The BakerMuse Guide to Writing a Best Seller

Yesterday, I was trolling the aisles of my local bookstore when I saw two enormous cash cows. The post Legosi Vampire Section.  And the “Business & Management” juggernaut.

Since I am a tad claustrophobic, the prospect of napping in a coffin for most of the day would be a hardship. So today, I am focusing on business, which is really about napping in the infinitely adjustable and curiously expensive Aeron Chair.

Basically, there are writers who are pulling down pots of money by using my patented method of book naming.  They simply combine the trend du jour (Wiki or Social) and some vague promise that sounds like a Zen koan.  “The art of doing more with less, more or less.”

So now that Thanksgiving is nearly upon us, I am honoring the tradition by sharing my opus: The BakerMuse Guide to Writing A Best Selling Business Book.  Also, available via Kindle, E-Book and Scent-o-Vision.

Just combine any of the words from Column A with C from the chart below. Use column B to begin the title or connect A & B.  For example, select Oprah from A and Nomics from C and you’ve got Oprahnomics.  Just add the Zen subtitle “How the big “O” can take you from has been to want to be.”  Voila.

Or maybe you want to get fancy. Take a renaissance name – oh, let’s say Copernicus from column A and the word Effect from C.  Toss “The” into the front and you’ve got The Copernicus Effect.  Add the Zen subtitle:  How Heliocentric thinking is radically transforming the economic landscape.” Double Voila.  

You can also pull a Black Swan.  Which is basically to create a color and then an attribute from an obscure animal to sandwich your premise.  For example, the Chartreuse Aardvark. Basically, the Aardvark has an incredible tongue which can scoop upwards of 50,000 termites or ants.  The business connection?  Well, scooping up customers with a single marketing move that it virtually spins gold and paper money -- which fixes up the flimsy Chartreuse  

Oh, and be sure to out a TM or SM after the title so you can rake in even more bucks from frivilous law suits.

 

Why I am no longer a sugar daddy.

Recently, my doctor told me that I have the glucose level of overripe sugar beet. Apparently, if I put one toe over the Vermont State line, I can legally be tapped and processed by the Log Cabin folks.

There is some irony in this diagnosis given that my ancestors grew sugar cane in Barbados.  And from the looks of those ancient photos filled with rotund bodies, they consumed mass quantities of it as well.

I knew something was wrong when black bears started tossing away their honeycombs and began stalking me. Wild pack animals were looking at me like I was a walking Snickers Bar.  And for swarms of mosquitoes, I was target practice and the body de jour.

Now I’m scanning the food aisles looking for anything that says “diabetic friendly.” This was my first mistake. I actually ate some sugar-free fudge and was immediately spot welded to the toilet for six hours.  Most of the approved foods (I am using that term loosely) taste like a mix between an old chalkboard eraser and styrofoam packing peanuts.

My food pyramid has been upended. Carbohydrates (we call them carbs in the biz) are monitored like Bernie Madoff walking the yard.  There are good carbs and bad carbs.  I happen to like the bad-boy carbs. Things like strudel, stuffing, pizza and pasta, candy corn, and anything Nabisco can stuff into a Newton – the very items that will put me into a coma.

No more Captain Crunch.  No more Dominos.  No more Oktoberfest binges with busty beer maids.  No more knocking the heck out of the Pillsbury Dough Boy while opening the buttermilk Grands. It’s basically a diet of protein and fat.  In other words, I am eating like a Neaderthal or John Madden.

Like B.B. King, I am stabbing my finger with lancets to get a reading.  It’s like performing a mini Hari kari on your digits.  Suddenly, I feel a kinship with Wilfred Brimley. I have grown an enormous mustache and have affected a surly, blunt demeanor.  If he's been off sugar and
carbs this long, no wonder he's surly.  

I don’t intend to walk lockstep into taste oblivion – I already have found something called indigestible carbs. It’s a loofah. Not so surprisingly, there's a secret brethren trying to turn cotton candy and pie crust into healthy proteins. Wish us luck. We're like Masons with candy bars.

It’s no longer “home sweet home.”  It’s “home low-glycemic home.” 

Hey, works for me.

Great hotels. Bad postcards.

During my college years, I worked as a desk clerk for Holiday Inn. I had a green badge declaring my high posiition and perfected the smile of an innkeeper. One of my jobs was to hoist the 10-lb letters on what was then called "The Great Sign."  My biggest problem was not having enough letters to put on the sign. So, what should have been Happy Anniversary Mildred and Larry was “Kudos to the Kouple.”

The only remnants of that experience is a vintage Holiday Inn letter “M” which was also "W" and if tape was applied could stand in as a "Z" and  my collection of curious hotel postcards.  Now a  lesser rag than BakerMuse would probably pick on mom and pop motel postcards with a wagon wheel or bagpipe motif, but our stalwart staff is willing to take on the 5-star bigwigs.

Like the this famous Swiss hotel.  Apparently the Schweizerhof is still in business.  I don’t know why. This bell hop looks like he wants to make sure my papers are in order.  You can almost feel his heels clicking together as I am escorted to an interrogation room. 

Notice the lack of eye contact.  The well-oiled brim. This guy looks like he’s on the payroll of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the James Bond super villain and official lap for white Persian cats.

What is even more frightening is that this postcard is over 60 years old but they still proudly use the image on the hotel web site.  

Here’s one for the Repulse Bay Hotel in Hong Kong. It’s not exactly a badge of distinction to tell people, “I’m staying at the Repulsive.” It may be the only hotel where nobody steals the towels. In fact, the guests pilfer towels from other hotels to bring back to the Repulse so they won't be mocked at while drying off at pool side.

I am pleased they added China after Hong Hong. Otherwide we would have mixed it up with Hong Kong in New Jersey.

According to hotel lure, Major C.G.R. Ringer didn’t want to give up one of his initials, so instead he gave Nairobi a grand hotel in 1904 as a Christmas present.

Sadly, what Nairobi really wanted for the holidays was a central government, clean running water and a "Slanket" or two.

The postcard has an angry lion, a rogue elephant and a surly, fez-wearing bartender. What's missing from the graphic is a large machete. Hey, what’s not to love.

My one problem. If I am going to get my shots and travel all the way to Nairobi, I don't want to stay at a hotel that has the same name as my previous residence in Virginia.  

Now, if you have a bad hotel postcard that you want to share, shoot a jpeg to inotivity@gmail.com.  If it's bad enough, you'll get credit and a chance to win a trip to that very hotel.  Not a big chance, actually.

Bon Voyage.

The Four Yorkshiremen Reprise

Like millions of Americans, I’m downwardly mobile. The great platonic shift of the economy and the soaring cost of junk food have been the catalyst for a whole new trend. In the old days (okay, two years ago) it was “remember how poor we used to be?”  Today, it’s remember how rich we used to be?”

So as an homage to the good old days,(Okay two years ago) I bring you Monty Python’s “The Four Yorkshiremen.” It’s a sketch first saw on the Secret Policeman’s Ball. It is in my top five funniest bits of all time.

It begins with four dapper men dressed in white tuxedos comparing stories on  how poor they used to be. 

JONES: 

Very passable indeed, eh?

ALL: 

Aye.

ATKINSON: 

You can’t beat a good glass of Chateau de Chasselas, eh Josiah?

JONES:

You’re right there, Obediah.

CLEESE:

Who’d have thought that 40 years ago, we be sitting here drinking Chateau de Chasselas?

ALL:

Aye.

JONES:

In them days, we’d be glad to have the price of a cup of tea.

ATKINSON:

Aye, a cup of cold tea.

ALL:

Aye.

CLEESE:

Without milk-

PALIN:

Or sugar-

ATKINSON:

Or tea.

PALIN:

Aye, in a cracked cup and all.

CLEESE:

We never had a cup. We used to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

ATKINSON:

Best we could do is suck on piece of damp cloth.

JONES:

But, you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

PALIN:

Because we were poor.  My old dad used to say to me, “money doesn’t buy you happiness, son.”

CLEESE:

And he was right.

JONES:

Right, he was.

CLEESE:

I was happier then.  We had nothing.  We used to live in a tiny old tumbledown house with great holes in the roof.

ATKINSON:

A house? You were lucky to have a house. We used to live in one room, 26 of us, no furniture and half the floor was missing. Huddled in one corner for fear of falling.

JONES:

Well, you were lucky to have a room.  We used to have to live in a corridor.

PALIN:

Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor. It would’ve have been a palace to us.  We used to live in old water tank at a rubbish tip.  Got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us. House? Hah.

CLEESE:

Well, when I say house, it was only a hole in the ground covered by couple of feet of torn canvas, but it was a house to us.

ATKINSON:

We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go live in a lake.

JONES:

You were lucky to have a lake.  There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of motorway.

PALIN:

Cardboard box?

JONES:

Aye.

PALIN:

You were lucky. We lived for three months in rolled up newspaper in a septic tank.  We used to have to get up at six every morning, clean the newspaper, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill, 14 hours a day, week in, week out for sixpence a month, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with a belt.

ATKINSON:

Luxury.  We used to have to get our of the lake at 3 am, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work 20 hours a day at the mill for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us about the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky.

JONES:

Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night and lick the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of cold gravel, worked 24 hours at day at the mill for four pence every six years and when we got home our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

CLEESE:

Right. I used to get up in the morning at half past ten at night half an hour before I went to bed…eat a lump of freezing cold, work 28 hours a day at the mill and pay mill owner to let us work there and when I got home, our dad used to murder us in cold blood each night and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah-

PALIN:

Now you try and tell young people of that today and they won’t believe you.

ALL:

No, they won’t believe you.

Here it 'tis in concert.

Neighbors and other disappointments

When it comes to neighbors, I admit I am a bit of a romantic. I wistfully dream of Mayberry's Aunt Bee bringing me a basket filled with home-made fried chicken and a freshly-baked peach pie. (To heck with clogged arteries, I say).

Or Home Improvement's Wilson Wilson, Jr. dispensing avuncular advice behind the fence leaving me, and yes, the entire world better for the experience.

Or at the very least, Dudley Moore's neighbor in the movie 10. A shameless hedonist who always threw lavish parties with beautiful women cavorting sans clothing.

Well, these days my neighbors don't cavort.  In fact, my neighbors don't score very high on the uber friendliness scale.  They are a usually a cross between Ted and Al Bundy. Seriously. What follows is sadly 100% true.  When my wife and I moved into a condo in Richmond, Virginia, there was a gentle knock at the door. A kindly older woman, wearing a flowered apron, brought us a casserole as welcome gift.

It didn't matter that I hadn't eaten a casserole since the early '70s, I finally found the faux Aunt Bee I was searching for my entire life. Well, we put the casserole aside and I went out to my car to get utensils, the neighbor on the other side us said, "Welcome to the neighborhood.  And by the way, if "Jane" your other neighbor gives you any food, don't eat it.  She poisoned her husband with a casserole."

We'd get her casseroles from time to time and she'd ask, "did you like them?" My standard reply was, "Oh, yes, apparently angels can cook. Thank you -- you're such a dear. "A year later, they carted her off to an asylum.  

I actually never saw my neighbor in Los Angeles.  We had a large fence and massive tree to protect us. But word on the street was that he was ex-military and a surly brute of a man.  I made sure to keep my Richard Simmond's workout tapes on mute.  Well, fast forward to jury duty.  A friend and I were both called to help dispense the justice department mete out freedom or punishment.

Later, when our mutual cases were over, he told me that his case involved a man who shot a dog for barking too loud. "Kind of weird ex-military guy, lives on *****.  Of course, it was my neighbor, the gun-toting felon. He was hauled off to the local pokey.

The strangest of all neighbors lived across the hall from me in an apartment in New Jersey. He seemed like a regular guy who aparently survived without doing any manual labor of any kind.  One evening, he knocked on my door and I opened it to find that his teeth weren't his own -- he had a kind of Moms Mabley kind of vibe.

He wasn't just three sheets to the wind, he was an entire bedding set to the wind -- including the matching dust ruffle. He says, "I like to sleep New York style."  I wanted to say "do you mean Albany or Manhattan? But I had the feeling that he was thinking Fire Island.  Fortunately, I had a deadbolt the size of the Empire State Building. 

Recently, I lived in Texas and had a wonderful neighbor.  The problem was her dachshund "Duke." He was the Eddie Haskel of dogs.  When he was with my neighbor he was your best buddy.  But when her back was turned, he became what is known in the trade as  SOS, "Son of Satan."  He had the remarkable ability to thrust his entire top row of teeth out a few feet from his body.  It was like a hot dog with badly-fitting false teeth. Needless to say, I left Texas immediately.  

Well, now I live in a Victorian mansion so large,  I am too busy finding my way around to ever consort with the neighbors.  Ah, life is good.