First it’s bullets that have never been fired, now it’s this

The only moon landing in history is NASA’s Apollo expedition in 1968.

AFP .. you guys have a serious problem.

Subject Hat Tip

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Finally got paid last week for the ever-loving magazine article, but alas, just as I feared, being implacable and insistent about being paid did rebound. My friend who referred me to them said “Ummm… you know you won’t be getting any more story assignments from them.” Which neatly coincides with what I had decided; if actually getting a check for work performed and published was going to be so prolonged an agony that I would pass on doing any more for that particular publication.

Getting the check at last means I could order another box of review copies of “Truckee’s Trail” which will go out in the mail the instant I get them. Most of them will go to Mom, who is even more brash about promoting my work than I am. Always has been; she was the one who practically frog-marched me into the place where I got the job that carried me all the way through college.

I mailed out autographed copies this week to everyone who paid for one, one to be considered for review by “True West”, another to be reviewed at Blogger News Network, one to B. Durbin with extravagant thanks for the use of her photo for the cover, one for The Fat Guy, who loves Westerns and Westernish things. Does anyone else want an autographed copy? Dave the Computer Genius helped me install a donation/payments page at www.celiahayes.com where you can order one with a simple click of the button. I’ll be sending for another box of copies in a couple of weeks, if anyone does.

On the marketing front, I have sent out quantities of postcards to various museums, historical societies and independent bookstores across the western states, and followed up with emails. A google map-search only turns up one independent bookstore in San Francisco which isn’t self-consciously leftist, new-age or oriented to alternate lifestyles and/or the LBGT community. I haven’t tackled Los Angeles yet; San Diego I’ll leave to Mom and her friends.

So far, a bookstore in Truckee has e-mailed me back, saying they will order copies – they carry about a dozen books about the Donner Party alone. I am picturing my book in the “local history” shelf, waving its hands and calling “Hey – read about the people who didn’t screw up their journey big time!” And the Truckee-Donner Historical Society is making noises about reviewing and stocking it as well. So my instincts for marketing the book are paying off in a small way; not bad, considering I have no reviews at all to publicize it with, so far!

I do believe I shall finish the first draft, volume two of “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees, etc” this week, at about a chapter and a half to go. This ends neatly with the conclusion of the Civil War, with all the men trickling home and facing up to the ruin that the war left of their farms and businesses. I’ll be taking a breather and doing a lot more reading before I do necessary revisions and additional research. Then comes the final volume, and finding a new way to write about trail drives and cattle baronies, something that hasn’t been seen in about a couple of million books, movies and TV Westerns.

There is some promising stuff I have discovered so far. Did anyone know that there were trail drives out of Texas, to California, well before the Civil War? And that refrigerated beef began to be shipped out of Indianola almost as soon as the war was over? Or even that the long trail drives towards the railheads in the mid-west even began because Texas was glutted with cattle that had run wild during the war?

Stay tuned….

They should issue a warning when you adopt a dog that says “Warning, this pup will worm it’s way into your heart, stand by you no matter what, require nothing, take nothing, and finally have to leave you way before you’re ready, no matter how old they are.”

My heart is breaking. We had 4 1/2 wonderful years together, but it wasn’t enough. Then again, 40 years wouldn’t be enough. She’s running free with the angels now - no limp, no pain, just peace and love. She’ll run forever in my heart.

When Alberto Gonzales shows up for work next week he’ll be greeted at the door and politely reminded that he resigned. His response of course will be: I don’t recall doing that.

Update: To my regret this humor is not original - I heard the line from a caller on The Dennis Miller Show before lunch today. I should have attributed it. Apologies are due to anyone who read this and thought “my he’s a witty fellow”.

Why didn’t the Washington Post run this cartoon? A sex joke. What’s the joke? Lola Granola is now a Radical Muslim and Steve won’t be getting any.

Geez Louise. Yes, people have feelings and lord knows we wouldn’t want to offend anyone - they might cancel their subscription and the newspapers can’t afford to loose too many subscribers.

Islam is a big grown up religion - if a billion faithful want to be part of the 21st century (and I think that they do) then they can stand a few gibes and jests.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Why is the West going to win**? Because more of our soldiers are like this, than not.

“The first time you get blown up by an IED, you’re like, Dude, this is badass! but after that you’re like, This really is not cool at all anymore. But riding out there, getting shot at, shooting back — that doesn’t get old.”

It’s more than just having bad-ass soldiers. Alison didn’t get that attitude from the Army - she carried it there from the civilian world.  The Army merely honed it to a fine edge and gave it direction.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Via.

*if you subscribe to the idea that there is a conflict between the West and humorless zealots**.

** In my world not all humorless zealots use Islam as a cover. There are plenty of other types of zealots that could bring the whole kit and caboodle to a grinding halt.

There are reasons for not particularly enjoying residency in Texas; beginning with the brutal summer heat, and working down through the serious lack of good mountains, distance from the seacoast, the brutal summer heat, highway interchanges that look like the planners just threw a plate of spaghetti at a wall-map, self-chuck-holing surface roads, the brutal summer heat, a distressing tendency for citizens to drown in urban low-water crossings, a high percentage of drivers of large vehicle who completely spaz out when it rains (as if they had never, ever seen such a thing before!), the brutal summer heat, urban downtown areas (I’m looking at you, Houston!) which look like Calcutta had thrown up on Los Angeles…. And the fact that everything is bigger applies to the insect life as well. You wanna see a garden spider large enough to snag small birds? Check out my back yard… but bring along a baseball bat. And did I mention the brutal summer heat?

Against those considerations, though, there is an even longer list of reasons to relish living in the Lone Star State… look, flyover country is not cultural Siberia. We’ve got the bookstores, the boutique cinemas, the museums and opera companies, and the whiney self-centered artistes to prove it. In no particular order of importance, we also have…

Wildflowers; square miles of wildflowers; For months in spring the highway verges and the empty lots, and the hillsides look like paintings by the better sort of early impressionalist painter.

And given enough rain, the countryside looks really, really quite pretty. Not spectacular, mostly of a gently-rolling variety, cut across with green rivers and creeks. The Hill Country is rather more enthusiastically rolling. West Texas is really, really rolling, but not very green most of the year. More medium crispy, and not to everyones’ taste… but this being Texas - where everything is bigger - there is more than enough of it all to go around.

Fields of grazing cows… very restful to look at, although in some places this program is startlingly varied with flocks of llamas and other exotica.

The HEB grocery chain. Statewide powerhouse, having sent several national chains running for the borders with a matchless combination of quality, excellent service and attention to detail. Quite simply, if it isn’t on the shelf at HEB’s Central Market, you probably don’t need it anyway. There are whole sections devoted to local salsa, hot sauce and BBQ sauce.

Austin local music scene; not that I know much about that first hand, other than seeing “Austin City Limits” on PBS but Cpl. Blondie does, and she made me put that in.

Local history: a rich mine containing many solid gold nuggets. Like Churchill once remarked about the Balkans, Texas produces almost more history than can be consumed locally.

Breakfast tacos; the food of the gods… oh, ye who only know of this marvel through the medium of Taco Bell should hide your faces in shame, and make a pilgrimage to San Antonio on your knees. I solemnly swear that every block on every main avenue has a breakfast-taco place on it somewhere. Many of them also offer drive-through service.

And Texas also has a most exuberant sense of being a distinctive place. Utah is the only other place that has anything like the same strength of identity, of pride in a shared and unique history. I suppose it comes from both states having been politically independent and separate entities during their respective founding decades. Sometimes this sense of identity strikes new visitors as rather overstated, but after a while it’s kind of endearing, and makes other places feel a little bland in comparison.

And finally, this is only a personal and purely anecdotal statement… but I do believe that out of all other bodies of human beings in the world, a substantially higher proportion of Texans will slide out of this existence and into the next, breathless, exhausted and whooping triumphantly, “Day-am! What an incredible ride!”

For the past four weeks I’ve been training up as a Customer Service Rep for a Ginormous Wireless Company. I gotta do that before I can move up because, well, everyone does that. I’m okay with that. I can’t supervise or teach what I don’t know. I’ve tried before. It doesn’t work. Besides, it’s really nice to NOT be in charge for awhile.

I’ve learned a lot in the past month. I thought I’d share a few things.

Monitor your minutes. Seriously, it’s easier than you think. You can keep track of your minutes via your phone or via your carrier’s web site every day if you want. Call the Customer Service folks. Tell them you want to audit your minutes for the last three months and ask them straight out if you think you need to change your plan. If you and your spouse are on a 1000 minute plan but are only using about 500 minutes every month, you’re paying way too much. The better carriers will be happy to help you save some money because they know you’ll appreciate it. Appreciation means you’re sticking around. Loyal customers are the life’s blood of cell carriers. We love new customers, don’t get me wrong, but the good customer who sticks around and pays his bills on time all the time? We adore them.

Go to your carrier’s web site. Most of them have more information than you can imagine concerning your plan, your phone and what you can do to save yourself some money.

Check for the companies that give you a Fave 5 or a Top 10. Think about it. There are only so many people you really talk to on a regular basis. If you’re talking to them for the price of your plan, how many additional minutes do you actually need? And the carriers love setting that up for you. It keeps their costs down if they know what numbers are going to be used most often. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know, but it just does.

If there’s a T-Mobile or a Cingular or a Verizon dealer in your area, take your business to them rather than buying a plan from one of those multi-phone places in the mall. Many of them are very reputable and have the highest integrity. Some of them don’t. Go to the brand name store and you know you’re not going to get any “extras” added onto your plan.

Check your coverage at home, at work and other places you might use your phone before you buy a plan. Not all cell phone companies have coverage everywhere. The better companies have pretty detailed maps outlining the coverage in your town and the towns you’re going to be traveling to.

Speaking of coverage, no cell phone company can guarantee coverage. Listen carefully to cell phone commercials. They’ll tell you the truth, they have “LESS” dropped calls, the “FEWEST” dropped calls, none of them will tell you they have no dropped calls. Read your contract. There isn’t a cell phone company in the country that doesn’t have a disclaimer saying that they in no way guarantee coverage or a good signal.

If you have a teenager and you’re going to give them a cell phone, make sure you buy them an unlimited texting package. Seriously. If you can’t afford to pay for unlimited texting for them, you can’t afford to give them a cell phone. You may have great kids, they may be completely responsible in every way, but you’d be surprised at how quickly a text conversation can rack up extra charges.

Here’s another thing. No company will turn off a phone or text messaging just because you’ve used your monthly allotment of minutes or messages. Everything over what you agreed to pay for is going to cost you a LOT more than if you called in to change your plan before your billing cycle ends. Adding more minutes or more text messages to your plan might cost you another 10-20 bucks, but if you don’t, at $0.50 a minute or $0.20 a message, how much do you think you can run up if you’ve hit your limit by the middle of your cycle?

Some cell phones are better at some things that others. Go surf around and read the reviews. Do you want/need fun and games and email and web, or do you need a phone that picks up even the weakest signals? Which phones give you the best balance? Do the lighter phones feel wrong in your hand when you’re talking for more than a minute?

If you are going to use your cell phone when traveling, especially internationally, call your carrier’s Customer Service Center and ask them to break down the charges for all calls you make and receive while you’re traveling. Getting your phone unlocked and buying a pre-paid Sim Card for that country might seem like the best idea, but there may be hidden fees and carrier charges that you won’t see until after you’re home and the trip is over. Even if you’re traveling to the next state over from you, make sure you have a roaming package while you’re traveling. Toll charges get more people in trouble than you could imagine. Never, ever, ever, ever, use your cell phone on a cruise liner. Unless you’re someone sitting at the Captain’s Table, you probably can’t afford it.

Be careful who you give your cell number to. You get charged for messages sent to your phone whether or not you requested them and text spam is getting almost as bad as email spam.

The bottom line is educate yourself. Do you know when your billing cycle ends? Can you change your plan up to the day before it ends if you’re going over your minutes or if you’ve not used them all? Can you get the same plan you’ve always had for less money if you extend your contract now? If you change your contract are you actually going to lose money because you’re on one of those old plans from the cell phone war days that you can’t get anymore? Are you paying for features you’re not using? Is your kid messaging a thousand times a day? Is that cute horoscope you subscribed to costing you $0.50 a day?

Shop around. You’re going to be with that carrier for at least a year unless you’re on one of those ridiculously jacked up prepaid plans. What kind of support is available? When is it available? You’re not buying the phone, you’re buying a service. Who gives you the most bang for your buck?

Shannon Love at Chicago Boyz has a good question

Some time ago, I made a humorous throwaway observation that Democrats didn’t believe in individual freedom of choice except in matters pertaining to sexuality.

At the time, I thought the statement a mere comedic exaggeration. As a libertarian, I consider each political ideology a mixed bag. Each political group gives freedom with one hand and takes it away with the other. I assumed that a little honest examination of all the Left’s policy positions would quickly reveal many areas completely unrelated to sex in which the Left advocated letting individuals make the decisions about what or what not to do.

However, to my disquiet, I cannot think of a single one! I honestly cannot think of a single non-sexual area in which the contemporary Left advocates letting individuals decide what or what not to do.

Can anyone else? I’m really serious about this. If you can think of an area please say so. If you can’t, ask around your leftist friends and contact me at shannonlove-at-chicagoboyz.net.

More at the link - it’s a good question. The people who read this blog are pretty smart … what do y’all think?

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

What are you listening to this summer? I haven’t taken a lot of time to listen to much of anything at all this summer, so I’m living vicariously. Is there anything new that’s worth listening to? What I’ve heard on the radio, has been kind of weirding me out. There’s something seriously wrong with that Coast Guard song…I just can’t put my finger on why it annoys me so much.

Rave reviews - no death threats

I wanna be like Osama
I wanna wear designer clothes beneath a robe
While my lackeys loom like vultures, I’ll declare a clash of cultures,
Kill civilians by the millions round the globe
Grow a beard down to my navel, conquer YouTube, get on cable,
And be wealthier than any man I know
Please make me like Osama B.
With an Al Jazeera Show!

The best defense against humorless zealots is making fun of them.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Carnival of Space #17 is posted at The Planetary Society Blog - hosted by the gracious Emily Lakdawalla.

“The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam to-day.”

Or so saith the Queen, and I can just completely relate, because in the mad writers-life waltz that is my own life these days, there is always the hope of jam tomorrow. The bread today is plain and budget, and naked of jam, but tomorrow it may be miraculously spread with finest-kind Confiture Bar le Duc.

Or so we keep hoping. I think the cats are holding out for a can of nice juicy salmon, hold the toast hold the capers, just plain, thank you. The dogs will be ecstatically happy with anything edible that has only bounced once when it hit the floor.

Tiny tastes of jam include the fact that “To Truckee’s Trail” is in Booklocker.com’s list of top-ten print best-sellers, and I did get an email from this bookstore in Truckee City thanking me for my query and noting that they had ordered some copies from the Ingram catalogue to stock in their bookstore. I am testing out running an ad here; home central for all things Western… and I finally got paid for the magazine article that had been published several issues ago. (What a goat rope… I’m not really sure I want to submit any more articles, not when I have to wait to get paid for months and then throw a temper tantrum. How demeaning is that? And do publishers do it because it’s a hell of a lot easier to stall writers than suppliers and printers?) But I had some paid work at Dave The Computer Genius’ place of business, and he let me use his computer and soft-wear to tweak my book-website, so my need to buy my own copy of it is put off for at least a little while. All good, all jam., or at least a tantalizing expectation of same.

Still haunting the mailbox though; last week I ordered a box of copies from the publisher; these are the autographed copies which readers have ordered, and some are to be sent out to reviewers. I ordered another box this week; more review copies, and one for the kid in the sandwich shop where I get a smoked-chicken sub every Saturday… and I have promises of all kinds of linky-love and reviews in the very near future. As soon as I have the books in hand. And mail them out.

There was that saying about promises and pie crust, though…
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Everyone has a reoccurring nightmare, so I have always been told. If you are very lucky they are fairly benign, sometimes to the point of making you wonder if they can really be classed as a nightmare, like dreaming that you are stark naked in your place of work. A good few years ago, there was an article published, the result of a survey that revealed that college-graduates of all majors and vintages still had finals nightmares. They dreamed they went in to take a Terribly Important Final Exam, and when they actually began taking the test, realized that they didn’t know any of the answers, or it was an essay question and their mind was a Complete Blank… or that, like my mother’s reoccurring Finals Nightmare, they skipped that class for the entire semester.

My reoccurring nightmare is a peculiar variant of the Finals Nightmare; The Radio Station Where Nothing Works. Either I am walking into a sort-of-familiar radio station control room, where the control board has been subtly reconfigured, where all the board switches which activate and control the audio levels for the mikes, the CD players, the computer (which as replaced the cart decks where the spots, inserts and IDs used to play from) have been changed around… or they have been disconnected completely. Or it’s a completely new control board.

And in a bare three minutes or so before I have to go on the air, I have to figure it all out, or fix it so it does work.

Sometimes it’s the CD players which suddenly cannot be made to work properly. Adding piquancy to this particular nightmare variant is the fact that some of the early broadcast CD-player models used in AFRTS got terribly buggy when over-heated. No matter how carefully the DJ cued up a particular cut, they would reset themselves to another selection, usually the first cut on the CD. Nothing is guaranteed to make a DJ feel more like an idiot than to cheerfully announce the next song,… and have something else entirely go out on the air. I got to the point where I would not announce the next selection on the playlist, unless I recognized the up-ramp. But total nightmare material: not being able to make the darned thing work at all.

Playlist. That’s another nightmare. Not being able to find the next thing you’re supposed to be airing, because the CD/record library is a complete shambles. Or to cue it up in time; see above as regards non-functioning CD players. At least my nightmare has progressed technologically, to the point where I’m no longer afflicted by record-players with missing tone-arms or needles. There was a new element in my most recent radio-station nightmare, though. I can barely read the tiny print on CD cases now, without my reading glasses, and I dreamed the other night of having a playlist with print too small to read.

And I didn’t have my glasses. It sucks to be getting old… but it does beat the alternative, doesn’t it?

…Or in other words, for what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful. No matter where Hurricane Dean makes landfall, South Texas will most likely get more rain. And we need more rain, (on top of the forty days and forty nights quantities which we have already been blessed with this year), about as much as Custer needed another Indian.

The first two weeks in August were about the longest stretch we had gone without a gully-washer, all spring and fall. Quite honestly it’s not like we were really complaining about that; a couple of times a decade it is damned nice not to have a summer drought. The wildflower meadows were spectacular this year and they lasted until… well, the tougher wildflowers, like yellow daisies, Mexican Hat, and sunflowers are still gong strong even as I write. I saw fields of purple wild verbena that I had almost never observed before. And when Wil and Blondie and I went down to the coast in June, Wil kept remarking that everything appeared as lush and green as the English countryside. Usually by high summer, the wildflowers are gone and the hills and meadows are starting to look light brown and medium-crispy. By August, everything is the color of dust. If it weren’t for watering gardens and lawns, suburbia would look pretty much the same, but not this year. The kvetching about not being able to go out and mow the yard because the lawn squelches underfoot like a soggy sponge has risen to nearly unbearable levels.

The grass itself is nearly up to an elephant’s eye; mine would be, if I hadn’t pulled out the last of it and did xerioscaping and a lot of pavers set in gravel by way of dog-proofing the back yard last year. But the bay tree and the fig tree, and the crepe myrtles have practically exploded, having put on so much new growth. Aside from the lawn-care fanatics, who really don’t want their private patch of paradise to look like an 8th of an acre of tall-grass prairie, the gardeners and wild-flower enthusiasts have few complaints about the rain. The ground is now so saturated, and the aquifer topped up to the over-fill level, any more rain will just spill off.

Our main local headache after the next bad storm does a prolongued swirlie over south Texas is that suburban San Antonio is threaded by creeks, and fairly substantial ones at that. Leon, Salado, Cibolo Creeks, and a handful of smaller tributaries all feed eventually into the San Antonio River. Even when there isn’t an established stream-bed, usually a wide swath of mown grass with some interesting rocks and a trickle of water down the middle, there is a well-known tendency for water to collect in the roads at certain points after there has been any more rain than a gentle sprinkle.

Some of these places are marked as low-water crossings, with a kind of giant yellow yardstick set vertically into the ground. Others can be recognized as such by mud-stains and an assortment of ground-level debris trapped at a higher level in fences and shrubs. The police put up barriers at most of them, but others are just well known by regular commuters. After living in the city and experiencing the aftermath of a couple of rainstorms, you just know where water gathers and swamps the street and adjust accordingly. With an extended rainstorm, though, the deeper such pools will become. Water in the creek-beds will rise over the level of the bridges crossing them… and water will collect in new places and catch everyone by surprise. It’s kind of embarrassing, to know you can be swept away in your car, in the middle of a major metropolitan area. Yeah, it’s nice to stay in touch with nature, but when the rescue services have to bring a rope out to you, marooned on the roof of your car in the middle of a raging torrent at the Basse Road and Highway 281 off ramp; it’s all a bit too much of a good thing. So, we’re watching the weather services with a bit of nervousness, and wondering if we should just take a vacation day or two next week, rather than risk the commute.

On the bright side, at least someone hasn’t drowned in high water in a parking garage elevator, in the same manner as a luckless office worker did in Houston several years ago.

Not shaving before I go to work was almost a death defying experience.  I’ve got a mustache and a goatee now and I’m letting my hair grow out to see what’s left and see what color it is.  Knowing our daughter, it will be blonde as soon as she has enough to work with.  I missed wearing earrings.  I can’t explain why.
Kids who graduated high school this past year think of the bands I listened to as “their parent’s music.”

The VA is just as screwed up as we heard about when we were active duty.  I told them I was leaving Cheyenne in June way back in February, they scheduled me for my benefits physical in July and have had to forward everything to Boise and start over.

Working for a ginormous wireless that truly does promote based on performance vs tenure is sweet.  I’ve met people that have stayed in Customer Service for years and I’ve met folks who got promoted within three months.

I love not wearing the same clothes every day and working in a “casual” clothes environment.  I have no problem going business casual when “the suits” are in town.

I already have two pieces of flair (watch Office Space for reference) and I haven’t even started working yet.

Some folks really hate the war and that spills over to their feelings toward the military.  I mean wow, they’re emotionally committed to those feelings.  I have no idea how to respond to it other than to tell them, “Folks in the military don’t decide which wars to fight, we just fight the ones our elected leaders tell us to.”

The cafeteria at work beats the living hell out of any military chow hall I’ve ever ate at.

(Previous parts, here, here and here)

Having made it clear who was boss among the Texas Hill Country settlers, Duff and his Partisan Ranger company were withdrawn late in the autumn of 1863 and assigned to afflict the lower Rio Grande. They left smoking rubble and several decades worth of hatred and distrust in their wake. Upon his unlamented departure, a scratch company of local men, both pro-Union and Confederate alike recruited by Major James Hunter effectively protected the frontier settlements in the Hill Country. It helped that a fresh outburst of Indian raids had re-directed everyone’s priorities towards meeting a more keenly felt and immediate threat. Hunter was respected by all, and trusted by the German settlers, and sensibly confined his attentions towards protecting those scatterings of hamlets and ranches from Indian marauders and left the enforcement of the conscription laws strictly alone.

Unfortunately, continuing Confederate reversals on the battlefields in Tennessee and Virginia led to a demand for more men to feed into the Confederate Army and a renewed outcry to enforce the conscription laws in the Hill Country. One of those new decrees insisted that the volunteers in the frontier company be immediately mustered into the Confederate Army. Opposed to doing any such thing, most of those volunteers promptly deserted, and Hunter’s remaining troops turned to hunting them down. A pair of deserters were killed while resisting arrest near Grape Creek in Blanco County, and shortly afterwards a relative of one of the men killed the neighbor who was assumed to have informed on them.

Meanwhile, a detachment of state troops went searching for Karl Itz, a survivor of the Nueces massacre, who was thought to be hiding near his family home in the Cherry Spring area. Unable to find him, they seized his two younger brothers and took them to Fredericksburg on the pretext of enlisting them forcibly into the Confederate Army. Instead, the two of them were murdered by their guards in the middle of Main Street, presumably as a means sending a message to other draft dodgers and bushmen. Another running fight between troopers and bushmen left authorities with the impression that the situation was truly getting out of hand. Major Hunter was effectively kicked upstairs and local command given to an excitable and impulsive man named William Banta.

Banta soon exhibited a lamentable tendency to see enemies everywhere, encouraged by the whisperings of pro-Confederate neighbors at his headquarters at White Oak Creek, a little north of present-day Kerrville. He and a local pro-Confederate named James Waldrip were also encouraged in this tendency by the arrival of a small squad of men from Kansas, from William Quantrill’s notorious band. Fresh from assorted partisan atrocities in Kansas, they had come to Texas to purchase horses, cattle and supplies. In short order, Waldrip gathered a band of like-minded partisans together with Quantrill’s men and determined to root out Unionists, deserters, draft-evaders and any whose views of the Confederacy were less than wildly enthusiastic. They would become known as the “hangerbande” or “the hanging band”.
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XCOR needs an aerodynamicist with trans-sonic and supersonic experience. This person must be a US Citizen or Green Card holder due to ITAR restrictions. Aleta writes

One would like to think that such exists in America, but so far I have no evidence to support the assumption. We do have resumes from people who are qualified, but none is a U.S. citizen, or holds a “Green Card.” We can’t hire foreigners. The U.S. State Department says what we do comes under ITAR, so we cannot hire qualified non-citizen engineers, neither can we sell our products to anyone who is not a U.S. citizen or entity. I just this morning had to turn down a job from a Brit who wants to set a world record with one of our engines. That is several million dollars in revenue that will now not come to the U.S.

But that’s beside the point at this moment. XCOR needs to find someone who has some experience with trans-sonic and supersonic design. I have written to and called many schools, colleges and universities. Crickets chirping. With a single exception, the University of Maryland, not one professor or teacher or college or university has returned a query. I understand that they graduate students, but apparently helping them find jobs is beyond the academic ken.

For the past year I have placed ads everywhere: Av Week, ASME, SAE, all the alphabet organizations and associations remotely connected with aerodynamics. The result: resumes for everything _but_ an aerodynamicist. I have engaged three head hunters, several job shops and other professional recruiting organizations. The score so far: 0.

Not that I think that any qualified person is reading this humble blog - but how nice if they were! No - I find it alarming that XCOR - a place just chock full of smart people doing really cutting edge stuff - can’t find such a person.

What the hey?

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Update:

I dashed off a quick note to Aleta Jackson commentating that by looking or a ‘new or recent college graduate’ they might be restricting themselves a bit. I’m assumed that the a) the lady wants to hear from me and b) I know their business better than they.  I was, essentially, being a nosy parker.

Aleta Jackson - she really is a nice lady - wrote back

Thanks, I think Jerry noted that we are also seeking gray haired people too. Over forty, over fifty, over sixty all welcome here! We have been actively looking for someone with considerable experience. The results: “I don’t want to move again.” “I have family and they are happy where we are.” “I’ve taken up another vocation.” “I haven’t done anything except theoretical stuff for 20 years.” “Hmmm, I guess I shouldn’t have switched to (name a different discipline).” Tjose are quotes, and I am not making this stuff up. I don’t have time to play mind games with folks.

My frustration level is beyond my ability to articulate. I’m not mad at anyone, but throughly sad that pioneers are so difficult to locate, and that most of those who are, aren’t allowed to work here. One poor Russian rocket engineer is driving a cab in Canada because he can’t be hired by a U.S. company. That’s a criminal waste of talent.

Sorry, didn’t mean to rant. Thanks for the thoughts. We really do want someone with experience and ability, and they can be 20 or 80 and we won’t care.

She also adds that they have great benefits.

ITAR isn’t only to blame and I am by no means an expert. But I’ve had to live with that law at the worker-bee level for a few years now. Without reflecting on it’s utility I have to say that as implemented it hampers small organizations and inconveniences large ones. The latter charge it to the cost of doing business and move on. The former … well it hurts, plenty.

Things in Iraq have come to a sorry pass - Coalition forces have resorted to throwing shiny bullets at civilians ..

An elderly Iraqi woman shows two bullets which she says hit her house following an early coalition forces raid in the predominantly Shiite Baghdad suburb of Sadr City.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Update: I’ve been reading other blogs around the internets talking about this. The tone is a kind of merry “ha-ha the press-tards didn’t get it right” kinda deal which I found funny at first but now I don’t know ..

We can assume the picture is planted - a set of un-fired, nay, almost polished, bullets does make it seem likely. Consider that the agit-prop might be aimed at people that are neither thee nor me;

• Fence-sitting Muslims.
• Persons of Quality in Christendom who Matter*.

Neither class is familiar with firearms except in the movies. This is what bullets look like to them. Show either of these two groups a chunk of flattened lead and it does not have the same visual punch.

The point of all this then, is to show a poor old woman whose house was hit by gunfire. Mission accomplished.

The damage done, the image lingers in spite of it’s veracity.

Reality doesn’t matter - perception does.

*I’m reading Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle - the 17th century lingo is getting to me.

(deteted and re-posted to allow comments. Punctuation in the title messes up the comments. Don’t know why, just one of the laws of the universe)

Or this one would, if it weren’t a weekday. Besides the slow corrosive frustration of dealing with the various submissions processes of the big literary-industrial complex over the past year with very little to show for it but a tall pile of incompetently Xeroxed rejection slips with totally lame apologias and indecipherable signatures, there is one enormous frustration coming to a boil.

This frustration has been sitting in my metaphorical in-box like a pile of cat poop for a while. It’s as if someone is trying to send me a message; the cats do this when the litter box gets a little rancid. They usually do it on the rug in front of the TV stand, though. This is more of a psychic pile of poop, with a long history attached.

That is, if this last March can be said to be history. This is when a friend of mine at the ratio station where I part-time referred me to his own week-day place of employment, a local monthly magazine of stupendous glossiness and cachet. He told me that they were always looking for good free-lance writing, and what with one thing and another, the editor liked one of my story pitches, and so I wound up with an assignment for a not inconsiderable payment… well, it was about as much as I make as part-time office help in a week of workdays. All clear so far: got the assignment in March, did the work in April (including a re-write) for a deadline in early June and publication in the July issue, with payment to follow publication. So… not getting paid when the article was accepted (as does one of the other enterprises that I do work for occasionally) but the following month. Hokay, so another four weeks.

The exact timing of payment for the article became a little iffy, when we actually got to July. When I asked, my friend allowed casually that he usually got paid for his stuff during the first week of the month. The editor, when pressed by e-mail, responded casually “oh, sometime this month”. And the invoice they sent to me to fill out and fax back to them so they could process the check said (in smallish print at the bottom) to expect payment up to six weeks after the issue in which the invoiced story was on the newsstand. Which bumped the whole thing back to August; especially if there is some quibbling about what actually constitutes the meaning of the phrase and the precise date of “hitting the newsstand”.

So, picture this: I am going down to the mailbox and hovering over our kindly postal-worker every day that I am working at home for the last two weeks, expecting a check, planning a quick trip to the bank just in case. My plans for that check include buying some blogads advertising space, a box of printed postcards to send out to market it directly, and a good few extra copies of the book to send out for reviews. I’ve lined up a good few promises of reviews from an assortment of bloggers and friends. The next step of my strategy depends on this and the fact that I have not been able to move ahead - because I am waiting on this payment - is sending me absolutely spare with frustration.

So, yesterday, still no check. It’s the 14th of August and halfway through the month. That six weeks is pretty much up, by a strict definition. Polite e-mail to the editor, asking where is my payment for the story I did in July.

Reply, which can be rephrased thusly: “Oh dear, so very sorry. Thought you had been paid ages ago… but our office manager is off today. I’ll ask her tomorrow, when she is in.” It is not a good sign when it looks like a situation is setting up to drag on forever and ever… especially when I’ve been to this getting-paid-for-freelance rodeo before.

I was stiffed on payment for another writing assignment recently – this was text for a website and the end client apparently stiffed the web-designer after promising a check in full for months– and I was gaffed off for months, re-sending invoices and reminders about the measly $30 that I was owed, before the designer finally threw in the towel and admitted that he had never been paid either. I can write off a piddling amount like that, but the payment from the glossy monthly is a little more substantial.

Not enough to take them to small-claims over, but too much to just walk away from. And the most frustrating, drive-your-fist-through-a-sheet of drywall part is that I can’t really make as much fuss over this as I would like. I can’t go off on my friend, after all, and I can’t really go off on the editor if I want future writing assignments from her… which is looking less and less appealing, actually, as this whole thing drags on. Is this a game they do with the other free-lance writers? They could probably go on for years, burning one or two an issue. It’s all about renewable resources, I guess.

There is still the faint hope that I might actually be paid, or be paid for other work in future. Writers like me are disposable; we can’t be prima donnas throwing spectacular temper tantrums all over the office, not if it sinks the chance of getting writing work with another local magazine, another editor. I do not write for validation – I already have that. Or for exposure – ditto. I write for money… and in this case, it was money I wanted in my hot little hand two weeks ago. Now I know how illegal aliens feel when their employer is dicking around with paying them for work already done.

It’s half-past nine here, and still no response from yesterday’s e-mail.

Update: Eleven forty-five, no email response all morning, so called the offices and spoke to the office manager. Apparently my payment is on a list which has to be approved by someone or other. I may have a check by Friday at the earliest. Or maybe Monday.

I am so not happy.

Further Update: Oh, well… not until Monday. The guy who signs off on all the checks is just this very week in surgury. How very convienient! And I am not any happier BTW!