Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog, page 99

Celebration 2009

Here's a picture from our just past Celebration of the Book, at Stephens College, Columbia, MO, October 10th.  Shown is our special guest, Margaret Sayers Peden, who lives in Columbia and is a Spanish language translator.  If you are a fan of Isabelle Allende or Arturo Perez-Reverte, you may have read some of her work.  She's something of a phenom and we were pleased to present her with a special award honoring her literature contributions.  Missouri First Lady Georgann Nixon presented it on ...

Rude Behavior Redux

What follows is an old post from my original website, back in 2005.  I'm reposting it because of a revisitation.  Yesterday I had a knock on the door and there were a couple of people from some small church, spreading the good news.

Now, there is irony here, because I've just started reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.  I didn't read it when it first came out because it received so much attention and there was an enormous quantity of posturing, both pro and con, regarding it, that I...

Events and Events

Hard to believe it's mid-October already.  Last weekend I was in Columbia, MO, for the MCB annual Celebration.  I've talked about this before—History and Fiction: Dueling Narratives—and all I'll add here is that the programming for the day was marvelous.

Turnout was another matter.  It wasn't embarrassing low, to be sure, but it wasn't up where I'd hoped it would be.  We have a lot to learn about proper promotions.  But it was generally successful enough that there is no question about next...

Casting Call

I'm feeling kind of antic this morning, so I thought I'd play a little fantasy game.  Most writers, whether they admit it or not, indulge in a game of imagining who would play what part in films from their books.  This comes almost second nature to me, since from an early age I started reading with a movie playing in my head and I would cast the parts.  (My most successful casting job was Michener's Hawaii—I got just about every part right but one, that of Rafer Hoxworth.)

So I thought I'd...

Blitzen

Another very old image.  Found this, much to my surprise and pleasure, in a box through which I was searching for something else entirely.

This is Blitzen, my first dog.  As a kid, my only dog.  Blitzen was a shepherd-collie mix and we got him as a puppy and I adored this dog.  We were very much a standard-issue boy and dog team.  I used to sleep on the floor with my head on Blitzen's chest.  Blitzen was a great dog.

Well, we got Blitzen when we lived in our own house on Wyoming, which had a...

More Doors

(Robin Trower is jamming on the stereo as I write this.  Just sayin'.)

I feel the urge to write something, but no one topic presents itself with sufficient weight to dominate a whole entry.  What to talk about, that is the question.  That poor guy who got tied to a tree in Kentucky was on my mind last week.

Census takers have, in certain parts of the country, been lumped in with so-called "revenooers" (to use Snuffy Smith jargon) and generally threatened, shot at, occasionally killed by folks e...

On Time and Great Legs

I'm pretty lucky.  No, I don't believe in luck, unless it's the ability to recognize the confluence of circumstances that result in specific outcomes, good or bad (hence bad luck), and thus act upon the result.  Luck is a description of things which occur or accrue to one without (seemingly) doing anything to effect them.  So, by that gauge, yeah, I'm pretty lucky.

For example, my companion.  This coming spring will mark 30 years for us.  Unbelievable.  I lucked into this.  But I recognized...

Boston, 1989

One of these days I will get the Art section of this website straightened out.  If you go there now, you'll find a lot of photographs, but several of them when clicked on expand to huge size and you only see a corner of the image.  I found that if you click on that again, it reduces to screen size.  Still, it's a bit of a pain.

Meantime, I can always post an image here now and then, and for no other reason than I like to.  Like this one, taken in Boston circa 1989.

I'm proud of my...

The Madman In The Auditorium

I like Barney Frank.  He says what he feels, usually in a way that makes his argument better.  But it's almost a no-brainer to do a comeback on the idiocy with which he was faced in Dartmouth, Massachussetts this past week.  I mean, what do you say to someone who thinks it's a valid statement to compare Obama to Hitler?

A woman carrying a poster with Obama's image modified with a Hitlerian mustache stepped up to the microphone to ask why Frank supports a Nazi policy.

There are so many things...

A Question…or Two…or More…

Just a couple of what seem to me like obvious questions.  (I know, I've been writing a bit on the health care debate, and I'll try to do some other things after this, don't want to bore anyone, especially myself.)

I see a lot of protesters waving signs that contain something like this:  HEALTHCARE REFORM YES, GOVERNMENT TAKEOVER NO.  TORT REFORM NOW!

Something about that doesn't quite add up.  If health care is to be reformed, who is going to do it?  The industry isn't without that there is a t...