Don’t Hitchhike

Tue   23 Sep 2008   15:36 by McGehee 6 comments [Fiction] Completed

UPDATE: I’ve consolidated this story in this one post, since it’s the one that’s received actual reader comments. I wrote this story—or more accurately, the story this version is based on—years ago, and did actually have it posted on the web for a while. In retrospect the ending was beyond suspension-of-disbelief design specs, and OSHA should have closed it down. By the way, alert readers might think they can figure out, based on physical descriptions, where “Clearwater” is. It’s true I may borrow from the physical environments of real places to describe the settings of my stories, but the people and events are entirely my own invention and are not meant to reflect on the actual residents of real places. Except California, if it makes them look bad or weird. Because, I mean, come on... It was a hell of a place to be afoot, out in the middle of the desert, a hundred miles from anywhere, walking along a stretch of two-lane highway where you were more likely to be bowled over by a galloping pronghorn than see a passing vehicle. And if a car or truck did come along it would be just my luck if it was somebody from Clearwater who’d recognize me, hit the gas, and blow on by. The moral of that story is, step soft sometimes or you’ll curdle that milk of human kindness that just might save your life. A man could die walking across Little’s Empty, which is what people call this wide-open tract of nothing. I was facing a long hike in work boots, blue jeans and a T-shirt. No hat to keep the sun off, just a dirty red bandanna for a sweatband. My worn, shabby old gym bag wasn’t big enough for more than two changes of clothes and anyway I’d figured to ride my Harley the whole way home from Little Springs (named after the same guy as the desert, and if I owned this much desert I’d damn sure own the springs too) in three hours at most. Damn machine gave out on me halfway between, and now I’d been walking for an hour, the hot sun blazing down on me from a cloudless sky, burning the back of my neck as I trudged on northward. My feet hurt like hell, but if I heard somebody coming I suppressed the urge to limp. » Read more "Don’t Hitchhike"

Tue   23 Sep 2008   12:49 3 comments

Playing Hooky The last couple of days I have not only not been blogging, I’ve been kind of remiss in writing. You hadn’t noticed, had you? That’s why I’m mentioning it.

Reasons to Conduct Regular Hard Drive Maintenance Even When Your System Seems to Be Working Fine

Sun   21 Sep 2008   22:10 by McGehee [Asides]

#67,312,645,346,567,589,342,387,656,904,578,234: I’ve been having a number of frustrating problems with Firefox over the last few months, starting with a disturbing tendency for the browser to crash for no apparent reason on an entirely too regular basis. If it didn’t crash, it would suddenly stop being able to access websites, and cause my system to bog down until I rebooted it—after which everything would be just fine. Or, embedded streaming video might refuse to run more than two seconds, forcing me to use another browser (usually Google Chrome) to view the video. Well, tonight I decided to defrag my two main hard drives and throw in a virus scan, and I discovered that there seemed to be some isolated disk errors—including one affecting Java. Which, reasonably, could cause trouble for web browsing. Ran a disk scan, and then pointed my virus scanner at the folders containing the files affected by the disk errors, and now everything seems to be okay. I won’t know for a few days whether the browser crashing behavior, or the system resource trouble (neither RAM nor CPU usage, as far as any of my utilities could ever identify), are really gone, but disk errors on the boot drive are never a good thing, and they are gone. <fingers crossed> Update, Tuesday afternoon: So far, so good. 9:34 a.m., Wednesday: First browser crash since fixing the disk errors. We’ll see how long before the next one. Around 10:00 p.m. Wednesday: Not a browser cache per se, but the system bogdown mentioned before, accompanying a loss of web connection. A re-check of the CPU usage showed there is actually an unaccounted-for 80-plus percent processor activity during these episodes, which I hadn’t seen before. Before rebooting I scheduled another disk check on my boot drive, and the next time I reboot there will be a scan for errors on the external drive. Thursday afternoon: Firefox 3.02 auto-installed after a system reboot. We’ll have to see if the browser is more stable after whatever progressive disk-error problems I may be having, re-assert themselves. (I hope I’m not having progressive disk-error problems, but if I am, I need to know about it before the drive goes boom.)

The 48-Hour Rule (Update: It Only Took 24!) (Re-Update: More like 120!)

Sun   21 Sep 2008   11:45 by McGehee 3 comments [War] [Get Offa My Lawn!] [Media Ochre]

Originally posted 9/15, re-updated and bumped. I was interested in this when I saw it headlined on a well-known headline-aggregator’s website, but I held off because I figured if there was anything to it other, better-read blogs would cover it, and probably have a better handle on it than I’d be able to get. On the surface it looks perfectly like the alleged “October Surprise” from the 1980 campaign, which makes it both highly attractive, and highly suspect. Two pieces I’ve seen so far are at Ace of Spades and Wizbang. It’s entirely possible there is something to this, that mainstream voters need to hear about—but right now it doesn’t appear so. UPDATE! Confirmed—by Obama. H/t: The Jawa Report. ‘NOTHER UPDATE!!!!!eleventy!! It took only 24 hours for the Obama campaign to confirm the allegation, and four whole days thereafter for Bush and Republicans to debunk it—because Obama couldn’t. Most of a week passed before the truth came out, and it DIDN’T come from the guy who was there and who was negatively impacted by the story. The guy who thinks he’s entitled to be our next president. Yeah, he’s ready for prime time, all right.

Watch Your Step

Sun   21 Sep 2008   11:21 by McGehee Talk back [Our Times] [Get Offa My Lawn!] [Here's Your Sign]

...that slope is slippery. In a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night. The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC’s “This Week,” telling George Stephanopoulos that coverage of foreign-based banks is “a distinction without a difference to the American people.” » Foreign banks may get help I beg to differ… Leaving that aside, however: this is why getting the government into the bailout business is ALWAYS a bad idea. There is no logical stopping place. If the government can offer loan guarantees to Chrysler, why can’t it also bail out mortgage lenders? And if it can bail out American corporations, why not foreign ones as well? There will always be a good-sounding argument for taking it that one step further, and at what point does it finally become respectable to say, “Wait a minute, stop! That’s going a step too far!” I submit that the “one step too far” was taken over 70 years ago. Maybe longer.

Fri   19 Sep 2008   9:57 2 comments

This Day Brought to You by… ...the letter AAARRRRRR!!!

The McGehee PDA Zone
Wed   17 Sep 2008   15:02 by McGehee 1 comment [Asides]	Readers viewing this site with a PDA or other small-display device should change their bookmarks to McGeheeZone.com/index.php/pda/ That URL will show you a much-stripped-down version of this site—lacking, for example, the sidebar with its blogroll and other links. I welcome feedback from users as to its readability on their devices. Update: URL fixed.

The Conscience of the Kingpin

Tue   16 Sep 2008   21:19 by McGehee Talk back [Asides]

Chris and I have recently become riveted to the new FX TV series “Sons of Anarchy.” I read somewhere that there are parallels to Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the character relationships of Jax, his mother Gemma (Katey Sagal), and her second husband (and the gang’s leader) Clay (Ron Perlman, by himself the reason we watched the pilot). Mindful of this, I’ve been paying particular attention to what is being developed on the series about Jax’s relationship to his late father as well as to his mother and stepfather. If the tension there is fully explored, at some point Gemma will be caught between her flesh-and-blood son on the one hand, and her husband and the figurative family the gang represents, on the other. If this were a Lifetime-TV series, she would of course choose Jax over Clay. But “Sons of Anarchy” is from the creators of “The Shield,” and though I’d never watched that show I quickly saw similarities between “Sons of Anarchy” and “The Sopranos.” No, Gemma wouldn’t side with Jax. But she can’t turn against him either, since family ties have been paid some serious lip service so far even by Clay. How she tries to hold it together will be interesting to see. Readers of the story I’ve been writing are aware that family ties are one of the larger themes being explored. Chapter 4 in particular deals with the familial relationships among the three Scruggins men that you’ve met so far, though some of the tensions glimpsed have been only partly exposed. I know why the source of Bob’s given name is an issue between Seth and Caleb, but I haven’t decided whether it will be more than a side strand to that thread. It gives some insight into the Scrugginses themselves but may only be a matter of texture rather than an actual plot point. I will admit that Seth, never having appeared directly in anything I’ve ever written before, is proving to be extremely interesting to me. I’m finding it challenging to move away from the Scrugginses and back onto the other plot threads I want to write about. I’m gradually working my way through a revision of another Scruggins-centric story I wrote years ago, bringing it more into the continuity represented by “Play Rough, Fight Dirty,” and will have it posted fairly soon. Maybe the work I’m doing on it will slake my interest in that clan long enough to get back to the Calhouns and Ironwoods, et al, for a few more chapters. Update, Wednesday: I reached a cliffhanger situation of sorts in rewriting the old short story, and posted it here. I’m sure I’ll resolve the cliffhanger. Eventually.

[checks calendar]

Mon   15 Sep 2008   11:42 by McGehee 1 comment [Wackadoodle]

...nope, it’s September 15, not April 1. So, my question about this is, when did The Penguin become the CEO of Google? Google may take its battle for global domination to the high seas with the launch of its own “computer navy”. » Google search finds seafaring solution Apparently that whole “Don’t Be Evil” thing has gone by the boards—along with the unspoken “Don’t Be Campy” and “Don’t Be Bond-Villain-esque.” Holy megalomania, Batman.

This Just In: Vegetarians Are Pinheads

Mon   15 Sep 2008   0:09 by McGehee 1 comment [Our Times]

This news is almost as earth-shattering as the discovery that things thrown up into the air don’t as a rule tend to stay there. Scientists have discovered that going veggie could be bad for your brain-with those on a meat-free diet six times more likely to suffer brain shrinkage. Vegans and vegetarians are the most likely to be deficient because the best sources of the vitamin are meat, particularly liver, milk and fish. Vitamin B12 deficiency can also cause anaemia and inflammation of the nervous system. Yeast extracts are one of the few vegetarian foods which provide good levels of the vitamin. The link was discovered by Oxford University scientists who used memory tests, physical checks and brain scans to examine 107 people between the ages of 61 and 87. » Eating veggies shrinks the brain On my Facebook page I recently changed my political label from “conservative” to “red-meat hippie.” So right, it’s embarrassing.

Page 3 of 796 pages  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 >  Last »