If I Won Ten Million Dollars

Image via WikipediaAnother blog I linked up to thru Twitter put up a cool question, surely one of the generic but eternally interesting ones. Mega-Millions
What if you won ten million dollars?

Every one who buys a lottery ticket buys the chance to run down that pleasant mental lane, at least until they check the numbers. I wrote a song about it, long time ago, and posted it as a comment in that blog, as well as on my writing blog, and here.

Ten Million -

I actually wrote a song about it for a girl a long time ago when she told me that I would dump her if I won the lottery.

If I Won the Lottery

There’s a lot of things that I’d change in this world
But none of them have to do with you girl

There’re a lot of things that I would do
Baby all of them would still include you

I’d quit my job at the factory
Give my car and house away for free
I’m in love with you, You’re in love with me
None of that would change,
If I won the lottery

Baby Baby the day my ship comes in
We will never eat Mac and Cheese again
Never drive junk cars, Never wear old clothes
Never worry ’bout where my pocket change goes

We’d buy a house, no an estate
hundreds of acres of land behind a gate,
We’d stay up and party and sleep in late
That’s what I would change,
If I won the lottery

That’s what I got, not usually the type to leave prose in comments, but what can I say it’s in the moment.

How to Know Your Password is Strong Enough

We are living in a world of passwords and usernames, one is getting simpler, the other is getting harder.
User names are no longer the exercise in clever letter play they use to be, as far as I can tell, most of us can get the name we want these days, with a minimal amount of added numbers or initials.
Passwords are a different story. These days, my old standby passwords don't quite pass muster, and as I continue to submit new variations, frustration brought about this revelation.

If you end up having to write it down, then your password just might be strong enough. Of course, you will lose that slip of paper, and have to get it reset, and the cycle goes on.

Breaking Bad - Easily the Best of 2008

This has been a weird season of television, yes, mostly thanks to the writer's strike and the lack of selection of quality new programming, or just entertaining new programming. Still, I don't know the whole deal but this season seemed to break good for "Breaking Bad," though I have to believe that the writer's strike is responsible for the short, seven episode season.

Seven excellent episodes.
This picture, of the two partners in the last episode of the season, could easily be them surveying the distant competition in the television world.

It seems like I just discovered this series, and actually, it was not that long ago that I dove into it on my DVR hard rive and since then it has been a fast, fun, drive. Bryan Cranston has gone from a familiar curiosity to an actor that keeps me riveted for his performances as Walt Myers. His co-star, Aaron Paul, playing Jesse Pinkman, Walt's former student and new business partner
is keeping up, as are the rest of them, both with their performances and the writer's handling of them.

This is when television is good, every episode of this series has aimed high and hit the mark, and each character has evolved a little bit, in what is relatively a short period of time for a television. Yes, character development in a televison series that is not on HBO. They have dragged Dexter off of Showtime because of the dearth of programming, maybe this show should be next. This show outshines Dexter in it's uncensored Showtime version, I won't even watch the network television replay.

The show is entirely recapped on AMC's website, they have taken down the two first episodes, but are planning to replay the entire series almost immediately. I'm under the impression that it has caught fire, that maybe I'm not the only one to recognize how good it is.

A Run Around My Blogs

Today, as a writing exercise, I opened up all of my little blogs, discarded at various addresses throughout the internet, and wrote a post on each. It was a nice exercise, mostly successful, except that I cannot figure out a single thing to say about the Chicago Bears today. I'm all footballed out, and the better for it. Here's what I came up with:

• Writing Blog - Where I begin to explore why I quit writing and why I have always had to write in some form, as well as review some writing and blogging blogs:
  

  Write to Done
  

  
  

  Webworker Daily

  
  

  Pro-Blogger

• Cubs Obsession - Brief Rant about the Cubs new owner, how he is a real-estate baron trying to put one over on the state and city and Cubs fans.
  
• Health Obsession - Brief rant about how fast the year has gone and then two reviews of new fitness sites I have found, sweat365 and MapMyWalk, comparing them to fitday unfavorably.
  

None of these posts today will get dugg, or even read, but they got my feet wet. Maybe this is why so many blogs have speedlinking posts or constantly re-run down their content. Any of you backlinking to me because I mentioned you, Hi there, and thanks.

Devil in the White City - Erik Larson

I am, at times, a voracious reader. I gobble up everything I can, sometimes with nearly no regard as to quality or genre, but I usually stick in my favorite areas; Sci-fi, Horror, and thriller fiction.

I am always on the lookout for a standout piece of work that I haven't read, and shoot outside of my comfort zones on occasion. So, I heard some guys talking about a book, and got the name of it, Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson. I noted the name, and based on a very generic recommendation, I stopped them before they gave me more details, and read the book.

Let me preface this by also saying that as I had a beer with a buddy, telling him about the book I'd just started reading, someone at the bar spoke up to tell me how good it was, and I had to stop them from going on and maybe ruining it for me. Well, that's what I said, I actually just didn't feel like talking to them.

So anyway, on to the book. Devil in the White City is one of those historical drama type of books that have become popular, and usually elicit no interest from me whatsoever. It was solely the person that initially recommended it to me and a few details that got me to read it. Still, the book came highly recommended on all levels.

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Toys - as memories and writing tools

Almost every place I ever visited as a child is defined in some ways by the toys that were there for me to play with. Every relative's home, office I visited, restaurant, even schools and churchs, had their own set of toys to play with. Maybe it is part of my generation, or an eye to things to come, but in many cases I remember the toys more than the place, or the people in it.

Let's take both sets of Grandparents, first my mother's side, where I can tell you that she and Grandpa kept a big cardboard cannister of Lincoln Logs and a stack of comic books, handed down from my Uncle and older cousins in the hall closet. I remember nearly as much about those toys, as I can about her holiday dinners, but this is because NOBODY cooked like my Grandma Shaw.

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Alcohol...Good for the Writer's Soul

Alcohol, and the way we drink it, or don't drink it, or observe it, is one of the most important character traits for a writer to notice.

Is this true? For many years, as I've pushed through troubles caused by alcohol, been forced to get treatement for alcohol consumption, and am still reminded daily of what has happened to me because of it, I still believe it. Sure, there are other things to help outiline people, but certain traits, maybe because they are common, outline the most.

Eating, smoking, gambling, screwing, loving, caring, stealing, lying... everything outlines people ina story, but sit them down at a bar and put a drink or two in front of them, and you begin to get to know your character.

An idiot I use to hang out with use to quote his father, a long dead, once well-thought of person in our small town. "You just can't know anyone enough to trust until you belly up to a bar with them."

I don't completely agree with that, but in the fifties, when it was probably first forged or taken from some other source, it was an indicator.

I spend a lot of time wondering about things like that. I have been told that all my stories are about drinking, drenched in it if you would, but of course it's not that simple. I write what I see and what I know, and know that I have spent a lot of time with some people and hardly got to know them at all, but if you sit down and drink with them, you get some clue. Maybe it is not a true image of the person, but a clearer one than say, if you set next to them in an office for years. At least if they're not talkers.

There are many ways to use alcohol to outline characters, or tell about real people. Alcohol often lets the guards down. Mean drunks, sloppy drunks, smoking drunks, yacking drunks, slutty drunks, etc. Also, what they drink, how they drink it, all of these are the staples and tells that come across a bar.

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Cho Seung-Hui, Poster Boy for Censorship or Bureacratic Failure?

Cho Seung-Hui, I won't commit his name to memory or learn to pronounce it, but everyone knows who he is, at least for a month or two, the psychopath that killed more than 30 people in Blacksburg Virginia, on the Virginia Tech campus.

As this tragedy is dissected in the national media, including the countless times this man/boy slipped through the grasp of safeguards in place to stop just such a thing happening, one thing jumps out at me; the way his writings are being used to bias a national public.

After this outrage, after the bodies are buried and grieving has been faced, will the only time we hear this sick, murderer's name be when some politician wants to advocate their issue on gun control or on censorship?

I've read the two plays that are up on AOL, they are bad. Yes, they are violent, but mostly they are just bad. In hindsight we can all say that they foreshadowed his actions, but it is not a direct line between violent, demented writing and killing spree.

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And the Train Takes Another...

There is a train track running straight through the heart of my hometown. Put there during the steel age it might once have been a center of commerce, a contact to the coast of Lake Michigan and all the wealth it brought to the mid-west through Chicago.
- the start of a the Steel Serpent

If you clicked the link above, or have read the story, or just know me. You know I've written about the Train before. I truly don't obsess about it, but I have observed others who do, and I often just have to stop and think about it as I watch the the story of the train continue.

I'm sure that every town, neighborhood, in every country, has their version of the train. In the Northwest it is the mountains, on the coasts it is the sea, but here in DeKalb, Illinois, it is the train that inordinately often takes away the unfortunate.

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