First World Problems

I arrived home from two weeks in Ireland late Sunday night, only to discover that we had no phone service or internet in the house.  Then last night we had a power outage for over 8 hours  --- and still no phone or internet.
I was really grateful, however, that the water supply was working.  :)

(FYI: the telephone repair guy worked for over an hour today, since the *&^% Comcast people have been putting in new cables without taking care not to damage existing cables, making this the third time in 9 months my phone service has been down.  And, yes, the electricity's back on too.)

Sharing The Humor

A few weeks ago, I got a tweet with a link in it to a buzz feed article about a hilarious Pinterest board.
(*pauses for a moment to reflect on how very meaningless that sentence would've been a decade ago*)

Blogger and would-be author Tiffany Beveridge is on Pinterest, like hundreds of thousands of other women (and some guys, too!).
She has a board about her imaginary, well-dressed toddler, Quinoa.  (Yes, she misuses the word "toddler," but the board is wonderful anyway.)  Here, she uses ridiculous fashion shots of children wearing clothes so expensive that their cost would feed an entire third-world family for months and makes fun of the pics to create character development for this fictional child.  What truly gives me warm fuzzies are the names she uses for the children: Quinoa, her BFF Chevron, Humboldt.  Hilarious.
Here, let me give you a sample or two:

She has captioned this picture thusly:

One time when Quinoa and I got separated in a busy train station, she thankfully remembered our safety training: stay in one place, look spectacular, and don't talk to poor people.

Isn't that great?
Here's another:

Quinoa and her BFF Chevron prepared a class presentation on The Captain and Tennille for Famous Person's Day.

And my favorite:

Sometimes when Quinoa is particularly well-dressed, she begins to levitate.

Go check out her board -- and laugh!

Can You Spot The Errors?

I pull my proofreading exercises for my students straight off the internet.  The trouble is, however, that sometimes the writing is so very bad that the kids can't figure out what to do to fix it.
Here are a few "good" examples of lack of copy editing I've found in the past few months.


“At age six, Ducharme's father hired two mermaids to swim up to a dock where the boy was eating his birthday cake.” -- from a Yahoo! news article about a reality show guy who likes mermaids. 4/3/13

Uh, but when Ducharme's father was 6, it's pretty unlikely that Ducharme himself was there.  I know some folks hit puberty early, but fatherhood at 6 is not too probable.

“A Memorial Day weekend storm has dropped three feet of snow on a New York ski mountain near the Vermont boarder.”  AP, Yahoo! News 5/27/13

Gee, I bet that renter was surprised.

 “We wanted to recognize our consumers as more than just moms, but also as women and give her a campaign that has her view Kraft salad dressings in a whole new way."  Yahoo! news article about Kraft salad dressing ad. 6/14/13.

And we're rockin' some MAJOR singular/plural confusion in this one, honey!  I had to read this three times to figure out what the writer was attempting to convey.


“Michael Romano is an American priest working in the Vatican's Secret Archives with a penchant for stepping over the line.” -- from the book blurb for  The Psalter by Galen Watson. 6/15/13.

I had no idea that archives could have a penchant for stepping over the line -- or for anything else, for that matter.

After being taken to a local hospital, nurses reported to police that the bandage had not been changed for some time....”  ksl.com news article about a bedridden person, 6/22/13.

Wait.  So the nurses had to go to the hospital before they could report to the police what had happened at the home of the mistreated bedridden person???!!!  What?!   This is the sentence mangling that occurs when people don't check their modifiers.


“Four women were killed in a rollover accident on Interstate 70 Saturday when the driver told police he dozed off at the wheel.” -- McKenzie Romero on ksl.com 6/22/13

Well, then, if the driver hadn't been so busy telling the police about his bad driving, those women wouldn't have been killed!!  Obviously!


“In addition to playing chess and reading, her mom said that she loves hanging out with friends, watch TV, and swim.” -- Yahoo! news article about a 13-year-old girl with a 162 IQ. 6/7/13

It seems to me that the writer should've asked the girl with the high IQ if she could explain to him parallels in the usage of gerunds vs. infinitives.

“Utah Lawmakers tackle teen suicide, bullying after deaths.”  Salt Lake Tribune, 2/20/13.


Why would you bully someone AFTER her/his death?  How does that even work?
Ah, yes.  Another problem with a modifier. *sighs*

Fortunately for my lesson planning, but unfortunately for all of us who have to read garbage like this, it's never very hard to find samples of un-proofread writing.
Do feel free to share in the comments section any you've found recently. :)

Guest Post: Martin Willoughby

I'm happy to be hosting Martin today!

How To Write Humour

There are lots of rules about writing humour, but there’s one that stands out from all the rest: If you’re not laughing, no one else will either. The second standout rule is aptly summarised by the playwright Alan Ayckbourn who said, ‘dramatic acting is easy compared to comedy acting’.  Why? Because everyone laughs at different things. That’s not to say there aren’t generalities that most people find amusing, the success of comedy shows such as Friends and Monty Python attest to that, but even then everyone will find something different in the show that they remember.

With a standup routine you can tell if it’s going well by the number of laughs you’re getting. You can then adjust your comedy routine accordingly, or, as Eddie Izzard, does, make a fake note on his hand to the effect of ‘Must remember not to do that joke again’.

Writing humour for a play, film, TV show or novel is more difficult than a standup routine as you have a far more general audience in mind than the relative few who attend comedy clubs, or those who find your brand of humour funny. 

First of all, find out what makes you laugh. Jot down films, comedians, etc. that make you laugh or smile, even when you’ve seen them a hundred times. For me one epic moment comes in a Bob Hope & Bing Crosby film where they’re sent into space. The capsule has been designed for monkeys and the feeding system goes, overfeeding them bananas and milk. I first saw that clip in the 1970s and it still makes laugh when I think of it now.

Once you’ve identified the things that make you laugh, see if there are any instances in your novel that lend themselves to a bit of humour in that vein and experiment.

For me, my first book, which was relaunched on 1^st July, started out as a piece of serious SF, but the characters lent themselves to comedy so well, I changed it and have been writing comedy ever since. There were ideas that just left me laughing out loud (my neighbours still give me odd looks), so I wrote them down and worked with them until they were funny even when I knew what was coming.

The second thing is not to elaborate. Don’t tell the reader every punchline; allow them to come up with their own sometimes. The best horror films use the audiences imagination to great effect and it’s a tool that a comic writer can use to good effect, such as the following piece from the second comedy I’ll be re-releasing later this year, Apollo the Thirteenth.

Carla remembered what God had said to her earlier and started to laugh, then whispered in Anne's ear. Anne started to laugh and said, “Oh that's good.”

As the novel never reveals what God has said, it allows the reader to make up their own joke based on what’s funny to them.

In summary, writing humour is about writing what makes you laugh, then making other people laugh too.  And you’ll always find someone who will find what you say funny.

..........................................................

Martin Willoughby has performed on stage in comedy, drama and pantomime and makes people laugh wherever he goes, sometimes deliberately. Tempers Fugit is his first book, published by Bubble Books is available as an ebook on Amazon, and will soon be available as a paperback.

Links

Blog:  http://mwilloughby.blogspot.co.uk/

Twitter: @Willabywriter

Alan Ayckbourn clip: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9709576.stm

Buy the book! : http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tempers-Fugit-ebook/dp/B00DNCOSWS/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1372589551&sr=1-1&keywords=tempers+fugit

Happy Independence Day!

Hey, Utah!  Let's leave all the fireworks to the professionals this year, okay?  Then maybe we won't have any new wildfires started!
Please????

The 2013 Utah Shakespeare Festival: Review of Peter and the Starcatcher

This is the last in a series of six reviews.  To read the others, simply click on "previous posts" on the blog, as the reviews have been posted the last six days running.

I love the Utah Shakespeare Festival!  Really, I do.  They do three Shakespeare plays and three non-Shakespeare plays every year.  One of those non-Shakespeare plays is often a very new play, and this year it was Peter and the Starcatcher.
This play was built up by the whole staff at the Festival; they raved over how wonderful it was.  I expected to love it.
I didn't.
In fact, I had to try really hard to find things I liked about it.
Let me give you the positives first:
1) The set is fantastic, and what the actors convey with minimal props is amazing.
2) The idea to put the musicians onstage in ships' prows is a stroke of genius.
3) Quinn Mattfield, who plays the pirate Black Stache, is freakin' HILARIOUS!!!

But that was about it for what I liked.
Here are the issues I had with the play:
1) The writers never decided who their intended audience was to be.
What I mean is that we have Peter Pan, a play about a very young boy (who still has all his baby teeth!), then we have the book Peter and the Starcatchers, wherein Peter is someone older.  Then we have this play.  It seems like it should be a play for kids, but the humor is very adult.  Sometimes it's sexual, such as when Stache -- who is most overtly camp -- digs into the Lord Aster's trouser pocket to get some keys.  And sometimes it's just waaay over kids' heads, with references to Phillip Glass operas and to Walt Whitman's poetry.  So, there's a very childish story told in a very adult way.  Huh?  It didn't work too well because it wasn't clearly a parody; it was part parody and part serious.
2) Although the play is supposed to be "good for girls," it's not.  First off, Molly is the ONLY female in the play: one girl in a man's world.  She is desperate to be a leader and to become a starcatcher -- which is a type of career.  But, when the play ends, she has to remind herself to "be a woman," and her father makes her leave everything behind.  The audience is then TOLD (not shown) that Molly will become the mother of Wendy and the other boys, that Peter will forget her and come back for her daughter.  This is a reminder that Wendy's mom has no adventures, has no career, merely exists for the sake of her children, and that Wendy is wanted only so she can be a mother to the lost boys anyway.  Thus, the message to girls becomes "have adventures now because later you'll have to give up everything so you can be a good mom, as moms never get to do anything adventurous and shouldn't be anything but moms."  Honestly, what woman wouldn't this offend?  It's negative about women with careers, moms who stay at home, and moms who have careers.  What kind of message is that for girls -- or boys -- to hear?  Gag.

So, should you see this play?  Yes -- if you are an adult and like adult humor and take this play as a messy parody.  It's not a play for kids.  It's not a play for anyone who's easily offended at sexual jokes.  Oddly enough, even though the play does have a mentality that childhood should be sweet and innocent, this is not a play for those who fear having their children grow up and lose their innocence.  In simple terms, if you don't want your "sweet and innocent" child to see bare-chested men playing mermaids with spinning starfish nipples, then you probably shouldn't take said child to this play.

Now the mermaids didn't offend me at all: the message of "women belong in the nursery" offended me a great deal.  And the confused state of "who is the audience for this play?" made me irritated at the bad writing.

If this play had been described and billed as Monty Python Does Peter Pan, I probably would've gobbled it up.  But because it was presented as a children's play with strong feminism -- and it failed to deliver on both  -- I didn't like it much, even though Mattfield is a freakin' camp pirate drag queen. ;)

More photos and all ticket info are available at bard.org.

The 2013 Utah Shakespeare Festival: Review of Twelve Angry Men

I have been reviewing the plays from the Utah Shakespeare festival all week.  This review is the 5th in a series of six.  If you wish to read the other reviews, simple go back or forward in time on the blog.

The Utah Shakespeare Festival does three Shakespeare plays and three non-Shakespeare plays every summer season.  One of the non-Shakespeare plays is generally a drama; this year, that drama is Twelve Angry Men.

Twelve Angry Men was originally created as a teleplay, performed before a live audience for Studio One TV in the 1950s.  It was later made into a movie and then into a stage play, but the stage play is more like the teleplay, as it is (obviously) meant to have a live audience.
It is an extremely intense play, and director David Ivers has chosen to keep it especially intense by having no intermission, so the audience is trapped in the same room with the 12 men and is carried with their emotions.
David Ivers also explained to those of us attending the first literary seminar that he chose to keep the play in the 1950s, with an all-white, all-male jury, because having women or persons of color would change how the situation is viewed by the audience.  One of the main points of the play, after all, is that  an all-white jury is trying a case in which both the defendant and the victim are immigrants -- although what race they are is never identified.
The play is about a jury who has listened to several days of testimony about a murder case in which a 16-year-old boy is accused of stabbing his father to death.  There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence and two semi-reliable witnesses.  As the play begins, 11 of the men are completely and totally convinced of the boy's guilt, but one man does not feel good about sending a boy to the electric chair when he (the juror) cannot convince himself that the case is so cut-and-dry.  This juror asks to go over the evidence again.  No one is pleased.
As they argue, however, several men begin to realize that they cannot be completely sure of the boy's guilt, either, and everyone's background and prejudices begin to play a part.

This is a fascinating play.  It is odd, also, that even though Ivers has kept every single detail (the set is fantastic) in the 1950s, the play still seems so very current right now.  Part of this is due to the fact that racial tensions never really leave us; they just switch races with area and time period.  Part of this is also that no character ever has a name in the play.  Not one.  Part of this is that every audience member will identify with SOMEONE: the hurt father, the logical man, the working man who hasn't had the education to keep up with the others, the young man who came from a slum, the man with prejudices, the older man, the immigrant, the shy man, etc.

This is NOT a relaxing play.  I was very tense after seeing it, and it took a good hour for me to calm down.  But this testifies to the success of the acting and directing.  Emotionally, I had a hard time remembering that this was fiction.

Five stars to Twelve Angry Men.  This is a superb production.

This photo, other photos of the show, and all ticket info can be found at bard.org.