Saturday, February 17, 2007

Wheel of Lunch

This cool. Enter your zip code and spin the wheel. It will decide what place you should eat near where you are. 

How to Secure Your Car

Use a giant tesla coil

Outrage DuJour

San Francisco schools may soon use a badly written and illustrated comic book as a history lesson. Why? Because it’s full of radical leftist diatribes, which pass for reality in some SF “minds”.

Reading, writing and anti-militarism? That may soon be the case in San Francisco where a new comic book pushing a political point of view is raising serious questions.
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Ronald Reagan hugging Osama Bin Laden, corporate America celebrating the spoils of war, a cartoon view of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal isn’t off limits in this comic book—“Addicted to War—Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism.”

It’s an undisputedly leftist view of the United States involvement in wars, and it may soon come to classrooms in San Francisco public schools.

Pete Hammer, San Francisco Unified School District: “The topic is one that a lot of teachers would have an interest in bringing into the classroom.”

Pete Hammer reviews new materials for the school district. He gave “Addicted to War” a thumbs up for use in the classroom.

Pete Hammer: “It hasn’t been adopted as material that every teacher has to use, teachers will have their choice about whether they want to use it or not.”

Frank Dorrel, Publisher, “Addicted to War”: “We’re really glad that the San Francisco School District, which is apparently against the war in Iraq, well not apparently, obviously is, has chosen to do this.”

Frank Dorrel is now helping to supply the San Francisco Unified School District with 4,000 copies of the book for use in high school social studies and history classes. The books are being donated by a local anti-war activist.

Aside from the fact that it’s propaganda, like most leftist pamphlets they like to accuse the US of all kinds of atrocities while ignoring the far worse genocide committed by socialists and communists, which continues to this day. Here we have a book making false claims that Reagan schooled Osama Bin Laden, ignoring entirely the Soviet adventurism which created the Afghan war that really created groups like Al Quaeda in the first place.

So SF schools want to take what amounts to a anti-American propaganda piece and use it to “educate” American children? Somehow, that doesn’t sound very American. 

The Date Rape Myth

Rape is a nasty subject, but the truth is the media loves to hate the male gender and they also love salacious stories. But a recent study shows that most women who claim they were slipped date rape drugs were just plain drunk.

Women who claim to be victims of ‘date-rape’ drugs such as Rohypnol have in fact been rendered helpless by binge-drinking, says a study by doctors.

They found no evidence that any woman seeking help from emergency doctors because their drinks were allegedly spiked had actually been given these drugs.

Around one in five tested positive for recreational drugs while two-thirds had been drinking heavily.

The findings further erode the theory that there is widespread use of Rohypnol and GHB, another drug said to be favoured by predatory rapists.

This was a UK study, but I’m sure the same would be true if it was done here. People like to blame outside things for their own stupidity. And our culture has become increasingly misandronistic.

If someone gets falling down drunk, they should be surprised if they get jacked. Especially if they do it in public, or in a pick up bar. 

SECRETS OF WRITING: FORESHADOWING

There’s a method for creating a feeling of anticipation in the audience by playing with their subconscious. It’s called foreshadowing. Foreshadowing involves cueing the audience early on that something is going to happen. But you do it in a subtle manner, so they don’t take notice of it on a conscious level.

There are several approaches to this technique. One is visual, the other is textual. When employing foreshadowing you don’t want the audience to see what you’re doing. You want them to feel it.

Shakespeare employed the textual method with dialog in JULIUS CAESAR. In the beginning of the play the characters keep using terms that involve cutting, stabbing, knives, etc. This foreshadows the scene where Caesar gets assassinated. Other dialog also indicates harm to Caesar in an indirect way.  For example, Caesar is walking through a crowd with Cassius, Casca and Brutus:

SOOTHSAYER: Beware the ides of March.
CAESAR: What man is that?
BRUTUS: A soothsayer bids you to beware the ides of March.

Later, Brutus talks to Casca about Caesar’s epileptic fit in the throng.

CASCA: ...before he fell down, when he perceived the common herd was glad he refused the crown, he plucked me ope his doublet and offered them his throat to cut. ...Three or four wenches , where I stood, cried ‘Alas, good soul!’ and forgave him with all their hearts: but there’s not heed to be taken of them; if Caesar had stabbed their mothers, they would have done no less.

Later still Casca talks to Cassius about Caesar:

CASCA: Indeed, they say the senators tomorrow mean to establish Caesar as a king; and he shall wear his crown by sea and land, in every place, save here in Italy.

CASSIUS: I know where I will wear this dagger then.

And so on…

The dialog serves to cue the audience that Caesar is doomed, because he is blessed with power that other’s don’t want him to have.

The visual foreshadowing technique can be accomplished one of two ways. Both are symbolic, but one form is more abstract. Therefore I call this first method abstract foreshadowing.

In abstract foreshadowing, you cue the reader with a symbol you prepare for them. This symbol is used when certain things happen. Every time, for example, something bad happens you show the symbol somewhere. Then, when you use the symbol later on, the audience subconsciously understands that something bad is going to happen soon. The symbol can be anything you choose. A woman wearing a big hat, a Christian fish icon, a laughing baby, a dog rooting through garbage, a smiley face button.

This technique must be done in a carefully balanced way so the audience recognizes the symbol, but isn’t hit over the head with it. You want them to be cued, not to be slammed. Otherwise, the technique becomes a parody. Like the fruit cart that always gets smashed in movie car chase scenes. 

The second method involves giving the audiences incomplete glimpses of the future. I call this the Oracle method. If the story takes place in the past, you can use a framing sequence to suggest something happens in the story that leads to a certain conclusion. For example, your story’s narrator can have one arm, but in the main body of the story, he has two arms.

You can also have a character get incomplete glimpses of the future in dreams, visions, or it can be foreshadowed through the knowledge other characters have of things that will affect the hero that he is still ignorant of.

Both the “abstract” and “oracle” methods can also be used in text. Symbolic phraseology can be used to preceed events as we saw in Julius Caesar. Oracle methods can also be used in dialog. For examples of both methods, study the script for Espers #1 provided in a later chapter.

REMEMBER: Foreshadowing creates anticipation subconsciously. It shouldn’t be obvious.

Russian Drivers

I guess they don’t believe in stop lights.