Scott Sherman Online

Children Beware

So, I'm at the Fort Lauderdale Airport, waiting on line to buy a magazine for my flight home. The woman in front of me, maybe in her forties, holds a box up to the cashier. Although she's wearing a tacky souvenir t-shirt, she seems to be a normal person. A typical tourist. She certainly doesn't appear mentally-retarded or obviously deranged.

The box she's holding contains an assortment of chocolates.  I can't see them, but the whole front of the package is a clear plastic cover, so I'd imagine it would be evident to her what was inside.

"Excuse me," the woman says to the cashier, "but I'm thinking of buying this for a child. Is this OK for a two-year old?"

"It's chocolate," the cashier responds in a heavily accented voice. She appears to be in her mid-fifties, pleasant enough, but there's nothing in her demeanor that screams "child safety expert."

"Yes, yes, I know," the passenger responds, "but is it OK for a two-year old?"

"It's chocolate," the cashier repeats. Its not clear to me if she understands the question. "It's good."

"Yes," the woman says, "but are there little pieces in it? I'm worried about him choking. Is is safe for a two-year old?"

There's a pause as the cashier carefully considers the woman's concerns. Or, maybe not. Certainly, no mental process is observable on her impassive face. She could be mentally calculating a helpful answer or she could just be staring into space. It's hard to tell.

"It's chocolate," she eventually offers. "It's good."

By this time, I've kind of stepped to the side to get a better look at the package in question. But it's held at an angle so I can't see much. I do, however, witness the customer break into a wide smile at the cashier's final assessment of this life-and-death question.

"Great!" the customer enthuses. "I'll take it." She puts the box on the counter and fishes for her credit card. "Thank you." Then, she buys the fucking chocolate!!!!!

Now, at this point, what you do? Do you point out to this woman that, other than confirming the fact that the item in question contained chocolates and that they were, in the cashier's opinion, "good," she's learned nothing that would give even the simplest soul comfort that these candies would not be injurious to her child's health? 

Do you say to the customer, "hey, do you mind if I get a look at that? I have a two-year old at home too, and he'd love...holy crap, are those razor blades in there?" Do you just mind your business? Do you suggest a parenting class?

I took the second option. But if I hear a two-year old choked on some chocolate, I'm going to feel terrible.

The Other Side of the Mike: My First Interviews for First You Fall

On The Digital Photography Show, I'm used to being the interviewer, but, with the release of my first novel, First You Fall, I've had to wear the opposite hat (because, you know, the concept of an "opposite hat" makes so much sense).

In any case, I've enjoyed the opportunity in the past few weeks to do two interviews in support of the book. The first was on HRC's The Agenda, hosted by HRC's Executive Director Joe Solmonese and the inimitable Mary Breslauer. Joe and Mary were really great. I thought we had a lot of fun, and I was totally jealous of the professional broadcasting equipement they get to use over at XM Radio. You can hear my interview on The Agenda here.

Next, I chatted with my friends Marc and Fausto over on Feast of Fools. Last year, both Feast of Fools and The Digital Photography Show were nominated for the "People's Choice Award" at The Podcast Awards. Sadly, neither of our shows won, although it was pretty amazing that we were even nominated when you consider that both shows made it to the top ten of over 4,000 nominated podcasts.

The Digital Photography Show was also nominated in the in the "Cultural/Arts" category, where we lost to National Public Radio's "This American Life." (Which was totally fair because you can see where The Digital Photography Show's amatuer budget and production values can  compete against the multimillion dollar juggernaut that is This American Life, which, by the way, is not even a podcast - it's a radio show show that is so popular that it also has a spin-off TV series on Showtime. Not that I'm bitter.)

In any case, while I went home empty-handed, Marc and Fausto took home the award for Best LGBT Podcast. It's no wonder - their show is enormously popular and extremely entertaining.

It was really great of the boys to have me on, and I was only too happy to throw on my Feast of Fools t-shirt and rock the interview with them.

Meanwhile, I have to say it's very weird being on the other side of the mike. Suddenly, I was feeling very Janet (Ms. Jackson if you're nasty) - I wanted to be the one in control. Luckily, all my interviewers were terrific and I had a crazy amount of fun. Thanks Joe, Mary, Marc and Fausto. (And thanks in advance to Oprah - just make sure you have me on with that delicious Nate Berkus, hear?)

From Air to Eternity

Six weeks after ditching Windows (sorry, Vista!) on my desktop, I've fallen a little in love with my iMac. 

It's not that things are that much easier on a Mac, because I don't find that they are. They're just different. And although Macs are supposedly the tools of artistic and visual thinkers, I think the Vista desktop is more attractive and useful than Panther. Certainly, Outlook 2007 is a more colorful and graphically interesting program than the Mac trinity of Mail, iCal, and Address Book (and why, for the sake of consistency, aren't they called iMail, iCal and iAddress?). 

There are also many great programs on Windows that I miss.

But Macs seem to work better. My Vista desktop, like all my other Windows machines, used to churn and freeze more a someone making butter in the snow. No matter how souped-up a computer I'd get, there were always inexplicable delays, crashes and incompatibilities. I finally had to accept that I was spending more time troubleshooting and tweaking my computers than I was getting anything done. 

So far, my Mac desktop has frozen up a few times, but always recovered perfectly. Switching programs is effortless and no matter how many I have running at the same time, I don't feel the sluggishness I'd so often suffer under Windows.  Do Macs allocate memory more efficiently? Beats me.

After six weeks of using my iMac, though, I began to really hate my Windows notebook, which suffered from every infirmity that plagued the other Vista machines I've run. It's just painful to use it.

So, I'm ditching Windows on the my laptop, too.  

I'm typing this entry at Barnes and Noble on my shiny new MacBook Air.  Even though it has a moderate processor and a slow hard drive, this thing is smooth to groove. I have several programs running - nothing heavy, like Photoshop -  but Firefox, Mail, Address Book, iCal, Imagewell, and some utilities like TextExpander, and everything's running beautifully. 

I wish the Air was more powerful, and I hate the insane paucity of ports (One USB port, Steve Jobs? Are you kidding me???), but I always like the smallest, lightest computer possible.  

I have fourteen days to play with this thing before I decide if I want to keep it. But I'm already a little in love. Not because it's sexy (although it is) and not because it's so tiny (which it isn't) but because it works. 

Talking Dirty with Megan Hart

Smart and hot Megan Hart, author of erotic romances including Tempted, interviewed me about my new book, First You Fall: A Kevin Connor Mystery, for her blog, Reading In Bed. 

Megan's naughty in the best sense of the word, and her books are great steamy fun for grown ups. 

You can read our playful interview here. 

I Built A Website for My Novel in an Hour!

So, I'm getting to know my new Mac and just playing around when I stumble upon the iWeb program. It says it makes it easy to build a website, so I figured I'd muck about and see if really does.

Guess what - it does! So easy, in fact, that in an hour I had basically designed a site to support my new novel,  First You Fall: A Kevin Connor Mystery.

I wasn't  intending to do a site for the book, but iWeb made it so simple that I was done before I knew it. So, I hurried over to GoDaddy, bought the name of the book as an domain, and posted the whole thing in minutes.

Take a look and let me know what you think - especially if you catch any typos! iWeb makes laying out the site easy, but the writing still takes some work. You can find it at www.FirstYouFall.com.

With the Mystery Writing Elite

A few weeks ago, it was my great pleasure to meet some of the greatest mystery writers around at a symposium in DC.

It was just prior to the publication of my book, First You Fall, and I felt like a real chump next to all these established writers.

But they were very gracious and I learned a lot from being in the their company.

Thanks, guys.

They are, from left to right, Anthony Bidulka, Greg Miraglia, Neil Plakcy, Rich Merritt, Mark Zurbo, Chris Beakey and me! 

 

My Book is In Stock!

A full week before expected, my book, First You Fall, is in stock on Amazon.

Holy crap! It's really happening! This is beyond cool!

Buy now! Buy often! Warning though: It's for grown-ups only.

You can get it by clicking the link below:

 

 

CA Says My Family Deserves "Equal Dignity and Respect." Them's Fighting Words to Some!

Is this how people felt when horse drawn carriages were being replaced by motorcars? I feel so lucky to be living in this time when so much progress is happening right before my eyes. 

With fairness in their hearts and the law on their side, the majority Republican California Supreme Court ruled that is was against their Constitution to deny same sex couples the same rights and privileges granted their straight brothers and sisters.

"An individual's sexual orientation -- like a person's race or gender -- does not constitute a legitimate basis upon which to deny or withhold legal rights," Chief Justice George wrote.  "Reserving the historic designation of 'marriage' exclusively for opposite-sex couples poses at least a serious risk of denying the family relationship of same-sex couples . . . equal dignity and respect..."

Unfortunately, my family doesn't live in CA, we're in Maryland, where the justices of our Supreme Court, just this last September, heartbreakingly upheld a 1973 ban on equal marriage rights, even though it was clear they knew it was wrong. Absent clear evidence of discrimination, the court declared (because, God knows, LGBT people aren't discriminated against in housing, jobs, family court, hospital visitation rights, inheritance laws, tax status, insurance matters or anything like that...) "judicial intervention is generally unwarranted no matter how unwisely we may think a political branch has acted."

In other words, if the people in the majority decides to merrily oppress the minority - have at it! Why would the courts - of all institutions - show an interest in Constitutional principles? Why, the whole thing is just silly.

Luckily, the California Supreme Court still thinks it has a responsibility to enforce equal protection under the law. You go, CASC!

Meanwhile, I can't wait to see that the nutters in CA - not to mention the rest of this great, free Nation, have to say about the prospect of people of whom they don't approve enjoying the same basic marriage rights that only they're entitled to abuse through adultery, divorce and domestic violence.

Already, the charmingly named Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council explains

MySpace is YourSpace

Many people have told me I need to join MySpace, so I did. (I'm easy that way.) Apparently, MySpace is very helpful when marketing a book - like this one!

I like the way you can "meet" people, but I don't really get what MySpace does. I suppose I'll have to educate myself.

But why do MySpace pages have to be so butt ugly? I've never seen more cluttered design in my life. They look like electronic ransom notes. Check out the mess below. Yikes! And this isn't just my page - most of them are this bad. Ugh.

I don't mind some advertising on a free service, but the entire right third of this page looks like Google Adwords threw up on it. Horrible.

 

And the functionality of a MySpace page - sheesh! When I was writing my profile, there were no rich formatting text tools - no way to make fonts italics or underlined or to indent a list. You had to either write your post in HTML or something called CSS sytle sheets or some such. What?

I though MySpace was supposed to be for the masses - they can't have a button to make your text bold?  I have to code simple text in HTML? Am I writing an online profile or going for my Microsoft.net certification?

Anyway, if you want to be my MySpace friend -and Lord knows I need friends - look how cranky I am - you can find me here: myspace.com/scottshermanonline.

Worst Sale Ever?

I took my kids to the toy store today - in a struggling economy, it's nice to see Toys R Us slashing prices like this: