Straw Man Law

I'm not a fan of "assault" rifles per se. (The definition used by the government to ban these a while back, before allowing the law to lapse didn't really address real assault rifles, but the civilian versions, and it went largely to cosmetics–flash suppressors, folding stocks, high-capacity magazines and such, and named names.) 


If I were out in the boonies engaged in guerilla warfare, I'd want a good deer rifle. Better hardware, more powerful, more accurate. In a tight urban environment, I'd prefer a pump shotgun. 


If you want a full-auto weapon, i.e., a machinegun, you can get one in many states, but it has to be registered with the feds, you have to have the checks, sometimes the approval of the local sheriff, and they will know who you are and where you live. I can't recall seeing a case where somebody who had one of those legally cut loose with it at the mall. And those, since they are no longer made for civilian use, cost a fortune. You can get a good used car for less than a nice Tommygun, and top-of the-line subguns are also spendy.


Do you need a hundred round magazine? A fifty? Twenty? Fifteen? Probably not. The average gun fight, according to the old FBI standards, was three feet, three shots, three seconds. 


The video shows an Army pistoleer doing fast magazine changes. With a little bit of practice, you can drop and insert a fresh one faster than it takes to read this, so you don't really need a high-cap magazine unless you are facing the Chinese Army come ashore, and in that case, you are screwed anyhow. 





My father's .22 lever action Marlin, as I recall, loaded like 19 rounds in a tube under the barrel. Not very sexy, and it took a while to reload once it ran dry, but outside of wars, more people have been killed with .22's than any other caliber. 


If the end times came and I had to narrow my selection to one gun as I headed for the hills? A .22 rifle and all the ammo I could carry would be my first choice. 


Where the real cure will come for deadly violence in America, if it ever does, will be to deal with the hand holding the weapon. As long as the hand is willing, a tool will be found. To educate people so that the idea of killing somebody else comes last, and not first? That's the trick. 


I wish I knew how to pull that one off.   

A Modest Proposal (Thank You, Mr. Swift)

I've come up with a solution to gun violence in America.

Well, a partial solution.

You want to dramatically lower civilian shootings in the USA? Here's what you do:

First, you outlaw the manufacture and sale of guns for civilians. Only police and military are allowed to be so armed. No guns for sale, no ammo, nada. 

No kind of gun, period.

Then, you make possession of a firearm a capital crime, no exceptions. Woman being raped uses a gun to stop it? Death penalty for her. Psycho killer opens up on a crowd in a theater and you shoot him? Same deal. No exceptions.

Got to draw the line somewhere, right?

Ninety-day grace period to turn in your hardware, in case somebody is on a long camping trip and misses the announcement. After that? Guilty ipso facto.

Eventually, most of the guns would get collected and with no more being made, why, that would do the trick. 

Well, yes, guns and ammo can still work after a hundred years, so some of the two hundred million out there will get stashed, but eventually ...

I expect this will cut down on shootings. 

At least by civilians.

Of course there are capital crimes on the books now, and more than a few felons have been convicted of them and are in jail waiting to be executed, so that isn't a complete deterrent.

Some whackos are always ready to die, can't do anything about that, but it'll be harder for them to get the hardware.

Probably should eliminate that waiting-around loophole: If you are caught with a gun, the police should be able to shoot you dead right then. If you survive, your execution is carried out as soon as the jury comes in and convicts you, no appeal.

Take you outside, kneel you down, one to the back of the head, end of story.

Sure, there will always be some nut-job who doesn't give a rat's ass if he dies, so the law won't affect those folks, but pretty much, it will eliminate a lot of the problem, yes?

Sound good to you? Ready to go there?

Please note: If you are so stupid you miss the satire and irony in this post? Don't send me a horrified note. It is in the same vein as Swift's proposal to deal with the children of the poor by eating them. Really. If you can't see that, how on Earth did you figure out how to operate a computer well enough to get here?

Tubeless

When we were first married, we didn't own a television set. My bride and I were in college, both of us working part-time, and our lives were full, so watching TV was way down the list.


The first set we got was after we moved to L.A., an old black-and-white, belonged to my Okinawa-te teacher, I think he let us have for ten bucks. Of course, back then ten bucks was equivalent to what, two million today ... ? (Actually, the calculator says $62.50, which was a goodly chunk, since I was earning about $500 a month back then.)


We got it because the moon landing was going to be televised and we wanted to see it, and that's easy to date: 1969. The screen on it was smaller than that of the computer monitor upon which I am working. Didn't have remote–you got up, walked to it, and changed channels or adjusted the sound or picture image manually. 

After that set croaked, we didn't replace it for several years. 


When the summer Olympics arrived in 1972, we decided to get a new TV to watch that, and did. Since then, we've had a TV in the house, and upgraded them usually every eight or so years to keep up with the Olympics.


Somewhere along the way, operations changed. Back in the day, if your TV faded to noise, you could open the back, remove the tubes, toodle on over to the 7-Eleven, and use a machine to test them. Find the burned-out tube, you could buy one, go home and replace it, and keep the sucker running. Solid-state solved that burn-out problem, save for the picture tube itself, but if something went out, that was it, it was dead, Jim. (My parents still have the first TV they bought in 1953. It was in a console that became part of the hi-fi furniture. Hasn't worked for decades, but it is still there, another TV perched on top of it.)


For the 2004 games, we got a big honker–a 40" square block that weighed a couple hundred pounds. Installed it in a cabinet with doors and when we weren't watching it, shut the doors and had a nice piece of furniture, made by, of all people, the Amish. Irony, anybody?


This set seemed to be one we'd keep until it died; however, we noticed that with the most common 16:9 ratio of screens in movies and digital broadcasting, our square block started looking pretty sad. Words onscreen got smaller and cut-off on both sides of the picture. The scores for basketball games shrank in size, to take advantage of the high-definition cast, and became unreadable. Like owning a really old computer, it worked, but the new software wouldn't work on it, and the Olympics are coming up ...


All of which to say is we got a new TV. Not the top of the line, and certainly not the largest  one available, but the difference between it and the old one is major. The old one? Like watching it with vaseline smeared on our glasses. The new one is like looking through a window. As George Takei's commercial said, "Oh, my!"


The amusing thing is, there aren't any tubes in it. The screen is run by LEDs and the whole thing is a couple inches thick. And we can see stuff we never knew about before:


Look, baby, you can see what color his eyes are!


That's not a cap he's wearing, it's a sweatband and his hair!


Look at that bird in the background, is that Red-tailed hawk ... ?


Even the Subway commercials are interesting to watch. And of course, you can stream video from your home wifi, rent movies online, plug in a flashdrive and view your pictures, and even check your email if you have a mind to do that. 


Here it is, the future again. 


Great way to turn yourself into a big ole couch potato, a new TV ...

Uncivilized

So. Another loon armed himself and stepped into mass murder. You will have heard the details by now,  I won't belabor them. A crowded movie theater, a crazy with guns, a dozen dead so far, scores wounded. A terrible, terrible thing, it could have happened anywhere. Any of us might have been in that theater, or our children might have been. 


An abomination, this, vile. There is no penalty dire enough for this monster. No torture too great. 


Predictably, the left and right will offer up their opinions on guns as a result. Here's mine: The shooter had an assault rifle, a shotgun, a couple of pistols, at this report. Too many?


Actually, I think there were too few guns in that theater. There needed to be a couple more.


Reports aren't complete, but I didn't see anything about anybody shooting back. 


Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. Or maybe, like that seventy-one-year-old CHL holder down in Florida who tagged a couple of armed robbers last week, some off-duty cop or legally-armed citizen might have cut this nutso down before he killed as many as he did. 


Even if he was a bad shot and he hit a bystander along with the killer? Look at the numbers.


We'll never know. 


We don't live in a civilized society. The wolves and rabid dogs are among us. Until they are all tamed or cured, the flock will always be at risk.


I feel for the families of those who lost people in this awful event. There are no words to comfort them. The family of the man who did it must feel overwhelming grief and pain, too.


Yes, he is crazy–sane people don't do shit like this. But that doesn't help, does it?

Road Rage - Tactical Error

Had ourselves a road rage incident in Beaverton a few days ago. There are several versions of the story, depending on which news outlet you like, but here's the gist:


(Let me use the term "allegedly" up front here to qualify the narration. Nobody's been convicted of anything yet.)


At a local watering hole, The Blue Iguana, on Cedar Hills Blvd., referred to in one report as "a Mexican nightclub," apparently a couple of the patrons leaving late in the evening, or early in the morning, had an interaction. Young men, having spent some time doing what young men do in bars. 


Words were exchanged. Then bottles were thrown. 


They got into their cars and left. The telling here varies, but apparently one of the young men was followed from the parking lot by the other. It seems there were passengers, but how many and in which vehicles? Can't say. 


The lead vehicle was a Nissan Maxima. The one behind it,  a somewhat larger Yukon.


At a traffic light next to Hwy. 217 by the Fred Meyers, the driver of the Yukon took it upon himself to plow into the back of the Maxima, to make a point. 


Whereupon somebody in the Maxima, and it looks like a passenger, Eduardo Hernandez-Dominguez, jumped out of his vehicle to discuss the situation.


For his trouble, he was run over by the driver of the Yukon, one Hector Torres-Espinoza.


When I say "run over," I don't mean that he was nudged by the bumper as the Yukon went by; he was knocked down, turned into a speed bump, and the vehicle rolled over him, thump-thump. Enough so that he was, at last look, in critical condition at a local hospital.


Somebody–probably a driver or passenger in the Maxima, unclear this, got a partial plate, and the police were able to run it. They caught up with the driver, arrested him for DUII–he apparently blew twice the legal limit–and felony hit and run. Other charges are pending.


Young men in their mid-twenties, alcohol, machismo, almost certainly women, are things that sometimes blend together badly, as seems the case here.


You have to believe somebody was sloshed–after somebody deliberately slams into the back of your ride, a person with whom you had angry words and some bottles tossed back and forth, maybe stepping out of your car in front of his is not the best move?


More people killed by cars than guns in this country. 

The Pepsi Syndrome

Last night I did something stupid, even more so than usual: I had some red wine in a stem glass as I was reading my email. As I stood to go crank up the barbecue grill, I picked up the glass, managed to catch the stem in the phone chord next to my computer's keyboard, and, well ...


You see the image up there ...


Because the Kinesis Advantage I use has these scooped-out sections perfect for catching liquid, they did. I had a dish towel over my shoulder, as I usually do when grilling, and quickly flipped the keyboard, cursing loudly, drawing my spouse and dogs running to see what happened, and used the towel.


For future reference, wine is worse than water when it comes to bathing one's keyboard. This I know because this would be the second time I had to take the thing apart. 


After an hour of Q-tips and canned air and tweezers, I managed to get the sucker working again–except for one key: the Control key.


And this morning, after more time to dry out, I quote Dr. Leonard McCoy regarding the Control key:


"It's dead, Jim."


It doesn't take long to realize how often one uses keyboard shortcuts, Control-this or that to select text, open and close windows, quit files, format with italics, get info, or whatnot. All of these functions can be done using pulldown menus or, in some cases, the touchpad, but what a pain in the ass that is.


I've had the keyboard for seven or eight years, long enough so the palm supports are worn out, and the E-key's letter now looks like an F, from finger erosion. And I can use the workaround, but only until I can get a new keyboard delivered ...


Never a dull moment.

Next Food Network Star

So another of my guilty pleasures, Food Network Star. They revamped it this year, working with established players–if you are a foodie, all you need are their first names: Bobby, Alton, Giada. 

Down to four finalists, and America votes this week.

And for money, it's Justin, all the way. 

I saw him referred to on a site as "adorkable," and that pretty much nails it. We've been calling him "the geeky kid" all season, and if he doesn't win, I suspect it won't matter, because he's gonna get a show of his own; I'm betting he wins it anyhow, been his to lose from the first episode ...

Fooling Houdini/Finger Fitness

So, being a magic geek as a kid, and somebody who now and then still picks up a coin or a ring and twiddles it, when I came across Alex Stone's book Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, why, naturally I had to 
get it.


Fascinating book, told from the viewpoint of a long-time amateur, then professional magician, who was also a PhD. candidate in physics before magic won out.


Stone talks about his own experiences, bad and good, his teachers, the philosophy and psychology of magic, gets into some history, mathematics, and even into the classic small cons of three-card monte and the shell game; and also how to cheat at poker. I much enjoyed it; his writing style is breezy, light, but with enough factual material to keep me intrigued until I finished it.  


I found it really interesting that the best card mechanic in the world, the guy who can deal seconds, bottoms, or from the middle of the deck, and who can cut the deck exactly in half one-handed every time and do sleights that fool everybody including the best magicians in the biz happens also to be ...


... blind. 


The title comes from a challenge Houdini used to offer: There was no stage magician, he said, who could demonstrate a trick three times that he couldn't figure out. (In showing tricks to fellow magicians, the rule of thumb is, Once is a trick; twice is a lesson. The magician Dai Vernon showed a card trick no less than seven times and stumped the great Houdini cold. There are competitions all over the place every year for magicians to try and outdo each other, and fooling a room full of professional magicians is considered the acme of the biz.)


Give the book four stars, and if you are a magic geek, five. Nothing else like it out there.


Along the way, Stone gets into the physicality of sleights, and mentions in passing a book by a guy named Greg Irwin, who has developed a whole ballet of exercises he teaches to strengthen the hands and train independence in the fingers. 


Watch the old video from the Carson show. It looks easy. It is not easy:





I have fairly strong hands and thought because of my fooling around with coins and like that, my fingers were pretty supple, too.


Not so, compared to folks who train in this Finger Fitness, which doesn't need anything but your own hands, and which more than a few musicians and magicians and physical therapists doing hand rehab swear by.


So I picked the basic book to play with. Guy also offers vids, but I'll see how the book basics go. 


Always something you haven't seen floating around out there ...

The Sands of Time

As you near the age of retirement, you start to get a shitload of mail. As that magical number ending in five approaches, the insurance companies begin an onslaught of advertising, booklets, brochures, pamphlets, tomes of material, starting six months out. 


As my wife and I are both rounding third base at the end of next month and the insurance companies want our business when it comes to supplemental health care, we have a stack of this stuff six inches thick. Seriously.


You young folks can move on along here; probably by the time you get to retirement age, social security and medicare will be bankrupt or turned into some kind of howling beast you can't hurt with silver bullets or garlic; the rest of you, a simple lesson in how to wade through the reams of paper you'll be getting if you have a mail box.


Attend:


Social Security, for which you have been paying your entire working life, is an elective thing. You can take it early and get a lesser payment. You can take it later and get a bigger stipend. You don't have to take it at all. There are assorted penalties if you keep working and also collecting your check early, but pretty much, after sixty-five, you are good to collect it. If you made really good money as a worker, you get more. If you were a hippie and didn't pay much into the system, you get less. 


Good if you have some other kind of income, because you can't live on social security alone unless you have paid off everything and develop a taste for mac 'n' cheese and cheap dogfood. If you don't have some kind of IRA or SEP account and you are young, it would be a good idea to get one going now.


Medicare is your health insurance, which you will tend to need more as you age, and it doesn't kick in until you turn sixty-five. (Medicaid is something else, but we aren't going there.)


If you work for a big company now, chances are you have part of a group plan that gives you some coverage for your doctor's visits, meds, dental, your vision, and hospitalizations. If you don't have that and are uninsured, you are probably rooting for Obama's safety net to hold. It's not perfect, but it is way better than nothing.


Medicare, which you also paid for, having been cobbled together over the years, is a hodge-podge of this and that. Various parts of it are given letters, Parts A and B and C and D and so forth. Each one covers some things. The basic parts, A and B, you get bare-bones coverage. To that, you can add more policies to cover the gaps. (You may have heard the term "donut hole." This is a gap between two kinds of coverage for which you are responsible. Basically, medicare pays up to a point, then picks up again after another point, but the hole is yours.)


Medicare costs you something each month. In my income bracket, it's $99, and that will come out of your SS payment before you see it. (If you were a zillionaire, it costs more, but changes are if you are a zillionaire, you have people who take care of all this stuff.)


If you have private insurance without a group plan, it costs a fucking fortune. If you get laid off or retire early and lose your coverage, there are things like COBRA, but believe me, these are not cheap. If we had to pay for private health insurance, which we did for the last eighteen months, my entire social security check would not have been enough to cover that.


There are various kinds of supplements, ranging, like your car insurance, from low deductible to high, and the costs tend to reflect this. Scores of plans.  Maybe hundreds.


How healthy you are determines which one you think you should get. If you don't get sick much, you pick this one. If you have a long list of meds and illnesses, you elect a different one. 


The good thing is, you can change this every year, twixt October and December, so if your health changes, you can get a different plan.


Sicker you are, the more it costs, but it's still way cheaper than private insurance alone.


This is all way too complex for me to explain, and here's what you need to do if faced with this tsunami of "Pick me! Pick me!" Hie yourself to a broker who knows this stuff. It won't cost you anything, since zhe* gets paid by the companies. We found a guy via our clinic, which added to the pile of mail about all this by saying, "We know you are getting a lot of mail offering policies, and this is our guy, who can help."


What I never understood from all the junk mail was, if you are pretty good shape, you can get a supplement policy to your medicare that is free. Doesn't cost you anything.


Well, okay, it's not exactly free, TANSTAAFL and all, but the money doesn't come out of your pocket in a chunk, though you have already helped pay for it, and will continue to do so if you are still working and earning anything because of what Uncle deducts each check.


How can the insurance companies do this? The feds pay them X amount every month for every policy, and that alone is enough for them to make money if they can get enough people signed up. There is competition for this business, and that's good for the customer.


Free is a very good price, and the coverage and deductibles are a good deal when you compare this kind of policy to one that runs sixty or eighty bucks a month and still has deductibles anyhow.


More than you wanted to know, but remember the key part: Get professional help ...
____


* "Zhe" (s/he) is one of the indeterminate pronouns I came up with writing the new novels series, for a character whose sex is ambiguous at first look. Or second look ... "His" "him," or "her" become "hir." It's a little tricky to get used to writing and seeing, but it fills a need.

New Novel Series

The cover illo for the first of the Cutter's Wars novels. In theory, it's due out this winter, about six months from now ...

The Rest of the Story?

A Detroit woman was killed, according to this story, when, at a party, she hugged an off-duty police officer from behind. His holstered weapon discharged and the bullet hit her lung and heart and she died.


The report says that the officer was hosting a party, dancing with his wife, when the woman, Adaisha Miller, hugged him from behind and the weapon fired.


According to the report, the officer didn't know the woman, who was 24 years old. 


There's something unexplained here. 


Report says the piece was a .40 S&W M&P. Like the Glock, the M&P is striker-fired, and in theory, can't go off unless the trigger is pulled. Supposedly worn in a waistband holster under a shirt. Doesn't say what the carry position was, strong-side, weak-side, muzzle down or cross-draw.


There is some controversy about the possibility of an accidental discharge with Glocks in holsters, some back and forth on the net about whether this happens or not. Haven't seen this with the S&W. Supposedly you can drop the M&P all day long and never get an AD.


If the only way for this weapon to fire is by pulling the trigger, then somehow she must have gotten a finger inside the guard. but the only way I can see a hip-holstered duty weapon killing somebody behind you with a heart-shot is a ricochet. Or if it was cross-draw and the the woman was squatting, or on her knees hugging him around the waist. 


Be interesting to hear what the investigation finds. 

Mermaid Man

Ernest Borgnine 1917-2012

Rest in peace, Mermaid Man.

Jockery

If you want to get fit and you are starting from way-out-of-shape, it's going to take you a while to get there. Just like packing on that extra thirty pounds might have taken you ten years, getting rid of it isn't going to be easy. If you crash-diet on coconut water and roach legs, yeah, you can drop weight in a hurry, but most of the evidence out there shows it will just creep back as soon as you go on round to Mickey D's and what you were eating before. 


Stop and think about it: If that's that got you there in the first place, why wouldn't it get you there again?


To make a permanent change, you have to alter your lifestyle and keep it that way. Doesn't mean you can't scarf down a double-cheese whopper with bacon and fries now and then. It does mean you'll have to balance the ledger when you do, else you will pack it back on.


Here's the secret to weight control, pay attention, save yourself a lot of money on diet how-to-books: If you eat more than you burn, you will gain weight, and it will mostly be fat. If you burn more than you eat, you will lose weight. If you want to maintain your weight? Think about it ...


That's the physics of it, folks. You can't get around those. Hormones and metabolic rates and neuroses not withstanding, there's no such thing as a fat man who never ate anything, nor a skinny woman who inhales thirty thousand calories a day and doesn't work out. 


There just aren't. If you can find one case in the scientific literature, that will will disprove my statement. Go ahead. I'll be here. 


ADDENDUM:


Let it be said: You can eat roots, fruits, and nuts, drink naught but purified water, and exercise to Olympic-class levels of fitness and guess what? You are still gonna die. If you have bad genetics, you might do all those things and get outlived by your obese, cigarette-smoking, beer-soaked, dope-toking, couch-potato brother-in-law who picked better parents than you.


Keith Richards, anybody?


Take "Gonna live forever" off the table. What we are talking about is the quality of life. Being fit and healthy can improve that dramatically. You have to decide if that's worth something.


If it is any consolation, it is easier to stay in shape than it is to get there. 


I know serious iron jocks who spend an hour or more in the gym every day. To avoid overtraining, they break it up into body parts–today, legs; tomorrow, back; Monday, upper body push; Tuesday, upper body pull; Wednesday, back; Thursday, abs, and so on. Some of these folks also work aerobics, three or four times a week, walking the treadmill, riding the bike, or actually going outside to run or cycle. 


These are serious people, and way beyond me in fitness and dedication. I'm a desk-jockey, and as those go, fitter than most. I can get the garbage cans out, I can open jars if my wife isn't home, I can bench-press my iPad ... 


Me, I do full body workouts at the gym, twice a week. That's because more than that, I will be overtraining, and less, not training enough.


My typical routine lasts only 20-30 minutes, depending on how crowded the gym is, and if I am in a hurry. The amount of weight for any given set, is sufficient to allow me to just manage eight reps. If I want to get stronger, I'll add weight. How I know it is time is, when I can do ten reps with a given weight without flagging, it's time to bump it up. 


Another formula here: The same amount of weight, the same numbers of sets and reps, your strength pretty much stays the same. To get stronger, you have to add something:  new exercises, weight, sets, reps, go faster or slower to increase intensity, or some combination thereof.


In a twenty minute session, I can keep my heart-rate in the aerobic zone most of the time and do. Since it takes fifteen minutes for the aerobic effect to really kick in, this doesn't mean much to me, but it does mean I don't sit for five minutes between sets to catch my breath.


Here's a typical workout:


Chins, L-sit
Seated incline leg press & calf presses
Bent over rows 
Seated Military Press
Seated Bench Press
Pec Deck
Alternate dumbbell curls
Dumbbell shrugs
Triceps press downs
Concentration curls
Lat pulldowns
Low back hyperextensions


Sometimes I'll do one set of these, sometimes I'll add in a couple more sets. I like to alternate arms in push and pull. Now and then, I mix everything up, though I don't get bored, it's not a bad idea to mess with your own expectations now and then.


Save for the incline press and calf work, I don't use more than bodyweight on anything.


This is sufficient to keep my muscle tone where I want it, and it takes only two twenty minutes session a week. Not what you'd call a major commitment of time, is it?

The Writing Devil is in the Details

When you are writing fiction, especially in this new age of direct-to-eBook-publication, you have to sweat the small stuff.


A few random notes ...


Traditionally there have been editors and copy editors who will address the content and nuts-and-bolts construction of your book, respectively, but while both can sometimes save you from yourself, sometimes they can't.


The small stuff slips past.


Gave your heroine blue eyes in the first book of your new series, then green eyes in the second book? Chances are your CE won't catch that, because you usually won't get the same person from novel-to-novel. I know this from experience. (Fortunately, in science fiction, you can, if you finally do catch such mistakes, sometimes fix them. Blue eyes there, green there? Why that's due to droptacs, which come in colors. Or, um, you know, an alternate reality ...)


The late Avram Davidson used to tell a story about reading a student manuscript. The hero is climbing up a sheer cliff face, monsters climbing up after him. He looks, up, sees more monsters appear that the top, waiting. He's trapped. How can he escape? And the student actually writes: "Oh, wait I forgot to tell you, he has wings ..."


It's not a bad idea when you start out to do a quick character bio, with a physical description of your character. Any time you put in new stuff showing your reader what this player looks like, or where she went to school, or how many siblings she has, refer back to the bio until you have it nailed correctly. Use the same ruler, you get the same measurements.


Prop continuity is another one. If your character lost his cell phone in Chapter Two, but makes a call in Chapter Five using a cell phone, where did it come from?


Ever notice in the movies how the hero's gun is cocked, then not-cocked, then cocked again, in the space of a couple of screen-minutes? That's because the continuity guy screwed up. 


Don't be that guy.


How many times have we seen some moron rack the slide on his pistol to chamber a round, then holster it, then a few minutes later, rack it again? Once is all you need, otherwise you are throwing live ammo onto the carpet.


Plot-devices sometimes require you have a character do something odd because you need them to be naked or unarmed or whatever in a subsequent scene. Be aware that there are clever ways to achieve this kind of thing. Go watch Die Hard and see how to set up stuff. Why is Bruce Willis running barefoot over broken glass? No better example, that, and everything else that gets paid off all the way through. 


And, as long as I am here ...


Rant interlude: 


For God's sake, if your hero is unarmed, gets into a fight with one of the bad guys, knocks him down, but LEAVES THE BAD GUY'S GUN LAYING ON THE GROUND and runs off, just so you can have him stay unarmed for the next fight scene? Come up with some kind of reason! Otherwise your guy is a dolt, an idiot, a lame-o, and readers will start rooting for the bad guy to put him out of his misery; surely I will. 


You can have your character make a mistake, but past a certain point ... ?


Hey, Roy, didn't you just knock one of the minions out?


Yeah, I kicked his ass real good!


So ... why didn't you pick up his gun?


Um. I ... forgot ... ?


There's a well-known private eye character who usually leaves her gun at home. One fine morning, somebody up and took a shot at her, put a round into the front porch wall next to her head, thunk!


So the next day, the next day, when she went out, what did she do? 


SHE LEFT THE FUCKING GUN AT HOME!


No! No! No! HELL NO!


Oh, yeah, I forgot. Somebody shot at me yesterday and it might be, you know, A GOOD FUCKING IDEA TO TAKE MY FUCKING GUN IN CASE THEY TRY IT AGAIN!


Why did the writer do this? She needed her heroine unarmed in a subsequent scene. 


This is not how to do it.


Rather, this is stupid, stupid, and did I mention, stupid? and that's when your reader–certainly this reader–will put your book down and leave it there, never to darken your sales rack again. I don't want to read about a detective who doesn't have enough smarts to pour piss out of a boot. She's as dumb as the woman in the nightgown who goes into the graveyard at midnight looking for what made the unearthly moan. Take her out, and do the world a favor. 


Rant over. 


Be aware of time: Days, dates, how much has elapsed. If you switch viewpoints, and your players are living in the same continuum, be careful that you don't have one doing something out-of-synch when you switch POVs. Better not have both of 'em walking to meet each other for coffee one fine morning and one of them takes five minutes but the other goes home and takes a four-hour nap during the same five-minute span. 


Unless, of course, it's time-travel or madness.  


You can control typos and grammatical errors, and even though the spellchecker won't save you from using "see," when you mean "sea," it will collect some mistakes. Run it.


Having somebody with sharp eyes read your mss will help. When you write something, as often as not, when you scan it for errors, you aren't really reading what is on the page, but what you think you wrote. I'll miss the same typo three times.


One trick I've learned is to change the device upon which I'm reading. For some reason, I will now and again catch a typo using the iPad that I missed on the desktop computer screen. Couldn't tell you why. 


There is another problem I have noticed in going to electronic publication, the transfer artifact. The file was fine when it left here, but by the time the publisher's conversion software got done with it, there were glitches that appeared in the final. Sometimes lines get broken like 
so. Nothing you can do about that, nor the funny characters that show up as little hearts or  or Ω other ding-batteries. I have revised some of those, only to have a different set show up on the next version. 


Enough for now. 


As with any rule-of-thumb, some of these can be ignored if you are a good enough writer. But if you are, you didn't need to read any of this, did you ... ?

Fun Toy

I don't use flat picks in my guitar work, such that it is. But if you do, you might find this amusing. A press that cuts picks out of plastic, like old credit cards and such.


Got the link from Ximena.

Whack a Mole

Given the recent to-do about people standing their ground and whatnot, resulting in injury and/or death of a participant, I thought it might be interesting to make a pass by my state's laws regarding such things.


You can peruse the codes here.


Nothing really new, but I was reminded of what one is or is not allowed to do when push comes to shove in these parts, and while all state laws are not the same, much less in other countries, a couple of things you might not know that you probably should.


Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, don't rely on this information to get you out of trouble.


First, the use-of-force in general is limited in a number of ways; and the use of deadly force is yet more constricted.


Generally, you are allowed to defend yourself if attacked, with force appropriate to the level of threat. You should make that choice with care, because you might have to justify it in a criminal or civil court. Or both. The general rule is, What would a reasonable person in your shoes have done in those circumstances?


Guy who steps from an alley with a baseball bat who wants to knock your head out of the park, you are allowed to take him down by any means necessary to stop him. Ditto, he heads for your spouse or child or even an innocent bystander.


Protecting yourself or a third party against a felonious assault (or even a felony) gets you leeway, and this can include deadly violence as a response.


If a police officer asks you to stop that bad guy by shooting him, you are theoretically protected, assuming you don't know for a fact that the order is illegal, in which case, no protection. 


You cannot violently resist arrest by a duly-sworn LEO, because this is a crime whether or not the arrest is legal. If you get busted and didn't do the crime, punching out the arresting officer is still a no-no. 


If you wake up one night in your bed to find that your dog didn't woof at the burglar looming over you, you are allowed, in Oregon, under the defense-of-one's-castle edict, to let all the air out of the guy, if he's armed or not. 


However, you can't chase him outside and then ventilate him as he runs away.


Property defense per se doesn't allow for deadly violence. You see somebody creeping your car, or even stealing it, you aren't allow to poke holes in him for that alone.


If you are the aggressor in a fight, i.e., you started it, you can't claim self-defense, win or lose.


Nor is dueling allowed, which means in this case, an agreement to do battle in the future. (Unless said combat is specifically authorized by law. I'm not sure about what this means, but maybe it has to do with sport: You  step into a MMA ring and try like hell to take the other guy's head off and manage it? As long as the ref lets you, you can do that, but–don't make plans to finish the match behind the dumpster if you aren't done yet.)


The future here doesn't have to be at the Oaks at dawn on Tuesday; it is any time subsequent to the agreement. 


Which means this: If you invite somebody to step outside the bar to settle your differences hand-to-hand, you can't claim self-defense for your use-of-force; more, if you are invited to step outside and you go? That kills your claim for self-defense, too, since you are both de facto in agreement to duel. Both of you can be charged, though that doesn't happen very often. 


If you decline to step outside, but when you do leave, the other guy is waiting and he takes a swing at you? You can deck him. If he steps in as if he's going to take the swing and you beat him to it? There's no law says you can't throw the first punch if you believe you are about to get your nose smashed. 


The operating mode seems to be, What would the D.A. and a jury think about it? If you believe no indictment, or "not guilty," then probably you are safe. At least at the criminal trial ...