Posting here has been sporadic for the last few weeks because on February 10th I tripped (walking down the front steps) and fell, breaking my left arm just below the shoulder. A clean break that did not require surgery or a cast but has been painful and damned inconvenient.
Conventional wisdom seems to be that for this kind of break I’m looking at 6 to 8 weeks recovery. I suspect the physical therapy will go on for some months. Could have been much worse..
This direct mail marketing piece showed up in our mailbox yesterday. Two things immediately caught my eye: the model didn’t look like he spent hours in the gym every day, his body looked more like a normal person’s body. And the tattoos. Lots and lots of tattoos.
According to a 2023 survey by Pew Research, 41% of Americans under the age of 30 have at least one tattoo. And we’re not talking high-grade Yakuza-class fine art here. These tats look like something you could get in the strip mall. Once again, I turned to ChatGPT for some insight on this cultural phenomenon.
“DALL·E 2 is an AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language.”Will this technology make verbal skills, a command of the language, more important than artistic skills?
PROMPT: Create a photo of a middle-aged man, wearing a T-shirt sitting in an aluminum lawn chair and make the image look like a Polaroid photograph.
Make the man much older… mid 70s.
Can you make the man look much less attractive and handsome?
One more tweak…
“The country had changed since the last time he d been through this way. Many of the little country towns, which had seemed prosperous, even smug, back in the seventies when he’d last made this drive, had been hollowed out, their storefronts empty, their economies wasted by out-migration, the collapse of small farming, the big box stores; their civic life was composed largely of the high school football team, the big signs painted on the water tank, the brick walls of the low, sunburned buildings: GO COUGARS! GO HAWKS! GO REBELS! On the dusty streets of towns named for nineteenth-century cattlemen, pioneers, heroes of the Civil War, they now saw few descendants of such people, only little clots of dark-skinned men and signs in Spanish. The Indians were slowly reconquering the land, for the white people had everything but enough children, and the children they did have wanted the life they saw on television, not the life of the small American towns.”
— The Return by Michael Gruber
In 2022, the top three most advertised drugs on US TV were: Rinvoq, Dupixent and Skyrizi. Which got me thinking about how pharmaceutical companies come up with names for new drugs, so I asked ChatGPT. Continue reading
“Religions are in the death business: preparing people for death, pretending to send them off after they’ve died, making believe they know what happens afterward, and explaining to the dead person’s relatives where they think their loved one might be now. Without death most religions don’t have a whole lot to live for.”
— Sit Down and Shut Up (Brad Warner)
The following is from the Autumn 2015 issue of Air Cooled News (An Official Publication of The Franklin Club)
In 1933, The Reo Automobile Company shipped 800 leftover 1933 Reo “Flying Clouds” to the Franklin Automobile Company. Franklin engines were installed and they were sold as 1933 Franklin “Olympics.”
In 1934 Reo still had unsold “Flying Clouds” so they decided to cut them off behind the front door and build pickup trucks. It is possible that at least one of these pickup trucks was shipped to Franklin where an air cooled 1934 Franklin engine was installed and it was sold as a 1934 Franklin “Speed Wagon.” If that did happen, the truck cold have looked exactly like this one.
In 2012, Wes Scott traded a Model A truck for the remains of a 1933 Franklin “Olympic.” This would provide the chassis for the Franklin “Speed Wagon.” In 2013 Wes’ son Donald found a 1934 Reo Speed Wagon in Shaniko, Oregon. This would provide the cab.
The bed for the “Speed Wagon” came from a Reo pickup in West Plains, Missouri. Richard Harry of Wisconsin provided an extra set of fenders so pickup rear fenders could be made from two sets of sedan fenders.
Another Franklin Club member, Ed Joy of Idaho provided a nice green hood that matched what was left of the original paint on the cab. The goal was to make all the pieces look like they came on the truck originally and to build a truck that could be used and enjoyed. At the Fall Midwest Region Meet in Clinton, MO the comments ranged from “When are you going to paint it?” to “Don’t touch it we like it.”
Wes is going with “Don’t touch it.”
Wes’ garage/shop/farm is just about 20 minutes from where I live and some car buddies drove me down and introduced me. Wes was kind enough to let me record a little video (5 min) of his amazing collection of Franklins and Model A Fords.
This brief video barely scratched the surface (you should forgive the expression) of Wes’s amazing collection. I hope to have another opportunity share some more.
Two new arrivals at Paul’s Home for Vintage Pickups this week. Not really a home since they’ll both be snapped up once Paul has given them a little love. He makes sure they run and are safe to drive but not much more (well, new tires of course). The Brown Bomber is a 1972 Ford F-150 and The Yellow Peril is a 1970 Ford F-250.
In my dozen years in small town radio I wrote a lot of commercials. Mostly thirty-second “spots” but lots of :60’s (more expensive). It wasn’t uncommon to finish a four-hour on-air shift and sit down at a manual typewriter and bang out ten or fifteen “spots” working from a newspaper “tear sheet” or a salesperson’ scribbled notes. And most of these commercials were scheduled to begin airing the following day so someone had to get in the studio and produce the ad. Point being, there was little demand or time for creativity and the sponsor wasn’t inclined to pay for it in any event.
For a variety of reasons, a :30 second ad had to be :30 seconds. Not 27, not 32. So we followed a rigid format. Given a normal reading speed, a thirty second ad was about 75 words, usually eight lines. Yeah, you could try to get cute and clever but the client wanted to hear about his business. His products or services. And if the client was a supermarket… price-and-item. As many as you could jam in.
So, no, this was rarely creative writing. It was short, simple, declarative sentences. Not a word or phrase to be wasted. I like to think I still write this way.
When email took over from letters and faxes people wrote long-winded tomes that went on for paragraphs. I went through a phase where I would put my entire message in the subject line with “see above” in the body. If it needed more space than that, I would call them or go see them. To this day I think of this approach as “write like you talk.” Which was the final test for radio commercials: reading the copy aloud before going into the studio.
