The business of music–and movies, books, plays, and all other art–has always been rather upside down when it comes to artists getting a decent share of the monies so they can, I don’t know, pay the rent.
And it’s no secret that musicians have had a rough time lately, just like other creative types, with people no longer paying cash monies to download mp3’s after they stopped swiping their debit cards for CD’s and cassette tapes and eight-tracks and vinyl. Yes, some hipster types still buy vinyl. Just not nearly not enough to support bands.
So musicians, big or small, rely on selling tickets to live shows along with T-shirts and other merch. If they are famous, and lucky, they get decent money from streaming sites.
Might be a musical revolution
Beyoncé and Taylor Swift are both going in a different, smarter direction with concert movies.
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour Movie snagged $128 million million in it’s opening weekend. Not week, weekend. AMC alone said it got $100 million in advance ticket sales. This thing will break all kinds of records.
Beyoncé might go on and break the new records. It could get huge.
Why this is brilliant economics and marketing
Concert movies or documentaries aren’t completely new. The size and impact of these two movies, though, will shake up everything.
What’s hilarious is I doubt the expenses are that high. If you’re already putting on a concert, with lights and roadies and backup singers and musicians and dancers–it is not that much extra cost to hire professionals to film during the show and behind the scenes. It’s not much more money to hire a director and editors to go through all that footage to shape the best movie.
Shooting a movie from scratch, now, costs a mountain of cash. A single Marvel movie can run $200 million to $300 million. Or almost double, if you add in marketing. Nobody understands Hollywood accounting, not even Hollywood.
One music video can run up millions on the tab, since you’re also starting from scratch and need dancers, sets, and days to shoot it.
The numbers aren’t all in yet. But I would bet every dollar in my pocket, and yours, that the return on investment for Taylor’s movie and Beyoncé’s film will both be absolutely bonkers.
These two mega-movies will also boost the health of AMC’s stock, causing millions of redditors to lose their minds, refinance their mortgage to buy more stock, and get divorced when their spouse does not understand why their life’s savings got lost on some kind of NASA-related quest to “go to the moon.” Pro-tip: do not do this.
Will this be a trend? Yes, yes, and yes
So yes, this can and should start a trend.
I am only a casual fan of Taylor and Beyoncé, and would never spend a day & night driving to Seattle or Portland to shell out $300 or $500 to see a live concert plus more cash for a hotel because I would not make it home until oh-dark-thirty along with dinner and breakfast and all the things.
Yet I would happily, happily spend $19.89 (symbolic and funny, very nice, Taylor) to pop down to a local theater and watch the concert movie. Absolutely.
And the same would be true for at least 50 other bands, big or small, that I adore.
Can it scale down to smaller bands?
Absolutely. Medium-popular bands could easily spend a lot less and still come out with a cool concert movie.
Even local bands could pull this off. A band in my backyard keeps cranking out great music videos on a shoestring. Love them.
I’d much rather pay to watch a concert movie in a theater than wait around for a band to get close enough for me to drive or fly and see them.
Honestly, I’ve seen fewer and fewer movies in theaters lately after coming down with Superhero Movie Fatigue.
It would be seven separate flavors of awesomesauce to see a hot trend of new concert movies coming to our theaters, week after week. Bring it. I will buy popcorn.
Listen: this silly blog started when I needed to sell the Epic Black Car, then romance authors and readers found that post—and you rock, all of you. What is up with your bad selves?
Later, I needed to hock The Nikon of Infinite Beauty. However: Today is different. See, we packed up and moved out while contractors went wild with hammers and power tools. Now we’re back in but still unpacking boxes, which in America are not allowed to be opened until they’ve been seasoned in your garage or basement for at least seven years.
I am therefore finding a mountain of things to sell, give away, or offer up to anybody passing by as I walk Ruthie, the Friendliest Dog in the World, who lays on the street to show skittish dogs that she is Friend and tried to do this to my neighbor’s red pickup truck, which did not reciprocate. But that’s cool, Ruthie still wants to play with the Shiny Red Truck.
Also, this is only the first batch. There will be more. Help me get my Marie Kondo on.
PLANT DECAPITATOR
I have used weed-whackers, which have little strings that keep breaking, especially when you try to attack a nasty armored weed. Weed-whackers are not my favorite.
This thing, now, doesn’t mess around with plastic strings. This is a Ryobi BC30 with an invincible steel blade. It stands against the garage drinking Mad Dog 20/20’s until the weed-whackers run out of string, then it saunters down to absolutely destroy any sort of unwanted vegetation, be it blackberries or scotch broom.
Scotch broom is the Devil and the reason I own the Vorpal Two-Handed Machete, which also likes to cut down trees and does a better job of it than Mr. Axe, who supposedly specializes in trees and only trees. Mr. Axe, you have been eclipsed and made redundant. Sorry.
Condition: Gently pre-owned.
Price: $40 or a bottle of sake. Yes, you can get good bottles of sake at Trader Joe’s for like $10, and that feels like a cheat code. Cheat away. I like sake.
ROTATING METAL TEETH OF DEATH
This is a gas-powered instrument of destruction, commonly used by jugglers who have lost the plot and get the idea that “Hey, keeping eight balls in the air is difficult and all, but what would really impress the ladies and fill up my tips can would be throwing at chain saw in there. And what if I set this thing on fire?”
Artists also use this Stihl MS 170’s like this to delicately turn blocks of ice into dragons and such for weddings or whatever, or to transform blocks of wood into friendly bears that guard your driveway.
Carhartt People have been known to grab these things and attack trees, who with their dying Ent breath try very hard to fall on those who attack them or nearby Ford F-150’s that cost more than our first house. Do not mess with people wearing striped shirts and doubly-reinforced jeans.
Condition: New, never been used. I believe these things cost $300-something new.
Price: If you are a juggler, $5,938 and proof of current health insurance. Yes, that price is stupid, and so is lighting death machines on fire and juggling with them. For everybody else, $100 or two bottles of bourbon.
PONDERING SURFACE
You can’t think deep thoughts while driving, running, or eating. But you have to remember all those glorious ideas until you have the chance to sit down at desk like this to write them down.
How you write them is up to you, artistic person. Maybe you plop down the laptop, one-finger an old Underwood, or go wild with a fountain pen. I don’t care if you use this to knit hats for cats–you need a surface to get your groove on like it’s a roller rink in 1976 and Rick James is on full blast.
Condition: Good, and not chewed up by puppies at all. Now, this is a utilitarian desk, something we probably bought at Fred Meyer, assembled, and painted blue. It looks fine, but it’s not some solid-wood heirloom to pass down to your kids.
Price: Free. Want to give it a home? Take it. If taking free things make your tummy feel funny, throw me a tiny airport-sized bottle of tequila.
Note: Now, the natural question is, don’t you need something to sit on, because otherwise a desk is kinda useless? Yes. The good news is you probably have a chair or three already. Desks like this and standard chairs go together just fine. It would be crazy to expect me to also have a handy chair to go with your new blue Desk of Deep Thoughts.
CHAIR
A trendy mesh chair, bit too small for a tall Swede like me. I like old-fashioned chair with leather. The picture above is the same chair, but new. Saw it in the store and took a shot.
Condition: The corner of the right arm looks like it got chewed by a puppy. Otherwise, good.
Price: Give me a number, or a puppy that doesn’t chew things, or three gray kittens with bright blue eyes.
Note: Now you’re gonna ask for a laptop. Bahahahaha no, I am not Santa Claus or some kind of genie trapped in a lamp.
HP LAPTOP
Do you have a lap, or a spiffy blue pondering surface that’s empty and lonely?
Stick this thing on there. Mash the power button and see the glory of Windows 10 or whatever. Watch as Microsoft tells you a bunch of times that this laptop may have six gigs of RAM but does not have the secret technology to run Windows 11. Connect to the series of tubes via this magic called “wifi,” which kinda looks like “wife” when you glance at it. Not even close. Wives are different and special and not for sale, barter, or trade. They pick you, dummy.
Fire up the internets and download OpenOffice, because I’m not leaving my copy of Office on this thing. Get paint.net and other stuff without paying a dime.
Go wild with your creative self. Write a short story about a lonely widow in Kansas who finds a purpose in life and a family of sorts after she starts a biker gang at the nursing home, except their bikes are souped-up Little Rascals, and their first crime spree is a mistake when Harold decides they should rob a bank, and because he’s hungry he picks the Food Bank, where the staff happily help them load up and ride off at full speed, thinking the cops will be right behind them.
Write the spec movie script COCAINE BEAR VERSUS PREDATOR VERSUS ALIEN, but don’t hit send on that sucker until after the writer’s strike is over, because no, AI cannot write shows and movies and novels, and Hollywood execs living in mansions need to stop giving writers crumbs and realize there is no movie business without dorky writers with dorky haircuts who have brains seventeen times bigger than theirs.
Price: It’s an old laptop that still works fine. Hell if I know what that’s worth on the free market. Let’s say 10 medium-sized avocados.
Note: Now you’ll expect art lessons or a camera, and I am sorry, this is not happening, I am not a department store named Guy’s Warehouse of Power Tools and Random Stuff.
TWO DIGITAL CAMERAS
When I first took my own shots at Papers of News, we had 35 mm film cameras that came in rolls of 24 shots, which went down to 12 shots once the papers got into financial trouble by stupidly going deep into debt to buy smaller papers that they then shut down. Brilliant! This is why the global list of the world’s billionaires is chock full of former newspaper executivies.
With these two digital cameras, there’s not need to worry about only having 12 shots. Machine gun it, because every frame of film costs dollars while digital is free free free.
These are little cameras, the kind you stick in your pocket. Can your iPhone take better photos? Probably. Can you give these things to two kids who need to turn off the screens and go outside to take shots of bees in flowers and deer poop and extreme closeups of a chocolate lab’s nose? Yes. You can do that. Totally recommended. Because little kids will only lose or break iPhones, where if they lose or break one of these things, meh.
Price: Close your eyes, reach into your wallet, and throw two random bills at me. Has to be random, no cheating. Does a one feel that different from a twenty or a fifty? Does anybody have fifties in their wallet these days? Doubt it. Haven’t seen one in forever.
Note: Cameras are window to the world. Every kid and adult should shoot photos to find out what they see as beautiful and share that beauty with others.
DETAILS FOR ALL ITEMS
Shipping and handling: Just like Amazon, I offer free shipping if you are Prime member, except I haven’t started giving out Prime memberships to anybody yet, so we’re not shipping anything, especially heavy thing like chainsaws and big bulky things like desks or long-ass machines like plant decapitators.
Pickup or delivery: I will deliver any or all of these items to anyone in the continental United States. Not kidding for once! Just pay mileage (0.655 per mile, standard federal rate) and meals (not Burger King, can’t do it) along with lodging. To be fancy, we go all Latin call all those things per diem. I will blog my way along I-90 to Missouri or whatever, where we will eat ghost peppers at a biker bar in between shots of cheap tequila before you return to the yacht club to brag about sending a speechwriter on a giant road trip to hand-deliver a $20 desk.
Other items: The other 498 bins in the garage and basement are what J.J. Abrams like to call mystery boxes, as in, it takes me two hours in a dark room to figure out what’s inside all of them, and popcorn is optional.
Making a trade or purchase: If you want any of this stuff, or have a request—Blue Ray or VHS movies! a single 3.5″ disk!t—hit me up in the comments or on the Twitters @speechwriterguy, because it’s probably in one of these boxes.
Back when stegosaurus strolled around sipping lattes and hiding from raptors, the Series of Tubes was shiny and new, and featured completely juvenile wastes of time like Mullets Galore.
This site featured the Mullet of the Week and a whole scientific taxonomy of mullets, which was both insane and interesting.
Mullets Galore may be dead, and unable to get resurrected even with the magic of the WayBack Machine, since the fool who created it used javascript or Shockwave or some other thing modern browsers vomit up as against their religion.
HOWEVER: a new champion of business in the front, party in the back has emerged: USA Mullet Championship, with registration for 2022 now live.
They have divisions (kids, teens, adults) and let the people vote on our national mullet champs.
Here are the kid champs from 2021:
Teenyboppers from 2021:
Men’s open winners:
And women’s open champs:
As a semi-serious student of mullets–and yes, I had a hockey haircut early in college–let me say that I’m happy somebody took up the torch.
I’m particularly stoked that they’re embracing the whole variety of mullets, from the “so bad it’s good” to the “okay, that’s kinda attractive, in a weird kinda way.”
It would be wrong to avoid saying that mullets are not the sole province of Americans, or something we invented.
The internets tell me a French fashion guru (Henri Mollet) made it popular in the ’70s and thus the name, translated into ‘Murican.
HOWEVER: This is all nonsense. Mullets have been around forever, all over the world.
Canadian hockey players are kicked off the team if they don’t have one. Soccer/football players could enter mullet competitions and win every single prize.
The mullet was always around, and will always be around.
I do want to point out that Richard Dawkins went at this scientifically in The Selfish Gene, saying that fashion comes and goes because once short hair is fashionable and the dominant meme, long hair (or mullets) becomes rebellious and cool until IT becomes dominant, and having short hair is rebellious.
Kinda like beards right now. Pretty much every man I know is rocking a pandemic beard and looking like Robert Redford in that mountain man movie.
Yes, that is Redford and not some weird joke I’m making. Look it up, kid you not.
VERDICT
Mullets are forever, and I am here for it.
If you rock a mullet, or know someone who does, please enter the 2022 contest and tell me what happens.
Which crime is worse, the digital money or the music video?
I report, you decide.
Here’s the deal: A married couple in their early 30’s may have stolen up to $4.5 billion in Bitcoin, and the FBI recovered a bunch of it.
They are accused of trying to launder 119,754 of the crypto coins, stolen back when those digital things were worth $70 million and such.
But the value went way up. Way, way up.
Before I dive into how these two jokers truly screwed up after pulling this off, let’s get to the music videos.
The woman’s name is Heather Morgan and she sings under the name Razzlekhan.
Her videos on YouTube went private after the arrest.
HOWEVER: you can’t defeat the interwebs when millions of people around the world have the motivation and skills to keep treasures like this alive. WARNING: bad words, bad lyrics, bad dancing, and bad singing ahead.
Is this the biggest heist of all time? The FBI puts it at No. 1 for seizing illicit monies.
There are all kinds of other famous heists, like the Great Train Robbery, that only brought in $3.4 million or so. Though I am trained as a journalist, and write the speeches, and did not major in mathematics, I’m pretty sure that $4.5 billion is larger than $3.4 million.
But is VERSACE BEDOUIN that the Worst Music Video of All Time? Maaaybe.
The competition is tough.
FRIDAY is pretty bad and comes to us from a professional singer and a professional production crew.
For amateurs, RED DRESS is high on the list because you’ve got decent camera work and all that for an amateur production but everything just seems off. Especially the singing. It’s the uncanny valley of bad videos.
Now, here’s where she and her husband went wrong–if they did what they’re accused of: Bitcoin is a silly thing to buy, a silly thing to hold, and a silly thing to steal.
If you rob a bank, there’s no natural trail. That’s why they have cameras, and vaults, and marked bills, and dye packs. The banks and the folks with badges and handcuffs have to work at creating a trail to whoever steals the money.
If you buy Bitcoin, and lose the key and such, poof, your money is gone. There’s a man in the UK who did that and has spent, I don’t know, a year of his life digging through the city landfill looking for his old hard drive with the Bitcoin info because he lost everything, the big dummy.
If you sell Bitcoin, or purchase something, there’s a record of that on the blockchain.
And if you steal it, yeah, there’s a still a record of purchases and sales. Which means it’s a lot easier for the police to start following the built-in trail that you can’t avoid. If you read the stories about this heist, they went nuts trying to launder the Bitcoin through all sorts of accounts and such and it Did Not Matter.
So don’t rob banks, don’t steal Bitcoin, and don’t buy Bitcoin in the first place. Buy some index funds, hold them, and forget about it until you retire.
Back to the music video. I’m going to give Razzlekhan the double win here: biggest heist and worst music video ever.
She gets the win because every single element is amazingly bad. The lyrics, the attempts at dancing, the singing, the camera angles. Everything.
Do they let you make compose and shoot music videos in federal prison?
Time starts to lose all meaning when you fly overseas, because unless you’re going to the South Pole, the time zones blur and send you way forward in time (or backward, equally weird).
Compounding things: driving to the airport means two hours, plus three hours early for international flights, so tack on five hours to that twelve-hour flight. We took off in the afternoon, so by the time it was wheels down in Amsterdam to switch planes, it’d been 24 hours without sleep.
And in Amsterdam, the line for customs was INSANE. It stretched for kilometers, since miles don’t exist here, and got so long that the airport police freaked out. I kid you not. They all showed up, took a look at the line stretching to Denmark, and did some kind of Dutch magic on the bureaucracy to make the customs line absolutely fly. I still don’t know how they did it.
The Air France flight to Paris was not screwing around, with a male flight attendant happily arguing with passengers about proper masks. No cloth masks, only blue surgical ones, and they handed them out if you only had cloth.
I sat next to a television journalist from Paris on the flight, a man who’d covered wars in Africa and the Middle East, and it’s always wonderful to talk to somebody from the news world.
Trains are wonderful, except when they are not
The train from Charles de Gaulle to Paris started out fine. With every stop, more and more passengers got on until the thing was insanely crowded. All the travelers from the airport with giant suitcases started getting stink eye from commuters simply trying to get to work.
We formed rival gangs, and since The Jets felt natural for the airport people, locals went with The Sharks, and we had a dance-off with switchblades, except nobody got cut because they were too busy singing.
Once in Paris proper, it took another train to get close to our hotel, up by Mount Marche, then a hike because we were too groggy and sleep-deprived to figure out which third train to take for the station right next to our hotel.
It does not take long, when dragging your luggage after 36 hours or whatever of travel, to learn you don’t want to haul that luggage another mile or two. We grabbed a taxi. Best decision ever.
TL;DR – When you arrive with the luggage, get a damned taxi, even though trains are great. Kthxbai.
Nothing is better than dinner outside on a busy Paris street
There’s something magical and unique about eating at an outside table and watching street life in Paris.
It never gets old, no matter how many times I’ve done it.
We were absolutely sleep-deprived, and common sense said to unpack and sleep. Nope. Having a good meal, outside, put a capstone on the Getting to Paris part of the trip.
I believe this should be the law. You can’t crash at the hotel right off. Getting a good dinner, or even a snack, along with a drink–that is required.
Day 1 of any trip overseas involves waiting in lines, taking your shoes off, and strapping yourself inside a metal tube full of explosive liquids.
Note: yes, you could technically go all Young Bruce Wayne and trade coats with a homeless person before sneaking aboard a cargo ship, and yes, there are people who’ve rowed across the Atlantic, but we are talking about getting to Paris before 2028.
So how can we fix airports and flying?
Here are a few ideas.
Idea # 1: Trains, trains, trains
Nobody likes driving to the airport at oh-dark-thirty, paying for parking, and taking a shuttle to the actual airport. How could we make this suck slightly less?
Trains.
Take your luggage and hop on a train that takes you directly to the airport.
Boom, no driving, no parking, no hassle.
SeaTac does have a train to the airport now. Though I live in a one stoplight logging town far away, it would be seven separate flavors of awesomesauce to catch a ride to Olympia, hop on that train, and hit the airport.
Sorry, parking lot barons. You provide a useful service, but trains would eliminate a major annoyance.
Idea # 2: Make boarding less silly
Right now, how do you get on the plane? IT IS THE CHAOS.
Let’s make this infinitely smoother by boarding window seats first, back to front. You go, Window Warriors.
Next up, middle seats.
Last to board should be aisle seats and first class / VIP people. Having them get on first slows things down. What’s the great thing about getting on first and waiting longer for takeoff? Feed the people holding special expensive tickets some special and expensive champagne while they wait and get them on last.
Idea # 3: Seats that fit
We have the numbers: average number of people who are tall, short, whatever.
Make seats on planes reflect real people instead of a mythical average, so anybody over six foot doesn’t have their knees shoved into the seat in front of them and average to shorter people get a break on price for taking up less space. But if we’re making prices reflect reality, average it all out to cost the same as now instead of overcharging tall folks.
Idea # 4: The adorable screaming bebes
Hey, I’m a father, and I get it. You want your pookie to see the world, or visit grandma.
HOWEVER: Itty bitty babies and toddlers don’t do well on long international flights, and by don’t mean well I actually mean a 10-hour flight often includes a free 10-hour chorus of screaming and inconsolable babies.
Babies and toddlers won’t remember a trip to Paris or Tokyo.
Multiply the age of the pookie by TWO and that’s how many hours the kid should fly. A baby can do two hours, a two-year-old can handle four, and so on.
Idea # 5: The Kiosk of Dumb Questions
At the Brussels train station, helpful staff stood at a kiosk to guide confused travelers to their train.
Airports around the world should do this. Otherwise, sleepy passengers wander the airport, staring at screens and asking random people questions in languages they don’t speak.
VERDICT
Traveling by plane is more annoying than it should be, but we can dream. What would you do, if you could wave a magic wand and fix it?
Listen: just like you, I have boxes in my basement that haven’t been opened for years. Stuff taking up space and time, and if you let it, all that junk will play some Marvin Gaye and start multiplying until you can’t walk down the hallway without tripping on a violin from 5th grade.
So I have things to hock, and I am a motivated seller.
Vorpal Typewriter of Infinite Weight
It’s an Underwood from around 1930 that used to live in my office in a mini-shrine to word machines of all kinds. Like a relic.
The keys no longer work. The ink is dry.
That doesn’t matter, because what you do is place a blank piece of 8.5 x 11 paper on top of the Vorpal Typewriter of Infinite Weight, cut your thumb as a blood sacrifice on the keys, and words begin to appear as long as your blood is O-positive.
The typewriter has specific tastes.
It isn’t portable, unless you have a F350 with the extra tow package, because at the heart of the typewriter is a miniature black hole, pulsating with power.
Thor once lost his hammer, Mjölnir, which nobody can pronounce, and he tried to pick up the Vorpal Typewriter as a temporary replacement, but he couldn’t lift the thing.
Today, the typewriter lurks in the basement and to plot its revenge. It will not be ignored, though it will serve as a boat anchor if necessary.
Price: $50 or a pint of O-positive blood.
Matched Pair of Professional Bongo Drums
Admit it: you’ve always wanted to play the bongos. Real ones, not those cute little drums they sell at tourist traps for thirty bucks. Those are toys, and you are not a child.
These are four-foot-tall monsters. If you have musical talent and technical expertise with amplifiers and such–as you should if considering playing professional bongo drums–you could hook these things up to speakers and shatter windows in a three-block radius.
Metal bands are old and busted. The new hotness is heavy ska, and you can’t do that with a traditional drum kit. You need ginormous professional bongos, my friend. YOU NEED THEM.
Price: $100 or a working manual transmission Yugo.
Note: technically, these are conga drums, but technically, I don’t care.
Ginormous and Powerful Nikon D3100
It hurts me to say this: full-frame digital cameras with mirrors and such are too big and bulky. They’re great, and take wonderful photos. I just hate lugging them around when there’s a slim little device in my pocket at all times that takes pretty damn good photos that automatically upload into the cloud and such.
This Nikon is amazing. It’ll do your taxes and turn a random man in a mustache into Tom Freaking Selleck.
But, my old beautiful camera, you are too large and bulky. It’s not you. It’s me. I found somebody far lighter, huggable, and modern, a Sony A6000, and we are planning to stay together forever and ever.
Price: You can’t put a price on memories.
Update: SOLD.
Portable Typewriter that Actually Types Boring Words
This isn’t an heavy and adorable antique. No, this typewriter is portable, comes with its own carrying case, and actually works.
You need ink and paper and quick fingers to make words on this machine, doing the job it was designed and built for back in the 1960s, despite it being the 2020s. The portable typewriter abides.
Kinda boring, really. I like you and all, Portable Typewriter, but you’re too competent and normal to be interesting. Give us some drama. Grow little mechanical legs and scurry around the garage preying on mice or something.
Price: Whatever, have fun typing away.
Starplus Command Module
This relic has strange wires and indecipherable buttons. My current theories are (a) Strategic Air Command used it the ’70s to launch nuclear bombers, or (b) alien visitors with a hankering for antique human tech used this to let their starship commander call down to engineering and such. “Bring us back to that delicious Waffle House, warp seven!” Hell if I know.
Price: $5, unless you know how to work it to launch nuclear bombers or summon alien ships.
White Monolith of +10 Paper Consumption
This beast has a huge internal stomach meant to hold paper and a thin maw where it feeds. There are no teeth, so I believe it ate pages whole and had a method of digesting them. It has a tail that ends in a wide head packed with tiny metal teeth, like a snake.
The control buttons include a lightning bolt to summon Thor, a down elevator, and a smiley face without eyes, which is creepy. There’s also a symbol of power–and upside triangle inside a circle–and an emergency rhombus button, to bring forth the helpful rhombus fairies.
Price: A cheap bottle of bourbon or an expensive bottle of gin, which I will use to trade for a medium-priced bottle of bourbon.
Listen: I have hardly posted a thing because the zombie COVID pandemic was the crazy, and working from home is both hard and easy, in that it’s easy to work harder and write far more speeches and such when you are in your pajamas at midnight and not wasting two hours a day on the highway.
So here are some thoughts.
Myth: Writers and editors are solitary creatures.
Reality: Many wordsmiths may be introverts, or extroverts, or whatever. But working with words does not make you anti-social. Not at all. I know people who bang on the keyboard for monies in a variety of ways–reporters, speechwriters, novelists, screenwriters, editors–and 5.6 metric tons of them are some of the most charming and social people I know.
The truth is, WRITING is the solitary part.
You need peace and quiet to do the creative bit, even if you work in a social setting like me with people everywhere. A ton of folks need to close the door, put on headphones, and go.
I can’t close the door and get solitude at work 99 percent of the time, so I’ve learned to tune out the rest of the world and bang on the keyboard faster than light, going back in time to before sound was invented, then returning to the social world when the draft is done.
Writers are different, and there are other folks who like doing amazing first drafts that take a lot longer. My belief is editing and polishing is a lot easier, and you can do a lot more editing and such with people around and noise. Yet that creative part, the hardest and most fun bit, usually takes some intense focus and solitude.
Myth: Working from home will (a) disappear along with COVID or (b) is the future for all possible workers forever and ever
Reality: There are some jobs that have to be done in person. Though I actually kinda believe (b) is true–though only for the workers with the leverage to fight and keep it. Folks were just as productive as when they drove into the office.
A ton of companies and organizations are probably feeling completely befuddled about this now. Maybe they’re jumping up and down that they don’t have to pay massive amounts of cash to rent office space, or freaked out because they aren’t renting and just built a giant building that’s empty.
Middle managers are likely losing their minds because they’re designed to operate in person.
I think this will be good for the workplace, especially people with kids and dogs and long commutes. Pretty good bet that a lot of workers who can Grab a Laptop and Do the Job Anywhere may want to come into the office one day a week for all those in-person meetings.
How well this whiskey pairs with coffee
It’s technically a whiskey creamer, and I am technically on vacation, as is my sister-in-law down here visiting. So we we are trying all these itty bitty bottles of different whiskey creamers in our morning coffee. YOU SHOULD DO THIS, but only on vacation or weekends because if you drive hammered you get wrecked, that is my PSA, kthxbai.
Today’s little bottle is: Sheelin White Chocolate Country Creamer, a product of Ireland, rated a 93 by the Beverage Tasting Institute and silver medal winner at the San Francisco Spirits Competition, where it excelled in the high jump.
Is it good? No.
It is great, and you ask yourself is there any alcohol in this at all, and you wonder why everything is second-person now, like it’s a bad detective novel, until you look at the tiny print on the tiny bottle to realize this adorable bit of cream and white chocolate is not kidding, and does contain whiskey, and is 28 proof.
As I’ve been married for FIVE BILLION YEARS, and have never used this thing people call “dating apps,” which sounds like an appetizer made from dates and possibly wrapped in bacon, I am unfamiliar with the Tinders and the Matches and the Bumblebees and such.
What I do know is that this new ad for Match is brilliant.
Here, watch it, then we’ll talk smack.
Okay, that’s perfect, right? The actors, the meet-cute scene, the montage. ALL OF IT.
What’s especially great to me is Ryan Reynolds was involved, and whatever he touches is inevitably funny, along with Taylor Swift letting him use Love Story, her best song, always will be, and no, I have ignored most of her pop songs and actually like the country stuff better, and the new indie piano album, understated, under-rated.
Taylor, you keep innovating instead of pumping out the same songs and albums for 40 years. No, I am not looking at you, AC/DC.
Okay, these dudes have a point.
Also: I would listen to the entire DOG ON THE ROAD parody album. Make it happen. Send me the link and I will send you monies to Australia via horses, dolphins, and finally drop bears wearing cute little ’80s fanny packs, Chris-Pine style, and yes, you want to see the full footage instead of three seconds of a teaser, here you go.
Note: I hope you are all surviving 2020, and I wish you all the best during the last few weeks of the Worst Year Ever–and my promise to you is that 2021 will be far, far better.
Now, weird news has happened forever. We just didn’t have CNN, fark.com and Wonkette around to shoot video, take notes, and tell us about when Billy Bob the Caveman drank that fermented berry juice and tried to kill a sabre-toothed tiger with a spoon. Pour one out for Billy Bob.
Florida Man has always been when us, even before there was a Florida.
HOWEVER: Perhaps the greatest local news video of all time, when it comes to weird news, is the Exploding Whale.
I’ve written about this before. The reporter who covered the story wrote an entire book after the event.
All we could see, though, was grainy footage. Clear enough to witness the cray-cray, just not up to our standards.
Today, however, for the first time, we can view the build-up and the carnage in glorious high-definition, because the reporter found the original footage on this stuff called “film” and technical geniuses turned that film into digital goodness.
Here, watch and share, and raise your glass to celebrate the 50th anniversary of what I believe should be a national holiday: The Day the Whale Exploded.
The Red Pen of Doom 