Landsberg's Blog

Tom Swiftys

2008-05-16T20:21:00.000-07:00

I love words. I love playing with words. One of my favorite forms of fun wordplay is the Tom Swifty. The name of this type of adverbial punning derives from the Edward Stratemeyer series of strip cartoons about a character named Tom Swift in the 1920's. Some examples follow:

"I used to be a lion tamer," he said offhandedly.
"I plan to work in a cemetery," he plotted gravely.
"I have sinned," said Adam originally.
"Will you marry me?" he asked engagingly.
"Henry VIII was very fat," he said unthinkingly.
"I've dropped my toothpaste," he said crestfallenly.
"That's a very large shark," he said superficially.
"Fire," he yelled alarmingly.
"This house is tasteful," said Hansel and Gretel gingerly.
"It is just gold leaf," he said guiltily.
"It is my maid's night out," he said helplessly.
"That's an ugly hippopotamus," he said hypocritically.

Add your favorites or create some original Swifties. It is fun and challenging.

Iran

2008-04-27T22:55:00.000-07:00

On the first day of basketball practice in my one high school Iranian town, I lined up all the prospective team members to take free shots. One after another they closed their eyes and threw the ball in the general direction of the basket. When I instructed them to hold the ball a certain way and to aim just over the front rim, I was met with looks as if I were seriously retarded.

"If Allah wills it, the ball will go into the basket."

I suggested that they could help Allah. Over half of the players did not return for the second practice. I was very lucky not to have been thrown out of town.

Iran is very much in the news lately. As a Peace Corps volunteer I spent two years in modern Persia during the Shah's reign. I found Iranians to be anything but warlike. In fact they have not launched an aggressive war against a neighbor since 1785. In that same period of time we have been in over a dozen serious conflicts and many more minor adventures. In the fifty or so wars around the globe since the end of WWII, the US, in most cases, has sold weapons to one if not both sides. Do not get me wrong, I have served my country not only in the Peace Corps but in the Navy where I became a disabled veteran. I am just stating the facts as I see them. While I am not a conspiracy theorist, the invasion of Iraq and our Iranian saber rattling do not pass the smell test.

For an insight into the Iranian people, I suggest a fun read of my book "Landsberg's Law". You can read the first chapter free by going to www.selfpublishersplace.com and followng the links.

DISCOVERIES

2008-04-27T12:17:00.000-07:00

I have made three discoveries that could alter your eating, footwear and medical attitudes. I shall now share them with you.
1. If you peel a banana from the bottom, that is the opposite end from the stem, then those pesky strands from the inside of the peel will no longer appear.
2. Wearing Wigwam socks is like encasing your feet in the most luxurious cashmere. They are made of merino wool and besides being incredibly comfortable they are virtually indestructable. They claim you can run a marathon in Wigwam socks, without shoes.
3. A pharmacist friend let something slip that I did not believe. He said that he quite frequently filled prescriptions for Obecalp which is placebo spelled backwards. A placebo, of course, is non-medicinal but the patient believes otherwise. This seemed impossible since it could seemingly leave the doctor and the pharmacy open to lawsuits. If my Internet research is to be believed, The single most prescribed "remedy" in both Israel and Norway is Obecalp. A Los Angeles emergency room was also cited for stockng and giving out a variety of different size and color Obecalp pills. When I asked my friend how he determined what to charge for the sugar pills, he said, "The more I charge, the better the Obecalp works".

If you have discovered any such nuggets, please share them with us.

A Novel Plot

2008-04-09T21:29:00.001-07:00

Consider the following a novel plot. Joe, a brilliant young scientist, becomes obsessed by the deadly crisis confronting our species. Over half of the more than 6,500,000,000 humans are dying, directly or indirectly, from malnutrition. Experts have attempted a reallocation of resources and other stop-gap measures with little lasting success. Joe conceives a truly transformational solution that will end hunger as well as greatly extend our life span.

Joe sees the major cause of man's abbreviated and troubled life span to be our personal system of nutritional processing. The ingestion, mastication, glutition, digestion and elimination of food is extremely inefficient. The body wears iself out processing large quantities of food in order to reap relatively minute amounts of nutrition.

Joe develops an Alternative Nutritional Delivery System (ANDS). His machine manufactures individually designed patches that deliver personalized optimal nutrition into the bloodstream, bypassing the primitive, debilitating, wasteful procedure we have unquestioningly accepted.

Powerful forces compete to capitalize upon Joe's invention while other seek to destroy the invention and Joe. On the one hand, whoever controls the patent for the individual machines will have more wealth and power than anyone in history. On the other hand, entrenched business and religious interests would be greatly threatened.

Life as we know it will alter radically. Our teeth and digestive apparatus will become as vestigial as the tail. Food markets, restaurants, dentists and toilet paper will become unneccesary to name just a few of the more obvious changes. There will be no obesity, diet related diseases or hunger. For those who say it cannot be done, in a sense, it is already being done. Coma patients are kept alive for years with intravenous feeding.

Joe evades those who would steal his invention as well as those who seek to destroy it.

Now consider that this story is not a plot for a novel. His name is false but his invention is real. I know Joe.

Self Publishing My Book

2007-12-11T23:36:00.001-08:00

Publishing my book-the why and how. I get notions. When I get notions I like to follow where they lead. I never let sayers of "it can't be done" or "it is a waste of time" or "you are crazy" deter me. If I had listened to those negative voices I never would have realized $800,000 from a twenty-five page Scrabble strategy book. The whole incredible story of that book is a small part of my present memoir "Landsberg's Law".

In my life I have been involved in some wild, interesting and revelatory escapades as well as something no one in the world has ever done that led to my being included in the Guinness Book of World Records. So I got a notion to write a memoir. I proceeded in an unusual manner.I emailed a chapter about every two weeks to ninety readers around the globe. Forty were friends and fifty were people who knew me or knew of me from a chat room in the Scrabble world. The benefit of this process was immediate feedback and instant editing by many of the ninety.

I did not necessarily intend the project to end up in publication but so many of the ninety urged me to publish that I began a search for the best way to make a book. Of the myriad possibilities I selected working with a printing firm. I would present the formatted text and they would print exactly what I sent them. I could select my own cover, type font and type size. After exhaustive Internet research I chose Morris Publishing in Nebraska. It was a very good decision since they were great to work with and did a fine job.

I embrace unintended consequences. If you do nothing, nothing will happen. Doing this book led to many new and renewed friendships. It led me to become president of the Laguna Woods Writers Club. It led me to discover self-published authors are mostly denied access to traditional venues of commerce. This led me to conceive www.selfpublishersplace.com It is a totally free website devoted to promoting and marketing self-published books. The site also contains an international forum and my blog.

"...I took the road less traveled by and it made all the difference."

Luck

2007-12-11T23:32:00.000-08:00

A beachcomber finds an incredibly valuable jewel encrusted throne. He hurries back to his grass shack and hides the treasure. A malefactor witnesses the scene, follows the beachcomber, kills him and steals the throne. The moral of the story is "people who live in grass houses shouldn't stow thrones."

All seriousness aside, this little story touches on the nature of luck. Here is a folk story told, with minor variations, in many cultures. "A young boy living on a poor farm in Russia asks his father if he can have a horse. His father explains that they are too poor to buy a horse. The boy cries saying that he is surely the most unlucky of boys, not being able to have the one thing in life he really wants. His father simply says that maybe he is unlucky and maybe he is not. A year passes and the boy befriends a wild horse and takes him home. He asks his father if he can keep the horse. The father tells the boy that he can keep the horse if he can feed and take care of it. The boy jubilantly exclaims to his father that he is surely the luckiest boy on earth. The father simply says that maybe he is lucky and maybe he is not. A few years pass and the boy takes a terrible fall from the horse leaving the boy with a lame leg. He tells his father that he is surely the unluckiest of all boys since he can no longer run and play with his friends. The father says that maybe he is unlucky and maybe he is not. A few years pass and war breaks out. All of the boys friends are taken into the army where most of them die but because he is lame the boy was not drafted. He tells his father that he is the most lucky of boys. You know what the father says and you get the point if this folktale"..

At any moment in time we cannot know what event may ultimately prove to be fortunate or unfortunate. As creative people we often have negative experiences that become material for books, films or poetry. The trick is to transmute the lead of life's disasters into the gold of your art in the crucible of creativity.

The Cooked Game

2007-12-11T23:23:00.000-08:00

A man passing through a small town asks a cab driver if he knows of any poker games. The cabby tells him that just the hotel runs a game but it is crooked. Later that night the cab driver encounters the tourist exiting the hotel and asks him what happened.

“I played in the poker game and lost all my money.”

“I told you it was a crooked game.”

“I know, but it was the only game in town.”

This famous poker story is illustrative of the situation existing in the publishing and book marketing business. A few major publishers have gobbled up the small houses and they control what books are marketed in most bookstores. The mass market minded publishers spend a great deal of money promoting their books, the book stores have overhead, they all must make a profit and this expense is passed on to the customer who frequents the book store since “it is the only game in town”. But wait.

Technology has made self-publishing simple and inexpensive. Last year more than 82% of new book titles were by self-published authors. These authors are generally excluded from bookstores and traditional marketing venues. There is a myth that self-published books are necessarily of inferior quality. Let me dispel this misconception by naming just a few authors who have self-published: Mark Twain, John Grisham, L. Ron Hubbard, Walt Whitman, Beatrix Potter, Edgar Allen Poe, Carl Sandberg, Gertrude Stein, Deepak Chopra, Upton Sinclair, George Bernard Shaw, Henry David Thoreau, Tom Clancy, Mark Landsberg and countless more.
Consider a revolutionary idea with me. There are millions of self-published authors. What if we avoid the crooked game by eschewing bookstores as well as books from the established publishing houses? We can support our fellow self-published authors by only purchasing each other’s books. It would not be long before we would have our own book outlets, reviewers and best sellers list.

Why support a rigged system? Let us start a new, clean game where the book buyer can deal directly with the author, cutting out the expensive middleman. Another self-published author, Benjamin Franklin, said at the signing of the Declaration of Independence “We must all hang together or we assuredly shall all hang separately.” Let us declare our own independence and let it start here at selfpublishersplace.com.