Writing, editing, design

I had nothing better to do, so I went to the Muse Convention. Who knew that Muses have to amass Continuing Education Credits each year. I had thought it was a lifelong gig like some marriages or herpes.

Tagging along also meant maybe I could find a better Muse. This one is just a temp, as are, it turns out, my inspired ideas. They don’t last long enough for me to write them down. Then when it comes time to write, the Muse is snoring on the couch, and I’m sitting chin in hand at the keyboard.

I sat in on a session called, “How to Avoid Getting Assigned to a Journalist.” It was packed. Glancing around the room, I noticed my own Muse, sitting in back and giggling with a few cronies, all sharing something from an aluminum flask.

I wasn’t sure whether to be offended because she was at the session in the first place or
thankful because she obviously wasn’t paying attention.

With all that giggling going on in the back corner, it was hard to follow the speaker, but I
gathered from the PowerPoint slides that being assigned to a journalist was the Muse
equivalent of being assigned the overweight kid as your partner in elementary school
ballroom dancing class.

The bulleted list explaining all this went something like:

• newspapers are dying
• journalists are hacks anyway
• you can wave your Muse wand ferociously and little more than “It was a dark and stormy night” is achieved
• they are notoriously tight with their liquor closet
• they THINK they are actual writers

The last one drew a storm of howls and laughter and many nods of agreement. I glanced over at my Muse, and she was high-fiving her buddies and and laughing so hard that the flask contents were dripping from her nose.

I couldn’t take any more and left for the lobby bar. I needed a drink, and I didn’t want to
have to buy one for my so-called Muse. How the hell did she keep her license? What kind of an operation is this?

I gratefully tipped the glass back and the nectar of forgetfulness (Ah, Lethe!) was about to hit my lips,
when….

“Hey, Elwood! Fancy seeing YOU here!”

The Muse!

(To be continued)

“Fail” and “epic fail” seem to be showing up more and more in the tweets I read. Both went viral on the web about a year ago and people assign the terms to both simple and catastrophic fumbles, stumbles and, of course, failures.

According to Slate’s Christopher Beam (Oct. 2008), fail really took off when the blog Failblog started up in May, 2008. Failblog set up a taxonomy of what constituted various levels of fail and of epic fail, the highest fail there can be.

I want to introduce a subtle variation on the theme: FLAIL and, of course, EPIC FLAIL.

A flail differs from a fail mainly in scope. Whereas fail represents the inability to do something, a failure being utter and complete, a flail represents a bad performance on something most people can do easily, but it’s not a complete failure. Just an inept, incompetent, or incomplete performance, usually by someone who believes they are very good.

For instance, an act deserving a fail might be forgetting to put the top up on your convertible during a thunderstorm; a flail would be if you go out to put the top up and you forget your keys and have to dash back through the rain to get them. Then you grab the wrong keys. If you then finally put the top up, but forget to close the windows, it would be approach epic flail status or almost total incompetence, especially if you were going off on people who don’t take care of their cars like you do when the storm hit.

Flail also involves people who think they know what they are doing but don’t, their lack of self-awareness providing much entertainment for those around them.

You run into a lot of flailers in amateur sports and in bars and in school. A person who has the most expensive golf clubs and brags about it, but fails to break 100? Flail. A person who has the most expensive golf clubs and loses his grip during a swing so that the club ends up in the pond? Epic flail.

A guy who walks up to an attractive woman in a bar and gets rejected is a fail. A guy who walks up to an attractive woman in a bar trailing a long piece of toilet paper stuck to his shoe and gets rejected is a flail.

A poor student who turns in bad work or zeroes an exam is obviously a fail. A student who believes his weak paper was directly dictated to him by God, and who doesn’t agree with the prof that a mere 10 errors in the first three paragraphs is too many, is a flail.

The difference is subtle but important. Anyone can fail, but only the blindly incompetent can flail.

I knew the happy days would end. The Muse is back from her trip to Mexico with the semi-famous (at least in his own mind) design advice maven, Dr. Design.

She ambled in, hair totally bird-nested and too unwashed even for dreads. A nearly dead cigarillo didn’t so much hang from between her puffy lips as cantilever there on her lower, stuck by dried saliva. She dropped a pull-tie Hefty bag, no doubt filled with dirty clothes, by the front door and headed for the couch, the left side of which has an indention that exactly matches her butt.

“Hey, Elwood! Got any cold beer?” Don’t know why she calls me Elwood. She dropped what was left of her cigarillo into my Starbucks grande double latte I just brought home with the Sunday New York Times.  She lit another.

“Whadjago deef or somethin? Ya got a cold beer or ya gonna make a run?” She blew a few smoke rings, a small fast one through a slowly moving big one, then fixed me eye-to-eye with a steely glare. I fetched her a beer.

“Thanks, bub.”

My karma must be bad. I asked the Universe for help, for inspiration, for something to end my creative drought, and the next day, she shows up as if from Hell’s temp agency.

“So, tell me. Didja get any work done or did you miss me?”  She flicked an ash toward the Starbucks cup and missed. I hoped the Times wouldn’t catch fire.

“Yeah,” I said with too loud of a sigh, “I did get some writing and web site work done.”

“Good boy, Elwood! Another few months, and maybe all my help will really pay off,” she said, before nearly losing a lung in another of a long line of hacking coughfests. Then she snorted up the excess mucus and drained the beer.

“Ya know what that tasted like?” she asked while actually belching the last word.

“No. I don’t.”

“That tasted just like another one!” she said with unsuppressed glee at her humor. “Just like another one! Ha-ha-ha.”

I don’t think I can make it. Can one fire one’s muse?

(To be continued…)

Dear Dr. Design: What’s the deal with capital letters? Were they invented in a capital city, like italics were invented in Italy?  –Not Your Type, Dallas

Actually, Notchmytype, they were not invented in a capital city and they shouldn’t really be called capital letters, as if they were chiseled into column capitals by the ancient Greeks. They should be called majuscules (the little letters are minuscules).

The terms upper case and lower case came from printers, probably going back to Gutenberg, who kept caps in an “upper” type case or drawer and the little letters were in the “lower case”, which was, uh, below the upper type case.

So the next time your editor asks you a question about capping a word, say: “Hey, you mean majuscules?” Your editor will be so impressed, a raise and promotion will be likely!

Dr. Design
doc@newsdesignschool.com

Wordle is a fun little applet that will make a tag cloud of text you paste in or a URL. You could even use it to compare two texts by creating a Wordle for each. Here’s the Wordle for this blog, minus this post:

What fun!

…can be found at this link. The code is different and they just start automatically, which is a pain, so I didn’t put them on this page directly. Here you can see the second part of the Linotype machine video and another one from the Chicago Tribune called “From Trees to Tribunes.” Enjoy.

The latest 1940 technology plays a large part in this 10-minute film about careers in journalism. Females will love the part about women working only in the “women’s section” of the paper…. Enjoy (anyway)!

Old “hot type” journalists will remember fondly these Rube Goldberg devices. Younger journalists will probably wonder how in the world we ever got a paper out with such technology. You know, Gutenberg was setting type letter by letter in the late 1400s. I read somewhere that he would not have felt terribly out of place in the composing room of the 1950s.

Enjoy.