During this dark period, Busted! A man whose pain and humiliation brought such joy to so many will serve as a guest guru, dropping the deep drug-bust knowledge of the rich and famous that any burnout can grasp between bong hits.
Sex and drugs have always gone hand in hand, and there have always been a lot of laws and re education aimed at getting the people to stop screwing willy-nilly and stop doing so many drugs. But, try and try, nothing seems to work. Everyone keeps fucking and everyone keeps doing dope. Sex education has been forced to acknowledge this painfully obvious reality and has grudgingly turned the focus toward condoms. The time has come for drug-bust education, beginning with acknowledging the obvious: People are going to do drugs.
It never will. Mankind has been getting wasted since we crawled from the mud and realized that we are all in pain and going to die. But Busted! Like all dirty wars, anything goes. Perjury, racism, public humiliation, and medieval punishment are all fair game. Sex education still begins with abstinence—no question, always the best way not to contract some gnarly disease. Similarly, in the Drug War, the best way not to get busted is not to possess drugs.
Drugs are bad. The difference, in my view, between marijuana and the host of other available inebriants is like the difference between casual sex with a condom and barebacking transvestites in truck stops.
A drug bust takes away all your decision-making authority, and wars are not about fighting fair. Bad things happen to people who get busted.
Profoundly bad things. No matter what your dope of choice, the criminal justice system brings only pain and suffering. Consider the Busted! There are almost as many ways to get nabbed for possession as there are drugs to possess, and all methods offer the same result in the same order: bust, strip search, jail, body-cavity search oh, yeah , guilty plea, more jail, criminal record.
Repeat if necessary. Drug-possession law ought to be simple enough: Have drugs, will get busted. What if some bastard sold you a bag of baby powder and called it cocaine? What if those are your panties? How about the fatty in the ashtray of the Cooper-nowhere-to-hide-Mini that just got pulled over? And how can you get busted on a paraphernalia charge when you bought that bong in a legit store and paid your damn sales tax?
Maybe you just connected a friend to a source, or drove her to her dealer on your way to Sunday school. All I did was pass on a beeper number! Drugs do not necessarily have to be of sufficient quantity or quality to get you high to get you busted for possession. Flakes of coke, nine pot seeds, a single crystal of meth, baby marijuana plants, bong resin , and needles with traces of smack have all been enough dope to make the bust stick, so long as the bustee was aware that it was dope.
Awareness is usually inferred by where the drugs were found. A very thin film of dust, comparable to one or two grains of salt :.
As was the case with Mr. Scott, possession busts for not possessing drugs are most frequently visited upon those who are suspected of dealing and parolees caught with paraphernalia, or who flunk a drug test see Drug Test?
Some states require a usable amount of a narcotic, rather than a detectable amount. In those states, an expert will testify that although she never does dope, has never done dope, and hates everyone that does dope, the dope that you had was sufficient to have had an exciting effect and was therefore usable.
The reality, though, is that any measurable amount is sufficient. So you went down to Washington Square Park and scored yourself a dime bag of parsley from the droopy Jamaican cat. Perhaps you paid some jittery basehead a hundred bucks at the circuit party for a couple of aspirins with happy faces. Can you get busted for parsley possession? Of course! You may get fugazied, but the judge will not pity you. In most states, you will get busted for attempted possession.
The dirty deed is done as soon as you pay for what you thought was dope. You can never trust those bastards. See Paraphernalia,. When is an eight ball not an eight ball? When you buy retail. Not when you get busted. Eight balls that are in reality two balls—mostly baking soda and enough speed to give you a headache—are still eight balls in the criminal justice system. You will be charged with possessing an eighth of an ounce of coke. In general, anything that you were planning to snort, smoke, suck, or jam in your vein counts toward the total weight of the drug.
But the Drug War can always get you coming and going. The lower down the food chain you are, the lower the quality of your dope should be. The difference is usually about five years. The better the dope, the more years.
When you actually have the drugs in your hands, in your backpack, or in your drawers, this is of course very easy to prove. One night in , Wisconsin woman Denene McCuskey was passing the pipe around her car. A cop observed the warm glow, ran up to the car, grabbed the pipe, and busted her for possession, claiming that Denene had taken a hit. But the pipe was bone dry, Denene pointed out. So the DA took the pipe down to the lab and had it scraped for pot resin.
As Ms. It happens. It happened to Leonard Hironaka. And if you find your lawyer suggesting a just-borrowing-the-blow strategy like this you should seek new counsel pronto. Hard to prove. Found some meth in your ride after Junior borrowed it?
Flush it immediately. Every second that passes with the dope on your watch makes your innocent-possession defense less and less likely to fly. Attempting to explain away drug possession by denying any knowledge of the drugs in your possession is a ballsy, usually doomed defense.
But if you do get nabbed dope-handed, the more you can plausibly distance yourself from it, the better your chances. Maybe that junkie maid packed your bags.
Something like that. The true clueless mules are usually women set up by their boyfriends. Snoop Dogg was accused of doing this to a concert promoter.
Also, judges are more ready to believe a woman was unknowingly carrying for a man—sexism Drug War style, but you will not be complaining. Pray like hell it never happens to you. Right here.
Right now. Under these unfortunate but not uncommon circumstances, a judge will usually give the search a , although your chief concern is not likely to be whether the search you are enduring is going to be held up in court. Not for now, anyway. Acting on a bogus tip that the two might be smuggling drugs, local police followed the taxi in an unmarked car. The frisks revealed no dope, so the cops decided to strip-search the girl, right there by the side of the road.
Sometimes painful. An aggravated ass search is when you have hit rock bottom. So Your Ass Is Clean. Your average magistrate is not going to be outraged very easily. Even the most brutal searches, by forced enemas, and the like are almost always given a the trial court. Repulsive Dope Ditty: Betty Jean Guy was seven months pregnant and wearing only a pair of panties and nightgown when the cops came by her house one afternoon for some drug bust action. The house was clean, but the cops thought Ms.
Guy had stashed the dope in her holiest. They took her in the bathroom and ordered her to take off her panties, bend over, and spread her butt cheeks. Guy to bend over, but she managed.
Undeterred, they took Ms. Guy down to the precinct to have another go at her. Finally, they saw a plastic bag poking out and, at last, busted her.
By the time a federal court decided that its conscience was shocked and overturned the conviction, Ms. Rough Texas Dope Ditty: At about a. Lewis kept chewing. Then another cop happened by and joined the fun. Lewis spit out some weed. Convinced there were more b uStE d! Still no dope. Finally, they took him to the ER and had a tube inserted down his throat and his stomach pumped dry—all without a warrant and against the instincts of the strangely reluctant doctor.
The Texas Court of Appeals decided this was excellent police work and ordered Lewis to stop all that whining. The Supreme Court has stashed the few Fourth Amendment rights you have remaining under your bed, with the lights out and the shades drawn.
The cops, however, have license to be the ultimate Peeping Toms. They can climb trees and peer into your windows with b uStE d! Essentially, the only limit, aside from simply busting down the door, is when the fuzz uses X-ray vision to see inside or employs some other piece of technology that is so tricked-out that the judge has never heard of it. Think of your house as a balloon. You and your dope are safe in there so long as it remains airtight and opaque.
Once the police suspect that there are drugs in there, that thin layer of rubber is the Fourth Amendment. But anything the police can see is fair game.
They can squish their faces against your balloon or hold it up to the light to get a better look, and if they see, hear, or smell anything suspicious, they can get a warrant and pop your balloon. One evening a few years back, Mr. McConaughey was at home doing bong hits, playing the bongos, and dancing naked to loud music with another man, by the way, not that it matters.
Unwisely, he left his front door open. The cops walked in without a warrant and busted him for pot plus bong possession, and Mr. McConaughey had to like it because he had made no effort to keep his session private. Got land? Post No Trespassing signs. The judge will consider the signs when deciding if the search was legal.
Good signage is a clear indication that you have made an effort to protect your privacy. Warrants are required to search your home, but this constitutional right, as Mr. McConaughey would probably complain to you about, is about as effective at keeping a suspicious cop out of your house as an R rating is at keeping the kiddies out of Raping and Pillaging XII playing at the cineplex.
That was how Kansas woman Rebecca Cardenas won the liberty lottery. He left and came back with a search warrant, discovered a couple of bongs and some baby pot plants, and busted Rebecca. It all starts with the fateful knock at the door. Consider the fear that grips your chest when a police cruiser suddenly lights up your rearview. A spike of adrenaline. A mental search of the interior of your car. If your mind stumbles upon something incriminating, the knuckles go white and the panic sets in.
The police are of course aware of the terror they strike in guilty hearts, and they, of course, use it to their advantage, usually to get your consent to come in for a little chat about your drug habit.
You will feel like refusing will make your problem worse. But as a Busted! Dope Note: Knock and talks are so inherently coercive that some states, including New Jersey, Washington the best state to party in in the country , Indiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, require the police to inform you of your right not to consent.
The criminal justice system has little patience for the wasted. No one gets to blame anything on the dope. You can confess b uStE d! Dangling Dope Ditties: Raymond Ruiz snorted enough blow and smoked enough pot one night in Florida that he decided streaking through his hotel would be an excellent way to get the most out of his buzz. Raymond was still extravagantly naked, as was his inebriated woman friend, and they had a pile of pot and a Baggie of blow sitting out on the dresser.
Nonetheless, Raymond hollered at the cops to come on in. Raymond ambled over to the dresser to search for his ID and began slyly snacking on the mound of dope. Still Raymond had no pants. At trial, Raymond complained that he was much too wasted to voluntarily consent to the cops coming in, evidenced by his nude behavior and the fact that his woman was similarly bare-assed.
But the judge was having none of it and busted him anyway. Home Searches Answering the Bell. If they claim they have a warrant for your arrest or a summons, go outside to speak with them. The Supreme Court came up with this little rule after a cop saw Carl Overdahl, an inebriated Washington State University student, wandering the campus one night with a bottle of Jack. Smart, right? The cop followed Carl into his room and busted him for possession when he saw the pot seeds and the pipe that was sitting on his desk.
To a judge interested in seeing your bust stick, a wide-open door is an invitation, your consent for the cop to have a look around. Poor in the Drug War: Food stamp recipients must allow welfare inspectors into their homes, no warrant required. If the inspector sees evidence of dope in the house he can have their food stamps cut off. Home Searches 3. You will not like this. Fleeing into your home will do you no good either.
You cannot take refuge from the police in your home without also taking up arms. Flying into the garage and b uStE d! Not very effective, and it looks bad. The more intimate, the better. Screwing is excellent. Consider tearing off your clothes at the sound of cops at the door.
Dope Note: Always also remember that if your criminal attorney starts making you any guarantees, start shopping for a new one. Hotel-Motel-Holiday Inn. Saaaay What? Anytime someone else has the keys to the joint, you gotta keep it discreet.
But in Arizona, Wisconsin, and probably Kentucky, the smell of MJ wafting from the crib is reason enough to bust down the door only hotel room doors in Colorado. These states have decided that smoking pot is destroying evidence of a crime, which creates an emergency situation that the police must respond to without waiting around for a stinking warrant. In other words, you get busted for possession as soon as you score.
As soon as you start smoking it, you get busted for destruction of evidence as well, unless you manage to smoke it all down before you get nabbed as the Arizona Supreme b uStE d! Court is worried about. Get it? In the other forty-seven states This odor indicated that evidence of a at press time—neither Scalia, crime, that is, possession of mari- Thomas, nor Rehnquist has juana, was in the process of being burned and thereby destroyed.
As weighed in on the matter. But if there is any indestroyed before a warrant could be dication that the weed may be obtained. Yet another reason not to mix kids with dope. Tepees, Tents, and Lean-tos: Park rangers cannot search your tent without a warrant, but they can if they smell dope or see incriminating evidence. Cops standing outside your house will break down the door if they hear that sound or anything else that could conceivably be the sound of destruction of evidence.
Otherwise, you have a smashed door, pissed-off police, and a couple of additional charges. Vindictive exboyfriends can give their consent, so can the kids, so can Mom and Dad, and the babysitter too, unless you prevent it from happening.
Your roommate can ruin you because anyone who answers the door when the cops come knocking can consent to a search of the house, so long as it appears to the police that she has the authority to do so. Drug War roomies must keep their distance. And you must keep everyone and all their belongings b uStE d! Sound good? While kids have virtually no authority over their own rooms, they have the authority to invite the cops over for a little drug-bust action, and they usually know where the bodies are buried.
After a half hour of abuse and searching the house for smack, the exasperated cops had still not found it. The point is that the judge will have no problem allowing the police to use your kids against you.
Word to the Newly Minted Exes: Get the dope out of the crib immediately. A vindictive ex—is there any other kind? Got all that covered? Keeping the balloon airtight? Handwritten return addresses are not good, particularly if the box was allegedly shipped by a business.
Cash payments are bad. Phony phone numbers: bad. Any type of smell: bad. Mail privacy went the way of the anthrax attacks in D. A typical arrest begins with a postal worker awaking with a start and stumbling upon your suspicious package and alerting the feds.
A drug dog will come down for a sniff and bark. The box will be opened very carefully, and the dope will be photographed, put back into the package very carefully, and sent on its way. This time, you will have to make a convincing argument that you received something that you had no idea contained drugs. A desperate defendant will go to jail still arguing that she thought she was just getting a dinette set.
And if you sign for a package using a phony name, the explaining gets into the realm of the inexplicable. Going with a PO box? Plainclothes detectives will be lingering over the junk mail down at Mail Boxes Etc. Registering incognito, by the way, is an additional crime.
Use a U. Postal Service mailbox and the package can be searched willy-nilly. If you have the fortitude to actually go down to the post office, a warrant is sometimes required before opening a suspicious package, delaying the search by about thirty-five seconds. Poor in the Drug War: The cheaper the method of shipping a package, the less right to privacy the sender has in the package. You always gotta pay for that privacy. It worked for Dubya, who reportedly liked his blow before the Lord showed him that drugs are bad.
Even Newt Gingrich blamed it on college, and nobody even bothered asking John Kerry if he likes dope. And since he was in Vietnam the chances are very, very good that he does, or at least did.
Who knows? He might have had a couple of bong hits after the election. They amount to pretty much whatever your university says they amount to. Abandonment of constitu- Everyone else more or less has tional protections and reliance upon ilfree reign, which a lot of Seclegal methods can lead only to the ond Amendment types like to destruction of democratic processes.
Just kidding. Nowhere is it more urgent to hide that shit than in a dorm, where you have already consented to a search.
And, unlike a house, you already have someone inside your balloon—the RA, who is there to prevent you from losing your mind your freshman year. Dorm searches without warrants are illegal only when the administration is cooperating with a police investigation aimed at busting students.
Under these circumstances, the administration will apply for a search warrant, usually after one of your fellow dorm residents has had enough of the dope smoking and complains. Notice the trouble one can get into for rolling good joints.
This informant reported to this Department in the interest of keeping the youth of Lake Charles from abusing drugs, that Boudreaux frequently uses Marijuana in Sallier Dorm [now Alpha Hall]. On several different occasions, this source has seen [Boudreaux] rolling and smoking Marijuana in his room at McNeese, room of Sallier Dormitory. This same person stated that Boudreaux frequently goes to the room of Jack Blacketter, room , and they have Marijuana in the rooms, and often hold parties.
This second source further stated that on several different occasions he has observed Boudreaux. Boudreaux roll nice fatties. While training wheels are annoying and make it hard to chat-up the ladies, they can prevent you from hurting your- The Student Handbook self. An RA knocking on the door is fundamentally different from a cop. As much discussed above, consenting to a search is never a good idea.
The problem here is that the police will simply wait in the hall while a warrant is being processed and then search your joint. On the other hand, if you allow the RA to deal with the dope you may avoid dealing with the police altogether.
Then study Busted! Pick your poison now. Dope Note: The Dope Elephant page 31 in the dorm is impossible to ignore. Since dorm rooms are typically lunch box—sized, b uStE d! Also keep in mind that most schools have a disciplinary policy concerning off-campus drug busts. Get busted by the police, go through everything that entails, and you could still get booted from the dorms or expelled from school. Finally, the university will undoubtedly inform your parents after the disciplinary process is complete.
Are you a nineteen-year-old sophomore? A regular at detention? Do you need lots of time-outs to get through the school day? If you answered yes to any or all of these questions, searching your delinquent ass will be very easy to justify. Dope Note: Like dorm residents, private school brats have no Fourth Amendment rights.
Big smelly parties are body blows to your Fourth Amendment rights. Police are called and often can search because you have committed the First b uStE d! Deadly Sin page 74 , typically by violating a noise statute or a city ordinance that outlaws parties over a certain size. The Successful Drug War Party A hard-core party is always risky no matter what, but you already knew that.
The unprepared host, however, is easy prey. The following are some planning and in-case-of-emergency tips: 1. If at around a. No Cover Charges A cover charge will ensure that you will be charged with the maximum available penalties if anyone hurts himself.
You will get a distribution charge if dope is being done, and you could be on the hook for running an illegal bar. Give the neighbor your number; slide it under the door if you have to. Police responding to a loud party complaint will often walk around the property, look in the windows, and have a smell of the backyard before knocking on the door.
Prevent Consent Keep the front door closed and locked. Cops banging on the door of a noisy party are not likely to bust down the door, but they are going to check the knob if no one answers. A locked door just means louder pounding. Nobody should be answering the door aside from the hosts, who have all read Busted! The music got too loud for his neighbors, and they called the cops, not Nick.
But the cop stuck his foot in the door in time to see Lockwood running through the house with the bong. Lockwood of course ensured that he would be busted along with Nick, and his behavior inspired the cop to search the entire house.
The Party Section Take a lesson from Nick. Fraternity Parties Most of the same rules apply to fraternity parties as to any other house parties, and there is probably already a Dope Situation Room in the house, closely guarded by the more subversive brothers. Sorority girls like dope too, but their parties are not held at sorority houses, since beer bongs are not very ladylike.
Some additional insight. Undercover cops have been known to pass themselves off this way, assuming that no one will go through ritual in public. One clearly labeled drink at a time. Disguising alcohol like this leads to nothing but liability. What About the Freshmen? Everyone knows that there has been underage drinking at every fraternity party that has ever been held in the history of undergraduate education.
Nevertheless, the hosts are still on the hook for preventing it or at least giving it the old college try. But it happened. And it happened in Dallas fucking Texas in the eighties. All day. All night. All the time. Sometimes for years.
Never buy dope, sell dope, or help someone else get dope at a rave or rave-esque event. The feds are more interested in ending the scene. This will be hard if you actually are. The DJ is God, my man! This is because for as long as there has been music, the people have liked to get a buzz on to get their freak on, and dope always makes the scene.
Not too long ago New York City got old-school to stop the dancing by dusting off the now infamous cabaret laws. There are actual signs insisting that no matter how good the music is, no dancing will be tolerated under pain of law.
People are ordered to stop dancing by management should they get looser than swaying on their barstools and nodding their heads in orderly fashion. And you know what they say: if they can do it there, they can do it anywhere. The hippies liked their acid, rock, and trippy light shows at places like the Avalon Ballroom and at festivals like Woodstock.
The party kids like Ecstasy, House, and trippy light shows at places like the Sound Factory see below , raves, and West Coast massives for the underage set. Carter, page 34? The massive club—big clubs are essentially the only venues with cabaret licenses in NYC—was raided in the late nineties and closed, but a New York judge refused to close it perma- The Party Section nently because the owners could not be blamed for the behavior of thousands of people.
As a condition of reopening, the judge ordered a drug dog to be put on patrol at the front door. Soon the fun had to end. At press time, Grant and his partners were facing twenty years. Fanta, the much-maligned drug dog, was asleep when the cops raided the joint the second time. Eight promoters, most of whom were college students, were also busted for selling E to undercover cops. The feds have accused Grant of organizing the promoters, er, dealers, and encouraging them to bring their customers to the club.
So rave gear has been used as evidence that the pro- b uStE d! Could they have banned tie-dyes in the Sixties? Candy is preferred to keep mouths happy, something from the Sweetheart or lollipop family. The owner folded and canceled the show. There used to be a lot of little rules about when the police could pull you b uStE d!
And there were some more little rules about what parts of the car they could search, what containers inside the car they could search, and whom they could search.
It was all very picky. Even if you get busted near your car after you parked it, they can still search the car. In any event, as Sandra D. In the Supreme Court case that gave the police this authority, Texas soccer mom Gail Drug War Driving Lessons Atwater was arrested and jailed for failing to wear her seat belt.
Your car is a bad place to party. This is no less true just sitting in your Benz. Same is true with boats, trailers, and anything else you can think of that can go from point A to point B. The following provides fair warning on how easy it is to get nabbed behind the wheel, and some survival skills from your in-house counsel for the outrageous risk takers among you. Bullshit, Er, Pretext Stops Stopped for exceeding the speed limit by two miles per hour? Failing to wear your seat belt?
Are those fuzzy dice obstruct- b uStE d! Funky piercings, wacky hair, Dead stickers, white people in black neighborhoods, and black people everywhere else will all attract the attention of the police. Wait and follow. And you will commit an offense. Many, many a drug bust began with a broken taillight or an unsignaled lane change.
Rubio was driving around with forty pounds of weed in his trunk one afternoon in southern Florida. Rubio kept his cool. Drive straight, man, he told himself, drive straight. Now he had a bullshit reason to pull Rubio over. Now is not the time to pass around the victory smokes. You can be pulled over for trying too hard not to get pulled over. Complete stop at a stop sign?
Here is where a menacing cruiser rides up into the rearview to watch you squirm. Dark skin? Dark eyes? Confusing headdress? Last name kind of a mouthful? It happens on the street. It happens at the airport. It happens on the road. More scrutiny an array of police interest and interleads to more searches. Very, very hard to prove. Could you explain that to me? Not heard of them, eh? Stay close to home and your bust will be like any other, painful and humiliating.
Leave the city or state and you will have to return to this place Drug War Driving Lessons again and again for court appearances, assuming you make bail. This will be breathtakingly expensive and hard to explain to your employer, should you still have a job. Leaving the country? Finally, get busted carrying drugs in your car and it will get Jacked by the Police page Legalize It Bullshit stops are not always pure bullshit.
There are equipment violations that will attract police attention no matter what. Nothing should be hanging from the rearview, and your windshield should not have spiderweb cracks. Expired tags and emission stickers will always get you pulled over. Always have clean license plates on the front and rear bumpers, even if your state requires only rear license plates.
License plate bulbs must be fully operational. Headlights and taillights? Correctly lined? The police must be able to see clearly into tinted windows.
And wear your seat belt. If not to save your dull life, then to save you from a drug bust. Ride around with any of these equipment violations, and you ride in the Third Level of Doom page A ride littered with debris is a sure sign of debauchery behind the wheel. Obviously, if your car smells like booze or drugs you are screwed.
At the same time, air freshener is always suspicious. Similarly, hip-hop whips are suspicious, as is anything else associated with young, urban culture, and even the wannabe white kids are suspicious.
Better not have any dope in the car. Most cities have noise ordinances, and you can be pulled over for a violation. The police will see you moving around in your seat and that is usually enough of a reason for a search. This is aggressive and suggests that you have something to hide in the interior of your car. Keep your insurance and registration in the glove compartment and leave the glove compartment open wide, demonstrating that there is nothing incriminating or illegal stored in there.
Drug War Driving Lessons Keeping yourself together also means having your license, insurance, and registration up-to-date and legit. If your papers are not all legal-like and straightforward, you are screwed.
Drug dealers are always renting cars through one person, then paying someone else to drive the car. You are being observed very closely. Again, no help for you nervous types. Deep breaths, maybe. Get Ticket.
Get Going. You: Ummmm. If you refuse to consent, the cop will assume you have drugs, likely in the trunk, and call a drug dog. The Supreme Court recently decided the police do not need any reason at all to have a dog sniff for drugs during a roadside stop. If you Drug War Driving Lessons do consent, the cop will tear apart your ride looking for the drugs. Cops have been known to keep electric drills in their cruisers to take apart cars right by the side of the road.
If all this sounds unfair and hard to beat, it is. Narcotics Checkpoint 1 Mile Ahead. Drug Dogs in Use. This is what the police hiding in the bushes are waiting for. If you see a sign like this, do not pull over and do not ditch your stash. Keep driving, right into the belly of the beast. The chances are excellent that there is no roadblock at all, and even if there is, you are better off taking your chances than exiting the road or throwing dope out the window.
Warning signs like these are often a ruse, designed to send already paranoid drivers into a cold panic. A sign announcing a violation of your stinking rights one mile ahead, however, does not violate your stinking rights.
The police, moreover, are still free to set up sobriety checkpoints to keep the roads safe, or a roadblock to make sure everyone has their insurance, and if they happen to catch a few dopers, so be it. But drunks tend to be the stubborn belligerent types. Your hopes and dreams are different. Take off your shades no matter what. Roll Down Your Window: This will shorten the encounter and will prevent a waft of boozy air from blasting the cop in the face.
Relax your grip on the wheel. White knuckles are suspicious. For you meth heads, try to remember to blink. Be Observant: Note the weather conditions. Did those high winds blow your Cooper Mini over the yellow line? Are those yellow lines faded? Do you have a mad hornet buzzing around your ride, affecting your driving?
No cop is going to be understanding. Dope Note: Here is where Preparing for Battle is vital. When your lipstick is smeared over the side of your face as you hand smelling over of your dope, ID wearing with hands an I-got- loaded-for-free bracelet, the game is up. That said, be aware of conditions that might affect your performance. A little something for your attorney to gnaw upon. Count thousand, in your head, two-one-thousand, one-onethree. If you have been busted before, you may be better off refusing to consent to any sobriety tests and accept the penalty for failing to do so, which is sometimes less severe than a sec- Driving While Wasted ond or third DUI bust.
This is particularly true if you were really soused, because aggravated drunk-driving laws bring more pain for being more wasted.
Lastly, if you happen to be wasted on drugs rather than booze, take the Breathalyzer; it only works for booze. Urine tests are much less reliable. I had a couple days where I didn't feel like writing. I did put together the first few chapters into an eBook for my wife to read. She got a giggle out of it.
If you want an in-progress copy, to read for amusement, just send me an email. The link is in the right-hand sidebar, at the top, where it says Contact Mother Superior.
Yeah, that's it. Click on that. Note, I'm not looking for feedback. The novel is very messy, filled with placeholders, and intentionally half-assed. Besides, I don't have time to incorporate any feedback until after November. But, if you're curious, I can easily send out in-progress copies the next time I batch one up for my wife, either as an ePub or a PDF.
Just finished Alastair Reynold 's House of Suns. Good book? Yeah, it was a fun read. Great book? No, not really. There are a few problems with it. First, it doesn't feel packed with original ideas. While not set in the Revelation Space universe , it seems to borrow ideas from that universe, modifying them to be sure.
But, if you voraciously read everything Reynold's writes, some of the ideas are going to feel recycled. Second, the characters are pretty transparent. There aren't many times where character revelations are, well, revelatory. Instead you're thinking "Yep, I knew she was a good guy all along" or "Yep, I knew he was actually a bad guy. Third, too much is explained by telling rather than showing.
Characters will learn something new and the reader will find out about it via the character engaging in long periods of exposition to other characters. Fourth, the framing story doesn't really add a whole bunch to the story. It's nice background, but I didn't really see how it ties into themes in the main story. Of course, there's always the chance that it's too subtle for me and I just missed it. I don't do subtle well.
No, seriously, I don't. Fifth, it's one of those books where the final outcome is really independent from the actions of the characters. In these cases, I'm always reminded of Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end, Indy fails to stop the Nazis. Turns out it doesn't matter. He could have just stayed in bed. Sixth, he uses the phrase chafing at the bit. It's champing at the bit. And don't bother telling me that chafing is a common alternative.
Pointless pedantry is immune to such things! It's sounds like I'm being extra critical. I'm not, really. It was still a fun read and I certain don't not recommend it. But it's not nearly as good as The Prefect. It's sorta like the last two Replacement albums.
They're good albums, it's just that the Mats were so good in their prime that the last two pale compared to their earlier albums. What's NaNoWriMo?
Why it's National Novel Writing Month! During the month of November, all sorts of folks take a shot at writing a novel, with a focus on quantity rather than quality. Knowing that, given the short timeframe, you will be producing crap is supposed to free you from such concerns and just let you write.
I'm still behind on projects, but I already committed to a friend that I would do it this year, and so I will. I've never written a novel. I have written a book. A decade ago, when I lost a shit-load of weight, I did write a book about it.
And I tucked it away, knowing that I had no insight on maintaining a healthy weight and also knowing chances were I would gain some back. And I did, about half of which I have re-lost. Still have about 25 pounds to go, sigh. So, I'm both excited and scared for November to start. I have the basic idea of my book down.
It's going to be a space opera, with a horny Kirk-esque captain who bangs anything that breathes, and a few things that don't. I'm still waiting for Punkie to add me back. Taps foot expectantly. I didn't want to use SexyNuns as my user name as that would raise expectations which I don't intend to meet.
Maybe not. I'll post status updates here. But I probably won't post portions of the book in progress. But, whatever steaming pile of manure exists at the end of the month, I will post here.
I'll even post an ePub version, for your eReader. This I swear! If your eReader doesn't support ePub, well, what can I tell you.
You bought the wrong one. This in an intriguing combination of fiction and non, all dealing with interstellar travel. The fiction is pretty sweet, going beyond the usual. Buddhists in space? The non-fiction is good, but focused solely on drive alternatives. I would have liked to see some other aspects covered. One bonus is that most of the non-fiction pieces reference other books that would be of interest. I bought a couple, but have only read one, so far.
How did that go? Back to the Moon - Travis S. China has secretly gone to the Moon, but are in trouble and need rescuing! It sounds like a smaller, earlier version of The Martian. So I gave it a shot.
This is awful. I abandoned it after four chapters. It reads like competent-men SF from the fifties, yet is only four years old. The characters? Here's Bill:. Bill rose from his chair and strode to the table, the alpha male in the room by the way he carried himself and his purposeful stride to the chair adjacent to the one Carlton had just occupied.
She had been Stetson's secretary, or, to be politically correct, his management support assistant, for almost five years.
Then there are the long rants at NASA, for making space travel boring. Legitimate gripe? Oh yes. Do you want to spend time with folks continually making said gripe? I don't. After four chapters, I checked out some reviews, to see if this got any better. What I found was that the characterization became even worse once the Chinese showed up, and the rants at NASA continued.
Starhawk - Jack McDevitt. McDevitt has a problem. The books are, generally, really fun reads. The problem? Hutch was getting old. In the fifth book , he moved her into a desk job, to the book's detriment.
Turns out, this really isn't the Academy series. This is the Hutch series. Hutch needs to be the star player. Book six put her back into space, which was great to read, but the book suffered in other ways.
Plus, now Hutch is, in the book's universe, getting a little old for action-packed space adventure. And, you know, that's not a bad idea at all.
The books isn't perfect. The overriding plot is thin. Hutch herself doesn't really do a whole lot of note. Although that fits the prequel nature. There are mysteries brought up that aren't resolved, presumedly as fodder for further books. This sort of thing is awkward in a prequel, as none of the earlier-yet-later books mention these mysteries.
Or maybe they do.
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