Tony Noland's Blog, page 9

A is for Absinthe

Yes, absinthe will knock you on your ass. Mythical psychotropic ingredients aside, this is largely due to the fact that it is 160 proof. Pouring it through a sugar spoon won't dilute it, just make it palatable. A couple of glasses of ANYTHING at 160 proof will make you see stars. 


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Follow me and find me around the web:
At TonyNoland.com // On Twitter // On Facebook // At Amazon.com
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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

A new Six Minute Story

I wrote a Six Minute Story this morning. Dashing off a poem so quickly and extemporaneously means there are bound to be a few scanning errors, but that's part of the fun. It might make more sense if the story prompt were included, but I think you'll still get the picture. Read it here .

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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

The Importance of Arbitrary Limits

What is the point of an arbitrary limit? Why set for yourself boundaries that mustn’t be crossed? With the entire world of art and letters, politics and emotion and everything else before you, why choose a number of words as the defining characteristic?
Why, indeed.
We might as well ask why an apple is round, or why birds have hollow bones. Weight, height, depth, length… these are physical limitations, constraints to which the organisms responds. Working within them, novel solutions – often amazing solutions – arise which pave the way to achieving the ultimate goal.
We set limits because therein glories lay.

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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

Happy Pi Day!

Happy Pi Day!
As you are no doubt aware, March 14 is celebrated as Pi Day in the United States, since we use the month.day.year convention of designating dates. This gives us a 3.14 every year, a date to celebrate math and irrationality.
It also prompts an awful lot of "Americans use a dumb date designation system, and should do it day.month.year, i.e. the way WE do it." comments in social media, but we won't talk about that because America! Also because everyone else is obviously jealous because 14.3.15 means nothing, so their approbation is therefore beneath notice.
But I digress.
As you may have heard, this year is a very special Pi Day. In just about an hour from when I'm writing this, it will be 3.14.15, 9:26:53, the only moment in my lifetime when the date and local time will align to produce the digits of Pi to 9 decimal places. This moment won't come around again for another hundred years!
And who knows? By then, America might have switched to day.month.year, or to the even more logical year.month.day. Hell, we might even be using the metric system by then. Who knows what the 22nd century will bring?
Happy Pi Day, everyone!

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~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Follow me and find me around the web:
At TonyNoland.com // On Twitter // On Facebook // At Amazon.com
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My books (click the cover for more info):
   



Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

Earthquake movies

I love a good disaster flick. "San Andreas" looks like it'll qualify.



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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

No New Boobs On This Blog

An update on the policies Google will implement for Blogger (which hosts Landless):

Google has updated its policies on Blogger, its blogging platform, to preclude new users from hosting adult content. Blogs that are created after March 23 and contain “images and video that are sexually explicit or show graphic nudity” may be summarily deleted. Existing blogs will be set to private; the only way to visit them will be for the blog owner to explicitly give permission to individual browsers. 
If that sounds too cumbersome, Google has some other suggestions for administrators of blogs with adult content: they can remove the offending content. Or they can remove the blog. In short, Google no longer wants their business.

Not that I ever posted much adult content (except for that one Friday Flash with the bondage and hot candle wax), but this seems like another step toward the sanitization/Bowdlerization of the web. There will always be plenty of porn on the Internet, but this is a major blogging platform deciding that the presence of adult content on some Blogger sites is a threat to the business position of the entire company.
Sic transit gloria boobs
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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

Caressing a wax doll

A passage from "Anna Karenina" struck me with particular force today. Before I share it, some introductions and scene-setting are necessary:

The Russians:

Anna Karenina: a noted politician's wife, now living in exile with her lover, Count Vronsky, for whom she has forsaken husband, children, home, and reputation.Count Vronsky: Anna's lover, who, having given up his army career and society position to be with her, has grown bored with his new life abroad, and who has taken up painting as a way to fill the hours of his empty days.
Golenishtchev: a self-important quasi-intellectual, now settled in this Italian town, perpetually gathering information for a grand treatise, and perpetually on the verge of writing it.
Mihailov: a brilliant artist who has been given the commission of painting Anna Karenina's portrait, and who in consequence has been obliged to listen to Golenishtchev's views and to look at Vronsky's own attempt at a portrait of Anna.

 "Mihailov meanwhile, although Anna's portrait greatly fascinated him, was even more glad than they were when the sittings were over, and he had no longer to listen to Golenishtchev's disquisitions upon art, and could forget about Vronsky's painting. He knew that Vronsky could not be prevented from amusing himself with painting; he knew that he and all dilettanti had a perfect right to paint what they liked, but it was distasteful to him. A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky's painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive." - Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, Ch 13.

 
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Fifty Shades of Grammar: just how bad WAS the writing?

If you're less into BDSM and more into CMOS , you might be wondering just how well the writing in "Fifty Shades of Grey" conforms to the norms of grammatical construction. From Grammarly comes this analysis of the types of proofreading gaffs you might find in this bestseller. For the record, Grammarly has never run MY book through their analysis, but (for obvious reasons), I'm sure it would pass with flying colors.


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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

#FridayFlash: The Heart's Primordial Fire

I could tell you a lot about electric arc furnaces, probably much more than you would ever want to know, or could possible care about. I could reel off statistics about the metallurgy, economics, and environmental impact of re-melt scrap steel vs. virgin iron ore, but I know it's an esoteric topic, one with a limited appeal.

Maybe if I were to talk about how Big Steel died? Relate how the old smokestack and coal mine Big Steel of Pittsburgh, Allentown, and Johnstown got the shit kicked out of it by electric minimills like mine, maybe then you'd care. After all, that's people, right? Men, women, kids, small town America. Wrap a flag around it and put a shivering puppy in the picture, then maybe you'd care.

But I don't come from Pennsylvania and I don't have any puppies on hand.

How about bulk shipping prices from the reclamation breakyards in Malaysia? Feed material mix ratios of shred to pig iron to big scrap? The impact of carbon and molybdenum content on the resultant steel's quality, market destination, and price?

No, that's stuff I care about, but you wouldn't. After all, I'm boring, I'm tiresome, I'm a one-note Charlie because all I care about is my mill.

What if I were to tell you that there's over two hundred tons of scrap in this melt? Busted engine blocks, mostly, about a thousand of them dumped them into the bowl. A thousand old cars, a thousand old chariots of the modern Rome, broken up so I can melt them down and start the whole thing all over again. I renew America with my filthy, boring, tiresome mill, day after day after day.

Still nothing?

What if I told you that in the middle of that pile of broken steel was the mortal remains of one Jeantte Alice Spurling, native of Weshona, WY? And what if I told you that the cap is already over the bowl, and that the electrodes are already primed? And what if I told you that when I throw this switch, sixty-five million volts is going to slice into all those engine blocks? Do you know what will happen?

Do you care?

In about forty minutes, the whole melt will be at two thousand, nine hundred and fifty degrees; the bowl will be filled with two hundred tons of molten steel, golden and powerful with an ancient, primordial fire. All the residual oil, engine fittings, and combustion gunk will vaporize, right along with sweet, plump, cheating little Jeanette. She'll be steam, then smoke, then ash, then nothing. She'll never have to complain about being bored ever again, not with my mill, my steel or with me.

After the melt stabilizes, in an hour or so, the foreman will order the rigger to pull a sample of the melt for the metallurgy QA/QC lab. Would it interest you to know that there isn't enough calcium in her bones to show up on the meter? I know, because I did the compositional math on the mass ratios last night.

And would it interest you to know that even though Richie McCauliffe, that piece of shit, is keeping little Jeanette company down there under the engine blocks, he won't show up in the melt chemistry either? Two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle, hair gel, and thick necked charm is still mostly just water and carbon. Compared to the weight of steel, one cheating lover with big tits plus one greasy redneck with crooked teeth equals nothing... nothing at all.

Oh, I could tell you a lot. Maybe after the ready light switches from red to green. Maybe after the melt starts.

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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.

How to Tie a Four in Hand Knot - Ultra Fast Edition

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Landless by Tony Noland. If you like the blog, try one of the books.