‘Sno Picnic When It Snows

Granted they got hammered pretty hard in New England; but here in the New York metropolitan area, people freak out over snow for no reason but that the media tell them to.

The forecast for New York City yesterday was for 10 to 12 inches of snow. So naturally there was nothing on the radio all day long except chatter about the impending snowmageddon, the storm to end storms, blah-blah… It was a perfectly typical snowstorm for this part of the country, and people carried on like they were going to wind up with the Donner Party.

Let me ask you nicely, folks: please, please, please stop believing the so-called “news” media. They hype, they spin, they lie. They sit on stories that make Democrats look bad (which means they sit on just about every true story about public affairs). They suppress. They get a real charge out of scaring people. Some of them, if they ever discovered afterward that they had accidentally told the truth about anything, would go out and hang themselves.

Here in New Jersey, the only hard thing about this snowstorm was having to listen to the media trying to panic people–and seeing them succeed.

How Not to Write a Fantasy

I don’t like to rip an author who has died recently and can’t defend himself; who was extremely popular and successful; and who, in the book I just read, was trying to create something positive and wholesome, even if he didn’t pull it off.

So I’m going to write a review without mentioning the author’s name or the title of his book. Why do such an odd thing? Because the book has lessons to teach anyone who wants to write a fantasy.

The biggest of those lessons is this: Don’t waste good ideas.

The story is a fantasy set in Victorian England. That’s a good idea; makes a nice change from the usual medieval stuff. The hero, unbeknownst to the other characters in the book, is immortal. In fact, he comes out of a legend that they’d all recognize. That’s another idea with a lot of potential.

The hero communicates telepathically with his dog, who is also immortal. The author could have done a lot with that. Instead, the hero and his dog mostly exchange sappy small talk that accomplishes nothing but to add pages to the book. Lots of pages.

There’s nothing in the story that makes it uniquely Victorian. We could just as easily be in New Jersey in 2013. There’s no Victorian feel to the story.

There is no reason for the hero to be immortal. He doesn’t do anything that a mortal hero couldn’t do. He’s been wandering around as in immortal for a couple hundred years, but we are told nothing of his adventures or experiences during that time.

Lesson Two: Please do try to make sense!

Just because your story is a fantasy doesn’t mean it can be incoherent. A lot of the stuff in this book happens for no apparent reason. A boy and his dog are made immortal–by a talking angel–and instructed to walk the earth and “do good.” Wherever they are, the angel warns, they must move on as soon as they hear a bell, any bell, toll once. How come? I dunno. And I don’t know about you, but being sentenced to an eternity of perpetual wandering seems like a heavy burden to me. What did the boy and the dog do to deserve this? Nothing, actually. Maybe the angel was just in a bad mood.

Lesson Three: It’s really hard to believe a story in which everyone is either 100% good or else totally mean and rotten. Worse, all the nice characters are really smart, but all the bad characters are abysmally stupid and incompetent. It’s hard to imagine how these villains could find their way out of bed in the morning, much less pose a threat to anyone.

This book was written for young readers, 12 years old or so. Unless an author has a warped desire to write to idiots, I think it’s always better to write up to children than to write down to them. Just because your readers are young doesn’t mean they’re unintelligent. Show them some respect. Give them credit for being able to understand that bad people sometimes look like good people, until you get to know them better, and that wicked schemes are dangerous precisely because they aren’t clearly labeled “wicked schemes.”

Give pre-teens credit for some smarts.

Football for Tulips

The Great Community Organizer has weighed in on the subject of football, saying it’s much too butch and ought to be changed (radically transformed?), and that if he had a son, he’d “have to think long and hard” before he allowed the lad to play football. We will not even speculate, here, as to what this person would actually allow a son to do. Some of those images are not pleasant to contemplate.

Personally, I used to be a football fan but I’m not one anymore. In fact, I hate football. But not being a liberal, I would never try to take football away from the millions of people who like it, nor would I try to ruin it for them. But liberals run the country nowadays, and they’re getting more and more het up to “do something about football.”

My secret agents have obtained copies of a Congressional Democrat Caucus bill to make football “safe.” These are the same people who insist that schools teach first-graders about “safe sex.”

The proposed legislation will replace Pop Warner, high school, college and pro football with something called “Flower Football.” Teams will be named for various flowers–the Tuscaloosa Tulips, Dallas Daffodils, Chicago Daisies, etc. Players will suit up in leotards, teams will line up opposite each other as in a scrimmage, and will then recite Maya Angelou’s poetry. The appropriate flower will be attached to every player’s helmet, and as soon as a flower becomes detached and falls off, the game is declared over with both teams winning and each and every player being given a little gold cup for self-esteem.

Admission to the games will be free. Flower Football will be entirely funded by a tax increase.

Beat Global Warming: Don’t Work!

The great thing about writing fantasy, supposedly, is that you can write anything you want. Magic, talking animals, false gods that turn out to be real, little kids outsmarting superhuman villains–hey, it’s fantasy: anything goes. At least that’s what some people think, and that’s why there are so many unreadable fantasies out there.

But when it comes to sheer twaddle, we fantasy writers can’t compete with the public policy folks. Yesterday in the Drudge Report we read about a left-wing think tank, the Center for Economic Policy and Research, releasing a “study” on how to stave off Global Warming. (Note: There is really nothing you can do about an imaginary problem, except to stop imagining it.)

Their solution?

Work less! Don’t do that American thing with the 40-hour work week and one or two weeks’ paid vacation. It’s roasting the planet. Instead, do the European thing with a greatly reduced work week and tons of vacation time. After all, that’s working out just fine for Europe.

So, let’s see… hmm… Decrease productivity, while the welfare state greatly increases expenditures. Yeah, that’ll work.

Only in a fantasy.

Meanwhile, Smithsonian Magazine (Feb. 2013, “Classical Gas”) reports that scientists studying Greenland ice cores find that “greenhouse gas” emissions started destroying Mother Earth around 100 B.C.–largely the fault of the Roman and Chinese civilizations. So if we really want to have a Pristine Planet, we ought to regress our global civilization to the level of something that existed before 100 B.C. Anybody anxious to experience Iron Age dentistry?

But that’s no problem, either–just stop working altogether. Presto–no emissions! And the government can provide for all our needs.

Welcome to Fantasy Land.

Who’s the Hidden Hypnotist?

The Super Bowl is over. But there’s still that voice in the background. Listen:

“You are now interested in college basketball. You are passionately interested in college basketball…”

It doesn’t matter if you never went to college, or if your alma mater didn’t have a basketball team, or if you’ve never attended a game. Now, suddenly, for no apparent reason, you’ve just got to have college basketball! You’ve got to get a new and bigger TV set in time for March Madness, the Big Dance, the Final Four, blah-blah-blah–You are passionately interested in college basketball…

Whose voice is that? Millions of people obey it without knowing who it is. Folks, don’t you think you ought to know whose orders you’re obeying?

The answer to that question might surprise you.

I’m Gonna Be on the Air…

You may remember a contretemps I had with the American Family Assn. for using some of my work without attribution (see my Dec. 8 post, “I Hit the Big-Time, Sort Of”).

Well, this has been resolved. I have been invited to be on Tim Wildmon‘s AFA radio show, live, to talk about my books. I’ve done radio interviews before, but never on this scale–200 stations will air the show, and I’ll be on for 20 minutes. The tentative date is Feb. 20, 10 a.m. CST. I’ll let you know if it gets changed. Thanks to my friend Bob Knight, columnist for The Washington Times and Townhall.com, for his good offices as a mediator.

As far as I’m concerned, this interview will be strictly business. I will absolutely not talk about the magic trick with which I mystified my wife last night–chopping a new pencil in half with a $1 bill. (If any of you know how this is done, don’t blab the secret.) Nor will I discuss our Moral Imbecile-in-Chief, Imaginary Climate Change, or or any of those other topics known for pushing me over the top.

I do hope, though, that he doesn’t ask me how long it takes to write a book.

 

Things I’d Rather Watch Than the Stupid Bowl

It’s Super Sunday! The Big Game! Hours and hours of pre-game palaver. Sit in front of the TV set and stuff your face. And don’t forget the Super Bowl commercials! And the halftime show! And hours of post-game analysis!

Here at my place we’ll be watching the old BBC Chronicles of Narnia. But if I didn’t have a movie collection, there are still many things I’d watch before I watched the Stupid Bowl. Water swirling down the drain in my kitchen sink. Pigeons and squirrels outside. Clouds. The ceiling. The floor.

I especially wish to avoid the tasteful, modest, celebrity-driven halftime show. As tasteful as a jackal retching. As modest as a Clinton. As entertaining and edifying as Klingon pornography.

Somewhere in the mix there’s supposed to be a football game. Who cares? Pwogwessives are going to abolish football pretty soon, anyway. Wait’ll you see what happens when Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer go to work on it.

Narnia, here I come.

Even Better Than Women in Combat

Now that we Americans are going to send women into combat, on purpose, there’s no reason why we should stop there.

We should send children into combat, too.

We are told that modern warfare really doesn’t much get into all that old-fashioned hand-to-hand stuff anymore: that, in fact, it’s more like a video game than anything else. And who’s better at video games than a kid? By the time he or she is twelve years old, a child has–in video games–slaughtered countless multitudes of zombies, rival gang members, space aliens, and other foes. To a kid, war will be just another video game.

While we’re at it, look at all the Social Security and healthcare money we could save by sending the elderly into combat, too. Instead of just sitting around watching Rachel Ray on TV, they can zero in on our country’s enemies and blow them to kingdom come.

By now everybody knows that the overarching mission of the U.S.  military is social engineering. The beauty of that is, you can keep plugging away at this mission even if you lose a war.

Hats off to our all-wise glorious leaders!

Just to Tantalize You…

In the latest installment of Jack and the Pancakes, Moley is distracted from her campaign to expose the innocent Dr. Cleveland as “the Al Capone of crime” by a desire to write a best-selling novel. Her story, she explains, is set in the Renaissance “thousands of years ago,” and is about the great artist, Leandro da Vinchy, and his brother, Vinnie. “Renaissance means ‘Big Deal’ in Italian,” she explains to the Pancakes. “They lived in ruins back then, instead of houses. It was the thing to do.”

“Vinnie da Vinchy was not a great artist like his brother, but he was a master of disguise,” Moley tells the Pancakes. “He could disguise himself as a building, and he once disguised himself as a picnic table. People ate off him without knowing he was a guy.” In the most exciting part of the story, Leandro and Vinnie are riding in a stagecoach from Rome to Pizza when they’re attacked by Indians, and quickly have to shave their heads to avoid getting scalped.

When Jack objects to this horrendous abuse of history, the Pancakes tell him that Moley’s history is much better than his dull and boring history. Jack faints, and his Mountie hat falls off. “See? I knew it was an exciting story,” Moley says.

And that’s all for now, folks. The rest is unsuitable for publication in this uptight climate of political correctness.

Let’s Scrap the Constitution!

“I’ve got a simple idea,” says Louis Seidman, a constitutional law professor at Georgetown University. “Let’s give up the Constitution.”

It’s simple, all right. Is there a law that says college professors have to be fools? This clown wants to junk the Constitution because it’s “archaic” and “downright evil.” He thinks we’ll get along just fine without it. I haven’t got space to go into his whole vacuous argument. Let this quote suffice:

“Even without constitutional fealty, the president would still be checked by Congress and by the states.” LOL “There is even something to be said for an elite body like the Supreme Court with the power to impose its views of political morality on the country.” I won’t repeat what I have to say about this opinion. You can probably guess.

Well, who needs a written Constitution, when we can be governed by the fleeting whims, venal schemes, and power-lust of a bunch of sinners and chowder-heads in Washington?

I wonder how much it costs to send your kid to Georgetown to learn how to be an amoral idiot.