The 2003 results of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in. This is a literary contest named after the author who wrote the much-plagarized opening line “It was a dark and stormy night.” Each year, the San Jose State University English department holds a fiction contest where entrants are encouraged to write their own worst opening line for a novel.

For example, here’s the winner in the “Children’s Literature” category:

The Prince looked down at the motionless form of Sleeping Beauty, wondering how her supple lips would feel against his own and contemplating whether or not an Altoid was strong enough to stand up against the kind of morning breath only a hundred year’s nap could create.

I keep threatening to enter this contest some day. Check it out. Great humor here.

I pass a copy of BusinessWeek everytime I walk into the office. The latest issue has a lurid headline of “STEALING HOLLYWOOD: Can the movie biz avoid the piracy that has crippled the music industry?”

Excuse me? “Crippled the music industry?” Funny, I wasn’t aware that the music industry was crippled. I certainly wasn’t aware that the Internet somehow killed the music industry.

What really ticks me off about this is that this headline, in inch-high letters, is declaring the Internet guilty of music-industry murder without the benefit of a fair trial. Where is the proof that Johnny Downloader has brought this business to its knees?

And don’t tell me about those RIAA-comissioned reports. They’re all bunk. In fact, some intrepid music lovers have picked apart the RIAA’s own numbers to prove them wrong. His verdict was that what killed CD sales is the fact that the industry quit releasing CD singles.

I feel towards the music and movie industry the same way I feel towards the airline industry. If these dinosaurs can’t adapt to current market realities, they deserve to die! They don’t need Uncle Sam bailing them out. Any Congresscritter who disagrees needs to meet a cluestick.

I could rant on and on about this but alas I don’t have the time at the moment. Tune into my brother’s site to follow his take on things.

Well, Kelly, Hallie and I spent a fun afternoon visiting my parents across town. We spent close to two hours swimming around their neighborhood pool, having a good time. My brother Allen and his family joined us and we all played in the water a bit.

My mom wasn’t feeling well around dinnertime and so health seemed to become the topic of conversation. After checking my mom’s blood pressure and his own, my dad put the blood pressure sleeve on my arm. After a few pumps, I relaxed and waited for the magic number to appear. I was shocked to see 134/84.

“That can’t be right,” I said. “It can’t be.” In my Navy days, nurses trying to draw my blood accused me of being dead. My blood pressure was so low it took over five minutes for me to fill a sample vial.

I pumped the bulb again and waited for the real results. Once again, the numbers were too high: 134/81. Yikes.

I have been pondering those numbers for the rest of the night, wondering how I got to this point. Looking back on my diet, I don’t see anything but supposedly healthy eating habits. I detest fast-food and eat it only under duress. I eat little red meat and really don’t get much salt in my diet at all.

As for my physical fitness, I haven’t felt better. I have been exercising in the evenings for the past few weeks. Kelly and I walk at least once a week; sometimes twice a week, depending on the weather cooperating. I am also sleeping better than I have in a long time.

I love my new job, and the excitement it brings. Finally, I get paid to show off my geekiness: I out-geek our customers daily. My morning commute is incredibly easy.

So, with all that said, how could I be facing such high numbers? It stumped me all night. That is, until I got a theory.

I am taking Aciphex for GERD, or Gastro-Esophogal Reflux Disease. Looking down the list of Aciphex complications, one jumped out at me: hypertension. My heartburn medicine may be saving my stomach at the expense of my heart!

I feel a little better about those high numbers now that I may have discovered their prime cause. At any rate, I’ve got a good excuse now to give my doctor a call and get that checkup scheduled that I’ve been putting off.

A random search for Mark Turner in everyone’s favorite search engine puts me three notches from the top. Now, if I can only talk more about my photographic skills, and maybe mention my new jazz recordings, I’ll make it to the top. If I dare go into my work with higher-order cognitive operations, I would suspect that I would be accused of conceptual blending. At the very least, my creativity and communications skills might be brought into question.

While I’m at it, I should mention how I’m an expert skier, especially when “the animal” in me comes alive. Oh, and I’m also the optimal president of my own company, Siteseers, Inc., providing Linux solutions. But I don’t yet have a Ph.D.

If you’d like to hear me play saxaphone, I suppose you’re still out of luck.

So I’m looking through the sports page in this morning’s paper and I get to a section called Carolina Outdoors, obsensibly about life in the great outdoors of our great state of North Carolina. As I am flipping through the pages, I notice the bylines of the stories.

Kansas City Star
Dallas Morning News
The Washington Post
Los Angeles Times

It turns out not one article in the whole section is filed from anywhere in North Carolina. Oh sure, there’s a “special correspondent” listed for one article, but there’s no way of knowing where this correspondent lives, either. At the very least, by nature of being a “correspondent” it is surely not an N&O reporter.

In other words, “Carolina Outdoors” is a sham, one that’s pretty typical of the paper nowadays. Where once there was a real local flavor to its reporting, the McClatchy era has turned it into a bland corporate rag.

The Triangle area will never be considered world-class until it has a world-class newspaper. Sadly, the N&O will never measure up.

(On the other hand, sometimes they really nail a story.)

I let my domain, siteseers.net, expire. It officially expired two days ago. I noticed this morning that the name resolution that worked when I first came in didn’t work an hour later. D’oh.

It’s all renewed now, though, and the missing DNS records should filter back into place in another day or so. In the meantime, you can still reach me by using the markt at markturner dot net address (or markt at siteseers dot com, which still resolves).

It’s a little lesson in “why not to filter the email address used in your WHOIS record.” 🙂

I was sad to learn yesterday of the death of Compay Segundo, the legendary Cuban musician from the Buena Vista Social Club. He was 95 years young, and I mean young.

Two years ago, I was among the lucky concertgoers who saw him perform at the NC Museum of Art. I was totally blown away that the performer up there just making his guitar absolutely sing was also ninety-three years old! And he was on tour even, giving these energetic performances night after night.

The man certainly knew how to love life, that’s for sure. I hope to be as full of life at that age as he was. He was known to chase skirts, drink rum, and to smoke cigars well past the point he should have known better. And yet, he lived life better at 90 than most people do at any time in their lives.

Hats off to you, Compay. Thanks for the music. It was your fountain of youth. I’ll spin the Buena Vista Social Club CD, close my eyes, and try to remember how sweet that sweet guitar sounded in person.

Here’s a nice profile of Compay from the Miami Herald. Scroll down near the end to read it.

Another Tour De France has kicked off. It’s the centenary; 100 years of cycling. And once again, Lance Armstrong is in the hunt for another win.

Man. There are few times I wish I had cable TV. College basketball season is one, and the Tour De France is the other. I just can’t get enough of it! I would love to watch a Tour in person someday.

A great story in the race is how fellow American Tyler Hamilton is also at the top of the pack, in spite of riding with a broken collarbone. Talk about cojones, hombre.

Now to wait until the race resumes Thursday to follow the action via the Outdoor Life website.

The torrential rains we’ve been getting the whole year have driven bugs into places they normally don’t dwell. For the past few months, Kelly and I have been battling ants, spiders, and other weird insects which have taken up refuge from the floodwaters outside.

Now I come into work to find the place crawling with catepillars. There were hundreds of catepillars crawling around the floor. Everywhere you looked.

Enough with the bugs, already!