the iPad, that's one issue a week.)


At my peak, I read four-five books a week, and I'm down to half that; however, sixty-five books in seven-and-some months, that's not too bad for an old guy ... 

American Sniper

Just finished reading Chris Kyle's American Sniper ( with Scott McEwen and Jim DeFelice.) 


Kyle, a Navy SEAL, was, when the book was written, the "most lethal" sniper in U.S. military history, somewhere around 160 confirmed kills, and probably more than that, since those numbers tend to be on the conservative side. Middle East, mostly urban Iraq, a couple of really long shots past two thousand meters.


Set 'em up, knock 'em down. 


Kyle is a self-effacing teller when it comes to credit in his war stories–he lauds the Army and Marines–talks about how lucky he was. Says he wasn't the best shot out there, just in the right place at the right time to see a lot of action.


He downplays them, but he won multiple silver and bronze stars, along with other ribbons, so he's a certified hero, no question.


SEALs go through heavy-duty training, and we get all that, along with his early background. Essentially, he was a Texas cowboy, a real working one and a rodeo rider before he went into the military, a self-confessed redneck who liked to brawl and shoot, and plenty of both in his memoir. He's a tough guy, and he got chewed on pretty good along the way but sucked it up. He didn't want to be left behind because of injuries, and he couldn't wait to get into the thick of things. Broke his foot during his training and didn't tell anybody so they wouldn't make him wait until the next class. 


You don't become a SEAL because you want to push paper as a REMF.


Absolutely a warrior, this guy. 


Kyle is the man you want on the wall when the incoming shit arrives. He's not the guy you want to accidentally bump into having a beer down at the local pub. Nor, I would think, as a neighbor who has had a couple too many at the block barbecue. 


(Kyle claims to have punched out former UDT (pre-SEAL units) and ex-Governor Jesse Ventura in a SEAL hangout bar in Colorado in 2006 when Ventura supposedly bad-mouthed the troops. Ventura says it never happened. One of a couple of "untrue lies," about him, he says. As opposed, I guess, to a "true lie ... ?"


Somebody needs to look up the definition ...


Supposedly there were witnesses to this altercation, but so far, they haven't stepped up to confirm or deny anything in public ...)


It's a warts-and-all portrait, the book, and Kyle's wife puts in her thoughts from time-to-time, which is an interesting counterpoint. God, family, country, that was Kyle, but in reverse–he was a SEAL first, then a husband and father, and God got what was left over. Great warrior. Lousy husband and father until he mustered out. He admits it, and there is a sense of that being the tip of an iceberg. Some PTSD that is mostly glossed-over, and I'd expect that. Going from a shooting war to the neighborhood Safeway overnight has got to be a major disconnect.


These days, Kyle runs a sniper school and private protection service, Craft International. 
Have a look at the T-shirt:

There is an "And then I killed ... " flow to the story once you get to the shooting war, and an offhand shrug as to the doing of that. He was paid to shoot people, that's what he did. He enjoyed the hell out of it. No regrets, and the only time there's a hint of compassion in his telling is when he passes up a shot at a kid sent to fetch an RPG launcher. Other than that, he'd plink anybody who fit the ROE–rules of engagement–and one gets the feeling that sometimes those rules were, um, not altogether observed. 


There's a lot of between-the-lines stuff here that seems to me to be way hairier than what is actually told, and what he says is bad enough. 


It's an interesting read, and a way to get a feel for how top-of-the-line troops think and function in a war zone, and what it costs them there, and when they come home.

Mo' Blues

Click here for a link to "My Babe."

We went to Artichoke Music's acoustic room Saturday night to hear Dave Mullany and Terry Robb "Bringing the Blues."


Dave played a set; then Terry did. Then they played a few songs together. Amazes me to see good musicians who haven't practiced together just click with each other and roll along like they'd been jamming every night for years ...


Most it was blues, though there were some side trips into other genres. Rags, primitive–Robb used to play with John Fahey–some gospel, some folk. 


Dave is an accomplished guitarist and singer–he also did some stuff on a resonator uke. Terry is so good he makes it look as if he's about to doze off in the middle of blazing lead runs. Both men live in the groove.


Lot of us in the audience were guitarists, and some of us students of one player or the other. I've taken a few lessons from Dave.


The Artichoke room doubles as a cafe, you can squeeze maybe seventy-five people into it and it was full. Just enough amplification, no hair-streaming wall of sound, and the fartherest seats from the stage are close enough you can see all the fretwork as people play.


Made me want to come home and shoot my guitar again. Happens a lot when I see really good players ...

Seriously Cute

You might need to take an injection of insulin before you watch this–it is really sweet ...

Gee Whiz ...

Okay, I have to ask: Am I the only person who sees a serious lack of any functional brain activity in the current flap about Marines peeing on dead Taliban fighters?


First off, they are dead and literally don't care. But second? 


In what universe is it okay to kill somebody, blowing them full of bullet holes or tossing them a hand grenade, raining down some big artillery, slitting a throat, whatever, but that's no sweat long as you don't piss on them afterward? Pissing on a dead guy is an atrocity? It shows disrespect? Whereas killing him is just peachy? 


I mean, it's barking madness, isn't it?


What the fuck is wrong with people, they can think like that? 


We are talking seriously fucked-up moral compasses here. 

Justified

Raylan is back, coming Tuesday.

Yeehaw!

Fun Video

A Corgi herding ducks ...

The Jaguar

If you are a fan of T. Jefferson Parker's mystery novels–and if you aren't, you should be–then you probably already know the latest Charlie Hood novel is out. The Jaguar is the fifth in the series, the others being, in order, L.A. Outlaws; The Renegades; Iron River; and The Border Lords.

Parker has other books, including a bunch of stand-alones, and they are all worth reading. 

The Hood books are all off-the-wall, and they tend to get more so as they go along. There is an element of flat-out fantasy that shows up along the way, and while it is kept ambiguous in an earlier book, I'm really interested to see how Parker eventually pays it off.

The set-up is that Hood, a Los Angeles Sheriff's deputy, gets loaned to the ATF, and winds up in various adventures with gun-runners and drug cartels. There are colorful supporting characters, including the son of a woman with whom Hood was in love with,  who is related to an  infamous Mexican Robin Hood, Joaquin Murietta, whose head she keeps in a jar, and ... well, much else I'd tell you would be a spoiler, so I'm going to leave it at that.

Well, okay, a little more: In the latest, the McGuffin is a pregnant woman who is kidnapped, and a ticking clock thus started–in ten days she will be skinned alive. The guy who does it likes her, respects and admires her, but is going to allow it to happen anyway, unless certain conditions are met. 

The book wanders through the Mexican countryside, into the jungle, this way and that; there's a hurricane, a flood, crocodiles, narcocorrido music, lepers, big money, a lot of shooting and people getting killed, and psychopaths every which way, one of whom is waaay more than he appears ...

What I recommend is that you buy them all and then read them in order. The experience will be much fuller. A fine and bumpy ride. 

Caveat: Early on, Jefferson made some gun mistakes, for which he was called to task. He has better vetting now, but he's not a gun guy. Not enough to put me off him, but worth a couple of head-shakes. Just so you know. 

Matadors Go Wide

So, after a note from Dan Moran urging me to it, I uploaded the rest of the Matador novels to Amazon.com. In theory, all of them should be available there starting tomorrow. In theory.


Dan will continue to offer them on the Fat Sam site, and will likely clump some of them together into omnibuses–omnibi?–in the somewhen future. (He got a new job, lotta money, and he's apt to be busy for a time. Good on him.)


Anyway, you should be able to see the list by clicking on the amazon.com button down there on the right, urging you to buy even more ebooks. Or here, starting manana.


Editor's Note: The titles are all live, save for Black Steel; I tagged it incorrectly with the info for Brother Death, so I fixed that. Twelve hours, so they say. If anybody is waiting and tapping their foot, it's the second-to-last in the series–read the others first and get back to it. Or drop by Dan's store and get it there. Costs the same, and you get more versions that you can read on a plethora of devices anyhow. 

Use It or Lose It

"Rust never sleeps;" and "Use it or lose it." Two old sayings worn smooth by time and repetition, but as true as they ever were. 


Why mention it today? Two activities bring this up for me: First, a guitar piece, El McMeen's dropped-D instrumental arrangement of the old love song "The Water is Wide," which I used to could play from memory but now can't. 


The other is how tight my hamstrings and low back have gotten because I haven't paid attention to keeping them stretched. Strong and flexible are better than either alone.


For me, loss of guitar repertoire happens because a piece stops getting played and fades from memory. In my case, it's because I started spending more time on the pieces I practice with the other old folks at the Closet Musicians' jam. When you have more than you can play in a single session, some of it doesn't get practiced.


There are folks who have immense repertoires, who can play a hundred songs without going blank on the lyrics or forgetting a chord change. And if you play a piece often enough and long enough, it does tend to burn itself into your memory. "House of the Risin' Sun," in A-minor is one that I should be able to remember after I'm dead, given how long I've played it.


Stuff I practiced for a couple years that I haven't played in a couple years? Not so much. Robbing Yarrow to play McCartney . . . 


I have noticed that if I go back to a mostly-forgotten piece, muscle-memory sometimes will give me a nudge in places and my fingers seem to be able to do a five or six-note run on their own. Somewhere down in the mental junkyard, some portion of it is not completely rusted through. 


Ditto the tight muscles groups. As long as I can do the physical things I normally do, the stretches to be able to do just a little more tend to get put onto the back burner. But what happens, insidiously, is that the djurus stop going quite so low, or the range-of-motion on a hoisted weight is maybe a hair less. It sneaks up on you. 


Yesterday, you could bend at the waist and put your hands on the floor; today, you can't scratch your knee unless you sit down. Bad. Bad. 


Do I need to be able to drop into a full split? No. Would I like to be able to do so? Sure. But the cost versus the gain is a factor; I'm not going there. However, there is a balance point and I do need to achieve that.


Fortunately, I know what to do to remedy both of these creeping forms of entropy and it's simple: Practice the stuff I want to keep, and take a little extra time during the workout to lengthen the muscles that have shortened.


There are three steps involved here:


First, you have to be aware that there is a problem.


Second, you have to determine the solution. 


Third, you execute the remedy.


Easy to remember with the acronym: BAD SEX ...


"Simple" and "easy" aren't the same, of course, and sometimes that third step is a killer, but the three-step approach is useful for a lot of what you run into in your life. 

What Were They Thinking?

Connections to Margaritaville

Here's how the game Connections went this time: 

I came across a nod to Key West, Florida, in an article I was reading, some offhand reference. So I went into the Apple bookstore and found a book called Mile Marker Zero, by William McKeen. It was a history, sort of, focused on the late sixties and early seventies, post-Pill, pre-AIDS, centered around the literary community there. Key West was one of Papa Hemingway's haunts before he moved to Cuba, and there were a plethora of other writers, who came there after they were famous or got so while they were living there.


Among the players are Hunter S. Thompson, Tom McGuane, Elizabeth Ashely, Margo Kidder, with passing references to Tennesee Williams and Truman Capote,  and there is a lot of boozing, screwing, mate-swapping, and dope-smuggling going on, amongs the manly-men and womanly-women ...


You probably know that when Jimmy Buffett sings about Margaritaville, he's singing about Key West. Buffett, a so-so country singer, would up in Key West in the early seventies through the auspices of Jerry Jeff Walker. Went from sleeping on somebody's couch and getting shooed off doorstoops to fairly successful and rich. Once Buffett's music began focusing on the scene there, and he came up with a unique sound that spawned hit records and parrot-heads and franchise bars ...


There were a slew of other moves and shakers in the literary community down in the tropics and most of them seemed to party long and hard. Booze, sex, music, it was apparently quite the scene. Eventually, most of them moved away.


So whilst reading the McKeen book, which is a lot of fun, I came across the name Tom Corcoran who was one of the boys in the club. Corcoran eventually went on to become a writer, and did a series of mystery novels set in Key West, featuring a photographer named Rutledge. When he makes references to various folks, they ring true, because he was there. 


In one of the books, there's a reference wherein his girlfriend grabs a baseball cap from Robicheaux's Dock and Bait Shop, in New Iberia, Louisiana. Dave Robicheaux is, of course, the protagonist in a bunch of novels by James Lee Burke ...

Art

Photo by Penny Meyer, March, 2011.

Came across this when I read a posting on a website about the artist Carsten Van Osten, an artist, who among other work, like comics for Disney, paints miniature figures. 


Always impressed by people who have this kind of talent.

Cramp

Most recent silat class, I apparently overworked my left sartorius muscle. For those of you anatomically-challenged, this is the longest muscle in the body, a skinny strap, originating at the anterior-superior iliac spine. This is at top of the leg. The muscle crosses to the medial side (inseam) and inserts on the upper tibia, via the pes anserinus, the co-joined tendon. The muscle aids in flexion, abduction, and lateral rotation of the hip, and flexing of the knee.

 If you step on a piece of gum and it sticks to your shoe and you lift your foot to look at the sole? It helps with all those actions. We have a kick that looks kind of like that, a hacky-sack sort of motion, and we did a fair amount of those last session. 

We worked legs pretty good overall, did a lot of kicking, twisting, sweeping, all like that. 

Um. Anyway, I was sitting in my office chair, playing my guitar, knees bent, both feet flat on the floor when all of a sudden that sucker seized up and it did not want to let go. I managed to stand and stretch it out, but boy, howdy, was that a not-fun surprise.

Cramp! Cramp! Ah, shit–cramp!

All better now. 

As one of my correspondents here has pointed out, it's hell getting old.

Still beats the option, though ...

Wafflewich

My wife made extra waffles this morning, and when it came time for lunch, I thought to myself, "Say, I've never had a sliced turkey and turkey hot dog sandwich on waffles before!"


So now I have.


Pretty good, too. The waffles are whole-grain, with various kinds of healthy germs and like that them. Meat, mustard, waffles ...


Scratch that one off the list ...

Amusing

Saw a posting on Facebook I liked: 


You're the product of four billion years of evolution–


Act like it.


And if you aren't into evolution, but deism or theism?


You were created by a Supreme Being and given dominion over the world–


Stop screwing around ...

Marketing

I saw this while checking out of a market earlier today. 


Maybe it's just me: Is it a major selling point that a snack with enough preservatives to outlast Twinkies and to keep something edible until the cockroaches take over is gluten free ... ?


Heard about the guy suing Mountain Dew because he found a dead mouse in a can of drink? Their response is that the stuff would have dissolved the mouse before he opened the can.


Is that comforting to anybody ... ?

Another Tragedy v2

Eighth grade kid in Texas was killed by local police when he waved a handgun at them and refused to put it down. There was a building full of witnesses heard them yelling that over and over before they fired. 


There is the usual aw-fuck-it! head shaking about how something like this can happen–especially since the kid's weapon was actually a pellet gun.


Kid punched somebody in the nose, pulled out the pistol, and then the police, answering a student-with-a-gun call, took him down.


His parents are in shock and stunned grief, and they wonder, why did the police have to shoot him three times? Why not only once? Or the unspoken one: Why at all? It wasn't even a real gun! He was a middle school boy, only fifteen. (Turned out it was twice; the head wound was a cut from the fall.)


Look at the two images above. Can you tell which is the 9mm pistol and which is the pellet gun copy? If you can, do you think you could do so if somebody had it in their hand and was pointing it at you? 


Utah police kicked a door in Ogden,  and six of them got shot, one fatally so, by somebody in the house. (Or maybe friendly fire, apparently that is a possibility.) But even so ...


Would you be counting your shots in either situation?


Over and over again, I bump up against this: If a bunch of LEO's pointing guns at you tell you to drop your weapon and you aren't ready to meet your maker? Drop the fucking thing. It's a lot easier to sort out the legalities if you are still around to do so.


Note: Airsoft and other pellet guns are often marked with a plastic day-glo red or orange ring at the muzzle, so they are instantly identifiable as such. See the images below:

How long do you figure it will be before some psycho realizes that dipping the muzzle of his real pistol into day-glow red paint will give him an advantage if the LEO standing across from him thinks he's got a pellet gun?

In California, a bill to make pellet guns of brightly-colored or clear plastic failed to pass recently, but that's probably not a bad idea. The clear, anyway:

But the bright colors? Not so much. Have a look at the SIG P238 and the Glock:

Jammed Thumb Blues

Somewhen at the gym yesterday, I managed to jam my left thumb. Dunno exactly how, only that it got sore as the day went on, swelled a bit, and by evening, was bothering me enough I had to tape it, ice it, elevate it, yadda, yadda ...


My left thumb has been sprained so many times there's no connective tissue left that isn't scarred. I tape it before every silat class, but I haven't had a problem with it in the gym before. Of course, these days, I can literally sprain it taking my socks off, I'm not careful ...


I even put up a YouTube vid a while back on how to tape the sucker. Course, it doesn't do you any good if you don't do it ...





Live slow, die old, leave a hideous corpse ...

Paint Program

Been fooling around with Corel Painter and the Wacom Bamboo Pad I got for Christmas. Top is the photo, shot with my iPad. Second is the "painting." Cool, huh?

Stick 'Em Danno

I posted on this once before, but I came across some pictures while I was cleaning out files and thought I'd stick some of them up.

I know some expert knifemakers. And while I have the tool-using ability of a bull walrus in heat, I decided five or six years ago that I needed to make a knife, just to see if I could.


I sort-of could. Barely. And crudely. Real knifemakers just smile and shake their heads when they see it, but I didn't have much to work with insofar as my native ability.


What I did was, I annealed a machete, using a small blowtorch. Then I outlined the full-tang design, cut it out, using hacksaws and a Dremel. I heated the thing up until it was a straw-color, then quenched it in heavy oil. Polished and all like that, sharpened it, put a set of faux-ivory scales and a guard of water buffalo horn, held together with homemade brass rivets. 


I imagine the first guy who figured out how to forge iron did a better job on his first knife, along with everybody who's operated a bellows and a grinder since, but I was inordinately pleased for several reasons.


First, I started with parts and wound up with a product that was the sum of those.


Second, I finished it, without going mad or burning the house down.


Third, I gained an appreciation for the real knifemakers with whom I did business. 


There are a few of those whose blades I came to own that I can name, in no particular order: Steve Rollert, Shiva Ki, Mushtaq Ali Ansari, Chuck Pippin, Jeff Crowner. And after having tried to do what they do? 


I really appreciate 'em ...

Work Out

It's amusing to see all the new faces at the gym just after New Year's Day. All the resolutions, and how long they (don't) last ...


Local paper has a front page piece today on the phenomenon–people who sign up for gym membership, go once or twice–or not at all. 


Four out of five people who have a gym membership don't use it, according to the article.


Four out of five.


I find that fascinating, though not surprising. Back when I was teaching martial arts, it was commonly known that the white belts paid the freight. People who sign up, get a uniform, last maybe a month, sometimes two or three, then quit. 


What I find really funny is the lack of focus from the noobs who do show up. This morning, I went down to the aerobics room to use the back hyperextension rack, and the bikes and walkers and stairclimbers were all full. But the intent isn't there. They don't want to work out as much as they want to be able to say they worked out. 


I'm sorry, but a guy pedaling lackadaisically on the stationary bike, listening to music on his iPod while reading a copy of The Ladies Home Journal? He's not going himself much good, and not nearly as much as he would if he concentrated on working up a sweat instead of just passing the time ...

Bookery

Okay, so, one more pass to polish, and the book ms for The Ramal Extraction goes off to Ace. 


 The contract is still very much last-century–according to it, I'm supposed to provide a hard copy and an e-version–though my editor tells me not to bother with the print, it's all electronic nowadays. 


Actually, it has been for a while. I don't think I've printed out hard copy on the last few submissions I've done–all the Clancy stuff with Tekno was via electronic files, as was the Predator book for Dark Horse and the Indiana Jones and zombies novel. Recent pitches for this and that, all done over the wire. The preferred format seems to be Word™, though I have translators that will allow conversion into pretty much whatever. 


My editor, bless her, is very understanding. Even though the book is due now, pretty much any time during the month is okay with her. 


Next one is due in September, and if I don't dawdle, I should be able to get one of the Matador e-titles done before I have to start on the next Cutter's Wars. Two books in eight months shouldn't be a problem, since I have a quarter of Churl drafted.


Of course, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions ...