WhimsyLand

I appreciate that the last thing I said last week was "More tomorrow", but that was before I spent the next three days either sleeping or throwing up with the flu.

You may heard about the little blizzard we're having.  I opened my front door to check the mail and a four-foot drift was piled against it.  It looked weird sitting there like a standing wave.  The blizzard warning is in effect until mid-day Thursday.  Sheesh.  And not a bottle of wine in the house. 

Denver International Airport is, of course, closed down for flights at least until tomorrow evening and many people will be sleeping there on cots tonight.  The official DIA website says "don't come here", and then nicely notes that security wait times are less than 5 minutes.  At the time of Denver's last big blizzard, I was on the last flight out before they shut down.  Then our 75-ton aircraft slid off the runway.  We exited out the rear drop-down stairs and trudged over to a bus that took us back to the airport.  For the next 3 days and two nights, almost a thousand of us sat in the bars, ate from fast-food restaurants, and slept on the carpets.  The most popular activity was riding the underground train.  People were actually talking to each other for a change, and one old guy was passing around a flask.  People of limited means relied on the airport authority's food coupons, which were redeemable at Burger King if you didn't mind waiting 2 hours in a line with hundreds of people in it.  I mainly lived on snack food from the news stand and beer.  It was nice having an ironclad excuse to do nothing but drink beer and read for a couple of days.

I was working on my Amazon Christmas wish list and noticed that:  people who bought Jordan and Sarah's Free Radicals also bought Dumanis and Marvin's Legitimate Dangers; people who bought Sarah's Siste Viator also bought Gabe's A Defense of Poetry and Sabrina's The Babies; people who bought The Babies also bought Alice Notley's Disobedience; people who bought Notley's Disobedience also bought Hejinian's My Life, and Marilyn Hacker's Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons;   people who buy Hacker's books then go out and buy more of them.

In the Spam Arms Race, the newest thing in comment spam is to drop in a section of text ("Madonna says she may adopt another child from abroad following her proposed ...") and a URL to an add for Viagra or mortgage loans.  Movable Type had some decent built-in spam control in their latest version, but it looks like I'll have to apply a Turing Test to comments in the future (I accumulated 350 spam comments during my absence).  A "Turing Test" is short-hand for those squiggly character strings you are asked to type in again to post, and is taken from Turing's famous test for deciding if an intelligent agent was artificial or human. 

I discovered yesterday that an in-law of mine is making large sums of money ghost writing novels for a famous mystery/thriller author.  You've seen him on the front table of any Borders, with what seems to be a new book every 3 or 4 months.  They are always competent, middle-brow fare of the sort that people buy to read on airplanes, and are generally on the NY Times Bestseller list when they come out.  I've heard that authors like Dan Brown and Tom Clancy have armies of researchers and a handful of ghost-writers that handle everything from chapters to entire books.  Books like these have sales of 50,000 or more per week, totaling hundreds of thousands of sales in the course of their life.  If the author gets, say, $4 per book, then every book produced puts another million bucks or more in his/her pocket.  And, these books don't appear at a Pynchonesque rate —  Michael Chrichton has written almost 30 books and Stephen King at least a dozen more than that.  It's hard to believe, but probably true, that all the poetry books sold in the 20th century don't total up to the sales of The DaVinci Code.

The Time "Man of the Year" is you.  That's right, all the people who participate (mainly on the web) to provide content and interaction (think You-Tube).  Like Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States Time has decided (at least temporarily) to throw Carlyle's Great Man Theory of History in the dustbin.  I've met a fair number of Great Men over the years, including three who became billionaires.  The only thing that differed among them was the relative degree of their rapacity and sociopathy. 

Well, I found a bottle of 25-year old creme de menthe.  I bought it when I held a party for my students when I lived in California, and it probably cost 1.99.  Isn't too bad in ginger ale, actually.