Dungeons & Dayjobs is finally, finally showing up in Google Book Search. Although the front and back covers are not visible, you can view actual images of a limited number of the inside pages. You could search for keywords inside it, though I don't know why anyone would want to at this point. I guess they let you check out a few dozen pages, then they cut you off. If I remember how it works, you could theoretically view and/or print 20% of the book, then wait a few months, then look it up again and read/print the next 20% of the book. Most people would not have the proper combination of cheapness and devotion to come back and read it or print it over several months.

Yay! More buyers? Maybe not, but there's no such thing as bad publicity, I hear.

Irrepressible.info is a campaign by Amnesty International to fight internet repression in countries like China, Iran, Myanmar, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Syria and Vietnam. You can participate by publishing censored material from their database directly onto your site. Sounds like you're hosting web content as a workaround so that people will still be able to see it, but actually it's just a way to advertise their campaign by showing examples. Still sounds cool. Look at the narrow column to the right and scroll way down.

Pinto Gumbo

1/4 cup butter
2 medium onions, chopped
1 medium green pepper, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 Tbsp flour
3 cups beef broth or vegetable broth
1/2 tsp red pepper sauce
1/2 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1 bay leaf
10 ounces cut okra
14.5 ounces tomatoes chopped (undrained if from can)
6 ounces tomato paste
2 cups pinto beans
1/2 pound mushrooms, chopped
3 cups hot cooked rice
1/4 to 1/2 cup cilantro, finely chopped

1. Melt butter in big ol pot. Dump in onions, green pepper and garlic. Cook five minutes. Stir in flour. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until bubbly, which won't really happen, so just cook for 2 or 3 minutes. Remove from heat.
2. Add all remaining ingredients except beans, mushrooms, rice, cilantro. Heat to boiling. Then reduce to simmer for one hour, stirring occasionally.
3. Watch a video or otherwise enjoy the time that you would have wasted peeling and deveining shrimp.
4. Stir mushrooms into gumbo. Simmer for another 1 to 1.5 hours. Remove bay leaf. Spoon rice into bowls and gumbo over the rice. Sprinkle with cilantro.

[Hi, my name is Rob and I've been meatless for three days. ...if you don't count chicken-flavored ramen and the beef broth in this recipe. Dang. Hey, I'm posting this recipe before even tasting it. I hope it doesn't turn out horrible.]

What does an average Texan do when Dahleks threaten her grandkids? Sets her sixgun blazing, until Dr. Who convinces her to jump in that little phone booth of his and split. Bill Hollweg made this audio play starring his wife and grandkids, and it's cute as hell. Download Dr Who Chylde's Play at Audio Infinite.

Another dog handler goes on trial for entertaining his buddies at Abu Ghraib. Is it a coincidence that they repeat how these few bad apples were mostly on the "night shift"?

Screw that. I work second shift, from 2 to 10 pm. We might be vampiric freaks who shun daylight, but are we the shift voted most likely to torture? I suppose nobody screws around on the dayshift at Abu Ghraib? Everybody manages to read the Geneva Conventions info card by daylight.

You know there's some moron Public Relations adviser in the Pentagon or the White House telling Bush and Rumsfeld, "Mention night shift as often as you can and people will just smile and nod, we all know what night shift is like. Those people are full of shenanigans just like the Ron Howard movie!"

Love Is All - cartoon of partying frogs, snails, butterflies and critters. Song written and performed by Ronnie James Dio, circa 1974.

Dungeons & Dayjobs is now available at the Chelsea Public Library.

Video of Pete Seeger playing Bring Them Home via youtube.

Werewolves at Rico's Throat:
Chapter Five of Brazen Hearts, Fresh, On Sticks
Rico attempts to rescue Josie from the werewolves, but more importantly, did he tell you about the boy he met? His name is Beretta and he has the most gorgeous green eyes....
Featuring muffled grunts and background voices by Melinda Ann Smith.
[Run time: 11 minutes, 58 sec. The link above points to 128kbps, 11.5 MB mp3 file. Click here to see other file formats for downloading or streaming.]

Joke from Pirates of the Caribbean 2 (trailer) gently ripped off from Douglas Adams quote.

Love-Interest (Keira Knightly): There will come a moment when you have a chance to do the right thing.
Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp): I love those moments. I like to wave at them as they pass by.

Compare with Adams' famous quote: "I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by."

What kind of disarmament card did you get for your mother today?

Mother's Day Proclamation by Julia Ward Howe (1870)
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: "Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice."
Blood does not wipe our dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

Son House - Camp Levee Blues


Youtube also has full video clips of Son House playing Death Letter Blues, Forever On My Mind and a few others.

...Holy shucking fit. Clean, clear video of Big Bill Broonzy.
Bukka White - Aberdeen.
Lightnin' Hopkins - Let's Pull A Party, Baby Please Don't Go, Black and Evil, Mojo Hand. (Sorry, I can't stop.) Don't the Moon Look Pretty.
Elizabeth Cotten - Spanish Flang Dang, Old Georgie Buck.
Sunnyland Slim - Tin Pan Alley Blues, Come On Home Baby.
Why didn't you tell me Big Mama Thornton could play harmonica like that?
Skip James at Newport, All Night Long & Crow Jane.
Hound Dog Taylor.
Leadbelly.
Muddy Waters - Got My Mojo Working.
John Lee Hooker - Hobo Blues.
Mississippi Fred McDowell - Going Down to the River.
Rev. Gary Davis on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest.
Sonny Boy Williamson - Bye Bye Bird & My Younger Days.
Howlin' Wolf at Newport part one and part two.

THE INTERNET IS OFFICIALLY NO LONGER FOR PORN.
Okay, I mean not just for porn.

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy is a book I picked up at a going-out-of-business sale. Remember in Silence of the Lambs where Starling tells about running away from home with a few of the lambs so they wouldn't be slaughtered? Replace Starling with a sixteen year old boy, replace the lamb with a pregnant wolf, and give it a gritty Western atmosphere, set in New Mexico around the 1920s or 1930s, taking the wolf across the border into the mountains of Mexico so it won't harass the livestock. There's a lot more to it than that. I don't mean to say it's a rip-off of that tidbit from Silence of the Lambs, just funny to pick up a literary western and think of Starling and Lecter.

It's hard getting used to dialog with no quotation marks. In places it blends with the narration, so you have to read a line twice to tell if it's spoken or just a description. But you get used to his style. Lots of "ands," which makes me self-conscious because I do it too. I tend to have two or three verbs or clauses combined into one sentence, but McCarthy runs together five or six clauses in one sentence, and he gets away with it every two or three pages. "He made his camp in the lee of an arroyo south of the pass and gathered wood and made a fire and gave the wolf all the water she would drink." Maybe it's just another stylistic thing that I'll get used to. But I suspect high school or college teachers would have ragged on this if I turned in stories like this.

I had never heard of "sitting a horse", but the characters in The Crossing do it constantly. Ride out to look over your line of traps, and you want to have an introspective moment surveying the hills and the sierras, naturally you're going to sit the horse. Not sit on the horse. "In the morning he sat the horse on a gravel bar and studied the moving water where the broad clear river...". Can't be a typo because I've seen at least six times in the first quarter of the book. Ma never told me how to "sit" her horse. Maybe yankees do it differently than New Mexicans.

At least she taught me how to cluck right. When she was first teaching me to ride, I was 4 or 5 and she led the horse on a rope while I learned how to pull and steer and what to say. One time she said, "Now cluck to him." I said, "Bawk bawk bawk bawk." She said, "No!" She demonstrated the sound of pulling your tongue sharply away from your gums so it pops or clucks. I'd heard the sound before but never heard it called "clucking."

Do New Mexicans cluck when they're done sitting their horses?

Harry Potter and the Titles of Fanfics We'd Rather Not See:
Harry Potter and the Uneventful Year When No One Tried to Kill Him
Harry Potter and the New Love Interest Who Happens to Have the Same Name as the 15-Year-Old Girl Writing this Fanfic
Harry Potter and the Uncomfortable Oversexualization of Minors
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood, the Quadroon, and the Octaroon
Harry Potter and the shameless Tom Clancy Crossover
Harry Potter and Ma$e feat. Lil' Jon and The Ruff Ryders
[Click that link for more titles]

Play guitar using both hands to pick and fret with a spoon in your mouth to play slide in between.
This guy is probably named Hannes Coetzee. [download 6 Mb mpg video] See you later, I gotta go see a man about a spoon.