To celebrate suspension of a blog that no one reads, I'll send you a pdf book of your choice. Email wolfdevoon@gmail.com (subject line: Pick a Book) and allow a couple weeks for delivery. I have to walk a mile to use a neighbor's wifi, weather permitting. If it's too hot, too cold, raining, or muddy, it might not happen promptly, and if you don't hear from me after a couple months, I probably died. For reasons that I don't fully understand, dead authors sell more books than living ones, so I'm not opposed to it. Let's hope that everything goes swimmingly during a progressively crushing recession and my neighbor doesn't lose power or internet service. One pdf per customer. Social media buzz appreciated. Search Google or Duck Duck Go for book descriptions and reader reviews. Cable & Blount is an anthology of my first three Case Files novels. Finding Flopsie is sold separately and mysteriously difficult to find. All titles include adult ideas, graphic sex, frank language, and bold white heroism. Eventually they'll all disappear in a cloud storage purge of hate speech. Act now before Amazon figures out who I am. Thanks.
Google lost my videos. Try https://vimeo.com/user66655576
I don't regret all the effort I put into this blog. I could have been more
careful with money. My daughter wants a .22 automatic and a holster for her
birthday. It took me a long time to learn how to write, and it never paid more
than pennies. Friends have been exceedingly kind to me, Tom and Erik in
particular.
Whether Steam Punk is ever completed, my portrait of an ideal man, I'm
satisfied that Escape was worth every hour and month of hot pursuit, every decade
of reaching higher creatively.
In parting, I'd like to mention two life lessons that proved to be pivotal.
As a 5-year-old, I rode a city bus that stopped right outside our house (the
bus line was owned by my uncle) and I went to kindergarten in a new brick building
funded by my grandfather adjacent to the high school where my dad graduated as
president of the senior class, his portrait in the hallway. I liked the
kindergarten kids, liked music class, clapping nice wooden sticks together, liked
milk and graham crackers and nap time. The memorable life lesson was watching
my kindergarten teacher churn cream into butter with a hand crank, which took a
long time. Served to us on a saltine, it was really good butter. Learning how
to do things was possible. The other pivotal life lesson was renting an office
on the 10th floor of a tall modern Max Factor Building opposite the Chinese
Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. I signed a one-page sublease offered by an old character
actor who was in partnership with a New York producer to make cheap genre films
that were never released. They made money by milking investors. "If you
want to get ahead in this business," the washed up B-list actor advised,
"you have to learn how to steal."
It's so damn sad. My dog is too old to understand verbal commands. He wants
to obey and can't. If I call him to Come Here, he doesn't know where I am,
walks the wrong way. I have to put water right in front of him, splash it with
my fingers, repeat several times as clearly as possible Here, Look, Dog Water. He
suffers from skin tumors and fleas. I wash him with dish soap that works better
than flea shampoo. If I don't give him cooked vegetables and oil in his food,
he can't poop. I have to gently wipe his blind eyes almost hourly. In the
middle of the night he was trembling and frantic, insisted on remaining
outside. I think his brain is failing, a harbinger of my own fate. I'll end up
like Lunch Bucket Joe, unable to frame or finish an intelligent thought, stuck in the
mud of misremembered lies written by someone else.
Good time to quit.
Before I do, I have to say it again. Oil is a highly competitive business, hundreds of producers, refiners, and pipeline companies with trillions of dollars at risk, squeaking by on single digit margins. They pay corporate taxes on profits and pay lease royalties on every barrel they produce. Offshore wells are big investments, drilling down through miles of water and rock, working from billion dollar floaters. Every aspect of work is regulated and public. The price you pay at the pump is 30% inflated by Federal, state, and local taxes. Oil is used to make plastics for hospitals, home improvement, electric cable, plumbing, food packaging, aircraft, cars, buses, schools and playgrounds. Every container ship burns bunker fuel. Natural gas cooks your food in homes and restaurants and generates a third of all U.S. electric power, 24/7, impervious to rain or snow. Fuel oil heats icy homes in winter. Natural gas is an input in fertilizer. Jet fuel flies every passenger and military plane. Diesel powers every big rig, farm tractor, bulldozer and backhoe. Discovering new oil & gas supplies is an intense scientific and engineering challenge. Drilling is dangerous and costly. The seven million men and women directly employed in U.S. oil & gas exploration and production are highly trained professionals, half of them university grads, without whom you would starve, no power, no transport, no medical testing or sterile surgery, no police or firefighters. "Green" tech is a swindle that would not exist without Chinese slave labor and lavish subsidies that oil companies do not have. We import over 1/3 of the oil we consume in America, because U.S. oil reserves are scarce and Obama made it impossible to drill the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (hundreds of miles away from ANWR). The corrupt oil kleptocracies of the Middle East, Africa, and Russia export most of their oil and natural gas to China, India, Japan, Korea, and Europe, setting the price that U.S. companies have to pay for imports. No one makes a nickel of profit from "nationalized" production except shieks, colonels, and smiling expats from England, France, Spain, and Italy. I've met them. They are incompetent bootlicks. U.S. geologists discovered and developed giant reserves in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Soviet Union, and Venezuela — all of which was expropriated and looted by corrupt kings and communist tyrants.
Please note that Mark Levin is a total fool. He thinks that hydraulic
fracturing of shale is "clean" and it was invented by Big Oil, a high
tech wave of the future. In reality, frackers are penny ante minnows, $100
billion in debt. Their wells cost 3 times more than straight holes, and all of the
thick rich "core" plays have been fracked to death. High pressure shale
fracturing was pioneered by an elderly drilling contractor who was unable to
make a profit doing it. Without high yield debt and 0% Fed funds, there would
have been no scramble for shale leases. High flyers like Chesapeake's Aubrey
McClendon surfed the fracking wave to disaster, financially and personally. His
company had to be bailed out by China's CNOOC. Major U.S. oil companies bought more
successful frackers, never made a penny of profit by acquiring
"experts" to dispose of millions of gallons of contaminated water to
produce a few thousand barrels of oil and natural gas. Fracking became 100% uninteresting
to Big Oil. The majors need to find and lift billions of barrels from ultradeep
Gulf of Mexico or Alaska or overseas
Oily shale frackers produce approximately 1 million barrels per day. Sounds like a lot of oil, right? Hah. We consume 20 million bdp. The OECD industrial democracies consume 50 million bdp. Global demand is 95 million barrels per day. Fracking is 1% of global supply. Watch what happens when junk bond rates rise to 12%. Frackers make more money hedging the market with derivatives instead of oil and gas production. It's all going to die off precipitously because they've already drilled all the thick rich "core" plays. Thinner shale is a fool's errand. Natural gas? Russia has half of all known gas reserves on earth. Qatar, Iran, and Algeria are natural gas giants. America is a pipsqueak gas producer, depleting our gassy shale reserves at a gallop. Two thirds of U.S. natural gas production comes from straight holes in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Colorado, deepwater Gulf of Mexico, and California, much of it derived as an associated byproduct of conventional oil production.
Over and out. Oh ... wait a minute. Here's a playlist.
The Hollies ("Bus Stop")
Laura Brannigan ("Gloria")
Arrowsmith ("Walking In The Sand")
The Pretenders ("Brass In Pocket")
Abba ("Take A Chance On Me")
Frank Zappa ("Fifty Fifty")
Bonny Raitt ("Something To Talk About")
Bee Gees ("Nights On Broadway")
The Pretenders ("Don't Get Me Wrong")
Devo ("Whip It")
Los Bravos ("Black Is Black")
Abba ("Money Money Money")
The Eagles ("Wasted Time")
Led Zeppelin ("In The Light")
Blood Sweat & Tears ("Go Down Gambling")
Joan Jett ("Hate Myself for Loving You")
Alice Cooper ("Only Women Bleed")
Led Zeppelin ("Black Dog")
Electric Light Orchestra ("Hold On Tight")
Huey Lewis ("I Want A New Drug")
Heart ("Straight On For You")
The Zombies ("She's Not There")
Notable speeches:
John F. Kennedy
Ronald Reagan
Margaret Thatcher
Movies:
The Inn Of The Sixth Happiness
Meet John Doe
Twelve O'clock High
Key Largo
It's A Wonderful Life
The Quiet Man
The African Queen
Sink The Bismarck
The Greatest Show On Earth
Charly
Day Of The Jackal
Anatomy Of A Murder
White TV:
77 Sunset Strip
The Rockford Files
Columbo
The Muppet Show
Get Smart
Kojak
If you're interested in satirical cinematic achievements, consider Theodore
Bikel's baritone benediction in Frank Zappa's 1971 feature length movie 200 Motels: "Lord, have mercy on the
people in England for the terrible food these people must eat." Highly
recommended. Swell song vocals by Howard Kaylan and Mark Volman (The Turtles), gifted rock drummer Ainsley Dunbar, the London
Festival Orchestra, and Murakami-Wolf animation. Zappa's musical genius at the
height of his vitality. Filmed in just two weeks (!) on super sharp 800-line video
with trippy special effects and transferred to 35mm by Image Transform. It pushed
me into a lifelong love affair with low budget production.
I'm in favor of gun control. Use both hands and practice.
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