Keep On Smoking And Taxing

A few years back, Cuyahoga County Ohio USA voters jacked up prices on cigarettes and funneled the smoke funds to the arts.  This resulted years later in an application for a Creative Workforce Fellowship from me.  I don't know if I'll get it, but if people don't vote to renew the cigarette tax by voting for Issue 8, then I do know that I will be more irate when smokers litter their butts on the ground.  At least now I know they're probably subsidizing my ticket price when I attend a play in Cuyahoga County, which is vaguely soothing.

New Trailer For Sorority Sisters Vs. Sasquatch

Here's the latest trailer.  Sadly, none of my character's epic fight against Sasquatch made the cut.  I hope it's in the movie, as it was a lot of fun to film!

Sorority Sisters Vs. Sasquatch Poster!

My buddy Mark Justice has unveiled the poster for his new movie.  I play a college professor leading a field trip that blunders into Squatch territory.  I am excited to see how the movie came out!

Thank You Though Amazon Said Nope!

Thanks to everyone who voted for Frequently Asked Questions About Being Dead during the Amazon Kindle Scout campaign.  Either Amazon thought the book stunk or not enough of you voted for it, but the end result is the same and Amazon won't be publishing the novel.  If it did come down to social networking muscle, then I suspect that authors with thousands of "friends" are going to be published by Amazon before an author who isn't even on Facebook is.  I've always been more of the "Read this if you want to; if not, plenty of other good books are out there" author, so I am not surprised.  Amazon wants to sell books after all, so if a thousand people already want to buy a book, then that's the one that they'll publish.  They probably don't want to muck around with a weird book and convince people to give it a try and put a lot of work in just to achieve the same amount of sales as something that's ready to go ka-ching.  Ah, well . . ., the grand publishing experiment continues.  I'll keep trying some literary agents for the remainder of the year and see if the grant came through.  Next year, I'll work some indie presses before just self-publishing the novel in 2017.  Patience please, as the book will be published at some point.

Kindle Scout Campaign Starts!

Amazon has posted the Kindle Scout page for Frequently Asked Questions About Being Dead!  It has a nice chunk of an excerpt from the book, a goofy picture of me, and a short interview with me.  It can be found at https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/JV2T9E5WNBFV.  If you like what you read, then please vote for it, so they will publish it.

Frequently Asked Questions About Frequently Asked Questions About Being Dead

Last year, I announced that I had a new novel finished.  Unlike my first two, I did not serialize it before publishing it in its entirety.  I want to explore some other publishing options.  I have sent it out to a few literary agents.  I even applied for a grant.  The latest news is that I have entered it in some Amazon Kindle contest where readers vote on novels they would like to read and Amazon will publish them itself.  So the publication of the novel is in the works.  You might see it as early as this year, and, provided I am still living and the creek doesn't rise blah blah blah, only as late as 2017.  In the meantime, you can read a big chunk of the beginning, about 12 pages or so, once Amazon posts it in their contest, which I think is tomorrow.  I'll announce it here once it is live.  Please feel free to vote for it and any other novels that you want to read.

Go Back To School Like It Is 1982!

With the depressing and dismal antics of another presidential election looming, you may find yourself nostalgic for the innocence of an earlier time.  If so, transport yourself back there, at least for lunchtime, with one of these fine vintage lunchboxes.  And don't forget a drink (though you may need something stronger than milk as the election season moans on)!

Dandelions Aren't Cancer

I read a horrible advertisement yesterday.  To illustrate a medical approach that roots out cancer by targeting specific genes, the ad's creators chose a graphic analogy of a dandelion being uprooted from a lawn.  As a public service in response, I should point out that, unlike cancer, dandelions will not kill you.  They're actually quite useful; they're even edible.  If they were less common, more people probably would even view their flowers as pretty (more precisely,  the flowers are flowerheads, composed of thousands of tiny flowers).   Unless one is obsessed by achieving the monocultural, chemically dependent industrial lawn that looks like a carpet of grass, dandelions are a rather welcome addition to a yard.

Ironically, the chemicals that power the industrial lawn may give one cancer. Maybe the ad's creators should have used a picture of Roundup instead.  The most cynical among us might think that the institution being advertised, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, might want people to keep dumping chemicals on the lawn so as to keep new cases of cancer flowing in for treatment.  That's probably going too far though.  More likely, some advertising agency just was ignorant and desperate for an analogy.

As William Niering once noted, "There's nothing wrong with dandelions; there's something wrong with people."

Cities Return To Wilderness

I recently read "Rus In Urbe Redux", an interesting article in The Economist.  The writer discusses how some cities are losing population and how they are responding to it.  While some cities try various schemes to reverse the trend (few of which seem to work), some have accepted their reduced size and embraced it.  One of the most interesting ways to embrace it is to just let parts of the city return to nature and stop wasting effort to maintain the area.  That appears to be what Dessau-Rosslau, a city in Germany, has done, demolishing buildings and converting them into meadows.  The meadows apparently get mowed once a year or whatnot, so they do not become forests.  I would skip the mowing myself and go all the way back to wilderness, but I suppose the city's caretakers do not want to have to uproot a forest in case they decide to do something with the land later.

I have seen sections of Cleveland, Ohio USA return to wilderness.  I even saw a pack of wild dogs once near Cedar Road close to downtown a few years ago.  Cleveland probably hasn't reached the state of Detroit, Michigan USA yet where trees grow in old schools, as beautifully documented in the book Detroit Disassembled, since the city seems to be at least attempting to manage its decay, but one can find sections of the city becoming wilderness, or postcivilization.  I suppose that there is no true return to wilderness due to all the remnants of human activity from buildings left standing to chemicals left in the ground, but it is an interesting process.

Not everyone agrees, however.  Nevertheless, given all a city's problems, grass and other plants growing as they naturally do, should rank low on the list, but the next time you see a plant growing out of a crack in a sidewalk recognize it as a foreshadowing of what probably awaits all cities given enough time.