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Best of Boles Blogs Volumes 1, 2 and 3 Now Available on Amazon Kindle Direct!

As you may know, over the past few weeks, I have been working on a “Best of…” series for the Boles Blogs Network to give you a way to find our work in the palm of your hand via Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing.  You may now read The Best of GO INSIDE Magazine and The Best of Urban Semiotic Volumes 1 and 2 using your Kindle, or smartphone or tablet or desktop — and now, today, you are also able to read three mighty volumes from the rest of the network in Best of Boles Blogs Volume 1, and Volume 2 and Volume 3 — all via Amazon!

Here’s the PR blurp for Volume 1:

Welcome to — “Best of Boles Blogs, Volume 1 (2007-2012)” — where we provide to you a unique, redacted and added value reading experience from the following fine blogs found in the 14-blog strong Boles Blogs Network: WordPunk, Memeingful, Celebrity Semiotic and Panopticonic. Weighing in at over 57,000 words and 155 standard typewritten pages, you are now able to read the keenest, edited, and reconstructed, works of David W. Boles in this exclusive Kindle Direct Publishing edition!

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Following Kurt Vonnegut to Write a Great Story

I love Kurt Vonnegut with a passion of a thousand fires and was devastated when he passed away five years ago. He wrote some of the best short and long fiction that I have ever read including Player Piano as well as some amazing advice for writers, all of which I positively love. One of his best pieces of advice came in the form of eight tips for writers, which I read about once a year to keep it somewhat fresh in my mind.

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Life is Loss: We are Our Deficits

As we continue to mourn the death of Dr. Howard Stein, we are left to ponder the joy of knowing him and, in missing him, we begin the healing process by remembering the important lessons he taught us.

One of the most poignant conversations I had with him in the last few weeks of his life dealt with age and growing older.  Howard reversed an important expectation for me, and I appreciate the reality of that sobering.

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Is Handwriting a Dying Art?

Let me give you a few questions to ponder. When somebody tells you that they want to give you their phone number, do you reach for a pen and paper or do you open your contact list in your phone? If you want to remember an appointment, do you write it down on a calendar with a pen or pencil or do you set up an e-mail reminder? When you have an idea that you don’t want to forget, do you write it down in a journal of some sort or do you digitally record it, perhaps e-mailing it to yourself?

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Betraying the Wishes of Charles Schulz

When I was a child, Peanuts was one of my favorite comics in the Sunday newspaper — for that was the only day of the week that my father bought the newspaper, as it had plenty of coupons for our bi-weekly grocery shopping trips. I also got collections of the comic from when my father would go to garage sales — so even well before you could find hundreds of the comic online for free, I had access to strips from the fifties and sixties.

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The Amazon Cloud Drive Review

Cloud Drive storage is big business.  I’m huge into hanging all my junk in the cloud.  I really like Google Drive and I also have backups to my Google Drive on SkyDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive.  The Amazon Cloud Drive is a much better service today than it was a year ago.  On my Mac, I can seamlessly upload all my iPhoto images with one click:

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California Spends More on Incarceration than Education

We know lower education rates mean higher rates of incarceration:

In yesterday’s Panopticonic article — Romney Wants Fewer Teachers, Cops and Firefighters — I argued fewer teachers would lead to more crime.  Some readers commented in email there was no proof of that common sense notion, so today, I provide some hard and unavoidable facts here in Carceral Nation confirming fewer teachers create larger class sizes and larger class sizes create higher dropout rates:

Oregon’s annual dropout rate over the last decade has dipped and climbed with the number of teachers. When the number of teachers dropped to nearly 27,000 in 1998, the dropout rate hit 6.9 percent. When teacher ranks climbed to 31,000 in 2007, the dropout rate had fallen to 3.2 percent.

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Maintaining Midwestern Goodness in the Big City

I’ve been spending a lot of time in my local Duane Reade/Walgreens — DuaneGreens? — this week trying to suss out exactly how and why the transition between the two merged pharmacies is working in the effect of Balance Rewards.  So far, so good — but there have been a few jukes and flukes.

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Why I am Glad I am Not Romney's Speech Writer

The speechwriter has one of the hardest jobs in the realm of writing. They must carefully choose words that will be spoken by politicians of different levels including the President of the United States. When the person gives the speech and it is a success, people applaud and think of how well the speaker has spoken. When the speech does not go well, on the other hand, nearly everyone wonders who wrote the terrible speech.

As an example, the speech that presidential candidate Mitt Romney gave at the Republican National Convention was not the one he needed to inspire — it is quite probable that those that were going to vote for Romney on the basis of his not being President Obama. Here are a couple of key low points from the speech.

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Will We Ever Own Our iTunes?

I have over 30,000 songs in my iTunes library and many of those songs were directly purchased from iTunes. I’ve scattered that musical library to Amazon and a portion of it to Google. Lately, I’ve been wondering what would happen to all that music if something happened to me. Sure, my wife could grab it, but should I ultimately plan to donate all that music to a school or sell off bits of the collection?

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