“The real judges of your character aren’t your neighbors, your relatives, or even the people you play bridge with. The folks who really know you are waiters, waitresses, and clerks.” ~Katherine Piper

A La Mie by Toulouse-Lautrec

Don’t play this game. Don’t even start. Sure, it seems innocent. Friendly. Simple. Stupid, even. But it will waste your precious time. But maybe your time isn’t as precious as I make it out to be. And who am I to deprive you anyway? Do I think I’m the ruler of your pursuits? I’m not. So, go ahead, try it if you want.

Tumble Waiter Game – MostFunGames.com

“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hey Blog Readers,

To celebrate the second printing (2) of my first novel (1), I’m selling first edition signed copies (trade paperbacks) for three dollars (3) plus shipping (3) while there are still some left in the box in my basement! (Only $6 each!)

Email me (julieluongo@gmail.com) your address and I’ll send you The Hard Way (Forge, 2008) – my unanimously praised novel-in-stories (like early Nick Hornby but with a female protagonist).

Here’s a link to my paypal account.

“We’re so trapped that any way we could imagine to escape would be just another part of the trap. Anything we want, we’re trained to want.” ~Chuck Palahniuk

Really, Palahniuk? Then explain this:

JuLu Ew Manchu

I was browsing Look at this fucking hipster today and came across my initials. JL. It’s so unexpected. I don’t even know this guy. Awesome.

“The good thing about being Dr. Frankenstein is that you can always make new friends.” ~Aaron Allston

Luongo's Monster

I planted the seed that grew this pumpkin then carved* it into this jack-o-lantern monster.** He’s been franken staring at me ever since.*** I’m like, “go out and meet people. There’s a little girl down the road who I’m sure would like to play with you.”**** But he just stares. We’re still bonding, I guess.

I wanted to submit my monster to A Patchwork of Flesh, but I’d have to make it into a 2.5 x 3.5 artist’s trading card and send it to him … and what are the chances I’ll get around to that? Still, I highly recommend his site if you’re a fan of Frankenstein’s Monster. Great stuff. Enjoy and Happy Franken Halloween.

(*Thanks to D for the carving set.)

(**Thanks to Mary Shelley for inventing it.)

(***Thanks to messiestsobjects’ for this joke.)

(****Thanks to James Whale’s version of Frankenstein in 1931 for this image.)

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot. Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone. They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

I was listening to the radio in my car because

1. I drive a car made in 1999 that doesn’t have a CD player built in.
2. The external CD player I have in the car, the kind that adapts with a cassette tape on a wire, doesn’t have great sound and the little buttons make it so I almost wreck whenever I get to fooling around with it. I’m already a bad enough driver. Did I mention I backed into a tree in my own driveway and crushed my rear tail light? Yeah, I did that.
3. I like to flip through the stations and see what’s playing. Radio music is mostly crap, but sometime I like pop music. Kelly Clarkson has crazy range.

OK, so that admission out of the way, I’ll get to the point. Some songs need never be remade. Joni Mitchell wrote it and should be the only one to ever sing it. Big Yellow Taxi. She owns it. She even pwns it.

Artist who have mangled include Amy Grant, Counting Crows with and without Vanessa Carlton, Sandi Thom, Kaya, Pinhead Gunpowder, Paul Tillotson, Moya Brennan, Keb Mo, Chris Thomas King, Keren Ann, Toxic Audio, and Bob Dylan. Indigo Girls, Jewel, Sarah McLachlan and Meredith Brooks covered it at the Lilith Fair. Who care, right? I’m just dropping wiki knowledge here.

It’s the Counting Crows with Vanessa Carlton version that raised my ire. It’s the most popular version of the song ever. Grr. Oh, the dramatic irony that a great song, perfect the way it is, has gotten popular in this bastardized version. It is paradise paved and synthesized and “ooo bop bop bopped” then run through a production studio, spit out into a dumb movie, then played and overplayed. It’s making me want to scream. Someone is to blame!

I doubt it’s Adam Duritz or Vanessa Carlton, and yet I feel compelled to tell them that Big Yellow Taxi is a criticism of taking stuff that’s great and turning it into crap. It’s not advocating it! They might have missed that point. It’s Jive…Jive Talking, even (OK, I had to shoehorn that in because I wanted to post this guy dancing to the Bee Gees. He writes: “I can’t dance, I can’t talk, only thing about me is the way my jello gut jiggles under that apron.”:)

My friend Matt and I are editing an anthology about Kind Acts. If you want in, now’s the chance. Below are links and submission guidelines. -Julie

Have you been the recipient or giver of a small act of kindness? Tell us about it for a book we’re writing. You can be credited or anonymous. Just tell us your story and help us pay your One Kind Act forward. Make the world a better place! Be a part of something big! Be featured in The One Kind Act Book! All of the details are below.

One Kind Act is now accepting submissions for its first anthology. One Kind Act is a social movement aimed at making lives happier and more fulfilling while making the world a better place … One Kind Act at a time.

Life is all about interacting. We forget that as we speed past other people in shiny boxes on the highway, or buy our morning coffee from a stranger in a window, or pump gas next to five other people never lifting our heads to see who they are.

But when we choose to notice the people around us and we act with kindness, we cause a chain reaction. A smile in the grocery store. An open door for a mother struggling with a baby carriage. A double batch of soup so there is extra for a neighbor. When we give and receive these gifts, we realize it really is the small things that matter.

We at One Kind Act have heard a lot of your stories and now we want to anthologize them to inspire and motivate others. We are looking for stories of both givers and recipients of Kind Acts. They may be with strangers, family members, or friends in private or professional settings. Don’t think your story isn’t what we’re looking for. If a Kind Act popped into your head, send it to us. And tell your friends. The more diverse, the merrier.

Guidelines

• Nonfiction stories and essays can be between 200 – 2000 words in length.
• Please submit your stories electronically as an attachment (word or pdf format) or in the body of your email to stories@onekindact.com. Subject line: “Anthology.”
• You may submit anonymously. However, if you would like to be credited, please include you name, city, state, country, age, profession, or any other pertinent details you would like us to include. Limit is a 65-70 word bio. Inclusions of web address will be considered.

Other Details

• You retain all rights to your work. We just need one-time and electronic reprint rights.
• Will reserve the right to edit your story for consistency, grammar, and spelling.
• You may submit as many stories as you like for consideration. Please send individual submissions separately.
• Deadline for submissions is midnight February 12, 2010. You will be informed by the end of February if your story will be included in the anthology.
• Publication is anticipated mid 2010.

Stay up-to-date about the anthology’s progress at: www.onekindact.com

The Bottom Line

Publishing this anthology is a labor of love for One Kind Act. Hence, we can not pay for contributions. However we will actively promote the anthology and your writing.

Thank you for considering a submission.

About the Editors

Matthew Costello is an e-commerce guru and CEO of Web Marketing Advisors, a strategic marketing and business development firm. Matt is also the founder of One Kind Act, a social movement designed to change the world by motivating others to leap in and really live, just One Kind Act at a time. He is dedicated to helping people focus on kindness and energize their lives.

Julie Luongo is the author of The Hard Way (Forge, 2008), her debut novel, which was met with unanimous critical praise. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Temple University and a Bachelor’s from Penn State in Advertising. She is a former writing instructor, editor, and playwright. She always thanks cashiers; waves people through in traffic, and sometimes even smiles at strangers. In addition Julie played a large role in the creation of One Kind Act.Com and continues to do so.

Reprint Notice

Permission to reprint or redistribute altered or excerpted material from this post is allowed only if you do the following:

• Include, all links, bio’s and credits.

Or

• Provide a direct link back to the post, and email us, to let us know about the link.

“Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.” ~Scott Adams

Two time Bulgarian Lottery Numbers:

4, 15, 23, 24, 35, 42

LOST Numbers:

4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42

So, maybe not all of the numbers are bad. Only four…or two, depending on how you look at it, I suppose. (Apologies to non-LOST fans. You really should watch it, though. Not just so you’d know what I’m going on about, but because it’s so very good.)

“He who distributes the milk of human kindness cannot help but spill a little on himself.” ~James Matthew Barrie

The Milkmaid by Vermeer

I’ve always been particularly skeeved by the idea of wet nursing. It’s probably because it brings to mind upper crusty women who couldn’t be bothered nursing because they were too engaged in being playthings to their important husbands and staving off melancholy with alcohol while their hearty and appropriately cowed maids (milk maids?) kept lactating long after their own children were weaned. Lazy, classist bitches can’t even feed their own kids. (I blame books for this bias.)

Also, the term. Wet nursing. It’s like “wet work” to describe killing missions. Gah. Go and ruin the word wet for me. I guess I wasn’t all that fond of it. But really, nursing wasn’t descriptive enough? Had to add wet to it? I really don’t think anyone would have been confused if Mrs. Haversham said, “Sally nursed baby Charles until he was out of diapers.” Nursing does the work, and context picks up the slack.

Of course I know that women giving milk to other people’s babies is probably more common in those tight, matriarchal-type communities where women clatch together and work and play and raise kids while the men do what they do (smoke and fart and hunt?) with their own kind. I get that it’s natural and practical… so are holes in the ground for pooping. But, whatever. I don’t come across a lot of references to wet nursing in my life. I don’t raise kids and only hunt in the grocery store. I don’t talk about baby feeding with my friends who have babies. As far as I know they’re cross-nursing and baking placenta although I doubt it…er, I hope not.

I bring it up because a while back a Chinese policewoman breastfed a bunch of kids after an earthquake (May, 2009). She was on the scene, her body was in the lactating way, and she eventually ended up nursing 9 babies whose mothers were too traumatized to give milk. (The kids were in a shelter without milk, powdered or otherwise). She probably saved their lives. Or at least prevented severe malnutrition. She was given all sorts of commendations and a promotion to Vice Commissioner of the Public Security Bureau. So, you know, another woman got a promotion because of her boobs. (Bah-dum-dum. Sorry. I didn’t know that’s where this was going when I wrote it.)

“Wink at small faults; remember thou hast great ones.” ~Benjamin Franklin

The above video is for a pants design called Winkers (patent pending). If you can’t access YouTubes where you are, then let me describe. It opens with an overly long screen of text I couldn’t read very well. Then, bam, the payoff! A woman’s butt, shot from the waist down (and some awesome instrumentals…pay special attention to the transitions). She’s got jeans on with eyes painted just below her bum area. As she walks, the eyes seem to wink, wink, wink, wink, alternately as the fabric of her pants is lost in the crease between her thigh and heiney. I’ve always wondered, how can I accentuate the creases between my butt and thigh fat better. Winkers answered!

Over the video is an unreadable email where you can apparently write for more info. But who’s looking at the text when there’s another design to admire? The next one is of scene clappers. To be accurate, this one highlights the pants sag between butt and thigh. But I’m just splitting hairs. In case you can’t see, under the arm of the clapper is the word “Action.” I’m not sure if this is intended to be a double entendre or just descriptive.

Next up is a duck. I think? At first I thought it was a stork beak, maybe reaching for the baby himself. But then after watching is again, I think it’s probably a duck…with a…is that a fish? Another double entendre? Or maybe it says “quack.” Or “help.”

After that, there are two animal eyes. Winking tiger, winking owl. Don’t miss the shot of a suburban house with a car and phantom SUV passing by. I’ll admit, by the second clip of the owl eyes, I was mesmerized. I kind of love that someone did this. He clearly agrees with Queen about the physics of the rocking world.

Overall, a great idea for anyone, but probably works best on the medium, large, XL posterior. You could probably get your jeans designed with anything that opens and closes. Not just eyes and beaks and scene clappers, but, I don’t know, chicken egg shells and pterodactyl wings. I wonder if I should patent that. Probably.

PS. Thanks for the video, JJT. And everyone who told me to blog already. Thanks for checking in despite the many weeks of inactivity.

Here’s a little outro music for you:

“I am bewildered at the length to which people will go to portray me so negatively.” ~Michael Jackson

David Nordahl Painting

With network news winding down their coverage of Michael Jackson’s death, I thought you might be feeling the loss. Shiva’s over and you’re left alone with your dark thoughts. So, let’s keep Michael alive with our memories. Remember when Michael Jackson decided to auction off some of his stuff and then he changed his mind? That was so like Michael. Paul Scheer went to a preview of the auction and took some fantastic photos. You can see them all here. I’m especially fond of the bronze baby who fell despite his cane. You’ll see.