What A Lulu!
(Don’t Use lulu.com)
I’d like to discuss the pitfalls of using lulu.com for self-publishing projects. I turned to Lulu on the recommendation of a fellow writer. What a catastrophic mistake!
Self-publishing is a valid activity for writers in the current world climate on near-unlimited print and media outlets. Traditional publishing is okay too, but attempting to get the attention of a publisher and dealing with editors is a major, major headache.
Lulu is not, I repeat, NOT the way to go in self-publishing. First, the writer cannot get in touch with these people directly. They do not answer the phone, but rely on e-mails that often do not directly answer your publishing questions, and they most often take days and days to respond. Next, their so-called online “operators” or agents are absolutely unfamiliar with the product that they’re dealing with. For example, if the writer has a question about the size of a prospective book, or resizing the work from a word processing program, that writer can expect to get at least three different answers to three questions from different operators. They generally don’t know what they’re doing! Often these so-called “specialists” will begin answering another writer’s question(s) while writing to you. Also, the writer will receive similar wrong answers that a different writer has submitted to lulu, making the experience seem like a three-ring circus. I have e-mail after e-mail that I’ve saved illustrating the latter!
If a writer expects to get some relief as a consumer with the Lulu folks, well then the writer can wait until hell freezes over. When the writer makes a mistake in the detailed process of self-publishing, then you’re stuck with the result. These folks make no refunds and have absolutely no sympathy, especially for a writer going through the process of writing a book for the first time.
There are many, many good self-publishing companies. Lulu is definitely not one of them!
Friday, April 11, 2008
Thursday, April 10, 2008
A New Gun "Law"
When it appeared that the forces of Right-Wing reaction could go no further, the Florida legislature passed a bill making it legal for workers to take their guns to work. Malls and shopping centers are not off limits either for the wondrous and influential workings of the gun lobby, lead by the notorious National Rifle Association. Florida Governor Charlie Crist, heralding this amazing piece of reactionary work, stated, “People being protected is the most important thing to me.” Crist is a member of the NRA.
Protected? Like the innocent kids and teachers at Columbine, or the students and professors attending class at Virginia Tech? Oh, but the Florida bill prohibits guns carried to work at public schools. A great concession from the folks who want a gun or two in every house, in every parking lot, in every car, and at every workplace!
The Second Amendment…well, I think that was meant for when there was an imminent threat from a foreign power, not your fellow worker or next-door neighbor!
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
General Petraeus meets the Senate
Yesterday’s hearing, in the U.S. Senate, was a complete travesty! General Petraeus (read Betrayus), shifted gears in the ever-changing “justifications” for the Iraq War. Once again the media played along. Senators Clinton and Obama didn’t go too far and actually challenge Petraeus regarding the utter and complete failure of the U.S. in Iraq. Remember, the military can’t be criticized since the conversion of the Vietnam War to a “noble cause” during the presidency of the “Great Communicator" Ronald Reagan. McCain, the Right-Wing warmonger from Arizona, went along with this new shift for justification of the great immorality that is the Iraq War.
U.S, National Security Advisor Walt Rostow uttered the words “light at the end of the tunnel” in 1967 to justify the continued atrocities the U.S. was perpetrating in Vietnam. Today, Bush and Cheney have offered the same phony reasons for war, ranging from weapons of mass destruction to the fictional democracy that has never materialized in Iraq. Iraq is a quagmire of militias, just as Afghanistan is a quagmire of warlords. And where is Bin Laden? We know where the shipments of opium are coming from, fueling the world drug trade!
Petraeus is being touted as a possible political candidate for future elections. The beat goes on with the imperial politics of an imperial nation!
Sunday, December 30, 2007
Boston December Approach
Boston December Approach
A pale three-quarter moon beyond the wing banking to starboard
The gray crenulated clouds below
Above the city where snow transformed commuters’ lights to phantasms of late fall.
A pale three-quarter moon beyond the wing banking to starboard
The gray crenulated clouds below
Above the city where snow transformed commuters’ lights to phantasms of late fall.
Selma and Bob
Selma and Bob
Selma hated Bob with a vehemence that would have led a casual observer to conclude that they had no business being together. The fact that over thirty-five years had passed since their wedding, following a brief relationship precipitated by the introduction of Selma to Bob by Bob’s parents, made it all the more amazing that these two misfits of matrimony would have survived literally eons of marital abrasiveness.
Both Selma and Bob appeared to be older than they looked at sixty-one and sixty-five respectively. Despite the fact that Selma searched out and attended the myriad opportunities for “personal growth” when they summered in the Berkshires, she vehemently refused to take one iota of information she had gleaned from these workshops and actually translate them into making either of their lives more rewarding or comfortable. Even when she saw the results a workshop on diet had had on their Berkshire neighbors Allen and Eileen, which she had attended along with Eileen in the nearby community of Lenox, she steadfastly refused to use either the book she had bought at the meeting, or use any of the common sense recipes introduced there for improving her health. In fact, although she had installed an expensive gas range in her vacation home in Massachusetts, she had failed to turn it on in over two years of living in that house and needed the prodding of Eileen to finally use it to heat up some biscuits meant as a farewell gift to her and Bob at the end of a summer season.
The most “humorous” workshop she had proposed to her friends was one dealing with Individual Psychology, a branch of psychology in which family relationships are at the core of treatment. What could be more ironic than a person who hates her spouse seeking out an expensive conference on how to deal with matters of interpersonal interaction? But, this was the reason d’etre for how Selma spent time during the summer months. She sought out these conferences as the moral majority searched for weaknesses in the human soul to exploit for political reasons!
Why Selma hated Bob was not clear. What was transparent however, was the fact that Bob had learned over the course of his torturous marriage to internalize the torment that Selma meted out and actually blamed himself for her reprehensible behavior. During the season just past in the Berkshires, Selma had left Bob for five weeks as a pay back for his deviating from the route they had chosen to travel to their summer home. Despite having traveled alone on many occasions in the past, Selma flipped out when Bob sought an alternate, and more picturesque route on his motorcycle, trailing Selma in their car, during the final thirty-five miles of their trip. She steamed with discontent at his departure when relaying the incident to Eileen and Allen on borrowing a flashlight from them in order to more effectively empty the contents of the car into their vacation home.
Even Selma and Bob’s dog had become extremely neurotic from being exposed to their constant bickering, as evidenced in his agitation while he urinated on Allen and Eileen’s plantings at the front of their house as an enraged Selma asked to borrow the flashlight.
Days later, when Bob sat holding his head over Selma’s sudden departure from the Berkshires because of the motorcycle incident, he attempted to tie her sudden and impetuous departure to her enmity toward him over writing a college girlfriend a short note several years ago. How Bob could combine these two disjointed elements in his mind was not unusual, as his ability in mathematics and his work in a government agency dealing with science belied even a scintilla of ability to understand or solve even the most basic practical aspects of living on a daily basis. Indeed, he had recently visited his friend’s house after being encouraged to buy some fresh corn at the local fool co-op because he could not figure out what to do with the corn in the husk or how to go about cooking it! Here was a man who had worked to unlock major secrets of the universe, but did not know that corn had to be submersed in boiling water in order to make it edible.
During Selma’s absence Bob could not stay away from Eileen and Bob’s house. He became a major unmitigated nuisance to them. One late afternoon, as the sun played off the deep green of a nearby mountain, Bob lamented that he would rather die than get legal advice in the event that Selma tried to evict him from their Berkshire home. In yet another faux pas of their married life, Selma was the sole signatory and owner listed on the deed to their summer home. Unbelievably Bob related near tears that “I would rather die than get legal advice if Selma takes action to evict me from the house.” He had come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing in his life mattered and that even his penchant for, and ability for scientific matters, had been “child’s play.” Never had Allen and Eileen seen someone so ready to devalue his entire existence! Allen’s intervention, recommending family counseling for both Selma and Bob, if she returned to the Berkshires, fell on deaf ears.
Eileen and Allen had been in Florida for about two months when Allen’s cell phone rang in January on their way home from the beach at Juno, where they would usually picnic or take long walks along the beach. They had owned a winter home in Florida for two years. The voice Allen heard was unmistakingly Selma’s voice, generally jovial when speaking to her friends, a decided change in tone and volume for the high-pitched, staccato attacks reserved for Bob. Allen and Eileen decided that they would first visit their friends at the home Selma and Bob shared with Bob’s two brothers in Boynton Beach, a house left to him by his father who had died only two years before. Thinking that perhaps the Florida sun and warmth would soften the hostility between Selma and Bob, their friends looked forward to the visit in just a few days. How wrong they would prove to be!
First, an initial volley was fired by Bob who wanted to travel to Miami Beach as the two couples had originally planned, but was short circuited by Allen who knew that they had already spent too much time sitting and chatting at Selma and Bob’s home to make the multi-hour trip worthwhile on this particular Sunday. As a compromise the two couples decided they’d walk along Atlantic Avenue, in Delray Beach, a tourist trap and one of the communities in South Florida with the oldest average age, a distinction which made trips to Delray eventually depressing and almost always universally boring.
On the way back from Delray, with Bob still complaining about the jettisoned trip to Miami, Bob suddenly swerved into the far right lane of travel, prompting Selma to grab the wheel from his hands and begin a verbal attack that thus far had been uncharacteristically absent from the day’s journey. “What’s the matter with you, you fool? If you’re going to drive, then drive. You’re going to kill us all with your stupidity!” Now, Selma was pretty much on track regarding Bob’s lack of driving expertise, but the vehemence of her broadside was what unnerved both Eileen and Allen who sat in the back seat of the convertible, gasping from the close call that has just passed. Sadly, all that Bob could conjure up as a response was a lame, “Don’t grab the wheel from me while I’m driving,” delivered in a voice that reflected his subservience and tacit acknowledgement that he had indeed nearly smashed the right side of the car against another car overtaking him wrongly in the far right lane.
Two weeks later the couples walked through one of the myriad and mindless shopping malls that had sprouted up during the most recent building boom in South Florida after eating at a nondescript restaurant within its staid confines. The Super Bowl would be played the next day which prompted a request from Bob that Allen travel down to Boynton Beach to watch this annual fest of legalized and widely accepted viciousness.
“Why don’t you come up here so that we can watch the game at this sports bar?” Allen asked as they walked past a line of televisions suspended from the ceiling at the outdoor portion of a bar they passed on their stroll through the mall. “I don’t think I’ll be able to find my way here without Selma in the car,” Bob whined, looking for assistance that Eileen and Allen knew would not come from Selma, who was completely disinterested in traveling anywhere on the so-called Super Bowl Sunday. “Go yourself,” was issued in a low growl from Selma, who did not know or care whether it was the Giants, Packers, Red Sox or Yankees who were playing in the scheduled game.
Now, it wasn’t so much that Bob had problems with memory, which however were substantial in his case and further infuriated Selma; but rather the fact that he was still able to propose and explain detailed and scientifically complex projects that interested him, but was totally unable to get on and off of I95 without substantial assistance, with the ramp only a few miles from the house he occupied in Boynton Beach.
This simple interaction precipitated a fusillade of jibes between the two. “Come along with me, tomorrow,” Bob both pleaded and whined, coupled with, “Why don’t you come down to Boynton?” he added looking longingly toward Allen as a way out of the morass and attack he knew would come. “I don’t want to go to your stupid game,” Selma shot back without hesitation. “But I won’t go without you,” he continued, as if looking to be repeatedly rebuked. “You can do something with Eileen,” he countered. “I don’t want to travel tomorrow for an idiotic game!” she now shouted, drawing the attention of passersby.
It was no so much that Selma was indeed right about the stupidity of football, as it was her taking each and every opportunity to use any interaction with Bob as a means of furthering her quest to drive him and his self-concept into the ground, and all this from a person who prided herself on seeking out and attending the most up-to-date conferences, in the long past wake of what was the age of personal development, as a means of bettering interpersonal relations in a society that had long since devalued the same.
One conversation in particular, as they walked to town in the Berkshires, between Bob and Allen upset Allen immensely. Allen had already turned down Bob several times when Bob suggested that he let Allen teach him the nuances of trading in what the stock market called margins. Allen wanted nothing whatsoever to do with anything that was even remotely tied to investments, and especially putting money into companies that produced military goods and “services.” He suspected that Bob’s penchant for investments must have had something to do with the military contractors, and he recoiled at the thought since he had been a war resister during the Vietnam War and opposed any such outlays. “It’s easy,” Bob relayed. “I can teach you how to make a bundle through this process.” Allen changed the subject, having lost complete interest and tolerance for the topic.
While they walked, Allen brought up the topic of service in the military, since both he and Bob were only separated by five years of age. “It’s kind of funny,” Bob began. “When I graduated from college I was placed on the payroll of a corporation that supplied the government and I was classified as unavailable for military service since the company was considered a significant part of the national defense.” Allen didn’t think it was funny at all, and remained silent.
While Eileen and Allen generally avoided both Selma and Bob after their major blowout of the summer and Selma’s five-week absence, they were moved when both Selma and Bob came over one evening after Eileen and Allen’s Yorkshire Terrier died, to whom they had been very attached, and they both placed stones on the grave that had been made for the pup in part of a flower garden beside their Berkshire summer home. Despite all of their contradictions and flaws, to which we are all subject, here was the dynamic duo of bickering and marital rancor, suddenly possessed by the most basic of human kindnesses.
Selma hated Bob with a vehemence that would have led a casual observer to conclude that they had no business being together. The fact that over thirty-five years had passed since their wedding, following a brief relationship precipitated by the introduction of Selma to Bob by Bob’s parents, made it all the more amazing that these two misfits of matrimony would have survived literally eons of marital abrasiveness.
Both Selma and Bob appeared to be older than they looked at sixty-one and sixty-five respectively. Despite the fact that Selma searched out and attended the myriad opportunities for “personal growth” when they summered in the Berkshires, she vehemently refused to take one iota of information she had gleaned from these workshops and actually translate them into making either of their lives more rewarding or comfortable. Even when she saw the results a workshop on diet had had on their Berkshire neighbors Allen and Eileen, which she had attended along with Eileen in the nearby community of Lenox, she steadfastly refused to use either the book she had bought at the meeting, or use any of the common sense recipes introduced there for improving her health. In fact, although she had installed an expensive gas range in her vacation home in Massachusetts, she had failed to turn it on in over two years of living in that house and needed the prodding of Eileen to finally use it to heat up some biscuits meant as a farewell gift to her and Bob at the end of a summer season.
The most “humorous” workshop she had proposed to her friends was one dealing with Individual Psychology, a branch of psychology in which family relationships are at the core of treatment. What could be more ironic than a person who hates her spouse seeking out an expensive conference on how to deal with matters of interpersonal interaction? But, this was the reason d’etre for how Selma spent time during the summer months. She sought out these conferences as the moral majority searched for weaknesses in the human soul to exploit for political reasons!
Why Selma hated Bob was not clear. What was transparent however, was the fact that Bob had learned over the course of his torturous marriage to internalize the torment that Selma meted out and actually blamed himself for her reprehensible behavior. During the season just past in the Berkshires, Selma had left Bob for five weeks as a pay back for his deviating from the route they had chosen to travel to their summer home. Despite having traveled alone on many occasions in the past, Selma flipped out when Bob sought an alternate, and more picturesque route on his motorcycle, trailing Selma in their car, during the final thirty-five miles of their trip. She steamed with discontent at his departure when relaying the incident to Eileen and Allen on borrowing a flashlight from them in order to more effectively empty the contents of the car into their vacation home.
Even Selma and Bob’s dog had become extremely neurotic from being exposed to their constant bickering, as evidenced in his agitation while he urinated on Allen and Eileen’s plantings at the front of their house as an enraged Selma asked to borrow the flashlight.
Days later, when Bob sat holding his head over Selma’s sudden departure from the Berkshires because of the motorcycle incident, he attempted to tie her sudden and impetuous departure to her enmity toward him over writing a college girlfriend a short note several years ago. How Bob could combine these two disjointed elements in his mind was not unusual, as his ability in mathematics and his work in a government agency dealing with science belied even a scintilla of ability to understand or solve even the most basic practical aspects of living on a daily basis. Indeed, he had recently visited his friend’s house after being encouraged to buy some fresh corn at the local fool co-op because he could not figure out what to do with the corn in the husk or how to go about cooking it! Here was a man who had worked to unlock major secrets of the universe, but did not know that corn had to be submersed in boiling water in order to make it edible.
During Selma’s absence Bob could not stay away from Eileen and Bob’s house. He became a major unmitigated nuisance to them. One late afternoon, as the sun played off the deep green of a nearby mountain, Bob lamented that he would rather die than get legal advice in the event that Selma tried to evict him from their Berkshire home. In yet another faux pas of their married life, Selma was the sole signatory and owner listed on the deed to their summer home. Unbelievably Bob related near tears that “I would rather die than get legal advice if Selma takes action to evict me from the house.” He had come to the conclusion that absolutely nothing in his life mattered and that even his penchant for, and ability for scientific matters, had been “child’s play.” Never had Allen and Eileen seen someone so ready to devalue his entire existence! Allen’s intervention, recommending family counseling for both Selma and Bob, if she returned to the Berkshires, fell on deaf ears.
Eileen and Allen had been in Florida for about two months when Allen’s cell phone rang in January on their way home from the beach at Juno, where they would usually picnic or take long walks along the beach. They had owned a winter home in Florida for two years. The voice Allen heard was unmistakingly Selma’s voice, generally jovial when speaking to her friends, a decided change in tone and volume for the high-pitched, staccato attacks reserved for Bob. Allen and Eileen decided that they would first visit their friends at the home Selma and Bob shared with Bob’s two brothers in Boynton Beach, a house left to him by his father who had died only two years before. Thinking that perhaps the Florida sun and warmth would soften the hostility between Selma and Bob, their friends looked forward to the visit in just a few days. How wrong they would prove to be!
First, an initial volley was fired by Bob who wanted to travel to Miami Beach as the two couples had originally planned, but was short circuited by Allen who knew that they had already spent too much time sitting and chatting at Selma and Bob’s home to make the multi-hour trip worthwhile on this particular Sunday. As a compromise the two couples decided they’d walk along Atlantic Avenue, in Delray Beach, a tourist trap and one of the communities in South Florida with the oldest average age, a distinction which made trips to Delray eventually depressing and almost always universally boring.
On the way back from Delray, with Bob still complaining about the jettisoned trip to Miami, Bob suddenly swerved into the far right lane of travel, prompting Selma to grab the wheel from his hands and begin a verbal attack that thus far had been uncharacteristically absent from the day’s journey. “What’s the matter with you, you fool? If you’re going to drive, then drive. You’re going to kill us all with your stupidity!” Now, Selma was pretty much on track regarding Bob’s lack of driving expertise, but the vehemence of her broadside was what unnerved both Eileen and Allen who sat in the back seat of the convertible, gasping from the close call that has just passed. Sadly, all that Bob could conjure up as a response was a lame, “Don’t grab the wheel from me while I’m driving,” delivered in a voice that reflected his subservience and tacit acknowledgement that he had indeed nearly smashed the right side of the car against another car overtaking him wrongly in the far right lane.
Two weeks later the couples walked through one of the myriad and mindless shopping malls that had sprouted up during the most recent building boom in South Florida after eating at a nondescript restaurant within its staid confines. The Super Bowl would be played the next day which prompted a request from Bob that Allen travel down to Boynton Beach to watch this annual fest of legalized and widely accepted viciousness.
“Why don’t you come up here so that we can watch the game at this sports bar?” Allen asked as they walked past a line of televisions suspended from the ceiling at the outdoor portion of a bar they passed on their stroll through the mall. “I don’t think I’ll be able to find my way here without Selma in the car,” Bob whined, looking for assistance that Eileen and Allen knew would not come from Selma, who was completely disinterested in traveling anywhere on the so-called Super Bowl Sunday. “Go yourself,” was issued in a low growl from Selma, who did not know or care whether it was the Giants, Packers, Red Sox or Yankees who were playing in the scheduled game.
Now, it wasn’t so much that Bob had problems with memory, which however were substantial in his case and further infuriated Selma; but rather the fact that he was still able to propose and explain detailed and scientifically complex projects that interested him, but was totally unable to get on and off of I95 without substantial assistance, with the ramp only a few miles from the house he occupied in Boynton Beach.
This simple interaction precipitated a fusillade of jibes between the two. “Come along with me, tomorrow,” Bob both pleaded and whined, coupled with, “Why don’t you come down to Boynton?” he added looking longingly toward Allen as a way out of the morass and attack he knew would come. “I don’t want to go to your stupid game,” Selma shot back without hesitation. “But I won’t go without you,” he continued, as if looking to be repeatedly rebuked. “You can do something with Eileen,” he countered. “I don’t want to travel tomorrow for an idiotic game!” she now shouted, drawing the attention of passersby.
It was no so much that Selma was indeed right about the stupidity of football, as it was her taking each and every opportunity to use any interaction with Bob as a means of furthering her quest to drive him and his self-concept into the ground, and all this from a person who prided herself on seeking out and attending the most up-to-date conferences, in the long past wake of what was the age of personal development, as a means of bettering interpersonal relations in a society that had long since devalued the same.
One conversation in particular, as they walked to town in the Berkshires, between Bob and Allen upset Allen immensely. Allen had already turned down Bob several times when Bob suggested that he let Allen teach him the nuances of trading in what the stock market called margins. Allen wanted nothing whatsoever to do with anything that was even remotely tied to investments, and especially putting money into companies that produced military goods and “services.” He suspected that Bob’s penchant for investments must have had something to do with the military contractors, and he recoiled at the thought since he had been a war resister during the Vietnam War and opposed any such outlays. “It’s easy,” Bob relayed. “I can teach you how to make a bundle through this process.” Allen changed the subject, having lost complete interest and tolerance for the topic.
While they walked, Allen brought up the topic of service in the military, since both he and Bob were only separated by five years of age. “It’s kind of funny,” Bob began. “When I graduated from college I was placed on the payroll of a corporation that supplied the government and I was classified as unavailable for military service since the company was considered a significant part of the national defense.” Allen didn’t think it was funny at all, and remained silent.
While Eileen and Allen generally avoided both Selma and Bob after their major blowout of the summer and Selma’s five-week absence, they were moved when both Selma and Bob came over one evening after Eileen and Allen’s Yorkshire Terrier died, to whom they had been very attached, and they both placed stones on the grave that had been made for the pup in part of a flower garden beside their Berkshire summer home. Despite all of their contradictions and flaws, to which we are all subject, here was the dynamic duo of bickering and marital rancor, suddenly possessed by the most basic of human kindnesses.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
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