Update...

Last night, I e-mailed The Other Matthew Rossi to let him know he had gotten a compliment, and he e-mailed me back to let me know that I should direct all complimentors to his blog, which is here.

My Doppleganger Returns

I found this comment from my Story blog a couple of weeks ago waiting for me when I came into work today:

Hi, I'm phil from England. I only discovered your writing last night and read solis Invicti straight away. I loved the writing. You have a real talent and I intend to find more of your work. You inspire me to keep going with mine. It was like a rush of sensory images that you couldn't help but be captured and enthralled by. I hope you've written lots!
-PGR

Suffice to say, I was flattered to get the fan mail. For a brief second, I joked with myself that I'm an international success, until I realized I'd never written a story called "Solis Invicti." So I googled my name and up came this. Which is, as I suspected, by The Other Matthew Rossi. So it seems he has surfaced again. Dr. Moriarty to my...um...similarly named Mr. Moriarty.

So, unfortunately, I can't accept the compliment, as it's meant for someone else. But Phil is right. It's a very good story.

Writing News/Blog News

As my move date comes ever closer, I'm becoming acutely aware of just how unprepared I am to actually move. Things like where I'm housing, registering for classes, figuring out what to take with me and what to leave behind, all seem like things I should have figured out or done by now, but I haven't yet. It's a bit nerve racking. In the meantime, I'm trying to spend as much time as I can finishing up various writing projects. Stories that I started and didn't finish for a variety of reasons.

I've also started a long-procrastinated project of updating my blog to operate more like a homepage for me. Someplace where you can find my stories and poems, in addition to the usual ephemera I post here. I've placed links to new blogs specifically dedicated to my fiction and poetry. I'll be post there more often in the next couple of weeks.

Finally, an interesting opportunity has come up for me in February. It's a bit too soon to go into any detail about it just yet, but if it pans out, it'll be pretty cool.

Going Off the Air

Short post to let everyone know that I'm going to be shutting off my cable pretty soon, so I won't have any Internet service at home anymore. Actually, that's probably good news for readers of this blog, because it means I'm probably going to be going out to wifi cafes more often. Which means I'll be more likely to blog. When I got the cable installed a year and a half ago, I thought it would increase my ability to blog. Instead, I just find I get home tired, unwilling to blog, and not really inclined to venture out again.

Ban them...Ban them all...
This is kind of old news, in that it happened over a week ago, but here's yet another instance of book banning in a school. In one of the author's blog entries on the subject, she includes this:

One thing I didn’t mention in the last post about the “Citizen’s Request for Removal of Instructional Materials” form that got the book pulled is that there was a checkbox near the bottom with three options. They are:

Do not assign it to my child
Withdraw it from all students as well as my child
Send it back to the proper department for reevaluation

Did you guys see that one in the middle? That’s the one that was checked.

I think this says a lot about the mentality of a person seeking to get a book banned. It says that the parent in question wasn't comfortable with other people exposing her child to moralities different than her own, but that she was perfectly comfortable imposing her own moral sense on the rest of the school. People who try to ban a book isn't just trying to protect their own children from ideas they disagree with. They're trying to wipe out the ability for anyone to choose to think that way, at all.

Small Celebrity

I've been going through extensive dental work lately to make up for the ten-year hiatus I took from going to the dentist while I was in college and afterward while I was unemployed. That's eight years with no dental insurance, followed by two years trying to figure out how to expain it to the dentist. I was lucky enough to find a dentist who understood. Or at least didn't feel the need to lecture me. I was also relieved to find out I don't have to have my wisdom teeth removed.

And once again, my friend John wrote to me to tell me his English class loves me. This is the class who convinced me last year to become a vegetarian. As ridiculous as it seems, every time he writes to me to tell me that, once again his kids have questions and that, once again, they love my answers, I get a little thrill. It's just a little reminder that I've grown up to be the person my teenage self would have liked.

Slowly lifting the ban...
There was recent article in the NY Times about a liquor company out of New York that has set out to create an absinthe legal for production in the U.S. The product, which is called Lucid, has been a hot subject of debate among American absintheurs. The problem of producing absinthe has long been one of food regulations. The FDA bans any product that includes wormwood, ostensibly because wormwood contains the chemical thujone, which is dangerous if ingested in large enough quantities. Quantities that don't exist in any properly made absinthe (in fact, there's more thujone in sage than in wormwood, so you're likely to get a larger dose of it from eating a plate of stuffing than you will from a proper absinthe).

There have been attempts prior to this to make an absinthe that can fit U.S. regulations, most notable among them being a wormwood-free product called Absente (pronounced "absent"...it's a pun, you see), which replaced wormwood with a related plant called southernwood. What makes Lucid different is that they have supposedly left in the wormwood, but produced the absinthe in a way that leaves out the thujone. It remains to be seen whether the product is any good--Absente is crap--but I'm hopeful that this is a good first step to creating a legal absinthe in the U.S.

Beer me...
In other brew-related news, last weekend I took a trip down to Indiana to attent the Three Floyds Dark Lord Day. For those unfamiliar, it's a once-a-year event to kick off their Dark Lord beer, which is regarded by beer enthusiasts as the Holy Grail of stouts. Dark and sweet and thick like motor oil, it's a pretty impressive beer. I wasn't going to go to the event initially, Munster, Indiana being a long and difficult way to go for a beer, but when I woke up, it was a beautiful day. Just the kind of day for a good adventure. So I hopped a train down to Hammond and took a cab to the brewery and then stood in line for several hours, waiting for the beer.

On the way back, I hitched a ride to the train station with a pair of guys who were very insistent that I accept their ride, and then chatted for an hour with a musician who had just missed the same train I had, which was his ride to a gig.

All in all, the journey was more interesting than the goal. Which tends to be the way these things go.

Laugh or Cry...
Bonnie sent me this article earlier today. For those of my readers who don't like to read, the first sentence should say it all:

Utah County Republicans ended their convention on Saturday by debating Satan's influence on illegal immigrants.

Don Larsen, chairman of legislative District 65 for the Utah County Republican Party, had submitted a resolution warning that Satan's minions want to eliminate national borders and do away with sovereignty.

Satan's minions, in this case, are illegal immigrants. The article contains a number of gems, including this one, which made me laugh out loud:

Illegal aliens are in control of the media, and working in tandem with Democrats, are trying to "destroy Christian America" and replace it with "a godless new world order -- and that is not extremism, that is fact," Larsen said.

Ah yes...I had forgotten about the truckloads of migrant television executives roaming about the country. The whole article is really hilarious until you realize these people are elected officials. It's just another reminder that, as good an idea as Democracy is, if you allow ignorant people to rule themselves, they will do so ignorantly.

Finally...
I'll be running the door at the Belmont Burlesque this Saturday. This week, the show is at Martyr's on Lincoln just south of Irving Park. Apparently, there's a Canadian troupe coming in to be guest dancers. Join us, won't you?