Taking after Daddy

When I was in junior high and high school, I was a proud member of the school’s drum corps. During my six years as a member of our school’s competitive marching band, we won six straight Massachusetts titles and two New England titles. When your school doesn’t have a football team, the marching band can become kind of cool.

In my tenure with the band, I marched in the Macy’s Day parade, the Rose Bowl and at Disney World.

Some of my best memories come from my marching band days.

It would appear that my daughter might be following in her Daddy’s footsteps.

I mean, she’s only two years old and stumbled upon this drum kit set up at the mall, but it almost looks as though she knows what she is doing.

Right?

Or am I just being one of those fathers?

A new plan for dealing with the never-ending coffee clichés

I know I have attacked the institution of coffee before and also immediately reconsidered that same position. But did you know that there are nine Dunkin’s Donuts within three miles of my home, and seven of them are located within my relatively small, suburban town?

My commute is about five minutes, and I pass two along the way.

Not to mention five Starbucks and an assorted of non-branded coffee shops.

The stuff is everywhere.

It’s also not uncommon for me to arrive at a meeting where the only beverage being served is coffee.

For the non-coffee drinker, it seems as if coffee can be found at every turn.

My complaint, however, has never been with coffee or the consumption of coffee, but once again, with the constant dialogue attached to coffee.

The comments, the complaints, the Facebook updates, the tweets, the laments, and the jokes about needing that first cup.

I can get through a single day without being clichéd to death with coffee.

That’s the crux of the problem. Drink as much coffee as you’d like, but could you all just stop talking about it so much, or at least find something new to say about it?

In order to make me feel better, I’ve come up with a solution:

I am going to echo every coffee comment, complaint and cliché with an identical statement, except I will replace the word "coffee" with "orange juice," a beverage which I consume almost every morning.

You tell me that you need a cup of coffee to wake you up?

I’ll say the same for that glass of OJ I drank this morning.

You tell me that it’s going to be a three cup day?

I’ll lament my decision to drink just a single glass of orange juice this morning.

Tweet something like "The Black Canister has been unearthed! Coffee is nigh (an actual tweet from today).”

I’ll tweet, “The oranges have been picked and squeezed. OJ is nigh.”

This echoing of coffee commentary will serve two purposes:

1.  Maybe after hearing these overdone, overused, clichéd coffee diatribes in a new context, coffee drinkers will consider reducing the number of times they talk about their beverage of choice on a daily basis.

Is this a likely outcome? No. But it’s possible.

2.  More important, it will amuse me, and in doing so, make me happy. It’s not uncommon for me to do something that is seemingly inane and meaningless in order to amuse myself, and while most people think these things are stupid and pointless, happiness is a commodity that is sorely lacking in many lives and one that I consider precious.

If I can do this and sprinkle a little joy into my life without hurting anyone (and perhaps engendering a smile or two from others in the process), I’m in.

My wife also thought the idea was amusing and approved of the plan.  Elysha often serves as my barometer in these matters, distinguishing between the amusing and silly ideas and the downright stupid and potentially offensive ones.

If only I paid better attention to her…

Hurricane Irene on the tongue

I took advantage of the excessive rain of Hurricane Irene to teach my daughter how to catch raindrops on her tongue.

Note that the sound effects were he doing.  She added them without my consent.

Your words are doing more harm than good

Today’s Living Social deal for Providence reads like this (with my added commentary):

In a city that's dripping with design (Cranston, Rhode Island?), it's sometimes difficult to define your own personal (font) style (Font? Is that supposed to be a play on words? The world’s first and hopefully last attempt at a font joke?). Walk away from the Wingdings (Another bad font joke? Seriously? And how many people will actually understand this unfunny joke and how many will be left wondering what the hell a Wingding is?) and into the salon with today's deal from Wil.O Design Studio in Cranston.

For $100, get a Brazilian blowout (What the hell is a Brazilian blowout? Do I even want to know?). Or sit for a women's haircut and eyebrow shaping for $27. Spend just $20 to mix that perfect shade of bronze without touching Photoshop (Seriously? A Photoshop joke, too? “I’ve got the perfect shade of spray-on tan for you and I didn’t have to use Photoshop to find it! Ha!”) with a full-body spray tan (Who does this anyway?). Armed with eco-friendly products and a fierce sense of what you need (Someone please explain what the hell a 'fierce' sense of what I need is), the artists at Wil.O know what it takes to stay unique in a copycat world (Spray-on-tan will keep me looking unique? Are you kidding me?). And, after getting confident with today's deal, crafting the next design standard needn't take more than a single mouse-click or pen-stroke (Could they have constructed a more convoluted and confusing sentence is they had tried?).

After reading the copy twice, I was compelled to send the following email to Wil.O Design Studios this morning:

To Whom It May Concern:

Your Living Social deal arrived in my inbox today. Though I do not currently require a full body spray tan or a Brazilian blowout, I would like to humbly offer my services in the future when it comes to writing ad copy for your business.  While I am certain that you are highly effective in your area of expertise, the copy for your Living Social deal leaves a great deal to be desired. For a small fee, I would be more than happy to put my expertise with the written word to work for you, crafting a clear, cohesive ad that will appeal to discernible readers everywhere or editing ad copy that you produce.

I’d be more than happy to send you a list of my credentials if you are interested.

Best of luck with your Living Social deal and with all future endeavors.

I’ll let you know if someone responds.

No buyer’s remorse here.

“Wait!” my wife said as she was heading upstairs to take a shower. She turned around, went into the living room and switched on the television. 

“What?” I asked. 

“I saw a commercial for the new Hard Knocks (HBO’s behind-the-scenes look at a NFL training camp).  I want to make sure we record it.”

Reaffirmation that I chose the right girl.

The best girl.

Amorphous, blabbering blobs do not sell books: Learning to write physical description

When I wrote my first novel, Something Missing, I was lost when it came to the physical description of characters, and the characterization of many secondary characters was entirely non-existent. No one who read my original manuscript could tell how old my protagonist, Martin, was, or anything else about him in terms of appearance. I’d venture to say that not a single word of physical description appeared anywhere in the first drafts of the book.

There were a couple reasons for this.

First, I possessed a genuine disinterest in physical description which had led to an inability to write it. When reading, I tend to scan the passages of  description, looking for where the action and dialogue pick back up. I am rarely concerned with how a character looks or even what the setting might be, and so I reflected this disinterest in my own writing.

I am also a strong auditory learner with very little visual memory. I can spend the entire day with my wife and kids and not be able to tell you what they are wearing once they have left my sight.

I often can’t tell you what I’m wearing unless I look down.

Conversely, I can remember everything that was said to me during a day, oftentimes verbatim, and I can recall conversations from weeks, months and ever years earlier with great accuracy. It sounds like a wonderful talent to possess, but those who know me best will tell you that it doesn’t make the nicest person at times.

Sometimes it’s just better to forget what someone has said and move on.

My agent helped me a great deal during the revision process of Something Missing in terms of physical description, and since then, I've gotten much better at it.

I am more aware of it and therefore better at writing it.

A couple of strategies have also helped in this regard.

Once I knew about my problem, I started keeping lists of physical descriptors that I could use later on. I would pick up ideas from books that I was reading and by scanning faces in restaurants and identifying previously unnoticed personal attributes. I would literally write things like, "Oh, there’s more than one kind of eyebrow" and "Women wear lots of different stuff in their hair!"  Eventually I started to find it easier to include these descriptors in my fiction.

I've also started searching for photographs online that best represented certain characters in my fiction order to help facilitate the process of describing their physical characteristics.

My current manuscript, for example, has a 16-year old punk girl in it, so I searched online for photos of punk teenagers, found one who looked about right, and saved it to my computer. I referenced this photograph a great deal at the onset of the book and now I have the image of this character firmly set in my mind.

There is also a flashback scene in my manuscript from the 1980's. Unaware of female fashion at the time, I used Twitter to ask what punk girls from the 1980's looked like and received a bunch of responses that I am now incorporating into the book.

Slowly but surely, I have overcome this obstacle.

As my books were later optioned for television and film, I was asked by producers, screenwriters and show runners who I envisioned playing Martin or Milo or some of the other characters from my novels, and for a long, long time I was unable to answer what should have been a simple question.

But since I had no real idea what my characters looked like, I was unable to envision an actor or actress to play them.

One producer asked, “I thought novelists envisioned an actor for each part in  their books?”

I didn’t have the nerve to tell him that all I ever envisioned was an amorphous, talking blob of humanity.

I’m better now, both because I have overcome many of the barriers to physical description, and because I am better prepared for these kinds of questions.

But the biggest lesson I learned through this process has been this:

Just because something isn’t important to the writer doesn’t mean it isn’t important to the reader. Writing is a two-way process. You write the story as you see and hear it, but then you must revise the story for how the reader will see and hear it.

Forgetting to do so, or worse, refusing to do so, will leave your reader annoyed and lost.

If you are lucky enough to find a reader for your single-minded, inflexible, presumably precious narrative.

Spitting in the eye of Hurricane Irene

The hurricane wasn’t exactly roaring when we went out to jump in the puddles, but the rain was most definitively hurricane rain.

I’m teaching my daughter to disrespect the power of Mother Nature.

We had some storm damage after all

One of these things are not like the other

My wife bought the new Sebastien Braun picture book Goldilocks and the Three Bears on Amazon yesterday.

While completing her purchase, she noticed the books that Amazon says are frequently bought along with Braun’s book.

They are:

Microcrafts by Margaret McGuire, which is described as a “step-by-step instructions for making tiny teddy bears, little ladybugs, petite porcupines, itsy-bitsy bikinis, and much, much more! Microcrafts shows crafters how to create dozens of miniature treasures, each no larger than a spool of thread.”

Negropedia: The Assimilated Negro;s Crash Course on the Modern Black Experience by Patrice Evans. The product description states that “Patrice Evans is The Assimilated Negro, a hyperobservant, savagely pop-savvy instigator bent on pranking the crap out of our modern racial discourse.”

Yeah. I can see where these books might fit well with a book that’s description reads like this:

“Goldilocks is walking through the woods one day when she comes across the three bears' cozy cottage. Inside she finds three delicious bowls of porridge cooling on the table. What will the bears say when they return to find that she has tasted every one? Sebastien Braun brings this much-loved traditional tale to life in a simple retelling for the very young. The second title in the Story House collection, this is the perfect introduction to a timeless classic for the very young.”

The lesson: You can kill mothers, fathers, and children galore. But don’t ever kill the dog.

I Am Legend is a post-apocalyptic science fiction film loosely based upon Richard Matheson’s novel of the same name. It stars Will Smith as one of the few survivors of a plague that has killed most of humankind and left many in a zombie/vampire-like state. It opened to the largest ever box office for a non-Christmas film released in December and was the seventh highest grossing film of 2007.

The film also sold 7 million DVD's, making it the sixth best selling DVD in 2008. However Warner Bros. was reportedly “a little disappointed” by the film’s performance in the DVD market.

And I’ll tell you why sales were disappointing.

The dog.

While helping to save Will Smith’s character from certain death, his dog becomes infected with the virus, and after much consternation, Smith’s character is forced to put the animal down.

It is the scene that prevents me from ever watching this film again, and I suspect it’s the scene that has suppressed DVD sales and has kept the film from being plastered all over the basic cable channels like so many other of Will Smith’s blockbuster movies.

It’s not the violence or gore of the scene, because there is none.

It’s because no one wants to see a dog die.

It’s that simple.

Kill mothers and fathers and children galore, and people will be more than happy to watch the movie again and again.

Smith’s blockbuster Independence Day is a perfect example. Millions of people are killed in that movie, including the President’s wife, who dies tragically under the watchful eyes of her husband and daughter.

A father gives up his life while his son listens on and a best friend dies while Smith’s character looks on and can do nothing.

And like I Am Legend, there is a dog in that movie, too. Once again, it’s a dog owned by Smith’s character. In fact, the two dogs look so much alike that they could be the same dog.

Perhaps they are.

And guess what?

The dog in Independence Day survives.

It appears in the final scene of the film.

And Independence Day airs on basic cable all the time.

Warner Bros. left a lot of money on the table when they decided to kill that dog in I Am Legend.

For a great many people, including me, that film became unwatchable the second time around.

Convenience would be a shoe shine boy and a bidet. Not an unlocked door.

I found this sign hanging on the restroom in the local Marshall’s department store.

Note that the restroom contains three urinals and two stalls. It’s a large restroom. Not a single person suite.

And thankfully, it is "unlocked for my convenience."

Unlocked for my convenience?

Someone explain this sign to me. Please.

And don’t tell me that it has something to do with department stores often requiring customers to obtain a key in order to use the restroom, because although this may be true, I still don’t need a sign telling me that the restroom is unlocked. It’s one of those things that are easily determined.

More importantly, it is assumed. The default for 99% of all public restrooms is unlocked.

And what if the restroom was locked to prevent theft? Would there then be a sign that reads:

Despite the inconvenience, the restroom is locked.

Probably not, even though informing me that the restroom is locked is slightly more helpful than telling me it’s unlocked. At least I wouldn’t push on the door a couple extra times or assume that it is occupied.

But worst of all is the audacity in attempting to take credit for something that is standard almost everywhere except for roadside gas stations and New York City fast food restaurants.

The restroom is unlocked for my convenience? Does Marshalls think it’s doing me some kind of favor?

Why not add:

For your convenience, the restroom is equipped with toilets and sinks and (in all probability) is stocked with toilet paper (though it would be wise to check and be sure before needing any).

Or how about adding some actual convenience to the restroom?

For your convenience, the restroom is equipped with televisions tuned to the latest sporting event as well as a shoe shine boy, a monkey with an accordion and a bidet.

Now that might warrant a sign.

Feeling uncertain about my chest

I like the song “Hey, Soul Sister” by Train a lot.

I’ve been listening to it this week as part of my evening run playlist, so I’ve had an opportunity to pay closer attention to the lyrics.

The second verse has left me feeling somewhat disconcerted.

Just in time, I'm so glad you have a one track mind like me You gave my life direction A game show love connection, we can't deny I'm so obsessed My heart is bound to beat right out my untrimmed chest I believe in you, like a virgin, you're Madonna And I'm always gonna wanna blow your mind

Untrimmed chest?

What the hell does that mean?

As a guy with a lot of hair on his chest, I can’t help but wonder if there is something I’m supposed to be doing with my chest hair that I’m not.

Have I failed in the personal grooming department for all my life when it comes to chest hair?

A little help, please?

The Wikipedia entry on "receptionist" is fascinating. Little did I know that it would lead me to the body of Christ.

I find it amusing when someone says that they work “in reception.” As if reception is a department akin to accounting or marketing or IT. In truth, I’ve only had one person ever say this directly to me, but the phrase came up in conversation last week, and I’ve heard it referenced before. I find this seeming deliberate avoidance of the word receptionist slightly offensive to receptionists everywhere.

When I managed a McDonald’s restaurant, I didn’t tell people that I worked in food service management or that I worked for a Fortune 500 company.

I said, “I manage a McDonald’s restaurant.”

You’re a receptionist.  There’s nothing wrong with that.

If you think there is, get another job.

In the process of writing what I thought would be a short post, I searched the phrase in reception online and returned thousands of hits.

Most interesting among them was a Wikipedia entry on receptionists that sounds like it was specifically written by a receptionist who loves his or her job a little too much.

It’s not your typical, passionless Wikipedia article. It reads like a sixth grade term paper. In terms of irony, obtuseness, and sheer entertainment value, it’s worth a read.

I’m equally fascinated by the photos of the two receptionists used for the entry.

 

Does this man (working at the Hampton Inn Suites based upon the data contained within the photo) and these two women know that their images have been used to help illustrate the meaning of the word receptionist?

Even more compelling:

Is the partially concealed woman in the second photo annoyed that her colleague has received front billing?  Has she always been jealous of her prettier desk mate?  Did this photograph sadly reinforced these feelings of inadequacy and self doubt?

Even better, are any of these people (I strongly suspect Mr. Hampton Inn Suites) the author of the Wikipedia entry?

I think it’s entirely possible.

Paragraphs like this would seem to support this theory:

At times, the job may be stressful due to interaction with many different people with different types of personalities, and being expected to perform multiple tasks quickly.

Sounds like someone complaining about his job to me. Perhaps a desk clerk at a busy Hampton Inn Suites in New York?

Or how about this paragraph?

A receptionist position… could be perceived as having a certain veneer of glamour with opportunities for networking in order to advance to other positions within a specific field. Some people may use this type of job as a way to familiarize themselves with office work, or to learn of other functions or positions within a corporation. Some people use receptionist work as a way to earn money while pursuing further educational opportunities or other career interests such as in the performing arts or as writers.

See that? Pursuing other career interests such as writers?

The writer of Wikipedia entries, perhaps?

And a veneer of glamour? C’mon!

This paragraph reads like a guy trying to explain to his parents why their son, a graduate from Hofstra with a degree in philosophy, is working the front desk at a Hampton Inn Suites.

“It’s just temporary, Mom. It’s paying the bills while I work on my career. I’m up for a small part in an off-off-off Broadway production of a modern day adaptation of The Tempest, and Billy and I are writing a screenplay about two slackers living in a Volkswagen. This is how people get started in the business.”

In fact, the whole entry on receptionists reads like the first draft for a pamphlet designed to elevate the esteem of the position of receptionist to prospective high school student everywhere.

It really is an amusing read.

And I’m not done.

The following two sentences appear along the top of the entry:

This article is about an employee. For those who believes in the doctrine of receptionism, see Receptionism.

There is so much to be said about these two sentences.

First, “This article is about an employee.” One specific employee? Perhaps Mr. Hampton Inn Suites? An odd choice of words, to say the least. And it sure as hell sounds like something the guy in the photograph would say based upon the nothing I actually know about him.

Then there is the grammar problem in the second sentence (“For those who believes”), but even more interesting is the implication that only those who believe in the doctrine of receptionism are permitted read about it.

For those who believes in the doctrine receptionism, see Receptionism?   

If I don’t believe in receptionism, I can’t click?

Naturally, I clicked, dragging me further into the wormhole that is Wikipedia.

Receptionism, it turns out, is a Christian theological doctrine which states that in a Eucharist service, the bread and the wine do not transform into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ until they enter a person’s mouth.

Apparently this has caused quite a bit of hullabaloo in various religious circles for reasons I don’t quite understand.  Read for yourself and see if you can make any sense of it.

I’m left thinking this:

If you truly believe that bread and wine are magically transformed into the actual blood and body of a man who died more than 2,000 years ago, arguing over when this magic takes place amounts to little more than the splitting of hairs.

Thus ends my journey through Wikipedia for another day.

Friends don’t let friends post creepy video messages on the Internet to women half their age

And just like that, Emma Stone is suddenly the least fortunate starlet in Hollywood.

Carrey claims that the video was supposed to be funny and was made to promote his new website, but the video is not funny.

Even if he was attempting to be funny, that does not make it any less creepy.

“I was trying to be funny” is never an excuse for acting like a dirt bag.   

Kitchen disco!

There are lots of good reasons to embrace my role as both a husband and a father. But rarely do they come together so perfectly:

Help me choose my column for McSweeney’s

The very funny and popular website McSweeney’s is running its annual column contest, and I am planning to enter. 

The guidelines are thus:

We are looking for writing that is engaging and interesting, in a “we know it when we see it” way. It would probably be a mistake to look at our current columns and try to replicate them. We love those columns, but they came about by authors simply following their own paths. Write about subject matter you’re interested in, in the way you find most compelling. Our site is primarily known for printing funny things, but columns need not be comic in nature. They just need to be good reading. Please take your time to make your submission as good as possible. One of the criteria we’re looking for is a writer who is reliable and obsessive over their own work.

With this in mind, I have been assembling a list of column ideas and would love to know what you think would make the best column. 

Here are some ideas so far:

1.  A column on how perceptions change after you become a father

My recent post about Dirty Dancing is an example of what this column would be like.  The goal of the column would to provide amusing but accurate accounts of the way in which fatherhood can radically shift the way a person once viewed something.  Items from my own life and from pop culture would be used as subject matter for future columns. 

2.  Sequel protection

I’ve been working on a series of posts designed to protect future generations from bad sequels in both movies and books.  Each column would describe the reasons why you should avoid a specific sequel while also providing a synopsis of the important cultural references that may be missed by not watching the sequel. 

For example, I would advise future generations to only watch the the first and third Indiana Jones films, but I would explain (among other things) the whole heart-ripping-out powers of the high priest in the film since it is occasionally referenced in other films and books and is the signature moment of the movie. 

3.  Literary analysis of toddler’s fiction

I recently posted a literary analysis of my daughter’s first story, and it proved to be surprisingly popular.  I could do the same in future posts, using my daughter’s stories (provided she tells me any more) and stories submitted by readers as source material.  I could also analyze some of the stranger nursery rhymes that my daughter is currently reading like Hickory Dickory Dock. 

Or perhaps you have liked something else that I’ve written in the past that I could expand into a column?

Suggestions are appreciated!

What is your favorite number? Favorite color?

Want to know how to annoy kids of all ages? When they ask you for your favorite number or color are, tell them that you don’t have one. It completely disrupts their understanding of the world. For some, it’s as if the entire planet has shifted on its axis and the apocalypse is near.

What makes it even better is I’m not lying when I say this.

I have no favorite number, and I have no favorite color.

I tell the kids that my preferences are based upon context.

Am I playing blackjack? Then my favorite number is 21.

Am I eating hotdogs? In that case, two is just right.

Are we talking salary? If so, my favorite number is the largest one available.

It all depends on the situation.

Same goes for colors.

If I’m trying to hide in the forest at night, black is my favorite.

If I’m choosing a color for my wife to wear, white is best.

If we’re talking about my front lawn, I prefer green.

But say this to a class of elementary school students and watch many of them lose their minds. They will argue, complain, whine, plead and insist that I choose one.

A student once wrote an essay on why I should have a favorite color.

But I hold firm on my lack of preference.

NPR’s Robert Krulwich has been writing about a mathematician’s recently project to collect the favorite numbers of people from around the world.

You can participate in the survey here.

Krulwich’s latest post includes some of the more interesting reasons why participants in the survey have chosen their favorite number. As always when it comes to Krulwich, it’s worth a read.

And just for the record, there is a box that I was able to check in the survey indicating that I do not have a favorite number, so I’m not alone in my lack of preference.

Is this sufficient visual evidence to determine a person’s IQ?

You go to the gym, presumably to exercise.

But instead of parking your car in one of many the available spots at the rear of the parking lot (as seen in photo #3) or in the empty adjacent parking lot not visible in these photos, you choose to:

1. Park illegally.

2. Park poorly.

3. Partially block a crosswalk.

4. Park about 30 feet from an available parking spot. 

4. Park close enough to the front door of the gym to eliminate the 20-40 extra steps required to park like a civilized human being, even though you have come to the gym to exercise.

I don’t normally like to judge based upon so little, but Is it wrong to assume, based upon this evidence alone, that the driver of this car is a stupid, self-centered, illogical moron?  

  

Stop counting words

I would like to offer an unsolicited, probably unwanted piece of advice to many of the writers who I meet in real life and especially on Twitter: Stop counting words.

Stop setting word count goals.

Pay no attention to those numbers at the bottom of your screen.

Please don’t get me wrong. There is no one in the world who believes in goal setting more than I do.

I post my New Year’s resolutions on this blog for all to see.

I work as a life coach to help others set and achieve goals for themselves.

The very first assignment that my students are given each school year is to establish a list of short, intermediate and long term goals.

I am writing a memoir that focuses specifically on goal attainment.

Goals are my thing. I set realistic goals and impossible goals. I modify, expand, and clarify them constantly. Most of my day is spent in the attempt to achieve a goal.

That said, the fixation of many writers on a daily, hourly, or even minute-by-minute word count (which I see on Twitter all the time) seems highly counterproductive and leads me to ask:

Okay, you wrote 500 words in the last 30 minutes.

How many of those words are good?

How many of those sentences were good?

Why did you stop writing to post the result online?

Why were you even watching the clock or the word count while you were writing?

Wouldn’t it be better to simple get lost in the story and forget about words and clocks?

Why would you ever want to leave your story to post a word count on Twitter?

Will that somehow make it a better story?

Do you think Dickens or Twain or Austin were counting words?

Most important of all, is word counting making you a better writer?

I don’t think it is.

What I would like to propose instead is this:

Sit down and write for as much time as you have. Write from the very first second until the very last second. Use all of that time to work on your manuscript. Instead of focusing on the number of words and the time it takes to write them, just focus on the story. The quality of the sentences. The development of plot and character.

No one cares how long it took Twain to write Huckleberry Finn or Shakespeare to write Hamlet or Toni Morrison to write Beloved.

Write a great book in the time it takes to write a great book, whether that be one year, five years or ten years.

Stop looking at those numbers on the bottom of your screen. Cover them with tape if necessary.

Pay more attention to the words above.

Pay all your attention to the words above.

Overwhelming evidence of insanity

I am not the first person to question out-of-context quotations. Having been victimized by the deliberate mis-characterization and outright altering of written statements, I know how easy it is to paint an inaccurate and unfair image of a person simply based upon out-of-context statements that a person has made. But there comes a time when the ludicrous, inane and frightening statements become so numerous that you can’t help but wonder what the hell is wrong with this person.

Michele Bachman has just about reached that point for me.

And while her defenders may say that any political figure can be caught off guard and misspeak when communicating to the degree that someone like Bachman does, there simply aren’t the enormous number of blunders coming from the mouths of politicians like President Obama and John McCain and Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney.

Yes, they misspeak. Yes, they flip-flop on positions. Yes, they pick and choose the facts that best suit their argument.

But I’m talking outright stupidity and insanity.

Bachman has it. These other do not.

Here are just three of the quotes that I have seen recently that have given me great pause.

PASSIVE AGGRESSIVE, CONSPIRACY THEORY BASED LEADERSHIP "I find it interesting that it was back in the 1970s that the swine flu broke out then under another Democrat president Jimmy Carter. And I'm not blaming this on President Obama, I just think it's an interesting coincidence."

PARANOID, HOMOPHOBIC DELUSION "Normalization of gayness through desensitization. Very effective way to do this with a bunch of second graders is take a picture of 'The Lion King' for instance, and a teacher might say, 'Do you know that the music for this movie was written by a gay man?' The message is: 'I'm better at what I do, because I'm gay.'"

FAILURE TO UNDERSTAND BASIC US HISTORY "But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States."