Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Ugly Tattoos

I don’t have any tattoos, but I do understand the reason people get them. For many people tattoos are a way of setting themselves apart and showing they are individuals. In a nation where most organized groups are striving for “ideological purity” declaring your individuality is understandable. I also realize there are times when a tattoo can relay useful information.

What I don’t understand is why anyone would go to a bad tattoo artist.

The inspiration for this post came when I met a girl who had several tattoos. The first one that caught my attention was the one on her arm that was either a fish or a duck. Trying not to get caught up on that I looked discretely at her cleavage. She had a tattoo at the top of her left breast proudly saying, “Marry” with the second “r” x-ed out.

I really don’t know what was worse, the fact that the tattoo “artist” misspelled a simple name, or that he thought he could make up for it by just x-ing out the second “r”.

Seeing this girl’s “artwork” made me remember someone I worked with once who had a tattoo on his arm that looked to me like a 2nd grader’s drawing of three rabbits with a circle hovering over them. I asked him why he had a tattoo of bunny rabbits on his arm and he told me that they were, “Indians dancing in the moonlight”. I had to take his word for it.

My feeling is tattoos are like jokes; if you have to explain it, you’ve done it wrong.

Perplexed why someone would get put something that ugly on his body I had to ask, “Why would you go to a tattoo artist that can’t draw?”

His response was, “He works cheap.”

I was speechless. If you are going to try and save money, why do it on something that will be on your body permanently?

If you are going to get a tattoo, a little due diligence pays off. Check out your tattoo artist’s previous work, and make sure they can spell. If you don’t the first impression you leave is not one of individuality, it’s declaring to the world, “I’m an idiot.”

So to all those people that don’t check out the work of a tattoo artist before they permanently disfigure their bodies I say, “Shut-up Stupid, your expression of individuality is one of stupidity.”

Fantastic Future Friday: GM has stopped giving people Hummers

Down With Tyranny has a funny bit on the Death of the Hummer. While I’m not thrilled that an American Car will no longer be made, it is nice that getting this monstrosity off the American roads will open the way for more fuel efficient cars to come onto the road.

The one major problem with getting cars made of lighter weight materials on the road is that they have to share it with these huge vehicles and the differences in weight means the smaller cars have to be engineered to be safe when the bigger car hits them.

With the death of the Hummer, a vehicle that had no reason to be on road in the first place, the weight difference are reduced and lighter weight more efficient cars can be safer on the American roads.

This will help make the concept of light-weight cars on the road be easier for Americans to embrace and lead to greater fuel savings, and that will lead to a fantastic future.

Writing Wednesday: Show and Tell

"This is my Grandpa, He lives in a box underground.

He doesn't talk much and smells pretty bad too -

But he's really fun to play in the sandbox with."

I’ve been going through my rejected short stories recently that I have divided into categories. Don’t Work, Don’t Quite Work , Love them why don’t they sell?

My “Don’t Work” pile is broken up into two more piles.

“Weak Ideas” is the biggest, I’ll get an idea and write a story and realize after writing it that the main idea wasn’t strong enough to make a story on its own, Like a guy who loves to solve puzzles makes a Pentachoron (a 4 dimensional triangle) that allows aliens to communicate with him, or two of the Galaxies ultimate warriors come to Earth to battle each other in an Earth Game and find out the game is chess.

I keep them around because I might have an idea that dovetails it and they can merge into a full story.

“Weak Characters and Weak Plot” I keep around to remind me never to do that again. (The growth of that folder is slowing down, so I must be getting better or fooling myself.)

My Don’t Quite Work folder is broken down into two piles:

“Weak Characters in a good situation” Self explanatory.

“I’m missing something.” This is the frustrating one, It’s usually some element I’m just not seeing, that is in my mind but I forgot to write it into the story.

My last Pile is the “Love them, why don’t they sell?”

I was looking through this pile the other day and noticed something in one of my stories.
I wanted to tell a tale about an ultimate bad guy, one who believed in his heart what he was doing was so beneficial to mankind that he could do incredible evil to accomplish it.

And that’s what I did, I told the tale. There was next to no dialog, no action, just a guy justifying his being an evil prick.

When I brought in someone to reason with him and ask him try to have a little compassion that’s when he started to come to life. Almost all of the original story was used, I just switched it from third person to first person. By having another character there to react to his justifying his actions it made my bad guy relatable as you could feel his obsession and even though you knew he was wrong you knew he couldn’t be talked out of it. So that even when the consequences his obsession came back at him, it was believable that even that wouldn’t stop him.

It’s the difference of showing vs. telling, but sometimes I’m too into my own stories to see something that obvious.

Darrell B. Nelson