I know times are tough and it's hard to think about giving, but for just a few cents a day, you can help buy this man a pair of pants.
Sadly, this man wonders the streets of New York only able to afford this thrift store ensemble of a pair of striped boxers and a flamboyant wife-beater. The minimal threads of cotton he is able to clothe himself with is equal to the shreds of dignity he has left.
This condition has led him to shaving his armpits and airing them out to dry in public.
This man can sometimes be seen late at night on obscure television channels parading around with overweight people obsessively trying to agitate their sweat glands to music played by dead people. The only rare sighting of him wearing pants is on a DVD about "loving oneself." Clearly, the love he has for himself is of an abusive nature and he is in need of a professional to intervene. This man should stop seeing himself immediately!
With your donation, we might be able to get this man the clothes and the help he needs.
THE BS NEWS QUIZ OF THE DAY
Friday, I asked...
"La Tasca, a Spanish Tapas restaurant in Richmond, Va. was recently fined $2,000 for serving what?"
42% said "Patatas A Lo Pube" - Yum! Try it with the crabs.
No one went for "Toe-tillaEspanol" or "Pinchos Mucus" - Both of which are wonderful with a little mole sauce.
58% got it right with "Sangria"
According to the AP, since 1934, the state of Virginia has prohibited mixing wine or beer with spirits. Frances McDonald, vice president of La Tasca Spanish Tapas Bar and Restaurants, found that out the hard way when his Alexandria location was cited for violating the sangria ban in 2006 and fined $2,000. McDonald said his business received no warning about the ban. Well, first off, ignorance of the law is no excuse, buddy. And this law makes perfect sense. Just ask anyone the morning after a robust evening of bouncing around between beers, wine and shots. That pounding in my head and that multi-colored swill spewing from my guts are an affront to mankind.
Quick Draw McGraw was one of many characters in the the Hanna-Barbera cartoon stable. While individual cartoons themselves seldom rose to the level of classic, the characters themselves certainly did. Most everyone knows or has heard of Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and Snagglepuss, but few would be able to quote any storylines. The characters were known for doing one or two things and they did that one or two things over and over again. Still, the characters were fun and, as a kid, I didn't care so much about the story.
Quick Draw was a horse in the Old (south) West with a sidekick burro named BabbaLooey, often acting as the sheriff and deputy of a small town. Someone would need help and Quick Draw would answer the call. Sometimes, for no discernible reason, he would go as his alter-ego, the Zorro-esque El Kabong. There are other oddities, too. Even thought Quick Draw is himself a horse, he rode a horse. As did BabaLooey. Quick Draw also had a pet dog named Snuffles. And everyone else in the town is human.
The Quick Draw McGraw Show debuted in 1959 and tapped into the popularity of all the westerns that were on at the time. It has run in syndication ever since.
The Quick Draw McGraw Show was sponsored by Kellogg's. McGraw even appeared on boxes of Sugar Smacks. Yum... Sugar Smacks.
Looks like Uncle Sam's going to give us some money to go play! Woo-hoo!
As is typical with the Bush Administration, the folks who could really use a break aren't going to be getting it. They just want to give us some money to go spend and stimulate the economy. This is just a leftover of Bush's days as a drunk when he would buy everyone a round to prevent him from drinking alone.
This recession - that we are not actually in but have been on the brink of for a very long time mainly because everyone in Washington is too much of a pussy to call it a recession - is all our fault, really. We are at war, and we, the American people, are not taking it seriously. Resident Bush, the great visionary, called us on it right after 9/11. Right when we were ready to roll up our sleeves and sacrifice for our country he gave us a directive - "Go shopping!"
Did we listen? Apparently not.
Even though it looks to me like a lot of people are buying a lot of things. I am seeing more iPhones and Blackberrys than I did six months ago. My fiancee and I bought a new couch last December. I rushed into a Target last night five minutes before closing and bought the 30th Anniversary DVD edition of Blazing Saddles (It's on sale for $6.50, by the way - Yee haw!). There's always a line at the Starbucks I go to. So, who's not pulling their weight? Poor people, that's who! They're too busy blowing their minimum wage paychecks on almost paying the rent. They are taking their unemployment benefits and jacking up the price of ramen noodles with their reckless spending.
The stimulus package is too little, too late and is just a placebo to make us think that congress and the administration are actually doing something. All they are doing is showing that the government is full of idiots who love to spend money when the country is trillions of dollars in debt.
Wish my budgeting system worked that way.
Oh, wait, it does. That must be that Trickle Down Theory at work.
THE BS NEWS QUIZ OF THE DAY
Yesterday, I asked...
"According to producer Michael G. Wilson, the title of the new James Bond film is what?"
14% said "The Stealth Affair" - Nope. Sounds like a Pixar movie about adorable hi-tech fighter planes in love.
14% said "Silhouettes" - Good description of the opening credits, but sounds more like a Lifetime Original movie with Valerie Bertinelli.
14% said "Die Another Golden Tomorrow and Live Forever Twice Dr. Octopussy" - How about "To Overkill Another Day"?
58% got it right with "Quantum of Solace" -
According to the AP, producers have revealed some of the secrets about the latest James Bond film, due for release later this year, including the inner turmoil that drives its suave superagent hero and its title: Quantum of Solace. WTF? Daniel Craig, who claims the title has grown on him, said Bond author Ian Fleming defined a "quantum of solace" — it means, roughly, a measure of comfort — as "that spark of niceness in a relationship that if you don't have, you might as well give up." Ummm... Where's the danger? Where's the mystery? Where's the cool factor? It sounds like the dry dissertation of a psych grad. Look for long scenes of Bond broodingly taking personality quizes in Cosmo.
First off, thank you for reading this blog. It's made a tremendous difference to me as a writer and if no one were reading it, I would have stopped doing it. But people do read, so I try to post something new Monday through Saturday by 8am, usually earlier.
If you are one of my early morning readers, you'll have noticed that I tend to post late on Thursday mornings. On Thursday mornings, I have coffee with my friend Andrew. We meet at 7am at Metropolis in Rogers Park and then walk over to where he works. It is here that we have a talk. But it's not just any talk. It's called "peer empowerment." PEP, for short.
Now, I know that already sounds weird. Maybe it is. It's certainly not a common practice among we humans. Here's how it goes, one of us talks for thirty minutes while the other one listens. Then we switch. And that's it. We don't try to solve each other's problems or in any way try to dissect what the other person said. We just listen to one another.
There are a few guidelines we try to follow. While listening, we try to avoid being judgmental. If I notice myself having strong opinions about what Andrew's talking about, I try to let go of it and try to stay focused in the moment about what he is saying. While speaking, we try to stay in the moment and try to "dig in" to whatever issue we're exploring for ourselves. We try to avoid speaking about the past or telling stories. Also, while speaking, we try to avoid being entertaining for the other person. We are speaking for ourselves, getting thoughts and feelings expressed so we can better grapple with whatever's going on in our lives. Afterwards, we might exchange a few comments about what we talked about, but generally we don't. Absolutely everything we say to one another is confidential.
I didn't realize this until recently, but Andrew and I have been doing this for five years. Time flies. It's an effective tool for getting a lot of things about career, family and relationships out of my head and into a realm of possibly doing something about them. There's also something really great and hard to describe about speaking and having someone attentively and non-judgmentally listening for thirty minutes.
Give it a try. It doesn't seem to work too well for family members and couples. Usually because the person talking tends to be talking about the person trying to listen without judgment. Virtually impossible for a married couple to do!
So, that's why I'm usually late on Thursdays. Blame Andrew.
THE BS NEWS QUIZ OF THE DAY
Yesterday, I asked...
"Miniclip.com features a shooter game where kids get to use what for targets?"
30% said "Illegal Immigrants" - That's the republican version of the game.
25% said "House Pets" - Yes, but they can only shoot the ones that scratch the new furniture. My fiancee would love this game.
15% said "High School Students" - Yes, and then they move to the next level, which is college students, and then co-workers.
30% got it right with "Presidential Candidates"
According to The Smoking Gun, Presidential Paintball, a popular online games site offers kids the opportunity to assume the identity of a leading presidential contender and then shoot their political opponents in a series of armed confrontations in the White House. While the ammo is paintball, the game on the highly trafficked miniclip.com site allows kids to train a rifle scope on six presidential aspirants and squeeze off a hail of shots (which are accompanied with a rat-a-tat sound). I think a better name might be My Little Assassin.
I recently wrapped up a big corporate gig where I had to write the narration for a series of mockumentaries. The mockumentaries were used as what's called "eye openers" and "energizers." They were the first thing participants saw at the start of each day, thus the "eye-opener" part and they were also peppered throughout the conference to give a boost to the proceedings, thus the "energizer" term.
The premise I was given to write for was that this particular group of salesmen were somehow linked to wolves. I was also shown a BBC documentary on wolves to model and a web invite that the company used that featured a Steve Irwin-type character in the wild tracking one of these sales/wolf beasts.This looked like a lot of fun. The BBC narration was very serious, which made it the perfect genre to imitate to heighten the comedy of the premise.
But how do you write a script for a mockumentary without any footage? You just take a swing at it and hope something hits. First, I studied the language of the BBC documentary and the topics it covered. I then started breaking it down to possible segments and possible narration. And boy did I have a lot of bits. My favorite was to show an older salesperson at a vending machine feeding his young - in my mind, a small group of children dressed like salespeople, complete with mustaches and receding hairlines.
After assembling four or five rough drafts and running it by my partners, we sent it on to the client. The client, in this case, is the person in charge of events and meetings. This person is our touchstone to finding out if our material is appropriate for the event. In this case, she thought the bits were funny, but had another parameter to throw down on us. When we go out to the dealerships to shoot footage, the salesmen couldn't know what we were really there to do. The video at the conference had to be a complete surprise. So, no asking them to do any wolf bits or anything out of the ordinary. Yikes! Now, it really was becoming like a documentary. We had to observe these salesmen in their "natural environments" and craft our segments from that. I had to learn to write backwards. Instead of writing a script and sending them to get the shots needed to support it, we had to get shots of salespeople at work and then craft the pieces.
Does that mean the time I spent on the rough drafts were a waste of time? Not at all. if anything, it got me writing in the voice and style of the BBC documentaries. It was good practice and about a third to half of the narration did end up int he final product.
But at first I was stumped and convinced this project was doomed. It was so out of the realm of how I was used to writing, especially for video. What helped, was spending one day with the camera crew at the first location they went to. We told the guys we were their making a promotional video for the company. I watched them do everything that day - make dials, appraise trucks, eat lunch, chat with each other about prospects and startegies, etc. It was a real eye-opener for me in that it didn't fit anything I envisioned. And seeing what they went through, gave me ideas for filling out the segment categories and gave me ideas for a few new ones. It was an important step that I now could see in my mind what the end result could look like. I was able to give the camera crew suggestions on what to be on the lookout for when they went to other locations.
In the end, it worked very well. I had to give up my usual approach and go with a back-and-forth script-to-video to back to script molding and shaping process. It turned out to be highly collaborative. It was up to the director to make sure the shots were there to use and up to the editor to make sure it all popped and flowed with the narration. Quite a challenge, but a satisfying one that forced me to write in a new way. If they had come to me before we started and asked me to do it, I would have told them to find someone who knows how to do it. Fortunately for me, I was already committed to work on it. I had to lean into a new process and teach myself how to do it as we were making it up. Great way to grow as a writer.
The big challenge with corporate work is to make it funny without relying on jokes that are too inside. I think we accomplished that. I'm keeping the client's name off the blog for a few reasons - I don't have their permission, for one. But if Fig ever posts the work we did on their website, I will link to it so you can check it out.
THE BS NEWS QUIZ OF THE DAY
Yesterday, I asked...
"Researchers in Europe have declared that a cure for children's colds can be found in what?"
80% said "toilet water, literally" - No, but I hear that works for dogs.
No one thought it was "swamp water" or "bath water" - Which are synonymous in some households.
20% got it right with "sea water"
According to Reuters, a nasal spray made from Atlantic Ocean seawater eased wintertime cold symptoms faster and slowed cough and cold symptoms from returning among children ages 6 to 10, researchers in Europe reported on Monday. It may be that the salt water has a simple mechanical effect of clearing mucus, or it could be that trace elements in the water play some more significant role, though the exact reason why such a solution works is not known, said Dr IvoSlapak and colleagues at the Teaching Hospital of Brno in the Czech Republic. So, there you go. You now have permission to waterboard your children. It's not torture. It's a cold medicine.
Many presidential candidates go for broke, literally and figuratively, while campaigning for our votes. They will simply do and say whatever it takes to convince us they are the ones we should be spending our vote on. It's a time-honored tradition and, of course, this gets ugly.
For the Clintons, this is business as usual. Their view is a lot of blood will be spilled in a campaign, go for it and clean up the mess afterwards. Obama has slowly been drawn in to the negative campaigning. Seeing Bill Clinton slam Obama is uncomfortable. Here's an ex-president who I thought did a decent job in the White House. Here he is talking smack about a guy I find sincere and likable, to say the least. It's, well, unbecoming of an ex-president, and is tarnishing my image of him. And when I see Bill trashing Obama, or watch Hilary and Obama go after each other at debates, its that uncomfortable feeling one gets being at a restaurant where a couple is arguing loudly. Hey, knock it off or take it outside.
I guess my real beef is that this is taking over the focus of the democratic primaries. There's such a lack of respect for the voters that the candidates themselves have turned it away from a civil debate about issues to a catty popularity contest. Many politicians, i.e. The Clintons, will sum this up as "just politics" and we'll all forgive each other at the convention. I think it has a longer, more damaging effect. I also think it shows their true colors and should act as a red flag for voters. If they have the capacity to be this slimy on the campaign trail, they'll be this slimy in the Oval Office. Do you want a candidate who speaks about what they stand for and demonstrates it by walking their talk, or do you want a WWESmackdown? You can't have both.
"We have got to understand, this is not about us personally. It's about what we are trying to do for this country."
John Edwards said that. He's running for president, too, by the way.
THE BS NEWS QUIZ OF THE DAY
Yesterday, I asked...
"According to a poll commissioned by 20th Century Fox, the favorite movie weapon of all time is the what?"
No one, absolutely NO ONE, thought it might be "Kill Bill's Samurai Sword,""Indiana Jones' whip," or "James Bond's Walther PPK gun" - I guess they're all too conventional. And that whip looks and sounds cool, but you need a lot of space and accuracy to get any use out of it.
100% got it right with "Star Wars' light saber"
According to The Press Association, the Star Wars' lightsaber has been named the favourite movie weapon of all time. The Jedi's blade beat James Bond's gun and Indiana Jones's bullwhip in the poll. Other weapons in the top 10 include the samurai sword from Kill Bill and the bow and arrow used in Robin Hood, the survey of 2,000 film fans commissioned by 20th Century Fox found.
Alright, enough with the exclamation points. You get it. I'm excited. I've been going through Robowriters withdrawals over the last month. We're tickled all sorts of different colors to be working with Gorilla Tango. A few Robowriters have produced or been associated with shows there. David Devries' Eat Mudis currently running there on the weekends, Fridays and Saturdays at 10pm. Robot vs Dinosaur will be producing our new show there in the spring. A very sincere WHOOP-DEE-DOO is in order.
Gorilla Tango is located at 1919 N. Milwaukee Ave., just a few doors southeast of the Western and Milwaukee intersection, near the Western Blue Line Stop.
THE BS NEWS QUIZ OF THE DAY
On Friday, I asked...
"The Swiss Meat Association is worried there may be a shortage of what?"
42% said "Italian tripe" - They have another name for it there - politics.
28% said "Lithuanian pig snouts" - Nope. Plenty there. Have a second helping.
No one went for the "Canadian turducken"
28% got it right with "Brazilian cow intestines"
According to Business Week, a sausage that has become a part of the Swiss national identity could soon become extinct, and the European Union is to blame. Despite the fact that Brazil has never recorded a single case of mad cow disease, the European Union banned imports of Brazilian beef intestines over concerns about Bovine Spongiform Encephalitis (BSE) on April 1, 2006. Switzerland isn't an EU member state, but it does observe food directives from Brussels to ensure it can continue to trade freely with its neighbors. "Darm-Alarm" is the call being heard across the land ("Darm" is German for bowels), wrote the Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten. One editorialist wrote, "Switzerland has surrendered itself in the case of our national sausage to technocrats in Brussels, of all people." Oh, shut up and drink your hot chocolate. The reduction of sausage from the Swiss diet will make everyone's cleaner colon there yodel.
Here's little Hans chowing down on the national sausage shaped, coincidentally, the same way it looks coming out.
