B squadron CLY in Egypt 1915

Well, work has heated up in a number of ways. Mostly meaning that I am working too much, or working odd hours.

The more interesting thing is that I have made a connection with my mother’s cousin in England and we are exchanging information on our ancestors. My grandfather and his father were brothers and both served in the British Cavalry in WWI. His Dad served with The City of London Yeomanry and I wonder if the brothers served together in that unit. It seems likely as my grandfather mentioned serving in Egypt and in Northern France and my cousin John (once removed) confirmed that his father did the same. Perhaps they were in different units that happened to serve in the same locations, but that seems unlikely.

Interesting to me is that I have inherited my grandfather’s military spurs. Those spurs have traveled to foreign lands such as France, Palestine and Egypt – three places I’d like to visit as well…

Found out such family tidbits as my Great grandmother died as a result of a sledding accident. How could that happen, you ask? well, she cut her finger while riding a toboggan. That eventually led to a n infection that ended up infected (gangrene) and death at a relatively early age. Be careful out there folks.

Got the interesting photo to the right from a website on The Yeomanry, who were known as the Roughriders. Name came about because a few of the lads rode with Teddy Roosevelt… Is there a chance my grandfather and great uncle John were in that group? Guess I’ll never know for sure, but they could be.

Other news here is that I got a “new” motorcycle. Been out for a ride and also doing the commute on it. 50 MPG and easy to park in Charleston. Win win win.

my 2005 Vstar 650 Classic

It’s beautiful to ride nearly all year long with no fear of frostbite.. ever.

Also spent some time with my youngest girl today. Went to her place to fix her bike chain and then we went shopping. Fun times. wish my other kids would move south. miss them. Speaking of the others, Happy early birthday to Caitlin and Zack!

If you are not living on the edge, you are taking up too much space.

Life has been very busy for me with my new job at MUSC. Working lots of hours and trying to relax in my off time, so I am not online as much as I used to be. As life settles in a bit for us in Charleston, I hope to resume more of that online and offline fun. Next show at theatre99 is April 7th at 8pm, 3 on3 improv competition. Come out and support my group, Combo Plate!

Interesting piece on Fox News that got Judge Napolitano fired. Dare you question the powers that be?

I think that there is a great deal of truth in this video. Politicians are all cut from a similar cloth and generally we are choosing the lesser of two evils and policies end up being very similar. Anyone who thinks that the government is run for the good of the people is fooling themselves. Government and the decisions made are all about money and who is paying who off.

I am not a Ron Paul fan by any means. I do believe in many things he speaks about, but also think his views on religion and government are disturbing. He has said he would cut funding to planned parenthood even though 97% of what they do is providing health care and information to the poor. It is also beyond doubt that he reviewed the racist remarks in his newsletters prior to publication.

I also believe that, positive aspects notwithstanding, he probably wouldn’t get much accomplished if he was elected since he doesn’t have support of either party. Could he be a neutral unifying force in the white house? Doubtful.

And a final thought. If you are going to be “pro life” you should be pro life, for life. If you care so much for life prior to birth, support that same life once breath is taken.

If you don’t want abortions happening be strongly in favor of contraception and education. Sex is going to happen. You can try to fool yourself that abstinence is the answer, but it’s not. The best way to prevent abortions is to support contraception. And for the record, no one is pro death, except the folks supporting the death penalty. No one is pro abortion. It is a terrible thing, but if it is made illegal it means rich folks wanting that option would fly out of the country to make it happen and poor folks would be in the hands of butchers.

To show your support for life, adopt an unwanted or orphaned child.

Many years ago I learned the philosophy of the shit sandwich. Sorry probably should have warned you of the extreme language on today’s blog entry. Okay, not extreme.

The shit sandwich is a management technique for corrective action with workers. You make your point, they learn their lesson and everyone moves off and you future interactions are all still pleasant because you handled the situation well.

Here it is in a nutshell. Always surround a criticism with two bits of positive feedback. This works like a charm. The positive bits have to be sincere; you can’t just say the words; you have to mean them. They have to be just as true and sincere as the center piece of the puzzle.

~~~

Hi John. How are you?

John: Okay… what’s up?

I noticed that your productivity was well above the average for this work center. I wanted you to know that you are doing a good job. I appreciate that.

John: well, thanks. I like to keep busy it makes my day go faster.

One thing I have to bring up though is that you keep an eye on quality. Sometimes when people work fast they miss some details. We had a couple issues with piece count per crate. Sometimes they were off by a few pieces. Can you try to keep that in mind moving forward?

John: I thought my counts were good.

Most of them were accurate, but we are trying for one hundred percent on this. Oh, by the way Chuck was telling me you showed him a quicker way to do step A. That’s great for teamwork. Thanks for helping out the new guy. It makes his job easier and helps our team reach the production goals.

John: Yeah, well he looked like he was struggling a little.

He’s doing well now. Thanks. have a great afternoon.

~~~

John gets back to work happy. this same thing works with kids, coworkers, parents, spouses, or anyone. Arrival and departure are both highlights, the middle is constructive and mission is accomplished. The “bad news” or negative aspect is sandwiched between two positives.

- – - -

And here’s the thing. From the most confident person to someone who trembles at the thought of confrontation or even conversation we all are riding on the edge of our egos. Small words and actions compound to either build us up or tear us down, and unfortunately the tearing down seems to be the easier of the two operations.

I ran cranes on construction projects and on demolition projects and I can tell you that buildings are a lot like egos. The build is slow and methodical and the tear down is generally quick and messy. Such is life. You may consider criticism to be constructive, but truth be told it has to be managed or it will be mangled. This goes just the same for trust.

To deliver a message to a loved one or a co-worker effectively and positively consider the shit sandwich.

This is my “thought for the day” feel free to share or comment.

So, we had a “fun day” of training on Friday, which involved team building and getting to know each other, along with a few video clips and some teachings on advanced personalization techniques. But the most interesting part for me was the trivia.

I’ll pause here for a bit of a tangent (what a surprise, right?) Trivia nights are a big thing here in Charleston. Don’t know if they are big in other cities, but I know we really didn’t have this sort of thing up in Reading. It might be a nationwide trend for all I know, but I’ll describe it in brief in case it’s not. People go into bars and play team trivia. No use of iPhones or technology, just brain power (?) or not, of the team members. A coordinator of events announces the trivia question and starts a song (they also act as a DJ of sorts) and after a song the teams have to submit answers and a number of points they are betting. At the end of the night there is a winning team and they get a gift certificate to the bar for like ten dollars or a free meal or some such prize. It’s free to play and sort of fun, so there you go. An alternative to karaoke, is how I see it. I’d rather sing, since trivia is not my strong suit.

So back to the story, our team does mediocre. Whatever, it’s just for fun, but I am somewhat competitive. A question is We all know Count Chokula, the breakfast cereal. What other characters have cereal in this series, and as a bonus, two characters are no longer in production. What were those character’s cereals? Answer is at the end…

But there were all kinds of weird cereals I remember. I liked Freakies. I still remember the theme song

we are the Freakies, we are the freakies

and this is our freaky tree.

You’ll never miss a meal

Cause you’ll love our cereal.

But what other weird shit went on back in the 70′s and 80′s when I was growing up?

Barby’s gay boyfriend Ken got an earring. Then that went away…

GoBots went away to be replaced by Transformers. (There is no GoBot Movie, now is there?)

Wacky Packages mocked marketing material.

We never wore bike helmets and didn’t even know anyone who had one. (and survived)

I made Creepy Crawlers with molten plastic and a baking surface that would easily give you third degree burns.

We made “Cat’s Eyes” with yarn and Popsicle sticks and then gave them to our Moms, like they needed some new piece of crap to hang on the wall.

We had Clackers, until stories starting circulating about them “exploding” and killing some kid. Then they were gone…

Does anyone remember a tie dyed looking goop that you used to blow up like a balloon using a thin red straw that looked like a coffee stir stick? The “balloon” you would blow up like a glass blower sort of, but it was sort of sticky and once it was blown up it always would develop leaks that expanded until your work was a sticky deflated mess?

Why were people obsessed with Evel Knievel so much so that we had an entire toy line, even of his rocket bike that never jumped the Snake River Canyon, let alone the Grand Canyon?

Why did GI Joe ever get Kung Fu Grip? and more importantly, why did he shrink to half the original size?

Does anyone remember the Hair Bear Bunch? And how did they get away with having an invisible motorcycle? was a motorcycle too tough to draw, so the animators said “fuck it, we’re just making it invisible”?

Does Gnip Gnop really need to make a come back?

Who else had a Sizzler race track?

A switchblade comb? Really? This was a must have for the cool kid who aspired to be Fonzie. (not to be confused with Fozzie Bear)

We played with lawn darts and no one was stabbed ever….

Corn hole had a whole other meaning altogether. It wasn’t some lawn game (at least not in our neighborhood)

In the summer we left home early in the morning and didn’t come home until dinner time, and I doubt Mom gave a crap where we were and I know she never worried about strangers abducting us..

I know there were other odd things going on. Do you have any to contribute? leave a comment and share them. Thanks!

Contributed to the list – Pet Rocks. There was good use of a few dollars…

So it’s Fruit Brute and Yummy Mummy. See photo —>

But our instructor, the entertaining and knowlegable Rebecca google image searches yummy mummy, but somewhat pornographic images come up on the search results. She quickly closes the window. Ha. Fun stuff.

So I am reading about making characters more real. One downfall of characters in a book or in a movie is that they are two dimensional. (even if they are in a 3D movie.)

Inspiration

So to develop characters further it is suggested that you ponder a few questions about them and number one of the list is their birthday. I’ve never considered this question before. I’ve written a book (Someone Else’s Tomorrow) and have a completed screenplay, one in the works and also have a  musical stage play halfway done, but this birthday thing could be a really good idea for fleshing out a fictional character. When were they born and who else was born that day.

You might take this from a Zodiac-type perspective and that’s cool too. It adds another dimension as well. Capricorns are:

Practical and prudent
Ambitious and disciplined
Patient and careful
Humorous and reserved
Pessimistic and fatalistic
Miserly and grudging

I don’t know, that’s just what one website said, but then you narrow it down. A character is born on January 8th (my birthday for this example) and shares the birthday with Stephen Hawkin. Am I like Stephen? How is the character like Stephen. But wait, Elvis was also born on January 8th, and David Bowie.

Okay, each of those is very different from the other, but are all of them ambitious and disciplined? Or miserly and grudging?

Am I? We are all complicated combinations and none of it may have anything to do with the signs of the Zodiac, our birthday or any other random fact, but those can all be used (by writers) to give traits and flaws and life to a character. You can use this to turn Pinocchio into a real boy.

I’m not an instructor of writing by any means. I think you have to pass a threshold to give other people advice. Have a book published that sells well. Have a screenplay optioned or even produced, then tell me what you did right. (and even then sometimes success can be a fluke and your advice would be shit. ) But I am passing this on with my thoughts, maybe just to ingrain them into my character building process.

What else makes us what we are? Certainly environment. Considering parents, siblings, peers, neighborhood and schooling adds to the depth, but you have to start somewhere, so birthday is a fairly easy thing that can add a lot. Who shares your birthday is an okay place to check out some folks who may help shape your characters.

It may be easier to focus on one person there. I think if you start taking too many bits and pieces you might end up with a character without cohesion. This could also work in a reverse fashion. I want my character to be like Wesley Snipes in Blade, so maybe I’ll look at Wesley’s birthday, see who shares it, and build from there.

This could be a total procrastination time suck if I let it, but I think to take the five or six main characters and really build them as individuals with their own motivation and back story will help. It certainly would help me as an actor to learn what drives behavior.

When I was doing the character building improv workshop I talked about posture and mannerisms. Starting out with how a character walks and behaves physically is a huge part of the visualization of who they are. For films and theater presentation is huge. A man limps into a room. Why is he limping? Did he just finish a marathon and is sore, or does he have a birth defect, or just a rock in his shoe or a bunion? A light limp could have a huge back story. Make it real. He was in a car crash as a child and now is terrified of riding in cars. Street noise invades his dreams and he is an insomniac. How does that impact his conscious life? Does he drag throughout the day? Is his limp an indicator? His foot drags and so does his day, and his life. He’s a pessimist.

Who is the most famous pessimist of all times in your world? Sigmund Freud was one. What influenced his life? What were his parents like? How could those things be added to the car crash victim?

I’m not really writing all this for anyone reading this, although it might make some aspiring writers think. I’m writing it to make me think.

Does your birthday suit you or could a specific birthday suit your character?

I am on page 45 of my newest screenplay (working title is Elemental Terror) and am looking at various ideas on development. An interesting post I read was over at MovieOutline.com which is called “Rewrite your script” and is full of interesting ideas on doing just that. It also is giving me some ideas on improvements to the existing 45.

Brains!

I really have to outline the entire plot, which is something I haven’t done before for a screenplay. I have a couple books outlined and never written, and most times it seems like words just flow and the ideas pour forth sort of like Niagara Falls. But sometimes there is a drought. Not on this one, but sometimes words don’t come. At that point what works for me is moving on to something else briefly and then revisiting.

That something else might be another writing project, or it might be reading a book on a similar subject or on writing in general. It also can be watching a movie along the same subject line or genre or perhaps even a film on film.

I just watched Chump Change, which wasn’t a great film, but was quirky and interesting enough to hold my attention. The funniest part for me was that the main character wrote a screenplay and then went into rewrite hell as everyone at the studio and anyone even loosely associated with the potential film started giving him notes. His script got progressively worse as he tried to please everyone. (This leads to the old saying that compromise pleases no one.) That seems to be pretty typical from the comments I’ve heard from working writers.

The best part was that for revision number 7 he simply resubmitted the original script and everyone loved it. Oh, the irony.

Anyway, on to outline and thing about where my zombie apocalypse comedy sendoff tribute to B movies is going. But maybe I’ll watch a movie first. (Procrastination is a writers best and worst friend. Time to think, but eventually you gotta start typing again.)

This working thing is really eating into my time.

time to write

I am grateful to have a job, and a job that I enjoy, plus one that pays pretty well. Experience and education do pay off, but I can’t fathom how the heck I managed to have a full time job, go to school at night, write daily, raise my kids as a single dad and still have time to play. It really boggles my mind. I know I used to get up at like 530am so I could write, and I dedicated that time to completing my first novel. That quiet time in the morning with a cup of tea was really a sanctuary from the cacophony of the rest of my life at the time.

I shouldn’t say that I don’t know how I did it. I do know how. It was all about focus. I had a lot of things going on, but I didn’t multi-task. I did one thing at a time and generally had a dedicated time slot to do it. School was on Wednesday nights. Writing was from 530 to 630 or 7am. Work was 7 to 3 generally speaking. Evenings were devoted to my kids.

We all have obstacles in our lives and it’s up to us how we face things. Do we throw up our hands and have the “it is what it is” attitude about our dreams? I think not. Certainly some things are out of our control and they are what they are, but unless we are willing to work hard and devote time (dedicated time slots preferably) we will always wonder “what if?”

I am starting to get up earlier so I can spend a bit of time on my latest screenplay and finishing up the musical. I’ve heard it said many times that if you want something to change, you have to change. If you want to write a book (and we all have a book in us) all you have to do is write a page a day. In a year that’s 365 pages – longer than the average book out there. It’s focus and persistent effort. Time to start walking the walk again.

So how do I mean that? Is it to be a post about training your thoughts, so you can focus better and not stray around the block (and around the web) when you should be concentrating, or will it be about the training I do?

Well, a little bit of both. Today was the orientation session for my new job. I am excited to take this training on EPIC and to get to training other folks. Should be interesting. New stuff for me and I will get to have days where I go home clean. yay for that.

On the other point, I need to get more focused on the writing and net stuff that I do since I will be outta here for 40 plus hours a week.

The best thing I’ve found is to close my browsers and my email. That “forces” me to concentrate on the task at hand, specifically writing articles for our various websites, blog posts here and there, and especially working on the new screenplay. I’ve got over forty pages done now, so I am about at the midway point. Experts all say that a script should be ninety pages – that equates to a page a minute, but you know when you describe a fight scene in a couple sentences, or a car chase, those few sentences could turn into ten minutes on film.

Anyway, concentration and focus. My main focus has to be getting through the EPIC classes and passing the tests to get to be an authorized trainer. After that, six months or more at MUSC and then who knows? Maybe they offer me a job. Maybe I get head-hunted again.

Oh, and I was reading an article on Harvard Business Review on “what to do with your hands while you are teaching?” The whole debate was that some people speak with their hands and some don’t. The article concludes that you should do what comes naturally to you and not be overly concerned. Hand movement doesn’t impact learning ability. So, why write an article that promises to answer the great debate with “whatever.” Seemed a waste of my time. Sort of like this paragraph was to you, except at least my conclusion came quickly. Just goes to show you that just because an article appears on a website with the word Harvard in it, that doesn’t mean diddley.

I have long been of the opinion that we, as US Citizens, have more in common than we think, no matter our political affiliations. But how many of us feel trapped by the political system that supposedly represents us? I think we see some of that in the recent Iowa caucuses. What real choices do you have?

Education is essential to climb the economic ladder. It always has been.

You who are on the so called “right to life” side of abortion, do you honestly think that anyone wants abortions? No one is “pro abortion.” But for some reason the same party that wants to make abortion illegal also wants to limit access to birth control, and also wants to reduce or eliminate any health care assistance to children in needy situations. I’ve heard it said that Republicans only care about life until the head crowns and then you are on your own.

But where do we stand on common issues and how do people make choices to support a candidate who only hits on a couple of our core values or thoughts? I am pro-gun and pro-choice. I believe that our personal lives aren’t any of the government’s business, so they should stay out of our bedrooms. Yet somehow that bedroom is the government’s business if a couple is gay or lesbian? How can people reconcile those two opposing points of view?

I want to keep my social security intact. Figure out how to make it work. The amount the average person pays in never makes it back to that person. The problem, as I see it anyway, is that the money paid in is not sequestered but mixed into the government pot and that is where trouble starts. Yet if we would end social security (which somehow is the only form of socialism that people can accept, by pretending it’s not), if we would end it, people would end up elderly broke and destitute. The multi-generational household is, for the most part, gone, whether you view that as good or bad, and we, as a society, have a responsibility to care for the elderly.

But commonality instead of polarization is the theme of this little essay. We all believe we should care for our elders I think. We all feel that an educated nation is the path to prosperity. In some fashion we all believe in the “golden rule” treat others as you would like to be treated, yet that seems to be taken only hypothetically.
We are “family centric” as a nation, although we choose to define family in many different ways. We love the people we love and don’t feel it is right for other people to judge our beliefs. We want to do more to help people, giving them a hand up, and feeling they should be working to improve their lives and pay it forward. We want the planet to be as clean and green as it was when we were young (or better) and we want businesses to be responsible for their actions.

Businesses don’t want to be regulated, but if they don’t act responsibly do they police themselves or look the other way? Some government regulation is good to protect us all. We think OSHA and safety regulations are an encumbrance and add to the cost of business, but most regulations came into being because of serious injuries and accidents in the past.

Over-zealousness in government needs to be eliminated and budgets and spending needs to be looked at dollar for dollar. A balanced budget in any government can be had if all agencies and spending were done by percentages rather than by dollars. (With a percentage thrown in to pay off debt) My household budget is done this way, why can’t the government live within its means?

This has been a rambling post, but the point is that we all should be united in our commonalities and be civil in the debate on the rest. Demonizing “the other” doesn’t gain ground in the long run. Spreading lies and gossip on the internet has become rampant. Spread truth, researched verifiable truth, and if you don’t like what you find to be true maybe look inward and think about why.

No one fits perfectly into the Republican, Democrat, Libertarian or any other party. But we all fit into the system somehow.