Environment II by mark andrew york

America's Next Great Pundit Contest

2009-10-30T20:36:00.000-07:00

At the Washington Post, didn't care for my poke George Will in the eye punditry it seems. Alas, this was no contest at all, but a diversity of mediocrity festival that resembles applying for any job if you happen to to over 50 and not already a Stanford perfessor like one of the winners.

Thank you for entering the first season of the America’s Next Great Pundit contest. You didn’t make the judging easy for us. Not only did we get nearly 5,000 entries, but a great many of those entries were really quite excellent -- smart, interesting, funny, well written and well argued. So while we’re sorry to say that we can’t include you as one of our ten finalists this time around, we hope this isn’t the last time we hear from you.

Oh it won't be. like most contests, these ten finalists are the most limp selection imaginable and the reason newspapers are doomed. The truth won't ever be sexy with this level of punditry. Glenn Beck, rest easy. Ca Ching!

The line up? Wow. Diverse and successful and alas, not writers. All of the columns suck. Insert any ethnic joke conservatives love. George Will's bullshit is sooo safe.

350 Awareness Day

2009-10-24T19:44:00.000-07:00

I attended a great presentation ay NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory this afternoon promoted by 350.org. Sea level rise was the most disturbing discovery. The displacement of water from the melting of ice sheets in both hemispheres congregate around the US coastline. Sea level rise is not uniform. Talk about your chickens coming home to roost.

Yet whack job deniers still persist. Like the Superfreakowingnuts and their hose to heaven pie-in-the-sky "solution" from the people who brought you the incompetent Windows OS, and commenters on major newspapers who claim this sort of wisdom.

"To respond to the carbon dioxide claim, true scientific data show that we had higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in 1820 and 1940 than we do now."

Why does this sort of ignorant garbage litter a major newspaper's web site? I mean really, many of us know we are riding on a ship with fools but are a long way from being a ship comprised of fools. One won't get that impression reading a comment thread at an environmental article on The Washington Post. What sad times for media.

CO2 is now at 388 ppm and climbing. 350 is the safest level of carbon dioxide we can have without drastic climate repercussions.

Political forecast:Increasing cloudiness for many among us.

The Lost Message of the Masons

2009-10-13T18:05:00.000-07:00

After having listened to The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown's latest opus, I admit that,like Matt below I wanted to like it, but in the end I just couldn't. Brown violates all of the rules of writing good fiction en masse from an over use of modifiers, repeating phrases as if they were a mantra we can't recall from the previous page. The key to thrillers though is a fast pace, murders, or one murder and a maiming in this case, although as others have pointed out, the murder victim was long forgotten once the deed was done. The italicized internal dialogue with he thought attribution is a beginners style mistake but having to fully master POV is not on Dan's radar when he can sell his tomes without learning anything save laundry lists of obscure facts presented as infodumps. As long as the whole thing is a chase scene it works. Sex? Let's just hope Dan's home life is more exciting than his characters.' I mean really.

Hilarious reviews here:

MATT TAIBBI
"The most irritating Harvard-educated, mullet-wearing, sexless pedant of all time."
09/25/09 at 16:30

The let down new agey anti-climactic ending felt like a rip off of the movie, The Jewel of the Nile. The jewels have been right before you all along. But where is the damn treasure! Yeah. I felt the way I did touring the Montana headquarters of the CUT church: standing in a gift shop awash in religious symbol trinkets ( like a Catholic field day sidewalk sale) from every belief in the history of the world humans have ever held, all gathered beneath a portrait of the owners of the church, The Prophets. Us. We are the Gods we've always dreamed of. Sure. It's all about us.

At the end of the day those of us involved in the pursuit of the publishing grail of are all just mystified by the Brownian product line and what he gets away with. I strive for the opposite, but the biggest fantasy of all may be that good craftsmanship should command this kind of money. I think that's the real lost message of the freemasons. And if you look in just the right place in the right light I bet it's chiseled into a corner stone somewhere,

Greenhouse Reduction Incentives

2009-10-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

Since no major industry is likely to reduce emissions out of their own volition and concern for the world, the first incentive is a swift kick in the ass. Kudos to the Obama administration for implementing my plan. Rebates and tax reductions for doing so to follow. Time for the coal power plants of the rust belt states, the south, and any other holdouts, to be pulled kicking and screaming into the 21st Century and face the consequences for the rapidly warming world. "O.H.I.O. Ohio," as Joan Armatrading sang. Selling scrubbers is good not only for the environment, but for those businesses. This is a win win. I should point out that most western states use natural gas, a much cleaner fuel, to generate electricity.

The Towering Inferno in the Warming World

2009-08-31T19:10:00.000-07:00

"Fire officials worried the eastern flank could approach the upper edge of Sierra Madre by today and that a finger of flames on the west could hit Sunland. But officials said they were "fairly confident" they could keep the fire out of Acton."

Great. I'm glad for Acton, which is the size of a postage stamp. I live in Sunland. Happily I'm not there. I'm fishing in the Eastern Sierra's. It's no coincidence. Good luck and goodnight. Little fire scarecrow?

Online Celebrity

2009-07-30T20:28:00.000-07:00

"On the Internet, however, it’s not one single subjectivity but a popular hive-mind that decides. The “big break” arrives when, with lightning speed and often to one’s own surprise, the inscrutable pack decides to start forwarding one’s content around."

I particularly like the "hive-mind" tag. In a role I played on the NBC show, Dark Skies I led Jerri Lee Ryan and Eric Close back to the hive; an alien pod. That's what so-called online success is based on: getting groups of friends to declare you the winner of whatever the online contest is. Real success though is even more scarce here than the traditional merit-based route, be it publishing fiction, talking about it, or journalism. On the contrary, it almost never happens at all, save in the minds of the entrants. Shoot for the real thing. It's still real after all these years.

Qivitters Are losers

2009-07-25T20:30:00.001-07:00

While Alaska melts and the oil dries up, the governor qivits. Hensley was profiled in John McPhee's, Coming Into the Country.

The Funeral

2009-07-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

Just happened to be on my vector control beat here in Burbank. I took it in to start the day. Fans gathered at the park across the LA River, which affords a ringside seat to Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn Drive was closed.

Flim Flam WSJ

2009-06-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

They keep at it over at The Wingerville Journal.

My response on the forum page.

"poster child for how to lie with statistics"

Doesn't this title belong to Bjorn Lomborg? It still does. The logical fallacies in play here are evident and not on the side of the so-called true believers of Anthropogenic global climate change. As long as true deniers don't connect random weather events, and their disastrous results, to a long term trend of a warmer climate that is undeniably attributable to emissions then it will all be moot for you. I suspect your heads will be in the sand long after the waters dry up inland and inundate coastal areas worldwide. It may be caused something else? Your job as a critic is to find it. What is your theory?

Salinger Sues Fanficcer!

2009-06-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

Salinger calls the new book "a rip-off pure and simple." Gee, ya think?

"The sequel's author, 'J.D. California,' explains that 'Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York. ... It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past.'"

The old man still has it in him. Keep out signs posted and shot gun at the ready. Bravo.

Amazon's Bonfire of the Vanities Finale

2009-05-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

James King won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award yesterday. It was certainly the best novel of the bunch even if I found some of his skill-craft lacking, such as passive constructions and the like, for a man with a recent MFA. But well-deserved nonetheless.

I found the selection process to be corrupted by so-called Vine Voice reviewers who had a vital screening role in a contest in which some members were also contestants. Houston we have a problem. This has an appearance of a conflict of interest. Naturally, Viners don't think so. I'm shocked. My count was four in the semi-final 100, but in the end the fold folded. No amount of gang reviewing of friends excerpts mattered, as a Viner tossed out an an early stage lamented. That can happen when an Amazon editor decides to as can a bad manuscript moved on. Mr. King had only five reader reviews. In the end, Penguin decided who they wanted and why. He's lucky he slipped by. Well done.

Global Warming's First Victims

2009-05-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

Are the animals of course. Here, grizzly expert Doug Peacock makes the case for the Yellowstone grizzlies, whose food source, the whitebark pine has succumbed to beetle kill in a vast way, due to warm winters for just seven years. It's a typical house of cards, with one piece falling and others in a textbook domino event.

I had lunch with Doug and his wife Andrea last October in Livingston, a month before I was run out of town by the Evil Editor. Peacock was a good friend of Ed Abbey and the prototype for Abbey's protagonist, George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang. For me it was meeting a legend, an introduction arranged thanks to ousted Park County Commissioner and chair, Dr. Larry Lahren, the man who also introduced me to Tom McGuane in Missoula at the Montana Book Festival, as "The man who ruined my political career,'Bless him!'" It's a tribute to my journalistic skills and Lahren's great character, that he didn't consider me an enemy. I'll always remember what he did for me.

The bears need to be protected again under the ESA. There aren't that many of them left and the curious matter of most native Montanans being afraid of the bears and wolves and bison be damned. The sad fact is outside of the liberal enclave of Hollywood insiders clustered at Deep Creek in the spectacular Paradise Valley south of Livingston, where the Peacocks live, most regular rancher folks hate wildlife, especially if they can't kill it, eat it, or sell it to tourists. It's a real problem in rural America. Saving wildlife isn't a priority with heartland types.

LA Times Festival of Books

2009-04-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

Another excellent time today at four fiction panels.The first described here. Dark humor abounded with novelist and screenwriter Jerry Stahl playing everyone and everything as his straight man on two panels. Good stuff.

McGuane on Hunting

2009-04-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

Wall Street Journal Sports

An excellent essay as only Tom McGuane could live and write. I know how honored I was when he invited me to the ranch in McLeod, Montana. I pulled in one Sunday afternoon in the fall on my way to fish the West Boulder River, upstream of Michael Keaton, Tom M., Tom Brokaw and Walter Kirn. I drove through his open gate down into the ranch. His pack of dogs greeted me en masse. I parked and went up to the old log ranch house escorted by the dogs and knocked on the door.

The window to my right framed the bald head of a familiar music figure, and quite a good novelist in his own right. Tom came to the door and we exchanged pleasantries. His brother in law blew in from Alabama, he said. I glanced at the SUV with Bama plates in the driveway. We talked about our visit in Missoula two weeks prior at the book festival where he spoke and we met formally after I interviewed him for a story in the local paper where I worked.

What are you up to today?" he said.

Oh, fishing the river."

He looked wistful. "Bad timing today for that."

"It's okay," I said. "We'll get to it anytime."

I handed him 50 pages of my novel he'd asked about and let him get back to lunch and visiting with family. Jimmy Buffett.

Jungle Bob Durr RIP

2009-04-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

Well I just got ripped for a book review I did in 2005 of my short time neighbor in Chase, Alaska in 1976, ex-professor Bob Durr of Syracuse NY. They weren't very friendly when I tried living "up the tracks" north of Talkeetna. People are animals who guard their territory. This is what the Durr's did.

I can't help but laugh at the fact that you're blogging about this. A whopping thirty years later and that one incident still bothers you. Goodness. While the fact that you've labeled the Durrs as “snobs” and the lake as a "strange place" irritates me to this bad point where if I ever saw you I might poke you in the eye, I am happy to fill you in on some details. Jon and Steve do small time music money making. Playing gigs (which by the way is not "panhandling", Talkeetna summers bring in a lot of tourists a gig at the Fairview pays at least $200 depending on who owns the place), selling CD's to tourists, that kind of stuff. Jon also hunts and sells a lot of skins. Bob has done well as an artist, and his paintings sell for good money across Alaska. And, as you know, he's written novels that have been published and that brought in a fair amount of revenue as well.
As for the past, Bob wasn't exactly the most responsible and Carol most likely handled what little money they had. So it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t know where the money came from. Also, with hunting and gathering a lot of their food, and no electric bills, rent, or car payments the living expenses were not much. Yes they did have some money in the first cabin when it burnt down, you surely don’t think that they had ALL of their money in a book in the cabin? They had just enough to pack up their stuff and go to NY because his father was dying, I can’t really remember but I’m pretty sure it was his father. There, Carol got a job at a hospital, and their rent was free since Bob’s father owned an apartment that he let them stay in.
One of my favorite things that you wrote about Bob was your question about his life. “Does he intend to just hang out on a biologically dead lake until the end?” It makes me smile because that was in fact what he intended to do and did. Back Lake was everything to Bob, he lived and breathed it, and it meant more to him than just about anything or anyone. Although my grandpa did a lot of horrible things in his life, but the one thing he did right was Back Lake. So it doesn’t surprise me that he shooed you away from his paradise. And when I inherit the lake, I’m sure I’ll do the same.

PS, the outhouse holes are REALLY deep.

As I told this young lady, who is Durr's granddaughter, I call them as I see 'em. It's my recollection of my time there at Chase and a critique of Bob's memoir The Coldman Cometh. Durr passed away onFebruary 25. He did it his way, no question.

Critical Birds of a Feather: Kookaburras

2009-03-31T19:57:00.000-07:00

Reached by telephone, Hansen [Dr. James Hansen, NASA Climatologist] sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

Global warming is a Rorschach test on the foibles of human reason and of projection. The handful of kooks aren't right. The consensus is. This the outsider is right business is the stuff of novels but rarely is in real life. Dyson and the whackjobs on FOX play the victim when the truth is they're just flat wrong. See Occam's Razor. ex parsimoniae. End of story.

The Bonfire is a Pyre

2009-03-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

Not only were many of the 500 quarter-finalists in the ABNA contest hopelessly flawed by bad grammar, wordiness, editing problems and cliched scenarios such as "a writer finds his muse while reeling from rejection letters;" a plethora of prologues, which violated the rules, and now some of the poor rejected masses got a corrected email saying their pitch eliminated their entries after the first one declared they made it into the 2000 and would get reviews soon. Oh Brother, where art thou?

Amazon sent them a $5 gift card for the mistake. Talk about a sad comedy of errors. Pathetic.

Amazon's Bonfire of the Vanities

2009-03-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

For the second year in a row Amazon.com sifted through some 10,000 entries for their Breakthough Novel "Award" contest. Amazon is a vanity press in addition to online only bookseller and hopeful these reams of losers will buy their vanity press product at Createspace that entrants were required to join in order to participate.

What slush contests like this do is illustrate that the goal of any novelist is a commercial contract. That's the carrot: $25K and a contract with Penguin. That's a bargain for Penguin. How they get there is another matter. Entrants write a 300-word pitch and an excerpt of 5000 words. Nebulous Amazon editors, whoever the hell they are, determine if the pitch works or not. If it does, those writers go into a group of 2000. Then Vine reviewers, a special group of amateur reader reviewers, randomly chosen, some who are also in the contest, are shipped 40 excerpts to read, also random. Yeah, that's bright. Talk about a crap shoot. So last night they announced the 500 winners and posted the excerpts on the Web site, including the two random reviews that helped determine the book's future in the contest. Final decisions came from the same unnamed group of Amazon employees. Later on an expert judging panel comes into play, but they have no hand in this phase. This is all about amateurs picking amateurs, many of which are perennial contestants with the same books.

As if by magic, many of the losers in last years' affair randomly made it through. Uh huh. Yeah, as if there was no memory of the same books. Consider this gent who made it all the way to the final three last year and then Penguin decided his bizarre entry wasn't fit to publish. It wasn't and still isn't, yet here it is.

Review
I'm confused after reading this excerpt, but since the writing is so clear I have faith that the author will pull this plot together and help it make sense later in the book. I just don't "get" how it all works - how a family gets to try a potential child out, and how the child gets to decide if they live or not. Regardless, it is a highly original concept and I'd be interested to read more.

Yeah. I was confused too when I read the same excerpt, which the author flogged for the last two months on the forums. Just think of all the possible decent manuscripts rejected while "glowing" reviews like this moved the author on? The number of other examples of this flawed decision process are the majority of the 500 winners from what I could tell surfing through. That and Vine reviewers also being dubbed by Vine reviewers. Ahem. Little conflict of interest scarecrow? I said this during the first Gather.com contest. In vanity world, crap floats.

Andy Revkin Drinks the Kool-Aid

2009-03-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

NYT science reporter Revkin on a so-called exaggeration of Al Gore."While climate scientists foresee more intense droughts and storms, there is still uncertainty, and significant disagreement, over whether recent patterns can be attributed to global warming."

Right. It's either that or the Tooth Fairy. That's a tough one. There's been a huge flap over this and with the wingnut Glenn Beck vilifying climate modeler and T. Texas professor Dr. Michael Tobis, in a breathtaking case of creative defamation that headlined on Beck's show on FOX. It's bad news personified. And totally false at its core. I'll not repeat it here, but as I told Tobis, this is the skeptic media modus operandi. I'm sorry to see Revkin co-opted in this way in another example false equivalency comparing Al Gore's so-called exaggerations to the falsehoods of George Will.

The Ole Vanity/POD Shuffle

2009-03-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

There's a statistical claim going around the net about the dismal performance, 70 percent, of new novels published every year by so-called traditional publishers not selling more than 500 copies. It's blatantly false.

First, there aren't 195,000 novels published every year as the statement claims.

According to Bowker.com for 2007, There were 50,071 new fiction titles introduced in the U.S. last year, up 17% from 2006, and the number of new titles in the category in 2007 was almost twice what it was as recently as 2002.

What is alarming is this: "While traditional book publishing was basically flat last year, there was a staggering rise in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books to 134,773, pushing the grand total for projected 2007 U.S. book output to 411,422 books. To maintain the continuity of statistics, Bowker is excluding this output from its traditional reporting and has begun tracking the On Demand industry segment separately."

Yeah Boy, Howdy. The claim made on these Web sites is bogus and seems to originate from a post by an author, sans source at this New Zealand Web siteHow many books do first-time authors sell? Over 195,000 new novels are published by traditional publishers in the U.S. every year. Of those, 70% sell fewer than 500 copies. Yikes..

Yikes indeed. Only 84 titles from iUniverse, now a part of Authorhouse sell 500 copies. This is a marriage of that pitiful and predictable fact and total books sold in 2005. Lies. Damned lies. And statistics.

Willful Disgrace

2009-02-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

George Will has lied through the years as it has suited his personal biases, as Media Matters points out.

"Washington Post can hide behind multi-layer processes all it wants, but as long as it publishes Will, it will continue to misinform its readers. The Post doesn't need to give Will a better fact-checker; it -- along with the rest of the media elite -- should instead give him a good, thorough shunning."

Will has no expertise on science or banking or anything except political history. One thing is certain: lies sell papers. And wars.

Send him over to The Washington Times where he belongs.

Willfull Ignorance Part ....?

2009-02-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

There's been so many it's hard to know, but George Will continues to spout lies about global warming. Are conservatives just blind on this or inherently stupid? It has to be deliberate. Then again opinion is opinion and some are worth less. His is one of the latter.

On Darwin

2009-02-14T19:10:00.000-08:00

"But what is astonishing," Olivia Judson writes, "is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw. His imagination told him, for example, that many female animals have a sense of beauty — that they like to mate with the most beautiful males. For this he was ridiculed. But we know that he was right. Still more impressive: he was not afraid to apply his ideas to humans. He thought that natural selection had operated on us, just as it had on fruit flies and centipedes."

Elementary Watson, as Holmes would say. And the greatest idea of all time.

Here We Go Again

2009-01-26T18:57:00.000-08:00

The latest vanity press mega transition is making the news like some sort of new archeological discovery, since that's how rare these anomalies are.

By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5.

Yeah well, the real story is missing from this piece and lies between those few liking it...and wound up getting an agent and the half mil. I mean, really.

The best thing about about TIME is their archive is open and online. Come fish with Papa.

Two Writers Talk through the ages

2008-12-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.
Jim Harrison

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken