as you know, later this month i will be releasing my third self-published book.

the first one, Blook sold about 100 copies and people were sorta bummed out that it looked more like a college reader than a book

so How To Blog was released almost a year ago and about 250 copies were sold, partially because it looked like a real book, but probably because it was pretty damn good.

in a few weeks i will be offerring Stiff, which are mostly posts from 2002-2003 of entirely fictional material where i die, meet Kurt Kobain and go to Hell.

i can easilly say that those stories are my finest collection of fiction ive ever written. it has a real beginning, a real center, and a real end. they arent just posts thrown together with some sort of faint storyline, theyre all meant to be read as a whole. theyre creative, weird, and unlike anything that ive written lately.

in addition to that tale, i have included about 20 of my best poems. yes, i know poetry isnt what the kids are into much nowadays, but a thousand years ago when i was running around they were all the rage. i majored in poetry in college, and most of these poems are from those days. several have been published in fancy publications, and i must say that they have held up over the years and arent like the shit that passes for poetry today.

straight up.

id have this book out right now but i have one problem, i dont have a cover that im happy with.

i tried to do something with karisa on the cover but it didnt work out. i tried working with an artist today, but that fell through, and i thought about going to you but for some reason i didnt because i wanted it out Fast, but now my better judgement is telling me that i can wait a week, and i should hold a contest: this contest

the Design the Cover for Stiff Contest!

heres what you do: create an image for my new book.

attatch it as a file and email it to this weirdo email address: tony.stiff.contest@buzznet.com, no entries sent to my real email address will be accepted. if you have questions put them in the comments of this post. that email address is only for submissions.

the book will be 5″ x 8″ so the image needs to be 1650 x 2550 at 250 dpi

the winner will get their name in the book, a month of primo linkage to their blog (or to their favorite blog) on the busblog, two copies of Stiff, and a cash prize of $66.66!!!

the contest will end on Tuesday Sept 13, so get to work!

heres my only bit of advice: CafePress will not allow me to sell a book whose image has a picture of a famous person or famous artwork, so no pics of Kurt.

good luck! and to those of you who are just watching, you can see the entries as they appear in my Buzznet gallery here

enter early and often!

let me make one thing perfectly clear, i dont hate our president.

allow me to explain.

i love pot.

marijuana, mary jane, cheeba, weed, chronic

green sticky purple haired wacky tobbacky.

love it.

i love the smell, i love the taste, i love its looks,

i love the culture, i love the sharing, i love people who smoke it, i love its resin, i love its paraphenalia, i love its high.

i love smelling pot in the bag, i love packing it into a bowl, i love lighting it, i love the sound that the water makes as it gurgles as i take a rip, i love inhaling, i love exhaling

i love exhaling it into the mouth of a pretty girl and i love to watch her close her eyes as she holds it

i love the sound of one holding and failing slightly – gnk – cough – gnk.

i love laughing and laughing and laughing at laughing.

i love hotboxing, i love rolling joints, i love finding weed, i love being passed joints, i love songs about weed, i love references about weed, i love the variety of uses for weed/hemp, i love the many ways to call weed weed. i love looking at the clock and noticing when it says 4:20.

got it?

k.

but at some point i had to really look at pot and what it was doing to me and i had to make the adult decision that it was hurting me more than it was helping me, it was costing me money without giving me much of a high any more, and it was slowly and surely killing me and putting me in danger.

so i acted like a grown up and quit.

i saw it was bad for me, i stoped, and in no way does that make me a hater.

similarily i ask you to look at your relationship, bush supporters, to this president, and ask yourself the same thing

is this president the leader that you expect from the most powerful man in america. is he causing you more headaches than joy. is he as effective as he should be considering the fact that he has a republican congress and a republican supreme court and support from most of the media for the exception of the nyt, the wapo, and for a few hours a day cbs?

are you truly in support of this president’s actions or have you just gotten into a habit of supporting republicans no matter what theyre doing to your well-being?

you can love bush like i love weed but ask yourself what it will take for you to kick the habit.

it took me 5 years of smoking and not getting high for me to realize that i was just going through the motions of smoking without receiving that euphoria, that benefit, that kick.

has george bush given you what you expect from the president’s office since 9/11 or have you just let him off the hook year after year after year?

i was not in the biggest defict of my life because of weed, i was not vilified by the world because of my habit, i am in good health and i was in good health, but at some point i took a long look at what i was doing and i made the conscious decision to stop it.

i kicked the habit.

i invite you to kick this habit of voting republican and supporting whoever does whatever regardless of what they do, because it is simply a habit which perhaps once was useful, but the thrill is gone.

america its time to get off the pipe.

katrina timeline + em + rabbit blog + mathieu

that I had just written the post of the week, but I’m happy to say that he was wrong.

That acclaim should go to Keith Olbermann who has successfully transitioned from being one of the best and funniest sports commentators to being one of the best and biting political commentators.

video here, transcript below.

The “city” of Louisiana, by Keith Olbermann, MSNBC

SECAUCUS — Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday afternoon: “Louisiana is a city that is largely underwater…”

Well there’s your problem right there.

If ever a slip-of-the-tongue defined a government’s response to a crisis, this was it.

The seeming definition of our time and our leaders had been their insistence on slashing federal budgets for projects that might’ve saved New Orleans. The seeming characterization of our government that it was on vacation when the city was lost, and could barely tear itself away from commemorating V.J. Day and watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus, to at least pretend to get back to work. The seeming identification of these hapless bureaucrats: their pathetic use of the future tense in terms of relief they could’ve brought last Monday and Tuesday — like the President, whose statements have looked like they’re being transmitted to us by some kind of four-day tape-delay.

But no. The incompetence and the ludicrous prioritization will forever be symbolized by one gaffe by of the head of what is ironically called “The Department of Homeland Security”: “Louisiana is a city…”

Politician after politician — Republican and Democrat alike — has paraded before us, unwilling or unable to shut off the “I-Me” switch in their heads, condescendingly telling us about how moved they were or how devastated they were — congenitally incapable of telling the difference between the destruction of a city and the opening of a supermarket.

And as that sorry recital of self-absorption dragged on, I have resisted editorial comment. The focus needed to be on the efforts to save the stranded — even the internet’s meager powers were correctly devoted to telling the stories of the twin disasters, natural… and government-made.

But now, at least, it is has stopped getting exponentially worse in Mississippi and Alabama and New Orleans and Louisiana (the state, not the city). And, having given our leaders what we know now is the week or so they need to get their act together, that period of editorial silence I mentioned, should come to an end.

No one is suggesting that mayors or governors in the afflicted areas, nor the federal government, should be able to stop hurricanes. Lord knows, no one is suggesting that we should ever prioritize levee improvement for a below-sea-level city, ahead of $454 million worth of trophy bridges for the politicians of Alaska.

But, nationally, these are leaders who won re-election last year largely by portraying their opponents as incapable of keeping the country safe. These are leaders who regularly pressure the news media in this country to report the reopening of a school or a power station in Iraq, and defies its citizens not to stand up and cheer. Yet they couldn’t even keep one school or power station from being devastated by infrastructure collapse in New Orleans — even though the government had heard all the “chatter” from the scientists and city planners and hurricane centers and some group whose purposes the government couldn’t quite discern… a group called The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

And most chillingly of all, this is the Law and Order and Terror government. It promised protection — or at least amelioration — against all threats: conventional, radiological, or biological.

It has just proved that it cannot save its citizens from a biological weapon called standing water.

Mr. Bush has now twice insisted that, “we are not satisfied,” with the response to the manifold tragedies along the Gulf Coast. I wonder which “we” he thinks he’s speaking for on this point. Perhaps it’s the administration, although we still don’t know where some of them are. Anybody seen the Vice President lately? The man whose message this time last year was, ‘I’ll Protect You, The Other Guy Will Let You Die’?

I don’t know which ‘we’ Mr. Bush meant.

For many of this country’s citizens, the mantra has been — as we were taught in Social Studies it should always be — whether or not I voted for this President — he is still my President. I suspect anybody who had to give him that benefit of the doubt stopped doing so last week. I suspect a lot of his supporters, looking ahead to ’08, are wondering how they can distance themselves from the two words which will define his government — our government — “New Orleans.”

For him, it is a shame — in all senses of the word. A few changes of pronouns in there, and he might not have looked so much like a 21st Century Marie Antoinette. All that was needed was just a quick “I’m not satisfied with my government’s response.” Instead of hiding behind phrases like “no one could have foreseen,” had he only remembered Winston Churchill’s quote from the 1930’s. “The responsibility,” of government, Churchill told the British Parliament “for the public safety is absolute and requires no mandate. It is in fact, the prime object for which governments come into existence.”

In forgetting that, the current administration did not merely damage itself — it damaged our confidence in our ability to rely on whoever is in the White House.

As we emphasized to you here all last week, the realities of the region are such that New Orleans is going to be largely uninhabitable for a lot longer than anybody is yet willing to recognize. Lord knows when the last body will be found, or the last artifact of the levee break, dug up. Could be next March. Could be 2100. By then, in the muck and toxic mire of New Orleans, they may even find our government’s credibility.

Somewhere, in the City of Louisiana.

police and thieves + crooks and liars + that colored fella + ktimes