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Uncertainty + 24-hour News Cycle = Wild Theories of Missing Airplane
It’s not often that the biggest story for two weeks and counting also doubles as a News of the Weird piece, but that’s what happened with the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 several years ago. It’s a true, real-life mystery. What happened to a 250-ton Boeing 777 and, more importantly, its 239 souls? Of…
Read MoreFebruary, that Crappy Little Month
The 1986 drama, “The Color of Money,” with Paul Newman and Tom Cruise (and directed by Martin Scorsese, based on a novel by Walter Tevis, who I mentioned in a previous blog) has a line in it that I’ve always remembered. After Vincent (Cruise) misinterprets something Fast Eddie (Newman) says, the older star clarifies:…
Read MoreDéjà Vu
Déjà Vu is a Classic Rock album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young featuring such iconic songs as: Woodstock, Our House, Carry On and Teach Your Children. It’s also a weird phenomenon that has rattled most all of us. Déjà vu, is French for “already seen.” It’s that dizzying, momentary flash of, “I’ve been…
Read MoreOut-of-the-Box Characters
The traditional plot model–setting, setup, lots of rising action all culminating in a story’s climax and resolution—is not too different from how many of us see our lives; we are the protagonists of our own narrative. Modernist writers like Virginia Woolf and Ezra Pound, and postmodern writers including Vladimir Nabokov, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and…
Read MoreLa Zona del Silencio
Have you ever had a strange feeling about a place you couldn’t immediately identify? Perhaps you felt it at that eerie abandoned plaza of a once-bustling town, or maybe you had a general sense of foreboding when you hit a particular stretch of land while walking through the sprawling acreage of a wilderness. You…
Read MoreWildies
Some of the best movies of the past three decades came from the successful writing partnership of Joel and Ethan Coen, responsible for “No Country for Old Men,” “The Big Lebowski,” and “Fargo,” among an impressively long list. When discussing their writing process in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, they mentioned an interesting…
Read MoreDETROIT SCHADENFREUDE
A federal judge just recently approved Detroit’s use of the bankruptcy laws to deal with the city’s staggering financial problems. This ruling will allow the city the freedom to pay pennies on the dollar to its creditors, and to significantly reduce its current and long term employee pension obligations. The decision is but the latest…
Read More4th Grade Lesson
When I was in the fourth grade, I was asked to help write a short Christmas play. (This pre-dated the ban on the reference to Christmas in schools). I fell in love with storytelling. This affinity for simple, straight-forward narrative has helped me throughout my professional and personal life. When I served as…
Read MoreThe Day After
Future social historians will look back at the 20th and early 21st Centuries and identify three socially transforming events in America: Pearl Harbor, the Kennedy Assassination, and 9/11. The day after Pearl Harbor, Americans realized they were no longer protected by two oceans and the Nation’s collective sense of security was transformed. The day after…
Read MoreWould You Believe Mayor Rob Ford as a Fictional Character?
Deep-sea creatures like the Anglerfish; string theory, which revealed through mathematics the possibility of multiple dimensions; the unlikely reality television careers of Gary Busey and Bruce Jenner – all these things might qualify for that wonderful Mark Twain quote: “Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”…
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