A friend sent me a link to a video, which struck my funny bone on several levels.
Warning: is it not work-safe (but this site probably isn’t either) and you must have a love of the absurd.
collateral damage from the war on sex
This is not the first time this has happened, but it’s the first incident I’m aware of.
A young woman was arrested on prostitution charges in February. She was mentioned by name in the article (both printed and online) and apparently was lucky enough to get featured on the local evening news. Two weeks ago, she killed herself.
I don’t know her or anything about her. I heard this through the Internet grapevine. Yes, it really happened. Her obit was published online with little fanfare. The details are few and far between. It has been made clear that her family doesn’t want the story to get out, so the few details I know will not be repeated here.
I wonder if the fallout has been brought to the attention of the arresting officers to see if they feel they’ve done their job in protecting society. I’ve no doubt they would be glad her recidivism rate has dropped.
jerked around
In January, I attended a party for $pread Magazine thrown by SWOP-USA. Overall, everyone was very nice. It was beyond disappointing to discover that my $2 bill article was not in the current issue (it was slated for the following issue, but I didn’t know it at the time).
What’s worse is that I talked, at length, to a guy who ran a bookstore and invited me to do a reading. We verbally planned the event. It was a done deal. I was very excited.
When I contacted him two days later, there was no mention of doing a reading for his store. He simply forwarded my information to another sex worker activitst in town. That’s it.
In that respect, the interaction was much like any client/provider social. The men want your undivided attention but never follow up. I should’ve seen this one coming a mile away.
repackaging information
A couple weeks ago I visited a Barnes & Noble that was much larger (and farther away) than my local one. I visited the Writing/Reference section and was pleased to find a few books by The Self-Publishing Manual, 15th edition. It looked much nicer than the 8th edition sitting on my bookshelf. It was thicker too and contained much more Web-useful information (to be expected). I didn’t see anything so compelling that I needed to buy it. After all, most of my questions have been answered by this point and I’ve discovered that what questions I still need answered can’t be found in a book. But, a good resource all the same. (I also noticed that the meat of most of his chapters hadn’t changed much.)
Then I opened Writing Nonfiction. It wasn’t a thick book. I’d considered buying it several times over the past couple years but I never did. Mr. Poynter has made a very good living by writing nonfiction and that alone was enough to make me want to buy this particular book.
This was the first time I got to see the book in-hand, noticing that it was large-print in a large-sized format. As I flipped through the chapters, the words started looking very familiar. When I compared them to Chapter 2 of The Self-Publishing Manual, they looked totally familiar (Chapter 2 is “Writing Your Bookâ€). Writing Nonfiction also has a few chapters dealing with the traditional and self- publishing industries, sort of a quick summary of what The Self-Publishing Manual covers.
popularity index
This blog must be getting popular. I’ve started getting nearly 100 spam comments a day. Just last week, my daily spam count was 10-30. Something to be proud of, I guess.