My Brother’s Keeper

First novel published in Ebook format:   http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/42346

“Bite Me, You Right Wing Screwball”

I provoked the irrational ire of a self-avowed leftie, Alric_IV (“Bite me, you right-wing screwball.” – http://www.intensedebate.com/users/1461192 & http://www.pacifica.org/ ), when I commented on a Breitbart.com post this week regarding cries of “plagiarism” at the Huffington Post over George W. Bush’s book Decision Points (http://bit.ly/a9IOSz ):

“What in the living hell is wrong with you? He didn’t mention a favorite news site. And nobody but a slope-skulled knucklehead would think of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh as news. Obama was recommending that people who favor The New York Times should sometimes read The Wall Street Journal. And then he gave a vice-versa example and mentioned The Huffington Post. He did not mention favoring one or the other.

“There’s no dealing with you idiots. You see something, and no matter how goddamned simple it is, you always construe it to mean something it clearly did not. You need a punch upside your goddamned thick skull.”

I guess it is true: When the facts get tough, the left gets ad hominem . . . . and, evidently, violent.

Right Nancy?

I Have a Mind to Join a Club . . . .

. . . . and beat you over the head with it.  ~Groucho Marx

Received a letter from Cydney A. Tune of the law firm Pillsbury, Winthrop, Shaw, Pittman, LLP (http://bit.ly/bRfwKE), informing me that the owl logo I was using created “the likelihood that the public will be confused into believing that the [Bohemian] Club is the source of the [Owl Works] Website and Facebook Page.” 

The Bohemian Club membership purportedly includes the likes of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. & George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Dwight D. Eisenhower, William Howard Taft, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Donald Rumsfeld, William Randolph Hearst, William F. Buckley, Jr., David Packard, Thomas Watson, Jr., David Rockefeller, Sr. & Jr., Eddie Rickenbacker, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain, among others. (http://bit.ly/cjTBLI)

I am honored to have it on such good legal authority that the public, whether in its usual or even in a heightened state of confusion, might include me in the company of such accomplished and respected gentlemen. 

As you can see, I have complied with Mr. Tune’s request and offer my apology for any confusion or unintended anguish I may have caused to the living or, especially, the dead.

But now I am in need of a logo for my sites.  If anyone might have a line on a new or even slightly used owl-themed logo, please let me know.

Legal Disclaimer: “I yam what I yam”

Right up front:  Why “Owl Works”? 

An admiration for Kelly Johnson and all he accomplished at the Lockheed “Skunk Works” combined with a psycho-Newtonian reaction to an informal lecture series on conspiracies by the good fellow down the hall from my lair.  The first I attribute to a father who once worked as a flight control engineer at the home of the P-51 Mustang, North American Aviation; the later to an ornery spirit inherited from a long line of tree climbers and rock throwers, which spawned a rather tempestuous relationship with rules, regulations, conventional wisdom and “The Establishment” (who or what ever it might be at the moment).    Thanks to my father, I possess an FAA Certified Flight Instructor Certificate.   Physical, emotional and psychological scars attest to the orneriness.

Being ”just too darn loud” for the music conservatory, I majored in Philosophy and English, ending up with more harebrained ideas than Wile E. Coyote and at least half a dozen manuscripts in varying states of completion and decay.  Years of pushing air in gin joints and a stint as a recording engineer enabled me to  ex-Spector-ate (as in Phil) a CD, with another in the works.  I was indentured to “Ma” Bell for a couple of years before escaping to toil as not even a cog — more like a  smear of grease — in the Military-Industrial Complex peddling electromechanical widgets.

As the desk drawer full of unswallowed methylphenidate screams, this probably ain’t the best place to come looking for a laser-like focus.  Really no telling what will show up in this notebook.  And a heads up for anyone with an OCD about the time-space continuum:  it’s probably going to be a Billy Pilgrim kind of journey.  I’m just hoping for a more peaceful ending.

So it goes . . .