(And you can only make these upgrades when you order the product; none of these features is upgradable after the fact, either by you or your local Apple Genius.)
I got a note on Twitter from a follower:
@jsnell “none of these features is upgradable after the fact” - I think you want ARE instead of is. #corrections
On first blush it does seem wrong, because the singular form “is” follows immediately after a plural, “features.” However, such constructions are surprisingly common in this zany language I use to ply my trade.
The solution to many vexing grammatical problems is to simplify the sentence, sort of like reducing an algebraic equation before solving for x. So that phrase becomes “Not one is upgradable.” (Oh, and by the way, both “upgradable” and “upgradeable” are valid.) Well, that scans. One (singular) is.
Except, wait, do I really mean none as a singular? When I’m really talking about the cluster of options for the MacBook Air, each one of which is individually upgradeable?
So I did what I always do when I’m confused. I throw myself on the mercy of the copy edit department. My charming and kind assistant managing editor, Sally Zahner, consulted with PC World’s Steven Gray and then replied:
In most cases you can justify using either “None is” or “None are,” but the trend is toward making the verb plural. When deciding whether to make the verb singular or plural, you need to decide what the speaker’s intent is—that is, whether the subject is plural or singular in the speaker’s mind. And in most cases it’s plural. So in your example below, you’re really saying: “All of the features are incapable of being upgraded”—or some such. You could also say, “Not one of the features is upgradable.” But the fact that you’re referring to all the features as a group suggests that you are really thinking of them as plural.
But of course this is pretty subjective, which is why I can never remember this fuzzy reasoning. But I agree that the trend is toward using the plural (which is why you second-guessed yourself, I suspect), and that’s what we tend to do on the copydesk. But it wouldn’t be strictly wrong to say, “None of the features is upgradable.” In fact, you’d make the stuffy, old-school grammar police happy.
Some days it’s fun working with words.
(By the way, I’m not changing it. But it’ll probably be rephrased in the print edition.)
]]>]]>From: brian lam <blam@brianlam.net>
Date: April 19, 2010 04:08:07 PM PDT
To: Steve Jobs <sjobs@apple.com>
Subject: Let's see if this goes through.Hey Steve, this email chain is off record on my side.
I understand the position you're in, and I want to help, but it conflicts with my own responsibilities to give the phone back without any confirmation that its real, from apple, officially.
Something like that -- from you or apple legal -- is a big story, that would make up for giving the phone back right away. If the phone disappears without a story to explain why it went away, and the proof it went to apple, it hurts our business. And our reputation. People will say this is a coordinated leak, etc.
I get that it would hurt sales to say this is the next iphone. I have no interest in hurting sales. That does nothing to help Gizmodo or me.
Maybe Apple can say it's a lost phone, but not one that you've confirmed for production -- that it is merely a test unit of sorts. Otherwise, it just falls to apple legal, which serves the same purpose of confirmation. I don't want that either.
Gizmodo lives and dies like many small companies do. We don't have access, or when we do, we get it taken away. When we get a chance to break a story, we have to go with it, or we perish. I know you like walt and pogue, and like working with them, but I think Gizmodo has more in common with old Apple than those guys do. So I hope you understand where I'm coming from.
Right now, we have nothing to lose. The thing is, Apple PR has been cold to us lately. It affected my ability to do my job right at iPad launch. So we had to go outside and find our stories like this one, very aggressively.
I want to get this phone back to you ASAP. And I want to not hurt your sales when the products themselves deserve love. But I have to get this story of the missing prototype out, and how it was returned to apple, with some acknowledgement it is Apple's.
And I want to work closer with Apple, too. I'm not asking for more access -- we can do our jobs with or without it -- but again, this is the only way we can survive while being cut out of things. That's my position on things.
B
But if “the ONLY thing that matters… is output,” when the focus is “quantity, not quality,” you’re not writing a novel. You’re masturbating. It’s fun, it doesn’t hurt anyone, and a lot of people could stand to do more of it—but it’s not exactly something to brag about, and in the end the only thing you’ve made is a mess.
“Write 50,000 words this month, and it’s okay if they suck” is a great idea. Calling the result a novel is asinine.
Well, if “National Harness Your Creativity By Committing to Writing The First 50,000 Words Of The First Draft of That Novel You Always Promised Yourself You’d Write” was catchier, they’d use that name.
But NaNoWriMo is catchier.
Talk to novelists. Writing a first draft is a lot about getting through it, about hacking through and discovering your story and your characters. Brilliant novels don’t happen on first draft. They happen after a whole lot of rewriting and editing, after the fact. But you can’t get to a rewrite until you’ve written the first draft!
I’m a big supporter of NaNoWriMo. I think it encourages people to think creatively and to make a big step - a bit like committing to running a marathon or climbing a mountain- that they might never do without making a public commitment. Is every NaNoWriMo novel good? No. Is every NaNoWriMo participant in it with the best of intentions or ideals? No. But the only reason to define any event (or, really, anything in human endeavor) by the very worst offenders is if you want to bash it. It’s called a strawman argument, and it’s what cleversimon is making.
I have been writing all my life. I write nonfiction for a living. I wrote fiction throughout elementary school, high school, and college. I edited a fiction magazine for a decade. And yet, though I promised myself I would one day write a novel, I NEVER PUT DOWN THE FIRST WORD UNTIL I COMMITTED TO NANOWRIMO IN 2006.
The result? I wrote a 160,000-word novel (now edited and rewritten once, really needing another editing pass and more time for me to attempt to find an agent to sell it) and am 52,000 words into a second. And yes, I plan on finishing it (or at least tacking on 50,000 words to it) in NaNoWriMo this year.
If you want to quibble with details of NaNoWriMo, go nuts. But it’s a beautiful concept that really does unlock creative power for a whole bunch of people. Why piss on that because you don’t like the name?
]]>It works by detecting the Wi-Fi base station I’m connected to. But of course, every time Apple updates its OS, it breaks the methods I use.
Under Leopard I use this approach:
system_profiler SPAirPortDataType|grep -e “Current Wireless Network:”|awk ‘{print $4}’
That Terminal command gets wrapped in a “do shell script” command for AppleScript purposes.
But here’s the thing. In a future OS update, Apple has changed the output of the system_profiler SPAirPortDataType
command. Now what it spits out is:
AirPort: Software Versions: Menu Extra: 6.0 (600.22) configd plug-in: 6.0 (600.27) System Profiler: 6.0 (600.9) Network Preference: 6.0 (600.22) AirPort Utility: 5.4.2 (542.23) IO80211 Family: 3.0 (300.20) Interfaces: en0: Card Type: AirPort Extreme (0x14E4, 0x8B) Firmware Version: Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.91.19) Locale: FCC Country Code: US Supported PHY Modes: 802.11 a/b/g/n Supported Channels: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 36, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56, 60, 64, 100, 104, 108, 112, 116, 120, 124, 128, 132, 136, 140, 149, 153, 157, 161, 165 Wake On Wireless: Supported Status: Connected Current Network Information: Extreme Meadow: PHY Mode: 802.11n BSSID: 0:1c:b3:ae:42:c3 Channel: 11 Network Type: Infrastructure Security: WPA2 Personal Signal / Noise: -58 dBm / -92 dBm Transmit Rate: 130 MCS Index: 15
So, grep/sed/awk terminal wizards, any suggestions on how to update my command-line command to parse that I’m connected to “Extreme Meadow”? And fail gracefully if I’m not connected to any SSID, at which point the entire “Current Network Information” block disappears.
Lots of smart people helped. This seems to work.
do shell script "/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks
/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/
Resources/airport -I|
egrep '^[ ]+SSID:'|cut -f2 -d:"
I run it via LaunchBar and paste the results into Twitter, generally.
tell application "Safari"
set longURL to URL of front document
end tell
set shellScript to ("curl --url
\"http://metamark.net/api/rest/simple?long_url="
& longURL & "\" ")
set shortURL to (do shell script shellScript)
set the clipboard to shortURL
Please note that the line beginning with “set shellScript” should be all on one line; I’ve broken it here in the interests of readability.
Update: Graham Ballantyne offers his version of this script, which is very nice.
And here’s another one from Brad MacDonald.
]]>I'm a baseball fan. So when I learned that Major League Baseball was finally going to join the NFL, NBA, and NHL in creating its own dedicated channel, I was pretty excited. I mean, an entire channel with nothing but baseball -- how great an idea is that?
The MLB Network has been on the air since early January, and as most people over the age of 10 understand, the reality is a whole lot more complicated than the dream was. But it's fair to say that spending a day with MLB Network will give you a good overview of most of the constituencies of modern baseball.
Many baseball fans, most of them aging, are obsessed with the rosy glow of the 20th Century (is it too soon to refer to the 20th as old news?), when baseball was truly the national sport. This is the constituency of Ken Burns' epic documentary, "Baseball," which is airing weekly on MLB Network -- the series' first appearance off of PBS.
It's also the provenance of Bob Costas, who has always professed to be an enormous baseball fan and has now proven it by switching his cable home from HBO to MLB Network. It's hard to think of Costas, who is eternally youthful in a Dick Clark kind of way, as a representative of Baseball's Olden Days. But when MLB Network plays back an NBC Game of the Week broadcast from 25 years ago -- and the network's time slots are currently filled with replays of classic baseball games of yore -- there's Costas, his voice sounding no different than it did when he anchored the Beijing Olympics last summer, calling a Cubs-Cardinals game with Tony Kubek by his side.
I've always liked Costas, but as my colleague Philip Michaels points out, he is someone who tends to speak in a tone best summed up as "the voice of the common fan and guardian of the game." It's a tone that's loved by the national-pastime crowd, but even someone who has sat through the umpteen hours of Ken Burns' documentary can probably admit that Bobby C can get a bit ponderous.
Still, baseball has always been a game that has romanticized its history, so why not spend the off-season -- there's plenty of time to kill! -- by dwelling on the past? But as we roll through spring training and the regular season nears, there's a question about how MLB Network will choose to cover the present.
Know this about me: I'm not a big fan of "SportsCenter," or "Baseball Tonight," or ESPN in general. I know this puts me in the minority when it comes to sports fans, but I've long since grown tired of the catch-phrase-spewing anchor schtick and the ex-jocks whose "analysis" of games is often laughably unsupported by reality, just so they can be provocative and get in faux argumentes with other ex-jock analysts.
If you like that sort of thing, I suspect you will like MLB Network's coverage of the news, which seems to essentially be following the premise, "What if ESPN could only cover baseball?" The off-season version of MLB Network's news show, "Hot Stove," is nothing more than ESPN's "Baseball Tonight," only with more time to fill. It's even got the same neon-and-plasma-screen set design, the kind that screams "Live! From an alien spaceship!"
Owing to the network being owned by Major League Baseball, during the season MLB Network will have amazing access to games, including live cameras in every stadium. I have no doubt that MLB Network will be the best place to get game information and watch highlights. (And to its credit, the network's wall-to-wall coverage of the A-Rod steroid revelations suggest that it will show some degree of editorial independence, even though it's owned and operated by the sport itself.) But I have to admit being depressed that the network has apparently stuck with ESPN's ex-jock-and-print-journalist analyst philosophy.
Look, I'll lay my cards on the table. I'm a paid subscriber to the excellent web site Baseball Prospectus. One of the biggest revolutions in baseball in the past two decades has been an increased use of statistical analysis to reveal new ways of judging the good and the bad in baseball, from managerial decisions to free-agent signings to player performance. Though Michael Lewis' book "Moneyball" is the most popular (to the point of being overused) description of this phenomenon, usually called Sabermetrics, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Statistical analysis is everywhere in baseball now. Even the most stodgy teams employ analysts, because what the analytics guys have revealed is not an opinion, it's truth. Truth that was previously unexposed.
So where are the guys who represent statistical analysis on MLB Network? I can't find them. The ex-jocks aren't there to analyze how the game works. They're there to bring anecdotes from their playing days and apply them to the present. They should only be one part of a rich analytical stew. Instead, they're the beef, the broth and the cornstarch. (I might also point out that most ex-jocks seem to have a very hard time saying anything critical about any current players, being that they're members of the same fraternity.)
Enough of the players. What about the journalists? MLB Network has a close relationship with Sports Illustrated, and employs SI writers Jon Heyman and Tom Verducci. They may be talented writers, but I have deep misgivings about both. I've never been a fan of Verducci, and the incessant lecturing tone of his articles actually was the thing that drove me to cancel my twenty-year-long subscription to SI. Heyman, meanwhile, is the man who -- as delightfully chronicled by the now-defunct Fire Joe Morgan web site -- went out of his way to disparage VORP, one of the most useful new methods of determining player value, and insulted the people who understand what it means.
I'm not saying MLB Network shouldn't have hired Heyman and Verducci. Well, maybe I am saying that. But even if those guys are going to hold down the desk at MLB Network, is it too much to ask for some serious participation from the modern statistical analysis guys? (Would it be catty of me to point that even SI's print magazine has imported analysis from Baseball Prospectus, perhaps in acknowledgement of the lack of understanding of modern ways of viewing baseball by its own writers?)
I'll admit it -- stats guys can be boring. As much as I loved following the election polls on FiveThirtyEight.com, operated by Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus, watching Silver on TV always made me uneasy. And I'm not saying that the network should suddenly become a giant walking, talking database with all analysis happening by spreadsheet. But surely there are stats guys out there who can clean up nicely, string a few sentences together, and hold their own in arguments with Harold Reynolds and Jon Heyman. You'd think Major League Baseball would know where to find them. So, MLB Network, where are they?
MLB Network seems to have done a good job servicing the fans of baseball's rich history, the fantasy nuts who want a fast-paced highlight show, and the ESPN viewers who (apparently) enjoy the punditry of ex-jocks who like to talk about how gritty Jason Varitek is and how much heart he's shown in playing for two World Series winners in Boston. But who's going to look at the stats with a steel eye and dare to suggest that there's a giant fork sticking out of Varitek's back?
[Jason Snell is the editorial director of Macworld.]
]]>I think the critics who are bashing the source material are guilty of the most pathetic form of revisionism; the work is a masterpiece despite its (admitted) flaws. Yes, it’s a B-movie plot with some ridiculous dialogue. So? Doesn’t diminish it one bit.
The movie is perhaps more interesting in terms of its relationship to its source material than as a movie. I don’t know. I would need several blows to the head to watch the movie in a state that doesn’t involve 20-plus years of self-interpretation of Moore’s and Gibbons’s work. I do think that perhaps this is the best movie that could ever have been made of “Watchmen,” with the possible exception of casting different actors as Adrian and Laurie.
I will point you to Alan Sepinwall’s review of the movie, which is probably 90-95% in alignment with my feelings.
]]>I don’t like the new “Bird’s Eye” logo that Pepsi has gone to. It looks weird to me. The old logo was fine.
However, the box design that’s rolled out with this new logo? Gorgeous.
Gone are all the background trappings. Gone is the ’80s style logo font. Instead there’s a very simple solid color, the new logo (ugh), and the word “pepsi.” It’s simple and very attractive.
Well done, box designer. Maybe you can have the logo guy’s job.
I’m a little less convinced about the new Mountain Dew boxes, which re-brand the drink as “MtnDew.” What, Mountain is too long a word? Come on.
]]>Since it came up on Twitter, I thought I’d detail my method below. This is something I’ve fallen into over the years, but feel free to vary it any way you like. That’s the beauty of cooking — you can do whatever you feel is right, whatever you like.
(makes two crusts worth)
I make it in the bread machine (you can also do it the old fashioned way, kneading and rising a couple of times), and when it’s done I generally separate the dough into two identically-sized balls. (Put some olive oil on your hands to prevent a sticky mess.) I put a little olive oil in a large zip-top bag and then toss in one of the balls, which lives in the bottom drawer of my fridge for a week or so.) The other one, I leave in the bread machine container until I make it later the same day. The same-day ball is puffy and soft; the next-week ball is thin and crispy. They’re both great.
At some point early in the process, after the dough ball is out of the bread machine, I place my pizza stone on an accessible shelf in our oven and heat it to 500 degrees. The more heat the stone can drink in, the better. Be generous with your pre-heating time. When the oven is pre-heated, the stone is still getting hotter. (Pro tip: when not cooking pizza, leave your stone on the bottom level of your oven. The mass of the stone will help balance out the temperature variation in the oven. Also you can get an unglazed paving tile if you don’t want to get a “real” pizza stone.)
I coat my peel with a thin layer of semolina (I used to use corn meal—don’t do it! Semolina is superior in EVERY way), then pull out the ball until it’s a circle (hand tossing like a stereotypical Italian pizza man optional) and lay it down on the peel. I coat the top of the dough with some olive oil and walk away for a little while, letting the dough rebound from my pulling and prodding. Later I return with pizza sauce (I gave up making it myself and use it from a can, or just use barbecue sauce if it’s BBQ chicken pizza.) Then on goes the cheese, generally a mixture of mozzarella and cheddar, though last night we threw in some jack as well and it was really good. What you top it with is up to you. (We generally use Turkey Pepperoni since my wife doesn’t eat pork, and for BBQ Chicken I just grill a chicken breast and cut it into cubes and toss it on, then use a spoon and drizzle some more barbecue sauce on.)
I pop the pizza in the oven (sliding it off the peel onto the stone is tricky, which is why the semolina on the peel really helps keep it slidy) and if I’m feeling careful I’ll drop the heat to 450. It takes about 12 minutes to cook the pizza in my oven. Once it’s done, I use the peel to pull it back out and let it cool. You don’t want to cut the pizza when the cheese is still molten.
A nice thing to do while it’s cooling is to spray or brush on olive oil on the crust at the edges. The crust absorbs the oil and ends up softer and more edible.
Once the cheese cools and thickens, you know what to do. (I love the Zyliss Pizza Wheel.)
That’s it. I like drinking my pizza with Sierra Nevada Porter. You pick your own favorite.
]]>The rules:
My high school had an actual, legitimate broadcast radio station. These days I suppose you’d just stream it on the Internet. I think we broadcast at fifty watts. It was like a light bulb. But my Junior year in high school I did radio, and had my own radio show for two hours every Wednesday, 3-5. I have a sound-check tape of my last show somewhere. I played a lot of Peter Gabriel. (One of the girls in my radio class was, in fact, the person who suggested that I might like a song called “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by a group called Crowded House. Uh, yeah.)
I was on my elementary school basketball team. Seventh and eighth grade. We didn’t have any place to practice or play at our school (I believe they’ve since converted the cafeteria into a combination cafeteria/basketball court). So we had to walk a mile down the Frank Dondero Nature Trail to the National Guard Armory at the Columbia Airport. (The Columbia College basketball team also practiced there, though they played at the high school — these days they practice and play at their own gym.) We were really terrible, especially after half the team quit or was ruled academically ineligible. We lost one game, to Twain Harte, 82-2. I kid you not. I wore a bag over my head to school the next day. Also true.
My favorite TV show of all time used to be “Max Headroom.” Great show. Waaaay ahead of its time. What it says about our culture and media and technology today, twenty years later, is still relevant. However, a couple years back I realized that it wasn’t true anymore. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” has eclipsed it. Depending on how it ends, “Lost” might beat that too.
I met my first girlfriend online. Which in 1987 meant on a computer bulletin-board. We had just had a scandal at the BBS I ran, where a user had posed as a girl, going to far as to having a girl he know call people and pose as this fictitious female user as “proof.” So when my new user from Michigan claimed to be a girl, I expressed skepticism. She immediately told me to pick up the phone. When the modems died out, we were left on the phone together. She was a girl, I can verify, and within a few months we were pretty much obsessed with one another. At seventeen years old I bought an airplane ticket and went to Michigan to spend a week with her. You’d think we would have been worried that we wouldn’t hit it off in person. We did. She’s one of my Facebook friends these days and I hear from her every now and then. She’s got three kids and is married to her college boyfriend. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t know about how serious it was between her and me, which is probably all for the best.
My daughter Jamie is named after my cousin, who we called Jamie growing up. (He was the last in a series of James Hysongs dating back to my great-great grandfather.) Jamie Hysong qualified as a pilot very young and was hoping to be a flight instructor when the plane he was flying disappeared over Lake Michigan in the spring of 1993. Eight years later I asked my aunt and uncle’s permission to name my first child after their son.
The first computer I used was not, in fact, an Apple computer. It was a Commodore PET, which my family bought in 1980. In the summer of 1984 I dipped into my college money a bit early to buy an Apple IIe, and experienced my first period of “buyer’s remorse.” That feeling didn’t last long — I wore that Apple IIe out. I joined the Mac world when I bought a Mac SE on clearance at the UCSD Bookstore in the spring of 1990. And I’ve never looked back.
I’m going to tag Lauren, Lisa, Matt because he’ll give me hell for it, CRAIG BECAUSE HE WOULD DO IT WITH THE CHOCK LOCK ON OK, and Andy. Though I’m not sure any of them will really do it. Nor should they.
]]>A starship leaves earth at a constant acceleration rate of 1G.
After the ship has flown five light-years, the people on board the ship have experienced 4.85 years of time passing. Earth has experienced almost six years of time. (I think.)
Every day a message is sent from the earth to the spaceship via radio.
So here’s the question. From the perspective of the spaceship, how often are those daily messages received? Although time on the spaceship is passing slower relative to time on the Earth, it also takes the radio message a year to travel one light-year.
Or to put it another way, the ship is now five light-years away from Earth. If I sent them a message five years ago, Earth time (i.e., one year after they departed), when did they get it, from the perspective of their ship’s clocks? And if I sent them another message the day after that, when did they receive that message? 24 hours later? 23 hours later? 25 hours later?
My head hurts.
]]>Last night at the same venue was a standard request show.
The good news is, I worked out a bunch of things that have been in flux about the universe & setting of my novel on the drive home, so that was productive time. But even though I’m more than 10,000 words in, I’m definitely not even to the core of the book yet. Still, I’m getting close now. Last night I introduced another character that I think will become one of the core six main characters. So that’s two introduced. Good for me.
Still, it’s a struggle sometimes. But that’s why I like NaNoWriMo — if it was easy it wouldn’t be worth doing.
]]>And you certainly could point to the 2000 election, where the guy who lost the popular vote squeaked through in the Electoral College. At the time neither of those guys seemed to be very hot stuff, but we had to pick one. I voted for the guy from Texas. And you know what? As it turned out, that guy was a completely incompetent president who helped wreck our economy, came up with bogus pretenses to invade Iraq — a decision that cost our country thousands of lives, billions of dollars, and all the goodwill the country had built up in the previous 60 years — and conspired with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to spend an inconceivable sum of money and dig us a huge financial hole.
So it turns out that maybe the 2000 election was the most important one of our lifetime. Oops.
Anyway, now it’s 2008. And here’s the unsolicited brain dump.
I’m voting for Obama because I think he’s a pretty smart and pragmatic guy, and that when push comes to shove he’s probably likely to make some decent decisions. I think McCain’s temperament is not generally suited for the office, though if elected I’m pretty sure he would compromise like a son of a bitch with the Democratic-controlled Congress. (What is McCain’s 2008 presidential run but a demonstration of compromise? This moderate Republican has said anything he could to be elected, including kowtowing to the same religious right-wing Republicans who tore him a new one in 2000.) In fact, I might even wager that McCain would do more backroom dealing with Congress than Obama would, if that makes any sense. I think Obama will want to be his own man, while McCain would want to “go across the aisle.”
I have little doubt that Obama will disappoint me, in ways big or small. Every president I have voted for has disappointed me. But I think he’s the right guy for the job, especially now.
The other reason I want Obama to win is, I want the Republican party to fall out of power and consider what it did to get to this point. What the trends — demographic and otherwise — are in this country. And to find a way to remold itself into something better than it is now.
When I checked the Republican box in my first voting registration in 1988, I did so because I appreciated the party’s beliefs about reduced government intervention, competence in government, and a philosophy to reduce spending whenever possible. These days, the Democrats seem more financially responsible (how in the world did that happen?) while the Republicans seem more concerned about fighting the culture war.
My vision of the Republican party was a party that wanted less government. Today’s Republicans want more government intervention than ever before, so long as it’s intervening for their interests, whether that’s Terri Shiavo or a late-term abortion or, yes, gay people who just want to get married.
Back in 1980 the Reagan Democrats said that they hadn’t changed — but the Democratic Party had changed right under them. When they looked up, they saw they were voting with Ronald Reagan instead of Jimmy Carter. Well, I feel much the same way. I haven’t gone anywhere. But the Republican Party has changed, and the ground beneath my feet is no longer painted in their color.
I haven’t been a registered Republican since 1996 (I’m a certified California Decline-to-State), but in all that time I generally thought of myself as a default-Republican voter. Even in 2004, when I voted for the stiff known as John Kerry because Bush had already proven himself to be incompetent, I felt that way.
But this year? This year, for the first time in my life, I want the Republicans beaten back into the woods. I want it to hurt. I want them decimated. Not just because they deserve it after the ruin that they have made of this country and their own party in the past ten years. But because they need to spend some time out of power, thinking about all the things they’ve done wrong.
It’ll be good for them.
]]>My main characters are kids when this first event happens, which is important because it sets up some massive social change that makes the world the characters grow up in.
So I’m doing a lot of writing of these characters that aren’t the main characters, which is really weird. But I want to take my time with this, because this is setting the scene for everything that comes later, and I think the readers need to know it. Though I might end up cutting it all in rewrite. Who knows?
Still, I’m 4,000 words in and we haven’t met a single main character other than the narrator. Hmm.
]]>