E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

Well, it's finally over: a long nightmarish week of life in a cloud-computing thunderhead, Cloud 8 1/2 as opposed to Cloud Nine, a dark cloud which, if there is a silver lining, it's strictly of the organizational variety. The Chinese have a term for making a mistake like I did: Loss of Face. In my case for falling flat on my shoulda-known-better ass for the oldest phishing scam there is: the "Lost in the Wilderness Send Money" scam. No, I didn't send money. I just asked everybody I know, ever met, ever emailed, or did business with to send money. Lots of it. Luckily, nobody else fell for it, although one friend nearly did. Looking back, the Hacker-spammer-phisherman knew exactly which buttons to get me to push. Most disturbingly, I have long known better than to fall for internet scams, other than a car purchase/theft which I easily averted. Yet there is a weakness millions of us vulnerable humans seem to be afflicted with: a willingness, even a need, to trust. T...

There were three extremely disturbing stories in the news this morning, and none had anything to do with Libya, or Obama, or deficits (at least fiscal ones) or our disfunctional Congress. What they had a lot more to do with was the End of Civilization as we know it. To wit: the Philadelphia Orchestra is bankrupt. That is huge, and utterly inexcusable to be allowed to happen in any society that still imagines itself to be advanced. On a lesser scale, but equally significant, here in Seattle two similar cultural decisions have been reached: to close down the Intiman Theater, arguably the finest repertory company on the West Coast; and on a smaller, but perhaps even more significant scale, Nordstroms is firing all its piano players. No, not because they are too costly, or not gifted enough, or destract shoppers from their mission. No, it's because today's shoppers, it turns out, pefer canned pop music to live piano. So I think it wouldn't be too much of a reach to say that to...

Pet Peeve: Hollywood producers have long had the habit of shooting location footage in their back yard and calling it Rome. Or Alaska. Or Seattle. Or New Jersey, where I happened to grow up. What these people seem obliviously, vaingloriously, utterly incapable of grasping, or even imagining, is that the rest of the world, or for that matter the rest of the country, does not in the slightest resemble those brown, burned out hills and valleys that surround Los Angeles, and resemble nothing so much as, well, Los Angeles. This past week I was watching two of my favorite shows, and they are favorites no more, because I have become so weary of having burnt brown stains smeared across my screen and being asked to believe it is Seattle, or Princeton, or Niagara Falls. Do these people in Hollywood actually imagine that nobody outside of Los Angeles County (or for that matter, inside of Los Angeles County) ever goes outside, opens their eyes, and looks around? That we won't notice the Hollyw...

A friend of mine works at NOAA, at their main research facility in Seattle. Or at least she will until Friday. Seattle happens to be the closest American city to Asia, as well as the devastating turmoil in Japan, where radioactive water continues to flow into the Pacific, and radiation into the air, all of which, sooner or later, will circumnavigate the globe. Already, low levels (so we are told) of radiation are turning up in both air and water in such unlikely places as Boise, Idaho, and Boston, Massachusetts. But no matter. Nothing to worry about, right? Except, well, maybe a little something called 'nuclear winter.' Which we may be having already in the Northwest, actually, since we have hardly seen the sun in six months, and then only on the cold days. Oh, and NOAA is also charged with trying to figure out whether the Gulf of Mexico is still alive, given most of its creatures are not; or, like the dolphins off Florida, are in the process of dying horrible deaths. But no ma...

I heard two strikingly contradictory, and yet somehow related stories on NPR, the past two days. The first was about Barbie. It seems Mattell is closing its Barbie factory in China. This was not the usual factory American corporations like to operate out of China. This one was special. This one had been intended for the express purpose of selling Barbie Dolls in China itself: to the growing market of pre-teen Chinese girls in the growing Chinese middle class, already some 300 millino strong when I was there (must be closer to half a million by now, which is a lot of girls). Unfortunately for Mattel, it turns out the Chinese didn't take to Barbie after all (even though my stepdaughter, with whom, along with her mother, I successfully absonded from the PRC per several chapters in my book, was a huge Barbie fan). Could this national failure on the part of the Chinese possibly have anything at all to do with the fact that Barbie, at least during my three year tunure from '04 to ...

As has been noted and reported repeatedly over the past year, America is not just on a war footing now. We have never not been on a war footing, or actively fighting on at least one front since I was born, since the first Boomer was born, and for most of the 20th Century before then, not to mention much of the 19th Century, and a fair chunk of the one before that, even a hundred years prior to our Independence (all those Indian wars, remember? Or maybe we'd rather not). Meanwhile, the Military Industrial Complex and the right-wing pundits who currently dominate the media landscape in the U.S.A. just now are agitating, slavering, and creaming in their dress uniforms over the incredibly profitable prospects of the biggest war ever yet to come: the war with China. Yes, Hu Jintao is a typical conservative political hack, the perfect Chinese equivalent to John Boehmer except in a bigger House. His and his party's policies on human rights, among other issues, still suck. But the cur...

I have a conundrum that may be unique in the annals of the literary expose. I just received via parcel post a package of books from Russia (see below). They are in Russian, of course, and published by Ekmo, a Russian publisher. They look very cool, actually, a nice hardcover edition with an embossed color illustration, as you can see. I am the author of this book, and have no idea what the Russian title is, but my original title was The Shakespeare Chronicles , written by me under the pseudonym John Underwood: my paternal great-grandfather's name, and also the name of one of Shakespeare's Boon Companions. Here's the thing: there is no English language version of this book. (Full disclosure: there is an obscure nonfiction trade book by the same title and a different pseudonym of Desmond Lewis. This is actually the basis of my book, and is part of the plot). My foreign agent Danny Baror sold rights to my book to Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian and Italian publishers back i...