Are newspapers sending us subliminal messages? Have you checked yours, today?
The cleanup of the cover-up was too much to bare, but a woman with a camera covered it anyway.
Are newspapers sending us subliminal messages? Have you checked yours, today?
Filed under newspaper humor
Haiku to you Thursday: “Words you will not hear”
Words you will not hear
ring forth from my fingers’ touch
and my lips’ caress.
Filed under Haiku to You Thursday, poetry by author, words
Limerick: “Knottiness”
There once was a woman from Oak Ridge
who used sexual “knottiness” as a bridge.
She’d tie down her sailor;
have him now and have him latter.
And she’d (k)not keep it quiet, (k)not a smidge.
Filed under Knottiness, limerick, poem, poetry by author
Writing tip Wednesday: writerly thinking
How a writer thinks—elementary my dear
by DON WILLIAMS
During a holiday sometime back, the Williams clan, including in-laws, outlaws and assorted friends, gathered to play Trivial Pursuit.
A competitive lot, we turn such games into raucous entertainment. Lots of praise, derision and laughter pertain, not necessarily in that order.
The games were close and the questions difficult, prompting snorts and catcalls, and three of the teams had flamed out by the time my friend the writer’s turn came to answer a question.
My sister Rebecca drew a card and read:
Sherlock Holmes turned into the gate at 221 Baker St, stepped inside the door and climbed ___ steps to his second story flat. How many steps did he climb?
There was a collective groan.
“Bury that one,” a brother-in-law said, even as Rebecca was discarding the question. “He’ll never get that.”
“Hold on!” My friend held up his right hand. “I’ve only read one Arthur Conan Doyle book, and it wasn’t Sherlock Holmes, but I’ll take a shot at that.”
“No way. How are you going to guess that one?”
“Elementary my dear Watson,” my friend replied. “In the time-honored Holmes-ian way. Deductive Reasoning.”
“That’ll be the day,” my brother Tim said.
“Listen up,” said my friend. “It has to be at least 10 steps to Sherlock’s apartment, even if the risers are relatively high, say, 10 inches, because they have to clear that first-floor apartment’s ceiling. And the answer likely won’t be more than, say, 20 steps, even if the risers are short, because that would put the esteemed detective’s pad more than ten or twelve feet above street level. See? Already I’ve reduced the universe of possible answers to 10.”
“Yeah, yeah,” my brother Rodney said.
“So,” my friend continued, “the answer lies somewhere between 10 and 20. Let’s take them one by one.”
“Better hurry,” said my sister Kathleen, eyeing the sandglass.
“OK. Ten is a lazy number that would make the author appear lazy too, so a writer like Doyle would never use it. Not here. Nor can it be 11, because that’s a lucky number, mildly distracting and therefore intrusive. More importantly, Sherlock’s a deductive thinker, so the author wouldn’t suggest, even subliminally, that his detective’s success owes anything to a lucky number. Number 12? Again, distracting. Sir Doyle wouldn’t want his readers to be thinking, even subconsciously, about Twelve Apostles or even 12 months. Unlucky thirteen? Similary distracting.”
“Time’s almost up,” said Kathleen.
Step by step deduction led to the right conclusion.
I could see my friend faintly flush, but he continued in a calm if faster voice. “Fourteen? Now there’s a Plain Jane. No writer worth his salt would dull down a book with such tasteless seasoning, even if it is red.”
“Red?”
“See? That could be a subjective thing. And 15? Again, like 10, it’s too pat and pregnant. Makes the author appear lazy.”
“Sixteen?” a brother-in-law asked, eyeing the fleeting sands.
“Like 14, another Plain Jane, even if it is black,” my friend added.
“Seventeen?”
My friend smiled. You could almost hear bells going off. “Seventeen seems random,” he said, savoring the moment, “but it’s actually quite sexy. That unobtrusive 7, peeking from behind the place-holding 1, is subtly mystical, alluring even, hardly rising even to the level of the subliminal, yet there it is.”
Rebecca rolled her eyes. “So, is that your final answer?” she asked in a bored voice, as she glanced at the card, but we knew her attitude was all bluff.
“Yesssss,” my friend whispered aloud, calmly assured. “Seventeen it is. By far the most interesting number between 10 and 20.”
Her eyes widened. “You’re right. How did you do that?” she asked as she flashed the card, answer-side up, on the table.
“Elementary, my dear. I’m a writer.”
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Don Williams is a prize-winning columnist, short story writer, sometime TV commentator and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual anthology of stories, essays and poems. His awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Journalism Fellowship at the University of Michigan, a Golden Presscard Award, the Malcolm Law Journalism Prize and many others. He was recently inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. He is at work on a novel and a book of journalism..
Need a speaker, panelist, tv commentator or teacher for your group or to lead a writing workshop in your town? E-mail donwilliams7@charter.net, or visit www.NewMillenniumWritings.com. New Millennium Writings is holding a writing contest for fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that you can still enter. Deadline is July 31, 2012.
Monday morning writing joke: interesting characters
Q. Where does a writer find interesting characters at the breakfast table?
A. In a cereal novel.
Just make sure it is a whole grain cereal, so you get well-rounded interesting characters.
Filed under Monday morning writing joke, writing humor
Workshop weekend: Sunday story: “Virtuosity”
I was somewhen gliding over Virtuosity when I woke up from my copy/paste coma. I was ten thousand bar stools above pay dirt, but the drinks had stopped coming long before the last sequence of route rot procedures was done. I tried to perk up with three quick and awful coffees and a Hershey’s kiss left over from my last intrusion into the real world, but it wasn’t helping much. The coffee was a tannic acid man’s dream, bitter and beyond redemption no matter how I tried to doll it up. And the kiss, well, I am a sucker for chocolate, even old chocolate, but this kiss had seen its last sweet pucker long ago, maybe even in a candy gallery far far away.
She walked into my room the way all sycophants do these days – with an air of predestination. She sat down in the old overstuffed chair next to the old overstuffed couch I was crouched on. She placed her legs in just such a position that a trigonometry professor would’ve been had pressed to explain, and it was all I could do to keep my eyes from triangulating on them. They were her best feature, but the rest of her was at least suborbital as well. She dressed in clothes with sharp angles, some of which would probably frighten an armadillo. Her lips were as full and shiny as a waxing moon and her hair gleamed as if it were a source of light all its own. In short, she was as textured as the night, and just as dangerous.
She dragged out a smoke and was about to light it.
“Not in here.” My head was a series of dots and dashes in binary world, and lighting up wasn’t going to help.
She pouted and then put them away. “The boss sent me.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
She looked perplexed, lost in the great heartland of non-sequitors, a trollop with a message trying to make connections with polarized plugs in a non-polarized world.
“The boss says—”
“I know what the boss says. He says it every time he sends one of you floozies down my rat hole with a message, and every time he promises me my freedom and every time he finds a way to wriggle out of following through. Tell Lucy, Charlie ain’t kickin’ at the ball no more.”
She looked even more nonplussed. I could just imagine one big minus sign stretched above her pretty little head, like a halo dancing black hole mambo with an event horizon. One day enough neurons might come burrowing out, Steven Hawking style, to make a moment of enlightenment, but age and propriety would keep me from waiting that long. After all, it’s not polite to stare indefinitely at a glacier, no matter how easy on the eyes.
[Editor’s note: not sure what to do with this. If I should pursue it or let it go. if you have read it, any thoughts or comments? is this an interesting beginning? Thank you for stopping by.]
Filed under story, Sunday story, Virtuosity, Workshop weekend, writing
Workshop weekend two: Saturday limerick: “Canard”
There once was a tree in my yard
that came down in a wind rather hard.
I sawed on it yesterday;
it’s still there today.
It’s tougher than a month old canard.
The hackberry where it split and most of it bowed to the ground to the applause of thunder and wind and rain.
Filed under limerick, poetry by author, Workshop weekend
Workshop weekend: Found story Saturday
In the process of making a small tree. Still much to do. Thankful for a neighbor and smart people who came to help.
There is an old joke.
How do you make a small tree?
Start with a large one.
[Editor’s note: I know, originally, the joke was: how do you make a small fortune? Start with a large one. But fortune would be eight syllables instead of seven and ruin the attempted humorous haiku. Plus, I’ll be more like to have a large tree to start with than a large fortune. I don’t hold much prospect that I’ll have a small fortune, either. As for a small tree, well, that may still take me a little while. You don’t know how much brush one full-grown tree can create until you have to clean up after one.]
Filed under Found story, Photo by author, poetry by author, Thunder, Workshop weekend
Freeform Friday: “The Kindest Cut”
Nude man armed with chain saw arrested in East Knox County
Source: http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/jul/12/nude-man-armed-with-chain-saw-arrested-in-east/
Below is a rewritten summation of the story.
KNOXVILLE, TN — On Wednesday, July 11, 2012, 46-year-old man, L.M.S. of Knox County was arrested because he was nude while using a chain saw to cut up a large tree that had toppled in his yard. Apparently, though appearances can be deceiving, this was not the first time he had subjected his neighbors to an au natural display of himself, though it may have been the first time he had done so with a chain saw.
He had occasionally been appearing in the nude for over a decade in this neighborhood in Knox County, but this time a neighbor complained about a public display of nudity by a nearly bald man obviously weighing more than the 210 lbs. listed on his driver’s license.
When Knox County Sheriff’s Deputy S.R. arrived at the scene, he later wrote in his report: “I saw arrestee standing behind the tree in his yard. When arrestee saw me, he ran inside his residence. Arrestee had no clothes on and was clearly visible from the complainant’s residence and the surrounding homes.”
L.M.S. was arrested, charged with indecent exposure, and was freed from the Knox County Sheriff’s Detention Facility after posting a $750 bond.
The neighbor who called in the complaint was reported to have said L.M.S.’s display of himself in the buff was “so common,” it had become a neighborhood joke.
A few editorial thoughts about this incident:
Maybe he was sleep chain sawing and didn’t realize it. You know, sawing some logs, so to say.
Or maybe he was caught up in the fervor of the upcoming Summer Olympics in London, possibly even wanting nude chain saw tree cutting to be a trial sport. Of course, it would be a little more difficult to identify which country he (or other participants) might be representing. He would be, however, competing in the style of the original Greek Olympics in which the participants did conduct their events in the nude. (I guess that was to make sure nobody was hiding any secret elixirs from the nearby temple at Delphi. Had to worry about doping even then.)
I say relocate him to Alaska, have him and others like him (After all, I’m sure he’s not alone.) chain saw trees in winter in the nude, and call the show, “Nude Loggers of the North: the chain, the pain, the complain.” Maybe ESPN and the Weather Channel could co-sponsor it.
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Filed under Freeform Friday, my hometown, Random Access Thoughts
Tagged as chain saw, commentary, humor, Knox County, Knoxville, nudity, satire