JamesSavik

In February of 2020 many people at my church got “the crud”. It was headache, fever and aches. Everyone got over it in a week at most. It wasn’t until one of our members took a blood antibody test that we figured out we had it before it was fashionable. No one including our elderly got worse than a modest case.

Chechnya is in a part of the old Soviet Union which used to call the Green Line. On the Russian side, it is Russian Orthodox and on the other it is Muslim. There is a long, bloody history of ethnic and religious violence. The Soviets managed to sit on the region with overwhelming force. When the Soviet Union collapsed, all of that pent-up rage came out and turned into the Chechen War in the nineties. It was an ugly guerilla war with some nightmarish incidents like the Beslan School Massacre. If I am not mistaken, Grozny the Chechen capital, name is Russian for “a terrible place”. It is a very challenging setting to work with, and you probably have to do as much research as writing. It is a period of history both sides would like to forget.

My story The Summer Job wrapped this week. I was gratified to see a good review and many, many supportive comments.

Yes it is Narcotics Anonymous and Oct 1st I got my 18 year medallion

I think Nifty may have had some impact on the shift from emotion/allusion to physical/messy in the description of gay sex. Some fiction on that site is simply text p0rn. In fact, you have to do a lot of shifting to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you read much of it, I'd say it will desensitize you somewhat. However, there is some incredibly good writing there if you can find it. There are a few lists of pointers to good stuff on Nifty. The only one I know of is the one at Awesomedude. It's old and hasn't been maintained for some time. Best of Nifty and the Web

the Second Time Around 1978 I first met Randy when I was sixteen, and he was fifteen. I met him at Frank's house- a guy from my football team that I screwed around with from time to time. He enticed me to come over by telling me about a cute kid from his neighborhood that wanted to join in. Randy was a shy kid. He wasn't big, athletic or a jock. He was cute and a lot more feminine than most of the guys I previously messed around with. What caught my attention was his bright, intel

Some people might think that the 1st memes invented were Keyboard cat, Philosoraptor and the numa-numa guy. That would be very, very wrong. Imagine you lived in a Kingdom that was one of the most powerful and influential in the world but, it had fallen on hard times. The king was, by all accounts, a corrupt incompetent dolt. The people were hungry and the spoiled, foolish Queen, when told there was no bread for the peasants said let them eat cake. While this might sound uncomfortably familiar to modern Americans, this was the climate that gave rise to the French Revolution. It was also the fertile ground for the French satirists who I submit were early generation memers. What people fail to understand about memes is they are much more about ideas than humor but the combination of the two makes them that much more powerful. What we call memes is an evolution of an ancient idea called satire more succinctly defined as the illustration of the absurd with absurdity. Every middle schooler naturally knows about satire because that is when they inevitably meet an incompetent and bungling bureaucracy. One must take care with satire as to be a proper smart ass, you must first be smart. Otherwise, you are just an ass. There were many French satirists. I would like to focus on a gentleman named Voltaire. Voltaire and the French satirists used their wit to point out the myriad hypocrisies and inequities of their political and social situations. Like Charlie Hebdo, many of the French Revolutionary era satirists faced rather deadly blow-back from those that failed to see the humor in their work. This was an amazing era and one that the modern democracies owe much to because many of the things we see as foundations of democracy were first discussed by the thinkers during this era. They were seeing the end of the monarchy as a practical form of government and looked forward to imagine what the next step would look like. See if you recognize any of Voltaire’s ideas: I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers. To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize. It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong. Common sense is not so common. It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere. Prejudices are what fools use for reason. As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. When it is a question of money, everybody is of the same religion. Superstition sets the whole world in flames; reason quenches them. Voltaire would have been hell on wheels if he had internet access. Be suspicious when you hear people in power discount the ideas of others. Those silly memers that poke them right in the hypocrisies have quite the history. So, when you see memers banned from facebook or twitter, what you are really seeing is da man swatting the Socratic gad-fly that stung him in a sore spot. Only a fearful tyrant censors speech. He is afraid that you will tell the people just what a putz he really is.

Read his bio here. Pay attention to the part about his marital status and how Disney fucked him over at 21. Tommy Kirk's Bio in The Sun Was Tommy Kirk married? Kirk remained unmarried throughout his life. Despite being viewed as one of Disney's favorite kid actors, it was previously reported that the company fired him over being gay in 1964 when he was 21-years-old. According to TMZ, Kirk once said: "When I was about 17 or 18 years old, I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t going to change. I didn’t know what the consequences would be, but I had the definite feeling that it was going to wreck my Disney career and maybe my whole acting career. It was all going to come to an end." The child star added: "Eventually, I became involved with somebody and I was fired."

This is why I stay in the South. Yes, in the summer it’s hotter than balls but we don’t get sastrugas.

Try out my favorite Aussie cover band: MixedUpEverything.

Here's a little something to set the mood for Halloween!

After cookies, the younger kids began to slow down. They had been playing hard all day and by eleven-thirty, many were played out. The younger boys used the showers in the down-stairs locker rooms. Phillip’s plan was for the younger boys to bed down in the racquetball courts. Gym mats were laid out, and they unrolled their sleeping bags. By eleven-thirty most of the younger boys were lying on their sleeping bags in little clumps chatting with their friends. Mikie had been keeping an

If you are ever up for a truly classic yarn, Xenophon's March of the 10000 is a great story. It is an adventure that explores leadership in ways that keep modern readers coming back.

One of the most pernicious toxins to a republic is the enervating blend of cronyism and corruption. At some point, it transitions to a cronyocracy which serves not the republic but only itself.

I can't tell you why there are so few. The best one I've ever read was Tappings by Kit.

Fun and games was the theme of the night. The boys wanted to play, and they had the gym to themselves for the night. Phillip and his minions had things well organized. Mikie was running the activities around the pool and Brice was supervising the three-on-three basketball tournament raging on the hardwood. Other games and activities had broken out at random. Some boys wanted to wrestle, play board games, watch movies and others were just fine with hanging out with their friends. The

In short stories, every jot and tittle matters. Every word must serve a purpose to drive the plot. Origin:

This word has a root most people won't get. There's a reason why classical education has been dismissed. Gentlemen like this and their words challenge people through the ages to THINK FOR YOURSELF and there are those who just can't have that. Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman Statesman, scholar, academia and skeptic. He said things like this.... "Do not blame Caesar, blame the people of Rome who have so enthusiastically acclaimed and adored him and rejoiced in their loss of freedom and danced in his path and gave him triumphal processions. Blame the people who hail him when he speaks in the Forum of the 'new, wonderful good society' which shall now be Rome, interpreted to mean 'more money, more ease, more security, more living fatly at the expense of the industrious.'" ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero "Politicians are not born; they are excreted." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero "Six mistakes mankind keeps making century after century: Believing that personal gain is made by crushing others; Worrying about things that cannot be changed or corrected; Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot accomplish it; Refusing to set aside trivial preferences; Neglecting development and refinement of the mind; Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero "A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero "Poor is the nation that has no heroes, but poorer still is the nation that having heroes, fails to remember and honor them." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero "Though liberty is established by law, we must be vigilant, for liberty to enslave us is always present under that very liberty. Our Constitution speaks of the "general welfare of the people." Under that phrase all sorts of excesses can be employed by lusting tyrants to make us bondsmen." ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero For more about him ==> Marcus Tullius Cicero There is nothing truly new under the sun. All the same mistakes have been made before. So swallow your god-awful red pill and wake up.

Lots of genre blending is being done these days. Sci-fi/horror is a big popular one. The Zombie trope is fun to play with, but it is over done. If you go there, try something original. Give it a twist like the zombie raccoons. As for micro-genres, I've got to give it a resounding meh. I haven't seen any better than the stuff we have posted here. Maybe it's out there, but the stuff here is free.

One of the writing tropes of the fifties that I would love to see resurrected is Heinlein's "Competent Man". In writing and culture, there are forces at work that attempt to portray men as weak and incompetent as possible. This has all sorts of negative consequences as nations are only as strong as their men. Every man is capable of being a polymath. It is merely a matter of backbone and confidence.

Wut he said.

That has been the problem since ~2000 when people that have never been readers started making movies. They order a screenplay from the 10,000 Typing Monkeys's Script Shop which gets the cliff notes version of the novel, adds some bullshit and before long you've got Verhoeven's Starship Troopers or Marc Forster's World War Z. The only thing the movies have in common with the novels is the name and a few characters. From what I understand, the new Dune is cut from different cloth. They are actually staying very close to the source material. I am cautiously optimistic. Fair warning. If they f* this up, when I die, I'll come back and haunt the bastards.

If you're lucky, you'll get to bask in a truly hot guy's refulgence.