Stare With Your Ears

Please enjoy The Mind Reader, from an episode of Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz.

Just slip on your headphones, click the play button, and stare with your ears.

Creative Ways to Pick Your NCAA Bracket

Even though the tournament is already down to the final 16 teams, I have created a short list of five ways you can choose the teams for your bracket next year. The list comes courtesy of an exercise I tried from Caffeine for the Creative Mind, a fun little book loaded with funny, enjoyable challenges to help get your brain jump-started.

Intended mainly for folks in ad agencies, anyone can find an exercise in the book to help get a short jolt of mental caffeine. Don’t pay thousands of dollars for seminars on how to be creative at work. Spend less than $20.00 and buy this book. And listen to Ken Nordine recordings while you’re working with it.

Five Ways to Pick Winners in the NCAA Bracket

1) Which team mascots would taste the best if caught, killed, and flame-broiled in a barbecue?

2) Which shools have the highest ratio of ugly, 1970s-constructed buildings to older, traditional collegiate-looking buildings (this might require some reasearch)?  Pick those teams to win.

3)  Which school mascots best complete this sentence:  “Honey, the ___________________ just called.  They’re in the middle of romance right now and will be late for dinner tonight.”

4) Pick any American celebrity.  Find out the city where he or she was born.  Pick the schools in this order:  within a 20 mile radius of that city, then 50 miles out, 100 miles out, and 200 miles out.

5) The Dave Barry approach:  Which school mascot would be the best name for a rock band that completes this:  “The Unnatural ______________.”

Hope your team wins.

World Builder: Beautiful. Wonderful. Sad.

From time to time I like to share videos I think exemplify the highest quality in production values.  Today, I’m happy to share World Builder, by Bruce Branit.  It took one day to shoot and two years to make.

It will take you nine minutes to watch.

Enjoy. And share.

(h/t:  American Digest)

Returning to My Bread-and-Butter Skill

I’ve spent the last two months on a contract technical writing gig, something brought me back to the skill that put me on this path to begin with.  My job was to coordinate the development of, and edit for clarity, a massive implementation guide for a major healthcare software company.

We developed an outline for the book, then the subject matter experts sent me their content.  I pasted it in, sent out a draft every day, got feedback, pasted more stuff in, sent out the next draft, wash, rinse, repeat.  Every Friday morning we held a long meeting to discuss the week’s work, clarify a few things, then start the whole process over again on Monday.

All told, the guide now stands at nearly 200 pages.  And there’s still one more chapter to complete.

Technical writing was (still is, apparently) my bread-and-butter skill, the basis for nearly every other skill I’ve developed since I landed my first tech writing  job in 1991 after spending five years as an English teacher (and five years prior to that in broadcasting).

Returning to it is like riding a bicycle.  It’s just harder to put baseball cards in the spokes.