My Bad Attitude.

This is how writers come up with stories:

I was reading a food blog today. I can't cook, but I do like to watch. Someone had posted pictures of a diner in a small Utah town. The menu included several Spam-based items. Insert Monty Python song here. Someone responding to the post questioned the presence of so much Spam. I opined that it was because of the large numbers of Mormon missionaries sent to Hawaii. I said we send them back with Spam and chlamydia.

Here's the idea. If you were going to invent an religion, how would you sell it? The goal is to convince people that your version of the supernatural is a New and Improved approach to reality. That if somebody follows this story, their life will be Much Much Better!

So what do you need to do? Perhaps shunt off anybody who is prone to break with the herd. Like the young people, who are full of hormones and questions. So why not give them a year to go off and proselytize? And by proselytize I of course mean get drunk and fall down with strangers. In between those weekends standing on people's porches in sweaty polyester suits.

And eating Spam, of course.

p.s. - If I've offended anyone, I don't care. I like Spam.

A Small and August Group.

Yes, you can have an august group in September. Because I say so, that's why. The group in question is Audiobooks I Have Shut Off. I've listened to many zillions of audiobooks, and have only shut off three. Today, Allen Steele's Spindrift joined the group. I put up with the science errors, the character deficiencies, the excruciatingly slow pace, the fact that it read like a book from fifty years ago, and the bland writing. I even made it through the half hour spent describing a hatch, the crawling conclusions about what the alien that built the hatch must look like, and the alleged space explorers saying "ewww" at the idea like a bunch of eight-year-olds.

What finally made me bail, not far from the moment when, even in such a hideously slow-moving book, we must, must be about to encounter the aliens? The moment when a scientist, allegedly having spent his entire life waiting for this moment, and stating himself to be an atheist, moves into the realm of the expected aliens, and starts praying. Sorry, folks, I can take only so many clichés and so little understanding of humans. Screw the aliens.

Next.