Readers and writers blog

I’m close to surrendering to this blog. I try to escape it, but writers keep sending us their work. And I can’t resist reading it. Now the problem is to format it so that you can read it.

So I’m busy formatting the two latest contributions, both short stories, one by an Englishman named Luke Darbyshire and the other by our old friend Hugh Yonn. Each is intended as the first installment of a longer work.

I should have both up by next Sunday.

‘Short’ is a bit of an understatement for Darbyshire’s story, “To Remember and To Forget,” which runs about 11,000 words. But it’s full of similes and alliteration that I find reminiscent of classic detective stories, and so I’m now deep into it. Darbyshire tells us it’s intended as the first of a five-part collection he’s writing under the working title Short Stories to Read and Repeat.

Yonn’s latest tale, “Me and the Good Ol’ IRS,” involves run-ins with two ‘Mr. Somebodys’ at a local bank and a regional IRS office, none of which goes well. You may remember Yonn as a Florida entrepreneur who at one time was a bigtime marijuana dealer, then a federal prisoner. This latest story is to be continued with an installment called “And That’s How I Got in the Pot Bidness,” or, as Yonn adds, “something like that.”

Although his stories are drawn from personal experience, Yonn tells us they’re fictionalized, and so we’ve switched his first two contributions to us — ‘Going for the Gold’ and ‘Shoulda Robbed a Bank’ — from our nonfiction to our fiction section, which is where the latest also will go.

Meanwhile, as I click through these latest works, forging them into our page style — and ignoring the guitar and music stand that are sitting next to this computer and that I really should get to — I take breaks to ponder the following:

• Why are we getting so much spam lately in our comments section — hundreds per day? Could it be that Jeff Paul — you know, the infomercial guy who sets you up each month with 10 Internet sites that make you money around the clock, even though you barely know how to use email — is suckering in more people now that their personal economy has crashed along with the big one?

Let me tell you, folks, the Internet doesn’t work that way. But your spam is making it more difficult for me to find legitimate comments to our site. No, I’m not interested in nursing jobs in Alabama, medical degree programs in California or porn sites in Russian, especially the latter: Anyone familiar with the Greek alphabet can decipher the first two words in “порно фото: баба ебет мужика.” Yes, “porn photo.” The rest says, “grandma has sex with a guy.” Gimme a break.

• Why are so many Bush supporters angry — no, make that livid — that Barack Obama got elected? He won by eight million votes. An incumbent George W. Bush won in 2004 by only three million — and really only by 120,000 in Ohio, which was the deciding state — and in 2000 actually lost the popular vote by 543,000 before the U.S. Supreme Court in a party-line 5-4 vote made him the winner.

Sure, we moaned and groaned for eight years, and he and his screwups gave us plenty of reason for it. In fact, he’s a major reason Obama got elected. I think most of us just wanted somebody smarter than us to run the country. But none of us rushed to buy guns or make threats against the president’s life, both of which apparently are happening in record numbers now that Obama is our president-elect.

What a country. Not only do we have to worry about the fundamentalists overseas, but they’re threatening to run amok here, too.

Talk to you next week, I guess.

– Sid Leavitt