So today is the day when we find out if the Democrats can manage to pass their Health Care Reform agenda. As I write this the vote is scheduled but has not yet been taken and so here are a few of my final thoughts on this. Continue reading
Well, I have been away from my blog for a few days as I have been busy.
Yesterday I had a doctor’s appointment with my Ear, Nose, Throat man. Dr Brian Weeks. IF you live in the san Diego region, have health insurance, and need any sort of Ear, Nose, Throat medical help I would highly recommend this doctor. His great at his work and hhe’s also great at talking to you about his work.
I may be having sleep apnea issues so Dr Weeks and I are setting up a sleep study to look into that. I’ll be sure to let everyone know what that is like.
Then I had to mess around with my bank. They got swallowed by a larger bank as part of the whole fun financial fracas and this week I got my new debt card. Worked fine as a credit card, but my pin number failed at ATMs. So it was sitting in the lobby waiting for a ‘banker’ to fix that issue. Finding out it was not fixed and being told that it should be fixed today. Joy
Today I sit around waiting for Fedex as I am expecting a DVD from amazon today.
So it turns out there was a file error that duplicated about 10 pages in chapter 5. I found them when I went to chapter 5 editing today. (I always do my edits ink on paper.) So it turns out I have written about 84 pages not 94. That seems much more in lines.
It’s still impressive because I am doing this while doing rolling edits. (For my other novels I have finished the novel and then edited it.)
So good but not great speed.
I think Cawdor is speeding along much faster than any of my other novels. Today I finished chapter 5 of the novel and looked at a rough page count.
I have written 94 pages of prose on this novel already. I started the novel writing just 1 month ago today.
I am hoping to bring Cawdor in for about 360 pages. (90,000 words for industry geeks.) I am flabbergasted (what a strange word that is) to find myself so far along after only one month. And Month that saw headaches, Overtime at the day job, and sundry interruptions.
I have just printed up chapter 5, the largest of the chapters so far and tomorrow I will start ink on paper edits. That will slow thing down, but I will be easily 110 pages by weeks end. very close to a third of the way.
Might I actually get the 1st draft finished by my birthday?
That would be un-flippin-believeable.
So last night I was in the mood for something fantastic. By that I do not mean something of such tremendous quality that decades later people ares till amazed with the filmmaking, but rather in the mood for a film that dealt with a fantastic premise.
Thanks to my new nifty database program, I was able to sort the movies by time, I was looking for something under one hours fifty minutes, and then I just scanned the titles until I saw something that struck my fancy.
So The Sword And The Sorcerer is a fantasy film that came out in 1982 about the same time that Conan: The Barbarian was released into theaters. While Conan was a big budget film, 20 million dollars, which grossed nearly 40 million dollars domestically, The Sword And The Sorcerer was a much more modest production. Reportedly The Sword and The Sorcerer was made for the price of a single set on Conan: The Barbarian, and yet it still gross 39 million dollars domestically as well. Clearly the better return on investment went with the little film that could. Continue reading
Presented without comment:
So I have spent a few hours this morning databasing my DVD/Blu-ray collection. I have according to the database 222 movies in my collection, but this number is not completely accurate. The database software counts boxed sets as a single entry, so for example my boxed set of the Star Wars movies is one entry, but it has three movies.
Given that my feature film count is closed to 290 from boxed sets. (The el cheapo 50 ‘classic’ horror films bosted that count by 49 alone.)
The database software is Movie Collector and I love it. After the jump is a screen capture of what it looks like. The software cost me $30 so it is not pricey. You can enter films by title, barcode number (typing it in by hand) or by scanning the barcode on the box of the DVD/Blu-ray. I bought a cheap barcode scanner off Ebay ($8) and it took me just a couple of hours to enter all the films. Continue reading
So, off the top of my head here are some correlations between select politicians and the D&D monster that best represent. This is list is for from exhaustive.
Bill Clinton: Come on this was a gimme, a Satyr. Nothign else fits this horny old goat.
Hillary Clinton: A harpy.
Sarah Palin: No doubt about it in my eyes, a Succubus. All charm and deception while she bleed you dry.
Barack Obama: A Rakshasa The shaping changing tiger that is smart, charming, and deadly. You never know exactly who he is cause he’s never in he real form.
Joe Biden: His’s the Gnome.
more when I think of them.
Been too busy playing with my latest toy. I got a barcode scanner — the very affordable CueCat — and now I can enter my DVD’s and Blu_ray in a database just by scanning the barcode. It’s very cool and I know that I will spend hours on Saturday entering movies.
I just noticed for the first time that I had lots of comments in my spam filter. I went though and not everything was spam. I’ve tried to approve the comments that looked legit but I might have missed some. If they were yours, I apologize. That is certainly no way to build a community.
Looks like Is John McCain A Vampire got some action. Maybe I should consider what other monsters or D&D monsters various politicians are.
I already know who the Gnome will be. LOL
It has occurred to me that we might want to ponder the question; Is John McCain a vampire?
Let’s consider the interesting coincidences.
Vampires are hard to kill: John McCain has proven to be very difficult to kill. Over the course of his naval aviator career McCain survived five crashes, to of which were incidents where he aircraft was hit by missiles. He survived all of those events. (It is interesting to note that the fourth incident on the USS Forestal was a Zuni rocket from a friendly craft misfired and hit the plane John McCain was it. An accident? or did someone suspect he was a vampire?)
Even after surviving the fifth incident where he was shot down by enemy fire and severely wounded after ejecting, John McCain proved to be inhumanly tough. Surviving an enraged mob, and years of torture and mistreatment at the hands of a ruthless enemy.
Vampires do not tolerate sunlight well: John McCain is well known for his devotion to sun block and wearing of hats outdoors even on cloudy days. Despite this is has had two brushes with skin cancer. Again he’s tough to kill and clearly does not tolerate sunlight well. (I will point out that not all vampire explode in sunlight. Dracula in the novel of the same name ventured out in sunlight, it robbed him of his powers.)
Vampires have an unnatural ability to charm people: Clearly John McCain has supernatural charming power. He has survived political scandals that would have sunk others, yet he continued to win the loyalty of his voters. In 2008 when serious conservatives vowed not to vote for John McCain, they were strangely effected by election day and cast their votes for a man they despised.
Vampires survive by taking life force from others and extending their own lives with it: McCain second life as a politcian has been fuel by his younger wife’s Beer fortune. Clearly he has extended his life with her blood money.
But perhaps the most troubling thing and best evidence that John McCain is a vampire.