THE ODD SOCKS DEPARTMENT

by Robert Lopresti

Welcome to our fall clearance! I am sweeping out my notebook, shaking out a few ideas that are too thin to be a post of their own, but too interesting (I hope) to shred. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited.

Cue the cackle.

Imagine that you are (or are pretending to be) a mad scientist or a criminal mastermind. (Insert political joke here.) Now imagine that something has struck your fiendish imagination as humorous and so you let loose with a good burst of evil laughter.

Now imagine what that laughter sounds like. Write it down, or at least decide what you would write down if you had a pen handy. Work with me here. Got it?

Recently a friend emailed me to ask for a favor. I said I would be happy to do it one but he would owe me. I followed this with: “Bwa-ha-ha! Why do archvillains always say that anyway?”

My friend replied that he thought the bad guys said “Mwa-ha-ha!” That got me curious so I went to what New Scientist magazine calls the Famous Web-based Search Engine or FWSE (you know which one) and did some research.

Bwahaha OR bwa-ha-ha scores 485,000 hits. Mwahaha OR mwa-ha-ha tops it at 500,000. And if you search for both versions at once you get 60 hits, some of which are devoted to discussing the two phrases.

I don’t know what’s scarier: that so many people use these phrases, or discuss the two versions, or that we can use advanced technology to keep track of such things.

Let’s be friendly.

A few years ago my little city was hit by waves of house burglaries. My friend Flip Breskin was concerned by what she saw as vigilante talk so she urged people to try a different approach, which I call the Walmart Greeter Theory of Neighborhood Security. Flip doesn’t claim to have invented it, just to have popularized it around here. Flip works at home and when she saw someone out on the street she didn’t know she went out and introduced herself. If she saw people parked in a car she smiled and waved. The result was that some people thought “what a friendly neighborhood” and some thought “let’s go find someplace that isn’t so alert.”

And all without a threat, a scowl, or an unkind word. Cool, huh?

Lights, camera, imagination.

Does anyone else do this? Does everyone?

When I am having trouble writing a scene, especially one with a lot of dialog, I pretend that the movie rights have already been purchased (ha!) and imagine seeing the scene on the big screen. “Hearing” the words is easier than trying to think them up.

I don’t usually worry about casting when I play this game. Too bad; I’m sure I could set up Bogart and Britney Spears together with amazing results.