Only in the Movies...

1. It is always possible to park directly outside any building you are visiting.

2. A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.

3. If you decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you bump into will know all the steps.

4. Most laptop computers are powerful enough to override the communication systems of any invading alien civilization.

5. It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involving martial arts; your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessors.

6. When a person is knocked unconscious by a blow to the head, she or he will never suffer a concussion or brain damage.

7. No one involved in a car chase, hijacking, explosion, volcanic eruption or alien invasion will ever go into shock.

8. Police departments give their officers personality tests to make sure they are deliberately assigned a partner who is their total opposite.

9. When they are alone, all foreigners prefer to speak English to each other.

10. You can always find a chainsaw when you need one.

11. Any lock can be picked by a credit card or a paper clip in seconds, unless it's the door to a burning building with a child trapped inside.

12. An electric fence, powerful enough to kill a dinosaur will cause no lasting damage to an eight-year-old child.

13. Television news bulletins usually contain a story that affects you personally at that precise moment you turn the television on.

~ Author unkown

Just for Fun

Here's a fun little video I created at with the help of Florida's orange growers.



Create Your Own: When you click on "create your own" in the video box below, you're prompted to pick a persona and voice and type in up to 500 words. The result is a video like the one below. You're then able to email it, post it to a social networking site or post it to your own web site.

If you do create your own, feel free to leave a link in the comments to wherever you've posted it!

Thanks to John Kremer of www.bookmarket.com for sharing this with me.

Arkansas: Where Stories Come From?

Story, Arkansas, where bikers are bards.


Then, if you drive down the road a spell, you find what you need to get that story on the page...




Okay, we've discovered where the Why ("Y") resides. All we need now is the Who, How, Where, What and When....

I discovered these towns and signs in western Arkansas two days ago. (It's a 55-mile drive along Hwys 27, 88 and 270 to get from Story, through Pencil Bluff to "Y" City.)

I also once slept in Story City, Iowa (itself in Story County) and have photographed and drawn the Book Cliffs of Utah and Colorado. What writerly locales have you found?

Photos by Mark David Gerson

The Humorous Art of Revision, or How to Write Good

This apocryphal list has been credited to Frank L. Visco, allegedly a vice-president and senior copywriter at USAdvertising


1. Avoid alliteration. Always.


2. Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

3. Avoid cliches like the plague. (They're old hat.)


4. Employ the vernacular.


5. Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.


6. Parenthetical remarks (however relevant) are unnecessary.


7. It is wrong to ever split an infinitive.


8. Contractions aren't necessary.


9. Foreign words and phrases are not apropos.


10. One should never generalize.


11. Eliminate quotations. As Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, "I hate quotations. Tell me what you know."


12. Comparisons are as bad as cliches.


13. Don't be redundant; don't use more words than necessary; it's highly superfluous.

14. Profanity sucks.


15. Be more or less specific.


16. Understatement is always best.


17. Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.


18. One-word sentences? Eliminate.


19. Analogies in writing are like feathers on a snake.


20. The passive voice is to be avoided.

21. Go around the barn at high noon to avoid colloquialisms.

22. Even if a mixed metaphor sings, it should be derailed.


23. Who needs rhetorical questions?

24. Be careful to use apostrophe's correctly.

25. Do not use them pronouns as modifiers.

26. And never start a sentence with a conjunction.

A Revolutionary New Invention...Certain to Replace the CD-ROM

Announcing the new "Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge" device, otherwise known as the B.O.O.K.

It's a revolutionary breakthrough in technology: no wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's so easy to use even a child can operate it. Just lift its cover. Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere -- even sitting in an armchair by the fire -- yet it is powerful enough to hold ass much information as a CD-ROM disk.

Here's how it works: each B.O.O.K. is constructed of sequentially numbered sheets of paper (recyclable), each capable of holding thousands of bits of information. These pages are locked together with a custom-fit device called a binder which keeps the sheets in their correct sequence. By using both sides of each sheet, manufacturers are able to cut costs in half.

Each sheet is scanned optically, registering information directly into your brain. A flick of the finger takes you to the next sheet. The B.O.O.K. may be taken up at any time and used by merely opening it. The "Browse" feature allows you to move instantly to any sheet, and move forward or backward as you wish. Most come with an "index" feature, which pinpoints the exact location of any selected information for instant retrieval.

An optional " B.O.O.K.mark" accessory allows you to open the B.O.O.K. to the exact place you left it in a previous session -- even if the BOOK has been closed. BOOKmarks fit universal design standards; thus a single B.O.O.K.mark can be used in B.O.O.K.s by various manufacturers.

Portable, durable and affordable, the BOOK is the entertainment wave of the future, and many new titles are expected soon, due to the surge in popularity of its programming tool, the "Portable Erasable-Nib Cryptic Intercommunication Language" stylus [P.E.N.C.I.L.].

Source: www.workjoke.com

Beware the Mindless Spell-Checker

The spell-check program in use by the editors of a Pennsylvania high school yearbook decided to take matters into its own hands this spring, determining that several graduating students' names could not possibly be correct.

Thus, Alessandro Ippolito was listed in the yearbook as Alexandria Impolite, Max Zupanovic as Max Supernova, and Kathy Carbaugh as Kathy Airbag.

Nothing beats a humane, er, human proofreader

Source: The Week

Inspired Quote: The Writer's Life

"There is no way writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or ever cured. The only solution is to provide the patient with an isolation room where the creature can privately endure the affliction and food can be poked in with a stick."

~ Robert A. Heinlein
(photo credit: The Heinlein Prize Trust)