and you’re in tune with this video.
Why Silly Saturdays?
Because laughter lifts you up.
Don’t believe me?
Check out this video with the great Ed Wynn, Dame Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and child actors, Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOMqqI-kzHY
I defy you to make it to the end without smiling, at least.
On the side of the head.
That’s what today’s Friday Find is all about.
In fact, that’s the name of it. A Whack on the Side of the Head is a book by Roger von Oech. It’s probably his most well-known book, and the reason I’m bringing it to your attention today is its subtitle:
“How You Can Be More Creative”
I don’t know about you—well, actually, I do know about you. There isn’t a person alive who wouldn’t like to be more creative. In my particular circle, it’s a mortal lock.
Actors, writers, directors, painters, programmers, parents. Everybody can benefit from an increase in creativity.
This book can help.
It’s an easy read. Large type, plenty of illustrations, lots of white space.
And, the content is good.
It’s a whack on the side of the head. New ways to think about things. Exercises to shake things up, questions to ask.
Advice, like give yourself permission to be foolish or reverse your perspective.
Stuff many of us have heard before, since and in other places, but it’s never a bad thing to be reminded of it in different ways and in different words.
It’s a book I keep on my shelves and ought to re-read more often!
I wonder.
No, I have not lost my mind.
Most likely, at the moment you are reading this, I know exactly where I am.
The difficulty comes because I am not writing it at the moment you are reading it. In fact, in this instance, I am writing it a couple of weeks early.
The reason for this extraordinary lack of procrastination is that my niece is visiting this week. (Yes, this week—the week you are reading this post.)
The decks have had to be cleared for fun and frolic.
The thing is, I don’t know whether we will be going to the beach, to St. Augustine, to Fernandina or where? I don’t know if her uncle will have convinced her to zipline over the ‘gators at the Alligator Farm. (I hope not, but there’s no telling.)
Will we have gone hiking?
Will we be at the Kingsley Plantation?
Will we be trying on clothes at the outlet stores?
Will we be out on the boat spying on manatees and egrets, ospreys and eagles?
Or will we be lounging on the dock discussing the meaning of life and what she wants to be when she grows up?
I have no earthly idea.
I do know, whatever it is, it will be fun.
She’s a pretty cool kid.
Past visits have included Cape Canaveral, flea markets and horseback riding. Stuffed piglets and straws.
She’ll be staying with my mom, but there’s a good chance we get her for a night or two.
So, at this point, now in the past, I don’t really know where I am today, in the present. (This post is getting as complicated as one of those Star Trek episodes where they run into a rupture in the time-space continuum.)
So, I’m wondering.
Maybe I’ll tell you when I find out. Maybe I won’t.
You get to wonder, too!
God Bless America
Our alternative national anthem was written by Irving Berlin in 1918 for a revue called Yip Yap Yaphank. He was stationed at U.S. Army Camp Yaphank at the time.
In 1938, he revived and rewrote it, and Kate Smith introduced it on her radio program. Ever since then, it and Kate Smith have been considered among our most patriotic symbols.
During World War II, Kate Smith broke records in selling war bonds to raise money for the United States’ war effort.
Things weren’t always easy for Ms. Smith, personally. She had a long-lasting career, recordings, a hit radio show, a TV show. She was, however, a target of ridicule on numerous occasions due to her weight. Her long-time manager, Ted Collins, helped her to come to terms with that and guided her career until he passed away in 1964.
She achieved a new wave of popularity, later in life, as a good luck charm for the Philadelphia Flyers. The team began playing her recording of God Bless America instead of the national anthem before certain games. They were noticeably more successful on those occasions. In 1973, Kate Smith appeared in person to sing and continued to do so intermittently. The Flyers still show a video of her, prior to important games.
In 1982, President Reagan bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on her.
After her death in 1986, she was conducted into the Radio Hall of Fame, the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame, and had a postage stamp issued in her honor.
All in all, it doesn’t seem like a bad way to be remembered to me.
Here are a couple of YouTube clips for your viewing pleasure.
God Bless America
Cher, Tina Tuner, and Kate Smith (an incongruous trio if I ever saw one) singing a Beatles Medley!
Be a good fraud.
Seriously.
Since I started this blog, it has become a target for spam comments. I don’t suppose that is unique to my blog. I think they must have software that harvests blog URLs and randomly posts comments. The hope, I guess, is that the blog will have a large readership that will then see the link’s posted in the comment.
Now, let’s consider the math—and the odds.
First, how many bloggers allow unmoderated comments? Obviously, some must, or this would be a futile endeavor from the get-go. But, can it really be enough to make it worth the set-up costs?
Second, how many bloggers are crazy enough to approve these spam comments? They are so obviously fraudulent. I suppose, if you were blogging daily with serious nutritional advice or plumbing repair tips, a comment like the following might entice you to approve it.
I’ve been surfing online more than three hours today, yet I never found any interesting article like yours. It’s pretty worth enough for me. In my view, if all website owners and bloggers made good content as you did, the net will be a lot more useful than ever before.
What you need to know about this comment is it was made to go on my post NSFW. For those of you who don’t remember, this is the one with the incredibly silly pirate video posted on a Silly Saturday.
All of you wondering how to make the net more useful, take heed. Apparently, all it takes is silly pirate videos.
This one, too, might be tempting.
Thank you incredibly substantially for your exciting text. I have been looking for these types of message to get a definitely very long time. Thank you.
I didn’t realize there was an Alexis Smith fan out there who didn’t know how to use YouTube for his or herself.
I guess my tip is two-fold.
First, as a blogger, don’t be dumb enough to fall for this.
Second, if you’re trying to fake it ’til you make it, fake it better.
It will be useful—eventually.
I am nearly certain that every student in every class wonders at some point, with varying degrees of exasperation, what possible use this will be. (I suspect the phenomenon is more prevalent in algebra classes, but I can testify to the fact that it is not limited to math.)
Well, I am here to tell you that you never know when you’ll find a use for whatever knowledge you’ve got—and I can prove it!
It all started, long ago, when I was in grad school.
Grad school is an expensive proposition. You take whatever financial aid you can get.
What I could get was a graduate assistantship.
And my assistantship took the form of being on the paint crew.
I was a theatre major, you see. There were sets to build. We’ll pass over the disappointment that the teaching assistantships mentioned in the acceptance letter didn’t really exist and the subsequent annoyance of the entire class of graduate students—and note, simply, that I did get to help teach freshman acting eventually, thanks to a) the power of the ask and b) the maternity leave of the teacher. Not everyone was so lucky, and that came later, anyway.
Most of my indentured servitude involved paint.
And the shows produced during those couple of years involved an inordinate amount of wainscoting.
I have a unique and usually useless skill.
I can paint fake wainscoting with the best of ’em.
There’s not a lot of call for this skill. Generally speaking, if one wants wainscoting, one wants real wainscoting. It involves wood and carpentry, not latex and paintbrushes.
I would have said there was no call for this skill, but then…the MotH* took up model trains. At the time, I thought this was an excellent thing. He needs an indoor hobby for those days when golf is out of the question or beyond the budget. Model trains seemed an excellent idea.
That was before he built his little barn and handed it to me with the words, “Here. You can paint that.” (I don’t know why the MotH always issues his requests for help as if he is conferring unbelievable favors upon me. It’s just one of the hazards of married life.)
But here’s the thing.
I can paint that.
I know exactly how to make fake wood (and let’s face it: balsa wood is fake wood) look real.
I learned how in grad school!
That expensive Master’s Degree in that over-saturated field actually has a practical purpose.
A little trip to the hobby shop, three small bottles of the appropriate colors of paint, and the dredging up of some long-lost skill, and there is a lovely weathered barn (which no farmer in his right mind would ever use—but that’s another story).
All that useless education did come in handy!
Surprisingly, even algebra came into play recently with calculating the pitch of the dock roof. That Pythagorean Theorem? It does have it’s uses.
(I have an amusing story about the Pythagorean Theorem and my undergraduate days, but you have to hear it out loud for it to make any sense. Totally useless as blog material.)
But, my tip today is to remember that knowledge is never wasted. It just may take decades to figure out where to apply it.
Keep your notes.
* MotH = Man of the House
Is there anything better than a bad joke?
Except it has to be a good bad joke. Like this one from a website purporting to have 86 of the World’s Best Jokes:
Which day of the week do fish hate?
Fry-day
Imagine rimshot here…and a groan.
But there it is.
Here is another Friday Find designed to increase your knowledge of all kinds of esoteric facts of questionable usefulness—or waste your time (assuming those two things are not, in fact, the same thing).
I, personally, love esoteric facts of questionable usefulness. I like to rationalize that with the theory that no fact is useless to a writer, actor or director. I suspect, however, that I’m just nosy. (We could be charitable and say “curious.”)
In many ways, I would be a good Jeopardy! contestant. Experience indicates, however, that I would never actually win. Final Jeopardy gets me every time.
Every time.
If my internet surfing is any indication, though, I am trying hard to change the odds in my favor. As you can tell, much of my time is spent in pursuit of those esoteric facts.
And today I found out about TIFO, or Today I Found Out.
It’s a website described fairly accurately on their About page as “a site founded on the precept that it is always good to learn something new every day.”
On it, you can find such interesting articles as How Deaf People Think, the origin of the term sideburns (General Ambrose Burnside), and the best ways to lower blood pressure naturallyalong with thousands of other things.
You can spend hours browsing, or click on a link to display a random article.
You can also sign up for a daily email. Frankly, I think that would be safer, unless, of course, your stint on Jeopardy is scheduled next week. In that case, you’re going to need all the help you can get.
And be careful with Final Jeopardy. It’s a killer.
Thank goodness.
Mother Nature thinks spring sprang a while ago. (I know it’s not a word. The MotH* is from Hell’s Kitchen. “Brought” is not in his vocabulary. He “brang” things. If he can brang, spring can sprang.)
Anyway, the trees have been leafing out, the fringe tree has flowered as have the azaleas and countless other flowering shrubs. As far as Mother Nature is concerned, we are well along in the spring department.
I, on the other hand, don’t call it officially spring until I don’t have freeze warnings driving me to put my plants in the garage. So, we’ll see. They’re out now, and I think they are going to stay out.
Spring and fall are the two best seasons down here. Warm enough to be outside and with humidity somewhere south of Oh-My-God! The mosquitoes haven’t started buzzing, and it’s not yet hot enough to wash the windows. (Whew!)
It’s really the time to consider any outdoor projects, but my decades of northern-ness haven’t quite convinced me to be out there working. I’ll regret that in a few weeks, but for now, I intend to enjoy the weather.
I’m aided in that resolve by the backward blessing of the frozen shoulder. According to my physical therapist, I’m supposed to “let the grass grow.” (Mowing the lawn last week was not on the list of approved activities. As I found out after the fact. Ow!)
I have decided to interpret that instruction to include almost all forms of physical labor. Housework has been reduced to the bare minimum, and the MotH can haul the boat out of the water himself if he wants it out.
This is the time to catch up on any light labors I can find on my To Do list. Clearing out the file cabinet, for example. Internet research. I may even run out of everything else and be reduced to working on my novel.
That would be something for a Thankful Thursday, indeed.
* MotH = Man of the House
The universe, that is.
My play has had the most amazing life for a first play.
Readings at prestigious theatres, nominations, awards.
Participation by fabulous actors, not least of which is Linda Hamilton, whose extraordinary generosity was only exceeded by her stunning performance.
All kinds of miraculous serendipity and synchronicity on the long journey from page to stage.
It has been a long journey, indeed. Geographically, for sure—NYC, New Jersey, Virginia, California, Maine. Professionally as well—so many smart people sharing their expertise and their advice. Personally—maybe personally, most of all, as I’ve had to challenge myself to master new skills, to be more assertive, to stand up for myself and others.
I’ve learned so much along the way. Did a few things right and several things wrong. Had a fabulous adventure, and the play hasn’t even been produced.
Yet.
And that’s the miracle today.
I have signed a contract.
At long last, Angels and Ministers of Grace Defend Us, will be getting a production!
The specific time slot hasn’t been set, yet, but at some point before the end of 2014, you can see my work at New Jersey Rep.
I’m so looking forward to the opportunity to see the play on its feet. Costumes, props, a set! Maybe I’ll get to tinker with the script, make it better.
And what’s even more of a miracle is that maybe I will finally be able to turn my attention to writing another one. (Although, you know, I’ve never been sure how I came to write this one—so we’ll see. No promises.)
I’m just going to take a short break from worrying about all of it and enjoy the newest part of the ongoing miracle.
I’m getting a production!
But, first, I’m getting some cake.
Priorities, you know.
What’s a celebration without cake?
