All grown up.
Remember those clapping games?
You and a partner singing a little ditty and clapping out some more-or-less elaborate pattern?
Well!
Check this out:
Okay, so maybe it’s not so much Miss Mary Mack as it is River Dance with hands.
What I really want to know is how the choreographer explains it. What’s the terminology? Are they doing falap, ball changes? Shuffling off to Buffalo? Or do they have a whole new language?
If you find out, let me know!
Stuff you didn’t even know you should wonder about.
(It pains me to end that sub-head with a preposition. I know it should be “Stuff about which you didn’t even know you should wonder,” but I couldn’t quite bring myself to be pedantically correct about a sub-head beginning with the word “Stuff.” Kindly overlook it, please.)
Now, where were we?
Oh, yes. Stuff you didn’t know you should wonder about.
I found this website.
It’s full of stuff that fascinates me. Stuff about which I never even thought to wonder.
Why is the glass in airport control towers slanted?
Why have doctors switched from white scrubs to green?
What makes some meat white meat and some meat dark meat?
What makes an Etch-a-Sketch work? (Actually, I think I had figured this out myself at one point—minus the technical details.)
The site is also full of stuff about which I have wondered from time to time.
Why cats hate car rides, for example.
No one who was on that car trip when I helped move my sister from Connecticut to Michigan could help wondering about that. That journey is one of those stories best saved for when I write my screenplay about a road trip—except a) no one would believe it and b) nobody could train a cat to behave that way on camera.
We will draw a veil over that trip except to say that I have been held prisoner by cats in a car, in a hotel room, and in an apartment, and someday, there will be a reckoning.
Anyway, all that is kind of beside the point of this post which is just to introduce you to yet another time-wasting website and/or help to prepare you for your next audition for Jeopardy!
It’s up to you what you do with that info. Proceed with caution.
…to my city feet?
I was wondering this for about a week, and now I’m not wondering anymore. I think I know.
This is a cautionary tale.
When I lived in NYC, I walked all the time. I walked to work. I walked to the theatre. I walked to museums and restaurants and friends’ apartments. To classes, to stores.
I did take subways for long distances, but I walked to and from the subway station on either end.
There was an occasional taxi cab or automobile excursion, but, mostly, I walked.
One learns very quickly in NYC that comfortable shoes are important.
I had comfortable shoes.
I still have those same shoes, and they still fit my feet in the same way.
But, suddenly, they’ve started to hurt my feet!
It began on the treadmill and continued during a trip to the zoo and the county fair.
All I can think is I have lost my city feet.
Because this here is not a land of public transportation.
If you’re going to walk, you are going to walk a loooooooonnnnnng way. And you’re not going to want to do that in 95° weather with 97% humidity. Well, okay. You may want to but, outside of incapacitating mental illness, you learn better.
So, I almost never walk anywhere. Add to that the fact that I almost never go anywhere, and I like to go barefoot—or, at most, slippered around the house—and I find I am now a person who gets blisters on trips I would’ve barely noticed previously.
This is not a good development.
Clearly, I am going to have to get off my—ahem—and back on the treadmill on a daily basis. Several times a day, in fact. Probably, multiple short walks will be better than long blistering treks.
It’s a plan.
In the meantime, I wonder how long it will be before I get my city feet back. And I’m wondering what else I’ve lost?
About writing what you know.
“Write what you know,” they say.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” you think. “How boring.”
Many times, we write to escape what we conceive to be our hum-drum lives. What is fiction, after all, but a child’s game of make-believe in which the writer gets to play all the parts?
No more “You be the sheriff, and I’ll be the bank robber.”
As a writer it’s, “I’ll be the sheriff, and I’ll be the bank robber. And the Pinkerton detective and the Apache on the hill and the dance hall girl and the coyote, too.”
And that’s great.
Nobody said not to use your imagination.
But you can write with more confidence if you know something about the scenery of the West. Because if you are drawing you description of tumbleweeds from Zane Grey novels, you are bordering on plagiarism, and you’re always going to wonder if you got it right. If you’ve seen a tumbleweed tumbling, you will know.
Aside from the confidence issue, in addition to accuracy, you’re just going to write faster. You’re not going to be stuck for details, because they are just part of your knowledge base.
And if you are missing details, you better acquire them. Google is your friend. As is any book you’ve ever read, every book you haven’t read, anybody you talk to and anything you do.
There may be only One Plot, but the details to make it your own are legion. And you know what they say. God is in the details.
Work on your powers of observation and memory. Work on your research skills. Work on empathy and understanding.
There’s a great episode, ‘We Was Robbed‘ from Season Three of NYPD Blue in which a detective is showing his would-be cop son the ropes. He tells him a story about a near-disaster in which he almost shot a man coming out of a building with what appeared to be a gun until he remembered the building was a toy factory. He says a cop should always know “people, places, the things they do, and the times they do them.”
It’s pretty good advice for a writer, too.
Was he a man, or a meal?
The Al Smith Dinner is an annual event, but it comes to public prominence in presidential election years. Most of us have heard of it, many of us see clips of the candidates’ appearances on CNN or our local evening news.
And some of us—me, at least—have been unclear as to who, exactly, Al Smith was and why should he have a dinner named after him.
Well!
Here I am on Smith Sunday to enlighten you.
Al Smith was a four-time governor of New York State and the first Roman Catholic nominee for President. He lost, first, to Herbert Hoover in 1928, and he subsequently lost the Democratic Primary in 1932 to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
He was hampered in politics by his Catholicism, many people of the time fearing a Catholic President would be too influenced by the Pope.
Later, he was a vocal opponent of Roosevelt and the New Deal and has remained a thorn in the side of Democratic candidates ever since.
This is largely because of the the Dinner which is designed to benefit Catholic Charities. The Democratic Party’s continued support of the Right to Choose creates tensions around the event.
It’s too entrenched in the traditions of the campaign trail to dismissed out of hand, and, most years, all the parties involved work it out—helped somewhat by the tradition that the speeches will be humorous and self-deprecating.
So, my children, that, in a nutshell, is who Al Smith was.
To one of the six horrible questions writers get asked.
One of the six horrible questions writers get asked is “Where do you get your ideas?”
My answer, lately, tends to be “I don’t have any ideas,” but I suspect the proper answer for most of us is “god only knows.”
But here’s a thing that could generate ideas. I haven’t used it. I don’t know if the ideas are good ones. But I figure anything that generates some ideas could lead to more ideas, so it’s probably worth a look.
In fact, it’s not just one idea generator, it’s a couple dozen. (Or several. I didn’t actually count.)
You should check it out.
I suppose there may be some of you out there all worried that using an idea generator leads to a lack of originality.
Maybe.
But remember when we were discussing the One Plot?
You can’t have an original idea.
But you can execute an idea with originality.
What is Pygmalion and My Fair Lady but a recycling of an idea? That one’s easy, right? But here’s one you may not have considered. Isn’t The Karate Kid a Pygmalion story? Dirty Dancing? You probably didn’t think “Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait” had anything in common with “Nobody puts Baby in a corner,” but it does. Is drilling “the rain in Spain” really so far afield from “wax on, wax off?”
The movie Dave is The Prisoner of Zenda.
There are no new ideas. We all have to do the best we can with the old ones.
So, if you can find a tool that suggests some possibilities to you, I say use it. Idea generators are launching pads. Diving boards. The struck match just before it lights the fuse.
Dynamite not included.
Enjoy!
I can’t find the origin of this quote, so it appears here without attribution. If anybody knows the author, speak up! I suspect it’s that prolific writer, Anonymous.
Anyway, here goes:
Life on earth may be expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun.
And you’d probably have to pay millions for that to do it in a space ship!
So, let us remember the ordinary, every day (or every year—because, you know, you get that trip a bunch of times in an average lifespan) miracles.
Let us remember in the midst of our scrabbling for money, attention and prestige, in the midst of our political posturings and maneuverings, in the midst of our squabbles and worries, in the midst of pain and illness—
Let us remember the rising and the setting of the sun, the heron on the dock, the moonlight on the waves, the rain-washed wildflowers, the babies’ laughter, the handclasps of friendship, the wisdom of the elders.
Let us remember the taste of the fresh-picked corn, the birthday cake, the sound of birdsong, the scent of blossoms, the strength of hands.
Let us try to enjoy that free trip around the sun.
‘ Cause everything else is extra.
And the Smith Chart
We have a chart! Who knew?
The only thing that could make me happier is if I could actually understand it.
If you’d like to see a Smith Chart, that there link will take you to Wikipedia.
I don’t even understand Wikipedia’s explanation of a Smith Chart: “a graphical aid or nomogram for electrical and electronics engineers specializing in radio frequency (RF) engineering to assist in solving problems with transmission lines and matching circuits.”
All I get from that is you can probably buy a book on it at Radio Shack.
Philip Hagar Smith was—you guessed it—an electrical engineer who worked for Bell Labs. His main claim to fame was the invention of the Smith Chart. He also wrote a book in 1969 called Electronic Applications of the Smith Chart: In Waveguide, Circuit, and Component Analysis.
It doesn’t sound like I’d understand much of that either.
I do wish I knew more about electronics and electricity. I’ve wished that ever since that episode I mentioned in Organized Lightning when a child actor asked. Apparently, I’ve never wished it hard enough to actually do something about it, however.
It’s on my “Someday/Maybe” list, though.
Someday, I’ll take a class.
Maybe, I’ll understand the Smith Chart.
I remembered to do it!
This is what you might call a minor miracle.
The thing is, I brought the laundry basket downstairs two days ago. Actually, the MotH* brought it downstairs—because of my pesky shoulder.
And therein lies the problem.
You see, the MotH took the basket all the way into the laundry room.
I rarely go into the laundry room unless I am doing laundry.
I don’t do laundry if I don’t remember that I have laundry to do.
My usual modus operandi when not actually starting the laundry the minute I bring it downstairs is to leave the basket in the middle of the floor in the more populated part of the house. That way, my feeble mind can be recalled to the necessity of transferring those clothes from the basket into the washing machine by the ever-present sight of the basket.
Fortunately, for some unknown and possibly miraculous reason, a little voice in my head announced, “Laundry,” a few minutes ago.
(This is a voice that should be encouraged. It needs a paycheck. Or cake!)
Anyway, I remembered the laundry, and I am doing the laundry, and this is a miracle on several levels.
First—that I remembered, second—that I have a washing machine and don’t have to go down to the creek with stones, and third—that I will have workout clothes for my next physical therapy session.
It’s not that my PT sessions are particularly strenuous, but I do think it’s wise to be able to move.
It’s not that I don’t have plenty of workout clothes.
It’s just that I don’t have very many respectable workout clothes, since I no longer belong to a gym. All in all, since I no longer go anywhere, almost, I don’t seem to have very many respectable clothes of any sort.
However, I have a couple of decent sets of workout clothes, and they are going to be clean.
Because I remembered the laundry!
* MotH = Man of the House
Where it all began
You know, Smith is the most common surname in the United States, Candada, and Great Britain. Its equivalent or translation appears in the top five in almost all European countries.
I’m thinking maybe I should have saved this discussion for Wondering Wednesdays, because I sure wonder why that is, don’t you? The name’s origin is trade-related. Blacksmiths, goldsmiths, silversmiths, locksmiths—all were known as smiths. And, I guess that covers a multitude of trades, but was it really so many more than cartwrights or wainwrights? Or were smiths just naturally more prolific? Maybe, being necessary for the creation and maintenance of weapons, they were behind the lines at most battles, so more of them survived?
I don’t know. But I wonder, don’t you?
I suspect, actually, upon further research, that I may have hit on something with that theory of being behind the lines. The three major smiths of mythology were all lame. It seems likely that able-bodied men would be warriors. The disabled, congenitally or through injury, would be smiths—and survive.
Wayland, the Norse hero smith, was hamstrung by King Niohad, and forced to forge items for him. In revenge, he killed the king’s sons, made goblets from their skulls, jewels from their eyes and a brooch from their teeth. He also raped the king’s daughter. (Maybe the moral is—don’t cross a smith?) He is also famous for fashioning the mail shirt that Beowulf wore.
Hephaestus, the Greek god of blacksmiths, was thrown out of heaven because of a shriveled foot (or he injured it when he was thrown out for a completely different reason). In revenge, he fashioned a throne for Hera that would not let her rise once she sat upon it. Dionysus had to go get him, get him drunk, and bring him back to Olympus to release her. (Don’t cross a smith.)
Vulcan, the Roman god of blacksmiths started out as a fire god. As the Romans conquered the Greeks, they associated many of their gods with Greek equivalents and incorporated the Greek myths. Consequently, Vulcan got thrown out of heaven, too, (by his own mother because he was so ugly) and broke his leg. In revenge, he, too, trapped his mother Juno on a specially-fashioned throne. The Roman version of her release, however, doesn’t involve alcohol. Jupiter gave him Venus for a wife, and in return, Vulcan released Juno. (Not only shouldn’t you cross a smith, but you have to buy them off when you do.)
This has all been very interesting to me. It just goes to show that the study of mythology is rewarding. I’m thinking this concept—don’t cross a smith—might be a useful one to adopt (always bearing in mind that “First, do no harm” is probably the best over-riding principle).
