Warning! Warning! Cultures colliding in 3…2… AGHHH!!!!
If you are a little girl in Syria – chances are you aren’t – and you want to play with a doll, I think that it’s great that you have a doll to play with fashioned in the style of your own culture. Mattel thinks it’s great, too. A Fulla doll costs $16, which is more than some Barbie dolls costs in the USA. The average monthly income in Syria…$100.
And some people think that Muslim girls aren’t treated right. They’re treated like Princesses. My parents never bought me an action figure that was 16% of their monthly income….
The World Vision Report included my Honduras soccer piece on an encore edition. I’m glad they liked it well enough to run it again. I think my On Air reading still has a lot of room for improvement.
Great news, but it would be even greater, if they paid twice!…
I made another audio slideshow to accompany a pitch to the folks at the World Vision Report. This one features the sights and sounds of the China’s controversial Three Gorges Dam Project. My last such pitch, a piece on Bibi Russell, has been accepted.
On Wednesday I posted a quote from James Sullivan’s book “Jeans.” Allow me to rewrite the quote in the context with which he intended it to be read:
First JEANS built the country’s (USA) infrastructure, then JEANS populated it with collective identity.
From what I have read in the book so far, Mr. Sullivan has a tendency to overwrite in his glorification of this inanimate object of Americana. They are jeans, that’s it. When they get wet, they don’t dry. If you’re sweaty they stick to you. And If you run in sweaty jeans you’ll get a rash. Jeans didn’t win WWII. Jeans didn’t settle the West. Give it a rest Sullivan.
That being said, you can bet I’ll be quoting Sullivan when I write…
Whether you think capitalism will save the world or destroy it, you have to admit, times just don’t get more interesting than these. As for this particular story, it just might be more ironic than a Chinese Wal-Mart….
“For the price of one cup of coffee you could be a published author.”
This appeared in an email from Writer’s Digest. Hey, if it worked for the starving kids in Africa…wait…they’re still starving? Huh, it’s bad when you have to steal someone else’s marketing angle. It’s worse when that angle was used to save starving children and it didn’t even work.
Also in the email…
“We promise the only jitters you’ll get will be from seeing your name in print.”
If only it were that easy. If only you had to pay $3.99, which is an expensive cup of coffee in my book, and you didn’t have to actually go through the pain and suffering of writing and the rejection that comes with it.
There are a ton of published travel anthologies. But I’m guessing there are even more that are never published.
Somebody has an idea for an anthology and they start posting a Call for Submissions in various places where travelers that think they can write hang out. They offer a $100/story and get a few submissions, maybe some decent ones, but not enough for a book. The idea dies.
Lucky me, I’ve only ever submitted to the ones that have died. In fact, I may have killed them.
Yesterdays hitchhiking post reminded me of an anthology I submitted to that was never published – “Cheap Stingy Bastards.” I sent in a short filler piece on hitchhiking. Let me search the archives for it…got it…whoa, that was…
Move over Going Home Barbie meet Fulla, the Barbie with Muslim values.
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