Pay It Forward - Thriller Writing Tips

I haven't seen the new Kevin Bacon thriller Death Sentence yet, but reading about it led me to an item I thought I'd share - Brian Garfield's Ten Rules for Suspense Fiction. Word up is they helped John Grisham with The Firm, so they can't hurt.

The new movie is based--loosely, I think--on Garfield's sequel to Death Wish, the novel and not the movie, and when I discovered that I bounced around Garfield links and found the thriller tips.


Unseen wonders
I can't tell you if the movie is any good, but once upon a time I liked the book. I found it in paperback on a variety store's rack. I'd read Death Wish because I couldn't see the movie. There was a time when I was too young for things.

I'd also read interviews in which Garfield expressed his dismay over Charles Bronson's portrayal as a hero in the film adaptation of Death Wish.

"Fill your hand," Bronson as Paul Kersey née Benjamin utters in the brutal final action set piece of the film, harkening back to a host of Western gunfighters.

Based upon
As I read, I discovered Death Sentence was Garfield's answer to his concern. Asides even featured characters voicing some of the same things he said about vigilantism in newspaper interviews.

Sentence focuses on Paul Benjamin's move to Chicago where he continues his vigilante ways until his notoriety spawns another vigilante more vicious than he.

He ultimately has to track down and face the other shooter and come to terms with his life and his losses.

It's far better than the inexplicably brutal Death Wish II, and worth a look if you enjoy a thoughtful page turner.

Other Garfield works I've enjoyed include Hopscotch inexplicably adapted for film by Garfield himself as a comedy; Recoil and if you can find back issues of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine look for his spy stories featuring cold war operative Charlie. Those are a load of fun.

Of Dress Codes and Civil Disobedience

My senior portrait is a lie.

It features a me with a haircut far shorter than I wore it in those days. I had to get it cut before they put me it in the fake tux shirt and the hideously royal blue tux jacket, lest the high school journalism adviser cull my portrait from the yearbook. That's the yearbook that's stacked under some afghans and Halloween decorations in the front closet. It's pretty pointless as a memory of those days.

I should have kept my hair like I wore it, left the yearbook in the box and relied on Kodak moments, though my parents, ever celebrants of conformity and short haircuts, would have been embarrassed. (The, uh, haircut in photos of my dad's retirement party are not particularly indicative of how I wore my hair around that time of my life either.)

I thought of all that when Christine called my attention to these guys, who have contended all summer in "Letters to the Editor" that how they dress does not affect how they learn.

The pink ties and orange belts are their way of expressing their individuality. Power to the people, young dudes!

Maybe the lesson in nonconformity you're teaching yourselves is more valuable than the decorum of appropriate collars and pant-leg lengths could ever accomplish.

Maybe it will remind you to speak out when you learn your government is controlled by lobbyists paying fealty to the congressional leaders--too-long-entrenched and deaf to constituents--who demand it.

In a wonderful interview with actor/writer Ethan Hawke on a recent Studio 360, the host's comment prompted him to spout a few lines from his turn as Mikhail Bakunin in Tom Stoppard's Coast of Utopia.

I can't help but think of that remark now. "To be answerable to authority is demeaning to man’s spiritual essence. "

Maybe we all need orange ties and pink belts, eh?

A Fine, Fine Day on the iPod

I've waited for a while for the fine, fine day that Tony Carey's "A Fine, Fine Day" would turn up on iTunes.

Recently I discovered at least a version, though it's a live recording that sounds a little different and more gravelly than the '80s original.

That's a little disappointing, because it's not just the song but also the rendition from its time that makes me like and recall it fondly.

Orwell That Ends Well - I made it through 1984
When it was on the charts or at least on Top 40 radio, I was a young reporter, periodically running the police beat at night. That involved riding a creaking elevator up to the top floor of the parish court house to read the jail log, a public record and sometimes a news source. It was once the way we, and I'm really using the editorial we, learned a first degree murder suspect had been booked.

More often than not it was less interesting, a chronicle of cable TV theft, shoplifting and unauthorized use of movables. I never knew what the hell that last one meant.

When I made those trips, wondering if it would ever end, I'd ride with trustees on cleanup detail. They always wanted to borrow pens and note books and have you make phone calls for them.

I don't know all of the things you can make from a Bic ballpoint but Dirty Harry got out of Alcatraz with a spoon and some dimes, so I always declined.

All of the exposure to the world of crime got me interested in Elmore Leonard novels, though, starting with a paperback reprint of Unknown Man 89, followed quickly by Split Image, Swag, Stick and others.

Fine, Fine Day was the background music, frequently on the radio and a spiritual cousin of Leonard's work, to me at least, with its account of a con returning from a long prison stint.

Stick 'Em Up
I pictured the song's Uncle Sonny--veteran of apparently numerous scams and shady deals--more like a Leonard character than a gangster in a business suit as the song's video did.

He was like numerous Leonard hard-timers including Ernest Stickley from Stick and his buddy Frank Ryan from Swag aka Ryan's Rules, who died in prison between the two novels.

The song celebrates Sonny's release and his celebration by taking a cab ride to Central Park, and that hopeful note kept me going as I adjusted to the routine of reporting and the harshness of the world.

The police beat was part of my assignment for five years. I don't remember the last time I rode that elevator, but it was a fine, fine day.

Does This Remind You of Anyone We Know?

Did anyone else have flashbacks to Little Britain after seeing yesterday's news conference with Sen. Larry Craig?

Speaking of Horror Movies

An interesting article from Wired contends video game horror surpasses Hollywood horror these days.

I need to check out BioShock that he's talking about.

I've been playing Silent Hill again because the movie recently aired on cable. I do like the game better.

If Your DVD Players has A "Vacancy"...

I suppose it's been out on DVD about 15 minutes now, so you may have seen Vacancy if you care about dark thrillers.

If not, check it out. It's a tight, nasty little nail-biter, made interesting in part by the casting of bigish names in what might otherwise have been a direct-to-video excursion.

We're talking Psycho meets Joe Lansdale's The Night They Missed the Horror Show or maybe sorta The Nightrunners with a little bit of Mountaintop Motel Massacre .

Luke Wilson, who's great in My Super Ex-Girlfriend, and Kate Beckinsale, who, OK, does her share of vampire hunting so she's not exactly not a genre star but still..., are a squabbling couple on a rushed trek home from a family gathering.

They get on one of those roads you never want to get on, stop at a quick stop where the charming mechanic (Ethan Embry) promptly sabotages their car and soon they're forced to stop over at one of those no-brand motels for the night.

Frank Whaley is the creepy innkeeper who sets them up in the honeymoon suite at no extra charge.

The water's bleak but even worse, the in-room VCR is stocked with snuff films. SHOT IN THEIR ROOM! (And a brutal, edgy stack of snuff films they are.)

Things don't let up from that point.

Here's why anyone who says this movie sucks is wrong.

1. Great performances.

2. Tight, disturbing direction.

3. A script that makes a few characters and pretty much a single location work to great advantage.

4. There are few stupid movie moments. Maybe a couple, but generally the characters make reasonable decisions. They still have a hell of a time, but they don't decide to take showers after discovering a stack of snuff films.

Maybe the troubled marriage could have been a little more nuanced, but you get to like the characters fairly well fairly quickly. Time spent on Lifetime Movie Channel flashbacks would detract.

I'll stipulate there's one decision where the filmmakers decided to play nice. Could have gone either way. Could have been really cold and cruel. They went for kinder gentler.

Overall, though, gritty and engaging.

I give it three Sid heads:




Really, because it deserved it. Not just because 3 means I don't have to make another graphic.

(No rights to Vacancy image implied.)

Tracking Henry and Fay

A friend, at an office where they do cool things like have movie outings, was going to one of the said movie outings this afternoon.

"Have you seen anything good?" he asked. "I guess I could check your blog."

Bourne Again
He'd already read my Bourne thoughts so I guess he would have been disappointed, and as you might notice if you scroll down, the blog this week has been devoted to pimping my audiobook. (H.G. Wells War of the Worlds newly available from iTunes or Audible.com. All major credit cards accepted.)

I haven't gone to the movies lately, but I've been watching DVDs of the fabulous Hal Hartley films Henry Fool and its new-on-DVD sequel Fay Grim, called The Empire Strikes Back of the series.

Henry: Portrait of A Mysterious Stranger
I'd never seen Henry Fool, though it was released in 1997, and I had a bit of a wait getting it via Netflix, but it was worth it.

It's long and quirky and brilliant with stage actor Thomas Jay Ryan wonderfully charismatic in the title role and supported by Parker Posey and James Urbaniak (voice of The Venture Brothers' father) as the siblings Grim.

Fool is an unpublished writer and braggart but in a good way and inspires Urbaniak's Simon Grim, a garbage man, to pen an epic poem that rocks the world when Fay leaks it onto the Internet.

Everything plays out in and around the Grim's neighborhood, where many other strange and offbeat characters pass through the narrative.

It all builds to a suitably ambiguous ending picked up in...

Fay, Wry Spy
It's six or seven years later when Jeff Goldblum and that kid from Kids as G-men enter Fay Grim's world.

They want her to go and find Henry (so much for the ambiguous ending). Did I mention she married him in the first film? She took back her maiden name.

Anyway, wearing a wonderfully spy-looking coat, she sets off to Europe and the Near East, encountering international quirky characters, dodging bullets and bad guys.

Even though it's slightly more accessible being a spy-thriller parody, Fay Grim is the weaker of the two flicks but still a winning effort that sheds new light on Henry and adds new meaning to his stack of composition books.

So unless a movie outing means a couple of hours away from the office, my suggestion - rent these, stay in and curl up with a healthy snack. If you're not, you know, going to buy the dramatized H.G. Wells War of the Worlds.

I give it three Sid heads out of four:



(No rights to Fay Grim image implied.)

Writing Old Time Radio - The Sounds And The Fury

When I was writing comic book scripts for Roland Mann under the Silverline banner, he had me work in what was then--and possibly still--called the Marvel Comics style.

DC, at least once upon a time, had writers do full scripts -- action, dialog, the whole megillah in one package. Marvel had writers provide a script with just the action first.

The artist would then take that and draw the panels. Once those were done the writer would come back and decide what people were saying, trying to match the facial expressions as much as possible.

It's kind of like lip synching with line art. You have to come up with words that describe action too like Thwapp! Remember Batman, the Adam West one? Google it, Junior. It was a big hit in its day.

The thinking behind the Marvel style is that it involves the artist in the storytelling a little more and keeps him/her from worrying about where the word balloons are going to go.

So, when I was shifting gears to write for audio--which was not that hard because as my resume notes I'm incredibly versatile and adaptable though also modest and self-effacing--I read some material on how to tell stories in sound and then I set to work.

Step one is adapting expository material to dialog. "Look there's a green streak in the sky. It's going down behind those hills."

To punctuate that you need an appropriate sound effect, not unlike those Thwapps I was talking about earlier.

SFX: MARTIAN CRAFT CRASHING INTO GRAVEL.

I approached the adaptation of H.G. Wells War of the Worlds, now available at Audible.com and on iTunes, the way I approached comics. Tell the story - don't worry where the word balloons go.

Or in audio terms, write the sound effects needed, let the sound artists worry about the rest.

WARNING: That can make the producer a little frustrated:

"You put this many sound effects in again I'm going to kill you."

Fortunately it's a long drive from Utah, where he resides.

A large number of sound effects can also lead to arguments with the sound engineer.

"That's not what a telegraph sounds like. That's what a morse code transmitter in World War II sounded like," sez I.

"How do you know?"

"I watched Hellcats of the Navy on cable."

"Well what does it sound like?"

"What am I? Michael Winslow? Go watch the Big Valley or Bonanza or something. Eventually they'll have to go into Stockton or wherever the Cartwrights lived and send or receive one."

Eventually, once the artistic differences are worked out, you wind up with a nifty audio program with sound effects helping to paint the picture in your mind's eye.

It really is theater of the imagination.

Now it's time for to save this.

SFX: MOUSE CLICK

And hit SEND.

SFX: Keyboard thwick.

War of the Worlds Is Now on Audible.com

The radio-drama style adaptation I did of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds is now available on iTunes and via audible.com.

It's kind of exciting even to be buried on iTunes, where it's interestingly easier to find if you search for Sidney Williams and look for the War of the Worlds (dramatized) title in the results mix.

You'll see there's a blues man named Sidney Williams, too. Although Mississippi Shivers sounds like something I'd come up with, thass not me, man. Would that I didn't have a tin ear.

Happily the price on the War of the Worlds adaptation is now around $10 and cheaper on iTunes or with an Audible membership plan.


As I've probably mentioned here before, the dramatic portions of the program were recorded in Great Britain. I got to talk to the actors, headed by Martyn Tott, in a phone conference while some scenes were recorded, which was kind of fun and exciting.

Check it out if you like.

The Sad State of Sci Fi Affairs

I guess it's a sign of audience transition as much as anything, but it's a little sad and a little perplexing to read about ABC's Masters of Science Fiction, an anthology series narrated by Steven Hawking and based on great works of SF.

When I first saw it spotlighted in TV Guide, I assumed it was on The Sci Fi Channel or somewhere on cable.

Apparently the series was developed with an eye toward low-cost Saturday material for ABC. That it was developed at all goes against the current tide, I guess.

Not many people watched the first installment with Sam Waterston from Law and Order, though I've watched both episodes that have aired.

Last Saturday's featured Terry O'Quinn, Locke of Lost as a scientist dealing with an alien mummy that's demanding world peace. It was probably his presence that doubled the ratings between episodes one and two, but apparently only four of six--if that many--episodes will be seen on the network.

Both episodes so far have been cerebral tales, tied to limited sets. You can see the budget showing.

In tone, they remind me a lot of the modern Outer Limits, but any thoughtful and diverse programming is welcome and worthy.

Heinlein's ahead
A Robert Heinlein story is next, and Harlan Ellison is behind the fourth episode, if it turns up. Check it out, and join me in waiting for the DVD which will hopefully bring all six episodes to the forefront.

(No rights to image implied.)

If you were dissected tomorrow...

What would be the sum of your parts if you got kidnapped by Richard Widmark's character in Coma?



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A Poem Found in Life?

Some free verse or just choppy prose. I don't write poetry much these days. Judge tenderly of me.

In A San Francisco Bookshop

I saw a man
In San Francisco
At a bookstore
Near The Purple Onion,
Squinting
Through two Pairs of spectacles
Double decker,
Stacked one on top of the other.

A scholar
A reader of books and thoughts
Struggling
Against body and
Time's degradation,
God's infinite jest.

What Was Is On the iPod?

I was on the road and listening to the radio yesterday when David Was came on to discuss the re-release of an album, Famous Blue Raincoat, in which Jennifer Warnes covers Leonard Cohen songs.

Objects may be closer than they appear
I was headed toward a local body shop to turn my car in for repair at the time. I was in an auto accident the other morning.

I caught a flutter of movement in my side mirror which directed my attention to my rearview.

A car was changing lanes behind me. I had the thought that perhaps I ought to put my foot to the floor because it was coming at a high rate of speed.

"She's going to cut it pretty close," I thought, right before she slammed into me.

The (Pick your own word from the Urban Dictionary) had to chase me down to hit me, but she got me. Tore up the back bumper because they make those out of cotton candy.

So Now I'm In a Rental
I haven't configured my iPod connector for the Chevy Malibu the rental agency gave me. Man I hate when they walk you around it and check for dings. "Better not be any more when you bring it back or there will be Hertz to pay.")

So this morning I was stuck with the radio presets. Oh, my God the humanity.

I'm risking dings trying to get it off the crap the previous renter had it on.

Would that I'd had my iPod rigged up. I discovered a little gem while Was discussed Leonard, you see.

Was, of Was (Not Was)--remember Walk the Dinosaur?--recorded a tune with Cohen on vocals once upon a time. Was mentioned it in his review, cleverly planting the seed in my ear.

And I now have a $1.29 DMR free version of "Elvis's Rolls Royce."

It's a great low-voiced tune about a trip at the wheel of Elvis's classic ride, with the voice of the King coming from the back seat.

Sounds like it would make a better ride than the Chevy, but I'll get by.

(No rights to image implied.)

Bourne Dizzy

I had the thought, as many people did somewhere amid one of the kinetic chase/fight sequences. But it was Christine who articulated it as we stepped from the theater: "That was almost like The Blair Witch."

She was referring to the so-fast-they're-blurry sequences that link together to make up The Bourne Ultimatum's story. Fast and furious has never applied more. Sometimes even sound cues are the only way to keep track of what's going on.

I'm not complaining, just dazzled by what I think is an expansion of the style Peter Greengrass began in The Bourne Supremacy and continued in the grim United 93.

His stories don't unfold on screen. They happen. Relentlessly.

Plot exposition is sprinkled in between set pieces.

Certainly most of the story from the Robert Ludlum series on which the Bourne films are based was jettisoned long ago, but the pace is what's carried over from the page.

In Ludlum, cars jumping curbs and other almost nonstop action is prevalent.

That page-turning quality becomes the high-energy visuals on screen.

It takes action and screen storytelling to a new place.

Check it out on the big screen if you get a chance.

Bourne Ultimatum official site

(No rights to image implied.)

Is There More Information/Less Truth?

In an article called The Truth About Denial for Newsweek, Sharon Begley reports:

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.


Draw your own conclusions about the truth or falsehood of global warming. The move to "Deceive, Inveigle, Obfuscate" as Mulder once put it on the X-Files is what concerns me.

It's not limited to the global warming debate. Of late, and yeah it may make me sound paranoid, I've detected an agenda in seemingly random comments in the Web 2.0 world, on blogs and op-eds, not in the immediate blog circle but in the blogosphere at large.

Never mind the topics. You can probably figure out the issues I follow by a browse through the archives, but specifics are irrelevant.

If it's happening on one issue, it's happening on others. Commenters with a particular point of view seem to converge on blogs, espousing similar ideas, just like a politician with a couple of talking points.

I guess the consistency of a message is the best way to recognize a questionable ripple in the pond.

It all seems a little more murky than whichever bias you believe the media might hold. Media outlets recently fired a lot of reporters when disclosures revealed they had contributed to candidates of any stripe.

Pulling at the ethics thread
Journalism in general has a high code of ethics. Higher than most professions. Lawyers after all are often in the business of constructing believable fiction which becomes real to the blind eyes of justice if the fiction is sold to the party of 12 in the jury box. Junk science doesn't have to hold up to peer review if 12 laymen accept it. (Addendum: Perhaps this is an oversimplification of how the legal system and lawyers work, but my thought is that it's more about selling hypotheses to a jury than dealing with empirical data.)

The blogosphere, however, hasn't developed a similar code for citizen journalists. The perspective of many blogs is obvious, yet there's definitely no code random commenters who might be averge Joes or Jolenes or marketing shills.

We have access to more information than ever, yet the truth is more elusive than ever before.

There are liars, and I think there are more damned liars out there than ever before. What a shame they're littering the information super highway.

Manly Concepts

Charles suggested--and Kate seconded, I think-- that a great high concept idea might be a battle between Wayne and Stewart.

My thoughts first went to a horror pairing a la Freddy vs. Jason, but then it occurred to me that Wayne and Stewart are from Chicago and Detroit.

Of course it would be a manly action picture. Two fierce competitors squaring off. Two men enter, one man leaves and all that.

Click the pic for a larger view.
(I know, I could have spent more time on the faces, but that wouldn't be as much fun would it?)

(No rights to original image implied.)

Is the concept high?

Dean Koontz recently released a podcast regarding his new novel, The Good Guy, and he notes it's one of several high concept books he's offered up of late. It's sort of a "put your typing fingers where your advice is" exercise, he explains.

He tells beginning writers that high concept--something that can be summed up in a sentence or two--is easier for publishers to latch onto. Faced with those who noted many of his books aren't so simple, he decided, starting with Velocity to turn out some thrillers that are both worthwhile and high concept.

Velocity - Guy gets a call from a killer who forces him to choose the killer's next victim.

The Husband - Working man gets call his wife has been kidnapped and he has to come up with $2 million he doesn't have to save her. (Or maybe it's thriller meets Running With Scissors.)

The Good Guy - Wrong man is mistaken for hired killer and sets out to save the intended victim.

Koontz places an average guy at the core of each situation, offers a deep and involving look at his soul, and keeps the pages turning. That mixture certainly dovetails with Charles' recent discussion on the importance of character and thrills. (Who cares if the guy's running with scissors or from scissors if you don't know who he is?)

I think my new project is high concept though I won't jinx it by offering that sentence here.

Maybe I'll just throw out some random ones. Maybe, just maybe it's an exercise that can cure writer's block:

The Exorcist meets Die Hard.

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington meets The Devil's Rejects.

North by Northwest meets The Seventh Seal. (Think about it: Death in a crop duster chasing Cary Grant.)

Play along at home if you like and stop chuckling. This is how Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man came about. Curt Siodmak was joking around about movie titles at the Universal commissary one day and wound up with an assignment.

Whysoserious.com - Out the corner of my eye

I don't have anyone on the ground at Comicscom in San Diego, but from the corner of my eye I'm watching the activity on whysoserious.com, a promo for the new Batman Movie.

An "I Want You" poster featuring Heath Ledger as the Joker appeared this morning with cooridnates of where to go for a big henchperson recruitment gathering.

Commonreview.com is steadily solving and posting clues and they do have people on the ground.

Is this viral marketing or something beyond? Any way you slice it, it's COOL!

(No rights to image implied.)

Zombie Orville Bites the Big Kernel

Advertising Age is reporting that zombie Orville Redenbacher creators Crispin Porter & Bogusky are being replaced by ConAgra Foods, holders of the Redenbacher brand.

I mentioned here a while back that the zombie Orville commercials struck me as creepy and not in a good way. Who wants their popcorn seasoned with formaldehyde after all?

I guess there are good and bad ways you can use zombies.

Zombie fighting associated with protective software = good.

Zombies associated with food = bad.

Perhaps most of all the Orville ads failed because the reanimation was off-putting. Maybe a better realized "reanimation" would have struck me as more appetizing.

But zombie Orville had an eerie pallor and a strangeness of movement we didn't get when real footage of Fred Astair or John Wayne was used in the past.

Maybe we have to wait a while for technique to catch up with idea.

Or maybe it's time to bury the dead.

Wikiquote - One of the coolest and most useful sites ever

Speaking of useful things you can find on the web, check out Wikiquote, a new Google discovery I just made trying to figure out who said what once upon a time. Pardon me while I gush.

It's prefatory notes call it "a free online compendium of quotations from notable people and creative works in every language..."

And it seems to cover everything Dante to Twin Peaks, which includes: "I like my coffee black, like midnight on a moonless night." -- Agent Dale Cooper.)

Actually a Dante quote may be more a appropriate example: Abandon every hope, ye who enter here." I did not know it was every hope, but if you dive in you will be kept busy for a while if you have remote interest in thumbnail bits of wisdom .

There's an A to Z list of literary works to browse, not to mention film. How exactly did Gerard Butler phrase that breakfast quote in 3oo? More eloquently than my memory served: "Ready your breakfast and eat hearty, for tonight we dine in Hell!"

Not to elevate 300 higher than it should be, but Wikiquote's not all high-brow. You can get the Grabthar's hammer quote from Galaxy Quest in its entirety, too:

"By Grabthar's hammer, by the sons of Worvan, you shall be avenged."

And hopefully you can also get plenty of inspiration.

The Web As Central Casting

Artists commission models to gain accuracy in depictions of the human form. It struck me, that I don't know that writers do that sort of thing as often. 

More frequently writers rely on experience and memory for the strokes that paint word characters, and much of the greatness indeed comes from within the writer. Yet, the web offers some interesting tools for which I believe scribes can sometimes draw benefit. 

Don't overlook the benefits to be found at your fingertips, even though I mentioned recently on Charles' blog that I often unplug the web to remove its distractions and potential for making me hover over minute details.

Singles sites aren't just for the lovelorn. 

The notion of browsing singles sites arose at a web design convention I attended. Web and marketing strategists--just like fiction writers--seek to devise realistic imaginary characters. They're called personas and they're developed to help envision the members of a website's target audience. Susan is a 31-year-old nurse interested in buying her first home. When she comes to a mortgage site she wants to learn about...

Where do you have a lot of people of various ages telling you about themselves? Singles sites are one starting point. Sure they have plenty of people who help you feel better about how you look, but they're ripe with profiles that list hobbies and interests, professions and passtimes. 

Indeed many points are fictional to begin with in those profiles, but they're certainly interesting places to visit for tidbits about real humans. Get past "outdoor type" and "outgoing" and there are frequently elements to jog the imagination. 

Model behavior 

Need to jump start your imagination as far as physical descriptions for your characters? Stock photography sites are a great place to visit for perusing varieties of hairstyles, facial hair and fashion choices. You may find the perfect zippered hoody to break your sinister, corner lurker out of stock character confines or remember some tic or trait from someone you once knew that fits perfectly. Web browsing doesn't substitute for observing real world behavior and observing the real world in general, but it can help sometimes with highlights and shadows.

Sacking Nike

Somehow I suspect, and come on if you're awake, you suspect too that Nike® 's decision to hold off on their newest Michael Vick shoe had less to do with due process and waiting for the court to decide the Atlanta Falcons quarterback's guilt or innocence on dogfighting charges than it did with corporate profits.

Their decision came, no doubt, after the statisticians in strategic planning counted their magic beans and decided they weren't gaining as much in street-cred as they were losing in customer good will.

This is a company after all that featured a brief hint of dog fighting in a commercial a few years ago just to show how tough they are. In a terse e-mail to Gwen Knapp of the San Francisco Chronicle Nike stated they pulled it only because it ran its course, not because animal welfare groups voiced dismay. Ms. Knapp noted:

"At a time when one of its star endorsers is accused of viciously abusing animals for thrills and profit, Nike probably should have hinted at some level of sensitivity on the subject. "

The response at the very least makes their statement that "we consider any cruelty to animals inhumane and abhorrent" seem disingenuous.

Regardless of what courts rule on Vick's guilt or innocence, Nike has shown just how skewed its moral center is and how reprehensible its marketing and advertising can be.

They are happy to be associated with exploitation of the most vile and inhumane kind if it's making them look like tough guys.

I bought new running shoes a while back and they weren't Nike's, though I'd had Nike cross trainers for a while. The ASICS® running shoes just felt more comfortable in the walking-around-the-athletic-store test.

Brand will play a bigger role for me in the future. I'm sacking Nike. I'm kicking Nike, that is I ain't buying them no more.

I'm not their target audience--I'm gradually aging out of just about every marketer's desirable range except maybe Metamucil's--but perhaps I'm not the only one who'll be giving my $80 to someone else the next time I'm in the market for an athletic shoe.

Michael Vick's guilt or innocence is indeed for the court's to decide, the presumption of innocence his rightful due, but Nike's trial is in the court of public opinion and it's time to bang the gavel and render the verdict.

In my mind as a consumer, they're convicted.

Addendum (7/27/07)

Los Angeles Times Nike Sacks Vick

Getting Simpsonized!

As part of the crass commercialism surrounding the release of The Simpsons Movie, there are e-mails and links circulating that tout a website that will allow you to get "Simpsonized."

Basically you upload a photo of yourself, and it will turn you into a Simpson's character.

Now while it may be fun, it's clearly a stab at selling you a movie ticket i.e. taking your money, picking your pocket. Don't be fooled by this trick. Don't let them seduce you into playing their little game.

Doh!

Having trouble getting Simpsonized?
The OriginalUnOriginal.com has some pointers that might help.

What I Ought To Be Reading Now - Joseph Finder's Power Play

Joseph Finder was nice enough to send me an ARC of his new novel Power Play, and I really should be reading it right now because it's due on the stands Aug. 7, and I really should write a thoughtful review to coincide with it. In case I don't make it:

Mr. Finder has taken the thriller in all new directions in his previous books including Paranoia, Company Man and Killer Instinct.

Power Play appears to be a nail-biter or a grip-the-arm-of-your-chairer or generally a great page turner.

He always delivers excellent, character driven tales that are well plotted.

Here's the gist of the tale:

A group of employees from an aerospace company are on a corporate retreat sans usual means of communication when they're taken hostage by armed thugs.

Fortunately, a junior executive named Jake Landry is on hand. Landry has a darker past than anyone realizes and it's up to him to stop the bad guys.

Watch for it on the stands soon or for the audio book. Check back here for a review, if not by Aug. 7 at least shortly thereafter.

The Language of Spam

You ever open spam by mistake because it has a subject line that looks like it might conceivably be a complaint?

At the day job, we get this e-mail entitled: "How to answer the phone." Not that anyone at our place might answer in a monosyllabic grunt or anything, but I thought it was from someone who'd had the phone answered in a fashion unbefitting and was being a little sarcastic.

Instead I'm greeted with this glittering American flag animation, one of those graphics people leave in comment tags on MySpace.

Below it was this message about how business phones should be answered.

"Press '1' for English. Press '2' to disconnect until you learn to speak English."

Then it proceded to note:

Only Jesus Christ and the American soldier ever agreed to die for you.

I was mulling over the various stripes in the message when someone offered an observation over my shoulder.

"I guess Jesus would've had to press 2. He spoke Aramaic."

58 Minutes and Other Thrillers

My reading flavor-of-the-month is thrillers. I have the Die Hard movies to thank. I re-watched Die Hard 2: Die Harder and Die Hard With a Vengeance around the time I went to see Live Free or Die Hard, which I thought was a pretty good action movie.

All of that reminded me I'd picked up but never read 58 Minutes, the novel by Walter Wager that provided the plot for Die Hard 2.

Several of Wager's books became action films in the '70s including the Charles Bronson vehicle, Telefon, but 58 Minutes got a John McClane injection for the big screen.

In the novel the hero is a New York counter-terrorism cop whose daughter is on an incoming flight when terrorists jam radar and cause other havoc in order to demand the release of five political prisoners.

It reads somehow like a thriller of another era, though its from the late eighties. It's an interesting book.

It's fun to play - how'd they deal with this on the big screen while reading it, too. McClane is an outsider in the film, while Frank Malone, the novel's hero, works to marshal available resources to deal with the problem at hand.

It's still white-knuckle territory with loads of physical action and a wrap-up that makes you say: Cool!.

I cracked open Ignition by Kevin Anderson and Doug Beeson over the weekend, a thriller that might have been a McClane movie. I believe it was actually optioned before the plot for was Live Free discovered in Wired, via another screenplay.

It focuses on terrorists who take the space shuttle hostage while it's on the launch pad. A tough but downed-astronaut has to fight them and save the crew, which includes some Russians as well.

We'll see where this trend takes me after that.

In the "There Might Be Some Hope For Us Yet" Department

I had a textbook once with an excerpt from Solzhenitsyn in which he described standing under an apple tree after a rainstorm.

(Happily, the complete quote can be found here. It's the top one.)

I thought of that message of optimism as I read a report in Advertising Age's daily e-newsletter this morning.

The Cone Cause Evolution Survey for this year found: "87% of U.S. consumers would switch from one brand to another if the other brand was associated with a good cause, up 31% since 1993."

Perhaps something once lost is regained.

Profundities

Christine regularly reads a blog called Walk Slowly Live Wildly, being the exploits of an off-beat family. She discovered it studying decorating photos, I believe. The blog's author, Sara, is given to small apartments yet works to make them lovely and uncluttered.

Christine can't achieve uncluttered. I, uh, own too many books and magazines.

All that's an aside though, I told you all that because I like the quote Sara has and I wanted to pass it along:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
– Margaret Mead

The Dirty Dozen

I'd probably seen television ads for it, and in one magazine or another, I'd encountered the image at left. I remember the guns pointed in all directions vividly.

So when my dad and my uncle decided to see The Dirty Dozen while we were visiting in Arkansas, I wanted to go too. It would have been 1967. Do the math on how old I must have been.

Skeptical, my uncle said I'd never sit through it, but my dad knew I'd do fine. Then he wondered what kind of movie he'd brought me to see when there was a hanging about two minutes into it. It was probably the second movie I saw in a theater, my grandmother having taken me to see Bambi sometime earlier.

It wasn't until I watched a repeat on television when I was older than the violence of the conclusion sank in. "Gasoline and hand grenades? They're doing what?!"


AMC was celebrating the 40th DD anniversary Saturday (7-7-07). Hard to believe.

We saw it in a downtown movie house, the elegant kind that's long disappeared. Later and for years they had a massive poster for Part II Walking Tall plastered across a side wall. We'd see it every time we drove into town.

When we were watching Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson pose as Nazis in remarkably well-pressed uniforms considering they'd brought them in a parachute drop and were wearing them over fatigues, it was still a different movie era.

The theater must have been in its heydey or on the outer cusp of its heydey, back when there were still lobby cards and satin drapes around the screen.

The moments that resonated with me were the funnier ones rather than the violence i.e. when Marvin shoots the bottom of a rope off as an insentive to a solider to keep climbing.

My dad liked John Cassavetes' Frakno best, I think. We talked about the show endlessly afterwards or I did. We even went to see another Lee Marvin show later, Sergeant Ryker, but it was tougher for me to follow, more courtroom drama than thriller.

Maybe it was better back then though when you saw one good movie once in a while in a great venue.

(No rights to image implied.)

Is It Hot In Here Or Am I Crazy

I've been told, though I don't have it on any official authority, that our local weather man--the guy who interrupted Lost--tells school classes he visits that global warming is a croc.

I've read Michael Crichton's State of Fear, which illustrates the "it's not really that hot" argument with a compelling thriller plot involving conspiratorial environmentalists who all drive the Toyota Prius. Plenty of people emerged to disagree with Crichton after publication, though many others are like the weather man.

Christine and I were talking over the notion as we drove back from our local farmer's market this morning with a bag of organic apples and some blackberries. It's not as hot here as it is in the West, but that's mainly because it won't stop raining.

"I think the reasons for opposing efforts to correct warming issues are mainly economic," I observed, profound chap that I am. You can read dissertations on those matters by analysts more astute than I, who note many fear dreaded NGE's, non-governmental entities looming behind Kyoto.

Christine's been reading Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher--one of the subversive texts to which I was introduced in college. I believe it was in a class called Contemporary Society and Human Values.

She paraphrased and observed there's far more to the universe than the economic, we just forget about that. There's spiritual, environmental, ethical. She probably rattled off some others, as she cited Schumacher's notion that economic is a "fragmented" view.

It's certainly a time to mull and ponder and review findings from places such as the Center for Inquiry, who've posted a position paper on the global warming issue after evaluation of scads of scientific data.

To boil it down ;-) - They say it's hot in here.

Doctor Who's Landing in the U.S. Again

The Doctor, you know who, returns to the Sci Fi Channel tonight in his time-traveling blue phone booth, a testament to growing popularity in the United States, I presume.

The third season of Doctor Who just concluded its run in Great Britain last week, while it took a year for the first season to make it to the U.S. If you've visited here often, you know I'm a fan, and Who fans don't just watch, they proselytize, or try to at least.

No Goof No Glory
A mixture of goofiness and hard science fiction, horror and hope, the new Doctor Who is one of the grandest science fiction television shows ever. If you couldn't take the videotaped versions from past years, the production values are on a par with Star Trek: TNG or any of the new Trek series.

The Best Period
And it's one of the best written television shows period. Amid all of the frantic action sequences and time travel that goes further than anyone's gone before, character-driven stories are the series' heart and soul.

A Show For Writers
This is a show that's great for writers--even of the very different prose medium--to observe. In the first two seasons, The Doctor (Christopher Eccleston who morphs into David Tennant) is paired with young British shop girl, Rose (Billie Piper), and their relationship is the underpinning for all of the first two seasons, culminating with an incredible two-part finale that airs as part of a marathon this afternoon (July 6) on Sci Fi. (Check local listings, what am I the TV Guide Channel?)

The new season, Series 3, begins in the evening with the 2006 Christmas special, followed by the first episode of Season 3 which introduces a new companion (Freema Agyeman) for the Doctor and promises to continue the quality of the first two seasons.

Tie-ins
Previous seasons have drawn on the wealth of Doctor Who tie-in material including scores of novelizations, and that continues once again with a two-part story based on a novel actually featuring an earlier incarnation of The Doctor, the one played by Sylvester McCoy. When actors change, ah, just read the Wikipedia entry.

The Human Nature novelization cum tele-story is offered by the BBC in ebook form, so it's a way to get a taste of the Who universe while waiting for prime-time to roll around.

Trust me, if you're not a Whovian, you should be. If you don't like goofy. Wait a few minutes and it's poignant.

After you read or watch, check out the BBC provided online commentaries available by iTunes. Also check out the wonderful Who Podcast, Podshock.

(I know the TARDIS is not really a phone booth, by the way, that's just short hand.)

No image rights implied. Logo belongs to the BBC.

The Purple Tomatoes Arrive

My first Cherokee tomato finally reached the point of plucking. It remains a little green around the very top, but it should be able to complete its costume change indoors.

I guess that's a milestone. We'll make use of this one and its now blushing brothers on the Fourth.

Produce Yet Green

Our purple tomatoes to be are finally showing a bit of color. They've been green enough for frying for what seems weeks now, and it's difficult not to be impatient.

As a temporary fix we bought some of the heirloom Cherokee variety at a farmer's market on Saturday from a guy and girl who looked pretty counter culture. Pleasure doing business local. It's a Green thing.

That prompted me to wonder if my square box garden and my back-to-the-land effort make me seem more hippie-esque or just more like my dad.

He didn't know about things like "local" and "Green" with a capital G. He just liked tomatoes, and he liked making me work in his garden.

I hated it. It was one more source he had for giving me things to do.

Now it feels a little more back to the land, which I guess is why any pseudo-suit with a bohemian streak tills the land, or the compost in his square box at least.

Maybe the Old Man was on to something. He just had a Dick Cheney way of expressing it.

The Night the Lights Went Out

Being a chronicle of my first evening without power in a while.

We've never had major power problems at our house. Usually the lights go out a few minutes and then come back on without us calling to report an outage. Does make the smoke alarms beep and the cats scurry, but that's pretty minor.

In Louisiana, when you called to report a service outage, you got a busy signal. I always figured that indicated either A.) Other people were calling too or B.) "We know, we know, stop calling!" Either way, you could rest assured the problem was getting fixed.

In my idylic fantasy world, I envision a power company that looks like a James Bond villain's control center. There are lots of big screens and grids and when power goes out at my house there's a little blip that lights up on their screen, prompting a technician to notify someone who flips a switch and makes my lights come back on and my alarms beep and the cats scurry.

I don't think it really works that way.

In the dark
After a couple of hours, in which we determined all of the people immediately around us were also in the dark and the guy a couple of houses down was watching The Closer, Christine said: "Do you think we should call?"

"I dunno," I said. "The lights usually come back on, and besides either the neighbors have called or they've figured it out at the power company."

We decided to call anyway. I was starting to remember the movie "The Trigger Effect." Wasn't it a power outtage that pretty much made society break down in that flick?

"Have you checked your breaker box?" asked the customer service rep. No James Bond villain lair, just a woman in a headset in a cubicle farm, possibly in New Delhi.

"No," Christine said. "We kind of thought since the street lights and all of our neighbor's houses are dark that there might be a bigger problem."

"We'll take it under advisement," the operator said. "We cannot give you an estimate at this time as to when your lights will come back on." Gotta have some wiggle room.

"They're never off this long," Christine said. "Something bad must have happened?"

"Yeah, I saw that is this movie called The Trigger Effect," I said.

So I'm reading a Robert B. Parker novel by flashlight a while later, and I get a strange sense of deja vu: Bad experiences the first time I had power connected to our house. It was delayed and I had to spend a weekend on auxiliary power.

The guy who assigns crews skipped over us, and the rep I talked to explained: "He's already assigned his crews. He won't reassign them. He'll just put you on tomorrow's rotation."

"Tomorrow's Saturday," I said.

"Monday's."

"And he won't correct the problem today just because, what? He has no imagination? Think outside the box."

"Well you see, he's already assigned his crews..."

I figured if we were relying on that kind of bureaucrat they might be waiting until morning for action. After all he may already have had things fixed at the house of the guy who was watching The Closer. So I called New Delhi again.

"We have logged your report," the rep said.

"Yeah, but are you actually, you know, doing something about it?" I asked. "You didn't forget to fix our area when you fixed the others in our neighbor hood and then send the crew off on some unwavering path to other problems?"

"Your estimated time of having your lights back on is 1 a.m."

Ah, progress.

Flash forward another couple of hours. I'm in the back room at the Bada Bing. I don't know why. The phone rings and wakes me before Paulie Walnuts breaks my knee caps.

It's the service truck driver looking for the house. Guess my neighbors didn't call or at least didnt' call twice, or he wouldn't have called me.

I talked him through the neighborhood and he arrived at my doorstep.

"We're going to have a look at that box in your neighbor's yard."

"There's a box in my neighbor's yard?"

"Yep."

"What are they doing?"Christine asked as I watched them through the utility room window.

"Poking a box in the neighbor's yard with a stick."

"Hmmm."

"No wait now they're digging."

"The problem's a little more isolated than in The Trigger Effect," Christine said.

"Good thing, society would have broken down by now."

Forty-five minutes later, an hour ahead of the estimate, the service man, who was a nice guy and clearly was working all night, had my lights back on and the lights of all those around me. I guess you could say they had me to thank since we called first.

"I guess it could have been worse. Wonder what caused that?" Christine asked.

"I don't know, but we can check the paper in the morning," I said. "My editor when I was a reporter always used to say: `When people's lights go out, they want to read about it in the paper.'"

Geeze, I guess on that point he was right.

Strange Vuze

Not long ago an Advertising Age columnist spent a week watching television anywhere he could find it, except on his set, and did OK. Cliff in his 8-Things Me-Me confesses to the world he gets by without television except on PC.

The online entertainment options are certainly getting better. It's still a matter of sitting in my home office for me, but I find myself doing that more and more. I mentioned making use of Netflix's "Watch Now" option, definitely added value for that subscription.

This week I discovered Vuze, which has been floating around in code-name form for a while. It's a wedding of You Tube and High Definition video, harnessing the power of that cousin with a slightly dark reputation, Bit Torrent.

Unburnt offerings
Their offerings currently include programinning from Showtime, A&E and the BBC. From what I can tell, the first episode of a featured series is free then it's 99 cents for additional episodes.

I sampled a show I've always wated to see - the British series Strange with Richard Coyle from Coupling, which incidentally is also an offering.

Interesting if not overwhelming show. Coyle is John Strange, a priest defrocked because he's given to a literal interpretation of demons in an age when the church is leaning toward symbolic. The late Ian Richardson of House of Cards and Murder Rooms is Canon Black, a manipulative older priest opposing Strange's effort. Demon hunting frightens parishoners.

Scientific Help
Samantha Janus is a nurse who brings a touch of science to the equation when she's drawn into Stranges battle with evil.

It's an interesting premise, a bit pokey in execution for my American tastes but overall fun viewing, especially in the sharp Windows media file Vuze provided.

I had to get a quick download to get started, but otherwise things went smoothly and relatively quickly. Took about an hour for the 1.3 GB show file on a fast connection. I'm sure it's proprietary in one way or another but I haven't explored that.

All in all not a bad experience and there seems to be enough free content for hours, although each additional episode of Strange will run into money.

Maybe I need a way to connect the PC to the TV in the den with options continuing to improve.

(No rights to image implied.)

Looking into the Afterworld

The word up is that Afterworld is looking like a hot property to advertisers seeking to penetrate the mobile market. (It's in Advertising Age but this blog requires no registration.)


If the adman protagonist of the piece--reminiscet of Cell and The Stand--should pop a top on your favorite softdrink somewhere in the 130-or-so minute-or-so episodes from the creator of the TV show "Dark Skies," well that would be fab.

That sounds like a good bet because it's been downloaded many times so far on You Tube and subscriptions are coming. Will the iPod and iPhone be among them? Would I put it on the SidPod? Not sure.

I'm not certain if I'm willing to pay, but the story so far on You Tube is stylish, cynical and fresh in spite of King echoes.

The hero is from Seattle, but he's in New York when Captain Trips--sorry--when disaster strikes and he has to traverse a post-apocalyptic America to get home.

Would I stay with it for 130 episodes? Will it develop a cult following like the "footage" in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition which anticipated You Tubesque guerilla video?

Time will tell. In the meantime the music video above offers a taste of what's to come.

Addendum
Crown from Bud.TV was nice enough to drop by and remind me in comments that Afterworld is available on the Bud site as well. They have available episodes in a convenient menu scroll. There's a brief registration. It's that Bud, so it is an adult beverage.

There is nothing like a meme (My Me-Me)

OK, Tammi at Drawing on Words , who has some cool new Wordpress diggs, tagged me for this game:

1. I have to post these rules before I give you the facts.

2. Each player starts
with eight random facts/habits about themselves.

3. People who are tagged need to
write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.

4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.

5. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Here are my eight:

1. I am working to purge myself of all superstition.

2. I keep a statuette of a figure called a Mum-Ra from the Archie McPhee catalog beside my computer for luck.

3. I met my wife on the job, meaning one of us had to leave the organization due to company policy once we were wed. Our boss at the time got mad when she tendered her resignation.

4. I was born when my parents were older, and the impact of that fact on my life is not insignificant.

5. I can sometimes be opinionated and passionate. (Could you tell?)

6. I wrote a college paper on detective fiction and got a pretty good grade.

7. I have way too much stuff on my DVR.

8. I follow the political world more closely than I once did. I know what the Enterprise Institute is, for example. Still, one of my best sources for analysis is "The Daily Show."

Tagging:

Wayne
Charles
Stewart
Clifford
Etain
Steve
Sphinx
Spicy

Was it something I said to the headhunter?

Sometimes I wonder if the laments about the lack of talent in the advertising and marketing worlds are accurate.

Not long ago, I discovered one of several e-mails from a recruiter hidden away in my web-based e-mail inbox. They had been there a while because they weren't flowing into my "new mail" display. Oops.

BIG, REALLY BIG
If you look at their website, they're a BIG talent recruiter. Possibly true, so I e-mailed back on the most recent query with a polite response.

I wasn't rabid about the position, but I thought I'd at least express interest to make contact, make nice, get the ol' foot in the door with the headhunters just in case they're sitting on my dream job, don't know you?

Best laid plans.

"Hi, how do you do, can you tell me more about the position...," sez I.

Then they start mildly insulting me:

...

this position has some requirements that you have
not yet had experience in.... Please stay tuned for a
more jr. position that will allow you to
continue to build on the career path you have
already embarked on.

...

Now--the creative syntax aside--to their credit they'd picked up on a copywriting-oriented resume, one that didn't focus as much on the web side of my day job slash. And I know the intent was not to insult, but I sent back an e-mail to the effect that I've been in the workforce a few years now, and I'm not really interested in a "junior" position.

They caved and sent back a job description that pretty much could be my resume. BA degree, writing, at least 5 years job experience...

Competent in the usual suspects HTML, Javascript, Flash, web forums, blogs ;-) etc. etc.

You know and I know the company was throwing everything but the kitchen sink in there. Bottom line - one web monkey to run the show.

I couldn't say yes to Vignette, but I'm familiar with site management software in general. I'm confident I could figure it out.

I couldn't say yes to Cold Fusion either, but again, with a gun to my head and a manual... If the monkey can write and run web software, the monkey can be trained to operate other machinery and create web forms accordingly. Sometimes the reverse is not always true.

Put 'er in there
The catch: the company was basically involved in an enterprise slightly more boring than, well, everything. Hence the need for a recruiter, methinks.

I e-mailed back.

"Thank you, but the position watching paint dry (a paraphrase) does not appear challenging. I do have the skillset mentioned in the description, however. Perhaps you were looking at a copywriting-focused resume. Please blah, blah blah ."

That's the last I've heard from them, and prior to that several e-mails had circulated into my box, so I'm thinking assertive was one thing not in the qualification mix.

Looking for talent? Maybe talent's not absent. Maybe talent just made your headhunter mad.

Airplane Reads

The captive environment of an airplane and airport has always been a great place to get some reading done.

I hate to fly. I shudder when the airlines get on the speakers to say - "We have more people booked on the plane than we have seats. Oops, should have seen that coming, would anyone like a can of tomato juice as an inducement to take a later flight?" Someone said worry is imagination misused, well I have a very good imagination. I'm always waiting for that overbooked shoe to drop.

But in an environment of otherwise total boredom I get more immersed in a book than perhaps anywhere else. At my house there are cats, you see. They don't time their disagreements or hunger impulses to chapter breaks. Also Christine is prone to watch HGTV.

I've read many books on planes over the years and I recall many of them. I read Elmore Leonard's Split Images on a puddle jumper to New Orleans once.

Other great airplane reads include Mark Frost's The List of Seven pitting Conan Doyle and his Sherlocks Holmes inspiration against esoteric societies.

Also, John Farris' The Axman Cometh which he wanted you to read in one sitting, and Robert Petitt once insisted I read Chet Williamson's short story "Her Skin's Just Soft and Purty, He Said" from Razored Saddles on a flight to Seattle.

I'm glad I don't have to fly more, but if I did I'd probably get more reading done.

Life 2.0

My friend came by my office the other day, and I realized how long it had been since I'd seen him in person. He didn't look like his instant message icon anymore.

Staying in touch with scattered and absent friends online is great and I love it, but this pal is a free-lancer who I've worked with for years on the job.

He works from his home that's about a mile from my office as the crow flies.

Yet we communicate mostly by IM and e-mail, utilizing various resources to move large files we're working on back and forth.

We just happened to have several to deal with this week. "Burn a CD," my friend happened to say. "And I'll pick it up."

Web 2.0 is great, introduces us to new friends and reunites us with old friends scattered by time and distance, yet I find myself wondering if some of Clifford Stoll's old ZDNet editorials about the importance of walking on grass once in a while aren't even more relevant.

We shouldn't fail to notice the world beyond the office window whether it be the grass or the people walking on it.

An IM's great but a handshake is even better if it's possible.

The ear thing and Sopranos spoilers

So I'm sitting in an airport terminal this morning with my fingers in my ears, stamping my feet and humming "I don't hear you!"

Christine was beside me doing the same thing.

An old guy next to us was looking at us strangely. (By old guy I mean at least 10 years older than me.)

Why was this going on?

Because we spent most of the night on a red eye or in airline terminals, we didn't get to watch The Sopranos finale live and CNN WOULD NOT SHUT UP with spoilers. It wasn't like changing a channel was an option.

First, American Morning or whatever they call their morning show, was on, blasting through the terminal, where we really needed to listen for a flight to be called.

We got through that with the finger in the ear trick, then apparently the staff or the airport gods switched the channel over to CNN Headline News for the Robin and Company discussion. I can't really blame Robin she was off. It was a sub on her show that was spewing spoilers

Again we had to do the ears.

It is seriously time for the news channels to reconsider how television shows are covered.

CNN and FOX News are broadcast all over public places, in hotel lobbies, terminals, department stores. They're not passive. It's one thing when it's Paris live, all the time.

However, when you're talking about a show scheduled for numerous rebroadcasts, spoiler alert does not cut it if there's not an easy way for people to look away.

Fortunately I did manage to avoid hearing anything other than "Fans were disappointed..." and "When Phil Leotardo..."

With your index fingers, you can turn spoilers into teasers. Finally we made it home and relaxed to watch the show, and, you know, make it safe to live with open eyes and ears.

And for those who thought the finale was a bust:

(Spoiler warning)
:
:
:
:
:
:
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It wasn't. The show wrapped up with more red herrings than a shelf full of Christie novels, riffing on the very thing for which the show's always been attacked.

That's brilliant.

But whatever did happen to that guy who was a Russian Green Beret?

Killing Fred

The picture was everywhere and initially I though it might have been produced "Lord of the Rings" style with trick perspective.

Not so, the 1000+ pound hog that was hunted to it's death was real. It's the reality horror writers might easily spin into a tale of terror.

The story behind the initial headlines is horrific in a different way.

Wayne Pacelle posted a link yesterday to a less publicized news account. The "monster" was raised as a pet and had a name, Fred.

The hunt to his death was a canned hunt.

I'm cursed with a writer's empathy - I can imagine what it must have felt like to a coddled, domestic animal, raised with meals provided and other care to suddenly become prey. Even if you want to argue that the creature did not possess the reason of a human there had to be a feeling of confusion.

Did Fred have the sentience to feel betrayal? Certainly he felt fear and pain even though there are those who argue animals don't have an understanding that they are going to die or of what death is.

As humans with empathy and reason we need to ask these questions. If we don't, we're less human.

The King Must Die - Or Why I'm Worried About Tony Soprano

Since the episode early in The Sopranos when Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano talked about failed attempts at college before his segue into organized crime, or waste disposal as the case may be, I've felt he was a Shakespearean character.

Now that the series endgame is going full throttle, if that's true, I don't think things look good for T.

On message boards, and in living rooms, viewers are rooting for Tony to take down rival boss Phil Leotardo.

Dramatically a showdown would certainly satisfy. Phil's just mean, after all. But I'm afraid like Macbeth and Lear, Tony's going to have go down one way or another either by the sword or under the wheels of justice. There is that lingering gun violation after all.

His psychiatrist's determination that he's a sociopath would also seem to further charge the tragic flaw notion, and the fact that he's drained the show's heavily symbolic swimming pool does not make for a sunny outlook either.

I just don't think Tony can live happily ever after, but the show's writers are always full of twists and surprises.

It's going to be interesting to see what happens next.