Fast Fiction

I am, in fact torn about blogging at the moment.

Since I’m traveling, I pre-wrote most of my candy blog entries for the next few days.

I feel uncomfortable even posting them at the moment. I’m not reading a lot of the news (some ... believe me, enough) and I haven’t been watching TV (I’m at my brother’s and it’s not something you’d want the kids to see).

I know that part of us, after seeing or reading want to be reminded of the comfortable things in life. Candy or sweets or nostalgia or just something that’s not suffering.

So, for anyone clicking around and finds no mention of the Katrina on candyblog, please know that it’s not that I don’t know what’s going on in the rest of the country, but I’d like it to be a safe little haven for a while. Forget about things for just a moment, remember what it is that we struggle for (not candy, I don’t think it’s THAT important) - we struggle to find a place of comfort.

I’m having trouble wrapping my head around what has happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s safe to say that it amounts to heaps of misery and it’s not over.

There’s nothing I can do about it, I can’t save anyone from their flooded attic or off a roof or ease the pain of losing a loved one or everything they own, their neighborhoods, their livelihoods. But there are other people who can help. This is one of those times where I don’t have a problem with throwing money at a problem.

I don’t know what the right choices are going to be but in the short term they’re gonna need some bare necessities so those of us who have more than the bare necessities should send what we’re comfortable with their way.

I’m in Pittsburgh right now, I flew right over this beautiful country today. Thousands of miles of hills, mountains, farms, rivers and canyons. The puffy clouds were stunning and sad because they were so unkind earlier this week.

I haven’t much else to say. Except go do something about it. Donate or write something compelling that will make other people donate. I did up a pretty good list over at blogging.la (and you can buy a T-shirt there too, if that’s what you like). Practically everyone is taking donations right now and PayPal is waiving their processing fees so that more money goes where it should. If you don’t like giving to a big organization, find a small one that you believe in. Or just spend some time volunteering around your area to make up for that organization’s loss of possible support because so much will be focused on Katrina for the next few years.

Also, Will, as usual, has posted something that pretty much echos my sentiments at the moment. So go read that.

There you go: donate, read, empathize and for heaven’s sake - keep yourself out of harm’s way whenever you can.

Yesterday on my way home from work I threw all the change I could find in the house at the coinstar machine at the drug store. It was about $45. Not too shabby for absolutely no effort and no pain. It’s a start. I can do better. I will do better.

Russ pointed me towards a link to one of my older posts (before Techorati alerted me) by on of my fellow nanovelists.

I’d comment there, but I’m not allowed, so I’ll post here instead.

Russ and I were just talking about that philosophy. I posted that almost three years ago (and have been living it for a full five) and in that time I’ve written three more novels, actually completed the marathon (and will probably do it again next spring), became a volunteer whale watch naturalist, started drinking and swearing, incessantly documented my life in photos and have traveled more to explore my passions.

In that time I haven’t updated the “list” of things to do in my life ... so it’s high time I did.

Happily my attitude about NaNo hasn’t changed: Lower your expectations, broaden your horizons. Life’s too short to keep talking yourself out of it. It goes for most other things in my life: If you want to do something, stop listing the things in your way and just do it. You wanna run, start running. Worry about distances later, worry about shoes later. You wanna write, start writing. Worry about publishing and format later. Do it now and if you want to do it better, do it again.

Here’s my current list of things I want to do (not in any particular order):

1. Go to the All Candy Expo in Chicago, Il
2. See the following cetaceans: Dall’s Porpoise, Risso’s Dolphin and Sperm Whale
3. Finish the LA Marathon in less than 6 hours and 12 minutes.
4. Do some other marathon (the Avenue of the Giants one sounds cool)
5. Redraft at least one novel to the point that it could be submitted to a publisher
6. Submit a novel to a publisher
7. Invent a recipe for a malted rice krispies square
8. Make more candy
9. Go to Alaska
10. Document 1,000 candies. (I’m about 12% there on candyblog)

I know there’s been a lot of coverage about Pat Robertson over the past few days. I mean, he’s been praying for Supreme Court Justices to die and is now calling for the assassination of other leaders, so it’s only fair that he get wider coverage for his revolutionary political agenda.

Here’s the latest article that caught me up on the whole affair.

But it’s this passage that really got me:

When the AP called Robertson on Tuesday for elaboration, spokeswoman Angell Watts said Robertson would not do interviews and had no statement about his remarks. On Wednesday, Watts did not respond to two telephone messages, three pages and a fax seeking further comment.

My guess is that Angell Watts really does not want this job any longer. (And God Bless the reporter for really going after that comment!) I mean, I sure wouldn’t.

Really, if they’re going to go after Darwin because it threatens their faith, then they should have gone after Newton a loooong time ago.

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity with ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory

KANSAS CITY, KSóAs the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

Oh, and this quote: “Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson [leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry] said. “What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.’”

The article doesn’t get much better than that ... I love the Onion. It’s like the Daily Show, only you have to read it, and it comes out once a week.

I was reading about the gas price surge. I’m a little curious how the prices trickle down to the consumer. It seemed that no sooner were the crude oil prices announced in the news after the death of the King, suddenly the prices went up at the pump.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the stuff we’re pumping into our cars today was probably purchased elsewhere (Venezuela, Canada, domestic or from the Middle East) probably a month before. So if the price goes up, they’ll pass it along right away (to ease us into it?) but if it goes down, how long does it take for us to feel it?

But the thing that really confuses me is this quote from a CNN article:

“Our demand for gasoline is always highest for June, July and August,” she said of the summer months, when families typically take vacations. She [Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey] said gasoline demand is expected to taper off after August.

The average American, as near as I can figure is 16 miles each way. That’s 32 miles a day ... 160 miles a week. If it’s a two parent household, they’re racking up 320 miles a week. Now, where are these people going on these car-based vacations? Is that really a jump in gas consumption? Or is this just a line the petroleum industry has been feeding us? Is it that the vehicles we drive for vacation are just less efficient. I’m talking about those Winnebagos and cars with trailers. And while we’re at it, what about those non-car vehicles like boats, jet-skis and hell, lawnmowers.

This article from last week says this: Americans burn 11.959 billions of gallons of gas compared to 10.318 billion gallons burned on average per month. So if we have a consistent 14% jump in gasoline demand every August, why don’t the petroleum providers just plan better? Have you ever gone to the gas station in August and they had run out?

I was approached yesterday to do an interview on Radio Open Source later this month.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Because I’d never heard of Radio Open Source, and now that I have, I think you should check it out.

Basically, it’s a daily radio program where they do interviews with a bunch of people on a topic. Not new, I know. What is cool is that they announce their topics well in advance and have a dialogue about it before the show goes on the air. As it’s on the air, they take calls, and after it’s on the air there’s more commenting. It’s about as close as you can get to open source radio interviews. In addition, they use Delicious tags so that everyone can add their sites that fit into the topic.

Today I listened to last night’s story on Hyperlocal Journalism - they covered Lawrence Journal-World which serves Lawrence, Kansas, H2OTown in Boston,  and Baristanet from Montclair, NJ. Definitely take an hour and check it out.

What it reminds me of is the good old days when I’d go to the bank downtown in Mechanicsburg or worked behind the counter at Jo-Jo’s Pizza and the cops would come in or the mayor and I’d find out what was going on. It’s harder, I think, in big cities or places next to big cities to find out what’s really going on. What was that boom? A transformer blowing up, but how are you supposed to know that if it’s not in the LA Times? Sites like Blogging.la, LABlogs.com, BlogDownTown.com, LAObserved and to a certain degree LAist (they had a really good piece about the Grove and how the employees aren’t allowed to park on the premises and the landlord doesn’t give a shit about people getting killed going back to their cars a half a mile away). Silverlake used to have a blog like this, Park2Park, but without a big base of support and probably a good group to fill in the gaps when someone gets really busy, it’s hard to maintain when you have a real life on the side.

Kudos to those who blog locally. I don’t think I’m ever going to be one of those people, I’m too lazy to get the story right but I applaud those who can do it.

I love the new stuff that folks come up with to take advantage of flickr.

The most useful one to date was just created by roschler, which allows you to go to any flickr photo and create quick html code for the small version (240x) with a link back to the photo and a link to the photo creator’s profile.

Flickr Photo Comment Tool

Expect some cool finds here because roschler has made it so easy to share cool pics. It’s a great addition to flickr’s blog this tool because you can just pull the code for posting elsewhere, like in comment forums. 

See original posting here.

And here’s a fun photo for today:

—from BlindGoofy

I was reading a story this morning that has Katherine Harris blaming the media for colorizing her photos to make her look like she had more makeup on.

Now, I don’t buy newspapers; I watch the TV news and I read the internets. I saw lots of coverage of her and I have a hard time believing that CNN and ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and FOX all colorized their LIVE TV broadcasts of her press conferences.

Believe that you want, Katherine, but you really looked that bad.

  pith helmeted clown 
  Originally uploaded by tinkernoonoo.

You probably saw a post on BoingBoing or something about something called Fast Fictions by Kevin Spenst.

You can find that at fastfictions.blogspot.com.

Last Friday I took a half-day from work. Not the morning off or the afternoon off, but the middle off.

I drove to Irwindale at the invitation of Chris, the founder and president of Candy Warehouse. Why you ask?

Because they sell candy.

Chris gave me the grand tour and it was just as I expected. A warehouse with small office facilities. Pretty much a cubicle farm (two wide and six deep?). He showed me his little photo set up for taking shots of candy (it pretty much looks like mine except he has studio lights and I have to use available light). It was Friday, which is a light shipping day, so it was just him and one of his warehouse workers there.

The warehouse was just as I’d hoped it would be (only a little smaller). Aisles and aisle of warhouse shelving with colorful cases of candy.

He loaded me up with oodles of samples as he showed me around. Some of it was just too weird for reviewing (earwax candy) but I got to take home lots of things I’ve always wanted to try, including: the long stemmed lollipops I saw all over the wholesale district when Crispin came to visit, finger lites (a light up lollipop), gummi sushi, gummi hot peppers and chocolate poker chips and playing cards.

It took me two sessions to take photos of it all and some of it is already gone.

Not the 5lb box of gummi clown fish though. Yet.

(you can read another version of this post a la.foodblogging.com)

Yes, we have another mouse.

I possess a certain amount of shame when I have a mouse. Because it’s a comment on my housekeeping or something.

The reality is that there is an abandoned house across the street from us that seems to be riddled with creatures as witnessed by Robin & Amy’s cat leaving them gifts on the front doorstep. My theory goes like this, the house across the street is experiencing critical mass, so there was a migration and one (or maybe more) got into our basement and eventually came up through the walls to the back of one of our kitchen cabinets.

Luckily, in the redesign of the kitchen, I decided keeping food on bottom shelves was a bad idea and we no longer do that, except for the corner D (a half a lazy susan) where we keep our grains. But they’re mouseproofed and mothproofed so he was probably rather annoyed at smelling food, seeing food but not getting food.

He ventured off under the stove and probably found some choice crumbs there, because the dog can’t get them. And stumbled into one of our traps.

We’re not entirely certain that he was by himself, so we’ll continue to set the traps until we don’t find anything for a week or two.

Some people think that we should do the humane traps. I’m not quite sure what I’d do with a live mouse though. It’s not like I could just let it go in a field nearby ... nope, mice in the house get the axe, or the snaptrap as the case may be.

I will further rid my home of the plague by washing the dog this weekend to drown any fleas that might be amassing (I saw one the other night).

Tomorrow I will take an exciting adventure to the second greatest place on earth for a candy lover.

No, not a candy factory.

A candy warehouse.

Watch this space for more tasty details!

Here we go, the ultimate combination of things that interest me.

Candy and Plate Techtonics.

Yes, you heard right.

The story goes like this: There was a brush fire in the Los Padres National Forest last summer. As they put it out, they noticed a hot spot in the ground with fissures and felt the heat escaping.

Fire investigators went back to the canyon days later and stuck a candy thermometer into the ground. It hit the top of the scale, at 400 degrees.

Being from Pennsylvania I’m accustomed to hearing about fissures because of mine fires. And being in California I’m accustomed to hearing about hot springs. At the moment they think it may be heat from pressure caused by a fault line. That’s a lot of pressure to create that much heat without breaking.

I’m just wondering where they got the candy thermometer. If my spouse took mine and went and used it to test the temp of some rocks, I would NOT want it back.

I don’t think my URL made it into the show notes for GOOD FOOD, so if you’ve found your way here, you’re probably looking for the Candy Blog.

I’ll be on KCRW’s radio show Good Food tomorrow (7/9/05) at 11:00 AM talking about candyblog.net. If you don’t live in Southern California where it airs, you can also catch the show on the web via real player on this page after it airs. KCRW also offers PodCasts of its shows.

I did the interview with Evan Kleinman a couple of weeks ago and was incredibly impressed by her show and the entire experience. I was always fond of the SNL Delicious Dish version of the show, but this was better. Good times.

I found this via franklinavenue and posted on b.la, but here goes my personal take on this list.

National Geographic Traveler Magazine published a list of 30 things you should do when in LA (I doubt they meant all in the same trip). In August it’ll be 13 years I’ve lived in Los Angeles. Let’s see how I did on the list. Starred items are ones that I’ve actually visited.

1. Hollywood Entertainment Museum
2. Venice’s Abbot Kinney Blvd. shops
3. Topanga Canyon’s Inn of the Seventh Ray
4. Catalina Island *
5. Downtown’s Flower Market *
6. One spa at Santa Monica’s Shutters on the Beach
7. Pink’s hot dogs
8. Fred Segal’s
9. Free TV tapings *
10. La Brea Tar Pits (from the outside, not the museum) *
11. Chinatown’s Chung King Road galleries
12. Hollywood Forever cemetery (and Cinespia screenings)
13. Museum of Jurassic Technology (in Culver City)
14. Larchmont Blvd. (especially Cafe Chapeau) *
15. Shopping at Robertson and 3rd *
16. Grand Central Market *
17. American Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre
18. Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels
19. Live music at Santa Monica’s McCabe’s
20. Los Angeles River (Los Feliz to downtown) *
21. Beverly Hills Hotel *
22. Venice’s canals
23. Mount Hollywood in Griffith Park *
24. Little Ethiopia restaurants
25. The Grove *
26. Koreatown’s Brass Monkey (for karaoke)
27. Farmer’s Markets in Hollywood and Santa Monica * (not Santa Monica)
28. Melrose’s Urth Caffe *
29. Adamson House
30. Philippe’s french dip sandwiches *

Well, I got 14 out of 30. There are some I’m not terribly interested in like Pink’s hot dogs, as I don’t eat hot dogs (tofu, beef, pork, turkey or otherwise). I have no clue what the Hollywood Entertainment Museum even is, but working on the Paramount lot is like coming to a museum every day, since there are little historical displays all over the place and I’ve had the pleasure of scanning historic photos of not only movies but the lot itself.

Will mentioned last night that I have not yet shared my thousand or so photos from my vacation.

Well, to save you the trouble of looking through what seem like dozens of identical photos of the same subjects, I narrowed it down to a scant 83 photos. That’s 9% of the whole take!

Check out my flickr set (click on the photo to be whisked away ...)

The NY Times published an obituary today:

William J. Brink, Editor, Is Dead at 89; Credited With Vivid Headline

The editor of New York’s The Daily News, his best known headline was FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD from the seventies during the financial crisis faced by NY.

The obituary ends with the following line “The corresponding headline in The New York Times that day, FORD, CASTIGATING CITY, ASSERTS HE’D VETO FUND GUARANTEE; OFFERS BANKRUPTCY BILL, remains unsung.”

I went on vacation and took 964 photos.

Friday:

 
• Arrived.
 
• Looked at Morro Bay, walked the bluffs of Montana de Oro.
 
• Saw a quail.
 
• Watched the sun set.
 
• Had Chinese delivered.
 
• Started reading Candy Freak by Steve Almond.

Saturday:

 
• Back to Montana de Oro for more bluff walking and cove-combing.
 
• Kayaked across the upper part of Morro Bay.
 
• Landed on the sand spit ... twice. Thwarted from crossing by the skittish snowy plover.
 
• Had a fabulous dinner.

Sunday:

 
• Walked the beach on Morro Bay near the house to watch the birds.
 
• Went to San Simeon and saw elephant seals and even a far off sea otter.
 
• Ate lunch/dinner in Cambria and experienced a small earthquake.

Monday:

 
• Wine tasting (well, I didn’t taste any of it) in Paso Robles.
 
• Back to Montana de Oro to take the stupidest hike imagineable over a 400 foot sand dune (straight up, straight down) to a lovely and deserted beach.
 
• Dinner in town.

Tuesday

 
• Packed up and hit Nipomo Dunes and Oso Flaco Lake.
 
• Drove to Los Angeles to enjoy traffic.

I’ll post later when I’ve gone through my photos. Unless you’d like to see all of them?

This is one of the scariest rulings I’ve seen come out of the Supreme Court in my lifetime. The Supreme Court ruled that local governments may seize people’s homes and businesses—even against their will—for private economic development.

Total control over these seizures is handled by the city. So, if you’ve never paid attention to your city council, now’s the time to. You’d better make damn sure they have your best interests at heart and not some developers under the guise that it’s fo the “tax base.”

Of course the other option is to never own property in anyplace desireable.

The justices in the majority on this were Justices John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. I’m totally baffled by who voted on which side. Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in her dissent, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

The other dissenting votes were Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, as well as Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

UPDATE: As I’ve read more I have further thoughts. In that article it addresses one of the questions I had, just what the public good has to do with tax bases? Is a government obligated to create a tax base? Is a strong tax base actually part of the common good? Is a government’s obligation to make money so it can spend it on the public? In the case in New London, the community was not blighted, what they were replacing it with had no more “community” value than the homes that were there, but the fact that they were putting in businesses that might help the depressed economy were what swung it in the developer’s favor.

I just see this whole thing as being a huge temptation for corruption, especially in smaller communities.

Having worked on a large photo scanning and restoration project, I can tell you that there is lots of info in old photos.

Here’s an interesting gallery at Houseplant Picture Studios, it’s of a photo album they found at the swap meet of an unknown family who probably owned a liquor store.

This photo says to me that they really wanted to get the light fixture in the shot, even if it meant that the people weren’t really featured.

The photo gallery features fashions, a liquor store (with candy at the counter!), vacation adventures, poker games and people sitting on couches or standing in front of drapes.

I’m really flabbergasted.

Candy Blog is doing well. Better than I ever expected. At the moment I’m getting about 50 hits a day according to my NedStats. I’ve also logged that there are at least four subscribers to the feed via bloglines, and another bunch via other aggregators. My webalizer stats say that I’m getting about 96 hits average this month per day, so I have no idea how to measure such things or if it’s even possible these days. Fast Fiction, by comparison on nedstats gets about 15 hits a day and it’s been around for nearly four years now.

The thing is, I’ve done very little to promote the site. I use it as my URL when commenting around the web, and made a few references on la.foodblogging.com to reviews. About 40% are coming to the site via search strings (usually a candy name). Another 20% seem to be via links from other people who have found me and are recommending the site. The other 40% seem to be coming without any link from anywhere ... that means bookmarks!

The thing that really sends my head reeling is that I’ve been writing for a long time (pretty much as a career choice since I was 18) and I’ve been trying to connect with audiences all that time through a variety of themes and formats (plays, blogs, short stories, essays, novels, etc.) and here comes a modicum of success via something that reaches so many people already, CANDY.

I know that the stats aren’t fantastic, but I figure with a little more promotion and a more robust site with more content it can succeed.

It brings me to ask myself, is this something I could devote my life to?

And the answer is an unequivocal YEAH!

I saw an article in the New Scientist about time travel. Apparently the universe has some very strict laws and one of them prevents time travel paradoxes.

It turns out that the latest understand of quantum physics explains that the universe might allow time travel, but not the ability to exact any changes in the past. Which might make me wonder if we can make any changes in the present either. Of course we’re not quantum objects. At least not by the current definition.

Earlier this week I was sitting in the back yard and saw a scrub jay flying up to the top of a nearby utility pole with a whole tortilla chip.

He sat up there and pecked at the chip until it broke into several pieces. He flew back down to my yard and set about scratching a little spot in the mulch under the orchid tree and covered up his piece of tortilla.

He flew back to his pole and repeated this, until he’d secreted away three pieces of his tortilla chip.

I went over to where he’d been doing this and could find no trace of his chips. I’ll keep an eye on the spot, lest we get those pesky tortilla trees sprouting up. Once they get established, watch out, you’ve got a yard full of them.

So, the Candy Blog is going well. But I’m getting growing pains and I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed.

The feature I miss most on Candy Blog is category tagging.

But then I have to remind myself that’s a feature I’m missing. I have no clue if any of my readers give a rat’s ass.

I get the sense that RSS is the wave of the future and categories would be pretty much irrelevant.

I guess my issue is that if I’m gonna do something about it, I should do it now, before people start actually linking to me.

Anybody else have any thoughts? I’ve looked at Word Press, Moveable Type and Expression Engine. They’re all great, but of course I have to install stuff on my servers and maintain them with updates and stuff. One of the reasons I like Blogger is that they do stuff to keep it running. Of course they’re not innovating as quickly as some others. I could go round and round like this.

Should I stay or should I go?

You know me and my transient obsessions.

At the moment I’m obsessed with two different things:

My candy blog is going along swimmingly. More than 50 reviews so far and I haven’t even gained any weight. In fact, I’ve not done a damn thing to promote it and it’s already come to the attention of Good Food on KCRW and I’m set to be interviewed for a segment later this month! Holy Cow! Anyone have any tips on what I should do, talk about, what to wear for radio (no noisy taffeta, right?), bring?

I’m ordering some new candy for review. Some more Wilbur chocolate (really just my “summer supply”) and I placed an order with a Japanese place for some cool new things that I haven’t seen in the American stores in Little Tokyo. I also want to redesign the blog and perhaps migrate to a different blogging platform. One with categories because this manually indexing is a pain in the arse.

I’m also on a kick about photography since I was confronted on Wednesday night in Hollywood about taking photographs in a public place by some private security people. I haven’t really blogged some of the other details and I don’t plan to, because I think they’re largely irrelevant to the issue of private security people being uninformed about the public’s rights. My plan is to go back to the same location next week and try again to get the photos I want and see if the same thing happens again. If it does, I’m takin’ names!

Okay, I can retract my earlier statement about the Huffington Post.

It’s a blog now. Not all blog, but mostly blog. Many of the contributors have some cajones and are opening their posts to comments. And based on what I read on Harry Shearer’s latest, I think the comments might end up being more fun that the post themselves. These are really well informed, strongly opinionated folks. That’s what blogs are made for!