Archive for November, 2009
Week on Twitter 2009-11-29
Weekly tweets in chronological order. Join me for more: @namenick 
»»»
Weekly links on e-books and self publishing 28.11.2009
- Plugin by C. Murray Consulting
9MPWM9KP8ESJ
Evolution of Twitter Question [picture]
Text above a tweet box seems to be the most important question of our times. This was real fun to imagine what would be the next one:-)
Childult
I Write Like says I wrote this story in Chuck Palahniuk’s style. It’s included in a free collection Password Incorrect.
Benedykt Ossolinsky, age 39, began to grow childish.
On the first day of his midlife crisis, he stood in front of the mirror examining his receding hairline and wrinkles on his face. In that very moment, while staring at his reflection he found in his eyes that mad look he had last seen thirty years ago in a photograph taken at a tethered flying model competition. The photo was taken by Henryk the servant, when his little charge decided he wanted a red biplane model Curtiss Consolidated Skyhawk Cruisader 3A “Bingo Star”.
This new look was also noticed by his co-workers, who for the most part, considered him to be an infantile spoiled brat. It fit with their idea of a boss.
And Benedykt was indeed the boss, even though he himself couldn’t quite believe it. He was the head of a foundation for the self-promotion of the Ossolinsky family, well-known descendants of Polish-American aristocrats, engaged in business ventures there, and charity work here. The position was highly honorable and very prestigious.
Just as the employees didn’t like Benedykt, in equal measure Benedykt didn’t like his job. He considered it extremely stressful and felt it forced him to super-human sacrifices. Everything was arranged by the family as a penance for avoiding work. He had to go to the office at least three times a week for two full hours and entertain various smiling journalists, drink coffee with them and listen. He had to sign letters and open gifts from various companies hoping to win favors. And he had to play golf and attend social functions, movie premiers, shows and art exhibits. The family had only planned for three months of vacation time a year. Scandal! As a sign of protest he took to coming to the office wearing a t-shirt with the slogan “Attention, Baby!” on it.
All of these unfortunate circumstances resulted in Benedykt’s addiction to drugs, alcohol and sex.
“Luckily, one can be an addict in style,” he liked to repeat to himself as he inhaled another dose of funfetamine and washed it down with a Hot Benedictus cocktail.
To repeat after his father – Benedykt had everything and couldn’t appreciate it. And truly, the father was right, his son had already experienced everything, tried everything, and was interested in less and less. Not like when he was a child, when he was just discovering the world, and the parents let him do and have whatever he wanted. Including the red Curtiss biplane.
And that was exactly what Benedykt realized when he saw that wild look from thirty years ago.
The next day he noticed his skin was smoother, even though he didn’t apply his usual moisturizing cream the night before, because he was too preoccupied with getting addicted in a truly grand style.
“Listen, what happened to your wrinkle? You know, the one that kept me awake all night before the Charity Ball,” Ewelina asked, she was Benedykt’s new, eighteenth to date, fiancée and was crazy about looking good.
She was afraid that particular wrinkle on the face of her future husband will destroy the photo in the wedding announcement section of the newspaper, but fortunately, her parents arranged for photo-shopping at the editorial offices, so everything would turn out just fine.
“Not here and not coming back,” Benedykt answered mischievously realizing that he was absolutely convinced it was true.
“Ah, my Benedictino,” Ewelina the 18th fiancée said sweetly and looked at her man as if she fell in love with him all over again.
During the following days and weeks, Benedictino analyzed his look in the mirror and noticed more and more significant changes for the better. His hair returned to its college heyday, when he could use sugar paste to style himself a Mohawk, just like a certain punk band member, who always stood on the left and played on a brown guitar, which these days could be found in the basement of the Ossolinskys’ residence.
Thanks to the glorious return of the college hair, Ewelina was replaced by Marzena, the 19th Fiancée, who was only 20 years old, but the age difference was hardly visible and was still getting smaller. The only problem with Marzena was that she was tall and Benedictino was becoming shorter, thinner and his body proportions continued to change. He began to look like a teenager, and the family forbade him to go to work.
After a while Marzena left him, because next to him she felt old and fat. Which was OK with him really, as the majority of his time now was spent on playing computer games suitable for children aged 12 and up. In addition, his parents had to purchase the entire stock of a model plane shop for him, so Benedictino bambino could spent hours gluing models together with the help of old Henryk, who wasn’t really good at it at all – his hands were shaking too much. This became the subject of many pranks on the part of little Benny. Pranks, which drove the old servant to a nervous breakdown until the man decided to quit working for the Ossolinskys.
And little Benny went from model ships to model planes (but he didn’t want a red Curtiss this time), and finally to Blaster Blocks and Galactic Wars.
He also began to display interest in little girls. His parents, to avoid a scandal, locked baby Benny at the Noble Kozierobki estate, where he got to peep at his new nanny, Justyna, when she was in the shower.
His parents kept buying him smaller and smaller clothes and were happy – their own son fulfilled their great need for a grandson.
And Benny-bo at the age of 41 became the lovely adult baby just like in the photo taken at the flying model competition, and under the watchful eye of his parents, he was developing beautifully. He stopped riding his bike, stopped walking, stopped talking, and during auntie Helena’s name day party, he said for the last time: “Mama.”
After a while, he stopped crawling and sitting up. He became tiny, and his lovely skin was the envy of all ladies of documented aristocratic pedigree. Unfortunately, he also began to spit out his cream of wheat and throwing the spoon while being fed mashed celery, which should not happen to an adult man from a good family. This, as well as the fact that he peed during the night and had to wear disposable nappies, was a source of profound grief for his family.
“Ah, it’s not so bad. Grandpa Thaddeus had the same condition, and that was back in the days of cloth diapers,” Bennicito’s father tried to cheer himself up.
After a while, during an event for the Polish diaspora in America, little Benidicticino-baby-boo began to latch onto his mother’s breast, and that was simply appalling.
Maybe out of shame the infant began to curl up with his legs touching his chin.
After a few weeks he fell out of even the smallest disposable diaper for newborns.
A day after that, he disappeared, or rather ceased to be visible. He became an embryo. A little embryo of a grown man in the midst of his midlife crisis.
iPhone in a book, literally [video]
A sweet compromise between the amazing world of paper books and an amazing world of e-possibilities. This is it. Fun for a boy as well as for a big boy. Great example for those, who still resist the “e” factor in reading.
15 free tools to mobilize your blog
Mobile web is growing at an extremely fast pace. Google says, that “50% of all new internet connections in 2009 will come from mobile phones”. According to the latest report by AdMob, data traffic created only by iPhone/iPod Touch has increased 19 times(!) from September 2008.
Can mobile users read your blog? There are several reasons why this is important. Make a quick check and open a blog on your cellphone (probably smartphone). If it loads fast and shows nice – you don’t have to read this post. Otherwise you might find tools listed below useful.
The tools are grouped into three categories: mobile friendly blogging platforms, plugins for self-hosted blogs and blog mobilizing services.
Mobile friendly blogging platforms
When collecting information for this article I discovered, that blogging platforms like Blogger or TypePad are one-way mobile friendly. They support writing posts from mobile phones, not reading them. There are tools to mail a post to a blog. There are special mobile apps for that. But when you’re done with writing, you will be surprised afterwards how hard is to read it. The exception is WordPress, proving one more time, that it’s the best blogging tool available.
If you plan to switch to another hosted blogging platform, think of WordPress, which makes your blog available both to you and your reader. »»»
Week on Twitter 2009-11-22
Weekly tweets in chronological order. Join me for more: @namenick »»»
Weekly links on e-books and self publishing 21.11.2009
- Plugin by C. Murray Consulting
Pisarz według Serwisu Informacyjnego Urzędów Pracy
Żeby napisać równie zabawny tekst o pisarzu, jak ten poniżej, musiałbym być śmiertelnie poważny – a być nie mogę, bo jestem śmiertelnie ubawiony tekstem takim, jak ten poniżej.
Informację wynalazł i podzielił się na Twitterze @pilas. Oryginał tutaj, zrzut ekranowy tutaj.
Nazwa: Pisarz
Kod: 245105
Synteza:
Zajmuje się działalnością pisarską w dziedzinie prozy, poezji i dramatu; tworzy powieści, nowele, opowiadania, biografie, monografie, pamiętniki; utwory poetyckie, dramaty – z przeznaczeniem na scenę, do realizacji teatralnej, radiowej bądź telewizyjnej; podejmuje w swoich dziełach problematykę psychologiczną, kryminalno-sensacyjną, romantyczną, religijną, obyczajową itp. »»»
An inquisition-style massage
The greatest hit of the new health season turned out to be an innovative type of a relaxing massage, incorporating, of course to a lesser extent, certain methods of tortures used on religious heretics in medieval times. The creator of this unusually successful way of reducing stress was one Antoni Elkbellows, a man possessing a long and confirmed by genetic studies lineage, according to which he was a direct descendent of a respectable family of magnates from nearby Pila – the Oxbellows. The Oxbellows were known for their deep faith, which they changed frequently, because they were open to new things. During their time at the royal court, they had introduced the so-called preparatory tortures, which were to sensitize the prisoners suspected of heresy, to the relativity of questions about faith, asked during the torture sessions proper, which few of the prisoners had survived, in any case.
Using such a rich family experience, Dr Elkbellows developed a 42 minute Inquisition-style set (that was the time an average prisoner-heretic could survive), containing among other things: wrist stretching, hanging by the fingers, 78 degree elbow twisting, dislocation of the spine, intensive ribcage massage, whole-body stretching using the Oxbellows-Aearial table, centrifugal thigh bending, circular manipulation of the neck, deep massage of the pelvis, hammering of the extremities, pulling under the Oxbellows Up-Down table, buttock slapping, and the trademark Elkbellows massage – stoning of stress-tensed muscles.
In the first ever in Poland inquisitional massage spa located on Saint Street, this motto was hung outside: “Even if you have no stress in your life, you will still get rid of it.” This was a creative interpretation of a famous, and reflecting the spirit of those times, maxim of Bożydar Oxbellows, who had told each and every one of his prisoners “Even if you are not practicing heresy, you will still die for it.”
Soon, the spa experienced a flood of clients eager for new sensations. One of them was Simon Klepacki, the boss of a trendy new disco “Metrosexual Shelter” and several other nightclubs providing pleasures of the whole body, and who in the last few months experienced a mental burnout from trying to procure Lola Thigh – as a singer for the club and as a woman for himself.
Simon’s appointment was scheduled for 3:18PM. Of course he was late, but only by 3 minutes, for which he received a harsh reprimanding look from an elegant receptionist dressed up as Princess Zabobona. When he entered treatment room number 3, called the Chamber of Absolution, he saw the masseuse wearing a uniform designed to look like burlap rags.
“Please sit down and be quiet,” the masseuse, who Simon already named her Dobrava, said tersely. “You will now watch an instructional film to see just what kind of stress the people in medieval ages had to deal with.”
A set of stone doors in the wall slid to the side to reveal a screen on which various torture scenes began to appear. When the Chamber of Absolution filled with the cries of tortured heretics, Simon closed his eyes in fear, and Dobrava got to work.
First, through rapid wrist crushing she removed Simon’s stress caused by doubts about the honest intentions of the accountant at “Metrosexual Shelter”. That stress tried to fight to be noticed by hanging itself on the stone wall to the left of the torture table, but soon disappeared without a trace.
Using a deep ribcage massage, the alluring masseuse freed Simon’s body from the frustration caused by the inability to drive his motorcycle at the maximum speed listed on the speedometer, a failure which undermined his feelings of pride. With fast nearspine motions, accompanied by groans from the tv speakers and Simon’s vocal cords, she got out of him and threw by the wall the anxiety caused by the professional attractiveness of Lola Thigh. Lola Thigh sang and preformed nightly at a venue of Klepacki’s major competitor, also a Klepacki (don’t confuse these two, the fact that both had the same last name was purely coincidental, and besides, the other one had a different first name – Jacek). The stress caused by Lola Thigh – the singer, left Simon’s tired body permanently, but not without some effort on the part of the inquisitorial masseuse. Likewise with the sadness after the loss of the best girls from the Night Fusion club, who went to further their careers in Deutcheczland at a resort in Karlsbad Vary. Tiffany was really great, and maybe even loved him. Now, the stress connected with her was rambling by the wall trying to find a way to re-enter Simon, who was fighting with the images on the tv screen and his growing interest in Dobrava.
Dobrava very skillfully moved on to pulling under the table. Never before had Simon experienced something like this. He wanted to join the cries of the medieval people on tv who were getting their toes chopped off, but he valiantly held back. A pity, because he was supposed to show his pain. It would have been much easier for Dobrava to pull out of him the angst caused by his shrinking, for four years already, member. Simon, when he saw on the floor the tension caused by his phallus, couldn’t believe its huge size.
It was time for the most important part of the massage – the stoning. Stone after stone, with the greatest dedication the inquisitorial masseuse in the Chamber of Absolution on Saint Street, dragged out of Simon all dirty and lewd thought about Lola Thigh (name on the ID card – Janina Chubby). Soon the whole cell was filled with a stuffy erotically-physiological atmosphere, and a single, abstract frustration about L.T. was trying to fight for survival outside the body of its former carrier.
“Stoning was a form of death sentence for those who did not deserve a beheading,” the voiceover on the torture film said at the very momement when Dobrava began to stone the sternum, where a scandalously large number of sex scenes with L.T., which had never happened, gathered.
After the stoning, there was a brief break during which Simon realized that sex with L.T. was worthless to him now. He felt freed from all sin and stress, and the only thing on his mind was a quick physical romance with his so effective inquisitress, who after 39 minutes he could imagine now totally naked.
But even this newly forming stress was noticed by Dobrava, and through a circular twisting of the neck, cast out of Simon with a nearly super-human speed.
The timer hidden in a showpiece resembling a toe-breaking device went off.
The session came to a happy end, and the voice on tv concluded:
“No actors were harmed during the making of this film, only four stuntmen suffered accidents with various degrees of complications.”
Simon planned to visit his club after the session, to relax a little with a drink and a girl. Now he didn’t feel like it at all.
He thought that he could visit, and for quite a long while, but somewhere totally different.
Recently updated Polish tech-absurdist and mobile fiction writer 3.0 beta. Addicted to ebooks and technology. Guest writer at 
Loading ...
