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So our relief over John Ashcroft's departure was awfully short-lived, eh? I mean, he was a dangerous lunatic who thought that the will of his imaginary friend in the sky stands above the laws and constitution of the United States, which is definitely not something you want in an Attorney General. But this guy?
He's a dangerous lawyer, who thinks that the will of George W. Bush stands above the laws and constitution of the United States, and that the executive branch has the right to imprison and torture even U.S. citizens, indefinitely, without judicial recourse, as long as it pinky-swears that the victims are terrorists or something. Which is definitely not something you want in an Attorney General.
A year or two from now, will we be looking back nostalgically at Ashcroft's famous morning prayer meetings and vocal performances, his loony fear of certain cats and his fondness for being annointed with oil, and think "gosh we had it easy then, back before Gonzalez"?
I really hope not.
End of Day Nine: 16,267 (ouch!)
End of Day Ten: 18,618
Today's goal: 22,000 (in my dreams)
Today's goal: 20,500 (more realistically)
So the last two days were "at least we're still hanging onto quota by our fingernails" days. I have a doctor's appointment this afternoon, to maybe find out why my head's always stuffy and I keep coughing and I have no sense of smell and not much energy in the evenings. Probably a lingering sinus infection. Or maybe there are pigeons roosting in my head. But anyway it's not helping much with the wordcount...
(I went to the parts department at the local Honda dealer to get the little remote control dingus for my car looked at 'cause it wasn't working. When the guy opened it up, there was a feather inside it. A delicate white down feather, that blew prettily around on the countertop. "Never seen anything like that," the guy said. The dingus case was closed very tight, and the feather is entirely inexplicable.A spammer writes another of those poems:He then replaced the battery in the dingus, but it still didn't work. I brought it home and opened it up again and cleaned it out, and noticed that he'd put the new battery in backwards, and now it works.
Still hafta wonder about that feather, though.)
itsformidable companion? is carnage chuckwalla
I of it as any quack
we not fowl not itsdoe
clifton itsyou michigan the angles
Ccigarette instantiate bookshelf barnyard icosahedron? dyspeptic
awhile? via of dictatorial jess
which is again in the novel, and (part of) a tantalizing list:
A. Because he had no-body to go with.
6. A dictionary index
7. Ejector seat in a helicopter
I wonder what (5) and (8) are. And (B)?
(Ah: google suggests that (5) is "inflatable dartboard" and (8) is "powdered water". And (Q) is "Why did the skeleton go to the party alone?". Of course!)
End of Day Six: 12,201
End of Day Seven: 14,017
End of Day Eight: 16,003
Tomorrow's goal: 18,000
I'm taking this "two thousand words a day" thing kind of literally, amn't I?
(I'm particularly proud of today, when the 2K words were hammered out in like an hour and a half or something at the very end of the evening, because there was lots of other stuff going on.)
And except for that, all I'm going to write down here is this very interesting and/or heartening set of Maps and cartograms of 2004 US presidential election results that Ian found. (See also these.) Just to offset those "red state / blue state" pictures some more.
Oh, and also these spam subject lines:
Subject: schoolgirlish ang horny young ladies are holding back you!
Subject: on the second shoe
Subject: Mikhail Alexandrovich: all the
Subject: of Nisan, there came
Subject: Re: Bang goes the gate,
Subject: pink colour, her forehead
which I like very much, and also this spam content:
you hellbender azalea to dell artistry
so blinn? cottonseed din
panjandrum Qunwieldy test the tnt, eta
credo a hinduism fad
by Ugroundskeep pregnant. diaper
pascal, cain we needn't
very, as via are or genera
which made it into this evening's novel writing. (Thanks also to the reader who sent in something vaguely related; we'll try to get to that soon!)
End of Day Five: 10,079
Currently: 11,747
Today's goal: 12,000
So we're still barrelling along, novel-wise. Not entirely sure what I'm doing, but a few nice scenes and ideas. A few things that I thought would be good didn't really work out, not surprisingly, and a few things that started out very small have worked nicely into somewhat larger things. Doing a good job so far avoiding those darn tempting Hot Girl-Girl Sex Scenes.
I wish more people had their actual novels-in-progress online, and that the NaNoWriMo site made it easier to find the people who do. Of course maybe I'm just looking for things that I can read and think "hey, mine's way better than that!". *8)
I actually uploaded a few pictures to flickr, which is kind of fun. There's lots and lots of good stuff up there. Entirely too much of it, in fact.
So here's a hard question: what happens when we get that pesky "how do you find really interesting content to look at?" problem solved? What then? (What then, wise guy?)
Hm, can I use that in my novel?
Subject: FW: Awomsee Uncroneesd Cartoon Girls
I've already used randomly-generated spam content in my novel, of course.
A reader writes:
A useful service! [link]
(The URL was actually much longer than that, but I think it got truncated by the comment box or the reader's browser or something and didn't work anymore, so I shortened it to a working version.) Clever idea, eh?
Seen on ntk, our Very Silly Quote o' the Day: "In comparison to other process-oriented industries, the meat industry had a lot of catching up to do before it arrives at a highly integrated functional system. 'We have now plugged this gap with myMEAT,' he remarks proudly."
Chortle, chortle.
If you liked Ernest Scared Stupid or Ernest Goes to Camp, you'll love Ernest Symbology.thegreatseal
I don't believe it for a second, but it is amusing. [link]
So maybe it's a hoax. [link]
[link] what, not in Iraq?
j
gino
That "not in Iraq?" one deserves a little more explanation: at the time the reader sent the comment, there was a Dept of State brochure there, called "The Network of Terror". It's since vanished; at least this page currently says "The Network of Terrorism is no longer available on the web". I managed to find a PDf copy that I have no reason to doubt here.
The thing the reader was referring to is a map on page 21, that shows "countries where Al Qaeda or affiliated groups have operated". The countries in red (and in the sidebar list) include Iran, Ireland, and Italy. And not Iraq.
Marginal Revolution links to some amazing photographs of people doing sexually transgressive stuff of various kinds. NSFW to some extent. Probably not anything I'll use in my novel. (Hm, it would be fun to do an X-rated (NC-17-rated) one some year, maybe. But this one I think I want to imagine a more general audience for.)
Let's see. While procrastinating from novel writing, I finished reading, and wrote up notes on, a couple more SF novels: Manifold: Time and The Palace Of Eternity. Both kinda fun, neither perfect.
I'm not sure if I've gotten rid of these replicators even yet. My nose is still stuffy, and just now I'm coughing and sneezing and feeling pretty tired. And I don't seem to have any sense of smell. But there are still words to write!
Sleep well.
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