Enemy of Entropy

Archive for April 2009

WTF? Georgia Senate Threatens to Secede!

16 April 2009, 7:23 pm. 3 Comments. Filed under Civil Rights, News.

Cur­rent Mood:Angry emoticon Angry

Geor­gia Sen­ate threat­ens dis­man­tling of USA
They really did, by a vote of 43 – 1. On April 1, but it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke.

The res­o­lu­tion goes on to endorse the the­ory that states have the right to abridge con­sti­tu­tional free­doms of reli­gion, press and speech. Accord­ing to the res­o­lu­tion, it is up to the states to decide “how far the licen­tious­ness of speech and of the press may be abridged.”
(snip)
Finally, the res­o­lu­tion states that if Con­gress, the pres­i­dent or fed­eral courts take any action that exceeds their con­sti­tu­tional pow­ers, the Con­sti­tu­tion is ren­dered null and void and the United States of Amer­ica is offi­cially dis­banded. As an exam­ple, the res­o­lu­tion specif­i­cally states that if the fed­eral gov­ern­ment enacts “pro­hi­bi­tions of type or quan­tity of arms or ammu­ni­tion,” the coun­try is disbanded.

You bet­ter believe that I’m writ­ing to our state sen­a­tor right away. Yes, this non­sense was slipped in on day 39 of the 40 day leg­isla­tive ses­sion, but that is absolutely no excuse. Our rep­re­sen­ta­tives have no busi­ness vot­ing for any­thing they haven’t thor­oughly read, under­stood, and debated. That’s their job!

Yet another rea­son I don’t want to live in Geor­gia any more. I seri­ously think this is a back­lash against our elec­tion of a black Demo­c­rat to the pres­i­dency. I’m look­ing at blue states now.

Review: Suite 606 by J.D. Robb (and company)

7 April 2009, 6:49 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Reading.

Cur­rent Mood:Bored emoticon Bored

Suite 606 Suite 606 by J.D. Robb


My review


rat­ing: 1 of 5 stars
I only read the story by J.D. Robb. I glanced at the other three, but they’re pri­mar­ily romance sto­ries, which do NOT inter­est me.

The whole point of these lit­tle antholo­gies is to intro­duce read­ers who enjoy an estab­lished author’s work to other, sim­i­lar authors, right?

I know that J.D. Robb is a pen name for Nora Roberts. I know that the sto­ries she pub­lishes as NR are romances. If I saw an anthol­ogy anchored by an NR story, I’d expect it to be full of romances.

How­ever, I don’t read the NR stuff. I only read her JDR books, which have a lit­tle roman­tic spice about the main char­ac­ter, Eve Dal­las, and her hus­band Roarke, with occa­sional glimpses into Eve’s part­ner, Peabody’s, rela­tion­ship with her guy, McNab. That’s it, though. Nei­ther of those sets of rela­tion­ships are the focal point of the plots. The mystery/​crime is the main thing, and while they’re set in the future with the advan­tages of tech­nol­ogy we don’t yet have, they’re essen­tially police pro­ce­du­rals. (I don’t con­sider them SF, quite, because all the tech seems to be extrap­o­lated from what we have now, and quite plau­si­ble. And, of course, the tech isn’t the point of the sto­ries, either.)

So why not put sim­i­lar sto­ries in an anthol­ogy anchored by a JDR story? Why why why? Mis­lead­ing and dis­ap­point­ing read­ers is NOT the way to gar­ner any pos­i­tive buzz for the lesser-​​known authors, and the back­lash can lead to less enthu­si­asm from estab­lished read­ers (like me) for the estab­lished author’s work.

View all my reviews.

Cur­rent Mood: (annoyed) annoyed

Online Job Hunt — Heard of this place?

4 April 2009, 4:58 am. 3 Comments. Filed under General.

Cur­rent Mood:Cool emoticon Cool

Yes, yes – I promise this is the last post for now. Prob­a­bly for the week­end, but at least for a few hours!

I con­tinue to hope to find some kind of work that I can do from home despite my unco­op­er­a­tive body. Of course, most list­ings for “work at home” and “telecom­mute” jobs are com­plete rip-​​offs. I don’t really have the energy to go the full self-​​employment route, which involves doing all the mar­ket­ing and billing and col­lec­tions and such (if you do, check out Noël Figart’s very cool series of ongo­ing posts, How to Make a Liv­ing From Home: A Free Course). More pre­cisely, if I do all that stuff, I worry that I won’t have any energy left to do the actual income-​​generating tasks.

I don’t remem­ber how, pre­cisely, but I ran across Vir­tual Voca­tions a while back, and have looked around the site a few times. I’ve yet to actu­ally pony up the fee to get access to the con­tact infor­ma­tion for the job list­ings, but the fact that they allow any­body to see the rest of the list­ings with­out pay­ing is pretty nice.

The only genuinely-​​negative thing I’ve come across about them any­where is a per­son who claimed that they con­tact Craigslist posters who have stated that they do NOT want to be con­tacted by third par­ties. I don’t like that at all, but it isn’t quite a killing blow. The only “it’s a ripoff” com­plaints I’ve seen are anony­mous com­ments left on any blog that posts a VV review. I give those all the seri­ous­ness of the commenter’s will­ing­ness to back up his words – mean­ing none.

BUT – peo­ple I actu­ally know are more cred­i­ble. So have any of you used the site, or do you know some­one who has? What do you think of them?

Jane Austen/​Other Book Recommendations?

4 April 2009, 3:18 am. 1 Comment. Filed under Reading.

Cur­rent Mood:Cool emoticon Cool

Um, I’m want­ing some­thing to read, and the libraries are being very slow about ful­fill­ing my hold requests, so I’m look­ing for old stuff that’s good and prob­a­bly on the library shelf just wait­ing to be loved. I think I might try some Jane Austen, as I recently real­ized that I never have, but the excerpts I’ve seen are wit­tier than I expected. I’m not fond of romances or “chick lit” or such things, which is where I’ve place her books.1

If I’m going to try them, where should I start? Any other authors/​books you think I should try?

I don’t care to read doom-​​filled, depress­ing sto­ries. There’s enough of that in the real world, and I can always go look at the news. I want to read about smart, like­able peo­ple doing inter­est­ing things while ban­ter­ing wit­tily. Humor is impor­tant, but goofy slap­stick non­sense looses me. I HATE HATE HATE “do some­thing obvi­ously stu­pid, try to get out of the result­ing mess” plots.

I’ve read Lois McMas­ter Bujold, thanks :-) Well, all the Vorkosi­gan uni­verse stuff, any­way. Her fan­tasy books have never inter­ested me, for some odd reason.

Thank you :-)

1 I think to some extent I got her all mixed up with the Brontës when I was a teen, and damned if I wanted more of that nonsense.

Cur­rent Mood: (mellow) mellow

No Katie Here

4 April 2009, 3:04 am. 2 Comments. Filed under Critters, Family.

In much lighter news, The Girl is in the Pacific North­west! For three weeks! She’s scout­ing col­leges and see­ing friends and so on. She’s already in geo-​​love after just a few days, say­ing she’d like to live there. Her hosts seem like Very Good Peo­ple, and I hope to meet them when they come to town for Dragon*Con.

Kyoshi is utterly uncon­solable, though. He wan­ders through the house look­ing for her, return­ing fre­quently to her door (still closed, and no, I won’t open it to let him in), the front door, every sin­gle win­dow — hop­ing in vain to catch sight of her. I’ve never known such a one-​​person kitty! He does come to me and Sam (a lot), fran­ti­cally at times, and he lets us pet him. But he won’t set­tle in our laps long at all. He has to dash to the front win­dows every time a car goes by, just hop­ing it might stop and dis­gorge the girl. I hope he gets more attached to us by the time she returns. Wher­ever she goes to school, though, I think she’s going to have to take the cat with her!

I’m less demon­stra­tive than the cat, but I do miss her. I know she’s with good peo­ple, and she’s hav­ing a great time, and she’s a smart young woman with a good head on her shoul­ders. But she’s my baby and she’s way far away and we’ve never been apart for more than two weeks in her whole life!!!

Ok. I’ll try to rein that back a bit.

 

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