But as of Feb 14, 2013, I am ending my tenure as CEO. Roger Simon, the novelist-screenwriter, is calling to me. After more than seven years, he is feeling extremely neglected. I am going to return to my creative writing while I still, to be honest, have some ability to do it.

– Roger L. Simon, back in February, hanging up his editor’s hat and putting back on the artist’s…

The Hollywood Reporter today offered a sneak preview of what our old boss does with his time when he’s not writing must-read articles on the newest disturbing developments in the Benghazi scandal, ”Cannes: Roger L. Simon to Pen ‘The Future of Now‘”:

Oscar-nominated screenwriter Roger L. Simon will pen the script for The Future of Now, the second feature from newly launched Primeridian Entertainment.

Arcadiy Golubovich, a principal of Primeridian, will make his directorial debut with the dystopian drama. His Primeridian partner, Tim O’Hair, will produce.

Primeridian is full financing the Washington, D.C.-set pic, with casting slated for June and shooting aiming for fall.

Read the whole write-up here.

Breitbart.Com also reported on Stoning of Soraya M director Cyrus Nowrasteh’s new project from Primeridian, a biopic of Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Looks like I should add The Gulag Archipelago to my reading list…

Walt & Lillian Disney with Richard Nixon and his family at Disneyland, 1959

We tend to think of Hollywood as a bastion of leftism, and rightly so. Books like Ron Radosh’s Red Star Over Hollywood demonstrate the deep-seated left-wing dominance of the entertainment industry. Even with the leftism prevalent in Hollywood’s Golden Age, many unabashed conservatives found success without compromising their principles, including one of the most creative minds in the business — Walt Disney.

Several biographers and writers that I’ve read have tried to declare that Walt Disney was apolitical, but I find this conclusion not to be true. Diane Disney Miller once said that her father was “kind of a strange figure” politically, and Walt admitted his own political naiveté:

A long time ago, I found out that I knew nothing whatsoever about this game of politics and since then I’ve preferred to keep silent about the entire matter rather than see my name attached to any statement that was not my own.

But plenty of people surrounding Walt Disney knew the truth: that he was conservative to his core. Ward Kimball, one of Disney’s “Nine Old Men,” said that Walt’s right-leaning politics made him uncomfortable and that politics drove a rift in their friendship in Disney’s later years. Radical writer Maurice Rapf, who worked on several Disney films, including Song of the South, said, “He was very conservative except in one particular — he was a very strong environmentalist.” However, Walt Disney’s conservatism did not manifest itself until after he had been a businessman for several years.

Walt Disney’s early exposure to politics came from his father, Elias, who was a Socialist — in particular, he followed the philosophy of J. A. Wayland. Wayland created a unique strain of Prairie Socialism in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Daniel J. Flynn, in his book A Conservative History of the American Left, tells of how Wayland “reached Americans with the message [of Socialism] that had been heretofore explained in a German, Yiddish, or Russian accent, but never with a Bible-belt twang.”

There’s nothing that makes Hollywood more nervous than portraying Islamist terror. As far back as 1994, James Cameron’s True Lies was denounced as racially insensitive for imagining a chillingly plausible Islamist terror threat involving nuclear weapons. Cameron, anticipating accusations of unfairly linking terrorism with Islam and Arabs, took care to try for “balance” by placing an Arab-American character on the good guys’ side (the actor who played him, Grant Heslov, this year won an Oscar as one of the producers of Argo). Yet the advocacy group the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) slammed the film anyway. The hysterical 1998 movie The Siege imagined that, in an overreaction to a terrorist attack, Brooklyn would be placed under martial law and all young Muslim men would be interned in Yankee Stadium. Ridiculous.

Since 2001, of course, Hollywood has almost completely avoided showing any Muslim involved in terror, changing the bad guys in 2002’s The Sum of All Fears from Palestinians to neo-Nazis. The 2005 Jodie Foster movie Flightplan, about an abduction on an airplane, used a hint that Arabs might be responsible as a red herring. The actual villain: an all-American air marshal played by Peter Sarsgaard. Several Middle East themed movies like Ridley Scott’s Body of Lies essentially saw a moral equivalence between the U.S. and the Islamists, saying both sides were up to comparably nasty stuff in the War on Terror.

At the risk of sounding pretentious, cynical, or both:

I don’t shock easily.

Zombie cannibal killers? What, again?

Another new “ism” added to the “hate speech” list? So last Tuesday.

So when I made my daily visit to the blog SmallDeadAnimals.com, I figured I was staring at a typo:

[I]t costs $84k a year to go to Columbia Journalism School…

“Surely that should read ‘$8,400 a year,’” I thought.

“Or maybe that $84,000 is the entire cost of a three-year degree.

“Ha! Pretty funny that there’s a typo in an article about journalism school…”

Except there wasn’t.

That’s the correct figure.

• Version 1.0 of my 2013 Self-Improvement Program: 7 New Year’s Resolutions I Invite Others to Steal
• Version 1.5, published a month later after my 29th birthday: The Plan So I Don’t Waste the Last Year of My 20s

Today I am joining Charlie Martin and Sarah Hoyt in attempting a 13 Weeks Blogging Self-Improvement Program. I invite others to join me and assist in the continued development of what we should call The Charlie Martin 13 Weeks Method. (Has a nice alliterative ring to it, methinks.) Back in February Charlie laid out his approach:

By accident, however, I’d noticed a process, or pattern.

1. Decide there’s something you want to change.
2. Find ways to measure your progress.
3. Decide on some small unthreatening things you can do that should affect those measures.
4. Track the results for 13 weeks and see what happens. It helps to pick appropriate tools and techniques for that tracking, but something as simple as a Seinfeld calendar, where you just draw an X on a calendar for every day you do something can be very powerful.

So here’s my 1-2-3-4 for The 13 Weeks Radical Reading Regimen:

1. The problem that I’d like to change is the one that Sarah identified in her PJ Lifestyle article yesterday: being buried in books for research. Over the past year I’ve tried to figure out how to organize the various subjects that I want to study in order to best make sense of them and find the connections across the disciplines. I want to read more books and do a better job of staying organized with the ideas and research that I find in them for my future writing and editing projects. I want to continue to explore connections across disciplines, reading both novels and a wide variety of nonfiction, both very serious philosophy and absurd satire.

2. I will continue to share the most interesting nuggets of my research in one daily PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf post that features an excerpt. Additional snapshots from my research will appear at my Instagram and Twitter accounts which can be followed here and here.

3. I will only create seven piles of books, one for each day, and then base each day’s reading on the titles from that pile. I won’t have to think about which books I’ll read each day. I’ll just draw from each pile. Each day will be based on 1-3 authors and 1-4 related subjects that I want to juxtapose together. This will not be a hard rule that I can only read from that day’s pile. If a book on another subject has caught my enthusiasm then I can still read it after dong the day’s necessary reading.

But I need to find at least two excerpts worth Instagramming and at least one of them should appear as a PJ Lifestyle Bookshelf selection to inspire debate and discussion. (That’s the purpose of those posts — for the regular readers who have complained, asking why I don’t take a few paragraphs to spell out my opinion of each excerpt offered. They appear because I am more interested in hearing reader feedback on them than pontificating my own ideas.) These seven piles will then flow into the six categories that I created in my original Counterculture Conservative book list from back in October. The seventh (and last) category I plan to add will be based on my list of the The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology. (This will be the basis for Friday’s  systematic exploration of evil ideas.)

4. I will create a calendar on a page of my journal broken up into 13 weeks and at the beginning of each day I will notate which page I am on in the books that I am reading associated with that day. I will photograph this calendar and blog about it each week, noting and analyzing my results on Tuesdays (the PJ Lifestyle day focused on writing, media, and technology). At the end of the 13 weeks I will see the progress I made on each author and subject. Then I will decide how to adjust each day’s reading focus, maybe taking a break from an author for a bit or adding another writer whose ideas are worth juxtaposing with the other thinkers of the day.

So what will the reading subjects be for the seven days of this “first season,” as Charlie calls it, of the The 13 Weeks Radical Reading Regimen? I’m doubling down on the authors and subjects of previous self-improvement plans, but focusing some plans and expanding others. As always, your recommendations for additional books and authors that I need to read are sincerely appreciated. Please leave suggestions in the comments or email me.

And publishers, authors and publicists: any and all paperback/hardback books received by mail will be photographed and blogged about. (And e-books that are especially interesting may also be featured. But actual books are of course more photogenic.)

Time And Writing Wait For No Man (Or Woman)

Believe it or not, when you’re a freelance writer, even if you’re working for someone else, you’re still expected to manage your time.

So let’s start by admitting we’re not going to have a novel ready in 13 weeks, since most of you – I presume – haven’t started.

The reason for this is that I was going along and doing preliminaries to the “13 weeks” posts when my editor – wisely – thought perhaps you guys needed to know when to expect the posts. Ahem. Being a writer, this had never occurred to me. One sometimes forgets that not everyone lives in one’s head.

So… we are still in the preliminary posts. I think I have two more, unless questions arise. And then we’ll start the countdown of 13 actual weeks, from beginning page of novel to end.

By then you should have a notion of whether you want to plot or fly by the seat of your pants, what your projected novel length is, and how to plan how much you need to write each week.

See, when we talk about planning your timing, in writing, it means two things: the timing of events in the novel, and the timing of your writing so you can deliver on deadline.

And yes, I’m aware that just like a lot of you will have different preferences when it comes to how a novel is timed – slow and languorous, or a mad cavalcade from beginning to finish – a lot of you will have this idea that you don’t time when you write, it just sort of happens when the muse descends from heaven and sits on your shoulder to whisper sweet nothings in your ear.

For the record, I’ve never met a professional, working writer who works on the muse-installment plan. There are some who will tell you they do in public. This is part of what we call keeping up the mystique, also known as “baffling the mundanes.”

Writing A Novel In Thirteen Weeks:

• Introduction
• Part 1: 3 Questions To Ask Before You Start 

If you’re going to write a novel, you have, of course, to start with an idea. Just like if you’re going to make a shepherd’s pie, first you have to catch your shepherd.

One of the questions I always get — in every panel, in every interview, at every con — is: “How do you get your ideas?”

The normal answer is: “I get them from [insert random, remote/small town].”  I use: “Hays, Kansas. But it will cost you a dime, and you have to send a SASE.”

The sad thing is that I could possibly sell ideas and never reach a point where I have none to sell. Like with everything else, ideas are something you train yourself to have, and once you start having them, you have them all the time. You’ll be Standing On the Corner, Minding your  Own Business (the infamous SOCMOB that guarantees you’ll be jumped by “two bad dudes”) when an idea will jump out of  a nearby dumpster, and there you have it.

For instance, the other day in my blog comments, commenter CACS mistyped “High School Cemetery” instead of “High School Chemistry,” and there was immediately a boarding school for vampires (children with special needs) in my head.

So, was that idea enough to write a novel?

Probably not, because it doesn’t interest me enough – but what you also have to understand is that the boarding school for vampires is not an idea for a story. It is an idea for a setting. I still don’t have an idea – and it is the idea that determines whether it’s a novel, a short story, or just a passing, throw-away detail in another story.

Let me explain: What you have there has no characters, no conflict, no… story. It’s at best a spark of a story, even if for a fantasy reader (or writer) it comes freighted with all sorts of implied problems like “do they have classes at night?”  “What do they do for the cafeteria — a blood bank?”  etc.

The Run Up

Or, In Which Things Have Already Gone Wrong

What happens very often when one decides to write a novel is: everything goes wrong.

It is a well-known fact to those who participate in National Novel Writing Month in November* every year that it seems to attract bad luck. One year, I had a pet die, a relative die, the roof over my office leak, and the printer develop a fatal short. I haven’t participated since because I’m afraid my livestock will die — I don’t have livestock.

The last two weeks haven’t been quite so bad, but I’ve got a lot of unexpected work, ranging from short stories to blogs to promoting my new book A Few Good Men, at the same time as one of my sons brought home something “interesting” from school that made 15 hours of sleep per day irresistible.

So — and this is part of successfully writing a novel or completing any project — we’re adapting to changed circumstances and carrying on.

Let’s start with frequently asked questions which, hopefully, will lay out what you need to know before tomorrow, when I will explain my method and schedule. And then we’ll have a post on ideas and how to work an idea.

Is America in decline?

I’ve been hearing the United States compared to the Roman Empire since around the 1970s, and I’m sure those apocalyptic sentiments were being expressed long before I was born.

However, it’s difficult to read and watch all the depressing stuff posted here on PJ Media and elsewhere and not conclude that, this time, it’s on.

America’s going Gibbon.

Some books propose possible ways to avert this catastrophe.

Aaron Clarey’s Enjoy the Decline isn’t one of them.

As his subtitle suggests, this book is about “accepting and living with the death of the United States.”

It’s full of counterintuitive, amusing, and sometimes infuriating advice:

What country should I move to?

What should I pack in a bug-out bag?

Why don’t black people go to national parks?

This book features something to offend everyone.

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Click to submit book suggestions for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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image courtesy shutterstock /iurii

Related at PJ Lifestyle:

The Plan So I Don’t Waste the Last Year of My 20s

It was like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy emerges from the grey remains of her dislocated home into an exotic world of color. That was how I felt at twelve years of age upon my arrival in Minnesota.

Home up to that point had been the dank flat malaise of inner-ring suburban Detroit. In many ways, the Motor City evoked Dorothy’s Kansas. Everything was built on the grid system, many right angles, old houses of stone and brick. It was tangibly dull, colors muted by wear and grime. Winters were especially bleak. An amalgam of overcast, endless concrete and dirt-ridden snow drowned the world in grey. By comparison, the big skies and rolling hills of the Mississippi valley seemed a storybook paradise.

That first trip to Minnesota was made in order to spend time with my father. He had been maintaining an apartment in the Twin Cities while starting a new position with Northwest Airlines. We were to scout out potential homes in anticipation of transplanting the rest of the family, my mother and two sisters. It was perhaps the most visceral manifestation of upward mobility in our family’s history, chasing opportunity across the country.

It was the culmination of my father’s economic journey, which had its beginnings in poverty. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about my father’s childhood aside from the scraps I’ve managed to glean from remarks thrown here and there. I know enough, however, to understand that my father’s rise to the middle class beat the odds — which were stacked against him from the start.

Many years later, I continue to benefit from the choices Dad made. Now the father of my own young family, I stand atop his shoulders looking to grab the next rung. From that position, I realize that some of the essential concepts my father applied are still relevant to me today. As I seek to renew the momentum my father achieved, I reflect upon where he began and how he got to where he did. There are valuable lessons there.

First, it’s important to understand the goal. When we consider the quest for upward mobility, what is our measure of success? In a 2011 piece for Time magazine, assistant managing editor Rana Foroohar makes a crucial distinction:

You can argue about what kind of mobility really matters. Many conservatives, for example, would be inclined to focus on absolute mobility, which means the extent to which people are better off than their parents were at the same age. That’s a measure that focuses mostly on how much economic growth has occurred, and by that measure, the U.S. does fine. Two-thirds of 40-year-old Americans live in households with larger incomes, adjusted for inflation, than their parents had at the same age (though the gains are smaller than they were in the previous generation).

But just as we don’t feel grateful to have indoor plumbing or multichannel digital cable television, we don’t necessarily feel grateful that we earn more than our parents did. That’s because we don’t peg ourselves to our parents; we peg ourselves to the Joneses. Behavioral economics tells us that our sense of well-being is tied not to the past but to how we are doing compared with our peers. Relative mobility matters. By that standard, we aren’t doing very well at all. Having the right parents increases your chances of ending up middle to upper middle class by a factor of three or four.

It’s a mistake to take for granted the notion that “relative mobility matters” without asking why. As we consider some ideas for rising from poverty to the middle class, it will become apparent that improving our individual quality of life is a superior consideration to how our wealth compares with that of others.

A reader suggestion:

The Most Powerful Idea in the World  by William Rosen (2010)

I’ve actually been surprised that this book didn’t receive more interest in the Right blogsphere.  In it, Rosen, tells the story of the development of the steam engine.  From the court cases in England that developed the idea of patent, beyond a royal spoil, the run of the first steam locomotive.  Along the way, we discover how the original inventors came not from “higher education” of the state supported kind but from alternative universities and the trades due to their Protestant religion.  We also learn of the formation of the Royal Society and peculiarity of membership being restricted to those who did not require a job.  A problem that left out many great minds and forced the Society to create a position for Robert Hooke, a man of great scientific discovery even as he was also a man who had to work for a living.

The book is short on technical detail of steam power but brilliantly colored in regards to the times it came about.  With enlightening discussions of the importation of energy (wood) into England before the discovery of coal as an energy source.  As well as the mines of Cornwall where the need to dewater was the impetus for steam power and the fact the first engines were not cost effective if the coal that fired them had to be carried past the mine entrance.

Walter Russell Mead had a post about Elizabeth I, “The Modern World Begins”.  To which I wrote:

“Your post reminded me of William Rosen’s discussion of the Case of Monopolies and Edward Coke in his book ‘The Most Powerful Idea in the World’.  His contention is that the decision in that case set the ball rolling for the English patent law.  Elizabeth I permitted her  monopoly awards to be challenged which precipitated that case.  Rosen asserts the creation of patents for the first and true inventor was the prerequisite for the development of the steam engine as well as all the other inventions that created the modern world.

I suppose one could say, Elizabeth is the mother of invention.”

The book is a celebration of the free market, the right to profit from your ideas, and human ingenuity unshackled.  As Rosen states, the steam engine was a decidedly Englsih-speaking world invention.  By which he meant, it is only in the English speaking countries that all the crucial elements for steam power were invented.  This is not to say the many immigrants from France and elsewhere to the English-speaking countries didn’t contribute to the steam engine, just that they did not have the opportunities in their home countries.

BTW, I learned of this book when Rosen gave a great interview on the Daily Show.  He was very funny and to his credit, Stewart stayed out of the way.  I’d recommend him for a PJTV interview candidate.

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Click to submit suggestions for new books for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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Image courtesy shutterstock / Konstantin L

More book recommendations at PJ Lifestyle:

The 15 Best Books for Understanding Barack Obama’s Mysterious Political Theology

One of the key concepts for anyone who wants an online career to understand…

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Click to submit suggestions for new books for the new daily feature at PJ Lifestyle.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

10 Reasons You Should Skip Traditional Publishers and Self-Publish Ebooks Instead

“It must be him, it must be him, oh dear God, it must be him or I shall die.”

Aging female baby boomers can relate to these lyrics from a 1967 hit song by Vikki Carr entitled, It Must Be Him.

Before the advent of answering machines, and decades before mobile communications and social media, waiting by the phone for your man to call was an ancient mating tradition that single women of all ages thankfully will never again have to endure.

I was reminded of this dating ritual since we are on the cusp of celebrating what is traditionally known as the greatest date night of all, New Year’s Eve.

While wracking my brain thinking of a suitable baby boomer topic applicable to this holiday, it hit me… New Year’s Eve, 1971, when I was a high school sophomore and my boyfriend was a senior.

All that stands out about that evening was my having to wait by the phone for my boyfriend to call to tell me the time he was coming by to take me to a house party (where someone’s parents were out of town).

As 5 pm turned into 6 pm, turned into 7 pm, turned into 8 pm, I became extremely anxious, especially when my mother said, “Would it be so bad if you stayed home?” (Yea mom, how about the end of the world as I know it.)

When Mr. Considerate finally called at 8 pm the trauma ceased. But thinking back upon that 1971 New Year’s Eve, it was how waiting by the phone helped form five positive personality traits that women like me did not even realize we were developing.  Eventually these five traits served baby boomer women extremely well as we made our way through the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s taking advantage of all the new career opportunities that the women’s movement afforded.

Here are the five personality traits aging baby boomer women learned while waiting by the phone.

1. Patience

When you were forced to accept someone else’s timetable you learned it was not just all about you. Waiting by the phone developed patience and was superb training for almost any career and life in general.

2. Rejection

This feeling was experienced when you finally realized that he was not going to call after he said (or you assumed) he would. Learning to cope with rejection without feeling like a complete loser was an important life lesson. The key was to think about all your positive attributes that this man was obviously missing. Then move ahead and don’t look back. This concept was easily applied to the professional world, especially if you were a business owner or involved in sales of any kind. Women of a certain age who experienced sitting by the phone waiting for him to call learned how to be resilient in the face of rejection.

3. Self worth/Self esteem

You waited by the phone and he did call. High five! You were on top of your game. All your flirting skills worked and you were the master of the feminine universe. (But sometimes you discovered that he was not worth waiting for!)

Later in life this same initial exhilaration was experienced when you landed a new job or a new client/contract/project was won. But you never let it go to your head. One learned early on that you must never be cocky because rejection in love or life could be lurking right around the corner.

4. Diplomacy 

He called, (maybe even weeks after he said he would) and you refrained from telling him that he was an insensitive jerk. But since you were really glad to hear from him you said no such thing. Later in the business world this skill came in handy when “the customer was always right” even if he/she was not.

5. Playing the Game

Once while chatting with some guy friends in my high school classes they admitted to me that often they did not call a girl after they said they would because they did not want to appear “pussy whipped.” (Yes, that was the operative term at the time.) So from this conversation I learned that there was a lot of game playing going on when it came to the timing of “the call.”

As a result, my friends and I would discuss when it was time to stop waiting and time to start living. (However, flirting with his friends was always an appropriate response.) The lesson “stop waiting and start living” developed into positive personality traits that were applicable to many future life situations.

But alas, girls/women today don’t have to deal with any of this waiting by the phone. In fact, waiting is a thing of the past since now there is no stigma attached to calling a boy before he calls you. Girls today will call, text, tweet, Facebook, or email and if that does not get his attention they will have their friends call, text, email, Facebook or tweet. From what I have heard about today’s dating habits, “whatever it takes” to catch the attention of the man of the moment seems to be acceptable behavior.

This behavior is a result of both the instant communications revolution and the women’s movement which generally has made the girls/women of today much more aggressive than my friends or I ever were in high school and college.

Perhaps this more aggressive behavior is cultural “payback” for all the countless hours their baby boomer mothers and grandmothers spent waiting by the phone especially in the weeks leading up to important date nights like New Year’s Eve. For around that time whenever the phone rang, teenage girls and young women were conditioned into thinking, “It must be him, it must be him, please be him or I will die.”

Happy New Year’s everyone!

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More on generations at PJ Lifestyle:

Dissecting Baby Boomer Liberalism Like a Frog in Science Class

Baby Boomers: The Most Depressed Generation

Young America! Stop Letting Boomers Feed Off You

via 30 Days Of Freelancing: Day 1 – Forbes.

This month, I’ll be chronicling my life as a freelancer.

This is Day 1.

TIP #1: Timing is everything.

I spend several days and one therapy session trying to figure out what to do with my Forbes blog this month.

Last month, I didn’t post much at all. The month before that, I wrote about obscenity. Originally, this blog was about what happened after I got downsized.

My therapist tries to convince me that whatever I do will be good.

I wait until I have 30 minutes left in the day, EST, and then I start.

TIP #2: Work slower.

Have you heard of the slow food movement? It’s part of the slow movement. Apparently, there’s something called the slow work movement. Pete Bacevice is its philosopher.

I decide I’m a recovering workaholic. The slow work movement will be my Alcoholics Anonymous. I will take 30 days to become a slower worker.

In theory, if you work less, you are happier. I am not sure how to get there. But I will try.

Start the Series Now.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

Neil Gaiman On the 3 Secrets of Freelancer Success

Talent Isn’t Everything: 5 Secrets to Freelance Success

PJ Lifestyle plans to continue expanding in many directions after the election — hopefully along with the rest of the economy! Over the coming months we’ll be seeking out new voices to complement our usual team of humorists and cultural critics. (Keep an eye out for future openings for new writers and bloggers.) Today we’re looking for freelance writers with experience and skills to review products.

These are some of the areas we’re looking to fill:

Gadget Gurus and Tech Thinkers.

With the holiday season approaching we’re looking for people who can highlight the must-have gadgets and gifts: laptops, phones, tablets, stereos, cameras, TVs, and all manner of electronics. Can you compare and contrast different products? Rank which is the best to worst TV, phone, or tablet? Also seeking software and video games reviewers.

We’re also interested in people who can look at the tech industry in the broader perspective, arguing not just if you should buy the new Apple or Google product, but whether either company’s new move is good or bad, and what the future holds as the two contend with Amazon.

Food and Cooking Experts

We’d like reviews of appliances and kitchen products, especially top 10 lists. We’d also be interested in How-To recipe articles explaining which products one needs to go about preparing various dishes. Those capable of supplying their own photographs or custom-made images for reviews are especially appreciated.

We’re interested in both the healthy, organic diet advocates and also the junk food apologists. Experts in Tobacco, Alcohol, and Wine also should apply.

Men’s and Women’s Fashion Experts

From high fashion to the casual and practical, what do we need to know to look and feel good no matter the occasion? And who offers the best deal?

What are the top 5 trends in fashion this season?

Also interested in experts in jewelry, purses, watches, and other fashion accessories.

Health and Hygiene and Make-Up Specialists

Best razors? Best deals this week on make-up? Are there new vitamins and supplements we should consider?

Outdoor Enthusiasts

We’re interested in reviews of sporting equipment, fitness gear, garden and lawncare supplies, and home improvement tools. Also: survival gear, hunting, self defense, and gun experts.

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Please email your resume, introductory letter, and urls of writing samples to PJ Lifestyle’s managing editor David Swindle: DaveSwindlePJM@gmail.com

Like peanut butter and jelly, like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen, Adam Carolla and Dennis Prager were meant to be together. Their on-air, on-stage chemistry works because it was meant to work. It’s supposed to work.

I am simply the one who made it all happen.

But unlike a coming together of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and a tall glass of cold milk, the union of the foul-mouthed atheist comedian Carolla and the erudite religious conservative Prager was not something as plain as the delicious smell wafting into the nose on your face. There was preparation and man-hours involved. There is a backstory.

Here it comes.

In 2005, while sitting on the roof of a house whose shutters I was painting to make some side cash during my senior year of college, I heard for the first time the commanding voice and demonstrable wisdom of Dennis Prager. In spite of the poor sound quality my small boombox offered, I heard the intellectual mentor for whom I’d been searching. Although the work I was doing at that exact moment was mundane and thoughtless, the monologue Prager unfurled had a zeal and depth that made one want to drop the paintbrush in order that he might go read an important book or start a charity or help an old lady cross the street.

Or, at the very least, do the best job of painting a shutter that one possibly could.

Like greater men such as Andrew Breitbart and David Mamet before me, I “found” Dennis in much the same way Gary Cooper in Sergeant York “found” religion.

To be fair to the Cooper-Breitbart-Mamet analogy, conservatism already coursed through my veins, but up to that point my political appetite had been fed primarily by the red meat served up daily on cable news shows and in Sean Hannity’s books. I believe in Ronald Reagan’s 11^th Commandment, and so please understand that I mean no disrespect to any of the fine people who represent my values in the media, but it was then, finally, that I heard in Dennis’ presentation a voice of strength and breadth and insight that I had secretly craved.

A man of substance. A man of thoughtful inquiry. A man of big ideas.

This was my introduction to what I affectionately call “Prager Conservatism,” and from that point until today I haven’t gone more than a few days without listening to his nationally syndicated radio show or reading his discerning weekly columns. Eventually, after graduating from college, my friends and I began hosting “Prager Hour” nights twice a month where a bunch of guys in their 20s would come over, enjoy a cigar if they so chose, hear a pre-selected segment or two of The Dennis Prager Radio Show’s podcast, and engage in lively discussion and debate for a couple of hours.  Dennis was Obi-wan to our band of Luke Skywalkers.

Thankfully none of us have had our hands chopped off with a light-saber by a scary man who claims to have sired us…yet!

Ever heard those “I had to walk five miles to school in the snow, uphill, both ways” stories from your parents? I have, too. Of course, my father’s stories were real. He grew up poor. Very poor. I’m talking soda and peanut butter were considered luxuries poor. Like wearing clothes with holes in them that two of his brothers had already grown out of poor. Like putting feathers in a corncob and tossing it in the air so he had something to play with because his parents couldn’t afford to buy him any toys poor.

Happily, since he was born in America, being born poor didn’t mean that he had to stay poor. He started at the bottom with a company (manually punching holes in carpet), moved on from there to become one of his company’s best salesmen, and actually made it to vice president of the rug division near the end of his career. In addition, he served in the military, had four kids, and played his way into the North Carolina Softball Hall Of Fame.

Happily, because of my father’s work ethic and determination that his kids were going to have it better than him, I didn’t have to grow up with the kind of grinding poverty that he did. Yet and still, I remember a conversation he had with me when I was young and he was still working his way up the ladder. He told me that at his income level, I qualified for the free lunch program at school. He asked what I thought about that. My response was, “I’d rather just not eat lunch.” Even then, I could tell he was pleased with that answer and we never applied for any kind of free goodies at school. As I got older my father started climbing the corporate ladder and money ceased to be a big problem, although he remained very frugal.

Then, as I flew the nest and went out on my own, I got to experience my own struggles with money. I rolled pennies for grocery money and went whole weeks on nothing but baked potatoes along with 3-for-a-dollar burritos and pot pies. I drove around in a car with bad brakes that would overheat if I didn’t drive fast enough to cool the engine because I couldn’t afford to repair it. I once had to borrow gas money to take a date out to dinner at a cheap restaurant. I had checks bounce because I had no float money and was regularly dipping below the $5 line to pay bills. I took day laborer positions at temp agencies and had to do things like lay sod to make ends meet. When I was out of town, I once slept in an elevator all night because I was too proud to crash with friends without paying. At one point, I kid you not, I seriously considered living in my car for a couple of months to save up some money.

So I do know what it’s like to be poor, and while I can’t recommend the experience, I can tell you that it is not all bad. There are actually some benefits to it. For example…

1) Once things have been really bad, you’re not as frightened of tough times and risks.

When you run your own business you have to make big decisions that can make or break you, cash flow can pick up and slow down, and sometimes you have to make choices today that will reverberate for years to come. In other words, it requires a high level of risk tolerance. Even if you don’t run your own business, you have to worry about getting fired or getting hit with big bills that put you in a really tight spot.

Well, the nice thing about having been so poor that you’ve had to sleep in your car multiple times (yes, really) is that you already KNOW that if worse comes to worse financially, you can handle it. That means when the storm blows in, the lightning flashes, and the tide gets high, you KNOW that you can swim even if you get swept off the boat because you have done it before.

“Times have changed and now the poor get fat.”
- Elton John, “The Bitch Is Back”

PJ Media’s John Hawkins recently posted a thoughtful piece called “Golden Chains: 5 Ways America’s Wealth Undermines Our Character.”

Hawkins said things that many patriotic conservatives and libertarians might not like to hear:

America is running on fumes. We can sometimes be like the kid who gets the run of his family’s big house while mom and dad are away and forgets how that fridge got so full (and that someone had to invent the fridge in the first place).

Throughout the West, many of us (right and left) are wasteful, indulgent, and entitled, with no sense of history and no thought for the future.

All very true.

However, it’s equally true that our “character undermines our wealth.”

That is – to turn Hawkins’ telescope the other way around – the way many Westerners live keeps them “poor.”

via BH Interview: Lovitz Says Obama Tirade Drew Death Threats.

Jon Lovitz spent much of George W. Bush’s presidency doing what nearly all of his peers did – making fun of the Commander in Chief.And no one said a peep.When the “Saturday Night Live” alum chided President Barack Obama for saying the rich dont pay their fair share earlier this year, he ended up letting a security escort walk him to his car.

Lovitz tells Big Hollywood that his now infamous podcast rant against Obama’s class warfare rhetoric led to death threats left on the voice mail of his Universal City-based comedy club.“I know where you eat,” one message warned.

The comedian, who owns the Jon Lovitz Comedy Club and Podcast Theatre, says he isn’t concerned about his safety. He is riled up, however, about the media, his fellow Democrats and why questioning the president’s policies means complete strangers now accuse him of being a racist.The wide-ranging discussion with Big Hollywood also touched on his evolving views on business and the publics reaction to his Obama critiques.The real story, as Lovitz sees it, is how the press is going after comedians. He praised two conservative media outlets for their coverage of his Obama comments.

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Related at PJ Lifestyle:

Sunny: Who is Jon Lovitz?