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  • Vacation

    Vacation

    It’s my nameday, school is out, and my wife and I are whizzing through the air in an amazing flying machine that but 110 years ago, was an unimaginable fantasy. (When this post comes out, we’ll be on our way to Dubai, en-route to Bangkok.)

    My second book, In Defense of Flogging, is all-but done. It’s been a slog. Last night I added 500 words on the subject of private prisons (when I noticed rather late in the process that I somehow failed to even mention the subject). Those 500 words took 10 hours. That’s less than a word a minute. Which is, unfortunately, par for the course. For the past few months, I feel like I’ve done nothing else, because, basically, I haven’t.

    The good news is you can already pre-order a copy of In Defense of Flogging on Amazon (which is actually a bit disconcerting to the author, to see your book for sale before you’re done writing it–maybe I should have bought a copy to see how it turns out…). And I doubt the price is going to be much lower than super-cheap price of $13.60 they’re currently hawking it for.

    As to vacation, I have two book reviews to write. But I’m healthy, I’m alive, I can’t complain. Bangkok, in case you’re wondering, is a city crazy about food. We will do our best to eat as much as possible, but even then we will barely scratch the surface of all the possibilities.

    And though, as interesting as it is, I doubt I’ll be making a return to the Corrections Museum.

    I have a few “Then and Now” posts lined up as fillers while I’m gone. I’m not certain if I’ll be posting much else until the end of the month.

    Be good. Stay safe. Happy New Year!

  • Then and Now: Fall River

    Then and Now: Fall River

    This one is almost too much to believe. And not for the normal reasons of becoming abandoned. Fall River, Mass, is still doing OK, I think. But not what used to be the heart of downtown.

    And now.

    It doesn’t look like the same place. But it is.

    Where’s that beautiful building on the right I take to be City Hall? Those things usually last. Not in Fall River. Look at what I assume is the new City Hall.

    Grim. Brutalist and grim. Vintage 1975, I’m guessing.

    Why were those beautiful buildings torn down, including the whole block on the left? To build a road, naturally. A freeway now runs under there.

    Such is progress. And you can’t stop progress. But of course you could stop dumb destruction.

    As always, the old picture is from Shorpy.

  • Word Frequency

    I’m ran the latest draft of my book through a word-frequency count. 47 uses of “simply”?! That’s simply too many, and I got that down to 11 (mostly just by deleting them–it’s interesting how often “simply” simply isn’t needed). Now I’m working on “certainly,” “of course,” and “actually.” It’s very easy to fall on such linguistic crutches when you’re writing.

    So the total number of different words in my new book is about 4,900 (out of 30,000 words).

    I don’t know why I find that interesting. I also wondered if it’s a lot or a little.

    Turns out I’m not the only one curious about such matter (oh, the world wide webs, how magic you are!).

    Zachary Booth Simpson was all over this, ten years ago.

    Compared to most books, I don’t use many words at all (that’s good news for my friend, Gotti).

    Moby Dick uses 17,227 different words. But Moby Dick is long. And my book is short. It turns out that for books of my length, my vocabulary seems perfectly respectable.

    Thanks, Zach!

  • NYPD Releases Misdemeanor Data

    Sort of. And only in response to a lawsuit.

    Here’s the Times story.

    Why not just give out the raw data so academics like me can actually use it? It might actually help the NYPD and the city. Just sayin’…

  • Rigid Feminine Pleasure Device

    From the Chicago Sun Times: Sex toy defendant arrested for failing to show up to court.

    Warning: there’s a picture of Ms. Bildsten, 56, of Gurnee, Ill.

    Here’s how she first came to our attention.

  • People Who Touch Your Junk

    People Who Touch Your Junk

    I love Venn Diagrams. This is a good one:

    It’s from a site I need to visit more, Chartport.org.

  • Text-to-voice software

    If you’re not a writer or a computer nerd, just skip this. Really.

    I’m editing my book (and being doing so for a long while). It’s very near done and still a very slow process.

    About six hours ago, I bought a text-to-speech program online for $50 (NaturalSoft, for what it’s worth. I have no idea if there are better ones). Honestly, it doesn’t work too well in Word, at least not when two word files are open at the same time, but it works just fine when you cut and paste text.

    It took me two days to get through about 30 pages. Tonight, using this program and having my book read to me while I looked at it, I swear things went at least three times as fast. That number is an estimate, but it’s not an exaggeration. I got through 50 pages tonight!

    Not only that, but I know I did a better job catching things I would never have noticed from just reading the text.

    And here’s why: because the damn thing doesn’t stop (unless you want it to, like when you have to make substantial changes). Slow and steady. It’s like being on an assembly line of your own words. I felt like cross between John Henry and Laverne De Fazio.

    But now it’s almost 6am and I’m off to bed.

  • Portugal’s Drug Policy

    The headline says: “Portugal’s drug policy pays off; US eyes lessons.” Of course it should probably say, “US ignores lessons.”

    I like pseudo neutral editor’s note: “This is part of an occasional series by The Associated Press examining the U.S. struggles in its war on drugs after four decades and $1 trillion.”

    The story is here. I haven’t read it yet, but I suspect it’s good.

    [Thanks to Sgt. T.]

  • Then and Now: Jacksonville

    Then and Now: Jacksonville

    This time from Jacksonville, Florida. It looks like the Hamrock Hotel is a pretty upscale place, with all them nice new Ford motorcars out front!


    The only old building left is vacant, abandoned, and falling apart. And as usual, business and buildings have been replaced with parking lots and vacant lots. There’s one big new building. But no reason to be on the city street anymore. Just four lanes of traffic to drive by quickly and lots of parking. One-hundred years of American progress.

  • In the Nation’s Service?

    Happy Boxing Day (if you’re Canadian). Or Second Day of Christmas (if you’re Dutch).

    Why don’t we have two-day holidays (especially the Friday after Thanksgiving)?

    In the news:

    People in jail recording themselves reading books for their kids to listen to.

    The DEA is big and scary and still unable to stop world leaders from dealing drugs.

    And the New York Times has an article about the pay of elties. A person born poor (bottom fifth of the income distribution) in “the Land Of Opportunity,” is much more likely to die poor that a person born poor in, say, socialist Sweden or England (the chances are 42%, 25%, and 30%, respectively). Not to mention our poor are poorer.

    And this is interesting: In my dad’s Princeton class of 1956, 450 of 750 graduates served in the military. By comparison, a third of recent Princeton graduates who got jobs after graduation went into finance (one of the reasons I didn’t like Princeton). Just eight went into the military.

    Speaking of the military: The U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service.

    Other signs the times are a-changing, for the worse:

    In 1977, an elite chief executive working at one of America’s top 100 companies earned about 50 times the wage of its average worker. Three decades later, the nation’s best-paid C.E.O.’s made about 1,100 times the pay of a worker on the production line.

    No doubt because the American economy is so much stronger today. But seriously… Why do we let this happen? Why do people insist on believing that regulation is the problem, that unrestrained for-profit corporations have our best interests in mind, and the only thing federal government is good for is the military?

    It just don’t make sense.