Tom Flanders

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Welcome to the first edition of my weekly newsletter. I'm having trouble uploading my little bits and pieces on the days I tried to set for each, so I'm consolidating the bits and pieces into a single chunk which I'll post Sunday nights, which seems to be the only day I regularly get around to working on this stuff.

100 Words - Bob and Barbara (fiction)

Bob, the crippled son of a barnstorming faith healer, didn't die of natural causes. His girlfriend Barbara pushed him, wheelchair and all, into the lake. They were having another one of their arguments about whether meditation should be the emptying of all thought or intense concentration on nothing when she hit him square in the chest with a sledge hammer then wheeled him off the end of the dock.

The police found her a couple hours later under an overpass on highway 12. She was sitting in the lotus position, gently rocking back and forth, humming a Tom Waits tune.

Whacked Word of the Week

Sadist: A person who intentionally makes themselves sad. As in - He must have been a sadist because he liked reading Kathleen Spivack's poetry.

The Funnies

Puzzles for the Rest of Us - Tomduko

Enter numbers 1-4 so that the columns and rows add up to the numbers on top and on the side.

	5	5
3
7

Writing - Another Rejection Letter

I let myself get my hopes up for this one. It was past due not only for rejection but for acceptance as well. I let myself believe that they liked it. Then the letter came, in the SASE I sent them. You don't even have to open them. If it's your envelope then it isn't good news. After a day or so of depression and I'm okay again. Now I'm relieved. The last few weeks I'd let the tension get to me. I couldn't write. The not knowing was horrible, and knowing that the letter would be there any day, whether their envelope or mine, was debilitating. So now it's all over and I can get back to writing. I'm half-way through the final rewrite of my first novel and I have several pages of notes on the next.

Home - A little visitor

On Friday, our dog TJ (pronounced Tee-Jay) kept barking and trying to climb under the bay window of our cottage. I kept pulling him away and yelling at him that there was nothing under there. I looked but didn't see anything. Then I poked a stick under and heard something, but I couldn't be sure what it was. I tried using a flashlight but still couldn't see much, but I did get a glimpse of fur. I assumed it was the cat that passes through our yard all the time. So I went and got the digital camera that has a very strong flash. I stuck my hand down and got these pictures.

I have no idea how or why the dogs and I didn't get sprayed. According to the web, skunks are hesitant to spray near their homes, so maybe that saved us. We called Animal Control and they told us to call Wildlife. We called Wildlife and their machine said it would call us back within 24 hours. Pat looked up skunks and how to get rid of them. Following the site's advice I pointed a floodlight into the hole and we turned a radio up load and left it on the floor right above where the skunk was holed up. An couple hours after dark I went out and the skunk was gone. Then sealed up the space. TJ is now much happier about the state of the back yard.

Movies - Michael Clayton

First I have to say that I'm not much of a George Clooney fan, though I did enjoy nearly a third of the movies he did for the Cohen brothers, so I didn't have much hope for the movie MICHAEL CLAYTON. I only watched because the movie also has Tilda Swinton who is one of my favorite actors. I can't say it's a great movie, but it is a very good movie.

Tilda is as awesome as usual and watching her in the final confrontation scene is worth the whole movie. Clooney is great in the title role, but I'm not sure if it's his acting or the luck of casting. Kind of like how Emilio Estevez was great in REPO MAN but sucked in everything else he's ever done. Sydney Pollack was good as Michael's perfunctorily unscrupulous boss, but at times I couldn't separate him from the character he did in EYES WIDE SHUT.

The story rambles, but it should ramble. This isn't a story that could be told straight out. It's Michael's life that we see in glimpses that defines who he is. And who he is isn't easy to explain. That complexity makes him real.

Auto Business - Will Americans buy a pickup truck from India?

Sixty years ago he same was asked about a weird little car from Germany which sold pretty well once Madison Avenue figured out how to market it. Forty years ago the same was asked about cars from Japan. It took a while, but they did eventually catch on in this country. Of course not all foreign car invasion were so successful as anyone who knew someone who had a Yugo will tell you.

So why a pickup truck from the Indian company Mahindra? Well first, it's small, second, it's a diesel. There are no small diesel pickups in America, and all of the big three car companies have flatly stated they have no interest in building one. Volkswagen is also prepping a small pickup for America, but the diesel option is still up in the air, and the VW seems more like a city truck than a work truck. The Mahindra has more the image of a work truck.

So will this little truck succeed? Probably not. Have previous foreign car invasions made us xenophobic towards new attacks on the American auto industry? Will people accept India as a builder of quality machines? Is the truck a quality machine? Will the marketing hit home?

I can't answer the xenophobia question. American values are in flux and I don't know which way they'll swing for this. As to the quality, only time will tell, but the head of Mahindra, whose last name is not coincidently Mahindra, has stated that they won't even try to sell trucks in America till their sure the quality is high enough. That fact that he speaks of quality as a goal rather than a fact gives me pause to think.

Will Americans accept an Indian work vehicle? They already do. Mahindra has been selling tractors in this country since 1994. They are assembled in Georgia and sold at hundreds of dealers across the country. That would seem to give them a leg up.

As for marketing? This is where my pessimism takes over. The American Importer is a company called Global Vehicles(GV), a company incorporated in Nevada, but headquartered in Georgia, and previously headequartered in Florida. For about ten years GV tried to import the Romanian off-road vehicle built by ARO. They were not successful. They claim to have a network of 315 auto dealers lined up, which I think is a big mistake. Why not leverage the tractor business? Your easiest customers are going to be people who already have the tractors. At least those of them that like their tractors. This could also help promote the truck as something special. As my wife pointed out, the suburban boys would love the idea of having to go to tractor dealer to buy the truck. I don't know how many tractor dealers would want to expand in that direction, but probably enough to make it interesting.

So will this thing sell? Only time will tell. It's not going to be easy, and it's probably not going to happen over night.