SWAT Port-a-potties

I know this is just silly, but...

You know when something awful happens in a neighborhood and the SWAT team comes out (thankfully) and maybe even the bomb squad? Sometimes there's a person barricaded in a home, and the police are there for hours and hours.

I never thought of this before, but they bring their own key-locked port-a-potties, bolted to a trailer. It makes sense. I mean, if you're evacuating civilians and deploying snipers, do you really want to knock on a door and say, "By the way, ma'am, may I use your bathroom?"

So I took a picture. Because even heroic death-defying law-enforcement officials have to pee at times.

Garbled Spam

Time to award someone for their prodigious gall!

I delete a lot of spam commments on this blog. This one made me laugh...you gotta credit this writer's stamina, hammering out a sales pitch with (I'm guessing) a dictionary and very cheap thesaurus before him or her.

I affair listening to music from my iPod while I'm on the emigrate, be it on the bus, the indoctrinate, or good while doing groceries. Quest of that saneness, I every time requirement a creditable span of stereo earphones with me, and of ambit on some days I'd like my earphones to be an whistles, where I match it with my outfit for that day. So I get a join of creator earphone every other month.

The typical links and garbage follow.

"on the emigrate"--was the writer looking for a synonym for on the road? and "the indoctrinate"--a class? But I'm mystified by the first phrase: "I affair listening to music".  I affair?  Too precious.

Dumb and Frustrating

Here's a dilemma:

When otherwise nice people send you an email that's been forwarded 728 times, with all 852,639 "to" addresses still attached, advising you in 36-point font that THIS IS NOT A HOAX! and THIS WAS ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA--IT'S REAL!!!! ... and what follows is so clearly a hoax and a pile of manure that no sensible person over eight years old could possibly believe it to be true, and Snopes and every debunking site in the f-ing world has exposed it and no one but a moron would believe that Bill Gates wants to send them a check because he's testing a new email system ... and yet the person who sent it to you is a decent person--stupid and naive, yes, but still not someone you want to insult and burn bridges between ... so what do you do?

Blog out your frustrations.

A Van with Gall

What remains to be said? For years, this work of art has been parked in the same lot each day. Sometimes I see a man wildly arguing or preaching to people who stop to talk. I've always assumed the topics of conversation would be a bit limited, so I just pass and do my Dilbert imitation ("Don't make eye contact....don't make eye contact")

EBay Good for Archaeologists

If you haven't already seen the story in Archaeology Magazine, Science Daily, Yahoo, or a host of other sources, here's the deal. Ebay makes selling faux antiquities so easy that looting of archaeological sites has decreased.

Professor Charles Stanish of UCLA wrote the article called "Forging Ahead, or how I learned to stop worrying and love EBay." It's a really good article; click on one of the links above to read it in full. What follows is my quickie dissemination of his well-researched facts.

Looting works like this: some poor schmuck robs a grave or stumbles upon a treasure. Said schmuck wants cash--usually to do something frivolous like feed his children--so he sell his find to someone, who sells it to someone, and so on and on. The money's made in the middle; the finder gets little and the customer at the end pays big time.

Selling fakes is a little different. In the past, the fake had to be really good to get a high price from collectors. Naturally, high-end fakes cost more to make and involved skilled artisans.

So in comes EBay, where a low-end, cheaply-produced fake--in fact, a mass-produced ton of cheap fakes--can be shipped out regularly to hundreds of wanna-be collectors all over the globe. Why risk arrest and jail by stomping around old burial grounds at night if you can set up a pottery workshop and sell more goods that way? The finder/producer now gets more money, because he's producing more goods--all day, in a shed, with his friends and neighbors helping out. The only middleman might be the shipping/EBay shop in the nearest town. (I bet there's a shipping dock in the back of this bazaar!) Also, because so many cheap antiques are available, the market for looted goods is impacted. Their price declines. A real win-win scenario.

Thanks to the miracle of online auctions. Ah, technology!

Blago Gets Big Bucks

Blagojevich.

Six figure deal for book.

Blagojevich, who isn't worth the trouble it takes to figure out how to spell his name. A potty-mouthed liar who tried to sell the Senate seat of the new president. Six figures--for what?

To tell us one is born every minute?

Anti-Valentines Day Cards--get an early start!

Andrew Shaffer, the wacky gentleman (I mean that in the nicest way) who combined photos of Charles Darwin with Santa Claus to create a line of Christmas greeting cards for atheists, is ready for Valentine's Day too. (read about Shaffer on Expatica, then visit his site at OrderofStNick.com.)

Some of the cards for February 14th feature Nietzsche and come in Sweet or Anti Valentines. I personally like Anti #3, with a portrait of a rather young Nietzsche and the quote, "A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love." You can browse them here.

Another of Shaffer's popular items is the Depressing Times cards, for Christmas, Valentines, and all occasions. They feature great black & white pictures from the 30s, with captions like "I made you a Valentine, but I had to burn it in a trashcan to stay warm."

If the Depression doesn't float you boat (can't imagine why it wouldn't), there are sour Valentines--ones that tell a person you're breaking up with them, or cheating, or crossing genders...but my favorite is this Gothic little number at right, with no caption. Who needs words?

None of this has aught to do with archaeology or France or writing, although I suppose it does take gall to send some of these cards out. I mean, your sister might stage an intervention or something. But they are so amusing.

Follow up to Fiction V. Memoir

A link to David Hauslib's Jossip blog, specifically to an entry titled "A Brief History of Modern Lying Authors."

He covers the top four frauds of the last ten years--three phony memoirs, and one journalist faking his stories. But the field is sooooo rich! One could, were one so inclined, fill a blog with tales of bogus memoirs, fraudulent war stories that made it into print, faked quotes to bolster research--and don't even get me started on plagiarism!

Is there no honor among writers?

Fiction V. Memoir--It's not rocket science!

Once again, an author has been outed as fabricating his memoir just as it goes to press. Herman Rosenblat's ANGEL AT THE FENCE: The True Story of a Love That Survived, it turns out, ain't none of that--not true, no one at the fence, and it hasn't survived--at least, not as a book. Rosenblat even has to return his $50,000 advance!

Seems that the touching tale of a girl who through apples over the fence of a concentration camp, and years later met the grown man she had helped save from starvation, and married him, sigh, oh sigh, was a complete fabrication. Rosenblat is a concentration camp survivor--no one doubts that--and sadly, because he lied, all that he has to say that may be of value is now doubted.

The movie is still a go. Since when has Hollywood ever cared whether a story is historically accurate? Seriously, different rules do apply, and the producers say they were planning to fictionalize it anyway. (IOW, the fiction they paid for was not fiction enough for them.)

Here's the New Republic expose of Rosenblat's book, the Times UK shorter online story, the Snopes version (which quotes the book extensively), and some interesting comments on Deborah Lipstadt's website. I include Prof. Lipstadt because she is the author and historian who stood up to David Irving and other Holocaust deniers. She calls ANGEL AT THE FENCE "not exactly a shining example of verisimilitude." Hee hee.

Deborah Lipstadt's book (History on Trial) reminded me of a real-life QB-VII--the Leon Uris novel about a trial over the Holocaust.

• Lipstadt=nonfiction.
• Uris' QB-VII=fiction.
• Rosenblat's story=fiction.

Fiction means it's a novelized, emotion-packed, well-paced drama that didn't really happen. Why do we all have such trouble with that concept? Has TV and movies spoiled us for finding drama in the mundane, real events of life?

One other point--the New Republic piece (by Gabriel Sherman) points out that Rosenblat's faux love story appeared in Chicken Soup for the Couple's Soul. Now that just sucks. If we can't trust the Chicken Soup books, what can we trust?

Mr. Rosenblat, you lived through the Holocaust. You have horrifying and--no doubt--amazing tales to share, if your wish was to be heard. Why on earth did you have to piss away your reputation and honor by lying?

The book's website has been erased, thank you for visiting.