Just An Earth-Bound Misfit, I
(No Kings, Ever!)

“The personnel manager called himself a human resources manager and, like personnel managers the world over, was one of the least personable people one could meet. Sitting across him, it was difficult not to feel that anyone who could happily reduce individuals to resources, to the same level as oil, bricks, and canaries in coal mines, probably shouldn’t be allowed to have any human relations that didn’t involve locks and prison bars.” — John Connolly, Every Dead Thing

He's trying out a career as a writer of mysteries. The big mystery is why anyone would buy his book. Trumpanzees hate him because he hit the gas on the Russia investigation. Democrats hate him because he put his thumb on the scales at the end of the 2016 election. Oh, he claims that he did it out of his sense of morals and honor, but for a really tall guy, he's pretty much a disgusting heap of sleaze.

I don't know if he has any talent as a writer. But I have zero interest in finding out in any way that could put a nickel into his pocket.

Renegade, by Adam Kinzinger. He's a Christian conservative who is, as you might have guessed, dismayed that his political party has turned into a fascist cult of personality.

I did learn that "accidentally" hitting other congressmen in the back is a dick move that McCarthy was known for. And that when the mob invaded the Capitol, Kinzinger was sitting in his office, alone, with the door locked and a Ruger LCP on his desk. He had given his staff the day off because he had been paying attention and he suspected that shit was going to get real.

But as for the rest of the book? Other than his personal history, as far as the politics go, the rise of the Tea Party, the events leading up to the TOFF's Coup Day and the aftermath, if you have been paying any attention to the news coverage (on non-Fox platforms), you probably won't learn anything. And those who have partaken of the MAGA Kool-Aid won't read it, so I'm not quite certain what Kinzinger thought that he was accomplishing by doing this book.

Kinzinger is holding to hope that his party will get over Trump and recover from the insanity of the past few decades. To that, I say: Objection, assumes facts not in evidence.

The big news is that Raylan's daughter has exited the show (thankfully). She was an addition to the tale originally told by Elmore Leonard and not in a good way. It was proof that Hollywood can fuck up anything.

But now they're back to more closely following the source material and the improvement shows. Even to someone who hasn't read the book (like a good friend of mine).

I will say this: Whoever added the material about Raylan Given's daughter has basically debased Elmore Leonard's work. It's one thing when they were mining his material for the original series (the shooting of two hitmen, Joe and Frank, in the original series, S1E4, comes from Pronto) yet it's quite another when the story and much of the dialogue comes from one book. Hell, if they wanted padding, there was an interview between the protagonist and a reporter which should have been good for several minutes, at least.

But I did like the mentioning of the original protagonist of the novel.

I've only watched ep.1, so these are first impressions. I have read the book.

First off, the protagonist in the book is a city cop, a homicide lieutenant. And he's certainly not dragging his young daughter around with him. The first part of the episode was extraneous, but the last part is fairly faithful to the book, right down to the make and model of the gun used by the bad guy.

So there may be some promise to this show. But we shall see. TV has a storied track record of fucking with and demolishing good source material.

The Good Book is being treated like a bad book in Utah after a parent frustrated by efforts to ban materials from schools convinced a suburban district that some Bible verses were too vulgar or violent for younger children.
...
The 72,000-student Davis School District north of Salt Lake City removed the Bible from its elementary and middle schools while keeping it in high schools after a committee reviewed the scripture in response to a parental complaint. The district has removed other titles, including Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” and John Green’s “Looking for Alaska,” following a 2022 state law requiring districts to include parents in decisions over what constitutes “sensitive material.”

I'm surprised that nobody has tried to ban a classic children's book, Johnny Tremain, since it has parts glorifying destruction of private property by political terrorists.

But really, the school district had little choice. If it didn't ban the Bible, then it would open the door wide to litigation challenging the law itself.

This is today's bestsellers list from the NY Times:


Jerrod the Boy wonder's book is at #2. That dagger symbol, underlined in red, indicates that there have been bulk purchases of the books at the bookstores that report their sales to the Times. What that means is that someone, or a group of someones, are trying to cook the bestsellers list by making it appear that a book is more popular than it truly is.

This seems to be a particular thing with the Right Wing Batshitters. A lot of books by the Fascist Right gain bestseller status by cooking the list. Both The Toff and his eldest spawn have done this. Flip-flop Mitt did it. So did Ben Shapiro, Caribou Barbie, Fascist Newtie and the Canadien Usurper. Because, get real; who the fuck is going to buy a book about a guy who shoved his dog into a rooftop carrier? Or some kid who, without connections to his corrupt family (both by birth and inlaws), would be the swing-shift manager at an Arby's?

But when books about the TOFF that are not flattering come into print, those are legitimate bestsellers.

[Former president Donald] Trump once proposed launching “missiles into Mexico to destroy the drug labs”.

According to [Trump's Defense Secretary Mike] Esper, Trump said “no one would know it was us”, because he would simply deny responsibility. Esper said he would have thought Trump was joking, had he not been looking at the president as he said it.

Trump was just nuts. As time went on in his administration, The TOFF kept losing more and more of his mind.

He was not helped by people like his Staff Nazi, Stephen Miller, whose idea of a good time was committing atrocities:

Miller is also alleged to have suggested severing the head of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, an Islamic State leader killed by the US, dipping it in pig’s blood and parading it as a warning to other terrorists.

Esper says he told Miller that would be a “war crime”. To the New York Times, Miller denied the episode and called Esper a “moron”.

But let's not honor Esper for telling the truth. He had plenty of opportunities to tell the American people what a dangerous and unhinged lunatic was sitting behind the Resolute Desk. Esper could have talked to a reporter the day after he was fired and said "look, this guy is totally unhinged" and explained why that was so. But he didn't. Esper kept his yap shut for eighteen months until he could profit the most from telling his tale. Which is a move that is almost Trumpian in its avarice.

My recommendation is that if you want to read his book, get it from your local library.

Also "Notes from Legitimate State-Approved News Sources", "Sanctions and Punishment" and "From Russia with Heavy Artillery".

There was a mention of it on Ten Bear's blog. When I looked into the writeup about the book, it looked interesting. So I ordered it.

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Gun Jesus looks at what may be the first portable Gauss rifle.



It's not terribly practical as of yet. For muzzle energy, it's probably around a Crosman .22 pellet gun. But you know that this thing will be refined and something like it will be usable.

And, as of yet, they aren't "guns". So if you had the technical ability, you could design and make one.

A TV adaptation of the late Sue Grafton’s million-selling Kinsey Millhone mystery novels, a prospect the author once swore she would return from the dead to prevent, is now the works.
...
“I will never sell (Kinsey) to Hollywood. And, I have made my children promise not to sell her. We’ve taken a blood oath, and if they do so I will come back from the grave: which they know I can do,” she told January Magazine. “They’re going to have to pass the word on to my grandchildren: we do not sell out our grandma.”

Grafton’s daughter Jamie Clark reaffirmed her mother’s vow when announcing her death four years ago, but the author’s husband and executive producer of the series, Steve Humphrey, says he and the family have agreed that the times — and the medium — have changed.

I call horseshit. The author didn't want her works sold for adaptation, but now she's long dead and her family has decided that they'd best grab the money whilst the grabbing is good.

Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, who orbited the moon alone while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin made their historic first steps on the lunar surface, died Wednesday. He was 90.

During an interview with NASA on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing, he had this to say:

Usually, you find yourself either too young or too old to do what you really want, but consider: Neil Armstrong was born in 1930, Buzz Aldrin 1930, and Mike Collins 1930. We came along at exactly the right time. We survived hazardous careers and we were successful in them. But in my own case at least, it was 10 percent shrewd planning and 90 percent blind luck. Put LUCKY on my tombstone.

His book Carrying the Fire is worth reading.

Shit's going on here. This post will take you to others I've written.

Worth reading: The Minute Men by John Galvin

Hal Holbrook, the craftsman who reincarnated Mark Twain on stage and screen for more than six decades and also stood out as Abraham Lincoln and Deep Throat, two other American legends, has died. He was 95.

Normally, I don't comment on celebrity passings. I tend to be of the opinion that master plumber are more important than movie actors.

But I'm making an exception for Mr. Holbrook. I saw his one-man Mark Twain show a very long time ago. A nice touch was, when starting one of the acts, he puffed smoke from his cigar from behind the curtain at stage left. It got a laugh.

What reading that I've done of Mark Twain was because my interest was sparked by his portrayal. He was, to my mind, Mr. Twain. One of the pieces Mr. Holbrook did during the show was from "Advice to Youth":

Don't meddle with old unloaded firearms. They are the most deadly and unerring things that have ever been created by man. You don't have to take any pains at all with them; you don't have to have a rest, you don't have to have any sights on the gun, you don't have to take aim, even. No, you just pick out a relative and bang away, and you are sure to get him. A youth who can't hit a cathedral at thirty yards with a Gatling gun in three-quarters of an hour, can take up an old empty musket and bag his mother every time at a hundred. Think what Waterloo would have been if one of the armies had been boys armed with old rusty muskets supposed not to be loaded, and the other army had been composed of their female relations. The very thought of it makes me shudder.

I was able to use that to good effect in a legal case, which pissed the hell out of the other lawyer.

Take a gander, sometime, at the bestsellers' list. This is one for nonfiction hardcover books.

On some books, you will see a little dagger symbol: † That indicates that some booksellers who report for the list received bulk orders of that book.

It is almost always right-wing screeds. In this list, it's books by Sean Hannity and Sarah Saunders; two people who are among the most notorious peddlers of Trumpist propaganda out there.

Contrast that with books that didn't need bulk orders to make the list: Melania and Me, Too Much and Never Enough, Disloyal, Hoax, Compromised and Donald Trump v. the United States; all books that did not require bulk sales to trolls in order to make the list.

When you see that a conservative is being lauded for writing a best-seller, other than Bill O'Reilly's histories or Chris Wallace's book on the dropping of the atomic bombs, you can be pretty sure that the only way that they made the best-sellers' list was by cheating.

I was reading a mystery the other day.1 As the story reached its climax, Our Hero pulled out his .357 revolver and "thumbed off the safety."

I wanted to throw the book across the room, and I might have, if it wasn't a libary book.

So anyway, here's this:


I don't know how a mystery author can take a lot of time to get places and locations correct and not spend five freaking minutes doing basic research on the basic tool of the trade of a fictional private detective.2
_____________________________
1. Collision Bend by Les Roberts.
2. Robert B. Parker was horrible in this regard.

In case you wish to pre-order.

UP 844 last month.


844 had a starring role in the latest Longmire novel The Western Star by Craig Johnson. Other than 844, it's not my favorite of the series, by any means.

I'm no fan of Comey. I think he put his thumb on the electoral scales to as much effect, if not more, than did the Russians. What he did in `16 was more about covering his bureaucratic ass than anything else. I wonder if this book is partially an attempt to try to toss some smoke over that.

It would seem that it is not a bright thing for a potential trial witness to go blabbing on long interviews, let alone writing a book. All of that will become grist for a cross-examination.

On the other hand, if he put the book out in two or three years, far fewer people would care, let alone buy it. So there is an undercurrent of "cashing out while the cash is good", at least to me. It's not a pleasant smell.

Besides all that, this book is #1 on Amazon's best sellers list and will probably be at or near #1 on the next iteration of most other best sellers lists (non fiction) by the end of the upcoming weekend. To to the extent that will gnaw at the rotting and diseased heart of El Trumpo, that's a good thing.