The Pentagon is moving to allow women to serve on Navy submarines. Here’s the story.

My friend Barry sent me this. (Not the Barry who broke his leg. The Barry who lost his leg. What is it with Barrys and legs?) Unfortunately, it explains everything.

USA Finance 101– How Our Finances got so Fouled Up!

An Easily Understandable Explanation of Derivative Markets

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar in Detroit. She realizes
that virtually all of her customers are unemployed
alcoholics and, as such, can no longer afford to patronize
her bar. To solve this problem, she comes up with a new
marketing plan that allows her customers to drink now, but
pay later.

She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby
granting the customers loans).

Word gets around about Heidi’s “drink now, pay later”
marketing strategy and, as a result, increasing numbers of
customers flood into Heidi’s bar. Soon she has the largest
sales volume for any bar in Detroit.

By providing her customers’ freedom from immediate payment
demands, Heidi gets no resistance when, at regular
intervals, she substantially increases her prices for wine
and beer, the most consumed beverages. Consequently, Heidi’s
gross sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic vice-president at the local bank
recognizes that these customer debts constitute valuable
future assets and increases Heidi’s borrowing limit. He sees
no reason for any undue concern, since he has the debts of
the unemployed alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank’s corporate headquarters, expert traders
transform these customer loans into DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS
and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then bundled and traded
on international security markets. Naive investors don’t
really understand that the securities being sold to them as
AAA secured bonds are really the debts of unemployed
alcoholics.

Nevertheless, the bond prices continuously climb, and the
securities soon become the hottest-selling items for some of
the nation’s leading brokerage houses.

One day, even though the bond prices are still climbing, a
risk manager at the original local bank decides that the
time has come to demand payment on the debts incurred by the
drinkers at Heidi’s bar. He so informs Heidi.

Heidi then demands payment from her alcoholic patrons, but
being unemployed alcoholics they cannot pay back their
drinking debts. Since Heidi cannot fulfill her loan
obligations she is forced into bankruptcy. The bar closes
and the eleven employees lose their jobs.

Overnight, DRINKBONDS, ALKIBONDS and PUKEBONDS drop in price
by 90%. The collapsed bond asset value destroys the banks
liquidity and prevents it from issuing new loans, thus
freezing credit and economic activity in the community.

The suppliers of Heidi’s bar had granted her generous
payment extensions and had invested their firms’ pension
funds in the various BOND securities. They find they are now
faced with having to write off her bad debt and with losing
over 90% of the presumed value of the bonds. Her wine
supplier also claims bankruptcy, closing the doors on a
family business that had endured for three generations, her
beer supplier is taken over by a competitor, who immediately
closes the local plant and lays off 150 workers.

Fortunately though, the bank, the brokerage houses and their
respective executives are saved and bailed out by a multi-
billion dollar no-strings attached cash infusion from the
Government. The funds required for this bailout are obtained
by new taxes levied on employed, middle-class, non-alcoholics.

Now, do you understand ?

Fifteen minutes ago, I got this email from a playwright friend:

I’m sorry for this odd request because it might get to you too urgent but it’s because of the situation of things right now,I’m stuck in United Kingdom with family right now,we came down here on vacation ,we were robbed, worse of it was that our bags, cash and credit cards were stolen of us at GUN POINT, it’s such a crazy experience for us, we need help flying back home, the authorities are not being 100% supportive but the good thing is that we still have our passports but don’t have enough money to get our flight ticket back home, please i need you to loan me some money, i will refund you as soon as I’m back home, i promise.

I emailed back:

John,

Is this for real? I’m going to message you through Facebook as well.

Lee

And so I did:

John, I got this email from you. Is this for real, or is this a phishing expedition?

Three minutes later, I got this reply:

No!!!lt isn’t a virus, I’m in this situation for real, I’ve been finding it difficult to make overseas calls from here. My phone’s out of service, probably because I’m outside the states. It has really been embarrassing for me,I’m very sorry for not informing you about our trip to U.K but I’m sure i can explain better when i return,I need some $$ as I have nothing on me now, was wondering if you could loan me $1,980, I’ll refund it to you as soon as I arrive home i will be glad to read from you soon.

John

And I got a Facebook chat message, “Hey Lee. You there?”

But I had already responded to the previous FB message with this:

What’s the name of the dvd you gave me? What happens to the lead character?

When I got no response to that, I messaged back: “Thought so. Contacting Facebook now.”

And I called my friend on his home phone back here in Los Angeles — and he answered. Right away. Why was he up? Because other friends who’d gotten that email called him to check. It’s 6:46 a.m. here and I doubt he would have been up otherwise.

Needless to say, he wasn’t robbed at gunpoint in the UK, and if he had been, a call to American Express or the U.S. Consulate or his bank or any number of other authorities would have loosened up some of his cash. I also let him know over the phone that if he had really been in a jackpot, I would have wired him the money. One of the things that made the phishing expedition so believable was the reasonable amount of cash requested.

What tipped me off that it wasn’t him? It’s not just the idea that John would have to inform me in advance that he was going to London (why would he have to do that?). It was the writing in the last sentence:  “It has really been embarrassing for me,I’m very sorry for not informing you about our trip to U.K but I’m sure i can explain better when i return,I need some $$ as I have nothing on me now, was wondering if you could loan me $1,980, I’ll refund it to you as soon as I arrive home i will be glad to read from you soon.” I think John would sooner shoot himself in the head than leave those personal pronouns uncapitalized, or write a run-on sentence fragment like that.

It comes in handy to know your friend’s writing voice.

On Friday, I saw Tiger Woods’ apology-of-sorts on a screen at a bar in Ft. Lauderdale. He pleaded for people to leave his family alone. Immediately afterward, his plea was analyzed by four experts trying to get at the root meaning of what he’d been saying. After that, more people analyzed it for our benefit.

I didn’t feel that I needed the apology, such as it was, anyway. What had he done to me? Nothing. Same as he had ever done.

But what if, unlike me, you’ve actually had close personal contact with Tiger Woods. Perhaps you think you’re owed an apology, but you’re not sure. For you, there’s this helpful chart, courtesy of Brokey McPoverty:

I put Stephen King’s latest novel, “Under the Dome” on my Christmas list because the premise of a town getting cut off from the rest of the world by a mysterious invisible dome sounded like fun, and because although it had been a long time since I’d read one of his books, I had enjoyed every one I’d read. I say this by way of saying that it is with a heavy heart that I come not to praise Stephen King, but to bury him.

Admittedly, no one expects Stephen King to be a prose stylist. If you want, say, Henry James, you know where to turn. But we do expect Stephen King to be a master storyteller; that is his métier. It is also his reputation. Google “ ‘Stephen King’ ‘master storyteller’ ” and you’ll get 11,000 citings. Go ahead, try it.

And yet, “Under the Dome” is not a story masterfully told. It isn’t even well-told. In fact, it’s very badly told, in the plotting, in the characters, and yes, in the truly awful prose. Perhaps worst of all, a wonderful premise rife with possibility is squandered on one-dimensional characters and a truly deus ex machina ending.

First, the prose. Again, I didn’t go into this book looking for literary prose. But it’s fair to expect more than what’s here from someone who has been behind the typewriter for 35 years, who has written 70 books, and who is the 18^th best-selling fiction writer in history. It’s not that the writing in “Under the Dome” isn’t gifted; it’s that it’s truly terrible.

Some samples drawn from the book:

1.

Like Piper, Lester mentioned the testing concept – an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history – but his major theme had to do with the infection of sin, and how God dealt with such infections, which seemed to be squeezing them with His Fingers the way a man might squeeze a troublesome pimple until the pus squirted out like holy Colgate.

Evidently, God squeezes the infection of sin the way man might squeeze a pimple filled with holy toothpaste.

I didn’t know God was concerned with infections.

If he is, I’m not sure he squeezes them. How does one squeeze an infection?

I’m not sure sin is an infection.

Pimples contain pus, but pus isn’t like toothpaste.

Pus erupts from pimples; toothpaste flows from tubes, it doesn’t erupt.

How is toothpaste holy? Or is it only Colgate?

Setting aside the metaphor of infected holy toothpaste of sin, exactly what does the aside (“an ecclesiastical hit during all the great clustermugs of history”) add to our understanding of this sentence? Nothing. The book is filled with roadway disasters like this that pull our eye away from the cars in front of us.

2.

A young mother has just fallen over unconscious on the side of a road, her baby strapped onto her back. The baby strikes his head and begins to bleed. Here’s how King depicts this:

A fly settled on his forehead, sampled the blood oozing through the cartoon images of SpongeBob and Patrick, then flew off. Possibly to report this taste-treat at Fly HQ and summon reinforcements.

Rather than arousing our sympathy for the baby (or his mother), we’re asked to speculate about the motivations and movements of a fly. That is, when we’re not cheerily dwelling on the cartoon bandage. The point of view – that of the author, thinking about the fly! – provides a clue into something else that’s so completely wrong with this book:  its utter lack of empathy for the characters. The author doesn’t invest in their plight because he doesn’t believe they’re real, and so neither do we.

3.

He was as happy as a maggot in dog-puke.

We don’t normally associate maggots with dog puke. (Or “dog-puke.” Why this is hyphenated, I don’t know. It’s not a compound adjective. “Dog” is an adjective modifying the noun “puke.” Like most of the book, this error leaves me feeling that the book is simply unedited.) I don’t know if maggots in “dog-puke” are happy, so it’s difficult to gauge how happy “he” is. Here’s what I suspect:  King was going to write “as happy as a fly in shit” – a cliché we all know – but then thought that precisely because it was a cliché, he’d better make it new. And so he turned it into something that isn’t so much new as a second cousin, and one that doesn’t quite make sense. Dog shit hangs around – I’m sure you’ve seen it near sidewalks everywhere. But how often have you seen “dog-puke” out in society? And how long does it last? There’s no way to associate it with maggots.

4.

The head was burlap with eyes that were white crosses made from thread. The hat was like the one the cat wore in the Dr. Seuss story. It had garden trowels for hands (bad old clutchy-grabbing hands, Janelle thought) and a shirt with something written on it.

Kids can write better than this. And doesn’t it sound like an adolescent wrote it? Note the slack verbs – “was,” “were,” “was,” “had” – three instances of “to be” and one of “to have,” leaving me wondering if King was the one writer who somehow missed out on reading Hemingway. Action verbs propel a sentence; one would think that a horror/fantasy writer would know this, and part of me believes that at one time King did know this, and has just forgotten. The subject of the third sentence, “It,” seems to refer to “The hat” in the previous sentence, meaning that it’s the hat that “had garden trowels for hands,” but that’s not his intention. He means the overall scarecrow. Finally, the lack of specificity points up the falseness of the entire description:  the thing has a shirt with “something” written on it. Oh. That explains it.

5.

“The Bushey girl,” Big Jim said. “How was she? Was she good?”

Carter hesitated, then said: “A little dry at first, but she oiled up a-country fair.”

Big Jim laughed. The sound was metallic, like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.

Lately, as a party game of my own devising, I’ve been asking friends to duplicate a laugh that sounds metallic, “like the sound of coins dropping into the tray of a slot machine.” So far, no one has been able to do it. Actually, no one has been able to understand what it would sound like. One writer friend visibly winced when I read the line, and looked confused when I asked him to laugh that way. When he asks us to imagine this laugh, I have no idea what Stephen King is asking for, and neither does anyone else I know. Leaving aside a “metallic” laugh, which I suppose would be grating in the way of a rusty hinge and which might be duplicable, I think about the sound of those coins, as replicated by a human throat, and wonder why King didn’t go for the full monty and throw in the sound of the jackpot alarm that summons security guards and onlookers. No, no one can laugh that way – but they can’t do the rest of it either.

6.

She pulled his arm tighter around her, although it wasn’t cold.

This is another example of a pronoun-antecedent disagreement. What he means to say is that even though it (the temperature) wasn’t cold out, she pulled his arm tighter around her. But because of the way he’s constructed the sentence, it would seem that even though his arm isn’t cold, she pulled it tighter around her. This, again, seems the sort of thing an editor should catch.

7.

A minute later he was poised above her, resting on his elbows. She took him in hand to guide him in. “Take it easy on me, Colonel Barbara. I’ve kind of forgotten how this thing goes.”

“It’s like riding a bicycle,” Barbie said.

Turned out he was right.

This is another example of tonal mismatch. Read it out loud and cringe. Given the context, I think we’re supposed to feel glad for these characters that they’ve gotten together. But it’s written like low comedy, or an entry for one of those contests of bad writing.

8.

One overweight woman (Mabel Alston; she also suffers from what she calls the dia-betties) sprains her ankle and lies there hollering until a couple of men come over and get her on [sic] remaining good foot. Lennie Meechum, the town postmaster (at least until this week, when delivery of the U.S. mail was canceled for the foreseeable future), borrows a cane for her. Then he tells Henry that Mabel needs a ride back to town. Henry says he can’t spare a car. She’ll have to rest in the shade, he says.

This is not storytelling. These are notes for storytelling. The paragraph reads like an index card plucked off the plotting board, transcribed, and filed away. The parentheticals are in the way and add nothing. And the typo, of eliding the word “her,” which is precisely the sort of error that crops up more frequently as the book moves past page 700, contributes to my sense that the book isn’t properly edited.

The writing is bad. It’s also reflective of what is a very bad novel.

The book shifts verb tenses many times, from past tense to present. At first I thought this was because sections of the story were being told in past tense by a survivor. But no, it appears to be a mistake.

The author constantly interrupts the narrative with asides and judgments that are distracting and wearisome.

The characters are thinly drawn. Jim Rennie, one of the town selectmen, is so transparently bad that every voter in town must be either a reprobate or a fool. Both church pastors are cartoons – one is a hypocritical porn hound who’s been involved in crime; the other is a liberal female do-gooder with a soft touch on God. The heightened fantasy of every character’s situation highlights their innate falseness. Rennie doesn’t just operate a meth lab; no, he’s operating the world’s biggest meth lab with a network extending across the nation. The unbelievability of the situations harms the believability of the characters, which wasn’t strong to begin with.

As for suspense, on which King’s reputation rests, there is little. The mysterious dome that cuts off the small town in rural Maine from the rest of civilization, it transpires, has been put there by alien space children toying with humans for their amusement. No, I am not kidding you. How, then, is the book resolved? One of the townspeople gets to the transmitter and begs a little alien girl to let them go, and the dome magically vanishes into the atmosphere. This is so shameless a deus ex machina I’m surprised the author isn’t embarrassed by it. And what is the role of our hero in the climax of the story? None. He’s not the one who makes the effort to beg the alien girl.

Why, given all this, did I read every word on the 1100 pages of this book?

Part of it was shock. I couldn’t quite believe how had this was. Some years ago, I had read several books by this same author and enjoyed them. This wasn’t just a bad book, this was a very bad book, a book seemingly written by someone who patently couldn’t write. Surely, I thought, this is a hoax of some sort; there is a twist awaiting me past page 1000 that reveals that the story has been narrated badly by some character for a reason.

Another part was that I like to end things I finish. When I shared this with my son, he shared his opinion of that:  “That’s stupid.” In retrospect, he may have been right.

A final part was that there are lessons to be learned here. Words mean things. Writing is important. Good writing makes an impact that bad writing cannot. It’s important to know this and to practice it. Put this way, reading “Under the Dome” was like performing an autopsy to learn how the patient could have survived.

As I got further and further into the book and my shock at its awfulness mounted, as I scribbled notes and stuck markers in pages that were especially bad, my wife finally said, “Yeah, I know, it’s terrible.” This was surprising. Not that she had read my Christmas gift before giving it to me, which was fine, but because she plows through genre novels with a gleeful abandon, and she hated this one. “Wait ‘til you get to the end,” she said. “It gets even worse.”

True. Because when I finished the book I was left to wonder this:  Did Stephen King’s editor, whom he thanks in the afterword, think this was acceptable (or even good) writing? Or was she sufficiently cowed by his reputation to let it all go? And which of these two alternatives is worse? That’s what I’ve been thinking about since.

No, I don’t know why all the paragraph returns have suddenly vanished from this blog.

But I’m going to get to the bottom of this.

(By asking people smarter than me to please get to the bottom of this.)

Today in my playwriting workshop we again discussed unreliable narration, and twist-ending plotting — and then later I took my daughter to see a movie that turned out to exemplify the perils therein.

Unreliable narrators (or protagonists) have made for some of the best debates drawn from literature. Is the knight in the Canterbury Tales the most accomplished hero in medieval history, or is he a boaster with few actual accomplishments? It’s difficult to read Chaucer’s tone on this, and the evidence seems fifty-fifty. In “Turn of the Screw,” is the governess haunted by those ghost children, or is she insane? In Richard Nixon’s autobiography, does he actually believe his lies and justifications, or is he brain-damaged?

But a truly unreliable narration demands that the argument be split both ways so that we doubt. If we can decide early on one way or the other, the game’s over. The narration — or protagonist — can be unreliable, but our conclusion has become definitive. Once that happens, everything afterward starts to look like transparent writing tricks.

The same goes with twist endings. If you can sniff out the twist early on, everything else becomes drudgery. Today in my workshop one writer asked for advice — to pursue writing an unreliable character and a twist, or to expose the device early on and approach the material from a different angle.  Do these twists well and you wind up with “The Sixth Sense.” Do it badly and you wind up with “The Village.” (Or, someone else chimed in, any other M. Night Shyamalan movie.)

So there I was at 2:15 for the beginning of this week’s big new movie, and by the first scene I was sure I knew what was up. By the third scene, I had confirmation. The obvious problem with relying on gimmicks is that if they fail, you have nothing else to entertain people with. The leading man still looks like a rat-faced little boy to me, and his acting in this movie is stapled together from 50’s B-movies and James Cagney, circa the grapefruit-in-your-face era. Even the first scene looks utterly fake, and for reasons that mystify me:  It’s merely of people talking on a boat, and yet the background rolls past like a canvas in a stage melodrama. Is it so difficult to film people on a boat that you need to Photoshop every frame? If you know your lead character can’t be trusted, and that leads you to an immediate conclusion about the unsurprising twist awaiting you an endless two hours and ten minutes in the future, and your popcorn has already run out, what’s left to be enjoyed?

Whenever this happens to me in the movies (and it happens all too often), I wonder if others see things this way. The woman two seats to my left gasped and murmured throughout the movie like a lady with a hand up her skirt. At one point I actually looked over to see if she had been signed out for the day from a nearby facility. But no; she was just slack-jawed in absorption with a truly dumb  and patently phony bit of hooey made by supposedly the greatest living American director. Which left me remembering this exchange from “Annie Hall”:

Alvy Singer (the Woody Allen character):  Here, you look like a very happy couple, um, are you?
Female street stranger:  Yeah.
Alvy Singer:  Yeah? So, so, how do you account for it?
Female street stranger: Uh, I’m very shallow and empty and I have no ideas and nothing interesting to say.
Male street stranger: And I’m exactly the same way.

The folks who coined the term “global warming” have realized their mistake (too late), and now say they should have said “global climate change.” I can attest to that. My birthplace in New Jersey has been buried under an avalanche of snow for weeks now, I have a friend in Washington DC wondering what all this white stuff is that has shut down the government, and another friend sent me an email last night with the repeated refrain “Have I said how sick I am of cold and snow?”

And then there’s me.

I’m writing this from the restaurant of a 5-star hotel in Boca Raton, FL, where, I assure you, I am freezing my ass off. It’s plenty cold outside, but it’s frigid inside. This hotel, which optimistic realtors might call “Miami Beach adjacent,” was not built for sub-60 weather. The glass corridors admit a regular breeze that would freeze the flippers off a penguin. My room is beautiful (actually, too beautiful — when I walked in and saw a two-story suite I tried to offer it to someone else in the party whom I thought more deserving). It’s also positively polar. As we took a break to regroup, I told my business partner I was heading to my igloo to order some blubber.

This is Florida.  But it doesn’t seem like the Florida of our collective recollection.

Wonder why the federal deficit is so high? Perhaps it’s because the last administration in its twilight had to commit billions to bailing out the banks who underwrote the near-collapse of the global economic system, and because the present administration has had to commit billions to bailing out the general economy in the form of stimulus programs.

But perhaps it’s also because that first group did things like build a big three-and-a-half mile fence — at a cost of $57.7 million.

Which directs me to my true wonderment:  From 2001-2009, where were all the deficit hawks of the party of Glenn Beck? Why were they so willing to drink the tea back then?

How much time do writers actually spend writing? This writer estimates his output at between 2 and 5% of his time. If that holds true for most writers, then most writers would be better off holding a job and writing on the side — which is precisely counter to the conventional wisdom.