photo credit: jchessma

I’ve been taking a creative writing course in order to help me broaden my writing skills and to move beyond writing only non-fiction. One of our assignments was to create a “Personal Universe Deck”. We were to make a list of 100 words - 80 words of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste (16 of each), 10 words of motion, 3 words of abstractions, and 7 miscellaneous words such as parts of the body, times of the day, places in the universe, hero &/or heroine, animals, birds, colors, invented words, and foreign words. We then took 100 blank index cards, and wrote each word on one index card. We were to shuffle the cards and randomly select 10 cards from the deck. Using those ten words, we were to write a poem. It was a fun exercise, and I was quite pleased with what I came up with, as silly as it may be.

The ten words I pulled from my deck were: sigh, buzz, hawk, flavor, sour, dark, shove, siesta, shake, and whisper. Here are the results:

Far, far up in the dark blue sky,

I see a hawk, then let out a sigh.

In my mouth, a sour taste.

The flavor of my life, oh what a waste.

My ears are ringing, I hear a buzz.

Yet I lay here, just because.

First a shake, then a shove -

A looming face appears above.

Then a whisper, I know that voice.

You need to move now, you have no choice.

The siesta is over, time to go.

How much I drank, I don’t want to know.

***

In 1968, Andy Warhol was quoted as saying “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” Today that expression has been paraphrased simply as “15 minutes of fame”.

For the most part, I think Warhol was right. But I think his numbers were off. These days, people become famous for the most ridiculous reasons, and their fame lasts much longer than just 15 minutes.

Take William Hung, the guy who made a fortune after his American Idol performance, singing “She Bangs” so badly that it made him famous.

Or how about the latest media craze, Jennifer Mee. Jennifer is a 15 year old from St. Petersburg, FL. What is her claim to fame? She hiccups. She’s been doing it for the past four weeks, and she can’t stop. That’s it. Yet, NBC’s Today show and ABC’s Good Morning America fought each other to be the first network to get an interview. (NBC won.) She has also been interviewed by Inside Edition, and is fielding calls from the Ellen DeGeneres Show, among others.

What do I need to do to become an instant celebrity?

Yesterday was President’s Day, a day set aside to honor and remember past Presidents of the United States. Originally, we celebrated George Washington’s birthday (Feb 22) and Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (Feb 12). In 1971 President Richard Nixon proclaimed one single federal public holiday, the Presidents’ Day, to be observed on the third Monday of February, honoring all past presidents of the United States of America.

That’s my history lesson of the week. Now, back to my topic - Holiday Marketing. I have always found it odd how retail businesses use national holidays to offer us special “sales”. Last night I saw a television advertisement by one of the car manufacturers.

The message from the advertisement was that, “in honor of President’s Day”, they were having a special sale. Now, I think that is very patriotic of them. But are they really discounting their MSRP, and did management throw a party or celebration and invite their employees? I’m pretty sure nothing special was done - they simply used the Holiday as part of their marketing strategy. So my question is, does anyone actually see this type of advertisement, then dash out to take advantage of the “sale”, especially since President’s Day only comes once a year?

Am I the only person who thinks this whole idea is just a bit wacko?

Astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, was born today (Feb 19th) in 1473. Copernicus was famous for the heliocentric system, proposing that the Earth, like the other planets, revolves around the Sun and that it turns once daily on its axis. The Church considered this to be blasphemy, because everyone knew that the Earth was the center of God’s universe, and everything revolved around us.

It amazes me that during these modern days, there are still people out there who claim that Global Warming is not caused by humans, that it actually is part of a normal cycle that our planet goes through.

At the time of my writing this, someone has even edited the entry for “Global Warming” on Wikipedia to read: “Global warming is human hating hysteria is the observed increase in the average temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans in recent decades and the projected continuation of rising temperatures…”

What is it about people that won’t allow their beliefs to be overcome by scientific evidence to the contrary?