NaNoWriMo2007 - Day One

Why a picture of The Man In Black? Where have you been? Look back a few days to see where the inspiration for this story comes from...
NaNoWriMo started last night. Midnight Halloween eve. I even stayed up to be there and start typing at the first possible minute. This turned out to be a horrible mistake. I should have left the house at least, whether or not someone was agreeing to meet me there. Sitting home on the couch watching the Halloween episode of MASH where Norm from Cheers gets a pool ball stuck in his mouth was not exactly the inspiration I needed to get started. Add to that the fact that I was insanely tired and somewhat let down about NaNo so far this year and I get waking up this morning to fear and loathing.
Perhaps the year two curse that I managed to avoid last year was not gone, just biding its time. Here it is, one year late but no less potent for its tardiness. Nonetheless, here is the first few paragraphs that I managed to hammer out before giving up and going to sleep at 1:30 AM.

He was big and bent, gray and old yet the tall stranger with a scar down one cheek and one glass eye stood out among the frontier villagers like a god among men. All of the men deferred to him, and the women tittered and giggled at anything he said, or didn't say. By and large, he was silent, simply observing the work around him with a wry grin. Nobody was sure exactly who he was and where he was from, although there were some whispers that he was a wealthy merchant from far away San Francisco. So far in his time in this small frontier town he had done nothing but sit all day in the saloon playing poker, smoking cigarettes and sipping whiskey. Although he had a canny way with the cards, nobody could say whether he won more than he lost; only that he was obviously not a greenhorn and obviously not hurting for money. What everyone agreed upon, although nobody actually would have voiced was that he was terribly frightening. Even the local toughs who were wont to harass anyone new in town until they had proved either unentertaining or dangerous had given him a wide berth, even tipping their hats politely as he passed. There was a solemn coldness about him that gave no doubt but that whatever the townspeople or life in general could throw at him he could handle, and most likely had done so before. He carried no guns or any other weapons that were easily apparent, and truly needed none. His freezing glare alone was generally sufficient to make any man have sudden thoughts of his own mortality.

Nobody had invited him to the barn-raising, but he showed up nonetheless. He seemed to be amused by the activities going on around him, but with no apparent desire to join in. Normally, anyone who showed up at a barn-raising event was expected to work as hard as everyone else before joining in the festivities afterwards, but Elijah Graves seemed to be the exception to that rule. He watched the men as they worked together to raise the four walls of the barn, watched as they fastened the roof joists in place, watched as they cleaned up and prepared for the pot luck supper. Only then did he move from his place to get a plate of food and return to his seat.

Charity Austin was in a foul mood to begin with, and had no expectation that an evening surrounded by local townsfolk would improve it.

"Mother, I really do not feel well. Might I go home and go to bed early?" she asked plaintively, averting her eyes.

"Charity, we have discussed this. It would not be proper for a young lady of your status to be traipsing through town at this time of night all alone. You will be patient and leave when your father and I are ready to go."

Her mother answered her request without even glancing at her. Her eyes were full of her husband, sitting on a rocking chair next to the mayor and sharing a laugh at something the man had said. Charity breathed a deep sigh, and resigned herself to her fate. Her father was pushing hard to be selected to the town council when the next position came open, and her dislike of these primitive frontier gatherings was nothing but an obstacle to such aspirations. The lump in her stomach only got heavier when she spotted the group of girls standing behind the plank tables serving food to the townsfolk. The were all chatting gaily with each other, looking sideways at a group of young men who also did their best to pretend that they young women did not exist. Charity quickly looked away before any of them made eye contact with her. The last thing she needed was another confrontation with them like last week. Her mother seemed to be oblivious to her status among the girls in town, and was constantly pushing her to be more sociable.

"Dear, isn't that little Jenny Cushman over there?" Her mother indicated the apparent leader of the group of girls; a stunning petite blond with piercing blue eyes and a laugh that had apparently captivated any man within hearing distance.

"Yes mother, that is the girl who embarrassed me in front of the entire school last week." Charity replied bitterly, refusing to look in the direction indicating. Her mother either ignored the remark or didn't care.

"You should go see if you can help her with the serving. She seems like such a sweet thing. Perhaps you two could become friends?" Her mother asked pointedly.

Charity was under no such illusion, either as to the possibility of befriending the mayor's daughter, or the reasoning behind her mother's question.

"Mother, she made me look like a fool in front of the entire school last week. Don't you remember the note that Miss Johnson sent home about it? After you suggested that I ask to be her study partner, she gave me the wrong book to read and when I stood to read lines from it I found out that this book was nearly pornographic! I thought that the teacher was going to have a heart attack!" Charity could still feel the heat of the stares of her classmates as she stammered through an apology to the class for what Jenny had insisted had been a practical joke that Charity had tried to get her to participate in.

"Yes dear, but that wasn't her fault. You really should get to know her better." She grasped Charity's shoulder and pushed her gently in that direction. "Go ahead. I am sure she would welcome your help."

"Mother, I will not!" Charity hissed, trying to keep her voice low. "That girl is a snake!"

"Charity Austin! I cannot believe the words that I am hearing coming from your mouth." Her mother's wide eyes expressed her apparent shock. "Then we shall go speak to her together. And you can apologize to her for being so uncharitable."

Rising to her feet, Mother grabbed Charity's hand with an iron grip and set off towards the serving tables. Charity resisted, but her mother was unstoppable when she had her mind set, and she certainly did not want to attract any further attention to herself by causing a scene.

Elijah Graves was beginning to bore of this party. It had definitely been interesting to see the primitive building techniques used to construct the agricultural structure earlier in the day, but as soon as the social activities began his interest began waning. He had finished the food on his plate and was finishing a very satisfying after dinner cigarette. The hard cider that had been served with his meal was just beginning to give him that mellow, relaxed feeling that he so enjoyed and he didn’t want to waste it on these strange, petty people and their confusing social antics. He handed his plate to a passing girl who blushed and nearly dropped her load of dirty dishes by trying to execute an extravagant curtsy with her hands full. Standing up, he wandered off towards town, barely acknowledging any of the people he passed with a slight nod of his gray head.

© 2007 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

No quite as highly anticipated...

Two days 'til NaNoWriMo.

Strange how I am not as stoked as I was a couple of weeks ago. I am still excited to begin my story, but not really sure that I will have the drive that I did last year. Still, I can't wait to see where the Boy Named Sue ends up travelling with the Infamous Space Pilot Ace Pedona and his Techno Idiot-Savant Sidekick The Tinker...

I am thinking that this book will encompass both Sci-Fi and Fantasy worlds, since I was reading some fantasy stuff the other day that really sounded like fun. Not the kind of fantasy that takes itself WAY too seriously, nor the kind that you must be a genius like Tolkien to write. More like the Myth Inc. type of stuff. Fantasy that allows characters to cast spells and travel through dimensions, but not so stuffy that you get bored reading the descriptions of the incantations.
To use a Sci-Fi phrase that I picked during NaNo last year: Hand-Wavium. The most powerful element in the literary universe. You don't describe every detail about how that anti-grav propulsion unit works, neither do you divulge the history of magical inter-dimensional doorways. You just "wave your hand" and it works. I get bored reading (and writing) overly detailed explanations. I just want to get on with the story.
So don't look for anything like that in my stories. I explain enough to make it somewhat plausible, place it far enough in the future (or far enough away from reality) that you can't really question it, and run with it.
I guess this is a lesson I learned from writing a novel by the seat of my pants and worrying more about wordcount than quality. Writing a story for me is more about discovering a new story that I have never read before than it is following a set path. Although I do take some pains to create an outline, once November 1st hits, I rarely if ever stick with it. It just kind of takes off and I follow it. Hopefully it tells a story that is at least fifty-thousand words long before I get bored with it. This has happened for the past two years, but the first year more than last year.


OK, speaking of getting bored; I am bored with my NaNo ramblings. So I will call it quits for today. But I will be back, just after midnight on October 31st, to post my opening paragraph.
I know... you are on pins and needles. (If anyone is actually reading this, you just might catch a faint whiff of sarcasm there...)

Diapers and Real Life and etc...

I should write about changing diapers. I should, but I don't think that I will. Perhaps I will just change the diaper instead. I mean, my lovely wife has been home all day changing diapers, among the other five thousand tasks she does each day. Why shouldn't I take just one of them off of her shoulder once in a while.
OK, so no thousand words today. Just a couple dozen about real life. Worry not, next Wednesday night, at the stroke of midnight I will leave real life behind and begin writing in earnest. Then, a thousand words in a day will be a slow day!
Happy NaNoWriMo!
(Oh, but I have written something recently. I haven't counted the words, and it took more than one day as well as some help from a fellow Wrimo, LazyM of the Austin Penguins.)
www.geocities.com/tweetywill/affiliate07.html

Friday October 26, 2007 - 04:41pm (EDT)

© 2007 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

One Thousand Words...

One thousand words. This November, I will be trying once again to write Fifty Thousand Words in Thirty Days. Also known as National Novel Writing Month. (Also known as NaNoWriMo). For anyone with a calculator, you can easily figure out that this means I must write no less than an average of 1667 (rounding up due to a repeating decimal) words each and every day in order to succeed. This sounds pretty easy at first glance, I mean it is no big deal to type that much in one e-mail for some people. (And you know who you are don’t you? Of course that is better than those who are not yet aware that they can actually type in an e-mail message and think that hitting “Forward” is the only way to communicate via computers and the Interweb thingy…) But typing that much EVERY DAY is something just a bit different. Realize that if you have one of those days where you are busy from sunup to sundown, and never have time to sit down at the keyboard and hammer out your days allotment you will find yourself then next day having to type 3334 words to catch up. Then after two days of non-contribution you will be facing a defecit of no less than 5001 words. Now typing 5000 words in a single day is something that is seriously daunting.
Of course, the savvy Nanovelist has learned to take advantage of the occasional lazy day at work and any sporadic bursts of creativity to pad the daily average whenever possible. On some days the words just flow and you can curse your fingers for being so slow that you can’t keep up with the story as it unwinds directly from your imagination. You have hours of time to do nothing but sit and type and you pass that sixteen hundred sixty seven word mark before the carpal tunnel pain even begins in earnest. In a situation like this, do whatever is necceesary to avoid stopping. Keep typing till the well runs dry even if you have to bring your laptop in the john with you. (True story my friends…) These moments of literary feasting are what will carry you past the days of famine.
Writer’s block is what the world generally calls this situation, but sometimes it is worse than that. Sometimes it is merely what we like to call Real Life. Meaning your space interceptor squadron is just about to run down that wily and dangerous smuggler once and for all and your three year old informs you that he has to use the potty. Now this is a serious dilemma. If you put down the keyboard at this moment, you may lose momentum and forget where you were. Precious moments will be wasted as you struggle to find the groove you are in after taking care of this supremely important human need. Of course the consequence of delaying a request from a small human like this who is still learning that it is possible to exert some control over such functions is much worse than failing to remember how you were going to corner the bad guy. So you push back from the keyboard only to discover that this small human has also yet to learn the difference between “present tense” and “past tense’.
So when you finish cleaning up the “past tense” all over the floor and finding new clothes for the aforementioned human being in training (which of course were not in the drawer where they belong but rather in the dryer since this particular human being in training confuses present with past quite regularly these days) you pop in a Blue’s Clues video for him and get back to work. After staring at the screen, re-reading your last couple of paragraphs looking for that dropped thread of thought you finally place your fingers on the keyboard and….
The two oldest kids begin screaming as if a whirling vortex of time and space is about to consume them and banish them to a far corner of the universe. Of course, the real problem is much simpler: he is holding a pencil. Not just any pencil, but THE SPECIAL PENCIL THAT SHE GOT FROM HER KINDERGARTEN TEACHER ON THE FIRST DAY OF HER FIRST YEAR OF SCHOOL AND IT IS MY SPECIAL PENCIL AND HE IS GOING TO RUIN IT AND HE WON’T GIVE IT BACK TO ME AND IT’S MINE MINE MINE!
Of course this particular writing utinsel has spent the last four years stuck in the penci and pencil holder on the counter next to the phone. In fact, she had, up until her brother had the temerity to actually touch it, forgotten about its very existence. However, now that he has touched it the spell of forgetfulness is broken and SHE MUST HAVE HER PENCIL RIGHT NOW!
She lunges for the pencil and her brother, suddenly equally enamored of this precious artifact from Ms. Hunt’s private collection yanks it away, the jagged edge of the broken lead missing his eye by mere fractions of a millimeter. Then the sister gets a hold and the real fight begins. I am sprinting as fast as I can to break it up, nightmares of Child Protective Services grilling me about how I allowed my child to lose an eye settling in a lead ball in the pit of my stomach. My voice cracks as I try to match their squealing in volume, threatening dire consequences which that same social worker from the earlier nightmare would be very interested in hearing. Then it happens, the struggle for ownership is simply too much and the Dreaded Event occurs. No, the perfect eyesight which I have thanked heaven for so many times remains intact. But The Precious Kindergarten Pencil gives way under the strain of two equally frantic children and snaps in two.
To my son, this event is nothing more than an annoyance. He only wanted the pencil to poke at a bug out on the front porch in the first place. Now that it is broken, he is content to choose any of the other fifty pencils in the holder to torture the poor unfortunate cricket that he has captured.
On the other hand, my daughter is instantly mortified. Death is the only fair sentence for desecration of an artifact so precious and rare.
After calming the trauma of losing such a rare possession (which we soon found was not THAT pencil anyway, after she finished crying) I can now return to my story. Once again, I re-read the last few paragraphs, stare off into space as if I can actually see the small fighter ships converging on the crippled freighter from here in my living room, I place my fingers on the keyboard…
And my dear wife comes home. Naturally, this is a joyous event always, and always will be forever and ever and ever (I am not sure she reads this stuff that I write but you never know…) and ever… I jump up and cheerfully greet her with a hug and a kiss. Or at least I try to convey that emotion without removing my fingers from the keyboard and smiling.
“Oh, I see you are working on your novel. How is that going?” She asks, her smile masking her real emotions every bit as well as mine.
“Pretty good, I am really on a roll here, I should be able to pad my average and have some breathing room for the next few days.” I say, hoping that she catches the implied promise that I will not be pining for the keyboard for at least a minute or two if she will only let me finish this part right now.
“That is great dear. Only… I had kind of hoped to spend some time with you tonight…”
As I save my file and close my laptop, I reflect on how difficult it can be to actually type that “easy” one thousand, six hundred, sixty seven words each and every day of the month for a full thirty days. Real Life is truly the worst obstacle to overcome when attempting to create a new world from nothing more than imagination.
Oh well. There is always tomorrow, when she has a hair appointment. That should give me at least a couple of hours of uninterrupted typing…
(After all that, I have only written 1400 words. See what I mean? Not as easy as it sounds!)

Monday October 15, 2007 - 03:48pm (EDT)

© 2007 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

It has been a while...

Wow. It has been a while.
So it is almost November. Know what that means?
So here, courtesy of my good friend, hero, semi-deity and fellow Penguin Flickguy, is the tagline for my novel this year. No, really.

A boy named Sue enlists the help of a space pilot named Ace to wreak havoc across the galaxy in his racing ship "The Piglet" with his trusty sidekick "The Tinker" who uses his techno-idiot savant skills to save the day, and destroy something very large, aka the summer home being built by a roving pack of alien bureaucrats that salvaged resources from the destruction of other universes in the course of their duties and used those resources to build said summer home.

See you in December! (If you are in the same asylum that is...)

Friday October 12, 2007 - 04:29pm (EDT)

© 2007 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

One Thousand (Whiny) Words... give or take.

I need a new job. I hate to complain, there are so many great things about my job. It really is a great job, and it is exactly what I have been working for since I got out of the Army.
So why am I feeling so discontent? I am not exactly sure, but I will try to explore why in the next thousand words or so and maybe come to a conclusion.
First, I suppose that I should explore the good things about my job. I will do this in order to remind myself why I continue to show up day after day despite the huge wad of anxiety I feel each day. I have a huge amount of autonomy to decide how to spend my time each day. Micro-management is unheard of, at least in my position. In fact, I think that the management forgets that I am here sometimes. (Oops, that would be jumping ahead to the bad things about this job. Hold that thought!) This allows me to come and go as I please, without much questioning about what I am doing and how long. The salary is above and beyond what someone of my credentials and experience should expect to earn. This provides a great living for my family that I am grateful for each and every day. There are some people that I work with that I really like, and some that I even look up to as role models.
So why all of the discontent and anxiety when I come to work each day? What is it about this job that has me dreaming of trout farms and novel writing?
Some of the “pros” of this job are very double-sided and also serve as “cons” as well. For one, the salary. Having become accustomed to a certain level of income, the idea of having to cut back is frightening to say the least. This contributes to a feeling of being trapped in my current position and is probably the biggest reason I loath this job. How insane is it that I hate my job because they pay me too much? The lack of direction is another double-sided benefit. This very lack of direction often leaves me wondering if I am succeeding or failing, since there is absolutely no input one way or another. Of course I hear about it if someone is frustrated with their computer. But is there anything I should be working on proactively that I am not aware of? Am I being completely successful if nobody is complaining about their e-mail access? As long as the FBI has not shown up to confiscate hard drives am I being diligent enough about enforcing information security? I suppose that my personality requires a great deal of external motivation to feel secure in my job. I don’t think I will ever again complain about a micro-managing boss, since I now know what it feels like to have a non-managing boss. That is not to say that he is a bad manager, just that he feels that he has no need to dictate anything to me, has much more pressing things to worry about and so completely leaves me alone. The freedom is great. The lack of input is terrifying.
There are other cons that are somewhat personal, and that I can only elaborate on in very general terms. Due to the complete lack of oversight, it seems that I am doing a great job. However I am very acutely aware of the things I do wrong on a daily basis, and I am even more acutely aware of the possible consequences of these mistakes. The fact that they remain undiscovered serves only to amplify them in my mind, rather than comforting me that I am perhaps blowing them out of proportion. I suppose that this could be my internal persecution complex at work, but it could very well be a valid fear that one day all of these mistakes will be revealed and the day of reckoning will finally arrive.
Am I just not cut out for a job with this level of responsibility? Does my personality just not respond well to the stresses of self-management? I worry that I am developing some very unhealthy neurosis, and then realize that this worry in itself could be a very unhealthy neurosis. Then I wonder if I am being a hypochondriac by diagnosing myself with unhealthy neuroses which of course is also an unhealthy neurosis.
I am killing myself with the unending worry. It is making me horribly miserable and bringing me to question the very decision to become an information technology professional. Am I even cut out for this kind of work? Is anyone ever “cut out” for a certain kind of work?
Or am I just running away from something uncomfortable or difficult? Should I just buckle down and force myself to keep my nose to the grindstone? Or is this a genuine sign that the profession I have chosen is not for me and that I must change or continue to suffer?
I am not sure, and I am not yet at one thousand words. However I am done whining for today. More on this topic later, I am sure.

© 2007 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved

The Poetry of Fox News

So after a very hectic two weeks, I find myself with some breathing room and instead of simply sitting here playing solitaire or re-reading the news again I think I will try to hammer out a thousand words or so.
As usual when I do not have a specific topic to write about I intend to ramble about, collecting stray words from the frightening dustbin of my mind and attempting to string them together into some sort of coherent train of thought.
In that vein, I must remark that it has been quite a while since I wrote any kind of poetry. If memory serves correctly, I think that I was in Korea last time I wrote any poetry at all. I used to love poetry writing, and if I do say so myself was pretty good at it. I will see if I can dig out some examples to post here and let you, constant reader judge for me. (Of course, since I don’t think that there are any constant or even occasional readers out there it will continue to be my opinion that counts.) The problem is, I think that life has been too good for poetry. Or perhaps I have just let other concerns override my impulse to create. Right now, I am trying to think of something to poem about, and nothing comes to mind. Have you ever had someone say: “Hey! Do that funny thing that you do!” because they saw you doing it once. Only you can’t just do it on demand because you were only able to do it that time because it fit in. Now, on demand you can’t seem to make it happen. That is how it feels right now, trying to convince myself to write some poetry. First of all, I can’t come up with a subject. I am sitting in my office, with no tasks immediately urgent watching Fox news and waiting for something to happen. (OOH! I just thought of something I need to get done today. Writing down on the “To Do” list now…)
Fox news may be one culprit. This non-stop garbage is so mind-numbingly anti-intelligence and anti-creativity that it is entirely conceivable that it may be damping out any creative thoughts I might normally be able to come up with. Why do I watch it? Because it is the only station that is streamed across the network at work. I can listen to music instead, but I am tired of all of the music that I have, so that gets old too fast. Silence in the office is a no-go right off the bat since it drives me insane and makes me want to bite people and burn things. (OK, anyone reading this must understand that for the record, I have never really had the urge to bite anyone although I do enjoy a good fire… It is just something I say to make people laugh.)
Fox news is annoying to me because they are so slanted to the right. Now most people reading this might suppose that makes me a liberal-minded person. Not so! I am a very conservative person (NOT Republican… there IS a difference!) Why would I be annoyed at a news station who is slanted towards my own point of view? Because it feels patronizing to me, as if I am not intelligent enough to make up my own mind and therefore must be force-fed the proper philosophy. It is also annoying that they try so hard to pretend that they are being fair and balanced, and that everything they report on is life and death. (Including and especially all of the celebrity news. No kidding, they went COMMERCIAL FREE to cover the courtroom drama surrounding the death of that bleach-blond hooker in Honduras. For crying out loud! Is NOTHING else of importance happening in the world? COMMERCIAL FREE! They don’t even do that for the presidential election!)
As a conservative-minded person, I have come to the conclusion that most of the “conservative” media out there is horrible and completely irrelevant. I have pondered for some time why this is so. “Liberal” media sources, although they are as much or more slanted than the other at least pretends to be intelligent. One must be paying close attention to see the bias in the reporting on NPR, and in some cases, even the bias is helpful in understanding the issue. However conservative pundits tend to just cram their views down your throat without even a pretense of intelligence. It may be due to the overwhelming majority of conservative thinkers who are poor, working class folks who really may not be able to grasp a more intellectual view of the news. (OK, I just insulted a huge segment of the population. I apologize, but please stick with me.)
Perhaps the more sneaky intellectual manner of the NPRs of the world can be viewed as somewhat dishonest. By disguising their news as unbiased and intelligent, they may be misleading some who are not intelligent enough to tell the difference. Perhaps they listen to this news and think that they are getting a much more balanced and intelligent view of the news while in fact they are indeed being indoctrinated into the liberal mindset.
I know that I used to be in this category. I listened to NPR every morning on the way to work. I was very interested in the information they presented, and the intellectual manner in which they presented it appealed to me. Listening to conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh turned me off for the reasons outlined above. I felt that they were patronizing me by feeding me their philosophies without apology or excuse. However, I can remember two specific events on NPR that changed my mind, and opened my eyes to the intellectual dishonesty that pervades this kind of media.
During the 2000 elections, I listened to a series of reports on NPR. They ran a biography of the two candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush.
Al was first. The half-hour report was filled with glowing praise of Al’s achievements and his thoughtful philosophy. He was presented as a man who was tormented by the injustice in the world and who rose above his priveliged upbringing to become a champion of the oppressed.
George was next. The picture they painted of him was frightening. A spoiled rotten brat of rich and powerful parents whose life was completely aimless and wasted until he suddenly learned that he could leverage the political clout of his family’s power for personal gain. The picture that remained at the end of this “unbiased” report was that this man who wished to be the leader of the free world was one temper tantrum from a return to the drug and alcohol-fueled irresponsibility of his youth.
These two stories were so obviously slanted that I was shocked. This organization who I had looked to for intelligent discussion of the issues had just given me a picture just as slanted and biased as anything I could find in conservative media. On top of that was the insidious way that they had painted the stories as “an unbiased biography of the two candidates.” In fact, it was a two-hour commercial for the Gore campaign.
The second event was a much smaller, but even more insidious story that sealed for me the liberal bent of National Public Radio and ensured that I would no longer depend on them for any kind of information.
A report on a movement in this country, and one woman in particular who hated children. For a half hour, they discussed how this poor woman was put upon by thoughtless parents of horrible little monsters who made her life difficult. She was disgusted by the thought that children were sweet, cute, and innocent. She viewed them as, in her own words: Crotch-droppings whose sole purpose in this world was to torture her and rob her of happiness. She of course had no children, had never had any. She worked at a rest home where she took care of incapacitated seniors and said that this was close enough to childcare for her. The story informed us that more and more American adults were beginning to feel this way, and that the rights of these poor citizens were being trampled on by uncaring parents who believed unfairly that they should be able to take time off work to care for their sick children.
I was appalled. The story concluded with this woman listing almost a dozen terms she used to describe children. “Crotch-droppings” being one of the least insulting. NPR broadcast this hateful diatribe as if it were an intelligent analysis of one person’s point of view. To me, this was hate, pure and undefiled. If this list of derogatory names had been directed at any other class of people, it would have easily been classified as hate-speech. But when directed at children, it was simply her right to express her feelings.
After this story, I turned off NPR. I listen to them occaisionally, when I find them telling interesting stories about science or arts. Even these stories are bent towards the liberal mindset, but at least now I am on the watch for the liberal indoctrination running underneath the interesting story. However I now know that this network of stations is far more biased than any conservative media I have encountered. They are just better at hiding it.
If Fox is annoying and patronizing, at least they are honest about it. Makes it much easier to see the slant and ignore it.
Plus, I have no option when watching news at work. I just hope it doesn’t smother my poetic creativity forever.

Fox News, droning on and on.
Stories of Anna, Britney and Paris
Far more urgent than Ahmadinejad and Maliki
Interrupt our sales of Head-On and PAD treatments
To ensure that we know the future of baby Dani is secure.
At least I can see
The bias in the coverage
Instead of the whisperer in the dark
The sinister and subtle
Network of the People’s Republic


© 2007 Tyler Willson. All rights reserved