Back of the Envelope

I thought I'd give some advice for Bush for the debate. I know, like the White House is going to read my blog. Still, I have a few thoughts of what he should do. So here goes:

1. Stay calm and confident. I really think Kerry will blow this if given a chance, so the key is to keep your cool and let him blow it. Don't play stupid on any point, but you don't have to win every argument for Kerry's natural tendencies--to bristle at any slight and to ignore and belittle any inconvenient fact--to come forward.

2. At some point Kerry will accuse you of questioning his patriotism. Okay, so maybe he's found some advisors who tried to talk him out of it, but I'm not betting on it. At this point it's important to point out that neither you, your vice presidential candidate, your family, the RNC chair, nor your campaign has ever questioned his patriotism. You've questioned his judgement and his steadfastness and his voting record (and if those are off the table for discussion as Presidential qualifications, you'd like to know what's still on the table, aside from Vietnam), but never his loyalty. Then list the vast number of Democrats who've questioned your loyalty and your patriotism. Quote them, and ask Kerry to stop questioning your patriotism.

3. Also at some point, Kerry will ask you to denounce the Swift Vets for Truth. Point out that the Swift Vets for Truth don't work for you, and while you disagree with their campaign, you'd like some evidence before accusing 250 veterans of being liars. Kerry could provide you with that if he'd just sign the 180. But if Kerry wants you to denounce them, it's only fair that he denounce Michael Moore, who's been given far more esteem by the Democratic Party than the SVT have by the Republicans, whose lies are obvious, and whose accusations are worse.

4. Kerry will bring up Vietnam. He can't help himself. I think the best response would be that you are more concerned with the war we're in now, and your record as Commander-in-Chief is more relevant than Vietnam. If he presses that you were avoiding combat during Vietnam--and I think you can count on that--point out that you joined a unit that was in combat operations at the time you joined up, and that you volunteered for combat duty but were denied. Not many people know that, and you're right not to bring it up at the least opportunity, but if he has to drag something out of you, it might as well be this.

Robin Jones is now soliciting entries for the next Storyblogging Carnival. I probably should have given him my advice on how to do this earlier, but I'll go ahead and do it now.

First off, I suggest posting the announcement with the complete rules about a week before the Carnival takes place, although Robin advertised a bit earlier. At the same time, you need to send out the announcement to the e-mail list. If I had the resources, I'd have a listserv list, but right now my list is just a bunch of e-mail addresses. That reminds me, I really need to send the list to Robin. I very much suggest that the host send out the e-mail, otherwise whoever sends it out will get a bunch of the entries.

The rules are still under development at the moment. Hey, we've only done this twice so far. Right now we're asking for a lot of information. In addition to the usual for Carnivals: blog title, blog url, story title, story url, and description, we also want a word count, a suggested rating, and author name or pseudonym (this is a new one, since I was uncertain what name to use for some of the entries I got last time). We use all of this in the Carnival entries, so none of it's extraneous, but it is a lot.

Once all the entries are collected, the host has to read all the entries. Yes, all of them. This allows the host to adjust the ratings as needed. (I've decreased the rating for a couple of stories when I thought the author was too hard on the contents, and I may have increased it once or twice.) It also allows him to comment on the stories if he so desires. Because the host needs to read all the stories, and because there's no length limit, I suggest a cut-off early enough to give him time for it. I make it on Friday night so I have the whole weekend, but I'm pretty lenient if people get an entry in late. That's also the reason why I take a maximum of twenty entries on a first come, first serve basis. If I had to read fifty entries, I'd never be able to do it. So far, we haven't received even twenty entries, but we've just begun, and we're growing. If we start regularly exceeding twenty, we may have to come up with a different solution. This is, of course, up to the host, and if he thinks he can handle fifty entries, he should go for it, but my rule is twenty, first come, first serve.

Then on the scheduled Monday the host puts up the Carnival. I think the format of the previous storyblogging carnivals works well.

The description of the story--the blurb--comes straight from the author's mouth, in order to avoid editorializing and spoilers on the part of the host. (If the author has a spoiler in his blurb, that's foreshadowing.) Occasionally I want to use a different blurb from what the author proposed, if the author's is too long or too vague, and sometimes the author asks me for help, and in this case I try to discuss it with the author until we come to an agreement.

I don't double check the word count unless it seems off to me. Trust me, once you've read five or six stories of various length, you can usually tell where a story falls, and I don't think it's necessary to be exactly right on the word count... five words here and there won't make a huge difference, although it can place one story ahead of the other in the Carnival, as the entries are listed in order of length. It's not terribly important, but I also put stories in categories. Stories 999 words or less are brief stories, 1,000-24,999 words is a short story, 25,000-59,999 words is a novella (only one of these so far--mine), and 60,000 words or more is a novel. These are somewhat arbitrary, and in the first carnival I defined anything less than 2,000 words as a brief story. The basic definition of a brief story is that it is not much longer than a typical blog post (a non-Steven den Beste blog post, that is). This post, by the way, is 1,034 words long [before the update was added]. I list the stories in order of length. I do both of these because this is the Internet, and on the Internet, people have short attention spans, and I want them to know what they're getting into when they start to read a story.

Both excerpts and stories in progress are exceptions to the rules. In some ways they are similar--they are both incomplete stories. For excerpts, however, the complete story is available somewhere--preferably online, but not necessarily, while stories in progress are not yet finished. Their word count is whatever is available in the blog, although with an excerpt the full length is included (again, so the reader knows what he's getting into should he decide he wants to know how the story goes). Since a story in progress has an unknown length, and sometimes the author doesn't even know what category it will be in when finished, I don't even give an estimate of the final length.

Any comments the host gives on a story are his own. I wasn't particularly impressed by my own commentary in the previous Carnivals. I do not comment on every story, or even most of them, and you shouldn't take the lack of a comment positively or negatively. I never comment on my own stories, for example. I also do not pan stories in my comments, although I won't rule out additional warnings for mature content (beyond the rating system). Sometimes I don't comment simply because I'm worried doing so will give too much away. If I feel I can comment without spoiling, and something in the story particularly struck me, then I may say how it did. I don't know how other hosts will comment on the entries, but I look forward to seeing it, since it's one area where I could use improvement.

So that's all there is to it. Any questions?

Update: Since the carnival began, there have been a couple of changes, but not many. These days the deadline for accepting submissions is Saturday night, rather than Friday, but that's still up to the host. And in addition to the two e-mails mentioned above, the host sends out a reminder e-mail a day or two before the deadline just to make sure people don't forget. I also ask that the hosts link to my Carnival category, as that contains links to the last twenty carnivals. Finally, since we've gotten a listing on Conservative Cat's Carnival submission form, we get entries through that webform as well. Those entries go straight to me, and I forward them to the host. Typically these entries don't have the full information we usually ask for, but I usually let that slide, although I may ask the author if something important is missing, and I'll be less willing to overlook it if I've added them to the e-mail list, in which case they should be getting the e-mails telling them what information to send. Being part of Conservative Cat's Carnival submission form also means that we should ping the trackback to make sure the most recent entry's on the carnival link list. I send the necessary information to the host.

You've probably already noticed that at the bottom of a couple of my posts is a section called Related Links, where articles on a similar topic to the post are listed. This is a feature of Powerblogs called post chaining. I like it, as it's a useful way to interconnect posts. In some ways, it's similar to what I already do, namely my Old Post/New Post scheme, where at the top of a post I point out the old, related posts, and at the bottom, I point out the newer posts. There is something to be said for each one. The Old Post/New Post scheme is more linear, since it links related posts in such a way that you're encouraged to read the earlier post at the beginning of the later post, and you're encouraged to read the later post at the end of the earlier post. The post chaining, despite it's name, is less linear--listing all the posts and their links together at the end of the post. I haven't decided yet whether I want to ditch the Old Post/New Post scheme for post chaining, keep with the Old Post/New Post and ignore post chaining, or use them both in some combination. For the moment, I'm just experimenting. As a side note, neither scheme seems to work very well with scheduled posting. With post chaining, it's probably just a bug. With Old Post/New Post, while it's easy to put the Old Post link in a newer post, since a post isn't actually given an ID until it goes up, it's impossible to place the New Post link until afterwards.

Old Post: My previous post on Instapundit's temporal anomaly was here.

Doc Rampage offers a theory on what caused the problems at Instapundit, while spacemonkey has a simpler explanation. You've got to love the blogosphere.

Old Post: The previous post on the draft was here.

The Wall Street Journal does a much better job of covering the draft than Snopes does (AOL link, since WSJ requires registration). I found the final paragraph pretty disturbing:

It's easy to see how such e-mails get widespread circulation. Christian Erhardt, a 27-year-old German national and New Jersey resident who is working as a marketing manager for a European camera company, says he got several copies of the e-mail in recent days, and forwarded a copy to 800 people, many in the media. "I don't have any children yet," he said in an e-mail exchange, "but believe me I don't want [them] to have to go to war."

Am I the only one creeped out that this German guy is trying to influence the US elections? With a false rumor, no less? I mean, I could understand forwarding it to a few friends, maybe up to fifty, but eight hundred? That's spam. And unless he's planning on immigrating, why would his kids even be in danger of being drafted?

I don't usually do any catblogging, but these guys were just too darn photogenic for me not to take their picture.

Officially, these are barn cats. Yes, we have a barn and everything, although technically, they aren't staying in it. Frankly, we have no idea where they've been staying. Their mother gave birth to them right in the middle of our patio, then promptly carried them off. We hadn't seen them for about three weeks, and we were beginning to think they might have died off. But it turns out that their mother had been taking good care of them, and she's recently brought them back to our patio, where they get way more attention than is good for them from both humans and other cats.

As you all probably know, I'm currently looking for work. For the time being, I've accepted a short-term contract at the local school doing some computer maintenance. It's not exactly something I'm planning on doing long-term, but it does give me a bit of money and a way to keep occupied. I don't know how this will end up affecting my blogging.

Old Post: The previous Storyblogging Carnival can be found here on this blog.

Welcome to the second Storyblogging Carnival. Here bloggers show that not only can they take down Dan Rather in a day, they can write better fiction too! Today we've collected twelve stories from various bloggers, some of whom you're probably familiar with and some you're probably not, but all worth checking out.

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Max's War
by Donald S. Crankshaw of Back of the Envelope
A 303 word brief story rated G.

A child's-eye view of war.

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Fide
by Curtis Schweitzer of a_sdf
A 310 word brief story rated PG.

An abstract, stream of consciousness statement of faith.

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Affirmations
by KJB of One Fish Up, One Fish Down
A 375 word brief story rated G.

A self-involved parent picks her child up from Safe Key.

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The Mother Meets the Rabbi
by Yetzirah of Yetzirah
A 665 word brief story rated G

How my Rabbi survived unscathed during my mother's official visit. And how she figured out why Judaism has survived so long. All in one golden afternoon.

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Not noir. Not ever. Never!
by Gary Cruse of The Good Intentions Paving Company
A 900 word brief story rated PG.

A noir mystery of 1920s love, rejection, and steamy nonchalance.

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Revenge of the Women of Kleenex
by Michelle Catalano of A Small Victory
A 1,202 short story, rated PG-13.

Single Superheroine seeks Super Guy.

[This is a fun one, from a genre that doesn't get the respect it deserves. -DSC]

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Haze
by cbeck of Feeding The Habit (A weekend blog)
A 1,273 short story in two parts, rated R.

"Now most normal aborigines would be out dancing, drinking, and not inhaling various clouds of smoke on a Friday night. But instead we sat holding hands in a small semi-circle with someone who should have been a beauty at our focus."

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The Never Ending Story Blog
by KJB et al. of The Never Ending Story Blog
The first 1,390 words of an ongoing story of indeterminate length, rated PG (so far).

This is a collaborative story effort, allowing contributions from anyone. You can make it about whatever you want, although your collaborators may decide not to play along.

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By Touch
by Wichi Dude of Wichi Dude
A 1,903 word short story rated PG-13.

A man uses an unusual talent to help his family. And passes that talent along.

[Nice. -DSC]

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Portraits
by Trudy W. Schuett of WOLves
A 2,078 short story rated PG.

Sometimes it's easier to hang together than to hang separately.

[This one's really sweet. -DSC]

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Transcendence
by Dave Gudeman of Doc Rampage
A 2,607 word short story rated PG-13.

This story is either farce or tragedy, depending on your beiefs. If you believe that humans are no more than automatons, then this is an amusing farce about how the survival reflex responds in a situation that evolution didn't prepare it for. If you believe that humans are living souls, then this story is a tragedy about the evil that can result from pride and self-centeredness alone. No malevolence is required.

[I liked this one. It's based on an idea I've also been considering using for a short story, if only Doc hadn't beat me to it. -DSC]

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Shadowed
by Marty Dodge of Dodgeblogium
A 2,975 word short story rated PG.

An exhausted man turns up at the Sage of Wales' front door begging to let in. Is he all that he says he is and who exactly is after him?

[This story is an interesting mix of horror and modern fantasy. I liked it. -DSC]

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Writer's Block
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 4,413 word short story rated R.

A struggling writer (of course) longs for female companionship, for which he invents a creative solution.

[This was an intriguing story, deliberately vague and ambiguous.-DSC]

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The next Storyblogging Carnival, on October 11th, will be hosted by Robin Jones of Beyond Salvage. While you can write me if you want to be added to the e-mail list, you should send your submissions to him at robjones-at-robinjones.us.

Today Glenn Reynolds posted about the US military changing the Pakistani launch codes. This was odd, because I could have sworn that I had read about this a long time ago--had, in fact, read about it in the very same Telegraph article that Glenn was referencing. I had even posted about it. It seemed odd to me that Glenn would come on this so late, so I checked my archives and found what I had posted, all the way back in February. (In fact, I originally posted it on my old blog.) And, since I'm pretty good at giving credit to whichever blogger points out an article, I found out from which blog I had gotten this information. I find it hard to believe that Glenn missed it when it was first posted, as I know he frequents this blog. Since I know uberblogger Glenn couldn't have just forgotten, I think the only possible conclusion is that he's stuck in a temporal anomaly. I suggest we gather an international team of world-class physicists, bloggers, and blogging physicists in order to fix this problem as soon as possible.

Sluggy Freelance — Gwynn has a lead to a way home, and the demons are bickering among themselves, while demonized Alt-Riff is trying to invent a way for the demons to enter the sewers.

It's Walky! — Is Jason dead? What's Alan up to? Will Sal kill the Head Alien? I can't wait to see what happens next.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Great, now even Mike's girlfriend thinks he's gay. Unfortunately, Maritza's computer goes down and she can't update for the rest of the week, so we don't know what happens next.

General Protection Fault — Looks like Ki's dad isn't as accepting as her Mom.

Schlock Mercenary — While the work's going well, the Reverend is having a moral crisis.

Old Post: It looks like my previous post cut Kerry too much slack.

Mark Steyn has more to say about Kerry's response to Allawi. He quotes something I didn't see in the article I read, but I didn't see a full transcript. Here's what he has to say:

Kerry didn't show up for Allawi's visit to Washington -- he was in Ohio again, which is evidently becoming the proverbial Vietnam-type quagmire for him. Nonetheless, barely had the prime minister finished than the absentee senator did a daytime version of his midnight ramble and barged his way onto the air to insist that he knew better than Iraq's head of government what was going on in the country. One question from his accompanying press corps was especially choice:

"Prime Minister Allawi told Congress today that democracy was taking hold in Iraq and that the terrorists there were on the defensive. Is he living in the same fantasyland as the president?"

It would be nice to think this was a somewhat crude attempt at irony, but given America's Ratherized media this seems unlikely. Just for the record, Allawi is not living in a fantasyland. He's living in Iraq, and he begins his day with a dangerous commute across Baghdad's ''Green Zone.'' John Kerry's regular commute, by contrast, is from his wife's beach compound at Nantucket to his wife's 15th century English barn reconstructed as a ski lodge in Idaho. Nonetheless, he's the expert on Iraq and the guy living there 24/7 is the fantasist, and he's happy to assure us the prime minister doesn't know what he's talking about. It's all going to hell, forget about those January elections, etc.

What a small, graceless man Kerry is. The nature of adversarial politics in a democratic society makes George W. Bush his opponent. But it was entirely Kerry's choice to expand the field, to put himself on the other side of Allawi and the Iraqi people. Given his frequent boasts that he knows how to reach out to America's allies, it's remarkable how often he feels the need to insult them: Britain, Australia, and now free Iraq. But, because this pampered cipher has floundered for 18 months to find any rationale for his candidacy other than his indestructible belief in his own indispensability, Kerry finds himself a month before the election with no platform to run on other than American defeat. He has decided to co-opt the jihadist death-cult, the Baathist dead-enders, the suicide bombers and other misfits and run as the candidate of American failure. This would be shameful if he weren't so laughably inept at it.

As I said earlier, I think Kerry will do very badly in the debates. He is fundamentally unable to deal with any opposition to how he wants to see the world.

Allawi spoke before the a joint session of Congress yesterday. He had this to say:

We Iraqis know that Americans have made and continue to make enormous sacrifices to liberate Iraq, to assure Iraq's freedom. I have come here to thank you and to promise you that your sacrifices are not in vain.

The overwhelming majority of Iraqis are grateful. They are grateful to be rid of Saddam Hussein and the torture and brutality he forced upon us, grateful for the chance to build a better future for our families, our country and our region.

We Iraqis are grateful to you, America, for your leadership and your sacrifice for our liberation and our opportunity to start anew.

We don't hear this sort of heartfelt gratitude too often, do we? We don't do these things for the gratitude, but it is nice to hear it every once in a while. Allawi also laid out the Iraqi interim government's plans to deal with the terrorists and establish a democratic Iraq. Concerning elections, Allawi said:

As we move forward, the next major milestone will be holding of the free and fair national and local elections in January next year.

I know that some have speculated, even doubted, whether this date can be met. So let me be absolutely clear: Elections will occur in Iraq on time in January because Iraqis want elections on time.

For the skeptics who do not understand the Iraqi people, they do not realize how decades of torture and repression feed our desire for freedom. At every step of the political process to date the courage and resilience of the Iraqi people has proved the doubters wrong.

They said we would miss January deadline to pass the interim constitution.

We proved them wrong.

They warned that there could be no successful handover of sovereignty by the end of June. We proved them wrong. A sovereign Iraqi government took over control two days early.

They doubted whether a national conference could be staged this August. We proved them wrong.

Despite intimidation and violence, over 1,400 citizens, a quarter of them women, from all regions and from every ethnic, religious and political grouping in Iraq, elected a national council.

And I pledge to you today, we'll prove them wrong again over the elections.

In response to this Kerry said:

I think the prime minister is, obviously, contradicting his own statement of a few days ago, where he said the terrorists are pouring into the country. The prime minister and the president are here obviously to put their best face on the policy, but the fact is that the CIA estimates, the reporting, the ground operations and the troops all tell a different story.

Kerry did not attend Allawi's talk, even though he is a Senator. Nor did he meet with Allawi, which I understand Presidential candidates often do when foreign leaders visit. I thought Kerry liked meeting with foreign leaders. I guess Allawi isn't one of those secretly endorsing him. Instead of meeting with him, Kerry continued his defeatist propaganda while impugning Allawi's honesty, once again showing his great diplomatic skills by insulting all our best allies, apparently in the belief that he'll be able to recruit a bunch of new allies to replace them once he's elected.

What I really noticed, however, is how Kerry is always at his worst when he's responding to what his opposition has to say. Remember his speech during the Republican convention? When his opponents talk about him, he's thin-skinned and defensive. When it's not about him, he has to spin it negatively even if it means impugning our allies and condemning the real good we've achieved. A better candidate would have found a way to respond positively, praising Allawi's optimism even while advising caution and pointing out how things could have been done better. Conventional wisdom holds that the debates will improve Kerry's polling, since he's oh-so-much smarter than Bush. Personally, I think Bush will wipe Kerry away in the debates. If his handlers can't control his thin-skinned and small minded responses now, how can they stop him when he's on his own at the debates?

New Post: More on this above.

Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted to eliminate the federal courts' jurisdiction over cases involving the Pledge of Allegiance. Frankly, I'm not overly concerned about the Pledge of Allegiance and whether kids should or shouldn't be required to say "under God." This is important, however, because Congress is finally making an attempt to establish its authority over the courts and rein them in. I like Ramesh Ponnoru's explanation of not only why Congress has this authority but also why they need to exert it:

Judicial errors are so hard to correct — and the potential remedies are now so weakened — because we have come to hold an inflated view of judicial authority. We think it natural that judges should have the last word on constitutional matters. We habitually treat the Constitution as though it were whatever the Supreme Court says it is. We assume that the Court has the job of determining the limits of everyone else's powers, which means, of course, that it has more power than everyone else. Such power, effectively unchecked, is bound to be abused.

There is, however, a way to start changing these assumptions. The Constitution grants Congress the power to limit the jurisdiction of the federal courts. Article III, Section 2, explicitly gives Congress the power to limit the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court ("the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make"). The power of Congress to limit the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts is implied. Article III, Section 1, grants Congress the power to create the "inferior Courts," which has to include the power to establish the scope and limits of their jurisdiction. (The Constitution spells out Congress's ability to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court because the Constitution, rather than Congress, establishes that court.)

A simple majority of Congress and a presidential signature can regulate, or establish exceptions to, the jurisdiction of the federal courts. A constitutional amendment is not required. Such a bill would reduce the power of the judiciary — rather than merely recall a few judges (as impeachment would) or make an impotent gesture of defiance to the courts (as the congressional flag-burning statute did). In addition, the effort to pass a bill would be educational even if it failed to pass, since it would challenge prevailing misconceptions about the proper division of interpretive power over the Constitution.

All in all, good news for me and others who think judicial overreach is the greatest threat to liberal democracy in this country.

This is just a reminder that you have less than twenty-four hours to submit your story for the Carnival. I have nine entries so far, including my own, and there's room for eleven more.

I haven't been talking about politics too much recently, but this is too rich not to comment on. There is an e-mail going around that says:

Mandatory draft for boys and girls (ages18-26) starting June 15, 2005. There is pending legislation in the House and Senate, S89 and HR 163,to reinstate mandatory draft for boys and girls (ages18-26) starting June 15, 2005. This plan includes women in the draft, eliminates higher education as a shelter, and makes it difficult to cross into Canada.

The Bush administration is quietly trying to get these bills passed now, while the public's attention is on the elections. The Bush administration plans to begin mandatory draft in the spring of 2005, just after the 2004 presidential election.

· The Congress has added $28 million to the 2004 selective service system budget to prepare for this military draft that could start as early as June 15, 2005.

· Bush has ordered the Selective Service to report to him by March 31, 2005 on their readiness to implement the draft by June 2005

· The pentagon has quietly begun a public campaign to fill all 10,350 draft board positions and 11,070 appeals board slots nationwide.

Please act on this:

· Tell everyone you know - parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, godparents, friends, teachers

· Call and write to your U.S. Senator and your U.S. Representatives and ask them why they aren't telling their constituents about these bills.

(Hat tip to Michelle Malkin, who got it from Betsy's Page)

I don't have a lot of respect for leftists in general these days, but this level of deception strikes me as well, sickening. Of course, it's just spam, about as believable as those ads for herbal viagara you get everyday, right? Yes and no. It's about as honest as those ads. There is such a bill, being proposed by Democrats in order to drum up opposition to the war. It is opposed by pretty much all Congressional Republicans, most Congressional Democrats, the Bush Administration, and the Pentagon. The Selective Service preparations are in response to a law passed in 1993, by a Democratic Congress under a Democratic President, a law whose purpose is to ensure that the government procedures for these things work properly, not to actually implement it. (See Betsy's page for details.) So aside from the germ of truth, and the correct spelling, I'd toss this e-mail aside with the rest of the spam and advise the college students who received it to do the same. Except that anonymous and duplicitous e-mailers aren't the only ones spreading draft rumors. John Kerry and Max Cleland have been playing it up as well.

I think this marks new territory for political deception. Propose a ludicrous law which cannot possibly pass. Wait a couple of months so that everyone forgets who proposed it, and then claim that it's what the opposition intends to do and use your bill as evidence. (For the record, the Democratic leadership is not actually using the bill as evidence, and there's no indication that they are behind this lying e-mail, but Democrats did propose this law specifically to increase opposition to the war by using the threat of a draft, and they are the ones talking about the draft.) Here is one area where the Internet is weaker than the mainstream media. No matter how hard it tried, the mainstream media would have a hard time pushing an idea like this. A blog could do it, but he'd have to have no comments and confidence that his readers could not traffic blogs which would fact-check him. E-mail, however, is perfect. The originator cannot be held accountable, and there's just enough truth in this to make it sound believable. Fortunately, Snopes is on the case. Unfortunately, the Snopes article says the draft is improbable while failing to note the most important lie in the e-mail--when it lays responsibility for these things on President Bush, when in fact the bill was proposed by the Democrats as a scare tactic.

New Post: Someone is covering this pretty well. See above.

I was reluctant to copy and paste a story from my writings page onto my blog. I ultimately decided to move this story because some people have said that they've had trouble accessing it from that page. I don't know why--I've never had trouble doing so, but I figured I ought to put it on the main page to make sure it's available. It is a very short story, composed as a writing experiment to give a child's eye view on war. I'm happy with how it turned out, although you shouldn't attempt to read any politics into it.

War was a bad thing.

All the grownups said it. Sometimes Max wasn't so sure they believed it, though. He and his mom had been at the grocer's when they heard the news about the one bomb that had destroyed a whole city in Japan. Mr. Clark, the grocer, had whooped and laughed. "That'll show them damn Japs!" he'd said, grinning at them and expecting them to grin back. Max had only felt scared. Sometimes they had air raid drills, and his mom would hold him and shush him and tell him, loudly to be heard over the screaming sirens, not to be afraid, that there weren't any real bombs. And if, heaven forbid, there ever were, they'd be small ones, not aiming for them, that they'd miss them by miles. He wondered whether some mom in Japan had held her little boy and told him the same thing... as one bomb, not aiming for them, missing them by miles, had killed them and thousands of others even further away.

Then they'd heard of a second bomb a couple of days later. "And if they don't give up, we'll keep dropping bombs on them until they're all dead," Mr. Clark had said. Max only prayed, prayed with all his might that there were no more bombs.

When Veejay day came, people laughed and cried and went to church to pray. War was a bad thing. Max believed it whether the grownups did or not. Max and his mom prayed too, but they didn't go to church. They stayed home and she held him, trembling as she sobbed, her tears making his hair wet, and he started crying too, without knowing why at first, and then learning the one thing that proved once and for all that war really was a bad thing.

Daddy was not coming home.

My sister liked this story a lot. My mother thought it was good, but predictable.

There's an interesting article on a superconducting quantum computation scheme here, in the EE Times. Be forewarned, while I'm not too familiar with this particular project, I have read about some of the experiments and I'm fairly knowledgeable about superconducting quantum computation in general. I saw a lot of things in this article that seemed fishy or flat out wrong. I don't think it's dishonesty on the part of the researchers, aside from the usual hype about their research, so much as the author's limited knowledge about quantum computation and superconductivity in general. I'll let you know more once I have a chance to read the papers. Maybe I'll do a fisking of the EE Times article.

Remember, the deadline for the next Storyblogging Carnival is Friday at 11:59 PM EDT. If you haven't submitted an entry, make sure you do so by then. The Carnival itself will be up by Monday. The reason I give myself so much time between the deadline and the day of the Carnival is because I have to read each entry, and there is no length limit. I have five submissions so far, and I'm pretty sure two others which missed the last carnival will be in this one (have to confirm it with the authors first), but there's still plenty of room since the limit is twenty.

Is the president's abilities to make philosophical arguments important? Jeremy Pierce has some thoughts:

Regardless of what you think of Kerry and Bush's philosophical acumen, one thing really bugs me about this whole argument. As I said above, it's important to be able to have some philosophical ability to make proper judgments on complicated issues. Are philosophical abilities the best way to choose a candidate, though? I've argued that Bush's abilities on this sort of thing are much better than his opponents allow and that Kerry's aren't as good as his supporters allow, but I'm not sure I'm willing to compare them with respect to each other. I just don't have enough information. If it turns out Kerry is better, as Dan wants to say, is that sufficient reason for voting for Kerry? I don't think so, for a few reasons.

For one thing, Bush surrounds himself with people who are excellent at this sort of thing...

Another reason I don't think philosophical ability should be the only or even primary reason for voting for someone is that some highly trained philosophers take what seem to me to be morally abhorrent views...

I think Jeremy is right, and more to the point, I think Dan Quattrone, whom he's arguing with, is engaging in a bit of projection. When all you have is a hammer, all you see are nails. In other words, he's saying that the most important ability of a president is to be able to think through complex issues philosophically. I disagree, because I'm a scientist. I think the president should think through issues scientifically. This means he should be able to apply mathematical models to the issues, and correct and refine the models according to how well they fit. Of course, I'm also an engineer, which means that I wish the president would think about the issues more like an engineer. That means he should approach issues by creatively applying proven solutions to new problems.

Do you see the problem here? The president is not a philosopher, a scientist, or an engineer. The profession his position is most similar to is probably that of manager. He needs to listen to his subordinates, who do the philosophy, science, and engineering, decide among the multiple solutions they present to him, and provide them the materials to work through the solutions they present. He is also a leader, who needs a clear vision of where he is taking the country, the ability to communicate this, and the perseverence to continue despite hardship. Finally, he needs to be a diplomat, negotiating with people both at home and abroad and making compromises that work. Now you can argue that the ability to think like a scientist, philosopher, or engineer help the president, especially when it comes to looking at the solutions his advisors present him and deciding among them, but that is only a small part of what he needs to do.

I don't usually read Al Jazeera, but this caught my eye when it appeared in my Gmail ad bar:

Scientists working at Los Alamos National Laboratory have discovered a way of improving the efficiency of some superconductors by as much as 500%.

A researcher from the University of Cambridge, Judith Macmanus-Driscoll, said the team had found a simple and cheap method for increasing the amount of current flowing through superconducting-coated conductors in a magnetic field.
...
In research reported in the journal Nature Materials, Macmanus-Driscoll and her Los Alamos colleagues discovered that when the compound barium zirconate is deposited simultaneously with the yttrium-barium-copper-oxide superconductor, it naturally forms nanoscale particles embedded in superconductor films.

The result was a two-to-five-fold increase in the current densities of coated conductors in high magnetic fields operating at liquid nitrogen temperatures.

Now, al Jazeera is not the most reliable of news sources. Remember, they used to have a news section called Conspiracy Theories (I can't find it anymore, so maybe it's gone--at least from the English site). And I haven't seen the paper to which they refer. Having said all that, it does sound plausible.

One of the biggest problem with Type II superconductors (which all high temperature superconductors, such as YBCO (yttrium-barium-copper-oxide ), are) is that they allow magnetic field to enter in the form of vortices--small whirlpools of circulating current with a single quantum of magnetic flux in the center. While electric current can flow through a superconductor without resistance, vortices cannot. The motion of vortices in a superconductor can cause a voltage drop and power dissipation, in effect killing your superconductivity. The way to prevent this is to introduce defects in your superconductor so that the vortices become trapped there and can't move. From the scant information available in this article, it looks like what's been developed is a cheap and easy way to add defects, in the form of nanoscale particles of barium zirconium, which trap the vortices and allow greater supercurrent and/or magnetic field. (There's a relationship between temperature, current, and magnetic field which defines the limits of superconductivity in three dimensions.) This isn't really a scientific breakthrough, but it is an advance in fabrication technology.

The next Storyblogging carnival will be on Monday, September 27th. If you have a story on your blog that you'd like to have included in the Carnival, please e-mail me at dscrank-at-alum.mit.edu (or post in my comments), including the following information:

Name of your blog
URL of your blog
Title of the story
URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
A word count
A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
A short blurb describing the story

The post may be of any age, from a week old to years old. The submission deadline is 11:59 PM Eastern time on Friday, September 24th (unless I decide to extend it again). More detailed information follows:

1. The story or excerpt submitted must be posted on-line as a blog entry, and while fiction is preferred, non-fiction storytelling is acceptable.

2. The story can be any length, but the Carnival will list them in order of length, from shortest to longest, and include a word count for each one.

3. You may either send a complete story, a story in progress, or a lengthy excerpt. By lengthy excerpt, I mean that it should be a significant portion of the story, at least 10% of the whole thing. You should indicate the word count for both the excerpt and the complete story in the submission, and you should say how the reader can find more of the story in the post itself.

4. If the story spans multiple posts, each post should contain a link to the beginning of the story, and a link to the next post. You should submit the first post to the Carnival.

5. The host has sole discretion to decide whether the story will be included or not, or whether to indicate that the story has pornographic or graphically violent content. The ratings for the story will be decided by the host. I expect I'll be pretty lenient on that sort of thing, but I have some limits, and others may draw the line elsewhere. Aside from noting potentially offensive content, while I may say nice things about stories I like, I won't be panning anyone's work. I expect future hosts to be similarly polite.

6. The story may be the blogger's own or posted with permission, but if it is not his own work he should gain permission from the author before submitting to the Carnival.

There are plenty of reasons to vote for Bush, but right now, one of my most important reasons is to really annoy those elitist liberals who think they can buy the election. You know the types: George Soros, Michael Moore, Moveon.org, etc. To them, truth matters less than the fact that they know Bush is evil, and they think if they just say it often enough and loudly enough, spend enough money and lie through their teeth if necessary, they can convince everyone else of this. Nothing annoys me more than seeing the full might of the mainstream media and the Hollywood elite arrayed in an all out effort to destroy a president. You may not agree with everything Bush has done. I like Bush, but I don't agree with him on everything. But I see no reason to doubt his honesty and good intentions, and for that reason alone the attempt to impugn not Bush's politics, but his honor, drives me crazy. I want to see Bush win, partly because I don't trust Kerry not to cut and run at the first opportunity, but also because I want to see those elites who think that they know better than everyone else learn that they aren't as powerful and influential as they think they are.

Update: Doc Rampage is thinking along similar lines. He believes that the Democrats basically use their influence in the media to mislead people about what they and the Republicans really want, and now that their influence is waning, they can't adapt to the shift as people see what they are. I probably wouldn't be quite so harsh on the Democrats, as I don't think their entire party is a lie. I do think that the Democratic leadership is shifting further and further away from the core values of most of those who call themselves Democrats, and are only paying lip service to those beliefs these days, and in that sense, Doc Rampage is correct.

Peter and the Starcatchers is a prequel to Peter Pan. The title character, Peter, is in fact Peter Pan, and this book is about how an ordinary boy became the flying, eternally young boy we are familiar with from J.M. Barrie's story. That, in itself, should make you interested in this book. We love to learn about beginnings and how things came to be. In the story we know, Peter Pan starts out life as a mystery. So when someone comes along offering to tell us what those origins are, we're interested. And skeptical. After all, J.M. Barrie died in 1937. We know this isn't the origins he had in mind for Peter Pan, if he had any at all. The writers of this book are simply making these origins up, so it's really their story, not Barrie's, that we're reading. We're really reading the book not because we want to know the origin of Peter Pan, but because we want to know the authors' version of the origin of Peter Pan. So, as with most other books I read, my decision to read Peter and the Starcatchers began not with the subject matter, but with the authors.

Plural, in this case. Peter and the Starcatchers is co-authored by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. I'll admit right away that I don't know too much about Ridley Pearson. I know that he's a mystery writer, but I haven't read any of his books. Dave Barry is another story. I've read quite a bit of what he's written, and enjoyed it all. Barry is a humor columnist, and if you're not familiar with him, you need to start reading his columns. Dave Barry is very funny, and if you read his works, both fiction and "non-fiction," you'll find that the humor is non-stop. I sometimes find I can't breathe for laughing. It was his name on the cover that convinced me to buy this book.

Peter and the Starcatchers is funny, but it is not as funny as most books by Dave Barry. While you'll occasionally chuckle and even laugh out loud, you won't find yourself laughing helplessly while trying to catch your breath. You may consider this a weakness of the book, especially if you bought it looking for Dave Barry-style humor. However, the reduced humor is purposeful, because this book is more serious than most of Dave Barry's books. That may seem odd, considering that it is putatively a children's book, but I don't really consider it a children's book. It is a common mistake to assume that any book about children must be for children, and thus Peter and the Starcatchers is classified as a children's book, in the same way as Harry Potter is. I wouldn't recommend any of these books for young children, since while they stay away from sexual themes, there do contain elements of violence and horror. According to the cover, Peter and the Starcatchers is for children ages ten and up. At that age, I was reading classics of American Literature in school, The Lord of the Rings for my own enjoyment, and other books that no one considers children's, or young adults', books. At that age I think it's helpful to think less about what age group the book is geared towards and more about whether there is material in the book inappropriate for the age group. Peter and the Starcatchers is tame enough that a parent can let his middle school children read it, but interesting and deep enough that he'd enjoy reading it himself.

In many ways, I enjoyed Peter and the Starcatchers more than I ever enjoyed the story of Peter Pan. I read a lot of fantasy, and the one thing that every good fantasy world needs is a sensible magic system. When magic makes no sense, then every magical solution is deus ex machina, and you never know when a situation is truly dangerous, since it's never clear what poses a challenge to magic. Peter Pan lacked a sensible magic system, but Peter and the Starcatchers introduces one that does a lot to explain the magic both of Peter Pan and of Never, Never Land. You get a clear idea of what the abilities and limitations of it are, and when you encounter a situation you can guess whether it's truly dangerous or not. And this is another thing that this book does well, creating a sense of danger. Of course, we already know that Peter has to survive--it's his prequel, after all--but there are many other characters whom we come to like, and the danger to them is quite real. This book is a lot less carefree and, well, childish, than the original Peter Pan, and a great deal more serious. For me, that makes it more enjoyable, although others may disagree.

On the whole, I recommend Peter and the Starcatchers, but not for young children. There are parts which they will find scary, places where it's not clear who the good and bad guys are, and a level of violence that parents may find inappropriate. By the time I'd think a child is old enough to appreciate the story, he should have not just the reading skills, but also the patience, to be able to read it on his own. I also wouldn't hesitate to recommend it for adults who always wished the story of Peter Pan made a little more sense.

Now that I've reviewed Dave Barry's book, what do you think the odds are that I can get him to review my writing?

Sluggy Freelance — Torg and Alt-Zoe? Torg and Alt-Zoe! They make such a cute couple, too. Too bad Gwynn's always barging in. Too bad she's not the only one barging in.

Day by Day — Chris Muir has to take an indefinite hiatus due to an illness in the family. I wish his family member a speedy recovery.

It's Walky! — Sal takes on the Cheese, possessed by the Head Alien, and Jason takes on brainwashed Tony. They're both overmatched.

College Roomies from Hell!!! — Mike and Blue discuss their father, briefly, then Mike and Roger try to get home alive.

General Protection Fault — Nick meets Ki's parents. Her mom likes him, at least.

Schlock Mercenary — Now working for Petey, Tagon's mercenaries put on a show for the O'benn.

Just so you know exactly how big the town my parents live in is, I thought I'd show you a picture of the phone book.

This is both the white and yellow pages. And it covers the entire New Roads area, not just St. Francisville, but also New Roads, Morganza, Rougon, and Tunica. Maybe I shouldn't be holding my breath for them to get high-speed Internet access here.

I've just been looking over the past week and noticing how slow my posting has been. The Storyblogging Carnival was my main project this week, consuming much of the time and energy that might have gone into other posts. It isn't a complete reason, however, and I'm wondering what is. Am I burned out on the whole blogging deal? The Memogate story drew a post from me, but I just haven't found much else interesting to say about it. And there are numerous other stories that I haven't said much about: Darfur, Beslan, Iraq. Well, a slow week isn't the end of the world, or even the blog, and we'll see whether I have more to say next week. At the very least, I have some storyblogging I want to do.

Doc Rampage has noticed that his readership has increased. I don't think this is too surprising. I've noticed that he's been posting a lot more recently, and it's all good stuff. Now, if he would only move to a decent blogging service provider.

Today's been a pretty miserable day for me, breathing-wise. When my allergies are really bad, I start sneezing, repeatedly. I never count them, so I don't really know how many times I sneeze, but it can go on for ten or twenty minutes, rapid stacatto bursts of sneezes separated by a couple of minutes of being almost ready to sneeze. In between the sneezing fits, my nose runs and I sniff a lot, my eyes water and burn, the roof of my mouth itches horribly, my lungs, and for some reason my arms, feel sore and weak, and all in all I feel terrible. It helps to eat--I'm not sure why, but it seems to suppress the sneezing impulse, and it reduces the itching in my mouth--but after a while my stomach starts to get annoyed at all the food I'm putting into it without being hungry, so now my stomach, while not upset, does feel uncomfortably full. On top of that, sneezing starts to hurt. My chest muscles ache with every sneeze, the roof of my mouth doesn't just itch, it hurts, as do my nostrils. The skin around my nose and mouth, rubbed raw by tissues, handkerchiefs, paper towels, and whatever else is handy, starts to feel chafed and burned. Every once in a while my nostrils become clear, only to quickly clog up again, one before the other. I have been unable to do much of anything productive until a couple of hours ago.

A typical day in Louisiana, right? Well, not quite. Yesterday, I felt fine. I am, of course, on medication, in my case Claritin, and I was just thinking that it must be working pretty well. Until this all started last night. And I think I can guess the source. Last night, because of the hurricance, my sister brought two cats and two dogs into this house. I'm now pretty certain that my allergies began acting up when they arrived. They're gone now, and I'm hopeful that my allergies will settle down soon. Maybe then I'll be able to blog again.

Yesterday was pretty tense as we waited for the hurricane to come this way. My sister and her daughter came over since they didn't want to be in their trailer when the hurricane came. She brought animals. Lots of animals: two cats and two dogs. The cats are hers, while the dogs belong to a friend of hers. My allergies did not take well to them, and I had to retreat to the room over the garage in order to sleep. After all that, however, the storm passed us by. I don't think we even got any rain, and it's even sunny out right now. Unfortunately, the storm did make landfall somewhere, and Mobile got the storm we didn't. I am glad New Orleans didn't get hit too hard, though. A good hurricane would wipe New Orleans from the map.

I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in the Storyblogging Carnival, and everyone who's promoted it on their blogs. I don't run a really high traffic site, averaging about 50 visits per day last week. I'm at twice that for the last couple of days, due mainly to the Storyblogging Carnival and those who have linked to it.

Of those who participated in the carnival, Doc Rampage, Robin Jones, Jeremiah Lewis, Curtis Schweitzer, and Yetzirah have all promoted it on their respective blogs. I've also had links from Mr. E. Poet, Joe Carter, Cassandra (who has, by the way, been inspired to write a better CYA story for Dan Rather by this Carnival), Chris Becker, John Hawkins (in the news section, so I don't think it will archive), Dean Esmay, and La Shawn Barber, some of whom have expressed an interest in participating in the future. I have, of course, been promoting the Carnival as strongly as possible without actually spamming my blogging friends and associates (as well as people who've probably never heard of me). So far, so good. I'm always looking for more attention for it, however, so if you haven't already, please promote the Storyblogging Carnival on your blog.

In short, things are going pretty well, well enough that I'm almost tempted to do another carnival next week rather than two weeks from now. Almost. I think every two weeks is going to stay that way for at least a couple of Carnivals, long enough for us to figure out how all this works. Meanwhile, I'm already talking to four people who didn't participate in the last Carnival but want to participate in the next one. At the least, it looks like we'll have no shortage of entries.

Well, it looks like Ivan will take a detour and mostly miss us here in St. Francisville. While that's good for us, it just means that some other poor soul will bear the brunt of it. I'm particularly concerned for Robin Jones, who took part in our Storyblogging Carnival. He's right in the hurricane's path.

Old Post: The previous post on this subject is here.

I pointed out earlier that having UN observors in the US might not be such a bad thing from the Bush administration's perspective, since most voter fraud seems to be on the part of Democrats. Deroy Murdock at National Review agrees with me:

For its August 22 edition, the New York Daily News compared Florida's and Gotham's voter rolls. It discovered 45,882 voters who appear to be registered in both places. They are 68 percent Democrat and 12 percent Republican, while 16 percent chose no party. Between 400 and 1,000 of them voted twice in at least one election. This federal offense carries up to a $10,000 fine and five years behind bars. Irving and Magdolna Hertz allegedly voted in person in Brooklyn and absentee in Miami in 1996 and 1998. When the News called for comment, Irving Hertz said, "I'm not here today," then hung up the phone. Recall that President Bush won Florida in 2000 by 537 votes.
...
Why are these, and many more, outrages so widespread? For one, these crimes are rarely punished.
...
Can the OSCE observers help? While they correctly will lack legal standing to intervene, they can and should blow their whistles as loudly as possible if they witness skullduggery. Their mere presence, however, may be their best weapon. One hopes that with guests in our house, Americans will be on our best behavior on November 2.

He has a point, I think. It's sad that it would take outside observers to stop voter fraud. The irony, of course, is that the Democrats called for it, so they're hardly in a position to complain. Moreover, they want the observers in the largely Democratic districts where most of the fraud apparently takes place.

Hurricane Ivan is now heading towards our part of Louisiana. On the bright side, we're far enough inland that we shouldn't have to evacuate and chances are we'll get through with a minimum of property damage. On the downside, electrical service is not the best here to begin with, and I suspect we'll be seeing some long downtimes during this storm. Expect blogging to be sporadic at best.

So what have I been working on since finishing A Phoenix in Darkness? Mostly, I've been working on the "sequel" to Fire, which I'll leave nameless as of now. I use quotes around sequel because I expect both Fire and this new work to be two parts of the same book, whose title I'm even less certain about. I'm about five chapters into it, which I guess is about a quarter of the way--it's hard to tell, since I don't plan things out in detail in advance. I know where I want things to go ultimately, and I'm gently prodding all of my characters in that direction, but meanwhile, I expect to be as surprised as my readers by some of what happens. They'll get where they're supposed to go eventually. I hope. I'm not sure what I'll do if they don't, aside from let things play out and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, I'm considering what I can do for the next Storyblogging Carnival. I'd like to have an entry, but two weeks is not enough time for me to write a story from scratch and send it through my usual revising process. Ideally, I should wait over a month between the first draft and the first revision, and another two weeks before the second revison, but I don't have anything far enough in progress that it would be through the second revision in time, much less the third revision, and I consider the second revision absolutely necessary for the story to be presentable. That leaves me with the option of digging up one of my old stories, either one previously unseen or something from my Writings page. Alternatively, I could do a lengthy excerpt from Fire, but I really don't want to do two excerpts in a row. I already have the distinction of having the longest entry in the first Carnival (6,000+ words), and it's an excerpt from a 35,000 word novella. A proper excerpt from Fire would be 17,000 words from a 90,000 word novel, and I'd really like to have an entry that people can read without investing a day or more into it. I'll have to see what I can come up with.

A little while ago, I asked Chris Lansdown, who works at Powerblogs and serves as my contact whenever I have a problem (I'm not sure whether he's really my official contact--he's the guy whose e-mail I have), whether they had a way to reference just the number of Trackbacks for a post, so that when I link to the Trackbacks section of the individual post page (rather than the separate page just for trackbacks used by default), it shows "0 Trackbacks" or "2 Trackbacks" rather than just "Trackbacks." This morning he e-mailed me to let me know that he'd added a new variable which just gives you the number of Trackbacks. I've since made use of it, as you'll notice on my posts on the front page.

Now, I don't know that Chris created the variable just because I requested it, but I suspect he did. In other news, Powerblogs has added a categories feature, which is now in my sidebar, although I haven't categorized many of my posts yet.

Seriously, if you're looking for a new host for your blog, consider Powerblogs.

Welcome to the first Storyblogging Carnival. Here we've collected links to eight stories for your reading pleasure.

If you're unfamiliar with the concept of storyblogging, it consists of storytelling in blog format. It may be as simple as posting short stories on your blog, or as intricate as blogging as a fictional persona. (I am excluding deliberate deception from this definition--you can argue that deception is a legitimate storytelling technique, but examples won't be included in this Carnival.) While storytelling is not necessarily fictional, the fiction/non-fiction divide makes a useful criteria to separate out the storyblogging from the usual blog commentary. However, as you'll see, I haven't kept strictly to this criteria.

When I first started to put this together, I had no idea how much work it would be to assemble a carnival from scratch. After several weeks of discussions with other bloggers, and a little bit of begging on my part, we've put together the first Carnival. I hope you enjoy it. If you're interested in participating in a future Carnival, check the details at the end. The stories are listed in order of length, from shortest to longest, with a word count included. They also include a rating for appropriateness, using the movie ratings as a baseline. Although I didn't ask for it, several authors self-rated their work (which I took as a suggestion rather than an absolute) and I've rated the remainder. For the most part, the descriptions were written by the authors themselves, with my comments indicated in italics. Without further ado, here are this Carnival's entries...

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The Village Itself
by Queenie of Rolling My Eyes
A 784 word brief story rated PG.

The laconic observation of the search for an impossibly large cat named Tilly.

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the adventures of Doc (Crocodile Hunter) Rampage
by Dave Gudeman of Doc Rampage
A 1,332 word brief story rated G.

What beasts lie in ambush among the linoleum? What horrors await the unwary trekker going to the fridge for a coke?Who will protect us from the ssssssserpent of eeeeeeevil?

These and other pertinent questions of the modern age are addressed in a delightful and thought-provoking manuscript by the famous civil explorer, Doc Rampage.

[While technically a true story, this fictionalized telling of it really is delightful. Doc Rampage, incidentally, is the first person to suggest a Carnival along these lines, although neither of us were using the term "storyblogging" yet. -DSC]

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Chloe Tuttle of Bogwillow
by Yetzirah of Yetzirah
A 1,343 word brief story rated G.

Sometimes people pass up their opportunity for that 15 minutes of fame, and go quietly about their remarkable existence. Chloe Tuttle was just such a person.

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Insomnia
by Jeremiah Lewis of Fringe
A 2,285 word short story rated R.

A writer who can't sleep wanders through dark cityscapes of mind and memory, and encounters a familiar stranger.

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Colossus
by Curtis Schweitzer of a_sdf
A 2,497 word short story rated PG.

"Colossus" is my expression of the power of the true American ideals--freedom, democracy, and equality. It expresses both the danger that the American ideal poses to dictatorship, oppression, and collectivism, as well as its place as the guiding conscience of the American soul. The story's abstract, future setting poses a world that has been stripped of liberty and justice--a world where the government's only recourse against the human need for freedom is to deny its existence.

They are soon to find out, however, the impossibility of such a task.

[I really liked this story; somehow it manages to be both depressing and hopeful. In part, stumbling upon Curtis's story is what inspired me to start the Carnival, an idea which had already been percolating at the suggestion of Doc Rampage. I had never heard what I'd already been doing called "storyblogging" until I read this. -DSC]

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Allergies
by Neil Uchitel of Digitus, Finger, & Co.
A 2802 word short story rated G.

I've never had allergies before this year. I grew up on a farm until I was 6 or 7, so I've never been allergic to horses, chickens, dogs, cats, whatever. I knew kids in school who had allergies, and I used to think to myself, man, it sucks to be you. Then, all of the sudden, this year I'm allergic to all kinds of stuff.

[This is another story that is technically non-fiction. That said, it's well-told and funny. Once again, it proves that storyblogging is more about how you tell the story than whether it's fiction or non-fiction. -DSC]

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Poor White Boys
by Robin Jones of beyond salvage
A 5,756 word short story rated PG-13.

A down-on-his-luck drifter has a chance meeting with another social misfit. A friendship is forged and they try and make a life for themselves, and their make-shift family, in a world none of them fit into.

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The Murder, an excerpt from A Phoenix in Darkness
by Donald S. Crankshaw of Back of the Envelope
A 6,359 word excerpt, in four parts, of a 35,553 word novella, rated R.

Quian, the capital city of the Kingdom of Manuel, is kept orderly by its professional City Guard. It is the last place where the young guardsman Seth would expect to witness the murder of one of the mysterious Domini in broad daylight. Who is behind it? And will the Domini themselves help or hinder Seth?

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The next storyblogging carnival will be in two weeks, and it will be hosted here at Back of the Envelope. If you wish to make a submission, please check out the submission guidelines in this post. If you wish to join my mailing list for the Carnival, let me know through the webform, or e-mail me at dscrank-at-alum.mit.edu.

Additionally, if you'd like to host a future carnival, please let me know.

Update: I've done a bit of updating to clarify things, mainly just homing in on a final format.

New Post: The next storyblogging carnival is here.

From today's comic:

© 2004 by Pete Abrams
Well, I expected this. I think I'm happy about it. However, now we know this storyline will have to end tragically.

Don't even think about trying to understand what's going on without reading this storyline from the beginning (this will take an hour or so). Better yet, start reading from the very beginning of Sluggy (this may take a couple of days).

I realize it's 9/12 by the time I get this up. Still, I thought I would share my recollections, taken from this post from earlier this year.

Sometimes I wonder whether Americans have forgotten September 11th. Not that it happened, certainly, but what it was like. In my case, I was frankly disbelieving. I had an indication that something was happening--I'd seen and heard some workmen listening to a radio as I walked into work. I hadn't really heard what they were talking about, but I got the impression that it was big. I was a Grad student at the time, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I didn't have a radio or a television on hand when I got to my office. The first notice I got was through an e-mail with a call to a prayer meeting, and reading that the reason for the prayer meetings were airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--I couldn't believe it. It didn't seem possible. I tried to get online, to check CNN.com, but with all the Internet traffic that day, I couldn't get access. Eventually, a friend came by to talk to me about it, and I got a phone call from my mother (who was concerned since two of the flights had left from Boston, although she had no reason to think that I would be traveling anywhere that day), and I drained them of all the information they had, which was surprisingly little. It's not the sort of thing you forget, but sometimes it seems like we have forgotten, that two years is just too long in this age of "Internet time."

9/11 was more than a tragedy--it was an act of war. It was neither the first nor the last such act: al Qaeda had struck again and again in the Nineties. It was, however, the one where we first realized we were at war. We had to decide whether we would fight or retreat, only we had been retreating for decades without realizing it. So retreat was only an option if we were willing to be attacked again and again, which meant it was no option at all. We had to fight. We still have to.

A slow week, but a couple of posts of interest.

Now accepting submissions for the Storyblogging Carnival -- I've decided that putting together a Storyblogging Carnival is worth the effort, so I'm inviting people to contribute. Of course, I didn't realize exactly how much effort the Carnival would be at the time. Still, it should be ready for Monday.

Interview today -- An interview in Boston gives me a chance to drop in unannounced on some of my friends.

Dozer's death -- My family buried our dog on Friday. We'll miss him.

Forgeries? -- I finally weigh in on CBS's forged documents. Could Karl Rove be behind it?

[NOTE: I had written a long post on this earlier, but the computer crashed and I lost most of it. I attempted to restore from autosave, but no luck. I've retyped most of it, but this post is shorter than the original.]

I was out-of-town Wednesday and Thursday for a job interview, so I missed the fun over CBS's 60 Minutes expose on Bush's Guard service, and the instant exposure of most of their evidence as fraudulent. Instead, I was in the airport Thursday, watching CNN Headline News as it repeated the CBS's allegation every fifteen minuted, while having nothing to say on the legitimate doubts raised about the documents even then. If I had been able to get online, I'd have known that CNN was behind the times. As it was, I pretty much dismissed the CNN report anyway, since I had little interest in Bush's National Guard service, and he hardly mentions it unless someone else brings it up.

Anyway, the crux of the argument is based on documents that CBS produced, supposedly produced by Bush's commander, Killian, for his private files, saying that Bush had not gotten his required physical and that Killian was being pressured by his commander to whitewash Bush's record. Since Killian is dead, he can't comment on it. According to CBS, his commanding officer, Hodges, upon having the document read to him, replied that it sounded like what Killian was telling him at the time. ABC News says that Hodges told them that CBS first misled and then misquoted him, and what he really said was "well if he wrote them that's what he felt."

So what did Killian write? Apparently not what appeared in the memos, since they're transparently fraudulent. What it boils down to is if you tried to produce the memos using 1972 technology, you'd have to use a rare, expensive, and complicated typewriter, the IBM Selectric Composer, work hard to produce the special features of the memo, and even then you'd have a hard time getting an exact match (in fact, there's a good chance you could not get an exact match--experts are still trying to determine whether it'd be possible). Meanwhile, you could fire up Microsoft Word, type out the memo, and let Word auto-superscript the "th" in 187th, and you'd get a perfect match right away. For more information, see Instapundit, InDC, and Powerline (All of these blogs have a lot more than just the post indicated. Just go to their front page and scroll down.). So while it's still possible that someone with a lot of dedication and time to kill could produce these documents on the right 1972 typewriter, it seems hi