5,000 words in, I should probably start figuring out how this short story ends, huh?

Meanwhile, there’s this story, which at 11,237 words (somehow I though it’d be longer) has moved well out of short story territory and begun to test the waters of whatever the hell it’s now supposed to be.

Writing gets easier, but it never, never gets easy.

Sounds like fuzzy math to me. I know I shouldn’t expect anything better from Fox News — and, for that matter, I shouldn’t be bothering to watch Fox News — but still.

They’re citing some study that says 34% of reporters described themselves as liberal, while only 7% described themselves as conservative. Naturally, they’re drawing all sorts of conclusions about that. (Fox News is always drawing conclusions from things.) A number of people on the panel of shouting heads have pointed out possible problems with the study itself — it asked for self-descriptions rather than positions on particular issues — but nobody seems to be addressing what to me seems a key point: those answers only add up to 41%.

Which means that 59% didn’t describe themselves as liberal or conservative. I could be wrong, but that would seem to indicate that a majority of reporters at least understand the basic idea of objectivity and the danger of bias.

Which is a whole lot more than I can say for Fox. Although maybe somebody on the panel did bring this up, I don’t know. I’ve stopped watching.

A few months back, I sent out a permission request form to a scientific journal in order to secure rights to a table they printed in 1973. As it turns out, the authors retained the copyright on their work.

So I’ve been trying to track down the authors. The (all but anonymous) letter from the journal informed me that they used to work for Company A. Unfortunately, sometime in the 1980s, Company A was apparently swallowed up by Company B. Which was itself swallowed up by Company C and then finally Company D. (And that’s only if I’ve got what I pieced together through Google completely straight.)

So now I’m wondering if it’s even worth trying to contact Company D and ask if they have any contact information. “Yeah, these people supposedly worked for a company that was bought by another company that the company with which you merged themselves bought. Any idea where they are now?”