Ker-Splash 2 Soon to Launch

The exciting new hobbyist/reference book, entitled Ker-Splash 2: The High Performance Powerboat Book, will be available later this month. This is Floyd M. Orr's fifth book and the sequel to Ker-SPLASH! Recreational Power Boaters Guide of 2002. This new release seeks to be the ultimate reading and reference guide for potential buyers of new or used boats, experienced powerboat owners, and recreational readers. Ker-Splash 2 contains 400 pages, over 150,000 words, and 135 B&W photos that span the width within the margins of the 7" x 10" format of the book. ISBN 978-1-449-54337-2. $19.95. Kindle and Smashwords editions are planned for later release, probably in March or April. There will have to be compromises and certain decisions made concerning the number, size, and quality of the photos to be included before the e-book editions can be released.

Ker-Splash 2 is the culmination of an intense year of research, compilation, composition, and editing. The first Ker-Splash is still in print, but the material has become quite dated since its 2002 debut. Both books include corporate contacts for all the major boat builders, but the changes, both large and small, between then and now have been numerous, to say the least! The NASDAQ crash of 2000 and the Dow crash after 9/11 set the stage for all the changes described in Ker-SPLASH! Unfortunately for all of us, Depression 2.0 reset the stage again, making the time ripe for an update on the state of the industry. One of the key purposes of both editions has been to inform both potential buyers and seasoned enthusiasts of the business status, both past and present, of the multitude of boat builders and associated companies.

Ker-Splash 2 attempts to be many different things to different readers. The main focus of the book is on the major types of recreational powerboats other than those designed primarily for fishing or any sort of utilitarian purposes. The fishing and utility types simply could not have been included without doubling the size and cost of the book. You would be shocked to learn just how many fishing boat builders there are in the USA! The major types of non-fishing boats covered are: runabouts, jet boats, jet skis, offshore performance boats, California Customs, speedboats, towboats, cabin cruisers, and deck and pontoon boats. The multitude of engines and outdrives especially designed for the various types of powerboats are described. Family tow sports are detailed in extensive instructions concerning how to teach a beginner to ski, learning to ski, towing technique and tips, and a chapter on water toys. This includes a complete breakdown of the skis, wakeboards and other towables available, tips on selecting them, and descriptions of the retailers that market them. As in the first edition, capsule historical background details of the sport, the boat types, and the brands are sprinkled throughout. Many brands that have been out of business for years are at least briefly described, including the most recent contact information in case a reader is trying to track down a rare part or service. Also as in the first edition, the author entertains his readers with humorous, autobiographical anecdotes and socioeconomic commentary. That's why the book, the series, and this blog are called Nonfiction in a Fictional Style!

A Life Changing Event

This is a 1977 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am SE in the traditional black, just like The Bandit's. In the summer of '77, I was in the market for my first new car since '68. I was driving what I called The Inconspicuousmobile at the time, a 1969 Impala four-door sedan with a 350 and Turbo-Hydramatic. It was light brown with a white top and an equally bland interior. When it needed a $600 AC repair, I decided I needed something closer to my roots. My roots vary quite widely in some circles, from high economy to high performance. All that I all ask of any car is that it have somewhat clean, timeless styling and drive with the precision of quality engineering in the handling and interior ergonomics departments.

A friend of mine who was the son of a Pontiac dealer had a new Trans Am in 1970 when they came in only one color, white with blue stripes, so I was very familiar with the breed. Both my mom and sister drove new Celicas. I remember going with my mom to a Pontiac dealer and seeing a T/A 6.6 in brown on the showroom floor. Mom commented that she could certainly envision me in that car! I replied that I could, too, except mine would be white inside and out with the gold-trimmed SE package and a four-speed manual transmission. Of course it would have the T-top and screaming chicken options, just like the brown one in the showroom.

There are three main drawbacks to any T/A of this vintage, particularly one with the SE package and Screaming Chicken decal on the hood. (1) You must wear gold chains around your neck with your shirt unbuttoned when you frequent the local disco. (2) You cannot carry squat on a long trip. (3) The CEO of Exxon will love you! If you can make it over these three hurdles, it's all downhill from there. The T/A looks, drives and acts like a car should, and the price is reasonable. Since I have never been one to give a rat's ass what other people think, #1 didn't bother me much, but #'s 2 and 3 did. I bought a 1977 Toyota Corolla Liftback SR-5 instead. It had a five-speed transmission, styled steel wheels, stiff suspension, a good interior design, and it carried lots of stuff in its pseudo-station wagon motif. The problem was that it got 27 mpg at its very best on the highway and 17 mpg around town was downright common! This meager result from only 75 horsepower haunted me every day I owned that car!

Little did I know in the summer of 1977 that less than one year later I would land a traveling job that would provide me with an included new lease car for each of the next twelve years. It wasn't long before I realized that I had nothing to lose by thumbing my nose at both Exxon and luggage capacity in my personal car. The SR-5 with low mileage got sold to an old friend and I bought Max, named after Mad Max, but later referred to as simply Baby. She was a 1970 454 four-speed Stingray that inspired the publication of my first book. I owned this beautiful beast for eighteen years. You see, the traveling job did not allow for the development of many long-term relationships. I wanted the old Corvette as much for the companionship of a local Corvette Club as anything else, and Max/Baby did a fine job of delivering on that promise. Max could get 17 mpg on the highway, and that was quite good enough when she was only a secondary vehicle of transportation.

The 1970 Stingray had a removable rear window, chrome bumpers, high-compression engine, and a Kamm tail, all things I valued highly at the time. The 1977 Corvette was quite a turkey with its plastic-coated, sloped rear bumper, fixed glass rear window, and low-performance, small-block engine. I was actually unaware at the time how much I would later appreciate the 1980 Corvette, another one of my favorite model years, but that's another story. (Go buy Plastic Ozone Daydream: it's in there.) The '77 T/A 6.6, on the other hand, was the last of a proud breed. It already had the fastback rear with more luggage space in both the rear seat and trunk. The T-tops were a popular option, and the 400-cubic-inch engine was still available. I even liked the wheels and color choices better on the T/A than the Corvette in 1977, not to mention that it was $2000 cheaper.

I left out a detail just to build the suspense. Surprisingly, the Corvette club in Dallas has never been a national powerhouse, but the ones in Fort Worth and Austin were two of the largest and strongest in the country, and I assume they still are today. I was getting a little weary of the sheer massive size of The Metroplex, and due to the job and old friends in Austin, was actually spending more time there than in my own city of Dallas! I moved to Austin in early '80 and bought Max and joined the club before the year was out. Twenty years later I would re-publish all my stories from the Corvette Club Newsletter in an edited book format. I would do this from my home in Austin that I shared with the wonderful native Austinite I married in 1997. She finally got me interested in computers after I had avoided them like the plague for decades. We are now retired and live happily and quietly out in the Texas Hill Country in a house I designed on my computer, and I am working on my fifth book. None of this would have happened if I had simply bought a white 1977 T/A 6.6.

Kicking Buttercup Butt

Shannyn Moore is finally, really mad! She is kicking Buttercup's butt all over her radio show right now! It's time to remove Shannyn from my Chicken Suit List. She may not yet be ready to talk publicly about Buttercup's faked pregnancy, but she certainly is discussing The Wild Ride and the free pass to oblivion that the MSM has provided for the Wicked Witch who wasn't PG in the first place! To quote the only phrase coined by Shannyn better than guano crazy, "Suck it up, Buttercup!!"

Assholiness Validation

Let's just call it AV for short. The thought occurred to me the other day that this phrase states the case quite succinctly. Back in the '50's we used to sometimes use a phrase, The Ugly American. The smirking chimpette you see here is the final distillation of that concept of the dark underbelly of what Americans, at least some of us, have always hidden quietly away in our souls. Americans can be the most arrogant hogs in the world, the true of pigs of the universe hogging resources, starting wars, trashing the planet, abusing animals, and generally trying to be the boss of everyone and everything that is not precisely the same sort of pig. It's okay for us to do all this because we are Christians. We are God's chosen people. Jesus? Who's he? There is only one Bible. You know the one I'm talking about, the version with all the hate-mongering, killing, torture, and general holier-than-thou exclusionism. The only version of The Good Book I like is the one where you are all going to hell, but I'm not!

The problem is that they are all in on it. All the cable news networks, all the old-guard newspapers, and even the well-heeled blog sites just want a piece of the pie. Tell any lie? How much will it pay me? If I just forget about carrying out any genuine investigative journalism and spew whatever pack of lies you feed me, you will pay me five million dollars a year? Is that the deal?

There are millions of Americans who will say or do anything for money. There are millions more who will accept any bullcrap as the truth if it allows them to bury their own conscious thoughts in a morass of obfuscation and sound bites. Please give me permission, Oh Lord, to be the biggest a-hole on the planet while I continue to watch Fox News on my 52-inch Sony with the Big Theater Sound. Please bless me tomorrow when I am forced to see homos and Lesbians loose on the street. Watch over me at my job where the boss insists on hiring dark people and paying them that disgracefully high minimum wage they don't deserve. Please stand guard over my Lexus in the parking lot while I am at work, and don't forget to keep an eye on my 4000-square-foot home in my gated Christian community. Last of all, Lord, I ask that you make sure that our un-American, socialist President does not get elected for a second term. Like all good Christian Americans, I want Your Designated Queen to be our President.

Why doesn't The Queen just confess to the deception of Babygate? She could tell her subjects that she had felt so moved by seeing that sweet little Down Syndrome baby that she just had to adopt him and give him the good home he would not have otherwise had. She could have said the birth mother was dead, a drug addict, a sinner, or whatever, and patted herself on the back for doing a good deed. Why did she not do that? Adoption does not ring the bells of this new breed of the misnomer, Jesus freaks. That's what we used to call them back in the good old days, but Jesus had nothing to do with the development of the deeply black heart of this new type of all-American Christian. Jesus was The Hippy Dippy Weatherman compared to these freaks! The new breed is all about power, greed, selfishness, punishment, and exclusion, not to mention a few dozen additional negative energies. They care nothing for the Christ-like attributes of adoption, so the concept that The Queen actually adopted a baby is quite meaningless to them. All they care about is the devilish concept that The Queen could have aborted a less than perfect child and did not. The devil is in the details: you cannot abort what is not in your body.

Going Rouge

I am pleased to announce that Going Rouge: An American Nightmare has finally been released at Amazon. I reported in my post entitled Fumbling Towards Ecstasy on October 24th that the publisher had no plans to sell the book at Amazon. Although I pleaded with Mr. Oakes then to reconsider his decision, the plan at that time was to sell the book only directly from O/R Books. Now that the publisher has made the smart move, I encourage everyone to order a copy for Christmas right now. The $15.95 price is the same as on the website and you can add another item to your order to get free shipping at Amazon. May I suggest Max Blumenthal's Republican Gomorrah or Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God? For a quick read and a big laugh, you could add this other Going Rouge to your order. Here is my review of that other Going Rouge at PODBRAM. You can also pre-order the paperback edition of Republican Gomorrah from Amazon now if you want to barely squeak over the $25 line!

Update: Amazon has just dropped the price of Going Rouge: An American Nightmare to $9.32. A combo order with Republican Gomorrah in paperback will not get you free shipping, but the price of Going Rouge from Amazon is now even lower than the price directly from the publisher!

Herding Cats

My frustrations with the left wing in America are about to make me explode. It's one thing for the right wing to be selfish, greedy, ignorant, stupid, and just generally full of assholiness, but when the left wing doesn't seem to have enough balls among the whole herd to assemble even one pair, I begin to really lose it! Here are the top ten things that chap my butt:

10. No matter how unlikely it may seem, the left wing Democrats always seem to find a way to rip a devastating loss out of a sure-thing victory.

9. Cable television has become so godawful that I can no longer see straight.

8. Get Geithner and Summers out of there and replace them with Robert Reich and Paul Krugman NOW!

7. Stop the War on Drugs NOW! The kitty isn't hurting anyone by hauling a little weed around in his trunk.

6. Liberal was never on George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words list, so quit acting like little sissy girls every time a right-wing a-hole calls you one.

5. The intelligent, not the right, wing controls Congress and The White House, so quit acting like wimps! (See #6 above, too.)

4. Support President Obama. He is our President and we do not want him to fail, so act like it.

3. Bring down that lying Wicked Witch of Wasilla NOW! Not tomorrow, not next week, NOW! She is absolutely nothing more than a greedy, narcissistic abomination of a liar. She is a pawn of the Christian Mafia. Babybate, Housegate, Planegate, Boogate, Troopergate, Dairygate, Ethicsgate - the list is endless. Don't act like you don't know this, either.

2. Recognize what CNN and the rest of the mainstream media have become and rise up against them all. They have sold their souls to the corporations. There is nothing else to say. We must stop watching and listening to them. We must denigrate them at every turn. We must stop believing their lies. The enemy is not in the Middle East. It is in NYC and Washington, D.C., and its name is CNN.

1. America cannot win The Civil War. If we do not call a halt to this culture-war slap-fight, we shall join the dinosaurs in the tar pits. We must work together to pull ourselves out of the corporate, cultural, economic, environmental muck.

Bikini Orange

Kindle & Smashwords Editions

I have recently discovered a few discrepancies among my e-books between the Kindle and Smashwords editions, but these have been rectified. If you have seen one of my earlier Kindle editions displaying double line spaces where single line spaces should have been, this problem has been corrected. All versions of all my books should display correctly now, although the Kindle and Smashwords editions will never be identical.

There are two separate versions of each of my four books now. The Kindle Editions have paragraph indents, but the Smashwords Editions have single line spaces between paragraphs. This is because the Smashwords versions have to be compatible with more than a single type of e-book reader. The Kindle Editions are priced a little higher because they have been specifically formatted for the Kindle only. Some of you may already be aware that the Smashwords Editions have been available directly from the Smashwords website for some time. They recently were added to B&N online and other sites, and soon will be available at Amazon. All the print versions of my current books will continue to be available everywhere.

Here is an update on the release of my upcoming book, Ker-Splash 2: The High Performance Powerboat Book. Initially at least, this book will be available only as a CreateSpace printed edition at Amazon. It is still on schedule to be released 1/1/10 or very soon thereafter. Ker-Splash 2 will be my biggest book yet, featuring a total word count much higher than my previous books and at least seventy photos, mostly of boats, of course. While awaiting the arrival of some key photos for Ker-Splash 2 from a particular boat builder, I took advantage of the break to work on the previously mentioned updates to the electronic versions of my current books. There has coincidentally been a bit of face-stuffing activity with old friends during this time period, too!

I call the photo above Bikini Orange. This is a 2009 Commander 28-foot catamaran in a mid-cabin design. This small boutique builder of California Custom Boats will be included in Ker-Splash 2. This photo is one of the outtakes that did not quite make the cut: a better shot is in the book!