Building Something at Larry’s

Well hello there my friends! And what is that scent you’re wearing? It’s intoxicating.

I’m so glad you stopped by, but I’m actually not here today. I’m spending the day on Larry Hehn’s blog, so I’m technically in virtual Toronto which is kind of like the real place except in virtual Toronto the Maple Leafs make the playoffs every year. Very exciting.

So hop on over to Larry’s and read my real post for today called What Are You Building?

And try not to be too fabulous today. Oh what the heck, be as fab as you want. Like you could really turn it off.

See Clay Blog

What up nation? I got a guest post about teaching, zombies, and bringing students to life over at Lessons from Teachers & Twits of the always fabulous Renee Jacobson. I hope you’ll check it out!

Also, many of you know that I’m trying to rally in the Worst Movie Ever Tournament at Tyler Tarver’s site. In case you didn’t already vote, you can point and click for Battlefield Earth by going to the voting page.

Finally, you look really attractive today. That hairstyle totally works for you.

Related Articles

• PTP 7 ~ Cooking Fire Ninja (educlaytion.com)
• Lessons From a Pop Teacher & a Few Zombies (rasjacobson.wordpress.com)

I Wish I Were a Muppet [Guest Post]

Image via Wikipedia

I am pleased to have a sweet guest post for today’s “Life & Times of Gen X” from Lee Skallerup Bessette, PhD. Lee keeps it going over at her site College Ready Writing, a blog about all things higher ed. She’s also active on Twitter.  

During her downtime from preparing students as writers and users of the English language, Lee cheers for the Montreal Canadians. That’s hockey folks, and that’s an eduClaytion win. Of course, if her beloved Habs come back in round 1 they may end up against my Penguins. Yes, I remember that her team knocked my team out of the playoffs last year. No, I don’t want to talk about that.

But maybe the best thing I can say about Lee is that she loves her some Muppets. So do I. So should any true Gen X’er.

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I love the Muppets. Scratch that. I love Jim Henson.

As a Gen X’er, I was raised not only by Sesame Street but also The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, and (shudder) Muppet Babies. You can read about my love for Jim Henson and all things Muppet here, a post I wrote after visiting the travelling Henson exhibit in Chicago.

Muppet movies are awesome because the songs were great, the jokes were neither too smart nor too dumb, and the cameos were well-placed and hysterical without overwhelming the movie (I’m looking at you Muppets From Space!).

I fear that [writer & actor] Jason Segel will be fighting an uphill battle to meet the high standard Jim Henson created since meta (work of fiction in which characters know they’re in a work of fiction), irony, and celebrity mugging have become so commonplace in kids “entertainment.”

In honor of the upcoming Muppet Movie, let me run down my four favorite Muppet films. I know the new one’s already been written and shot, but I can only hope Segel took notes.

PTP 7 ~ Cooking Fire Ninja

When I was a kid I wanted to be in Karate Kid, good at cooking shrimp, and able to spit fire. Well, looks like the dream boat just pulled in.

I’m gonna keep the mashup short and sweet, especially since I need you to watch that other itty, bitty video down there! But read these fantastic posts also.

Jess Buttram’s tribute to her mom.

Ironic Mom’s guest spot at ProBlogger. (Readers are raving. So proud of my blogging friend and search bomb queen.)

The always brilliant Jon Acuff on The Wrong Way to do Twitter. Look for his new book Quitter about closing the gap between your day job and your dream job, between what you have to do and what you’d love to do.

Don’t miss Matt’s funny take on Vampire Nerds. You’ve gotta read a title like that!

Finally, I am in the fight of John Travolta’s life in Tyler Tarver’s “Worst Movie Ever” contest. I have actually fallen behind after jumping out to a massive lead. I suspect tomfoolery and Scientologists are to blame. Watch this super short video and click the link below.

Bonus video: MOBILIZE YOUR PEOPLE. I NEED YOU!

Just hop over to the voting page and cast your click for Battlefield Earth. Then get all your peeps on Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, or wherever to vote too! Anyone who supports me will automatically become a member of my survival squad in case of any potential scientologist riots or zombie apocalypses.

Remember what a great offer that is now that you know I am a ninja who can spit fire and even cook during the down times.

You all are the best! Have a phenomenal Easter my friends.

What’s the best thing you saw on the web this week?

Let me know if you’d like to take a Down & Nerdy spot in coming weeks!

Posts That Pop (PTP) appears on weekends and features some of the best web content I’ve discovered recently.

Connect with me on Twitter @ClayMorganPA.

The Best Movie Villains of the 1980s

Image by annethelibrarian via Flickr

Special treat today for a unique edition of FFF (no poll). I’ve asked 4 fantastic bloggers to briefly explain their pick for best movie villain of the 1980s. I could wax awesome about how terrific each of these folks are, but you’ll see that by reading what they’ve prepared just for us! Be a hero and check out their links too.

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Ivan Drago by Ellie Soderstrom from WritingGig. Twitter @elliesoderstrom.

Imagine The Incredible Hulk without green skin, ripped pants, and a good human heart and you’ll have Ivan Drago from Rocky IV. This Goliath of a man is my favorite 80s villain, not just because of his steroid-charged training montage, not just because of his granite expression, and not just because he instills fear into the heart of the Italian Stallion. It’s because he has the best, most terrifying line of any baddie of the decade. “I must break you.”

You know Drago’s a truly successful antagonist when he puts Rocky’s marriage on the rocks. We watch in horror as Adrien doesn’t even even give Rocky one of her awkward kisses goodbye. Curses on you, Drago, for pulling one of the best cinematic couples apart!

Even though Drago’s spiky haired wife claims, “he is not a killer,” when we look deep into his blue eyes, as cold as the Russian terrain, we know he’s a killer . . . we know. With one colossal punch to the face, he steals the life of Rocky’s arrogant best friend, Apollo Creed. Apollo! You should have listened to your wife and became a trainer/heavy user like the rest of retired boxers! Let Apollo’s demise be a lesson to you, Brett Favre.

But the more we learn about Drago’s stony heart and even stonier muscles, the more we realize that it’s actually his biggest weakness. We all know Rocky’s big, golden, Philadelphian heart makes him the best—makes him the better man. And it’s not just because Drago’s heavy diet of steroids will shrivel his voice and penis and turn him into a woman eventually, but because Rocky has a family, robot, and honor worth fighting for.

How To Successfully Network

This is a companion piece to an earlier post called How To Create Opportunities.

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Weird things happen to me all the time. People who know me will tell you that my updates are rarely boring. Although I’ve experienced gobs of near misses professionally, some nice opportunities have hit and more continue to come along as time goes on.

I don’t believe in luck, and chance has zero power since it is not a thing. Every effect must have a cause. As Branch Rickey–general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s–said, “Luck is the residue of design.” I’ve had that statement clipped to my heartstrings since college.

We don’t have to take chances, but we don’t have to succeed either. As a great leader I know has said, “If you’re not failing, you’re not trying.”

I fail plenty because I try things, sometimes stupid things. Some of you have witnessed this fact firsthand. That’s okay because there’s always a point in those missteps even if it’s just to figure out one more thing that doesn’t work. I am way more comfortable with screwing up than I am with never attempting anything.

A big part of this process includes what we call networking. Go back far enough in history and you’ll find that the word comes from ancient fishermen. Picture the disciples casting their nets over the side of the boat. That net was their greatest tool. They threw it out there consistently, each time hoping to successfully hit their target. Bigger nets gave those guys a better chance of snagging what they were after, but teamwork was vital to the operation.

The Life & Times of Generation X: Toy Stores

Image via Wikipedia

From the perspective of most kids, childhood is about toys. The simple goal is to get them. Once that plan is complete we move onto phase 2 which consists of getting more. Kids of today maintain the desire for playthings. What they want may be the same, but how they get them is completely different now than in previous decades.

Toy stores were magical when I was a kid. In fact, one of my local haunts called Children’s Palace was actually designed as a castle. You would enter through sliding doors and see aisles of fun that went on forever. The shelves stretched way up towards a distant ceiling. I remember thinking that if I was the richest man in the world I could buy all those toys. Forget world peace or international power. That stupid stuff wasn’t even on my radar. Know what was? Every action figure and remote control car on the shelf.

The internet and retail giants like WalMart slowly strangled the toy store industry to death in the past 20 years. Gone are the days of snagging the ultimate catalog–the annual Christmas Wish Book–from the mailbox to circle all the stuff you wanted. Toy reconnaissance. No one cared whether these items were provided by Santa, mom, grandma, or the smelly neighbor who thought a dime would buy you an ice cream cone.

We just wanted the toys.

With apologies to Baby Jesus, page images from those catalogs and visions of palatial toy halls kept me awake on Christmas Eve. I was a product of my culture. Greed reigned and toys built empire.

PTP 6 ~ Frenemies

How about we keep it short and sweet and fully clothed this week? Maybe. So right to the webby goodness we go. Thanks for checking out the links. You smell terrific.

There’s only one Tamara because after God made her she broke the mold herself and swore about stuff. Hey, she’s just trying to be real which is about the most important thing to me when it comes to finding people I can befriend. Tamara Out Loud features her thoughts on “Real Life and Real Faith,” and she spent a minute the other day discussing A Hardcore Breakdown of Awesome Words.

The Book of Piper Bayard

We’re in the business of making dreams come true here at eduClaytion, and that’s exactly what’s about to happen up in this piece. Piper Bayard took home the crown in the world famous March Movie Madness. She and The Princess Bride stood alone after 30+ people from 3 continents were eliminated.

The past week has been a whirlwind fairy tale for Piper. She’s already been serenaded by Chase “van Dross” McFadden and was recognized by some half-naked idiot.

When Piper and I first met I told her two things. One, she’s super sweet. Two, the letters of her name can be rearranged to spell Rid Bay Rapper. She’s the original RBR and this year’s MMM champ. 

She’s also “The pale writer of the apocalypse” with a cool website, and you must know her on Twitter. Follow her and reap the benefits. So take a look at what she’s got while I drive her around the stadium in my Corvette. It’s a parade yo, and the Float O’Piper just pulled up. Here you go.

~*~*~*~

Give us the personal details we should know.

I’m married to the Skynet computer guy from Terminator 3. Sort of. My husband is an electronic engineer who designs the data storage systems that allow corporations to violate my privacy, which is something I hate. I feel like such a whore, but I’m willing to live off of it while I work through that moral dilemma. We have two teenage spawn, a boy and a girl, who show me the meaning of awesome every day.

Have you lived in New Mexico all your life?

Born in Missouri, but I moved to the High Plains Plateau in eastern New Mexico as a young girl and grew up in world of cowboys, sunsets, and land as flat as a table. The coolest thing about it was the simplicity. Flat earth. Infinite sky. It’s like being in a snow globe with dirt instead of snow. Now, I live in Colorado. The mountains are beautiful, but I miss the sunsets that magnify the disparity between the tiny, fragile earth, and the enormous orb that lights it.

Describe your experience as a cancer survivor. What do you say to someone who is fighting that battle? How did your battle change you?

How To Create Opportunities

Senator John Pippy (Image via Wikipedia)

I didn’t look like much at the age of 19. My tall, skinny frame sprouted into the floppiest mop I ever wore. Lord knows why I made an appointment with the congressman.

His name was John Pippy, a young politician who had taken out a local incumbent a few months earlier. The Pennsylvania representative took youth and energy to Harrisburg, but he also kept an office in my small hometown. I was a history major, so I stumbled in to check out his operation one day.

The secretary said he wasn’t in that day but could she help me? I told her I didn’t really need anything, just wanted to say hi to, um, Representative Pippy. I think we freaked each other out a bit, but she was paid to be nice to constituents no matter what they looked like.

“Would you like to make an appointment?” she asked.

“Uh, okay,” I asserted.

The following week I peeled myself from a friend’s floor to make my 10:30 a.m. appointment with the congressman.

“You’re going where?” my friend asked.

I told him.

“Why”

“I dunno. To meet him.”

A short time later I sat across from Representative Pippy. “What can I do for you,” he asked.

Come Visit Me in Awesometown!

Knox McCoy invited me to appear as the sixth resident of his Awesometown. You can read the interview at his site.

I have never enjoyed an interview so much and he asked questions that have never been asked by anyone else in history.

Great stuff. If you only read one interview today by Knox McCoy, make sure it’s the one with me. You smell terrific.

Thursdays With ALF

Preamble:

I wanted to call this new segment Growing Up Gen X until I found a blog with that exact title (good stuff btw). So now I’m trying to come up with another sweet name because I want to be individual like everybody else.

So here are a couple of potential names for your perusal:

The Gen X Generation

Image via Wikipedia

Gen X Living

Gen X Flashbacks

I kind of like the first one, but none are as good as my first choice. Help?

Preamble over.

~*~*~*~

How many of you can tell me what A.L.F. stands for? Give yourself double bonus points if you said alien life form. Call yourself my potential soul mate* if you said one of the most beloved TV shows from the late 1980s.

I loved ALF. The show only lasted four seasons but gave me lots of laughs. Besides Garfield, ALF was probably my first mentor in sarcasm, wit, and observing the quirks of human behavior which just happen to be three of my favorite things. I wasn’t exactly a Mary Poppins type of kid.

ALF aired Thursdays at 8, but we always missed it because that was the time each week when my sisters and went with our mom to clean a doctor’s office. Fortunately we had a VCR by then so we designated a blank VHS and recorded the show. We’d race into the house and watch the evening’s episode before getting ready for bed. I actually still have a tape I made of the one hour movie special in which ALF gets amnesia and thinks he’s a salesman for Michigan Life Insurance.

I bet you haven’t thought about ALF this much in a long time. Actually, most people probably never thought this much about ALF ever.

PTP 5: Ferris Bueller Edition

This week’s video will make even more sense if you’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, especially if it’s the first movie that a) you ever saw at a drive in & b) memorized. Maybe that’s just me.

Don’t worry. My therapist says we’re making great progress.

But seriously, congrats to all you from the tournament and recent PTPs getting those Freshly Pressed honors! Great stuff.

Here’s the sweet (by that I mean rockin’) article from Kristen Lamb about the Good Old Days. Ah, memories.

Amanda Hoving throws down her interesting observations in this post called On Cleaning Toilets or Reading Playboy.

Be sure to check out the big wrap up on a week of Search Bombing over at Ironic Mom‘s site. I also left a comment there with many of the best search bombs I received so you can see what was done to me at the end of her post.

There’s only one way to describe Knox McCoy: Indescribable. Whether he’s doing straight off the wall with Monday Morning Meatloaf or mixing off the wall with a point, you should see why so many people have run screaming from him over the years.

And we have the Top 10 Insane Reasons to Want Another Baby from Kelly at Dances With Chaos. Funny stuff for sure.

Finally, here’s the link to that final MMM bracket used in yesterday’s video. I know it was hard to see clearly through all the emotion brought about by Chase’s stirring farewell song. If you missed it stop your life right now and check out the recap video.

Let me know if you have links to great content for next week’s PTP!

Posts That Pop appears on Saturdays and features some of the best web content I’ve discovered recently.

Connect with me on Twitter @ClayMorganPA.

MMM: And the winner is…

We came into this March Movie Madness with only one goal: to figure out what in the world we were doing. Well, I’m happy to say that after four weeks of dancing, our crazy legs have shimmied to a halt.

This contest is over.

The final votes have been cast.

The winner has been determined.

Our journey together is coming to an end.

What can we say about the epic epicness of this epic event? This tournament was so epic that we’re ending a week into April even though it’s called March Movie Madness.

I’m sure Jessica and Piper didn’t get much sleep last night. I know I didn’t, but then again I really don’t get much sleep any night. But I digress.

Before I reveal the results I feel it’s necessary to let you know that a rigorous tiebreaker system was implemented in preparation of a possible tie. After consulting with my attorney (read: my imagination) we determined that the most practical tiebreaking technique would be to see what each movie title offered in the way of anagrams.

After careful analysis, we determined that Princess Bride can be rearranged to spell “prescribed sin” while The Lion King becomes “Thinking ole!”

Secure in this information, I then tabulated the votes through an equally (insert synonym for rigorous here) process that consisted of clicking ‘Results’ in my poll stats.

The results are compelling.

MMM: There Can Be Only One!

It’s the big day! I’m so excited I feel like that kid on a leash in line at DisneyLand! We’re about to hold the greatest event in the history of movie blogging tournaments this week.

Faint not now beloved.

The upstart Lion King has roared into the finals behind the crafty leadership of Jessica Buttram. Meanwhile, The Princess Bride has cut a swath right through the other half of the field and recent reports just into eduClaytion indicate that Piper Bayard isn’t even left-handed!

Be sure to vote and don’t take anything for granted. This tourney is up for grabs like that year I watched American Idol and it came down to the two Davids and everybody knew David Archuletta would win because he was so adorably Mormon. I also knew Archuletta was a lock because I had been rooting for the other David the whole time. He was a rock guy so you know I’m all over that. And when Clay Morgan backs someone or something in a contest that someone or something loses.

Yet David Cook won. The point is that nobody knew. See how clever I am at analogies? And I even threw in an idiom in the paragraph before that. It’s like a grammar clinic up in here.

The winner will get some cool opportunities to sit and chat with me in the green room while we eat expensive meats and cheeses. All that before I lavish praise all over you like a monsoon.

Well guess what troopers? I only came here to do two things, make jokes and get votes. Looks like I’m all outta jokes.

Both of these write ups are excellent today, clever and funny. Let’s do this.