Dear comic/sci-fi/fantasy/etc. convention organizers:
You may have read about the galactic frack-up at New York Comic-Con last week, in which hundreds of convention-goers learned that NYCC was posting hideously uncreative, gratuitously gleeful promotional tweets from their personal Twitter accounts. As a convention organizer yourself, these tweets and the subsequently trollful complaints may have filled up your feed. Nightmares of similar PR disasters may have (should have) have kept your heart racing as you tried to sleep.
NYCC attendees contacted us to ask what can be done about it, and that's why I entreat you today to think thoroughly through future attempts to lever technology against the fandoms, particularly when it comes to linking convention badges to personal data,...
Lifestyle
Dear Greater Richmond Community,
When the Flying Squirrels arrived in Richmond nearly six years ago, we inherited the shell of a hulking stadium in disrepair and were promised a new ballpark on the horizon.
We invested over two million dollars to renovate the Diamond, making it more satisfactory for baseball and your enjoyment. We hired a stellar management team and assembled a first class staff. The Squirrels immediately began to forge relationships with baseball fans, the business community, local officials, leaders within the schools and universities, and with civic and charitable organizations. We quickly became a good neighbor and dependable partner.
As years passed, we worked to secure our ties to you. Parney, Nutzy, and our organization have reached out to the community...
2,197
Dear Bajaj Auto,
Let me start by saying a big thank you! Thank you for giving my father his first two wheeler, the good old work horse Chetak. It was on my father’s Chetak that I had my first taste of two-wheeler riding while standing between the basket and his seat. Let me also thank you for launching The Pulsar, one of the most iconic motorcycle brands of our country, second only to the Bullet! Lastly, let me thank you for giving me my first motorcycle, the humble Pulsar 135LS which gave me the perfect balance of an economical city commuter and a decent highway tourer at a time when I was in college and had limited economical sources to afford and maintain a bike but the wanderlust to explore our beautiful and vast country. That’s not all, let me thank you for buying a stake in the...
2,477
Dear Michael,
I was alarmed at the recent opinion brief you posted on your website advocating the outlawing of so-called "assault rifles".
I doubt that I'm the only American who was perturbed by your point of view. While loudly decrying and condemning the political trickery of the insidious socialists and authoritarians in our midst, you have now written and published an influential piece to further their agenda.
As an American Jew, and the founder of "Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership" (JPFO), I believe that I can offer a unique perspective on the dangerous fallacies of "gun control". I would hope that I might get you to reconsider your present stance.
You seem to be – as are many well meaning Americans – ignorant of certain aspects of world and U.S. history....
2,879
Dear Curiously Aligned Universe,
Indeed, this eighth grade year does continue to persist in unfolding most strangely. God knows I have tried to fully insulate myself from the insidious tentacles of social life, have time and time again turned away from that preteen pyre of nonsense, heaped high with dances and crushes and cliques and cell phones, around which my fellow students gather, drawing ever nearer, puerile brains benumbed even further by its bewitching glow, until, in what amounts to a kind of Kristallnacht of the mind, academics are wholly abandoned. Yet it appears that no matter how strenuously one tries to live a socially abstemious life in pursuit of loftier intellectual goals, no matter how thoroughly one attempts to shut out the world, the world will nevertheless rudely...
2,405
Dear Batsheva Dance Company,
We are a group of New York-based human rights activists and artists calling for a boycott of your performances at the Joyce Theater in New York City due to your collaboration with the Israeli state and its Brand Israel campaign. Launched in 2005, Brand Israel is a government public relations initiative which uses cultural productions to distract from Israel’s daily human rights violations. In 2009 Arye Mekel of Israel’s Foreign Ministry stated, "We will send well-known novelists and writers overseas, theater companies, exhibits... This way you show Israel’s prettier face, so we are not thought of purely in the context of war.” While efforts to promote a positive image of Israel abroad persist, Palestinians continue to suffer from Israeli state policies....
2,413
Dear McDonald's,
Hello! It's me, Mayor McCheese, don't you know? It's been a while. Just wanted to declare how glad I am you kicked CEO Don Thompson's McMuffin out the door. His last gasp for increasing sales was to have people “pay with lovin'.” Pack that idea into a Styrofoam McDLT casket and bury it in a landfill already. Someone didn't have his thinking cap on.
Most people don't come to McDonald's because they want to. They come because they have to. They either are economically challenged or stoned. It's humbling enough to show one's face at McD's. Why do you think our more discreet drive-thrus are so popular? Thompson wants our “happy” workers to ask people to humiliate themselves by hugging or dancing with strangers in exchange for food. That's bad enough—but consider who is...
6,502
Dear Louise,
That’s not your real name, but it rhymes with “Big tease,” so it fits you.
You were at the Silversun Pickups concert last night at the LC. I was there, too. You must remember me; I was the one you were dancing with during the show. My calm and rock-hard demeanor didn’t tell you this, but I fell madly in love with you. I wanted us to grow old together. And that wasn’t just the two 32-ounce AmberBocks talking.
You and I hit it off. I pulled out some of my best zingers and occasionally flashed that luminescent smile I knew you couldn’t resist. And while we were dancing, the people around us kept giving me the thumbs-up, apparently astonished by the notion that whatever magical voodoo I was enticing you with was working. Not that I don’t have the boyish good looks of Zac...
2,325
Dear Young Lady Who Dances on my Block,
Every day, when the weather is warm enough, I see you. You put your headphones on and dance down the sidewalk near my building. It looks like so much fun! I can tell you love music. However, the second you see me (or anyone), you stop. You pretend you were just walking down the street, minding your own business.
Yes, that's right, I said I see you. I see you dancing. I see you get scared, wanting to go unnoticed. I see you clam up. I see you stumble over your own feet as you try to look nonchalant. You aren't fooling anyone, hon. You're busted, but it's OK!
I've wanted to talk to you for weeks. I wish I had stopped you during the summer, when you didn't have school and were out all the time. Unfortunately, I'm both a grown-up...
2,492
Dear President and Mrs. Obama,
I was moved by Mrs. Obama’s recent words about dance, on the occasion of the inspiring dance event at the White House on September 7, 2010: “…witness the grace and beauty that stirs our souls and connects us to each other like nothing else can.”
It was very nice of you to notice. I do not mean that in the way it may sound. I mean that such notice has been a long time coming, and like all hopeful change, it is most welcome. But let’s see it as a beginning, please.
The big picture of dance is about grace and beauty and connecting us to each other, we would all agree. From time immemorial, communities have danced to connect to power, home, to tell stories, to initiate the young into the culture, to express the fullest range of what it is to be human, and...
2,440