Jack & Rob’s Comical Commentary

Life is hard, fiction is harder.

You will recall, undoubtedly (since I know that you few, you brave who frequent this obscure little corner of the internets hang on my every word), that I wrote about submitting stories the proposed Hint Fiction anthology way back in July.

Alas and alack, word came last evening that none of my stories were chosen.

Disappointing to be sure, but when I noticed that among several  familiar names who did make  the cut were  award-winning Irish crime novelist Ken Bruen, award-winning horror writer Peter Straub and National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates, I was able to bear up under it.

They received 2500 submissions overall  and accepted only 3% of them. That means there will be 125  stories in the book. That works out to 3125 words or less so this is either going to be a very slim volume or there’s a lot of filler material. Either way, I hope to see a copy when it is released, if only to say “hey, my story was better than that one” at least a couple of times.

For your entertainment, and because I said I would, here are the the three stories I submitted:

AFTER LIFE

Heaven was nothing like I expected. No angels, no pearly gates. Just lots of people I’d never seen before, so I knew it wasn’t hell.

THE GAME

The woman was beautiful, the sex fantastic. “Why me?” I asked afterwards.  She smiled. “Tag, you’re it,” she said and ran out of the room.

FINIS

The Last Man found the Last Woman, and joyously shouted “Adam and Eve!” She said nothing. That night, she crushed his skull with a rock.

And two more that I didn’t:

THE TOUR

The day the Americans came to our village, people came from miles around to curse them all, misshapen and rotting in their sealed radiation cages.

THE SECRET COUNCIL THAT RULES THE WORLD

A team from the Secret Council That Rules the World came for me in the dead of night. “We’ve got a problem.” They always did.

I kinda like trying to tell stories in a very limited amount of words, what is generally called Flash Fiction and usually involves stories somewhere between 100 and 500 words, and I plan to try my hand at some other such tales  which I  will post here unless (or after) I submit them to some print or online venue.

I also will try my hand at developing one or more of the above tales into a longer format. I mean, what is it that each one was  hinting at?

Along those lines, I am really, honestly, this–puts–me– on–the–record–and–I–can’t–back–out–now, going to participate in National Novel Writing Month in November. Anybody see the potential for a 70,000 word story anywhere above?

Jack & Rob’s Comical Commentary #17

The Democrats’ health care fiasco—an update.

If you want to know what, besides mindless fear of being criticized for being (gasp!) liberal, is motivating the Congress to ignore the will of the people on health care, take a look at this list of lobbying donations made during the first three months of this year.

For health care alone, these are the numbers:

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America: $6,910,000
Pfizer, Inc: $6,140,000
American Medical Association: $4,240,000
American Hospital Association: $3,580,000
Eli Lilly and Company: $3,440,000
America’s Health Insurance Plans, Inc: $2,030,000
CVS Caremark Inc: $2,005,000
Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association: $1,800,000
GlaxoSmithKline: $1,780,000
Merck & Co: $1,500,000
United Health Group, Inc: $1,500,000
Sanofi-Aventis U.S. Inc: $1,460,000
Novartis: $1,347,134
Abbott Laboratories: $1,260,000
Astrazeneca Pharmaceuticals, LP: $1,250,000
Medtronic, Inc: $1,238,000

That’s about $27,000,000 into the coffers of the weak and willing.

Cowardice plus avarice. Not exactly what we were looking for to pull us out the Bush/Cheney disaster, is it?

Why I still need Internet Explorer.

I long ago replaced Internet Explorer with Firefox as my browser, a move I suspect was made by a lot of you reading this. The audience may be small but it does seem astute.

Explorer is still on my system, of course, no point in removing it. And it does have it uses. For one thing, it is the default “preview” browser used by Notetab Pro, the excellent text editor I use to write HTML files for uploading to the net and allows me to see what a page will look like before I actually do that. This was much more a factor when I was doing my whole website by hand, not so much so not that do these blogs online with WordPress. It is still invaluable for The Dubya Chronicles, however, since that whole site is done by hand even now.

Also, a newsletter I do for a local brewery looks very different in IE than it does in Firefox when sent by email and viewed with Gmail. It is much cleaner and better in IE because of some conflicts with Gmail and for that, and other things I do online, IE is an easy method of checking what people are seeing and/or if they are seeing what I want them to.

IE is also the only browser that allows Netflix members to view the free online movies which are part of our membership. I hadn’t used it for that until Sunday evening and was very, very impressed with the capability and the quality of the film on my computer screen.

The movie I watched was the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still from 1951 as part of deciding whether or not I’d be checking out the remake which was released last Friday and which is playing at a pretty nice movie theater about three miles down the road.

One of the things I hope to do with Mermaids in 2009 is spent more time on pop culture topics and, if I can, check out a new movie several times a month. The movie house down the road, along with several other with a fifteen minute drive or so, offers that opportunity. This was the first step in that direction; whether I can adjust my weekly schedule to follow through with the plan remains to be seen.

Be forewarned, this is highly addictive.

I’ve had it on all day.

Beautiful.

A story about a man who spent 34 years in the White House.

And they call him Maverick.

Wow.

From Wonkette:

Nail, Meet Hammer.

Kevin Drum this morning on the tone and direction of the McCain Campaign’s weird, content-less and seemingly silly attacks on Obama of late:

Cultural insecurities are the foundation of modern American conservatism. Surely we’re not just now noticing this?

Bingo.

He’s too skinny. He’s too uppity. He’s the Anti-Christ.

That sort of stupidity flies with the base (adj.) base (noun) and it’s been at the core of GOP politics since they no longer had Reagan’s cheerful optimism to sell.