crazy visor guy luvs milf trucks

What the...
( and still life with sleeping nut case behind the cut )

Casus Belli: What's Farsi for "Tonkin Gulf"?

Gosh, I wonder who planted this one?

Of course it's entirely possible that Iran is supplying arms to groups inside Iraq, but why the hell would they be arming Sunni insurgents? And considering the NYT's record on covering exploding things in Iraq, you know. I call disinformation!

Oh, and didn't we meet this sniper back at Khe Sanh back in '68?

BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP

I went to the supermarket tonight near midnight as I often do. The only reason I ever go to Ralphs is that it's open late; otherwise I'm at the produce market, Trader Joe's, etc.

The Ralphs on 17th Street in Costa Mesa, CA is very bright, painfully so. I feel like Lou Reed coming down off heroin when I walk in there out of the dark into the fluorescence. The produce is horrible except for one or two items, so it's strictly a packaged goods and dairy kind of place for me most of the time. I really like the people who work there, though.

Lately I've been going to another Ralphs less than a mile away if I can; it's only open until midnight, but the Westcliff Plaza one's staff has revolted and replaced the corporate Slow Jam/Office Rock muzak with their own mix CDs, so that my 20 minutes of grocering are smoothed by a few tracks of 70s funk or 1940s jazz etc.

Tonight I made the mistake of going back to 17th Street and experienced the worst innovation yet. They've put a door buzzer in because of all the beer runs etc. and every time anyone enters or leaves it makes a piercing, cringe-inducing 70 db BEEEEP. No, not BEEEEP. More like BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP. It's the sort of sound I associate with fire alarms at hospitals. Can't be ignored, makes you stop in your tracks and flinch. I could see people making involuntary attempts to cover their ears each time it went off, which was about every three or four minutes. We were all on a broken starship from a shitty science fiction movie.

I grabbed the stuff I absolutely needed and checked the fuck out. At first I thought the noise was a broken alarm, but the checker confirmed the worst; it was permanent and would go off on every use of the door. I expressed disbelief. "I feel like writing a letter!" She handed me a comment form to send to them. "I'd really appreciate it". I told her I probably wouldn't be back for a while but I'd send in the comment letter.

Another customer came up and we bonded over the hell-noise. What the hell were they thinking? As I left, I told the checker "The mental health costs they'll pay out to you guys are going to be way worse than a few beer runs." She high-fived me.

Writing for Bloggers: Introductory Course

People like this guy who tried to get paid for blogging give me the ennui. Blogging is writing done by postliterate geeks. These people are used to being paid for their hobbies, because an obsession with computer programming or its equivalent often accidentally results in a nice paycheck. This will not happen with your blog. Since none of you have met a writer before or read an entire book, some review is going to be necessary here. Writing is not like computer programming. Here are some things about writing:

• People write because they have to and get paid if and when they can. Writers do not expect to make a living by writing and very few of them get paid more than lunch money. This is true for bad, mediocre, and even very good writers.
  
  
• Writing is done for an audience. If you write entirely for yourself, and do not stop to consider your readers and what they may find interesting or pleasant, do not be surprised if you are not read.
  
  
• "Content" is not generic. If you do not have anything to say, do not write. If you have something to say that is said frequently by others, you will not be read. A new person writing "My occasional rants on the world of PC Gaming with particular emphasis on multiplayer online games" or "A daily set of links to Slashdot and three or four well-known political websites with my unique and irreverent perspective" will not be noticed, much less read.
  
  
• Writing is harder than talking. It is, in fact, a craft. (See Podcasting, below). The only people who are read by many others are people who take care to put words together properly, and these people usually have to go over their writing several times and edit it for repetition, clichés, dumb catchphrases, and ugly turns of phrase. If you are not willing to do this you will not be read.
  
  
• Podcasting is not writing. Podcasting is talking into a microphone and then having people listen. If you are not a speaker of professional quality you will sound like a complete fucking tool on your podcast. The number of people willing to listen to a mouth-breathing, sniffling amateur drone about technology or politics is small. For example, it's smaller than the number of people who are willing to listen to the BBC or National Public Radio. Much smaller. Do not podcast.
  
  
• Even if you have exciting things to say, even if you write with careful attention to your audience, even if you spend years improving your skills, you will not get paid. If you build a better mousetrap, it's said the world will beat a path to your door. If you write a better paragraph, you then have to beat a path to your job.

If you stripped out all the personal yawps, pictures, and linksmanship from my own blog and then pulled out the bits that could have theoretically been sold to a newspaper or magazine as reviews or op ed, and then assumed that I sold them all and got paid for them all, I'd make maybe $250-$300 a month unless I'd really hit the bigtime. And you would have made an ass out of U and me in the process, because not even very good writers sell all their stuff.

I hope this is helpful. If you still want to write things on the internet despite never being paid and rarely being read, you are a writer. If you work very hard at it, someday you may get $15,000 for two or three years' work and be distributed in tiny quantities to libraries and bookstores. It will be the happiest day of your life.

I mean it about podcasting, though. Don't do it.

The New Colonials

Put away the pith helmet, the Webley .45, the swagger stick, and the quinine tonic. Here's the new kit for the new East India Company.


Baghdad Survival Kit

As posted by spangledrongo on Flickr.

Today's unfortunate headline

Britain to Rebrand Ethnic Minorities