Things I've Always Wanted To Say

To Jesus, "Thank God you never wore socks with sandals!"

To Louis Armstrong, "Would you please clear your throat."

To Billy Joel, "Date a Jewish Girl, would you please."

To Moses, "Roman numerals? Are you kidding me?"

To Madonna's father, "Well?"

With all due respect to Kenny Rogers...

...my father-in-law, William Stein of New City, NY, an engineer, poet and devoted player of Texas Hold 'Em has shared with me the following original poem.  He has agreed that I may share it with my readers. It is rare to find one person who combines the science of engineering and the sensibilities of poetry with the risk-taking and bravado of a good bluff, but William Stein does it with grace and class.

Ode to Alan & Tony, The Ace and the Ten

If you can keep your chips when other players

  Are losing theirs and blaming it on you

If you can bluff and keep the others guessing

  And have the style and form to follow through;

If you can wait for starting hands worth playing

  And conceal their strength with smile and guile galore

If you can bet and raise your weak opponents

  Inducing calls until they’ve chips no more;

If you can shroud a pair of Tens in mystery

  Or play a suited Ace with style and grace

And watch the flop produce a Set or Flush draw

  And not reveal your psychic change of pace;

If you can win and keep a humble mind-set

  Or lose a hand and never voice complaint

If you can bear the pain of someone’s suck-out

  And exercise emotional restraint;

If you rejoice each time you’re playing Hold-em

  With friend or foe and all who play for fun

You’ll grow in wisdom and in understanding

  And then one day you’ll know the game, My Son.

What You Don't Know About Gravel Could Choke A Horse

In NYC, there is concrete and asphalt. Sidewalks are concrete, roadways are asphalt, and that's all there is to it.  In the GNC, we have concrete, mostly for foundations, asphalt for roadways, and we have gravel for everything in between. We have more varieties of gravel here than Dunkin has donuts. I know this because I have just researched, purchased, had delivered, spread, and graded twenty tons of Item 4. Shopping at a quarry is not something I had to do when I lived in mid-town Manhattan, but I did it last week in the GNC.

A nugget of Item 4 (I don't know why its called that, since as far as I know, there is no Item 1, 2 or 3) is about the size of a sugar cube.  Imagine twenty tons of sugar cubes being delivered to your apartment in a 4-axle container truck and being brought up in an elevator. Twenty tons of Item 4 would fill every room in your NYC apartment from floor to ceiling with enough left over to fill the swimming pool at Asphalt Green.

To give you an idea of the varieties I had to choose from, there is: bank gravel (gravel mixed with sand or clay), bench gravel (gravel located on the side of a valley above the present stream bottom, indicating the former location of the stream bed when it was at a higher level), creek rock (rounded, semi-polished stones that are dredged or scooped from river beds and creek beds). Crushed rock (rock that is mechanically broken into small pieces then sorted by filtering through different size mesh) is different from crushed stone (which is generally limestone or dolomite that has been crushed and graded by screens to certain size classes). A special type of crushed limestone is dense grade aggregate or DGA.

The most common sizes of crushed stone are 3/8, 5/8, 3/4, 1 1/2, 2 1/2.  If you really need another size, I'm sure you can find it. Crushed stone is measured in inches, but fine gravel is measured in millimeters (particles with a diameter of 1 to 2 mm).  Go figure. 

There is also lag gravel (coarse gravel produced by the removal of finer particles), pay gravel (also known as “pay dirt”, a nickname for gravel with a high concentration of metals) and  piedmont gravel (coarse gravel carried down from high places by mountain streams and deposited on relatively flat ground) not to mention  plateau gravel (gravel from a region above the height at which terrace gravel is usually found) and terrace gravel.  

There are more species of gravel, but this is a blog not Wikipedia.  

Let's not forget Item 4, which is good for driveways.  Item 4 is about $25 per ton delivered, so I just paid $500 for pebbles, and the GNC has rocks everywhere I look.  Go figure.

Building A Platform

Yesterday in the mail, came another rejection from an agent I had invited to represent my manuscript . It was my return envelope, with my three sample chapters inside, but nothing else - not a letter, note, scribble on the pages, nothing. I understand being busy, but "No. Thanks." doesn't take long to jot.

I am learning from talking to other authors that nowadays: the time from agent-finding to traditional book-on-the-shelves is now up to three years; the the average number of copies sold at an in-person, in-store book signing at Barnes & Noble is one; that if the manuscript doesn't have "robots and vampires" it has little chance of getting any traction with the first screeners at literary agencies.

We authors in the GNC (there are some) are witnessing the "disintermediation" of the publishing industry by the internet, leaving all but a special few with no access to the "old" channel.  One agent wrote to me in his rejection note that he liked my characters and plot, but that Costco and Walmart sell more copies of fewer titles than Barnes & Noble does of all its titles combined, and therefore publishers are publishing for Costco and Walmart shoppers.  My characters and plot wouldn't appeal to them.  That says it all.

So, unless you're Stephen King or John Grishman or endorsed by Oprah, I guess it has to be self-publish, e-publish and sell from your own "platform".  

Excuse me while I go the Walmart to try to find a book on "Building A Platform."  Ah yes, here it is, in the home improvement section!

Recent Snowfall Totals

According to the NWS, the snowfall in the GNC on Saturday night into Sunday ranged from over 16 inches in Elka Park to about 4 inches in Cairo.  In my neck of the woods (literally, it is a neck of the woods), the actual total, measured by me with a yard stick stuck into the railing on the front deck, when it was all over was 8.75 inches.  But that was before I started talking about it.

When worried relatives called to check on the power situation, we minimized, "Oh - it was nothing.  Just a little over 6 inches - barely covered the driveway.  Nothing to worry about...we didn't even lose power."

But for friends calling from the Midwest, who always brag to me about how much snow they get and how rugged they are, I said, "Damn!  Pretty heavy snowstorm here for October.  Cold, windy -- I'd say we got about a foot, give or take an inch.  Was out shoveling by 7am so I could go out for some groceries.  Roads will be plowed soon, I guess", though the roads had been plowed hours ago.  We love our county plowmen.

Skier-friends starting checking in around noon, wondering if Hunter Mountain was opening for the weekend.  "Well, you can hike up and ski down if you like.  We got at least 14 inches - probably more at the summit.  Not too wet - not the usual Catskill Concrete. You can make some nice turns but bring your rock skis.  Fourteen inches of snow doesn't cover 15 inches of rock!"

The last person to call was a friend in the valley who wanted me to come down and help him move furniture.  "Gee, I'd love to, really, but we got over a foot-and-a-half of heavy, wet snow and the roads haven't been plowed or sanded yet.  Don't think I want to go down the mountain today - you know, there's still one lane out on 23A near Moore's Bridge. Sorry...why don't you call Jim from Palenville.  They hardly got any snow down there."

If you want a reliable weather report from a reliable source on the Mountaintop, you had better not call me.

First snow of the season.

Time to put away the shorts and sandals.

Variety in the GNC

Traveled round trip from the Mountaintop to Poughkeepsie train station at dusk last night, about 110 miles. Here is a list of what was dead at the road side, road middle and rest stop.

• rabbit
• squirrel
• porcupine
• skunk (unmistakable)
• deer, also later, fawn (cute, but dead nonetheless)
• unrecognizable varmint sort of like a beaver, but with a long, round tail
• cat (no collar)
• bird (species undetermined), pretty feathers, not far from cat
• chipmunk
• something larger than a chipmunk but looks like one (maybe just a really big chipmunk?)
• snake 
• human, perhaps (car on fire on thruway after multi-vehicle accident)
• twelve pack of Budweiser (missed the trash can at Truck Stop, NB past Exit 19)

Returned home by 9pm.  I'm sure the list would be much longer at 2am.  Suppose you could make stew.