Welcome to EppsNet, where the writers are not on strike!

Striking writers are stupid. Pretend you’re a TV executive and your writers are on strike.

Oh dear! What will I do? I’ll have to show reruns and only get 90 percent of the dimbulb audience I’d get showing new episodes. Boo hoo hoo!

Television is the opiate of the masses, man! People will watch it no matter what’s on. They can’t live without it.

We’ve got TVs in restaurants, health clubs, cars, you name it. They’re ubiquitous!

The number of people like me — who think that if you want to eat dinner in front of a TV set you should stay the hell at home — is very small compared to the number of people who will not leave their homes if it means being separated from a television.

Hey scribes! People are going to turn off their flat-panel LCD high-def TVs — and do what? Read a book? Interact with their families?

Fat fucking chance!

Writers can stay on strike forever for all anybody cares.

That’s why TV shows are so stupid. They’re written by stupid people.

This just in

Stars Won’t Attend Golden Globe Awards

Golden Globe-nominated actors and presenters won’t attend the televised award show Jan. 13 because of the writers’ strike, the Screen Actors Guild announced Friday.

— People

Well then . . . that casts things in a whole new light! Actors will not attend the Golden Globes because they’d have to cross a picket line of angry wordsmiths and ink slingers.

OMG! I hope the earth doesn’t stop revolving on its axis and fling us all into space because actors are boycotting the Golden Globes telecast!

What are the Golden Globes anyway? Another excuse for actors to get together and suck each other’s dicks?

Rot in hell, thespians!

I was laid off recently by a mortgage bank here in Southern California. Times are tough in the mortgage business, as you may have heard.

First, some tips on how not to do a layoff:

1. Call the layoff a “rightsizing,” which suggests that there was something “wrong” with the people who were let go. (Actually, the company I worked for has already announced another “rightsizing” in which 1,000 more people will be laid off over the next few months. They just can’t get these “rightsizings” right.)

2. Overnight a layoff information packet, including a 20-page severance agreement, to the home of laid-off employees, asking them to sign and return it via the enclosed UPS envelope.

3. Don’t enclose the UPS envelope.

4. The next day, overnight a second packet to employees’ homes, containing the UPS envelope and a letter correcting phone numbers, email addresses and other misinformation in the previous day’s packet.

5. Include an obvious misspelling or two in the letter — ideally, something that would slip past a spell checker but be caught easily by anyone who bothered to proofread it. Suggestion: “If you have nay questions . . .”

Unemployed people like to see the kind of flamboyant incompetence that still draws a paycheck.

Want to hire me?

Here’s what I’m good at:

• Software development
• Project management
• Writing
• Training, coaching and mentoring

Looking for 10 reasons to hire me?

Here they are.

I thought sports columnists were appointed for life, like Supreme Court justices, no matter how irrelevant they become, and yet I see that the Los Angeles Times has just dumped J.A. Adande.

Well, by golly, that’s a good start!

I can’t think of a single print columnist, at the Times or elsewhere, who’s remotely relevant anymore. There are dozens of sports websites (not that one — start at Deadspin and follow the links) with at least an order of magnitude more energy, insight and wit than you’ll find in your local print rag, which is why newspapers are going the way of the 8-track tape, the buggy whip and whale oil.

The next in line to go at the Times should be fatuous blowhard T.J. Simers.

Simers positions himself as a pot-stirring wiseass, and the line on him seems to be that if people don’t like him, he must be doing something right.

Actually, nobody likes him because he’s a dull, uninformed, solipsistic clod, whose “style” consists of run-on sentences, juvenile name-calling, and endlessly repeated in-jokes and shout-outs that were never funny in the first place.

(That’s a better sentence than Simers ever wrote, if I say so myself.)

I notice that you use plain, simple English, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English–it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.

— Mark Twain

Enron’s performance in 2000 was a success by any measure, as we continued to outdistance the competition and solidify our leadership in each of our major businesses. We have robust networks of strategic assets that we own or have contractual access to, which give us greater flexibility and speed to reliably deliver widespread logistical solutions. . . . We have metamorphosed from an asset-based pipeline and power generating company to a marketing and logistics company whose biggest assets are its well-established business approach and its innovative people.

— Enron Annual Report, 2000

Source: Why Business People Speak Like Idiots: A Bullfighter’s Guide by Brian Fugere, Chelsea Hardaway & Jon Warshawsky

E. L. Doctorow once said that “writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” You don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard.

— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

My creative-writing students say they’re postmodern, too. One wrote the relativist sentiment that popsicles and crucifixions were equal; I said it depended on which you were offered.

— Oronte Churm

Via Alicublog:

He writes the worst English that I have ever encountered. It reminds me of a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of the dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up to the topmost pinnacle of tosh. It is rumble and bumble. It is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.

— H.L. Mencken, on the speeches of Warren G. Harding

From a 1955 interview with Nelson Algren in The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER: How about this movie, The Man with the Golden Arm?

ALGREN: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Did you have anything to do with the script?

ALGREN: No. No, I didn’t last long. I went out there for a thousand a week. and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.

[S]tories hold power because they convey the illusion that life has purpose and direction. Where God is absent from the lives of all but the most blessed, the writer, of all people, replaces that ordering principle. Stories make sense when so much around us is senseless, and perhaps what makes them most comforting is that, while life goes on and pain goes on, stories do us the favor of ending.

— John Hodgman

George Murray, a poet and co-editor of the literary blog Bookninja.com, sees the near-annual release of a new Stephen King novel as ‘the literary equivalent of watching a skinny Japanese dude scarf down 100 hot dogs in an eating contest; you are kind of grossed out, but gotta hand it to him.’ Murray harbors a unique theory about what distinguishes a genre writer like King from a so-called serious artist like Joyce Carol Oates. ‘It seems with Oates the hotdog eater is a performance artist commenting on the nature of consumption and American hegemony,’ Murray avers. ‘With King it’s just a guy eating 100 hot dogs, then looking like he’s going to die of nitrate poisoning.’

— CBC.ca, “Automated Storyteller”

True believers of one stripe or another, no longer content to merely bore spouses and neighbors with their nutty opinions, can now spew forth on their own blogs, thereby playing a pivotal role in creating the polarized climate that dominates debate on nearly every national issue.

— Randell Beck

. . . everything can be taken from a man except one thing: the last of the human freedoms–to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.

— Anne Frank

On this date — September 2 — in 1944, Anne Frank was among 1,019 people on the 68th and last train from Holland to Auschwitz. Anne and others hiding with her had been betrayed and captured a month before and held in the Westerbork detention center.

Continue reading The Blog of Anne Frank

Having students write essays about books accomplishes three things. It makes them hate writing, because it’s such a fruitless, uninteresting assignment. It makes them hate reading, because even books they enjoy are turned against them. And it probably makes them hate thinking, because the kind of analysis they’re forced to do is so strained and dull.

— Joseph Weisberg

Continue reading Teaching Kids to Write