Here’s some helpful advice on how to behave, ladies!
The video is part of an ongoing project from the comedy group The Second City. You can see more of the videos (like Ariel and Belle!) at their youtube channel.
I remember my dad telling me this, when I was but a wee youth of a bibliophile. However, in this day of paperbacks and Kindles, there’s not much use for knowing how to properly treat a hardback. Plus, if the comments at Boing Boing are any indication, modern hardbacks use a glued binding that doesn’t necessitate this kind of care anyway.
(from ListNews, apparently via The Dusty Bookshelf, but there is a straightened out perspective at Boing Boing, if you’re interested in printing it.)
This is not how I take pictures. I only ask two questions — are all the eyes open? is everyone smiling? — and I generally ask those two questions after the picture’s already taken, and all my subjects are dispersing.
But, if you want a glimpse into the million-and-one (okay, 40) things that flash through a professional photographer’s mind when he or she is taking a picture, this website lists ‘em.
(I think I pinched this from Facebook, but I’ve had the tab open for a few hours, and I don’t remember.)
May 042010
If you have to, someday, live out of your car, you could do a lot worse than asking the Internet for advice.
That’s essentially what happened when Reddit user reconchrist found out, when he posted a “thank you” of sort, to the Reddit community, for keeping him feeling positive while he was living in his car.
Not only did her get a bunch of positive and encouraging replies, he actually got an astounding amount of free advice on how to live well out of your car.
The top post now is by user xenophone, who lists a bunch of good advice, but I’ve read through about half the thread, and I kind of feel that I could live out my car quite comfortably right now, if I had to. (Xenophone has also started an “ask me anything” thread about that experience.
Also, interestingly, isn’t it kind of sad in our supersized life that a car — our transport devices — are easily large enough for semi-permanent shelter?
Mar 082010
Having never won an Academy Award — never even nominated! — I am exactly as qualified as most critics to tell you what I think could be better next year.
Not that this year’s awards were bad, but there’s always some cringe-worthy stuff that makes me thing, “Geez, someone should tell them not to do that.”
This year, I’m that someone. Academy members, pay attention to my list for next year, and the ceremony will go even more smoothly than it did this year. In no particular order:
1. Don’t thank companies. I don’t care if XYZ Production or Uber Distribution really did help you with your film. Either care enough to thank the people involved, or skip it.
2. No lists. Thankfully, there weren’t any crib sheets that I saw this year, but too many “speeches” were still just long lists of all the bigwigs associated with a film. Yes, we know that it takes a lot of people to make a feature motion picture. You don’t have to thank all of them.
3. Let the little guys talk. When Joe Schmoe and his partner Jack Schmoe are nominated for their first-ever Oscar, and they win, and it’s for something like Best Sound Editing in a Foreign Documentary Animated Short, I understand that the celebs want to get on with it before their tushies fall asleep. But it’s pretty damn rude to only let one guy talk and then shut off the microphone 20 seconds later when Schmoe No. 2 approaches. That’s especially rude because you can apparently afford fifteen minutes for self-congratulatory starlets to flub their teleprompter lines.
4. It’s “Precious.” Full stop. Please drop the subtitle crap like “Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.” Thankfully, many people dropped it when speaking, but there it was, all over the screen.
5. Bring back “The envelope please” and “The Oscar goes to…” Why was everyone all of a sudden saying “The winner is…”? When a large proportion of your audience is tuning in just because of tradition, shouldn’t you, perhaps, stick with it?
6. Offer speechwriting lessons, or services, to nominees. When Christoph Waltz told a story, instead of reciting a stumbling list of names (see Rule No. 2, above) or companies (see Rule No. 1, also above), it was the highlight of the night, for acceptances. Too bad it was the first one. His speech nicely encapsulated all the reasons why his award was suprising, humbling, and yet perfectly deserved. Sandra Bullock wasn’t doing too poorly, focusing on the other nominees with wit, until she started babbling about all the mothers in the world “who are never recognized.” Perhaps she missed every other nominee in the history of the Oscars, who has thanked his or her mom?
7. Time limit for presenters. If the dude who wins an Oscar is limited to 30 seconds before the music cuts in and the microphone cuts out, why did Ben Stiller get to overdo his N’avi joke until it was way past funny?
Okay, that’s seven — and I’m pretty sure we can get to 10, with a few comments. (I actually had a sheet going during the telecast, but I left it at Amy’s parents’ place, so I’m working from memory. I may have missed a few irritants that I jotted down at the time.)
Now, chime in with your own.
As a news writer, after I do all my research and interviews, I find it difficult to actually sit down and write the story until I have an angle to attack it from. Usually, this is the lede, but sometimes it’s a grasp of how the first couple of paragraphs will turn out.
Once I have that, I find the structure of the rest of the article just flows right along from there.
At least one other writer in my newsroom writes his ledes last, though. I guess he gets all the info structured, then introduces it. It’s not wrong per se, just completely foreign to my experience.
Headlines, in case you’re unfamiliar with the way that newspapers work, are written dead last — and they’re not even written by the reporter, rather they are written to fit into the space available by the person doing layout.
I suspect that book titles are similar. And in fact, this post at The Rumpus takes a look at what makes a good title, how some titles are very bad, and why authors don’t always come up with the best ones:
The point is, though, when it comes to the writing process, sometimes a bad title can help you more than a good one. In their book Deepening Fiction, Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren talk about the idea of creative beginnings versus actual beginnings: Even if we end up cutting the original “creative beginning” of a novel or short story—the part of the novel or story, often, that we’re most attached to—this doesn’t mean it’s not an essential part of the writing process. In some ways, it’s the most essential. The same goes for titles, I think. I’ve heard students tell me they come up with their titles first, before they have the slightest notion of a plot. I see nothing wrong with this, so long as they’re willing to give up their “creative title” when it no longer serves the story.
There is also a good, thought-provoking list of Titles To Avoid. I will keep them all in mind.
Feb 202010
If you like writing, then you might be interested to know what’s worked for other writers. Thankfully, The Guardian has compiled a list of 29 different writers’ Rules For Writing.
Mostly, inspired by Elmore Leonard’s list, they come in batches of 10. But some writers condense it down to five — others focus on a single, very important rule.
There’s surprisingly little overlap, which perhaps just proves that you need to come up with your own rules. But there are lots of good ideas, from the stylistic (“Introduce your main characters and themes in the first third of your novel.” — Michael Moorcock) to the idealistic (“Learn poems by heart.” — Helen Dunmore) to the practical (“Do back exercises — pain is distracting.” — Margaret Atwood).
Part one is here. Part two is here.
I believe it would be fun to design a series of inspirational posters based on this compendium of advice.
Now that I am a weekly lecturer in a university class (I teach introductory journalism) I am quickly discovering the challenges of keeping people interested in what you’re saying for three full hours.
It’s different when writing, and I have a fair bit of practice setting words down (but I hope I don’t bore you here, and I’m not offended if you scroll down to other posts). Speaking out loud though, either extemporaneously or with notes, is a wildly different beast.
Gretchen Rubin, who blogs at Psychology Today, has a list of eight personal observations she’s made that you can use to tell if you’re boring someone. It sounds a lot like the last hour of my classes:
1. Repeated, perfunctory responses.
2. Simple questions.
3. Interruption.
4. Request for clarification.
5. Imbalance of talking time.
6. Abrupt changes in topic.
7. Body position.
8. Audience posture.
She goes into a fair bit of detail with each one. A couple of years ago, she also made a list of topics to avoid if you want to not bore someone.
I’m indebted to Boing Boing for the links. I don’t know for sure if I can make my classes a heck of a lot more lively (I already do a lot of in-class debate and I encourage dialog, which works; it’s the straight lecture portions where I don’t always shine), but I can at least know for sure just how bored those students are.
Sorry guys.
Great “conversation” over on a New York Times blog (actually, it’s more like a double-column) about the perils of trying to give advice to graduates. Although one columnist, David Brooks, is specifically trying to come up with a speech to give to high school graduates, some of their thoughts are applicable to just about any age. Says Brooks:
At the moment, I’m thinking of talking about the chief way our society is messed up. That is to say, it is structured to distract people from the decisions that have a huge impact on happiness in order to focus attention on the decisions that have a marginal impact on happiness.
The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.
The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this.
The most important skill a person can possess is the ability to control one’s impulses. Here too, we’re pretty much on our own.
These are all things with a provable relationship to human happiness. Instead, society is busy preparing us for all the decisions that have a marginal effect on human happiness.
Spoiler alert: he blames men. His counterpart, Gail Collins, is much more optimistic. Though perhaps that’s because she doesn’t have to give the speech. Good read, and makes you think about the priorities we put on things.