Are You A Bad Driver?

Based on my experiences driving lately, I have come to the conclusion that the license bureau now apparently gives people driver's licenses with all the discrimination that someone in a parade throws candy into a crowd.  Since I've heard that many studies have found that most people consider themselves above average drivers, a logical impossibility since only half of all drivers could be above average, I've composed a little quiz to help my fellow motorists measure their driving ability and suitability for sharing the public thoroughfares.  The quiz is based on data diligently gathered from driving around Cuyahoga County in Ohio, especially the East Side of Cleveland.

1) Do you drive a sport utility vehicle?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

2) Do you drive a pickup?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

3) Do you drive a car manufactured by a European car company (say, a BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volvo, Volkswagen, and so forth)?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

4) Do you find driving an excellent time to catch up on your phone conversations?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

5) Do you have temporary license plates?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

6) Are you missing a hubcap or two?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

7) Do you think speed limit signs display the minimum speed you should be doing?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

8) Do you consider turn signals an optional accessory for your automobile?

If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

9)  Do you think that the proper space between autos when following another car should only be able to be measured in millimeters?

 If yes, skip the rest of the quiz and scroll to the end.  If no, continue on.

10) If you see a deer, do you slam on the brakes and point at it?

If yes, scroll to the end.  If no, you might be an above-average driver (though, given what I've seen lately, I have my doubts).  Please keep on driving carefully and courteously.  You don't need to scroll to the end of the quiz.  For the rest of you,  keep scrolling.






Keep scrolling.












 Keep scrolling (you're almost there!).












 Keep scrolling (really, you're almost at the end of the quiz!).









The End Of The Quiz:
Yes, you are a bad driver.

Apostrophe Blues

Lately, I've been seeing more misused apostrophes than I can ever remember seeing before.  Yesterday, I drove past a store called "Two Cousin's Beauty Supply" (yes, a typo is on the awning, which has all of four words on it).  Today, in my little Kent State alumni magazine, an article has a reference to a married couple as "The Mayfield's".

Yikes!  I'm seeing this all the time.  Can't people afford proofreaders anymore?

I can sympathize.  I can't afford a proofreader either.  Fortunately, I'm pretty good at proofreading, but when one proofs one's own work, blind spots are hard to avoid since one has seen the material too many times already.

The issue isn't actually a big deal either.  It's unlikely someone will really get confused with a needless apostrophe in a plural.  People already do it all the time with numerals such as "1980's" (though, for the record, "1980s" looks so much better).  In spoken language, no apostrophe exists so "cousins" and "cousin's" sounds exactly the same.

Still, it's a bit worrisome when people mix up plurals and possessives and just sprinkle apostrophes randomly across their prose like shredded cheese across pasta.  Perhaps people don't read much any more and don't pick this written convention up.  According to David Crystal, in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, the apostrophe was once used for plurals like "cousin's" at one point (the example he cites is "comma's") and has been a source of confusion since being introduced into English in the 16th century.

For the record though, standard usage in English today would drop the apostrophe in most plurals (There are some exceptions such as the "1980's" example mentioned above, but actually it can almost always be avoided in a plural without much confusion), so "cousin's" should be "cousins'" (assuming the beauty supplies store's name is meant to be a plural possessive; if the "two cousins" is meant as an adjective modifying "beauty supplies" then no apostrophe is needed at all) and "Mayfield's" should be "Mayfields".  Instead, the apostrophe should be used for possessives such as "my cousin's shampoo" or "The Mayfields' store".

Ah!  The apostrophe's plight makes me weep for so many lost apostrophes! 

Did Voter ID Laws Backfire On The G.O.P.?

In the past few years, more states in the USA have been enacting voter identification laws wherein voters have to show identification at the polls before they can vote.  This was usually done in states where Republicans had the majority in the legislature, and many observers, the American Civil Liberties Union among them, noted that such measures were in response to basically a nonexistent problem in that actual voter fraud was a very rare occurrence.  Many people such as journalist Greg Palast noted that the voter i.d. laws seemed to fit into a pattern in recent years of Republicans trying to make it harder for people to vote, especially people likely to vote for Democrats.

It makes one long for the ideal democracy wherein candidates and political parties try to win elections by appealing to the voters with good public policies, not by trying to prevent people from voting.

But, assuming the critics of the Republicans are right and the voter i.d. laws were just an attempt to prevent the elderly, minorities, the poor, and students (those most likely to not have the right i.d.s and "coincidentally" those most likely to vote Democratic) from voting, did the Republican plan backfire and actually hurt their chances of winning?

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his supporters seemed confident he was going to win the 2012 election right up to the end.  Perhaps that was because they were believing what they wanted to believe, or because Romney, at least, knew Karl Rove or somebody had fixed some voting tabulation computers to make Romney seem like the winner (until some hackers checkmated Rove and prevented him from doing that).

Perhaps overconfidence or a failed electoral theft are the whole story behind Romney's surprising loss (well, surprising to him at least), but I was also reminded of a story a friend of mine told me years ago about how his father, a hardcore conservative Republican, used to vote twice every election, once at his current polling station and once at the polling station for where he used to live a few years earlier (he moved but never updated his address there, leaving him on the rolls).  So, basically, some guy who loved Rush Limbaugh and Republicans was voting twice in every election.  Maybe that was an anomaly, or maybe he wasn't the only Republican who did stuff like that.  In any case, with the voter identification laws in place in many states, he wouldn't have been easily able to do that anymore.  So, even if the Republican plan was actually to clean up voter fraud, then it didn't work how they imagined it would.  All they did was prevent the Dittoheads from voting twice (or three times, I heard another story that one woman voted in her mother's and grandmother's name after they were deceased since they all shared the same name).

All of this is at the level of friend of a friend stories (it's shocking how people aren't more open about their electoral fraud, isn't it?  Ha!) so it's a pretty thin ice argument, but it is interesting to think about.

Maybe in the future, instead of trying to prevent people from voting, the Republicans should just concentrate on trying to appeal to all the voters by offering policies people like.

That might be less likely to backfire on them.

Of course, then they probably wouldn't be able to mainly stand for rich people doing enough for society as is so they shouldn't have to pay taxes too, and for rich people being able to loot the public treasury any time they want, which seem to be ultimately their two primary public policy positions.

Leaving Books On Consignment

Today, I received a package in the mail from Freebird Books in New York City and got reacquainted with some old friends I hadn't seen in over five years.

Two copies of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus.

I had left them on consignment at Freebird in 2007 when Crazy Carl Robinson and I did our book tour.  Every year, I'd dutifully check in with Freebird and get the same depressing news that the books were still there unsold.  I'm thankful that Freebird was nice enough to keep stocking them, and I always told the Freebirders (originally Sam and then later Peter) that I'd stop by to pick them up the next time I was in New York City (plus that way I could shop at Freebird--it's a cool store).  After five years though, it was apparent that I wasn't getting back to N.Y.C. anytime soon so I asked if Peter would mind shipping the books back to me in order for me to get them back and for him to free up room on his shelves for books that would actually sell, which he thankfully did, going above and beyond expectations by generously picking up the postage costs.

I learned a lot about leaving books on consignment over the years, and my basic advice for authors is don't do it.  I've been lucky enough to have some great experiences such as the one with Freebird but I've also lost books from stores that went out of business.

The one exception is local stores.  If you live nearby a store and can pick up your books whenever you want, then maybe leave the books on consignment.  Even that could be a pain though.  One of my favorite bookstores in the Cleveland area is Mac's Backs, and they've probably sold the most books for me over the years, but at one point they reorganized the store and their Emus copies got lost in the backroom, where, of course, no one could see them nor buy them.  Eventually, I got the books back, but it took a while.

In general, I would suggest to authors to make the bookstores buy the books out right.  If the stores don't have confidence enough to do that, then they have little motivation to move the books.  Particularly if you're on a book tour and may never visit that city again, good luck getting your books back or even getting paid if they do sell.  So don't do it.  Even if you follow all the bookstore's rules and dutifully check in on your consignment, you may end up losing some books.  One time I left zines on consignment at Quimby's, a great store in Chicago, and I checked on them as I was supposed to and at one point Quimby's decided to purge a bunch of zines from their stock, mine among them, and mailed a postcard to all the consignment holders.  I never got my postcard so they just disposed of my consignment material.  Obviously, I never left anything on consignment there again.

Even if I did though, checking in on out of town consignments is a pain and seldom worth the money.  In my case, I make more selling books directly to readers than I do selling them through stores (not surprisingly, a book with a toilet on the cover isn't prone to impulse buys by bookbrowsers).  As my remaining stock of books dwindles, I've been collecting my books from consignment (I'm down to Webster's in State College, Pennsylvania now) so I can sell them directly.

Also, beware of friends that offer to leave books on consignment for you.  They often mean well but won't always follow through.  So this may seem like a great way to extend your books' reach via consignment, but it usually isn't.  I lost 12 books when a pal went homeless and obviously had more important things to do than check on my books.  He's fine now, but in the meantime I lost 12 books when stores that he stocked went out of business.  Another "pal", I suspect, was hoping I'd forget about the consigned books so he could keep the money from them; fortunately, that didn't happen, but it was yet again another pain hardly worth the effort to deal with.

Perhaps with the growth of ebooks, leaving books on consignment will be less of an issue for authors in the future, but, for the record, don't do it unless the store is local, and think about it even then.  I did make some money from consigned books, and I'm happy so many stores carried Emus on their shelves, but I like it better when I run into copies of the book the publisher stocked at places such as Skylight Books.

Why?  I already got paid from those books so I don't have to check on how they're selling every year.  Nevertheless, I do want them to find good homes, so if any of you Angels in L.A. are looking for a good read, then you know where to find it.

N.Y.C., you missed your chance.

However, don't despair, mail order is available worldwide!

I'm Enjoying The MOOC, But I'd Prefer A Book

Recently, I've been hearing a lot of chatter about MOOCs.  At first I thought people were talking about cows with speech impediments, but then someone explained that a MOOC is an acronym for a "massive open online course".  Since, supposedly, this phenomenon is going to destroy higher education as we know it but possibly save students money, I thought I'd investigate and signed up for a course called Think Again.  The course really isn't teaching me anything new, but it's been a fun experience thus far.  I watch videos as a professor explains concepts of logic and rhetoric and then I take quizzes to test whether I've been paying attention and learning the material.  However, I must confess that I don't see what all the fuss is about.  The professors (the course is co-taught) won't answer questions since a couple hundred thousand people are taking the course.

Yes, that's right.  The equivalent of the city of Akron, Ohio is taking the course.

So, we can forgive the professors for not holding office hours, as understandably they would like time to eat and sleep and stuff like that.

So basically, the course is like watching YouTube while filling out related crossword puzzles between videos.

I actually had a course like this in undergrad.  The communications professor was a control freak so he wouldn't let anyone else teach his courses when he went on sabbatical.  Since the university wanted to run the courses while he was gone, they worked out a deal, and the professor was taped giving his lectures.  So when I and my fellow students showed up for lecture, we watched a video of our professor giving the lecture.

I didn't like it much.  I much preferred live human professors.  The chief advantage of the video from the student perspective was that everyone, teaching assistants included, would occasionally make fun of the video aloud, making it a bit like a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  In fact, this experience served as the inspiration for one of Funnybear's moneymaking schemes in The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus.

Ultimately, humanity invented the equivalent of the MOOC centuries ago.

It's called a book.

If someone can't be there in person to explain something, then he or she can just write it down, and the reader can read it at her or his own pace.

Nevertheless, I'm enjoying my MOOC, and I think it's very cool of the professors to teach people around the world for free, but I don't think I'll sign up for another one.

I'd rather read a book.

If I want to watch a video, I'd rather it be something like this.

Gender Obsessed Junk Mail

I get a lot of bulk/junk mail, probably just like you do, and I find it interesting how I get addressed in it.  Most of the time just my name is used on the envelope and my first name on the letter salutation, which is fine.  It's nice to know that I'm "dear" to a  car dealership and that we're on a firstname basis though we've never met; it makes me feel very egalitarian and fuzzy, though I still don't visit the dealership and I just recycle the mailing approximately five seconds after I open it up.

Some organizations, however, must think that's a bit too informal, so they slap a "Mr." on their address labels and salutations that use my surname.  Women, I assume, get a "Ms." or "Mrs."

Now, we're fairly well-conditioned in American society to view things through the prism of gender, but I still find it a bit strange.  Perhaps it's helpful for marketers to know my gender, but why bother to waste ink using it on the mail materials?  Do they think that helps the mail carrier know who to deliver it to ("Look for the one with the penis")?  Is it a vestige from more formal days?  Why do they really care what gender they're selling a product to?  Just focus on selling the product, folks.

I feel bad for those with gender neutral names who occasionally get the wrong gendered salutation (not to mention transgendered folks who get the wrong gendered address label), but mainly my objection to it is that it just seems like a waste of energy and resources.  Imagine all that ink being used to print millions of misters and whatnot.

Oh, wait, it's junk mail.  It's all a waste of ink.  Never mind.  

When Did Barack Obama Turn Into Dick Cheney?

I wake up to National Public radio (NPR).

Don't ask me why.

Perhaps listening to music instead would make me linger in bed and be late to work whereas hearing some cheerful NPR announcer repeat the inane comments of a government official gets me out of bed and going just to get away from the sound of such mundane horror.

The other day I woke up to a report that Obama wanted to keep the Bush era tax cuts.

I thought I might have still been dreaming.

Perhaps it was a nightmare.

But no, I was awake, and that actually was what the President wanted.

I knew there was a reason I didn't vote for him, the first Democratic candidate for president I didn't vote for ever (I even voted for him in 2008).

Is Obama nuts?  Can he really not add like fans of nutty Paul Ryan claim?

Why on Earth does he want to continue the Bush era tax cuts?  They are one of the two major reasons the federal deficit and debt continue to grow, which is likely to cause long term problems for us as a country when we have to spend money paying interest and repaying debt instead of spending it on something useful for the country (the other major reason is the government spends too much--when Tom Coburn makes more sense than Obama, we know we live in a scary world).

It made me long for the actual Bush era when most Democrats hated the tax cuts and railed against them, pointing out the problems they would cause down the road.

Guess what?  We're down the road now and looking at record deficits and a record debt.  We're probably entering a new recession (you probably didn't even know the last one was over, eh?).

In short, we're in bad shape with ever fewer choices to get into good shape.  Being no fan of higher taxes, I still prefer them to a future economic and governmental collapse.

So why is Obama sounding like Dick Cheney, who allegedly said in 2002 that deficits didn't matter?  Why would he want to continue at least a portion of the tax cuts that caused such a fiscal mess?  He's reelected; he doesn't have to pander to the populace anymore; he can do the right stuff now.  Instead, he seems to want to keep cranking up the debt.

Maybe we'll be better off going over the "fiscal cliff".  At least one Democrat still has some sense.

It's too bad we didn't elect Howard Dean in 2008.  Or, even better, in 2004.

I mean I like that Obama read comic books growing up.

I just wish he'd read some economics and math books as well.

And that he'd now stop reading from the Dick Cheney playbook.

Countdown To The Apocalypse!

A few years ago, the idea that the end of the world will happen in 2012 started to circulate.  Supposedly, it's a Mayan prophecy (actually, it comes from a couple of hippies getting stoned but that usually doesn't get mentioned).  Now, end of the world myths are always a bit fun, but they can be dangerous when people get a little too carried away with them.

If you're still eating canned food from when the Y2K computer bug was supposed to end civilization, then you've no doubt learned your lesson.

Surprisingly, as the doomsday of 21 December 2012 draws ever nearer, I've heard less and less about it.  I suppose people have found it less charming when it's only a couple of weeks away.  Obviously, I find the whole notion laughable.  I even wrote a whole novel poking fun at it back in 2008.

Who knows though?  If the world doesn't end, then, on the Winter Solstice as a consolation prize, I'll run an article explaining in more detail about where the whole idea came from and how it caught on.

If the world does end, well, then you and I probably have more important things to worry about then this little blog.