wanted
The city of Brattleboro, Vermont, seeks an indictment of Bush and Cheney.
song of the week
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSZcK48cTiU]Joni Mitchell and The Band. "Coyote."
little lies
These memoirists just can't seem to stop lying. Love and Consequences. Misha: a Memoir of the Holocaust Years. All right, I wasn't raised by wolves and I'm not even Jewish, and I didn't murder anyone. Here's the woman's response when she was found out. "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving." (my emphasis) She lives in Worcester County, or so she says. Here's what the narrator of my story "I Will Eat A Piece of the Roof and You Can Eat the Window" had to say: Stuart, I read fiction, my job is to be gullible. I believe anything anyone tells me except for people who write memoirs.
florida book awards
My friend and tennis partner Leonard Nash has won the Silver Medal for General Fiction in the 2007 Florida Book Awards. My friend Jim Hall got the Silver Medal for Popular Fiction. Other friends who won include David Kirby, Chrissa-Jean Chappell, Julianna Baggott (twice, once under her nom de plume, N. E. Bode), and Diana Abu-Jaber. Congratulations to all.
writers conference
A link to the FIU Hutchinson Island Writers Conference coming up this fall.
how to think
Ten rules on how to be creative and thoughtful. (via Neatorama)
extreme circumstances
A very short story by Merle Drown.
bridge of flowers
Don Bullens's winning photograph in flick'r contest.the original of laura
Why is Dmitri toying with our hearts? Insight into the Nabokov manuscript.
hypocrite or nitwit?
"Sitting down at the table, having your picture taken with a tyrant such as Raul Castro, for example, lends the status of the office and the status of our country to him. He gains a lot from it by saying, look at me, I'm now recognized by the President of the United States." --George W. Bush
praise exasperates me
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY6ltI1n5Lo]A beautiful little film about Anton Chekhov.
scientologie
“Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.” L. Ron Hubbard. And why write a book when you can plagiarize it?
schadenfreude
"Even if you infer that various States acting through their legislative process have repealed sodomy laws, there is no protected right to engage in extrasexual - extramarital sexual relations, again, that can trace their roots to history or the traditions of this nation." Now, no Republican D.A. who said that would ever be caught drinking on the job and having thousands of sexually explicit videos and racist jokes and sexy emails to his secretary on his computer. And if he had them, let's say, he certainly wouldn't try to erase them after getting a subpoena, would he?
a song to start your day
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OO3ZMdcL8Pc]Little Feat with Bonnie Raitt, Emmy Lou Harris and Jesse Winchester. Dixie Chicken.
temple clothing
Today's short story waiting to be written. "A Lake Point man was arrested on suspicion of luring a developmentally disabled man from his mother at a Deseret Industries store, taking him into a dressing room and putting LDS temple clothing on him earlier this month in Centerville. " And then it gets weird.
the electron
An amazing bit of film here. "'It takes about 150 attoseconds for an electron to circle the nucleus of an atom. An attosecond is 10-18 seconds long, or, expressed in another way: an attosecond is related to a second as a second is related to the age of the universe,' said Johan Mauritsson of Lund University in Sweden."
the secret life
Republican judge in drag behaving badly. Chekhov might have been writing about Judge Somma:
“He had two lives: one, open, seen and known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth -- such, for instance, as his work in the bank, his discussions at the club, his ‘lower race,’ his presence with his wife at anniversary festivities–all that was open.”
See more ;
"People have lost fortunes and even been put to death because of imprecise punctuation involving semicolons in legal papers. In 2004, a court in San Francisco rejected a conservative group’s challenge to a statute allowing gay marriage because the operative phrases were separated incorrectly by a semicolon instead of by the proper conjunction." (thanks to John in Dania Beach)