. . . has now taken possession of my uterus.

I'll send them codeine to go along with it for the cramps that used to occur monthly, and now take place whenever my body decides on them . . .

I would have been down with those who insisted that there be an exception for the preservation of a woman's health, if I didn't know from first-hand experience that "health" is interpreted to mean "mental health," and "mental health" is generally regarded—within certain segments of the health-care community—as "not having given birth to a child one didn't plan to conceive."

Had the phrase been "physical health," I would have felt better about the insistence on including that language. As it is, Kennedy essentially invited that modification:

Kennedy acknowledged continuing disagreement about the procedure within the medical community. In the past, courts have cited that uncertainty as a reason to allow the disputed procedure.

"The medical uncertainty over whether the Act's prohibition creates significant health risks provides a sufficient basis to conclude ... that the Act does not impose an undue burden," Kennedy said Wednesday.

While the court upheld the law against a broad attack on its constitutionality, Kennedy said the court could entertain a challenge in which a doctor found it necessary to perform the banned procedure on a patient suffering certain medical complications.

The law allows the procedure to be performed when a woman's life is in jeopardy.

This should be interesting to watch. I wonder whether it'll make a difference as a practical matter: there really are those to whom the "right" to terminate a pregnancy is as essential to human existence as oxygen and fresh water.

I do think abortion should remain nominally legal, but it's way too widespread and casually-undertaken right now. In fact, the major abuses all go the other way: young women get buffaloed into this major procedure, without any counseling about how it will affect them for the rest of their lives.

If I'd heard anyone say that when I was 20, I would have laughed and said they were merely being sentimental.

I know better now.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:52 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
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. . . on just locking up the weirdos. (And, you know—why that wouldn't work.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Right now, it appears that the Mac/Safari people are screwed on my site, whereas the Wintel/Explorer people are holding their own.

Let me know, boys and girls. Just give me system-browswer-what's working.

Thanks!

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:38 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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1 Goofy stuff happens in Safari. Links disappear and text lines collapse accordingly as the links are moused over. But if i highlight a block of text, the links remain and can be clicked on. I'm posting this via Firefox. -Bob

Posted by: Bob at April 18, 2007 11:46 AM (CP6tB)

2 MS Win I.E. Version 7.0.5730.11, 128-bit is functioning normally.

Posted by: Darrell at April 18, 2007 12:37 PM (Jlyo/)

3 I see Fluffy is on the job and doing well.

Posted by: Darrell at April 19, 2007 07:36 PM (Q5WT8)

4 Uh, gee, Darrell: I don't know what you're talking about [posting via IE]

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 19, 2007 08:34 PM (f3SX3)

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Democrats are primates! That means they can be educated!

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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How I love your pizazz.

How I envy you your clothes, and your face and your beautiful body. I saw you read at the UCLA Book Fair once, and realized on some level that I just wanted to be you, with your beautiful embroidered cloak and your thick black hair.

And how I forgive you your leftism, despite the fact that I don't think it's done your humor as much good as one might hope. And yet, and yet . . .

Marguerite is grieving:

I look at the shooter's expressionless face on the news and he looks so familiar, like he could be in my family. Just another one of us. But how can he be us when what he has done is so terrible? Here is where I can really envy white people because when white people do something that is inexplicably awful, so brutally and horribly wrong, nobody says – “do you think it is because he is white?” There are no headlines calling him the “White shooter." There is no mention of race because there is no thought in anyone's mind that his race had anything to do with his crime.

So much attention is focused on the Asian-ness of the shooter, how the Korean community is reacting to it, South Korea's careful condolences and cautiously expressed fear that it will somehow impact the South Korean population at large.

Sweetie, you haven't even studied criminology in the way that my fuzzy-headed 70-year-old mother has, or my 54-year-old husband (who is also a comic, by the way), or . . . or the way nearly any other sentient creature has.

Take if from a short, young, homely white chick (who just happens to be a crime writer)—

If there is any industry other than "NASA engineer in the 1950s" that says "White Guy" with a capital W andG, it is the field of multiple-victim homicide. Whether expressed in serial killings or in the type of "mass murder" young Mr. Cho perpetrated at Virginia Tech, the first picture anyone get in his/her mind of a mass murderer/serial killer is that of a pale white male loner. Or, sometimes, two pale white male loners who work together. (See Columbine, or the Hillside Strangler[s].)

Sure: there have been blacks involved in this type of crime. And even Asians, though I've been told it isn't fair to count Pol Pot or Chairman Mao. And Aileen Wuornos tried to make us—the women of the world—slightly less underrepresented in the annals of multiple-victim homicide. (Bloody Mary helped there, too.)

But the undisputed champs in this particular arena of evil are pale white men.

If people discuss his Korean-ness, Margaret, it's because that factor makes it different from the norm. It's because this very disturbed young murderer doesn't fit the mold, racially. It's the "man bites dog" element in the story.

Young Mr. Cho has no more in common with you than I do with that white guy who executed people in the cafeteria in Texas, or with Ted Bundy. [Well, there is the name, Cho, but that's just the luck of the draw, and it will give you great material over the years, once you've absorbed this horrible shock.]

Evil is its own ethnicity. Count on it, Margaret. Rational white/black/brown/Asian people all over the world aren't suddenly looking at their Korean friends/neighbors/colleagues/schoolmates/vendors/clients any differently.

It's a stupid world, Baby-Doll. But not quite that stupid. Not quite.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:21 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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So. Should we have a national "report the weirdo" hotline?

Sean: No.

Ace: Maybe.

Me: Absolutely. But I shall report myself, so as to beat the rest of you to it.

Seriously—as a creepy strange person and part-time crime writer, I don't know how far I want to go down the road of judging people on the basis of the shit they come up with for their fiction. You know?

I mean, I've got some nice landscaping in my backyard, and I'd prefer that the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department avoid digging it up just because I'm writing about disembodied, semi-decomposed corpses right now, and my last manuscript discussed the sexual side of serial killing.

But the fact that his classmates were thinking about what they would do if he showed up one day with a loaded gun suggests to me that we might need more citizen-driven threat assessment.

How that's consistent with the Bill of Rights isn't clear to me. Unfortunately.

Please discuss.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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At least I don't sit around making up quizzes that compare people to one of the five digits on a human hand, Mr. Composer-of-Blogthings!

I just, um. I just print the results:

You Are a Pinky

You are fiercely independent, and possibly downright weird. A great communicator, you can get along with almost anyone. You are kind and sympathetic. You support all your friends - and love them for who they are. You get along well with: The Ring Finger Stay away from: The Thumb

Via Caltechgirl.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 07:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Hackbarth has the story of a Virginia Tech professor who gave his life to save the students in his classroom.

Details are still sketchy, but the way I got the story, he bought his students enough time to escape via an open window—and was shot and killed while he tried to block the murderer's path.

Just when I'm ready to weep at the utter blackness of human nature, I hear a story like this, and start to weep again at the good.

I was raised on bromides about how "everyone has some good and some bad in him/her." That's true enough, as far as it goes. But which part of you is stronger? Is it the beast who might kill, or the angel who could save others at the cost of your own life?

It's the part you feed.

Feed the good: Ninety-nine percent of the other stuff we worry about is bullshit.

UPDATE: Darleen weighs in on the hero of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 06:21 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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This person may want to identify herself, but I'll leave that up to her:

I was 12 years old when Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas University clock tower and started murdering people below.

I had to refresh that old memory of grainy, black-and-white TV coverage by
doing some research, but one of the reasons he didn't kill MORE people than
he did was that not only did the local police fire upward at him, trying to
keep him down . . . but LOCAL CITIZENS ran to their homes and cars and brought back their guns and rifles and joined in on firing up at the tower.

Now we all just wait around for the SWAT teams and heaven forfend any
civilians try to help.

But the police aren't doing much either: they're too busy "securing the perimeter," as Attila the Hub points out. They don't try to get the shooter, so lives can be saved: they just seal off the campus, as they did at Columbine. Meanwhile, the students we've disarmed so V-Tech can be a nice, safe "gun-free zone" are being systematically executed. Law enforcement wasn't there. School security wasn't there. Those students who owned guns weren't permitted to have them on campus.

And we've told kids that when someone has a gun, we ought to do what they say. So when they were told to line up, that's what they did.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 03:00 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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He's especially amused by the allegation that Magnum was in mid-air when she was assaulted; it's apparently among the many very different accounts she gave of the "rape":

Absent the discovery of a complex canteliever-and-pulley-sexual-flying-harness in the bathroom—a discovery I'm quite sure Mike Nifong would have revealed—we're to believe that Crystal Gail Mangum was raped while floating around like Baron Harkonnen hopped up on Bene Gesserit meth?

Maybe she just got confused. Maybe it wasn't the Duke lacrosse team at all, but the notoriously badly-behaved Duke Acrobatic Sexual Assault & Levitating Synchronized Sodomy squad.

I've had run-ins with those guys. And let me tell you, once they've psychokinetically raised you in the air, they go at you with their meat-bats as if you were a friggin' pinata.

Honestly, I don't know how the hell those guys still manage to collect $5000 a year in student fees. I don't care how many Meals On Wheels fundraisers they hold, I'm just tired of being gang-raped by sodomaniacal Sith masters of white skin privilege.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:42 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Barry Saunders of Raleigh, North Carolina's, News & Observer encapsulates the "reasoning" we'll be hearing a lot of in the weeks and months ahead: that if only a big magnet in the sky could suck up all the firearms on the planet, no one ever need fear "gun violence" again. And events like those at Virginia Tech would need never happen again.

I'm too angry to send him a polite, reasoned reply. Perhaps I'll be capable of it later.

There's an e-mail address at the end of the piece: you might try sending him a note if you can compose one that will create reasonable doubt in the back of his mind about the wisdom of his views. Don't just vent. It won't do any good.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:54 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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. . . for Gun-Free Zones.

Does anyone have a current body count from these very-safe gun-free zones?

I mean, at least high-risk activities like sky-diving aren't generally considered critical to one's career (in the case of colleges) or mandated by law (in the case of high schools).

Our schools are turning into do-it-yourself killing fields, due to the proliferation of gun-free zones—which are, in effect, target galleries for the unhinged.

Ed Isler points out:

Pollsters have found that 85% of Americans would find it appropriate for a principal or teacher to use "a gun at school to defend the lives of students" to stop a school massacre (Research 2000 poll).

The words of Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker should be haunting him in the wake of the massacre at his school. Last year, a bill was killed in the Virginia legislature to enable those with concealed weapons permits to carry their guns at schools. Hincker said that "I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus."

I'm sure the parents of the dead kids appreciate it very much.

UPDATE: More here, via a fairly good Instapundit roundup. I am just enraged that we disarm people, and tell them never to resist the nice guy with the weapon. Thirty-two innocent people dead. With a different public mindset—and different policies—it could have been one or maybe two, including the gunman.

Don't let the silly words of Larry Hincker die: make sure he and the other state legislators around this country know that we don't want to feel safe. We want to be safe—at least, as safe as we can be in a world that includes the criminally insane.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 06:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Either that, or defer legal adulthood and voting rights to 21. We can't have it both ways.

Insty has more.

As far as I'm concerned, if you are old enough to die for your country overseas, you may drink. Period.

Discuss among yourselves: at special family dinners, at what age would you give a teenager a little wine&mdash:say, on Thanksgiving day? Sixteen? Seventeen? (Assuming that this is not a teenager with a chemical dependency history, of course. Just a normal kid, to whom you want alcohol to be as neutral an issue as possible.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:13 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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He pretty much nails it:

Only in America: a team of champions who think they're victims, an old white fool who talks like a gangsta rapper, and multi-millionaires grown rich on race-baiting who promote themselves as guardians of civility. Good thing there are no real problems to worry about.

Yeah: to me, the galling thing was the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton being consulted. Both of those guys are bigots par excellence. A friend of mine said Oprah shouldn't have weighed in, because she's so rich.

"Oprah can say whatever she likes," I told him. "Having money should not exclude one from speaking on the issues of the day. But given how freaking anti-Semitic Jackson and Sharpton are, they are acting like total hypocrites."

Like Steyn, I don't know much about Imus' work, but I do live with a comic. There's really no way of guessing what these guys might say next, and sometimes it's outrageous stuff. But 95% percent of it is ironic, and 99% is really funny.

In a sane universe, Imus would have apologized and the MSM would have moved on.

Of course, if a "botched joke" is a firing offense, it would seem that John Kerry's career should be over. No?

No. Big Media don't see it that way, because soldiers, airmen and Marines can never be victims in the sense that champion basketball players can.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:50 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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1 Great article! You are right on target. The hypocrisy of this is unbelievable. It's maddening to watch it discussed on television as though it makes sense. Logic has just been thrown out the window. I linked over here to this, but your trackbacks aren't on

Posted by: beth at April 16, 2007 11:16 AM (u79qt)

2 BTW - that team lost the championship. It doesn't really matter - but I've noticed that people keep talking about this ruining their big moment. They were beat by the team from Tennessee.

Posted by: beth at April 16, 2007 11:17 AM (u79qt)

3 Had it been me that Imus attacked I would have told Sharpton and Jackson to take a dmaned hike. That these women were so eager to take on the roll of victim pissed me off. There's plenty of ways they could have fired back at Imus with strength and integrity. Instead they were happy to let the media and race baiters paint them as victims - of THREE LOUSY WORDS! Give me a freaking break. A more productive lesson from these "future leaders" would have been how to gracefully endure and overcome the verbal slings and arrows of idiots like Imus.

Posted by: Janette at April 16, 2007 04:53 PM (5R+zg)

4 Kerry should have been thrown in jail for his meetings with North Korean government officials in Paris in the early 70's, which should have made him ineligible for serving in the US Government, per the Constitution. Imus made the mistake of denegrating with an off the cuff remark members of the class of people that the Democrats pander too, so, regardless of how much he has done for Liberals, he had to be sacrificed.

Posted by: William Teach at April 16, 2007 06:26 PM (doAuV)

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Laurence seems tense. Are all the New York Money People in Texas like that?

It seems like some people want to ethnically cleanse the planet of New York Money People, and there's tremendous overreaction to that in some quarters.

Perhaps instead of ethnically cleansing them, we could simply send them back where they came from.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:49 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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. . . for a nice fag. I mean, really: who doesn't?

Except those who are dreaming of spotted dick. Professor Purkinje's ten-year-old daughter once asked him if "dick" meant "penis." When he confirmed that it did, she asked about the spotted dick she'd seen on English menus.

"It's a sort of custard," he explained. "If you meet a boy who really has spots on his dick, you run fast in the other direction."

The next morning he woke her up and asked her what she wanted for breakfast. "Spotted dick!" she announced.

"We're fresh out of that," informed her. "How about cereal and milk?"

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:32 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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It would be a shame if something happened to it.

My traffic took a dive over the weekend. Now, I understand that some of you were put off by the facts that:

1) I didn't really post on Saturday or Sunday;
2) The site was taking forever to load, because I still had the old Blogads script in my templates;
3) Comments weren't working;
4) There were moments that mu.nu itself appeared to be down;
5) I'm a snotty, rather irritating person.

However, you know what happens when my traffic drops too drastically: I reach for my smelling salts, and then I stop posting entirely, even during the week. Yes, I know that other bloggers—weak-willed, spineless ones—assume that "if I build it, they might come."

That doesn't fly here. My philosophy is, "if they show up, and I feel like it, I might entertain them.

So be sure to show up, and leave me lots of comments. If the mu.nu comments are down, please write your concerns on a $50 bill and mail them to me via the U.S. Postal service. Remember: the money will go to a good cause. Me.

UPDATE: Since I'm in an unsentimental mood, the text "during the wee" above has been corrected to read "during the week." I do, however, still reserve the right to blog while on the potty, and there's not a thing you can do about it. (And if you're on the phone with me and hear tinkly noises? Those must be my wind chimes.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:15 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment
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1 $50 bill, huh? Was the Fed giving you trouble cashing in those defaced T-Bills? Fun Fact: Many readers don't know that they can arrange to list LMA as the sole beneficiary to their estates! Until now. Knowledge is "power"! (But don't write that down on your official documents--LMA doesn't want any legal battles with SondraK)

Posted by: Darrell at April 16, 2007 08:17 AM (oLdKY)

2 Gotta hand it to ya, Attila Girl, I never even guessed that you were posting during the wee! Whaddaya use, a laptop?

Posted by: Colin MacDougall at April 16, 2007 08:22 AM (Zydip)

3 Well, Colin--there are certain advantages to sitting down while urinating. I know chicks don't have the "full directional control" than men enjoy, but we certainly have an easier time multi-tasking.

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 16, 2007 09:56 AM (f3SX3)

4 Sure! Going for the tried-and-true way to increase your traffic, are we? You'll need a 'Digg This' button. Btw, some of us men are able to do the same, handsfree. I won't say if we can tell you how cold or how deep the water is, because that would be bragging. And delusional. FunFact: Stockbrokers would go out of busineess if their customers ever stopped taking phone calls in the loo.

Posted by: Darrell at April 16, 2007 12:03 PM (Ks+OS)

5 I will never understand the need to talk on the phone in the can. When someone does that at work, I start banging on the door yelling "I gotta go!"

Posted by: William Teach at April 16, 2007 06:31 PM (doAuV)

6 I wouldn't ever do it in a public restroom. But at home . . . ? Why not?

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 16, 2007 07:05 PM (f3SX3)

7 I think there's something up with Sitemeter, Google, or both. My traffic has dropped 50% since late last week. I can't have gotten that bad all of a sudden. Can't I?

Posted by: Sean Hackbarth at April 16, 2007 09:12 PM (QJ5cf)

8 Their database does strange things, Sean. I have had convo's with them about it. It was corrupted for me for like 9 months, only registering about half to 2/3rds of my actual hits. Problem in one of their servers.

Posted by: William Teach at April 17, 2007 05:37 AM (doAuV)

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I don't know if I've really exploited this angle—at least, not directly. Every once in a while I do remind the world that I am G-d's gift to All Matters Editorial, and no slouch in print/electronic production, either. And, yes: I spent years designing print ads, so I have a pretty good eye.

But I'm not sure my market as a freelance copyeditor is the same segment as those who follow my blog.

Although the "getting work via one's blog" tactic worked for Laurence and any number of others, I prefer to skip the middleman and demand money outright from my readers. This seems to work the best.

Of course, maybe there's someone out there looking for a new-media-savvy, whip-smart editor who happens to be a potty mouth on her personal blog. That'll work.

Via Sean.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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The JL Kirk Associates/King & Ballow shitstorm has been raising my hackles to the point that I've been slightly afraid to post about it: bullies make me absolutely furious.

People who use unfair tactics against those in the job market piss me off, and unjustified legal threats against those exercising their First Amendment rights do the same thing. JL Kirk Associates and King & Ballow are both behaving not just like assholes, but like idiots. I'll let you decide which is worse in either case—the assholism or the idiocy.

Over at Patterico, the smart-and-dishy Justin Levine puts it this way:

IÂ’m late to the game here, but I wanted to join the growing numbers in the blogging community who officially declare JL Kirk Associates, Alan E. Korpady and the Nashville legal firm of King & Ballow to be complete asshats. No self respecting person who supports free speech rights should ever utilize the services of these people.

In my experience, the bigger the law firm, the less likely they are to understand how blogging culture has changed the landscape. These people donÂ’t understand that a legal threat is far more likely to damage their clientÂ’s reputation, rather than repair it.

Ah, yes: but isn't it a beautiful thing? Before King & Ballow issued this legal threat, many people in Tennessee hadn't even heard of either them or JL Kirk Associates. Now both companies are household words: the former as a sicko scam operation, and the latter as an extraordinarily clumsy handler of media relations.

Here is the post that King & Ballow thought might constitute "tortuous interference" with the business of JL Kirk and Associates (and their reasoning is tortuous, indeed):

J.L. Kirk & Associates: My Story

Feel free to skip to the end for the juicy stuff...

JL Kirk & Associates found my husband's resume online. They contacted him a couple of weeks ago and offered their services as an 'Executive Placement Firm'. As I'm wont to do, I of course Googled them as much as possible and found very little in the way of solid information. So I've decided to write up our experiences with them for anyone else who is interested in finding out more about this particular operation.

Anyone who has been searching for a job for any length of time is well aware of the various vulnerabilities that are part of the process. There's the self-doubt, frustration and impatience, coupled with no small amount of worry. So when a job searcher gets an email that says "maybe we can help!" the relief is almost immediate.

My husband filled out an application and questionnaire, and returned it directly to the company. He then received an appointment with a counselor the following week. During that appointment the representative of JL Kirk & Associates interviewed him just as one would for a position. The afternoon after the interview he received an email that congratulated him on making it through the first step of the process. They wanted to schedule a second interview which required my presence as a Support Person/Spouse/Significant Other. When he scheduled the interview he questioned them directly about their fees and payment arrangements. He was told that if we received approval after the second interview the money would be discussed at that time.

So today was the second interview, and we drove to Maryland Farms for our 2:00 appointment. We sat in a waiting room next to a fake fireplace and a lone man in a suit. At 2:11 a matronly woman came out and announced to the other man--in front of us--that she would not be able to meet with him because he wasn't able to bring his Support Person. They had a lengthy conversation in front of us about this failed meeting and his disappointment. He asked to speak with her behind closed doors (as would I) and then five minutes later that conversation ended with him leaving dejectedly. She then turned to us (it is now 2:17pm) and greeted us warmly.

We were led into an office that appeared to have been the result of a decorating war between a loan officer and an eccentric grandmother. The prototypical office furniture clashed with a giant print of Raffael's Cherubs a reproduction oriental rug and a handmade mosaic table with a tilted top. The Husband and I were seated in two chairs across from the interviewer, who sat on a sofa next to a pile of throw pillows.

Here's where the fun starts. We heard all about how hard it is to find a job, how most jobs aren't posted online and are only found through networking. We heard about how the really good jobs are available only to those 'in the know' and can only be obtained through some wizardy combining Masonic handshakes, good dentistry and whatever pixie dust this particular company stores in the backroom. This interview seemed very carefully designed to exploit every potential vulnerability that any jobseeker feels. After about 10 minutes of conversation subtly designed to push every button we may have, the interviewer handed us a booklet that was said to be a tailored write-up of my husband's profile as a job-seeker. The interviewer left us alone in the room to digest the booklet on our own terms.

The booklet consisted of three pages of reiteration of the interview's strong-arm tactics, followed by a regurgitation of information from my husband's resume, all summarised with a couple of pages essentially saying "the job market is tough but we think you're really great and so we'll be here to help you get a job!" We skimmed the booklet and reviewed our game plan, then signaled the interviewer by opening the door.

Our game plan was to ask direct questions about the company's operation and placement record. In short, 'what exactly do you do and how well do you do it?' We had test answers in mind. In short, if we ask a direct question and get a vague answer such as "every case is different so numbers are hard to apply here" that tells us a great deal about the company's services.

Sure enough, our first question about placement rate was answered with an "every case is different, etc." style answer. Ultimately she gave us the figure of "90 to 92% placement rate" and then proceeded to tell us a long tale about a 'failed' client who showed up 37 minutes late to an interview with a CEO from an out-of-state firm. We all agreed that was indeed very unprofessional of said client and what a shame and how good to not work with him. (I of course was thinking about how we were on time for that interview which she failed to start until 17 minutes after the promised appointment time.)

She then gave us the very good news that they were prepared to accept us as clients. Then the fun began. We were told that Headhunters and Employment Agencies took fees only when a job had been secured for the job seeker, and they took their fees (generally 30-40%) from the hiring firm. But that means the job seeker gets a lower starting salary because all of their good money is going to the headhunter/employment agency. Thankfully, though, JL Kirk & Associates will be able to get my husband a job making a far larger starting salary. All we need to do is put $4,420 on a credit card today. Once we do that the entire weight of the firm of JL Kirk & Associates will begin the task of navigating treacherous shark-infested landmines of the job search on behalf of my husband. And just trust them, because they find jobs for 90% of the people who pay them to.

So that's how it works. And that's pretty much how we expected that it would work. But both the spouse and I believe that it's irrepsonsible to not pursue any lead during this time so we thought we'd go through the process. Especially since they kept so much of it in the dark from the outset.

JUICY STUFF BEGINS HERE

But I'm very angry about it. If you've made it this far, I suppose maybe you could tell that I've been supressing most of my irritation. However, irritation makes for good blog reading, and so here it is.

I get really ticked off at people trying to use fear to motivate others. I don't care if you are a fire-and-brimstone preacher, an insurance salesman, a used-car salesman or a cat burglar. Finding someone else's fear and vulnerability and using that vulnerability to somehow enrich yourself is a cheap and underhanded tactic. It's wrong and it's cruel. And I think that's exactly what this placement firm did to us today. There were times when I felt like I was sitting across from a spider. We were meant to feel at home enough to let down our guard so that the woman could then ply us gently with tales of terror. All of it was designed to make us hand over nearly $5,000 without question and without possibility of a refund.

The husband and I are not always idiots. We both expect to pay for services rendered from any provider. But we generally like to be treated as responsible adults. We had legitimate questions about the fee structure and we raised those at several points in the process. For them to not even discuss that fee structure until they had battered us emotionally for half an hour is what I would consider to be unethical. I'm sure there are other employment agencies and headhunters out there. We'll continue to look for them.

In the meantime, I would discourage anyone who stumbles across this entry from even going through the JL Kirk & Associates "interview process".

UPDATE

I should also mention that this company was formerly Bernard Haldane before it was purchased by Mr. Kirk Leipzig. One of the accusations against Bernard Haldane was that they would make an examination of the potential client's assets and charge accordingly. I find it interesting to note just how close our "fee" was to the tax refund we recently received. Hmmm. Makes you wonder, no?

The rule in business now is that whatever takes place in private may be brought into the public square if either party attempts to take unfair advantage of the other.

Be careful what you do in the dark: someone may lift the rock up at any moment.

Glenn has a few mini-roundups:

Insty on JL Kirk, #3: The Media Bloggers Association is on the case;
Insty on JL Kirk, #2
Insty on JL Kirk, #1

Now, you all have a nice day. And fight fair!

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:01 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 1802 words, total size 11 kb.

I announce that I'm working on a new mystery, and I've given myself two months to complete the initial manuscript, so I can spend most of June polishing it.

Everyone is thrilled—and even more so when the hear the first scene, in which our intrepid hero and heroine (sort of) discover the body of the victim.

"Wow. This one really moves along," remarks one of the other writers. "And the people are must less sarcastic with each other than in your other book."

"Well, they're less sarcastic because they are married to each other," I explain. "It isn't in their best interests to draw blood every time they speak. And the story is actually moving along because I decided that there was no time to go for literary merit."

Someone else chimes in: "is there any way that this time you could give them some sort of excuse for solving mysteries? I mean, could they have specialized knowledge of medicine, or be private investigators, or something like that?"

"No," I reply. "They solve murders for the same reason Nora and Nick did it. The same reason Tommy and Tuppence did it. They just do it because it's fun. Either the reader buys in, or he/she doesn't.

"That said, I promise you'll like them. They are very likeable people."

"Great," says our teacher. "Now go home, put these copies away, and don't read our notes just yet. Just keep typing out that first draft."

I suppose I ought to shut down my blog for the next six weeks, but let's see if I can get by without taking that sort of extreme measure.

Naturally, Marvelous Mike starts a list for me of golden-age mysteries set in the non-Los Angeles southwest. He tells me he's going to email it to me later in the week.

"Take your time," I respond. "I'm on a diet right now, anyway, for obvious reasons."

Posted by: Attila Girl at 10:24 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 326 words, total size 2 kb.

1 "Well, they're less sarcastic because they are married to each other," I explain. "It isn't in their best interests to draw blood every time they speak..." You didn't tell us your new novel was set in an alternate universe. Besides Phoenix, I mean.

Posted by: Darrell at April 16, 2007 08:36 AM (oLdKY)

2 Less sarcastic doesn't mean they aren't sarcastic at all. Just means I've toned it down from my last book.

Posted by: Attila Girl at April 16, 2007 10:09 AM (f3SX3)

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