Wetmachine friend Matthew Saroff has had a string of great (if depressing) blog posts recently. This one on the truly horrifying statistics on (non) job creation over the last decade & how they relate to monopolization and the nature of the corporation is particularly compelling.

So after a nearly a decade of giving away PDFs of my first two books, I've decided to sell them as ebooks in different formats.

The technical hassles in so doing are bigger than they should be, although most of the problems are perhaps more in my head than in the format-conversion technology.

Mainly, I'm trying to convert PDF versions of my book to MS Word .doc format.

Any help in making me un-stupid in this process would be much appreciated. [Read More!]

Don't know if you've noticed, but there's been a lot of gloomy stuff going around. Altogether too much of it, frankly. So here, apropos of whatever, to counterbalance that gloomiosity, a man who brought joy to my yute in giant carts full — and who still does.


Wow! Oooooooooooooooooh! Lah dah dee dah da deeeeeeeeeeeeeee! Hah! Wow!

I'm a member of the volunteer firefighting company of Tisbury 651, a ladder truck that also goes by the nickname Tisbury Tower One, on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Saturday morning, three days ago, my company was called out to a fire on Christiantown Road in West Tisbury, a town that borders on Tisbury, under a mutual aid arrangement between the towns. The fire was at the home of Danny Prowten, a 63 year old thirty-year veteran of the West Tisbury Volunteer Fire Department. Mr. Prowten, whom I never met, died in the fire.

Many of the firefighters, EMTs and police who responded to the call, and all of those to first arrive, knew Danny Prowten well. Some of them had been his firefighting companions for twenty years or more. As I came to learn, he was reknowned for his courage and selflessness.

Newspaper accounts of the fire appear here and here and here, but they all say pretty much the same thing (and anyway, it's not at all clear that any of these outlets actually had reporters on the scene — or if they were there, that they were allowed to stay anywhere nearby. I certainly didn't notice anybody who wasn't fire/police/EMT or family.)

I spent about seven hours on the call, and about two and a half hours at a “critical incident debriefing” Sunday, so the events of this past weekend are very much in my mind today.

Below, a few bloggish remarks slightly edited from notes I jotted Saturday & Sunday nights--just my way of decompressing.

R.I.P., brother Prowten.

UPDATED I have added and deleted some things since first posting. Please see the first paragraph after the fold. [Read More!]