Taking Opportunity by the Hair

Ten-minute break at rehearsal. 

I don’t sing...sing well, that is...but I’m good enough to backup others and so I’ve got a minor, albeit fun, role in a production of Into the Woods.  In the last couple of weeks I’ve joined with another cast member to create the two-person peanut gallery.  Cracking jokes about everything from lines, to music, to everything.  We’ve become convinced that Stephen Sondheim must’ve been on speed or some kind of upper when he wrote the music for this show.  Of course we’re just having a laugh at our inability to wrap our mouths around the songs which are really, really fast and full of tongue-tangling lines.

But there is a good line full of truth in the show:  “Opportunity is not a lengthy visitor.” 

The ancient Greeks depicted Kairos, which is sometimes translated as “time, period, or season,” as bald save for one lock of hair near his forehead.  He was always on toe-tips in any statue because he was running (and sometimes with winged feed) at a sprint because his presence is fleeting and so to make the most of it, you must grab his lock of hair as quickly as possible or else he may never come around again.  He’s here and then he’s not.

The Romans, understanding this as well as having their personification of opportunity (Occasio/Tempus), bequeathed to us the phrases carpe diem and tempus fugit.  While the first one everyone associates with seizing opportunity, the second not so much.  As Tempus was the Roman counterpart of Kairos, and Kairos was always depicted as running it creates a double meaning since “Tempus flies.” 

But, I digress.  Opportunity is short-lived.  Take it.  Sometimes you do have to “go into the woods” to get what you dream of most.  “Though it’s fearful, though it’s deep, though it’s dark, though you may encounter wolves...if you know you’re wish, you can have your wish, but can’t just wish, no to get your wish you have to go into the woods.”  

Amazon and Second-Class Customers

Been running in circles chasing Amazon this week about an issue.  Finally got a reply from them today and it’s filled with such faulty and insulting logic I don’t know where to begin. 

The very first review posted by one of my first customers happened to be from my mother-in-law.  She’d never read the book.  I never asked her to post the review.  Only thing I want is honest reviews from readers who can tell me if I’m headed in the right direction with my writing.  In this case, she gave one.  It was 4-stars and included “I couldn’t put it down,” a line used by one of my beta-readers a few months ago when I pulled the manuscript out of mothballs and needed insight. 

Well, Amazon pulled my MIL’s review and never could give me or her a straight answer.  So, I poked the bear again and got a reply:

“Subject: A Message from Amazon Review Moderation

“Hello,

“After receiving your response, we have reviewed your account and re-evaluated the Customer Review removed from your book, "The Promise."

“Unfortunately, we cannot post the review to the Amazon website because you know the reviewer.

“We encourage your friends and family to share their enthusiasm for your books using our Customer Discussions feature. To find Customer Discussions, go to the book's product detail page, scroll down past Customer Reviews, and click on the Start a Discussion button. Anyone who visits Amazon can read a discussion.”

My reply to their reply is as follows with the text of their reply interspersed and addressed point by point:

“Please allow me to address the logic employed by your review moderator, the text of which I will attach and address point by point.  It is circular, faulty, and only serves to stifle author readership.

“Subject: A Message from Amazon Review Moderation

“Hello,

“After receiving your response, we have reviewed your account and re-evaluated the Customer Review removed from your book, "The Promise."

“Unfortunately, we cannot post the review to the Amazon website because you know the reviewer.”

“I’ve just self-published my first novel.  I don’t have the big press releases, the massive staff, and the endless resources of all the major publishing house in New York who dominate the book world and are trying to maintain their oligarchy over it.  The only people who are going to buy my book right are likely going to be people I know or have known.  In this case, one of them is my mother-in-law, who had never read my book until she purchased it during the first days of its release.  Yes, she purchased it.  I didn’t give it to her; that would have violated the terms of my KDP Select agreement. 

“Now, I ask people for honest reviews.  Lying to me not only upsets me, it will never make me a better writer.  Even my wife is a harsh critic when needs be, but I take everything in the spirit it’s said and run with it.  Janet Smith said exactly what a good friend and beta reader (whom she has never met) said, almost word for word:  “I couldn’t put it down.”  That’s music to an author’s ears!  And Amazon wants to keep me stifled?  Wants to stifle the honest reviews of it’s customers?  Because that is exactly what has happened: she bought the book and then she honestly reviewed it.  I didn’t ask her to say anything.  Never even asked her to review it.  Janet Smith is a customer, my customer and your customer, who, through lawful purchase of a novel she had never read, has earned the courtesy of having her review posted.  If Amazon can’t see that that is exactly what has happened, then you’re “blinder than a Tiberian bat.” 

“We encourage your friends and family to share their enthusiasm for your books using our Customer Discussions feature. To find Customer Discussions, go to the book's product detail page, scroll down past Customer Reviews, and click on the Start a Discussion button. Anyone who visits Amazon can read a discussion.

“So, here’s where faulty, circular logic comes in.  Janet Smith cannot post a review but she rave about it to the top of her lungs in a discussion at the bottom?  Why not just let her post the honest review of a book she’s purchased and read?  Hell, she could just post the exact same words in your “Discussion Feature” without clicking the little stars.  And what has she done then if she does that?  Posted a review.  Not an “official” review, mind you, but a “review” nonetheless. 

“This is treating one of my customers – who is one of your customers – as a second-class customer only because she happens to know me personally since I married her daughter.  That’s right: you’ve relegated her to second-class status.  She’s not “pure” enough to post an honest, unbiased review (which she did; it got 4 stars; biased would’ve been 5).  But she can do the exact same thing without all the bells and whistles in a area reserved at the bottom of the page where no one reads? 

“Does Amazon wish to suppress the honest opinions of my fledgling readership?  Are honest reader/reviewers of my book, if they just happen to know me, second-class customers to Amazon?  Because if you say they’re not, but then treat them like you’ve treated Janet Smith, then your actions are speaking far louder than your words.  You are segregating one class of reader away from making a review in favor of others based on a set of assumptions because anyone in their right mind knows telepathic reading of another person’s mind is limited to speculative fiction.

“No author in the world who is just starting out can survive under these conditions if they wish to take their chances by publishing strictly through Amazon KDP.  Is Amazon actually protecting the turf of the Big Six Publishing Houses by stifling beginner’s readership voices all the while pretending to support the self-publishing pioneers?  Is that how Amazon really wants to be seen? 

“Your logic in this matter is not only terribly faulty, but it’s so full of horse manure I could plant roses in it and watch them bloom next spring.

“And, may I add, your review guidelines are buried so deep in the site, I bet don’t see but about 2 hits a month.  The numbers for that page will probably be double that this month because I’ve had to hunt for them.  And when I say “hunt,” I mean traipse through the brambles and the briars of the piney woods kind of hunting.  If you want people to know the guidelines, put them where they can be easily seen by everyone.  I had to click five separate links from the Amazon main page to find them.  They’re not easily found. 

“I am politely asking Amazon to reconsider their position on this matter.  Not only because it looks bad, and it's faulty, but it's just wrong-headed in this case.”

To adapt a line from a good movie:  “Here endeth the ranting.”

Facts Versus Hollywood: Space Vacuum and Bullets

You watch sci-fi movies and you see characters face the possibility of death from getting stuck outside the spaceship/space station or have a rupture in their space suit that causes all the air from their pack to bleed in the vacuum of space.  Tension ramps up; we fear for them; we know that if they don’t do something soon, they’ll pop like an overblown balloon!

Umm...wrong.

That’s where the science and the fiction deviate. 

Watching movies and television conditions us to expect certain possible outcomes which, in truth, are myths wrongly perpetuated by Hollywood because someone, somewhere back along the creative line, assumed something and it wasn’t accurate.

Two of the most commonly held misconceptions are that if someone were trapped in the vacuum of space they’d rupture open; and that when someone is shot they go backwards from the impact of the round hitting them.

When it comes to people suffering a gruesome death in the vacuum of space, let scientists tell the tale.  It’s actually far more gruesome than anything Hollywood had conceived.  According to the good folks over at I F***ing Love Science, a series of catastrophic events would ravage your body before you croaked.  The loss of external pressure around your body would lower the boiling point of bodily fluids, like blood and cerebrospinal fluid, such that bubbles would start forming (similar to “the bends”).  Because of these bubbles, the pain would be intense.  Then you’d swell up, likely to twice the normal size, but because of skin’s elastic properties, you won’t rupture.  But you’ll wish you had. 

As for oxygen in the this vacuum, forget trying to hold your breath.  All you would do is cause your lungs to rupture from the increased pressure inside them trying to race to those areas of lower pressure.  Not a pretty way to go.  And even if you expelled as much air as possible from your lungs to prevent such a catastrophic organ failure, you probably won’t have more than 15 seconds or so of consciousness; death would follow in about one to two minutes. 

In that one to two minutes span, should be picked up before you die, your body will be bombarded by radiation galore – X-Rays, gamma rays, and ultraviolet – to such an extent that cancer is inevitable.

The good writer at IFLS recaps it this way:  “In sum- you’d swell up, burn, mutate, pass out and your lungs might explode. Lovely.”

Yeah.

As for the other matter – what happens when a person is struck by a bullet – we have videographic evidence for that; no need for speculation.  Video footage of the D-Day Landings in the 1^st Infantry Division sector of Omaha Beach show the moment one American soldier pays the ultimate price.  There is no great flailing of the arms; no falling backwards and sprawling out; nothing dramatic.  He just falls in mid-stride and crumples to the ground.  It’s quick and over with.  (At the 39:04 minute mark in this video, watch the soldier furthest left: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN4dxsvOc_k.)

So there are two Hollywood-created myths that don’t quite “gee haw” with reality.

http://www.iflscience.com/space/what-would-happen-your-body-space-without-spacesuit
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN4dxsvOc_k

Missing Confederate Gold: Myth or Fact?

I was asked the other day, “Where did the story about lost Confederate gold get started?”

Good question. 

We’re talking about something that has reached mytho-legendary status in the U.S.  It’s been used in movies (Sahara, National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Timecop, and the classic The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly); literature (Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and it’s MGM movie adaptation); and, interestingly enough, two foreign comic books series (Tex from Italy and the Franco-Belgian Blueberry).  The idea that Confederate gold took flight at the end of the Civil War from the invading Yankees has become so inextricably linked with that time.

But as with any legend, there is or are some kernels of fact.

In 1862, with the Union naval flotilla approaching New Orleans, banks in the city, at the advice of the Confederate government, began dispersing their gold and silver specie to safe locations.  The Bank of Louisiana dispatched some three million dollars worth of gold and silver to Columbus, Georgia where they were put into the charge of W.H. Young, President of the Bank of Columbus. 

On the 11^th of October, 1862, General P.G.T. Beauregard, in command of Confederate troops in South Carolina, was directed by the Confederate Secretary of War to seize the specie and deliver it to a Confederate depository in Savannah.  Beauregard executed the questionable orders and completed his task, depriving Louisiana depositors of their money.  The exact whereabouts of the gold and silver from the Bank of Louisiana is unknown but most likely was used (illegally) by the Confederate Government to pay war expenses. 

Another, and more enticing possibility, comes at the end of the war, when chaos was the order of the day.  In April, 1865, after the Petersburg defenses fell and Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia retreated down the Appomattox River, the Confederate Government and what remained in the coffers of the Confederate Treasure and the independent banks in Richmond, was sent into flight south along a similar route as that taken by Jefferson Davis and entourage.  As this “treasure” made its way through the beleaguered South away from the Yankees, some of it was used to pay those soldiers it encountered:  $39,000 here in North Carolina; $108,000 there in the Savannah River area; another $40,000 there in Augusta, Georgia. 

Of the remaining Confederate funds left, $86,000 was entrusted to a Confederate office who was to take the money and entrust it into Confederate accounts abroad, presumably for the continuation of the Southern fight for independence.  That was May 4, 1865.  What became of that money has never been known.  Other funds that left Richmond included a large amount from the Richmond banks, which was captured May 10, 1865 by the 4^th Michigan Cavalry only to be stolen on May 25, 1865 by a group of men outside the Chennault Plantation in Danburg, Georgia.  Of nearly $250,000 taken in that impromptu raid, just under half of it – $111,000 – was recovered.  The rest vanished.

A few Confederate officers, most notably Generals John B. Magruder and Joseph Shelby, did make it to Mexico after the Civil War where they would remain for a short time before returning to the United States.  It would not impossible to imagine a few more having done the same, since 600 men from Shelby’s command followed him across the Rio Grande.  (Shelby’s unit, nicknamed “The Undefeated,” inspired the 1969 John Wayne – Rock Hudson movie of the same name.) 

It would not be difficult to imagine that maybe, just maybe, some of that gold worked its way south toward or into Mexico and disappeared.  Not too hard, really. 

American History is filled with such interesting little facts.

http://southernsentinel.wordpress.com/the-lost-confederate-treasure/

http://books.google.com/books?id=0mdKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA23&dq=%22When+New+Orleans+was+about+to+be+evacuated%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TN8rUvL3LYH68gS5-YGoBQ&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22When%20New%20Orleans%20was%20about%20to%20be%20evacuated%22&f=false

http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/6-soldiers-who-refused-to-surrender