Call Me the Queen of Bad Habits

3 min readMay 16, 2022

Yep. I’m at it again. I can’t seem to help myself. Sorry. Not sorry.

Let’s get on with things then! 🙂

Here’s a sample:

Fresh out of college, Elon Musk built his first business around an early Web search technology to help struggling newspapers launch themselves into the digital world. Frenetic and combative, Musk struck the newspaper executives he was pitching as brilliant but weird.
“He slept under his desk and he didn’t smell very good,” said a former news executive who negotiated with Musk and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of angering the world’s richest man. “He didn’t have any inherent interest in newspapers. He told me he wanted to do this so he could make money and then do what he really wanted to do, which was design spaceships.” [Emphasis mine.]

Wow, if that don’t remind me of someone … Well, you know. I can understand why he’d want to be anonymous. After all who would want the world’s richest man to be pissed off at them? Too bad I didn’t think about that ten years ago, huh? Not that he even noticed when I splashed his face all over my blog(s) and compared his company to Hitler. Okay, enough of that, then.

Oh, and really, they’re more like Napoleon, when you come down to it.

So, I’m thinking of starting a banned books club. [That’s a gift link, BTW. One of my remaining few.] What do you think?

And, if you subscribed to the Washington Post, you could also access this list of the books that school systems are banning and their reasons for doing so.

Or I could list them. I think that’s a pretty fair use, huh? I won’t reprint the discussions, okay? I think my good pals at the Post and Jeff and Amazon should be fine with that.

Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
New Kid by Jerry Craft
Maus by Art Spiegelman
The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story by Nikole Hannah-Jones and the New York Times Magazine
And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberly

And here are the Top 10 Most Challenged Books from the American Library Association.

What with the cloud cover here, I’m not sure we’ll get to see the moon turn red.

We the users want technology to work for us. Here are our demands. [Another gift link!]

Algorithms prey on you. What if you could reset them? [My final gift link of the month.] As an indie author, I could tell you a thing or two about how algorithms prey on us all.

RIP John Leo. I will say this for him: he liked cats.

Seaching on “Book World” presented a shitload of choices.

The Whitest thing I’ve ever seen. You know when people ask me how I’m doing, here’s what I always say. “Fine.” I am such a liar.