It's a 24-hour time frame with a hole in it...
Amazon
I've shared this link several times; the comments are worth reading too, though the work-around some commenters suggested did not work for me when I tried it. There's another work-around I've described that also seems to need sharing every year or so, as writers wail, "Did you forget to post a review on Amazon?" about some book I've given four stars on Goodreads, Net Galley, and Library Thing. No, that's not possible. My Google account will never forget that it started out as an Amazon Associate account. Amazon buttons pop up everywhere. But Amazon is very deliberately blocking my reviews, although Net Galley sends them and Amazon does seem to be storing them. It's greed rather than a desire for transparency, and there's nothing really wrong with that except that Amazon tried to claim it was about transparency...Amazon now displays reviews only from people who bought the book from them. Publishers' review copies don't make any money for Amazon. What I complained bitterly about, when the must-buy-the-book-from-us policy went into effect, was that purchases made with giftcards don't count either, although they do make money for Amazon. (At the time a lot of online clients found it convenient to pay in Amazon giftcards.)
I don't use cards associated with any real bank account online, and I don't recommend you do either! If, however, you already do buy things online with a credit or debit card account, you may agree on a time when you will be able to log into my Amazon account, using a temporary password, and use your card to buy $50 worth of books. There's no rule about whose name appears on a card (more than one person has already done this) nor about where books are shipped. If you normally buy books for all your friends and relatives, you could have one book sent to my mailing address and the others sent to the next few people on your gift list. (Not that I'd object if you wanted to send me $50 worth of books from my wish list.) The only real requirements are that you buy $50 worth of books within an hour or so, then log out, so I can change the password back. I will not see your card number, nor will you see the password that will work after this shopping spree. "Priscilla King" is a business, of which you, if you choose to do this, are a temporary employee. After spending $50 on Amazon you quit.
In theory the non-writers who are thinking "What impatient little children these writers are! Don't they know that a book that gets four stars on Goodreads is sure to be bought by someone who will give it four stars on Amazon." Writers may understand this, but publishers don't. Today's publishers are no longer the mellow, independent old gentlemen of yesteryear, who had one list per year and could afford for people to discover the slow steady sellers. Today they're all driven yuppie-types, up to their teeth in credit-card debt, ready to shred a book (and its author's reputation) if it's not flying off store shelves in three weeks. After all they sent out review copies to well-known book lovers like Barb Taub and me; those review copies cost the publishers money, and they and the authors have a right to see our reviews on Amazon. But they won't.
I think this is heinously unfair to the authors and publishers, and amounts to religious discrimination against people who are seriously trying to "Owe no man any thing" and/or avoid extravagance. Most reviewers did, after all, originally go to Amazon because our houses and sometimes our stores had every available wall covered in books and we wanted to make a little room for a few new books. We buy books--new books, by the dozens, if we have the money. We go to book parties and ask authors to autograph books as graduation presents for our students. Chortling fondly, if not senilely, over memories of the relative who gave us the Bible (King James Version), Silent Spring, Albert Schweitzer's Life and Thought, and when we asked for "something about a kid" Anne Frank's Diary, for birthday presents in successive years in primary school, and buy similar book-as-flattery-and-as-goad selections for the children we know. But even the relatives who owned the oil fields in the years when they were gushing money, in my family, never did anything so extravagant as make small purchases with credit cards. We order books from publishers with postal money orders, or buy them from local stores with cash. The whole point of calling the bricks-and-mortar store I still want to open an "Internet Portal" was to make it easy for people I know to buy things from Amazon in a local store with cash.
The publishers, I'm sure, would come out ahead if they went back to the old plan of keeping ia book in stock and promoting it for two years, and Amazon would come out ahead if they limited reviews to people who had ordered books from Amazon, but accepted orders placed by publishers or clients or local booksellers for the reader, and orders made online with giftcards. Of course everyone feels desperate; the coronavirus panic has cost and is costing everyone money. But desperation is unseemly, and discourages customers.
Christian
Actually this article about spirituality is not specific. Sadhu Sundar Singh was a Christian but here, I think, he was writing to Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist people too.
Election 2024
Isn't it utterly typical of the Illiberal Left, not just to wallow in a lack of understanding of what RFK's actually said, but to go after his wife? She may not get another movie role, they threaten. Hoot. About time we had a First Lady who's a Summer and can wear colors that don't make practically everyone else look sickly. I think Cheryl Hines would be good in that role. And if they don't win? I think Kennedy's not advertising his wife's work is classy, and I didn't even know what she did, before...I think it's a pretty sure thing that if a big-name studio drops Hines for standing by her man, and a newer, smaller studio picks her up, they'll have a built-in fan club. I mean to say. I usually think blue-eyed blondes get more hype than they want or need already, but isn't she a fine specimen of the type?
Long story short, for those coming in late: Kennedy is not anti-vaccine. Nor am I. Pro-choice and pro-caution are two different things from anti-vaccine. It's like saying that people who sniff, squeeze, weigh, and thump before they buy are anti-fruit. I think even the COVID-19 vaccine actually did well, as poorly tested new vaccines go--it just didn't touch the now-dominant form of COVID=19, for which the effective preventive happens to be natural immunity.(Don't push me on that, though, because it's so likely that the last man I'll ever love, in a physical way, was one of the relatively few casualties.) I think there are some real anti-vaccine people in CHD, but that tells you as much about Kennedy's politics as the fact that there are some fanatical vegans in CHD. Y'know, there are women in CHD, too--RFK is a man.
(Is he the man for whom I'm going to vote? Afaik he's the only D who has a chance of winning, in 2024, if the Republicans don't totally throw away the election by in-fighting, but I find it hard to imagine the Chief Jackasses of the Donkey Party ever supporting a D so sensible. I find it hard to believe I'll have a chance to vote for him. If I had? Is a fish going to swim?)
Farming
A world without bees be a world without these:
Fashion
Actually, if you've ever looked at pigs' feet, their toe bones are exactly like high-heeled shoes. So when I see women wearing their sex toys out in the street, I redirect my mind from the image of what those shoes are actually built for doing to the relatively clean and wholesome image of pigs.
Holidays
I posted something for Mothers Day. I didn't post anything, except Zazzle merchandise, for Fathers Day. Probably that's because I've had twenty more years to get used to not having a father. Anyway the artist known as S.A.R.K. posted a lovely Fathers Day piece.
Pictures
You have to see JJ Pryor's pictures of the Dragon Boat Festival. Gorgeous decorated boats and vivid nighttime scenes:
Politics
Applied Conservative Studies 101: Always encourage any legitimate work as being preferable to welfarism...
I think I have bought a book from Amazon once, and it was a book i really enjoyed, so i left a good review of it. And it's still on Amazon somewhere. Over here we have good libraries with great selections and if the bricks-and-mortar bookstores are dying, some are still holding out.
ReplyDeleteIf I ever went to Singapore, one thing I'd want to see would be the libraries! I imagine most of the books that aren't available here would be in languages I can't read, but it would be interesting, anyway.
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