Before even the first surveyor’s stake was ever driven into the ground or the first name-brick was sold, I firmly committed myself to never setting foot into the sadly named Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because the very idea of a hall of fame for rock and roll musicians just seemed to represent everything that Rock and Roll never was.

I know that my opinion is a minority one in the extreme, but I have to take some pleasure in the news that ABBA was inducted into the pantheon of clay idols last night. Abba for feck’s sake; along side the surviving Hollies!

Oh the humanity.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

In multiple-viewpoint novels, a frequent auctorial trick consists of calling your hero by his first name, while calling other characters by their last names, even in scenes where they are the viewpoint characters. Robert Ludlum generally does this. It”s a way of putting a white hat on the good guy, telling the reader whom to root for. Sometimes I find this awkward, but sometimes it seems perfectly natural. p. 173

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

[Updatge @ 1004 on 16 March — From The Irrawaddy:

At least seven political groups, including one established pro- government party, are preparing to register to take part in the upcoming election, according to the leaders of the groups.]

If Aung San Soo Kyi’s National League for Democracy party may sit out Myanmar’s faux elections this fall, other dissidents, labeling themselves The Third Force, intend to give the generals at least the semblance of political opposition. The younger dissidents may be able to act in ways that the NLD could not.

From BurmaNet News:

A number of dissidents opposed to Myanmar”s harsh military regime plan to challenge the government in elections expected this year, even as new rules force many of the country”s best-known activists to sit on the sidelines.

These dissidents, informally called the Third Force, are seeking to bridge the gap between Myanmar”s two main political factions: the military, which has turned Myanmar into a police state since taking over in 1962, and the National League for Democracy, the severely weakened opposition movement led by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, who remains under house arrest.

Residents of Yangon, Myanmar, stopping last week to read newspapers giving details of new polling laws, although the military regime hasn”t yet set a date for the election, the nation”s first since 1990.

The movement is made up of younger activists who believe it is possible to reform Myanmar from within its existing political system, and some veteran dissidents, including some whose families held government posts before the takeover.

If the generals take the Third Force seriously, the question is how much longer will movement’s members be free to take part in the election.

Roldo Bartimole writes:

You might wonder why Mark DeMarino gives a damn about Fox News”s WJW-TV, Channel 8, his former employer. But he does. He can”t shake the idea that journalism is supposed to be about something meaningful.

In this day of cost cutbacks – some possibly necessary, many seemingly simply to cut costs – newspaper and broadcast outlets would be the target of a typical I-Team investigation. About not delivering what is promised. Bait and switch.

That”s what prompted DeMarino for fire off a blistering e-mail to news director Sonya Thompson and other station managers.

It”s a message that shouts, Continue Reading »

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Fiction is one damned thing after another. If your hero, however likable he may be, confronts his problem, however desperate it may be, and just plain goes ahead and solves it, you have not got something Publisher”s Weekly is going to call a “real page turner.” p. 168

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

President-elect George W. Bush once mused: If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator. To be fair, I bet that in the secret places of his mind, President Barack Hussein Obama occasionally considers the same thought as he wrestles with Congress over health care.

So I wonder how much other government wonder about their own political travails when they see to what extent Myanmar’s military dictators have corralled the Internet in their country.

From Reporters Without Borders:

The fight for free access to information is being played out to an ever greater extent on the Internet. The emerging general trend is that a growing number of countries are attempting to tighten their control of the Net, but at the same time, increasingly inventive netizens demonstrate mutual solidarity by mobilizing when necessary.

The Internet: a space for information-sharing and mobilizing

In authoritarian countries in which the traditional media are state-controlled, the Internet offers a unique space for discussion and information-sharing, and has become an ever more important engine for protest and mobilization. The Internet is the crucible in which repressed civil societies can revive and develop.

The new media, and particularly social networks, have given populations” collaborative tools with which they can change the social order. Young people have taken them by storm. Facebook has become the rallying point for activists prevented from demonstrating in the streets. One simple video on YouTube – Neda in Iran or the Saffron march of the monks in Burma – can help to expose government abuses to the entire world. One simple USB flashdrive can be all it takes to disseminate news – as in Cuba, where they have become the local “samizdats.”

Myanmar’s State Peace and Development Council (aka the generals) gets particular attention in the report.

A few rare countries such as North Korea, Burma and Turkmenistan can afford to completely cut themselves off from theWorldWideWeb. They are not acting on their lack of infrastructure development because it serves their purpose, and it persists. Nonetheless, the telecom black market is prospering in Cuba and on the border between China and North Korea.

And.

The “Enemies of the Internet” list drawn up again this year by Reporters Without Borders presents the worst violators of freedom of expression on the Net: Saudi Arabia, Burma, China, North Korea, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, Uzbekistan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, and Vietnam.

Some of these countries are determined to use any means necessary to prevent their citizens from having access to the Internet: Burma, North Korea, Cuba, and Turkmenistan – countries in which technical and financial obstacles are coupled with harsh crackdowns and the existence of a very limited Intranet. Internet shutdowns or major slowdowns are commonplace in periods of unrest. The Internet”s potential as a portal open to the world directly contradicts the propensity of these regimes to isolate themselves from other countries.

It’s just all those bad countries, right? We don’t need to worry, we have the First Amendment. Don’t rest so comfortably.

More and more states are enacting or considering repressive laws pertaining to the Web, or are applying those that already exist, which is the case with Jordan, Kazakhstan, and Iraq. Western democracies are not immune from the Net regulation trend. In the name of the fight against child pornography or the theft of intellectual property, laws and decrees have been adopted, or are being deliberated, notably in Australia, France, Italy and Great Britain. On a global scale, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, whose aim is to fight counterfeiting, is being negotiated behind closed doors, without consulting NGOs and civil society. It could possibly introduce potentially liberticidal measures such as the option to implement a filtering system without a court decision.

The price of freedom is eternal vigilance: by citizens.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

[P]roblem, after all, is what a story is about. To one extent or another, every story or novel involves a lead character”s attempt to cope with a problem. If the lead is well drawn and human and believable and sympathetic, if he”s the sort with whom the reader can strongly identify, then the reader will want things to work out for him. And, if the problem is believable and significant and urgent, and the lead”s successful resolution of the problem becomes important to the reader. p. 167

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.

If world leaders send messages of shame and encouragement to an oppressive regime and no one reads them, do they make a difference? Increasingly this is the question anyone has to ask about the lack of response from Myanmar’s military dictators to the rest of the world. Can Indonesia change that?

From The Sydney Morning Herald:

An intriguing sidebar to the story of the Indonesian president’s visit to Australia this week has been the additional insight into Jakarta’s role in trying to solve South-East Asia’s biggest problem: the brutal grip of Burma’s military regime.

Burma is the most glaring bit of evidence for the critics of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, ASEAN. To them, the regional grouping’s inability to persuade Burma’s military junta to retreat from political power shows it up as a toothless tiger, unable to provide the foundations for a wider security arrangement in Asia, and its human rights standards to be set at the lowest common denominator.

Indonesian opinion makers here for President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s visit privately expressed a lot of frustration that their country’s new clout in world affairs – as a boisterous democracy of 240 million people with a strengthening economy, and the world’s largest Muslim population – has to be filtered through ASEAN.

Indonesia’s inclusion in the Group of 20, which combines the major developed nations with the emerging economic powers and gave Jakarta’s leaders a taste of being at the centre of things during the global financial crisis, is causing its thinking to wander away from the ineffective ASEAN, to the alarm of other members not in the G20 themselves.

Under SBY, as the president is known, Indonesia is also taking more of a direct role in pressuring Burma’s generals towards democratic reform. Later this month, its Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, is visiting Rangoon.

And when Natalegawa comes home, then what?

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog video excursion I present: From My Dad.

Via reader Mary Jo…

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Motivation is the business of supplying your fictional characters with plausible reasons for them to act as you would have them act in order for your stories to be dramatically effective. p. 163

From Telling Lies for Fun and Profit: A Manual for Fiction Writers by Lawrence Block.