Back in Britain, the Fab Four did please
But could their sound survive overseas?
The moptops gave a go
On the Sullivan Show
Beatlemania spread like a disease

Event: The Beatles appear on the Ed Sullivan Show for the first time
Year: 1964
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beatles

Now, because this is a special occasion, I present an additional bonus limerick:

Listen up, ’cause I’m telling you, dude
This date is much with hist’ry imbued
Not by treaties, or wars
Or amazing sports scores
On this day, a new website debuted

Event: The Wandering Wordsman launches
Year: 2009
Learn more: Just stick around. You don’t have to go anywhere else for this one.

For those of you who weren’t around on Monday, here it is again:  I wrote a novel.  It is a digital novel, titled The World, and it can be found at the Amazon Kindle Store.  The price is six dollars: cheaper than going to a movie and far more entertaining, especially considering the movies that usually come out at this time of year.

Now, I would not ask you to buy a book entirely sight unseen, which is why I have made the introduction and first chapter available to read on this website.  Simply click the button for the “Book” page underneath the banner and start reading.

If you are interested in purchasing the novel, first you will need an amazon.com account. Then, if you do not own a Kindle, you can download the free Kindle application from the Amazon website for iPod Touch, iPhone, or PC (a link for the PC version is provided below). Then you can go to the Kindle store and buy it (using the other handy-dandy link I provided).

Buy the Book!

Download the free Kindle application for PC

“What’s up?” said the gym’s manager
A great muscle-bound brute
“Hi,” said Aeris. “This is Cloud
We need to make him cute”

“Is there some other way?” asked Cloud
As she pushed him toward mat
“I have . . . another wig,” said Bro
“But nobody wants . . . that”

The dress-up game went on and on
Perfume, circlet, makeup
Finally, Cloud reached a point
Where he could not say, “Yup”

This week’s puzzle:

A merchant who sets himself apart from others by telling the truth loses a bet because of an amateur artisan’s fortitude. After realizing that vocabulary issues have been holding him back, he writes his name, reads a letter, crosses a line, and goes to the beach.

Puzzle from two weeks ago:

A gamer tries to help a friend deal with disappointments in his career, emotional troubles, and a boss who doesn’t care if he lives or dies. When he grows concerned that he might lose his friend, he tries to secure the relationship by making an important delivery, but in the end it only gets in the way.

And the answer is . . . ▼

Because of last week’s outage, I have decided to present, as a special treat, a Movie Three-Liner in addition to the usual movie puzzle for this week. The spirit of the puzzle is the same; this one simply happens to consist of three sentences instead of two:

A man requests help from someone he would not normally ask and has the police called to arrest him. He does it a second time and gets punched in the face. When he does it a third time, he gets back something he lost because of the second time he asked.

Nowadays the city has it all
The U.N. and the New Year’s dropped ball
Long before Son of Sam
It was New Amsterdam
And old Wall Street was just that: a wall

Event: The City of New York (then New Amsterdam) is formally incorporated
Year: 1653
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Amsterdam or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_New_York_City

Because I would hate for you to miss out on an important historical event due to this website being out of commission, here is the entry that should have appeared last Tuesday, January 26th:

With music the hills were alive
But Nazis made it hard to survive
Oh, would not it be nice
To sing of Edelweiss
Switzerland: a long, long way to drive

Event: Birth of Maria Augusta Kutschera (later, Maria von Trapp), real-life inspiration for The Sound of Music
Year: 1905
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_von_Trapp

In a previous edition of Brevity=Wit I lamented the disappearance of prologues, implying that they have all but vanished since Shakespeare, but there are some modern works that take the time to set the scene with a few choice words.  Some of the best-known examples from the latter half of the twentieth century are the “opening crawls” from the Star Wars trilogy.  George Lucas was a man who knew how to get the audience up to speed quickly, beginning the first of his most famous creations thusly:

“It is a period of civil war.
Rebel spaceships, striking
from a hidden base, have won
their first victory against
the evil Galactic Empire.

Du”

Zzzzzz . . .

Okay, you have to admit, those yellow letters moving slowly past a black backdrop are strangely hypnotic.  They could put people to sleep even without going on and on, which is why I think we should make sure that this introduction is no longer than it needs to be.

It’s not a bad start, really.  He sets up the whole “Rebellion vs. Empire” situation pretty effectively, but the point could easily still be made while conserving a few valuable characters.  A couple tips: one, do rebels have anything but hidden bases?  I can’t imagine they’d last very long operating out in the open.  Cut that phrase.  Second, do you honestly think anyone could believe that an organization called the “Galactic Empire” is not evil?  You save an easy five characters by removing that unnecessary classifier.

On the other hand, looking at this piece more harshly, we can see that many key elements are missing: the stolen plans, Princess Leia, the DEATH STAR for crying out loud!  Sure, you’ve established that there’s a war on, but I kind of already figured that, given the title, “Star Wars.”  How are we supposed to know why the big white spaceship is attacking the little gray one, or why the lady with the sticky-bun haircut is messing with that little robot, or what the heck that giant thing that looks like a moon but is actually a space station is?  Do you expect audiences to figure these things out for themselves?

Then at the very end the prologue appears to switch to German, but let’s not go into that.

Don’t worry, though.  This thing is salvageable, with a judicial application of brevity:

“Rebels stole plans for the Empire’s Death Star, which can blow up planets. Princess Leia got them, but she’s being chased. What can she do?”

There.  Now we the audience can sit back and watch spaceships shoot lasers at each other without having to think about a plot and other silly things like that.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he said with haste
“I’m Cloud: all that is man”
“I know,” said Aeris, giggling
“But what’s a better plan?”

“He’s o’er in the gymnasium
It, uh, smells kinda gross”
She said, “We’ll be back for the dress”
Cloud was near-comatose

As I write this, I find myself thinking about sports.  At any given moment, people all across the country are eagerly anticipating some big game somewhere.  It seems to me sometimes that the world of professional sports spectating is defined by waiting.  You have to wait during commercial breaks.  You have to wait during timeouts.  You have to wait during pitching changes.  And, from hockey rinks to baseball stadiums to football fields, before anything can even get started, you have to wait through someone singing our national anthem, the Star-Spangled Banner.  And when you’ve been thinking all week long about that first pitch, jump ball, or kickoff, it can feel like our friend Francis Scott Key wrote not just a song but an entire opera.

To be fair, the duration of the anthem is not entirely the fault of its author.  Let’s not forget the performers, those people who (if they bothered to learn the lyrics) can put eighteen or more syllables into the word “free.”  But I thought that it couldn’t hurt to take a look at the text and see if I couldn’t cut it down to a more reasonable length, for the sake of all those impatient sports fans out there.  My first attempt looked something like this:

“O, say can you see
By the dawn’s early light
What so proudly we hailed
At the twilight’s last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars
Throu”

Sure, it’s shorter, but it’s also just about incomprehensible.  All I get is that we’re supposed to be looking at something with stripes and stars.  That could be anything: a tiger eating Lucky Charms, a zebra who was rewarded by his elementary school teacher for doing well on his homework, or a group of Hollywood party animals who got too rowdy and had to be sent off to prison.  Clearly, it takes more than twilight’s last gleaming to shed some light on this mess.

Now, you could argue that many people don’t know what the song is really about even in its full version, but I like to strive for clarity.  So here is the comprehensive abridged anthem:

“Look at that flag with the stripes and the stars.  You can see it by the gunfire.  Up there on the ramparts with those free and brave folks.”

There you go: you’ve got the flag, the stripes, the stars, the ramparts, the free and the brave, all the fun stuff.  Plus you don’t have to spend nearly as long on your feet before you get to sit down and enjoy the game.  And you know, it wouldn’t have to just be for sports.  Now that I think about it, I see no reason why you couldn’t replace the interminable full version of our national anthem with this baby (let’s call it “Starry Flag”) whenever you want.  Why, even in the most formal situations . . . what?  He actually wrote three more verses to this song?  Oh, come on, Key.  No wonder the British locked him up.  They must have been sports fans.