Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

One question: am I really supposed to mow the lawn in February? It certainly seems to be growing. And when I took the dogs out yesterday, I was absent-mindedly brushing away a fly circling me for a full minute before I realized that a fly was circling me. That ain’t right. I’ve also just realized that my computer is operating, for some unknown reason, with a UK dictionary and wants me to spell “realized” as “realised.” I must fix this, as I have lost a big chunk of my formerly crackerjack spelling ability in recent years and thus may not notice subtle changes in the colour of my prose.

Speaking of losing my mind, right after I was diagnosed with ms a few years ago, I came across a book called something like “Cognitive Impairment in Multiple Sclerosis.” Cheery, right? Bad enough you can’t walk and can’t see half the time, but it turns out you can’t even sit quietly and think convincingly. The book had been written by a guy with ms and proved to be absolutely unreadable, which sounds like a joke, but I think it was because he was simply a horrible writer, not because he had cognitive problems. I also tried to read “Blindsided” by Mr. Meredith Vieira (Richard Cohen), who has ms and seems like a really nice guy, but I had to give up because his writing style reads like the voice-over on a network news report, bland, shallow and impersonally descriptive, which makes sense since he is/was a network news producer.

I had, back then, gone through six hours (!) of cognitive tests at OSU, the verdict of which was that I had developed some quite peculiar gaps in my mental hedgerows. I am unable, for instance, to add long columns of two-digit numbers in my mind, something I used to do routinely in my job at the Catplex. My short-term memory is dodgy, and I tend to misplace the dogs. I also tend to get turned around downtown, which is pretty scary since our town consists of a gas station, post office, one traffic light and not much else. I can never remember which way the high school is. Thank heavens I don’t go to high school.

Sunday in the Park with Treacle.

All of which brings us, inevitably, to Downton Abbey (not to be confused with Downtown Abby, who hangs out in the high school parking lot on weekends). I swear to god that if there were anything else on TV I would never watch this show. But Storage Wars and Shipping Wars and Hoarders have all started to blend together quite disturbingly in my dreams, so we tivo Downton and watch it in small chunks during the week. I think we’re about two weeks behind at this point. I don’t want to flog this thing too badly, because the only alternative is Dog the Bounty Hunter, but someone in the Guardian the other day called it “the Epcot Center version” of England, and that seems about right. In a bit of classic Disneyesque all-your-tie-ins-are-belong-to-us behavior, PBS apparently tried to open a tawdry online gift shop (“Lady Mary knotted pearl necklace and earring set”) on the coattails of the show without permission of the producers and got itself smartly slapped down.

The New York Times runs about one article per week about the show, the most cringe-worthy being one on the rage for Downton-themed viewing parties among the Manhattan elite. (Small world, indeed. I went back to look at that article and noticed that the accompanying photo features John-John ex-squeeze Christina Haag, with whom I worked many years ago.) Now that the huffy Brits have put the kibosh on cheesy Downton swag, I’m sure there are already clandestine tiara-parties on the Upper East Side where far pricier baubles are traded like Tupperware in Des Moines. It’s nice to know the 1% haven’t lost their childlike taste for dress-up, isn’t it?

So, anyway, a biggie in the ms cognitive whammy department is emotional lability, which means that your emotional reactions to small things tend to be hugely out of proportion. Some people, for instance, foam at the mouth and throw things when it rains. I, on the other hand, weep at stupid things on TV. It’s totally involuntary, and the weird thing is that I often don’t feel especially sad, happy, melancholy or even mildly moved when it happens. But if there’s a kid giving his mom a handmade card in an insurance commercial, I start blubbering. It’s mortifying. And infuriating.

And it’s especially infuriating when I watch Downton Abbey, because the show is shamelessly wrenching your amygdala at every possible opportunity with soaring strings and portentous little speeches embedded in a plot so cornball and dialogue so stilted that the part of my brain that still has some standards is begging me to change the channel to My Name is Earl. But no, there I sit, sniveling over some improbable subplot involving implausible characters whose names I can’t remember from week to week. It makes me want to foam at the mouth and throw things.

Onward. In addition to the TWD Facebook page, we now have a TWD Google Plus page, which can be reached by clicking on that big red thing in the right column. Bonus points for anyone who can tell me what G+ is for. It seems to be a cross between Usenet and Twitter.

As always, we depend on the kindness of readers for our kibble, so please consider subscribing. Think of it as a tiara for your mind.

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Well, this is it, kids. 2012, the mother lode and epicenter of ominous predictions. Just remember, whatever else may happen, that there’s gonna be a lot of space to fill on the lesser cable channels come a year from now, so get your ideas into development asap.

Am I the only person around here who is having real trouble typing the numerals 2012? I know what year it is (most of the time, anyway), but my muscle memory has apparently had a mini-meltdown.

So, this just in: I’ve always been a bit of a news junkie, hardwired into cable news and the internet, but watching one popular uprising after another around the world produce nothing but a new roster of corrupt autocratic stooges (on top of our somewhat more sedate domestic iteration of the same dreary process) has finally, at least temporarily, burned out my political synapses. So I’ve decided to throw in the towel for a while and submerge myself in the soothing balm of the collected works of PG Wodehouse, which I first read many years ago but now seem even funnier. So for the next few weeks months years I plan to use Jeeves’ soothing purr to drown out the barking of the crowd  outside.

Meanwhile, for those of you who persist in paying attention, I suggest you take a gander at All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, a three-part documentary made by the remarkable Adam Curtis for the BBC in 2010. It is available, along with many of his other films, at the Internet Archive. Fascinating stuff. It explains the connections between, among other things, Ayn Rand, communes of the 60s, systems theory, the “balance of nature” and the rise of computers.

Speaking of Skynet, I seem to have acquired a NOOK Simple Touch e-reader just in time to watch Barnes & Noble implode completely. Well, it was both cheaper and snappier than the equivalent Kindle, and, unlike the Kindle, lets me add my own books in the widely-used epub format, so if B&N really does buy the farm it won’t be just a paperweight. The rationale for the acquisition (it was a Christmas gift) is that my left hand is largely dysfunctional because of the ms (and my right hand isn’t what it was either). This makes it impossible to handle a large book, especially a hardback. So now I have this little thing, just a bit bigger than a mass-market paperback, on which I am painlessly reading Haruki Murakami’s 944 page 1Q84, which weighs in at about three pounds in hardback, well beyond my comfort zone (I can’t even hold a coffee cup in my left hand). I wish the screen were a bit brighter, but I like the fact that it can’t do anything but show you a book. I actually find reading on this thing very natural, and the fact that I can make the type as large as I like takes away all the stress of trying to focus my eyes on a printed page. I still prefer paper, however, and hope real books are around for a long, long time.

Incidentally, I stopped by the local B&N the other day to buy a simple case for my Nook, and I was taken aback by the palpable desperation of the woman who showed me my choices. She strongly urged me to bring the little fellow in for a visit, perhaps take a class in Advanced Nookery (for a machine that comes with a three-page instruction manual?), buy some Nook bling, or just hang out in the Cafe, guzzling expensive bad coffee while reading ebooks for free. Wow. It was like those old Maytag commercials with Jesse White as the lonely repair guy.

It’s really too bad that I can’t publish The Word Detective on the Nook, but you can subscribe to The Word Detective for Kindle via that link or the link over there in the left column. Amazon was supposedly selling ten zillion Kindles per hour last month, so you should probably hop to it before they run out of electrons. Apparently you folks who bought a Kindle Fire (Brilliant name, doncha think? Kindle… Fire… get it?) are out of luck, as that particular gizmo demands a different format of website, or something. But it works with all the other, non-bloated-and-slow Kindii. My cut of your subscription, and I mention this only because I know you’re dying to know, amounts to exactly the cost of one-half can of Fancy Feast.

Come to think of it, any Nook or Kindle with even a rudimentary web browser can read this site.

———————–

We interrupt this digression for an important announcement: The Word Detective website depends on your support to pay the bills. If you find this little circus helpful, interesting, amusing and/or worthwhile, please subscribe or contribute to our survival. Fifteen bucks per year is only four pennies a day, but it makes a huge difference at this end. It’s like magic. Here’s your chance to be a magician.

———————-

Yes, well, there’s that. Thanks to all the folks who have contributed to our upkeep recently, and for the rest of youse, please consider tossing a farthing in the cap. As the poet said, “Four wee pennies a day keeps the worry-weebles at bay.” Or something. I think he drank.

And now, on with the show….

... and your little dog, too.

readme:

Oh, ye of little faith. I promised that there would be a proper December Issue before month’s end, and here we are.

I carried over the modified meme-version of our logo graphic this month. Oddly enough, I made that graphic before I saw the Wizard of Oz one, though I definitely had that caption in mind.

My absolute favorite of the breed, however, is the Magritte treatment below. My first thought on seeing that was “Gee, that would make a great shower curtain.”

Speaking of little dogs, our pal Pokey, the little yellow doggie that wandered in about twelve years ago, is showing her age. She appears to be almost entirely deaf, mostly blind, and somewhat demented to boot, though Pokey was never the brightest bulb on the porch even on a good day. The good news is that she remains indefatigably cheerful; when she detects that you are putting food in her bowl, she bounces into the air, all four feet off the floor, tail wagging as madly as it did the first day she was here.

Unfortunately, Pokey’s vision, or lack thereof, is a problem because she follows me all over the house. She always has, probably because she was dumped in the woods to starve and is understandably insecure even after all these years. The first few weeks she was here, in fact, she slept on a futon in my office and I had to sit with her and tell her bedtime stories every night so she’d settle down and sleep. Well, I probably didn’t really have to, but I did. Anyway, she can climb stairs just fine, and so she does while I work in my office on the second floor every day. But she’s very reluctant to descend the stairs, as she really must at least a few times a day.

So I have to help Pokey downstairs, a process that involves coaxing her to the head of the steps, then gently grasping her collar and supporting her just enough to encourage her, but not so much as to make her panic and start thrashing around. Meanwhile, I have my own problems going downstairs, so I have to grip the banister with my other hand and try not to lose my balance. I’m starting to think a winch and a basket might be a better idea. The scary part is when we approach the bottom of the stairs and Pokey decides, every so often, that she’s sick of the whole laborious process and might as well jump. From the fourth step up. With me attached. I ought to sell tickets.

Pokey occupying the orchard.

But eventually we both make it to the first floor and, as I breathe a well-earned sigh of relief, Pokey runs into the dining room and, literally deaf to my entreaties, pees on the rug. Oh well. Pokey is a lucky dog. We promised her when she came here that we would always take care of her, a vow which, over the years, has approached the cost of a decent used car. But Pokey is more fun.

Speaking of money and gratitude, as is usual at this time of year, thanks, as always, to those kind souls who keep the Good Ship TWD afloat with contributions and subscriptions. Since it is late in the month (nudge, nudge), I must point out that subscriptions make awesome holiday gifts for that person who somehow slipped your mind or just happens to need a little extra something this year. And since every subscription comes with access to our archive of columns which haven’t yet been posted free on the web, it’s like getting an 18-month sub for the price of a one-year sub. You’ll also be contributing to the upkeep of our menagerie of animals who have wandered in here over the years, like Pokey, looking for a safe home.

And now, on with the show….

... and your little dog, too.

readme:

All right, already, this isn’t November. November was a bad month anyway. Bad enough that I forgot to put the requisite snarky taglines at the head of each column, and I didn’t notice until a half-hour after I posted these. Too late now. Anyway, there will be a December Issue coming down the pike in two shakes of a lamb’s tail. Honest.

Moving right along, I do not, believe it or not, own any sort of tablet computer or smart phone (crowd gasps, screams, begins stampede to exit).

But I happen to know (Thanks, Google Analytics! Bestest massive privacy violation ever!) that many of you read TWD on on your cell phones, tablets, microwave ovens or mood crystals (I know you’re out there). I also know because you’ve taken to writing me to say how cruddy TWD looks on your phone. So, stepping briskly past how bizarre I find that last sentence, I went looking for an “app” I could offer you folk who evidently cannot afford a real computer, and discovered that cooking one up would either require a lot of money I most certainly do not have (and would send to the gas company if I did), or would take forever to figure out on my own. Drat. Double drat with extra cheese.

But since I can’t sleep knowing that even one reader is suffering eyestrain trying to read my deathless prose on one of Steve Jobs’ tiny cash machines, I searched around until I found a temporary (just kidding, it’s probably permanent) solution in the form of a WordPress plugin that produces a “mobile” version of this site. It’s supposed to automatically detect most flavors of mobile device, but if it doesn’t, you can click the links at the foot of any page on this site. And if you find yourself trapped in cramped mobile hell and wish you were here in the bright, open air, there’s a link at the bottom of that mobile page that will bring you to the regular version. The search box is also at the bottom of the page, although there is a mysterious and pointless “search results” menu item at the top. I know what glitch put it there, but I can’t get rid of it.

Anyone up for a consumer tip? A few years ago we had to buy a new furnace on account of the fact that the old one dated back to WWI and broke every few months. I also needed AC because the MS makes me sensitive to high temperatures (“sensitive” in this case means my vision dims and I fall over). So we scraped together money and bought a high-efficiency furnace. End of Act One. In Act Two, we notice that the furnace, when it’s cold out, keeps coming on for a few minutes, going off, and then starting again about 30 seconds later. That ain’t good. So, long story short, Kathy Googles around for a few days (literally) and discovers that tons of people are complaining of the same thing. And they’ve had their furnaces serviced multiple times, but the problem persists. If it persists long enough, it turns out, your furnace burns itself out and you get to buy a new one. Bummer.

But then she finds a page put up by a furnace repair place that provides an intriguing clue to the problem. In many cases, the culprit is not the furnace per se, but the filter. People buy an expensive  new furnace and figure that they should spring for the fancy-schmanzy high-priced filters that remove micro-micron dust and last for several months to boot. This turns out to be a bad idea because the furnace has to work harder to force the air through, overheats, shuts itself down, and starts again after it cools down a smidgen. What you want to do, they say, is buy the cheapest, flimsiest filter you can find. And so we did, and the furnace works way better now, never does that on-off thing, and keeps the house much warmer, too. Who knew?

Lastly, thanks to all the folks who have supported this site through contributions and subscriptions. Subscriptions, by the way, make lovely gifts, and also feed the vast, lumbering herds of cats around here, so one subscription actually makes two people happy, though in most cases only one of them is covered in fur.

And now, on with the show…

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

So I turned on the local news the other night to see when it would stop raining. I wasn’t really paying close attention; I actually had my back to the TV and was writing something. After a few minutes, however, it percolated into my frontal cortex that the people on the tee-vee were very excited about something, so I turned around and noticed that emblazoned across the screen in flashing orange was FEROCIOUS WILD ANIMALS ON THE LOOSE — RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! or words to that effect. Turns out that some … jerk, to put it mildly … had been keeping fifty or so lions, tigers, mountain lions, cheetahs, wolves, grizzly bears, black bears and monkeys, plus a giraffe, in tiny cages on his “wildlife preserve” west of Zanesville. And now, for whatever reason, he had chosen a dark, rainy evening to turn them all loose and then shoot himself. You saw all this as the top story on CNN, the BBC, et al., I’m sure.

The particular problem for us at that moment was that the “preserve” was just about 25 miles due east of us. That sounds like a long way away, but it’s all open, mostly flat country around here, and the authorities seemed a bit unclear as to exactly how long these animals had been loose — at least five or six hours at that point. Still, it seemed unlikely that they would make it this far, or it did until the news helpfully reported that there had been credible sightings in southern Licking County, about seven miles away.

So it’s a dark and stormy night, and we’re sitting in the proverbial isolated farmhouse, with lots of big windows and flimsy doors, surrounded by cornfields and our own woods backing up on a few hundred more acres of cornfields. I have already learned to be careful when I take the dogs out at night because the coyotes around here are numerous and aggressive. And there have been consistent and credible reports in recent years of large cats, probably escapees from just such private zoos, being spotted (and in one case photographed) in our area.

And now we apparently had a wave of ticked-off tigers, grizzlies and lions headed our way. What I wanted at that moment was a bunch of floodlights and an AK-47. What we had were two arthritic dogs, both largely deaf, and a whole lot of useless but no doubt tasty cats. Around 2 am it occurred to me that for any large and hungry carnivore downwind of us, our house would smell like a big box of food. And these critters were accustomed to being around (and fed by) people, so the natural shyness that keeps coyotes (mostly) at bay would be, as HR Haldeman would say, inoperable.

After a nearly sleepless night, we awoke to learn that almost all the animals, sadly, had been shot by law enforcement agents. Under the circumstances there really was no other choice, but the pictures of dead lions and tigers were heartbreaking. Ohio really needs to make private ownership of such animals illegal for the sake of everyone, especially the animals.

Onward. I realized the other day that this month marks the five-year anniversary of my diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. Part of the diagnostic process (apart from MRIs and lumbar punctures and other fun stuff) involves trying to remember any earlier, undiagnosed symptoms, and I realized that I had actually been having the symptoms of relapsing-remitting ms since about 1990; difficulty walking, pain in my eyes and blurred vision, etc. I had gone to various doctors over the years and no one ever suggested ms, even though the symptoms I was reporting were absolutely classic. And as late as early 2006, when I went to see one of the “best neurologists in Columbus” (according to Columbus Monthly) because I couldn’t feel or lift my left leg at all and was periodically partially blind, he told me it must have been due to sleep deprivation.

So by the time I finally figured out what was going on, they classified me as having “primary progressive ms,” which is not treatable by drugs and just gets steadily worse, which it has. But I’m still walking, albeit usually with a cane, and writing these columns, albeit much more slowly than I used to. The problem is that I now have trouble just keeping up with this column, so outside projects, on which I have always depended for income, have become impossible. Just in the past year I have had to beg off participating in two TV productions because of this stupid disease.

I have been lucky enough to have readers who have contributed to our survival by subscribing to TWD-by-email. So if you can possibly swing $15 for a year’s subscription, I’d be much obliged.

Update: Our only vehicle is a 1997 Toyota (which we bought used). We recently took it in for an oil change and to get some funny noises checked out, and discovered that the power steering was kaput, some gaskets in the engine were leaking pots of oil, the parking brake was frozen and non-functional, and the timing and other belts were shot. Gee, I guess something in that list explains the burning smell. Anyway, this news precipitated a mad and mortifying scramble to borrow enough money to fix all these things, and ended up eating up a large chunk of our tiny reserves. So your support (i.e., by subscribing) would be deeply appreciated.

And now, on with the show….

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

So True Blood has wrapped up for the season by killing off a few dozen characters. Couple of nameless vampire zombies in the Moon Goddess Emporium, Nan Flanigan (too bad), Lafayette’s boyfriend Jesus (really too bad), that werewolf guy with the bad hair (Marcus), Marnie for the second time, Debbie van Pelt (the only remotely normal person on the show, even though she was a werewolf) and then, big finish, Tara with a shotgun blast to the head. Whoa. Is Tara really dead? I bet not. You know who is dead? That guy who showed up to visit Terry. Nobody else seems to have picked up on that. But Russell Edgington, the Vampire King of Mississippi, is apparently coming back next year, so things are looking up. Russell Edgington is awesome. Incidentally, the annoying witch-groupie hippie guy gorily offed by Eric the first time they killed Marnie is now appearing in a MasterCard commercial playing a suburban dad with a kid in a shopping cart. Weird casting choice, given the popularity of True Blood.

Incidentally, speaking of commercials, our son (Michael Mercurio) appeared in a Tide Stain Stick commercial a few years ago. (He’s the soldier standing immediately stage left of the guy the drill sergeant is yelling at.) They recently started running it again, for which he gets paid again, which is cool. This commercial shows up on a lot of “my favorite commercial” lists, so they may be running it off and on for years.

Onward. So Borders Bookstores has bought the farm. It’s always sad to see bookstores close, but I was never a big fan of their aesthetic, a sort of crypto-hip we’re-not-really-a huge-corporation Whole-Foods-of-Books shtick. Not a Whole Foods fan here, by the way. It reminds me too much of food coops.

I have hated food coops since circa 1969. C’mon, I just wanna buy some bananas and go read a book, OK? I don’t want to go to a meeting, especially not with a bunch of weedy, whiny control freaks.

Elsewhere in the book biz, Barnes & Noble seems to be on the verge of being sold, or something, although most of the people interested in buying it are apparently just trying to get their grubby paws on the Nook. There have even been rumors that Apple is going to buy B&N, kill the Nook, and convert the stores into Apple Stores, or maybe Apple Book Stores. I think Apple should buy Amazon too, and shoot that godawful Kindle. Then run the B&N stores off the Amazon back-end.

When we lived on the Upper West Side, we referred sardonically to the giant B&N at 82nd Street and Broadway as “The Great Satan.” (After all, they did drive Meg Ryan’s little bookshop out of business, right? BTW, the store You’ve Got Mail used as the set for her shop actually sold, as I recall, over-priced pastries and insanely over-priced antiques.)

But in real life, Shakespeare & Company, a block south on B’way, was driven out of business by that evil B&N (although they retained branches in the Village and on the East Side, which is a funny way to be driven out of business). And Endicott Books across Columbus Avenue from us croaked when B&N moved into the neighborhood, but that’s because Endicott hired snotty idiots (favorite actual clerk quote: “Dylan Thomas biography? Have you looked in the music section?”) and shared a name with a chain of cheesy shoe stores. I liked Coliseum Books off Columbus Circle, but my absolute fave was The Strand. Nice to see they’re still around.

Still, a B&N is better than no bookstore at all, and I’d be very upset if the chain folded. The closest B&N to us is in Pickerington and pretty near worthless unless you’re jonesing for a blueberry scone. Books, not so much, since the shelves are stuffed with “inspirational” drivel, home schooling supplies, and the vomitous voluminous wit and wisdom of Glenn Beck. The staff is mostly harmless, but there a couple of remarkably nasty jerks working there. The store at Easton on the east side of Columbus is better, but that’s a 60-mile round trip, which is a long way to go for a third-rate bookstore. But again, any B&N is better than no bookstore.

Um, what else. Oh yeah, please subscribe.

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

OK, enough already. We get it. Suffocating heat and humidity. Constant rain. Giant mutant bugs. Tropical-sounding birds and absurdly dense vegetation that grows a foot a week. Yellow-gray air that smells like sulfur and burns your throat. Lightning flickering on the horizon at 2 am. The lights dim ominously. Don’t look now, but I think somebody broke the planet.

On the bright side, great thanks to the anonymous reader who sent me a recertified IBM/Lenovo T60 ThinkPad from Woot. Apparently Lenovo released these packages to a number of outlets; Woot sold out quickly (which is the whole point of Woot), as did Newegg, but Newegg now has them back in stock for about $225. The consensus seems to be that it’s a great deal. I love this computer.

A thing of beauty.

Back in 2006-7, the T60 was the top of the Thinkpad line, selling for $2500-$2800 new. These things are built like tanks, extremely solid and close to indestructible, sporting a magnesium roll cage protecting the innards. This particular model comes with a smallish hard drive (60 gigs) and not really enough memory (1 gig), but more memory can be had for ~$25 for 2 gigs and the HD is easily swapped out if you really need more room. It comes with Windows XP, but I cured that with Linux. It runs like a top and has a dual-core Intel processor, which makes it snapper than my desktop, which is coming up on its tenth birthday.

Interestingly, it also comes with an IBM docking station, which is very, very cool. (The docking station alone goes for $209 on Amazon.) When the computer is in the dock, you have both VGA and DVI monitor connectors, serial and parallel ports, digital sound output and all sorts of other neat things. But what I really love about the dock is that it solidly holds the computer at a slight tilt, the perfect angle for typing. It’s actually reminiscent of using a portable typewriter. Combined with the legendary ThinkPad keyboard, this is a really great machine for writing. The screen resolution is 1024 x 768, again a bit outdated, but also perfectly suited for writing. It also has a built-in 56k modem for when civilization collapses next year and a tiny little keyboard light atop the screen for when the grid goes down. And, for some strange reason, a fingerprint reader. And Bluetooth.

By the way, if you’ve never used a ThinkPad keyboard, you really don’t know how good a laptop keyboard can be. I cannot believe folks seriously use those ghastly MacBook keyboards all day. They’re like tapping on glass. ThinkPad keyboards make you want to type. (I must really like them; I use an IBM UltraNav keyboard, essentially a standalone ThinkPad keyboard, with my desktop computer.)

Oh yeah, before I forget: at the foot of each entry here you’ll see a teeny-tiny Google +1 button you can click if you have a Google account of some kind. It’s the equivalent of a Facebook “like” button but more immediately useful to me, because the number of “+1′s” a post gets shows up in the Google search rankings, and about 70% of my traffic comes from people searching for a word or phrase on Google. So, if you are so inclined….

What else. Falling Skies is over until next summer, if there still is TV next summer. I’m gonna miss it. Yeah, it’s seriously silly in many ways (e.g., How come the aliens don’t seem to have heard of aerial reconnaissance?), but it’s good, goofy fun. Still, this business of shows being off for a year (or longer, in the case of HBO) drives me a little nuts. I guess it’s back to Pawn Stars and Law & Order (Original Recipe) reruns at lunchtime for me.

Speaking of TV, you may know this already, but if you ever watch any of the HGTV “House Hunters” shows (House Hunters, House Hunters International, House Hunters and the Mold Pit of Doom, etc.), I have bad news. They are totally bogus. The premise of the shows is that the “house hunters” look at (and consider) three homes, apartments, whatever, agonize a bit, and then buy one. Except that they’ve already bought it, live there, and have moved their stuff out temporarily so they can “consider” buying it again. Apparently the shows have been sufficiently popular that word has spread from the neighbors of some of the supposed “hunters.” It’s one thing to script a reality show (Quelle surprise!), but when the whole premise is horse-hockey, you wonder why you’re bothering to watch it at all. Of course, around here we’ve quickly adapted to the news and now spend the show making fun of the hunters’ taste and trying to guess which house they already own.

Onward. We’ve done some number crunching with a hammer I borrowed from a neighbor, and it certainly looks like we’re flat broke here at Word Detective World Headquarters. In fact, unless the market for cat-fur lap robes bounces back big time, we’re looking at candlelight and kibble in the near future. So it would be totally awesome if some of youse guys would subscribe. We have a variety of attractive plans, from simple $15/yr subs to the $5/month Sustainer Subscription, but whatever you can afford would be an enormous help.

And now, on with the show…

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Stop the presses! After mulling over my savage pan of All Things Bright and Sweaty last month, I finally thought of something nice to say about summer.

This was not easy. As I write this, the Heat Index is 110 degrees and I’m not allowed to play outside. OK with me. As I’ve mentioned, due to my ms, above about 75 my legs stop working, my vision blurs, and I fall over sideways. So I don’t go outside much, but it’s no great loss. There’s nothing out there but biting flies and snakes and gray, soupy air. It’s like Jurassic Farm, especially at night. It also smells foul, partly from the paper mill ten miles southwest of us, partly from Toxco two miles down the road (I am not making that name up), and partly because the fields surrounding us have been repeatedly doused with herbicides and pesticides for the past month. Thanks, Farmer Bob.

It’s gotten to the point where I’m dreaming about the heat, like in that old Twilight Zone episode. Every so often it rains in small, exceedingly strange and violent thunderstorms. Yesterday we lost power for about four hours, but we bailed out after two and drove to Bob Evans. They were close to closing, so they put three sandwiches worth of chicken salad on mine, and the french fries were actually hot. High point of the week.

Incidentally, the columns in this issue were sent to subscribers back in January, so if you’re feeling faint from the heat you might try printing them out and holding them against the back of your neck. And don’t forget that the mere act of subscribing will make you feel better.

Speaking of dreams, we finally watched last year’s Inception on the DVR. Well, at least it wasn’t Avatar. I found it a bit frustrating, because the first half of the movie sets up some interesting ideas and subplots, which seem like they’re going to be developed in the second half. And they are, sort of. But first the whole thing turns into a standard Hollywood heist film (Assemble the team! Preferably by flying all over the world! Because nobody has cell phones!). And then it turns into Mission Impossible 10 with way too many pointless gunfights and car chases, and the interesting ideas, along with the main plot line, sort of melt into a half-hearted puddle. But at least it wasn’t Avatar. Avatar was genuine torture.

Before I forget again, please send me your questions. I need questions! Lots of questions! The more detailed the better, but just a bit about what you think about the term, where you heard it, etc., would help. As an inducement, if I pick your question as the basis for a column, you’ll automatically receive a free one-year subscription to TWD-by-Email. Or not. Your choice. Anyway, bring out your questions!

Thanks to the person who sent me a Google+ invite. They seem to be doing things quite a bit better than Facebook does, especially regarding privacy. The “circles” thing is a definite improvement over undifferentiated “friends.”

Oh, right, I was saying something nice about summer. Ready? No school buses.

Here’s the thing. We live on a typical rural Midwestern road, a two-lane blacktop (really 1-1/2 lanes) with no shoulder, and scary-deep drainage ditches on both sides awaiting the unwary. “Town” (gas station, post office, hardware store, tiny drugstore, dive bar and several not-good pizza shops) is about three miles down the road. So when you have to go there, you drive between immense fields of corn or soybeans (they alternate crops every year) until you reach the first problem, which is a sharp curve at the corner of one of the larger fields. If the crop is soybeans, no problemo; you can see what’s coming from the other direction. If it’s corn, you’re screwed; you’d think that cars coming into a tight blind curve would slow down and stick to their own side, but you’d be wrong. We’ve had several close calls at that curve with morons going way too fast in the wrong lane. The speed limit for most of this road is 45 mph, which is nuts, and many people try to take this curve at 35-45. A substantial percentage fail, as evidenced by the permanent deep wheel ruts at its apex leading to the newest telephone pole on the road. It’s always the newest pole on the road.

If you survive that curve, you drive another half-mile until you reach the woods, where things get really interesting. The road rises and then dips sharply, and at the bottom of the hill it takes a 90-degree twist to the left as it rises steeply into the woods. It’s exactly the sort of gut-wrenching dive and twist you find on roller coasters.

Bon Voyage, Bucko

If, perchance, you should miss the turn through inattention, you’ll quickly find yourself airborne above a 30-foot drop into the old Ohio & Erie Canal with only some sparse and scraggly trees to break your fall. Yes, people have done this. No, there is no guard rail, but there is a nice series of little yellow signs pointing to the left, all of which have been hit at least once.

The speed limit here is 25 mph, but you’d be insane to take it at more than about ten. And again, the real problem here is the imbeciles who come shooting into that curve doing 45 mph and wind up going sideways in your lane. Let’s just say that it’s drivers like that who make it profitable for our tiny county to have not one, but two full-time medical evacuation helicopters based here.

Anyway, if you survive that bit of fun, you’ve got a straight shot to town through the woods, albeit with the canal cut on one side and a similar drop to the fields on the other. (The road alongside the canal is actually built on the mounds of earth they removed while digging the canal back in the 19th century. This bit is the deepest cut they had to make in the entire length of the canal.)

Then there’s one last blind hump and plunge, and you’re in town. Whee! For extra fun, be sure to try this ride in the winter when the road is covered in ice.

So the real problem with this road is the other drivers, many of whom are our neighbors, many of whose driving skills lack … finesse. I mean c’mon, you live on this road — why would you take that curve on the wrong side? Can’t you envision the possibility that it might be your own kid coming the other way?

But in the local pantheon of stupid and scary, nobody can come close to the school bus drivers. We have complained, our neighbors have complained, the parents of the terrified children who ride the bus have complained, year after year. But twice every weekday afternoon during the school year, the Big Yellow Horror comes roaring around those curves completely on the wrong side of the road going way, way too fast, like something out of a Stephen King story. All you can do, if you’re driving this stretch right after school gets out, is to stop well before you get to the woods and peer through the foliage, looking for a glimpse of yellow. Or you just wait until 4 pm, after which the coast is clear. Too bad the post office closes at four, huh?

So no school, no school bus, hooray for summer. End of rant.

Maybe I’ll go hang out at the post office. Their air-conditioning is absolutely polar.

Lastly, please subscribe.

And now, on with the show….

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Hey, it’s still June out here in the boonies. We get our seasons on dialup. But I’m not gonna miss this month when it’s gone.

Would it be unpatriotic to say that I hate summer? This is, after all, the United States of Beach Party and Backyard Barbecue, right? But I do, and I always have. I grew up on the shore of Long Island Sound (my parents had left me in the care of some seagulls), but I actively hated the whole sitting-on-the-beach thing. I liked sailing, and I really liked going down to Tod’s Point in the winter, but the beach? Meh. I do miss the ocean, though.

Anyway, it has rained almost constantly for the past month, and this place is beginning to look decidedly tropical. Trees that were on their last legs have blossomed into spectacular health. The grass grows inches every day. The thistles proliferate, as do the mosquitoes. You can’t turn around without encountering a snake, and last week I saw the biggest spider I’ve ever seen, right there on the front porch. Seriously, this thing was the size of a teacup, a genuine nightmare, and it wasn’t afraid of anybody. I more than made up for that deficit by nearly having a heart attack on the spot and nightmares for days afterward. When your house is as porous as ours is, the distinction between “outside” and “inside” is largely statistical, and there’s no reason that thing couldn’t find its way inside if it chose to.

I have decided that I would very much like to live in a high-rise apartment with central air and wall-to-wall carpeting, a shower that works, windows and doors that fit, no flooded basement, no bugs, no blackouts, no tornadoes, no coyotes, no farmers spraying their crops (and us) with chemicals banned in every other advanced country, no idiot neighbors “accidentally” shooting at our house, and water you can drink right from the tap. If I ever win the Lotto, I am back in NYC so fast…. But I wanna live in NYC circa 1980, not the Disneyfied Trustifarian strip mall Manhattan has become.

Speaking of tornadoes, we had a tornado alert the other day and the county warning sirens went off. Twenty minutes after the warning had been issued by the NWS, ten minutes after the storm had passed just south of us. This is all too typical around here.

What else? I finally got around to watching the final episode of the first (and last) season of The Event, which NBC canceled to make room for more cowflop reality shows. The Event producers apparently didn’t know they were about to be axed, because the show ended with a really fine cliffhanger, one good enough to make me very angry that it will never be continued and resolved. I didn’t mind when Carnivale and the ludicrous Invasion dribbled out a few years ago because they had already lost steam and any reason to continue, but I really liked The Event. The Event had actual ideas.

Oh well. I’ve been watching TNT’s Falling Skies, but the jury’s still out. Parts are interesting, but there are way too many cute kids to be healthy. The Executive Producer of Skies is, of course, Steven Spielberg, who also produced the recent Super 8, a fawning homage to the oeuvre of, wait for it, Steven Spielberg. I didn’t like Super 8 while I was watching it, and over the next few days I came to absolutely hate it. Apart from the fact that big hunks of it made no sense, it seemed like little more than a plodding, checklist concatenation of ET, The Goonies, and Close Encounters, three treacly American classics that I’d vote to deep-six for eternity. Dude shoulda stopped with Jaws.

Oh well, here comes July. I’d be amazed if we weren’t overrun by zebras and wildebeest by August at this rate. A family of raccoons has taken up residence in the upstairs of the pole barn we use for a garage, and they’ve produced two babies, which are, dare I say it, even cuter than kittens. I sneak Momma Raccoon dry dog food every so often. (And yes, I know not to get very close to them.)

Thanks, as usual, to all the wonderful folks who subscribed or contributed last month. You light up my life, by which I mean, of course, that you pay the electric bill. And buy food for the baby raccoons. And for the cats and dogs. And for us.

Hey, I just noticed that we’re nearing 1,000 Facebook “likes” on our TWD Facebook page! And not a single one of you is related to me! And I actually know only three or four of you personally! I’m not sure what that says about my friends and family, but hey, It’s Awesome!

Now, if I could just get every one of you lovely folks to send me ten bucks….

Lastly, please send in your questions!

And now, on with the show….

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Spring is here, Spring is here, life is skittles and life is beer… Well, at least it seems to have stopped raining for the moment.

The vultures are back! I love the vultures. They nest every year in our old semi-dead hollow tree down by the road and spend their days soaring above the yard and the field across the road.  I counted nine of them wheeling above our side yard the other afternoon. They are truly awesome birds. You can go stand in the yard and they’ll swoop low over your head to say hi. At least I hope they’re saying hi and not just checking my pulse.

We acquired a flock of crows in our trees last year for the first time. That sounds like we paid for them, but they actually just appeared. I grew up with crows, and I didn’t realize until these showed up how much I had missed their caws. And in the early evening, I sit on the front porch and watch the bats zoom back and forth catching bugs. Bats are cool.

The downside of spring around here is the clouds of agricultural chemicals that envelop the house. We’re sandwiched between two enormous fields, each spanning hundreds of acres, where soybeans and corn are grown in alternate years. Because of the rain, the farmers are way behind schedule in their planting, and they’ve been spraying late into the night. Not fun. It’s a huge argument against country living.

Many thanks to our readers who have subscribed or otherwise contributed to our well-being lately. As I may have mentioned a few times, your support literally keeps this leaky little boat afloat. I know money is tight for most people, but, if you can swing four cents a day ($15/yr), you’ll be ensuring that we’re here when you run into someone who firmly maintains that the proper spelling of the phrase is “all tolled.” Think of us as an insurance policy on a small but important bit of your sanity. So please consider subscribing if you can, because (as I have lately discovered the hard way) there are many people out there who would like to but can’t.

Many thanks also to the kind person who sent me Dragon voice-recognition software. I actually do have a computer that can be booted into Windows 7, so that’ll work. My shoulder is healing slowly, but I’m  going to use this software even after it’s working again. One of the things that ms has done is undermine my ability to make my fingers type the proper letters. I worked as a legal proofreader for several years at a large NYC firm and I was very good at it (good enough that I quit wearing a tie to work and got away with it), and until a few years ago I almost never made a mistake typing. Now? Fuhgeddaboudit. Word salad. It’s mostly my left hand that’s the culprit, but that’s half of every word up for grabs. But I still compose complete sentences in my mind before I type them, so speaking them aloud instead ought to work. It’ll be like having an amanuensis. My father worked as an assistant to H.L. Mencken in the 1930s, and he said the high point of that gig was when Mencken got into the habit of introducing him to people as “my amanuensis.”

Speaking of computery things, my primary computer just went kablooey, which isn’t surprising, since it’s a low-end desktop Dell from 2003. I bought it NIB on eBay for less than $400 and gave it a real graphics card, a decent power supply, a cheap sound card and four gigs of cheap memory, and it hummed along happily for eight years. Now the graphics card has died rather dramatically (strobing orange screen!), but I’m not sure I’ll replace it since (a) I don’t have the money at the moment, and (b) the whole machine has been acting strangely for a few weeks, and Dell never built anything to last this long. Kathy’s final Dell (before she jumped ship to a Mac years ago) died of a fried motherboard one day after the one-year warranty expired. What a coinkydink, eh?

I’m thinking I’ll just build my own next time. After all, I pretty much built this one. And I can buy the parts over time, like building an airplane in your garage. And I can use the disk drives, sound card, etc. I already have.

By the way, the failure of this computer freaked me out less than it would have last year, when there was a good chance I’d have lost the last few changes to whatever column I had been writing. But since I now use the Dropbox online backup service, my documents folder online gets updated literally as soon as I save the file on my computer (where it continues to exist in case the internet isn’t working, etc.). If you sign up through that link, you get 2 gigabytes of free storage, and I get an additional 250 mb. You should still run weekly backups of everything to an external drive, but Dropbox really is insanely convenient.

Elsewhere in computerville, one of our neighbors called me the other day. He lives about a half-mile down the road and, like most people who didn’t grow up with computers, he regards his as a temperamental mystery. He was wondering why his DSL connection keeps going dead, so I explained that last year Verizon unloaded its rural lines to a bunch of feckless gits from out west called Frontier, who apparently haven’t quite grasped the complexities of running a business with actual customers. The solution, which I learned last year and relayed to him, is simply to turn off the DSL modem, wait ten, twenty or twenty thousand minutes, and fire it up again. Works about 50% of the time. It doesn’t work when it’s raining, but, then again, neither do the phones around here.

By the way, DSL out here, sold as being between 3 and 5 mbps, actually tops out, on a good day, at around 370 kbps, or about one-tenth of the low end of the advertised range. It’s really just glorified dial-up. But you people in the big city with your true broadband don’t have vultures, so we win.

Lastly, as always, please consider subscribing. C’mon, gang — it’s four cents a day.

And now, on with the show….

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Alright, already, a little late. I’ll explain in a moment.

Hey, TWD has 863 “likes” on Facebook. Awesome. I hope we hit 1,000 before the whole Zuckerbergian shebang goes belly-up. I read a news story last week that said FB is ludicrously over-valued and early investors are trying to unload their shares (I believe the actual phrase they used was “claw their way out”) before reality sets in and the bubble bursts.

Waiting for the other shoe to drop in Cybertopia has been a kind of hobby of mine for years. Way back when (mid-90s) I thought Cliff Stoll was right on the money in branding the whole net-evangelist circus (Negroponte, et al.) as “Silicon Snake Oil,” and Nicholas Carr and Evgeny Morozov are both worth reading on the subject of the internet and society, especially claims made recently that Twitter and Facebook will be the magical agents of a global wave of freedom.

Which is not to say that the internet doesn’t have its good points. A few years ago I suggested that people check out Arts & Letters Daily for pointers to interesting long-form articles. ALD is still going strong (though listing a bit to starboard much of the time), but I’m happy to report that several other sites have since appeared that also point to worthwhile things to read on the net. Best of the breed at the moment is probably The Browser, closely followed by Longreads and the aptly-titled Give Me Something To Read. There’s usually a bit of overlap between the sites at any given moment, but checking them all once a day certainly beats hanging out on Fark (Woman Survives Tornado by Hiding in Tanning Bed!) or, God forbid, the Huffington Train Wreck.

By the way, I changed the layout of this page from 90% fluid to 1000 px wide so that the columns would end closer to where they should. Let me know if this is screwing up anything at your end. Any screen resolution 1024 x 768 or higher shouldn’t have a problem. You people on iPads should just suck it up and tilt your heads or something.

———————–

We interrupt this digression for an important announcement: The Word Detective website depends on your support to pay the bills. If you find this little circus helpful, interesting, amusing and/or worthwhile, please subscribe or contribute to our survival. Fifteen bucks per year is only four pennies a day, but it makes a huge difference at this end. It’s like magic. Here’s your chance to be a magician.

———————-

Onward. Um, has anyone noticed that there seems to be something pretty seriously wrong with the weather? We’ve been spared the horrible destruction in the South, but it’s been raining more or less non-stop for two weeks, often violently, and we’ve had two tornadoes hit within a mile of us in the past month (both following precisely the same path, which is very weird).

I suppose I should explain why this issue of TWD is so late. So I’m sitting on the living room couch a couple of weeks ago, and I notice that Boots the Cat is staring at the ceiling. This is not unusual, because Boots is obsessed with ceilings in general, and this ceiling in particular due to the honking huge ugly ceiling fan the previous owner of this pile installed. We’ve always meant to take it down, but that would leave a big hole in the ceiling and would also require me to climb up there, which, as will become apparent in a moment, would be a very bad idea. Anyway, I glance up and notice that Mister Boots is actually staring at a huge, nasty-looking spider crawling across the ceiling and due to arrive above my head in about 30 seconds.

I have a problem with spiders, which is too bad because this house is infested with about nine different species of them. I’ve taught myself to ignore them most of the time, at least the little ones, but I happen to know this one is the kind that bite, a lesson I learned about a week after we moved in, when I sustained a chomp on my hand that took a month to heal. So I hop up and go out to the kitchen, where we have a tall, heavy chair of the sort intended to be used at a breakfast bar (which we do not have, so I don’t know why we have the chair). It’s tall enough to put me up near the ceiling, so I drag it into the living room and clamber awkwardly up, intending to show the spider a fascinating article on funicular railways I’d been reading in the magazine our local electric coop puts out instead of reliable power. I’ve never met a spider who wasn’t totally into railroads, so maybe we can be friends.

In retrospect, I figure that my shoulders must have been about eight feet above the floor when everything went wrong. Somehow the stool began to tip, launching me into thin air, whereupon gravity kicked in and I fell straight to the wooden floor, landing on my right shoulder. From eight feet up. The Very Heavy Stool, meanwhile, was doing its own acrobatics, and somehow managed to land on top of me, smashing my left knee, left upper arm and (go figure) my right hand. It hurt. Everything hurt.

Long story short, nothing was broken, but I had bruises all over and, more importantly, seemed to have torn or otherwise damaged the tendons in my right shoulder, making that arm unusable and very painful. Breathing, in fact, was very painful.

That was more than two weeks ago and my shoulder still makes sleeping difficult. And since I have only limited use of my left arm because of the ms, I haven’t gotten a lot done lately. You should see the lawn. It’s awesome.

So, in the end, the spider got away and I have had to promise at least once a day ever since not to climb up on anything ever again. What makes this all even more stupid on my part is that I have fairly regularly fallen of off ladders outside in the past few years, so my sense of balance is clearly no good anymore.

This cat is a piker.

Elsewhere in the news, Inky the Cat is mad at me because I said she’s beginning to look like a bowling ball with ears. But she is. I think she’s making up for being the runt of the litter and last in line for food as a kitten, and she’s doing it with a vengeance. If she notices you making a sandwich, for example, she races out to the living room, where most informal eating takes place, and positions herself carefully for the most effective begging. Once the food arrives, she perches on the arm of the sofa and cries piteously until you give her a bit, then a bit more, and so on until the score is You 3 bites / Inky 7.

Inky the Insistent

Then, as the last morsel nears your mouth, she howls like her tail is on fire, stands up on her hind legs, and swings her paw at your face in hopes of intercepting the last precious bit of food on the planet.

I think she may be getting a little spoiled.

What’s worse is that (a) the other cats are starting to notice that her abominable behavior gets results, and (b) the dogs have realized that the cats are cleaning up and now sit directly in front of the TV, blocking the view while wagging their tails like idiots. I think I’m gonna take my chances with the coyotes and start eating outside.

Oh well, that’s it for now. Sorry this issue is late, but remember that if you subscribe, you never have to wait for the website to be updated even if I’m indisposed. I am constitutionally incapable of missing column deadlines. There were actually a couple of nights right after my fall that it hurt too much to lie down, so I sat up all night writing columns, popping Motrins and watching infomercials. It was weird. Every cat and dog in the house gravitated up to my office, like a slumber party with fleas.

And now, on with the show….

Semper Ubi Sub Ubi

readme:

Hey, it’s still March.

So Big Love is over. It actually improved a bit in its final season. But, like most HBO productions, it suffered from weak writing and had an infuriating tendency to wander off into absurd subplots. And, like so many HBO shows, it killed off its most interesting characters early on, in this case Harry Dean Stanton, who was drop-dead perfect as polygamist patriarch Roman Grant. I think it’s interesting that the only two characters who came close to Stanton in depth (and acting ability) were Chloe Sevigny and Matt Ross playing, respectively, his daughter Nikki and psychopathic son Alby. I’d watch a spinoff set in the Juniper Creek compound if they’d bring Roman Grant back.

Awesomely evil.

Elsewhere in the news, giving the evildoers of the world a run for their money in the Machiavellian Scheming department, the clever gnomes at Facebook recently unleashed a “feature” whereby unaffiliated websites (such as this one) can replace their native commenting system with “Facebook comments.” Because, you know, everyone who really counts is already on FB and those who aren’t can quick like a bunny run off to join if they have a sudden urge to post a comment at, say, TechCrunch.

Predictably, the malcontents and anti-social elements who resist every step on the path to our great and glorious future under the wise leadership of Chairman Zuck have sprung forth, sabotaging our collective morale with defeatist whining, wailing about “privacy” and other quaint un-Web 2.0 relics.

There actually are advantages for websites adopting the Facebook commenting system. People are more well-behaved, at least in theory, because their comments are tied to their Facebook accounts and they are, therefore, unlikely to say anything in comments that would offend their mothers. The comments also bounce back to Facebook and may show up on the commenters’ friends’ stalkers’ pages, giving the host page a PR boost.

But when Facebook talks about “convenience,” they mean convenience of advertisers and identity brokers, who stand to reap bushels of demographic intel from this scheme. Bottom line, I don’t think requiring your readers to join Facebook and have their privacy compromised by multi-dimensional tracking goblins just in order to leave a five-word comment is either reasonable or desirable.

Besides, it’s not as though our comments here at TWD are overrun by trolls. I read all comments before they appear, which sometimes takes me a few days, depending on the weather, but that hardly strikes me as an onerous task. The only comments I haven’t approved so far are pathetic comment spam (of which we get quite a bit) and the few that have employed abusive language toward other commenters. You’re free to call me an idiot, but not your fellow readers. Anyway, please do comment!

Incidentally, you don’t have to be registered on this site to leave a comment. The form asks for your name and email address, but that’s hard-wired and I haven’t figured out how to change it. In the meantime, feel free to make up a nice name and email address. I’d actually advise against entering your actual email address.

And please do send in questions! Lotsa lotsa questions. It makes my job easier if I have lots of questions.

Onward. Recently, Frank Rich, in his last column for the New York Times Sunday Magazine before leaving for New York magazine, recounted a simile that William Safire used to explain what it felt like to write a regular newspaper column:

“Safire … was fond of likening column writing to standing under a windmill: No sooner did you feel relief that you had ducked a blade than you looked up and saw a new one coming down.”

After writing the newspaper column behind this website three times a week without a break since 1994, I can say that I’ve never seen a better metaphor for the relentless tyranny of a regular deadline. Producing a column essentially every two days means that I am frequently writing paragraphs in my head when I’m walking the dogs, and the relief I feel when I finish a column is like getting home from work at midnight and realizing that you have to be back there at 6 am.

Don’t worry, I’m not working up to announcing that I’m stopping. I can’t imagine not doing this. And writing this stuff used to be a lot more strenuous; when I first took over the column completely after my father died in 1994 (we had been collaborating for a few years at that point), I was suddenly faced with writing six columns per week, a schedule that had been set when my father was writing it for the old Bell Syndicate in the 1950s.  That quota had always struck me as a bit nuts when we were sharing the work, but I definitely wasn’t going to be able to do it on my own. So I bit the bullet and told the papers that carried the column that I’d be halving the product. It turned out that nobody was running all six columns anyway, so they really didn’t care.

My relief didn’t last long. Somehow I drifted into writing another, completely separate, weekly column for the New York Daily News, and then yet a third weekly feature for the Newark (NJ) Star-Ledger. I was also working four days per week for a large Manhattan law firm. Hey, I drank a lot of coffee. We lived on the Upper West Side at the time, where the byzantine alternate-side parking rules meant that you had to spend at least an hour a couple of times every week sitting in your double-parked car while they swept the streets (if, that is, you wanted a parking space south of the Bronx for the next three days). So I’d grab a gallon of coffee and a legal pad and go sit in the car writing my columns longhand while garbage trucks and taxicabs crawled by inches away. It was actually weirdly restful.

When we first moved to East Possum, Ohio, I thought I’d have plenty of time to write other things, and I did manage to produce three more books in the first few years. Living in a house built in the 1860s on several acres of land, however, turned out to be nearly a full-time job in itself, much of which seemed to involve heavy lifting and obstreperous machinery. But even then I could often do two or three columns in a single day with no problem.

That changed in 2006 when, after at least twenty years of intermittent but gradually worsening symptoms, I was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis. I’m still walking around, albeit often with a cane, but I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t affected my work. There are days I can’t see the screen very clearly, for instance. I make far more typos. And I write much more slowly. But as these things go, I rate myself as very lucky.

Unfortunately, the decline in my personal health has been mirrored by the collapse of the newspaper business, and I have lost several of my most remunerative print outlets as they sank beneath seas of red ink. Sic transit big chunks of my income. The publishing world is in similar straits, and, as I noted a while back, this stupid disease has put paid to my backup career, pole-dancing at the Denny’s up by the interstate.

The bottom line to all this is that reader subscriptions and contributions have become increasingly important to our survival over the past three or four years. So please consider subscribing.

One of the problems I’ve had with subscriptions is that I hate asking people for money. So people subscribe for a year, they forget to renew, and I am put in the position of either sending reminder notices (i.e., asking those people for money again) or simply letting the one-year sub turn into a five-year sub. I actually suspect that there are at least a few people going on ten years, but it’s hard to find them. There’s also the problem that, even if I could zero in on the “legacy” cases, I’ve never been able to cut off anyone’s subscription for non-payment. I just can’t do it. Every year or two I try to send out reminder notices to subscribers, but it all gets very confusing.

So in order to at least keep track of things more easily, I’m switching to the PayPal subscription program for all new subscriptions, which means that at the end of the year PayPal will send out a note asking you to re-up, which I hope folks will. If you can’t swing it then, don’t worry.

I’ve also created a TWD Sustainer Subscription, which deducts $5 per month from your PayPal account until you tell it to stop (either through your PayPal account page or via the “Unsubscribe” button you’ll find below and on our Subscribe page).

I hope (really, really hope) that readers who enjoy this site and have to wherewithal to do so will become Sustaining Subscribers. Hey, it’s only 17 cents per day!

Sustainer Subscription – $5 per month – Automatically deducted from your PayPal account each month.

To cancel a subscription, click the button below. You will be taken to a PayPal page where you can cancel. You can also cancel any subscription from your PayPal profile page.

Lastly, as I say on our Subscribe page, fifteen bucks can be a lot of money if you’re retired, disabled, unemployed, or on a restricted income for whatever reason. If you are in such a situation and would like to subscribe but can’t swing it at the moment, please write to me via the question form. You won’t be the only one.

And now, on with the show….