Tales of AIC

AIC stands for "Ass in Chair," as in "get your ass in the chair and write." It's the numero uno piece of advice for aspiring writers. It means put AIC when you don't feel like it, when you're just not inspired, when you've had a hard day at work, when there's a really good rerun of "The Office" on, or whatever.

Thus, a new category of posts which I'm calling "Tales of AIC." These are stories of writers who've put up with serious obstacles to their writing, obstacles that are a lot more than "just not feeling inspired," then put AIC and did it anyway. Since I confess I have not always followed this advice, these stories are as much for my own inspiration and edification as for yours.

Our first tale of AIC comes from SF writer Michael Z. Williamson, via John Scalzi's excellent blog Whatever . Williamson talks about the writing of his book CONTACT WITH CHAOS:

As to writing it…I had some personal issues at home, including a pending deployment .... then I deployed, (ever tried writing a novel at the end of 12-15 hour shifts 6 days a week in a war zone, with one day off to do laundry, clean gear…oh, and respond to the occasional disaster that knocks base power down and requires all engineer personnel to report in? With a roommate with very annoying habits in a tiny room in what’s effectively a doublewide trailer with 30 NCOs in it, in 126 degree heat, with sandstorms, and very intermittent internet connections due to sandstorms, and very limited wireless because of the risk of interfering with air ops? Don’t answer that, it’s rhetorical), then I came back, and then I had, and still have, service connected illness…but at the time, all I knew was that I was waking up gasping, hacking up my lungs until I choked, then kicking into an asthmatic reaction, then clogging up, then crashing asleep for two hours, then repeating.

I don’t recommend this as either a motivation to write, a good way to write, nor even as a character building exercise.

Still, somehow I got it written, and while it’s not the best I’ve done, I think I pulled the big idea off well enough.

Well, I know I'll think twice before complaining about being too tired to write again.

Inhaling Your Drinks, Redux

BLDGBLOG: Atmospheric Intoxication

A former boutique storefront in London has become the temporary home for a pop-up bar with a twist: 2 Ganton Street is currently the U.K.'s "first walk in cocktail." Created by Bompas & Parr (known for their earlier experiments with glow-in-the-dark jello and scratch & sniff cinema), the "Alcoholic Architecture" bar features giant limes, over-sized straws, and most importantly, a gin-and-tonic mist.

Lucky ticket-holders (the event has now sold out) are equipped with plastic jumpsuits and encouraged to "breathe responsibly" before stepping into an alcoholic fog for up to 40 minutes – long enough to inhale "a fairly strong drink," according to Wired UK.

Is there a Bacardi Room, by any chance?

Good News: Americans A Bit More Optimistic

American Optimism Makes a Comeback

By David Paul Kuhn

Americans' attitude about the nation's future has steadily recovered in recent weeks. Happy days are not yet here again. But from the course of the country to the economy, polls show the public's mood is decidedly better now than at any point in the past year.

The public's satisfaction with the direction of the country is the highest it has been since April 2007, according to Gallup tracking. Only 26 percent of Americans say they are satisfied today. But a mere 15 percent expressed satisfaction in mid-February. A third of Americans now believe the economy is improving, twice the portion who were optimistic in mid-January.

Americans now seem to believe that the worst is behind them. A slim majority of Americans, 52 percent, agreed that the U.S. economy has stabilized. Last month hardly more than a third said the same. Pessimism has also dwindled. Today, only 36 percent of the public believe the worst is yet to come. Last month, 57 percent said the same, according to Ipsos/McClatchy polls.

A CBS News/New York Times poll reported last week that only 39 percent of Americans "feel things in this country are generally going in the right direction." While still low, that's the highest "right direction" result since February 2005. Rasmussen polling records a similar trend, finding that more Americans believe that the nation is heading in the right direction than any time since 2004. Consumer confidence has also reached its highest point in the past year, according to Gallup.

More at the link, of course, but the gist of it is that while we have a ways to go, American confidence is definitely trending upwards. Which also means that the constant right-wing message "Socialist Marxist Fascist Terrorist Teleprompter Pizza Handshake Bow Bow Teabag Teabag Teabag ObamaFail ObamaFail ObamaFail" isn't getting a lot of traction outside of the so-called liberal media.

Sorry, Mandy, Pamela, Little Joey, and the rest of you wingnuts. The old tricks of whipping up fear and outrage over trivia just don't seem to be working anymore.

I know you wanted Obama to fail, so the fact that Americans are more confident now after one quarter of an Obama Presidency probably makes you just sick with rage. So sorry. But, then again, sick with rage seems to be your default condition anyway, so no great loss.

This Is Why the Wingnuts Continue to Fail

Nixon Shaking Hands with Mao=Diplomacy

Reagan shaking hands with Gorbachev=Statesmanship

Bush shaking hands with Putin=International Relations

Obama shaking hands with Chavez= OMFGSOCIALISTMARXISTFASCISTWEAK WEAKTRAITORTRAITORTRAITORBLAAAAAGH!

For God's sake you people, GROW UP. It's a HANDSHAKE.

Once again, focusing on trivia rather than substance and trying to convince the American people that a simple gesture of civility will lead to the Downfall of America....

and THAT is why you fail.

You're So Vain, You Probably Think This Column Is About You

It seems that self-proclaimed "radio talk show host" Pamela Furr felt that she was one of the targets of a recent column about what it takes to become a right wing pundit. She posted on her blog:

I've got much to say since I've been on hiatus, but this is a very interesting "column" from a local attorney here in Moore County, NC.

Those that know me realize that I had to respond. After all, this is what I do as a right winged, wingnut! LOL Here is my letter to the editor for the Pilot Newspaper in Southern Pines, NC.

Dear Editors:

My name is Pamela Furr and I guess I am one of those "right wing" radio talk show hosts that Mr. Rhodes fulminated about in his highly entertaining column last Sunday. OK, let's face it -- the column was wrongheaded and full of hyperbole. Call me a nut, though (and Mr. Rhodes already has, I guess, by inference) - but a full life and a profession spent interviewing politicians (yes, including Mr. Obama) have caused me to consider extreme wrongheadedness to be highly entertaining!

Imagine my surprise and delight while visiting my parents on Easter Sunday as I opened up my hometown paper to stumble upon some of the vilest tripe masked as satire I have read in quite some time (I have to think that somewhere in Dublin, seismologists are scratching their heads over the rhythmic spinning underneath Jonathon Swift's grave). Normally one does not encounter such vitriolic wit outside of rest stop bathroom walls. Bravo, Mr. Rhodes!!! Bravo!

I am not interested in matching Mr. Rhodes' feeble attempt at satire by going point-by-point (though this might be an excellent exercise for a conservative Poli Sci class, if such a body existed), but one thing especially tickled my funny bone:

Mr. Rhodes -- None of us "right wing nuts" has EVER said Obama was a bad speaker. That is, not as long as the teleprompter doesn't go on strike. I mean, have you ever heard such a chorus of uh's, um's and ah's in your life as when that screen goes blank?

Ronald Reagan could talk all day about substantive things without a cathode ray tube anywhere nearby. So could Bill Clinton. Well, Clinton could talk all day - how substantive his talks were, varied from day to day (or… cigar to cigar?).

And neither of these men had to fill time with a Special Olympics joke [to digress a bit - a SPECIAL OLYMICS JOKE???? Imagine a Republican making such a joke - he would have to commit honorable hari kari before the press let go of THAT story].

Sincerely,

Pamela Furr, right winged wingnut talk show host

This raises a number of questions, most notably "who the hell is Pamela Furr?" Fortunately, the Google is our friend, and it tells us that Ms. Furr was recently canned from her job at Hunstville Alabama's WVNN, so her claim to be a right wing radio talk show host is dubious at best. I suspect that her "visit to her hometown" is more akin to moving into her parents' basement. (A suspicion which she has since confirmed in her comments, BTW)

We don't really know why Ms. Furr lost her job. We don't know if it was for making racist or anti-catholic comments on the air, as she seems fond of doing on her blog. Since spelling isn't really crucial on the radio, it's probably not for her inability to spell simple things like "Olympics" or my name. I thought for a moment it might be for her utter failure at fact-checking, since another quick Google reveals that St. Ronnie did indeed use a teleprompter. Often. But then I thought, "no that can't be it, because since when do right wingers give a damn about fact-checking?"

So it remains a mystery. We here at Fresh Hell wish Ms. Furr good fortune in her future job searches. We would also seek to reassure her that no, the column was not directed at her, because until she decided to poke her head up and yap, I had no earthly idea who she was.

But thank you so much for proving the point of the column, which was that the right wing is totally obsessed with meaningless trivia like teleprompters. This is most likely because they have no ideas, no coherent plan, no solutions of their own, and as we've repeatedly seen, no principles other than IOKIYAR!

A Tale of Two Scandals That Weren't

Latest Newspaper Column:

One of my favorite quotes from President Barack Obama came during a recent press conference. When a reporter asked why he'd taken three days to respond to the AIG bonus scandal, Obama answered: "I like to know what I'm talking about before speaking."

A couple of recent Internet-driven scandals demonstrate that both sides of the political aisle would do well to heed those words.

The first story: While campaigning in St. Louis last year, then-Sen. Obama had lunch at a pizza place called Pi, like the Greek letter. He immediately declared that it was the best pizza he'd ever eaten. So when restaurant owner Chris Sommers came to D.C., the White House asked if he'd come by and make pizza for 140 or so White House staffers, as well as the president and his family. Sommers, probably realizing that a small business doesn't get a chance for that kind of publicity every day, said yes.

Enter right-wing bloggers, for whom no matter is too small to trigger a teeth-gnashing frenzy of rage and hatred. The popular Republican blog Ace of Spades started the conniption when a contributor identified only as "Jack M." began by calling the president a name that I cannot repeat in this newspaper, then went on to rail: "Hey, you guys know what says you are really sincere about this whole Global Warming thing? Jetting a dude across the country to make you a freaking pie."

He went on to say a few more nasty things about extravagance in troubled economic times, and generally painted Obama's pizza party as the worst case of imperial excess since Marie Antoinette. Pretty soon, Pizzagate, as it was inevitably dubbed, was the outrage du jour all over right-wing Web sites.

Only problem is, "Jack M." managed to get pretty much everything wrong about the story, other than the part about Obama liking pizza. Political reporter Tommy Christopher did something radical: He picked up the phone and did some fact-checking.

His findings: Obama didn't "jet anybody in"; Sommers flew coach on a commercial airliner, and he was already coming to D.C. on other business, so his ticket was paid for by the restaurant, not the taxpayers.

The pizzas were paid for by Obama himself. Therefore no increase in carbon emissions, since that plane was coming to DC anyway. The pizzas weren't on the taxpayer's dime, unless you consider Obama's presidential salary the taxpayer's dime, in which case we can expect another complete wingnut meltdown the next time the man buys toothpaste.

Then, over Easter, my fellow liberals proved that they're not immune to shooting first and asking questions later.

It started when customers of the online book retailer Amazon.com noticed that books by gay and lesbian writers or with gay or lesbian themes were disappearing from the sales rankings on the company's Web site. This is a big deal, since the rankings also determine whether or not your books turn up when someone searches on the site.

A few people e-mailed Amazon and got back a reply from customer service that the books had been removed for "adult" (as in X-rated) content. Problem was, the books delisted weren't necessarily any kind of erotica; one of them was Nathaniel Franks' "Unfriendly Fire," a nonfiction book about gays in the military.

Indignation spread like wildfire, aided in large part by the online messaging service Twitter, where angry messages flew fast and furious. Many of the messages accused Amazon of some secret anti-gay agenda; some could be summarized, as writer John Scalzi put it, by "FOAMY FOAMY FAIL FAIL BOYCOTT GAAAH!"

When higher-level Amazon executives returned from their Easter break, they quickly put out a press release: Yes, they were trying to keep actual "adult" products from turning up in searches. (You'd be amazed by what you can buy on Amazon. Really.) But putting gay- and lesbian-themed books in that category was, in their words, "an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error."

Gradually, the formerly delisted books started showing back up.

Of course, there are always going to be people who'll continue to believe the worst. A significant number are still saying they don't buy the "cataloging error" explanation from Amazon, and I predict that years from now we'll still be hearing from people still fuming that "Obama used taxpayer money to fly a guy in to make him a pizza."

The great thing about the Internet is that it has sped up access to information. Unfortunately, misinformation spreads just as quickly. Maybe waiting three days to learn what you're talking about would be a good rule for all of us to follow, at least from time to time.