Thursday, August 27, 2009

Sinister Decade - now an e-book!

You can now download Sinister Decade onto your favorite mobile device. Warning: it looks weird (difficult to format poetry so that it looks good on a tiny screen.) I'm going to fiddle with it some more this evening and see if I can get it to look better.

http://feedbooks.com/userbook/7274

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

RIP Ted Kennedy

Sad day, especially considering how close we might be to achieving one of Kennedy's lifelong goals - health care for all Americans. I wish he could have lived to see a bill passed.

Ted Kennedy was a Senator that you had to respect, one of the few really good guys in politics, and he will be missed.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Sinister Decade

A "beta" release of a poetry chapbook I'm working on can be found here:

http://sinisterdecade.awardspace.us/

It contains poems I wrote between 1999 and 2009. Feedback is encouraged.

Special offer for Sinister readers:

E-mail me if you'd like a physical copy of Sinister Decade. If I have enough of a response, I'll make copies available and charge only the cost of printing. I'll even sign it, if for some odd reason you want that.

Or, you could just print out the .pdf and staple it together yourself.

Either way, tell me what you think.

Monday loldog

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Saturday, August 22, 2009

The nurse left work at five o'clock.

Here's my submission to NPR's latest "three minute fiction" contest (click the link in the post title).

The nurse left work at five o'clock. Mike stared at the last sentence, the cursor blinking steadily on his laptop screen. He'd come up with the nurse because none of his other characters seemed to be doing anything. They were all just sitting around drinking at a bar, like an interminable Hemingway novel, but in this case, the sun would never rise on them.
Mike rubbed his face with his hands and stretched, letting out a mighty yawn that would have shaken the windows if such things were possible. He got up, padded over to the kitchen, poured himself a drink, and began, finally, to feel clear-headed.
Who was this nurse? And what did he have to do with the vampires drinking at the bar, or the mysterious shadowy creatures that lurked...he shook his head. The story had gotten way out of hand. He'd been watching far too much HBO, and that had seeped into his writing like blood seeps into a carpet.
Mike sat back down at his computer. The nurse left work at five o'clock. Of course! It was so simple! Mike finished the story, his pale fingers blazing over the keyboard, his violet eyes glinting with a feverish excitement. The head vampire fell in love with the nurse, they had vampire babies, and there was a whole slew of complicated moral implications that nobody, neither human nor vampire, really wanted to deal with. But Mike would make them deal with those implications, because as Author, he had the Power. He very nearly whooped with joy as the complex threads of narrative wove themselves together into a tapestry of blood and gore and love and hate and sex and violence that Mike was convinced would absolutely redefine the vampire romance genre. Those pretty Twilight boys and their swooning teenage harem wouldn't know what hit them.
And that nurse character, who he had come up with on a whim, in the middle of the story, had turned out to be the linchpin of the whole thing. Mike typed the magical words “The End” and hit “Save.” His word processing program quit suddenly and he was staring at his desktop. Gone? Frantically, he clicked open his word processing program again and found, thankfully, that his story was intact. He must've just bumped a key after saving it.
This new technology, he thought to himself with a toothy grin, I'll never get used to it. He remembered writing by candlelight with a quill. But that was many, many years ago. He got up from his chair, swirling the dark red liquid in his glass, walked over to the window, and looked out at the sleeping city.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Friday, August 14, 2009

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Scenes from the Front Lines

Yesterday I attended Rep. Wu's (OR-1, my U.S. House member) town hall on health care at Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland. That is, I attended the raucous battle of wills that took place outside (the forum was full long before I got there). I figured there would be some sparks, but I had no idea what I was in for.

Clearly, because this is Portland, the sensible pro-reform crew far outnumbered the teabaggers and their far-right allies. Still, there were plenty of fireworks.

I'll let the pictures and the video speak for themselves, with a bit of commentary.

First, a few pictures:









And now, the video that really captures the spirit of the thing. It's broken down into four segments. The first is a discussion between a free-market "why should I pay for anything that isn't mine" woman and a couple of single-payer advocates. The second segment shows the crowd bursting into spontaneous chants of "Health Care Now!" or on the other side "No Big Brother!" and "Socialism Now!" The third segment shows a guy with a megaphone saying that health care will lead this country to bankruptcy. In the fourth and final section, I stumble into a nest of real lunatics. I can't really tell what the woman is saying, but it sounds like something about a death pill. You'll also get a glimpse of a "9/12 Project" sign and another sign that says "Obama out of my doctor's office."

Unfortunately, I did not catch one explosive exchange on video. A right winger began screaming at another guy, "Don't call me a nut! Engage me in debate!!" Difficult not to call the guy a nut when he's literally screaming in another guy's face. Also difficult to engage someone in debate who's screaming in your face.

Without more ado:

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Congrats to Justice Sotomayor

First attempt to blog from my Iphone. Congrats to newly minted Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Rachel Maddow calls out the astroturfers on health care

Rachel Maddow exposes the corporate interests behind the fake grassroots campaign to disrupt health care town hall meetings, and explains how Americans are being duped into fighting against their own interests through a professional fear campaign.

Monday, August 3, 2009

Keith Olbermann names names

In a powerful Special Comment, Keith Olbermann calls out Republicans and Democrats obstructing health care reform as the insurance industry whores that they are.

Monday loldog

Coming soon: something other than loldogs and videos. I promise.

funny pictures of dogs with captions
see more dog and puppy pictures