Underused Words. July 4th Edition.

Create your own verbal fireworks with these dazzlers:

Scrum
Conurbation (hint:  most of us live in one)
Mercurial
Gusto
Rubbish
Coddle
Canny
Esconced
Verdant
Sonorous (we'll experience a lot of this over the holiday)

Ask Well & You Shall Receive.

Speaking up for what you want is hard for many of us.

Check out this four-point plan for ask success: http://l3wilso.wordpress.com/2008/06/25/ask-and-you-will-receive/

A Cheeky Confirmation.

Sign up for an e-newsletter and you get a confirmation. 

But not like this one from Phoenix's 944 Magazine, which is genius:

You have just registered with 944.com. This is the best thing you will ever do. Your whole life is going to change. You just became 48% more popular and twice as good looking.

Congratulations.

Your login information is as follows:

Email Address: writesquared@att.net

Password: ----
To get you started, you may login here - http://944.com/member/.

You can stalk your exes, look for new prospects and totally avoid getting any work done at your job by compulsively checking our website, which is constantly updated with new events and photos from each of our markets.

You can also subscribe to any of our pages' RSS feeds for the latest updates, or find us on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.

Thank you,

944 Magazine

Never Hire a Social Media Expert.

Everybody and their brother (and sister) are on the social media bandwagon. 

But is it all just smoke and mirrors?

My friend Susan sent this provocative article along with the note:  "makes real sense."

http://www.businessinsider.com/why-i-will-never-ever-hire-a-social-media-expert-2011-5

She's Funny, and a Damn Good Writer To Boot.

In the June 17 issue of Entertainment Weekly, actress/comedian Aisha Tyler chronicles a day in the life of a traveling stand-up. 

It's a laugh-out-loud piece of writing.

To wit:  "Stand-up is not galmourous.  People are used to seeing celebrities on the red carpet, lip gloss poppin' like a backup dancer in a Gucci mane video.  They are less accustomed to seeing celebrities in line at Starbucks with a murderous cowlick, or stumbling through the Detroit aieport with a four-alarm hangover, moaning like a zombie on the hunt for brains."

In her essay, Ms. Tyler also works in such underused words as braying and raw boned.

Buy a copy of the mag.  

The Tao of Willie.

Willie Nelson--cowboy, poet, outlaw--is also a philosopher as I discovered reading The Tao of Willie.

Says the singer/songwriter:  There is no single definition of the Tao, but I like to think of it as finding a balance between resistance and surrender.

There are many sage nuggets in this small volume such as: 

I believe the truth is found in your own heart.  The trick is to shut up and listen.  The trick is to believe.

There's too much and too little.

Still is still moving to me.  http://mayamystic.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/tsalagi-tale-who-wins/

And my favorite:

Ninety-nine percent of the world's lovers are not with their first chocie.  That's what makes the jukebox play.

Writing That Transcends the Blues. And Continents.

I've recently moved to Arizona and have been gobbling up everything I can find on the Grand Canyon state.

While browsing at the Mustang Branch of the Scottsdale library system (shout-out for great architecture and a super-friendly staff), I ran across The Anthropology of Turquoise by Ellen Meloy.  Meloy writes that "turquoise is the wealth of the nomad, portable and protective."

She says that if you "Poke a shish kebab skewer through a globe at the Colorado Plateau it will come out the other side on the Tibetan Plateau.  More than all others, the cutlures of Tibet and the Native American Southwest have absorbed turquoise into their traditions, ceremonies and folklore."

I know this is true, for I saw women in Tibet--and men, too--with lengths of turquoise braided in their jet-black hair. 

Tibet changed my life first.  Now Arizona is changing it.

Nearly every page of this extraordinary essay collection slayed me with gorgeous prose like this:  "Here I was in Texas, remembering that I was conceived but not interested in Texas and instead was once crazy to go to Egypt or Persia or the Arabian deserts to live on a caravan and how such dreams, as forlorn as they now seemed, were fed by light."

She also references the great female nomad Isabelle Eberhardt who roamed Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria--places I have also wandered and loved--and was labeled for her "radical individualism."

If you love the desert--any desert--buy this book. 

http://www.ellenmeloy.com/turquoise.html