Must Be Global Warming Again

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I was looking at the Accu-weather forecast for Dunwich.  There was a special miasmal ectoplasm alert on for the area (as usual).  But the temperature forecast was eye-catching:

Tonight: Clear and bitterly cold.  Lo: 4°F

Tomorrow: Mostly sunny and cold; the coldest day until next winter.

That was an interesting statement.  Now don’t get me wrong.  Hearing that it would get down to 4°F was in no way cheery.  Single digits and below is a special part of the “charm” of New England.  Camera Girl and I prepare for this by stacking two hundred pounds of blankets on top of ourselves in bed and use snorkels to get air.  So, no, I’m not looking forward to tonight.  But to hear that from now on until next year it will not be getting horribly cold again is like being someone trapped in a flooded building where the water line is only inches from the ceiling and you’ve been dog paddling for dear life and breathing the last few inches of air for hours praying you wouldn’t drown and finally the tide begins to recede.  You experience a sense of relief and victory over a horrible enemy.

It snowed today but I waited until about 2pm and the sun came out and melted the dusting on the driveway.  I went around trimming back the ten foot piles of snow along the edge of the driveway just to show them who’s boss and how limited their remaining time would be.  I think as I struck with my shovel I taunted the snow in a somewhat insane manner.  It’s been a long winter.  The other day I was able to get the snowblower working.  I poured warm water down the chute and like magic it was completely functional.  So, all of the horror from last week was unnecessary.  But uncertainty ruled and I didn’t want to use up any time fiddling with the machine when I knew I barely had enough daylight to shovel myself out from a foot of snow.

But all of that is behind me.  From now on melting snow will be the reality and preparations will begin for spring.  Already we are preparing for the next milestone.  St. Patrick’s Day is coming up and Camera Girl will prepare her version of corned beef and cabbage.  Lately she hasn’t been boiling it.  The cabbage is sauteed and the beef is pan fried but it still connects us with the patron saint of the city of our birth (before Mamdani installed the minarets on St Patrick’s Cathedral).  After that Easter is right around the corner and dare I hope some lamb could be on the menu?  Camera Girl despises lamb.  She prefers ham or pork for Easter but every once in a while, she’ll provide a lamb alternative for lepers such as myself who enjoy a little flavor at Easter.

But all of this is premature.  Tonight, I’ll add another hundred pounds of blankets to the pile and we’ll hunker down to 4°F one last time.  And who knows, in a few weeks I might even start saying, “Boy I hope it cools a little, I’m stifling.  Must be global warming.”

Trump and Iran

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So, I feel like I’ve been down this road before.  I remember when George W Bush said we had to go into Iraq.  And I was gung-ho.  We’d blitz Saddam and drag him off and then give Iran the same treatment and the world would be peaceful and quiet from then on.  And we’d do it by remote control like some big old video game where everyone comes home in one piece and that would be the end of that.

Well, that’s twenty plus years ago and we’re all a lot older and wiser now, I thought.  So, what the hell does Donald Trump think he’s going to do with this Iran thing?  Iran is bigger and uglier than Iraq was.  Sure, half of its people hate their own government and are celebrating the bombing of the Republican Guards and the death of Ali Khamenei.  All of that sounds great but when the missile launchers and the other long-distance weapons have been neutralized but the bad guys are still the ones with all the machine guns killing civilians what happens then?  Are we going to send in the Marines?  And what happens when the body bags start coming home?  That would be the end of the Republicans for another decade.

What occurred to me was that maybe the CIA and Mossad can funnel guns to the people who want to get rid of the Islamic State.  If they have enough actual men who are willing to go head-to-head against the Republican Guards then a small team of trainers from these intelligence agencies could stand up a credible force within Iran to overwhelm the Islamic State with the help of targeted aerial attacks from the Israelis and Americans.  But is that really going to happen?  I’ve read that Mossad is already on the ground in Iran and has been for years.  That explains how they’ve been able to sabotage things like the Iranian nuclear program and Hezbollah’s cell phones.  Maybe they really will be able to topple this regime in the next few weeks.  It’s definitely possible and Israel has an existential reason for wanting the Iranian regime to disappear.  If the Islamic State were toppled tomorrow, Hezbollah and Hamas lose their paymaster and greatest ally.  Most of the violence in the Middle East loses its sponsor.  Without the mullahs it’s even possible that Lebanon could become a normal country again.  And a peaceful and prosperous Iran would change the whole balance of power in the Middle East and might even stabilize the whole region.  Think of the amount of misery that would disappear from that tortured region.

Well, those are all the good words I can think of for a situation that is fraught with peril.  I just hope Trump knows exactly what he is doing and what to do in every one of a thousand scenarios that could happen in that insane corner of the world.  When I think of all the possible ways things can head south very fast and very badly It makes my head ache.  Okay, Khamenei is dead.  Good.  Now what?

One Month In

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So today was the last day of my marketer’s book launch service.  And as of now we sold sixty books.  Thirty-four were e-books and twenty-six were paperbacks.  And today I noticed that one sale (an e-book) was sold in Germany.  Well, well.

Owing to the fact that book sales have not topped one million copies, as of yet, I’ve decided to turn the whole thing into a network marketing exercise.  I intend to find ten people and have each of them buy ten copies and then each force ten people to each buy ten copies and then so on and so forth until by level ten we have ten billion copies sold!  By the way that math may be off a little but you get the idea.  After all if it worked for Amway and Communism how can it possibly fail?  Why didn’t I think of this earlier?  All I have to do is buy a white board and some dry erase products and maybe combine this with a Tupperware item or two and before you know it I’ll be a huge success.

All in all, it’s been very educational.  I guess the takeaway is that price-point and ads on Amazon are what sell books.  As soon as I dropped the price of the e-book from $5.99 to $2.99 there was an immediate surge in sales.  Since I have very few reviews, I’ve decided to drop the price of the e-book to $0.99 and try to get a bunch of sales right away in the hopes that it will generate some reviews.  Of course, that’s just my idea but it seems to make sense to me.

The marketer has additional services to extend the launch but I’ve decided to try it myself.  Now that I’m running the campaign on my own, I’ll depend on Amazon’s automatic key word selection to attract the attention of the techno-thriller/vigilante justice readers out there.  It should be very interesting to see how this change affects sales.

I will say that becoming a “best selling author” is harder than I imagined.  I assumed that with my incredible writing skills the publishers and the reading public would beat a path to my door and shower me with riches.  So far, no path.  So far, more like a trickle of riches.  But I am undismayed.  My acquaintances who’ve read the book report enjoying it a lot.  Now of course they may be just saying nice things because they like me.  But I will say it is very nice to receive accolades even from friends.  If instead they had told me, it was awful I think I’d be pretty discouraged.  So currently I’m buoyed by the minor success I’ve enjoyed and hopeful that with further exposure the book will find an audience (possibly in Germany!).

So, let’s just see how the next stage in this odyssey goes.  As always feel free to add a review to Amazon and hopefully the word will get out that a new classic has appeared on the horizon for discerning readers.