You might have forgotten that Gasoline Alley is now available IN GRAPHIC NOVEL FORM. Need I add that Rex Morgan, M.D., is not? And need I add to that that that is a pile of BS? There’s a pizza delivery/PCP story line from the late ’80s I would like to revisit. No, really.
There’s nothing quite like spending most of a day arguing with people on the Internet, only to have the soft, fine-smelling individual who lives with you—and who knows much more about what you were so heatedly arguing about than you do—return home and gently explain that you don’t know what the hell you are talking about.
So, a note to anyone who read anything I wrote today about Amazon and Macmillan and electronic book selling: Whatever I said is probably mostly right, but almost completely wrong in some parts. Sorry! Sigh.
If anyone’s interested and hasn’t read it yet, John Scalzi (whose blog is one of the handful truly worth subscribing to; he’s loud and smart and fun to read, and posts one to three times a day, which is about perfect) has explained how hard Amazon sucked eggs this weekend here.
Anyone who thinks the fight going on over ebooks right now between Amazon and publisher Macmillan isn’t a big deal might consider that books have been a literally fundamental technology for us Westerners for at least the past half-millennium or so, and that this current dispute is really about who controls the medium. Which is, of course, the message. Anyway, good thoughts and summary here (via bulicks).
My latest “Blogging the Hugos” post, on Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, is up. Relatedly:
And we are alone. Until his mom and my wife get back from the gym.
He has an ENORMOUS HEAD.
I am saying things he could not possibly respond to, like, “So did you catch the State of the Union?” even though this is not that funny when you are alone, just in case my life turns out to secretly be a sitcom or a comedy movie some people somewhere else are watching.
5:21 pm: Probably ought to have waited to break out the loud electric guitar toy, my sanity is telling me.
5:29 pm: I feel like we should be talking more. Or at least like I shouldn’t be watching Saw.
5:36 pm: Turned on the TV and the news was on. They were talking to the American public in exactly the same tone I’ve been using for the last half hour.
5:43 pm: Babyhood seems to consist mostly of grabbing for things you can’t reach or that people won’t let you reach. Ha! Welcome to life, friend.
Two things happened to me yesterday (I mean, more than two, but two that have any bearing on this post): For one, I watched the State of the Union address in its entirety, this being the first one of my adulthood that I could stand to listen to and look at without getting angry. And several hours before that, I interviewed a source who mentioned, in a discussion unrelated to any major policy issue, that she’d worked with legislators a fair amount and that they really appreciate getting letters from their constituents.
I guess that makes sense! I’m still young enough to have bought Nevermind when it was released, so, you know, disaffected, and I come from an industry (newspapering) where letters from the public are a thing to be feared or at least mocked. So I’d unconsciously assumed that the only people who wrote letters to senators and representatives were senior citizen cranks, and that nobody cares, Moby, nobody cares.*
But I thought about what my source said, and it occurred to me that maybe legislators are just as frustrated with the public’s lack of engagement with them (or at least the public who isn’t nuts’s lack of engagement with them) as the public is with their seeming disconnection from us. Or even if that’s not the case, the sort of person who goes into politics probably has the sort of ego that likes getting messages from other people, and also wants some of those other people to like them.
Anyway, then the SOTU came on, and it really drove home for me that, yeah, President Obama had decidedly not promised to do everything himself if we elected him. And I’d agreed with the whole “we have to do this together” sentiment in theory, but—like a lot of other people, I suspect—once he’d won the vote I kinda started hoping he could just take it from there on his own. I mean, I passed out flyers for one day. Wasn’t that enough?
No, it wasn’t, so today I’m embarking on a new tradition: I’m writing my three federal legislators—both senators and my congresslady—once a month. I’m just doing one letter, copying-and-pasting, and switching the names because these aren’t Christmas cards, for crying out loud, but that’s three more copies of the same letter than I’ve ever sent out before. I’m going to try to keep it meatily short (today’s letter is a little more than 600 words, about the length of a newspaper column), and I’m going to do my best to sound sane, and I’m going to stick to it. And who knows? Maybe it won’t make a damn inch of difference, but at least these three people who make major decisions for me will have an idea of where I stand on them.
I think you guys should do the same thing! Here’s how to find your representative, and your senators should be easy enough with the Google. And my letter is after the jump—feel free to tell me what a doofus I am if you think I’m a doofus.
*The reference is here, around minute three, and ought to be a meme.
…my wife has saved me the trouble of posting pictures from California, complete with tags you can and should read by hovering your pointer over the images. A photo of me in my famous SHARHOLDER T-shirt is among the offerings.
(Thanks, Jon.)
My wife notes that, yes, our plane from Dallas-Fort Worth to SFO got hit by lightning. Yes, we were descending through a dark gray mass of cloud, already a bit on edge, and suddenly a golden ball of brightness exploded just off the right wing (that is to say, like, 30 meters directly out my window) and there was a sound like a gunshot. It could never happen to me again, and I’d be pretty cool with that.
