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The Sorry Legend of the Great Bootsock

The Legend of the Great Bootsock is a sorry homily for the rest of us who have talent, but zero gumption to keep fighting the hard fight against time and condition and geography.

The Great Bootsock got his name as the star of his small-town high school football team.  As the true freshman quarterback of his team, he won the first game he ever played by diving over a goal line scrum — even though one of the opposing players had grabbed his sock and was pulling him back from the score.

When the sock pulled away from the aggressor’s grasp, it wrapped around the heel of the great Bootsock’s cleats, sticking there like a flag of immediate infamy and respect, and the Legend of the Great Bootsock was born.

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Three Days of a Hundred Years of Darkness: Hurricane Sandy and 12 Months of Nothingness

One year ago today, 8.5 million people in the New York City area were without heat or power as Hurricane Sandy blasted the soft middle of our lives — thrusting us backward a hundred years behind a wall of water into at least three days of cold and darkness:

Monday night, at 11:00 pm sharp in Jersey City, New Jersey, the lights went out and stayed off until last night at 7:43pm.  That’s three days without power or heat.  Hurricane Sandy was a massively nasty beast, and we’re just now starting the recovery process.  We are hungry and scavenging for food.  Supermarkets are closed.  Few places have power.

For many of those directly touched by the floodwater a year ago, life has yet to return to normal, and many will never recover the good lives they once had before the storm; and that is a clear failure of the government safety net and the lack of any sort of real social fabric that meshes us together.  The King has no clothes, and we don’t, either!

When it is better, and more profitable, to cut and run and abandon than it is to stay and rebuild and recover — we all have a problem.

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My Failed Daily Short Story Experiment Results

Robert Burns once wrote, “The best laid schemes of mice and men / Go often awry, / And leave us nothing but grief and pain, / For promised joy!” I thought of this stanza often during the course of this last month. Before the month started I had the idea that I would attempt to write one story every day, give or take. At the end of the month I found myself with one complete story and one partially completed stories and a lot of days during which I did not get any new writing done but I did edit one of the two stories.

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Failure of The Voice in Season Two

Last year, I really enjoyed the debut of The Voice on NBC.  I thought it was a fresh approach to music and we needed that respite from the drudgery of American Idol.

It’s that time of the year again and both Idol and The Voice are back and competing for eyes and ears and I am disappointed to report that, so far, The Voice has lost its magic in its insipid ordinariness and predictability.  What used to be unique and fun has now become a bit of a bore fest.

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Divorcing Amazon Prime Because of A-1 Courier Services Cheating

UPDATED:  August 11, 2010
A representative from A-1 Courier Services, moments ago, just posted an “anonymous” comment on this article.  I replied to “joe blow” in the comments stream, but I also want to be on-the-record here, in the article proper, with the evidence of A-1’s continued betrayal and deceit as a company.

Here is a screenshot of the comment notification email.  Notice the IP address and the resolution of such as “mail.aoneonline.com” and also notice the name and email address are also faked.

Doing a public lookup for — IP: 67.151.183.242 , mail.aoneonline.com — provides this result for that IP address:

Amazing, isn’t it? Why did A-1 bother faking their identity?  Why not provide a cogent and rational comment that would be on-the-record for everyone to read?  I believe that behavior to falsify is powerful, public, testimony against what sort of company A-1 really is in the continued analysis of evidence.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE PUBLISHED:  August 5, 2010
Amazon, we have a problem.  For years, I have given you the best years of my life and thousands of dollars.  I rely on you to bring me music, food, household supplies and pretty much everything else I buy to live a life in a shrinking, modern, world — but those days of my reliance upon your nurturing fame and quenchable celebrity are over.  I am currently an Amazon.com Prime member.  I will not renew my Prime relationship with you as I wean away my love to find other online providers who will meet my needs.

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When Nothing Indicates Something

Nothing is always something.  The lack of finding something isn’t an indicator of failure — it is actually a revelation that what we thought was there, was not.  Recently, the New York Times reported on the “failure” of the promise of genetic mapping research to help find more cures:

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On Not Being The Goat

At Columbia University in the City of New York, the unconquerable and indefatigable Dr. Howard Stein, would beg his graduate Playwriting students to never be “The Goat” on any production.

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