Un-American Activities -- Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid!

Pick pretty much any moment from any day, and you'll find a group of highly-paid Congresspeople sitting in a room and wasting their time and our money.

And that's fine.  I long ago reconciled myself to the notion that government is the well-dressed equivalent of a dog's breakfast.  Nothing of note ever gets done, but the messes left behind are always epic.

But there are days such as today, where even my abysmally low expectations are set far too high.

I speak of course of Representative Pete King, and his hearings on the subject of Muslim radicalization within the US.

You'd think these imbeciles would learn something from the asinine antics of their brain-damaged forebears.  Joseph McCarthy, anyone?  Communists hiding behind every shrub, every fountain, every comic book?  Except of course there weren't any.  McCarthy ruined lives and careers but his army of hidden Communists never materialized because they never existed in the first place.

Sigh.  Pete King probably has a brass bust of Joe McCarthy on his mantel.  Or full-length nude photos of McCarthy in his desk.  Because King is determined to not only follow in McCarthy's footsteps, but actually exceed the man's dedication to the ideal of finding monsters hiding in every corner.

This time around, it's not Communists, but....<gasp> Muslims.  Or, as Joe King doubtlessly prefers to pronounce it, moo-slims.  They're radicalized, infers Pete.  Radicalized and ready to throw down some jihad any second now!  Blood and apple pie will run in the streets! Hide the wimmin and grab yer guns, boys, 'cause the mooslims is a' comin!

So what does Pete do?

He drags Muslim Americans onto the Hill, and grills them, ostensibly in the hope that they'll get distracted by the cameras and blurt out their sinister plans to blow up the nearest Dunkin' Donuts before nightfall.

That's what outrages me.  No American citizen -- be they Muslim, Baptist, Hindu, whatever -- owes Pete King or anyone else an 'explanation' of their beliefs or their patriotism.

That's supposed to be one of the central perks of being an American -- that you don't have to explain your beliefs to anyone, least of all a bunch of jackbooted government thugs.

I've worked in a university setting all my life.  I've worked with Muslims.  I've worked with Hindus.  With Buddhists.  I've even worked with members of even more exotic sects, such as Methodists and Presbyterians.

According to Pete King, I should have been blown up years ago.  Or if not blown up, converted to radical Islam.

Oddly enough, neither has happened.

Not even close.

Okay, I have developed a fondness for Indian food.  Maybe that's the sinister gateway to terrorism.  From Chicken Korma to radical Islam, in five easy steps?

Want to know about the people I've worked with, laughed with, talked with, over all these years?

They're just people.  The Muslims wanted to go home and see their kids like everyone else.  The Hindus, ditto.  Aside from differences in lunchtime preferences, and who drank coffee and who didn't, I didn't see any significant variations in behavior.

Just what am I supposed to be afraid of?

These 'hearings' are ridiculous.  Ridiculous and insulting.  And as far as I can tell, the only people engaging in overtly un-American activities are Pete King and his cronies, who are obviously engaged in demonizing Muslims as part of a painfully transparent effort to revive the post-911 paranoia just in time for the 2012 elections.

To my Muslim friends out there, I apologize.  Fat lot of good that does, huh?

I Spy

One of my favorite blog-related activities is checking the 'audience' monitor to see where readers of this blog are from.

This week, we've picked up readers in Iran, India, Singapore, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Spain!  So hello to all you folks, wherever you hail from.

I imagine quite a few of my international readers first starting reading the old blog (may it rest in peace), which was basically a non-stop rant against a certain former presidential Administration and its penchant for instigating pointless military escapades.  I also devoted several hundred pages to describing the overly carnivorous eating habits of former Vice President Dick 'I Crave the Blood of Infants' Cheney, who I still consider one of the most evil men to have ever gutted a live wildebeast for his midmorning snack.

Well, sad to say, I've calmed down a bit.  Not because I'm a huge fan of the current occupant of the White House, but because I've decided it doesn't really matter who's sitting behind that desk.  They aren't the ones running the show.

But for my international readers, I will offer a brief summary of the current state of affairs here in the States.  To wit:

1) American Foreign Policy -- Troops in Iraq?  Check.  Troops in Afghanistan?  Oh yeah.  Billions poured daily into wars without goals or end?  You know it.  Payments to 'allies' such as Pakistan, which are immediately funneled into supplying the very people shooting at us?  Made daily.  The only conclusion I can draw is that American foreign policy is still being drafted by a super-secret combination of Ouija Boards which channel deceased Halliburton executives and are operated by meth-crazed Rhesus monkeys.

2) American Domestic Policy -- This one is easy.  400 -- that's four hundred -- Americans have more wealth than 155 million other Americans combined.  Which makes it easy for the super-rich to buy more than enough congresspeople to keep tax cuts for the rich and the industries they favor firmly in place, while the middle class vanishes like snow in a blast-furnace.  Everything else revolves around this simple axis of wealth.  Coming soon:  You'll either be rich in America, or very very poor.  Welcome to Third World Homeland.

3) The 2012 elections?  Get ready, folks, because this will be the single most stunning parade of sheer idiocy that you've seen since, um, 2008.  Gingrich, Palin, Santorum -- forget the carnival freakshow, because this is going to have it all, and then some.  And, as I said before, the real icing on the cake is the futility of the whole wretched star-studded spectacle.  It doesn't matter who wins.  The 'winner' is just a cardboard cut-out propped up on a stage for the rubes to throw things at.  The real decisions are made quietly, without any fuss, in a cherry-paneled room somewhere over snifters of brandy and five hundred dollar cigars.

See why I basically stopped even mentioning politics?

Anyway, welcome to the blog.  Drop me an email at franktuttle@franktuttle.com and say hello!

MidSouthCon 29 Approacheth!

First, a reminder -- hotel registration for MidSouthCon 29 is open until the 11th at the Con rate.  Eighty-five bucks a night for the Hilton isn't too bad, either.

This will only be my second convention.  I'm really looking forward to it -- it's fun to hang out with with my spiritual kin.  Too, I love the costumes.  And the dealer's room.  And the art show.  And the awards banquet, and the panels, and meeting various luminaries in the field.  It's a good time, and if you've never been to a SF/fantasy convention, MidSouthCon is a great first stop.

By the way, if I spot any Kindlers at the Con, I'm going to ask to take your picture (with your Kindle) and post it here on my blog.  I'm just curious about how many SF/fantasy fans are also e-book enthusiasts.

In other news, Markhat fans can expect the print version of The Banshee's Walk to hit the stands on June 7 of this year.

That's about it for now.  Time to get back to work!

Lots O Links!

If you hooked me up to a brain activity monitor right this moment, all you'd see are nice flat lines.  I don't know why, but I'm just spent.  There's not a clever thought or catchy phrase anywhere near my noggin now.

But a lack of anything significant to say has never left me silent before, and I'll be darned if I'll start now.

So -- links!

Passing the Narrows.  This is one of mine.  If you've got a Kindle e-reader or you have the Kindle app on your phone or other device, you can grab this for less than a buck.  It's a quick read, about a crew of desperate Confederate war vets taking their steamboat down a haunted stretch of the Yazoo River.  It first appeared in Weird Tales a few years back, and it's always been one of my favorites.  Guess who the character Swain is based on!

World War Z.  Yeah, this is zombie fiction -- but hang on a minute.  That's just the backdrop.  The book is nothing short of brilliant, in both its depiction of a world mauled nearly to death and the tiny acts of heroism and sacrifice that always go largely unnoticed in any massive catastrophe.  Read it, and I promise you'll never hear wind in the trees at night quite then same way ever again.

Living Ghosts.  This is music; specifically, the Amazon MP3 album by band Absinthe Junk.  If you want the iTunes version, well, search iTunes for Absinthe Junk -- if there's a way to link to an album in the iTunes store it's unknown to me.  But it's worth the effort!  Junk is sort of the angry love child of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin.

The Black Company.  This is an old-fashioned paper book.  It's fantasy, but unlike any fantasy you're likely to have read before.  Gritty, unflinching, brutally honest -- this is war in the trenches.  Not for the faint of heart.

Fark.  We're painfully aware that the world is a chaotic, dangerous place ruled only by the laws of Whim and Caprice.  Fark is a weird news website that collects the freakish best and random worst of Planet Earth and lays it all out in a neat column for your perusal.  With snarky one-line descriptions, and a weekly Friday game of 'Match the Mugshots With the Crimes.'  If you don't Fark, you should...

Regretsy.  You've probably never heard of a website called 'Etsy.'  I hadn't.  Etsy dot com is a marketplace for hand-made items of all sorts.  Think about that for a moment.  Yeah.  Exactly.  Etsy may have started out as a showplace for folk art, but wide swaths of it quickly devolved into a hilarious free-for-all of hilariously mis-shapen pieces of 'found art' which appear to have not been crafted by hand but rather with foot.  I know, I know, it's not nice to mock the clumsy and the inept, but man is it fun.


Enjoy!

Signed and Away

Just signed the contract for The Bonnie Bell! 


Which makes the sale officially official.  Stamped and sealed, even.  I'd have sealed the envelope with a big red glob of hot wax, but things are done electronically these days and it's impossible to scrape all the wax off the monitor.

So that makes six entries in the Markhat series, with another already in progress.  I'm happy about that.  Happy and a little frightened, because we all know what happens to most series after a few books.

Seriously.  Take Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake books, for instance.  The first three were great.  But something happened after that, and I've not been able to follow the later books.  I'm not knocking Ms Hamilton; but for me, the series evolved into something I don't care for.

It doesn't happen with every series, of course.  Rex Stout managed seventy-odd Nero Wolfe books without a single fatal mis-step.  Jim Butcher's wizard-for-hire tales are bumping along as good as ever.  Kim Harrison and her Hollows books haven't jumped the shark.

Still, I worry.  But until I start getting rejections instead of contracts, I'll just stay the course and trust that Markhat and the gang know what they're doing.

Too, I have another project in the works.  A secret project, one that has absolutely nothing to do with finders or haunts or Trolls.  I think people will be surprised -- nay, amazed.

But that's a story for another time.  Right now I need to finish proofing the print galleys for The Banshee's Walk.  That involves reading the whole thing yet again, character by character and word by word, looking for any remaining hidden typos or sneaky format errors.

I live a life of glamor and excitement, I do!  Look -- is that a dangling participle, on which light yonder breaks?

The Lazy Man's Lament

The flu is gone.  It's time to get back to work.

I only wish my brain worked that way.  You see, being sick completely wrecked my self-imposed work regimen.  I didn't write; I couldn't.

What I could do is lie there and watch junk TV while all those fissures in my brain smoothed themselves out.  I had a solid week of nothing but the worst of the worst -- COPS.  Las Vegas Jailhouse.  Operation Repo.  Even, heaven help me, World's Dumbest.

And I loved it.  I loved every glorious empty moment of it.  I didn't have to create, or critique, or even consider.  All I had to do was watch.  Slime mold should learn to me as passive as I.  I was flatlined.  Coroners gathered at my door.  Undertakers made measurements.  Crows stood on one foot, ready to snatch up a tender eyeball at an instant's notice.

That is my natural state.  Mouth slightly open.  TV flashing.  Eyes blank and staring.  Nominal heartbeat and respiration, just enough to keep the TV remote in play.

Top of the food chain, Ma!

But now that my traitor body has fought off the invaders, I can no longer claim fever and fatigue keep me from the keyboard.  So here I am, fingers poised, ready to create Deathless Prose and Salable Manuscript.

I get as far as 'The' before some little voice whispers 'Hey, isn't 30 Rock on about now?'

It's a long slog back to productivity.

But here goes...

How Not to Survive the Flu

If you've been wondering where I've been, well, that shaking, coughing mound of what appears to be dirty laundry, over in the corner, covered under used tissues and empty bottles of Vicks NyQuil?

That's me.

I'd back up a bit if I were you.  That's better.

What felt like the onset of a mild cold last Monday evening was bone-aching, muscle-spasming flu by Tuesday morning.  I haven't been really sick in quite a while, but I'm making up for lost time.

I don't know what strain of flu this is, or what 4-letter acronym it goes by.  I'd suggest PAIN or HURT.  It starts with a few innocent seeming sneezes and then your brains are leaking out your nose and that cracking sound you hear when you cough is your sternum finally cracking.

Then it gets really bad.

The doctor put me on Tamiflu, which certainly put the flu in a bad mood.  My own efforts to self-medicate have been less than successful, possibly because in my delirium I mixed up a book of old folk remedies with a Betty Crocker cookbook and wound up trying a lot of chicken-based casserole poultices.

Here are some other treatments to avoid, during the flu:

* The old adage 'drink plenty of liquids' doesn't extend to include grain alcohol or Febreeze.
* Chicken soup does give me energy, because if I see another cup of it I'm going to throw that crap outside.  And believe me just walking to the door right now takes quite a burst of energy.
* Get plenty of rest, they say.  Oh really.  Because I was thinking about going outside and chopping a couple cords of oak firewood, but if prevailing wisdom says I should lie here and shiver in a pool of my own sweat, well, okay, I'll do that then.
* Zinc is said to have therapeutic benefits during colds and flu.  You know, I could eat my entire set of zinc cookware right now, and I don't think it would do anything but dull my teeth.  Okay, I ate a ladle, just in case, and nothing happened.

I'd write more, but I have to go huddle in a corner and shake now.  Am I not supposed to be at the top of the food chain?  All this over a microscopic twist of proteins, a mere virus, a thing with fewer brains and less muscle than Charlie Sheen?

I'd shake my head in disbelief if that didn't require so much effort.

Send pudding and potable beverages.

BP Kills Gulf, Delays Payments to Residents. Cartoon Villains Everywhere Green With Envy

We haven't heard much about the Gulf of Mexico lately, and what we have heard from BP is a cheery line of 'Well, back to normal!' that is <gasp> slightly less than true.

Vast regions of the Gulf are covered in a thick layer of crude and dead animals.  See for yourself here. But because the damage isn't visible from the top, BP and their best buddy Feinberg have been accused of underestimating the damage and dragging their heels in paying Gulf residents who lost everything in the spill the money these people were promised.

Now, to make matters worse, BP is complaining that Feinberg is being too generous in his meager payouts.  And that's while BP is flooding Washington with lobbyists and paid 'scientists' who are actively working to reduce the official total volume of oil spilled -- because that number directly affects the payouts.

Read about it here.

BP is doing precisely what Exxon did in the wake of the Valdez spill.  They drag their heels, throw legions of lawyers in every direction, and bide their time, knowing their petro-pockets are deeper than any of the plaintiffs'.

It's despicable.  But that's way big business is done.

BP and all the rest will be drilling in the Gulf again, before the summer is out.  And they'll be cutting corners and taking risks and generally acting like boozed-up seventeen year olds with their first taste of whiskey and freedom.

Live and don't learn, that's us.

I'm Looking at You, Italy

Let me start by stressing that I have no strong opinion either way concerning Amanda Knox, the American exchange student who was tried and convicted in Italy of murdering another college student.

Innocent?  Guilty?  I don't know.  I didn't follow the trial and barely noticed the verdict.  My own rule for traveling abroad is this -- don't lick the taxi seats.  Also, don't engage in drug-fueled romps with strangers and knives.

Those simple rules, plus my habit of always traveling under an assumed name after receiving extensive plastic surgery to alter my appearance, has always served me well.

But now I hear that the Italian police are suing Amanda Knox's parents for libel, after they reported mistreatment of their daughter by the cops.

Oh, so convicting their daughter wasn't enough, Italian police?  Now you've got to sue the mortified parents because they dared to insinuate you might have engaged in (gasp) mild police misconduct?

That's just not cool.  You got your verdict.  Justice was presumably served.

Suing Mom and Pop because they acted like parents just smacks of petty spite.

I hope the Knoxes tell you where to shove your libel suit.  Heck, Italian police, maybe you'd like to sue me for libel.  After all, I did just call each and every one of you a doorknob-sucking hacksaw snacker.  I also hinted that it takes six of you to count to four.  Too, your language sounds like a ferret sneezing.

Come and get me.

I'm in Rome right now, at the Hotel della Minerva, under the alias 'Samsonite M. Pennyfathing, Esq.'

I dare you.

Finally -- Anonymous Versus Westboro Baptist

The world is, regrettably, filled with people I don't like.

The offenders are plenty and varied.  People who text in movies.  People who drag jam-packed shopping carts into the 20-or-less line.  People who --

Well, most people, really.

So I'm not a people person.  But even the most touchy-feely huggy-huggy pro-people people must agree that the  members of Westboro Baptist Church are indeed the most repugnant examples of a truly subhuman species of lower primate -- and I wouldn't even give the Westboro bunch that high a rating.

For those of my readers across the water, the Westboro clan is composed of a senile old preacher and his mostly-inbred congregation of knuckle-walking morons.  Now, if this bunch of genetic mistakes kept to their own ragged hovels and only intruded into the lands of men long enough to raid garbage dumps or gaze longingly at dental offices, they'd not be the target of my ire.

But instead of quietly attracting flies in some damp corner of rural Kansas, the Westboro creatures spend their time trotting from funeral to funeral, where they disrupt the proceedings by yelling in their gutteral dialect and waving badly-made signs expressing condemnation of the dead -- right in the faces of the bereaved families.

Why they do this is a question best answered by a qualified clinical pathologist who specializes in severe mental disorders.  My own explanation is much simpler, and can be expressed by the equation 'inbreeding + innate stupidity + paranoid delusions = a bunch of complete wankers.'  Yes, there is a religious element to all this, but it's so juvenile and grotesque I won't burden you with a description of it.

They're just stupid hillbillies with an equally stupid agenda.

For years, they've been more or less tolerated, since they are after all the grimy underbelly of Free Speech.  Towns have gotten clever about granting them a space for their 'protest' and then making sure a few thousand actual humans show up and occupy that space before the Westboro primates can coax their aging minivans into town.

Motorcycle gangs and riders even meet the 'protesters.'  The bikers then park in front of the toothless Westboro troglodytes and rev their bikes to drown out their hoots and bellows.

When biker gangs note your activity and proclaim it unacceptable, man, you've really crossed a line.

Well, Westoboro has apparently crossed another line.

They have, reports indicate, provoked the wrath of Anonymous.

Anonymous is the shadowy group of elite hackers who have recently laid numerous high-profile corporate bullies to rest.  VISA, Mastercard, and at least one much-praised internet security company have all fallen prey to Anonymous lately -- and none of them had first cousins for parents.

According to a letter alleged to be from Anonymous, they've had enough of Westboro, and they've issued to them a warning -- crawl back into whatever damp hole you came from, or face the wrath of Anonymous.

The Westboro bunch can be counted on for one thing -- stupidity.  So they'll do the stupid thing, and call Anonymous out.

And then -- well, I'll start popping popcorn, because this will be hilarious.

It's one thing to wave signs at funerals, Westinbred.  But if you think your tinker-toy websites and your private info will remain even remotely intact if Anonymous sets their sights on you, well, you've got another thing coming.

And in my mind, it's a thing long overdue.

Go Anonymous -- FOR THE LULZ!