Peanutopolis

Hubby and I drove to the Grand Rapids area today to attend our niece’s graduation ceremony.  On the way, Hubby got hungry, so we stopped and bought a couple of candy bars.  Hubby got a Snickers, the back of which is pictured above.  We had a good time discussing what a Peanutopolis might be.  I bought a Pearson’s Salted Nut Roll, which I figured was closer to a real Peanutopolis than a Snickers was.  Thus . . .

When Hubby finished eating his Snickers, here’s what he found on the inside of the wrapper:

If you’re having trouble reading this, it says, “Peanutopolis \pE-nut-ă-pu-lis\ (noun) A state of mind making you feel very strong and powerful, almost mayor-like.”

Say what?  This has to be entered in the annals of “Strangest Ad Campaign Ever.”  I mean try saying “Peanutopolis” a few times and see what it turns into, even if you aren’t thinking along those lines to begin with.  And the definition?  It leaves me shaking my head.  I’d have defined it as “a city of peanuts,” which would have led to humorous imaginings about what peanut people might look like.  I don’t typically think of “opolis” as a state of mind, do you?  And if it is, I’d say my state of mind could be described as confused by this ad campaign, rather than strong, powerful, and mayor-like.

Writing to Write

I’ve had a bunch of ideas for posts here within the past few days, but do you think I can call one up into the forefront of my cerebral cortex?  Ha!  Not if my life depended upon it.  This gives me a good opportunity to discuss writer’s block.  While this is a rare ailment for me, it does happen and I’ve developed a few ways to deal with it.  One, which I’m doing now, is to start writing.  I write whatever comes into my head, whether it makes sense or not.

(Right now, Young Son is on the upstairs computer recording music to his video camera.  He’s doing it in a wonky way – by playing the music really loud and letting the camera microphone pick up the sound.  The music keeps interrupting my train of thought.)  See how I did that?  If an interior monologue doesn’t present itself as writing material, I make use of exterior events.  That’s another way to break writer’s block.

A third way that I overcome “The Block” is to reread my writing notes or whatever piece I happen to be working on at the moment.  When it comes to my notes, what typically gets me going again is to add to those notes.  As for jump starting an existing piece of writing, this may be weird and I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but I can’t pick up where I left off using a computer.  I actually have to start by handwriting the paragraph or two after where I’ve left off.

If none of that works and I’m blocked because too many thoughts are spinning around in my head and I can’t sort them out, I have to walk away, literally.  If I go for a walk or do some other physical thing, I slip directly into writer’s mode and the prose flows.  I can see and hear the words in my head and rearrange them until they sound good.  Then I’ll repeat a critical phrase or two until I can get back to paper or a computer to write stuff down.  Going for motorcycle rides has given me great training for this memory exercise because it’s impossible to write on the back of a cycle.  The activity produces tons of story ideas, though.

Speaking of motorcycle rides, THAT was one of the blog post ideas I had.  (Wrote myself out of the block, I did.)  Wednesday night, Hubby and I went for a ride with an area group and we all rode to Onamia for supper.  It was my first ride of the season and it was beautiful.  During a normal Minnesota spring, we would have been out before this, closer to the beginning of May, but it’s been too cold.  At one point during the ride, a small deer bolted down a fence line, trying to get away from the noise we were making, but made the mistake of running the same direction we were going, so couldn’t escape.  We were all worried that it would turn and head into the road.  That would not have been pretty.  Deer and cycles don’t mix.

French Exchange Student

Today we received a packet of information on the French exchange student who will be staying with us for a few weeks this summer.  Daughter signed up (with our permission and assistance, of course) through her French class.  The fun thing about the packet is that our exchange student included photos.  Surprisingly, she looks like she could fit right into our family.  According to the info we were sent, we now need to send our exchange student a letter explaining who we are and include photos as well.  We’ll start with snail mail, but our French student has email, so we’ll be able to send her more photos and info that way.  The info booklet said that European students don’t have the same unlimited access to the internet that Americans do, so we’ll have to keep this in mind.  This whole experience is an adventure for us and I’m pretty sure the few weeks we have our guest will whip by.  Time to brush up on my high school French.

Sweeney Todd

Holy man!  I watched Sweeney Todd last night with Hubby and Eldest Son and Young Son #2.  Daughter was sleeping over at a friend’s house.  She’s glad we have the movie for a week because she wants to see it too.  Let me tell you, Johnny Depp deserves an award for being one of the finest actors ever.  The guy inhabits a role, which I’ve noticed is an attribute found more often in British actors than in American ones.  I was on the edge of my seat every time he whipped out one of his straight razors as Sweeney Todd.  The amount of trust a person placed in the hands of a tonsorial artist (barber) during the time of straight razors was immense.  Imagine baring your throat to a man with a sharp blade.  After watching Sweeney Todd, there’s not a chance you’ll ever be willing to do this.  I wondered aloud to Hubby about Alan Rickman, who plays Judge Turpin, trusting Johnny Depp to shave him during the movie.  Hubby said, “They probably used dull blades for filming.”  Knowing Johnny Depp’s devotion to his craft, I doubt it.  He and Sacha Baron Cohen, who plays a barber named Pirelli in the movie, probably both had training in the use of a straight razor.  Depp wouldn’t settle for anything less.

Alan Rickman played one creeeeeeepy judge.  Honestly, I wanted to shower after watching him and his henchman Beadle, played by Timothy Spall, perform in the movie. Rickman is like Depp in that he is a consummate actor who makes you believe.  He’s one of my favorite on-screen villains.

Helena Bonham Carter was the charming and practical Mrs. Lovett, who made the worst pies on Fleet Street, until she had some help from Sweeney Todd.  There’s a fabulous series of scenes in which Mrs. Lovett is singing of her dreams for her and Sweeney Todd, including her plans for them to have a house by the sea and to get married.  The costume changes during this portion of the movie are delightful and exhibit director Tim Burton’s quirky habit of juxtaposing the light-hearted with the dark.  The costumes are colorful and fun, but Depp and Carter are still wearing their dark eye makeup with pale faces and ratty hair.  It’s priceless and one of the signature stylistic devices of Burton, who is truly a one-of-a-kind director.

I heartily recommend this movie, but not for wee little kids.  Every time Sweeney Todd slashed a throat, I had to cover my eyes because Burton does not leave this to the imagination.  And my neck hurt vicariously after watching the bodies hit the ground.

The Beauty of the Internet

Now that I’ve got a Facebook profile, I’ve smacked into one of the beautiful realities of the internet:  Age means nothing online. I’ve always been aware of this on a subconscious level, but Facebook brought it home to me when my daughter’s friends started friending me.  Me.  A mom.  In an earlier era, I’d be considered an old can’t-have-anything-to-do-with-her fogie.  Think of the Codename: Kids Next Door cartoon and you’ll know what I’m talking about.  Adults were the enemy.  Being a teenager was about separating yourself from uncool adults.  All that is out the window with the internet.   Anyone can contribute to the internet.  Anyone can talk to anyone else, regardless of age or nationality or gender.

Of course, I’m not so naive as to believe that there aren’t people online who will take advantage of this situation.  How many guys have been caught on To Catch a Predator because of soliciting sex from teens online?  For that reason, those of us who are responsible adults have to monitor our behavior when it comes to communicating with someone we think may be under the legal age of an adult.  I, for one, won’t be the one to initiate friending any of my daughter’s friends on Facebook.  That’d be creepy.

My sister-in-law pointed out another beautiful facet of the internet.  It’s a great place to find medical information, especially on hard-to-treat and rare disorders.  She is suffering from the effects of a long-term Lyme disease infection.  It wasn’t diagnosed until she’d had it for a year, and if you know anything about Lyme disease, early detection makes treating it far easier.  The longer one has the infection, the more likely it will cause neurological problems and the harder it is to get rid of.  Another difficulty associated with a long-term Lyme infection is that insurance companies refuse to recognize it as a disease, so they won’t cover treatment.  (Don’t get me started on how crappy health insurance companies are.  They just want to take our money and deny anyone ever has any health problems.)

If I remember correctly, my sister-in-law didn’t have the tell-tale circular rash associated with early Lyme disease, so she didn’t realize she’d been infected.  Also delaying the diagnosis was the false negative she received on the first Lyme test she took.  Apparently, this particular test is used more often for diagnosis because it is less expensive.  The downside is that it returns more false negatives than the more accurate test.  The long and the short of it is that my sister-in-law has been able to find information critical to her care online that wasn’t available ten years ago.  Yay, internet!

In honor of my sister-in-law, here are some links on Lyme disease, how to prevent it, how to tell which ticks might give it to you, and what the rash might look like.  Get in the habit of doing regular tick checks if you spend any time outdoors.

CDC – Lyme disease transmission (pictures of ticks)

Lyme Disease FAQ

NASD – Lyme prevention

Lyme Disease Foundation – photos of rash

Backlog

I’m itching to write.  I have an entire backlog of stories waiting to be told.  I’m moving from one writing notebook to another, which happens every time I completely fill a notebook and need to start in on a blank one.  When I do the move, I transfer ideas that I still want to work on from the old and into the new, so they stay at the top of my mind.  Because of the backlog, it’s all getting unwieldy.  I’m having to leave story chunks in previous notebooks and make notes in the new notebook to look back.

In examining what I’ve transferred, I have a good nine solid story ideas, ones to which I’ve given a lot of thought, or perhaps started writing, or about which I’ve made copious notes.  Nine!  Crikey!  At least one of these threatens to become a novel using the general topic of extinction.  (Yeah, I know, I’ve got to narrow that down.)

In order for me to get crackin’ on any one of these ideas, I need to have an uninterrupted period of about two hours.  That’s not too much time and normally I have this on Mondays, however . . . and this is a big HOWEVER . . . I have to finish giving birth to the Greenville series before I can get back to writing fiction.

You might see a contradiction here in that I can manage to get plenty of blog posts written, but blog posts don’t take the same kind of focus that a fictional piece takes.  When I enter fiction, I enter it, becoming part of the world I’m creating, living inside my characters’ heads.  It takes more than a few minutes to do this and with the logistics of getting Greenville out, I’m not in the proper space/time continuum to do it.  This is why successful writers have agents and publishers.  The support structure allows them to maintain room in their heads for their writing projects.  That’s not the path this Jedi has chosen to take, however, so I shall keep plugging away and filling notebooks.

FtTP – Trent Reznor + The Movie Industry

I haven’t had any Frankensteining the Talent Pool (FtTP) ideas in a while, but one just came to me. Why hasn’t Trent Reznor pulled a Danny Elfman yet? You know, Danny Elfman from the ’80s band Oingo Boingo. He’s got read hair and pointy features that match his last name. After his gig with Oingo Boingo, Elfman went on to writing soundtracks for movies.

After discovering that snatches of Nine Inch Nails’ songs from Ghosts are running through my head, I realized that they are very much like movie scores. Most of NIN’s songs would work well with SciFi movies, what with all the industrial clanks and hisses, but what might be even more interesting is if Trent would write music for a Victorian-style drama, with all of its roses, violets, lace and fairy wings. It’s Trent’s haunting piano that leads me to believe that he could pull this off.

I’ve Caved

Dang!  I’ve caved!  I joined Facebook.  And all because of Nine Inch Nails.  You see, I saw on the band’s feed that they had a Facebook profile and when I clicked over, I saw that a discography was included, the very thing I was longing for on the band’s website.  I’d still like to see it on the NIN website with notes by Trent Reznor, but I’ll take what I can where I can get it.

Here’s what I’ve noticed about the web in general and about NIN in particular.  There are now a ton of easy-to-use applications that allow someone to have a web presence very easily.  Obviously, my blogs have given me a web presence and now that I’m on Facebook, I’ve expanded my reach.  You can have a Flickr account to post photos and a Cafe Press account to have a store.  I can’t even begin to touch the number of web apps out there that a person can take advantage of and most of them are free for at least the basic service.

This spring at work, my co-worker and I took an online Web 2.0 course called 23 Things on a Stick, which was run through our regional library system.  Through 23 Things, we were introduced to a smidgen of the wide variety of these online apps.  It was both cool and overwhelming.  The cool part is that a small nonprofit organization no longer has any excuse not to have a web presence.  A nonprofit can be online in the time it takes to start a blog or build a Squidoo page.  The overwhelming part was feeling like we should be taking part in everything, but we quickly shook that feeling because it was unproductive.  What we determined was that we had to choose among these apps carefully, that we didn’t have time to manage and maintain a whole bunch of services.  We want to select things that we can work into our existing structure without too much pain.  We are already blogging and we love it.  There are other things we want to do, but I’m the IT department at work (along with being a writer, exhibit builder, receptionist, tour guide, the bookkeeper, manager, publications designer etc., etc.), so when we want to add a web-based service, I have to devote a chunk of time to learning how to use it.  (There was no small amount of frustration involved with teaching myself html and css, believe me.)

NIN seems to be blanketing the web by using a bunch of these services.  The band has a channel on YouTube, a Flickr page, a MySpace page, and, obviously, a Facebook profile, which is how I started in on this topic.  Next thing you know, the band will be geocaching.   The point is that if you want to be effective in using a whole bunch of online apps, you’ve got to have the time to do it properly, and I’m just guessing here, but I bet NIN has a staff member who does nothing but this.

The Wild Man of Productivity

Ever since my husband finished his school semester a couple of weeks ago, he’s been a Wild Man of Productivity.  He planted our small garden plot, took a bunch of junk to the dump, took brush to the community brush pile, and trimmed out the kitchen door and painted it, along with painting some other trim in the entry way.  When I came home from work yesterday, I found a ladder against our dead maple tree on the boulevard and a giant pile of branches from said tree in the yard.  He was ridding the tree of branches so that it can be felled.  Not only had he done this yesterday, but he’d also traveled an hour round-trip to pick up some MDF (medium density fiberboard) for more trim.  As if this wasn’t enough for one day, he had also mowed the lawn.  Crazy, huh?  All of this activity is for a reason, though.  We will be having a French exchange student for three weeks this summer, starting in mid-June, and Hubby is using her arrival as a deadline for completing household tasks.  Nothing like a deadline for motivation.  Hubby did take a break today, though, not accomplishing much of anything.  Even a Wild Man of Productivity needs a day off.

Certificate of Assumed Name

I’ve done it. I’ve officially registered a Certificate of Assumed Name with Minnesota’s Office of the Secretary of State. I had to because when I start selling books, I’ll be operating a business and I didn’t want to do so under the name Mary Warner Publishing. There are waaaaaay too many Mary Warners in the world. Instead, I decided on Woo Woo Teacup Publishing as my business name. (Wonder why I chose that name. Hmmm. )

Once the certificate is filed and a copy sent back, then it has to be published in two consecutive issues of the legal section of a local newspaper. I paid for my notices this morning. I had called ahead and was told that the notices would be $50-$60 total for both of them. When I had to fork over the dough, suddenly the price was $82.32. Nice, huh? Turns out the local paper decided to add an extra column per page, which makes each article skinnier and longer. They charge length-wise per column inch. What a racket. I wonder when the Secretary of State will get with the program and realize that newspapers are dying and find a way to post the legals on the web. Sheesh.

Here’s another crazy thing. I think the Secretary of State’s Office is sexist. When I got the copy of my certificate back, it was addressed to my husband. While I love and adore my husband, this was irritating because he wasn’t listed on the certificate as an owner. Hubby was also irritated about this for the same reason. I’m not his property, after all. When I called the Secretary of State’s Office to ask what was up, here’s what I was told: It’s our policy to take the name off of the cover letter first, then we take it off the envelope, then we take it off the check (or was it check, then envelope?), and if we don’t have a name from any of those, then we take it off the certificate. Isn’t that ass-backwards? And it’s a bogus explanation, too, because the top name on our checks is mine. If my husband files a Certificate of Assumed Name, are they going to send me his notice? You can bet your buttons they won’t. Exactly when did women get the right to vote? Oh, yeah. 1920. Do you think somebody should tell the Secretary of State’s Office that women can also own businesses without being under the jurisdiction of a man? Fudge anyway!

Manufactured Holidays

Now that we are almost a week past Mother’s Day, I’ll let you in on a little secret.  I hate manufactured holidays.  You know, the holidays that marketers love because it gives them an excuse to sell you something?  Frankly, I’m not a very good consumer.  I’m a tightwad when it comes to spending money and I believe that our excessive and unnecessary consumption is what’s ruining our environment.  There!  I’ve said it.  And Marketers?  There’s not a thing you can do about it to convince me otherwise.   You could manufacture a holiday devoted entirely to the glory of being me and I’d tell everyone to save their money and have fun doing something free on my behalf.

In my estimation, Mother’s Day is a manufactured holiday.  I am a mother and I don’t need a special day wherein my children are supposed to bow down to me because somebody “out there” said so.  Any mother who demands this is probably a mother who breeds a lot of resentment in her children.

I’ve seen a couple other online stories that echo my sentiments concerning Mother’s Day.  One of them was posted by Seth Godin.   (Seth’s a marketing guru, no less, which just goes to prove that there’s an exception to every rule.  Not all marketers are for useless consumption.)

The other story – from MSNBC – talks about the founding of Mother’s Day by Anna Jarvis in 1908 as a way to honor her mother.  Even though Anna was the founder of Mother’s Day, she didn’t care for how it turned into a marketer’s dream, either.  From the article:

“. . . Jarvis became increasingly disturbed as the celebration turned into an excuse to sell greeting cards, candy, flowers and other items.

Jarvis became known for scathing letters in which she would berate people who purchased greeting cards, saying they were too lazy to write personal letters “to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.”

Before she died in 1948, she protested at a Mother’s Day celebration in New York, and was arrested for disturbing the peace.”

I suppose if Anna Jarvis can be arrested for disturbing the peace over a manufactured holiday, I guess I can get tetchy about it on my blog.

Bumper Sticker

I was driving behind a maroon Dodge Caravan yesterday and noticed it had a bumper sticker.  The bumper sticker said, “Not all who wander are lost,” which I thought was an incredibly cool saying.  I wander, but I sure as heck don’t feel lost.  When I see a bumper sticker that I’m attracted to (like the Darwin fish), I sometimes have the desire to meet whoever owns the vehicle.  Do you ever feel this way?

As for putting bumper stickers on my own car, I don’t do it.  I’m not sure why.  I always say it’s because I don’t want to devalue the car, or think that if someone who disagrees with my bumper sticker slogan buys my car, they’re going to have a tough time removing the sticker.  Both of these are pretty bogus reasons for not plastering bumper stickers on my car because when I buy a car, I operate it until it’s ready for the scrap heap.