Not surprisingly, Orhan Pamuk’s cast of characters have names unlike any I am familiar with.  There is a good deal of talk about some once great Turkish leader named Ataturk I have never heard of.  There are foods and drinks-such as Raki, which are all beyond my experience.  For all their strangeness, I can still identify, at least a little, with the love struck poet Ka, who is the story’s hero. For who among us has never been in love?

I find Snow wonderfully entertaining, as it keeps surprising me by dragging my Western Self out of the role of reader and into the role of participant.  While listening to the horrid conditions of this horrid place called Kars, I find myself thinking good old fashioned imperialist thoughts.  If only we could build a couple of Starbucks and a Home Depot, then everything would be better.  Then, just as I am thinking these thoughts of Nation Building, one of the characters will complain about how Westerners all want to come in and change everything and make it like the West.  Clearly the speaker does not think this would be a good idea, so I am forced to ponder, why wouldn’t it be a good idea?

The novel is setup as a long story being told by a friend.  A friend that can’t help but give away bits and pieces that are just too juicy to wait for their proper time and place.  The foreshadowing takes the form of future past perfect-His beautiful green eyes, one of which would be shattered by a bullet in 47 minutes, stared intently at Ka.  Like the opening sentence of 100 Years of Solitude, a little of this goes a long way.  I soon tired of the narrator telling me what was going to happen and who was going to die and then returning to the mundane business of storytelling.

If Snow is my only window into the world of Turkish men, then it is a world I am glad to steer clear of.  They are a cold and murderous lot in the small town of Kars.  Or they are cowards hiding in their basements.  Or they are rebels waiting for their own chance at murder and revolt.  The women are victims who refuse to admit to being victims.  Everyone sits around drinking Raki and staring out the window at the huge snowflakes.

There are two beautiful sisters in the story, each a perfect woman in her own way.  Our sad sack poet falls in love with both of them at one point or another.  He is amazed by their eyes, their faces, their large breasts, and by the fact that one of the sisters is willing to run back to Germany with him.  He falls madly in love in their bodies, so much so that he later finds a porn star who resembles the sisters and he buys all of her tapes.

Germany is mentioned often in the story, apparently every Turk that wants to escape Turkey ends up in Germany.  The Germans do not seem to be amused by this.  Germany also represents The West in the story, as the poet Ka is supposed to be a reporter for a German Newspaper.  This leads to all kinds of debates as to what, exactly, this tiny flyspeck of a town should say to The West.

Snow’s format ultimately defeats me.  The entire story being told as a long series of flashbacks within flashbacks and its endless predictions about what is going to happen, what has already happened, and how our poor narrator becomes tangled within his own tale by following in Ka’s footsteps and falling in love with one of the Sisters himself.

In the end it’s the story of an unimportant man, writing unimportant poems, and dying a meaningless death.  The window into the desolate little town of Kars is one that is best left closed.  The larger theme of the dangers of Islam taking over the world is pushed to one side, and ultimately forgotten.  All the larger ideas are ignored as the novel shrinks to one man’s obsession and then slides past this man and rambles on into pointlessness.  Snow had a lot of potential, but it lost its way.

Making a living doing this kind of stuff has always been beyond my realm of expertise.  Super Affiliates claim to make 100K a year or more selling other people’s stuff online.  I think they make their real money selling How I Made 100K a Year as a Super Affiliate books.

The Big Players in this game are Google Adwords, Amazon Associates, and places like Commission Junction and Clickbank where there are hundreds of companies looking for people to hawk their wares.  The interesting thing is that most of these companies do everything they can to make it difficult, if not impossible, to use their services at the same time.

Adwords is how Google makes it’s billions, so the system is working well for someone.  Go to Google and type in the name of any product or service and you will see a row of little ads along the right hand side of the search results.  These ads pop up because of the words entered into the search bar, the amount of money the advertiser is paying per click, the amount of their daily budget, the quality score of their landing page, the weather conditions in Sri Lanka, and what mood Google happens to be in at the moment.  Like all online businesses Google has a near infinite list of Policies and Procedures, the violation of any of these can get you kicked out of Adwords.

Amazon.com started out selling books, but now sells just about anything that be stuffed into a container and delivered to your door.  This makes their Associates program especially appealing as you are free to promote everything available on the site.   Amazon.com also has a very long Operating Agreement with the many ways in which you can be booted out of the Amazon Associate program.

The hundreds of companies using Commission Junction and Clickbank each have their own sets of rules and guidelines, though the companies on Clickbank seem to have a much more anything goes feel to them.  The Big Name Companies always have long lists of terms and often require that these terms be updated from time to time so they can add new restrictions.

The point of Adwords is to use ads to drive traffic to a site which is there to sell something. Only Google doesn’t really like sites that are just trying to sell something-and they outright hate sites that are trying to sell things with Affiliate Links.  They like companies that are using their own websites to sell their own products.  Adwords is still the best way to drive traffic-if you have an unlimited budget and a site that meets their Quality Score test.

The Amazon Associate program, like all affiliate programs, is designed to sell more stuff.  They provide banners, text links, widgets, and discussion boards.  Among the cool dodads are flash widgets with moving parts and the ability to set up your own aStore.  The problem is that you are not allowed to direct link to Amazon through Adwords.  This tends to make the stand alone aStore pretty useless as there is no way for anyone to know it’s there.  What Amazon wants is someone who has a site with it’s own traffic that will drive some of their readers to Amazon.

What most companies looking for Affiliates want is Yahoo, Road Runner, or Alexa to run their ads.  A site that has tens of thousands of hits a day might get someone to click on an ad.  What they don’t want is traffic from Adwords.    Which is usually fine as Adwords often doesn’t want to send them traffic anyway.  I tend to find this whole circle a bit baffling.  I am paying Adwords to run ads, but they will only run ads they approve of, to site they approve of, for products they approve of.  Ok, Google Adwords has Standards.  Which makes me even more baffled when I see the countless companies that forbids the use of Google Adwords by their Affiliates.   What gives?  An Affiliate’s job is to drive traffic to a company’s site in the hopes that they will buy whatever the company is selling-except the Affiliate is not allowed to use the most power tool to drive traffic.

I also don’t understand why so many people are now offended by affiliate links.  I understand ad blindness and I tend to ignore most ads myself.  I even understand not wanting to see any more ads. I remember when Iwon.com came out and they said you could make money by using their search engine.  I remember being at a friend’s house and using Iwon and telling him about using it to make points.  He was outraged at the idea that he would use something that I might get points for.  And that was just for make believe points.  I didn’t understand why he was pissed off then, and I don’t understand why people hate affiliate links now.

I found myself without anything to read while out of town recently and I bought The Girdle of Solitude.  Written in 1977 there is a strong feeling of Tune In, Turn On, and Drop Out to it.  Our heroes are redneck Pagans living in parts of the former United States and in possession of a number of interesting mind powers.  The villains are a group of Christians and a group of Scientists.  There is horse back riding, shooting of bows and arrows, and occasional wild sex in the woods.  The key moment in the story is when a woman leaves The City and hooks up with one of the men from the Shandos-one of the Pagans with the gnarly mind powers.  Their son, Singer, is a key figure who has even more powerful mind skills than those he grows up.

I liked the story, a nice mixture of Questing, Warring, and Ethnic Cleansing, but the writing left a lot to be desired.  Characters were killed off in amazingly blunt fashion, as in they were an intricate part of the story in one sentence and they were dead and forgotten in the next.  Characters were introduced and I expected them to be important, only to have them shoved off stage immediately.  Scenes shift from place to place and person to person, sometimes in the same paragraph so that I had a hard time figuring out who was doing what.

There was a kind of Logan’s Run feel to The Girdle of Solitude, only from the outside in.  Our heroes are the scattered remains of humanity, not the sequestered few obsessed with their own pointless pursuits.  Among the odd little predictions that didn’t quite pan out are a set of Heinlein style Rolling Roads and a computer that takes up vast amounts of The City’s power just to sit in readiness to answer a question.  I know that personal computers were still a couple of years off in 1977, but hadn’t the idea of Rolling Roads been put to bed by then?

I was expecting a bit more magic, either evolutionary or technological, than I found. Near the beginning of the story three people travel to a forbidden zone city in search of the lost Girdle of Solitude, while there, they meet with an unnamed evil.  This evil is described in terms that brought to mind the Smoke Monster from LOST.  Later, more people travel back to this same cursed city and are confronted by the same evil again-it turns out to be rats.  Maybe this was a better monster back in the days of Willard and Ben.  Reading it now I am shocked by the idea. Tidal waves of rats-Really?

The Girdle of Solitude was pretty good, and there was a sequel.  But I am not going out of my way to find it.

What if the magic wand also made the rest of the world feel sorry for you and send you millions of dollars in donations-and millions more in supplies and free labor? 

What if you were one of those poor people who got to live in better homes and have people take care of you and feel sorry for you because of your great misfortune?

On the other hand, what if you are one of the dozens of cities that has seen their crime rate grow from the mass exodus of bad elements?  Maybe you wouldn’t like it so much.

The Magic Wand was Hurricane Katrina and five years later New Orleans is a safer and better city than it was before the disaster.  I was in Houston the week after Katrina struck , in a motel filled with people  who had fled the city of New Orleans.  I watched the ongoing drama on CNN and though about my own trips to the Big Easy.

I’ve been all over America and I have been in some pretty rough neighborhoods.  But New Orleans was the only city I ever visited where I really wanted to be back in my hotel room before it got dark.  And I was staying in the French Quarter. 

I heard an NPR report a few months after Katrina that talked about how the New Orleans police didn’t have many murders to investigate due to the drop in crime.  At the time of the story, only 12 murders instead of the normal dozens or hundreds.  New Orleans seems to have recovered in this area as well, with the city on a pace to have over 200 murders in 2010.

 I like the touristy areas of New Orleans.  I remember going on the Grey Line Tour of the city.  At one of the bus’s frequent stops, the tour guide pointed to a Levee and said-”If New Orleans is ever hit by a Category Five hurricane, the entire city will flood when this levee breaks.  Ha Ha Ha.”  

Even on a normal day the water was clearly visible just the other side of the levee.  We all looked around and saw that we were in a giant bowl.  I couldn’t help thinking of that humorous Tour Guide when that levee broke.  I guess everyone in New Orleans thought it was a joke.  I wonder what the Tour Guides say now?

I grew up in Poly, one of Fort Worth’s many fine ghettos, and if I could have waved a wand and made it disappear, I would have.  Instead I did what everyone lving in a ghetto does, I got out as soon as I could and never looked back.

I’ve been writing this and that for a long time, but I have never been published.  I have a couple of manuscripts I have been kicking around, but they are pretty much lost causes.  And that brings us to Reason #1, which happens to be the reason my book will never be published-I Have Not Written It.  But judging from his comments on the books that have been written, I get the feeling he thinks this is a good thing.

The fact that there are 78 Reasons why your book may never be published and only 14 reasons that it just might be speaks to the odds against having a novel make it into print.  The essays given to each Reason are short and often end with a little gag, so as to take the sting out of the barb.  The advice is sound and well reasoned and will likely be ignored by it’s intended target.  As he says, Writers tend to have blind spots when it comes to their own writing.  I can read the reasons and nod my head in agreement, and yet my own work suffers from any number of them.

My favorite little gag has to do with Pat meeting one of the authors whose work he had rejected.  The Writer tries to explain the deeper meaning of the work and clarify the points that Pat had missed.  In the end he said they had to end their talk, as his pizza was getting cold and the Writer had other deliveries to make.  Da-dum-bump!

He talks about basic stuff here, but I know from talking to fellow would-be-writers that the basic stuff is often missing from their world view.  Things like Grammar, Syntax, The Slush Pile, Publishers, Editors, and Agents.  All the stuff you should have learned by reading Strunk & White and the opening essays of Writer’s Market and Literary Marketplace.  Things that all those books on How To Write A Novel and Get It Published bang on about.

This is a book written for people who already have a novel finished and need some advice on where to go from there.  An idea, a few notes scribbles on a napkin, a rough outline that hits the high points, is not a finished novel.  78 Reasons is still a great little book and well worth reading, even if your novel is forever in the planning stages.

In the end, the advice boils down the bleeding obvious-write a Great Book.  Then make sure you have a great cover letter, a short and snappy bio, perfect spelling, everything correct and proper in the manuscript, and the patience to wait for that call from a happy Editor who wants to publish your book.  How hard can that be?

The hero, such as he/it is, is a little robot bearing a striking resemblance to Number 5 from Short Circuit.  His job is to clean up the Earth, one pile of scrap metal at a time.  He is a walking garbage compactor who has been busy for the last 700 years or so turning random bits of trash into nice compact cubes.  He then uses these cubes to make skyscraper high pyramids.  I suppose that there was a time when some other machine came and took the cubes away, but those days are long gone.  Wall-e is the last of his kind, and whenever he sees another Wall-e, he just uses it for spare parts.

As Wall-e rolls around the city collecting junk and playing with his pet cockroach, his movement activates high tech billboards which talk about the perfect world created by B&L.  B&L seems to have taken over the world, as their logo is on everything Wall-e passes. This is a very good looking bit of animation, Wall-e has a nice used up feel to him and the rust and corrosion of an abandoned world looks pretty convincing.

The images that flash to life on the billboards are of people living the good life, sitting by the pool, smiling and happy.  Even the President, Fred Willard, is all smiles in his random announcements.   At first I thought that Pixar had finally solved their one great weakness-that their human character rendering totally sucks.  But no, this is just real world footage added for no good reason that I can see.  It only serves to make the cartoonish and goofy looking ‘humans’ that show up later look even more goofy and cartoonish.  Why not make a cartoon Fred Willard?  Or why not try and make realistic looking people?

As Wall-e goes about his never ending task, Earth is visited by a high tech probe scanning the city for signs of life.  Wall-e falls in love with the sleek white probe and followers her back to her mothership, where the remnants of humankind are on a never ending cruise.

When I was a kid I read every Mad Magazine I could get my hands on.  These were often brilliant bits of business, lots of satire and irony and the artwork was pretty impressive as well.  One of the stories form an early issue of the magazine talked about how the Chinese were going to take over America. As we did nothing but eat and watch TV, we would evolve into humans with large round bottoms and withered and atrophied legs.  The Chinese would just push us over and take over the country.

The writers of Wall-e must have read the same Mad Magazine I did as the people on the cruise ship are fat and can’t walk.  Everyone rides around in hoverchairs and is constantly waited on by robots.  The Robots are the important characters, the people are the left over villains of an evil empire that has been dead lo these many years.

There are all kinds of cute touches, such as Wall-e’s obsession with Hello Dolly, or was it Bye Bye Birdie? and the fact that Wall-e’s girl friend could instantly solve Rubik’s Cube.

But the overall plot was lacking a few bits of common sense. The fatsos are always eating and drinking, where does this foodstuff come from?  The cruise ship is in perfect condition with no signs of age or wear at all-how is this possible?  Our heroes meet a couple of Jumbo sized Wall-es who are busy making giant trash cubes, which they then jettison into space.  Where does the material for new robots, etc, come from and why haven’t they jettisoned the whole ship after 700 years of throwing their trash into space?  Human reproduction seems to take place without human involvement and there were no old people.

In the end, the hapless humans return to the ruined Earth, which is still ruined, despite Wall-e 700 hundred year efforts to clean one corner of it.  As the credits roll we are shown little pictographs of the Robots plowing fields and doing other bits of primitive labor.  If robots could terraform Earth in the first place, why did the Americans have to abandon Earth?

I’m a bit too old fashioned for The Cadillac Ranch, I prefer my art to look much as it looked when the artist created it.  I have never been a big fan of graffiti-well, except for Banksy.  I remember visiting the Bridges of Madison County not long after the movie had been released.  The Bridges had been painted a nice fresh white for the film.  By the time we saw them, they were covered end to end with mindless scribbles.  Much the same can be said about the Cadillac Ranch.

So unlike Stonehenge or the Mona Lisa, people are free to bring in cans of spray paint, gallons of house paint, shovels, rakes, and implements of destruction.  The cars bear little resemblance to their original selves.  Some people have not been content to add to the endless layers of paint and have taken to bending the metal here and there.  I sort of like the idea of changeable art, but at the same time, I wish there was a permanent exhibit somewhere with pristine cars sporting a fresh coat of wax on their exposed halves.

Other visitors expressed outrage at the mounds of garbage littering the surrounding area.  Dozens of used spray cans, dirty paint brushes, and empty gallon paint cans formed a ring of trash around the sculpture.  Clear evidence of why the U.S. Parks Service keeps people with spray cans away from the Washington Monument.

There were a couple of people busy whitewashing a large section of one car. I suppose to give themselves a clean area to ‘work’ in.  The fact that their own creation will be covered with someone else’s ‘art’ in pretty short order didn’t seem to bother them.  Having never had an inner vandal to feed, I am completely puzzled by this behavior.  There are only two reason to stop in Amarillo, Texas-The Big Texan and The Cadillac Ranch.  And here are people actively working to destroy one of them.

Ok, so The Cadillac Ranch is not exactly in the same league as Falling Water or The Venus De Milo, but it is still a work of art.  It still deserves some respect.  But if it’s creator doesn’t give a damn about it, I don’t guess I should either.  I still couldn’t help approaching the site with a bit of excitement and I did find it very interesting, for all it’s layers of paint and rusty decay. 

There were no signs here saying not to take photos.  No signs saying not to touch the art.  In fact, now that I think about it, I’m surprised there wasn’t someone sitting there selling cans of spray paint for $5 a pop.  There was nothing in the way of explanation, as there is at The Texas Stonehenge site.  It’s just a gate in a fence and a handful of old cars planted in a field in the middle of nowhere Texas.  And I guess that is the way it should be.

Well, maybe they could add a tape playing Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch on an endless loop.

Part of the shows charm is that we get to hear the Conchords sing their latest terrible song. My favorite Conchord song is The Humans Are Dead. It’s a short little ditty about how robots took over the world in the 1990s. You’d never guess this video was shot with no budget and a cell phone.

The Wife has always been a big fan of Haunted Houses.  One of our first dates was to a grade school haunted house with peeled grape eyeballs and macaroni brains.  It was still fun, even though it was not the scariest haunted house.  But then, we weren’t kids either.

On our first trip to Disneyland, during an October, their Haunted Mansion was closed for maintenance.  How can you close a haunted house in October?  The next time we went it was open, but it had been given a Nightmare Before Christmas makeover and was not exactly the same as I remembered it.  Oh well.

We live close to Six Flags over Texas and often go to their haunted nights, but much of the stuff is outside and it take a while to get dark around here.  There are a lot of smaller haunted houses here and there, so the Wife often hits one or two of those.  She sometimes drags me along with her, but I am not as impressed with things as I used to be.

Our favorite haunted houses are in Kansas City in an old warehouse district.  They are top haunted houses with a lot of rooms, lots of people jumping out at you, and lots of cool set pieces.  These are great Halloween activities, but I doubt that I will be getting up there again this year.  Besides, it’s a been there, done that kind of thing now.

The London Dungeon is a great little place in London that is not exactly a haunted house, but is filled with elaborate Halloweenish sets and costumes.  It’s more of a wax museum, but it did have a few scares here and there as well.

We have never been to the Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando Resort, but it does sound like our kind of thing.  I like the large haunted house props and the fun Halloween costumes. Haunted houses are one of our things to do on Halloween.  In fact, The Wife tends to like Halloween stuff all the time.  The prices seem a tad high, but them, most of these mega haunted houses are pretty expensive.  Someone has to pay for all those spooky Halloween decorations.  Maybe we can get away for a few days and check it out.

TICKETS ON SALE NOW FOR UNIVERSAL ORLANDO RESORT’S HALLOWEEN HORROR NIGHTS 20

For 24 Nights This Fall, Guests Will Face New Haunted Houses, Scarezones, Shows at Nation’s Most Frightening Halloween Event

WHAT: Two decades of diabolical icons.  Two decades of preying on the fears and nightmares of millions of people.  Twenty years of horror. For 24 nights this fall, Universal Studios Florida will be home to all-new haunted houses, inescapable scarezones, hundreds of frightening “scareactors” and live shows.  Guests will be immersed in the horrors of years’ past and introduced to brand-new frights.

OFFERS & TICKET PRICES:Universal Orlando Resort is offering a variety of ways to experience Halloween Horror Nights 20, including:

The Gory Getaway Vacation Package includes three-night hotel accommodations at a Universal Partner Hotel, one 2-Day Base and Halloween Horror Nights Combo ticket, one 5×7 souvenir photograph and access to live entertainment at Universal CityWalk.  Guests visiting during the day also receive Early Park Admission to Islands of Adventure before the general public. The Gory Getaway Vacation Package starts from $299 per adult, and can be booked online at www.HalloweenHorrorNights.com or by calling 1-888-467-7677 (HORROR-7).

Advance tickets for Halloween Horror Nights are now on sale for $74.99 plus tax.

Guests can buy Halloween Horror Nights 20 tickets at www.HalloweenHorrorNights.com or by calling 1-888-467-7677 (HORROR-7). Because of the event’s popularity, tickets for weekend nights are expected to sell out and should be purchased well in advance.  For more information, visit www.HalloweenHorrorNights.com.

WHERE:Universal Studios Florida theme park at Universal Orlando Resort

WHEN:September 24-25, September 30-October 1-3, 7-10, 14-17, 20-24 and 27-31

Mark Whitacre can’t help himself.  He thinks of he is the man in the white hat, as the hero in his own story, as a man doing the right thing.  The only problem is that he is a lair and a thief.  This tends to make his usefulness as a whistleblower a bit limited.  It makes him a pretty good suspect though.

The Informant is filled with Mark Whitacre sharing his advice on life and how to make people like you.  On the one hand, he is a dim bulb who walks around in a Pollyanna world where doing the right thing is all that needs to be done to be the hero.  After he becomes an informant he still thinks that he will one day be President of Archer Daniels Midland.  He is told by his lawyers not to talk to anyone, so he sets up a series of press conferences and goes on a media blitz.  He is honestly confused when the FBI is not happy that he has given an interview to The Wall Street Journal.

On the other hand, he is a world class embezzler.  One of the running gags after he admits to stealing money is that the amount he stole keeps getting bigger and bigger.  What started out as a mere $500,000 ends up being over $10 million and maybe more.  Mark Whitacre seems to have a hard time remember things like dates and numbers.  His wife is also a bit dim as she mentions how Mark bought ten cars, three of which they never even used.  That’s the kind behavior that might tip some people off that something a little odd was going on.

The most amazing bits of the story are when Mark is recording the secret meetings about price fixing.  He makes people move when they are blocking the camera, bangs on the tape recorder in his briefcase when the tape gets stuck, and cleans the lens on a hidden camera with other people in the room.  No one notices his odd behavior, but then, his behavior is always odd.

He ends up in jail, still thinking he has been wronged. He may have stole a few million dollars, but ADM stole tens of millions. He wanted a Presidential Pardon for his crimes. The Informant is based on a true story, but you have to wonder whose version of the truth is the real one.