Five bedrooms! I can explain. I need one for the library. One for the music room. One for the computer room. One for my guests. That leaves only one for me, and that’s only if I make a workshop out of half the garage. That means it is barely big enough. I mean, where will I sleep when the girlfriend and I have a spat? (Probably up in that belfry thingee, but don’t tell her.)I can’t believe I’ve lost my favorite towel. A big Burgundy plush that Lizbeth got me for Xmas. Other people lose ordinary things. Their keys, their shoes, their way in life. Me, I loose a towel as big as a bedspread. In fact, now that I think of Liz, that’s exactly how big it was. Oh yeah.
This year’s award for the worst TV commercials goes hands down to Allstate Insurance. That dreadful black actor with the worst pitches clearly meant to insult the spectacularly successful Geico lizard. It is hard enough to stay awake in front of a TV without him appearing every twenty minutes. God sakes, that is bad broadcasting. But for clients, you can’t get much worse than Kiss, is it 104.7 FM? The radio that advertises for diabetics to act as guinea pigs.
You can infer this was not the most exciting Friday over here, but I did talk to North Carolina for a half-hour. The basic question is one I cannot answer, “Is the flyer project doable?” I’ve come up with all the operational statistics at this end, including getting the production costs of 1,000 pages down to less than $94, including allocation of fixed costs. That beats the $240 Kinkos wants just for the photocopies. This is all dependent on finding quality 11x17 printers and copiers at reasonable prices. The office could be outfitted for less than $600.
It’s been a while, but I heard the Nano is finally hitting the markets. This is the $2,500 car (from India) with a 650 cc motor. Wallace called it a Tata, which threw me, but that is the name of the person who came up with the concept and set up the production lines. It is not yet slated for import here. Top speed is 65 MPH and would I buy one given the opportunity? Of course. I have utterly no loyalty to American auto manufacturers, their lack of quality, and the general sleaziness of their “sticker price” sales tactics.
One of my clients knows a patent attorney, one who works with musicians. Good, maybe he understand the total lack of investment capital at my end these days. Word is that musicians are patenting their work but I still have no information about what is covered. But there is a chance of some pro bono arrangement and I’ll have to take another look at crossword puzzles. I’ve written them as a hobby for years and Satori Publishing has said directly they want puzzles with novel clues.
The pay scale is simple. Five dollars per puzzle, and you get paid a royalty on how many different publishers buy that week. It works out to probably a hundred bucks per puzzle and I’ll write them for that amount any day. That doesn’t mean there is no irony to me finally selling my writing in that form. Time to dig out my 15 by 15 (the standard size of a crossword puzzle blank). For the curious, I can write a pretty good puzzle in just under two hours. There are software puzzle apps on the market, but the product is nearly as worthless as the people that use them.
I’ve got a follow-up idea to the Buzz (sample flyer) that wants customers to spot the “fake ad”. It is just an idea but why not have the first letters of each solved word spell another word in one of the ads? The winner has to read many ads carefully to find it. Now, I’m marketing. I’ve also begun to include an ordinary but stubborn word in the final position, kind of let them know who is boss. Favorites are words with silent letters, like “island” and “tsunami”.
