Oh, darn. I wasn't Raptured...again.

Ya know, it boggles my mind that in today's age, there are still people like Harold Camping who make their living by trying to scare the living crap out of people. It's even more mind-boggling that there are people stupid gullible enough to not only believe him, but who uproot their families, sell all their stuff, and stand there waiting to be hauled up to some heavenly reward.

I have nothing against people's religious beliefs. What I have a problem with is the religious "establishment" that tries to keep power over people and sucks them dry financially. Especially when some of those "churches" are nothing more than thinly disguised political groups that shouldn't, IMO, receive tax exempt status.

It's very sad that there were people who actually sold their stuff and toured the country in RV caravans back in May "spreading the word" about the May non-Rapture.

Do people not research anymore? Do these people honestly fail to look into the history of the Bible and how it came to be? Ya know, the "rapture theory" is not actually in the Bible the way it's portrayed by a lot of evangelicals. Today's moden "Rapture" theory was actually concocted around the 17th century, and popularized back in the 1800's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture

Go ahead, I'll wait.

Google "rapture theory" and you'll get a lot of information about it. I strongly suggest if you're gullible enough to follow some old fart who has an engineering degree and keeps making wrong predictions about the end of the world, that perhaps you should educate yourself as to what he's preaching. And what he's preaching WRONGLY.

Again, I do NOT have a problem with religion.

I do, however, have a BIG problem with predators, regardless of their faith (or lack thereof) who prey on people looking for solace.I have a HUGE problem with establishments who use fear to keep a stranglehold on their followers. You know what groups like that are usually called?

Cults.

I support belief systems that give people comfort as long as it's not hurting them or anyone else. Unfortunately, there are too many "religious leaders" out there (and not just Christian, they're in EVERY denomination, including non-traditional ones) who are looking to protect their own interests and not promoting the common good. That's why I say while I support religious freedom, I do not and will not support religious "establishments."

And if you were expecting to get Raptured today and wake up tomorrow morning all disappointed, I'll do my best not to say see, I told you so.

Simple Facebook Etiquette

You know, I didn't think I'd really have to post a helpful hint like this, but it just happened to me.

If you don't like what someone posts on their Facebook (or other social media wall), then DON'T COMMENT on it. If you do comment, don't do what the asshat on my wall just did and tell me to "pipe down" after insulting one of my friends. Disagreeing is one thing, being disrespectful and calling people "annoying" when they challenge your small-minded beliefs is just begging for a verbal smack-down.

Wow. That was this person's one-way ticket to me unfriending and blocking their ass.

What the...?

I've lived in Florida all my life. Only two other times I can remember it being this cold, but not for this long. The first was in 1976 or '77, when it "snowed" very light flurries in the Tampa area (where I grew up), and again in the winter of 1989.

This is ridiculous. They actually cancelled school here today in the county I live in, and we live south of Sarasota!

That's ICE on my car, even after the sun has been up for about an hour. It was 27 degrees here this morning.

BRR!

Open Letter to NY Publishers

(The article prompting this letter can be found here.)

Okay, Simon and Schuster and Hachette, seriously, WTF? You are going to delay the release of ebooks for months after hardcover...why?

"...Preserve your industry?" Seriously? Okay, let me explain some basic economics that apparently someone hasn't taken the time to explain to you.

Cheaper books (ebooks) that cost a fraction of the cost to produce and sell (because the cost per unit goes DOWN with each ebook sold, versus print in any format that still has production/shipping costs that remain constant or increase with each copy sold depending on energy and fuel costs) will sell MORE in the long run than any print version simply because you never have to pull them from the shelves. Ever. As long as the Internet still exists, you can sell the things. Your profit margin is higher because, unlike print, you have a one-time production cost involved in editing and file prep, then that's it. No printing, shipping, stocking, transport costs involved. Period. No returns. You can pay the authors a higher royalty percentage and STILL make a higher profit for a lower cost.

So explain to me why moving to a modern business model embracing ebooks isn't happening? You are only delaying the inevitable, and by doing so you are HURTING your authors, cutting your own profit, and alienating a huge and growing group of readers who will take their business elsewhere. Not to mention you're encouraging pirates who will scan and upload copies of the unavailable titles to file sharing sites and people will find those instead of buying the ebook versions. So you're losing money that way too.

Wake. Up. You are driving your businesses toward extinction, and believe me, readers will not jump off the cliff with you.

"...but I'd need to get another extension cord to do it."

And just like that, my husband unwittingly gave me the title for this blog post. Now, I've blogged about my husband's holiday decorations before. This year we've added more wire animals, another couple of blow-ups (including my favorite, the huge chubby penguin), and have swapped out more of the lights for LEDs. One thing that was really neat to find out is that the white LEDs are now coming in a "warm" flavor, meaning they really DO look just like "real" white lights instead of having that bluish tint the "cool" flavor of white lights do. We added a few of those too.

(The picture is from my BlackBerry, because I was too lazy to find the regular digital camera and find batteries for it and...etc. If you click on it, it should give you a larger version.)

We've also added a music sync box which plays, at a neighbor-flinching volume, a wonderful collection of Christmas music, and it flashes the lights in time with the music. (Keep reading.)

When I noted to hubby that the very front row of light-up walker markers down by the street should stay lit all the time and not on the blinker, he said... "I can do that, but I'd need to get another extension cord to do it."

And the humor behind that statement is that already, we have cornered the market in extension cords.

But he's worked damn hard on it, and I'm really proud of him, all ball-busting aside, because it does look great. I keep informing him it's not a competition, but he keeps grinning that he "won" because he's got his outdoor decorations up before anyone else on our street, excluding the guy at the end who puts out his balls every year.

Um, light-up plastic balls. (Get yer minds outta da gutter.)

And now, for your viewing pleasure, a relatively crappy cell phone video that doesn't do the set-up justice. If you turn your volume up, you can barely hear the box. (I turned the volume on the box DOWN to a less ear-splitting volume so we don't have the home owner's association crawling up our asses.) Sorry for the quality of the video, I'll try to get a better one shot...if I find our video camera and figure out how to get the video to my laptop.

Moonfaker.

I was mightily surprised to find out today, on this 40th anniversary of the moon landing, that there are some braniacs out there who honestly believe the moon landing was a hoax.

Really? I guess these people turn themselves inside out trying to disprove we ever made it. I'm not sure why they do, but they do.

Mythbusters (I love this show) did an episode tonight on disproving the conspiracy theories. Pretty interesting stuff. Don't know how I missed all the hub-bub all these years. I mean, it seems like I did hear about that at one point, but I didn't seriously think there were flat-earthers out there who seriously believed their own horse-hockey.

I'm wondering if there's a story in that somewhere. What happens when the fake-moon-landing theorists are proven wrong, do they switch to the 2012 Mayan apocalypse malarky? Were they sucked in by Y2k too?

I have enough real-life concerns to worry about without making stuff up to worry about as well.

(And for those of you wondering, yes, I do love James Bond. *LOL*)

Tweet, Twit, Twa...never mind...

I admit it. I'm a Twitter idiot. I mean, I'm pretty good at deciphering php and css code, can build and tweak templates for my website, finally figured out how to use Facebook (then the *&^%$s switched it around and I'm RElearning it), etc, etc, etc.

Twitter, not so much. I've got an account, but at first I couldn't figure out how to get my phone approved. (Turned out it wasn't good enough to use the area code, I also had to punch in a country code, go figure?) I even think I have two followers. Couldn't figure out how to follow them, however.

I have a BlackBerry, for chrissake. When I swapped out phones and had problems, I figured it out so I didn't lose all my data. I am NOT a technotard, I swear I'm not. But something about Twitter defies me. Maybe it's too simple for me? *LOL*

There goes the electric bill...

Clark (Griswold) Sr. and Jr. were busy last week at our house. These are the nicknames earned by my husband and son.

My husband has already declared when he retires in a few years, the annual Christmas light display will be his "hobby."

Goddess help me.

Last year I (yes, ME, myself, not anyone else) installed a dedicated 20 amp GFI external circuit, on its own breaker, so he would quit tripping my living room circuit when he plugged into the only outside outlet on the front wall (which for some stupidly inexplicable reason is hooked into my living room circuit).

Took him all of fifteen minutes to blow that.

After helping him reconfigure his layout, we made it through if I didn't turn on the lamp in the living room at the same time as the front lights.

So this year I installed ANOTHER dedicated 20 amp GFI external circuit. And he's switched a few of the strands over to LEDs, which should help. But he's added one wire animal and one blow-up animal to the "menagerie" (which includes a blow-up Santa on a motorcycle, a blow-up polar bear, blow-up penguin, several light-up deer, a family of light-up geese, a polar bear, etc. etc. etc.

You get the idea. This is in ADDITION to the lights on the roof and in the yard. And they informed me that they're not done.

I'm not complaining. Seriously. He does a great job and it looks fantastic. But I hate dealing with electrical. Something about the idea of possible electrocution that stifles my enthusiasm.

Sorry the pictures are blurry, it's hard to take night light pictures. And what you're seeing isn't even all of them, because there are lights along both sides of the house and some out back.

We're the first people on our street to light up, and even though we're more than ten houses from the end of the street, when you turn onto our street, you can immediately see our house.

I heard them muttering something about "visible from space" and put a kabosh on that.

Yeah, I know, I'm a Grinch, but our light bill can't take that. *LOL*

Welcome to Tales from the Snark Side

Hi, my name is Lesli, and I'm a blogaholic...

This blog will be focused (mostly) on my writing and writing-related issues, like plugging other writers, book reviews/recommendations, etc.

You can link to a couple of my other blogs in the sidebar, but my writing-related issues will land here in this new home.

I'll also be adding links to other writers as I build this blog. You can click the link join the e-mail list. No, I'm not narcissistic, but it seemed easier to just name it after me, since that's my name. Hey, if MaryJanice Davidson can do it...so can I. (It's called branding. And to think your local government pays consultants bazillions of tax dollars to work out their branding for them.)

Oops, slipped into a snark there.

So have fun, enjoy, and look forward to hearing from you. Snark on!