Calamity Cash and the Town With No Name: A Success Story

My good friend, former roommate, and fellow writer Randall Nichols just released his own indie comic, Calamity Cash and the Town with No Name, a collaboration with artist and fellow West Virginian Justin Cornell 4+ years in the making. This is a success story of the kind you don’t often see in the post-college abyss: a writer and an artist, both contending with their own responsibilities and commitments, harness the time to produce a full-length comic over a period of years. This is evening and weekend warrior shit at its finest, and now they’ve invested the capital in their very own print run. That’s why you should buy it.

"Calamity Cash & The Town with No Name" Synopsis:  The mother/daughter vigilante team of Tana and Cal Cash are on the run from an Afro-rocking, Kung-Fu assassin, and have been forced to make their last stand in a nameless desert town hiding a unbelievable secret - every last citizen is in the Witness Protection program! Out of gas, low on ammo, and with their backs against the wall, Calamity and Mama Cash become the town's unlikely protectors, but with friends so quickly becoming enemies, and old enemies becoming friends, is the whole place doomed to burn around them? And will our heroines be the ones to light the first match? A modern-day action/adventure western with words by Randall Nichols, and art by Justin Cornell. "Calamity Cash & The Town with No Name - Pt. II" (25 pages, $4.50 w/shipping).  [from The Mojo Wire]

If that doesn't wow you, here’s another reason to buy: Randall’s work is witty, bitingly observational, and he portrays his vagabond, struggling twentysomethings with an insightful sincerity that never stoops to melodrama or cliché. Based on my dealings with the writer, I can guarantee you that this is going to be good.

One more reason: copies are only $4.50 (including shipping!) signed by the author and the artist. Click here or on the picture above to go to Randall’s blog, The Mojo Wire, and purchase via Paypal.

For those of you still reading who haven’t yet clicked above, I’ll give you another chance to buy Randall’s comic now.

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It’s uplifting to hear that, in a world teeming with mundane distractions and lacking the financial and emotional support so vital for creative work, projects like Calamity Cash are getting finished instead of abandoned. Projects like Cash need an audience willing to shell out the few bucks necessary to keep them coming, but lack the marketing resources of a large publishing house to spread word of their existence to an overcrowded market. To know that so many projects have gotten off the ground through Kickstarter and other grassroots campaigns is inspiring, though even the most promising or awe-inspiring of projects is doomed to failure unless people know about them. I look and listen to the advertisements surrounding me on a daily basis and find that most of them feature products I already know. Yes, Coke is a sweet drink, Planet Fitness is a badass place to work out, and Old Spice makes you irresistible to women. Mass advertising, though its secondary purpose is to inform, first and foremost inundates us with those products profitable enough to warrant support while the smaller ones struggle to get noticed. How many amazing comics, novels, blogs, musicians, movies, webcomics, animated films, photographers, architects, dramatists, and other media could we discover if only we had the means?

Randall realized this long before I did, and, for a significant period after we left Bennington, blogged, Tweeted, Facebook shared, and generally talked about as many of his friends’ projects as he possibly could, to the point where his social networks obsessively centered around the achievements of others. My own meager work failed to escape his attention, as he tweeted a lot of things from this blog and eventually devoted an entire Mojo Wire entry (featuring one of the most unflattering pictures of me ever to grace the internet) to my metablog project Corporate Takeover. When asked about his constant sharing, he said that his friends were doing great things and he wanted to help in any way he could.

Creative pursuits (especially writing) are isolating avocations, and for those of us lacking contacts, the chances of getting your work noticed can be frustratingly slim. We owe it to ourselves to harness those resources available to us, but we all need friends willing to shout our achievements from the metaphorical rooftops of social media and weekend drinking sessions. We also owe it to those friends to return the favor without being asked.

So again, buy Randall’s comic for a measly $4.50, or explore the blog to read about its long, arduous history. For those who enjoy samples, try some of his fiction: New Hooverville, Arches, and more . Or take a peak at the writer himself during our more formative years:

Revenge is sweet. Thanks for the support, man.

On the Temperature-Diminishing Effects of Simultaneous Bodily-Cleansing Apparatus and Laundry-Scouring Appliance Usage When Connected to a Single Hydrogen Dioxide Boiling System

(or, Will Running the Washing Machine While Taking a Shower Make the Water Go Cold?)
 
Background:
In older residential dwellings built with older plumbing systems, simultaneous use of two plumbing fixtures utilizing hot water will often cause a sudden drop in temperature in both systems, though the drop is most noticeable (often painfully so) to an individual taking a shower.  


Purpose:
To determine whether an inhabitant of a two-person apartment will have to suffer through an icy-cold shower if the washing machine is turned on during said shower. The ability to bathe oneself concurrent with one’s weekend laundry cycles would be a valuable time-saving asset to both roommates, so long as the showering roommate is safe from sudden bursts of debilitating cold.  


Hypothesis:
In the experimenter’s apartment, water pressure in both sinks (kitchen and bathroom) and the shower has been colloquially described as “very good,” with both occupants commenting on the extreme temperature when the faucet is turned to the hottest position. Routine conversation with the building's landlord has revealed that all three of the building’s units utilize separate boilers, with no interference from the other units having previously been reported. Though a formal test has not yet been conducted, neither occupant has reported a significant decrease in shower temperature due to the other’s use of the kitchen sink.

Materials: 
The apartment occupies the entirety of the second floor of a three-story building. Date of construction is unknown, but predates 1952 (the date of purchase by the current owners). The apartment utilizes a standard shower system (dimensions and yardage unknown) with pipes running down to a boiler for the individual apartment (specifications unknown) located in the building’s basement.

The apartment’s kitchen holds a Maytag “Dependable Care Fabric-Matic Heavy Duty Large Capacity” washing machine (purchased used for twenty-five dollars and installed using original parts), with a manufacturing date between 1990 and 1995. The washing machine is connected to the second floor boiler via an adjustable spigot, with drainage occurring via a rubber hose.

The detergent utilized will be a standard two-ounce aggregate of Gain, with no fabric softener or other additives.  


Procedure:
1. Load washing machine and detergent as normal, starting a standard Warm-Cold, Heavy cycle with infinite water level set to maximum.

2. Rotate hot and cold shower knobs the standard number of degrees (hot: eighty degrees counterclockwise, cold: twenty degrees counterclockwise) to heat the water to the experimenter’s typical shower temperature.

3. For safety purposes, conduct a preliminary temperature check before entering.

4. If the preliminary check reveals a suitable showering temperature, execute a standard eleven-minute shower while mentally noting temperature observations for post-shower recording.  


Results:
The experimenter noticed no adverse effects, commenting proudly that it was “just like any other shower.”  


Conclusion:
Though the simultaneous usage of more than two plumbing fixtures will still need to be researched, performing regular loads of laundry with the apartment’s washing machine is not likely to cause a decrease in shower enjoyment, so long as the amount of hot water consumed is not too large. Though endurance tests of very long showers or many showers taken in a row may prove more conclusively how much strain the water boiler will endure, for now, both roommates may safety do their laundry in the morning without the need for shower backup.

The Less-Frequently Discussed Second Half of the "You're Not Special" Speech

In this blog’s time-honored tradition of providing commentary on cutting-edge issues that everyone’s already forgotten about, I present for your enjoyment the “You’re Not Special” Wellesley high school graduation speech.


Youtube’s great and all, but I really recommend reading the full transcript.

For those who haven’t heard (or haven’t clicked above), last month, English teacher David McCullough told the entire 2012 graduating class of Wellesley high school, their families, their friends, and (after the resulting media frenzy) the world, that if everyone was special then no one is, that in 2012 American high schools would graduate 37,000 valedictorians and 37,000 class presidents, and that today’s graduates have been pampered and complimented all of their young lives instead of experiencing the hardships they needed to grow. This of course got people talking more than the humdrum “Go out and achieve!” speeches usually do. Most commentators (Rush Limbaugh included) took McCullough’s side, launching rants against the younger generation comparable to an angry grandfather waving his cane at the neighborhood kids for wearing sideways caps and low-riders.

But I don’t want to talk about those things because they’ve all been said before. I, however, am more interested in another section of McCullough’s speech that antsier Youtube viewers might not have reached:

In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another—which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality—we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement. We have come to see them as the point - and we're happy to compromise standards, or ignore reality, if we suspect that's the quickest way, or only way, to have something to put on the mantelpiece, something to pose with, crow about, something with which to leverage ourselves into a better spot on the social totem pole. No longer is it how you play the game, no longer is it even whether you win or lose, or learn or grow, or enjoy yourself doing it… Now it's "So what does this get me?" As a consequence, we cheapen worthy endeavors, and building a Guatemalan medical clinic becomes more about the application to Bowdoin than the well-being of Guatemalans.

McCullough’s explanation for why we love praise and awards more than personal fulfillment is, I fear, accurate, because if we’re constantly in competition with each other for the best grades, the best colleges, and the best jobs, then deeds that bring those rewards closer to our trembling grasp become all the more precious. It makes us desperate to get the things we want: we’d do anything. In a dishonest world, if we don’t take the fabulous prizes by any means necessary, then someone else will. If the average high-school senior, worried about getting into the college of his or her choice, was faced with whether to carefully research and prepare a term paper for a class in which he or she already had an A, or join an overcrowded after-school club whose leadership qualities would look really good on a college application, which would that student choose? How often have you seen a co-worker follow correct protocol, say something intelligent, or work a lot of overtime not because it was the right thing to do, but because the boss was watching?

The most satisfying actions aren’t always the ones that carry the most reward. The girl who wrote all those Twilight books earned far more fame and riches than John Kennedy Toole ever did for writing A Confederacy of Dunces, but which will likely last longer? Moving past the soundbites, McCullough’s speech speech actually calls for a more honest world where people work to produce something real (like a Guatemalan medical clinic) and not just to fill up their resumes with important-sounding achievements and program names.

 And I’m not just saying that because I got rejected from Bowdoin back in high school

We're Pleased to Bring You a Short Essay on Public Relations Writing

Writing for public relations is different than other kinds of writing. If I am at work and something bad happens, I must present it in such a way so that it appears as if something bad has not happened. (Failing this, I should present it in such a way that does not make my organization appear negligent or broken-down.) Public relations writing must create a fantasy that everything is going perfectly well. Organizations are always excited to present something, proud of something else, pleased to announce this, and regretting to inform you of that. I must spin negatives into positives, and when I share bad news, it is with an apology for the inconvenience. I cannot show you any of this writing, for I am embarrassed to have created it. You would not recognize me in it.

However, if I’m writing for myself and something bad happens in that writing, I am always honest about that bad thing and how it affected the characters involved. I do not want bad things to happen in my writing any more than I want bad things to happen in real life, but in describing them honestly, as they occurred, they take on a power that people can feel, understand, and appreciate. That thing becomes real, and we can appreciate the full power of that terrible thing.

The terrible lows of writing not bound by an organization’s constraints also brings with it dizzying highs; for when our minds are open to honest writing we also become receptive to all the emotions that come with it. No one could ever be open to a novel that began A friendly reminder that... for readers, knowing that the reminder is not at all friendly (and may actually be less friendly than a normal reminder), will shut off their minds to what follows. We live in a world saturated with the worst kind of bland, uninspired, official-sounding English meant to disguise truth in a cloud of euphemism.  How frightening to think that it might affect our ability to digest the writing that really matters.

School Administrative Office Fill-In Game

Instructions: There's a problem at the school, and the office assistant needs some help! Fill in the blanks in the sentences below using one of the choices under (A), (B), (C), or (D):

Office Assistant: Is it OK to (A) ____________________?
Principal: (B) ______, because if (C) __________, then (D) __________.
Office Assistant: I see.

(A)
...sign this welcome letter?
...let this kid with a broken leg use the elevator by himself?
...remove this tick from a junior high girl’s scalp?
...ask a fifth grader to help me move this very large and heavy fish tank?
...give Tylenol to this girl who’s having menstrual cramps but doesn’t want to tell me?
...post pictures from the science fair on the school website?
...let this kid go home with his grandmother without a note, even though I talked to the mother about it earlier today?

(B)
No...
I wouldn’t if I were you...
Uh-uh...
You’d better not...
Technically, we're not supposed to...

(C)
...anything in that letter was inaccurate or could be claimed as false advertising…
...the cable suddenly snapped and the elevator hurtled downward into the basement...
...the tick burst, spewing lyme disease-filled puss everywhere...
...that fish tank fell on his foot...
...you gave the wrong dosage and she had to have her stomach pumped...
...any of those parents didn’t want their children to be photographed...
...there were to be a car accident, kidnapping, fire, molestation, abusive situation, air raid, or if the kid got sick or had an allergic reaction to something in the car or tripped and fell on the front stairs or bit down on his popsicle too hard and cut his tongue or got really upset and cried a lot on the ride home...

(D)
...the parents would sue the school, they’d sue me, and then they’d sue you
...you’d be legally responsible
...you’d be held liable for that
...it’d be a legal nightmare, and you’d be dead in the center of it
...there’d be grounds for a lawsuit, and you wouldn’t like that very much, now would you?

Officespeak Dissected: On the Overuse of Myself

From the Journal of Contemporary Linguistic Study, Volume 21, Issue 2:


Because Officespeak as a dialect spoken by middle- and lower-level administrative workers and bearing its own unique vocabulary, idioms, and grammatical structure has only recently come under the close scrutiny of linguists, many of its idiosyncratic uses (or usages, as Officespeakers would say) have not yet been isolated for further study. This journal proposes to chronicle some of the emerging distinctions drawn between Officespeak and our own variety of Common English.

One of Officespeak’s most widespread traits is its use of the reflexive pronoun myself to increase the formality of a sentence. Consider the following Officespeak sentences alongside their common English equivalents:

Example #1:
Mr. Graham and myself are expecting you in the meeting room by 3:30. (Officespeak)
Mr. Graham and I are expecting you in the meeting room by 3:30. (Common)

Example #2:
He gave copies of the guest list to Donald and myself to proofread. (Officespeak)
He gave copies of the guest list to Donald and me to proofread. (Common)

Example #3:
Return this letter, signed and dated, directly to myself. (Officespeak)
Return this letter, signed and dated, directly to me. (Common)

Linguists theorize that Officespeak’s use of myself in place of I or me deviated from Standard English in one of two ways:


Theory 1: Base Uncertainty: As in the first two sentences, Officespeak’s myself often appears when the speaker is referring to both himself and another person. The speaker may have been unsure whether to use I (a subject pronoun) or me (an object pronoun) and thus risk appearing unprofessional by making the mistake. Myself, however, shrouds the sentence in a more formal tone whose grammatical structure is more difficult to decipher (one of the dialect’s main purposes), ensuring that the mistake will not be noticed. Over time, use of myself grew to include sentences in which the speaker refers only to one person, as in Example #3. (For a more thorough discussion of this transition, see Hartwick pp 17-293.)



Theory 2: The Fear of Unprofessionalism: In common English, small children are often criticized by teachers and pedantic parents for making the following error:

X Josh and me got really wet!
O Josh and I got really wet!

The top sentence is wrong because the italicized portion is a subject, not an object. However, using Josh and me is correct when it serves as the sentence’s object:

O Ryan splashed Josh and me with water!

If this is still confusing, try reading the sentences without Josh around to muck them up:

O I got really wet!
O Ryan splashed me with water!

However, through overcorrection, many children learn to shun using Josh and me in both cases, thus transposing the taboo onto both subject (correctly) and object (incorrectly). When attempting to form a sentence that would accurately use Josh and me (see Example sentence #2), the Officespeaker substitutes myself, fearing that any use of Josh and me would be viewed as improper.  Kincaid M. Fowler, the theory’s leading proponent, reasons that Officespeakers attempted to escape their childhood humiliations instead of correcting them, and widespread Officespeak use of myself then grew to include subjects (as in Example #1) and objects without a second noun (Example #3).

Altered use of other reflexive pronouns (yourself, themselves, etc.) has not yet been adequately documented among Officespeakers, though the linguistic community is currently awaiting a promising study of the speech patterns of manufacturing accountants in the 128 corridor of northeastern Massachusetts.

Stock Responses

The Scene: Our hero, on a break with a co-worker, is discussing a recent string of terrorist scares in which white powder was mailed to schools around the continental US.

“Everyone thinks it couldn’t happen up here,” my co-worker says with an air of authoritative experience, “but if it did, as soon as you opened that envelope, there’d be that moment when suddenly, BAM—you’re in the real world.”

“That’s true,” I agree. “I don’t think people consider serious threats a possibility, though I also don’t really like the term “real world” because, I mean, we all live in the real world—”

In the middle of this sentence my co-worker’s eyes take on a vacant, glazed look, his mouth forcibly curls upward into a smile, and his cheeks crease unnaturally with the strain of listening to something he is so clearly not interested in, for he is annoyed by my insinuation that he has just used a clichéd term inappropriately and could not care less about my interpretation of the phrase “real world.” That’s when he says it, in a long, slow drawl:

“Yuh-huh.”

More and more often I find myself noticing moments like these when my interlocutor acts on his or her obvious disinterest by either changing the subject or (more commonly) using a stock response. In this instance I am uncertain whether the culprit is simple disinterest or my having chosen to speak at all. Or, is it a fear that I may take the conversation to a place in which my co-worker has no bearing, and thus nothing to articulate? (He would have to be quiet, then, and might become embarrassed if it appeared that I knew something he did not know. After all, he is older than me.)

The stock responses people regurgitate in these situations have no real meaning, but are easy to say and create the illusion that the person is listening or interested in the topic at hand. (To my great disgust, they have also become more socially acceptable.) Common examples include:

I know!
Oh, sure.
Definitely!
Absolutely!
Amen to that.
Yeah, I know, right?

Stock responses are often accompanied by a lack of eye contact, forced smiles like the one described above, an overabundance of laughter, or continued involvement in a task or activity while speaking. I believe the majority of people accept these encounters as a conversational norm (particularly in the workplace or when meeting people at parties before the alcohol has worked its desired effect), but we don’t have to let this happen. If we all listened more, made more of an effort to engage ourselves in what other people had to say, and focused less on sharing personal accomplishments, our conversations would flow more genuinely. They would also be more interesting, and talking to others would be more fun. It would be a more dynamic world.

But there are a lot of people out there, and a lot of them are stuck in this conversational rut. Is it too late for some of them whose souls have been dulled by years of flagrantly self-centered behavior? I wish I had the answer.