It would seem that Amazon delisted all the books from Macmillan over the weekend.  I’m not going to pretend I have any knowledge of publishing or bookselling, so I’m going to refer you to John Scalzi’s analysis of the situation.

I have a Kindle.  I’m rather fond of my Kindle.  But if I can’t get the book I want to read for my Kindle, I’m not above buying those things made from tree mulch.  At Barnes & Noble or Borders or the local independent bookstore.  Or even the newly-renovated public library up the street!  I go to Amazon for convenience.  If they take away my convenient, it’s their loss when I jump in my car and visit their competitors.

Also?  Why I’m not getting an iPad:

According to the decidedly bizarre people at Westboro Baptist Church, God pretty much hates everything and everyone… including the good ol’ U. S. of A.

This brings all manner of thoughts right to the forefront of my mind, causing a collision that makes it difficult to write about any one thing.  But I’ll work on separating it all out.

First, can you say “hubris”?  Wow.  Going with the assumption that the Entity Known As God is greater than anything a mere mortal could comprehend with the three-pound (give or take) lump of goo in our heads, how could a mere mortal say that he or she knows anything about the mind of said Entity?  On a tangent to that, how do we even know whether or not something godlike even has emotions?  The honest answer is, “We don’t.”  Also tangentially, it would appear that mere mortals have a fondness for anthropomorphizing, well, everything, really.  So the Entity Known As God has emotions because we mere mortals have emotions.

I’m not arguing for or against the existence of the Entity Known As God, by the way.  But all mythology makes the Entities Known As Gods look and act and think and feel an awful lot like the people who are writing the stories about the ENAG.  I’m just saying that we mere mortals are kind of arrogant in thinking we might know what the ENAG is or is not thinking or feeling.

Next, I think I’ve figured out those bizarre people of Westboro Baptist Church.  Since they say that God hates America, they themselves must be anti-American, and not even Americans at all.  But I don’t think ENAG cares much about arbitrary geopolitical borders on this, or any other, planet.  Kind of like how I don’t care what the ants in the colonies are doing under my lawn… as long as they don’t put their little piles of sand in my driveway, I won’t run them over.

And then there, “God hates…”  Wait.  What?  No.  Jesus loves me, this I know for the Bible tells me so.  (Catholic grade school… give me a break.)  Does that mean that Jesus isn’t God?  Well, some people believe that.  But I thought Christians believed that Jesus is God.  So that means that the bizarre people of Westboro Baptist Church aren’t Christians.  Ah!  Now we’re getting somewhere.  Now it all makes sense!

Being the happy science fiction loving nerd that I am, my theory about the bizarre people of Westboro Baptist Church is that they’re aliens from another planet (atheists, of course) that have come here to sow negativity and dissent so we mere mortals are ripe pickings for their evil overlords who will show up here one of these days to harvest the lumps of goo in our heads as a gourmet appetizers.  And then they’ll build a galactic bypass.

There were some Russian scum ditty pus balls who had been trying to post spam comments here for a couple of weeks.  These posts were all in Russian (and Google kept offering to translate them for me… I naturally declined), and they all something like 100+ lines long.  There were a lot (like almost all the lines) of links, and I’m pretty sure it was all porn.  At first, only two or three of these spam comments would come in each day; then 25 or 30.  That may not seem like a lot to some people, but I’m not sure there are that many legitimate readers out there.  Then there was the day I received 85 spam in one day.  On one post.

While it was extremely annoying to see all those comments in the Akismet spam folder, I really appreciate the fact that Akismet is so diligent in keeping them away from those of you who are real people.  I say, “Three cheers for Akismet!”  Oh, and “Thank you.”

And since I closed comments on that post, I haven’t received a single spam comment at all.  Ah, spammers.  May you all rot in hell.

I had my quarterly checkup with my fibro doc this week.  He’s not one of my insurance company’s providers, so I have to pay for everything out-of-pocket.  He’s got me taking one prescription that I get from a compounding pharmacy.  All the other supplements, I get from him.  Normally, my office visits run close to $500 every three months.  Thank goodness I can afford it!  And thank goodness for my Health Savings Plan, so the cost of visiting him is from pre-tax dollars (every little bit of savings helps).

This time around, I got a couple of new prescriptions… both generics, both covered by my insurance, and both available at the pharmacy around the corner.  One is for pain, the other to help me sleep.  We’ll see how that goes.  I also need to get some blood drawn for my semi-annual blood tests.  Looks like he added about eight extra tests, so I’m hoping to have some blood left to donate to the Red Cross.  My weight stayed the same, which pleased me because I haven’t had the energy to exercise and pleased the doc because he seems to think “the holidays” are a mad food fest for everyone.

Since the last appointment, I had a slight decrease in severe-pain days, but an increase in absolutely-no-energy days.  The lack of energy is typical for this time of year, and is exacerbated by lack of sleep.  Since the last pain medication made me puke all day, I’m hoping this one will be better and knock the severe-pain days down to zero.  The last sleeping medication made me wake up feeling like I was extremely hung over, and I’m also hoping for better results from this one.  As I’ve said before, good sleep is something I yearn for.  I’m pretty sure getting sound sleep every night (or at least most nights) will go a long way towards alleviating the feelings of hostility I feel towards the world.  I know I would appreciate that, as would my family, friends and coworkers.

Oooh, and maybe if I get more energy, I’ll be able to exercise again.  I really do feel better when I spend 30 to 40 minutes on the treadmill in the morning!

I hate them.

There.  I said it.  I hate compact fluorescent light bulbs.  They all buzz in my ceiling fixtures, and that’s going to drive me mental.  I can’t use them with the dimmer switches, and some previous owner of the building seemed to think nearly every freakin’ room needed a dimmer switch.  I even have one light fixture that eats up the bulbs in anywhere between one and 10 days.  This light fixture is not saving me any money, that’s for sure.  So I think I’m going to go back to regular incandescent light bulbs.  Well, except for the kitchen and the garage, where they actually seem to work.  And don’t buzz incessantly.  Oh, and the laundry room and the one bathroom that has the regular fluorescent light bulbs.

With the damn buzzing, I’m spending more on alcohol than I’m saving in energy anyway.

… I’d wish for eight consecutive, uninterrupted hours of sleep each and every night.

I don’t usually have problems falling asleep (except for my semi-annual bouts of insomnia in the spring and fall, and they only has for two or three days).  It’s the staying alseep I can’t seem to manage.  Apparently, I’m an uber-light sleeper.  I didn’t use to be.  I fondly recall the days when I could sleep through the every-six-minute rattle  and screech of the Ravenswood line trains.  I could sleep through the Clark Street bus as it rumbled past that apartment I had over the realty office.

Oh, but not any more.  Every little sound wakes me up.  I’ve taken to wearing earplugs at night, and those help. Every little motion wakes me up.  I have the firmest possible Tempur-pedic bed they make.  You’ve seen those commercials where somebody drops a bowling ball on the bed and the glass of red wine doesn’t topple over?  Lies.  All lies.  If one of the cats jumps on the bed, I notice it.  When the Spousal Unit (who weighs considerably more than the cats) rolls over in the middle of the night, I notice it.  And, of course, I wake up.

My fibro doc says the very best thing I could do to help alleviate the fibro symptoms is to get eight hours of sleep every night.  So here’s what I’m thinking… a concrete bunker with my most excellently awesome and comfortable Tempur-pedic bed.  I’ll lock myself in (no cats, no Spousal Unit).  No sound, no movement… and I’ll be able to sleep for eight consecutive, uninterrupted hours a night!  Well, yes, the cats and the Spousal Unit will be disappointed.  But maybe after a few months of good sleep, I’ll be able to go back to the bedroom.  Hey, it could happen.

(And I only call him a douchenozzle because cheesy pus rectal cancer odoriferous son of a bitch was a little long for the title.)

I read yesterday that Pat Robertson is saying the recent earthquake in Haiti is simply an exhibition of God’s wrath.  That the people of Haiti brought this on themselves.

What.  The.  Fuck??!?

I’ve come to the conclusion that there are two types of Christians:

• The Christians who seem to embody the teachings of Jesus Christ.  These people go about their daily lives being good and decent people.  They are thoughtful and kind, and never tell anyone they’re going to hell because they haven’t “accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior.”  These lovely people proclaim their faith in deeds and not words.  My Christian friends are of this variety, and I treasure each and every one.
• The Christians who make a mockery of everything Jesus Christ taught.  These people go about their daily lives railing on about how God hates everything and everyone who isn’t just like them.  They loudly shout that God is punishing the world.  They have the Old Testament Yahweh seriously confused with the New Testament Jesus.  They have to proclaim their faith in words (but do those words have to be so hateful?) because they certainly do not proclaim it in their deeds.

Pat Robertson belongs to this second group of “Christians.”

It is the Pat Robertsons and Fred Phelpses of this world that make me eschew Christianity.  Oh, I’m happy to study it… along with Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Wicca, Taoism and many others.  But there is just too much Public Display of Hatred coming from “Christians” of a certain stripe for me to align myself with that faith system.  Unfortunately, my friends in the first category of Christians seem to be in the minority.  And that’s too bad.

It’s another book meme, this one involving just one book.  The handiest book at the moment is Death by Inferior Design by Leslie Caine.  Here’s what you get:

I battled through a mental flashback of Randy complaining about the taste of his Budweiser and forced myself to return her smile.  “That’s good to hear.  I noticed Taylor’s truck is parked in your driveway.”

What?  You expected profundity on a Monday?

I love this one, and haven’t shared it in a long time.  So here’s my fun little paragraph pulled from five of the books I have surrounding me at the moment:

The man was called Calvin Fritz and the helicopter was a Bell 222.  They give you greater flexibility and skill as a journal writer.  You can set the locale identifier for your script’s content using the LCID property of the Session object.  Likewise, whenever a line proceeds in an even, fluid manner and then becomes frenetic and energetic, it demands more attention.  If possible, activate new extensions in the php.ini file.

Wow.  How totally random and bizarre!  Using books of the same genre make for a more logical (though often equally bizarre) paragraph, but since most of the books surrounding me at the moment are computer-related, I thought a geek paragraph might be a bit much… and would probably only be amusing to a fellow geek.

Today’s books are:

1. Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child
2. Creative Journal Writing by Stephanie Dowrick
3. PHP Cookbook by David Sklar and Adam Trachtenberg
4. Expressive Drawing by Steven Aimone
5. ASP by A. Keyton Weissinger

I didn’t do much over the Christmas break… which was the whole point, really.  I managed to finish reading six books, but didn’t manage to post about any of them on my book blog.  I watched some ER, some Angel, some Bones, some Law & Order: CI, as well as a few movies.  I got the new Blu-ray player hooked up, but had to run a cable from the player to the router because the wireless bridge didn’t work consistently.  The cable snaking across two rooms is pretty annoying, but I can watch my Netflix Play Now movies on the TV.  That’s a good thing because the recliner is more comfortable than my desk chair.

I made my Secret Family Recipe sloppy joes (vegetarian style) for Christmas dinner and the whole family went out to dinner to a new-ish local restaurant with the Spousal Unit’s stepmom a few days after Christmas.  Jolly good fun!

I mentioned the books I read, but I should point out I’m a complete book nerd.  I printed out labels for about 250 books, attached them to the spines of the appropriate books, and shelved said books in Dewey Decimal order.  (I picked Dewey over Library of Congress numbering because my first job was in a library, and we didn’t have any of that crazy LoC stuff at the time.  It’s nostalgia, pure and simple.)  I have another bookcase full of books that I need to put in my most excellent Collectorz book database so I can label them, too.  I do so love being a complete geek.

I had a couple of other things on my To Do list, but… meh.  Whatever.  I relaxed a lot.  And that was the whole point.