The Writer's Poke

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/11/23/pie.protest/ For Writers: For some, the pie has become the great equalizer. Used mainly as a political weapon, the pie attack makes a messy, if not somewhat juvenile, statement. The victim of the attack is humiliated in front of a crowd, and is forced to spend a few bucks at the dry cleaners. But why use the pie? If you don't like what Ann Coulter or Pat Buchanan has to say, isn't there a more civil way to protest their views? Perhaps not. Pies, after all, are the weapons of the voiceless. But to that we might add: the gutless. What would really be fun is to give the pie throwers their just desserts. Give them a taste of their own pie, so to speak. If you're ready to give it, then you should be prepared to take one to the face yourself. In fact, when Ralph Nader was attacked, he tried to do just that, throwing pieces of the pie right back at his assailants . Who would you hit in the face with a pie if you had the opportunity...

For Writers: When I was an undergraduate, most co-eds wore sweatshirts tied around their waists. It didn't matter if it was spring, summer, or fall. That was just the style, and it was a style that protected backsides from the leering inspection of hungry male eyes. Another group of women, however, wore sweats with a word or slogan right on the seat. One example is the word "juicy," which is apparently the name of a clothing brand. I certainly didn't know that at the time, but it did make for some interesting reading opportunities. I'm sure I'm not the first person to ask this question, but why would anyone want to put a word on their butt? Especially a word like "juicy"? And what about all of the girls that tied sweatshirts ever-so-carefully around their waists? Did they secretly wear the "juicy" slogan underneath? What do your clothes say about you? Do you wear only specific brands. Do your clothes brand you in any other specific ways? ...

For Writers: Recently, a University of Michigan professor took his son to the ballpark to watch the Tigers play. Before taking their seats, they hit the concession stand for drinks. The dad ordered a beer for himself and a Mike's Lemonade for his son. Luckily, small kids take a long time to drink anything, and the boy nursed his lemonade for almost the entire game. Then all hell broke loose when a security guard noticed that the seven year old boy was drinking Mike's Hard Lemonade, a drink that contains 5% alcohol by volume. (Note: you cannot even enter its website without verifying your age --> http://www.mikeshard.com/blog/wp-content/plugins/age-verification-032a.php?redirect_to=http://www.mikeshard.com%2Fblog%2Findex.php ) The dad claimed he had never heard of Mike's Hard Lemonade, which has been around since 1999. This was a college professor, one that drank alcohol himself. How is it possible that an educated man, especially one that drinks adult beverages, could h...

For Writers: When was Michael Jackson’s Thriller released? Late 1982. When did my mom buy me a Michael Jackson-style jacket? That didn’t happen until late 1984, when it was on sale for 70% off. Actually, I loved the jacket when she brought it home from the mall. All black, it was a bit more “toned down” than some of the clothes he wore at the time. It still had all the pockets and zippers, and it still had the puffy v-shaped shoulders, but I thought it looked cool. When I wore it to grade school, however, I soon discovered it wasn’t cool. Jackets made out of parachute pants material might have worked in 1982, but they didn’t work in 1984. This was the conclusion of most of my sixth grade classmates, and so I quickly threw the jacket to the back of my closet. Going to school with goose bumps was better than going to school with my peers singing “Beat It” in my direction. Think of a time when you experienced peer pressure. How did you handle it? In what ways do you still experience peer ...

Barack Obama just received the left-handed endorsement of Rush Limbaugh; of course Rush supports Obama because he believes him to be the weaker of the two candidates. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/ While it's true that Obama and Clinton have different bases within the Democratic party itself, I think it's still very unclear which one would do better against John McCain. And since when is Rush a big McCain supporter, anyway?

Watch and smile. :)

I know you're dying to know who major American writers are supporting in the upcoming presidential election. According to Wikipedia, Barack Obama is the overwhelming favorite among writers. Wikipedia notes 26 major writers have come out for Obama, including: Toni Morrison Tobias Wolff Alice Walker Maxine Hong Kingston Stephen King Garrison Keillor In contrast, only 3 major writers have come out for Hillary: Ann Rice Maya Angelou Erica Jong And for John McCain? Zero. Information courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Barack_Obama_presidential_campaign_endorsements#Writers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hillary_Rodham_Clinton_presidential_campaign_endorsements#Writers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_John_McCain_presidential_campaign_endorsements

Read Catch-22 and then tell me you support the Iraq War. Not much time to write today, but relish these great insights from The Man -- all from Catch-22 : Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning. Garroting. That's what justice is. War ... it paid well and liberated children from the pernicious influence of their parents. Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it's to seem long. But in that event, who wants one? Insanity is contagious.

So I walked into my office on Friday, and I saw that my computer keyboard had been upgraded with a "damn it" key. How handy! Apparently, there are a lot of new function keys coming out, including "oops," "duh," and "panic." Perfect. Finally some keys that I will actually use! http://www.computergear.com/comkeycapset.html

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, of course. Moving sure seems like eating an elephant, and over the past two weeks, I've been doing it one car load at a time. The good thing is, our new house is just four miles from our apartment. Our official move date is Friday, and I'm hoping to have everything except what won't fit in the car moved by then. Anyone want to help us move on Friday? I'm buying the beer and pizza. :)

We've bought a house, and that means we have to buy a bunch of "stuff" to go with it. As I'm sure you know, most "stuff" these days comes from China, and yet, most Chinese don't use any of the stuff that they make for Americans. That led me to wonder: What do Chinese think of Americans? Can you imagine making a bunch of products, never being able to use or benefit from those products yourself?

I'm going to see Thomas Friedman, the author of The World Is Flat , in a couple of weeks. This week, he was presenting at Brown University, and he was the latest victim of a pie attack. A lot of people have taken the pie to the face. Can you imagine how scary it would be to be attacked with pies? Actually, I think it probably would be pretty scary.

For Writers: My parents had been here before, but my dad’s latest toy was his GPS navigator. He put in our address as the final destination, told my mom they’d arrive by 7 p.m., and off they went. About four hours into the trip, we called them for a progress report. They had just passed Rockford and were beginning to work their way through Wisconsin. According to the GPS, they were right on schedule. What could go wrong? We called them again around 6 p.m., assuming they would be near LaCrosse and about ready to cross over into Minnesota. As it turned out, they were well on their way to Eau Claire. Apparently the GPS had failed to mention that when I-90/94 splits, they needed to follow I-90, not I-94. And while they knew it seemed wrong to be heading north on I-94, they hadn't brought a map, and it didn’t dawn upon them that the GPS would lead them astray. After all, a GPS is foolproof, right? Just set the directions and go. In what specific ways does technology blind you? “Technolo...

For Writers: Singer Mariah Carey views her body as a temple, even going so far as to insure her legs for two million dollars. While a lot of her fellow divas, such as Gwen Stefani, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera, have had children, Mimi has declared that having a child "would leave me feeling violated." Mariah has an interesting way with words, and to use a word like “violated” to describe the process of childbirth does make one pause for a moment. To be sure, what childbirth does to the mother’s body could easily be described as violent and tramatic, but a violation? A synonym for “violate” is “defile,” and both words carry with them a sexual connation. But does a child really make a mother “impure” or “dirty”? And does consensual sex that results in childbirth actually constitute “sexual abuse” as the word violate implies? Far be it from me to suggest that everyone should have children, but perhaps it would benefit everyone to study the meaning of words – if for no ...

For Writers: One of our culture’s running jokes is the idea that all women go to the bathroom in pairs. Why do they do that? The movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle posits that women like to out-gross each other with the bathroom noises that they can make, but at least in the movie, each woman maintained the privacy of her own respective stall. But before we visited Robert Frost’s New Hampshire farm, it never dawned on me that outhouses typically had two holes. Did people back in the day really go to the bathroom together? Were standards of bathroom privacy that much different? Personally, I can’t imagine dropping a deuce right next to someone else, no matter how intimately I knew the person. As it turns out, there’s a fairly simple answer for why outhouses have two holes. One hole is smaller than the other, designed for children so that they don’t fall in. After all, who wants crappy kids? Write about something you do in private that you wouldn’t feel comfortable doing with oth...

For Writers: My gut tells me, “You’re fat. Instead of drinking that next six pack, why don’t you work on making a six pack out of me?” I’ ve ignored its words of warning for years, and now I wear 3XL shirts, and I don’t want to be one of those people that ends up wearing tent-sized attire. Knowing what to do and doing it are two separate things, of course, and that’s the rub. Often times, people believe more education is the panacea, the solution to all of life’s problems. “We need to educate people about [fill in the blank].” But do we really need to educate people about the dangers of smoking, the stupidity of drunk driving, or how eating at fast food restaurants 20 times a week is actually equivalent to slow suicide? No. Education isn ’t always the answer. The answer is listening to what we already know, and acting upon that knowledge. Think about the one thing you know you need to do (or stop doing) but haven't . Develop a plan of action, outlining step-by-step the process tha...

For Writers: You can have a bigger penis, the ad promised. Guaranteed to add three inches. One of Jason’s friends was having a birthday, and this would be the perfect gag gift. But Jason’s parents were quite protective, and he knew that if he sent away for the item, they would be sure to open the package – whether it was addressed to him or not. And how does a 12 year old explain a novelty penis gift to his mom? No problem, I said. Just use my address. My parents would never open a package addressed to a neighbor, and then I could take it over to him with no questions asked. So why did my dad decide to open the package? Something a bit suspicious about the return label maybe? I don’t know. All I know is, when I returned home from school one day, dad motioned me over to a package addressed to Jason. Oh crap, I thought. Open it, he said. I did, and there it was: a condom with a three inch piece of Styrofoam for the user to insert inside. Someone got screwed alright, but it was Jason for ...

For Writers: I couldn’t believe that my mom spent $300 on a CD player. It was the Sony Boombox I had been asking for, and for Christmas 1987, it was mine. Or so I thought. Actually, mom had intended it to be the “family’s present," but I quickly claimed ownership by stealing it back to my room. One of the first CD's I ever bought was KISS’s Crazy Nights . I played it constantly, and for whatever reason, KISS was a band I really could identify with. So did my neighbor, Jason, and he always bought Metal Edge and magazines of that genre. We'd pour through the pictures of our favorite bands and look at the t-shirt ads. That’s when I decided to do something daring. I would buy a KISS t-shirt. My parents wouldn’t approve, I knew, so when the shirt arrived in the mail, I started wearing it in secret. I also started washing my own clothes so that mom wouldn’t see it in the laundry. At school, some of my teachers were surprised to see me wearing a t-shirt that only "druggies...

For Writers: We knew we were having a baby, but at that point, we still didn’t know the gender. Either way, I didn’t think it would matter to me, but curiously, I found myself going to the sports store to buy gear and equipment. I bought footballs and basketballs, and I started thinking about little league. Unconsciously, I was preparing myself for a son. Soon enough we would learn that we were having a girl, and of course girls play sports, too. But I had to laugh at myself. Although I like to consider myself an “enlightened” male, there was apparently something deep inside me that wanted, or at least expected, to have a son. It goes without saying that I love having a daughter, and in many respects, it’s quite a relief having a girl rather than a boy. And who knows? Perhaps she will still be on the football or wrestling teams in high school. Considering who her parents are, that outcome is quite more likely than her developing into a Barbie-type cheerleader. If you were having a chil...

For Writers: A number of years ago, I experimented with living in the dark ages. Have you ever lived without a TV in the house? I did it for about a year, and I can’t say that I was any less happy. But we live in a culture where a TV (or three) in every house is the norm, and in the days before the Internet, not having a TV did make it more difficult to stay up on current events – at least current events related to TV viewing. And I still remember how absolutely shocked I was the first time I went over to Linda's apartment. Her TV only had a 13 inch screen, and that to me was almost a “deal breaker.” How could I date someone with such a small TV? I joked to her that watching her TV was about as satisfying as watching the radio. It’s funny looking back because after all, that screen was little bigger than the screen on my current Ipod. For years I thought a 25 inch screen was a good-sized TV, but that was before the days of cheap large-screen LCDs and Plasmas. We currently own a 42 ...