Not Non-Fiction

People make fun of me when I tell them what I’m majoring in at college. They say “I thought that was just a joke!” Well, let me tell you, it does sound funny and a lot of us who major in it joke about it too, but there’s also a very serious side to it. Do you think basket weaving is easy? Have you ever tried it? Do it before you make jokes. There’s a lot more to it than just threading a strand around the spokes. That takes a lot of manual dexterity and also concentration and time. And you have to think about the materials you’re using. Wicker, reed, rattan, and bamboo all have to be handled differently, and each one can be woven in a wide range of styles. Those are just some of the most common materials, the sort of stuff you’d get from your local hobby shop, if it hasn’t gone out of business. If it has, well, you can buy a kit online if you want, but, as a college student, I’m also learning how to forage for as well as grow my own raw materials. If you think that’s easy then just try it. But don’t come crying to me when your willow tree dies because you didn’t know where to plant it.

Yes, I know, the process of making baskets can be mostly automated. Mostly. Who do you think designs and builds the machines that make baskets? Well, mostly engineers, but they need to consult with trained basket makers to know where to start. It’s all interrelated. And think about how useful baskets are. Let’s back up a bit. Think about the whole history of humanity and our reliance on handmade crafts. That kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? Now think about all the things you can use baskets for: storage, carrying. Well, they can be decorative too. The point is, if you’ve got a nice basket for carrying things or storing things you’re not just going to throw it out. If you were going to do that you might as well use a plastic bag. Thanks for helping to trash the planet. And when’s the last time you heard about a kid suffocating inside a woven basket?

Great, so you want to know about the other part. That’s not easy either. What, do you think we just sit waist deep in a swimming pool? Or hold our breath while weaving? No, we go all in. We don’t have to do it but we like the extra challenge. And that’s what it’s all about: learning to overcome challenges. I realized that way back in fifth grade when my English teacher used to use “underwater basket weaving” as a metaphor for something useless that didn’t require any thought. Not that I’m knocking English. After all English majors know what I’m talking about. We even get the same questions. “What are you going to do with that?” I don’t know. How does creative problem solving, manual dexterity, and scuba certification look on a resume? Exactly. It’s not like I’m studying something so highly specialized it’ll only be applicable to one career path. If I wanted that I would have studied accounting.

Source: Tenor

When I was offered a golden parachute for my retirement I jumped at it. Well, not literally. The jump would come later because it turned out what they were giving me was an actual golden parachute. Literally. I don’t know how they got enough pure gold to make an entire parachute and it’s probably best not to ask. Sure, it’s just gold foil so it’s not exactly thick but it’s still a parachute. All folded up and in the pack ready to go. The thing’s got to weigh at least fifty pounds. I checked and the price of gold is close to $3000 an ounce right now. If I can find a place to cash all that in I really will be set for life. That’s the problem, though. It’s not like I can just walk into a pawn shop with fifty pounds of gold foil and expect them to buy it from me on the spot. Even if I can still find one of those cash for gold places I couldn’t expect them to have enough on hand to buy it all. If they could I’d need five, maybe six briefcases for all that cash. Okay, now I know I’m being ridiculous. They’d give me a check or maybe we could work out some kind of direct deposit. Even if they could, though, I’d be lucky to get the whole amount. Talk about flooding the market. It’s not like a few years ago when there was one of those cash for gold places on every corner and I could have made a separate stop at each one before they knew what hit them.

What about the taxes? Could I set up a Swiss bank account? How hard is it to do that? Or maybe one of those offshore deals in some place like the Cayman Islands. I would have looked into this if I’d known I was going to suddenly get this much gold. I guess I still have time, though.

Yeah, now that I think about it I realize I really don’t want to cash it in all at once. It would be better to break it up into little pieces and cash it in over six months or maybe a year. That would be smarter and even a little bit of gold is going to be enough to live on for a pretty long time.

That still leaves me with the question of whether I can sell it like it is. Are there places that take gold foil? Maybe I could find places that make statues, like the Oscars or something. Or those super fancy restaurants that put gold foil on desserts sometimes. But I doubt they’d want this much gold. Now that I have it, though, I’d kind of like to try one of those desserts. Hey, I could even make my own. Then I’d get the gold back. Yeah, that’s kind of gross but I still wouldn’t want to waste it.

Maybe it would be smarter to melt it down into little ingots or something. How hard could it be to melt gold foil? Oh, this says the melting point of gold is almost two thousand degrees. I guess it wouldn’t be that easy. Maybe I should buy a forge or something. I bet I can get one online for pretty cheap. Sure, I’ve got a big wad of gold right now but I still want to be smart about how I spend it.

Speaking of research I also need to figure out how to open this parachute. I never really thought about it before but I think this building’s got about twenty, maybe twenty-five floors. That’s got to be at least three-hundred feet. Should I check that? Never mind. I should be fine if I just pull the cord as soon as I’m in the air. But it’s almost five o’clock and that’s when they said they’d be throwing me off the building so I really need to figure this out.

At least I’m not stupid like Dan in the next cubicle who took the severance package. That cost him an arm and a leg.

Source: Wikipedia

I have mixed feelings about a new Creature From The Black Lagoon movie. On the one hand it seems like everything these days is a reboot, remake, or remix. On the other hand there’s a belief that there are a limited number of stories to be told and that everything already is a reboot, remake, or remix, the prime example being Shakespeare’s plays which were based on other sources, and he didn’t even pay royalties. And on the third hand, since we’re talking about monsters and anything’s possible, because I’ve always loved all things aquatic and went through a long phase of wanting to be a marine biologist like Jacques Cousteau, before I realized that job was already taken by this guy named Jacques Cousteau, I grew up fascinated by The Creature, even before I saw the original movies. Because the Saturday matinee on the UHF station mostly stuck to various versions of Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster, with occasional appearances by The Wolf Man and a few disappearances of The Invisible Man, I even wrote my own Creature story. It was loosely based on Jaws, although when one of the crew says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” they actually go back to land and get a bigger boat, which just gives The Creature more time to wreak havoc, though it’s good because it’s ultimately discovered he’s going after polluters. I was an environmentally conscious kid, and also influenced by Namor Of Atlantis, but that’s another story.

There’s also already been a modern retelling of The Creature From The Black Lagoon: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape Of Water. Not only did I really enjoy it for its lovely, strange, and dark story but, in spite of only being inspired by, not connected to, the original three films, it seemed to pick up where the original three films left off. Although only very loosely connected the three Creature films still, taken together, tell a story of first love, maturity and marriage, and finally love turned toxic.

The first in the series, the 1954 The Creature From The Black Lagoon, has The Creature as the villain, but there’s also a side story of scientist David Reed and his girlfriend and fellow scientist Kay Lawrence. She’s the one who’s kidnapped by The Creature after he sees her swimming above him. Like a lot of classic monster films there wasn’t any interest in exploring why The Creature would find a human attractive, or even interesting, but what stands out for me is she’s resisted David’s pressure to marry because she wants a career of her own. The Creature is a not-so-subtle metaphor for the pressure put on women to be dragged down.

The sequel, coming out just a year later, was Revenge Of The Creature, with a whole new couple, animal psychologist Clete Ferguson, and his assistant, ichthyology student Helen Dobson. Clete and Helen fall in love and The Creature becomes a surrogate child. Clete is the father figure, disciplining The Creature with a cattle prod while Helen is more nurturing. And because they thought it would be a good idea to keep The Creature in an oceanarium open to the public it escapes and goes on a rampage. Things turn Oedipal—another story thrown into the mix—when The Creature kidnaps Helen and Clete has to come to the rescue.

The last of the original films, The Creature Walks Among Us, gets a lot of hate, and, I admit, deserves it for the ridiculousness of the Creature miraculously developing lungs so it can breathe air, but I like how dark it gets. Also it’s the only one that makes The Creature sympathetic. Finally it’s the humans who are the villains. We get a whole new couple. This time it’s Dr. William Barton—no relation to the real life engineer Otis Barton who designed the first bathysphere—and his trophy wife Marcia. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia is willful, independent, and enjoys shooting at sharks. She attracts The Creature’s attentions when she accompanies the men on a dive. That’s the extent of its interest in her, though. The reduced budget of the third film created a story focusing mainly on the human relationships, and making them more complicated than ever. Barton murders another man who made a pass at Marcia, not caring that she wasn’t interested, then tries to blame The Creature. Somehow aware of the danger it’s in The Creature escapes its cage, kills Barton, and goes to the sea, never to return.

There were plans for at least one more film that would introduce a female Creature, which could have been interesting, but it never made it past the early stages and it would take sixty-one years for The Shape Of Water to make romance central to the story, keeping the third film’s sympathy, and even love for, something not human.

Del Toro’s film seems like a fitting end, and yet relationships are as strange and ever-changing as the sea itself, and if there is a new Creature From The Black Lagoon, I’d like to find out what it says about who, and what, we love, and how love connects us to all life.

Source: FromOldBooks.org

This ad popped into my inbox recently:

Announcing WriteOn™, the new program that makes better writing easier. Like you we value clear, well-written, thoughtful, communication. There’s nothing more important than getting your message across in your emails, documents, and presentations while keeping your own personal voice which is why we’ve designed a product that does it for you automatically.

Are messages written by you weak, do you sometimes not made yourself clear? Are there grammatical errors you’re not aware of or that go unnoticed by you? WriteOn™ can help you.

Do you still have to review the writing before it goes out to make sure nothing unplanned got added? Yes, but we’re working on it.

Avoid repetitions, unnecessary clarifications, or lack of clarity in your writing using WriteOn™ to make your writing clear and concise and remove unnecessary repetitions that you might have missed.

Does WriteOn™ sometimes add extra words or delete necessary words? Does it sometimes make your writing sound cold and impersonal? Yes, but we’re working on it.

If you’ve ever struggled with how to start a sentence WriteOn™ can help you. Just start typing and let WriteOn™ finish the rest. Its predictive AI programming can anticipate what you’re going to say by scanning your entire computer as well as the internet. Will WriteOn™ occasionally send inappropriate messages to your boss or automatically select “Reply All” for confidential correspondence? Yes, but we’re working on it.

Do you feel that the writing and critical thinking skills you worked so hard to develop while getting your MFA in creative writing are wasted in a job where at least half your time is spent doing double entry of numbers in spreadsheets? WriteOn™ is just the program for you, writing emails automatically for you that are close to what you would write, giving you more time for double entry of numbers in spreadsheets.

Have you ever looked at a full page article and wished it could be summarized as a three-quarter page article? WriteOn™ can do that.

Does WriteOn™ sometimes take an article about whether Pluto should be reclassified as a planet and summarize it as the filmography of Lana Turner? Yes, but we’re working on it.

Teachers and instructors, would you like a program that can create lesson plans for you based on your curriculum? WriteOn™ can do that and can even generate virtual lectures complete with diagrams.

Did WriteOn™ read selections from the Marquis de Sade to a roomful of second graders? We at WriteOn™ can’t comment on the lawsuit but we’re working on it.

Is it easier you for to talk, translating your words to text? WriteOn™ has a new, unique voice-to-text feature just like the ones in your phone, your TV remote, the virtual assistant you use to order groceries, and that have been used by office workers for more than thirty years. WriteOn™ comes with a special feature that can be keyed exclusively to your voice.

Is WriteOn™ so sensitive it will sometimes pick up you in the bathroom hitting your head against the wall muttering “I can’t take another day of this” and send an audio file of that to your entire contacts list? Yes, but we’re working on it.

Try WriteOn™ for free with the discount code below. The future is here. The future is now. The future is we’re working on it.