Rain in Arizona!

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A strange thing happened today. The normally sunny, dry weather of Arizona changed. There were these dark clouds in the sky all morning, and in the afternoon those clouds started to discharge liquid. At first I wasn’t really sure what was happening, I kept thinking that maybe I was imagining it all, but no, it actually happened. We had rain. Not the Monsoon storm rain that we get in the summer months (usually, but not for the last several years as we are in a horrible drought), but just a gentle type of rain that went on for hours. It kind of put me in mind of the weather that I got used to while living in Oregon, of course without the temperature being in the low-thirties in October. Just a very strange thing to have actual, normal rain here in Arizona, it doesn’t happen that often.

The somewhat humorous result of this (both the fact that we never get rain, and the fact that we just got rain) is that no one in the entire state of Arizona ever pays a damn bit of attention to the windshield wipers on their car. When it actually does get around to raining, you often find that your wipers have melded with the windshield sometime in the 120 degree heat, and as such the first time you try to use them all you hear is the scraping of the metal bar on the glass. All that while what used to be a flexible, rubber wiper is still absolutely either melted to your windshield, or turns to powder the first time it moves. I managed to escape the windshield wiper fate as I just replaced mine, after trying to use the little window squirter and wipers to try to clean the windshield, only to find that I had wiper integrity at about 1%.

The problem with this all, and why it is not humorous, is that the people that live here (in Arizona) don’t understand how to drive in the rain. It is pretty much common knowledge that water makes the road a bit more slick than usual. What doesn’t seem to be common knowledge, at least down here, is that water also makes oil float to the surface. While people in rainy areas are used to having the roads be a bit slick, people down here just don’t get it. You can have the best tires on your SUV, be a pretty defensive driver and have the best anti-lock brakes available. All of that is not going to stop you from skidding down the street for several blocks when you lock up your brakes in a mix of water and oil.

The lack of rain on the roads in Arizona makes it so that the oil really pools up in the low spots, as well as just making a thin coat along the whole length of any stretch of road. That is exactly the time that you have to understand that the sign posts a limit to how fast you should go: In perfect conditions, 75 mph is alright. In less than perfect conditions you should go a lot slower, especially if you value your own life. Just remember, as that SUV passes you up, going 85mph+, in the rain, that there will be a frivilous lawsuit filed somewhere when it inevitably slides as it goes into a corner, then kills all of the people in it. That is, of course, driver error, but in our society we really want someone to pay us, or the family, when we do things that are monumentally stupid.

• In sports news, the Red Sox actually did come back from a 3-0 defecit to beat the almighty Yankees. That is about all I have to say about it though, since I really don’t give a damn one way or the other who actually wins the World Series. Of course my wife did bring up the fact that Boston will actually have to win it to get rid of the Curse of the Bambino. So I guess I had better root for the BoSox in order to get my Cubbies to break their own curse.

I had no intention of posting anything today, but that thing about the rain and foolish people who don’t know how to drive in it just took over my conscious.

On the up side, I really don’t think I am going to post anything tomorrow. Of course, as always, time will tell. You just never know when some jack-Ass is going to do something so stupid that you have to bitch about it.

Site stats; ALCS

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My infrequent posting pattern continues, some may even say that it is becoming the norm. I dunno, I would like to think that there were pressing, real-life issues that kept me from posting, but no, nothing like that at all. You see I got caught up in another one of those silly Club Pogo challenges. The challenges are little more than a digital pissing contest, but I just can’t stand the thought of failing at any challenge that I begin. The problem with that is that I often start challenges (in life as well as that game site) that involve games/things that I am not very good at, or at least not familiar enough with to try.

This time, the game ‘Dominoes’ was the source of my problems over the last few days. It turns out that there is a use to them beyond just lining them up and knocking them down. Which is good, I suppose, as I always wondered why they went to all the trouble of putting numbers on them if their only purpose was to be stood on end and knocked over. Actually, I have played dominoes in the past, used to be passable at it, but the version that they offer on that website doesn’t use the same rules that I played by. In fact, a quick look at Dominoes.com shows that there are at least 68 different domino games. Of course I know how to play exactly one of them, which was very different than the online version that I was offered as a challenge.

If I were able to take the hours that I spent trying to win those 65 games and funnel them into a good cause, I likely would have gotten a lot more Diablo playing done. I did win the 65 games in the challenge, albeit only an hour before the expiration of the challenge. Considering that they give you seven full days to do each challenge I would say that I cut it pretty close.

• While perusing my site statistics today I noticed a couple of interesting search strings that resulted in hits. Those particular searches were for ‘free sixteen porn picture’ and ‘watch free little girl porn’ (both without quotations, of course). I will readily admit that I changed the title of my page to say, “Still Porn Free”, as a ruse to see if I could get a few hits just because it had the words free and porn in it. I never had any idea that it would result in pedophiles clicking through to my page. Curiosity drove me to do a Yahoo search for those exact strings and I found the reason why.

When I ran a search for the first string (free sixteen porn picture), I was indeed near the top of the list. What is worse is that the quote about the first fifteen words of the header, then quote a little snippet from somewhere on the page that contained one of the search terms. The actual part from my page that was quoted said, “I know that it really did sound fresh, but I was also about sixteen, and I didn’t really know anything about anything …”. Now I was talking about a writer at that point, yet I could see how that particular line could be taken out of context. So Mr. (or Ms.) pedophile was thinking that it was a child getting fresh with someone…I can accept that, a simple misunderstanding.

The second search string really has me baffled. I did searches on Yahoo and Google for ‘watch free little girl porn’, and my site does indeed come up. Unfortunately, for porn seekers, the ‘watch’ in question is a wristwatch. It is even stated in the little description of the site that Mr. (or Ms.) pedophile clicked through to get to my page. What I wonder is, did they really think that ‘Armitron’ and ‘Rolex’ were code words for child porn? I don’t know, I think that said person was just clicking through every link looking for a picture of a naked child, and man that is sick.

I have been trying to get my father’s side of the family to let me put a directory, on this site, that has all of the photos and history we can find about our ancestors. I thought that it would be a great way to get names and photos out to try to find some other branches of the family tree. One of my Aunts had misgivings about posting that on the internet, and I wondered why. Now I know. The last thing that you ever want to think about is the possibility that there is some sicko, somewhere, looking at an old, black and white photo of your mother bathing you in the sink…And jerking off…That is just wrong.

• In sports news, what the hell is going on in baseball?

I grew up in Oregon, and as such we didn’t have a local baseball team to root for. What we did have was a WGN station on our local cable service. I became a Cubs fan, since that was what we had. When I moved to Arizona, and shortly after the Diamondbacks became a franchise, I rooted for them as well. The Diamondbacks did win a world series in my lifetime, while I still somehow doubt that the Cubs ever will. Last year it was a possibility that the Cubs and the Red Sox could have met in the World Series, but no one ever really thought that was going to happen since Boston has the curse of the Bambino and Chicago has the curse of the goat (sorry for the sparse info link there, gotta get back to the game).

Unless the Red Sox find a way to fuck up a seven run lead in the seventh inning, they will be the first baseball team to ever come back from being down 3-0 and win the series. Of course the Yankees and Redsox are only playing the ALCS and the winner must go on to play the winner of the NLCS series, but I would venture to say that whoever wins this game will win it all (which is not much of a venture statistically).

This all meshes nicely with my theory that the Cubs are going to be the first professional sports team to go exactly a century between championships. Look for them to be on the first platform in 2007, go Cubbies! This talk is a bit premature, as the game is still on. Probably in the seventh inning stretch judging by the sounds of it. Still, happy thoughts.

The problem with baseball, as everyone except pretty die-hard Yankee fans know, is that there is absolutely no equality in the game. Every other major sport puts limitations on how much you can spend to make the ‘ultimate team’. The Lakers (in the NBA) have done a great job of winning within those constraints, as did the previous San Francisco and Dallas dynasties (in the NFL) of years past. I don’t follow hockey closely enough to make a reference there, but it seems that the teams are basically pretty evenly matched (within reason).

The Yankee’s are able to buy every ‘free-agent’, every year, and give them more money than anyone else ever could. I do understand that the Yankees also make the most money, but come on. The Yankees will regularly have half of the top 10 highest players on their team, while the worst teams will have a couple of decent players, but no one that really stands out. It is not because the shitty teams don’t want to win, not that they don’t want to be competitive, it is just that the Yankees have more money. Speaking of that, You have to have a bit of respect for Curt Schilling who chose to go to the Red Sox to try to dethrone the Yankees in the American League, after having beat the Yankees in the World Series with the Diamondbacks. That is a hatred/desire to dethrone a team that I have yet to see in any athlete.

Seriously, though, I am going to go watch the end of this game…I think we may be seeing history here…

Strange dream; Team America: World Police; The System Has Failed

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I took a few days off around the website in case you haven’t noticed. Again the problem was just an utter lack of anything to say, I won’t let that little fact stop me today!

If anyone out there is into dream analysis, here’s one for you. In this dream I am standing in front of a shopping center in the town where I grew up. There is an ambulance parked nearby. Next to me (in the same general area anyway) are two paramedics and a young kid that I don’t recognize. After a few moments a black Chevelle with blacked out windows comes around the corner, the passenger window comes down, a rifle comes out and fires three shots, about a half a second apart. The Chevelle speeds away.

The three shots seem to have hit their intended targets. The two paramedics are both very obviously dead; each having been hit in the head and missing a great deal of the skull. The kid that I don’t recognize is hit also, but in the chest. He is breathing but barely. I can’t be certain what the bullet actually hit, but in my best estimation it looks like it probably missed his heart, I think he had a collapsed lung though, as he was coughing up blood.

My shouts for help go unanswered, the shopping center is deserted. In fact I don’t think there is a single car in the lot with the exception of the ambulance. I remove the stretcher from the back of the ambulance and put the kid onto it. I manage to get the stretcher into the back of the ambulance but I can not figure out how to secure the kid to the stretcher, or how to keep the stretcher from rolling/sliding. After a minute or so of trying to figure it out I decide it is better to bang him up a bit on the way to the hospital than to let him die while I am fucking with the straps.

I have never seen the driver’s seat of an ambulance but in my dream there are so many switches that it puts me in mind of a jet. All I want to do is start it and go, which I figure out quickly enough. The second I am on the road in front of the shopping center though there are cars backed up going both ways with no way to get around them. I start messing with the switches hoping to find the siren or the lights, and eventually find the one for the lights, yet the cars don’t seem to see them, as they don’t make way for me to pass. I do eventually find the siren (bear with me I know this is weird), it is a hand crank on passenger side of the cabin. In order to use the siren I have to put the ambulance in park, move to the passenger seat and crank it. I do this and the cars immediately all make their way to the side of the road, but by the time I am back in the driver’s seat the noise has faded and the cars are all back in front of me.

Through experimentation I am able to figure out that if I give the thing a good crank, five revolutions or so, I am able to get back to the driver’s seat and make it a couple of car lengths before I am boxed in again. A couple of dozen times of doing that and I make it to a cross street that I take towards the hospital (in my dream the location of the hospital is actually the location of the court, but that is another story). The four streets that surround the hospital are all one way, I was of course on the wrong street and had to make my way all the way around the thing to reach the entrance. When I come to a stop at the emergency entrance I crank the siren once more and a bunch of people rush out of the hospital. When I open the back of the ambulance to get the kid out, he is just sitting there on the stretcher with no sign of an injury at all. As I stare around confused, looking back and forth between the kid and the doctors, the black Chevelle pulls up behind the ambulance. I duck to the ground instinctively, but when the doors open the two paramedics from the shopping center get out. Suddenly a police car appears, I am in handcuffs, the hospital (which is in the location of the courthouse in the actual town layout) has turned into the police station and I am in a room being questioned about stealing the ambulance when the dream ends.

So what does that all mean?

•With the Megadeth concert being only two weeks away, I finally decided I had better go ahead and buy the new cd. The System Has Failed is the latest release, which I have just listened to twice. I have a couple of comments about it. First, they sure did go back to their roots as far as speed and power. I am not sure if it could hold a candle to ‘Rust in Piece’, but it is certainly on par with ‘Countdown to Extinction’. The second thing of note is that a lot of the lyrics are pretty sub par for Megadeth. The songs make sense (as much as a song can) but they just don’t seem to be of the same caliber as most of the older stuff. I suppose one can only write about so many great poems beforing running out of brilliant stories to tell.

One other thing that I took away from listening to it, I don’t think that Dave Mustaine thinks much of George W. Bush, or the situation in Iraq. That much is never actually said, but it is kind of implied. Even the albums cover art depicts someone, who looks an awful lot like dubya, paying off Vic the judge. The first song on the album, ‘Blackmail the Universe’, starts with air force one getting shot down and the president being detained by terrorists. One of the quotes in the song is, “I red, white and blew it.” That is a great line…

• The wife and I went out to take in a movie today. It was the first movie that I have seen on opening weekend since the original theatrical release of E.T. So what movie was so compelling as to make me see it on opening weekend, a movie so powerful to break a 22 year run of never seeing a movie on opening weekend? Well Team America: World Police, of course.

This is one of those movies that is certainly not for everyone. If you like it, you really like it, if you don’t like it, you actively hate it. A quick look at the reviews on RottenTomatoes will certainly evidence that. I am of the camp that really, really liked the movie. If you have yet to see it, I have only this to ask, “Jesus titty-fucking Christ!”, why not?

Now I am going to talk a little bit about the movie, not a review, more a list of things that I did/didn’t like about it. That means that there will be some spoilers. Of course this movie is pretty hard to spoil, I could likely read the entire script to you verbatim and you would still be blown away by it. That all being said, away I go.

First off, the movie took me completely by surprise. I had seen only one trailer for it ever. I mean there was only one t.v. commercial that I ever saw advertising the film, and that was a couple of months ago. All that I was able to gather from that was that it was done with marionettes, and that the minds that created ‘South Park’ were behind it. That was not a lot to go on. That was all that I knew about the movie when my butt hit the seat at the theatre (where we arrived a half an hour in advance, only to find that even at show start there were only about 20 people there).

To start with a few very specific examples of what I didn’t like about the movie. 1) There is a puking scene that goes on WAY longer than it needs to. The guy threw up, we get it, move on. It was not all that funny to just watch a marionette spit out pea soup for a minute and a half. 2) There is a quite unnecessary little song that the evil mastermind (Kim Jong Il?) sings, should have been on the cutting room floor, and likely would have been were it not for the childish humor in stereotyping the speech of all Asians by making all the ‘L’s sound like ‘R’s. The movie would have been better off without it. 3) There is just a lot of profanity for the sake of profanity. I know that they are Lampooning other movies and the such, but no one really ever says Fuck that often…Not even me and I am a potty-mouth. 4) The ‘running joke’ about the main character sucking ‘Spotswoods’ dick had lost most of its steam by the time that it actually happened. While I did find it a bit humorous, I don’t think it was actually necessary. I am sure that there are a few issues that I am overlooking, but I want to get on to the good stuff, so I will leave that all for a later date.

What I liked about the movie, now that is a tough one. I would probably have to list at least half of the movie to get all of that across. I will try to just list a few extreme laugh out loud (xlol) moments.

Xlol moment 1: This one is covering two scenes, the destruction in both Paris and Cairo. I was laughing so hard because that is just the way the rest of the world seems to look at the U.S.A., Destroying every precious, ageless monument, yet declaring victory after leaving the country in ruin.

Xlol moment 2: The twangy, country-western style song that Trey is singing while the main character makes up his mind about going to fight for his freedom. The song ends with something close to “Freedom isn’t free, it costs a buck-o-five”. I may have been the only one in the theatre laughing, but that one really tickled me. Take that all you country-western artsists that write songs about freedom, yet would never ‘slip on your boots’ to fight for it!

Xlol moment 3: The first time the team started to roll out of Mt. Rushmore, when they first started to sing “America, America” in a pretty dignified tone, then followed that with the hammering, “America, Fuck Yeah!” on our way to save the mother-fucking world, Fuck Yeah! Or however it actually goes, I damn near pissed myself with laughter. I think that was mostly because it reminded me a lot of the song from the old G.I. Joe cartoon themesong at least I thought it did right until I just listened to the g.i.joe theme again, not even close. Still, that was really, really funny when they broke that song out.

Xlol moment 4: There were a lot of times during this film that I laughed out loud, that is quite unusual for me as I try to never be noticed, ever. After the first half hour or so of the movie I was able to contain my laughter for the most part, and as such the fourth xlol moment was in the credits. There are the two separate sets of credits, the ‘team america’ credits (which appear to be in steel with rivets) and after that the actual, normal credits roll. During the first credits, while the ‘America, Fuck yeah!’ song is playing, they start throwing out random terms. Like, “the internet, Fuck Yeah!”. There are a lot of them that I didn’t actually hear, but one of the last ones was, “Slavery, Fuck Yeah!”. I nearly split my gut with laughter, while I guess my wife didn’t hear it at all.

Jesus titty-fucking Christ, that is the funniest movie of all time. Well the funniest movie in this century. Then again, this century is only four years old…The funniest movie counting the last two centuries then…But, I guess they didn’t have movies before then, so I guess it really must be the funniest movie of all time.

As far as the fact that the characters are just marionettes, it really only comes up when they really want you to see it. The first ‘fight scene’ illustrates that, but I am pretty sure that it is done on purpose. In the latter part of the movie, the marionettes do some hand to hand fighting that looks, at the very least, as realistic as most of the crap that Hollywood has to offer. Also, and unlike Hollywood prodcutions, with one exception, when the people are dead, they are dead. Having no head, splitting your torso in half, these things will keep you down for a while. No one in this movie gets slapped and then ignored for the duration.

I guess I better stop now, if I don’t I will likely go on forever. Just go watch the damn movie!

Homosexuality

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So, you know how I Often say that I don’t really have anything to talk about? That is certainly not true today. Whether I run out of steam before I get to the bulk of the bitching, though, remains to be seen.

• On the work front, I agreed to leave work an hour earlier than usual to go pick up a part for the bosses van, a part which I am sure they will ask me to install tomorrow. The unfortunate part of this transaction was that I said I would do it just for the money I paid for the gas to get there. Due to some unfortunate planning, I was driving directly into the setting sun, with a dirty windshield and the nearest ‘squeegie’ far enough behind me that I didn’t want to go back to wash the damn window. I did spray the window with the cleaner that is in your little ‘window squirter thing’ and turn on the wipers, only to find that one of the wipers had crumbled to dust, and the other one was only barely alive. I eventually had to pull over and use a rag from the trunk to try to clean the window enough that I could see at all. Even with the outside of the window cleaned up, I was still driving almost half blind, since the inside of the windshield has had a weird film over it ever since the car over-heated a couple of years ago (which made me run the heater to try to circulate whatever water was in the car). I guess what I really need to do is hit the damn thing with a bit of windex before I go volunteering for jobs that require me to drive into the sun. Perhaps I will do that this weekend.

• The real story today is going to be all about homosexuality.

I happen to have a brother that is gay. He is not being gay as a way to get back at his parents, he is not looking for attention, he is just plain gay. I, more than most, have developed a sort of tolerance towards homosexuality because of it. I mean it is pretty difficult to go out ‘gay bashing’ when you know that you have a family member who is just the same.

I have often thought that his being homosexual was a choice, but my wife emailed me This article from CNN that is making me finally think a little bit differently. Of course you could find a study somewhere to back up literally anything, but the odds that CNN is going to be posting incorrect information, on purpose, is pretty laughable.

One study does not a fact make, I understand that. What I do understand is that I have a brother that happens to be homosexual. That brother is still my brother. This same brother is trying to marry his partner, yet it is not allowed under state and federal laws. They are not trying to marry as a mockery of the “man/woman” union, they are trying to marry so that one spouse can be included on the other spouse’s health insurance. Why is it that that is not possible?

I understand that there are staunch beliefs, on both sides of the coin, about this type of marriage, but, who does it really hurt?

If two gay men do marry, there is no way that they can ever procreate. Convoluted laws will make it damn near impossible for them to ever adopt a child, they will be just “life partners”. Isn’t that the whole point of marriage? You pick the one person that you want to spend the rest of your life with? Why is it so wrong that one of the partners can’t pump out children?

I find it humorous to hear anyone talking about homosexuals trying to ‘bastardize’ the ‘sacred union’ of marriage. I bet, if you actually run the statistics on that, there will be very few homosexuals that ever divorce. Why? The homosexual people seem to be looking for the right person as opposed to settling for the person that is ‘close enough’.

A lot of hetrosexuals make tons of mistakes along the way (while looking for their perfect mate), that is because they are doing their best to just snatch up someone, anyone, before they are too old and no one wants them anymore. I think that the homosexuals kind of have it better in that respect. They have been looking their entire lives, have been shunned by society, and just want to find that one person that makes them happy.

Homosexuality is not a crime, it is not even a ‘condition’, it is what that person is. Loving another person of the same sex should not carry the taboo that it currently does, there are homosexuals that are brave enough to admit it everywhere, even children of those in the oval office.

Here I must actually site a particular quote from Dick Cheney, while being questioned about the homosexuality of his own daughter:

Cheneys Criticize Kerry’s Remarks on Daughter
“You saw a man who will say and do anything in order to get elected,” Mr. Cheney said. “And I am not speaking just as a father here, though I am a pretty angry father, but as a citizen.” The vice president went on to describe the Massachusetts senator as too vacillating to be commander in chief and unwilling to support American troops at war.

You see how he just avoided the question, then made it a question of homeland security? That worked for the first four years, not gonna work for the next four, at least I hope.

Why using the absolute, stone-solid FACT that the Cheney’s daughter is gay is ‘doing anything to get elected’ really escapes me. I think the fact that you do your best to hide it really says more about personal character…

It really must suck for Cheney, to be so opposed to homosexuals, having one as a child, then to find out that you aren’t even gonna be the veep any more. I bet we will see his ‘true colors’ shining through pretty soon…Mark my words…

Commercials; Government; Writing

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Today’s post brings good and bad news. The good news is that I don’t have any desire to talk about John Saul, or books at all for that matter, today. The bad news is that I did yesterday, and while I completely forgot to post it, I am just gonna throw it on the bottom of this page since I have all but run out of issues to tackle.

Let that be a lesson to all of you who are thinking about starting your own website, especially if you are palanning to try to put up news with your own opinion or snark, don’t start in an election year! For the first six or eight months that I was doing this site I could easily find some news item to go off about, yet now it is all politics. Actually it really isn’t so much about politics as it is about which candidate says what about the other, and which one made the most weird faces in the last debate. Is that what politics has come to?

I was watching some show on TVLand the other day, possibly MacGyver, and they showed an old commercial (That is one of the things that TvLand is famous for, they air old commercials for lots of products, I can remember seeing a Parkay margarine commercial from the ’70s and a Shake-n-Bake commercial from around the same era. They are really pretty nostalgic to look back at.), when an old, black and white commercial came on the screen. The only thing in the entire commercial was a picture of rain falling on a random street, with a voice-over saying something like, “It may rain this November Eleventh. If it rains, get wet. It is that important.” (again that is not actually a quote but the best I can recall and I can’t find that commercial anywhere on their website, or anywhere else on the internet for that matter). The screen then flashed up a ‘Vote for ___’ logo. I don’t remember the exact candidate, nor do I know the year the commercial was released, so it is difficult for me to try to find the damn thing. At any rate, I think you will see the point here. Political advertising used to be about spreading the name of the political candidate, now it seems to be about conveying the worst ‘half-truths’ about the opponent.

I am certainly not a political pundit, but I do know a bit or two about us grunts that actually work for a living. Not a damn one of ‘us grunts’ really care what the presidential candidates were doing in the early ’70s. ‘Us grunts’ would like to see the war in Iraq ended with the fewest possible casualties on all sides, but that is not all that we think about. ‘Us grunts’ are also a bit concerned about a couple of policies. You see, most of ‘us grunts’ weren’t born horribly rich (George W.), most of ‘us grunts’ didn’t marry horribly rich (John Kerry), most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes for the richest 1% of the population, hell most of ‘us grunts’ don’t give a damn about taxes on the top 20% of the population. ‘Us grunts’ are looking for a bit of substance in the presidential claims about policies that actually involve ‘us grunts’.

Health Care is a really big ‘for instance’. ‘Us grunts’ don’t really have a lot of options; Making too much money to get free health care, yet not making quite enough money to actually afford the care that we do have. Despite that, laws are being passed to keep us from trying to obtain medicine at lower prices, ‘us grunts’ don’t care for that at all.

Another thing that ‘us grunts’ just can’t seem to understand is why buying a huge, gas-guzzling SUV can get you a tax break. It seems like the price of gas has been going up awfully fast lately, ‘us grunts’ are looking for the most fuel effecient automobile that our meager income can buy. Of course ‘us grunts’ might be able to afford those huge, gas-guzzling SUV’s were it not for the fact that minimum wage is at its lowest point in thirty years (adjusted for inflation), yet I doubt that ‘us grunts’ would buy them anyway… Why waste a precious resource that is already nearly drained?

I would really, really like to care about which candidate has better hair, which candidate did what in the ’70s, which candidate’s daughters have been arrested on the most drug charges, but I just can’t. There is more at stake here than just a figure-head for our country. There are lobbyists, albeit on both sides of the coin, that are willing to give millions or billions of dollars to whoever comes out of this thing as the leader. I have had almost four years to watch what one of them did with that power, now I would like to see anyone else in his position, to see what that power might bring. Damn me for being partisan.

PostScript: I know that the term ‘us grunts’ is not grammatically correct, but nothing else I ever write is either. I used the term ‘us grunts’ only because it starts with two letters that are important to me.

First off, and much to the great relief of everyone here I’m sure, I am not written off of the christmas card list of the friend who sent me the John Saul novel that I have been bitching about so much. In fact, said friend also has his own copy of the novel and was not able to make it through the first few chapters before he realized that he had basically read it in other Saul books. That means, at the very least, that anyone who reads and is also capable of retaining knowledge will know that Saul just keeps recycling the same story. The only explanation for this (why people still buy the books I mean) is that I think a lot of the readers are adolescent and just looking for a quick read with an easy to follow story.

My mother also read this book, my copy in fact, while my wife and I were on vacation, and she thought that it was pretty good, yet, it also seemed oddly familiar. I am now beginning to think that the way Saul is able to have continued success (31 novels worth) is that there is absolutely nothing remarkable about anything he has written. You certainly can’t walk away from the book with a fear of any one person or thing, within a couple of days you wouldn’t be able to name any of the main characters even if threatened with torture. I guess I should just call his work ‘disposable fiction’. Then again, all of the Saul that I personally own is in hardcover, and while I never paid cover price for any of it it is still far too expensive to simply throw away, yet that is what your mind tries to do with it.

If anyone other than John Saul were to send a John Saul novel to a publisher in the hopes of getting it printed they would likely be laughed right out the door. Mind you, that could be said for a lot of authors today. In fact if you start looking at the novels that are called ‘classic’, there are very few authors that have more than one in that category.

Interesting thought, that. Perhaps all of the authors that we consider great today only ever had one good novel, while the rest was mindless dribble, or at least very derivitive of their initial work. That is an unimaginable idea however, since most of the great authors of the past never made a single cent off of their work. I suppose that it would be really great to know that your story has outlasted you, but they never knew; It takes a century or so to see if the story can transcend to that status.

I seem to remember that Edgar Allan Poe (take this test, its fun) died penniless, in a gutter, none of his work ever made him a penny. Yet, some of Poe’s stories are required reading a hundred and fifty years later. On that same note, I somehow doubt that any John Saul will be ‘required reading’ in the year 2154, I could be wrong. (if you happen to be in the year 2154, and are reading this, and John Saul is required reading, please shoot me an email so that I will know that I was in error.)

When I was in my teens, even into my early twenties, I thought that my writing was going to change the world. Of course I have since sobered to the reality that I am likely never going to get a single word put to print before I die. I am not capable of writing with correct grammar, nor do my ideas do more than stem off of the fiction that I have read. The few, truly original, ideas that I have had work well in my head but do not seem to do well when put to paper (computer screen in this case). I do enjoy writing, my friends and family enjoy reading what I have written, yet I don’t seem to have that ‘it’ that is going to make me rise above every other guy in the world who tries to write anything. My ‘fan base’ could be counted on one hand, my grammar is horrible, at this point I am just hoping that someone within the family tries to get the hundreds of short stories in my file cabinet put onto paper someday. The one thing that I do have is really screwed up dreams, that is where the short stories come from. I never have a dream long enough to work itself into a novel though, and that means that what I write is just as forgettable as every other book you have read in the last few years.

As if that is not enough, I just went to the bathroom to find out that I have been wearing my underwear inside-out all day! Life Sucks!

John Saul

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I awoke this morning at about 6:30, which is far earlier than I really wanted to get up on my one day off, but was not able to get back to sleep. We recently put up a thick curtain over the south-facing window in the bedroom, which a street light was shining through to keep us awake, but have only a blind over the west facing window. Long story short it was bright as noontime in the bedroom by then, I find it difficult to sleep when it is light out. Thus I am groggy and feel like crap in general. I did manage to finish the book that I was reading, however I am not sure if it is a contributing factor in my current mood.

John Saul’s Black Creek Crossing was the book that I finished reading this morning. For me to criticize an author’s writing is much like being the one legged man in an ass kicking contest, but I am not going to let that stop me this time. There will be some spoilers in this, keep that in mind if you ever plan to read it.

I have read a lot of Saul’s work, mostly in my late teens/early twenties, and one thing that I can say for them is that they read pretty well. The flow is usually pretty good, due in part to the fact that you know what is going to happen long before it ever does. His descriptions of places and people work pretty well also; quick enough to not bore you but complete enough that you can recognize places or characters by name. The prose itself is straigt forward and not cluttered with a lot big words for the sole purpose of showing off his vocabulary. With the exception of the overly dramatic prologue, and other such examples littered throughout the book, there is not a lot to complain about in the writing. Saul certainly isn’t Dickens, but he can get the story across in a pretty fluid way, in my opinion anyway.

Now just to note a few of the major problems with the book. The story about the teenager being picked on and getting revenge on his/her tormentors is certainly in at least half of all of Saul’s books. The “horrible things happened in the house in the past, and they happen to the new family that moves in also” premise has been done to death, by Saul. Most all of his books start with a family moving into a house, then something within the house or the community making the new occupants relive the old horror. The family that moves at the beginning of this book at least includes both a mother and a father, often in his books it is just the mother and a single child. Of course the father in this story is an abusive, incestuous alcoholic, so not much of a stretch to not consider him a father.

I am not going to go into any more of the similarities between this book and others that he has written, if you have read any of his other work you already know, if you haven’t it would take only the first chapter of any of his work to see it. He writes what sells, more power to him.

one of the issues that I really had with the book was with the demeanor the main character (Angel)’s parents. The father (Marty) was being portrayed as a very abusive and controlling man. There were at least a couple of occasion where you were led to believe that he was being physically abusive to his wife, albeit offscreen. This physical abuse, as well as most of the verbal abuse, was happening while he was drunk, which was most of the time. In one scene he actually raised a beer bottle with the intent to hit his wife with it. Yet, for some reason, there are several times when the wife (Myra) yells at him and he cowers like a little puppy. That is not the behavior of any of the abusive alcoholics I have ever known, it also made me certain that the father was no threat for the duration of the book (which was bad since he was the only variable I hadn’t explained within the first twenty-five pages).

Now, just to nit-pick. The novel is 358 pages long, that is including the prologue and epilogue. There are 47 chapters, that means that the average chapter (including the prologe and epilogue) is just about seven pages long. Many of the chapters are less than four pages long, and one would have been less than one page were it not for the white space for the chapter heading and the blank space at the end. Throwing all copyright and fair use laws to the wind, I will quote chapter 46 for you right here:

SETH BAKER CAME AROUND THE BEND IN THE ROAD and saw the house that stood at Black Creek Crossing looming against the night sky. Even though there were lights on, the house had a look of terrible foreboding about it, and as he made his way across the lawn, part of him wanted to turn away and go somewhere else.
But there was nowhere else to go.

Not after what had happened in his house.

As he approached the front door, the awful sense of foreboding grew stronger, and he paused at the door, which was standing wide open, and listened.

A silence seemed to emanate from the house, a silence that felt as if it was about to swallow him up. Once again he wanted nothing more than to turn away, to leave whatever was inside the house undiscovered, and again he knew he could not. Steeling himself, he stepped over the threshold into the living room.

The television was still on, but somehow even its droning didn’t dispel the strange sense of silence that imbued the house.

Knowing he didn’t want to see whatever it was that lay beyond the living room, but knowing there was no alternative, he moved deeper into the house.

He found Angel at the bottom of the stairs, staring at the bodies of her parents, who were lying on the floor-her father on top of her mother-in a pool of their own blood. Myra Sullivan’s eyes were open, and as he looked down at her, Seth had the uneasy feeling that she was looking back at him. Turning away, he looked at Angel. “It happened at my house too,” he said softly.

Angel gazed at him, and for a second Seth wasn’t sure she even saw him. A moment later, though, she spoke, her voice hollow:

“I know what we have to do.”

Seth said nothing and when she led him out of the house, he silently followed.

They crossed the lawn to the road, and instead of turning right, toward the trail that would lead them to the cabin hidden in the cliff, Angel turned left.

Once again, Seth followed….

That is punctuated exactly as it is in the book. I am not very good at sight typing though, so I may have a misspelled word in it. The strange capitalization at the beginning is also just like it was in the book. For some reason the first line of text in every chapter was all in caps. Why? I got no idea. This was the shortest chapter in the book, but not by much. There were several chapters that were just a bit longer than this one, and many of them did basically the same as this one; it doesn’t tell you anything at all. This particular passage isn’t really necessary in the book at all, why emphasize it by calling it a chapter?

The little passage here does illustrate the overly dramatic thing I was talking about though. The fact that he separates a couple of lines into their own paragraphs, most notably “But there was nowhere else to go.” and “Not after what had happened in his house.”

It kind of puts me in mind of the writing I did while I was in my teens, of course the lines set that way gave me goosebumps when I read them back to myself, in reality they don’t seem to have that effect at all, or perhaps they do but only for a much younger reader.

To end this before (hopefully) the friend who bought the book for me and got it autographed takes me off of his christmas list, I will just say that it is a John Saul novel. If you have never read anything by Saul, Black Creek Crossing is a pretty good example of his writing. It has been a long time since I have read the other books that he wrote, and they honestly blend together in your mind since they are all so similar, but I do believe that you should read at least one of his novels. Saul doesn’t seem to posess the unlimited imagination of someone like Stephen King, but the one story that he has been telling (over and over again) over the course of his career is worth a look.

Were I to pick one of Saul’s novels to recommend, this one probably wouldn’t be it. If pressed I would probably recommend Black Lightning even though the reader reviews just shred it. Black Lightning is a serial killer story though, and I think a lot of the reviewers were serial killer buffs. At any rate, Black Lightning was one of only a couple of Saul’s works that I didn’t know the ending of within the first twenty-five pages, in fact I recall still being guessing until near the end.

• Nothing else of note to speak of today. Tune in next time to see if I am indeed removed from my friend’s christmas card list.

Telemarketers; Pool

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My little bitch about yet more people trying to cover (destroy) old songs yesterday did not result in any sort of feedback, which I have come to expect at this point. Makes me wonder if I should actually go ahead and try to write something worth reading, but, then again, that is hard. Much easier to throw out a bunch of dribble that no one ever reads than to actually take the time to write out some eloquent, poignant post that no one is ever going to read. I do pick my battles.

• So you know how the telemarketer’s call you, my stock response is, “is this a soliciting call?”, then, when pressed, the caller will admit to being the hated telemarketer. Today I happened upon a telemarketer that was alomost as smart as your average rock, of course I didn’t know that initially. The pitch was for long distance telephone service, my angle is usually to just hang up on those types of telemarketers, yet, today, I decided to fuck with him. Hilarity was the direct result.

When I answered the phone, there was a voice saying, “are you happy with your current long distance service?”. This would have been the point that I just hung up the phone most every time I get those calls, yet today I felt a bit ‘rowdy’, as it were.

Mind you, I am on the phone with this guy as we are speaking.

I asked him what company he was representing, he replied that he was representing ‘Verizon’, whom I don’t think actually offer home service in the first place. Yet, after watching a bit of ‘Crank Yankers’ last night, I just wanted to fuck with him.

His next question was, “are you happy with your current telephone provider?” Now, what I told him was both a blatant lie, and proof that I was fucking with him. I told him that I didn’t even have a telephone at home (while I was talking to him on it), because they had de-regulated some of the home service, my phone was one that got de-regulated, which caused my rates to triple and I just had it disconnected.

Well the guy seemed to be feeling sorry for me, and offered to transfer me to their wireless sales department, as they don’t offer local service in my area, so that I would at least have a phone of some sort. So, yes, the guy was as dumb as a rock. He did seem to catch on though. While I made him hold to answer call waiting he hung up on me. I sure hope that at some point while he was holding he realized what a complete idiot he was, that thought makes me smile.

That was one of the first times that I have ever decided to go ahead and fuck with a telemarketer, as such it was a pretty short experience. I am thinking now that I might try to do it once in a while just to see how long I can keep them on the phone, and how outrageous the stories I can get them to believe can get. They are the ones that are bothering me, after all, so making them look like complete idiots seems to be a pretty fair exchange. Trust me when I say that if I do this, as a scientific research project of course, you will be the first to hear the results.

It is Saturday, October 9, 2004

The last post got cut short, a bit abrubptly, when I asked the wife if she would like to go shoot a game of pool at the (remaining) local bar. We went ahead and walked on down there (drinking and driving is always a bad idea, even if it is only a few blocks) to find the place packed. Yet, strangely, there was no one around one of the three pool tables, I asked everyone near the table if there was someone with ‘ownership’ of the table (if you have never played pool in an arena where there are a lot of drunk men, you really need to find this out before attempting to drop your quarters into the thing. Men, especially when horribly drunk, can be a little bit less than understanding when you try to breach the etiquitte of ‘pool table ownership’.), but nope, it was ours to use as we pleased.

I had consumed a beverage or two (a lot of beer) before we went down there in the first place, and while I find that the beer does calm the nerves a bit (in small doses), it seems that I might have dosed myself a bit too much to play pool well that night. Of course we only do it for fun, so that is kind of the point.

I have a kind of ‘double-bell curve’ thing working when I play pool. I can not play worth a damn when I am stone sober, that is related to the fact that I am very shaky most of the time. Before you go trying to blame that on the consumption of alcohol, or lack thereof, let me state that I have had this problem since I was in my early teens and had never tasted that sweet nectar. Once my hands stop shaking, (enough of the alcohol depressant to slow my nervous system) I can play pretty well most of the time. I was, unfortunately, already past that portion of the newly created ‘double-bell curve’ at this point, yet not into the fourth part of the it. The third point of the ‘double-bell curve’ is that point when I am actually drunk and can’t hit a damn thing. Once again, and again unfortunately, I can not skirt the edges of that zone to get the pool prowess from the next zone. The final zone, in the ‘double-bell curve’ is absolute incoherence. That is when my pool is pretty much at it’s best. It is much easier to make the shot when you see three of every ball, and three pockets to get them into, and since they are all the same ball, and all the same pockets, all you have to do is sink it.

Last night’s pool play was dominated by my inability to make simple shots (indicative of the first or third levels of the double-bell curve), but ended with me playing pool with a man, whom I had never met, that wanted to “win” the table from me. At that point I was not able to hit the ocean with a rock, and wanted to just let him take the table, of course he would have none of it. Damn, those (we) drunkards do have our values. I did eventually lose that game, which was not much of a “throwing” of the match, since I couldn’t make a damn shot to start with. It did allow my wife and I to hobble home though, and I say hobble because I am pretty sure that walking kind of implies that you are on an invisible track, while hobbling could take you from curb to curb.

• This thought will be taken up in a future post.

Song Remakes

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I had absolutely no intention of putting anything up here today. Nothing on my mind, just thought I would go ahead and take care of a couple of Pogo.com challenges. Not a lot on my plate for bitching tonight, or so I thought.

I have previously bitched (at some length) about the fact that I really hate it when bands remake (cover) songs, yet I never really thought that I would get as angry about it as I am right now.

Some of the songs that get remade later, ‘Smokin in the Boy’s Room’ for instance, stayed true to the song, while beefing it up a bit for the ears of the people who would listen to it a couple of decades later. Sure, Motley Crue took a few liberties and changed little things about the song, but the song remained the same, though the names had changed. That is the same thing that has happened with every fifties classic that I can even think of. It is almost like there are only four actual songs (I mean only four songs that have ever existed, and everyone is ripping them off) and everyone tries to spin them in their own way…

I truly believe that most of the remakes are coming from a band trying to pay homage to their roots; It is what they grew up on, it is what they played while they were alone in the garage, it is a kind of a ‘thank you’ to whatever band made the song that made them, in turn, go ahead and form a band. If that is the way that it happens/happened, they should really try to pay a bit of respect to the source material itself. I will mention Metallica’a cover of the old song ‘turn the page’, Metallica nailed that one right on the head (even though I don’t really care for what metallica has become), and brought an old song back to life. There are times when a remake can introduce new fans to old music, but, not only are they few and far between, they also require a bit of talent. Unfortunately, I seem to be more talented (at the guitar anyway) than about 80% of the hacks (I mean bands) that do their best to totally destroy the song that they are trying to ‘cover’.

I suppose that I am being a little bit more bitter than usual (at least I hope I am being more bitter than usual) because of the remake/cover of just one song. The band Nonpoint tried to do the old Phil Collins classic; “in the air tonight”, and they tried to make it a power-chord-laden, Old Metallica song. The thing is that the song was not written that way. The silence that follows all of the verses was done intentionally to set the mood. The original song is powerful for its silence, for its lyrics, for the fact that you don’t want to listen to it without someone next to you, or at least someone else in the house. The song is very dark, very morose, and impossible to listen to without someone holding you… Unless, of course, you have listened to that horrible cover of the song. Trying to turn this particular song into some sort of a speedy, punk-rock type of song is just so, so wrong. The song was what it was, and it is still played on classic radio stations all over the country. If you really want to try to make a name for yourself, why not try to remake some old ‘Beatles’ or ‘Zepplin’ songs?

John Saul; Watches

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Well, Yesterday’s post actually resulted in two emails. While I would like to think that it was all a result of myself writing better, or perhaps more controversial, things, that is certainly not the case. Both of the emails were asking me the same question: If you don’t really like John Saul, why have you read so many of his novels?

I expected this question to come from Flux at the BlackChampagne website when I originally wrote the message to him. When he didn’t actually ask the question, I kind of gave up on looking for an excuse to give him. Then, when two people emailed the question that Flux never asked, I was forced to start to try to come up with a reason why. I have found that reason, basically put, I don’t know.

The year was roughly 1991, I was riding with my oldest brother from Oregon to Arizona. Speed limits at the time still being in the 55mph range on much of the road, while being 65mph on others, it was taking us a while to get there. The only tape that we had in the car, at least the only one that I would agree to listen to, was Europe: The Final Countdown. That was what we listened to for about 20 hours of driving time and it really, really, really got old.

My mother, while we were at her home in Arizona, offered us a book-on-tape version of Saul’s first novel “Suffer the Children”. Being that myself and my brother would rather die than to listen to that godawful ‘Europe’ music again, we took it and plugged it in as we were leaving Phoenix. The strange thing is that I am not able to find anywhere on the official John Saul website that there was ever a ‘book on tape’ version of that story…ever… I know that this was the story that I listened to, and I know that it really did sound fresh, but I was also about sixteen, and I didn’t really know anything about anything. Of course that knowledge (the knowledge that you never knew anything in your teens) really only starts to come to you much, much later.

Probably about four years after the previous incident, I realized that I actually wanted to read the works of Saul. It was certainly not an ‘epiphany’, or anything of that sort. I just happened to check out a book at the local library, by Saul, and read it. The book-on-tape versions of the books are either far better, or I have really low standards. At the time I was living with a dear friend, and we would kind of juggle the books to make sure that we were both able to read them before they had to go back to the library. It was during that period that I read every novel that Saul had ever written.

There are certain requisites one must reach before becoming a ‘good author’. Saul, in my opinion, did not meet a single one of those requisites. What Saul did do was keep me reading his books.

So, here we are, many years later. I have read every book that Saul had written, prior to the “blackstone chronicles”, of course I read that all as well. The thing is that some combination of age/experience in life tells you what is going to happen long before the question ever comes up. I, now, have an autographed copy of Saul’s latest novel. I will read it, every page. Not just for the story, but for the fact that a very dear friend bought it for me.

The other question, via email, was regarding the dual watch photos that I placed in yesterday’s update. The question was; “are you sure about the prices you attribute to each watch?”.

The answer is pretty simple, “NO”.

I have never bought a Rolex, ever, and I don’t plan to…

This person’s issue was with my saying that the ‘armitron’ was under a hundred dollars, while the Rolex was over a thousand… Well, it turns out that I chose the wrong ROLEX to pick on. The Armitron watch in the photo is still under a hundred dollars, the ROLEX watch is (prior to my previous beliefs) only about 800. Thank you for clearing that up. So that, the Rolex, watch will keep time only 8 times better than the three-dollar watch that you can get at the local 7-11. To follow that up, your average cheap-ass-watch can keep time, being off by only thousandths of a second, for years. The more expensive watches have to be repaired by ‘jewelers’, the name itself cost money.

Buy the cheap watch and there will be no need to negotiate later,.

Rolex Vs. Armitron; John Saul Vs. Stephen King

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First off, I just want to go ahead an mention that I only waited until the fourth day of the month to get around to changing the date on my watch. That might be a new record for me. My watch is very often a day off just because I am too lazy to change it. Not that I am necessarily too lazy to take the fraction of a second to actually change the date, more that my watch has a certain issue when I try to do it (or I have an issue with the watch, or both).

The thing about watches is that if you happen to be a man, and not a metrosexual type man, you only really need one. That being the case, you want to have one that is quite durable, yet that looks respectable enough to wear in semi-formal wear; A plastic digital watch doesn’t look very good when you are trying to dress nice. This leads to you (hopefully) having a watch that is much like mine (which is an Armitron. Of course the website does not let you actually browse through the designs, except by category with a representative picture of each, which makes that link all but useless.), for those on a budget, or a much more expensive one that is just as utilitarian (of course the link to Rolex is every bit as useless as it does the same “Flash Navigation” crap that makes it impossible to link to anything within the site.).

For your consideration, I offer the following two photos. I apologize for not being able to get them to the same size, but the Rolex got too blurry when I sized it down, as did the Armitron when I tried to size it up.

Now, I know for a fact that the Armitron is stainless steel, not just the back of it, but the band and everything else as well. I know that because it has been on my left wrist every single day for about three years. The Rolex appears to be damn near identical to the Armitron, so I am going to go ahead and assume that it is also made of stainless steel.

The stainless stell allows me to dip my hands into heavily bleached water without fear of damaging it, makes it quite easy to clean, and also gives it a simple silver and black look that you honestly could not get with your average Swatch. The fact that blood rinses neatly off of it is something that I really adore, but that may be just for people in my chosen profession.

I can wash the blood of of the watch once the day is over (much like washing your hands) and wear the same watch out to dinner in semi-formal wear. In fact, I am pretty sure that I was actually wearing this watch while I was at my Wedding. As for the fact that the Armitron watch in the photo is under a hundred dollars, while the rolex in the photo is over a thousand, I got nothing. Some People (idiots) will simply pay more for the name. I am glad that I am not one of them.

I have gone way, way off topic here, I will try to get it back into focus now. I don’t like to change the date on the watch because (on any watch that is a chronograph) you have to pull the winder (or what used to be a winder) out about half way to get to the part that changes the date alone. Nearly half of the times I try, I pull the damn thing out too far and end up messing the minute hand on the watch up. That is really not that big of a deal, but I do like to keep my watch as close as possible to three minutes ahead of actual time. I suppose that is yet another one of my weird obsessions, but it does pretty much gurantee that I am to work a minute or two early, and since I never leave work until at least five minutes after (as a precaution), I am guranteed to never arrive late or leave early.

• I sent an email to Flux over at BlackChampagne.com a couple of days ago. It was a pretty simple, short email, in which I just pretty much ripped on John Saul. Of course, as luck would have it, he went ahead and posted my email, then linked to my site. I am not opposed to that in any way, I mean you don’t really start typing on your own site if you aren’t looking to have people read it. Posting your thoughts in such a (potentially) public venue will make it so that a lot of people read it.

In case anyone out there actually reads both his site and my site, I want to make one point clear. I have read over 20 John Saul books, the most recent was the 6 book series called The Blackstone Chronicles (I do apologize for not linking to the amazon.com or other sellers of the books, but those reviews are pretty harsh…Albeit deservingly so). Most every book that Saul wrote I read before I had come out of my teen years. I read the “blackstone chronicles” only because I felt an obligation to read the rest of his work. I knew then, as I know now, that the ‘Blackstone Chronicles’ was a direct attempt to rip off the Green Mile serial series that Stephen King did.

I would likely not even be reading this latest Saul novel were it not for the fact that a friend took the time to buy a copy of the book (in hardcover) and got the author himself to autograph it, with my name in the message. It is not even formulaic crap, no, to call it formulaic would imply that he uses a formula. He doesn’t seem to use a formula at all, instead he just writes the same damn story, over and over again, changing names where necessary. But, that is why I actually quit reading Saul in the first place.

I don’t have it in me to bitch any more about this subject, but trust me, I stand behind my decision that Saul is not a real author.