day dreaming about a book I wished I had written

Had great idea last night.  I lay awake thinking about it until about 4 this morning.  Suppose you found yourself captive in Afghanistan by hostiles and somehow, with a friendly translator,  bargained yourself into telling stories nightly Scheherazade style.  Only the story you chose to relate was to tell a favorite book of yours for instance Dies The Fire by S.M. Stirling. 

I lay there thinking how would narrate the book as a series of short stories. I wondered how to pronounce Hakke palle, which is the Finnish war cry. that means, Kill them all!!! er roughly.  I figured the topic would be very appealing to the Taliban. Mike Havel tells young Eric some of the Finnish saga's sung in the equivalent of sweat lodges that are extremely funny. Pretty sure Taliban appreciates tales about flashy knives.

I have already thought of a couple reasons why this might not work. Do or should I get author's permission to quote extensively, would I commit plagiarism somehow?  I dunno. 

I know of one author who has written a series called "American Hostages"  All about women CIA analysts, CIA agents and a very specially skilled CIA assassin who are stationed in Afghanistan when it gets overrun and they are carted off individually to their fates. 

The third book hasn't been written yet but I sure would like to see the CIA assassin try achieving peace amongst her captors with stories from her favorite book.  A movie would be good.  For that I would have to win about five lotteries in a row.  Sigh.

It is official

I cannot follow directions.  And I am going to blame it partially on the very small font at the various sites I visited today on behalf of my husband.  It was time to freeze HIS credit report. 

What? Sure Honey, I can help walk you through the process.  Oh, you want ME to do it while you watch......sigh. 

I got into trouble almost immediately because one of the sites kept freezing and I got the little circle of death or outright nuthin'.  First of all I typed Expedia into Google and oopsie, try Exquifax.  Put in all the information and that one worked very well. 

Went to Transunion that so confounded me yesterday, today everything went well also.

Next we went to Experian and I got into trouble immediately and floundered around trying to even FIND things.  Turns out there are different menus to choose from and each site calls their credit freeze something else. 

Before we were finished I got confused and was going to go to the next site and husband said, "No dear, we already did them".
"You sure?"
"Yes".
"Thank you, God." Sob.

As a dire warning one of the pull down menus on Google had credit freeze all three credit unions. Husband thinks it was a phishing site. But it was so tempting and if true REALLY pisses me off.

I HAZ A STOOPID

I recently finished reading and reviewing a book at Amazon for one of my favorite authors.  She writes about shifters and this book was all about a Jaguar millionaire and he fated mate who is an architect.  I enjoyed the book very much but I noticed a technical error regarding the girls nephew.  In particular his birth certificate as I have had extensive experience with BC's and how painstaking the state is regarding accuracy etc. 

I promptly left a review for the author explaining my finding.  She replied that I must have two stories confused as there was no birth certificate mentioned in her story.  WHAT!?   That cannot be true.  I decided to reread the book just to find out at what page exactly this all happened.  I was about half way through the book when it occurred to me to ask, where was the boy?  Soon?  I began to doubt my smug conviction that I was correct. 

So I opened another book by another author that had a world about wolf shifters and sure enough there was the whole damn birth certificate drama. 

Well crap!  Now I must apologize to the orginal author and try to charm her.  So I wrote an apology and told her that I really had hoped that her story with the BC was true and that we had somehow through the overuse of the internet opened a hole to an alternate universe.  I was then going to ask her if Trump had gotten elected and if North Korea had nuclear weapons and if not could I come live in her universe?  O bother.

OMG the great credit freeze chase!!!

All righty then.  I was prompted to do the credit freeze thing.  Here is what happened, it only took a couple hours but I am near exhaustion. 

1) Marched through the steps for Equifax the one that started all this crap and surprisingly every thing went swimmingly and I was prompted to print the confirmation number letter.  I fired up the printer which takes FOREVER to click, pop, grind and process until ready to print.  Hey, not so fast there, printer cartridges are depleted, change them or no printing.  Ugh, dug out the box, read directions, pried open printer, dug out old cartridges, fumbled other cartridges into printer, close door.  Printer resumes processing, grinding, popping and much of a muchness. Eventually printer flashed that the cartridges had previously been used and were depleted, please replace THOSE cartridges.  Shit and shinola!  So I went to Amazon and ordered new cartridges!!!! and wrote down the damn confirmation number from Equifax.  Then I turned off the printer. I didn't feel like Googling the hack for extending the printer cartridge lift for one. last. print...

2) Experian experience went well.  Put in info. Presto chango, they charged me 10 bucks.  Wheee! 

3) Transunion.  What a nightmare!!! First of all I had to select user name and password. Simple huh?  Nope, you get caught up in adding a number to the password and the user name cannot be used in the password.  Then I put my credit card in, the same one used for Experian and there was a problem.  What!?  I called credit card company and finally got a real person to speak to and they checked it and said the expiration date was different and she would change it to match my card and my card had been charged 20 bucks.  Uh thanks.  So back to Experian. I finally found the customer service number that WASN'T  A FAX NUMBER and got a very extensive menu.  I had to be very patient to listen to WHICH FECKING NUMBER to push to REFUSE the goddamn survey!!!  I was about to go to the nuclear number 0 option but I heard something that chirped that something had been placed on my account.  I am not precisely sure what that something is but at this point I shall let the fortunes go their delightful way. 

I can only hope that the criminals have to go through the equivalent of this to hack the crap that they want. May they live in interesting times. I am also a more than a little pissed that suddenly Experian and Transunion are raking in 150 million times their 10 and 20 bucks because of Equifax.  Bastards!!!

PROJECT RUNWAY

Last night's theme was for the designers to make dresses either good or bad, a modern interpretation of Descendants 2, daughters of Snow White and Malificence.  Last weeks winner got to choose who got which theme.  They had a budget of 300 dollars and two days to get 'er done.  Off to Mood for fabric.  Thank you Swatch!! And another twist the models were the customers and they got to choose which designer they wanted.  The twins went last, boo hoo. At judging there were six outfits left, highest and lowest scores. 
The three high scores included one of the size 22 models, lovely Black girl who rocked a gold and black lace thing with perfect cleavage and sassiness.  Larger Black ladies generally have better body confidence as it is a cultural thang and she rocked the runway.  If I had been her designer I would have asked her to stomp the runway, toss her head and give a finger wag at the turn.  Yeah, girl.  One designer chose a tightly textured maroon fabric made into snazzy tight pants, a jacket with peplum, long sleeves.  The cuffs were black and looked like melted vinyl records.  The front lapels were a nice flat black in a sort of controlled petal design.  The winning design was by the Zen guy with a girlfriend.  The models really like him.  Anyway his dress was very modern and forward thinking.  The top was a white crop top, long sleeves, long cuff with nicely manufactured wide flat ribbons with demure colored trim.  The body of the dress was a largish print of very subdued lines.  There was a slightly shaped cut to mid thigh in the front and the arm holes were cut to show what Heidi called peek-a-boob.  Very cute. The losing looks were the twin with hair.  She designed a very simple outfit with shorts and a gauze opaque skirt.  She was in.  Gah.  The loser was a 23 year old kid who wore dresses and long blond hair.  He had previously designed safe stuff and he designed to go all out and designed something with lots of strips of cloth strung up and down the dress, many seams were not finished, it was a hot mess.  He over designed and ran into a time management issue.  He was sent to clean out his station. Loved the show.

Oh dear

Regarding the 24 hour coverage of the hurricanes; I detect the faint tinge of exhaustion amongst the reporters.  I have heard MSNBC say "Thanks for that sporty report".  Uh okaaaaay.
Sure the coverage has been hypnotic but big bad Irma certainly took her damn time getting to the USA for gawds sakes.  Topical islands wiped out, where did all those folks go?  Where?  And just as Irma poops out to tropical storm over Orlando, here comes Jose.  Uh huh.  The right people did their job right and the citizens followed orders for the most part, and that is a good thing.  The insurance folk and Trump are happy, the hurricane whores are not.
Take heart there is still a couple months left in the season. We still have to see the results of land fall Irma during the day, so we can gawk at the wreckage.  I sincerely pray bam, bam, bam hurricanes do not become a habit.  Thanky.

Lets talk about music

I grew up in a baby boomer household.  The kind of music we heard on the radio was very old school country music such as The Letter Edged in Black and Old Shep, genuine tear jerkers.  The other music was Glenn Miller big band type of stuff.  I learned how to dance at sock hops at noon in the gym at school and Glenn Miller featured highly. 

TV music was mostly The Hit Parade, the regular singers had to figure out how to produce the current hit in a different way each week.  They sang "This Old Man" and other popular songs from movies we didn't see until well into our adulthood.  Of course we watched The Lawrence Welk show and learned how to dance the polka.  I remember one particular live show where a lady from the audience danced so energetically with Lawrence Welk that her wig bounced off.  Pretty sure that would have gone viral if the internet had existed in the 60's.

Elvis Presley did not feature much in our household.  Mom deemed his music too provocative.  I didn't care each way.  I watched the Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan show and could only hear teenaged screaming and I only knew their early music from top 40 radio stations. 

The next three or four decades blurred together.  I like driving music because I loved driving.  When I lived and worked in California it was nothing to hop in anyone's car to drive to the San Francisco airport just to watch the jets land and ride on the walkways.  Oy!

I learned what little I know about classical music courtesy of Carla.  She mentioned how much she liked Handel's Water Music.  I bought the album, the tape,the CD and enjoyed it in various reincarnations over the years.  Opera was a different kettle of fish. I grew to love Nessun Dorma and other bits and pieces.  An entire opera?  Um please pass the hard stuff.  Burp.

Sister Ellen always enthused about American Idol and I never got into that.  Later on I began watching The Voice.  I really liked the blind auditions and learned to love songs I had never heard of.  I even Googled the original songs and found that in some instances I enjoyed the second hand version even better. 

As a miscellaneous category and in no particular order I have come to enjoy the following modern pieces; Say Something, Listen, Gravity, I'm a Creep, Hallelujah, Defying Gravity, Alabaster Box, Fix Me Jesus and The Four Seasons.  And I love just about any version of Tennessee Whiskey. 

I have noted on various international versions of The Voice there are a few songs that will guarantee a four chair turn; It's a Man's World, Natural Woman, Highway to Hell, Who's Loving You.  Yeppers that does turn the chairs. 

I accidentally discovered Hailey Reinhart on Google.  She was on American Idol when she was 18 and got to the semi finals.  Her voice has improved so much over the intervening years.  She does a terrific set in All About the Bass. 

So having exposed my vast ignorance I shall go catch up on morning news and when I get bored I will watch Britain's Got Talent on my Kindle.  Happy Labor Day!!!