J.T. McDaniel's blog

Reading on Camera

When you write a new book, one of the problems is always getting people to buy it. The most difficult part of this is letting potential buyers know that the book exists. Small publishing companies don't have budgets that allow them to buy network television time for the author to ponder killing off his most popular character, thus giving the readers an incentive to buy the book to discover if he did. Thirty seconds of James Patterson on CBS costs more than my publisher spends on their entire operation during a year.

So the only way I'm getting on CBS is if I do something newsworthy. Writing another book isn't, so I don't think I'm likely to need to skip work some morning to talk to Charlie Rose.

One thing I can do is get on YouTube. I did some acting when I was younger. I also worked in radio for quite a few years. The combination provides sufficient confidence for me to figure I can sit in a comfortable chair reading a story from my new book, This and That, without making a complete fool of myself. So I took my camera, which has a video setting, put in on the tripod, and gave it a shot.

Pretty awful. The image, that is. The reading wasn't bad, but there wasn't enough light on my face and there was a blue reflective bar running vertically through the scene.

Now I needed to make two purchases instead of one. The first was MoviePlus X3, which Serif has on sale at a steep discount now that a newer version has been released. My editing needs are extremely simple. I need to be able to create title cards at the beginning and end of the video, and I need to be able to cut the shots together. The hope was that I'd be able to read an entire story or essay right through without any fluffs. If I couldn't, I needed to be able to pause for a few seconds, then start over with the paragraph where I'd screwed up. Then, during the editing, I'd be able to cut out the fluff and pick up where I'd started over.

The second thing I needed was a better camera. So instead of shooting the reading on my old Kodak Z1015IS, I went over to BestBuy and picked up a Sony HDR-CX160. Instant jump in quality, with a 1080 x 1440 image area (full HD, in other words). Converting the finished image for YouTube results in a reduction in quality, but it's still reasonably good. An additional advantage of the Handycam is that you can turn the display around 180 degrees, so you can see it as it films you. Makes for a lot more confidence that you haven't accidentally moved out of frame.

So last night I set up the camera, turned on some extra lights, picked up my Kindle Fire, and started reading A Patient Man, one of the stories in This and That. As expected, there were a couple of fluffs, which were cut out with only a minimum of fuss. I picked that particular story for various reasons. It's fairly short. It's written in first person form, with only a few lines of dialogue. And it's suitably creepy. I grew up reading Poe, so I like creepy.

I also do it well. My favorite part as an actor was probably Jonathan Brewster, and the resemblance to Boris Karloff was likely brought across most strongly by the voice, rather than the makeup. I didn't quite go full Karloff for this story, but I think I managed the proper genially sinister effect.

Don't take my word for it, though. The upload went smoothly, so please feel free to pop over to YouTube and take a look. J.T. McDaniel reading A Patient Man

Some Planning Tips for Towns

At the present time, I live in a medium size townhouse in what the Post Office says is Dublin, Ohio, but actually turns out to be Columbus. That's really only confusing at tax time; Columbus' income tax is higher than Dublin's, so I get to make up the difference.

I've noticed a few things about city/town planning over the last few years. Little gems of wisdom that the professional planners have either missed, or couldn't convince municipalities and developers to pay for. The sort of thing I'd like to make mandatory. For example:

• Any new roads built should be required to have a sidewalk on both sides. This would include perimeter roads around shopping malls and office parks, and the entrance roads to apartment complexes.
• Apartment or townhouse developers should be required to fill the space between the inter-unit firewalls and the finish wall with rock wool or something similar. Whatever insulation is used should have two qualities: it should be fireproof, and it should prevent sound from getting through. Done properly you'd have four inches of insulation on each side with a proper firewall between, and your neighbors could play their music as loud as they like without bothering you.
• Multi-unit buildings should have minimum four hour firewalls completely separating each unit from its neighbors. In an apartment building, this would include a four hour fire rating on the floors. Any building with more than two units should be masonry, not wood. It's entirely possible to build an apartment building where any unit could be completely gutted without any neighboring unit catching fire, but it costs significantly more so hardly anyone is actually doing it. Maybe if the owners were required to live in their own buildings?
• It has been discovered that living in a city that's unfriendly to automobiles results in an increase in the average lifespan. It turns out people living in Manhattan tend to live longer, and remain healthy longer, than people living in much of the midwest. This may have something to do with the fact that most Manhattanites don't own cars, and often walk several  miles a day just getting around their neighborhoods. There are places in New York you can't easily go by car; there is nowhere in New York you can't go by foot.
• Apartment developers generally try to avoid providing adequate parking. City codes usually specify a minimum number of spaces per unit, but more often than not this will be fewer than the renters actually own. I doubt we can ever get anything passed that would require the number of spaces to be based on the  number of cars, but I can't see any reason why there can't be a requirement that landlords have to provide at least one reserved space per unit. Then maybe I could go to a Clippers game in the evening and have a place to put my car when I get home.

I don't expect to see many of these suggestions enacted into law. The fireproofing ideas, masonry construction, stronger firewalls, are the sort of thing you'd think developers would do anyway just to protect their investments. Rarely a week went by when I was living in Atlanta that a kitchen fire in a newer luxury apartment didn't result in burning down the entire building. Most apartment buildings in the Atlanta suburbs are wood frame construction. Masonry buildings, with masonry firewalls between sections, could eliminate a lot of these big fires. Apartment fires in newer buildings in New York rarely burn out more than one family. If you look behind the drywall on the walls separating the individual apartments you find concrete.

Soundproofing is just common sense. Landlords generally prefer that tenants stay for extended terms (presuming there are no rent control laws). They're more likely to stay if they don't have to listen to the neighbors. Once, when I was in Georgia, the apartment above mine was rented to a hooker. A very loud hooker. It's not easy trying to sleep with someone screaming, moaning, and generally encouraging the customers directly above you.

This is making me miss my house. There's a lot to say for living on a quiet street, on a one-acre wooded lot (I actually had only a quarter acre, but the three lots around me were unbuildable, so I got the benefit without having to pay the taxes). If I look out my front window here I see cars. If I looked out my front window there I saw a bird feeder, usually with plenty of customers.

Well, another three or four years and I get to retire.

On the First Amendment

Why does the Bill of Rights begin with the First Amendment? It has to, of course, but why is this particular amendment first and not one of the others? It's first because the men who created the  Constitution and Bill of Rights--in particular, James Madison--recognized that it was the most important.

We need to remember that the Bill of Rights was never intended to grant rights. Madison and the others worked from the premise that these rights were innate. The Bill of Rights didn't give you these rights, it stated in no uncertain terms that these were rights you already had, and the government was never to be allowed to take them away.

Recently, the First Amendment has come under attack yet again. The most vocal of its enemies are often those who most loudly claim to be defending it, and this time is no different.

When it comes to religion, the First Amendment contains two equally important, but to some minds conflicting clauses. First there is the establishment clause, immediately followed by the free exercise clause. Both are frequently misinterpreted or ignored, but the establishment clause is probably attacked more often.Usually by those who feel that the free exercise clause is the only one that counts (as long as it's their religion being exercised).

The most literal meaning of the establishment clause is that Congress is forbidden to establish an official religion for the United States. A lot of very loud fundamentalist Christians think it should be limited to precisely that and nothing more. They feel that religious involvement in government is just fine, as long as no one is trying to declare the United States as officially Baptist, or Methodist, or Catholic, or whatever. They have no trouble at all with the idea that there should be no official Church of the United States, not least because  you'd never get them to agree on which denomination should get the franchise.

Madison, who would certainly be the expert on original intent, had a much broader idea in mind. His actions as President, as well as his writings when out of office, make it quite clear that the intent of the First Amendment is that there should be no government support of religion, nor of anything that might create the impression of such support. Religion wasn't to be harmed or hindered, but it was to be left to thrive or whither on its own. Madison vetoed measures that would have given government money to churches for the purpose of poor relief (he would certainly have vetoed the current faith base initiatives), and another measure that would have spent government money printing copies of scripture. After leaving the White House, he also expressed the opinion that paying chaplains for the legislature out of government funds was certainly unconstitutional, though he was willing to allow the chaplains as long as the legislators paid them out of their own pockets.

One  could easily say the same for military chaplains. There's no good reason for the government to pay them when they could just as easily be paid by their denominations, or out of the collection plate. There are probably some television evangelists who could provide the entire military chaplaincy budget for a year by donating their take for a couple months. True, the chaplains would no longer be military officers, but most of them don't act like officers anyway, and they've never been allowed to command troops or carry weapons.

Well, that's not going to change. Congress and the military will continue to have chaplains based on nothing more than precedent. Madison himself recognized that the legislative chaplains would probably get to keep their jobs simply because they were already established (and even then you couldn't expect legislators to pay for things themselves).

The real First Amendment battleground is in the schools. In Rhode Island recently a student went to court to remove a prayer banner from the auditorium. The school had an easy compromise offered, simply remove the word "prayer" from the title, the invocation "Our Heavenly Father," and the "amen" at the end. The rest of the prayer was a simple collection of platitudes to which there could be no objection.

But rather than compromise, the school decided to fight it out in court where, predictably, they lost. Official school prayers, whether led by faculty members, or just presented silently to the students, have been illegal since 1962. The result is that the banner remains in the auditorium, covered over pending an appeal, and the student has to be accompanied to school by police to insure her safety. The death threats were probably as predictable as the court decision. The church has always simply killed its enemies whenever it had the power, and many school kids are barely civilized to begin with. Still, much as some would like to limit the scope of the First Amendment, Madison's view continues to prevail. Government cannot be seen as supporting religion.The Founding Fathers had recently fought a war to escape from an oppressive government with an official religion, and they weren't about to allow the same sort of theological tyranny to compromise their vision of a secular nation.

The other area where fundamentalists continue to attack the First Amendment is school biology classes. The Indiana senate yesterday passed a bill that would "allow" teachers to introduce religious explanations whenever they discuss the origins of life. Creationists are as relentless as they are wrong. Despite the minor detail that the development of life, and even the existence of the universe, can now be explained without the requirement of supernatural input, the fundamentalists aren't about to give up the struggle. Particularly, their clergy aren't about to give up. After all, they recognize that reducing the supernatural to coincidence, misapprehension, and myth also means they'll have to go out and start earning an honest living.

Get a free book

Starting at midnight tonight, and for the next 24 hours, Kindle owners can get a free copy of my new book, This and That. If you love it, feel free to write a glowing review. If you hate it, well, it was free, so just keep it to yourself and go complain about something you actually had to pay for.

Up to this point, I have mostly written novels and edited history books. With this one you get a short story collection, followed by autobiography, and finishing up with all sorts of stuff ranging from the silly to the infuriating. I suppose some would be well advised to just quit reading when they get to the religion section, as I don't want anyone showing up in my front yard with a stake and firewood.

I had fun with the stories. As you might expect, I started out with a submarine story. Then I let the subjects range a bit, so besides the Navy, you get some mystery, some horror, a bit from the Army Air Forces, and baseball. I happen to like baseball, particularly if it's the Indians or, at the AAA level, the Clippers. What's not to like about the Clippers? They've only won the AAA championship two years in a row now, even with the Indians calling up their best players late in the season.

There's a certain amount of childhood in the autobiography. Not a lot of it. Every time I watch Glee I find myself thinking it's nice we didn't have any dumpsters handy. I was actually pretty good at getting out of a locker from the inside. There's a lot more about New York and Cleveland theater in the early 1970s. You'll also find some stuff about Viet Nam. Not my favorite place, all things considered, though you do get to hear about Sebastian Cabot's arse. I liked Japan a lot better.

The Real Problem with Climate Change

The real problem with global warming, or with the more generic term climate change, isn't the science. Even the most skeptical religious fundamentalist—yes, I realize skeptical fundamentalist is a bit of an oxymoron—is certainly capable of recognizing reality. Climates do change, and sometimes man is responsible.

The generally arid condition of Israel at the time national sovereignty was restored in 1948 was almost entirely due to human action. Specifically, to the presence of numerous Arabs and their even more numerous goats. Overgrazing had stripped most of the vegetation, allowing the topsoil to erode. In Roman time Israel was noted for its fertility, and was a net exporter of grain and other agricultural products. Goats have been responsible for creating a lot of barren land over the centuries.

The real problem with climate change is the inate skepticism of the American people when it comes to politicians. It's difficult for most of us not to recognize that the political "solution" will be exactly the same as it always is. Congress will raise taxes—or, more likely, create new taxes—to address the problem, and then use the money for something else. Most likely either raising their own pay and benefits, or funding some project that doesn't do a thing for the environment, but stands a good chance of helping them get re-elected.

Government naturally tends to think in terms of motivating change through methods that benefit the government in the short term. Voters are presumed to have no long term memories. So it makes more sense to a politician to impose penalties for failing to meet an arbitrary limit, rather than provide an incentive for meeting it. Penalties work, but the customers end up footing the bill through higher prices. It's similar to corporate income tax, which is actually a sales tax on the consumer disguised in the price of the product, and doesn't cost the company anything unless they've been saddled with an incompetent accounting department.

It makes a lot more sense to create incentives, but politicians tend to see these as a cost to government or, at least, not producing any government income. I think we need to provide some incentive to convert most transportation to hydrogen over the next decade or two. I've already suggested reactivating some of the older hydro powerplants as hydrogen production facilities, as locating such plants at dams provides both of the things needed for hydrogen production—lots of electricity, and a supply of water. The carbon footprint of a hydrogen powered car is, after all, essentially zero. You can easily make hydrogen from water, and when you burn it you get the water back (or most of it, anyway).

But we also know that's not how government likes to work. Governments always prefer to tax rather than not tax. Most Conservatives wouldn't have that much of a problem with the concept of climate change if they didn't know it would be used mostly as an excuse to separate the taxpayers from their money, and that no one would actually do very much to fix the problem in return.

A few changes

I took a little time this evening to remove a number of short stories from my website, and several old posts from this blog. It just seemed like a good idea. Everything I removed is included in my new book, This and That, so they haven't really gone away, I'm just making people pay to read them now. Lot's of new stuff in there, too, of course.

I'm seriously thinking of adding the book to the Amazon Kindle Owners' Lending Library. This is a system that lets Kindle owners who are also Prime subscribers borrow one Kindle book every month. I figure the borrowers probably wouldn't buy the book anyway, and depending upon how many people borrow books in any given month the publishers (and, hence, the authors) get paid a variable fee for every book borrowed. Under the right circumstances, you could theoretically make more with people borrowing your books than if they buy them. Most likely, though, that's not going to happen.

For the time being, This and That will be exclusive to Amazon (as an eBook). The printed version is available at all the usual on-line stores.

This and That

As of last night, the last of the editing and correction is finished, and This and That is now in its final form. The book is already available on Kindle. The print edition (8½″x5½″ trade paperback) will probably start showing up on the retail websites sometime next week. All 400 pages of it.

One story, A Big Disappointment, would make a great baseball movie. How would you like it if you made it to the major leagues and your mother wouldn't talk to you because you were playing for the wrong team? Much as I'm sure I'd hate what some director did to my babies, everything in the book is available. Just give me enough money, I can probably learn to live with the disappointment. Give me enough money and a good part in the movie and you can screw around with the story as much as you like. Probably.

That's how you say it

With nothing more interesting on over most of the weekend, I found myself watching a lot of science programs. These included a lot of astronomy, along with a good bit of simplified physics. The one thing I found particularly annoying was what seemed to be a universal tendency to mispronounce the name of the planet Uranus.

I know perfectly well why this is happening. It seems that a lot of people find the correct pronunciation funny, reacting like Chris Griffin, giggling and snickering, "He said your anus!" Unfortunately for the astronomers, that's exactly how every dictionary I've ever seen says to pronounce it.

For that matter, I'm not entirely sure how the usual alternate pronunciation is any better. Is it any less embarrassing to change the pronunciation from a potential butt joke to a homophone for an adjective meaning urine soaked? If you feel you have to use an alternative, try "Oor-AH-nos," which is more or less how you say the name of the Greek god the planet is named after.

Or consider renaming the planet Caelus, bringing it into line with the rest, which all take the Roman rather than the Greek versions of the gods' names.

I don't suppose I'm really upset about this. It's entirely too easy to pick on TV documentaries, which apparently have an actual required quota of mispronounced words. Just off the top of my head, I can remember programs where Bucyrus was pronounced "BOO-cyrus," the city of Lima, Ohio was pronounced like the city in Peru (it's pronounced like the bean), the Luger pistol was described as being designed by Gi-org (instead of Georg) Luger, and the standand American infantry rifle of World War II was the "GEHR-und," instead of Garand (Guh-RAND). Come to think of it, I believe these were all narrated by the same announcer.

That's part of the excitement of watching a History Channel show. You know that somewhere in the midst of the program the narrator is going to stick his foot in his mouth.

Too long in this condition

No, don't worry, I'm not going to start streaming bagpipe music (extra points if you can figure out that connection). But I just noticed that it's been a little over a year since the last post, which seems a bit too long. How are you supposed to benefit from my profundity it I don't type at you more frequently?

Or should I care? No one seems to be following this blog anyway.

The new book is finished. Nearly finished. I'll spend the next few evenings sitting in my chair with the proof and a red pencil trying to catch the last of the typos. Possibly excluding the one on the back cover, which I may just put down to eccentricity and an occasional preference for archaic spellings where they seem to fit the mood. (Spelling "whimsy" as "whimsey" is just being whimsical, and falls right in with the argument amongst British authors as to whether you haul goods in a wagon or a waggon.)

The book, in any case, is called This and That, and will be a genuine bargain at only $18.95 ($8.95 on Kindle). In effect, you get three books for the price of one. A nice little short story collection, an autobiography, and me being an opinionated old curmudgeon.

As for the bagpipe music, I have been giving some thought as to what I want played at my funeral. Not that there's any hurry—my family history suggests I've got at least another 30 years left. I know what I don't want. There should be no lone piper producing yet another soulfull rendition of Amazing Grace. I'd thought about a really slow, emotional rendering of Lord Lovat's Lament, except that's a bit too, well, Campbellish. Ah, well… there has to be something nice and gloomy and MacDonaldish I can inflict on the mourners.

That's the nice thing about planning your own funeral. You get to make all your relatives and friends feel sad and gloomy, and you're dead and don't have to listen to it. I may even write my own eulogy, just to make sure someone says something nice about me.

All moved in

It feels as if I'm finally all settled in. All the boxes are unpacked, with the exception of a few that contain stuff stored away on the off chance it might be needed again someday. I mostly seem to live in the basement now, but it's a very nice basement. That's where the big television and my computer are located, along with lots of books. The living room has comfortable places to sit, the stereo, and a fireplace, but no TV. It should be a nice place to sit and visit, or read a book.

One prediction hasn't exactly proven out. When it was definite that I was moving to Dublin, one comment was, "You'll love it. There are a lot more women than men." That might even be true, but the single ones seem be either still in college, or to have graduated from high school about the same time as my mother. Of course, considering that I don't think I've had a date in this century, I don't suppose it really matters.

Still, if nothing else, at least my bowling average is up. Not enough that I'm going to say what it is, but up.