We’re at it again. I hope you enjoy this story, and then go check out the similarly-themed stylings of Crow (graphic-maker), Robin, and Caiti. Also, I believe I owe Hockeyfalls a shout-out for her tremendous help conceptualizing this piece.

The Terrible Fate of Mr. Johnson

“Oh God. Really?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck.” A moment’s pause. “Are you sure?”

He sighed beneath his woven black mask.

“Yes,” he said again, his voice still booming, confident and unwavering.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said his victim, sprawled on a small wooden table with his hands tied together above his head and his feet spread apart. “Acid? That is so cliché.”

The dark figure towered above the victim’s head, clenching a string in his gloved hand, which was tied to the bottom of a bucket that was affixed to a swivel, which had been bolted to the ceiling. He didn’t move, not one inch.

“And what is that bullshit Rube Goldberg contraption?”

The masked head tilted up to the ceiling, and slowly down again. “I’m quite fond of it, actually. Now that you mention it, however, I think a laser would be more cliché, and considerably less painful. Would you rather wait here for a few weeks while I acquire and assemble one?”

“No!” came the anguished response. “I’d rather you didn’t…”

“Didn’t what?”

“What will the guys think when I’m found like that?” Johnson closed his eyes. “I can see Larry, Mike, and David huddled around that water cooler… ”

“How’s this for an obituary?” Mike muttered, squinting to force back tears. “Johnson: a man who never did live up to his namesake.”

The three men each scrambled for a surface to grab on to, narrowly avoiding doubling over with laughter. David stuck out a stubby arm and leaned on the blue jug for support, which sent the plastic container toppling from its white base, water soaring into the air. Mike and Larry scurried out of the way of the torrent, but soon fell to the ground themselves, panting.

When he had finished describing his prediction, a delighted chuckle erupted from behind the mask. “That would be very unfortunate.”

The figure started to pull on the rope, tipping the bucket slowly towards the ground.

“Oh Jesus!” whimpered Johnson, and his arm muscles tightened, pulling desperately at their bindings.

The bucket halted at a 45-degree angle to the ground, and swung haphazardly back to its starting position, splattering a drop of white liquid between the victim’s legs. It hissed softly as it dissolved through the wood.

“It is interesting, though. You say you’re most worried about what your coworkers will think of you?”

Johnson let out a relieved sigh. “Yeah, why?”

“Not your loved ones?”

“I don’t really get along with much of my family.”

“Children?”

“Nope, never wanted any,” said Johnson impatiently.

“How about–”

“–look, do you really need my life story?”

“No, no I suppose not.” The masked man paused, letting his gloved hand float perilously next to the rope.

Johnson squeezed his eyes shut and gritted his teeth, preparing for the inevitable.

“Only,” came the booming voice once more, “it is curious.”

Johnson opened his eyes to roll them at his captor. “What?”

“I notice you didn’t even mention your wife.”

“Eh,” said Johnson, “she never had much use for it anyway.”

Well, we’re back! Or at least, I’m back. The other FFFers have been at it for a while, but I’ve been out of town. Regardless, it is my pleasure now to present to you the eighth Flash Fiction Friday I have written so far, and also to encourage you to read the pieces of my companions in this venture, as always all of them and mine written off of the same prompt. In no particular order: Caiti, Robin, Crow.

Lately

Lately, I’ve been noticing that things aren’t right. It’s not that I’ve contracted some kind of angst (and I shudder at using the word, even in my thoughts) that you get sometimes and can’t shake, no, it’s a different kind of unsettling fear about the future, and it’s frankly appalling that a man of my age and stature should feel it at all. After all, here I am, living my own dream, possibly the dream, surrounded by fans and actors and producers…

And it’s not that I can’t focus or can’t do anything, but it’s more that there’s a layer of thin fog covering everything, and it’s not disappearing or drifting off, either. And I can see my idea, my salvation, you might say, it’s sitting right there in front of me, but just beyond my reach and I can’t see it clearly enough to copy down anything because this cloud has descended upon me. And it’s getting thicker, and it makes it that much harder for me to figure out where I’m going.

Understanding that is of the utmost importance. I decided at the age of thirteen when my best friend nearly died (twice) of cancer that I wouldn’t live for nothing. And to a new, official teenager like me, I guess that meant I would, well, really do something with my life that would somehow add a touch of meaning to that storied and most important entity, mankind. (As a side note, it meant that I also had to be unlike my parents, who, near as I could tell, were completely content in waking up and working and living and dying.) But it’s a difficult thing, being important and making contributions to what I now know is a mere concept. I figured that I wasn’t, as they say, cut out for politics, or wired for law or well-suited to anything else. But I was creative, in some ways, even if it all came out of negativity and death, and I had read somewhere that art was truth and truth beauty, and my family had the necessary connections, so I decided to make films. Of course, it’s a hard thing, making meaningful films. Sure, you can send messages or make statements, but it’s ultimately not up to you, it’s up to the people watching. And I’ll admit that I have no idea what makes a great film and what makes a bad one. I’ve put out films that I thought were golden but that the critics and everyone else absolutely spat on, and vice versa. I guess when it comes down to it, I’ll just have to accept that there isn’t perfection in film, as there isn’t in anything else…probably less, given that there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t like what you’ve made, and that’s the only criteria you ought to judge by…but early on, I made it my mission to capture and captivate each and every one of those lost souls who just didn’t “get” it or refused to acknowledge my genius and my contributions or for whatever other reason didn’t respect my work, and so I guess you could say I decided to be discontent.

Rather, as I’ve come to see it now, helpless. And I remember inserting some of this same struggle into one of my early films, where the protagonist, (and I always give them tragic names) Anthony, laments that he is insignificant. “This world,” he says in a bit of a soliloquy, although it is visually quite interesting, not static like you see a lot of in lesser works, “is God’s punishment for Eve’s pride. Individually, we are all beautiful and unique, but together we form a crowd so large that the tallest man could not be seen from the front. I am short; why should I yearn to have any part in that?” He was murdered at the end of that film, randomly, by petty criminals, in the dead of night, and the critics called it melodramatic. I’m not sure if I even cared about the reviews, because all I could do once committing myself to the decision to be famous and worthwhile was step back and watch myself go towards something, towards anything that I thought would influence people or get my name out there or, I don’t know, make me feel like some kind of progress was being made towards a substantial end of any kind whatsoever.

Except, and I realize this only now, that destination has never been entirely clear, if at all. Life is not one of my films, although it tends to be just as depressing sometimes. There is no end to any of this except the end, no credits to follow the last picture, and I know it’s irrational, but I can’t help but feel that if I don’t find one, I’ll be a miserable failure, even if they judge me to be a success by my cars and jewels and, I suppose I should mention, artistry. And there’s only one solution to that problem, and I’m already doing it as much and as well as I can, so it’s hard for me to understand why I still can’t feel as if things are right and well in this world.

Never before have I had such an insatiable thirst to escape reality, even though it’s what I’ve always sought to do, and I can’t help but wonder if it’s because mankind alone among the stars had the unlucky stroke of being endowed with the courage to imagine things greater than ourselves. Yet, what can I do but keep letting myself think freely? It is, after all, what I am paid for.

I recently added some grammar blogs to my RSS feeds, and now I’m terrified of making a mistake and ending up on one of them. So, sorry, but it might be a little while. I am still working on some cool (but long) posts, such as parts 2 and 3 of the newspaper website series and an article about Denver’s new zoning plan, the light rail, and how it compares to plans to re-make Paris, which has lost much of its charm to suburban sprawl.

So stay tuned-ish, but please don’t submit my writings to any language-focused blogs, k? Unless you think they’re amazing or something, in which case feel free to submit away.

Part one of three: Bring it home

Newspaper websites have a major problem: they’re mostly awful. Online news presentation has barely changed in 10 years, and worse, editors and publishers across the industry think the solution is shoe-horning “web 2.0″ ideas into the existing model, rather than re-thinking what a newspaper website should be.

Nothing demonstrates this problem more than the state of newspaper home page design. This graphic (via The Denver Egotist) illustrates the problem extremely clearly: newspaper home pages are still by and large static extensions of a newspaper front page, instead of dynamic websites. If you don’t believe me, take a look at a few current newspaper home pages, and tell me if any of these look like functioning websites instead of digital stand-ins for their printed cousins:

These sites are all jam-packed with text and photos, all laid out in sections just like a printed front page. If you don’t see a problem with that, you don’t understand the web. This is an age when people use Google as a search engine, spell checker, dictionary, translator, and calculator. They don’t do it because they don’t have other options for all of these things, they do it because they’re lazy, and interacting with a single line of text in a single search bar is easier than pulling out an individual tool for each function.

For instance, searching the word ‘Sanford’ in the top right of my Safari browser instantly turned up the three most popular articles on the embattled South Carolina Governor at the top of the main Google search results page. No scanning was needed. Likewise, searching “200,000 x 150“, “translate journal from french to english“, and “define: newspaper” all return a specific result that I asked for, right at the top of the page. Granted, some memorization is needed to produce each result, but it takes no more time to learn these basic commands than it does to scan through a newspaper webpage to find an article you’re interested in.

By the same token, successful informative websites don’t present the most information, or even the most organized information; they present the most accessible and useful information. When you take the time to read a printed newspaper, it’s because you enjoy the process of scanning headlines and turning pages to find stories that interest you. But when you visit a website, you don’t want to have to go through that. You want the things you like at the top, easily accessible. No newspaper website today provides that information. Instead, they provide a scattered jumble of everything, and I mean everything.

When my father worked at a newspaper, one of the things he often talked about was how editors struggled with how to build an online “community.” Instead of trying to cultivate an active readership by reworking the online product, their ideas frequently boiled down to adding “a comments engine” and “social tools” on top of the existing structure. The problem with this is approach is that newspaper’s online offerings frequently become a weird, useless product that falls somewhere in between a search engine and social bookmarking site.

This middling approach doesn’t serve any reader well. The thing we know from the success of Google is that people often know what they want, but need a reliable tool to help them find it. The thing we know from the success of blogs and social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit is that when people don’t know what they want, they turn to others to show them. Newspaper websites don’t do either.

They typically scatter every single bit of their content on the front page, forcing users who know what they want to scan for the articles that interest them. Search features on newspaper websites are often clunky and ineffectual, and more often than not hidden in sidebars or rendered tiny and almost impossible the find among globs of text. In other words, they’re afterthoughts, which, in an age of the instant global desktop search, is inexcusable. I propose a novel solution: every newspaper should put a large search box at the top of the page, above the banner (or, in the ancien lingo, “masthead”), and have a search guru on staff who can either utilize Google custom search to its fullest or design an algorithm specifically for the newspaper that sorts articles by recent relevance and popularity, not solely chronologically.

Moreover, this idea of article popularity should become a central feature of the newspaper site. The reason for this: when people don’t know what they want, or are just browsing, newspaper websites are still largely useless in the internet age. Yes, headlines are categorized into sections and most newspapers have big bold “Breaking News” or “Important Stories” at the top, but these stories are all either organized chronologically or chosen by one web editor who sits at a computer posting what he or she thinks will be big or important.

It’s funny, because editors and reporters often talk about stories “going viral,” but they don’t realize that things “go viral” not because of how they’re promoted, but because when content is accessible and interesting enough, users find and disseminate the content themselves. Instead of actively trying to tease their stories into getting more hits, newspapers should do away with web editors altogether and let users choose the content with Digg/Reddit-style front pages. Seriously.

The newspaper already has a perfect, built-in engine to constantly refresh the top stories, much like Digg’s “Upcoming” and Reddit’s “New” pages: breaking news. Every newspaper front page could essentially be whittled down to two columns, with a simple list of the top twenty or so stories (as voted by registered users) taking up the main column and the latest (or “breaking”) stories in the side column along with the usual assortment of ads, links to the most popular columns, weather, etc.

This would serve many functions. It would dramatically un-clutter the page, simplifying it into one list of top stories from all sections as chosen by the readers of the newspaper, while relegating less-popular sectional headlines to sub-pages that a focused reader can browse to on his or her own. Moreover, all of these sub-pages can be laid out similarly to the main page, keeping the entire site consistent and easy to use.

More importantly, it would actually build a community by encouraging readers to register so they can vote and stay active by giving them a stake in the content. The reason sites like Digg and Reddit are so popular and sustain such a vibrant community is that they give users the feeling that they’re constantly contributing to the content by deciding what gets promoted to the top and what gets relegated to the bottom. In a newspaper setting, this becomes more valuable, because newspapers have unique identities, and the demographics of readers for large dailies are more compact than for global internet sites. Readers of a local newspaper are more likely to be interested in the same topics, especially when there are two or more newspapers in a community whose editorial boards skew to either the right or the left.

This means that given the chance to vote content up or down, users will automatically select the most relevant and appealing stories for the majority of fellow readers. When users enter the main page of the site, instead of scanning through hundreds of headlines that may or may not be appealing, the most interesting stories will always be at the top; and if a user disagrees, they can do so actively by voting a story down.

Moreover, because the content would be dynamic, with breaking news constantly entering the fray and top stories changing ten or more times an hour as users vote, any dissatisfied user would know that he or she can return in a few minutes and probably see something new. Alternatively, a reader could browse to his or her favorite section, where a new dynamic list of the most popular stories inside each section would displayed, or browse through less popular stories on any list to find a more eclectic one that fits his or her taste.

The point of all of this is to focus the newspaper website more on keeping readers engaged in the content and less on simply providing the content in some new, fast, or exciting way. The editorial quality can still be maintained, with professional reporters writing everything and editors verifying every fact; it’s only the presentation that becomes user-controlled, which is exactly the sort of interactivity that the internet can provide and that readers buy into, because it feels like they have a stake in making the website great.

This is important for many reasons…which will be discussed in parts two and three of this, er, essay?

In part two: More on building community with comments, columnists and, gasp, blogs.

I need to comment quickly on the Letterman vs. Palin stuff that’s blown up recently around the interwebs, even though I feel that by doing it, I may actually be legitimizing it in a way I shouldn’t. That said, in case you missed it, Letterman made a fairly standard late-night joke about Alex Rodriguez impregnating Bristol Palin when Sarah and daughter recently attended a Yankees game with former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Here’s the video:

Anyhow, the problem with this joke was that Palin actually attended the baseball game with Giuliani and 14 year-old daughter Willow (yes, that is her name) Palin, not the 18 year-old and previously knocked up Bristol. Whoops, not a good mistake to make. But, intentional on Dave’s part? Me and everyone else with a brain are betting not, given that the joke only makes sense in the context of Bristol, the daughter made famous when her mother decided to make her and her unborn child and her unborn child’s father a part of a national Presidential campaign.

In light of that fact, you can see why the elder Palin wouldn’t want to use this unfortunate incident to turn her innocent 14 year-old daughter into a sex-fueled media event, and so, in response, Sarah promptly went on the Today Show to rant about how David Letterman was obviously intentionally commenting on raping her innocent little 14 year-old daughter, how it was just a convenient excuse that her older and of-age daughter happened to have been impregnated, which, again, we only know because she made Bristol a centerpiece of a national campaign, and went on and on about how horrible Dave is and people these days, etc. etc. Meanwhile, the right-wing values attack dogs, lead by feminist crusader John Ziegler, have answered the call of, uh, duty? and have organized petitions and boycotts and demonstrations against the stately TV host. Needless to say, the good conservative folk are outraged, OUTRAGED and the net boards are full of commenters using horrible spelling and worse grammar to trash that evil child molesting supporter Mr. Lette–Wait a minute. Feminist crusader John Ziegler? This John Ziegler? (Money: right around the 3:30 mark)

Right. So the card-carrying feminist shock jock brigade has taken charge and has now started a campaign to get Letterman fired, and wait a minute, not only are the failed-radio-host-turned-documentary-filmmakers involved, but now Republican New York State Assemblyman Brian Kolb, the Minority Leader representing a district approximately 223 miles from the Ed Sullivan Theater (Mr. Kolb has a lovely website, by the way), has deemed the event important enough to his constituents that he has taken up the call to have Letterman fired and has set up a website along with Ziegler.

Which raises the question: why, exactly is this an important issue to a New York State Assemblyman? Is there some agreement between the states of New York and Alaska that requires this kind of action that I’m unaware of? Perhaps more likely, could it be that the Republican party is in such a shambles that what passes for leadership in the GOP these days sees this as a national issue that could somehow save the party? And what’s more disgusting here, the fact that they’d dare demand that David Letterman, my favorite talk show host, be fired, or that they’d drag an innocent 14 year-old girl into a national debate on the false pretense that she was being used to make a rape joke to try to drum up controversy to get her mother back on the national political landscape, and moreover, use fake feminist outrage as a mantle to hide behind while they do it?

I’m just a humble blogger, I’ll let you decide.