Category: The slush pile

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | Owning ideas:

In the US, for instance, it is illegal to copy your own CDs on to your own iPod.

I thought this would be fair use, a la home taping?

John Irving:

“The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn’t behave that way you would never do anything.”

Feels like that these days as I close in on 33,000 words.

white:~/Documents/nanowrimo 2005 paul$ wc -w 2005.txt
33095

2/3 of the way there.

And don’t say GoDaddy: they seem to be unwilling to take my money without taking credit card information they don’t need.

National Novel Writing Month – NaNoWriMo Wordcount:

Your current Word Count is 26700.

wc(1) says: 925 26700 275012 2005.txt

That means I am about halfway [ugh].

It gets a little harder to pull the daily ration of 1,500 words out of my guts each day, but not so hard I haven’t been able to (touch wood).

It helps that I do this after everyone has gone to bed, when I really can’t do anything else. They’re all asleep so I have do something quiet. The clicking of keys from the living room doesn’t seem to keep anyone awake.

I have tried to write some stuff earlier in the day, but there are too many distractions, too many other things I need to do or simply can do (procrastination? what’s that?). So come 9 PM, I hit the couch and see what I can come up with. And this week, school is dismissed at 1 PM, making it even harder to get anything done.

[credit]

An idea that has come ten years late
Featured advertisers: MicroTel and Select Comfort Bedding.

So how do they sleep at night, if they know they are sponsoring this crap?

If the ad revenue dries up for these shout shows, they’ll be gone: the media companies aren’t in the business of supporting hours of talk that don’t cover their costs.

If you do business with these companies but disagree with the viewpoints they endorse with their ad dollars, tear them out of your Rolodex and if you feel like it, write them a note and tell them why.

Attytood: This man almost died because of Bush’s FEMA:

In the past few days, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has ordered searchers not to break into homes. They are supposed to look in through a window and knock on the door. If no one cries out for help, they are supposed to move on. If they see a body, they are supposed to log the address and move on.

The morticians will remove the deceased later.

But [Lt. Frederick] Fell broke the rules and ordered his men to bash open the door, launching a series of events that would save a man’s life and revitalize California Task Force 5 from Orange County. In the past two days, the 80-member task force had identified seven dead bodies in the same neighborhood, and they had rescued no one.

But Tuesday, 16 days after Hurricane Katrina smacked this aging community in the face, an unconscious and emaciated man identified as Edgar Hollingsworth, 74, was rescued. The man is expected to survive.

Wonder if they’ll be disciplined for breaking orders?

Seriously, what would it take to break a window or try a door to see if anyone is beyond asking for help but still in need of it? This tough old bird lasted 16 days: how many others were bypassed?

Technorati Tags: incompetence, katrina, ongoing victory