[Note: I come up with these occasionally.  Just thought I’d share.  Maybe recipes for the Super Bowl?  Or, something to eat when trapped inside by a blizzard?  I take no responsibility for medical fallout.  You are what you eat…and drink….]

Baloney Quesadillas.  Ingredients: Flatbread, cheese and baloney slices, and salsa.  Layer slices of baloney and American cheese onto half a flatbread (ham and brie can be used by sophisticates).  Spoon on salsa liberally.  Fold the flat bread over and heat in the oven for 30 seconds.  Serves one.  Enjoy.

Kermit’s Revenge.  Ingredients: Fresh spinach, Kiwi slices, a few jalapeños, cilantro, lime, two glasses of green tea, tabasco sauce, and a glass containing two fingers of Jameson, neat.  Lightly steam the spinach and put it in a blender.  Add the Kiwi slices, cilantro, jalapeños, the juice of half the lime, green tea, and tabasco sauce.  Blend together.  Serve blender contents to your wife or girlfriend who’s trying to get you to eat healthy.  You drink the Jameson.

Humble Pie.  Ingredients: Apple sauce, hamburger buns, Reddi-Wip, and cinnamon and sugar (optional).  Pour half the can or jar of apple sauce onto each large hamburger bun.  Add cinnamon and a bit more sugar.  Add top of bun.  Sprinkle powdered sugar on the top and microwave for thirty seconds (a wee bit more if the applesauce was cold).  Add Reddi-Wip.  Take the Chevy to the levee and eat your pie—or share with your companion.

Suicide Bomber.  Ingredients: Cola (Coke, Pepsi, RC Cola—who cares?), rum, vodka, gin, pepper, tabasco sauce, and tomato juice.  Mix to taste (if you drink enough, you can’t follow this direction). Toast Charlie Hebdo.  [I usually don’t make fun of terrorism…and never of the Prophet.  I came up with this out of desperation when my ex-physics student lost his father in a 1985 M-19 attack one terrible day in Bogotá.  There might have been other hard liquor ingredients, like aguardiente.  Experiment.]

And so it goes….     

[Note to readers: this is my second post on the ebook revolution.  In the first, I spoke to the advantages of ebooks over pbooks, but I didn’t mention the one potential advantage considered here.  Enjoy!]

I’ve been an avid reader all my life, but I sense that there are fewer of us with each passing decade.  That’s a unisex statement.  When most people are just struggling to make ends meet, sometimes with more than one job, raise their children, and stay healthy, time for any entertainment can become scarce.  But gender differences also influence the statistics.    Women readers outnumber men, a positive development if you assume that this means that (1) men are sharing more in household duties, and/or (2) all the modern gizmos we have free up more leisure time for women, and/or (3) women are now socially and economically independent enough to enjoy quiet moments reading.  It’s a negative development if it means that men are so addicted to computer games, streaming video, porn, or sports that sitting down to read a book is the last thing they’ll do.  The idea that reading is something you had to do in school can make for a quick exit from a rewarding reader’s life almost as fast as math as well, for both men and women.

Let me posit that the ebook has the potential to change some of the negatives non-readers feel toward reading.  While I’ll not be quick to experiment (I’m a traditional reader and writer), I know this potential exists.  Even established writers like Deaver are experimenting.  I’m not applauding his writing a novel in reverse (that’s just a strange and ungainly way of presenting the written word, of course), but his release of an audio-only book is interesting. It doesn’t go far enough, though.  An ebook gives an author many opportunities for exploring multimedia.  In particular, sight, sound, touch, smell, and the written word can be blended together in a single story.  Who knows?  Maybe we can add an odor app or a touch app to ereaders and tablet computers.  I don’t know how many times I’ve written a gunfight scene.  Even if the gun has a silencer, the sound is a better description than simply writing pfft!  The odor of gunsmoke could be added too.  In my new Mary Jo Melendez novel, there’ll be a fire scene.  Heating up your ereader or tablet, adding the crackle of flames, and including the odor of a burning room could make that scene come alive.

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Selma.  I suppose it would be politically correct to join many reviewers, including WABC’s Sandy Keenan, and call this the “movie of the year,” but I don’t have to be politically correct in these posts.  Having lived through these events (the film focuses on those leading up to the Votings Right Act of 1965) and previous ones leading up to integration (they’re more important, but not covered in the film), I will still acclaim that this is a pretty damn good documentary (that justifies the lack of Best Picture and Best Director Oscar nominations in my mind, though).  I’m not one to cry about quotas either because I don’t believe in them, especially when it comes to talent, but, akin to The Theory of Everything, there’s one actor here who should have been nominated for the Oscar corresponding to Best Actor.

I’ll also have to disagree with some pundits: this documentary doesn’t belittle LBJ.  It shows him to be a savvy politician whose actions were determined by political realities.  I have more of a quarrel with him about his prosecution of the Vietnam War than his against-stereotype promotion of civil rights (he was a Texas politician, for pete’s sake!).  He knew that the future of the Democratic Party could reside in the black vote.  (His prescience was limited, but he had no way of predicting the increasing importance of the Hispanic vote.)  The GOP’s attack on the right to vote still continues for that reason—with voter ID reqs, shortened times for absentee voting, gerrymandered districts, and so forth.  Vietnam taints Johnson’s legacy, not civil rights.  The war on poverty—and now the growing divide between haves and have-nots—isn’t a black and white issue, it never was, and it’s our most pressing domestic challenge right now.  Johnson’s War on Poverty only encompassed the first skirmishes in that war.

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Item: Who’s N. Scott Momaday?  Some of my readers might have noted his quote running across the top of this website and wondered.  More energetic ones might have googled him to find that he’s of Kiowa descent (my understanding: they roamed in the same general geographic area as the Lakota, or Sioux) and the winner of the 1969 Pulitzer of House Made of Dawn.  Very observant ones who also receive the Smithsonian magazine will remember him as the author of the article “The Year that the Stars Fell” (that superb January issue also contains the following interesting articles “The Lady Vanishes,” about Amelia Earhart; “PTSD: The Civil War’s Hidden Legacy”; “Darwin’s Forgotten World,” about where his theory took shape—hint: it’s not the Galapagos; and “Descent of Man,” a poem about evolution in NYC).

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Hillary, Jeb, and Mitt.  Old duffers in the Senate and House.  Most of the SC judges.  Naughty or nice, they’re old.  But are they effective?  Do they have enough stamina to continue a political life?  And, most importantly, why aren’t younger people stepping forward?  Even Barbara Bush wondered about that, specifically why someone else besides the Clintons and Bushes couldn’t run for president.  My ponderings are more general: is politics so tainted that people can’t even imagine running for office?  Maybe people just don’t want to subject themselves to the electoral process, which has become beleaguered by political infighting and mudslinging.  Another way to put it: you have to be a mentally challenged masochist addicted on power to yearn for public office these days.

I’ve been elected a few times—“volunteered” is the better word—to club positions, committee chairs, even a department head, and I always had more regrets than rewards.  Any leadership position requires a tough skin; it’s usually a thankless task where you often feel like the target in a pub game of darts, the latter the barbs directed at you as you attempt to do your job.  I can imagine those bad experiences magnified thousands of times, even for local and state government positions, let alone national ones.  It’s become so bad that only “experienced people” (read: old has-beens) can stomach it.  And we pay the price for that in our Western democracies.

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(Carolyn J. Rose, The Devil’s Tombstone, Amazon Digital, 2014, B00RC4X0XQ)

This mystery novel makes the series set in the Catskills around Hemlock Lake a trilogy.  75% is excellent mystery and suspense, but not as tightly focused as #2 (Through a Yellow Wood) or as fresh as #1 (Hemlock Lake).  It is another narrative jewel, though.  I love the setting and characters and Ms. Rose’s probing of good, evil, and all the gray area in between.  She does this as well as or better than, say, David Baldacci in One Summer or Wish You Well, two other books that show valid mystery and suspense stories can occur in rural America.

The mystery surrounds several cold cases that Dan Stone’s old boss, Sheriff North, assigns to him.  Although Dan and wife Camille are busy with a new baby, riding herd on teenager Julie, and counseling her brother Justin, the wife knows Dan needs a distraction and is happy when the sheriff deputizes him.  Although Dan keeps his investigations under wraps for the most part, two cases he solves early on add to his notoriety in the rural community, but the feud between the judgmental head of a traveling revival show and that community’s preacher presents a major problem.  The author ties all these threads together in a suspenseful climax.

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France has declared war on jihadist extremists.  The rest of Europe is at war with them too.  And we are at war with these radicals.  Indeed, the modern world should be at war with them.  There’s nothing “modern” about this fanatical thinking, this barbaric insult to true Islam and false ideology.  It’s old thinking, a fanatical vision of how much better it would be to return to the simpler days of the early Middle Ages, of Ayatollahs and warrior chieftans, feudal lords and lowly serfs, a social structure built on the primitive foundations of theologically justified despotism.  Never mind the ironies—terrorists using the internet and high-powered modern weapons to further their cause while spewing their retrograde ideologies eschewed by good people everywhere, including truly devout Muslims.  Terrorist minds are dark, evil minds, living in dark lives and thinking dark, fanatical thoughts.

But France and the rest of the world face a conundrum: how can we preserve the freedoms we enjoy and what many others yearn to enjoy when faced with these practitioners of evil?  What is the right balance between a civilized society and thugs who would tear it down?  Modern living also breeds frustration, especially among poor and exploited immigrants, and France has perhaps ignored that for too long.  Out of frustration and despair with one’s lot in life, some people are bound to lash out—it’s only human nature.  When they become violent, they can use any religion or ideology to justify their actions, a dangerous rationalization, a contagious mental virus that could destroy the rest of humanity.  How many of our freedoms do we surrender to prevent the spread of this contagion?

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The ebook is changing how, what, and when people read.  The “how” is clear: many people are finding that carrying around and reading a book with an ereading device is better than lugging around a huge pbook.  Consider William Manchester Paul Reid’s The Last Lion, a biography about Winston Churchill.  (Yes, I read books like that too.)  This pbook (the version I’m reading isn’t even hardbound) weighs more than the bust of Beethoven sitting on my upright piano (I use fake books, the staple of piano bar musicians everywhere, to pretend I’m Schroeder)—in other words, the book could be used as a weapon in a murder mystery.  I received this book as a Christmas gift—people still like to give their reading friends and relatives’ pbooks because they’re a bit more tangible than ebooks, I suppose.  But avid readers like me are exploiting the ebook revolution to lessen the weight on our sagging bookshelves.  Instead of chaotic stacks of pbooks around the house, we fill our Kindles or other devices.  (Many devices are compatible with a free Kindle app downloadable from Amazon.)

There’s still a niche for pbooks.  Anything with a lot of graphics, especially color graphics—those famous coffee table books, for example—probably won’t work well in ebook format as long as paper-whites are still around (I prefer paper-white because they eliminate the glare).  My fake books are another example, although I’ve often wished I could change the “font size” of some that I find challenging my aging eyes (they started “aging” at twenty-one, so the downhill slide has been gradual).  Self-help pbooks are another example when they contain screen captures.  The latter don’t often help if you’re  using a paper-white device and the screen shots are in color; the font size is also a hindrance here too.  I tend to use my laptop, for example, if I’m trying to read an ebook written by some internet PR and marketing guru who uses screen captures.

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We’re into 2015 a few days now, so two questions come to mind: Will you look back on 2014 positively?  Will you look forward to 2015?  Depending on your political proclivities, you’ll believe Congress will be worse, stepping up its war against the middle class and poor, now that the GOP controls both Houses; Obama and the rest of the executive branch will muddle along and maybe the economy will improve in spite of what anyone does; and the Supreme Court will continue to wage class warfare too by hiding behind an 18^th century interpretation of the Constitution.  Or not.  So, let’s not worry about the political world.  Many of us, in fact, would prefer to ignore ALL the politicians.  More a look ahead to what needs to be done, the following topics are more interesting than pure politics…and politicians.

Economy.  Despite handwringers and naysayers, the economy in 2014 did pretty well.  The horror felt by big oil and gas stockholders at plunging gas prices, mirrored in giant swings on the NYSE, couldn’t match Putin’s as Russia’s oil-based economy started to tank.  (Maybe the Soviet Union only fell because Russians, including their inept, Mafia-don-like leaders, don’t understand capitalism?)  Why the American economy even worries about big oil and gas now is beyond me.  The real JRs of our country are rapacious, energy dinosaurs, so their companies deserve to go under, but that shouldn’t affect the rest of the American economy anymore.  I smell a conspiracy.  The Wall Street bankers’ celebration of too-big-too-fail might be contagious.

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Item: ny times attacking Amazon.  I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to start writing “ny times” without caps, because they’re continually showing their small-mindedness.  I’ve already stopped reading their Sunday Book Review—their bestseller lists are completely meaningless and should be ignored for multiple reasons.  When Hachette caved to Amazon, the newspaper lost a cause they’d been hammering, so now they’ve come out against Amazon by declaring that they aren’t needed by online buyers in a recent article.

All I can say is, “Huh?”  Online retailers are never “needed”—they’re simply a convenience for many shoppers.  I made many purchases from Amazon this Christmas because they offered the same products at lower prices.  When that doesn’t happen, I go to another website…or (horrors!) to a store.  There are certain items I don’t even like to buy online—computers, TVs, cars, appliances, and so forth, even shoes (I need to try them on).

While I don’t “need” Amazon in general for online buying, I often use it for that.  But, most of all, as an author—and this is true for ANY author—I can’t ignore Amazon.  No author should.  They’re still the best place to sell my books.  Smashwords and its associated retailers are a distant second—I have to focus on my ebooks that are available in both places.  Maybe that’s just me (I don’t sell many books in total, so my stats might be biased).

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