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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Campbell’s Chunky Spew

    As part of the ongoing effort to find something I’m willing to pack for lunch, Wendi’s been buying some different flavors of the Campbell’s Chunky soups. It’s a great idea: Big can, pull-tab top, no water to add. I pack a can, a bowl, a spoon and some crackers and viola! As long as I’m near a microwave I’m set, right?

    We started off with a couple of the chowders, most notably the Old Fashioned Potato Ham and the Baked Potato with Cheddar and Bacon Bits. Yum, good eatin’.

    Today was the debut… and finale… of a new flavor in the cupboard. Chicken Broccoli Cheese and Potato. Based on the track record of Chunky soups so far, this seemed a no-brainer. Chicken and cheese in a potato soup? I could stand a little broccoli to get some chicken soup, right?

    So I popped the top, poured full the bowl, covered appropriately for the microwave and keyed in the cooking time. After the two-minute stir I began to worry, as “cleaning” the spoon left my tastebuds a bit underwhelmed. When I pulled the bowl out and uncovered it after the last minute of cooking I knew something was horribly wrong.

    The odor that greeted my nose as the steam fled the bowl was that of fresh vomit.

    Let me state that again for effect.

    A fresh can of Chunky soup smelled, when cooked, as though someone had barfed in my bowl.

    Because I usually frown on wasting food, I still dipped my spoon in for a taste. My taste buds refused to veto the judgement of my olfactory passages. It didn’t taste bad, but it also didn’t taste good.

    And so, into the conveniently-located toilet it went. Yay for my office being right across the hall from the restrooms. I am left with a sleeve of saltines as my sole lunch option, and with the scent of spew in the air that’s not much of an option yet. I’ll be drinking a lot of water, and I’ll be leaving the server room door open for a while. (You wouldn’t believe the gale-force winds out of that room. My office will smell like good old stale computer-room air in mere minutes.)

    Don’t let this story deter you from trying the fine chowders, but steer way clear of Chicken Broccoli Cheese and Potato. This public service message brought to you by the letters M, T and V and by the numbers 0 and 1.

    (Hint: It’s an anagram of sorts.)
    Campbell’s Chunky

  • Excerpts from my NaNo novel in progress

    Because I’m either an attention-whore or a glutton for punishment, or possibly both, I’m putting up excerpts from each day’s writing efforts. There are six… ah, seven so far. If you’re wondering just how much of a lousy hack I really am, the proof awaits.

  • Literary Pretension Theater Presents…

    I hereby present an amusing and mildly interesting article-of-sorts that Neil Gaiman himself describes as, “a funny polemic, and a fine warning against laziness in plotting.”

    He then adds, “Not sure it’s of much use beyond that, nor that it was meant to be.” I got a few good laughs out of it, though. It’s a lucky thing for us all that Stephen Donaldson got much, much better once he got all those atrocious Covenant books out of his system.
    The Well-Tempered Plot Device

  • Take a peep at this, will ya?

    Thanks to fellow NaNo “ObPippin” for pointing me towards The Lord of the Peeps. Yes, it is exactly what it sounds like.
    The Lord of the Peeps

  • So, Karel, how’s that writing thing coming?

    In between fiddling with That Damned Laptop and my NaNo project pages and Quatro, The Undead PC… I have managed to churn out 5,000 words or so over the course of three days. This means that I’m actually on track, oddly enough.

    The laptop trouble turned out to be entirely the fault of Mandrake 9.0, the KDE portion of which is hopelessly befouled. I installed it onto one of my desktop PCs at home and had even worse performance than I did on the laptop! Desperate to get a Linux-based writing utensil working, I installed (sigh) RedHat 8.0. It’s working, but I’m not as happy as I would have been with a good Mandrake rig. Oh well. Once November ends I can blow it straight to hell and try something else.

    A fair portion of my weekend was spent at Java Vivace in NW Portland hanging out with fellow WriMos. An impromptu kick-off party was held Saturday afternoon, while yesterday was our “more regular” semi-impromptu meeting. I got there early yesterday and managed to get most of the day’s quota done between bites of omelette and sips of cocoa.

    As an aside, is it just me or do coffee shops have the world’s worst hot chocolate? Bland, lifeless cocoa is the bane of my existence. One of the banes, anyway. It doesn’t get better with whipped cream, I can assure you. Someone, please, point me towards a place that serves really tasty and sweet hot chocolate.

    To sum up, not only am I solidly on track but I have a working progress chart, backup copies of my work on almost half a dozen computers, and a new group of friends to chat with both online and in person. And I’m sure we’ll stay in touch for at least a couple of weeks after November has passed…

  • Friday Five. Amen.

    • Were you raised in a particular religious faith? – I was more-or-less raised RLDS. That’s the “other” branch of what most people know of as The Mormons. You see, Brigham Young went to Utah and Joseph Smith III stayed in Missouri. And believe me, that’s more than you needed or want to know about it.
    • Do you still practice that faith? Why or why not? – Nope. I’m a confirmed and practicing agnostic. If there’s a God, he and I aren’t much aware of one another, and I like that just fine. Dig through my older Thoughts journal entries, I think I’ve covered this subject in sufficient detail before.
    • What do you think happens after death? – Decomposition, mostly.
    • What is your favorite religious ritual (participating in or just observing)? – I don’t think I have one. You see, that would involve actually studying religion and its rituals. I’m pretty sure that my favorite ritual would turn out not to be a Christian one, however.
    • Do you believe people are basically good? – I believe that people are basically… people. “Good” is just as much of a label as “Gay” or “Christian” or “Black” or “Parent.” People are a lot of things, usually all at once, and what you see someone as is probably only a small and fleeting part of their overall makeup.

    Friday Five

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