A Decade Of Fun (January 5, 2015)
. . .
S “Accuracy, Brevity and Clarity. Guidance from the handbook for ham operators.”
J “Abstruse, Bloviated and Cryptic. . . . On occasion?”
S “Hamming it up. On more than one occasion.”
. . .
S “One week a law review, the next an economic journal, followed by a foreign policy tract and then a social discourse. And every week, ‘e-commentary’ aspired to be a weekly literary adventure.”
. . .
S “Tom Clancy observed that most military and defense secrets are publicly available in ‘Aviation Week & Space Technology’ magazine and other sources. He stirred plot and characterization into the mix to cook a potboiler with insight.”
J “An international thriller every few weeks this year? That should be thrilling.”
S “Every week is a thriller. First understand the ‘Box.’ Assemble all the available and inscrutable and obscure and arcane information in a pile. Connect two dots cautiously and carefully pencil in to craft the first line. Proceed with caution and care to connect a third dot and proffer a plane. Pen the right lines, erase connections between the wrong dots, and then distill, titrate and edit to craft a convincing and compelling production.”
. . .
S “If I could see the bar, I raised it. And then raised it again for good measure until it was out of sight. And measured twelve times, wrote once. The final product may be . . . measured and out of sight?”
. . .
S “After ten years of careful observation, ‘blue’ and ‘red’ not only cannot see eye-to-eye, they cannot see each other and cannot stand each other and cannot sit down together.”
J “They just do not play well with others.”
. . .
J “Forget it. ‘Conservatism-cum-a-four-digit-I-Q’ as a political, economic and social movement will never catch on. You only get one word.”
S “That gets one back to the fundamental challenge. Why even try? They say there is nothing that one can do. They are right. Yet I write. Is that absurd or insane?”
. . .
S “And a lot of fun.”
. . .
[See the discussion at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/05/arts/writers-say-they-feel-censored-by-surveillance.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news.%5D
[See the e-commentary at Writin’ (February 17, 2014) and So Many Words, So Few Ideas (Sept. 21, 2009).]
Bumper stickers of the week:
investigate, interpolate, extrapolate; titrate, distill, edit
Measure twelve times, write once
Peg it, and peg the fun meter.
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