A note to my poisoner

Someone poisoned me.

Repeatedly, secretly, deliberately, and over a twenty year period.

Worse, I know who did it, a guy named Chester Stranczek ...

...and why ...

...money.

The poison: vinyl chloride, a colorless organic gas known to cause cancer and which is unsafe at any level.

Chester Stranczek was a small town mayor... wait, I'll call him Chester, no, Chet, because though I never met the man personally, I might as well be on a first name basis with him because he personally affected my health with his slimy little plot.

Here's the story. Crestwood Illinois is a small village near Chicago. A staunch Republican, Chet became its mayor in 1969 promising low taxes, continuously posting personal, hokey political messages for the town to read on a changeable sign in front of the hall. Any money saved on spending would be refunded to the townspeople, in person, by a grinning mayor who shook their hands as they came to pick up their money. Seriously, they had to pick it up personally from the mayor in a fantastic public relations ploy.

And they loved it, and him  -   at least the seniors did. The village and seniors thrived, though his penny pinching ways doomed the village's children to small, barely sustained libraries, schools and play areas. But that didn't matter to Chet, because kids can't vote and don't pay taxes. Read this article someone wrote gushing about Chet. Then read on.

Yep, people loved their Republican mayor, and no one bothered to run against him at re-election time. And Chet continued to take care of the elderly with a miserly nod to the young of the town.

Anyway, Chet discovered a great new way to save money. The water the village was bringing in from Lake Michigan was a bit pricy, so why not supplement the water with water from an old well that had been closed down by the EPA due to its unsafe drinking water? Who'd notice, huh? The well had been contaminated by vinyl chloride leached into its system from an old dry-cleaning operation. I mean, sure, the water wasn't safe, but it was free. And if they noticed, so what, they were saving money, right?

So Chet started feeding this contaminated water into Crestwood's drinking water, saving the citizens hundreds of dollars in water bills. And no, he didn't tell anyone, and they trusted him, because after all, he was Chester, their wonderful mayor. This went on for twenty years.

People started getting sick. Bad stuff. Cancers, leukemia, nasty stuff. And as the numbers of people with cancer starting reaching alarming levels, the EPA took notice, investigated, and discovered Chet's little plot.

Of course, by the time they discovered this, Chet had already gone off to Florida to enjoy his retirement, having handled the reins to his son who was mayor now. So the son was run out of town, the well closed and sealed and Chet's off drinking pina coladas in Florida while I, who drank eighty cups of Crestwood contaminated coffee every day, examine my bald spot to try and determine if my hair loss is genetic or something that vinyl chloride had a hand in.

See, the moral of this story is we need the Environmental Protection Agency. I know a certain party is doing its best to convince people we don't need 'Big Government,' but for me, I need to know there's someone out there watching over the Chets of the world. The ones who will knowingly poison someone for a buck.

I don't trust corporations to take care of their own emissions. I believe the polar bears are swimming where there used to be ice. I don't trust Big Oil to drill responsibly in a a manner that won't wipe out wildlife. I don't trust politicians who take money and then vote the way they are paid. I want regulators watching Wall Street. See what happened to our economy when regulations were relaxed? We crashed. They're trying to put their greedy little paws into our retirement income now. They aren't trying to save us anything, they just want to siphon billions in fees and administrative costs off the top.

But that's another story.

In the meantime, I'll keep checking out my stool samples for signs of blood.

Oh, and Chet? Enjoy your retirement, you SOB.

Norm

(hey, did this depress you? if so, lighten up and read my political humor book, Bonk & Hedz, a caveman... and woman ... story)

9/11 - We lost the war

As I was driving into work today, listening to the aftermath of yesterday's observations and prayers for the 9/11 victims, it occurred to me that the terrorists won. They got what they wanted, well, a lot of it.

Since 9/11, we lost many of our freedoms. X-rays at airports are more invasive than ever. The government can listen to our cell phone calls, invade our privacy, intrude without warrants. We're spending billions, no, trillions on Iraq and Afghanistan, and our economy sank to Depression levels. Lobbyists and politicians latched onto 9/11 for personal gain. While the economy faltered, Halliburton got fat. Well, fatter. No, more like obese.

And gas? Well, we still need it. Why? Because lobbyists for Big Oil own the parts of our politicians not already in the pockets of pharmaceuticals and Defense. The unholy trinity of drugs, defense and Wall Street feed and prey on our weaknesses.

If it weren't for oil, we wouldn't care about the Middle East. It would just be a big desert wasteland of no importance to us. Instead our warships patrol the seas, protecting oil tankers at US taxpayer expense, while pirates terrorize unprotected American citizens just out for a vacation sail.

Gas costs over four bucks here in Chicagoland. Can someone please explain why we can build an Ipad, but we can't improve on the internal combustion engine invented over 100 years ago? Did you ever see the documentary, "Who Killed the Electric Car?"? Watch that film, which shows we had the technology to get away from gas and oil decades ago.

And why, when our economy is a shambles, does a certain segment of our political leadership absolutely refuse to cut Defense, preferring instead to cut everything important to the poor and middle class?

Why does this same political leadership refuse to let Medicaid negotiate the price of drugs, which would drastically lower the costs overall to the American taxpayer?

Bought and sold, that's why.

And while these same politicians claim they want smaller government, they used 9/11 as an excuse to create Homeland Security, the (misnamed) Patriot Act and other Federal agencies, so they could restrict our freedom, all under the guise of protecting us from terrorists.

The parts of the government they want to shrink are those parts that protect Americans. The EPA (clean air and environment, so they can pollute to their hearts' content), financial regulation (so they can take our money without government intervention). Do you know why the price of gas is over $4? It's not because of a shortage in oil. It's because of Wall Street speculators.

In other words, they want to watch us, but they don't want anyone watching them.

9/11 just gave certain special interests excuse for free rein to take away our money and our rights ... and for what?

So they can have their corporate jets, not pay taxes, pollute the world, and just not give a shit about their fellow man ... or that polar bear swimming around where there used to be ice.

The terrorists got what they wanted. A less free America, a financially crippled America, a war-weary-just-sick-of-it-all America. And our own in-house terrorists helped them along.

Norm

http://www.normcowie.com

Kiss this book goodbye...

Kiss Her Goodbye by Mickey Spillane

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Max Allan Collins ... super-author
Mike Hammer... iconic character

Mix these two fantastic ingredients, and voila... a tepid, meandering mess that couldn't carry me to page fifty.

I've loved movies based on Max Allan Collins books, I even met him in a bar at an author conference, and a few of my friends (Joe Konrath) know him, so I was excited to put my hands on this book. So much for that expectation.

Having never read a Mike Hammer book probably hurt, because if I had read earlier works then I might have understood the fawning attention other characters lavished on Hammer. But that shouldn't matter. Any book should be good enough to catch and keep your attention, be it the first book in a series, or a later book cobbled together by another, albeit superstar author. This one felt saccharine and contrived, at least through the first fifty pages.

I'm old enough now that I won't waste my time finishing a book just to see if it will turn and finally hook me 100 pages in. And as a fellow, though far less known author, I don't have the luxury of being able to write books that don't get your attention right off the bat.

So for me, time lost that I'll never recover. I won't compound my mistake by reading the rest of the book.

Norm

http://www.normcowie.com



View all my reviews

I blew out a flipflop .. so where's the damned margarita?

http://amzn.to/r1TtW2

I can't tell you how many times I heard Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville without ever appreciating the emotional, devastating angst of when he stepped on a beer tab and blew out his flipflop. I mean, it sounds funny, and I grinned picturing it.

(wait a sec...let me freshen up my wine glass ...)

***  ELEVATOR MUSIC ***

(okay, sorry, I'm back. Found some chips and salsa, too. Anyway, where was I?  Oh, yeah, emotional trauma)

Back to my story. So there I was, surrounded by palm trees...well, I was in LAX, not Florida... his story takes place in Florida, right. Anyway, I was trying to get an early flight back to Illinois, but couldn't. So I'm stuck in California. Yeah, I know, there are worse places than California, huh. Like maybe Waterloo, Iowa.

So get reservations at the LAX Ramada, no, Raddison... Radison? Radish? Anyway ...

(dammit, there's a fly buzzing around me. Must want my salsa.  Get out of here!)

Where was I?  Oh, yeah, LAX.  Oh, and how come there aren't good looking stewardesses anymore? Are they all off cheerleading for XFL teams or something?

Sorry.

So I've got my reservations, and I'm tired, just want to sleep, and I head off to the bus shuttle to the hotel. Some blonde skinny pierced chick sees my yellow reservation hotel slip and she says, "hey, do you know where the shuttle.."

Before I could answer, it happened.

Yep, total flipflop blowout.

(wait a sec while I load some salsa.)

*** crunch, crunch, wine slurp ***

Damned good salsa, made with tomatoes, green peppers and onions all from my own garden. Good stuff.

Back to the story. Yeah, somehow the toe of my left flipflop caught on one of the rugs near the exit of the airport.  It ripped up the cloth that went between my big toe and its second lieutenant. So the flipflop was just hanging there suspended from the loops that go over the sides of my foot.

Blonde pierced chick was looking at me, so I tried taking a step. And couldn't.  That one tiny broken part of the flipflop invalidated the whole of the rest of the flipflop, making it totally unsuitable and unsuited for travel. It wasn't gonna go anywhere.

I tried walking, but it was like a horse with a broken leg. The flipflop just dangled from my foot, refusing to get back into its flipflop position. I leaned over and tried to tuck the cloth in between my toes, but no dice. Nothing. I tried to tie it around the toe, but it wasn't having it either.

Giving pierced chick an apologetic look, I headed off to find a flipflop store. And I found out there wasn't one...at least on this side of Security. And I wasn't going back through the 'let's see Norm's innards' x-ray machine. So I walked barefoot to the shuttle and went to the hotel.  Once there, I knew barefoot wasn't going to cut it anymore, so I put on the flop (there was no longer any flip to it), and shambled along to the reservation desk. After signing in, I found out where the gift shop was, and shambled that way sliding my foot like a new-born zombie.

Gasping, I limped into the gift shop and said to the pregnant girl chomping gum at the counter, "Where are your flipflops?"

It was California, surely this was a given.

Sure enough, she languidly pointed to a remote corner and I shuffled over.  Ah, a veritable paradise of flipflops.

All sizes.

All colors.

All uniquely crafted.

And ... all female.

And now I realize why Jimmy Buffett needed the margarita after busting his.

Norm

Hey, I have a new book out!  Bonk & Hedz, caveman humor.  Get it on Kindle for less than $2

http://www.amazon.com/Bonk-caveman-woman-story-ebook/dp/B00572N0W6

Nookie, and a bit of Were

I've been sort of weirdly busy lately. No, not writing books. But fortunately, I'm cranking out the books at a rate I'm happy with ... two books within a year, Bonk & Hedz and WereWoof, so I don't mind the wasted time so much if it gets more of my products on the shelves. I'm up to six books now.

What's consuming me now has been getting them into salable (salable?) format. Making them available as ebooks in Kindle, Nook, Sony and anywhere else that puts it into peoples' hands.

Kindle is easy. But getting the book into Nook is harder. There's a site called Smashwords, but whipping the formatting into shape often ends up with me feeling like the whip-ee instead.  But I think...maybe... I have it figured out. I successfully put WereWoof into Nook, and it seems like Bonk & Hedz and The Adventures of Guy will be on soon.  At least I hope so. It seems to take a bit of time for Smashwords to appear in the Barnes & Noble's system, so I'll keep checking. 

One of my test stories for Smashwords was my short story Were.  It's fun and free. Check it out here 
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/70878

Political Commercial

I usually don't use my blog for anything other than my book information, even though some of my books (at least my adult books) definitely skirt political issues ... usually those things that my characters find patently ridiculous about politics (which is about everything about it).

But I'm going to make an exception .. because of what's going on with the debt ceiling crisis, and more particularly, President Obama's speech the other night and Speaker of the House Boehner's infuriating response.

Some of what I say may cause people to 'unfriend' me, or whatever, but I'm willing to take that chance as long as they read what I say first.

I'm a registered Republican.  The first President I voted for was Gerald Ford, a Republican.  I voted for George Bush Sr. in the primaries up to when he lost to Reagan and then became his VP. I liked Bush because he called Reagan's 'trickle-down' economic ideas 'Voo-Doo Economics.'  Bush was right. He served as a two term VP to Reagan and I patiently waited for him to ascend to President and go back to his pre-Reagan economic plan.  He won but he didn't go back economically, and that's when the Republican Party began to desert me.

So while they journeyed right, I stayed where I was and Clinton came along and got my vote.  He took the three trillion dollar plus debt that Reagan and Bush saddled us with and he balanced the budget!  In fact, he left Bush Jr. with a surplus! I voted for Gore and imagine if he had won. Cleaner air, higher taxes on the rich, and we'd probably still be in great shape.

Instead, Bush gobbled the entire surplus up with his wars (don't get me started on Halliburton and Cheney) and tax cuts, and ran the National Debt higher than all of the Presidents before him ... COMBINED.  With the tax cuts, the rich got richer and the Middle Class essentially vanished. The deregulations in finance led to banks going wild, playing with our money, and when they crashed they took our economy (and most of my 401k) down with them. Then we bailed them out and asked them to stimulate the economy, but they kept the money instead.

We never asked for it back, we never prosecuted anyone ... it just went into their pockets.

Now the billionaire Koch brothers (owners of conglomerates, Georgia Pacific, et. al.), stepped in because with a Democratic President and Senate, they knew that restoring the tax cuts would mean cutting into their stash of money (a note here, the 400 wealthiest Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 150,000,000 Americans).

Anyway, the Kochs knew if they control the media (Fox), and kept saying the same things over and over again, middle class Republicans would rally to them. Middle Class Republicans like catchy sayings.

On that note, here's something Rush Limbaugh said the other day.  He said there's no such thing as Global Warming. He said it just feels warmer than in the old days because we have air conditioners now.

Um. Maybe we should ship a few of those air conditioners up to the polar bears swimming around in what used to be ice.

Anyway, the Koch brothers actually got a bunch of their Republican Governors together and launched a massive plan to sell/privatize government assets, strip unions of bargaining power and basically rid themselves of the Democrats, once and for all. They used their Republican-nominated Supreme Court to agree that Corporations can pay whatever they want politically under the guise of 'free speech.' And they took over the media. So while a hundred media covered a twenty person Tea Party rally in Washington, the same media totally ignored hundreds of thousands of angry Wisconsin citizens who closed down their capital. And the same media is ignoring as the right wing Wisconsin politicians are being recalled left and right.

Yes, people are finally awakening to the Corporate agenda led by the Koch Brothers and their stooges.

Anyway, I sent the following letter to my Republican Congressman today, with a copy going to Speaker Boehner. I don't expect them to respond:

Dear Representative XXXX

You are my Representative in Washington, and frankly, I don't feel very represented right now.

You and your colleagues are jeopardizing my daughters' futures, my financial future and our country's financial future with your grandiose scheme to hold our nation hostage in the interest of advancing a political cause that isn't supported by the majority of Americans.

People who know anything about history and economics know that Social Security has nothing to do with the National Debt.  And anyone with a memory knows that most of the current National Debt was racked up by the wars and by the bailout made necessary by financial deregulation, rather, than as the Speaker of the House tried to say, the health bill. In fact, Mr. Boehner was conspicuously silent on the true causes of the deficit in his address to the Nation in what was a transparent attempt to shift blame.

So for Congress to use this same National Debt to risk our nation's debt standing, and on the way jeopardizing mortgage, installment, charge card and student loan interest rates is abhorrent.

If you have any plans of being a true leader, you should introduce a bill calling for all Congressmen, Senators, President and other elected national leaders to sacrifice your own government pensions and government health plans, since all of you can afford to get by without these easier than we shrinking members of the middle class can.

Anyway, for now, just raise the debt ceiling as it should have happened automatically to pay the bills Congress already incurred.  Or at the very least, take Social Security off the table because it's completely unrelated to the mess at hand.

Signed,
Norm Cowie

So that's my two cents.  A lot of my friends are Republicans. I don't hate them for disagreeing with me.  I think though, that they disagree because they are misinformed (deliberately, I might add). They just don't realize that if they make less than $250k, their Party doesn't represent their interests.  And I think it's clearer today than ever.

And what are my credentials you might ask. Fair enough. I'm a Vice President Finance of a multi-million dollar company. I've been a leader in the credit community for twenty seven years, with expertise in economics and finance. I write an award winning bi-monthly article in a credit magazine and was Credit Executive of the Year with the Chicago chapter of the National Association of Credit Management.  If that's not enough, I'm a good swimmer (grin).

Feel free to copy it and send to your elected officials, or forward to your friends, or unfriend me.  You have the right to do any of these, because this is, after all, America.

Formatting

Writers Block?

Hah, never had it.  Writing isn't difficult.

But I've been beating my head against something called 'formatting.'  I'm trying to get my books all into electronic format, with varying degrees of success.

As of right now, the only one that's formatted correctly is Fang Face. And there's a reason for that ... my publisher did it. The only other one without a format issue is The Next Adventures of Guy .. mostly because my first publisher is from the cave days and doesn't offer any of their authors' books on Kindle or Nook. Which is one of the reasons I refused to renew The Adventures of Guy with them when they asked.

In the last three months I've tried putting four books on Kindle.  Well, I succeeded with all four, but I don't like some of the format issues.  And I've totally struck out with Smashwords, because their more ticklish system simply rejected my efforts to put in WereWoof, which would put the book in Nook and other places.

But now I'm hopeful I have the formatting issues straightened out, and to test it, I'm putting my short story, Were on Smashwords right now as a free short story ebook. As we speak, I'm moving further up Smashword's queue, and I'm crossing my fingers that when I wake up in the morning, I'll find out it was successful.

If not, I might pull out one of my remaining hairs.  If it was successful, I'm going to format WereWoof, The Adventures of Guy, The Guy'd Book and Bonk & Hedz so that they all look great under both Smashwords and Kindle.

So wish me luck!

Norm

www.normcowie.com