Small Piece on CNN
CNN was looking for baby naming stories. They liked my submission and interviewed me. Click the pic to jump to the story!
Kill the Owls, Don’t Kill the Owls… or Apply “Limited Experimental Removal”
Which means: kill them. It’s amazing how many words and phrases in English translate to kill. We euthanize animals, or ‘put them to sleep.’ Mobsters ‘rub out,’ ‘hit,’ ‘take out’ and ‘take care of’ “problems.”
We starve the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, the EPA, the BLM and private organizations of funding through congressional stupidity and sequester (sorry, that’s also congredumb) so that human interference destroys native species’ habitats. Then come up with essentially last-ditch, people-intensive ways of ‘saving’ the impacted species.
Owls are top avian predators as well. Give them back their mice, rats, frogs, toads, lizards, snakes and slow birds and we won’t have to shoot them: they’ll be competing for a larger food base.
We can accomplish that fairly cheaply: kill all feral cats and make owners either keep theirs indoors, or pay hefty ‘hunter’ fees. Cats are top-level predators of a wide variety of animals, with few natural predators. They spread taxoplasmosis gondii for better protection, and to hunt more effectively. Their feces causes birth defects.
Please don’t hurt me: I’ve owned some wonderful cats. I’ll probably own one in the future (hopefully a Maine Coon as shown on right). Heck, I would pay a large fee to allow my (neutered) cat outdoors. But their impact on the local biome is horrendous, far larger (and more painful) than a few ‘specialists’ performing limited experimental removal with Hevi-shot™ pest control devices set to full-choke.
Using a Language as an Evil Shade
An article’s title in the NYT’s Science section proclaims: “[the] Debut of Atlas May Foreshadow Age of ‘Robo Sapiens’.”
It’s one thing for the head of a company trying to create truck-loading robots to say that “…A new species, Robo sapiens, are emerging.” He’s not supposed to be a biologist (and any decent one would regurgitate into her or his mouth at the very thought).
On Priorities and Possibilities
Reading about authors with hundreds of short stories, a dozen novels. Knowing Jay Lake and his writing urge despite dire circumstances. I burn my creative candle on both ends: day work and client work, both in development. Writing, even poetry, gets such short shrift it might as well not be part of my gig.
Writing used to be a habit. Habits are actions we fall back upon during stressful or busy times. My mind fulminates with ideas for poems, stories, development ideas (software) and patents. I can’t possibly do any of them with my current load.
Now that I’m ~stably employed, it’s time for me to rethink to where my ship heads: land of opportunity or creativity. I’ve neglected the latter, but it’s part of why I left management, and it’s what turns my crank. I have a history of depriving myself in the name of self-sabotage. (Kinky, I know.) This is looking like a case of that. Time to change it.
Famous Story Outlines
Brilliant little piece. Okay, just a normal piece — but AWESOME reproductions of some famous author plot/character outlines for books (and a magazine article). Totally rejuvenated me for writing!
A new word: Augre
To use one of wikipedia’s favorite words, this is a portmanteau of “augmented” and “reality.” With Google’s Google Glass finally becoming a human-portable heads-up display (something done by IBM in the late 90s with their portable computing initiative), we need a name instead of a phrase to describe “google glassing.” I’m sure the lawyers at Google gnash their teeth over the use of googling in the same way we xerox things and buy kleenex at the store.
augre 
aug·re [auhg-ree] verb, augred, augring, augres
- the act or power of viewing one’s environment with the aid of technology providing additional information related to objects
- To discern information gathered by scanning an area with augmented reality vision.
- the act of visually looking about in order to glean additional, computer-generated information about one’s surroundings.
synonyms
computer vision, machine vision
Examples:
“Joan augred the ballroom, then headed towards the bobbing icon above her waiting friend.”
“I can’t augre any wifi around here.”
“I can’t augre that guy over there; he’s wearing viewcamo.”
“Go left at the next intersection, my augre’s reporting patterns of infrared activity there over the past week.”
On Slash as a
Professor Anne Curzan, in her blog piece entitled “Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore,” hails the use of “slash” in a sentence as an “innovative conjunction” or “conjunctive adverb.” She sites examples such as “Does anyone care if my cousin comes and visits slash stays with us Friday night?” Or “I went to class slash caught up on Game of Thrones…” [emphasis mine].
As a poet I play with words and usage all the time. However, I see “slash,” IMHO, as a form of grammatical laziness. Of course, YMMV. One can make the same case for Internet acronyms as for slash — with identical, in my opinion, results. Leave the slashing to the slashers. And/or poets.
Body of Proof & Crazy Soldiers, Revisited
I don’t have a television or cable, but there are several shows I watch online as “guilty pleasures.” One of them is Body of Proof on ABC. Yes, I know, I know: it’s silly beyond all beliefs; the science is bad, the procedures are insane, and the plots… Well, the plots are the source of this post.
I remember all those horrible movies in the 70’s and 80’s. Crazed Vietnam vets were a wonderful plot card to play. The first two episodes of this show were just new clothes on the old dummy: crazed vets doing crazy things because of what they endured at war, and came home unappreciated, ignored, or discriminated against.
There’s more reason now than before to not just honor, but actively assist the vets in our communities. Many survived injuries to which their counterparts from the 70’s would have succumbed. We have more treatments, and more understanding of, PTSD (from which I suffer).
While shooting scripts need to pull in the target demographics, we need not denigrate military veterans in the process. It’s time the entertainment industry took the easy joke, easy madman, easy antagonist off the eye-level shelf, and put it behind glass. Respect is harder earned, easier lost in our instantaneous communication culture. They risked their lives in their country’s service: let’s give them preferential treatment.
Returning From a Posting Hiatus
I’ve been working a job, now a job search, and working on some cool software code that’ll debut on this site.
That’s come at the expense of writing. I’ve done precious little work on Infection (although I made some critical progress on some story arc issues to lock in the longer view). I don’t think I’ve written so few poems in this time frame.
Multi-tasking apparently gets harder as life stress levels rise. Time to take care of priorities: slow down to speed up.
On Focus (Again, and Again, and Again!)
Six months ago for some reason I had a clearer “plate” for writing. But third rewrites, frantically writing down scraps of ideas for new stories, and working on what is turning out to be a monumental task for a simple thing (Google Charts embedded in WordPress, with data updates), plus the flotsam and jetsam of life’s issues, had made for a plate of raw squid tentacles (calamari, for those trying to keep with the metaphor) entangled with angel hair pasta, glued together in a sauce of lost time and chores.
And on my ride to work my train buddies ask “how’s the writing going.” It’s about discipline, I want to say. “And if you find mine, please give it back to me.”
So today I finish the rewrite of Generation to Generation so I can give it to one LAST reader before getting a {sigh} cover together.