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Airport Bloopers at Newberry

Bex and I arrive at Newberry Airport to continue the next leg or our travels in South America and it’s mass chaos.

We’ve just survived a taxi ride from hell; our driver yelling on his cell phone – at his wife I presume, and then dozing off at the wheel. He managed to do all of this in great style; his hazel locks flying in the winter air. Shivers…We’re back on solid ground now.

We spot the Aerolineas Argentinas sign and weave our way through the crowd. We get in line like everyone else, though nothing appears to be moving. The computer systems have crashed and everything has been delayed. I whip out my camcorder; this is the perfect moment to add another entry to our travelogue!

I’m about to begin recording when I hear the two guys in front of us, well, discussing us.

“So, which one do you like?” he asks his friends in Spanish. “The blonde one or the dark one?” They’re about to get into a ‘deep’ discussion when I turn around, trying not to smirk but visibly failing, “You know, I can understand what you’re saying…” I’m half Argentinean but this is not the first time I’ve been mistaken for a foreigner.

The look on his face is priceless and his friends are in a complete uproar. The culprit sheepishly introduces himself as Diego, and his friend, Mariano.

The ice has been broken.

We get to talking with their group and soon learn that these guys are Argentina’s National Kayak-Polo team! They are on their way to play a tournament in Iguazu Falls.

Since we’re such an international group we start showing each other our passports. Rebecca’s burgundy British passport, my navy blue Canadian passport, Mariano shows as his green DNI. Then Diego opens up his document and realizes, this is not his passport! Staring back at him is the picture of his brother. And let me tell you, Diego did not resemble his brother so impersonation was out of the question.

After all that’s happened I find this hilarious. Diego runs off to his coach to show him the problem. Phone calls are made, and a relative is sent racing across town to bring the correct document to its rightful owner. The computer systems are still down buying him valuable time.

By the time we reach the counter we are sad to see the team go. We exchange e-mail addresses and say our goodbyes all under the watchful eye of woman behind the counter, who shares no sympathy at our parting. “Let’s keep the line moving.”

Lessons learned:

1) You never know who may understand your language.
2) Check your passport before you leave home.

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Posted August 29, 2012 by Global Vito in New Artist Spot Light

August Alsina ‘Hard Knocks’ [Video]

Check out the new video “Hard Knocks” from the mixtape August Alsina University: School of Hard Knocks, hosted & arranged by Greg Street. School of Hard Knocks,” was released yesterday, August gives you a glimpse visual on the title. The 19-year old will release his “Throwback” EP next week on September 3, which is on his birthday so make sure you support and wish him a happy Birthday August Alisina.

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Monday, August 22, 2011

I'm America's Sweetheart, bitch!

Adorably, Hayley Mills delivers the smack-down to a bunch of snobby, upscale, husband-hunting gold-diggers.

Take that, you skank!

From the Truth About Spring (1964).

1 comment:

Moderation enabled only because of trolling, racist, homophobic hate-mongers.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.


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4 Ohio officers killed by criminals in 2011

Published: December 26, 2012 7:20 AM

DAYTON, Ohio (AP) -- New FBI statistics include four Ohio police officers in the total 72 officers who were killed by criminal activity in the United States in 2011.

The Dayton Daily News (http://bit.ly/RRl4rU ) reports that the national number of police deaths is the highest since 1995. And the four deaths in Ohio were the most since 1997.

Of the 72 nationwide killings, records show 63 of them came by firearms, mostly handguns.

The 2011 officer deaths in Ohio included sheriff's deputies shot to death and fatally injured by cars.

Warren County Sheriff Larry Sims tells the newspaper that people seem to have less concern about taking the life of a police officer. He said the overall disrespect for laws and authority these days is "scary."

Information from: Dayton Daily News, http://www.daytondailynews.com

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The Day Dream Puzzle game1.5

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Publisher Description

Dante Gabriel Rossetti - The Day Dream. Nice jigsaw puzzle made from the painting of a well known artist. Easy to play, you can control everything using only a mouse. The game runs well on every PC with Windows and contains no viruses or adware. And what is the best feature of this game? It's completely free - so don't hesitate and download it right now!

Download and use it now      The Day Dream Puzzle game 1.5

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Release Date: 2007-02-05
Publisher: Spidla Data Processing Inc.
Operating System: windows


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July 31, 2010

30 items

Now that I'm officially 1/3 of the way through my 30x30, it seems a bit overdue to post the ingredients for my remixes.

Here they are - 30 items.

1st row: linen blazer - thrifted / striped blouse - thrifted / print cardigan - Ann Taylor

2nd row: gray v-neck tee - American Apparel / white v-neck tee - Forever 21 / navy striped tee - Gap / pink tank - Anthropologie / black henley tank - Old Navy / black scoopneck tee - Urban Outfitters / striped scoopneck tee - Urban Outfitters

3rd row: blue skirt - Urban Outfitters / yellow skirt - self-made from vintage fabric / navy skirt - Gap / cutoffs - Old Navy / red print skirt - self-made from vintage fabric / floral print skirt - thrifted / jungle print skirt - thrifted

4th row: light skinnies - H&M / blue skinnies - BDG / black skinnies - Forever 21 / print dress - Target / blue button-down - thrifted / chambray button-down - thrifted Banana Republic

5th row: orange flats - Urban Outfitters / gray flats - Urban Outfitters / white oxfords - vintage, thrifted / espadrilles - thrifted / tan flats - Old Navy / black sandals - Ross / gold sandals - Target

All told, there are two jackets/cardigans, eight tops, two shirts, six skirts, four pairs of pants/shorts, one dress, and seven pairs of shoes. I see now that I stayed pretty neutral with the tops, but somewhat made up for it with the many over-the-top prints of the skirts. I probably went a little overboard with the shoes, and a little underboard with cardigans as my office is extremely over-air-conditioned. Anyone else learning any garment selection lessons in hindsight?

Edit: Click the image to see it bigger if you'd like a bit more detail on just how wrinkly my clothes were when I photographed them. Look, I really hate ironing, ok?

The T-Shirt, and an interlude featuring woodland animals

Remix items: gray v-neck tee - American Apparel / red skirt - self-made from vintage fabric / gray flats - Urban Outfitters

Spices: belt - thrifted / earrings - H&M

This shirt is so ubiquitous, I feel like I should simply refer to it as The T-Shirt. It must be the single best-selling item from American Apparel. I see it, on others, on blogs, or on myself, almost daily, and I think every one of my female friends has it, and a few of the guys do too. I know it's in Tania of What Would a Nerd Wear's 30x30 too - anyone else remixing The T-Shirt?

Prepare to see an awful lot of this skirt too. It was once part of an enormous, boxy dress, but last weekend I whipped out the scissors and wound up with a cute, boxy blouse and this, the mother of all loud skirts. I haven't even finished hemming the thing properly and I've already worn it thrice - thrice! I'm even wearing it right now, although this remix is from a week ago. I love the breezy rayon and the deep pockets, but it's that nutso print that keeps me coming back for more.

So I just took a little break from writing this here post (blogging is exhausting stuff, people) because there was a seriously cute chipmunk on our patio. He kept creeping up to the glass door and peeking in, so I had to go sit on the floor by the door and watch his antics for a while. He hopped around like a Disney creature for a few minutes, no doubt waiting for me to break into song as the orchestra swelled fantastically in the background, but I failed to deliver, so he scooted into a nearby bush in a huff. I waved a tiny goodbye, and that's when I noticed the three guys in the parking lot, just standing there, looking at my patio like there was a crazy lady in the window or something. If I had to hazard a guess, it was probably because of the skirt.

July 28, 2010

excuses, excuses

Remix items: print dress - Target / black sandals - Ross

Spices: belt - thrifted / necklace - Urban Outfitters

Hot days, busy weeks, delayed trains, etc.

Big number nine! Not really a knockout of an outfit, but what can I say, it was screaming hot when we took this photo on Saturday. In all honesty I'm a pretty devoted dress girl in the summertime, but I tried to break out of that mold a bit for this challenge. This is actually the only dress I allowed myself to include in my 30 items - I figured, sure, I could pick out twenty dresses and ten pairs of shoes, but what's the fun in that? And while dresses are certainly easy to wear and feel pulled together, they often don't really shine on the versatility front. Unless you can flip one half up or down and wear it as a top or a skirt, any dress is sort of always.... that dress. Or maybe that dress with a cardigan.

July 26, 2010

my, what big teeth you don't have

....or, "What to Wear to Your Double Extraction."

Remix items: striped tee - Urban Outfitters / floral skirt - thrifted / tan flats - Old Navy

Spices: belt - thrifted / frozen corn, edamame - Wegmans

This wasn't my most exciting remix yet, but I think I have a pretty good excuse for being a bit under-accessorized - my instructions from the oral surgeon even prohibited wearing nail polish to my appointment, much less any jewelry or makeup. Still, this was my first foray into the stripes with florals trend, and while I played it a little on the safe side, I have to say I was pretty happy with the results. In truth, this outfit was mostly dictated by comfort. I wanted to wear something that still felt pulled together for being out in the world, but would stand up to a day spend curled up on the couch with Netflix and an ice pack. The whole wisdom tooth bit wasn't too bad though - certainly expensive, but it could have been much more of an ordeal than it was. Aside from the actual extraction, I haven't really had any pain or swelling, and I've pretty much been able to eat normal food after that first day. No puffy face or nausea-inducing painkillers this time.

July 25, 2010

black coat, white shoes, black hat, cadillac

Remix items: print cardigan - Ann Taylor / black scoopneck tee - Urban Outfitters / black skinnies - Forever 21 / white oxfords - vintage, thrifted

Spices: necklace - vintage Finnish postage stamp, East Village flea market

These snappy white oxfords are one of the aforementioned recent thrift finds that I just had to get into my 30x30 somehow. I picked them up last weekend for $2.99, practically unworn! Unfortunately the fact that they're practically new also means they're not in the least bit broken in, and wearing them for the first time for a full day in 90+ degree weather in NYC? Maybe not my brightest idea yet. Which is to say, my feet are shredded, y'all. I'll be taking at least a week's recovery time before I remix these stiff little puppies, I can tell you that much. Pain aside though, I felt just so cool wearing this outfit around. The white shoes with black pants just seem so Rat Pack-y.

July 24, 2010

six, pick up sticks

Remix items: chambray shirt - thrifted Banana Republic / navy skirt - Gap / flats - Urban Outfitters

Spices: necklace - Urban Outfitters (clearance!) / belt - thrifted / polish - Revlon in Minted

I loved this outfit when I wore it, but looking back at the photos I'm afraid the tucked-in button-down just does boxy things to my shape. I'm preposterously short-waisted, so I feel like this is something I have to watch out for with blousier shirts. It's easy for me to just end up looking like a head sitting on boobs sitting on hips with no breaks in between. This is why I am (clearly) enamored of a good belt and a high-waisted skirt.

This outfit pretty much came together as a vehicle for the shoes and the new polish. I didn't want my clothes to compete too much with the insane traffic-cone brightness of the flats, so I figured denim and navy could behave like neutrals and let the brights stand on their own. These shoes definitely got me a lot of attention, and the adjectives others used to describe them ranged from "cool" to "distracting." I agree with both, although I certainly mean the latter in a good way. Every time I walked somewhere that day I'd smile and look down whenever I caught a glimpse of my neon feet, and I had no fear of being run down by a rogue cabbie.

July 23, 2010

five alive!

Remix items: striped blouse - thrifted / skirt - Urban Outfitters / flats - Urban Outfitters

Spices: necklace - Anthropologie / belts - thrifted / goofy face - new photographer

This is the first of many catch-up posts to follow, in what I'm guessing will become a regular(ish) pattern of past-tense blogging. I wore this one last Saturday for a day of thrifting in Trenton. I have a pretty established strategy when it comes to thrifting - wear slip-on shoes, a skirt (in case there's no dressing room and you've got to shimmy into something out in the open), and always carry cash. I checked out a couple of thrifts I hadn't been to before, and was rewarded most handsomely. I've actually decided to swap a few of my new finds into my 30x30 lineup and eliminate some items I haven't worn yet - I know, I'm a rebel.

Last weekend I also boldly began a new phase in the life of ye olde (newe) blog - I enlisted the boyfriend to be my photographer! As a result, photos of me will be sharper, have better contrast, and probably involve more embarrassing facial expressions. Photos of the clothes will remain crappy, because I took those in advance and can't be bothered to reshoot/re-Photoshop.

The new job is going well, but the commuting schedule is definitely a killer. I got a little bit of a break today since I get a couple of wisdom teeth yanked this morning. Clearly not the most fun for a Friday, but I had my lower ones out years ago so having just the tops out wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. I forgot how unpleasant a mouth full of gauze is though, yeesh. At least this time around I don't have to fuss with antibiotics and painkillers though, just regular old Ibuprofen and ice packs.

July 17, 2010

in absentia

Ay me! I'm afraid my 30x30 efforts have suffered a grave blow - employment. Specifically, employment in NYC, which requires me to awaken at an ungodly hour and to return home well after dark. My new schedule has put a serious damper on my infant picture-taking-and-editing routine, and I've discovered that my carefully curated selection of 30 items are not all so very office-appropriate, and so I've been forced to don unauthorized (and, frankly, sort of boring) outfits for most of the week.

Setbacks aside, I am still absolutely gung-ho about the ongoing remix effort in spirit if not evident action, and I've got a little backlog of pictures to edit and post from last weekend and this week. It may take me a little longer than I'd hoped, but by George, I'll hit those 30 remixes yet!

July 9, 2010

date not

Remix items: men's button-down - thrifted / skinny jeans - H&M / espadrille wedges - thrifted

Spices: earrings - vintage, thrifted in Denmark / belt - Frye, thrifted / envelope clutch - vintage, thrifted / sad face - date night, cancelled

Today's outfit! Present tense! Catch-up complete!

Small victories.

I wore this exact outfit about two weeks ago to a dinner party - I like that it's almost monochrome, so the salmon espadrilles really pop, and I love any excuse to wear these earrings. Usually I'm more of a necklace girl, but I got these earrings at a little vintage store near my school in Copenhagen five years ago and I still love them. They're shell, so they're not too heavy, but they're perfectly jingly and dramatic, and exceedingly sexy with a bare shoulder. I didn't want to overdo it here, just an outfit for going to get some ice cream with the boy. The long face is because he called right before I took these - working late, so no date tonight. Oh well. At least I'll look hot walking the pup, even if my posture does make me look a bit preggo.

If you haven't already, you should check out Kendi's blog by clicking the banner below. She's the original (and still the best) 30x30-er.

30 for 30 Banner

everybody loves three

Remix items: white tee - Forever 21 / yellow skirt - self-made from thrifted kitchen curtains / tan flats - Old Navy (clearance!)

Spices: necklace - My Mom's Basement via etsy / belt - thrifted / wood & brass bangle - thrifted / standard blogger pose - cliche

This was yesterday's outfit, so now I'm almost up to speed. Nearly living in the now.

This skirt is one of many that I've made this summer. I've had about a month of blissful free time between finishing graduate school (woo, Master of Architecture!) and starting a new job, and I've had no trouble at all keeping myself entertained. I haven't had much time for sewing over the last few years, but lately I've gotten back into it with a vengeance - in fact, one of my remix items is actually a skirt I haven't even made yet! This yellow one used to be a set of kitchen curtains from the seventies that I picked up at my local thrift. The print is all these great line drawings of kitchen herbs and aromatics, with a few mushrooms thrown in for good measure. I love it just paired with a crisp white tee.

Remix items: black tank - Old Navy (clearance!) / floral skirt - thrifted / black sandals - Ross
Spices: belt - thrifted / painted bangle - had it since I was four / pedicure - Revlon Craving Coral

Bang! I wasn't kidding about playing catch-up. This skirt is definitely a new go-to for me this summer, the fabric is a super lightweight, floaty rayon, so even though it's a little on the longer side for me, it's still nice and breezy for hot days. The bracelet I really have had since I was four, and while I can't say for sure where it came from, it's almost a lock that my mom thrifted it for me to play dress up with. She used to buy me all kinds of "finery" at the thrift store - mostly lacy camisoles and sequined evening blouses that I wore as dresses - that I would insist on wearing to preschool on a daily basis. Apparently the teachers repeatedly sent notes home asking that my parents not bring me to school in such "nice clothes" since all I did was play in the mud and ruin them - little did they know that my mom was getting me that stuff by the $1 bagful just so I could do as I pleased.

I've actually been secretly working on this 30 for 30 challenge for a few days now. There have been a number of things getting in the way of putting this up here and on flickr, not least of which has been my somewhat time-consuming image-processing... process. It takes a while to clean these puppies up and put them on a white background, but I do it to hide two major shortcomings of my photos. Basically, I have no tripod (#1), and I don't know how to use a decent camera (#2). You would think neither of these would pose a problem, since I have a darling boyfriend (#1, solved!) who rocks general socks with his SLR (#2, solved!). But, alas, I am (embarrassingly enough) a little embarrassed to ask for his help with this bloggy thing just yet. Sheepish, if you will. So for now, I take all my pictures with my wussy little point and shoot, and photos of myself I take indoors with a self-timer with the camera propped up on a bookcase. Not exactly a recipe for great photos. So I'm covering for my weak-photo-sauce by making their presentation super stylized. Pretty slick, huh? Well, it was, until I pointed out said weak-photo-sauce. Damn.

fashionably late

So I'm going for the 30 for 30 challenge, the brilliant/evil brainchild of saucy blogger Kendi of Kendi Everyday. Of course I'm almost a week late to the party, but better late than never, right? Unless you're so late the hostess is already vacuuming potato chip crumbs out of the carpet by herself. Oops. Oh well, she could probably use the company. So without further ado, here's the first installment of my 30 for 30.

Remix items: striped blouse - thrifted / cutoffs - Old Navy (clearance!) / flats - Urban Outfitters

Spices: necklace - My Mom's Basement via etsy / purse - thrifted / smile - cheeseball

The crazy heat we've been having lately gave me the perfect opportunity to debut this little semi-crop-top I thrifted up in Massachusetts over the holiday weekend. The lightweight linen and loose silhouette make it perfect for sweltering days, even if the shape doesn't photograph in the absolute most flattering way. The necklace is one you'll definitely be seeing a lot of here, it's a brass whistle and glass bead on a double chain, and all of the materials are vintage! I saw a great whistle necklace a few weeks ago at the Brooklyn Flea, so I quickly scooted over to etsy and found TONS of options, but this one from My Mom's Basement was just absolute perfection.

More remixes to be uploaded today since I'm playing a bit of catch-up, and I'm hoping to post images of all my remix items soon!


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What Apps/Software Do You Like and Why?

I’ve been thinking a lot about design recently, and I know the guys have as well.

Anthony (@anthonyslai) came back from An Event Apart in San Diego with some interesting information, and I’m looking forward to hearing what Rich (@rmanalan) learned at Future of Web Design earlier this week.

I’m digging into design and psychology books (facilitated by my new iPad), hoping to get some insight. However, I’m thinking the best resource is all you people.

So, help me, if you would, by dropping a comment with a list of what apps (on smartphones) or standard packaged software you like, and more importantly, why you like it. I’m fine with games too, but they might not be as helpful. So, mix in a few with utility beyond entertainment, if you don’t mind.

If nothing else, this will help me identify some new apps/software based on your wise recommendations.

Find the comments. Do it now.

  1. Two apps I have to now live without. 1) Franklin Planner. The absolute king of all planners, IMHO. I had this on four different Palm Pilots after having the physical planner for a number of years. When I got my Treo, there was no option to add this planner – Franklin Covey had really integrated with Outlook and I didn’t want to. I’ve yet to find a planner even close to this in terms of usefulness, especially for a smartphone. Had some ideas on how to improve it but they were very minor. 2) HandyShopper. This was a freeware app for Palm and Windows Mobile. I’m now on a Blackberry and stuck without. It seems HanDBase could be used to make something similar, but HandyShopper was awesome. I still have my old Treo just for HandyShopper use when I go shopping, it let you have a one-hand mode so you could tick off the items as you added them to the cart. I ended up using this for tons of lists.

    So, my votes would be a super powerful planner and a flexible shopping list device. Oh, and both would have to have a tool that facilitated exporting the data into at least a text file if nothing else. I had to scramble to get my data when I switched devices.

  2. Interesting. I’ll have to take a look at those. Sounds like utility in design, wrt the one-hand operation of HandyShopper. I haven’t even thought about a planner since I had one in the mid-90s; Palm replaced that for me. Will check out Franklin’s software.

    Thanks for the tips.

  3. In terms of integration across platforms Dropbox and Evernote are Apps that I have on all of my devices. I’d be lost without them. On the iPad my most used Apps apart from the 2 mentioned above are GoodReader for reading documents, Reeder for RSS Feeds, and The Twitter App – although I’ve noticed Hootsuite has arrived on the iPad today, so going to check that out.

    On my Android phone i’m using mostly the Facebook App, Hootsuite and the Gmail app. Of course there is Dropbox and Evernote, and Google Maps which get used all the time.

    I’m a big fan of Mindmaps, and I use Mindmanager on my laptop as Oracle pay the license. I’ve just stumped up €7.99 for iThoughts on the iPad, and used it for the first time last night. Crucially it can integrate with Mindmanager.

    I’m learning about GTD at the moment, and currently run a paper based system. My plan is to eventually bring this system online. Omnifocus seems to be the premium GTD app on the iPad, however it is not available on the PC or on Android. I’m therefore looking at Toodledo which is available on the iPad and PC and which syncs with Got To Do on Android.

  4. Sounds like you need to go Mac and dump that PC. That would eliminate some of your transfer issues. I’ve heard good things about OmniGraffle on Mac and iPad, but the price tag is pretty steep.

    Anyway, Dropbox rules. We’ve been their cheerleader for years. The 1Password+Dropbox integrations are fantastic too.

    I’ll check out the ones on your list that I haven’t used. Thanks.

  5. Funnily enough since i’ve got the iPad i’ve been thinking of switching to Mac. However times are tough, so unless I get a big pay rise, or Oracle start letting us get Macs via procurement, i’ll be waiting.

  6. This is an old post but I am STILL looking for a replacement for Handy Shopper from the Palm.  All the shopping apps, and I’ve bought most of them, are overkill.  Handy Shopper was simple and reliable.

  7. Time to build one yourself, a quick search says you’re not alone. Replicating Palm apps for iOS and Android seems like a lucrative business, given how many hardcore Palm followers are out there.

  8.  I stopped using my Franklin Planner around 1988.  It still sits on my stacked in/out boxes in my home office, collecting the random business card, much lower on the clean-and-purge queue than reorganizing my email lol.  But when I had a need for it, I shared Chris’ opinion.  It still has the picture I took in Hawaii, for staring at as motivation.  Nowadays I’ve gone back to sticky notes (outside of work-provided Outlook, which I don’t sync anywhere).  Several apps have thrown themselves at me, to no avail.

  9. I never liked the bulk of a planner. Sticky notes will always be my go-to method for reminders though, regardless of all the sexy options.

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Melissa Fay Greene

Melissa Fay Greene is an award-winning nonfiction author whose upcoming book, Wonder Dog, based on her New York Times Magazine article, is about a service dog academy in Ohio that places dogs with children with invisible disabilities.

Culture: Stories & Lit
Finding Amazing Service-Dog Candidates in Shelters
Excerpt from The Underdogs by Melissa Fay Greene
Shelter Dog, Shepherd, Trained as Service Dog

A German Shepherd mix slated for euthanasia watched Karen Shirk from behind the bars of his cinder-block cell in a cacophonous county animal control building. With his long black muzzle and imploring brown eyes, he looked at her with that heartbreaking shelter-dog mix of worry, fear, confusion, and hope. “This is a good-looking boy. Do you know anything about him?” Karen called from her wheelchair to a nearby worker. “Can he sit? Can you sit, boy? Sit.”

The dog sat. His haunches trembled with the sincerity of his “Sit.” He tentatively raised one paw a few inches above the floor, in case the stranger also wanted “Shake.” She didn’t say “Shake,” so he lowered his paw quietly and put his whole focus back into his excellent “Sit.”

He was an “owner-surrender,” though there was no coercion or “surrendering” about it: his people, for reasons unknown to the shelter, had brought him here to be disposed of. In crowded shelters, owner-surrenders are among the first to go: without the required ten-day “stray hold” bestowed upon lost dogs or cats for whom someone may be searching, the owner-surrenders quickly join the ranks of the sick, the injured, the elderly, the pregnant, the nursing mothers and their newborn litters, and the defamed pit bull breeds—no matter how gentle—to be euthanized one by one by one, usually by lethal injection …

The scrape of shovels and splash of water and the homesick yelps of imprisoned dogs ricocheted around Karen and the German Shepherd mix as the dog sat for her on the cement, making worried eye contact, in the most important and possibly last audition of his life. Did the shelter dog understand on any level that he had won Karen’s attention, however briefly? As he gazed unflinchingly and longingly into her eyes, was he aware that he’d captured the attention of a human being, something in scarce supply in a county animal shelter? Of course he knew. He was begging her, with his eyes, not to leave him.

“I’m going to give him a try,” Karen said to an employee. “Let’s take him outside.” The worker stepped into the pen and clipped a leash to the dog’s collar.

On the way down the cement hall toward the steel exit door, the shepherd, leashed, stayed beside Karen’s wheelchair, but his paws moved double-time, like a speeding cartoon character whose legs accelerate into wheeling blurs. Outside, the dog blinked in the sunlight and barely knew which way to run first. Just in case, he briefly sat again, tremblingly, joyfully. When the passenger door of the van opened to him, he bounded into the seat, wiggled in happiness, settled in, and never looked back. He moved into the cabin with Karen and her own dog, Ben, and soon began training for Karen’s first child client, a twelve-year-old girl with paralysis. Soon two rescued Golden Retrievers joined them, one for each of the adult women who’d requested dogs. It was a happy messy life for Karen, the start of her finding a way toward the life she wanted. The hospitalized preteen squealed with joy when she saw the German Shepherd mix for the first time and named him Butler—“because he’s going to be like my furry butler!” When his mobility training was finished and he was placed with the family at home, Butler broke the no-child barrier among service dog agencies, among the first service dogs in the world to be trained for a child.

He was a great success! He heeled beside her wheelchair, slept on her bed, and always sat up extra straight and tall when told to sit, since this was evidently his winning skill. The girl’s laughter rang through the house again whenever Butler, unable to contain his love and happiness, stood up, propped his front feet on the armrest, and leaned into the wheelchair to lick her cheeks.

“Am I too old for one of your dogs?” strangers phoned to ask Karen. “Is my child too young for one of your dogs?” “Am I too disabled?” “Am I disabled enough?”

Karen told everyone the same thing: “If your life can be improved by a dog and you can take good care of a dog, I’m going to give you a dog.”

A couple with a ten-year-old son with autism phoned to say that their boy constantly ran away and they’d hoped a service dog might keep track of him, but the service dog agencies had all denied them. This was again new territory. Karen knew that placing service dogs with adults with invisible disabilities, like post-traumatic stress disorder or seizure disorder, was the cutting edge of service dog work, but it hadn’t yet been tried with children. It was a tall order, quite different from training Butler for mobility work with a child.

Back to an animal shelter she went. Despite the forbidding prison-like appearance of the place and the collective hysteria of the stressed and frightened dogs, Karen knew there had to be animals there with high intelligence and fine dispositions. The problem was that their panic at the harsh, crammedin, and grating conditions of captivity concealed their true natures. The confinement in cement cells with industrial drains in the floor made the dogs seem ferocious, impossible to tame, even insane. They bared their gums and barked in fear, scaring away adopters.

As Karen wheeled through the cat room on the way to the dog kennels, cats stuck their forearms through the bars of their stacked-up cages, waving their paws around in blind search for human contact. Karen stopped to stroke the arm of one cat; the lean middle- aged tabby instantly withdrew his arm and flipped onto his side in the cage in winsome appeal. He’d waited so long for a tummy-rub! He stretched out and began to purr. But Karen couldn’t reach that far into the cage and had to move on. She knew that virtually none of these adult cats would see daylight again.

Tail lowered, ears flattened, face downcast, Patches, a Beagle mix, managed just a couple of tentative halfhearted tail-wags from the back of his cell. His overtures hadn’t beguiled anyone in the nearly twenty-one days of his captivity and his time was up. Karen positioned her wheelchair outside his cage for a closer look. Every morsel of emotion rushed into the dog’s moist trembling nose. He approached and shyly pushed his nose through the chain-link barrier.

“Okay, boy, I see you,” she said. When he was led out of his cage by a handler for one-on-one time with Karen, the little dog was so excited, shaking so hard, he couldn’t avoid peeing a little on the cement f loor. Like Butler before him, he left the shelter riding high in the passenger seat of Karen’s van, his mouth wide open with happiness, his ears rippling in the wind he hadn’t felt in a long time.

Before pulling onto the state road, however, Karen sighed, stopped, wheeled around, pulled back into the parking lot, and called out her window to a staffer to bring her the middle-aged tabby cat.

Patches, the rescued Beagle mix, became one of the first dogs in the world (similar work was beginning in Canada at that time) trained in autism assistance. He may have become the first dog in the world trained to track a single child. Now when their son disappeared, his parents cried: “Patches! Find Kevin!” And Patches took off to find the boy, wherever he was. One night he tracked him to a stranger’s backyard three blocks away. The land sloped down to a stream; Kevin, in his pajamas, was peering into the water when the dog interrupted his reverie. “Patches just saved our son’s life again,” the parents emailed Karen.

The cabin filled up with rescued dogs. “It’s a wonderful feeling when we see one of our animals adopted by 4 Paws!” said Mary Lee Schwartz, executive director of the Humane Association of Warren, Ohio. “We’re happy when a dog gets adopted to a normal home, but when one gets adopted to a home when he’s going to help someone, we’re thrilled! I can’t think of a more exciting thing to happen for a dog, especially one on Death Row.”

Another shelter worker commented: “People are surprised that we have such highly talented dogs coming through our shelter, capable of performing the functions of service animals. But of course we do.”

All shelters have them: indescribably marvelous animals just waiting to be given a chance.

Dog's Life: Work of Dogs
Is it possible for a dog to help in a recovery?

That first weekend, we weren’t sure we were keeping him. It was a trial placement.

As we drove the excited little Terrier away from his foster home—the two foster dads waving fondly from their front step—he dashed frantically around our car’s interior, clambering over everyone, scratching our legs, trying desperately to reach an open window—not to escape, it turned out, but so he could experience head-on the full 45 mph smash of wind in the face. In the front passenger seat, the scruffy brown mutt perched on my husband’s right thigh, curled his front paws over the lowered window, angled himself toward the side mirror, and stretched his torso and neck into the gale. The airstream peeled back the fur from his face, the lips from his teeth and the unshorn bangs from his eyes until the wild-eyed dog with airborne ears looked like a demon flying beside the car.

At our house, the little demon—a knee-high, wire-haired Terrier mix (something like a Cairn, I thought, though the foster dads thought Yorkie), two or three years old—streaked up the hardwood staircase and stumbled back down and flew back up and tripped back down. He flushed the two cats from their hiding places and chased them until they vaulted to furniture above his reach; he nosed the two elderly, bewildered dogs as they lay curled together in a dog bed; then he ran upstairs and downstairs some more. He’d been captured by Southern Animal Rescue at a Wal-Mart parking lot, where he’d lived and foraged as a stray. Evidently, neither the Wal- Mart parking lot nor the foster home had included stairs, for his interest in them was boundless. I was down there! Now I am … wait for it … up here! Bark bark bark! Watch out—I’m coming down! Bark bark bark!

He was enthusiastic about everything. He yapped at a peeved cat sitting on top of the piano and then pursued the other cat up the stairs lickety-split. He was getting good at stairs! The two elderly dogs, rousing themselves from their autumnal haze, raised their heads and knitted their eyebrows in looks of concern. Theo, an 11-year-old miniature Wire- Haired Dachshund, had pursued a lifetime career as first lieutenant to Franny, the stout, freckled, 13-year-old Rat Terrier. Now, imagining he needed to put a stop to these shenanigans (though Franny likely felt no such thing), Theo sprang into aggressive action and hurried to the bottom of the stairs where the new pup was playing Chutes & Ladders with himself. Teeth bared, Theo tried to take a snarling bite out of the young Terrier’s leg on his next trip to the bottom. The new guy yelped and ran back up. A few of the humans suddenly couldn’t remember why anyone had thought getting a new dog was a good plan.

In the fall of 2012, we had five teenagers living at home (ages 15, 16, 17, 18 and 18), two elderly dogs and two amiable cats. Our 24-year-old son Lee—the third oldest of our nine children (four by birth and five by adoption at older ages from Bulgaria and Ethiopia)—had just been diagnosed, to everyone’s astonishment, with a late Stage III colon cancer, so he had moved home. His beautiful girlfriend, Maya Selber, flew down from Philadelphia to join us on the surreal Long March into cancer treatment. This made for seven young people, two middle-aged people, three frequently visiting young adults and four animals under one roof. There was also the deadline (for me) of a book contract, and the pressure (on both my husband and me) of trying to keep everything and everyone afloat financially and emotionally.

“Stay away from the Internet,” the cancer survivors among our friends warned us. “The projections, the statistics, won’t do you any good. They won’t apply to your son anyway.” Our son was a statistical outlier—a 24-year-old with a disease that typically appeared among people in late middle age.

I had no trouble avoiding cancer websites. But I did have trouble working. It wasn’t just the demands of medical tests, consultations and hospital visits, as Lee bravely and compliantly began chemotherapy, radiation and daily self-injections, and faced two surgeries in the not-distant future. It was the fact that, even if I found a free hour, I couldn’t think about anything other than cancer. And the fact that, as a family, we were sliding into a group depression.

Lee happens to be an ebullient, generous, playful fellow. He excels at happiness and at including everyone in the fun. From a young age, he has been our family camp counselor, holiday planner and coach. He tells us when it’s time for touch football, when it’s time for charades and when it’s time to sit down and watch the Atlanta Braves on TV. He knows when we need to buy tickets and go to Turner Field instead. He knows when we need company (always), when it’s time to decorate the den for the start of the Falcons season and when I must buy the Settlers of Catan Expansion Pack for Additional Players. He knows when he and his siblings need to go to late-night bowling.

His professional life reflects his flair for play. He is a teacher and coach at a school for teens and young adults on the autism spectrum. Over the last few years, he has organized sports and games for Ethiopian orphans, for children hospitalized with heart defects, for teenage Sudanese and Eritrean refugees in Israel and for destitute children in Haiti.

In the summer of 2012, Lee and Maya created a children’s recreation program in the town of Kenscoff, Haiti. When they returned, Lee, always slender, startled us because he’d lost more than 20 pounds. He insisted he was fine; he must have lost weight from eating nothing but plantains all summer and from some gastrointestinal bug. Everyone agreed it had to be an amoebic infection. Until it wasn’t.

The day the GI doc phoned with the definitive diagnosis of an enormous malignant tumor, I found Lee sitting in the dark in the living room. “How are you doing?” I asked.

“I just feel so … lucky,” he said.

“If I were Haitian, I would die of this. If I were Ethiopian, I would die of this.”

That was his stance: gratitude—for family and friends, for Emory University Hospital, for Obamacare (that allowed us to carry him, at 24, on my husband’s law firm’s insurance policy)—and humor. The day the surgeon estimated that the tumor must have been growing for a decade, we pondered the news over dinner. “Lee,” I said. “This means that middle school, high school, working in Ethiopia, gap year in Israel, college at Oberlin, college in Israel, working in Haiti, everything you have done, you have done with cancer. Now you’re starting treatment. Sometime next year, you’ll experience life without cancer for the first time since you were 13 or 14.”

“My Major League Baseball career! It’s not too late!” he cried.

“Maybe you’ll have musical or artistic gifts!” I said.

“I won’t be the slowest of the six brothers anymore!” he yelled.

But Yosef, 15, our almost-six-foot-tall Ethiopian son, corrected him: “No, Lee, you will still be the slowest.”

Lee, already a Fantasy Football League player, created additional leagues that fall so that far-flung siblings, cousins and friends from Haifa, Jerusalem, San Francisco, Oberlin, Columbus and Detroit could remain in daily touch without mentioning the one topic he didn’t want to talk about. But, as chemotherapy and radiation took up more and more of his time, his energy flagged. Little by little, he passed on pickup football and front-yard soccer and driveway basketball. Then he began declining board games. Constantly obliged to fast or to follow a liquid diet, he stopped telling us when it was a good night for pizza, when we needed fresh bagels and when he hoped I would make lasagna. Because our younger children had experienced great loss in their young lives— the four Ethiopian children had been orphaned by disease, had lost siblings to disease—sorrow ran through our house. Behind closed bedroom doors at night, teenagers were crying.

I began searching the Internet for information. Not for information about colon cancer in 24-year-olds. For information about rescue dogs. It was pure fantasy to look at their pictures and to imagine leading one away to a life of love and happiness, dogs and teenage athletes, fields and woods. Searching the shelter and rescue websites every day for an adoptable, medium-sized dog became my great escape. Like Fantasy Football, it was Not Cancer.

For an animal lover, there are few harder things to look at than photos of dogs behind bars, especially those at county shelters with significant kill ratios. I don’t know which are sadder: the lackluster eyes of dogs who have abandoned all hope, who sit with slumped shoulders gazing down at the cement, or the still-bright eyes of dogs who, with pricked ears and lifted eyebrows, believe someone is coming for them. Photos of dogs in foster homes pierced me, too, because the pups lolling across someone’s lap in a back yard, with wideopen smiles, clearly thought they had a family, when in fact they were still in limbo, their futures uncertain.

“Do you think we should get another dog?” I asked my husband one night in a high-pitched voice as though expressing a sudden passing thought.

Despite the fact that we were in the midst of a major medical emergency, my husband, Don Samuel, a criminal defense attorney, the man who had agreed every step of the way about adding another child until we ended up with nine, said yes.

“Three dogs aren’t too many dogs?”

“Franny and Theo nap most of the time now.”

“They do.”

“And they say dogs are a great consolation for people going through cancer treatment.”

“I’ve heard.”

“You know Maya never had a dog? This would be such an amazing experience for her, something fun to come home to after a long day of sitting in the chemo infusion room.”

“Definitely,” he said, wondering why I offered so many supporting arguments for an idea he’d liked instantly.

I returned to the Internet the next morning with zest. I studied the names, genders, backstories, estimated ages and guessed-at breed mixes of scores of dogs. I attended weekend pet-adoption events. But I came home with only pet food.

I didn’t rush into a commitment, because actually bringing home a dog would mean I’d have to give up my fantasy life of browsing for a dog. I wasn’t sure an actual dog could replace this vicarious escape.

Then I saw a picture of the little brown Terrier. The photograph was blurry in the foreground—because he was pushing his trembly, wet, black nose too close to the camera—and blurry in the rear—because his tail wagged so fast. He looked boyish, mischievous, something like Lady and the Tramp’s Tramp. There he is! I thought.

Typing quickly, I emailed the rescue group (from which we’d adopted our black-and-white kitty the previous summer) and said, “We’re interested! Is he still available?”

I held my breath. How could someone so cute still be available even 60 seconds after his photo went up? He was still available!

“Do you want to go meet a dog?” I asked Lee.

“What??!! Really?” he cried. “Really?”

All the kids yelled: “Really? We’re getting another dog?!”

“I don’t know, I don’t know!” I said. “We’re just going to meet one.”

That Sunday at the foster home, the first thing I saw was a curious black nose busily poking here and there through the slats of the backyard fence. I recognized that nose! And here he came, tearing into the front yard, frisking through the grass to meet everyone.

It wasn’t love at first sight for me. For me it was more: Okay. And something like: He looks nicely proportioned.

It wasn’t love at first sight for anyone. “What do you think?

What do you think?” we all asked one another.

“Let’s give him a try,” said Donny.

“Do you have a clue how he is with cats?” I asked.

“Take him home for a week,” said one of the foster dads.

“The rescue group knows your family. See how he does with your cats.”

So we led him into the car and he squashed over everybody trying to get his head out a window.

He rampaged through the house all weekend. He sprinted into my bedroom, saw me reading on the bed, jumped up and bounced off the bed, and tore out of the room. He was a steel ball in a pinball machine. We were the levers.

“Are we keeping him?” we asked one another.

“If we’re keeping him, he needs a name,” I said. I felt unsure. I felt: not in love. I felt: I can’t even fall in love with him if he doesn’t have a name. I felt suddenly aware of the work involved in assimilating a stray dog into the household. The two cats and the elderly Dachshund had already signaled thumbs-down. Only the 12-year-old Rat Terrier, Franny, approved of him; she had accepted his polite licks and gestures of youth and respect. But then, Franny was a saint. I wasn’t. I thought: Can I—should I—really take him on at this time?

But he needed a home. We had one.

God knows we needed an infusion of joie de vivre. He offered that.

“Let’s keep him,” I said.

“What are you thinking? Of course we’re keeping him!” my husband laughed.

Lee and Maya assumed the responsibility of choosing a name. By Monday night, the little fellow became Bodie. By Tuesday morning, it was as if he’d always been Bodie. Maya touched him only gingerly at first; his rough fur felt greasy to her. (She’d grown up in one of those families in which a parent pretends to be allergic to dogs; she’d never been this close to a dog before.) She startled when Bodie nestled against her leg, or when he sat up and looked her straight in the eye, apparently asking for something. To be petted? She touched the top of his head cautiously, with one finger, and he settled back down with a groan of contentment.

When Lee bathed Bodie for the first time, Maya stood back, taking pictures with her iPhone. She laughed at his slicked-down, mournful look in the bathtub, screamed when he escaped and scattered water through the house, and marveled when his fur dried to a remarkable and colorful silkiness. (According to a later doggie-DNA test, the foster dads were right: there was no Cairn in him, but one parent was purebred Yorkshire Terrier). He wasn’t a monochrome brown dog: he was streaked with hues of wood-brown, gray, khaki and gold, growing lighter from his back to his front as though he’d been held by the nose and dipped in chocolatebrown pigment, which then ran off the length of him. The soft down on his narrow chest was champagne-colored.

He adapted easily to home life, to family life. He was naturally housetrained; the modest type, he preferred to conceal himself behind a distant tree or bush for elimination. He made peace with the Dachshund and the cats within the week. He waited for permission before jumping up on our beds: he sat, hoping for a word or gesture. If you forgot to invite him up, he gave a few soft reminder yips. He joined the teenagers on their soccer fields and stole the ball. His dog manners were excellent. Somewhere I’ve read that stray dogs are often the best socialized. He was instantly popular at dog parks, glad-handing everyone, chatting everyone up. He could have run for office.

When Lee was laid up for hours or days, Bodie snuggled loyally with him. He laid his face across Lee’s sleeping body with a melancholy look and refused to leave the bed. When Lee felt a little better, he pulled himself together in order to take Bodie for a walk; through the months of intense treatment, Lee’s walks were dedicated to Bodie’s health and happiness, as if they had nothing to do with his own. He had major surgery in March 2013. On the fourth day after surgery, Lee was able to leave his hospital floor and ride the elevator down to a small park on the hospital grounds. We brought Bodie to visit him. Such joy all around!

Maya fell head-over-heels in love with her silly pup. Watching her made me wonder if it was almost worthwhile to grow up without a dog so that, at 24, you could fall in love with your first one so boundlessly and breathtakingly. Whatever he did became her little nicknames for him: “You little licker,” she cooed. “You little barker. You little muddyface.” He was smart and eager to learn. She taught him to sit, to stay, to come, to shake, to fist-bump and to roll over.

Bodie was happy all the time. He trotted, smiled and wiggled with happiness. He loved every person in our family. In parks, he ran so fast, with such freedom and joy, that he nearly took flight. From the prick of his ears to the loft of his tail, Bodie had Not Cancer written all over him.

One night, Lee announced: “We don’t think it’s possible to love anyone more than we love Bodie. Are you saying people love their children more than this?”

“Hmmm, probably,” I said.

“That’s not possible. Bodie is the cutest thing on earth,” he said.

I agreed completely! Bodie is the cutest thing on the planet! My very first instinct—my lightning-fast reaction when I first saw his photograph—had been accurate. How on earth could I have thought only, “He’s okay” and “He’s proportional” when I first met him? How was it possible, that first weekend, that we hadn’t realized we were in the presence of someone so adorable and so incredibly gifted and special? Love was absent then, so we couldn’t see clearly. Now that we’re in love, we understand that Bodie’s gifts are just like Lee’s. He lives to make friends, to have fun, to share his extraordinary sense of everyday joy.

Lee’s cancer is in remission now, the 14 months of struggle, pain and treatment nearly finished. He, Maya and Bodie moved to their own apartment (situated on a dog park and next-door to a park and jogging trail). Bodie visits our house every day and (when Lee and Maya are out late with friends) he sometimes sleeps over. Thanks to his doctors, family, friends, Maya and Bodie, Lee feels that the past year—on balance— has been a great one.


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Dog's Life: Lifestyle
Are Some Dogs Pessimistic?
A new study addresses this question

In a recent study in the journal Current Biology, researchers assert that shelter dogs who show behavior indicative of separation distress tend to be pessimistic, compared with more optimistic dogs who are less likely to exhibit separation-related behavior. I’m going to explain briefly how the experiment was conducted and then discuss my concerns with the researchers’ conclusions.

  In their experiment, 24 shelter dogs were taught that a bowl in one location had food in it, while a bowl in another location was empty. Once the dogs were trained to this paradigm, they were tested to determine whether or not they had a “pessimistic” cognitive bias, or an “optimistic” one. In the test, bowls were placed in locations other than the ones that the dogs had been trained to understand. These ambiguous locations were in the same room as the tests with bowls that had either been empty or containing food during training. The time it took for the dogs to approach the bowls in these new locations was recorded.   Dogs who went quickly to bowls in ambiguous locations were regarded as having an optimism that the bowl would contain food, while dogs who were slow to approach the bowl were considered to be pessimistic about the likelihood that the bowl would contain food.   In another part of the study, these same dogs were observed to determine how much time they spent exhibited separation-related behavior patterns such as vocalizing, destructive chewing, and inappropriate elimination. The researchers found that “pessimistic” dogs showed more separation-related distress than the “optimistic” dogs, and thus concluded that the negative affective state of these pessimistic dogs is correlated with separation distress.   My concern about this study is that I’m not convinced that the time until a dog approaches a bowl in an unknown location indicates optimism versus pessimism. What if degree of curiosity or tendency to fear new things is more relevant, rather than a cognitive decision about the likelihood of food being present? It is even possible that the dogs who were slower to approach the bowls were not as good at generalizing from the learning task or that they spent time considering what to do rather than acting impulsively. Or, perhaps the dogs who were slow to approach the bowls don’t tend to investigate things that are not theirs? (For dogs in home settings, we call this being “well-trained” or “well-behaved.”)   The authors say that the results of the experiment were “unlikely to be explained by running speed/motivation, learning ability, or other dog characteristics” but except for running speed, they did not control for them. The researchers have provided evidence that dogs who are slower to approach a bowl in an ambiguous location are more likely to exhibit signs of separation distress, but I don’t think they have made a strong case that they can conclude more than that. They have not demonstrated a correlation between separation related distress and a pessimistic cognitive bias. There are too many other possible explanations that need to be sorted through and tested for such a claim to be convincing.
News: Guest Posts
Counter Surfer, Caught!
Man videos his unsuspecting Basenji

Ever wonder what your dog is up to when you’re away? I know I’m curious about how my dogs pass the time when I’m gone, especially when I return to find what looks like the aftermath of a fairly epic couch party, but I’ve never gone so far as to deploy the nanny-cam. Thanks to this bit of undercover cinematography, I’m thinking twice about respecting their canine privacy.

News: Guest Posts
Hurricane Leo
Destruction and devastation return with the rains

As the rainy season approaches and the air turns crisp, I become excited for fall. I can finally give up my pipedreams of developing a decent tan and start looking forward to wearing my favorite scarves, boots and coats. The one thing I don’t look forward to is the beginning of hurricane season. While my sympathies go to those living on the Gulf Coast or the Carolinas, I’m talking about a different type of hurricane. This one is named Hurricane Leo.

  Hurricane Leo is the seasonal nickname bestowed upon my three-year-old Schipperke, once the rainy season starts. A spell of shorter, wetter days often means less time to play outside and a frustrated Leo ends up creating entertainment for himself: Rifling through the laundry, licking every strange surface in the house (the toilet? Come on, Lee...), staring out the window and commenting on (barking at) every single thing that moves outside.   This year, hurricane season came early and unexpectedly. I had hired a painting contractor weeks before to come and re-paint the entire interior of my house, and had everything planned out perfectly for weeks. The house would take two days to paint, and during that time I could keep the dogs company outside, sipping lemonade in a hammock while watching them play. It was a perfect plan: Until our heat wave was interrupted with scattered showers and lightning. Not cool.   The dogs and I were forced out of the house, now that every room was covered in fresh paint and plastic-wrapped furniture. The two-day paint job turned into four days, and Tropical Depression Leo slowly began gaining momentum. Leo grew increasingly frustrated with being removed from his normal surroundings and forced to stay indoors all day with me and Skipper at a friend’s apartment. While Leo had no shortage of toys and chewables to keep him occupied, the combination of bad weather and new surroundings created, you guessed it, a Perfect Storm.   As if he could think of no better way to express his feelings and frustrations, Leo jumped up onto my friend’s bed, stood over one of the pillows and peed. For about a minute. Even though he had been given multiple opportunities to potty outside, I truly believe he was saving it up to perform a memorable form of protest, like the sit-ins at U.C. Berkeley in the 1960s or Ghandi’s hunger-strike. Maybe he just was agitated and did something strange, as dogs are known to do when under stress. Needless to say, our welcome was worn out, and (after sopping up as much dog urine as possible and offering to launder my friend’s pillows and duvet) we headed back to my house and took our chances with the painters.             Within minutes of being home, Hurricane Leo escaped my grasp and bolted into the house, running laps through every room and touching nearly every wet surface along the way. I screamed. The painters screamed. Hurricane Leo seemed triumphant with several white streaks along his back and sides. Instead of yelling at him, I rinsed him off, put him in the car, and we drove to an inner East Bay dog park, where there were no storm clouds in sight. While my hurricane season hasn’t hit in full-force yet, I’m wondering what I can do to better prepare Leo (and myself) for the fall and winter. Indoor agility? Daycare? Enrolling Leo in yet another training course? Whatever it takes to keep the hurricane away.

Dog's Life: Lifestyle
Be Prepared
Plan ahead for emergencies

After attending a canine emergency seminar last year, I put together a first aid kit that included Elizabethan collars, bandages, eye wash, antibacterial ointment and contact information for the emergency vet. I was feeling pretty prepared, though, of course, I hoped that I’d never have to use any of it.

Unfortunately, earlier this week, my dog, Nemo, crashed into our coffee table, injuring his eye. With the first aid kit on hand, I quickly slipped on his Elizabethan collar and drove to the emergency vet. I was horrified when it dawned on me that Nemo had never worn an Elizabethan collar before. So his first experience with the collar involved a frantic car ride, getting prodded at the vet and a thunderstorm that erupted en route to the hospital. I couldn’t even feed him treats just in case they needed to do surgery the next day.

Fortunately Nemo only seemed slightly annoyed, but this situation could have easily been prevented had I taken the time to get him used to the collar beforehand.

The next day at the ophthalmologist’s office, I saw someone struggling to get their dog to stay still on the scale. It was a simple behavior that would have been a piece of cake if they had trained a nose touch or stand.

It got me thinking that there are many behaviors we can teach our pups to help in these situations, such as swallowing pills, wearing a muzzle and opening their mouth for a check-up. Kathy Sdao’s Husbandry Training for Dog Owners article is a good place to start for ideas on teaching some of these helpful behaviors.

Hopefully you’ll never find yourself in a serious emergency, but a little prep will help make them less stressful for both you and your dog.

Dog's Life: Lifestyle
Just For Fun
Tricks for kicks

A lot of training is simply teaching our dogs to be polite members of both human and canine society. Walking nicely on a leash, proper greetings, coming when called, doing sits, downs and stays on cue and letting children eat ice cream cones without helping are all useful skills that make any dog more pleasant to be around.

  Yet, it’s the fun things we teach our dogs that give many of us the most joy. Even simple tricks such as beg, crawl and rollover provide loads of fun both when we spend the time with our dogs to train them and when we get to show off their tricks to other people.   Some tricks are timeless, taught to each generation of dogs. Other tricks cycle in and out of favor, with certain tricks being popular right now. Among the “in” tricks to train dogs lately are the following:   “Aaachoo!” The dog retrieves a tissue when you sneeze.   “Leg up” To lift a leg as though urinating, but without really doing so.   “Stop, drop, roll and crawl to safety.” To stop, lie down, rollover and then crawl as a demonstration of the fire safety behavior   “Tidy up!” To put each toy into the toy box.   Does your dog have a favorite trick? Is it your favorite as well?
Dog's Life: Lifestyle
Best Family Dogs
Which breed? It’s a common question

I am frequently asked which breeds of dogs make the best family dogs. It’s a fair question because different breeds represent different genetic stocks of dogs, and it’s well known that genetics can have a strong influence on behavior. In a recent article, What Are The 5 Best Dogs For Your Family?, Sarah McCurdy tackles this subject.

  Her top picks for best family dogs are the Newfoundland, Pug, Keeshond, Golden Retriever, and Labrador Retriever. I have no objections to her picks and have seen all of these breeds on many similar lists. It is true that all of these breeds have many qualities to recommend them and that many members of these breeds are great with children, easy to train, and generally a joy to have around.   Still, I think that as useful as these sorts of lists can be, I caution people not to choose a dog simply because members of that breed are supposed to make good family dogs. There is a lot more that goes into choosing the right dog for your family than picking a breed that’s a “good family dog.” It’s important to consider what you are looking for in a dog and also to evaluate an individual dog based on more than just its breed.   Dogs from the same breed vary a lot in their behavior. For example, some friends of my parents had a sweet, Jack Russell Terrier who was calm, cuddly, and very biddable. This is not typical of the breed by any stretch of the imagination, yet many people that met this dog subsequently wanted to get a Jack Russell. I was always worried about these elderly people in my parents’ social circle acquiring a dog that was not right for them as a result.   It might surprise many people to know that I saw more Labrador Retrievers and Golden Retrievers when I was working with aggressive dogs full time than any other breeds. Do they tend to be aggressive? Not necessarily—it’s just that they are such common breeds that I was bound to see a lot of them because every breed has dogs with behavior problems, including aggression. The point is not to assume that a dog will be social and kind, good with kids, playful, or any other trait, based simply on their breed.   A dog must match your lifestyle, so even if, for example, the Newfoundland appeals to you, it’s not the right dog for you if you are not interested in regular grooming, or if the thought of dog hair on your carpet is a deal breaker. Similarly, an American Eskimo may not be a good bet if you live in an apartment building where barking is not tolerated, even if the breed suits you in every other way.   And when choosing a puppy, my best advice is to meet the parents if possible and only get a pup from a litter if you like the behavior of the parents. The parents’ behavior is one of the best predictors of a puppy’s behavior because so much of behavior has a genetic basis. If the dad is locked behind a fence because “he’s not good with strangers” then I wouldn’t bet on the puppies being good with strangers. And no matter what breed you are considering, I recommend avoiding the puppy that is off on its own (indicating a high likelihood that the puppy is overly shy and not very social) or the puppy that goes crazy, leaping and slamming into walls to get to you (indicating that impulse control may be a challenge for that individual.)   One of the advantages of adopting an adult rather than a puppy is that the dog is already developed and you have a better idea of what you are getting. If you adopt your dog from a shelter or a rescue (both of which are wonderful ways to acquire a fantastic dog and that I support wholeheartedly!), an adult dog is less likely to surprise you by developing into an individual very different than what you anticipated. Of course, millions of people have adopted puppies from shelters or rescues without knowing the parents, only to end up with the greatest dog they’ve ever known. And the same phenomenon applies to people with crosses of more than one breed. In fact, many people swear that the best dogs are so mixed in terms of breed composition that their parentage is truly “anybody’s guess.”   Part of acquiring a new dog is a commitment to accepting life’s little surprises. Even with the best research and planning, you may not get exactly what you bargained for so and there’s no way to guarantee that your expectations will be met. That’s why another key part of ending up with the right dog is an understanding that “right” can cover a broad range of possibilities.   Exceptions are very common to all the generalizations I’ve mentioned, but when getting a puppy, I believe in maximizing your chances of happiness by using any information available to you based on breed, family history, or observations of the puppy, by choosing the right puppy and by socializing that puppy well. The breed can be an important part of choosing a compatible puppy, but choosing a particular breed that you think is right for you is no guarantee of what that puppy will be like now or as an adult.

Dog's Life: Lifestyle
Dreaming of Dogs
What are your nighttime canine visions?

If there was a group called Dog Dreamers Anonymous, you would surely find me at their meetings, standing up to say, “Hi, my name is Karen, and I dream about dogs.” In fact, I dream about them every week, sometimes multiple times. Last week for example, I had three dreams about dogs.

  The first dream was about a dog trying to block the waves from ruining a little kid’s sandcastle. The dog ran in between the sand castle and a big wave and blocked most of it so that it did not destroy the castle. The child who had built this particular castle had been bullied and teased by some other competitors in a sandcastle building contest, but ending up winning an award from the judges, thanks in part to the dog’s quick move. In my dream, I was very excited about what the dog’s actions might mean about dog’s cognitive and social abilities since he acted to prevent a future problem and chose to help the child most in need.   In the second dream, I was running slow motion through a field of daisies with many dogs, most of whom belonged to clients. For years, I’ve said that people probably picture the daily life of anyone who works with dogs to be mostly running through a field of wildflowers with piles of puppies, and probably in slow motion. The reality, though still wonderful, isn’t quite so idyllic.   I was running a race in the third dream. A dog joined me after a couple of miles and ran with me the rest of the way, which kept me going over the last few miles when I was feeling bad and wanted to stop. As I crossed the finish line, I turned to give this dog some water, but he was gone. I looked all around, but couldn’t find him. Later, I learned that every struggling runner who finishied the race reported having this dog as company, but that he always disappeared at the finish line.   Do you dream of dogs? What canine thoughts dance in your head as you sleep?
News: Guest Posts
Pit Bulls Save Chihuahua From Coyote
The lucky little dog has good neighbors

The town of Littleton, Co., is on edge this summer due to coyote attacks on a young boy and pet dogs. Early Saturday morning, Buster the Chihuahua mix was grabbed by a coyote while he and his owner were outside their home. The neighbor's Pit Bulls chased after the coyote who then dropped Buster. The little dog crawled under a bush and the Pit Bulls guarded him until the coyote was gone and Buster's owner could rescue him. Buster will undergo surgery today for various injuries sustained during the attack. Hopefully, he will make a full and quick recovery. What struck me most about this incident was how the owner did not view the coyotes as "bad," nor did she see the Pit Bulls as completely "good." What are your thoughts on this unique dog-saves-dog story?

News: Guest Posts
Shelter Dog Plays Trick on Staff
Locks are no match for Red the Greyhound

The staff at Battersea Dogs & Cats Home in England had a mystery on their hands: Who let the dogs out? Enjoy!

News: Guest Posts
Blanket Lust
An (seemingly) unstoppable obsession

I am obsessed with blankets. Turns out, so is Leo. My blanket obsession began with a passion for textile design, which developed into a habit of buying any blanket, comforter or quilt that caught my eye. Leo’s blanket habit is related to mine: Whenever I bring home a gorgeous coverlet, he has to chew a gigantic hole right in the middle—as soon as he is left alone with it for more than 20 seconds.

  Sometimes I think fate must have ironically brought Leo and I together, or that maybe Leo is saving me from the fate of being crushed under an avalanche of blankets when I open the linen closet. With Leo’s blanket-munching, I recognized there were two issues that needed to be addressed. First, Leo could not be left alone with blankets until he learned chewing on them is inappropriate. Secondly, he needed a positive outlet for his chewing, such as a chew toy.   Keeping Leo away from blankets worked for like a week. His tenacity for finding unattended blankets was borderline inspiring. I’d leave the bedroom door open for a minute while I went to grab clothes from the dryer: Gigantic hole in the blanket. I’d take a catnap on the sofa: Down feathers everywhere when I awoke.   Since keeping him away from blankets wasn’t going to happen, I tried taste deterrents, like bitter spray misted onto the blankets. Apparently, the only one affected by this was me. Many a nap was rudely ended by a bitter taste. After falling asleep in a blanket cocoon on the sofa (exhausted from watching back-to-back-to-back episodes of Cake Boss), my open mouth would inevitably make contact with the surface of the blanket. It was heinously gross. Meanwhile, Leo would power through the nasty flavor. For my sake, I gave up on the bitter spray.   My plan to redirect Leo’s affection from blankets to toys has been even less successful. Even after taking Leo to training specifically to pique his interest in toys, he drifts after more than 20 seconds unless it is something he can eat (like a bully chew or a Kong toy). I see a future with a morbidly obese dog curled happily on elegant, intact quilts.   The reality is Leo and I both have issues that need to be dealt with (though I’d like to think that I can curb my blanket-purchasing habit as soon as I can curb Leo’s blanket-eating habit). What next? Do I give Leo one blanket and designate it as his? Do I continue my two years of attempting to interest him in toys? Do I concede that maybe I won’t have nice blankets ever? Any suggestions?


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How to Make Pumpkin Cookies with a Flower Cutter

Decorated Pumpkin Cookies | The Bearfoot Baker

Autumn is a time of year to go outside and enjoy nature’s display of gorgeous colors and celebrate the harvest. My little town knows how to celebrate by hosting several fall festivals and craft shows. My goal each fall is to visit all of them. I love the beautiful fall colors but the reason I go is to find inspiration. You don’t have to look very hard to see cookie inspiration.

This year I went with my hubby and grandson. It was different because we were strongly encouraged (by a very determined 3 year old) to visit the “kid” section. It was full of bounce houses and had a pretty neat petting zoo and lots of crafts for kids. I normally wouldn’t have visited that part of the festival because well, I am not a kid. I like to walk around and look at the craft vendors and bee booth.

I am glad we went to the kid section because it had the cutest little pumpkin patch I have ever seen. There were big pumpkins mixed in the little pumpkin that the kids could walk through pick the one they wanted. As I stood there and looked around I knew I had to make pumpkins cookies with a little twist.

Pumpkin Cookies for Fall | The Bearfoot BakerAs I looked down, I remembered the pumpkin cookies that LilaLoa made with the paw cookie cutter. She made the cutest cookies of the top view of the pumpkins. I fell in love instantly. So the cute little pumpkin patch and Georganne’s cookies inspired my pumpkins.

Supplies for Pumpkin Cookies:

Flower Cookie Cutters
Royal Icing
Sugar Cookie Recipe
Orange Icing – 15 Second icing in a decorating bottle or piping bag fitted with a #2 decorating tip
Thick Brown Icing – #21 decorating tip
Green Icing – Thick icing in a decorating bag fitted with a #352
Green Icing – 15 Second icing in a decorating bottle or piping bag fitted with a #2 decorating tip

  • Airbrush Gun
  • Orange Airbrush Color
  • Brown Airbrush Color

Fun Pumpkin Cookies | The Bearfoot Baker

  • Begin by outlining the flower cookies with the orange icing.
  • Flood every other section and let it dry for about 20 minutes.
  • Next, flood the remaining sections and let them dry for a few hours.

Airbrushed Pumpkin Cookies | The Bearfoot BakerAirbrushing these cookies really help them to look like a pumpkin instead of an orange flower.
Airbrush the edge of each section with the orange airbrush color and let it dry for a few minutes. Easy Pumpkin Cookies | The Bearfoot Baker

Add the tendrils with the #2 tip and green icing.
Next, add the stem with the brown icing.
Then, add the leaves.Easy Airbrushed Pumpkin Cookies | The Bearfoot BakerYou might like the look of that pumpkin cookie but I was looking for a pumpkin with a little more aged look. Can you see the difference in the two?

If you want your pumpkin to look aged, after your airbrush the orange let it dry and then repeat with the process with the brown airbrush color. Then, add the tendrils, stem and leaves. Simple Pumpkin Cookies | The Bearfoot BakerI like both of them but I think the aged look resembles the pumpkins I saw at the festival better. It was worth taking a little time to add another layer of airbrush color.

Colorful Pumpkin Cookies | The Bearfoot BakerThink outside of the box and make different colors. I knew I would like the yellow and the orange but the green, purple and blue really surprised  me.  I can’t wait to go back to the fall festival next year. Who knows what they will have that will inspire more cookies.

More Pumpkin Cookies:
Mickey Mouse Pumpkin Cookies
Decorated Pumpkin Cookies
Cute Pumpkin Cookies
Simple Pumpkin Cookies
Folk Art Pumpkin Cookies

Bear hugs,


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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU is one of The Black List's Top 50 Most Downloaded for 2013! Also, a look at the site's data.

I got some very exciting news this weekend.  Despite behind hosted on the Black List site for a mere three weeks of last year, my script TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU was one of the site's Top 50 Most Downloaded Scripts for 2013!

As I did not purchase a review from the Black List, none of the traffic to my script came from official Black List emails.  This accomplishment is entirely due to my publicizing the script here and on social media, as well as the many strong rankings from Black List members.

Because of several high ratings of 8s and 9s, the script is currently in the 1 or 2 positions on several of the site's feature lists, including Top Unrepresented, Top Uploaded, Top Horror, Top Mystery & Suspense.

If you're new here and need to know more about TOBY IS NOW FOLLOWING YOU, check out this post.

Or you can watch this short video pitch.

For Black List industry members, the script is available here.

I'm already taking meetings about TOBY and as this week is really the first week back from vacation, I'm optimistic that I will be hearing from more people this week.  My assumption is that a number of people downloaded it to enjoy over their holiday breaks and that the coming weeks will see them reaching out if they liked it.

As some people have asked, I intend on doing a more complete data dump about my Black List experience as I approach the end of my time hosting the script there.

The complete Top 50 Downloaded List is available here.

There are a couple of interesting finds here. Five writers each have two scripts on the Top 50 Downloaded List:

Dennis Luu - ON THE RUN and MOTHER

Conor Healy has three scripts on the list - CLEAN, BLACK AJAX and EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN.

As I'm a Black List member I went through and looked up each one of these scripts and gathered some data with regard to their ratings and paid reviews.  In cases like this, it's Black List policy to not share private data on individual scripts, but I am allowed to share non-identifying data.

I also want to caution that the data here only measures the Top 50 scripts against each other.  I don't have the information to stack these findings against the rest of the site as whole.  So what we're dealing with here may be a lot of correlation of data among the scripts in the Top 50 rather than determining the causation of how they ended up in the Top 50.

Having said that, these people succeeded in at least drawing traffic to their script so that at least suggests they figured out the salesmanship aspect of the goal.

40 of the Top 50 Scripts had a paid review of 8 or higher.  Some individuals had hidden their paid reviews, but by going by through my Black List emails featuring all scripts rated 8 or higher, I was able to at least identify scripts that met that threshold.  This means that only 10 scripts, or 20% of the list were able to draw traffic to their page by other means.  So it's not necessary to pay for a review on the site in order to get downloads, but it certainly improves your odds.

20 of the scripts (40%) had only a single paid review visible.
14 of the scripts (28%) had only two visible reviews.
3 scripts had three visible reviews
1 script each had four and five visible reviews, respectively.
1 script had seven paid reviews visible.

Does the number of paid reviews peak at 1 because 1 review is effective? Or is it because most people don't want to pay an additional $50 for a second review?  Or could those writers have paid for two reviews and only gotten one review to their liking?  There's no way to know for certain.  But you can say that 60% of the top downloaded scripts may have spent only $50 or less on reviews in order to attract their audience.  Pay to host it for two months and get one review and you've only spent $100, which is only slightly more than your typical contest entry fee.

What this also suggests is that a few writers employed the strategy of paying for reviews as a way of ensuring multiple appearances in the weekly emails.  Each paid review of 8 or above merits a mention in the weekly releases.  So if you purchase a review every other week and all of those reviews come back 8 or above, for the price of four reviews, the script will be pushed out to the membership every other week for two months.  Note that this strategy only really works if your script is good enough to get strong reviews.

16 scripts (32%) had fewer than 10 total ratings. (This includes both ratings from paid reviews and ratings from Black List members.)  One script had 2 ratings, one script had 3 ratings, three scripts had 4 ratings, one script had 5 ratings, three had 6, four had 7, two had 8 and one had 9 ratings.

Only ten scripts (20%) had 20 or more ratings.  Six scripts did not make this information available.

The other thing I wanted to take a look at is to see what percentage of the Black List member ratings were 8 or higher.  This is where it gets tricky because writers have the option to hide this information.  In fact 29 of the 50 scripts chose that option.  Of the remaining 21 scripts, only 11 had more than 50% of their ratings come in 8 or above.

I know, the numbers in that last paragraph can make your head swim.  What I want to get at is this.  Though you have to understand we are dealing with a VERY small sample size, it's not necessarily the end of the world if half of your ratings are below 8.  It's still possible to attract attention even with lower scores.  10 out of 21 scripts still got downloaded frequently even though more than half of the scores were less than 8.

Two things can probably make the difference here - having an irresistible logline, and having a strong review from the Black List reviewers.

I had also pulled the data with regard to how many of these writers were represented.  Here's where it gets tricky.  Since all of this information is self-reported and not mandatory, a writer doesn't have to identify themselves as repped.  Indeed, there were a couple writers who didn't have rep info listed even though I knew they had an agent or manager.

Additionally, I recognized a number of the repped writers as people who found representation only after uploading their work to the site.  But there's no way to know for certain who among these writers might have had an agent or manager before coming here.  So if I were to conclude "X number of writers on the Top 50 found their rep through the Black List," that would be impossible to confirm.

However, I suspect someone will go hunting for that data and might not put it in the same context that I am.  Between the information on the Black List site as well as public announcements about representation, I can state that 19 of 50 scripts had a rep attached.  Thus, (and I'm stating this again just so there's it's clear) going by the information available on the site and what has been publicly announced, we might conclude that 38% of the Top 50 have representation, but I urge against taking that as hard data. The actual number could be even higher, and we should not assume that 38% only encompasses writers who found their reps through the site.

And to think I swore off math once I got to college...

  1. And be sure and mention that Texas is a GREAT place to shoot movies! We would love the work.....but if not here---we have a bunch of production peeps in Atlanta, so that would also be an excellent choice!

  2. Congrats on getting meetings for TOBY! That's exciting. So far I've found the Black List to be a helpful tool, but writers need to know some of these stats. You have to get a gaggle of strong reviews to appear either in this list or even in the "Top Lists" section of the site, and even then you're lucky to get a handful of industry member downloads.

    Mine has been in the top 10 of the current "Top Lists" link (usually 7-10 places behind TOBY), and it appears 6 times in the "Top Film Scripts" page, and so far I've had 6 pro views and 2 pro downloads.

    I'm not complaining, however. From my experience this is the best way to get pro eyeballs on your screenplay by far. The strength of the system is that the cream really does rise to the top, and if your stuff is good enough you can get some attention. But it does take some time!

  3. That's a great analysis. And where you speculate about motives, your guesses match my experience. Thanks. - Bob I "Possum," "Poker Face."


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Tuesday, August 9, 2016

The Aaron Sorkin MasterClass in Screenwriting is as awesome as you expect it to be

As longtime readers of the blog know, I'm very careful when it comes to endorsing products and services. So long as there are plenty of free and cheap screenwriting resources out there, I'm always wary of sending business to services and charlatans who charge hundreds of dollars for their expertise.

When I do endorse a product, I always make sure it's one that I've used myself. I've thrown my weight behind the Black List and I've paid to post four scripts up there. Last year, I was invited to check out the MasterClass video series with Dustin Hoffman and recently I was granted access to an even more relevant MasterClass - with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.

Aaron Sorkin probably needs no introduction, but manners demands that I do so anyway. His first film was an adaptation of his own play, A Few Good Men. Subsequent films include Malice, The American President, Moneyball and The Social Network, for which he won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. He's enjoyed similar success in television, having created Sports Night, The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom.

A Few Good Men is one of my favorite films and one of those that if I come across it while flipping channels, I have to watch the rest of it. The Social Network deservedly won the Oscar because it manages to tell a very complex story with complete clarity. The script deals in multiple timeframes, including two separate depositions as framing sequences and the audience is never once lost or disoriented. When this class was announced, I saw one snarky person retweeted into my feed who sneered, "I don't think there's anything at all about screenwriting I'm interested in learning from Aaron Sorkin."

Look, I'll admit I wasn't the biggest fan of Studio 60, but it's petty bullshit to use a writer's weakest moments as the disqualfier for anything they have to say about the craft, you need a serious attitude adjustment. When someone like Sorkin offers the chance to pick their brain, you shut up and listen.

The Master Class is a series of 35 videos that total nearly eight hours of viewing. That's $90 for eight hours of viewing. That's a cost of less than $12 an hour. Think of it like this - would you pay $25 to see Aaron Sorkin give a two-hour talk about screenwriting at the WGA Theater. I bet many of you would, and on a per-minute basis, that would cost you more.

Sorkin has broken the class into a suggested viewing schedule that paces the videos out over six weeks. I wasn't able to take that leisurely tour, but it makes sense to me and if you look at it that way, you're paying only $15/week.

There are several components to the class, delivered in Lesson Videos, which take the form of direct lectures and workshop sessions. In the workshop, Aaron works with about a half-dozen students. In some segments he reads a scene from their script and offers critiques. What's refreshing is he's a very encouraging teacher, always finding something positive to say and offering criticism in a way that's instructive without being rude. He's also upfront when he's out of his own depth. (He tells one student who's skilled at action writing that he doesn't know any advice to give because action writing is his own weakness. He jokes that if he had written that scene it would have just been two people talking.)

There's also a multi-video series where the same students become Sorkin's writers room and as an exercise, they begin to break what would be the first episode of the fifth season of The West Wing. (In other words, they try to figure out how Sorkin would have continued the show, had he not left at the end of the fourth season.) I've been able to see three different showrunners in action in their writing rooms, and I can tell you that Aaron leads the discussion very differently than most. (However, there's also a power disparity. In other rooms, you'll find co-EPs and midlevel writers who bring a lot of experience to the table. Aaron is essentially working with staff writers, so the dynamic is different.) I say this because it's not a perfectly accurate representation of a writers room, but it's still a very instructive series on a lot of levels.

The real gold is in Sorkin's direct lectures. If you are interested in screenwriting and either didn't attend college or your college didn't have a Screenwriting course, these lecture videos are an excellent way to begin thinking about the basics in a way that's digestible and encourages you to apply these lessons to deconstructing films you've seen.

One of Sorkin's fundementals is the idea of the "Intention and Obstacle." The Intention is what the main character wants, what's their goal, what's their drive? If the movie is about a cross-country drive to San Francisco, why is it important that they are going now? What are they going towards, and just as importantly, why do they need to be there at a certain time? Sorkin points out that it's a better movie if they NEED to be there by, say, Thursday for a job interview. That's better than if there's no tension at all for when they arrive. The obstacle, of course, is what is getting in the way of their intention, and Sorkin goes through a couple examples.

In other videos, Sorkin shows a scene from his work and deconstructs various aspects of the writing. He puts us in his head as he crafted the scene, showing why specific choices and lines of dialogue were chosen to carefully reveal something about the characters, or to push the drama forward.

I especially appreciated a video where Sorkin described himself as a "rules guy." He believes there are absolutely rules of drama, principles that all great works conform to. However, he wisely reminds the audience not to be led astray by "fake rules." The real rules come from Aristotle's Poetics. The fake rules would be guru-speak like "Never use voiceover."

Each lesson is accompanied by a PDF that recaps the basic point of the lesson and offers further assignments and resources. These assignments might be something like "Pick a movie to watch tonight. Critically look at why the movie works or doesn’t work. If you find yourself using snarky terms, remember, that doesn’t help you diagnose the script. Keep a journal and write down what works about your five favorite and what doesn’t work about your five least favorite movies. Share your findings with your MasterClass classmates and see if they agree or disagree."

I wasn't able to participate in any of the community discussions due to time constraints, but I'm sure they'd be a useful resource. Similarly, I wasn't able to make use of the Office Hours feature, where students can submit video and text questions for Aaron to answer. Even before factoring in that added value I feel like the class is well worth it.

I give the Aaron Sorkin MasterClass my enthusiastic endorsement. Particularly if you are new to screenwriting and really have a desire to understand the fundamentals, this class is a fantastic resource. In the grand scheme of things, $90 is a bargain for all of this. Christmas and Hanukkah aren't that far off, so if you can't commit that cash yourself, put it on your wishlist. You can find this and every other MasterClass at www.masterclass.com.

  1. Thanks for this. I've been leaning towards taking the class, as soon as my schedule opens up a bit (2 more weeks). This settles it: I'm in!

    1. Enjoy! The necessity of posting this review in a timely fashion forced me to binge, but I feel like you might get more out of the class if you follow Sorkin's suggested schedule, as included in the workbook.

  2. I actually take the Writing Masterclass by James Patterson. It is every bit as enjoyable and expert as you mention Sorkin's class to be. I've oft thought of taking a scriptwriting class as well and I am sure Sorkin's is the one I will take. The presentations and feedback are amazingly easy to get into and the self-paced and ability to go back over and over help a lot. I love the set up of Masterclass and I am glad you wrote about it here as well.

  3. Your review of Sorkin's class was spot-on. I now worship at the altar of intention and obstacle.


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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Different types of reporting on McCain's War

Here is Patrick Cockburn, the Arab-speaking Iraq correspondent for the London Independent, Violence erupts in Basra as Iraqi forces battle Mehdi Army 03/26/08.

The US has been eager for the central government to regain control of Basra, which sits on top of Iraq's oil reserves and is also close to the American army's main supply line that runs west of the city up the main highway from Kuwait to Baghdad. Basra has hitherto been run by competing local warlords, each of whom has been seeking to gain control of valuable local concessions and rackets such as fuel and the ports of Basra and Umm Qasr. ...

Mr Sadr has been keen to avoid an all-out military confrontation with the US army or Iraqi units backed by the Americans ever since he fought the US Marines in Najaf in 2004. Although his Mehdi Army militiamen suffered heavy losses because of the American force's superior arms, they showed that they were prepared to fight to the end. In the warren of slums in Basra, they could do the same and they could also spread the fighting across the overwhelmingly Shia south of Iraq. (my emphasis)
Here are Sholnn Freeman and Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post in Iraqi PM Gives Basra Gunmen Ultimatum 03/26/08:

It was unclear why U.S. forces would take part in a broad armed challenge to Sadr and his thousands-strong militia on the eve of Petraeus's assessment, which the Bush administration has said would greatly influence its decision on whether to draw down troop levels. (my emphasis)
Now, in the paragraph just prior, they reported that Basra is "the conduit for Iraq's oil exports". It doesn't seem to have occurred to the folks at the Post that it's also strategically vital for the US supply lines. Maybe they should read Patrick Cockburn's reports to find out why, why, why might the Americans be concerned about fighting in Basra. Or they could check Pat Lang's column from the 07/21/06 Christian Science Monitor, The vulnerable line of supply to US troops in Iraq.

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"It is the logic of our times
No subject for immortal verse
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse."

-- Cecil Day-Lewis from Where Are The War Poets?

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Aug. 3rd, 2005 @ 11:44 pm I'm a theif!!!
Current Mood: happyhappy
Current Music: Mae as usual!
I stole this from mandy... this should be very interesting... :\

1. Name:
2. Age:
3. Height/Weight:
4. Fave Color:
5. Fave Movie:
6. Fave Song:
7. Fave Band:
8. Most Embarassing Moment:
9. Are you a virgin?
HERE COMES THE FUN ... ... ...
1. Are we friends?
2. Would you kiss me?
3. Would you ever ask me out?
4. Would you hold me if I was crying?
5. Would you take care of me when I'm sick?
6. Do you want to tell me something that you couldn't before?
7. If I gave you my phone number, would you call me?
8. If you heard a rumor about me, would you defend me?
9. Do you think I'm a good person?
10. Do you think I'm cute?
11. If you could change anything about me -would you?

fill it out I guess...

Peace Easy, God Bless.
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