Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

“woke” is the new caravan.

The revolution will be supervised.

Sadly, media malpractice has become standard practice.

The “burn-it-down” people are good with that until they become part of the kindling.

There are more Russians standing up to Putin than Republicans.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Not rolling over. fuck you, make me.

The fundamental promise of conservatism all over the world is a return to an idealized past that never existed.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Come on, man.

I’m starting to think Jesus may have made a mistake saving people with no questions asked.

People are weird.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

The arc of history bends toward the same old fuckery.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

Nothing says ‘pro-life’ like letting children go hungry.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

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Are things ever going to settle down?  With everything that’s going on, that’s probably not in the cards for the near future.  Which makes it even more important to celebrate our victories and our accomplishments.

I hope this can be a place where we can all be excited when one of us has something good going on.  You don’t need to have published a book, to have received an award, or be featured in a gallery, but those work, too!  Maybe you moved into your dream house, or you finished rebuilding your 57 Chevy, or you just got married or you’re retiring, or you had a kid, or you just passed your boards.

When you have something to celebrate, I hope you’ll be willing to write up a little something and share it with us.  Send me an email if you’re interested.  ~WaterGirl

Celebrating Jackals – and Jackal Adjacents!

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It’s been a good long time since we have had a Celebrating Jackals post!  And by good long time, I mean far too long.

f you look at it one way, you could think that this is a strange time to celebrate anything.  Viewed in another way, in times like these, it’s even more important to take the time to celebrate the good things.

First up: Albatrossity

A proud papa moment, and worth celebrating in a time when science and scientists get hate mail whenever they mention anthropogenic climate change.

My daughter Ellen (pictured below using her first pair of binoculars to study a grasshopper) was the primary writer and corresponding author of a 2023 Nature paper that just won the Frontiers Planet Prize (worth over $1 million) from a Swiss foundation. The laboratory of Peter Haase (her postdoc advisor) gets the money, but maybe some of it will come her way to fund a student or postdoc in the future.  She was in Switzerland for the announcement and presentation of the prize, and now is back in Montana. She is a Smithsonian Institution research ecologist, working to understand grassland community ecology in eastern Montana Lots of grasshoppers there!

At any rate, this will look pretty good on her CV and in her annual review report! And if her research helps us understand and help our warming planet, that would be good, too.

Auto Draft 106How adorable is that photo!

Seriously, if I were a parent, I might be tempted to want to freeze that moment in time forever!

So let’s celebrate with Albatrossity – and if anyone else has *anything to celebrate, please share it with us in the comments.

*You do not need to have won a million dollar prize in order to participate.

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First Night: Home Sweet Home!

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“Is this Heaven?”

” No, it’s Iowa.”  “No, it’s Maine.”

First night in her new home. It’s home for a month until MomSense moves into the “new to her” house.

Greetings from the lake. It’s a cold and rainy evening but the lake looks so peaceful.

We closed on the sale of my house today and I’m so relieved.

This is home for now.

MomSense

Congratulations, MomSense!

 

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Friends In Weird Places – Bleg

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Afternoon or evenin’, Jackals. ‘Tis I, your erstwhile, post starting and not finishing, friendly neighborhood sometimeish front pager. It’s a busy life in chez Rue and I have a lot to catch y’all up on. It’s been a lot. However, tonight’s post is not about me, it’s about Friend of the Blog and Jackal, Larime. In case you don’t know, Larime & Sylv have been going through a tough time from late last year to now. The great news is two-fold. Sylv is out the hospital after her surgery and recuperating back at home. And, Larime wrote this kick-ass comic book – Sex on Wheels. But, enough from me, let’s let Larime speak in his own words. Donations are truly needed and if you have art needs, please, order a commission. Buy a book. Below are the amazing cast portraits Larime did for my podcast audiodrama, Fast Track To 40. Help an artist out, eh?

Some of you may remember me from pet portraits I did for John over the years – I’m disabled and draw with my mouth. Sylv, my spouse of 25 years, is also disabled. We’ve had our rough patches and successes over the years, but this year has started out as the hardest, yet.

On January 12th Sylv went into the ER with what we thought was pneumonia from COVID. We’d both been sick right after Christmas, I got better, they did not. Scans showed over a liter of fluid in one lung, and about a third of that in the other. They were admitted, and a couple days later had the worse lung drained. There were enzymes in their blood tests that gave the doctors concerns about heart issues, and after a series of tests, they decided to do a cath (run a tiny camera up into the heart via the thigh).
Sylv has bad genes on both sides of the family, and the doctors said their heart was the weakest and worst they’d ever seen in someone their age. A bypass was ruled out because the veins and arteries were all too small and fragile for harvesting, so they decided to do 5 stents between two arteries. When working on the second artery, Sylv coded. Twice. CPR was successful both times, and the procedure finished.
After a week in the cardiac ICU, then another in a rehab wing, they finally discharged Sylv a month after they first went in. They got a nifty DVT (deep vein thrombosis) in the right thigh as a parting gift, and now we have about $1k in monthly prescriptions between crazy-expensive blood thinners, blood pressure meds, cholesterol meds, and a number of other things they’ll be on for life to keep from having any future heart attacks. They are uninsured (not by choice, it’s a looooong story) and I haven’t even looked at the hospital bills yet. We’re low-income disabled people. You can’t get blood from a stone.
During all of this, I was completely on my own for a month except for two visits a day from a friend I’m paying as my aid for an hour each visit. I had to eat delivery, order groceries delivery, go out to get drinks after my initial drinks were gone, and could only use the restroom twice a day. I survived it, it was nothing compared to what Sylv was dealing with.
Now we’re just trying to recover and rebuild. Sylv isn’t able to help me load up and unload all my gear I need to go draw caricatures on the Strip, my normal gig I support us with. We burned through everything we had getting to this point, and without regular work, we’re in a bad spot. Anything and everything is appreciated.
If you’d like art, you can check out my online shop here: https://store.sendowl.com/s/5fa9ad67-17ae-4eaf-a85f-985227fb3f2a
If you just want to help, my PayPal and Zelle are xlarimex (at) gmail (dot) com. My Cash App is $LarimeTaylor. I don’t have Venmo, and Go Fund Me takes several days to clear, and I have rent and bills due in three days and it might not clear fast enough.
Thank you all, and we’re so sorry we have to ask, but your help is hugely appreciated.
And there you have it. If you can do a little mitzvah, much appreciated. We’re a weird bunch but a good bunch. Open thread.
Friends In Weird Places - Bleg
HLM, BLF, Richard
Friends In Weird Places - Bleg 1
Clarity, Janet, Pennny
Friends In Weird Places - Bleg 2
Aaron, Jason, Dan

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Music Thread: Silver Heels & More

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Someone we know as MomSense… raised two sons… who are in a band… that released an album today!

The first song on the album:

I loved this song, and I can’t wait to hear the rest.  The video is stunning, here’s a screen capture of one of my favorite scenes.

Music Thread: Silver Heels & More

Silver Heels playlist on Spotify:

It’s Friday night.  Let’s talk Music!

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Help a Jackal in Queens

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Citizen Alan needs a few pointers and some help:

Barring something unexpected happening between now and then, I will be starting the Bankruptcy LLM program at St. John’s University in Queens NY this August. Yes, the loud-mouthed liberal from Mississippi is moving to the Big City. However, I am now in a panic mode about housing, as I missed the deadline for student housing and am on a waiting list. It’s probably too much to hope for but are their any Jackals from the Queens area who can give me some advise on where to get an apartment reasonably convenient to St. John’s?

Open Thread

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Celebrating Jackals: Frankensteinbeck Has A New Book!

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Frankensteinbeck mentioned in the comments the other day that he has a book coming out soon, so I asked if he would be willing to write something up for a Celebrating Jackals post.  He graciously agreed, and what he wrote could lead to some good conversation, I think.

Read on and see for yourself!

Frankensteinbeck

I have a book coming out on May 4th!

Many of you know that my most successful set of books are the Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Supervillain series.  I’m finally back to it, which raises a topic worthy of a post:

Selling out, and money vs art.

This is a tough one, folks.  Author gotta eat.  My previous publisher stealing from me nuked my career.  But the topic went back to before they went bad.  A writer is an artist, and an artist needs to make money, but also care at least two figs, preferably an entire cargo ship’s worth of figs about his art.  It’s hard to do that and keep it from wedging itself sideways in the canal of your career and blocking…

I think I’ve stretched that metaphor too far.

When Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m A Supervillain took off, I was faced with a problem.  I hate story creep.  Open-ended series end up wrecking themselves.  But again, author gotta eat, and here was my chance to live the dream and support myself on writing!  So, I made a deal with myself.  I’m not going to write the same book twice.  I could make a longer series out of Penny’s story, but it would have an ending, period, decided on before I started.  I wrote book two knowing generally what would be in book five.

Now I need to bring my career back to life, and the dark, exotic fantasy I write for passion ain’t gonna do it.  A Supervillain book had to happen.  What to do, without compromising my need to create stories I am proud to tell?  I decided to go the Discworld model.  I will write books about different characters in the same world, branching out as each book gives me more people to write about.  Maybe some of those characters will deserve more than one book.  This I can do while keeping things fresh, although I mourn that I don’t have the freedom of time and creative resources to write the freaky stuff in my heart.

I’ll add an extra twist, that’s on topic for art vs money.  I don’t like repeating myself.  I wanted individual ridiculous names for each book.  My original title for the second Supervillain book was At Least I Didn’t Blow Up Our Moon.  But… artistically, titles and cover art don’t matter.  They’re marketing.  They’re the thing that’s supposed to get someone to take a peek so you have a chance to snare them with your writing.  So my initial publisher insisted on the Please Don’t Tell My Parents title formula, and since I badly need to reclaim my former fan base, I stuck with it here.  Similarly, my new publisher goes way cheaper on cover art (Watergirl said she was going to attach this book’s cover) so what I worked out with the artist is something that thematically resembles the covers of the previous books.  What I need for this book is a sense of continuity.

As an ironic twist, after writing this new ‘back to the Supervillain world’ book, I needed a break, to write something purely for me.  It… turned out to be another Supervillain world book.

And so, on May 4th enjoy Please Don’t Tell My Parents I Work For A Supervillain, about a teenage girl who wants to be a heroine, finds out she doesn’t have what it takes, and finds a kind of adventure and fame that does suit her.

And then once I get through the beta reader phase, my publisher and I will put up Please Don’t Tell My Parents I’m Queen Of The Dead, about a teenage girl (get used to that in my books) who finds out being the only necromancer in a generation means trouble.  Lots of trouble.

Enjoy, and may your art be meaningful and profitable!

If you have something to celebrate, don’t be shy.  Let us know in the comments or send me an email message.

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Open Thread: An Interesting Life

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Subaru Diane has an interesting story to share.  As always!

Editor’s note: Why is she not writing a book?

Auto Draft 39

This is a picture of my mother, Elizabeth Cannon Lowry, standing next to President John F. Kennedy at the White House, in January 1962. Here’s a bit of backstory:

In March 1921, following the inauguration of Warren Gamaliel Harding, the new President was wandering around the White House, unable to sleep and looking for something to read. He found nothing — the Executive Mansion had no books!

Word of this reached the American Booksellers Association and they determined then and there to stock the WH Library with reading material for the President and the First Family. They selected 200 American books that had been published in the past four years, and in early 1922 they presented them to Harding in a low-key White House ceremony.

Every four years from that point on (the year following inauguration year) the ABA made a similar presentation, always focusing on American authors, publishers, and themes in their selections.

Presenters were usually members of the Executive Committee/Board of Directors of the ABA, and it so happened that my mother (who owned and managed our family bookstore) was on the Board in early 1962 and hence part of the WH delegation.

Of course JFK was probably the best-read POTUS since Jefferson or Lincoln and until Obama, and probably already owned most of the books presented! But the point is, the books were not selected with specific presidents in mind, nor to be part of their personal libraries.

Instead, the 200 books every four years were meant for a permanent, cumulative, ever-growing White House library, for the use and pleasure of the President, the First Family, and WH staffers during their four-year stint, then left in place for their successors.

I haven’t heard about the program in years. I hope it’s still operational. A few years ago I emailed the ABA asking about it, but never got an answer. I should try again.

Open thread.

 

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