‘Slut’ or something much worse is currently tops to degrade a female perceived as promiscuous, but ‘hussy’ is a close relative and once the preferred a-bomb of past a-holes.
Source: 5 Common Insults That Reveal Dark Things About Society | Cracked.com
[Writer’s note: What began as a writing prompt — photo and first paragraph — has become at least the start of a story. I will endeavor to add short sections to it, at lest as long as there is some interest. It might be a little rough in parts, but that’s because it is coming “hot off the press,” which could be part of the fun of it. In the meantime, you are free to jump off from any part of this story thus far and write your own version. Click Holly’s Corner below to get Parts 1 – 6.]
by David E. Booker
“Possibly not,” I said, then took a bite of my sandwich. I didn’t have much money left and if this case didn’t pan out, I was going to have to look for 9 – 5 work, which was something I loathed. But a recipe? Had I stooped so low as I need to chase down some family heirloom the world had not heard of nor was likely ever to?
She pushed up from stall seat, turned, and stomped out the door.
My charming personality was working wonders again.
It was a cool, rainy day down at Holly’s Corner.
I looked up.
“Got my tip?”
“Tip means To Insure Prompt Service. Should be an E, but probably nobody would say Tep. Your service was neither prompt nor ensured. Go tell your rock climbing boss he’ll get paid when I get paid, assuming my client feels like paying.”
“That’s not the deal.”
“The original deal didn’t call for you to put my client on life support, either.”
“Not my fault.”
“Those hot chocolate burns didn’t happen by themselves.”
The tables nearest us were empty and not being refilled. Since Holly’s was a seat yourself place, I could only take that to mean Marc and I were being avoided and bad for business. I liked the place and wanted to be able to come back, but before I could think of some way to end this, Marc stepped forward, picked up the half of sandwich I hadn’t gotten to yet and brought it up to his mouth. He took a big bite.
I glanced over at the nearly empty hot sauce bottle. When Tricia left, I decided I’d have the other half the way I usually do. I looked up at Marc. His broad, dark face had an eerie placidness about it as beads of sweat popped out of his forehead and scurried down his face only to be followed by another one or two or a dozen.
I hadn’t refilled my drink and there wasn’t anything on a nearby table, so Marc dropped the rest of the Ricky Ricardo on the floor, turned and raced out of the restaurant.
Everybody’s a food critic.
#
(To be continued.)
Filed under 2015, photo by David E. Booker, Story by author
Store opening in University Village in Seattle, WA. Twenty years after Amazon started selling books online.
by Issie Lapowsky
Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/11/amazon-killed-the-bookstore-so-its-opening-a-bookstore/
Bookstore owners already loathe Amazon for gutting the cost of books online and driving so many brick and mortar shops out of business. Now, the online retailer is both beating them and joining them, with the opening of its first physical bookstore today in Seattle.
Amazon Books, as the new store is called, will be like any other Main Street bookstore (remember those?), except that Amazon will use the troves of data it collects from its online customers to stock the shelves. That means its book displays will feature real Amazon book reviews, and the store will showcase books that have amassed the most pre-orders online. The books will also come with Amazon’s trademark low price tags.
It can afford those cut-rate prices, of course, because Amazon Books is as much a bookstore as it is a billboard. Amazon’s not suddenly betting big on the bookstore business, and it certainly doesn’t need the store to be a success in order for Amazon to succeed. It’s better to think of Amazon Books as a giant advertisement. If it makes a little extra money for a $294.7 billion company, all the better.
The one silver lining for the book enthusiasts forced to watch their industry turn into a gimmick is that, according to the Seattle Times, Amazon is hiring from other retail stores and libraries that may be struggling. Well, silver lining for those hoping for Seattle-area book store jobs. For Seattle-area book store employers, it’s probably not pleasant watching their employees get poached.
For now, Amazon says the store won’t be serving double duty as a warehouse or pickup center, and the vice president of Amazon Books, Jennifer Cast, tells the Seattle Times the company doesn’t yet have plans to open a second location. “We’re completely focused on this bookstore,” Cast said. “We hope this is not our only one. But we’ll see.”
Additional article: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-opens-first-bricks-and-mortar-bookstore-at-u-village/
[Writer’s note: What began as a writing prompt — photo and first paragraph — has become at least the start of a story. I will endeavor to add short sections to it, at lest as long as there is some interest. It might be a little rough in parts, but that’s because it is coming “hot off the press,” which could be part of the fun of it. In the meantime, you are free to jump off from any part of this story thus far and write your own version. Click Holly’s Corner below to get Parts 1 – 5.]
by David E. Booker
Tricia slumped back in her booth seat. There was a slight frown on her face, which only served to make her look even more attractive. She was almost too pretty: blond hair, thin, big teeth, large blue eyes. The wrinkles made her look more human, more accessible, at least to a shlub like me.
“You’re right,” she said. She reached forward and fiddled with her paper napkin.
“Tell you what. I’ll eat the other half as is. As it was made by the chef.”
It was a cool, rainy day down at Holly’s Corner.
“I’m offering a compromise, which is what happens most often in life. Maybe not in politics.”
Her face wrinkled again. “You don’t know my family. They don’t compromise.”
“And you?”
She sighed and then shrugged. “Sometimes.”
Some things transcend genetics and even behavioral environment. They exist somewhere in between. Some habits fall from the family zeitgeist. Nature versus nurture was an old but simplistic dynamic.
“So, what do you want me for?” I asked.
“I want you to find a recipe.”
I stopped chewing on my sandwich. “The Colonel’s secret sauce?”
“That’s eleven herbs and spices. You’re mocking me.”
I guess I was. I had had a woman shake her rolling pin at me, driving me into the mud, and now I found out the woman was drunk and it was all over a recipe.
“You don’t understand….”
I hate that phrase, but let it go. Obviously, I was missing something. Or she was. I decided to spice up the second half of my sandwich. She saw what I was doing and stopped talking.
“You are obviously not the person for this case.”
“Possibly not,” I said, then took a bite of my sandwich. I didn’t have much money left and if this case didn’t pan out, I was going to have to look for 9 – 5 work, which was something I loathed. But a recipe? Had I stopped so low as I need to chase down some family heirloom the world had not heard of nor was likely even to?
She pushed up from stall seat, turned, and stomped out the door.
(To be continued.)
Filed under 2015, photo by David E. Booker, Story by author
Not exactly a household name, she attracted fans and detractors.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/woman-who-reviewed-31000-books-on-amazon-dies
Harriet Klausner is not exactly a household name. But in the weird subculture of Amazon reviewers, she was either a legend or a legendarily bad shill. Klausner amassed more than 31,000 reviews of books under one username, seeming to sell just as many on Half.com after she finished them. Now Klausner, a former librarian and self-proclaimed speedreader, is reportedly dead at age 63.
The Age of the Internet review.
The three paragraph reviews often introduced a plot summary (often inaccurately) for the first two paragraphs before a brief summary of praise, and a four or five star review. Many of the reviews were of mass market romance books and other pulp genres. Many reviews cropped up on the day the book was released, with many of the books showing up on her son’s Half.com account before the actual release date, according to a blog post of the cheekily named Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society (which was anything but.) This led to allegations that the reviews were planted and paid for.
Read the rest: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/woman-who-reviewed-31000-books-on-amazon-dies
A posting in Time magazine from 2006.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570726,00.html
Without the web, Harriet Klausner would be just an ordinary human being with an extraordinary talent. Instead she is one of the world’s most prolific and influential book reviewers. At 54, Klausner, a former librarian from Georgia, has posted more book reviews on Amazon.com than any other user—12,896, as of this writing, almost twice as many as her nearest competitor. That’s a book a day for 35 years.
Klausner isn’t paid to do this. She’s just, as she puts it, “a freaky kind of speed-reader.” In elementary school, her teacher was shocked when Klausner handed in a 31⁄2-hour reading-comprehension test in less than an hour. Now she goes through four to six books a day. “It’s incomprehensible to me that most people read only one book a week,” she says. “I don’t understand how anyone can read that slow.” All TIME 100 Best Novels
Klausner is part of a quiet revolution in the way American taste gets made. The influence of newspaper and magazine critics is on the wane. People don’t care to be lectured by professionals on what they should read or listen to or see. They’re increasingly likely to pay attention to amateur online reviewers, bloggers and Amazon critics like Klausner. Online critics have a kind of just-plain-folks authenticity that the professionals just can’t match. They’re not fancy. They don’t have an agenda. They just read for fun, the way you do. Publishers treat Klausner as a pro, sending her free books—50 a week—in hopes of getting her attention. Like any other good critic, Klausner has her share of enemies. “Harriet, please get a life,” someone begged her on a message board, “and leave us poor Amazon customers alone.”
Klausner is a bookworm, but she’s no snob. She likes genre fiction: romance, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, horror. One of Klausner’s lifetime goals—as yet unfulfilled—is to read every vampire book ever published. “I love vampires and werewolves and demons,” she says. “Maybe I like being spooked.” Maybe she’s a little bit superhuman herself.
Read the rest: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570726,00.html
It is time, once again, for a new word to live by. This is a word or phrase not currently in use in the U.S. English lexicon, but might need to be considered. Other words, such as obsurd, crumpify, subsus, flib, congressed, and others, can be found by clicking on the tags below. Today’s New Word is a compounding of word and a suffix two words. Without further waiting, surlen is the new word for this month.
OLD WORDS
surly, adj. 1. Bad-tempered, churlishly rude. 2. Unfriendly; irritable.
sullen, adv., adj. 1. Ill-humored or silently ill-humored. 2. Showing irritation. 3. Sluggish, like a stream.
NEW WORD
surlen, adj. 1. Dark look of irritability. 2. Sluggish and ill-tempered. Can be rude.
Displayed most often by children between the ages of 10 and 20, who master it when told by parents or adults to do their homework, pick up their rooms, finish their chores. If looks could kill, grave diggers would be in short supply.
Sometimes referred to as the “passive-aggressive up yours.”
Filed under 2015, new word, New words to live by
[Writer’s note: What began as a writing prompt — photo and first paragraph — has become at least the start of a story. I will endeavor to add short sections to it, at lest as long as there is some interest. It might be a little rough in parts, but that’s because it is coming “hot off the press,” which could be part of the fun of it. In the meantime, you are free to jump off from any part of this story thus far and write your own version. Click Holly’s Corner below to get Parts 1 – 3.]
by David E. Booker
Rainy day down on the corner.
Plans were for me to meet my new client here. We had only talked on the phone. I had no idea what she looked like. I stood inside the doorway, dripping on the concrete floor. Holly’s had once been a bar called The Corner Lounge, then a used bookstore with a poster of Cormac McCarthy and the words “McCarthy for President” underneath it. Rumor had it that McCarthy used to visit The Corner Lounge when he lived in Knoxville. Now all that remained of the Lounge was a dark, curved wooden bar where you placed your food orders. McCarthy probably didn’t hang out here on the infrequent occasions he came back to town.
“Hey, are you looking for me?”
I pivoted. Water flew off the bill of my ball cap and hit a woman squarely in the eye. She flinched.
“Are you—?”
“Tricia,” she said as she rubbed her eye. “It’s usually the second date before I let the guy poke me in the eye.”
“Technically, it wasn’t a poke.” Another rivulet of rainwater ran off the bill of the cap. This one fell harmlessly to the floor.
“You going to argue with a client?”
“I haven’t introduced myself.”
“I saw the rolling pin woman through the window. I couldn’t help but laugh when you dived into the mud.”
I felt a little heat come into my ears.
“How cute,” Tricia said, her eyesight back to normal.
“Glad I could entertain.”
(To be continued.)
Filed under 2015, photo by David E. Booker, story, Story by author
[Writer’s note: What began as a writing prompt — photo and first paragraph — has become at least the start of a story. I will endeavor to add short sections to it, at lest as long as there is some interest. It might be a little rough in parts, but that’s because it is coming “hot off the press,” which could be part of the fun of it. In the meantime, you are free to jump off from any part of this story thus far and write your own version.]
by David E. Booker
Rainy day down on the corner.
She scowled and pointed something with a large barrel at me as she rounded the corner onto Central. Bolt into Holly’s or dive into the dead flowers beside a car parked in front the restaurant were my two choices.
The passenger side car window slid down.
The rain picked up in intensity. I could feel it tapping on my shoulders as if to catch my attention and say, “Now, stupid. Decide now … or be dead.”
The car was almost parallel with me. I caught a whiff of its acrid exhaust. The woman had her best angle; her cleanest shot. And that’s when I realized she was pointing a rolling pin at me. Mud and the petal from a dead flower splattered me in the face as I landed half on the sidewalk and half in the raised bordered flower bed. Considering where the board hit, my gait would never be the same.
“Hey, stupid,” the woman said, “get out of the dirt.”
“Mud,” I said, rolling over onto my side, then back.
A car horn blared, so I didn’t hear what the rolling pin woman said next. I think it was “get up,” which I was doing.
“That woman is a … (Another car horn blared as the car swerved around the stopped white car.) … she doesn’t deserve it. It’s my book!”
She was still pointing the rolling pin at me as drove on, probably because a police cruiser was easing up Central toward her position.
I brushed my hands together and only managed to smear the mud in one palm on the other. My pants were wet. So was my rain jacket and baseball cap. I brushed my hands down the sides of my jacket and then stepped inside Holly’s.
Plans were for me to meet my new client here. We had only talked on the phone. I had no idea what she looked like. I stood just inside the doorway,
(To be continued.)
Filed under 2015, photo by David E. Booker, story, Story by author
Award-winning book banned in New Zealand. First time in 22 years.
by Simon Collins
Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11509128
The author of the first book to be banned in New Zealand for at least 22 years is asking: “Will I be burnt next?”
Ted Dawe, 64, the head of studies at Taylors College for international students in Auckland, is the unlikely subject of the first interim restriction order on a book under the Films, Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993.
His award-winning book for teenagers, Into The River, has been banned from sale or supply under the order issued by the president of the Film and Literature Board of Review, Dr Don Mathieson, QC.
The order took effect when it was issued on September 3 and applies until the full board meets to decide on a permanent classification for the book. Dr Mathieson said that would be as soon as possible and “may very well be at the end of this month”.
In the meantime, media law expert Professor Ursula Cheer has said it was illegal to supply the book even to a friend.
“Having it for your own personal use is okay. Passing it around to your friends is not,” she said.
Mr Dawe said he was “blindsided” by the ban, which was sought by lobby group Family First after deputy chief censor Nic McCully removed a previous R14 restriction on the book on August 14, making it totally unrestricted.
“It’s extraordinary,” Mr Dawe said. “I’ve had quite a few emails from people who share that sense of outrage. Do we live in a country where books get banned? I’ll get burnt next.”
He said Family First director Bob McCoskrie and Dr Mathieson, who wrote a dissenting view advocating an R18 restriction when the majority of the board rated the book R14 in 2013, were overstepping the rules of a democratic society.
“Those two individuals are united in their determination to establish this as a line that will not be crossed. I feel they have wildly overstepped the whole mechanism of looking at art and making judgments on it,” he said.
“New Zealand has taken a giant step towards that sort of regulatory moralising that I think most people felt we had left far in our past.”
He said it was not easy to write a book that teenagers would want to read, or to get it published.
“People involved with teaching boys, especially English teachers, know how important books like this are because they speak to boys about the things that other boys’ books don’t have the firepower or the vitality to do effectively,” he said.
“The book was never about sex and drugs, it was always about bullying people and how that damages people for the rest of their lives. That is really the underlying theme, everything else is just the trappings that go along with that.”
Ms McCully’s decision last month quoted another writer for teenagers Bernard Beckett as saying that sex, violence and bad language were common in books that were taught in schools such as his own 2014 novel Home Boys, which “includes a boy showing his friend how he masturbates, and ends with an explicit sex scene”.
“Thinking back to the classic school texts, Catcher in the Rye started it all,” he said. “A Clockwork Orange is as brutal as they come, and is frequently taught in senior school.”
Libraries Association director Joanna Matthew said Auckland Libraries submitted a British graphic novel Lost Girls to the censor this year because it included images of sexual activity by children. The censor rated it R18.
But she said libraries generally supported freedom of speech and saw the ban on Into The River as “a tragedy”.
“If we censor literature that talks frankly about some of these issues, then I think we run the risk of burying them,” she said.
“We would be much more effective as a society if we worked to counter the problems that the book articulates rather than trying to restrict the book.”
The NZ Booksellers Association has placed a notice on its website warning bookshops that they face fines of up to $3000 for an individual or $10,000 for a business if they supply the book.
However the book is still on sale on Amazon at US$24.99 in paperback or US$9.99 on Kindle.
Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/news/article.cfm?c_id=1501119&objectid=11509128
Filed under 2015, book banning, books
Poet Michael Derrick Hudson was published in The Best American Poetry 2015 anthology under the name “Yi-Fen Chou.” Hudson claims to use this name as a “strategy” for getting poems published.
by Isaac Fitzgerald
Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/isaacfitzgerald/yi-fen-chou-is-michael-derrick-hudson#.ljkm9RZAe1
The poetry world was shocked Monday to discover that Yi-Fen Chou, a poet who appears in the anthology The Best American Poetry 2015, is actually the pen name of Michael Derrick Hudson.
Michael Derrick Hudson a/k/a Yi-Fen Chou via poetryfoundation.org
Hudson’s poem “The Bees, the Flowers, Jesus, Ancient Tigers, Poseidon, Adam and Eve” was both originally published in Prairie Schooner and reprinted in The Best American Poetry 2015 under the name Yi-Fen Chou.
In his bio for the anthology, Hudson admits that he used the pen name of Yi-Fen Chou as a strategy for getting his poems accepted by literary journals:
Many in the literary community took to social media to raise their concerns about the publication of Hudson’s poem in light of his nom de plume.
But Sherman Alexie, guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2015 — and in some sense originally a victim of a hoax — defended his decision to publish the poem, even after learning that Yi-Fen Chou was a pseudonym.
Details at: http://www.buzzfeed.com/isaacfitzgerald/yi-fen-chou-is-michael-derrick-hudson#.ljkm9RZAe1
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