Dave's Fiction Warehouse

I was on the Internet long before AOL, embraced e-mail in its infancy, put up a few web pages when you still had to know some basic HTML to do it. I've had online photo albums for years, I'm still slogging away with this dumb blog and I even flirted briefly with Facebook. So I don't consider myself some kind of Andy Rooney luddite, still scratching my head over the Zip Code system. But I still don't get Twitter . If you don't know what Twitter is, fine. Perhaps we are kindred spirits and let's just enjoy this moment. If you do, that's fine too. I come not to judge. Because really, my thinking on this is mixed. We already have the attention spans of Mediterranean fruit flies, and I'm not 100 percent sold on on anything that makes them even shorter. On the other hand, who has time, what with gas prices and the war in Iraq, to put together complete sentences? Twitter asks nothing in this regard and gives much. You riff about about what you're doing, and...

When you call yourself a writer you frequently find yourself reading books not for the pleasure of reading them, but for things to mock and, with luck, the short-term reassurance of feeling that if this guy can sell books, you can too. That was the reason I picked up the 1987 paperback Hot Summer, Cold Murder by one Gaylord Dold. A friend loaned it to me with the endorsement that it wasn't terrible, that it was crime novel and it was set in Wichita. He didn't have much else to say about it. Now, there are a lot of not-bad crime novels, but very few set set here in the Paris of the Plains. I can think of only one other, offhand ( The Ice Harvest , by Scott Phillips). In Hot Summer , Gaylord Dold introduces the brooding PI Mitch Roberts, who drinks muscatel and smokes Lucky Strikes and exchanges improbable repartee with an improbably beautiful femme fatale. I know: the last thing crime fiction needs is another hardboiled private investigator. And the painfully titled Hot Summer ...

One thing about losing your job on the Andrea Doria, it lets you hang around at a safe distance and enjoy the spectacle as the vessel founders. There was a time when I might have been alarmed at the news that the Orange County Register is farming out some its copy editing and page design to India. These days, it just makes getting laid off seem a remarkably prescient move on my part. Especially when I read this bland justification from deputy editor John Fabris: "In a time of rapid change at newspapers, we are exploring many ways to work efficiently while maintaining quality and improving local coverage." Rapid change? You could say that -- and show me the newspaper manager who hasn't said it about a dozen times in the past five years. It's the part about working efficiently and maintaining quality and improving local coverage that doesn't ring true. Doing more with less -- that mantra has lost its meaning. The ship's gone down; now it's all about people...

I've always wondered about the appeal of the Hummer. It's a ludicrous cartoon of a vehicle, wholly unsuited to any purpose except getting rid of any excess gasoline you have lying around and compensating, not too subtly, for an owner's shortcomings in other areas. I'd curse when I'd see them parked in the narrow streets of Philadelphia, taking two parking spaces instead of one, shouldering out into the traffic lane so you had to risk a head-on collision to get around it. I don't write stories about serial killers, but if I did, my serial killer would go around with a rocket launcher, blowing up Hummers and Hummer drivers with reckless abandon. Hell, I'd do it myself if rocket launchers weren't so crazy expensive. But now, it appears $4 gas might do what minimal intelligence could not: consign the absurd Hummer to the vast Museum of American Dumb-assery. General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner announced plans to close four SUV plants and said the company is ret...