Which Craft?

A group from Humor Bloggers is following a summer camp theme and writing about crafts today.

Crafts were never my thing but my wife, Karen, is an artist and has had businesses involving both art and craft. The craft business involved painted t-shirts for kids, several years ago. Karen would design and make one and put it on our 4-year old daughter and then take her to dance or gymnastics or music class and wait for the other mothers to ask, “Oh, that is SOOO cute, where can I get something like that.”

It was the cheapest marketing ploy ever and it led to the downfall of her t-shirt empire. The Garment Workers Union found out that we were exploiting free child labor – non-union, no less. They would show up at the dance studio, singing “Look for the union label …. “ and intimidate all the moms into backing out of the purchase. It didn’t seem to matter that we were using an American child when we could have easily outsourced and adopted a Chinese girl.

Our daughter inherited her mom's artistic bent and was also entrepreneurial. However, when it came to selling, her philosophy was, “why spend time and money making something when you can sell what’s already at hand. One day she successfully sold a bunch of rocks from the yard to the exceedingly nice man across the street.

Another day she and a friend got some chalk to draw hopscotch on the driveway but the geese from the nearby lake had other ideas; our driveway was covered in goose droppings. When I arrived home I found the feces had been neatly circled in chalk and a huge sign was drawn in chalk near the street “FRESH POOP FOR SALE”. Karen told me the girls had been out promoting their goods, shouting their sales pitch to passing cars.

I don’t have talent for arts and crafts. I try to create things from the news. Yesterday I read that“Michael Jackson's Prosthetic Nose Is Missing”, which gave me an idea.
I am contacting the Hasbro people to sell them on my idea of a MJ Potato Head Doll


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Moonwalk at the Apollo

Yesterday's news as summarized on wordle.
This is the way I like my news, condensed into keywords. I get all my knowledge of current events from headlines. I don't have time to read columns of words. Even Twitter tweets are TMI, in my opinion.

We all knew that there would be rumors that Michael Jackson's death was faked. We all knew that his nose and his skin tone were fake. What I didn't expect was this headline claim that Jackson's moonwalk was faked.

Jackson supposedly performed the moonwalk in 1983 during a TV special. Television fakes stuff all the time so I'm not surprised if they did this too. I mean, he was lip syncing, why not step syncing? The prevailing theories are that he walked forward and they played it backwards, or that they moved the stage while he stood still, or that he was already dead and being manipulated by strings.

But what surprised me even more was the claim that some other guy actually debuted the moon walk on television 14 years earlier. Nearly 40 years ago, this Neil Armstrong dude did this performance. Come on, he is clearly being aided by a walker of some sort. And may I say that the costuming, choreography and production quality in 1969 were soooo primitive. It's not even in color.

For now, Michael Jackson's legacy is in the hands of his executors: quite fittingly a business manager and an attorney. I am sure they will come up with the true story and sell it to you at a fair price.

Post Script:
Here's my favorite juxtaposition of headlines this morning from MSNBC news.

Nearly all the MJ merchandise is ‘bootlegged’
Newsweek: Why didn't economists predict the crisis?