Saturday, December 25, 2010

Monday, December 13, 2010


Solar Energy

As you may have noticed from a previous post I've been irritable lately. I've also been dealing with low energy levels. Besides the usual holiday bullshit, the weather has also been getting to me. Check out this five day forecast:



How can I deal with this? All that sunshine! I'll get sunburn.


Saturday, December 11, 2010

Updates At xrayer.com


The last two issues of my zine, Ray X X-Rayer #77 & #78, have been uploaded at my website, http://xrayer.com . Each zine is a collection of posts from this blog in PDF format; you can print them out for your own personal use. I also did some tweaking with the format, putting the issue links for each year in reverse chronological order, i.e., the latest edition is listed first.

Friday, December 10, 2010


Too Short? Too Bad


I've received a couple of comments that my hardcopy - snail mail zine, the Ray X X-Rayer, is too short of a read.

Guess what. I ain't writing War And Peace.

My zine is a collection of posts from my blog. I slap it together when I feel like it. Sometimes it's only four pages, other times longer. Considering that I only charge a lousy dollar for it, it's not worth the time and effort to produce it, sort it, and then get it out in the mail. I would rather do all my writing online and leave all the meatspace bullshit behind.

If you find my paper zine is too short, then produce your own that meets your length requirements. You'll see how easy it is.

Anyway, zining is supposed to be about individual, independent expression.



Googling The Gs


Two words, six letters. And a lot of frustration.

Throw in information overload and it's a big mess.

I had remembered reading somewhere about a FBI program that employed people from all walks of life to help out with surveilling a suspect. These employees were civil servants, not Special Agents, who looked like the average Joe or Jane. That was because they were the average Joe or Jane. The nickname for the program was the Gs. I thought the Great Search Engine Google could help me find the answer.

So I used keywords like "FBI" with "civilian spies" or "citizen spies" or "the Gs." Nothing. A dead end.

I dug out my copy of the book, The Spy Who Got Away (1988), by David Wise. This nonfiction work tells the story of Edward Lee Howard, a CIA agent who escaped to Moscow after passing US secrets to the Soviet Union. I checked the index and found under Federal Bureau of Investigation references to the Gs, the Special Support Group.

More Googling but no good hits. So I just went with abbreviations: FBI SSG. And then the answers were revealed -- not too many but something.

I was going to write about the Gs but I'm too Googled out to continue. Next time.

So when you're reading one of my posts, keep in mind that sometimes a lot of frustrating research is involved.