How come Oprah Winfrey is on the cover of every issue of her own darned magazine? I mean, even Martha Stewart gives it a rest.

Why does it have to be so bloody hot in Texas in the summer? And how long will summer last this year? How many more months of running the AC night and day will we have?

How come we were supposed to be moving beyond race with the nomination of the Fresh Prince from Chicago… and yet here we are again, having the same old discussion! But with the added frisson of being called a racist it we don’t vote for him. (Oh, yeah, and can we have a break from his entitlement-addled BAP of a spouse moaning about how hard it is to get along on a yearly salary of more than I will ever make in the next decade? Or two or three? Thanks.)

How deep are major media in the tank for Obama, actually? Deep enough to need a snorkel? A deep-sea divers’ suit and something to pump down oxygen to them?

How come anyone cares what celebrities think? About anything other than their next professional appearance, that is.

Who the hell cares about Paris Hilton? And why?

Which one of the dogs or cats threw up a strangely reddish patch of vomit, and please god, let the red color be from the reddish chunks of stuff in the dog food.

What’s Madonna’s new remaking of herself going to look like? Anything age-appropriate? She’s pushing 50, you know.

Will the price of gas go down? Would it be a little cheaper to run the car on milk? It’s at about the same price per gallon this week. How soon will the owners of all those big honkin’ SUV and pick-up trucks replace them with something smaller and fuel efficient. I remember the 70s, people – I remember this happing once before, and yes, I’d like to be able to see past the vehicle waiting next to me at a stoplight. Instead of looking at the step that allows them to climb into the cab of their big honkin’ SUV, which is at my eye level, thank you very much.

When those SUV’s and pick-ups get to expensive to run… will they wind up in the hands of people, who… I don’t know… live out in the country and really need a big, sturdy, 4WD vehicle with space to stuff a couple of Angus cows in the back?

How badly am I going to hate the part-time and regular job that I start next week at “Enormous National Call-Center Which Shall Remain Unnamed” by the next of six months? One year? Can I stick it out long enough for some of my books and on-spec writing jobs to pay off… so that I can turn in my employee badge of servitude and shake the corporate dust off my feet… again.

Stay tuned – we’ll know the answers to most of these in a couple of months. Or a year, tops. All but the one about Paris Hilton. That’s a mystery for the ages.

I belong to a Yahoo discussion groups for fans of Westerns, and one of the curious things is how very passionate some of the members are about their favorite authors, and western series, some of which are well known, like Elmer Kelton and some quite obscure like Amelia Bean, who wrote about the Fancher party, of the Mountain Meadows Massacre fame. Old western movies are also mad faves, everything from the acknowledged classics like “Stagecoach” and the original “3:10 to Yuma” to obscure B-movie features and movies made for television that have since sank like a stone. Generally the older stuff is held in higher regard. Oddly enough, many of the members of the group are English – at least to judge from the frequent laments about how little there is in the way of ‘Westerania” to pick through on the other side of the pond.

Like it or not, this is how we begin to visualize the past, through books and movies, first seeing these things, as if through the prism of how a writer, movie producer or TV director visualized them. The trouble with this is that the farther we are in time from the events pictured, the more of the milieu of the time that such things were created seeps in around the edges. Look at a movie like “Gone With The Wind” – it practically screams the date of it’s premiere. But as hard as the various creators might have tried to banish every scrap of inauthenticity in trivial things such as women’s hair-styles, interior decoration or weaponry – contemporary sensibilities and habits of thought are even harder to root out. Movies like “The Patriot” and “Dances With Wolves” took especial pains to superficially and physically appear authentic – but then fell apart when it came to things like the likelihood of a village of escaped slaves being out in the open, and a Union officer in the 186os going over to the wall, metaphorically speaking, to join the Sioux Indians. But never mind – it’s a story. Like “Gone With the Wind” we can overlook anachronisms and accept gaps in logic in service to a riveting and entertaining story. Well, sometimes – depending on how much of a fuss-budget we are for strict authenticity. If something that feels to us like authentic sensibility is present, though - who wants to quibble about details?

But this gets harder to do with a great many more recent movies, and not just Westerns. Something went out of our movies when many producers and directors began to think more about a ‘message’ and a movie as a personal statement of belief… not strictly as something that a great many people would plunk down the price of admission in exchange for being entertained for a couple of hours. The old studio system turned them out assembly-line fashion, good, bad, indifferent and superb, A-list, B-list, genre, serials, bios, epics, musicals and all. As one of my former bosses was fond of saying – it’s a numbers game. The more there is of any one thing, be it sales calls or movies, the better the odds that more of it will pay off… or be really, really good. The old studios diversified their releases. If a movie bombed… well, there were three or four more in the chute, so who cared but the accountants and maybe not even them, very much. Some of them which bombed, or did indifferent business at the time of release later made a better showing, farther on down the track. And some of those are beloved by website discussion groups, so here I am circling around to my main point… which was that there were Western movies made after the 1960s (to pick a date at random) but few of them seem to attract much of the same degree fanatic devotion.

Why? I wondered if the reason might have something to do with the fact that watching this show a couple of years ago on PBS left something of a sour taste in my mouth.

(To be continued)

Being let go as a part-time announcer from the public radio station where I worked since… umm, how many years ago? Thirteen, I think – maybe fourteen. It was a bit of a shock, being told over the telephone that there would be no need for my services after the 14th, thank you very much. Still a better way to be told than just ordered to lump all of your personal stuff into a cardboard box and being escorted off the premises by a large security man; TPR doesn’t have a security guy at present anyway, even though that might be another one of those things that are changing. As it turns out – it wasn’t just me. It was all the part-timers who worked one or two regular shifts a week; weekends and evenings mostly, and additional if needed because someone else was sick, or going on vacation or had a temporary conflict with their regular work schedule. We were all given the word, by letter, email or phone. Almost without exception, each of us initially assumed that we were the only one being let go.

A little background might be in order: I started work there under a general manager who was the original GM, since the classical station began broadcasting in 1982. Both the classical station, KPAC and the news/information station KSTX operated from the adjacent studios in the same location, shared the same management staff and production facility and even occasionally swapped announcers back and forth. The announcers, full and part-time were an amusingly assorted lot – so were those who produced various pre-recorded programs. Over the last fifteen years there have been a couple of retired Air Force broadcasters besides myself, including one who had been the commander of Air Force Broadcasting. Another producer was a lady was an accomplished poet. There was a retired diplomat who wrote a weekly opera lecture program that I produced, who was the single most cultured human being that I never knew personally – we worked together every Saturday afternoon that the Metropolitan didn’t broadcast an opera for about a decade. Musicians – there is a horn-player for the local symphony, and a teacher who builds exquisite bespoke harpsichords, and a young man who played piano in a restaurant on the Riverwalk.

There was a genial Irishman who was a retired railway executive – his wife owned a white Rolls-Royce. (We have – or had – four Irish people on staff, an amusingly high ratio for South Texas.) There were a couple of actors, both of whom had pretty recognizable names in local theater circles, a freelance video producer, a writer for a small glossy magazine, and a woman who teaches at the local community college and helps run a local animal shelter and the spay and neuter program. Add in an assortment of ‘ladies who lunch’ who did it for amusement and broadcast students who did it for exposure and experience, amateurs and enthusiasts of every stripe – and when I say amateurs, I do not mean it in the pejorative sense. Just about all of us were quite skilled, enormously experienced – having done this sort of thing for years. This wide assortment among the staff conferred upon TPR a considerable degree of connection and inter-connection to the community. I used to joke that you could connect anyone in San Antonio to anyone else in about three degrees, if you routed the connection through TPR.
Unlike the local PBS TV station – which seemed to have a revolving door for their staff, turnover in at TPR was pretty minimal. Hardly anyone was fired or quit – people left because they died, or a spouse relocated out of the area. Otherwise, people stayed for decades. This was SOP until the old general manager retired a couple of years ago. The new GM had ambitious plans to expand the local news mission.

I think the station came into some serious grant money – for the studios were all rehabbed and updated, this last year, with all sorts of jazzy new equipment and computer razzle-dazzle. The old sat-net room was also rehabbed, and turned into a cubicle farm for the news staff. They hired a guy to be news director, and just last week a new full-time announcer, who had an impressive resume from another classical station.

The thing about the new computer technology is that long segments of programming can be pre-arranged to play – the music, the announcements, spots and IDs all. Automated radio, in other words – other stations have done this for years, and the means of doing it has become less and less complicated and easier and easier to facilitate. Some of the more far-sighted of us joked about this possibility over the last couple of months. But the thing about TPR was that we weren’t like other stations – we had real human beings in the studio, after hours and on weekends. Our listeners expected to talk to a real human being – and as I said, many of us had been there for years. Surely management couldn’t seriously be thinking about throwing all that community good-will and staff experience over the side, just to turn TPR into a clone of Sirius radio, or a classy version of Clear Channel …

Alas, they could, and did. I don’t even think we are getting any sort of severance pay, not that we would have expected anything, being that we were part-timers with no benefits at all. I don’t even think we will get a certificate or anything like a letter of referral. New broom, in the hands of new management – we agreed that if this is what TPR is being transformed into – than it is just as well that we have been swept out the door.

(So please, I bleg of you, hit the book link and boost my sales stats for “Truckee” - and next month I will begin taking advance orders for the “Adelsverein Trilogy” - with luck, the royalties will soar well above what I earned at the radio station!)

A story you probably won’t see in the New York Times…or any other major media. Yeah, thanks guys - for keeping us in the loop.

Courtesy of Rantburg, my source for all stuff that is beyond the usual media fringe.

Of all of the manufactured news “events”* of the last couple of years – the Koran flushing story, the so-called Jenin massacre, the adventures of Green-Helmet Guy and his penchant for playing with dead children, 60 Minutes and Dan Rather’s amazing faked TANG memos - the Al-Dura hoax sets a number of awful records, besides being about the first of them all. Jenin was debunked within a couple of weeks, ditto for Green-Helmet Guy, and about the only casualty for Dan Rather’s adventure with copies of old files was his own credibility. The Koran-flushing story sent the Moslem world screeching like a cage full of howler monkeys, even though no one could explain how on earth a solid book could be flushed all the way down past the u-bend anyway.

The Al-Dura story – that stands by itself for a couple of reasons, not least because of the very horror of the event that it presented; a frightened, cowering child, killed by Israeli troops right in front of the news cameras. A horrible event, as presented – but what was even more horrible was the speed with which the image and the event became an icon and how unquestioningly it was accepted at face value across the Moslem and the western world as well. The Al-Dura story also killed people, quite a lot of them, starting with the two lost Israeli reservists who were murdered and torn apart by a Palestinian mob within two weeks of its’ incendiary broadcast.

Of course it had happened, right in front of the television cameras – couldn’t you believe your own eyes? But as it eventually developed, maybe you couldn’t. Compare all the other video footage shot that day, of Palestinian mobs trying to provoke a reaction from Israeli solders at the Netzarim junction, while dozens of news cameras rolled, to the final edited version of the apotheosis of the littlest Paleo-martyr – which no apparently no one saw fit to do until months and years afterwards. If anything, the whole appalling story is proof of the axiom that a lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its’ boots on.

To me, the worst thing about matters like the al-Dura affair, and the TANG memo was how eagerly a thin story and staged footage were initially embraced as a representative of a gospel truth by reporters and news establishments that we had come to expect better of. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity doesn’t even begin to excuse actions like that. I don’t know which is worse – that our national and international media overlords would be so stupid as to swallow stuff like that listed in my opening graf whole, or so venial, malicious and arrogant as to cooperate in perpetuating a blood-libel, fully knowing the basis for their story was manufactured.

I do know that increasingly the credibility of the traditional news media has been pissed away over the last half-decade, now that we have the ability through the internet to follow-up on stories like this, that once would have been relegated to the newspaper morgue and to history books written decades after events. Progress in that, I suppose. Tn the popular mind, the half-life of a libel like the al-Dura hoax is probably right up there with that of plutonium, and President Bush’s famous plastic turkey and several times more harmful.

Just when I was beginning to think the whole Amazon-Booksurge-POD imbroglio was dying down, now it begins again. Angela and Richard Hoy of Booklocker.com have filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon. Com (details here)

I had begun to hope that Amazon had seen the error of their ways, deafened by the level of outrage expressed by the many, many, many POD small presses and niche writers like myself, as well as professional associations like the The Author’s Guild, the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA),and The Small Publishers Association of North America and was going to rethink their policy of demanding that all POD books sold directly through Amazon.com be printed by their in-house print service. Well, there was certainly no more talk of any more POD houses caving in , under threat of having the “buy’ button turned off on the Amazon page for any authors’ books published by those houses.

At the Independent Authors’ Guild, our members are terribly split over how to respond. Not in the sense of “I’m going to take my marbles and go home” sort of split, more the “everyone decides what is in their best interests” in the way of response. We are an association of equals; there is no corporate line to be toed. Some of us do not give a rat’s patoot if we have any sales through Amazon or not, especially after this greedy grab. Others care very much, since they make the bulk of their royalty payments through on-line retailers, of which Amazon.com is the 800 lb gorilla. One very dedicated member felt that she had no choice but to sign with Booksurge to publish her historical novel, into which she had put too many years of work to put at risk. Others of us are boycotting Amazon.com, and switching any links in our book-marketing materials to Barnes & Noble or Booksamillion. It’s not just buying books and other goods through Amazon.com – I’ve stopped posting book reviews there, participating in any of their blogs or discussion groups, or asking my readers to post reviews for “To Truckee’s Trail” there; I’d much rather throw my custom and marketing interests to Barnes and Noble. (They answer emails about my book page there much more readily than Amazon does, oddly enough. Amazon’s ‘author tech help’ runs the gamut between unresponsive and non-existent)

I’m only too proud to be a Booklocker author, and to continue to be published by Richard and Angela: the Adelsverein Trilogy (aka Barsetshire with cypress trees and lots of side arms) will be available from Booklocker in December. I got my ‘economic stimulus’ tax rebate this week and am using the largest portion of it to get started. Who says that the gummint doesn’t support the arts and literature?

Yes, this news story was a bit of an eye-opener. So it’s only one of those specialty stories by a specialty media outlet, but still; how very nice to know that I had the good taste and good fortune to wind up living in San Antonio. Whooda thunk it? Apparently we scored really high on clean air and water, reasonable housing costs and diversity, whatever the heck that means – possibly the ready availability of breakfast tacos, the food of the gods, at some divey little outlet on every block of every major street in town, and being able to buy bottled cajeta . Why, yes indeedy, we are diverse, and some of the neighborhoods are being gentrified at a pace that would warm the cockles of a real-estate investor’s heart. My dear late friend Dave advised looking toward wherever the gays are moving in and rehabbing. By his estimation, that would be Mahnke Park and Government Hill, around the fringes of Ft. Sam Houston. Umm, yes – despite all that you might have heard to the contrary, this part of Texas is diverse. They’re just not about doing it in the road and frightening the horses, k’?

Part of the charm – and there is considerable charm, once you can get past the incredibly awful summer heat – is that San Antonio is a small town, cunningly disguised as a city. I swear that everyone is only two or three degrees removed from everyone else. It seems to be a very tight set of interlocking circles, and once you become a member of two or three of them then you are linked to everyone that all the people in your various circles are linked to, and so on and so on. I wish I could play this a little better, because I would probably sell more books that way, but still, it is amazing how you can put out a call for help and have so many people just pop out of the woodwork. Last year, I needed to become acquainted with the workings of an 1836 Colt Paterson revolver – and lo and behold, within a couple of days I was getting a briefing session with the only owner of a replica pair in the whole of San Antonio. (Note to self – must remember to tell this nice person when the Adelsverein Trilogy will be available, and to include a thank-you in the book notes. Yes, there will be notes and a laundry-list of people and institutions who have helped me incredibly with the whole project!)

The walk with Weevil and Spike – or rather the usual round of them dragging me around the neighborhood at a brisk pace this morning only made me realize again that this is a very nice place to live; the sky was a clear rain-washed blue and it was cool, much cooler than we normally have a right to expect for May. Recent rains have made everything green, everyone’s garden looks lovely, even those gardens of neighbors who don’t usually fuss with their garden. There are some houses for sale, but no more than usual – and I expect that a lot of them will be snapped up in the summer PCS season. Yes, that is another sort of diversity; having military rotate in and out, and for a lot of them to retire here. I had read somewhere or other that just about every Korean restaurant along Harry in the vicinity of Fort. Sam was started by an Army spouse. This sort of phenomenon probably also counts for the Vietnamese restaurants and the British tearooms.

And if I needed any more proof of the fact that San Antonio is a very nice and upcoming place to move to, I have only to look out the kitchen window. They have put the frames, roofs and siding on two more houses that I can see, in the new development that took up the segment of the green-belt along Nacogdoches road. Every Sunday that we take the dogs around through the new development (which is called Rose Meadows, BTW – even though there aren’t any roses and hardly any meadows left!) a house or two more is finished, a house or two more is sold and a house or two more is moved into.

Hopefully by nobody who will be such an idiot as the one who abruptly cut in front of me from the center turn-lane on Perrin-Beitel just below the turn-off for Nacogdoches. Yeah, you in the beige Toyota Corolla. We got all the idiots we can handle – can you please learn some basic courtesy or go back to where you came! Thanks a bunch, sweetcakes – You’ll make San Antonio an even better place to live, in either case. We have a reputation to keep up, now.

(Although the following appears with my name on it, ths is actually a guest-post by another IAG member, who did a lot of numbers-crunching and came up with some recommendations: Michael S. Katz is an attorney, editor-in-chief of Strider Nolan Publishing, board member of the Independent Authors’ Guild, and author of the comedy novel Shalom On The Range Take it away, Mike!)

Amazon.com recently announced a new policy requiring all Print On Demand authors to use Amazon’s own printing company, Booksurge, in order to be sold through Amazon. Many POD authors and publishers are understandably upset by this, as this can only serve to cost the authors money, and cost the printing companies business. But in terms of Amazon’s market share, how much business are we actually talking about?

WHO’S ON FIRST?

Sales of books totaled $2 billion in 2000, at which time on-line sales made up between 7.5% and 10% of that total.1 Amazon and BN.com now account for more than 85% of online book sales.3 Recent data shows that Amazon’s book sales are approximately four times that of BN.com,4 and Amazon has a 70% share of the Internet book market, so this translates into a 15 to 17.5% market share for BN.com.5

Amazon’s total sales in 2006 were $4.63 billion, but this includes books, music, and various other items, including a lot of high-end electronics, jewelry, and the like. Barnes & Noble actually outsold them at $4.68 billion (and they were basically limited to books, music and movies), but their on-line presence had only $477 million in sales. Why are people flocking to Amazon over BN.com?

A LOT TO RECOMMEND IT

A lot of it has to do with programming. Amazon has a reputation for being the best at tracking customer habits, having collected information longer and used it more proactively. Over the years they have collected detailed information about what its customers buy, considered buying, browsed for but never bought, recommended to others, or even wished someone would buy them.10 Amazon uses this information to calculate recommendations that boost sales.

In the entertainment industry, recommendations are a remarkably efficient form of marketing, as they enable films, music and books to more easily find the right audience.9 For example, the book Touching the Void, a tale of a mountain-climbing tragedy, was released in 1988 to good reviews but modest success. In 1998, the book Into Thin Air, about another mountain-climbing tragedy, was released and became a bestseller. All of a sudden, people began buying the older book again. Touching the Void began to be displayed side by side with Into Thin Air, and actually wound up outselling the newer book. How did this happen? Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, attributes this to Amazon.com recommendations. Amazon’s programs note buying patterns and suggest similar books to readers. Some people follow the suggestion, enjoy the book, and post excellent reviews. These purchases and reviews lead to more sales, more recommendations, and the cycle continues.9

Readers’ reviews also stimulate sales, although moreso on Amazon than BN.com. One study (Chevalier and Mayzlin) examined how sales on both sites correlated with number of reviews and customers’ ratings.12 They determined that a good review will increase the number of books sold, although with much greater effect on Amazon than BN.com. A bad review has a greater effect than a good one, based on the assumption that many 5-star reviews are believed to be “planted,” whereas 1-star reviews are seen as more legitimate.12

GETTING FROM POINTS A(MAZON) TO B(ARNES & NOBLE)

How do prices compare between the big two? A study (Chevalier and Goolsbee) collected Amazon and BN.com data for 18,000 different books during three different weeks in 2001. They determined that there was significant price sensitivity for online book purchases at both sites. But the demand at BN.com was much more price sensitive—both to its own prices and to Amazon’s prices—than at Amazon.4

A one percent increase in a book’s price at Amazon reduced sales by about 0.5 percent at Amazon but raised sales at BN.com by 3.5 percent, implying that (based on the 4-to-1 ratio in sales) every customer lost by Amazon instead bought the book at BN.com. Conversely, raising prices by one percent at BN.com reduced sales about 4 percent but increased sales at Amazon by only about 0.2 percent.4 Therefore, a customer lost by Amazon would usually wind up buying the book at BN.com, whereas a customer lost by BN.com would not necessarily go to Amazon. If BN.com keeps its prices right, they can steal away a lot of Amazon traffic.
(more…)

Well, this is getting interesting – last weekend the writing world – or that portion of it that doesn’t have a name which frequents the New York Times best-sellers list - was all agog over Amazon.com’s fiat that all books sold through Amazon must be printed by it’s POD subsidiary, Booksurge. (Gruesome details here in my post of Sunday last).

Many of us ink-stained scribbling wretches are being advised to A-remain calm, it is not the end of the world as we know it and B- that Amazon doesn’t own the bloody world yet, anyway so change over all of your links to Barnes and Noble and sit tight.

Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly has the latest development here; yes, a couple of POD firms have caved, given yesterdays deadline to stand and deliver, or else their authors ‘ buy buttons’ be disabled on Amazon’s website. Angela has some shrewd guesses about why and how this is all going down the way that it is, as well as a link to further developments – and the cheery news that no buttons have actually been turned off or harmed in the making of this power-grab/controversy.

The Independent Authors’ Guild forum has been all of a twitter though: what would Ingram/Lightning Source do about this? (Break out the terrible swift sword and start trampling those grapes of wrath, some of us hoped!) How would the various POD firms react ? (Stand tall and tell ‘em “Nuts!”, some of us hoped!) And how would the general public react? A volcanic outburst of rage would be nice, but perhaps a little much for us mere scribbling mortals to hope for. Some of us still have day jobs, you see, Although book-blogger PODdy Mouth has a nice takedown here, including a number that can be called…

OMG Amazon has a actual telephone number for people to talk to a real live human?

Well, OK, probably some poor barely-minimum-wage call center drone, so keep it civil and dignified, people. It isn’t their fault; the guys whose f**king brilliant idea this was are well beyond being reached by a phone call. Maybe not beyond subpoena… eh, call me a dreamer. It goes with the territory, I write historical novels and would like to make a living from it, for f**ks sake! Given that there are so many lawyer-bloggers, perhaps some searching analysis of whatever basis there might be for anti-trust action. All well and good; and this sort of controversy is bread, butter and circuses to the blogosphere.

But I have long predicted that the towers of the literary industrial complex would totter, crumble and fall when a certain technological point was reached – when there was a desktop gadget that would print and bind a nice little paperback or hardbound book. Even if it was so expensive to buy that only places like Kinkos would have them, even if it could only crank them out one or two at a time, even at a cost per unit substantially above that of one of those industrial print shops that could churn out a thousand in a minute – it would mean the end of the literary-industrial complex. Anyone could take their book content and cover file, with ISBN and everything, down to the corner copy place, pay them to print and bind a couple or three or half-dozen copies of your book… and you could mail them to whoever had bought them. Or who you wanted to send them! That’s the future, and according to this release, may be here already, in the form of the Espresso Book Machine. Think of this as Ingram/Lightning Source looking across the poker table with a steely gaze and saying, “raise.”

“It’s always been the holy grail of the book business to walk into a store and get any book,” said Kirby Best, president and CEO of Lightning Source. With the signing of today’s strategic agreement with On Demand Books, proprietor of the Espresso Book Machine, Best sees that goal coming a little bit closer.”

And savor the discription and call me a prophetess: “We’re building a new machine that’s much smaller that can be mass produced, version 2.0,” said cofounder and chairman Jason Epstein. Neller adds that a beta machine, which will be the size of a copier at Kinko’s (3’ X 2-1/2’ for the finishing unit with another 2’ for a duplex printer), will be ready in the fall. If all goes well, a less expensive model will begin leasing in 2009. “The point of this machine is to represent the ultimate in POD,” said Epstein, who sees it as the best way to preserve backlist. If the machines catch on and proliferate like so many Starbucks outlets, the marketplace would become radically decentralized and book distribution would require simply an Internet connection.”

Oh, yeah… definitely we’re into round two. Pass the popcorn.

(Crossposted at the IAG Blog)

(And yeah, my blogosphere cover is now comprehensively blown - I blog under the name “Sgt Mom” and write books under the name “Celia Hayes”. It turns out that someone is already using my real name and has somewhat of a reputation under it. I understand that Elizabeth Taylor had something of the same problem.)

Question – Where does the eight hundred pound gorilla sit?
Answer – Anywhere it wants to!

It hasn’t made much of a ripple yet in the political blogosphere, but among the various writers’ discussion groups, websites and e- newsletters, discussion of the Amazon-Publish America imbroglio is achieving a melt-down-and-drop-through-to-the earths’ core degree of nuclear passion. The implications of Amazon’s recently announced policy of requiring that small independent and publish on demand (POD) presses who want to sell through Amazon must print their books through Amazon’s “Booksurge” publisher-printer are being chewed over like a mouthful of rubbery and vile-tasting bubblegum through this weekend, ever since this story was posted in the Wall Street Journal.

A short background refresher in the vagaries of independent publishing may be in order here. Once upon a time, in a universe far, far away there used to be two ways of being published. The first kind was the respectable kind, with one of the big name publishing firms that with luck and if you were any good, or fairly good or even a literary genius, and you had any sort of agent, you would wind up with stacks of copies of your book in all the bookstores, a nice royalty check, maybe even an advance, good reviews in the right magazines, and hey, presto – as Blondie says, pretty soon you were a ‘real arthur’. The other kind of publishing was disdainfully known as ‘vanity’ publishing. The assumption was that untalented hack with lots of money would contract with a publisher to print quantities of a book that ‘real’ publishers wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole and no one but the ‘vanity author’ and his family and friends would ever read, and the ‘vanity author’ would wind up with a garage full of expensive books that would never go any farther than that.

Clear so far? Good. It’s different now; between the internet, the development of POD, or print-on-demand technology, and the big-name publishing houses becoming risk-adverse, unadventurous and stodgy. Rather like Hollywood and the music industry, come to think on it: stuck on established big names, carefully constructed sure-fire blockbuster hits and guaranteed big returns. The quirky, original, eccentric and genuinely creative will likely never be invited in the door – even if they are talented, too. The result has been an explosion in the numbers of writers who have gone ‘indy’ – just like filmmakers and musicians, because the technology has allowed it. Getting in through the doors of the big-name publishing houses is no longer the only game in town.

Print on demand technology allows a printer to print up copies of a particular book as they are ordered from a formatted electronic text file. Because they are usually printed in small batches, not in 10s of thousands at a whack, the cost of the individual copy is higher, but not all that much. And because they are printed to order, the matter of warehousing thousands of copies doesn’t come up; all very ecologically sound. It allowed writers who couldn’t or didn’t want to publish through a traditional publisher and couldn’t afford to pay for a print run from a so-called vanity press to pay a small set-up fee for their text and cover, which would be available to the printer. Whenever orders came in for their book, the printer could run off as many copies as needed and drop-ship them to the customer.

Sensing an opportunity, a whole host of new publishers sprang up or morphed from their previous incarnation. Most of these are internet-based: Author House, iUniverse, Booklocker, Booksurge, Publish America, Lulu: just check out the IAG books and members to get an idea of the range. And a fair number of authors set up as publishers themselves, since the actual printing of the books was now relatively inexpensive and accessible. While a good many of resulting POD books are just as much vanity publications as ever were, and are pretty dreadful besides – quite a few are not. In fact, the best of them are as quirky, literate and as high quality as anything available from the big traditional houses – and those authors who took it seriously have reached a wider audience. As another IAG member pointed out, readers don’t much care how a book that they love to read was published – they just want to read it. Nothing is in stasis for long – POD publishers grew, or were absorbed by others.

Amazon.com purchased the POD publisher Booksurge in 2005; not a large publisher or a particularly well-regarded one. In fact the worst POD book I ever reviewed was a Booksurge product, although that seemed to have resulted from author stubbornness rather than Booksurge incompetence. Still, it didn’t seem to be terribly out of line for a book retailer to be also in the book publishing business – and Booksurge books didn’t seem to be given any special favors among all the other POD books available from Amazon… until this last week. If anything, I thought it might indicate that the bright sparks at Amazon thought that POD published books were the wave of the future.

The main printer for many, if not most POD publishers is called Lightning Source; it’s owned by Ingram, the mega-huge book distributor. It’s essential for POD books to be included in the Ingram catalogue; it’s a main line into brick and mortar bookstores; other wise you might just as well be back in the vanity-press days, with a garage full of copies to hawk around. But it’s also essential for your books to be available on-line, and on-line means Amazon.com – the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla of internet book marketing. If it’s published, it’s available from Amazon. Over the last couple of years, Amazon.com has been relatively welcoming to readers and writers alike; offering opportunities to review and blog about our books, to do Kindle reader editions of our books, to do wish-lists and recommendations, to set up discussion groups; as a matter of fact, the Independent Authors Guild started as an Amazon discussion group.

So last Friday’s action by Amazon.com, demanding that POD publisher, Publish America now and henceforward have their books be printed by Booksurge, or else their authors books would not be sold directly through Amazon comes as a rather thuggish slap in the face. (Publish America’s news release is here.)

Worse – as reported here by Angela Hoy at Writers Weekly – it looks like other POD publishers are or will be getting the same treatment. (there’s a long bloglist of other reactions to this at Writers Weekly)

In essence, POD writers are being told to make a choice between doing business with our chosen publisher and printer…or being sold through Amazon. Amazon might be able to make this stick – they are, after all, the eight hundred pound gorilla. But pissing off people who bought as well as sold a fair number of books through them is perhaps not as good a business model as previously assumed. There’s a petition here, and a place to comment. I hope it does some good. (Donation not needed, though!)

(Crossposted at Blogger News Network, and at the Independant Authors Guild Blog)

(Part one is here)
As was noted by a number of other bloggers and commenters, one doesn’t usually have a choice about your relations. Parents, cousins, grandparents and all; you’re stuck with them, as embarrassing as they are. Friends or spouses, business partners or clergy – those we choose – and we are known for good or ill by the company that we keep. Barack Obama’s chosen clergyman and mentor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, has been shouting pernicious and venomous nonsense from the pulpit, apparently to great applause, every Sunday for twenty years. From this distance, he sounds too much like a black version of Fred Phelps for my taste. Black racism ought to be just as much the political kiss of death as white racism.

And perhaps it is – since well-meaning people of pallor seem to be fed to their back teeth with having ‘you racist!’ screamed at them, every time they voice a mild criticism of controversial mayors like Ray Nagin and Marion Barry, or buffoons like Al Sharpton - or any one of those other race-card playing luminaries, who seem to have no more qualifications for the position they hold other than a whip-lash inducing swiftness in accusing critics of racism. Here we are in this year 2008; at least forty years since casual social racism was acceptable in most circles, more than that since racial segregation was the law of the land, sixty years since it was the common practice of the military, a hundred and forty since chattel slavery was outlawed utterly… well, really, what better time to have a conversation about race and racism in American society? Even if it is a rather academic discussion; most of the people who are not paid to care about racial relations simply don’t care all that much. They just get on with living and working.

So here’s the ultimate bottom line: give or take a couple of points either way, the percentage of Americans identified as ‘black’ lingers somewhere about in the low teens. A politician who has made a career about being ‘black’ and being the ‘great black hope’ just is not going to get much traction nationally, even if he or she can get all of that ‘black’ block to vote for them. They have to appeal to everyone else in the body politic, and a great many of them, too. Kicking a white, or Hispanic or Asian voter in the teeth in order to make points with the black constituency on Sunday, and then turning around and asking those white, or Hispanic or Asian voters to vote for you on Monday isn’t going to work all that well. It’s why Jesse Jackson never got vary far with any of his bids for national office. Considering his established track record, one really couldn’t picture him kissing Anglo babies or eating breakfast tacos on the South Side with much enthusiasm.

A serious candidate for higher office has to be able to do that – just like a woman seeking higher political office cannot be too closely identified as a radical feminist. You can’t make your initial appeal to the angry fringe, and then move smoothly on in appealing to the majority, not after spending months or years bashing the very people you are asking to vote for you. It just will not work, as Senator Obama probably already realized. His initial appeal was precisely because he appeared to be a skilled and polished mainstream politician who just happened to have the year-round permanent dark tan. Alas, the association with the Reverend Wright (not to mention his apprenticeship in Chicago machine politics) has revealed him as just another race-card player like Sharpton or Jackson, only with nicer suits and a more polished manner. Pity that. We will have a black president in the near future, but he or she won’t be one of those whose identity and appeal has been built exclusively as a ‘black’ candidate. They will be a candidate whose color is incidental to who they are and what their qualifications are; someone from the mainstream, someone like Colin Powell, or like the late mayor of Los Angeles, Ed Bradley.

(Later: amusing video from Conservativeintelligencer.com, “>here )

Yes, I did write quite a number of posts about them, didn’t I? Stern words, had to be said. And I think I did a pretty ringing job, the first time around, so here are exerpts and links:

The strength of the West is in that very noisy disputation, our freedom to put everything on the table, to question, to non-conform, and by disputation and argument, make our beliefs even stronger for having all the idiocy knocked out of them. As such has been our custom, and in the reported words of Martin Luther, at the Diet of Worms: “Since your majesty and your lordships desire a simple reply, I will answer without horns and without teeth. Unless I am convicted by scripture and plain reason–I do not accept the authority of popes and councils for they have contradicted each other–my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me. Amen.” (original post here)

As far as American newsprint and broadcast television is concerned, the phrase “freedom of the press” is from this day now enshrined in my favorite set of viciously skeptical quote-marks. The affair of the Danish Cartoons, and their non-appearance in all but a handful of newspapers has put the lie to every bit of lip-service ever paid to the notion that the American people had a right to know… had an absolute right, enshrined in the foundations of our very Republic to know… well, whatever it was that would goose the ratings, or boost circulation this week… A right that every journalist would fearlessly defend, with every fiber of his principled, journalistic being. Oops, there seems to be a little contradiction there. Principled… journalist… now there is a concept worn to tatters by this little international imbroglio, especially after Eason-gate, Rather-Gate and all the other tedious-gates. (original post here)

…the next time I hear someone pontificating away on the awesome responsibilities involved in upholding the “freedom of the press”… and they are from a newspaper which refused to run the Danish Cartoons, or a television station which refused to air them, citing “community sensitivities” or “deference to religious feelings” or whatever the sad excuse du jour is…. I shall laugh and laugh and laugh. (original post here)

Amusingly, that lugubrious old talking prune, NPR’s Daniel Shorr was coming out on the side of being all sensitive and being responsible about “using the power of the press” as regards the Matter of the Danish Cartoons. (Doesn’t that sound like a very dull Sherlock Holmes adventure, or the worst name for a war since the “War of Jenkins’ Ear”?) Just like the pet professor of international relations whom my local paper keeps on hand to drivel on about the Moslem world and international relations, and how the US must…must…zzzzz… oh, sorry. Dozed off there for a moment. I do that when reading the gentleman’s editorials, but so do probably most of his students. (original post here)

Wouldn’t change a thing… well, except to point and laugh at Daniel Shorr a little more.

Temps in the 30s with wind, rain and snow, does NOT qualify as “SEVERE” weather.  If I can see down my street clearly to the “T” intersection (about a block and a half away) this is not limited visibility.  Visibility would be more limited if we weren’t getting any weather and the smog got a chance to settle down.  “Mountain passes are closed!” is not a reason to break into Regis and Kelly, it’s what’s known as “normal” for winter in the freaking mountains!  A crawl across the bottom would suffice.  Seeing your red, panic-stricken, hyperventilating face telling me you’ve come in early to “monitor the situation” doesn’t make me think any better of you, it makes me think you’re an idiot who migrated here from Southern California back when we were in a draught.

Seriously people, get a grip.  It’s just snow and ice.  You handle it by driving what we call “carefully.”  Say that with me, “Care-full-ly.”  Full of care.  It’s simple.  Slow down and be aware of the people around you.  Get off the damn phone, especially if you’re talking to someone you’re on your way to see.  Oh, and your four wheel drive protects you against, say it with me, “nothing.”  We’ve had black ice for the past three nights.  In case you haven’t learned the hard way yet, all four tires slide on wet ice just fine.

Your freaking out over every “weather event” just makes people become immune to your warnings.  If we ever do get a no-kidding, rip roaring blizzard dumping a foot or three of snow on us, we’re not going to believe you when you say to stay inside.

“Here, dhimmi! Sit! Stay! Roll over! Want a treat?! There you go – such a good dhimmi!

“Now, give up your minorities… there’s a good dhimmi, now!”

“Sit! Stay! Who’s a good dhimmi then?

“Quiet, now! Good dhimmi!”

“So obedient! I hardly have to tell them what to do!”

(All links courtesy of Da Blogfaddah)

Later: “Now, Dhimmi - quiet! Sit still!”

Oh, so it looks like the ever beloved New York Times has nobly volunteered itself to be the Piniata o’the Month for unleashing yet again – in the words of Maxwell Smart “the old Krazed Killer Veteran Story”. You know, the same old, same old pathetic round of stories that those of us over a certain age saw in the 1970s – and not just in the news but on every damn cop show; the freak who got a taste for killin’ and brought it home with him after the war. Honest to key-rist, NYTimes-people – what is your assignments editor these days smoking these days? I am a little late to joining the predictable pile-on from every quarter, which looks like it includes just about everyone short of the VFW.

At least it’s nice to know legacy media drones can do a google search these days and assemble a laundry list of whatever it was they were looking for in the intertubules. A step up from a couple of years ago, all things considered. But… and that is a big but there, almost as big as a Michael Moore butt…it is just that – a laundry list of incidents where someone who was a military veteran of a tour in Afghanistan or Iraq was subsequently involved in or thought to be involved in a murder. Or manslaughter, or something.

No context, no analysis – just OMFG, the Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming (and it’s all the military’s fault!) Look, NYTimes-people, coincidence is not co-f**king causality. Sometimes, it is just a co-incidence, and laying on a smarmy layer of sympathy and glycerin tears over the poor *sniff* innocent *sniff* widdle misdiagnosed *sob* veterans does not make your s**t-sandwich of a story any more palatable. Not to veterans and their families.

Not only can we remember this kind of story post-Vietnam, but the very senior among us can remember it post-WWII. I am reliably informed that there was even a certain amount of heartburn over an anticipated propensity for free-lance violence on the part of returning veterans from the Civil War – and no, I will be not sidetracked into a discussion of how the still-expanding western frontier managed to provide an outlet for all of those Billy Yanks and Johnny Rebs seeking post-war excitement.

My point would be that when this same-old-same-old went down post-hostilities every other damn time, the experience of military service was a bit more evenly spread among the general male population. The general reader had enough friends and relations in his immediate circle to take the whole Krazed Killer Veterans are Koming narrative with a large handful of salt. They knew enough veterans personally to not take what they read in the papers as necessarily the whole truth, and to put the sensational stories of post-war veteran crime into context. And they could blow them off as just another grab at the headlines.

But service in the military these days draws on a smaller sub-set of the population – and unfortunately that set does not include the media or cultural elite. Tripe like the NYT’s Krazed Killer Veteran – if it is not challenged and countered robustly- will soon solidify into conventional wisdom, just like it did with Vietnam veterans. And that, my little scribbling chickadees at the NY Times – is not going to happen again. Welcome to attitude adjustment, Times-folks. I can promise a real interesting and educational time for you over the next couple of days. Take notes. They will come in handy, especially for the next time you are assigned a story about military veterans.

Later: (Update from Iowahawk, too delicious to leave unlinked. Beware, NYTimes- this one is gonna leave a mark!)

Still later: And so will this blast from Col. Peters. My advice to the NYTimes writers is to load up on Midol, as well as taking notes.

I think the fuss over the Danish Mohommad cartoons was the point where I definitly lost all respect for that segment of the Western press who were all about striking a brave pose about the so-called “right of the people to know” against any threat to that most sacred of rights…but folded like a wet paper bag when it came to actually - you know - telling people about things, like the Danish Cartoons o’ Death. Here the fearsome Muslim street was going ape-shit over a set of cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, which poked mild fun at how Danish cartoonists were afraid to publish cartoons about Mohammed for fear of the Muslim street going ape-shit… and our brave palidins o’ the press were all in fear and trembling of actually showing us the cartoons that set the world on fire. (Or that part of it actually Muslim.)

Yep, in the face of it all, they delined to publish a set of drawings about three degrees milder than Family Circle, for fear of ‘offending people’. Nice to know the guardians of the press have our backs, good to know they will fearlessly stride forth and defend our right to know. Thanks, press guardians - appreciate the effort.

Of course there were some who did slap their manly chests, step forward and actually publish the Mo-Toons of Doom. And one of those who did, is caught in the predictable fallout and has made a defense of press freedom that ought to put a blush of shame on the face of every editor of a news program or newspaper who declined to live up to what they had claimed to be their reason to exist.

Courtesy of Da Blogfadder and Samizdata.

A few items of note to report

A bit of progress in the first draft of Vol.3 “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms” – well into chapter 4 of the final volume. A test reading by my skilled and perceptive first-line editors (ok, Mom and Dad) provides positive feedback and a high interest in a new cast of characters. I am setting up a positively soap-opera-esque level of drama here, and yes, I will be careful not to turn the sister-in-law aka the Southern Belle from Hell into a caricature… although she is a walk-on, and at full strength these ladies tend to seem terribly over-the-top to us repressed Anglo-Yankees anyway. Mom and Dad give high props to the introduction of new leading characters, BTW. Since this is by way of becoming a family saga, and covers about half a century of eventful Texas history, this was necessary… a hero of a wild, wild western creaking around on a zimmer-frame just does not work for me. There may be writers of genre fiction this would work for, but not me and not this genre.

I’m tinkering a little with the first volume, and meditating upon revisions to the second volume; I’d like to finish the whole thing before going out and fishing for publishers again – just in case I am struck by a wildly creative notion about two chapters from the absolute end, and need to go back and set up the preconditions.

Blondie and I finished Christmas shopping last weekend – er, rather we emptied out the closet where we chuck the items as we buy them here or there throughout the year, take an inventory and figure out what few little items we need to put on the glorious display of generosity to our nearest and dearest that custom requires of us.

Never mind that most of our gleanings were bought on sale, from yard sales or are items for D-I-Y gift basket assortments needing assembly and the lot is currently spread out over the dining area table along with rolls of Christmas paper and a bundle of bags and Christmas tissue paper picked up on sale after Christmas last year. Note to our nearest and dearest – the book-writing thing is not paying off that well yet although I do have hopes. “To Truckee’s Trail” is available at Amazons’ Kindle reader store. Can’t figure out how come the cover pic isn’t posted, and given their customer service degree of friendly helpfulness I am afraid to ask why.

The Fat Guy did a lovely review here; so did Juliet Waldron for this month’s issue of the Independent Authors Guild newsletter (scroll down, it’s on the third page), and Jaime at FictionScribe posted a long interview on how I came to write it. Might I suggest that it would make a lovely Christmas present for anyone who likes a good old-fashioned read?

I’d work up some bile for Franklin Foer’s belated and protracted apologies for the Private Beauchamp/Baghdad Diaries debacle, but I have to be in a sour mood to do it proper justice.

As for Legacy Media/The End of/As We Know It, I’ll note that a sales rep from the local newspaper called last night, offering a special home delivery deal; the Sunday paper for $2.00 and the rest of the week at no additional charge. I love the smell of economic desperation in the morning. Or whenever.

Is it really that slow of a news day that your lead story at the top of every hour involves dissecting a speech by Bill Clinton? Is it really news that Bill Clinton did one thing in the 90s and then has changed his story today? This surprises…hands…anyone? It’s like slapping your forehead realizing the Donald Rumsfeld may not have been a strategic genius after all.  It’s like thinking, “Hmmm, I think that Fox may not be “fair and balanced.”

Not even in the election season yet and I am tired of it already. God give me strength to endure. I think I’ll go hide out in the 19th century and review the build-up to the Civil War for a while, refresh my memory of what bare-knuckle, no-holds-barred, knock-down-and-drag out national politics really was like. Puts it all into proper proportion, I guess.

I’ll come out of my burrow in about eight months. I can always hope that there has been a vicious caning, or a duel on the Capitol lawn, something to break up the monotony of leaks and counter-leaks and he-said-she-said gabfests on the Sunday morning political affairs TV shows, and of political pundits knitting their brows and talking through their hats about who is ahead in the polls and why. Newsflash – they’ve got about as much chance of being right as any fool with a Magic 8-Ball.

Seriously, who the hell talks to people who call out of the clear blue and want to take up fifteen minutes of your life asking stupid-ass questions? I don’t – who the hell doesn’t have caller ID and an answering machine?

I will commit myself to two principles: one, I will try and refrain from using sarcastic names for the various hopeful pols parading their various qualifications or lack of same in the 2008 version of our national political game of “Survivor on the Potomic”. Her Thighness, the Silky Pony, Pretty Boy, or the Hildabeast – such derisive nicks shall not cross my keyboard after today. That is just too junior high, so very Maureen Dowd. I promise to stop it at once. Mom raised me with better manners. When someone made a disgraceful display of themselves in public, Mom said that nice people do their best not to notice – or at the very least least, to be gracious about it.

And two: I will most likely not vote for Hillary Clinton, AKA her Inevitableness. I am qualifying this, because you never know. An unforeseen political tectonic spasm in the next few months may throw to the surface some morally disgusting, totally unacceptable, completely charmless dreg with a murky background and apparently bottomless sources of funding… sorry, Senator Kerry, I wasn’t talking about you. Anyway, someone who makes Her Inevitableness appear to be the lesser of two evils. Hard to picture anything short of Cthulhu performing that feat; but so far one thing about her which disinclines me toward her how the legacy media has sort of crowned her in advance. Oh, and the way that some people blithely assume that just because I am a woman, and a small-f-feminist of many years standing that I will of course vote for here.

Think again. Frankly, I think Rudolph Guiliani might do. At least he looks better in a dress.

To: Various Movie Producers
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The Current Gaggle of Anti-War Movies

1. Yes, that would be you that I am looking at; Mr. DePalma, Mr. Redford, and all the rest of you whose releases, despite being advertised expensively, applauded by the ever-so-cool award-giving set, and drooled over by your fan-boys and fan-girls in the critics circles to the point of having to tread water … are nonetheless tanking like the RMS Titanic. Audiences in flyover country are avoiding plonkingly earnest sermons like “Lions for Lambs”,”The Valley of Elah”, “Rendition” and others of that ilk as if they were made of plutonium. Fleeing reviewers aren’t even flinging any hilariously sarky remarks over their shoulders like they did for a vanity stink-bomb like “Battlefield:Earth” – which at least produced viciously amusing reviews. You guys can’t even hug that thin comfort to yourselves.

2. There is a somewhat soothing chorus of justification, cicadalike in it’s buzzing monotony: oh, it’s those silly proles in flyover country, they just can’t handle difficult questions, or they’re tired of the war, and really, popularity isn’t everything-our filmmaking is selective in it’s appeal, and anyway we’ll make it up in the overseas markets, or on DVD. Good luck with that line of reasoning, guys and gals. It’s worked for a good long while, and it may work for a little while longer, but methinks I see the edge of the cliff fast approaching. Wily Coyote, super-genius might stay suspended over thin air for quite some time – but eventually the laws of gravity and economics will apply. Piss off your natural audience once too many times, and one is as a tiny splat on the canyon floor, way down below. Just ask the Dixie Chicks.

3. See, it’s like this; you’re in the entertainment business. Emphasis on Entertainment, emphasis on Business. As a very wise movie producer observed some decades ago, “You want a message? Send Western Union.” Doing earnest dramatizations of your own opinions might make you feel all bold and stick-it-to-the-manly, and make your closed little intellectual set all misty-eyed with adoration for your cinematic genius, but frankly it’s leaving the rest of us looking forward to our next round of un-anethesthetized root-canal work, performed by a sadist with a jack-hammer.

4. And furthermore, (and I am looking at you, Mr. DePalma) reliving the 1960ies and the Vietnam War by recycling the same old scripts, the same old villains and the same old conventions is worse than tiresome. In vigorously painting the military, the US government and Americans in general with the same old United Colors of Atrocities, you are essentially doing the work of enemy propagandists. Adding insult to injury, it isn’t even good propaganda. You are insulting an enormous chunk of your domestic audience, routinely and substantially reducing the numbers of people in flyover country willing to plunk down $10.00 at the multiplex. This will not end well - again, recall the Dixie Chicks.

5. Thinking of all the stories that you are isanctimoniously gnoring, in order to churn out these politically correct wankfests is enough to make me want to pick up a good book. Or write one; a book that recalls to us what we are, what we stand for, and what we fight for. As for yourselves, enjoy the applause of your peers and their tinselly awards, and the perks that Hollywood offers you… for now.

Sincerely, Sgt Mom

My previous memo on the topic is here, and no, my first name is not Cassandra - Sgt. Mom