SoCS – Leonberger Life

An enormous nuclear bomb explosion in the dessert featuring a huge mushroom cloud. — War on Amazon.com. Hydrogen bomb test by Alones Shutterstock Asset id: 2194195335.

Today is the second time I participate in Linda Hill’s streams of consciousness. To read about the rules and participate click here. Today’s prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is “review.” The first thing that came to my mind was the review wars on Amazon.

The badge features a twig with rain drops and it says Stream of consciousness Saturday #SoCS — 2019-2020 SoCS Badge by Shelley!

I’ve written several hundred reviews on Amazon, for software, computers, electronics, consumer products, movies and books. I was an Amazon Vine Voice for many years. Amazon Vine Voice is a program where Amazon reviewers receive free products from vendors in exchange for unbiased reviews. You must be invited by Amazon. However, as I was offered fewer expensive items, I got annoyed and I quit. My thinking was basically, if I don’t get a free TV or computer, I am not writing any reviews. I kind of regret that now. Free products are still free products.

There were and still are a lot of shady reviews and shady reviewer behavior on Amazon. This sometimes led to fights. I remember one prominent reviewer, Harriet Klausner. She was the #1 ranked reviewer on Amazon.com for many years and she held the #1 spot in the Amazon reviewer hall of fame at the time of her death. If you spent any significant time on Amazon as a reviewer, you know who Harriet Klausner is. I did a quick search for her as I was writing this, and I found the Wikipedia link for Harriet Klausner.

Harriet Klausner wrote 30,000+ book reviews in a relatively short time. I counted 20,000 reviews in just a few years. She loved every book and every book was intriguing to her. Almost every book was five stars. Then some people started accusing her of not really reading that many books, or for being biased. I admit I also had my doubts that someone could read thousands of books per year. Some people came to her defense while others claimed she was a fake. We may never know the truth, but the negativity spread.

People started accusing each other of faking reviews and fights broke out. Reviewer gangs were formed. They went around clicking the unhelpful button on other people’s reviews. One reviewer could get 3 helpful clicks the day after he published a review and then get 1,000 unhelpful clicks the day after. This affected the reviewer’s standing in the ranks. People were trying to improve their rankings, which back then were published next to the reviewers name, and fights broke out over the ranks. Amazon mostly put a stop to this by changing how the rank was calculated, hiding the reviewer rank well, and eventually removing the unhelpful button, as it was so widely misused.

Atomic bomb explosion in a city - nuclear attack on a crowded city – 3D rendering of a mushroom cloud encompassing a city with skyscrapers. — I happened to have a few exploding nuclear bomb pictures handy. I think that illustrates what was happening on Amazon. Shutterstock, asset id: 2188083835 by CI Photos.

Reviewer rank was a major cause for the Review Wars but the actions that Amazon took greatly improved the situation. However, there is still some really shady stuff happening on Amazon. For example, people writing negative reviews for books they have not read. In this case it is not reviewer rank that is the cause. People slam books they have not read because they don’t like the author, or they don’t like the topic. Sometimes, inauthentic reviewers can slam a book just because it is written by an independent author.

Topics like evolution, climate science, vaccines, religion and politics, offend some people and attract dishonest reviewers. Even a simple fact that is widely accepted by experts/scientists in the field can enrage some people. For that reason, books on these topics can get a lot of negative reviews from people who never bought the book, or if they did, they never gave the book a chance. This is often obvious to those among us who actually read the book.

Another related phenomenon are commentors who attack or argue with reviewers who have left a positive review for a book. This happened to me. I wrote a five star review for a climate science book I really liked, and this guy started leaving comments on my review in which he attacked the book and the author. He did not attack me, not directly, but he said disparaging things about the author. What was behind all this was that the author had sued a couple of people for one million dollars for defamation and people associated with the defendants attacked the author and the people who wrote positive reviews for the book (using fake names of course). Reading a bit about what was going on I found out that it was possible that I was arguing with one of the defendants, a Fox News host by the name of Mark Steyn.

Note: The author of the book in question won the one million dollar lawsuit in 2024 but the amount was reduced by a judge in 2025. I can add I ended up sitting next to Mark Steyn on a flight from Marseille to London. I was going to ask him if he had paid the one million dollars, but I said nothing. I moved next to my wife (empty seat) and another Fox News anchor took my seat.

Russian Tsar Bomba mushroom cloud rising high above the clouds. High quality photo realist ( 3d make ). — Amazon is still being bombed by hostile fake reviews and argumentative people. This is an illustration of the Tsar Bomba explosion by mbafai Shutterstock Asset id: 2208486661.

Naturträne a Dark Punk-Opera Life Review

Speaking about reviews, a piece of music that popped up in my head as I was writing this post is Naturträne (Nature’s Tear) a German PunkOpera song by Nina Hagen. Naturträne describes a woman who appears to be distraught over natural degradation (rattling exhaust pipes / Auspuffrohre knattern) and a lost love and her crushed soul. My high school German is rusty. You can say it is a very poetic but dark review of her life. For those who don’t know who Nina Hagen is, she is a former East German Opera singer, actress and musical artist who sings in the Punk-Opera genre and is known for her theatrical style.

She was able to make it to West Germany, and the song below was performed at Rock Palats in 1978. If you don’t know who Nina Hagen is (Europeans will know who it is) you are in for a shock. She depicts a distraught and crazy woman very well. However, it is bizarre but authentic.

Do you like Punk-Opera?

Sorry, that’s the question that popped up in my head right now.

My Lucky Day from Hell

These events took place in northern Sweden when I was about 14-15 years old. My dad was building a summer cabin, or rather a summer house at the time. My brother and I was helping him. Summer cabins, or summer houses, are very common in Sweden. Almost everyone has one, by a lake, a river, by the sea, or up in the mountains. He had asked me to put up a wall, and he had given me instructions for how to do it. I was determined to do a good job.

The magazines I used to read at the time had horoscopes in them and the horoscope for this day predicted that it would be my lucky day. This made me excited. I was certain I would do a great job. After all my horoscope predicted it would be my lucky day. What could go wrong on my lucky day?

I should say that I was a bit skeptical of horoscopes. They were vague and did not seem to be able to predict anything, and they certainly seemed to get my personality wrong. However, the lucky day prediction was a pretty specific prediction, so I took it to heart.

To build the wall I needed to predict how many planks to put up, and calculate the best distance between them, so building the wall involved some predictions, not the astrology kind, but the mathematical kind. I proceeded to build the wall. I predicted it would take a couple of hours. Unfortunately, it turned out my predictions / calculations were wrong. I started over but I made another mistake with my predictions and had to start over. My predictions were going wrong and I started to become frustrated. I continued to build and tear down the wall several times but on the seventh time I exploded in anger.

I randomly grabbed an axe that was lying on the ground, and I shook it and swung it around as I was running around in the yard screaming in rage. I don’t know if any of the neighbors saw me. Maybe they did and hid in a cellar or a basement. I hit the axe in a random place in the yard and to my surprise the earth swallowed up almost the entire axe. I guess I was strong.

Almost immediately water started gushing up from the ground. I had accidentally cut the waterpipe to the summer house. The waterpipe was buried in the yard and I had no idea. Water quickly filled up the yard until it looked like a shallow swimming pool. That’s when my dad came home. The wall was not finished, planks were laying everywhere, there was water gushing up in the middle of the yard, and the yard was inundated with water. He said something along the lines of “My God what happened here?”. He was angry and disappointed, and he had to call people to come and help us with the mess. It was sort of an emergency.

So much for my mathematical predictions, calculations, and so much for my Horoscope predicting about my lucky day.

I can add that I remember this incident because I recently left a comment about this unfortunate occurrence on someone’s blog. It is the first time I do this so please tell me if I got something wrong. Now it is Saturday here, so I am posting.

What about you? Have you had a lucky day from Hell?