Most people would agree that humans are the top of the food chain here on Earth. Though there can be much debate as to where all the other animals, critters, and creatures who share our planet sit in terms of order, there can be no argument as to who holds the bottom rung: adolescent and teenage boys.

I know this for a fact because I have the perspective of having been one of these bottom-dwellers, and the experience of evolving up a couple of rungs on the ladder since then.

In speaking with other men around my age I’ve learned that some of the stupid things I did as a kid, those guys also did even though we grew up in different parts of the country. For example, any male I’ve ever met who lived in the vicinity of an electric fence has at one time or another touched said fence on a dare. I can’t explain what force in the universe compels boys to touch the exposed metal wire when we know we’re going to receive a somewhat painful jolt of electricity (and yes, Smartypants, I knew it was on because I watched two other guys grab the fence just before I did), but we do it. We have to. We have no choice. But in all my laughter-filled discussions about male adolescent stupidity, I have found only a select few men who knew the painful joys of a game called Red Butt.

I did a quick Google search and saw that there are variations on the rules of Red Butt, and given that there’s no formal governing body that oversees the… uhh… sport, I’ll give the rules as we played them in Newtown, Connecticut back in the mid-1980s.

Equipment:
1 large brick wall.
1 tennis ball
1 group of adolescent/teenage boys
Tighty-whitey underwear (wearing boxer shorts could have devastating consequences)
2 much free time

First, someone has to be “it.” A bummer, I know, but dems the rules. We would line up in a straight line facing the wall about 50 feet away. On “go,” we all sprinted toward the wall. The last to touch, was it. The “it” person then bent over directly in front of the brick wall with his butt facing the line of boys. The biggest/meanest kid would then take the tennis ball and everyone would line up at the 50-foot mark. The objective was to nail the bent-over kid in the ass with the tennis ball. If the thrower was successful in connecting with the buttocks of the “it” boy, there was no need for anyone to run. The “it” boy stayed it, and the ball was handed back to the same thrower to try again. If, however, the thrower missed the butt, it’s a free ball. If the bent-over kid gets to the free ball first, then the thrower is now “it” and has to bend over. If a different kid scrambles to the loose ball first, then the “it” boy remains it, and the kid who picked up the ball gets to throw next.

This continues until someone runs home crying that he’s been “it” for too long and won’t be able to sit for a week, or until recess is over. Having been “it” more than once, I can promise that this game is aptly named.

I recognize that Red Butt gives an awful lot of ammunition to people who support the creationism theory. I mean, if Darwin is correct, how the hell did so many men survive playing Red Butt (and those hits that connected just below the buttocks and between the legs) and then eventually procreate? The world may never know.

Anyone up for a game? I have a tennis ball.

In my life I’ve had the opportunity to travel a pretty good distance from home. I’ve seen other countries, I’ve been all over the United States, and I’ve explored my own back yard. One thing I’ve discovered for certain is that we live on a very weird planet. To truly capture the odd folktales, ghostly legends, UFO sightings, and understand the cryptids lurking in a given area, you need to be local for a good deal of time. I was born in Massachusetts. I’ve lived in a few other states, but I came back. I know the locals and the locales. If I don’t know the history or the witnesses, I know who to ask.

I spent most of last year exploring a bizarre place called Massachusetts. In my research I learned that life here in the Bay State was perfectly normal… right up until about 10,000 years ago. And then things started to get weird. Massachusetts has more than its share of ghosts; I knew that years ago. We’re old New England, we embrace our history, and we’re more apt to talk about our ghosts than some other parts of the country. But we also have our monsters: Pukwudgies, Bigfoot, the Dover Demon, Big Hairy, and the Thunderbird just to name a few. We have Salem — arguably the world capital of all things witchy. We have Cape Cod, full of sea tales, giant serpents, and Wampanoag creation legends. Every corner of the state has something unusual to share. Sometimes you just need to scratch the surface a bit.

This was the most fun I’ve had writing a book. I crawled through caves, I trekked through swamps looking for cryptids, and I pored through history books discovering the oddities our forefathers believed in.

In the past, I had the chance to contribute to other books in this series including Weird U.S. and Weird Hauntings, but this was my first opportunity to mostly take the reins on my own “weird” book. With the help of some invaluable contributors like Daniel Boudillion, Chris Balzano, and of course, Mark and Mark, Weird Massachusetts came together like a dream. I hope you’ll pick up a copy and enjoy the very weird Bay State!

-Jeff

The phrase “insult to injury” is a writing cliché. But there are circumstances, times, and events where nothing but a cliché will do. It’s in these circumstances that we must forgive the writer for the use of tired phrases.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to go to Volcano, California, to speak at the Ghost Rush Conference. During some down time at the event, I took a walk around town — a town with a population of 101. So when I say I took a walk around town I’m being quite literal. There’s a wonderful wooden structure in the village that begs further investigation once you get a glimpse of the building. It’s old, has a tin roof, plank siding, and no windows. I learned from one of the locals (and the plaque on the front), that this was Volcano’s first jail. It was built in 1871.

Two men guilty of crimes were sentenced to construct the jail with two-by-twelve timbers on the outer and inner walls with boiler plate sandwiched in between. Once the construction was complete, the two carpenter criminals were told to get inside and get comfortable, because they still had time to serve. Yeah… insult to injury.

One of the most frustrating aspects of being a working writer is having your work stolen, misappropriated, or otherwise pilfered. With the proliferation of the Internet, the sickness of copyright infringement has become as widespread as the common cold. I thought we all learned about the basics of copyright in middle school and high school (and hopefully we learned stealing is wrong by pre-school), but, sadly, it seems as though many adults who should know better simply don’t.

Important disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer. This isn’t legal advice. But to quote Jay-Z’s song “99 Problems,” “I ain’t passed the bar, but I know a little bit…” These are guidelines to help you better understand an overview of copyright.

I’ve seen my own work appear on Web sites, in books, and referenced in lectures, sometimes without giving me credit, and sometimes giving me credit, but permission was never asked. Bottom line: it’s illegal, it’s unethical, and it’s sloppy on the part of the person doing the stealing, or the publisher producing the work.

Here’s the easiest rule of copyright that I can come up with: if you didn’t write it, draw it, paint it, compose it, sculpt it, take the photo yourself, or commission any of the above with the understanding that you would own the work, then it doesn’t belong to you.

There is such a thing as fair use and citation when it comes to others’ work, and I’ll get to those shortly. In fact, I’ll get to them right now…

Public Domain
When a work is in the public domain, it means that you are free to use it, and no reproduction permission is required. However, you still need to cite the source and give credit where it is due no matter how long ago the author/artist who created the work died. If something was published before January 1, 1923, then there’s an extremely high chance that the work is in the public domain. There are exceptions on both sides of that date, so you’ll need to do your research on whatever work you want to include and/or reference. For a good article on public domain, check out Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

Fair Use
“Fair Use” is a legal term meaning you don’t need permission from the work’s author and/or publisher, but you do need to cite your source. There are limitations, of course. For example, you can’t take the latest copy of Harry Potter, write your own one-paragraph introduction, and slap quotes around the whole book and call it fair use. In a book-length work, you can quote up to 300 words of text as long as you give full credit to the author, source, and publisher. There are varying styles on how to do this, but give credit to all three and you’ll be okay.

Example:
In Jeff Belanger’s book, The World’s Most Haunted Places (New Page Books, 2004), he writes, “…up to 300-word quote here.”

With magazine, newspaper, and online articles, you’re limited to 150 words, and you still need to cite the author, source, and publisher.

Here’s a good article to check out on copyright and fair use from the Houghton Mifflin company: http://college.hmco.com/instructors/ins_custompub_prepare_script_permission.html

People Just Don’t Get It
“You should be honored I used your work.” “Putting your work on my Web page helps get you exposure.” “I don’t see what the big deal is.” All arguments I’ve personally heard from people who have infringed on my copyright. These arguments come from people who generally don’t make money at writing, don’t understand the value of good content, and are new to the realm of research and writing.

The goal of publishing anything, be it movies, a Web site, a magazine, a book, music, or any other media, is to provide unique content that people can’t get anywhere else. If you’re good at publishing, you build a big audience, you can sell advertising, you can sell subscriptions, and everyone in the food chain makes money from the publisher on down to the author. If you’re bad at publishing, you go out of business quickly.

So if I put an article on my Web site, the value of my Web site goes up, because there’s nowhere else on earth that a reader can go to see that content but right here on my site. If someone copies the article and pastes it into their Web site or message board, now people can go elsewhere for that same content and the value is diluted. It’s unfair to the publisher who paid for the unique content, and unfair to the author who agreed to do the work knowing it would only appear in a specific publication. It’s also against the law.

How Do You Know Something is Copyrighted?
If someone gets completely drunk at a bar and jots a poem down on a paper napkin using pink lipstick to write with, it’s copyright protected. Now, if the person didn’t sign their work, and you found it on the ground while cleaning up, it’s impossible to know who the copyright belongs to. But it’s still not your work. If you wanted to reproduce that drunken poem somewhere, ethically, you should still cite the source: i.e., I found a napkin on the floor of TK’s bar in New Haven, Connecticut on March 8, 2007, it read: “Blah, blah, blah…”

When it comes to litigation, the person whose work was infringed upon simply needs to prove that they created their work before you did. If their work appears in a book, magazine, newspaper, or other dated material, it’s pretty easy to prove, and you will lose the lawsuit if you took their work without asking.

Even if an article doesn’t have the little “c” with a circle around it (©), the work is still copyright protected.

What About Linking to Articles on the Web?
You never need permission to link your Web site to an article on another Web site. In fact, one wildly popular Web site, www.drudgereport.com, has made a name for itself being a single Web page that only links to articles on other Web sites. The value in the Drudge Report is that its editors cull news headlines from all over the world and provide links to what they believe to be the most useful and important news articles. Judging from the huge amount of traffic that Web site garners, many tens of thousands of others obviously like the job they’re doing.

You also don’t need permission to provide a summary/teaser for the article and then provide a link. Something like, “We found Jeff Belanger’s article on writing and publishing to be a great resource. He covers getting your first book deal, dealing with publishers, and literary agents. You can read it here: http://www.jeffbelanger.com/blog/?p=42.” (You alert readers may have noticed I’ve already referenced and linked to a few other articles already in this blog.)

Who Is Responsible?
Bottom line… the author is always ultimately responsible. Even a mediocre publisher will often review an author’s submitted work and check on permissions for photos and excerpts — but only if those photos and excerpts are obvious (i.e. cited). If an author chooses to lift several pages from another work and tuck it into their book without citing, it’s almost impossible for a publisher to know. Publishers who see large excerpts or the use of photos taken by others and don’t keep permissions on file are taking a big risk. They can only hide behind the indemnity clauses in their contracts so much. If copyright infringement lawsuits start to fly, the accused author will be mentioned first, but the publisher will almost always be a party in the suit as well. A publisher’s indemnity clauses in their contract with the author will state that the author is responsible for what they submit to the publisher and the author will bear any legal costs to the publisher should something go wrong. However, if the accused is found guilty of plagiarism or copyright infringement, their books may have to be pulled from the shelves, an event that is both embarrassing and costly to the publisher.

Give Credit Where It’s Due
Referencing the work of others can be a powerful tool in making your written argument stronger. Obtaining permission to cite longer excerpts from other authors’ work is usually pretty easily done. In some cases, you may need to pay a licensing fee to use a photograph or longer excerpt, but those fees are usually reasonable. Remember, this is someone’s work, and it may be their bread and butter, they may have families who depend on that income… so bet your butt they take it personally when you take the work without asking. To put it in perspective, I’d be less upset with a person who broke into my house and stole my television set than I would with someone who lifted an article from me and used it for their own gain. Someone else made my television. My work I created with my own blood, sweat, and tears.

Dammit… just when you think you’re healthy, and everything is going along just fine… you get turned into a zombie. 

Thanks to Brett of Bhold Designs for bringing out my good side. You can also check this sick puppy out on MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/bholdbrigade

Southwest Airlines. Their motto and enchanting ding tone are becoming as familiar as McDonald’s golden arches, as Budweiser’s Clydesdales, or as Nike’s swish logo. I discovered yesterday that their slogan is more literal than I ever would have guessed. Thanks to Southwest, in the span of a 15-hour period, I saw two oceans, Canada, the Great Lakes, the Great Plaines, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, the Rocky Mountains, the Hotel Del Coronado, the painted dessert, and Mexico.

It’s a funny story, really. My flight left Providence, Rhode Island, at 6:40 in the morning bound for Tucson, Arizona, with a layover in Chicago’s wind and wild weather. The flight took us to the edge of the Canadian border, over the great lakes, and down to Chi Town. The plane got in okay, but when I landed I saw that my connecting flight to Tucson was cancelled. In fact, any flight scheduled after 10:30 AM was cancelled. Oy. Now what?

“We can send you to Las Vegas where you can try and get on standby for one of the three flights heading to Tucson,” the Southwest agent said.

I knew staying in Chicago meant that I could be there for days depending on when the impending snow storm was going to let up. Okay. Las Vegas. Big buffets. Gambling. I could get stuck there.

Our Sin City-bound plane was one of the very last flights to leave Chicago before the storm. They flew a southern route, so we got a great look at the Grand Canyon, snow rimmed, painted, amazing. As the plane neared touchdown I saw the famous Las Vegas strip. The Bellagio, the MGM Grand, and the Excalibur all beckoned from a distance.

“All the flights to Tucson are completely booked,” the Southwest agent told me in Las Vegas. “But I can get you over to San Diego where you can catch a flight back to Tucson… the flight leaves in 40 minutes.”

Okay, San Diego… nice weather. Good Mexican food. I could get stuck there.

The flight was fast, and there was Mexico, Southern California, and the Pacific Ocean. Nice.

“Yes, we can get you on the next flight to Tucson. It leaves in an hour.”

Woo hoo! Tucson. I could get stuck there. At 5:30 PM the plane touched down at my final destination. At baggage claim I made another discovery. Not only was I free to move about the country, but so was my luggage. While I was checking out various oceans and national points of interest, my bag thought it would be fun to take some different flights, to see some other cities.

So I hit the “Gas City” truck stop off of I-10 and picked up a “Gas City” t-shirt (so I could change clothes), and some toiletry basics. That night I’d be roughing it, I guess.

Southwest called me the morning to let me know that my bag had indeed finally arrived. I asked the company representative (and my bag) where they had gone, neither said a word. However I saw lipstick stains on my luggage and it smelled like booze. So wherever it went, it must have had a good time. Between my bag and myself, we freely moved about the country, all in a single exhausting day.

Since the last football game of the regular season, the media has been running with a David (whichever team the Patriots are playing) versus Goliath (the Patriots) motif. Each week, Goliath has prevailed. The Patriots are now the first team to ever go 18 and 0, and they are one win away from a perfect, undefeated season — something that has only happened once before (back when you could only win 17 games in an entire season) in the National Football League. Of course, this Patriots team also broke a slew of records along the way: most points scored by a team in a single season, most touchdown passes thrown by a quarterback (Tom Brady), most touchdown receptions by a single receiver (Randy Moss), and most consecutive regular season wins (dating back to the 2006 season). This is the greatest team to ever play the game. That’s not opinion, that’s the numbers.

No other team has won this many games in a row, or put up this many points. And here’s the hardest fact to accept: if the Patriots lose the Super Bowl, all of these accomplishments just become a footnote in NFL history. If they win, then the ‘07 Patriots will be talked about for decades to come (just as the ‘72 Miami Dolphins have been talked about for 35 years — something that will change if the Patriots win in two weeks). No matter what happens in the Super Bowl, the Patriots are destined to become an adjective.

For you non-writing types, here’s a reminder: an adjective is a word that modifies a noun. It can enhance, qualify, specify, or diminish the noun. For example: That is a fat man. In this example, “fat” is the adjective used to describe the man.

If the New England Patriots win the Super Bowl, their name will become an adjective synonymous with greatness, dominance, and perfection. As in: In Patriots-like fashion, Bertha Teidlebaum’s baking outshined all the others in the church bake-off. Or: The Red Sox looked Patriots-esque in last night’s game when they beat the New York Yankees 18 to 2. Shoot, even a modified version of the team name may take on a whole new meaning. Imagine the coach of the Indianapolis Colts trying to get his team fired up for the first game of next season by saying, “Now let’s get out there and be Patriotic!” (Suitable to, or characteristic of, the Patriots.) Every overly-dominant football team over the next decade or so will be described with the word “Patriots” in some way.

Then there’s the flip-side. It’s almost too horrible to think about, but the reality is this: if the Patriots lose to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl, “Patriots” will come to describe something that is hands-down better than all of its competitors, but comes undone the one time it really counts. A horrible adjective indeed. Imagine a stockbroker saying something like, “I put in the order for 10,000 shares of GE just an hour before the stock price tripled on some great market news. But I totally pulled a Patriots and forgot to confirm the order so it never went through.” Any football team that blows a big lead will do so in Patriots-like fashion; Patriotism will come to mean something terrible; and any number one seed in any future playoff game will have to sit through pre-game speeches from coaches who warn them not to be Patriotic. Get it done.

The Patriots are the better team. All the numbers prove it. But any sport fan knows that on any given game day, things can go wrong. The Patriots won’t make the mistake of under preparing for this game, they’re too well coached and disciplined for that. But on any given Sunday things can and do go wrong. Even David slew Goliath once.

The Patriots are bound for immortality on February third. That’s already determined. Whether it’s fame or infamy now rests in their own extremely capable hands.

Go Goliath! And for God’s sakes watch out for rocks.

That’s right… sorry to be the one to tell you, but you’re not special. There are many other people who can do what you do. There are people who can do some of the things that you do even better than you. Accept this fact and you’re on the way to getting better at everything you apply yourself to.

Ego is the number one detriment to your growth and progress. Don’t get me wrong, confidence is a good thing, and ego can be a natural and normal extension of that confidence, but as soon as you think you’re the best at something that you do, you cease striving, you stop learning, and you limit your own potential.

I’ve seen this phenomenon in every work environment I’ve ever been in, and I’ve also seen this in interpersonal relationships. When you think you’re great at anything… you become complacent.

Knowing I’m not special has made me more competitive, more cooperative in my business and personal dealings, and it’s made me apply myself to the things I’m most passionate about.

If I ever felt that I had done my best work at any occupation, then it would be time to hang it up. I wake up each day and remind myself that I’m not special, so I work harder, I forge alliances and relationships that will help me get better at what I do, and I strive to push my successes to greater heights than they’ve been before. Seeing progress is where I find satisfaction, not in any singular accomplishment.

Accept that you’re not special, and you’ll be ready to really start kicking some butt.