HUMANITY

Everyone in the world should watch this.  I wish they would.



http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?47990-21-Pictures-That-Will-Restore-Your-Faith-In-Humanity

FREEBIE

I posted about the Outside Plumbing FREEBIE in several places with an incomplete link.  I am very sorry.  I wish I could say this is so unlike me, but I should know better and triple check everything.

OUTSIDE PLUMBING; The Myths of Manhood is free only on Smashwords through October 3, 2012. Smashwords will download to any ereader or app, including Kindle.  Adobe Digital Editions which is free is lovely for your PC.

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/233639

I promise to test this one.

Joy

My first  published review! 

 I am delighted.

 Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Sharp, funny, witty view of men September 28, 2012

By Waldo J. Tomosky

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Outside Plumbing is a great read - - - hard to put down - - - very insightful, funny but oh so true.

ADIRONDACK IMPRESSIONS; IN WORD AND IMAGE

Assisted Living

Is it a choice?  Would you opt for it?  My dad is 93 and has refused to come and live with me and is getting to the point where he is not doing too well on his own.  My brothers and I are dragging our feet about making a decision because it is difficult at any of our advanced ages to change the status quo, but let me tell you, the experience I have had this past week tells me it is going to be a rough road.

I have a cocker spaniel.  He is twelve and a half.  He is deaf as a post.  He has dislocated vertebrae.  He had to be treated with steroids and has been nutso ever since.  He has  the usual Cocker Spaniel problem with "submissive urination".  Don't ever get a Cocker.  They suck up love and piss all over your house.  We had to put in hardwood floors because of him  They are nice floors, tho.

He has huge problems with anxiety and elavil made him a mad man.  He has chewed through every type of gate we have tried.  He has chewed through thick bungee cords we have used to make furniture unmovable,  Wouldn't that sting when it lets go?  He will pee everywhere, usually on my wool dining room rug, always by the leg of my chair or my husband's, if he is not restrained.  I have given him xanax and lunesta and benedryl.  Just makes him superdog.  He is so old and looks so gray and  feeble but has moved tables and chairs and cedar chests when confined.

 I was doing nothing but putting up and taking down barricading every day and night doing the three step treatment on the new urine spots and vacuuming the one from two days ago that was finally dry.  I was at my wits end. (Yeah.  We tried diapers.  You do not want to hear that story.)  I said to my daughter, I cannot do it, but if you or dad takes him to the happy place, I know it has to be done.  Just don't tell me or ask me.  Immediately she calls and says, but it cost $300.  So we get that straightened out and she comes to get him when I am home and have to say good by.  Then she calls later and says she couldn't do it.  She said it was what I said about our 16 year old lab.  You KNEW when it was time, and we didn't feel that way about Henry yet.  Just sad.  Not even mad.  Although a few curse words were uttered at the sight of a new urine puddle.  Always checking no food around, no chairs to climb on, no doors to bedrooms left open.  We were living like prisoners of this poor dog who was just deaf and nuts and none of it was his fault.

So she says there is a nanny who fosters only elderly cockers and if she can't take him  he can go to sav a pet because Fran's pal works there.  Oh, God.  When will I stop crying about this?  It is a good thing I don't have my driver's license because I would have gone to get him three times just today.  What is wrong with us that we put ourselves through such suffering for creatures that don't recognize our suffering, human or animal.  My dad has no clue how we agonize over his life station.  And now that my daughter is married and a mom and a home owner, I see myself reduced to that station.

Assisted living is not really living.  Think about this while you are still your own master.

Sunny Day

Ask David

Fun site to promote your work.Outside Plumbing - The Myths Of Manhood Well thought out and executed. Have a look. Participate.

Not Just Me

I tend to be on the paranoid side.  Maybe I smoked too much dope when I was younger, or maybe I'm not smoking enough dope now.

Have you ever felt real paranoia?  That totally unfounded sense of fear?  I have. It's a pretty funny story.  Well, actually it's not much of a story, and not very funny,  but I was much much younger--don't point the finger of blame.  One of my more honorable citizen type brothers came over to my house one evening just because he knew I had it and wanted to try it out.  "This stuff does nothing."  He could barely walk and talk.--Anyway:

I was living a pretty upright snooty suburban life but still knew of several roads of access to the venerable weed.  A "friend" had a "friend" who was a Chicago cop and he merely requested some which he was freely and generously given.  It was the first time that I saw someone had actually used those decorated rolling papers.  All red white and blue like the fourth of July.  Big doobies, little narrow twists, a baggie full.  So, here I was in this "social situation" and we lit one of the chubbies.  I swear to you, it was something else.  Cher said she didn't like to smoke weed because it always made her feel paranoid.  People should study how that stuff lights up certain areas of your brain, especially different parts of the brain in different people, because in this group, I was the only one who got that feeling.  I had to be firmly "hugged" and reassured until the feeling began to pass. And I remember it very distinctly.  It was far from the first time I had used it, but it was the first time I had that reaction.   I had the good sense to never try LSD.

I think it hit me so hard because it is a tendency already present in my brain.  I am really going the long way around here, but I might as well make it worth your while. The summer after the twin towers attack, I would not go to Great America.  When anyone I knew was going I was a little nervous.  You people who make up the entire rest of the world have no idea what it is like.  It is a constant battle to not let these ideas and fears control my life.  And sometimes when I am a little too close to the edge, they do get out of hand.  I mentioned to someone that I would not go there because I knew when the next attack came, they would go for a place with a large number of people.  And I was convinced there would be a second attack.  Still am. The person chuckled over it for several years. Probably still is chuckling away.

So I have noticed this thing on the internet, a place where  I spend way too much time,( a thing which, incidentally, I am also trying to ratchet back on,) that I will post comments and do all the little captcha things and boom, my comment goes in the dumper.  My very first thought was that I was being selectively blocked.  I have been called out on my "comments" more than once.  I thought that because it seemed it was a certain circle of people I liked to interact with.  Then I noticed it in other venues.  Some of them I just dropped out of, took them off my subscribed list.  I am too much into this stuff already so that was a good thing, but then someone remarked that they found a bunch of my stuff in their spam folder and I became aware that it was always a wordpress blog,  I am a google blogger.

I used to have a wordpress blog, but it was stupid, got no traffic, produced no results so I just let it go.  So I tried to open that back up and copy my posts into it and it wouldn't let me sign in or register because the name was "already in use."  Yeah.  By me.  So I was signing in with twitter which always worked, but doesn't give me that nice little red click-through to my beloved blog.   As I have stated before, I will not bother commenting if I know it won't bring me blog traffic.  If my sign-in doesn't link back to this blog, forget it.  I usually don't have anything important to say anyway.  Don't flatter yourselves.  It's just for the blog traffic.  (JK).

Then I noticed that people were saying they could only sign in from certain computers, or they always showed up as anonymous if the sign in took.  Contacting wordpress customer service is like falling down the rabbit hole.  You can only go through forums.  One I tried to link to said this forum is no longer accepting entries.  So, WTF.   Maybe George Soros bought WordPress.

I am going to continue to try and just wean myself off this.  I know that is heart breaking for some of you, my more devoted followers.  (Please notice tongue in cheek here guys.) "IT" has already filtered out remarks I have made, with a great deal of humility and gratefulness, to people who have been kind enough to comment on my own google blog.  But it is better for all of us.  It is bullshit.   There are controls coming into place here that are going to be used for other reasons and they are already using them. We are just guinea pigs with our puny little ego blogs.  Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are all going to fly out the window.  The window is open and our words are already being  shagged toward it.

Yeah.  I am paranoid.  I have this theory that every folk myth, such as centaurs and fairies, are somewhere grounded in reality or they wouldn't be so persistent in every culture. (More on that later.) Like the small dark pictish people used to ride their dark little horses bareback, holding the mane, and it gave rise to the tales of the centaur.

OK.  I already know and have back-up documentation that I am nuts,  but seriously, do you think all those movies like Eagle Eye and The Wire and Sleepers and Sneakers are all just figments of peoples imaginations?  Be happy with that.  For now.

Y'know?

This is all a little confusing.  I hate promo, and when I am doing it, I am doing it on a surface level.  It produces meager results, but it produces results so I have to keep doing it until the right person reads the right words. Then I am home-free, money in the bank, genius acknowledged.  Well, no.  Probably not.  But what I was saying about doing it on a surface level--

There are many helpful sites.  There was one on Goodreads that had a list of places to post your freebie promotion.  These are very helpful.  I use more each time, and the downloads of my freebies are phenomenal, thousands, actually.  If one percent of those bought the thing or even read it, it would be sweet.  But anyway--

I get mixed up about which sites said which thing, and I do not have the mental ability to keep track of it.  I have notebooks full of web addresses and where my last chapter ended and I will post a whole promo and realize, thank God usually before hitting PUBLISH, that I have used the wrong book.  It is one of the others that is on freebie this time.  Seriously.  I have done that.  I try to watch it and supervise myself, but I guess I am just not that vested. It may be age related, but it is certainly, let me assure you from the lofty viewpoint of my aging reputation,  not an IQ problem.

I think it is mostly Linked-In, a site of spurious reputation.  It seems to generate lots of hits and downloads, but it is always full of people offering their editing services and someone from a distant Nation offering conversion services which is a laugh and a half.  If I can do it, and I have done it beautifully, anyone can.  But maybe they buy those conversion services because they are not that vested in their projects. But the site to which I give  vague and unreliable reference constantly has people mouthing off about editing.  How you are just plain stupid if you do not at least invest the money in a good editing service.  (What money?)  I retort constantly about the complete superfluity of conversion services,and I retort frequently about the unnecessary expense of purchasing editor services.  Most of us have no way to discern the reliability of such services, and I kind of think if we did have that ability, or that much familiarity with the process, we would not be sitting in our dining rooms at our PCs uploading our "work" all by ourselves.  Maybe that is just me.

I was used as an editor in an unofficial capacity at Contemporary books some years ago.  To explain that, I was given unedited manuscripts and expected to return printer ready galleys with all the errors edited out and corrected. This was only after I had worked there for a number of years and proved my abilities.( By the way, I would only want a proofread from anyone.  I don't want my peculiar style edited away.)

But today I followed a link to a site that had an excerpt from a book about the Iraq War.  It was labeled humorous, a biting satire.  No.  The excerpt was not humorous.  It was a dead on narration of the way things are.  There were problems I had with the story.  The person who printed the excerpt on this blog was an editor at Grove Atlantic.  He did admit this was his first project (or, at least, his first in that capacity at that company) and he was infatuated with it, (his included remarks about the moral or practical elements of that war being waged  may have influenced his attitude,)  but he mentioned, when expounding about the work, several times, military officials sitting in the safety of the FOB and making decisions and giving commentary about the actual battle front of which they had very biased views.  FOBs are most definitely NOT havens of safety.  They are shelled all the time.  They are targets.  Big targets. So that was wrong.  Then I read the excerpt which was well written and a powerful narrative.  But he would use a phrase and you couldn't get whether he had the reference wrong or if he was being facetious.  I read a lot.  I get irony, sarcasm, jokes, etc.  Seriously.  I get it. I can even write it.  I guess you have to take my word for that cuz you haven't read any of my work yet, have you?  And this guy's attempts at acerbicness (acerbicity?) (being acerbic!) or wryness (being wry) or direct humor fell short a few times, just in the excerpt.

THEN, one of my bigger concerns because I deal greatly with dialogue, some say successfully, but there again you will have to take my word--there was a paragraph with quotes from two different people in the same paragraph.  Does that seem like nit-picking to you?  It wouldn't if someone had said to you that they had trouble figuring out who was speaking at the time.  (I don't go for that "he said" "she replied" "he retorted" stuff, probably to a fault.)  My grand daughter, darling though she is, has no interest in writing so much as a grocery list, but is able to quote that rule to me.  A new paragraph for each speaker, even if it is only a one word quote. Crap. That's hitting the return key once.  Now this was an excerpt that was presented for our viewing by the guy who edited it for Christ's sake.  This, to me, is up there with the typo in the New Yorker cartoon (yeah, I saw that) and the typo in the two page, glossy, perfume ad spread in Vogue Magazine.  Yeah.  That was real.

I just don't like the pot calling the kettle black, so to speak.  Getting an MFA in fine arts, or writing, or literature, or what ever they label it, does not indicate anything but some writing on a fancy piece of paper for which you paid great sums of money.  More to be said for epublishing.  That editor is the one that would be selecting your offering from the bunch of offerings presented to him by the agent that won't even reply to your query.

Politics and Friendship.

My daughter and I actually talked about politics today.  She mentioned a person who she is friendly with and likes very much.  She said she didn't know what she would do with out her, which I know is true, the person is important to her, but she is so tired of hearing the person's political views.

I lost a long lived friendship because of politics.  You are not supposed to let politics or religion affect a friendship.  You are supposed to care for that person anyway on a friendship level.

I do not get that.  If a person believes something you completely do not understand or you know is horribly wrong or misguided, how can you respect that person and be friendly with them?  Talking about your kids can only go so far.

I know, from some of my "on line friendships", that you can discuss things you have in common and avoid the political rhetoric.  But, many times,  I have to grit my teeth.  And I have to go on the political or news related websites and spout off. Then I have to check back and read how many people commented on my remarks or how many likes I get. I HAVE to do that.   And it is totally venting.  At this moment in time, I am actually trying to rein that in.

It is frustrating because I think there is nothing any one can do to change the way things are going.  I honestly think we are in for a rough time, and I honestly feel we are sitting back and doing nothing.  And don't say that won't happen. How many times in history have populations been devastated when the scourge was clearly visible and recognized and moving closer and they all, ALL, said to each other. "Everything will be okay.  It will never get that bad."

In my personal life I have said, only a few times, because it is hardly ever appropriate in my personal life, "I just need someone to tell me everything will be all right".  (Rockabye. Rockabye.)  So maybe that is human nature.  Instead of building up our fortifications and taking the necessary steps to defend ourselves, we are turning to a person who says everything will be all right.

Are we "hoping" for a good outcome?  Are we content to live or try to live with a bad outcome?  I think there are that many people among us who choose to ignore a threat or actually really have no idea about what is going on.

 I am fucking scared.

Hell Freezes Over

I have heard this is a very old joke, but I never saw it before.  From a wonderful website called "I fucking love science".


The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different Religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.
With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:
1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.
2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?
If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day in Hell before I go out with you", and take into account the fact that I went out with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.
The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct . . . leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

Men

Adam Corolla just published a book called "In 50 years We'll All be Chicks."

We're given too many permissions and we want to take over,

Hannah Rosin put one out called, "The End of Men".

Men are unnecessary since sperm donation.  Um, where do we get the sperm?


Naomi Wolf has one called, "Vagina:  A New Biography".

I always thought of the vagina more of an entry way into which you put things like penises and tampons and birth control devices and, perhaps toys. Maybe a little nystatin every now and then.  Sort of a playing field or path to parenthood in some cases.  Apparently it is now a political symbol used to gain power and control or used to crush the female spirit.

C'mon,  guys.

You, male and female, all know the dynamic is getting a little out of whack.  But none of you want it to be like that.  None of you.

Find a way to adjust your attitude, change your opinions, understand the differences between male and female.  And for Pete's sake, enjoy it all.  Read Outside Plumbing:  The Myths of Manhood.  I promise you will look at your partner in a totally new way. A guy is a guy.  Let's work on enjoying that before Adam and Naomi and Hannah take it away.

A light-hearted look at the male dynamic and its origins with a grain of truth underneath the humor. Epub only,  (if you don't have an ereader, download Adobe Digital Editions for free.  It gives you a beautiful book-like experience on your PC, and, maybe your iPhone or Android.)

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098R9HPK

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/233639  (for ANY device)

Available

Outside Plumbing is now available at Amazon.com and Smashwords.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098R9HPK

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/233639

A light-hearted refreshing look at what makes a guy a guy, with a kernel of truth.

A little understanding can go a long way.

Outside Plumbing

 Are you in a relationship?  Having some rough spots?  Doesn't everyone?  Wish someone could make it all better?  Sometimes it is so hard to understand what is going on with your partner.

Outside Plumbing:  the Myths of Manhood is my first non-fiction book. It is a light-hearted look at what it is that makes a guy a guy. I promise it will give you a new perspective.  Fun with more than a grain of truth.

Available at Smashwords and Amazon.  You can download to any reader at Smashwords. 

This book is non-fiction,  tongue-in-cheek, anecdotal, easy to read, short, but contains more than a kernel of truth.  

The males weigh in: 

"You manage to discuss it without sounding bitchy."

"My wife came into the room to find out what I was laughing at.  I made her read it."

"Skewered."

"On the money:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/233639

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0098R9HPK

http://www.dittymac.blogspot.com

When the summer's through. . .

With a few exceptions, I have not had a very good summer.  How about you?

(The date stamp on my camera is so very wrong.)

Hopeful Theory

http://stevevernonstoryteller.wordpre... 

Notably Quotable

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

 "My new book sells faster, it appears, than either of its forgoers. This is not for its merit, but only shows that old age is a good advertisement. Your name has been seen so often that your book must be worth buying."