Fiction and Gender
One of the best analyses I've read of why women prefer "women's fiction," when as a class we don't consistently prefer women's conversation, was a "Gene & Gina" feature in the Washington Post Magazine, in which Gene Weingarten let himself be schooled by Regina Barreca on writing columns women found funny.
In this column Gene and Gina wrote alternate paragraphs of a flash of fiction about two yuppies meeting for lunch in a yuppie restaurant.
Each paragraph showed us what each yuppie was thinking as they said the first half-dozen or so lines in their conversation. Basically they were selfish, friendless, one-dimensional yuppie jerks, more concerned with being rated better than others in their field than with accomplishing anything in particular. She was a "top" oncologist; he was a "top" lawyer. She wanted to hire him to investigate something. Before she had a chance to explain what, however, the male yuppie became twitchy. They'd been just sitting and talking and thinking for 500 words, he howled, using up another hundred or so, and nothing was happening! He was trapped in a modern, female-friendly story! "DO something!"
"So she shot him."
Readers like it when fiction moves a little faster than real life, but only believably so. We don't have to sit through the process of elimination in which she decided to hire this particular lawyer and not one of the other 500 lawyers in the city. We do expect him to sit still through the explanation of what he's been hired to investigate.
Music
These music links came from a site that attracts a slightly older crowd. You may notice. However: Steppenwolf.
Skeeter Davis.
NRBQ.
Dan Hicks.
Cowboy Frank.
Greg Abbott's computer parodies a song by Frank Sinatra. The voice sounds almost real...until you listen to the words.
Van Halen.
Aaron Neville.
Pennsylvania in Danger
Proposed "data center" could inflict more unwanted climate change on Virginia, Maryland, and New York as well. You must live in the county to sign the petition but you can publicize it, and fund it of course, from anywhere. Pennsylvania was not designed to support these things. If they exist they need to be somewhere, I don't know, out in the Sonora Desert, or in the glyphosate-soaked prairie of Iowa, or buried in the permafrost on the Canadian Shield. No "data centers" should be allowed within fifty miles of any town or working farm.
Prepare for the walkout. If the corporations insist on rolling their "data centers" into our towns the way they ram their "updates" into our computers...there's one thing we can do before weak town council members come up for reelection. That is walking out of the Internet. We all remember how to unplug. It will seem odd and uncomfortable at first, but we were living adequate lives before the Internet existed and we will live adequate lives if it has to come all the way down. But a solid, early walkout is the best chance of keeping the Internet going. All we have to demand are NO "data centers"--NO "cloud storage" for our data--we will connect to the Internet, if at all, only from computers with hard drives AND external data drives. No Chromebooks. No Windows 11. No "phone apps." (No flatphones!) If even a few technorati do it and stick to it, the corporations will have to back down. There'll be no demand for "data centers" if they're having to negotiate whether there's a demand for computers at all.
Pennsylvania is meant to look like this...
(photo: Homeworthy)
...not like this.
(photo: China.org)
Weather
What's your local Air Quality Index rating? Kingsport's and Bristol's, and presumably Gate City's, are primo just now, according to this map:
Of course, that's in terms of smoke from other people's wildfires, only. Actual air quality just now is so humid that one wretched smoker walking down the road below is likely to make breathing unpleasant for hours. Smokers should avoid walking on this road.
This particular smoker should know that what I see out the window is a kid, a nice lad a bit older than The Nephews, married to a nice girl, hardworking and intelligent young people I would like to help to succeed. And because I've never actually heard of a case where an elderly widow wrecked the home of a nice young couple, because Kathy Lee Griffin's toy boy is at least a bachelor and so was Shug Avery's and anyway she was fiction and real old ladies who have toy boys have money to support the wretched things, but even so the filthy minds of some neighbors can imagine that I might want a toy boy--which I do not--helping you succeed means that you walk on other roads, where all the houses have men in them. If I talk to you it needs to be in front of your house, with your wife in sight. If you walk up this road for the exercise and the scenic mini-waterfalls, you should walk as a couple, preferably by daylight, and leave the cancersticks at home. (The dogs, of course, are welcome.)
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