the wandering radish

Let Them Eat [Wedding] Cake.

2008-05-12T22:11:12Z

The American economy is a mess. Again. Unemployment in America is at crippingly high levels. Again. The prices of oil-based fuel are skyrocketing, and showing no signs of slowing down. Again.

The cries of the American people are being ignored. Again.

Juxtapose all that with the big, 'spectacular' wedding for Jenna Bush, daughter of the current U.S. President. So many distractions,...

All while the ecology of the whole world is collapsing around our ears.

But, no, the sky isn't falling.

It's dying.

The Wonder of it All

2008-05-08T07:47:16Z

Oh, this makes me laugh *so* hard!! Ricky Gervais is a pure and unadulterated genius! A genius, I tell you:

Now what I want to know is this --

If creationists really, really believe in the bible’s explanation of life, the universe and everything, don’t they ever worry that that their God might get a wee bit miffed at all the damage they are doing to His world?

Rather like Mom and Dad taking off for a holiday and saying, “No parties", only to come home to all the boorish evidence of all your friends' teen-aged debaucheries. [face it kiddies, pissing in your own salad bar is just stupid]

Being fashioned after their God, by His own hands, carries great expectations from you on His part and big responsibilities on the part of humans. [Oh, well, so much for that.]

If creationists really, really believe that their God made all humans [all of 'em, not just the white men] in His image -- and I suspect that goes into the metaphorical, as well -- isn't it past time that they start living up to their own hype?

Just wondering.

Sex versus Gender

2008-05-05T18:53:42Z

[originally posted on my wordpress blog on 2007/april/01]

In order to access certain sites or groups online, you must register. I don’t have a problem with that. But then they demand that you provide a dossier of yourself, at minimum your sex and your age. Are you a Mr., a Mrs., or a Ms.? Why should it matter? Are they thinking of buying me a drink?

The age bit is already personal enough as it is, but I really, really must protest being categorized by my sex.

Like there’re only two kinds of people on the planet. Sheesh.

Yeah, yeah, I realize it’s for market-research purposes, but — dammit, if I were a typical whatever, it probably wouldn’t matter. But I’m atypical for my sex. While my sexual orientation in entirely hetero, my gender is androgynous.

So some schlock-slinging bozo then comes up to me and tries to peddle his gender-oriented crap at me, because of his bourgeois assumptions built on the foundation of reproductive anatomy, on which sexual organs I have or don’t have,… man, that is just too personal.

My choices of dress, entertainment, art, and reading material are frequently questioned — sometimes challenged — because of my sex, or because of my androgyny. And it was lots worse when I was a kid.

Like it’s really anybody’s business but mine.

I repeat: sheesh.

Filling in the Blanks

2008-05-04T19:26:00Z

My primary blog is over at Wordpress. I just like the way Wordpress handles, like a sports car.

[Now, don't go getting your knickers in a twist, I like LJ very, very well. But it handles more like a mini-van, and I really enjoy shifting gears.]

Anyway, things are somewhat hectic in my brick-and-mortar world at the moment, so what I plan on doing is to round out my LJ blog a bit more by re-posting some of my earlier bits from Wordpress, just for reactions' sake and all. Drop a bit of bait, see what nibbles at it, and learn my way around the LJ communities.

More to come, so stay tuned to this channel,....

Writer's Block: Smashed

2008-05-01T18:13:34Z

If you had a crowbar and could smash anything in your home or office, what would it be? Why?

View 500 Answers

The car -- across the street -- whose alarm - keeps - going - off.

The noise, the noise!

Elephant, Cork, Monkey,...

2008-04-25T00:42:45Z

Were you ever the recipient of this lame-arsed and degrading come-on?
"If I said you have a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?"

Theferret --

[Personally, his choice of screen names is an insult to ferrets everywhere, so I prefer to regard him as a weasel,... but I digress.]

Theferret went and did this irretrievably stupid can-of-worms thing:

"We all reached out in the hallway, hands and fingers extended, to get a handful. And lo, we touched her breasts - taking turns to put our hands on the creamy tops exposed through the sheer top she wore, cupping our palms to touch the clothed swell underneath, exploring thoroughly but briefly lest we cross the line from 'touching" to "unwanted heavy petting." They were awesome breasts, worthy of being touched."

and

"And my God! We all reached out like zombies trying to break through a door to get to those breasts. And it wasn't getting any worse! We weren't degenerating into an orgy, but rather exploring the amazement of how beautiful this body was and how wonderful it was to have access to them."

Oh, my everlovin' gods. Are you skeeved, too?

And never before have I seen one man do so much back-pedalling on a blog. Alas, for the sake of his credibility, it came too late. The damage was done. The monkey had removed the cork from the elephant's arse, and the shit went everywhere.

Truly it had no choice, because it was a substantial mountain of shit.

Theferret, in his juvie online boasting after the fact, has sparked a mighty firestorm.

Many, of all sexes and genders and orientations, responded. From what I was able to access, the bulk of those responses is highly critical and vociferously disapproving of Theferret's pet~~ting~~ project.

And then I came across the words of tablesaw:

"Women's breasts are not magical devices for healing straight men's psyches. Women's bodies do not exist to make straight men feel better about themselves. Women have their own shit to deal with, and a lot of the time, that shit is us, even (sometimes especially) when we're trying to do better. And trying to be the spokesperson for a movement without acknowledging, accepting, and fucking dealing with your position of power is just working at crosspurposes to that same movement."

Thank you, sir, for your empathy and compassion. You give me hope for the het male portion of the western world.

I, too, posted some knee-jerks to this, ah, person's Open Source [yes, thanks for hijacking that term and bastardising it in the same breath] 'project', and began writing this post several times. Each attempt, until this one, I deleted as being a tad reactionary. So I empowered myself by giving myself permission to consider the issue and write only once I was able to give it the calculated bit of mild snark it truly deserves.

Based upon the silly, sophomoronic notion of the buttons the female objects had the "right" to choose to wear -- green for "Yes, you may ask" or red for "No" -- in this Fandom Scandal, here is my considered response:

If the red button, when I push it, fails to make you, the Hopeful Groper, disappear -- in a puff of common decency with a Karmic scream of excruciatingly abrupt enlightenment, and remove this wretched sense of degradation and violation you've just dumped on to my psyche with your lewd insinuations of entitlement -- what damned good is the bloody thing?

Dear Blog [feb/27/08],

2008-02-27T18:33:46Z

Still exploring and poking around in Scrivener, learning in childish delight all its functions; many things accomplished. Go me. Still gotta create synopses for all of the chapters to get maximum benefits of outliner function, in order to avoid having to create a spread sheet,...

... need more coffee; still feels like Monday; argh.

Multi-part beast of a story has had another growth spurt -- quintet is now a sextet; story's gone from originally being a single volume to six volumes, and that's WITH using an outline to wrangle and paddock this critter.

Prologue -- which spanned four decades -- caused too many headaches and too many hangovers, so had to cleave the little bugger out of my cranium and the story's timeline, and it's now a Prelude Novel,... it was the only way to deal with world building and forty years of back story, the only path to clarity, the only thing I could think of to avoid pace-destroying expositions.

Again, clearly, it's my Muse who's in control and I'm just being dragged along for the ride because I'm the one with the fingers.

Still getting used to thinking and writing in British spellings as opposed to US spellings. Don't know why I've taken to it, but it feels the right thing to do. [shrug] Maybe I'm channelling, again.

Typeface and Formatting

2008-02-23T18:55:23Z

Obviously, I'm weird -- I actually like [and prefer] Courier. Maybe it's nostalgia on my part, but the Courier font is a bridge between me and all the published authors and playwrights and screenwriters of modern times who've come before me.

That Courier is the standard in accepted manuscript format makes me think of the sourdough bakery on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. They take a generous pinch from each batch to preserve the yeast culture that they've been using -- for how many decades, now? -- and pass it along to each and every batch that's yet to be kneaded, raised, baked, and eaten. That's legacy. You don't mess with legacy, especially when it has a proven track record.

Maintaining Courier as de rigeur is like passing on the torch, appropriate considering its name. And the first thing I did after installing Scrivener was to set my font and pitch defaults at Courier 12.

Knowing from the beginning this font is the one editors expect, it's what I've accustomed myself to seeing, whether it was on a sheet of eight and a half by eleven shoved into a typewriter, or shining up at me from my laptop. Then again, maybe I'm just being superstitious in the same way baseball players are,....

... why mess with the magic if it works the way you need it to?

Order out of Chaos

2008-02-21T05:52:52Z

After transferring all my manuscript files from Word to Scrivener, I spent hours [and hours] creating folders and sub-folders, cataloguing all my research, and doing S-and-D on all the space-eating duplicates, thus triggering a mild OCD episode while making certain I wasn't deleting any files that I gotta keep --

At long last, I have a search-able hierarchy wherein I'm able to find what I need when I need it. Monk would be proud of me -- it's so tidy it almost hurts.

Everything's so much easier that it feels, well, downright decadent. Who knew that writing fiction could be so hedonistic? I'm actually getting afterglows, here.

I've been playing -- yes, playing -- with the outliner feature, and, I gotta say, well, WOW. Now, if only I could teach Scrivener to peel grapes,....

Cinderella -- thinking stuff

2008-02-20T02:30:57Z

Once again, I’m pondering the ‘makeover’ motif, why it consistently has such great appeal for the masses,...

One of the best-loved tales worldwide is Cinderella. It’s the iconic makeover story, validating and elevating the object-character all the way to becoming royalty. It’s the template for the thousands of makeover stories that have since followed and wallowed in its wake.

The makeover story is not at all like the ‘Ugly Duckling’ scenario, where it’s just a matter of time before the object-character finally comes into being -- via the prophecy of genetics -- through no efforts on the part of the object-character, other than riding out the tough times until those superior genes finally kick in.

Nope, in addition to riding out the tough times -- without the safety net of promising genetics, or the family’s socio-economic rank -- the ‘Cinderella’ has to work hard for that transformation.

There are risks of and penalties for failure. There are adversaries at cross-purposes with the goals of the object-character. And there are no guarantees for success, or happiness, or love -- damn near everything is at stake.

The new status has to be earned.

My thoughts on it are these -- on a deeper level it isn’t nearly as much about changing the object-character’s physical appearance as it is about changing the object-character’s self-perception. More, it’s about owning how you appear, and taking up the reins to determine how you present yourself to others, and then taking responsibility for how they will perceive you. If you don’t like how they perceive you, you have the power to change that.

Ultimately, this is what the makeover story says to me:
How can you expect your life to change -- if you won’t change?

Nothing ventured is nothing gained.

Valentine's Day Haiku

2008-02-14T19:58:55Z

For my Lovely S.O.:

A flutter, a glance;
the not-so-innocent gaze
that draws me to you.

- by r.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

p.s. you make my heart go pitter-pat.

Scrivener

2008-02-13T21:21:25Z

Way back in May '07, I asked the folks over at DeepGenre about software for creative writing. They were most generous with their responses, eagerly pointing me in directions that proved helpful. I explored all the options presented, and the most attractive software for my needs, hands down, was Scrivener.

However [there's always a however, isn't there?], it's for Mac OS X only, while I had only PC's available to me. So I continued struggling [and spewing profanity in the process] with Word and Windows XP Professional on the Thinkpad T40.

My lovely S.O. ultimately wearied of my rantings and whinings about the perfidies of hardware and software that were proving counter-productive to my writerly efforts, and presented me with a new MacBook Leopard [thank you! thank you! thank you!]. Being the IT guru that he is, he then downloaded Scrivener onto my new ~~toy~~ tool for me.

* swoon *

Scrivener is, is, damn, it's just WOW. Scrivener was created by writers for writers. I've had it only for a few days, now, so I'm still discovering all the cool stuff it can do. There's also a very active forum for chatting, bug hunting and reporting, and tech support galore for Scrivener.

There is only one possible downside to all of this wonderfulness,...

... No More Excuses.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

p.s. anyone else notice that XP resembles a rather bad-tempered, contemptuous emoticon? maybe that should've been my first clue,....

MacBook Leopard: the Elegant Machine

2008-02-12T19:03:02Z

MacBook Leopard is sleek, deco-moderne sleek. Sleek in form, sleek in appearance, sleek in function. Neither white nor beige but shining eggshell in colour, it's smooth and cool like polished marble beneath my eager palms and fingers.

When opened, the famous apple-with-a-bite-taken-from-it glows soft and pale on the lid, like a night-light to keep me from stumbling or futzing about in the dark. The Bitten Apple logo reminds me of Eve who sought to appease her hunger for knowledge and understanding. And I so grok that -- how can anyone be expected to choose ignorance over enlightenment?

Until this Elegant Machine found me, I'd worked only with PC's. The IBM Thinkpad T40 served me,... well? Yes, it served me very well, as well as it could with only 512 megs of memory. Compared to the MacBook , that was like taking a tricycle down a goat path. The MacBook Leopard -- with a full gig of memory that's vital for holding a massive multi-book work-in-progress manuscript [and all its research] -- is more like taking to the skies in the Gossamer Condor. I'm still doing all the pedalling, but it's no longer such a labour.

The Mac Leopard is slim and stealthy and powerful and fast. It's beautifully close to being a Golden Rectangle.

This laptop is solid. There is no flimsiness to this thing. It's quiet and quick, and the battery holds a charge for over six hours -- that easily covers the time to make a transcontinental flight, or the drive from Portland down to Ashland. It has features that make scripting and research so much easier and better organized, and quicker to retrieve.

The real beauty of the MacBook? It's user-friendly without being dumbed-down or condescending. It doesn't try to tell me that this or that is what I really need or want -- and then insist on giving me what it wants instead of what I want -- as though I couldn't be trusted to make that decision for myself. That, and all the best software is written for Macs, and sometimes only for Macs.

While no longer a MacVirgin, I am far from debauched. Experience, knowledge, and wisdom always demand their prices [just ask Eve or Prometheus], and that price this time for me was daring to just try out a Mac -- I ignored my trepidations and I'm glad of it. I have an appreciation now for the boastful claim: Once you go Mac, you never go back.

The training wheels are off. I no longer need them, and they were only slowing me down, anyway. Now, I have wings.

Feet First

2008-02-07T00:21:24Z

Or is that 'first feat'?

This is my first entry on my spiffy new LJ account, and suddenly find myself at a loss for words, 'coz I'm so busy poking around in the editor here --

Ooh! There goes the garage door! My lovely S.O. and Lunch have arrived!! Tacos. Mmmm.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

And, oh my gods,... S.O. has just presented me with a brand new MacBook.

Criminy. What do I say, besides the obvious stumbling and stammering 'THANK YOU!!' -- ?

He says he did it so I could download Scrivener for my writing. I'm giddy, and feel like crying with surprise and confusion and happiness, because the gesture goes way beyond just a new laptop -- he believes in my writing.

Ooohhhhh. Shivers,....