Category: Reviews

Reviews of books, movies, tv shows and other items

They Don’t Make Them Like That Anymore

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Today I watched the old movie “Gunga Din” for like the trillionth time.  And it has all the same silly things going on every time I see it.  The gags are telegraphed, the sentiment is slapped on with a cement trowel, the improbabilities are piled to the sky.  You name it.

But watching the three leads; Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. go through their paces as Kipling’s three sergeants is a never-ending treat that I can watch several times a year probably until they finally bury me.  It’s a joy to behold.

And the picture works as both a comedy and an adventure story.  And the supporting cast (including an elephant named Annie) provide plenty of support and opportunity for our heroes to search for treasure, destroy British Army discipline, romance the girl or save the day.  And you know, I think I like the fact that even when it was being made, the British Raj was already a sore point for the social justice types but this movie plays up the “white man’s burden” aspect of the story even more than needed to match the historical era.

Sam Jaffe’s Gunga Din really is a minor role right up until the critical juncture in the story where he saves the day.  But he does give the regimental bhisti his due.  And the actors portraying the army officers and the officious Bertie Higginbotham, all acquit themselves with the expected amount of British bluster.

So, what makes this movie fun?  Despite the well-acted lead characters, I think the success of this movie is thanks to the unflagging action, both comic and adventure.  The heroes are constantly fighting savage tribesmen, jumping off cliffs into rivers, breaking out of jail by means of elephant powered building demolition and fighting their way through a saloon full of Scottish highlanders.  They only slow down when poisoning Bertie Higginbotham at an engagement party.  Armies of strangling Thuggees are no match for these soldiers three as they roll out their “three musketeers / all for one and one for all” routine to frustrate the Thug Guru’s master plan to defeat the British and restore India to the greatness it had known before Alexander the Great had slapped it around in the fourth century BC.

So, I have to state which of the three sergeants is my personal favorite.  Now Douglas Fairbanks Jr.’s Sgt. Ballantine is never in the running.  He’s the romantic lead and thereby much abused by his fiancée’s humiliating attentions.  And despite the excellent work done by Cary Grant as the ebullient Sgt. Archibald Cutter I have to give the win to Victor McLaglen’s Sgt. MacChesney.  Just on the strength of the facial expressions that he manages when the Colonel confronts him with the prospect of Bertie Higginbotham replacing Ballantine, I’d have to give him the prize.  But there are just so many great scenes where he steals the show.  Even pleading with an elephant using “baby talk” to get it to take medicine always cracks me up.  And it really is McLaglen with his hand in the elephant’s mouth.

So why can’t they make movies like this anymore?  I don’t think it’s the actors.  There are plenty of those who could perform these parts.  It’s the writers and directors.  Either they can’t or won’t give us good stories.  Maybe the producers just won’t allow them.  But whatever it is, that’s where we are.  And I can live with that.  I have my DVD and it’ll last for longer than I will.

“Now in Injia’s sunny clime,
Where I used to spend my time
A-servin’ of ’Er Majesty the Queen,
Of all them blackfaced crew
The finest man I knew
Was our regimental bhisti, Gunga Din.”

Rudyard Kipling

Another Psycho-Killer, Another Book Lesson

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Another day, another psycho leftist shooter.  As I said the other day, be prepared for an almost endless sequence of these suicidal people.  Their lives are a misery to them so they want the rest of us to suffer too.  Only in addition to everything else that was wrong with this guy he even failed to accomplish what he set out to do.  He wanted to kill ICE agents and instead he killed and wounded illegal alien detainees that were in an ICE van.  Now that level of incompetence and stupidity really does deserve the Darwin Award.  And right there with the shooter’s idiocy, the Left is trying, once again, and to no effect, to question whether the shooter was a Leftist.  Well, give it a day or two and they’ll settle for, “He wasn’t a card-carrying member of a terrorist left-wing organization, which is another way of saying these organizations don’t have cards.  Their badges are the crazed looks on their faces and the social media memes and buzzwords of the left.

Well, enough of that.

Some of the results from the beta-readers of my novel are coming in and the consensus is that this guy photog must be out of his mind if he thinks anyone is gonna read his awful book.  As reader after reader disparaged its characters, plots and even adverbs I was like a cornered wild animal looking for some way to escape the tsunami of negative results.  I yelled, “Nooooooooooo!!!!!!!!”  Well, maybe there weren’t that many exclamation points in real life.  But I was pretty busted up.  So, I took a bottle of Tylenol and washed it down with a gallon of grape Hawaiian Punch and pretty soon I was really sick.  But that took my mind off my book problems while I headed to urgent care.  Now that I’ve mostly recovered, I’m happily in denial and working on an alternate reality where I’ve sold more books than James Patterson and am twice as handsome as Brad Pitt but somehow it turned out backwards.  I’m unfortunately, twice as handsome as James Patterson and have sold more books than Brad Pitt.  You know it really is important to work these things out ahead of time.

I have an appointment to talk with a marketer who specializes in self-published books and I’m trying to put together a list of questions to ask.  At the moment all that comes to mind is, “How can I become fabulously wealthy from my book without putting in any effort at all?”  And I think I’ve nailed it.  That is exactly what I want an answer to.  But I have this nagging suspicion that there may be more to it than that.  I seem to be confusing marketer with the genie from Aladdin.  Well, you can hardly blame me.  Both of them are in my mind, mythical creatures with supernatural powers.  But seriously, this whole book thing has been an interesting experience.  I’ve learned that writing is a craft that requires lots of work and especially in the planning stages.  Writing a story by the seat of your pants seems more intuitive and natural to me but I now understand that building the story ahead of time saves time at the end when re-writing is extremely painful and maybe impractical.  Well, the journey continues.

Guest Contributor – Chemist – 24SEP2024 – Death of SF Magazines

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I have always enjoyed the shot story format. For a while, in the 60s & 70s, some of the big name authors were competing with each other to write a complete story on the back of a picture postcard. Some of these were amazingly good!
As for Analog, I gave up on it a long time ago (30 years?). Their Science Fact articles were all doom and gloom:
“We are all going to die and thee is nothing you can do about it!”
Or:
“Here is why FTL travel, Nuclear fusion, laser defenses, etc. won’t work and cannot work.”

And, to me, the Fiction was woke before woke was a thing. So I stopped buying after I realized I had a years worth of issues that I had not read and could not motivate myself to read.
I suspect that Analog (and maybe the others) got infected by the same liberal women who took over the NY publishing houses.

Another datapoint: I recall talking to a successful SciFi author in the 80s who switched from writing short stories to novels. When asked why, he said: “Its just as hard to sell a short story as a novel, but novels pay a hell of a lot better.”

BTW, Photog, another non-woke publishing house is Chris Kennedy Publishing.
You might consider sending him a copy of your novel.
https://chriskennedypublishing.com/

Just Something that Came to Mind

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Lately there have been a lot more options if I wanted to talk about what’s in the news.  There’s all kinds of Jimmy Kimmel talk.  He’s off the air, he’s back on, he’s gonna apologize, his show won’t be carried in a quarter of the country, blah, blah, blah.  And Donald Trump just got through trashing Joe Biden and the UN in front of the General Assembly.  There are psychopaths shooting up innocent victims everywhere you look and Democrats are desperately kowtowing to Mamdani hoping he can provide the magic bullet needed to bring back the millions of voters who are jumping ship.  Yep, there’s all kinds of madness everywhere you look.

But I can use a break from it from time to time.  I just get fed up with the awfulness of the world and the awful people doing awful things.

So, let’s talk about something less depressing and maybe more interesting.  A while ago I mentioned I bought a copy of a book I owned back in the stone age.  It’s an anthology of science fiction stories published in the 1950s, edited by Robert Heinlein, called, “Tomorrow, The Stars.”  There are fourteen short stories in the book’s two hundred and forty-nine pages.  They’re all between ten and twenty pages long and were written by authors “famous and less well known” at the time.  Interestingly, one of the less well-known authors was a certain, “Kurt Vonnegut Jr.”

So, I’ve been rereading these stories, some for the first time in over fifty years.  I won’t pretend that they’re all equally good or that any of them are timeless prose.  They’re not.  They’re pulp fiction or maybe slightly better than pulp fiction.  But they’re also entertaining.  They amuse.  They keep the reader’s interest.  They tell a story.  All that good stuff.  But what’s my point?  I’ve read lately that science fiction short stories are an unsellable product.  All the magazines and the anthologies are going bankrupt.  No one will buy them.

Back in the dark ages magazines like Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made plenty of money selling monthly editions filled with mostly just short stories.  Sure, they would also serialize some novels but mostly we were reading short stories by authors, “famous and less well known.”  Now I am well aware we are living in a new age.  Theft of intellectual property has been the downfall of all the formerly lucrative entertainment forms.  CDs, DVDs and books have been pirated out of existence.  Young people have been conditioned not to pay for anything.  Everything is a streaming service.  Amazon sells books by the penny/a page method.

Yes, yes.  I get all that.  But these are just the technical details of our age.  Piracy has always been around.  What it takes to sell a product in the face of these kinds of obstacles is the same thing that is needed in any other place and time; creativity and psychology.  And in fact, a short story would seem to me to be the easier sell.  You can read (or hear) a short story in a car ride or a subway commute or a high school class that you don’t want to listen to.

Sometimes you don’t want a four-hundred-page epic fantasy.  Sometimes you don’t even want a novella.  Sometimes you want a ten-to-twenty-page story to take you out of your life for a half hour.

Just something that came to mind.

The Asphalt Jungle (1950) – A Movie Review

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The Asphalt Jungle is a heist film noir co-written and directed by John Huston.  It stars Sterling Hayden, James Whitmore, Louis Calhern and Sam Jaffe with a supporting role for Marilyn Monroe.  Sam Jaffe plays “Doc,” a criminal mastermind who was recently released from prison and is now recruiting a team to steal a million dollars-worth of gem stones from the safe of an upscale jewelry business in the unnamed mid-western city in which the story takes place.  Local racket boss Cobby points Doc to Alonzo Emmerich (played by Louis Calhern) as the fixer who can finance the caper and line up the fences to sell the jewels.  He also finds him a getaway driver (James Whitmore as Gus Minissi), a safe cracker (Anthony Caruso as Louis Ciavelli) and a “hooligan” (Sterling Hayden as Dix Handley).

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

As the team assembles Doc privately discusses with Dix his distrust of Emmerich and tells him that he will depend on Dix to protect the loot in case Emmerich attempts to double-cross them.  There is a subplot around a dirty cop; Lt. Ditrich who receives protection money from Cobby but is being pressured by the police commissioner to find Doc.  And we learn more about Emmerich’s personal life and his problems.  Emmerich has an aging bed-ridden wife and a young beautiful girlfriend; Angela Finlay (Marilyn Monrie) that he keeps in a love nest downtown.  And maybe not coincidentally he’s broke and can’t fund the heist.  But his associate     Bob Brannom; a hard-boiled private detective who doesn’t see crime as an obstacle to making money, talks Cobby into fronting the heist expenses and throws in with Emmerich in a plan to steal the jewels and leave the heist team out in the cold.

At this point we watch the team in action.  And it’s like clockwork.  Right up until the point when the nitroglycerin blows the door off the safe.  Somehow the blast triggers an alarm at a bank down the block from the jewelry store.  And when the security guard shows up at the back door Dix flattens him with one punch to the jaw.  But his gun flies out of his hand hits the ground, discharges and shoots Louis Ciavelli in the gut.  Gus takes Louis home and tries to get a doctor who will keep his mouth shut about the gunshot wound while helping his friend.  Meanwhile Doc and Dix show up at Emmerich’s to transfer the loot and get their cut.  But when Brannom sticks them up Dix shoots it out with him.  Dix is wounded in the side and Brannom ends up dead.  Doc convinces Emmerich to fix his mistake by using his legitimate connections to work a deal with the insurance company to get $250,000 in return for the return of the jewels.

Meanwhile the police have offered a reward for the capture of Doc whom they assume is responsible for the theft.  A witness comes forward saying that Doc had been seen entering Cobby’s gambling house and Lt. Ditrich is given an ultimatum to find Doc.  Ditrich slaps Cobby around until he confesses and gives up everyone involved in the heist.

The police go to arrest Emmerich and he shoots himself to death rather than go to jail.  They arrest Gus and go looking for Louis but he has already died of his wounds.  Dix has a girlfriend Doll who hides him and Doc while the police search the city for them.  Doc decides to head out on his own and catches a cab that will take him to Cincinnati.  But stopping off at a café he indulges in watching a young woman dance provocatively to a jazz tune a little too long and a couple of state troopers recognize him and arrest him.  Dix and Doll drive out of town, heading for Dix’s boyhood home in Kentucky.  But Dix has been slowly succumbing to his gunshot wound and just as he reaches the farm his family used to own, he collapses and dies.

This sounds like a pretty wild story and it is.  But it’s very well done.  Jaffe, Hayden, Whitmore and Calhern do a splendid job portraying their characters and selling the plot.  And even the secondary characters like Monroe and Caruso are very strong and provide an entertaining atmosphere for this noir.  I may be biased but I’ve always thought this was one of the best crime dramas ever made.  And this was done in the days when the Hays Code limited the amount of violence that could be displayed in a motion picture and when special effects were basically non-existent.  I would say this movie gets my highest rating for fans of crime and noir films.

Hear Ye, Hear Ye

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Update:

To verify my ownership of “The Sniper” for the Royal Road folks, I am adding this note to show I also control Orion’s Cold Fire.

 

We interrupt the daily progression of actual civil war to bring you a message about a fictional civil war story.  I’ve finished the manuscript for my book, “The Sniper.”  Now I’m looking for beta readers.  I’m looking for folks to read the book and give me their honest feedback.  Also I’d like to disseminate the book to friends and family who you judge would be a good fit for the book based on your estimation and if they agree to read it I’d like to get their opinions too.

I’m looking to get this book out to the largest group of people possible to see whether it is something that people will want to read.  So after reading it if you think it’s appropriate for people you know let me hear that too.  And remember, I’m not a fragile author.  If you think it sucks, say so, but also tell me why you think it.

If you’re interested leave a comment to that effect and I’ll e-mail you a copy of the story.  Now this is just a pdf.  No nice cover, no actual paper.  Just electrons.  But I will guarantee that this sniper is nothing like the actual sniper we’ve had to hear about for the last week.

And just to remind you here’s the beginning of the book.

 

Chapter 1 – An Object Lesson

Joseph Boghadair was set up at a loophole in a small prefabricated metal building at the top of the mountain that contained the Icarus Mine.  His .50 caliber sniper rifle was trained on the narrow road that led up to the mine.  He could see a line of black SUVs about a mile and a half down the road and he was getting ready to start firing on the convoy.  His first shots took out the engine of the lead vehicle thereby halting the convoy.  His second volley took out the engine of the last car in line thus trapping the rest of the vehicles between.  Then at a more leisurely pace he took care of the other eight vehicles.  By this point the passengers were crouching behind their disabled cars and randomly firing handguns and automatic weapons in Joseph’s general direction with almost no discernible results.

After about half an hour a few of the men in black body armor attempted to reach a stand of trees about 300 yards away to their left.  Joseph put a few well aimed rounds in front of their path and they quickly retreated back to the supposed safety of their not-so-mobile-autos.  Joseph snorted wryly at their shyness.

An hour after that a helicopter approached the mountain from the opposite direction to Joseph’s loophole.  Walking over to a window on the other wall he could see a distant Blackhawk approaching at relatively high altitude.  Joseph then began his preparations for their reception.

Between crew and troops, the Blackhawk had a dozen men on board.  And more importantly it had a couple of Hellfire missiles.  From a very safe distance away it targeted Joseph’s position and fired.  The missile struck precisely on target and obliterated the steel structure almost completely.  All that remained was the foundation of the structure around the mine shaft, now clogged with debris.

The Blackhawk landed about three quarters of a mile from the mine entrance.  At this point the agents, hunkered down behind their vehicles, began to stream toward the helicopter.  By the time they reached the aircraft the troops had exited and were waiting for their rescued brethren to arrive.

FBI Special Agent in Charge, George Chastain assembled both teams and briefed them on the updated mission plan.  “We will proceed to the mine head and look for any human remains.  We will collect whatever we can retrieve for lab analysis and attempt to seal the mine head until qualified personnel can be assembled for recovery operations.  It is presumed that the target, Joseph Boghadair was killed by the missile strike but we will take no chances.  He was an extremely dangerous individual and should not be approached by anyone without backup and prior approval from leadership.  In addition to his war record it is believed that Boghadair is responsible for the shooting deaths of forty-six people in the last six months with thirteen of those people being FBI personnel.  No one enters the mine until remote sensing equipment is brought in.  Alright, proceed.”

The agents formed two groups.  Apparently, SUV agents and helicopter agents must not bond very well.  But before they were more than a hundred feet from the helicopter the ground began to quake so powerfully beneath them that they were irresistibly knocked off their feet.  And while they were clawing at the ground for dear life, they could see that the high ground where the mine head was located had collapsed into the earth.  The roar of that collapse was more frightening than the initial earthquake and some of the agents hid their heads under their arms in abject terror.  When the mountain stopped shaking the men started to collect themselves and stand up.  When they looked around them, they were astonished.  A circular pit had opened up centered on the mine head.  It was a thousand yards in diameter and so deep that only blackness could be seen at its center.  Several cracks had formed outside the circular pit.  One of these had nearly swallowed the Blackhawk.  It was on its side and half buried in the crevice.  Its rotors were fractured and it wouldn’t be flying away from this landing.

Chastain went over to the edge of the crater and just stared down into the blackness below.  Then he went back to his team and started giving orders to begin a retreat from the stricken mountain.  He was trying to think of what he was going to tell his boss.  Nothing reasonable came to mind.

Various Kinds of Pruning

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Monday was a good day at work.  Progress was made and I’ve got a much better understanding of what we’re going to be up against in the next couple of weeks.  Sure, madness will break out now and then.  But it’s not just this fog of ignorance.  There’s the beginning of planning and a path forward.

And there’s the situation going on in the world.  Charlie Kirk’s murder is disgusting and the more details that come out the worse it shows the Left’s psychotic fringe to be.  These people aren’t merely insane.  They have ceased to be human.  The assassin was a “furry.”  The fact that his “partner” was trans wasn’t enough.  He also pretended to be an animal.  These people are so far beyond help that simple execution might be the kindest thing we could do for them.

Hopefully Kash Patel is up to the job he needs to do.  Proving conspiracy by all the other members of Robinson’s associates is the first step.  Then he must widen out the investigation to locate the entire Antifa network and trace back their money to the donors and NGO’s that fund them.  It would be nice if Obama gets caught up in that net.  But first things first.  Shut off the money and arrest the ringleaders who call the shots.  Without them and the money, the small fry psychos will wander off and starve on the streets.

I’ve heard Trump is pivoting from invading Chicago with ICE and the National Guard to going to Portland, Oregon instead.  Now that’s an interesting idea.  Portland probably has the highest per capita number of trans weirdos, Antifa thugs and homeless drug addicts of any city in the country.  It would be the perfect place to haul away tractor trailers full of degenerates and psychopaths.  But I hope they’ve planned this carefully to avoid injury among law enforcement and maximize the jail time meted out to the Antifa “community.”  I know they like throwing Molotov cocktails at law enforcement.  Intelligence will be needed.  But Portland is definitely in need of pruning.

I have a feeling I’ll be self-publishing my book.  I don’t think there are many traditional publishers who are brave enough to embrace my dystopian world of armed insurrection against the deep state.  It is pretty radical.  I’m still trying to learn the basics of book marketing; especially advertising on Amazon and elsewhere on the web.  But I have gotten the book out there in the real world now.  I have a friend reading it and I’m very interested in getting his feedback.  My intention is to decide one way or the other about self-publishing and then send out a bunch of copies of the manuscript to friends and associates and see what they think.  It’s pretty heady stuff to even have a small audience read your words.

The weather has been summer-like for the last few days and the forecast is for another couple of weeks of the same.  That should allow me to handle the winterizing chores easily and plan for next year’s spring.  Probably the highlight of the garden season was the thornless raspberries.  I took a chance that they were the kind that mature in one season.  I cut all the canes to the ground and added a bunch of fertilizer and they grew like crazy and spread and produced tons of fruit.  In fact, they’re not done yet.  Next year I’ll do the same (cut down and fertilize) and I expect them to spread to almost double where they are now.  We’ll have to give them away to strangers.  But I’ll eat a ton of them myself.  They’re delicious.

Well, that’s enough talk of pruning for Monday.

 

 

Exaggerations of the Simple Stuff of Human Life

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Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when the second witch says:

“By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.”

And Macbeth enters.  What a marvelous scene.  Witches, bloody ghosts and a demigod truly drained of his humanity.  A horror story in a stage play.  And then Ray Bradbury takes that line, “Something wicked this way comes” and makes it the title of his own American ghost story; the story of a haunted carnival.  Now what does Macbeth have to do with Bradbury?  Well, in both cases we have basically good people seduced by the devil.  Whether it’s Shakespeare’s witches or Bradbury’s Mr. Dark it is the story of men succumbing to the devil’s promise for their heart’s desire in exchange for their souls.

Macbeth wants the Scottish crown.  Bradbury’s Green Town denizens want various things.  Tom Fury and Mr. Crosetti succumb to lust.  Mr. Tetley wants money.  Miss Foley and Charles Halloway want their youth back.  Jim Nightshade wants to be older so he can indulge his various negative desires.  And for these things they risk becoming permanent prisoners of Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger’s haunted carnival travelling the American continent in search of more souls to consume.

What a marvelous conceit.  An ancient locomotive from the Civil War era, arrives in small towns in the middle of the night and sniffs out the spiritually wounded inhabitants and lures them into the haunted attractions of the show.  If they wander into the house of mirrors, they will see their heart’s desire or their greatest fear.  Or they can follow the barker’s lure and enter the tent where the belly dancers expose their bodies for a silver dime.  And those that disappear are no longer recognizable as themselves and so cannot be rescued by any police force.

And redemption can only be had in Bradbury’s story if the devil is laughed out of town.  Laughter and happiness are the only cures for this evil.  The secret is to realize that life is not a tragedy.  Even at its worst, it is better than the alternative which is nothingness.  Pain and sadness and even death are a human story and in fact the only certainty in this world.  But it’s also still better than never existing.  Because no matter how sad and awful our existence, it’s still ours.  We get to feel it and react to it and maybe win a few rounds before we’re finally cornered and beaten by death.

So, the ride’s the thing.  That’s the lesson that Charles Halloway learns by the end of the story.  Even though he’s old and overwhelmed with trying to be the father of a young boy, that overwhelming challenge is his greatest opportunity to squeeze every bit of meaning and gusto out of what remains of his life.  And the boys get to see that fears and desires are exaggerations of the simple stuff of human life.  Lust and greed and fear are just the ingredients of life taken out of balance from their normal proportions and occasions.

I wonder who will take this theme up next?  Maybe I will, someday.

Grammata-Euphoria

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All this Charlie Kirk media madness and the manhunt have depressed the hell out of me.  We live in a madhouse surrounded by awful, depraved people.  So I needed a break.  So I’m writing about something lighthearted instead.  My apologies.  I’m sure on Friday more horrible things will occur to drag me back into the madhouse.

Publishing a book.

Step two complete!  I sent off my manuscript to the one traditional publisher that I’m confident isn’t ideologically opposed to the political position of my protagonist.  Now I’ve got to write a “query letter” and send it out to a bunch of agents to see if any want to represent me.  And I have to make a list of publishers that will take submissions without agents.  Once I’ve done all that, if no one bites then I have to self-publish it and then I have to market it (advertise, announce it on social media, run a Kickstarter, hire a skywriter to put my message over Manhattan, and get a Superbowl commercial).

Well anyway, that will keep me busy for a while.  Based on all the advice for new writers that I’ve read, I intend to disseminate my story for free to all of my friends and try to get as much good word of mouth and favorable reviews as I can when it’s ready to launch.  After all, I don’t want hundreds or thousand of readers and dollars.  I need millions and billions!  Like the holy texts, my book should be in every home in the first and second world.  And dammit why not the third world too?  Surely, I can squeeze the little bit of hard currency that they would normally buy food with and divert it into my coffers.  Yes, yes.  That sounds right.

Well anyway Larry Correia started a monthlong Kickstarter for his new book on Ark Press and within about 24 hours he had $150,000 collected.  And what has he got that I haven’t got (beside thousands of devoted fans)?  Unfortunately, that is exactly what he has that I don’t.  Ah, the trials and tribulations of the unknown author.  There should be a “Tomb of the Unknown Author.”  It could be right past the colonnade of heroic sculptures of Homer, Moses and whoever wrote George Burns’ jokes.  It should have an eternal flame that’s a large hibachi using charcoal brickettes as fuel.  Some residue and aroma from a nice porterhouse steak would be fine and possibly a meat thermometer somewhere nearby.

You know I did learn that writing a story really is just for yourself.  I found parts of the work where I said, “Now that’s exactly how it should be.  Dammit, the writer nailed this perfectly.”  And of course, I know I’m talking to myself but it’s immensely satisfying when the words evoke exactly the emotion you’re reaching for.

Of course, the tricky part is knowing (or hoping) that the scene will elicit that same response from someone or better still, many someone-s who will let the world know just what a genius the author is.  I guess the definition of a great writer is when the whole world (mostly) is moved by what you write in the way you wanted them to feel.

Alright, that’s enough grammata-euphoria.  I’ll only report back when something interesting (publication or a book deal) is imminent.  Until then we can concentrate on the latest hideous atrocities on the streets of our cities and Trump’s latest poke in the eye to the Left and its minions.