The Da Vinci Cold

At least they waited until the reception.

For those who read the New York Times, you know they have a right-leaning columnist named David Brooks, a man who continually berates us coastal liberals for being out of touch with the heartland values of mainstream America. Of course, David Brooks doesn't live in the heartland, he only imagines what life must be like out there in flyover country.

As someone who grew up in small town America, and know first hand what the heartland can cook up given enough alcohol and inbreeding, I think of David every time I read a story like this:

In Ohio, the bride's stepfather chose her special day to stab her father and brother in an argument at the wedding reception. Yes, we've all been to receptions like this, haven't we.

More values from America's heartland.

Does anyone know where Senator Rick Man-on-Dog Santorum was last weekend?

In Pittsburgh, the police found a dead dog dressed up in blue jeans, T-shirt, socks, tennis shoes and a baseball cap. Neighbors said the dog's name was Pimpin', so maybe the poor bastard died of shame.

She's probably blown that 500 grand on tuition and text books.

I wasn't going to post about this latest plagiarism scandal. Duane covered it and First Offenders weighed in, so for me to bring it up might seem like I'm piling on. And you all know that a gentlemen does not pile on.

If this is news to you, Kaavya Viswanathan is a Harvard sophomore who got a cool half mil for this book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life, and one other. She's accused of plagiarizing from novels by Megan McCafferty.

Tom Tomorrow over at This Modern World (I'm not linking to all of these places because they're right over there, you lazy bastards) has this interesting twist. He seems to think someone might have ghosted Kaavya's novel.

Ms. Viswanathan worked with 17th Street Productions, (now Alloy Entertainment), and Alloy holds the copyright to “Opal” with Ms. Viswanathan. I've never heard of a publisher holding the copyright with an author, and neither has Tom. He also points out that 17th Street Productions is a book packaging company. For those who write their own books, a packager hires ghost writers to crank out popular series like Sweet Valley High. Ghost writers get a check and, with that check, they promise not to talk about novels they're written for others. As 17th Street Productions packages the Sweet Valley High Series, Tom wonders if there might not be a ghost lurking somewhere behind Ms. Viswanathan's book.

Publishers are always on the lookout for attractive people to promote, people who would garner more press than say, a bespectacled fifty-something writer who stays at home with his two dogs. That they saw this beautiful Harvard sophomore as a possible new star in the chick-lit cosmos should surprise no one. I can see the people in marketing now, smiling like cats, assured of prime TV time.

This ghost writer theory does provide a new wrinkle to the plagiarism story.

I wonder if somewhere there's a pudgy, pasty, middle-aged guy looking to get into Witness Protection.

Putting audiences to sleep, one reader at a time.

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My credit card company loves me.

So I figure, why not join the rest of America, deep in debt, watching retirement bear down on me like a runaway train.

I'm coming to Phoenix for Thrillerfest. Screw the expense. Want to help? You can always contribute to what promises to be a crippling bar tab.

The kind people at ITW are comping my banquet ticket, because they want to witness, in person, the soul crushing blow when one of the other debut novelists takes home the award. Then they'll point and jeer, chanting

Loser Loser Loser.

I can live with that.

But, and I can't stress this enough, I hate PayPal. Seriously. I hate PayPal. I went to the site to pay my fee, with a credit card because I am an American, and they said my account was restricted because I hadn't OKed the most recent change in the Terms of Service, as if anyone except spammers had contacted me from PayPal about anything in the past year.

So I said, fine, where do I do that? I go to the TOS page and I've bought fucking homes with less legal bullshit. So I wade through it, my eyes glazing over, spending the better part of an hour, then I get to the end and THERE'S NO FUCKING PLACE TO OK THE TERMS OF SERVICE! I CAN'T FIND THE BUTTON. Help is no help. Contact is a lot like SETI, I send out messages and wait for signs of life. I keep circling back, doing it again and again, kicking serious OCD, until I'm now thinking of homicide and not the high-paying fictional kind.

So now I don't know what to do. Anyone at ITW who can take my credit card number? (Don't even try, Mr. Banks). Please, help me out here. I can't write a check because it will bounce higher than Mr. Jordan can jump. I can't get through to the Nazi fucks at PayPal. I am so screwed.

If you go to Phoenix and see sleeping in the lobby, do me a favor and slip me a cracker or two.

Really, writing the book was easier than booking this trip.

Sean Hannity is helping this man reproduce.

Thanks to Jesus' General, we know this man is looking for a mate on Sean Hannity's on-line dating service. (Yes, there is such a thing.) He's called a Hannicatch, and catch he is. Below is his personal information, in his own words and spelling.

Ladies, you might want to check it out.

I dont like the other choices under language first off..If you dont speak English, git the heck out of my country! I dont like other races intermingling with my race, I think the man must defend his women and his race too. But I dont hate the other races, I just think they should git there own place!

And I love kids, they are God's gift to us for doing the evil deed... I have guns and ninja knives and I am looking to share them with that speshul someone. I am irratable when my flag is disrespected, or if queers get too close, but other than that my friends say im easy going unless I get drunk... I am a good protector and I love to be the man...And I love America!!!

I am good lookin and I can kick like a mule... I am athletic and have muscles...Shoes make me feel gay, so I wearboots...I am definately a briefs man..when I wear any...

I am looking for a woman that will stay at home with the kids and with grampaw... I am notpicky about looks, but I do like a bigger girl...I am for real, I need a good woman and I live by the bible... I love kids and wnat to raise them in a christian house that has rules and punishment for breaking the rules..like go to bed with no supper and wash the floor with a toothbrush...or I will git the numchuck out and spank your but! But not to hard cause I am a Christian

There you go, ladies, a real man who knows how to treat a woman.

Somewhere a roscoe barked.

For a second year, I was invited to shoot with a gaggle of military academy graduates, despite my never having advanced beyond the rank of E-4. Twenty-one shooters took up positions at a Camp Butner range and terrorized cardboard for a few hours.

It started to rain as we finished up, so we looked for a place to eat our packed lunches out of the weather. For a half hour I followed officers around in the rain, men who obviously didn't have a fucking clue where we were going. It was a lot like active duty.

Once we found a covered spot for lunch, the grads of West Point, Annapolis and the Air Force Academy added up their scores and a plaque was awarded to the winning team.

Navy won, I think.

I don't know for sure because, as a guest, my score doesn't count. But between you and me, I was 4th out of 21, with a final score of 303.

I don't shoot often. In fact, the last time I was at the range was last year with this bunch. But I did OK. That's one of my targets up there. You'll see all ten rounds hit the paper, and this was at 25 yards. At my advanced age, I can barely see 25 yards, let alone hit anything at that distance. I was just happy I didn't shoot anyone's eye out.

For you gear heads, I was shooting a Colt 1911, my favorite pistol. Seriously old school.

I love these cordite-soaked outtings. When my nephew is in town, we hit the range, him with his Special Ops H&K, me with my slab-side GI .45. A few years ago, my brother-in-law, Chris, took me to the range at Quantico and we threw lead down range. We were the only ones there, and we got to talking with the range master who said, "You boys interested in shooting anything automatic?"

Does the average American shun the all-you-can-eat buffet?

So we fired off a few clips from a Mach 10, an ugly little thing I'd only seen in movies, an Uzi, a weapon I'd fired once in the service, and my personal favorite, an H&K MP5, the choice of SWAT teams the world over. Damn, I want one. I want one real bad.

My sister calls these get-togethers TBEs, or testosterone-based events. Jenny once said, "I don't get it. They're loud, smelly and dangerous," to which Chris and I replied, "And what don't you get?"

So yes, I'm every conservative's nightmare. A liberal with a gun.

I'll close this self-indulgent ode to the firearm with one of my favorite movie quotes. This is from Tombstone, when a blowhard mistakenly reaches for his revolver and an unarmed Wyatt Earp says, "Go ahead. Skin that smoke wagon and see what happens."

Damn, that's some fine writing.

Should I start a political blog or just shoot myself in the head?

Let me start by saying how much I admire Barry Eisler's courage in hosting his new blog, Heart of the Matter, an open forum on important topics. The beginnings have been a little rocky, but not as bad as one might think given the bitter divisions in American politics.


Barry's posts, and one from his friend, former Spec Ops officer who goes by the nom de guerre of Slugg, have been thoughtful, considerate, and informed.

Some of the comments, however have not. One accused Barry of posting nothing more than what he could get from "the drive-by media," the exact phrase I heard yesterday from Rush Limbaugh. So we know what that guy listens to as he scopes out the local elementary school playgrounds.

Then someone suggested that he didn't know you had to be a Special Forces officer in order to cut and paste Seymour Hersch, implying that Slugg's post was just a rehash of what Mr. Hersch had written in the New Yorker, you know, that liberal magazine. Barry promptly set fire to the guy and he left.

Now, I expect things to split along ideological lines, and if you can look way off to your left, you'll see where I'm coming from, and that's OK. Dusty and I have both had fistfights with Charlie Stella, a man of terrific writing ability, in spite of his Neanderthal politics.

Just kidding, Charlie.

No, I'm not.

We all made up in the end and I expect we'll have a few good drinks together in Arizona, and that'll be great. I'm too old to let politics get in the way of alcoholic comraderie. Life is far too short.

But, you know how it is. There's always one guy. One commenter who is stupid or dishonest or sometimes both.

The argument in question went something like this (and I've edited this to make me look smarter and more reasonable. Let the other guy start his own damn blog):

The jerk: "Linguistically speaking, if you're not Pro-Life then the only other choice is Pro-Death."

Me: "I prefer to think of abortion as a right to privacy issue. And nothing is this black and white."

Jerk: "What does politics have to do with abortion? It’s a matter of right and wrong, moral and immoral, life and death. Not politics."

Me: "I'm just saying that nothing is this black and white. There are always shades of gray. There are even contradictions in the Bible, but please, don't start throwing scripture at me."

Around this time the guy asked me why I assumed he was Christian and I, assuming I'd made an incorrect assumption, apologized, to which he replied (and this is a quote):

"Why, because I'm Christian? I think it says something (what I'm not sure) when you feel you have to apologize because you confused me with being Christian. Is being Christian an insult? As far as killing life of any kind, I could very well and might possibly be, a Buddhist. The sad thing is that had I mentioned the unwarranted killing of insects as the Buddhist believe, no one would have said a thing."

Now, if the president was a born-again Buddhist, or the Buddhists were campaigning to get their cosmic tale taught in science class, or if Fox News was reporting every day on the War on Buddhists, then I could see how relevant Buddhisim was to a political discussion, but they're not.

And this guy knows it. Suddenly, he's turned a political discussion, one started as a thread on linguistic spin, into an assault on his religion and he went on to wonder why I was not allowing him (as if I had this magical blog power) to quote scripture.

Jesus Jumping Christ, I had to walk away to keep from reaching through the lines and throttling the guy.

So, while I applaud Barry for trying to host a thoughtful blog on politics, I worry that dishonest asshats like this, armed with the smug surety of the convert, will make it impossible to have an honest give and take.

That's why I save my political rants for the Planet, where I can openly mock people's most deeply held convictions. It's much more fun.

Pooping our way to energy independence.

As the owner of two large dogs, this is the best news I've heard since Jesus. Apparently, we can tell the Saudis to go suck it because we don't need their oil. We have dog poo. Tons of it. I know, because I pick up five or six pounds of it every damn day.

Leave it to the free thinkers of San Francisco to step in something and smell potential. Their punjabs of poo say city pets are producing 6500 tons of the stuff and why shouldn't they turn those turds into turbines. They say the dog doots picked up in city parks and pried from the treads of a million San Francisco sneakers will be used to produce methane gas, which can power America to energy independence. Bite on that, Iran!

Will this mean my boys, Boomer and Duncan, will finally start carrying their weight around here? Probably not. With our luck, once they discover their droppings are worth money, both will become so constipated it'll take dynamite to unblock those bowels.

As the saying goes, "If shit was gold, the poor would be born without assholes."

There goes my case against Jennifer Jordan.

I was going to retire on the money I'd get from suing Jennifer Jordan's Fuck Noir. Now, I'm just fucked.

The California Supreme threw out a sexual harassment case by a former assistant on Friends.

What was her beef? Was she shocked by the sheer fantasy of young people renting those huge Manhattan apartments? Was she offended that the only black person on the show was being boinked by David Schwimmer and was hotter than the sun?

Nope. None of the above.

She was offended by the writers. "They talked icky," she said in her complaint.

"Who the fuck isn't offended by writers?" the chief justice asked. "Now get your skank ass out of our fucking courtroom. And take that faggot lawyer with you."

With the brakes thrown on this gravy train, it looks like I'm going to have to suck it up and finish this novel.

Fuck.

Decline in the death rate? I have a few suggestions.

According to this story, more people than ever are refusing to go toward the light. That's not good. Soon, the highways will be clogged with people driving 45 in the left lane with their blinker on. Come on, folks, time to go. Chop chop.

The story says this is an amazing success for American medicine, but I see it as a conspiracy between denture adhesive marketers and the producers of The O'Reilly Factor. Time to cull the herd.

I know several people who should run a bath and plug in the toaster. There's one guy I worked with who is such an evil prick that I've promised to make him a character in every book I write. The fat neo-Nazi pedophile? That's the guy. The businessman who picks up a transvestite hooker and gets used for group water sports? That's him, too. The guy's name is Tom and he's someone we could definitely do without. Come on, Tom. Stand in this puddle and hold these wires. That's right. That's right.

Let's all encourage people to shuffle off and let's get that death toll back up where it belongs. Come on, people, if we work together, we can make the USA number one.

Number one!
Number one!
Number one!

Twenty-six years ago today...

I know, I know, the mustache was a big mistake, but marrying this woman was the smartest thing I've ever done.

Happy Anniversary, Jenny.

Thank you for taking on this lifetime project.

You want to support the troops? Send them your books.

I was a kid, uneducated, bored, removed from everything anyone would consider a normal life, and I was desperate for things to read. Thoughtful friends sent me books. They sent Richard Brautigan and John Barth, Steinbeck and Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde and Chekov, Shakespeare and Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Joseph Conrad. I still have that collection of Conrad in my library, thank you Miss O'Donnell.

I can't tell you how grateful I am, 35 years later, to those who took the time and effort to send those books.

Now it's our turn. Jennifer Jordan posted this over at her place and I want to pass it along, just in case you missed it. I don't care what your politics are. I don't care what you send. Just send something. These guys will appreciate books more than you will ever know.

Do it now, and pass this along to your friends. I'm putting together a box today and I urge you to do the same.

21st TSC, Medical Transient Detachment
ATTN: Soldiers' Angels,
Mary Ann Phillips
UNIT 23203
APO AE 09263

Good news! Wolfowitz says bird flu could kill us all.

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz says bird flu would bugger the word economy and kill billions. Hurray!

Paul Wolfowitz was one of the major architects of the Iraq war, the guy who said it would pay for itself and wouldn't cost American taxpayers a dime. Considering he was off by 300 billion dollars (and counting), we can figure he's completely wrong about this, too. Wonderful news!

And it gets better.

President Bush is expected to turn his laser-like attention toward "a detailed action plan" for how the United States would deal with this threat from birds.

"I don't like parrots. You can't trust 'em," the President said. "They talk. And that parrot in Nogales is a liar."

So relax, eat all the Chinese chicken you want. The bird flu isn't a problem.

Thanks, Mr. Wolfowitz! Thanks, Mr. President!

Selling books and selling out

I don't want to talk about Rumsfeld and his resignation. We kicked that horse to death over at Barry Eisler's fine new blog.

No, I want to talk about book promotion.

Tommy Franks showed up on MSNBC's Hardball, and what fascinated me was not Tommy's fellating the boss with the giant-headed Chris Matthews. No, what caught my eye was the strategic placement of Tommy's five million dollar memoir. Not one, but two copies flanked his military noggin, both ready for prime time. (I couldn't find a screen snap, so I threw together a facsimile in Photoshop, but trust me, it was this obvious.)

Joe Konrath has covered book promotion over at his place, and he's all for it. Really. But even Joe draws the line at this kind of blatant shill. In his excellent guide for conference panelists, he tells writers that it's inappropriate to prop their book up on the dais.

But here's Tommy Franks being interviewed about six generals' claim that the management of this war has been so disastrous in its incompetence that heads should roll, and Tommy sees it as a great opportunity to push a little paper.

I have a disclaimer to make here. I was one of the writers considered, very briefly, to co-write Tommy's memoirs, and if it had been my name in small type on the cover you can bet I'd be all up in this shameless promotion. Go Tommy Go!

But it was still chutzpa on a major scale. If it was me, and I was being interviewed about something as serious as mixing a fine vodka martini (I have few other areas of expertise), I don't think I'd put two copies of Beneath A Panamanian Moon up behind my jug-eared head.

One copy, maybe. But two?

Even whores have things they won't do.

And the winner is...

I got four players for this tired old contest, proving it's stayed long past your patience.

That said, the winner is Rita. This was my typewriter until an old girlfriend gave it a three story drop, telling me more graphically than any other critic that maybe writing wasn't my game.

Too late, Sandra. Snoozer.

Way off, Steve.

And Duane, you're too smart for your own good.

Now, Rita, if you'll email your name and address to davidterrenoire@hotmail.com, I'll send you one of my last copies of Beneath A Panamanian Moon. If you'd like a personal inscription, let me know, but I've been told it's worth more with just a signature.

About 25 cents more.

The Last Typewriter Challenge

Yes, this is the last one. Yes, I can hear the multitudes cheering. But the best news is, this challenge comes with a prize.

That's right. The first person to correctly guess the owner of this machine will win a book, signed by this author.

Clues? This writer is still alive, although the typewriter bit the dust about the time the tall ships entered New York harbor for the big Bicentennial blow-out. He's written a small handful of short stories but he's best known for his first book.

If I told you more, there wouldn't be any challenge to The Challenge.

Take your best guess. I have work to do.

Shut Up and Sing, Part II.

This should be filed under "Be Careful What You Wish For."

Back when every true American thought the Iraq war was a swell idea, radio talk show trull Laura Ingraham wrote a book that billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife bought up by the bushel. This book, aimed at Hollywood entertainers, was called Shut Up and Sing.

Cue Neil Young.

Jonathan Demme, who filmed the recent documentary Neil Young: Heart of Gold, reports that, “Neil just finished writing and recording – with no warning – a new album called Living With War ... a brilliant electric assault, accompanied by a 100-voice choir, on Bush and the war in Iraq. Truly mind blowing. Will be in stores soon.”

The featured track is titled “Impeach the President.”

Shut up and sing, indeed.

Bull City Hell

JD Rhoades brings his Hell On Earth Tour '06 to my home town of Durham today. He'll be reading from his book, soaking up the love, until I clear my throat, remind him that there are people in the audience who are thirsty, and then we'll adjourn to a place of food and drink, followed by a pilgrimmage to The Blue Bayou for some electric blues.

If you're in town, join us. Regulator Bookshop, Ninth St., 7:00 pm