Month: August 2026

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 25AUG2026 – Bureaucracy of the Military Flavor

photog 0 Comment Current Events, Ed Brault, Guest Contributors , ,

I had a similar situation with my Disability pay when I retired from the Army. Due to a snafu about a separation check when I was RIFed in 1986, I could not get my retirement pay until it was paid back. Basically 2 years’ retirement pay. Meanwhile, I was approved for a 70% VA Disability. I figured that would cover most of the delayed retirement. However, the checks did not show up. When I enquired, I was told that the Disability would be withheld until the separation pay was repaid. After careful examination of the paperwork they sent me, and finding that both checks were being put towards the settlement, the math said that the repayment had been completed six months earlier. When I contacted the VA I got the bureaucratic run around until I demanded to talk to a supervisor. You can’t, the drone said. Why not? I asked. “Its POLICY!”

So, I let them have their policy, and filed a Congressional complaint. Neither Bernie nor Lehey did any good, but amazingly, then-Congressman Welch lit a fire under someone’s ass and six weeks later I got not only my retirement and disability, but $36,000 in Disability backpay!
Keep fighting,
Illegitimi non carborundum!

Next!!!

photog 3 Comments Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

Bureaucrats are one of the things that make American life purgatorial.  But small-town bureaucrats are a special case that is worth discussing because of their emergent characteristics.  When I was young and living in New York City, one of the most horrific ordeals that the city could dish out was a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles.  The DMV was located in a large old building and there would be many, many lines of New Yorkers waiting to get their business attended to.  Maybe your license was about to expire and you had to pay the fee or get your picture taken or take the eye test or, God forbid, you needed to correct a mistake on the document.  You would wait in one of these lines and hope against hope for quick service.  Eventually, this hope would cruelly die in that first line.  The glacial pace of the line would sooner or later crush your spirit and you took on the same weary, miserable expression of everyone else around you.  And even before you reached the front of the line you would have already sized up the essential traits of the clerk waiting on your line.  She (it was always a woman) had a face that could stop a clock and her IQ probably hovered around 75 and she worked and talked so slowly that you weren’t sure from moment to moment whether she had lapsed into a coma.  But regardless of her demeanor and obvious imbecility the only thing you knew going in was that she would declare your problem didn’t fit her services ands she would redirect you to the back of some other line.  And this same process might be repeated several times until finally you might just flee the building rather than risk arrest for assaulting a public servant.

But small towns do not possess this kind of apparatus.  Even at tax time they do not possess the vast numbers of citizens needed to turn lines into killing fields.  They just don’t.  But what the bureaucracy of a small town does possess in spades is kooks.  Once again, they’re all women (well not the road department but they’re not really bureaucrats) and they often have faces that could stop clocks but their scope of influence is limited.  There just aren’t enough people in town hall to endlessly stall a tax payer from receiving some government service.  So instead of delay they’ve developed the art of obfuscation to a high art form.  I was talking to the assistant town clerk of Dunwich and wanted to clear up a problem having to do with the misspelling of a road name.  And it was complicated.  Both names that were listed in various state databases were incorrect but I wanted to determine who had jurisdiction over what the correct name actually was.  She sent me to the Assessor’s Office but the Assessor was out of the office for a while and so I got the assistant to the Assessor.  I might as well have been speaking to a parrot.  She kept taking the information I gave her and mixing it up in her mind and when I tried to correct her, she just talked over me and tried to solve the wrong problem.  And of course, she just kept getting more and more confused and excited until she was just rattling her mantra about how these kinds of problems were usually the taxpayer’s fault.  Finally, she told me to call the Post Office because they knew what everyone’s address was supposed to be.  But when I mentioned that the Post Office was a federal agency and the state should be the ones with the official records, she told me I had to come back when the Assessor was back because I was upsetting her.

And that’s what I did.  The Assessor knew all about the incorrect names in the databases and told me that the state had issued a statement pointing to the documents that contained the correct name.  It took all of two minutes to answer the question.  The assistant was at her desk with her head buried in her paperwork and studiously ignored my interaction with her boss.  So, is the small-town bureaucrat worse than her city relative?  Absolutely not.  There is none of the moronic sadism that is on display in Gotham.  And honestly, I’m sure the assistant assessor isn’t abysmally stupid.  She’s just a fuzzy headed old lady who isn’t up to any kind of logical thinking when anything is out of the ordinary.  But it does make for an ordeal at Dunwich town Hall.  Next!!!

24AUG2026 – More Book Writing Stuff

photog 2 Comments Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy

Oh no more writer talk!!!

I watched a YouTube video about fiction writing.  The premise of the video was that trying to learn how to write by the commonly accepted method of just writing a bunch of stuff and seeing if it’s any good is a hopeless effort.  He distinguishes two versions of learning; the “kind environment” and the “wicked environment.”  The kind environment is what we would call normal learning.  So, if you wanted to learn carpentry or to play the guitar, you would study objective instructions on learning progressively more and more difficult skills in the field while receiving continuous feedback on your mistakes through a teacher or some objective test of your results.

He compares this to learning to write which he says is one of the worst cases of a wicked environment.  Basically, you bang out a book on your own without knowing anything about the objective rules of what is good and bad and so your work has a thousand defects that you can’t even recognize.  The only feedback happens after you work on a book for months and years.  And trying to find objective criticism is extremely difficult.  So it’s very difficult to improve.

As an example of the advice given by writers, he mentions Stephen King’s advice that writers should write a thousand words a day.  But King also states explicitly that writing is a talent that cannot be learned but is inherent in an individual.  You either have it or you don’t.

Now the video maker is someone who sells a program on how to become a writer.  So, his point is that what new authors need is to have constant feedback from an objective judge on whether what they are producing is good or bad.  He states that before you write a novel you have to first learn how to write a sentence, then a paragraph, then a scene and then a chapter.  I guess that does sort of make sense.  But I wonder how much it costs to become an author in his school?  Well, I see his point about learning to write.  It does seem that most of us haven’t gotten an objective teacher to tell us what’s good and not so good in our writing.  Oh well.

But this guy has lots of other information on his YouTube channel and actually I found some things that are helpful.  He is a big believer in free book promotions as a way to expand audience and advertise its presence to the larger reading audience.  So, there are two promo strategies I’m lining up.  The Based Book Sale is having a sci-fi sale in September that I hope to participate in and I also plan to set up a promotion on a site called Freebooksy that has hundreds of thousands of readers looking for a free read.  Between these two efforts I hope to be able to distribute around a thousand copies of the book and that should be a large enough sample size to figure out whether the book is popular.

Well currently my book has sold a little more than four hundred copies.  I guess that’s not so bad but I do hope to see an increase in sales month over month so I want to give it a boost this fall.  Now as far as Stephen King’s statement that writing literature is an innate talent that can’t be learned, I guess I’m of two minds.  I’m sure there are people who don’t have an inner ear for good writing and probably won’t ever write anything very entertaining.  But I also think that training yourself to put together a good scene or an interesting plot line will greatly improve the quality of your books.

The Great 2026 Summer Cooldown

photog 12 Comments Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner

Well, we’re going through a cool-down here in Dunwich.  It’s been in the low seventies today and rainy.  I heard this will be going on for a week or so.  That’s okay.  With the kids going back to school it’s best if it’s not too hot.  Most of the school buildings aren’t air conditioned so summer weather is truly oppressive especially while the kids are still in mourning over summer vacation.

I walked around in the rain and found some interesting bugs.  There was a preying mantis and some hungover bumble bees holding onto the cone flowers for dear life.  And then I found this really tiny, almost microscopic bight yellow spider.  At least I think it’s yellow.  Sometimes it turns out that these things are really some very light, bright green that looks yellow to people like me who are blind to green.  Well, whatever color it was, it was sliding around on a strand of web and moving from flower petal to flower petal, trying to look like part of the plant.  And maybe to someone with color vision, maybe because he’s some kind of green, maybe he does blend in.  But to me he sticks out like a sore thumb.  So, every time he flies off, I watch him trying to blend into his background.  So, then I start trying to get good photos of him.  But he’s unbelievably small and every tiny breath of wind shakes the flower stem and throws off my focus.  So, I probably took dozens of frames that will be just blurred garbage and those files will add to the terabytes of photos that I should be deleting from my desk top hard drive but don’t.

But it was fun.  I found a monarch butterfly chrysalis on a day lily plant.  It was at least fifty feet from the nearest milkweed plants, so that’s an interesting bit of information that I can use in the future.  I’m trying to decide if I should collect the chrysalis and try to photograph the hatching.  I’m trying to decide what would be the optimal container to allow me to get the best photos of the hatching process.  I probably will have to hurry because they only spend a week or two in the chrysalis and for all I know it may already be ready to hatch.

There’s talk about another kid’s movie in the near future for me.  Princess Sack of Potatoes is back next week for the end of her vacation.  The plan is to see the new Minions movie.  Camera Girl is also a fan of these annoying yellow creatures so the three of us will experience this event together.  Actually, the last Minions movie wasn’t so bad.  It took place in the 1960s in New York and London and the music was very nostalgic.  I haven’t looked into what the theme for this masterpiece will be but it’s a non-Disney production so that is at least one factor in its favor.  Well, here we go into fall!