rockets in the night - a metaphor

Narnia Anthology

2008-05-17T03:09:29Z

For Your Consideration:

The Narnia Anthology Through the Wardrobe, with my contribution, is available now in Borders

Instead of the big-time poster for Prince Caspian, I wanted to show this--

--I think that's pretty cool. Looked indie, turned out that Disney put it out. But anyway.

The last time I worked with BenBella books was their World of the Golden Compass anthology--

--and that was quite a success. I am back now for the Narnia anthology. I contributed an essay called "Reading The Right Books," which is 4th in the book, so I'm like "Breed" or "Rape Me," good placement. In conjunction with Through the Wardrobe, BenBella Books set up this website, TeenLibris.com, where they put up an It's Kind of A Funny Story excerpt.

I would love it if you would get my book and read my essay. It explores how CS Lewis, in Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Can you believe they're going to put out Voyage of the Dawn Treader? That book was fucking incredible!), combined Irish and Celtic myths with Christian imagery. Specifically, the voyages of St. Brendan.

I'm going to have a giveaway of this book, so stay tuned, but in the meantime, I'm going to see the movie, because I saw the ad for it and just said "holy crap" over and over again and made my friend rewind the DVR.

Be More Chill Play

2008-05-17T02:19:42Z

For Your Consideration:

-- The Play
Tickets Now Available at the Griffin Theater in Chicago

Adapted by Bill Massiola and directed by Jonathan Berry, the first theater adaptation of anything I've done--a Be More Chill play--is doing a run from May 18th through July 6th at the Griffin Theater in Chicago. I gotta go out there at some point to see. The show just got coverage in the Chicago Sun-Times, and if you are in Chicago or the surrounding lands, if you went and saw it, I would be very very thankful. Thank you!

(Now, in the Sun Times piece about the play, there is a link to something quite bizarre that has been popping up lately about Be More Chill: this salad bowl.

The bookofjoe is a popular blog about, well, stuff, and Joe, with whom I corresponded back in '04 when Be More Chill came out, found this thing, and put it on his site, and now I see it linked everywhere.

Iced Serving Bowl

Keep salads and fruits crisp and chilled — without ice cubes!

Simply place the included liquid chill pack in your freezer overnight, then lock it into place on the bottom of the bowl.

Food stays fresh and cool without getting soggy — even outdoors!...

From Harriet Carter Houseware. One of the stranger things I've seen associated with any writing I've done. I didn't make, nor do I endorse, any bowl.

Tickets, Triggers, and Kidney Stones

2008-05-16T21:56:56Z

I had a good week last week, but got very depressed on Monday. And what set me off was the dumbest thing:

[Just one, though.]

Now, my dad spent a good chunk of my childhood, like the father in Squid And the Whale, driving around Park Slope, Brooklyn looking for parking spaces. He had all this sage ancient wisdom about it, too, like he would recognize a certain car in front of him and know where that car would turn at the next avenue to go to his presumptive parking spot, so therefore he could make this other turn, loop around, and beat him to the spot he knew he wasn't going for.

I always thought it a little silly.

Well, now--strange days--I have a car. I see that it's not silly at all. In Brooklyn, a parking ticket is $45 and a double-parking ticket is $115. In Manhattan it's like one order of magnitude higher. I've heard that UPS has a $20M yearly budget just for paying parking tickets in NYC.

$2000000 budget
/ $300 avg. ticket (a little high, maybe, but Murphy's Law)
= 66667 tickets

(That seems way to small. They have to get at least 1000 tickets a day, with the number of trucks out there. That would be, given 250 workdays a year,

1000 trucks
* 250 workdays
= 250000 tickets
* $300 / ticket
= 75,000,000

So a 75M budget would be more appropriate. Just FYI. UPS.)

Anyway, I saw this ticket and I was just like, fuck. Here I am having to pay this goddamn thing...... (mumble mumble)... I hate myself and I want to kill everyone!

How'd that happen? The logical steps in my brain were "here's this ticket --> I have to pay a bunch of other crap too ($4108.23) --> my sources of income are inconsistent --> one big source of inconsistent income is writing books --> the current book I am writing SUCKS --> I hate myself and want to kill everyone."

But really nothing changed when I got the parking ticket. It's not like the parking ticket was for $75M. It was just $45, and I'm so cheap, I eat breakfast at the library and I'm pissed that the platter (eggs, toast, meat, and home fries!) just went from $2.50 to $3.00.

That got me thinking about depression triggers.

The things that are generally listed as depression triggers are fairly inane:

Death in the family - obvious

Financial setbacks - obvious

Substance abuse - obvious

But I learned about an unexpected one from The Noonday Demon--

.

--which was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist (2001) and is generally accepted as the definitive layman's text on depression.

The author, Andrew Solomon, writes from experience.

[I like this picture, I think he looks like Kafka]

Solomon went through some REALLY bad shit--like at one point he was having unprotected anonymous sex with men in London to try and get AIDS so he could die without killing himself. What fascinated me is that two of his major episodes were caused by physical trauma: first he had kidney stones, and then he got a dislocated shoulder.

(By the way, how much salt do you need to eat to get kidney stones? I eat a lot of salt. Like I put two packets of salt on McDonald's fries when I eat them. And potato chips? I'm addicted to THESE goddamn things:

Are kidney stones inevitable for me? I hear that peeing them out is the worst possible pain a man can experience.)

It's not as if Solomon got hurt, got a bunch of medical bills, and then got depressed. Or as if he got convinced that he could never recover. A physical injury literally tripped his brain into a breakdown. That's how his chemistry works. He told the doctors that he previously had a severe episode brought on by kidney stones and he needed morphine RIGHT NOW, they told him to chill, and lo and behold, he went down again.

That's something I never would have thought of as a trigger. I personally would--I know this sounds sick, and I'm probably cursing myself here--but I would welcome a mild hospital stay when I'm down. The lack of responsibility! They give you drugs, food, if anybody calls you--"Sorry, man, I'm in the hospital." Definitely wouldn't trigger anything for me. I come out and get a parking ticket--THERE'S where the trouble begins.

[the parking ticket that caught Son of Sam]

I know that I'm not the only person who has been set off by something as ridiculous as a ticket. Anybody else?

Anyway, happy ending to this one. The other day, this amazing thing happened to refute the ticket problem:

ALL OF THE PARKING RULES IN PARK SLOPE ARE SUSPENDED FOR THE WHOLE SUMMER!!

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! That means I can park anywhere I want and NEVER get any tickets!!!!! Until September. I hate doing multiple exclamation points, but seriously. It's times like this that I wish I could do the Bill Hicks maniacal laugh:

Britney Spears and Vincent Van Gogh

2008-05-08T17:27:01Z

Britney Spears, who has bipolar, is making progress, reports the New York Times:

[She] was awarded extended visits with her sons after a child custody hearing in Los Angeles Superior County Court on Tuesday...

Mark Vincent Kaplan, a lawyer for Kevin Federline, her former husband, said the extended visits with the children, Sean Preston, 2, and Jayden James, 1, were "recognition of the progress that has been made, a progress of structure and stability."

Who ever thought you'd read about Britney in the Times? You really never know how it's going to turn out with celebrities. I think that's why we like them so much--not that they're beautiful (so many of them have thin lips and Picasso faces), not that they're rich, but that we are suckers for narrative: the star-crossed lovers, the tragically-fallen-heroes-who-left-us-something-indelible, the everymen. And Britney? Her narrative is getting more and more unique:

1999-2002 -- standard sexy shell--is she a bad influence on America's young women?

2003-2006 -- standard celebrity train wreck -- what happened to her? is she washed up forever? her true colors are shining through, she's trash, etc....

2007 -- almost unprecedented public meltdown (at least I never saw anything like it in my life)

2008 -- first person I've seen to put mental health on the cover of People magazine:

In between numbers 3 and 4, sometime last year, I wondered if she would be a suicide--a decidedly 00ze, post-talent suicide. That it would be fitting, wouldn't it? We are a generation that celebrates bad things, like Britney's music, and so we'd see her go instead of Kurt Cobain. ("You're the first generation that just loves CRAP," my dad used to say. And he's right: Thundercats was crap. Having a low-paying job is crap.) If she killed herself... wow. Even our celebrity suicides are campy! Aren't we witty?

But then she got taken out of her house in January on that stretcher--

--and her placement into parental custody did her wonders, and her legal turnaround began. (And I show that picture above, with the crowd, to highlight something pretty savage I read about the event:

"Paparazzi came out in force, following the ambulance as it left. Another group of paparazzi met the vehicle at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, some banging on the ambulance doors..."
[CNN]

Wow, that's gotta be fucked up. Photographers banging at you as you go into the psych hospital. I don't know if I'd ever have made it to the psych hospital if I'd had a huge crowd of people trailing me giving me shit.)

It's to my great discredit that I had to wait until somebody went into the hospital and I saw it on the news, with comments from inane celebrity journalists ('Britney Spears Meltdown': the fallout and aftermath of the Britney Spears drama in a special report on "Showbiz Tonight") to think about the person as someone who needed help like me and didn't deserve to just get laughed at. There's no question in my mind that if Vincent Van Gogh were around today, his hilarious mental illness issues would be picked up by CNN et. al just as hungrily:

Am I Crazy? A New Mental Health Direction for The Blog

2008-05-05T19:48:46Z

Since it started... I don't know when... in 2004?... I've had this blog be about two things:

self-promotion

funny stories from my life

But for the last six months, I've been building up to a switch. I have to start writing about mental health.

Can't be helped. Going to the psych hospital and coming out and writing It's Kind of A Funny Story has been the most important experience of my life (with the exception of getting engaged). And since then I've come in contact with so many suffering people that I think it would be, frankly, irresponsible of me not use my (very small) soapbox to help as many folks as I can. Besides which, there are simply fascinating things happening in--

science

culture

medicine

--that will, in the next decade, have a profound effect on those of us who are certifiably just a little bit crazy. I truly believe that in the 2010s, we can:

get the stigma out of mental illness

get society at large to understand its enormous costs

take real steps toward keeping people from contracting it (and yes, that's the right word).

And shit, that'd be a big deal. Would it be like curing polio? No. I recognize that. But would it be like the successes of the gay rights movement and the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement?

Absolutely.

So, if you don't care about mental health--if you're here because you read Teen Angst? Naaah... or Be More Chill and you want to hear the funny stories (I can't imagine you came for the self-promotion)--I hope you can warm up to it. But don't worry, I can't keep from telling funny stories too (like the one that starts below). I haven't been able to stop since I did it in grade school to keep people from making fun of me. So that's always going to be a MAJOR part of things. My goal, ultimately, is to combine the two--funny stories about mental health with a purpose.

Last night, when I started writing this entry, I just couldn't get into it. I was all distracted reading about David Icke, the immensely popular "Illuminati" and "New World Order" author of such books as:

Tales from the Time Loop: The Most Comprehensive Expose of the Global Conspiracy Ever Written and All You Need to Know to Be Truly Free

Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster

Children of the Matrix: How an Interdimensional Race has Controlled the World for Thousands of Years-and Still Does

Alex Jones' Prison Planet.com: The Earth Is Being Turned Into A Prison

really

Prison Warders,

this video

doesn't

Mike Huckabee

selling out his speeches

Icke is the author of several books that (in a nutshell) essentially maintain that an elite cabal of shape-shifting, child molesting, human sacrificing, Satan worshipping, lizard-aliens are currently engaged in a conspiracy to centralize power and enslave the human race.

I Know What You Did Last Math Class

"A profusion of online programs that can track a student’s daily progress, including class attendance, missed assignments and grades on homework, quizzes and tests, is changing the nature of communication between parents and children."
-- NYTimes, May 4, 2008

Times Magazine

daily fluctuations in class ranking

This is sick and it is going to send many young people into mental hospitals.

"[At the end of the school day,] Mrs. Dobbins refrains from the traditional after-school interrogation [of her children]: Did you cut math class? What did you get on your language arts test? Thanks to ParentConnect, she already knows the answers. And her children know she knows. So she cuts to the chase: 'Tell me about this grade,' she will say."

"Parents hope to transform even modest dips before a child’s record is irrevocably scarred. 'I tell my son, "What you do as a freshman will matter to you as a senior,"' Mrs. Dobbins said. '"It will haunt you or applaud you."'"

"[O]ne Kansas parent compared watching PowerSchool to tracking the stock market."

Times

don't

Stress causes depression.

Rosanne M. Thomas, Gregory Hotsenpiller, and Daniel A. Peterson.

shown

cause

The companies that provide the real-time child-monitoring grade-reporting services mentioned in the Times article are:

Edline

ParentConnect, owned by Pearson

Pinnacle Internet Viewer, by Excelsior Software -- recently purchased by GlobalScholar.com.

PowerSchool

I encourage you to email or call these organizations and tell them that their businesses are damaging American children (and yes, children, not high school kids--the Times mentions 4th graders being monitored by these programs).

Here are relevant contact numbers and emails:

Edline
312.346.9900 (Corporate)
email form

Pearson, owners of ParentConnect
general contact

Global Scholar (new owners of Pinnacle Internet Viewer)
877-824-4040 (appears to be a sales number, so...
GlobalScholar.com
10900 NE 4th Street, #900
Bellevue, WA 98004)
email form
list of management team

PowerSchool
(916) 288-1600

ORGANIZATIONS.

[David Icke's forums - as of 3:09:19pm EST, May 5, 2008, 1052 users logged in and viewing]

New York Press, Geckos, and A Lot of Love

2008-04-24T05:26:08Z

It's been 20 years since New York Press, the first newspaper I ever wrote for, was founded. And of course, I only found out by accident:

I had no idea I was going to be on that list, and such high billing! That's some damn good company. Just want to make notice of two who weren't on the list.

George Tabb

George's punk-rock writing produced some classic mid-90s pieces. Like "Why Chicks Can't Rock":

"Then there’s the whole orgasm thing. Men, unlike women, really know how to blow their loads. Let’s take an AC/DC song for example. Like 'Let There Be Rock' or 'Whole Lotta Rosie.' Angus, the guitarist, certainly knows his rhythm. The songs have a steady beat you can wank to, and they both build up with crazy guitar leads to one hell of a climax.

One.

Not two.

Not three.

And not zero.

One.

Women, for the most part, don’t understand this. They are used to the whole multiple-orgasm thing, or none at all; therefore their songs are all over the place and are usually unintelligible."

George has since become a 9/11 health advocate--
- George's message
- George w/Brian Williams
--and the author of two great books. The latest, which I really dig, is Surfing Armageddon:

.

Marty Beckerman!

Hey man, how is The Beck not here? With classics like "her strapless pink shirt certainly would make a snug fit on your average oxygen particle." (From "Marty Beckerman Goes to College".) Marty kicked ass at the Press.

But no matter. His new book Dumbocracy, out just in time for the election, will put him on top of many lists:

Other than that the list is great, although it's really sad to see Jonathan Ames there and not feel happy anymore, because I love his writing but then I saw him out one night, told him about a reading I was having, and he told me, "I never go out to other people's readings," which is just a dick move.

So, the reason I even came across that list was because I was looking through New York Press for an old article I wrote about Russell Tappan Hawkey, a sort-of crazy and resourceful older hippie (only of course they're all older now) who looked like Robert Redford, who I met outside of Mars Bar--

[this is the place where I saw a man get on top of the bar, bend over, and show me the tattoo of the sun's rays shining out of his asshole]

--who impressed me with his story about being the universal messiah. ("I'm not just the messiah for the Christians," he explained. "I'm the the messiah for the Jews, the Hindus, the Muslims, and the Buddhists." [full-text])

Russell once told me that:

"I don't believe in the capitalist economy, I believe in the gifting economy."

I wasn't quite sure what this meant. He explained, "You give gifts, and then you get gifts from the universe." I doubted the scheme, but five minutes later we got on the subway and there was a pear sitting right on the seat next to us.

"See? Look!" he said. "The gifting economy at work!"

And he ate it.

Now, I just found out that the gifting economy is a real thing! Well, it's called the "gift economy," but Russell was right. He sends me emails occasionally from Asia, where he says he is living with snow monkeys.

Point of all this is that I wanted to get into the gifting economy--I want a new hobby, something cheaper than M:TG--so I began visiting the "barter" section of craigslist.

Wow, talk about a treasure trove of humor. People try to trade the MOST ridiculous stuff in the gifting economy--"CAR AUDIO FOR PAINT BALL GUN", "Looking 2 Trade My 8GB Iphone 4 A Dog"--and I found a few gems that were so wonderful, I decided to start a blog:

Funny Things on Craigslist

I couldn't believe that no one had done it before! It seemed genius. But then, I found out that craigslist already has a "best-of". midnight picnic says that he likes my blog anyway, because of the categories (and, I would hope, the wit), but I don't think I have the time to do it, not if I'm finishing up this new manuscript--things are going well; that 585-page first draft gave me a lot to work with.

THIS brings me to the topic of geckos. I found the following ads in the barter section of craigslist two weeks ago. Note, there were THREE ads, posted separately.

GECKOS ....GECKOS.... GECKOS.....GECKOS

Reply to: comm-632889355@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-04-06, 9:40PM EDT

LOOKING FOR FREE LEOPARD GECKOS, IF THERE IS ANYONE WHO WANTS TO GIVE THEM TO A GOOD HOME ,,,,, I HAVE PLENY OF ROOM FOR THEM.... I CAN PICK UP.

THANKS..............

LOOKING FOR FREE LEOPARD GECKOS/SUPPLIES (BROOKLYN)

Reply to: comm-632889908@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-04-06, 9:41PM EDT

WANTED HEALTHY UNWANTED REPTILES................... IM LOOKING FOR FREE LEOPARD GECKOS..........I WANT TO EXPAND WITH THE ONES I HAVE......THEY WILL BE IN A GOOD HOME WITH PLENTY OF SPACE...

IF YOU HAVE SUPPLIES YOU DONT NEED SUCH AS LARGE PIECES OF DRIFTWOOD, VINES AND HAMMOCKS,OR EVEN LIGHTS ( 8 1/2") THAT WOULD BE GREAT TO..

PLEASE DO NOT EMAIL IF YOUR SELLING OR IF YOU ARE A BREEDER....... PLEASE EMAIL ME IF YOU HAVE ANY TYPE OF UNWANTED REPTILE THANKS

LOOKING FOR REPTILES (BROOKLYN)

Reply to: comm-632891192@craigslist.org
Date: 2008-04-06, 9:42PM EDT

I AM LOOKING FOR FREE LEOPARD GECKOS

I HAVE PLENTY OF ROOM IN THERE HUGE TANK AND WANT TO EXPAND WITH THE ONES I ALREADY HAVE , THEY WOULD BE IN A GREAT HOME.... OR IF YOU HAVE REPTILE SUPPLIES SUCH AS LARGE PIECE OF DRIFTWOOD , HAMMOCK ,VINES OR ANYTHING FOR REPTILES THAT WOULD BE GREAT ALSO.

I WOULD PREFER FEMALES , DUE TO HAVING MOSTLY FEMALES,,, BUT IF NOT ITS STILL OK. THANKS.... PLEASE NO EMAILS IF YOUR GOING TO SELL. IF I WANTED TO PURCHASE I WOULD BUY FROM A PET STORE....THIS IS FOR HEALTHY UNWANTED REPTILES.

IF YOU HAVE UNWANTED TOKAY GECKOS I CAN TAKE THEM ALSO.

I've removed the guy's email address to protect his gecko privacy. I ASSUMED that geckos had to be a drug term, but nope, it seems that this guy is just a gecko freak. Of course, like with anything else, there is an entire gecko world out there:

Are you Killing your Leopard Gecko too!

More of the quarterly report:

Photos

I was never proud of my photos--the most popular one I've ever uploaded is Joan Baez kissing Reverend Billy at Burning Man 2005, and I didn't even take that--I just needed it for a blog post. I don't remember where I got it. But in the last few months two of my photos have been picked up by places.
1. For KGB Bar. Used on Schmap.com, this map-type site.
2. They took this one for Wikipedia! A person emailed me on Flickr asking me for it. Interesting because I just read Miles, his autobiography. AMAZING. Reading it made me feel ashamed of my paltry artistic efforts.

Some Writing I Didn't Post Yet

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ned-vizzini/

An Interview I Didn't Post Yet

http://www.invictusverbum.com/blog/?p=4

People Whose Stuff You Should Buy:
1. Lach, who people call "king of the anti-folk scene" but who really is just one of the best songwriters around, period. If you don't believe me, listen to "Drinking Beers With Mom".
2. Music from Recommended If You Like Records. In addition to being run by the guy who fronted "Shrivel" (not their real name) in Teen Angst? Naaah..., this is the label that puts out The WoWz, whose song "Happy Today" is one of my favorites of all time and is the best song I know about manic depression. I wish I could find it online. It makes me cry sometimes: "I know that this feeling will soon go away / But I'm feeling happy today."
3. Music by Consider The Source

My Birthday and More of The Quarterly Report

2008-04-04T20:44:20Z

It's my birthday today. Usually when it's my birthday, it's pretty, but today it's gray and nasty--a good day to stay in and write, which I did.

Now, when it comes to my birthday, when I was a kid, there was a swing set at my school, and I used to swing high enough to crash into one of these trees--

--to bite the flowers off. They never tasted great but they were fun to bite.

(like that, but pink)

I had a deadline for my birthday this year, which was to finish the first draft of a new novel. I did that. I did it a few weeks ago.

It felt great, but I hate to announce these things, because it's a first draft: that doesn't mean anything to readers. That isn't a final draft, or a sale, or a publication, or a success. It seems wimpy and desperate for me to announce a first draft. But I haven't finished the first draft of a book since Jan. 2005, so it means a lot to me.

The first draft is 585 pages. Upon reading these pages, a lot of them I don't need--I hope I'll get to use them in the future, but I find that writing is never like that: there are no B-sides. I do have something funny about LA and New York that I think I could send somewhere, but would I get paid? I like to do writing that gets me paid.

However, as I go over the stuff, the second, and I believe, final, draft looks excellent. I'm really happy with chiseling those 585 words into something gleaming.

Now, I don't know if it gleams, but I have won an award in Austria! (I am Eine echt verrückte Story in that link.) It's called Austrian JugendLITERAturpreis, or Austrian Youth Literary Prize, and it actually comes with prize money, in Euros, which is like getting paid in crude oil.

I'm really thankful to the Austrians for supporting me. This award is wonderful even if it does NOT have the amazing "Lufti" mascot that the other German award I got has. We have now TRACKED DOWN THE LUFTI, and he does not disappoint:

.
(We had been looking for a real picture.)

Please note that the Lufti might not be considered a real Pegasus because he uses balloons.

That award has now been officially given out at the Lepzig Book Fair:

.

That's Florian the awesome publicist from Germany taking it.

You know, looking back on this year, I have to say, stuff like that award is the stuff that I have had the most fun with. Like:

the reader who wrote me from Poland and asked if I had "heard of" Poland

the review from Woodbury Reports, Inc. in Bonners Ferry, Idaho that said "[D]efinitely NOT... suitable for those shocked or easily offended by language or typical teen behaviors."

the guy from the United Arab Emirates who sent in his sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge

Now I'm associated with a golden German Pegasus.

I've also had a bunch of stuff to be thankful for in the last year, besides getting engaged. I'd like to thank Books of Wonder for doing this:

.

And also, thank you so much for other bookstores around the country that are doing it. I keep getting mail about the book so it is doing right-on good.

And I would also like to thank my dad for helping me clear out my old apartment. During which process we found these:

(Does anyone else remember when foil comics were like, the shit, and you'd pay a lot of money for them?)

Does anyone want to buy one? Or does anyone want to trade? ("Trade comics," Jesus.) I need a bunch of stuff including and especially this:

My Six-Word Memoirs

2008-03-26T13:52:01Z

On March 25th, I did a reading at KGB Bar from this book:

The book collects six-word memoirs, and has spawned a six-word craze sweeping the nation, but to tell my life story truthfully, I needed 25 of the six-word memoirs. People liked them at KGB. Here they are.

1. Born at fifty-third and third: Ramones-er-ific

2. scrungy block, many homeless, curious smells

3. neighboring nightclub busted for selling heroin

4. other neighbor, Avis, has scary employees

5. at night, insomnia, carried around block

6. homeless taunt my dad: "Why kids?"

7. move to Park Slope: teachers, GLAAD

8. school: writing is the best revenge

9. high school, the New York Press

10. bylines: embarrassing as they are wonderful

11. people in Minnesota publish my stuff

12. college: Mom wants a backup plan!

13. computers and D&D always interested me

14. computer science: but where are jobs!

15. jobs went to Hyderabad, but look!

16. book deal, and they want two

17. first one okay, second big problems

18. similar to GNR "Use Your Illusion"

19. one night, go crazy, into hospital

20. inside, surprisingly, food, folks, and fun!

21. get out, write book, contract fulfilled!

22. along the way, many great spirits:

22A. John Strausbaugh, Marty Beckerman, Nick Antosca

22B. Rachel K-B, Jonathan Ames, Amanda Stern

22C. Denis, Suzanne, Olivier, not name checking...

23. just giving thanks; to Rachel too

24. oh, also I fell in love

25. perhaps that should be the last

Should I explain any of these (i.e. little explicatory notes after some of them)?

Jerky / First-Quarter Report

2008-03-25T02:58:16Z

I like beef jerky. I'm always amazed at how expensive it is ($7? $8?) and so I haven't bought it in a year and a half, but I have a good memory of how things taste--good or bad--and so I occasionally find it pleasantly warming my palate. (This taste-memory, by the way, has ruined me on sushi forever--I'll relate that story at a future date.)

Anyway, when I used to have the $$$ to eat beef jerky, I was partial to the hot flavor--the hotter the better--if the truckers hadn't snapped that all up. Second choice: teriyaki. But once I was treated to the Alain Ducasse of jerky:

It's in Nevada. They had:

buffalo jerky

turkey jerky

ostrich jerky

...and of course, purported alien jerky

I had the alien jerky--tasted like beef to me--and ostrich; it was great. One thing that I didn't try or even SEE was this:

Wow. I never had considered that as a food. But I love smoked salmon (also something I never get because it's too expensive), so when I saw it at the supermarket recently, I bought it and tried it...

My God. How should I describe salmon jerky? Let's try to describe it as a process:

I opened the jerky bag.
As soon as I opened it, I was assaulted by cat-food smell. In my younger years, I would've turned away at this point, since I have found that foods that initially smell bad or sound weird also taste bad or weird. But since I tried rabbit and rattlesnake sausage (visiting a library in MI, thanks for the introduction!), I have become more adventurous.

I nibbled on a piece of the jerky.
It was as small a piece as I could get in my mouth, but it immediately filled me with the horrific taste of death.

I chewed.
Now it became clear that I was entering a new dimension of pain. The jerky tasted like old, hard garbage.

The aftertaste bloomed on my tongue.
You know how sometimes you taste something and it tastes great, but then the aftertaste is unpleasant? And how sometimes, the converse is true? The salmon jerky had an aftertaste experience that I have never encountered before.
1. Its taste was terrible.
2. Its aftertaste was worse.
3. Its after-aftertaste was WORSE.
4. Its after-after-aftertaste brought out subtle tones of worse-ness I had never before encountered, pulsing through my mouth in waves.
I swallowed it.
I didn't want it to go to waste, did I?

I closed the bag.

My fiancee told me I wasn't allowed to eat any more.
This is good, because I'm a drama queen AND I'm OCD so I would have eaten every last piece of that salmon jerky just to write about it. But now, after saving it to remind myself to write about it, it is going into the garbage to feed the cats it deserves.

Now, on to the...

First-Quarter Statement

I've started to think that people should NEVER mention their accomplishments on their blogs. Blogs are for stories and opinions, I think. If you want to know about an artist's laurels, you should click on the "press" section of his/her website, and who does that anyway, except to be

jealous

smug

The only exception, possibly, is pushing upcoming events, which is why I put one at the top of this entry (and I've had it on my homepage for a week).

(BTW, please help me: do you read this blog on my homepage or my LiveJournal? If people answered that would really help. Please, thanks.)

So the only reason I'm doing an update here is that I am very OCD about what I've done, and the updates tend to bring out good stories. I'll be doing this once a quarter now. I didn't finish this time, so I'll bring it over into the next entry.

Six-Word Memoir Book Hits Times Best-Seller List!

I promise I won't do the dick thing and now refer to myself as a "Best-Selling Author." But yes, Not Quite What I Was Planning, the really-quite-smart book of six-word memoirs, is currently on the New York Times Bestseller list, in Paperback/Advice (as of this writing it is #9).

I'm obviously thrilled that I got a chance to contribute, but I am more proud and happy for Rachel Fershleiser, one of the book's editors. She is a proprietor of the wonderful website SMITHMag, whose motto is "Everyone has a story" and which has published many stories of 100 words or less, including mine. Rachel deserves all the success that is coming her way and you should visit her site.

I remain very proud of my memoir, which I am going to be a dick and repeat:

"Oh shit. No way? Yeah, dude."

Some people think it's stupid--that it's not really a memoir. Well, it's supposed to represent a feeling and an attitude, see? The life story, for better and for worse, is in Teen Angst? Naaah.... By the way, I have heard from a number of readers that they can't find Teen Angst at their local bookstores. I am looking into this. I'm not too worried, because the book still has a great presence on Amazon, but if you DON'T find it in a store, please ask them to order it, and:
- tell them they should have it "modeled" or on "automatic re-order!!"
Those are synonyms. Books that are "modeled" or on "automatic re-order" are restocked whenever they run out of them on the shelves.

Thank you: Be More Chill and It's Kind of A Funny Story nicely stocked across the country

Meanwhile, I just wanted to thank everybody who's got the books and hasn't stolen them from the library, etc.--here's an email from my editor at Hyperion:

"B&N has It's Kind of a Funny Story (set up for automatic reorder) at 723 stores which means all of their superstores and some of their Dalton or College stores. Be More Chill is modeled at 685 stores which means almost every single superstore with maybe 5-10 exceptions nationwide."

If you see a store that doesn't have either book, tell me, please.

It's Kind of A Funny Story Wins the German "Golden Lufti" Award!

I think the best way to tell people about this development is to hand things over to Florian, the wonderful German publicist who's been working with the book over there. From a March 3rd email:

"Hi Ned,

I know it's neither the Pulitzer nor the Nobel Prize in Literature, but ... tadah! You just won the "Golden Lufti"!!!!!!!!!!

This is the youth literature prize of the "Mecklenburgische Literaturgesellschaft", unfortunately without any financial bonus, but in Germany this award is quite known, as you can see on the large German Wikipedia-Quote concerning Lufti.

You may ask yourself, what or who is that Lufti, Ned. Well, Lufti is a German relative of the Greek Pegasus and by that also a flying horse and on the Lufti-Page you can also see some small pictures of him. It is a reading horse, so "Make my day, Mr. Ed!" as he would say if he could talk."

Unfortunately the only image of the Golden Lufti I can find is--

--but Florian went to the awards ceremony, so hopefully we'll have pictures of the actual Lufti soon.

More Art

Maybe someone could send in their own rendering of a Golden Lufti? We've had more great reader art come in lately.

So thanks. Looks like the rest of the Quarterly Report will have to wait, as this entry has gotten as bloated as the nation's youth. I'll finish up next entry, and THEN I'll finally move forward with the new focus for this blog.

A DM's Miscellany (Part 2)

2008-03-05T22:12:33Z

You know how excited I am to be doing this? Going through all the things that I've wanted to post for a year and finally putting them up? It's incredible. My fiancee asked me early on: you have OCD and ADD?! And that's about right. Both are on display here.

American Television Evangelist Kenneth Copeland

Thank you Lord for providing me with this picture--the perfect opening for ANY blog post. This guy appeared on TV while I was living in New Hampshire and he was so bizarre-looking that I went online for pictures. It's like a joke--have you seen anyone look more Satanic? You know when Satan appears in clouds and stuff? I bet you Kenneth Copeland appears in SATAN from time to time.

(By the way, that link "clouds" above is to an image of Satan that purportedly appeared during 9/11. If you look closely at this video and this web forum you can see what people are talking about.)

The Copeland picture, of course, is from a site about hidden Biblical codes that holds that Copeland is a false prophet, a "Snake," and a "Beast." But in the non-Biblical code world, he's better known for "his claim that Bible believers would receive one hundred times their donation in return".

Now, I want to take a moment here to point something out, and to give a little requiem for the pre--00ze. Back in 1997, 1998, if I found Kenneth Copeland, I could try and arrange an interview, pull the best, most hilarious crap from that interview, buffet it with other hilarious crap, and make a terrific little article about him, which I could then publish in New York Press. And all over the country, in alternative newspapers, writers were doing the same.

Blogs have killed that. The market for funny stories exists entirely in the blog world now. And you get paid a whole lot less for blogging. I had a lot of fun writing about Brent Camponi for New York Press, for instance. Would I have had the chance to find him without a paid gig? Never. I got his name from a press release AT that paid gig.

So this genre, the zany profile--my all-time favorite--is dead. Or is it? Is anybody getting paid to dig up the Kenneth Copelands of the world anymore?

Harper's vs. Harper's Bazaar

I'm not on the knife's edge of popular culture very much, so when I am, I notice, and I have to hold on to that triumph. People may know that there are two very prominent, very different magazines in this country with Harper's in the title. Harper's is a monthly journal with fiction and political coverage. Harper's Bazaar is a women's fashion/lifestyle magazine.

(By the way: John Strausbaugh, who used to be my editor at New York Press, has now put out his book Sissy Nation. In it, he notes something that we all overlook--how fucked-up the word lifestyle is. [We don't want a LIFE anymore, says John, we want a lifeSTYLE.])

Harper's:

Harper's Bazaar:

Dude, how SCARY is Cameron Diaz?

At a party back when I was closer to the knife's edge of popular culture, I met Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's. Now deceased, Lapham was literary royalty. So when I met him and was like--

"Wow, yeah, I've seen your magazine. Isn't it kind of like Elle?"

--he didn't even answer me. He turned away and left me puzzled for a while.

But guess what? Now, I feel okay!! I'm apparently not the only person to have this problem. See, Harper's' (ug, what a possessive) most famous feature is "Harper's Index," a monthly compendium of unbelievable statistics. The blog Jezebel, on 8/28/07, combined Harper's and Harper's Bazaar to create a "Harper's Bazaar Index":

So TAKE THAT, Lapham! You could have explained. Fuck, I don't get mad when people talk about the fact that there's a character named Vizzini in The Princess Bride who looks like this:

.

A DM's Miscellany (Part 1)

2008-02-25T06:54:42Z

The internet was supposed to be a global library--remember? A library where everything would be accessible and we'd all have fun sharing our knowledge? But now, I find that all of the IMPORTANT information isn't available. For example, "A DM's Miscellany":

That right there is the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide that I used to read as a kid. I didn't play Dungeons & Dragons, because I could never find people to play with. But I read the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and ESPECIALLY The Monstrous Compendium (later renamed the Monstrous Manual). The Monstrous Compendium had the complete list of monsters with their hit points, magical capabilities, and weapons preferences, but ALSO with their cultures, ecologies, breeding habits...

My favorites were:

This is an obvious one, kind of like saying "I like pizza", but mindflayers:

(aka evil squid wizards)

(Please note that there is also a band called "Mindflayer". Pictures of this band at "Bulb Fest" 2003 might be the GREATEST things you ever see.)

The wood nymph, I think she was called

Wood nymphs, or perhaps they were "wood sylphs," were these creatures in the game who lived for like 500 years, and they selected ONE human male to be their mate for life. They were incredibly powerful and these wood sylphs, once they SELECTED their mate, would wisk him back to their beautiful flower and give him a little bit of immortality so that he could just live with his beautiful wood nymph without having to worry about anything for the next 500 years.

Now, naturally, I tried to find EVIDENCE of these wood nymphs online--but I couldn't get a .pdf of the Monstrous Manual that I used to read. However, when you start LOOKING for wood nymphs, you find some pretty funny things. Including banners like this:

(If anyone has any information about the wood nymph/wood sylph that I am talking about--from this edition of the Manual--

--please tell me. Thanks. We need to end this tale.)

In any case, the best thing about the Dungeon Master's Guide was the chapter called "A DM's Miscellany." It covered everything that wasn't covered in the rest of the book: how to handle combat in flight, how to calculate torch expiration... It was the most interesting part of the book by far. The small stuff.

I have a ton of small stuff like that lying around, so starting this week I'm going to go through it. Here goes:

My Man Wesley Snipes Pays No Taxes

People who've read It's Kind of A Funny Story might remember the part where they watch Blade 2 and Craig describes it as the best action movie of all time. I have seen Blade 2 many times and I do believe that it is the best action move of all time. The reasons in the book pretty much make it clear, but in addition to that, there's the scene where Ron Perlman says:

"It's just like my daddy said before he killed my mommy: 'If you want something done right, you've got to do it yourself.'"

Anyway, Wesley Snipes hasn't appeared in many pictures since Blade 2, but he did appear in this picture--

--one of my favorites of all time. That is Wesley Snipes after being cleared of all major charges by a Florida jury for NOT PAYING ANY TAXES FROM 1999 TO 2004.

The NYPost had so much fun with this story. Some of my personal favorite details:
1. Wesley, on his acquittal: "My mamma would be very happy . . . No fraud, baby!"
2. "The 'Blade' star beat more serious charges [he did get some penalties] by arguing that he believed failure to pay the IRS isn't a crime..."
3. "The prosecution showed how Snipes once sent the IRS a rambling, 600-page diatribe where he labeled himself a legal 'nontaxpayer.'" (600 pages! Get this guy an agent!)
4. Wesley's lawyer, Bryan Skarlatos, of Kostelanetz & Fink: "Usually, ignorance of the law is no defense. But in tax law, ignorance of the law is a defense."

The Best Thing I've Ever Read in the New Yorker

Funny and very, very sad. George Saunders is great.

"Man struggles to return from the dead"

I am usually not a fan of those "News of the Weird" items in newspapers. But this one ran across the top of my Gmail and I clicked it and I loved it:

Man struggles to return from the dead
WARSAW (Reuters) - Red tape is preventing a Polish man from returning from the dead.

Piotr Kucy, 38 and from the city of Polkowice in southwest Poland, was wrongly identified by authorities last August as a drowned man, only to show up a few days after his own funeral.

Despite pointing out the fact that he was alive to government officials, Kucy still remains dead in official records, stopping him from working and paying social insurance.

I just want to point out: "Showed up a few days after his own funeral." Where was this guy? What had he been doing?

So, more to come. And there's a reason I'm cleaning out this old stuff. You'll see at the end.

43 Things Math

2008-02-12T18:21:25Z

I always thought 43 things was a dumb website: you list things that you want to do, then find other people that want to do them? Why, so you can fail collectively? But then I found something encouraging:

People who want to write a novel: 17645

People who want to read a novel: 18746

I read somewhere (and like my dad, I can never quite cite sources; my mom always says "in the Wall Street Journal," "on X blog," etc., but my dad just says "somewhere" and it has messed me up--it nearly derailed a Cranium win one time) that 75% of Americans want to WRITE a novel, but about 49% actually read. That's bad economics for writers. This is slightly better.

Of course, you're still in a place where for every book written, there is one person out there to read it, so everybody should be getting a book deal of... I think $0, right?

Well, I decided to do the math.

Here goes:

The people who want to read novels will probably never do it at all. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt that 50% will manage.

(This 50% is not entirely guesswork, btw: 57% of Americans read a book in 2002 according to an NEA report ["Dumb USA: Only 57 percent of Americans read a book in 2002" -- prisonplanet.com], and I'm tempering that with the 49% I heard from my dad.)

The people who want to write novels are a lot more screwed. Let's say 1% of them finish.

1% of novel writers actually write their novel * 17,645 = 176 people write novels

50% of novel readers actually read a novel * 18,746 = 9373 people read novels

There are 176 novels for 9373 people to read.

Let us assume that a book costs $15 (probably more).

$15 * 9373 people who want to read = $140,595 that the people are willing to spend on books

$140,595 / 176 books = $798.84 out there for each book

Therefore, each 43 things author should receive $799 for writing her/his book.
[I always think that it should be her/his, to be alphabetical.]

If the book takes nine months to write, part-time (20 hours/week), that would mean each author was getting paid $1.11 per day to write the book.

Please note: about $2.3 billion people live on this much per a day.

(That's based on this article about >$1 and >$2 populations, and the Feb. 2008 world population.)

George Orwell said, "There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter."

But I still feel hopefull about the whole thing. Why? General illness, and the perspective of those $2.3 billion.

Is any of that math wrong?

---------------------------

Coming in March:

I'm reading my six-word memoir from the new book Not Quite What I Was Planning--

--on Tuesday, March 25th at 7pm, at the famous KGB Bar in Manhattan. [more]

I don't think it has to be a big secret, now that the book is out; my six-word memoir is:

Oh shit! No way? Yeah, dude.

Jerome from Manhattan

2008-01-31T03:39:31Z

I'm not sure how the big sports radio station in New York got the call letters "WFAN"--does it work like with vanity license plates?

In any case, it gets me every time; it sounds like the sports radio station on a kid's cartoon. "Sports Radio 66, WFAN!" these boisterous voices call, morning noon and night, as WFAN does it's 20-minute "20-20 Sports Updates," which are like news reports, except they JUST cover sports. (A quadruple murder could happen in Central Park; the 20-20 Sports Update wouldn't mention it.)

WFAN has been broadcasting for over 20 years. I've listened to it in various incarnations through those 20:

When I was a kid, my dad would listen to it in the morning and I'd catch it in the background--it was with this guy called Imus who wasn't funny.

In college, this man carried me through my nights:

His name is Joe Benigno, and as far as I'm concerned he's a saint. From his Wikipedia:

Joseph Benigno (born September 1953) is an American sports radio personality. He co-hosts the 10am-1pm weekday timeslot on WFAN in New York City. Prior to joining WFAN, Benigno was a frequent caller to the station, known as "Joe from Saddle River." He would get his first taste of radio experience in 1994, when he guest-hosted a show on WFAN as a result of winning a contest held by the station.

Benigno is a longtime, die-hard fan of the New York Mets, New York Knicks, New York Rangers and especially the New York Jets. He is not afraid to go into tirades when his teams aren't doing so well. He once said a Jets loss on Christmas ruined his celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ.

I put Beningo on when I started my computer science work at 12 or 1 in the morning. His callers were the most entertaining people I'd ever heard. When people meet me, they always ask:

"Are you really from Brooklyn? You don't have that accent."

And I think, of course not. I'm a educated person and I talk like one; my accent is flat. I can't even do the Brooklyn mook/mobster accent. (I can't do any accents except for Beavis and Butthead.)

But the Joe Beningo callers, THEY had Brooklyn accents. Their accents were like beautiful smooth bricks.

And there was one who towered above all the rest:

Mister Jerome Mittelman

He was known on air as "Jerome from Manhattan," and he was the craziest, most exasperated motherfucker I have ever heard ANYWHERE, let alone on radio. He became a sort of celebrity on the show, so much so that the Times wrote about him:

from "Citypeople: Seventh-Inning Kvetch"
October 24, 2004
By JOHN FREEMAN GILL

"Jerome Mittelman, an only-in-New-York bundle of frenzied rage, frustration and sports opinions, typically calls WFAN three or four times a week during the baseball season, often to subject his [beloved] Yankees to the sort of searing, hurt-tinged critique usually reserved for one's closest friends and family....

Mr. Mittelman knows his team, and his calls often begin with a calm, reasoned observation before igniting, within just a few syllables, into ear-splitting, apoplectic fury....

'There's very little that actually makes Jerome happy,' said Mark Chernoff, the WFAN program director. 'Even after the Yankees have won the World Series, Jerome would be on the air the next day saying he wonders which players are going to leave - so he's already looking at the negative side. One of our hosts' lines one year was, 'Jerome, can we have the parade first, before you're worried that they're not going to win the World Series next year?'"

(That was Joe Beningo, btw, and what he said, more specifically, was "Can we have the parade first, Jerome? Can we just have the PARADE, please?")

Here are some of Jerome's classic lines:

"Don't give me the check! Send it to the Yankees! Get more players!" (When his mother, in the background during a call, told him his disability check had arrived.)

"No more!" (After the producers gave him $60 for a blind date, which he returned.)

"The Yankees are done! D-O-E-N: DONE!!"

But in 2004, Jerome stopped calling. It was horrible. His health problems were bad and HIS DOCTOR TOLD HIM THAT HE WAS SO CRAZY ABOUT THE YANKEES THAT HE MIGHT DIE.

That's a fan on WFAN.

(By the way, if you found this whole story stupid because I don't have any actual audio clips of Jerome ("You had to be there!"), I understand. I'm writing about him primarily because I want to FIND some clips. Can anyone help me here? I know the WFAN staffers have recordings. Can we get this stuff on Bittorrent?)

Craig Kilborn vs. Josh Homme vs. Jon Stewart

2008-01-23T13:19:14Z

One of my rules for this blog was always "no sports," because nobody wants to hear about a team that they don't like. (No, wait, plenty of people want to hear about a team that they don't like; nobody wants to hear about a team they don't know is the problem.)

But a billion people watch this thing--

--and so, seeing as I'm from New York, I think I have the right to talk about the NY Giants a little bit.

---------------------------------------

I used to watch Giants highlights over the top of my cereal bowl on Monday mornings before school. Me and my brother would sit at the circular part of our counter with SportsCenter on and gobble up Honey Bunches of Oats, a.k.a. the sugar cereal most cleverly disguised as health cereal. (Honey Bunches of Oats has calories per serving than Lucky Charms.)

My favorite SportsCenter anchor, and the funniest by far, I thought, was Craig Kilborn:

.

Therefore, I was quite pleased, in 1996, to learn that he was going to be hosting this new show called The Daily Show on Comedy Central.

Pretty much nobody remembers Craig Kilborn on the Daily Show, but I remember it being hilarious--they had a segment called 5 Questions at the end of each interview where a guest would be asked five quick, biting questions while the following graphic looped below them:

When I watched the Daily Show at night AND Kilborn was hosting ESPN in the morning, that was a little much. But otherwise he was great. Unfortunately, in 1998, he left the show. One possible reason, from Wikipedia:

In a 1997 interview with Esquire, Kilborn described Daily Show creator and executive producer Lizz Winstead as an "emotional bitch."

Well, there you go. Good job, Craig. Kilborn went on to host The Late Late Show after Letterman, which I didn't care for, and didn't re-up his contract there in 2004. His most notable appearance this decade was in Old School as Max. ("What are you gonna do? Tell on me? That's something chicks do.")

Then, of course, there's Kilborn's uncanny and annoying resemblance to Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age. (Does he need that qualifier anymore? Or is he an actual rock star?)

Kilborn:

Homme:

These pictures don't do them justice--on TV, they're interchangeable. And although I love his music, Homme is afflicted by similar dickishness.

The upshot of all this is that at parties, people will ask me about something that I saw on the Daily Show, and I'll say:

"I don't really watch the Daily Show. I haven't liked it as much since Craig Kilborn stopped hosting it."

And they'll look at me like I have a hand crawling out of my eye:

By the way, I just put that on Flickr (so that I could resize it properly for the blog), and someone commented immediately: "Kool kreation...!!!". So I put up a disclaimer: it's from the forthcoming and surely fantastic The Eye.

And look, it turned out that I didn't end up talking about sports at all.

Deciduous or Evergreen?

2008-01-06T16:41:46Z

New Hampshire doesn't always look perfect, but sometimes it does look like this:

Question is, which sort of tree do you like more in its snow-covered state--deciduous or evergreen?

In your decision-making, don't forget to take this picture into consideration as well:

I Care So Little That I Love Everybody

2008-01-04T06:47:47Z

I don't get into politics much. In 2000, I voted for Ralph Nader--not because I believed in the Green Party, because he was the class president at my high school.

But CNN's coverage of Iowa 2008 has roped me in and now I'm probably tethered to the TV with a feeding tube for the next couple days, until I get bored.

But until that day, America, I'm the classic swing voter. In fact, I'm the classic swing person. I'll listen to whatever people tell me and get completely convinced of it before the next person talks. I can't help it -- their arguments are just so convincing!

there needs to be universal health care

without universal health care, people will die

all the other industrialized nations in the world have it

there shouldn't be universal health care
So I'm liable to vote for anybody, and it's likely to change after any argument. The best way to get me to vote for you is to just give me a really good argument before I go in and vote.

But I'm having FUN with this year's presidential election.

First, there's this:

Mike Huckabee Playing Bass
(If you can't see, here.)

I saw Huckabee on the Tonight Show, Jay Leno's first night without writers, which had one funny joke ("New Jersey banned the death penalty -- you can still bury the bodies there, but you have to kill 'em in New York"). As soon as I saw him, I thought, "This guy could be president."

Not that I agree with his policies, although his tax plan, which combines banning the IRS with Communism, is certainly interesting. But
1. he's funny -- he's the funniest presidential candidate I've ever seen
2. he plays bass (and the band is called CAPITOL OFFENSE! Holy shit! CAPITOL OFFENSE!)
3. he eloquently defends himself against a lot of people who write him off as an idiot
4. he's not ashamed of his religion
  
  Important interjection here: WHAT exactly is an "Evangelical Christian?" What does that mean? Besides "hard-core?" I find that Google is less and less useful for answering these questions.
5. Before this last point, I just want to say that I never particularly liked Chuck Norris -- I saw one episode of "Walker, Texas Ranger" on the treadmill screen at the gym the last time I went to the gym, which was like three months ago. (It was the first of a two-episode time travel story.)
  
  That said, this is amazing:
  
  (If you can't see, here.)
  
  (The joke here is so obvious that it practically writes itself! Forget the striking writers, just get MIKE HUCKABEE!!!!)
Now, Barack Obama is a different story.

Here you're dealing with a real orator. Regardless of what you think about his positions -- and I think that his plan to have the US stop torturing people is good -- it's fun to watch a real orator work. This is what people went to hear when they went to hear Socrates.

Obama's Iowa victory speech was riveting and uplifting, yes, but under all that, it was well-constructed and delivered.
- what worked: repetition but not threes
  
  "They said... They said... " -- Obama uses repetition but he doesn't get caught up in threes. It's very tempting when you're writing to have three, concise, points, because three is such a powerful number. Then you try to stuff a third point in for no reason! But when you avoid always having three, concise, points, you can gain the power of repetition without losing the credibility. He used twos and fours.
- what worked: MLK cadences
  
  Well, here's a gimme. If you can speak like Martin Luther King Jr., you're speaking like one of the great orators of all time.
  
  But it's tough to do that, because MLK has a trademark in the minds of Americans with the preacher cadences of "I Have A Dream." If you try to talk like that, it seems like you're stomping on a legend. Obama can use what worked so well for MLK and get away with it because:
  - he's black
  - it's been long enough since "I Have A Dream" for people to have said "it's cool to cover it" -- I don't mean to be flippant about this, I mean that if you tried to cover Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction" in 1969, a few years after it came out, it would sound blasphemous, but when Devo covered and reinterpreted it in 1977, it was universally accepted and acclaimed.
  What's really great about this is that Obama's MLK cadences can also be heard in the hardcore mega-churches of the Huckabee camp.
- what worked: subliminal messaging
  
  Everybody got on Huckabee for the "white cross" in the ad -- which I do think was a plant, absolutely. But Obama had a better trick -- he talks about a United America of Red and Blue States while people wave signs that say "Obama" in red and blue!! So simple. Instead of signs with one color, give 'em two!
  
  But Obama gets away with this because it's not really subliminal at all. Right?
- what worked: "father from Kenya, mother from Kansas"
  
  Oooh, I hadn't been let in on that particular delicious flourish.
- what didn't work: specifics
  
  In a speech so focused on uniting with such historic value (a black guy winning a presidential caucus in a 9X% white state?!), there were MANY moments where you wished that specifics weren't targeted so much. Right after his "They said... They said..." opener, Obama revealed that "they" were "cynics" -- why? That's a tautology. Just let "they" be every person who has ever done anything fucked-up in the past.
  
  That's who you're running against, if you want to be great.
Someone please please answer the evangelical question, I'm serious.

Golden Compass Giveaway

2007-12-30T23:59:51Z

My mother was very, very happy when Golden Compass was such a bomb at the box office. She feels that Philip Pullman is an annoying godless punk. She'd probably say that to his face.

I have my own opinions, since I contributed to this book this year:

The World... is a collection of essays on The Golden Compass, edited by Scott Westerfield. I read through the interminable series in order to contribute. I have NEVER read anything more repetitive. (Every time something happened, it had to be explained to two or three other people.) However, I wrote about this back in summer, so to avoid being too hypocritical, I'll stop there.

The World..., available only at Borders stores for a while, is now available online too, but, as I do with all my books, I'm giving it away.

I have always had giveaways for my books. Why? Because I hate having my own books in my house. Why? Two reasons:

It's always the mark of a failed writer -- they can't sell any books and they can't GIVE them away

plain old shame

Why the shame? I'm afraid that people will see the books and question me about them and attempt to determine how they are deficient in some way. And of course, they are deficient one huge way: there is not a 4th.

But before we get caught up in self-hate, right there above is the Golden Compass book. Would you like it?

First two people to respond get one of my two signed copies.