Remembering Charlie

Whenever I see a cartoon like this, I think about the Younger Daughter's dog Charlie. He was a lab mix and was always happiest when the weather was -- at least for humans -- not particularly nice.

The folly of one-upmanship in writing

I started reading Cold Days, a novel by Jim Butcher, last night. It's number 14 in his Harry Dresden series. I kind of like the character of Harry Dresden; I've read several other books in the series and I enjoyed The Dresden Files during its brief one-season run on Syfy a few years ago.

Unfortunately, I'm not overly impressed with the direction the series has taken. Butcher has fallen into the same rabbit hole that's sucked in a number of other authors in genre fiction. Laurell K. Hamilton, Charlaine Harris, and Janet Evanovich are the three I'm most familiar with, but I'm sure there are others. I think of it as self one-upmanship, an irrational impulse to top whatever was in the last book in a series with something that's even more shocking, unusual, terrifying, funny, or sexual. Butcher keeps introducing new totally evil and ever more powerful supernatural beings that are out to get Dresden; Hamilton has turned Anita Blake's love life into something close to an Olympic sport complete with team uniforms*; Evanovich keeps pushing the envelope on the eccentricities of her characters in an attempt to milk more cheap laughs out of her readers.

Whatever causes it -- an unwillingness to invest time or energy in doing more character development or playing too many video games where you advance from level to level -- it strikes me as evidence of a lack of some basic writing skills. An author shouldn't have to resort to cheap tricks to hold the reader's interest. Just because they're called "novels" doesn't mean an author has to try hit new levels of novelty in every work. It is possible to write novels with recurring characters who deal with variations on the same theme over and over and at the same time have the books become better and better. Most mysteries, after all, are variations on the same theme: something gets stolen or someone gets killed, and the lead character gets to figure out who did it. The mystery is what sucks you in, the various plot twists, and not one upmanship, e.g., in the last book the hero got clubbed with a baseball bat so in the next one the author's going to up the ante by having him shot.

Of course, if you're weak at coming up with a decent plot line and your characters are all rather flat, then what's left? You fall back on novelty and the equivalent of special effects, just like in a bad movie, and hope that your readers stick with you.

The readers won't, of course, but it usually takes quite a few pallet loads of remaindered books for the authors to figure that out.

[*Is Anita Blake's vagina Teflon-lined? After reading some of the sex scenes, you have to wonder how the woman can still walk, let alone go out and slay vampires.] 

Happy birthday, Nerf

It's Caturday

Kelvinator redux

Back in May I mentioned bidding a fond farewell to our ancient Kelvinator. Turned out it wasn't totally gone. This was in the mail today:

What did I find when I opened the box, you ask?

This stash of CFLs is a thank you to us from a consortium of public power companies in Michigan -- various REAs and a couple of municipal power companies -- because we decided to jettison our energy hog antique refrigerator. The S.O. and I looked at that stash of CFLs, thought about just how infrequently we've had to change the ones we already own, and had the same thought: we now have a lifetime supply of lightbulbs. The S.O. is such a cheap bastard so frugal he made the switch to CFLs years ago. About the only incandescent left in our house is the one in the refrigerator.

Level playing fields

One thing that's always intrigued me is the way any change in the overall business climate always results in a handful of business owners howling like wounded banshees about the devastating effect those changes will have on their specific companies. We hear the howls every time a suggestion is made to raise the minimum wage, alter the legal hours minors can work, or limit the tasks certain classes of workers can do. At the moment, we're still hearing the howls about the evil, evil effects of the Affordable Care Act. You'd think that after the shit storm that erupted over John Schnatter's pronouncements about the ACA forcing him to lay off workers that business owners would have learned to keep their mouths shut. You'd be wrong. The latest idiot is some fool in Omaha who owns a few Wendy's franchises. He apparently hasn't figured out that bloviating about cutting your workers' hours to avoid paying for health insurance isn't a real smart move.

Leaving aside for now the issues of the negative publicity he's generating, i.e., he's openly saying he'd rather have his employees' illnesses go untreated than make sure they could afford to see a doctor occasionally (does Wendy's have a secret sauce? And just how much snot goes into it?), just think about the ego involved. The man thinks the world revolves around his business, that his handful of fast food outlets is absolutely unique in the costs he's encountering as part of doing business. His expenses are going up so how is he expected to compete with the other purveyors of grease and soggy french fries? It doesn't seem to have occurred to him or to John Schnatter or any of the other asshats whining about the costs resulting from the Affordable Care Act that every other business owner in the U.S. is facing those same cost increases. The playing field is level. Their competition is going to be experiencing the same situation; everyone's costs are going up by the same amount and they all risk similar penalties for noncompliance.

If only one hamburger outlet had to raise the prices on its cheeseburgers by a dime to compensate for an increased business expense, the business might have a reason to whine. It would be harder to compete if only one business was getting hit. But when all of them are? Maybe the cumulative effect will be that customers buy a few less burgers over a year's time, but the price increase isn't going to be what determines which specific burgers they buy -- it's going to be the overall image of the company that makes the difference. Everyone's been subjected to the same change in the cost of doing business; no one's been advantaged or disadvantaged relative to the competition.

In short, while there maybe some minor differences in the products being sold (e.g., Wendy's has its mystery meat chili, Runza has runzas, McDonald's has the filet-o-fish), for most people fast food is fast food. Not a whole lot of thought goes into deciding between one quick lunch and another. I think the S.O. and I are pretty typical in the way we pick a place to eat when we're in a hurry: convenient location comes first on the list and what's actually on the menu is a secondary consideration. Unless, of course, the CEO for that particular company has managed to demonstrate some first-class asshat behavior, in which case it doesn't matter if it's the only fast food outlet in the county, we won't eat there.

Just how stupid does a CEO have to be to go out and deliberately generate negative publicity for his business? And just how do these idiots get to be CEOs in the first place? The stupid, it burns.

Dreams

Do you ever bother with dream analysis? I have acquaintances who read deep meanings into every dream they experience. They keep dream journals and reach for a pen as soon as they're awake. I'm always quietly amazed they can remember anything. When I dream, I usually just remember flashes of weirdness. Like this morning. I woke up feeling like I'd just shot a scene from Them!, although I didn't have a conscious memory of having seen any giant, fire-breathing ants. Very strange. This was one of those mornings where I kind of wished I could remember more. Were the S.O. and I somehow shrunk down to the size of ants, or did we encounter ants that had mutated to the size of Shetland ponies? What sort of deep meaning, if any, should I read into it? Or was this simply a reminder to add ant traps to the shopping list?

Is there any other type?

Have supermarkets started peddling potatoes grown in vats? Is there some new secret process for producing spuds that doesn't involve dirt?

And what unnatural oil might be like? WD-40 maybe? Or maybe 10W30?

I'm also mystified as to why any company feels like it has to include advertising on the bag the product is in. I'm pretty sure that anyone who's pulled a bag of chips off the shelf has already decided those chips are going in the shopping cart.