It’s an odd time of year to write about criminals, but also appropriate given people trying to steal your identity electronically, along with debit and credit card data. It’s a sad fact of life that people choose to do bad things rather than good ones, particularly when it comes to a season where we should celebrate our human goodness, kindness and love for each other.

Still, having had our credit card data compromised several times recently, and given last year’s huge data breaches during the December holiday buying season, it is worth remembering that it’s not all good guys out there.  The smiling faces you encounter are sometimes offset by the dark side – someone seeking to steal from you.

Several weeks ago, I had a random email exchange with a friend that started on this subject.  It morphed into a longer conversation about theft and how often our personal lives had been affected by thieves.

At first, it didn’t seem like much.  We had both been raised middle class, we want to college, we did not live in crime-ridden neighborhoods (maybe a couple of dicey places in college or just out of college).   So we didn’t think there was much that had been stolen from us along the way.  And yet….

As we dug deeper, and started to relate personal incidents where we’d been affected by crime, the list quickly grew.  Mine started back when we moved to Kankakee, IL to start high school.  I had a red sting ray bicycle.  We had moved from New Jersey.  I had never locked the bike riding to and from our grade school or around town.  At our high school in Kankakee, my bike was stolen the first day I rode it there.

The police actually found it on a porch in another part of town, and returned it to me.  Pretty amazing when you think about it.  But that was a first lesson to buy a lock for my bike.

Thus the bicycle theft path began:  Two of mine were stolen when I lived in Milwaukee (one time they smashed our storage closet in the basement of our apartment  building); the back tire was stolen twice; and I caught a guy once, chasing him down the street until a policeman saw us and pulled him over.  Living in D.C., I had my tire stolen right in front of the guard office of the U.S. Department of Energy.  The lesson:  Lock the body of your bike and both tires, and even that is not foolproof.

My car was broken into twice in D.C., though nothing major was stolen.  In my first job, someone got into my hotel room in Joliet, IL while I was sleeping and stole all the money from my wallet.   My car was also broken into during that job, and vandalized.

Then, the topper was 4-5 years ago when we were seeing our dad for Christmas, our car was stolen from the parking lot of the hotel we were staying at in Topeka, KS and burned after being used in a robbery.  My wife and I still worry every time we go to a hotel now. Then there is the recent data theft. 

My friend has had his house broken into three times and garage once, money stolen from his wallet in high school while at football practice and his credit card compromised “at least five times in the past 10-12 years.”

There are a lot of &*%$#&$%*&(&Y)(*&(^#$%^&^^)(**$#% criminals out there.  Keep it in mind.  Be safe.  Merry Christmas.

Translating real life to the written word has always been hard.  Writers know this.

It doesn’t matter if you were back in the days before the typewriter was invented, or you’ve come of age in the world of texting and Twitter. You still have to think about an event, and describe it with feeling and vividness.  If not, readers don’t relate.

Success is defined by feedback.  You hear from people that what you wrote meant something to them -- that they’ve ha d similar experience, or you made them laugh or cry.  They emoted because of what you said.   All writers should strive for those beacons.

When it comes to communications today and using them to substitute for verbal interactions, we are still limited by words.  Writing something doesn’t translate into frowns, grunts, shoulder shrugs or chuckles.   We can’t read the body language.

That’s why the use of shortened acronyms have developed to provide the person you communicate with a better perspective on where you are coming from.  By typing IMHO (in my humble opinion), you know that person is trying to get a point across without sounding dogmatic.  They want you to know they are offering up soft advice, not pushing it in your face.

Smiley faces, and other emoticons serve the same purpose.  They’ve been created to help you share emotions.  They are not perfect.  I’ve certainly found myself scrolling through the 42 laughing/crying faces on my email account to find the perfect one that reflects what I’m thinking, then I close my eyes and pick one when none of them seemed right.  It still works out, but all those choices often don’t capture what you want.

That’s why creating your own device for capturing an emotion proves beneficial.  On the subject of laughter, for example, there are so many ways you can crack up.  It can be a chuckle, guffaw, knee slapper, cause you to cry, or fall on the floor laughing, your side hurting, gasping.

That’s why so many acronyms have already been invented to encompass this range:  LMAO (laughing my A off); LOL (laugh out loud); ROFL (rolling on the floor laughing); ROFLMAO (you can figure out the combination).  You can just laugh; you can laugh uproariously; you may just be slightly amused.

Because our family loves to laugh, my two brothers and I have created our own sub-language that helps not only describe our sense of laughter, but serves us cathartically.   It gives a sense of laughter release.  It is the closest to the real thing you’ll find.  I’m not sure which of us invented it (I think it was the oldest bro), but we immediately all adopted it, and it has served us well over the years.  You too can use it.

Here’s how it goes.  Someone writes you an email that makes you laugh.  You respond, “afdgpoiagrfdpja[goiqwigg.”  Type random keys as fast as you can, as long as you are laughing.  This demonstrates you’re going nuts and how long the laughter lasts.

To refine this, hit the “enter” key in the middle:

S:Lksag;lfrigip[[aorig

Agas;gflkgrtekmgs;thlmh

;alrgj;pkfgm;mkhthtwrpoihkutyh/

Aegl;bhmwr;nh /

Whtpm;rwm;trkmh

That shows the laughter continues and continues. You pause and then break down again.  By the end of this typing, you are drained.

When you lose it, that’s time to give a long burst: rijtponqwptihkns;intgh;pinhtoith;pqwigportinh;sbfbnepaqiv;qrnaenv;pavns;bvpjqaep[grj;iargnpirgpeagring;ang;pagrnpsirggnpertoihgjpgi;ferptiogjnhpboyt;rgljghsp;wrisgfn;blsjrgsfd;kl.  There, now I feel better.  Whew.

Try this technique.  It will not only seem right, but it will make you feel good.

If your readers don’t understand, explain it to them and suggest they adopt it.  Maybe if we get enough people involved, this will become a trend emulated around the world, and we’ll all starting relating and communicating better, laughing along the way.

OMG, can no one make a decent pen?  It blows me away how pathetic pens are these days.

Not to be Mr. Nostalgic or anything, but back when I was growing up, the Bic pen lasted forever.  In 4th grade, I’d watch the ink go down through the clear hard-plastic tubing, wondering when it would ever reach the end and actually stop writing so I could complain to the teacher about not being able to finish the assignment.

As an added bonus, you could pull the inner tube that held the ink out of the receptacle and use it like a straw to shoot spitballs at your buddy across the classroom.  If you were clandestine enough, you got away with this and would slide the pointed writing end back into the tube just after you hit Paul in the forehead with a wet wadded piece of notebook paper. 

If you were unfortunate, you could spend the rest of the class standing in the corner with the Dunce hat on, crying and complaining that Paul started it, so it was his fault.  Now, pens not only can’t serve as a spitball device, but they fall apart or stop writing effectively within a couple months and have to be tossed in the ash heap.

This could be a plot by pen manufacturers to keep us buying extra product.  Or perhaps there is an online conspiracy attempting to stop us from writing by hand completely, so we become fully dependent on sending electronic messages.

Both subterfuge attempts force us to throw pens away, grow angry and curse.  As the ink evaporates in the delivery device, you scribble and scribble and nothing comes up.  When this happens to me, as it does frequently (more on this in a minute), I rant.   In fact this is at least the second time this column has dwelled on the declining quality of pens in the world.

The most recent incident that drove me batty (and to put pen to paper to jot down notes about it; ha!) occurred last week.  Step one:  As I was writing, the ink stopped drawing on the paper.  I furiously jabbed the pen onto the notepad, swirling it around, running it up and down, back and forth.  I shook it.  Nothing helped.   I threw it out.

I selected a second one.  This one you had to click on.  Applying pressure, BOING, it popped apart, so the when you pushed down, the cylinder that held the pen fell to pieces, not holding together to allow pressure to be applied and words written.  I launched this one across the room.

I tried a third.  It had been sitting in the container on my desk so long (not in use), that I couldn’t even draw a line with it.  Discard.

Hoping to change my luck, I took one from my wife’s desk.  No dice.

Finally, she suggested I use a fine-point marker that has its tip shaped more like a honed pencil than the more balled shape of a regular pen.  This allowed me to sign whatever the heck it was I was trying to sign, sigh, and write down all these notes about the different ways that pens fail to serve their purpose.

Where do we send pen complaints?  I’m lodging one right here.  I expect the manufacturers and branders to pay attention.  Your products don’t make the grade.  They fail.  Fix your mess.  Send me free samples that work effectively and effortlessly for a year, and I will sing their praises.

If you don’t, I’ll spill the beans about your plots to rip us off and make us forget how to write by hand. Good thing I can send this online.

The prototypical sports fan tends to be, if not totally maniacal, at least slightly fanatical (heed the word “fan” in fanatical).  If you consider yourself a fan, there is some element where you go nuts about the team you follow.

Sports franchise owners mostly get this, and do their best to upgrade their team on an annual basis.  Despite their best efforts, it’s amazing how some teams sink to the bottom every year.

Some visible examples include the Chicago Cubs in baseball, the Oakland Raiders in football and Minnesota Timberwolves in basketball.  If you follow professional sports, you don’t really need to think about it.  Instead, these teams come immediately to mind because you know they perpetually stink.

Once in a while they get close to the playoffs or actually do make it to the first round, but if that happens, they exit quickly and the team drops to the basement of their division standings the next year.  You could almost guarantee making some big bucks by predicting this. 

“Hey, Freddie, the Cubs are gonna capitalize on making the playoffs last year.  I bet they make the World Series this year,” Saul observes.

Freddie, if he is smart, would ask Saul how much he takes home in his paycheck, then suggest a bet in that exact amount.  Then he could steal Saul’s paycheck without going to jail.  That’s because Cubs’ fans favorite phrase is, “Wait till next year.”  Which implies the previous year was a hunk of sour dog meat.

A friend of mine goes off on “fans” like these.  They’re not fans because real fans would care and not support a team that perpetually lost.  At some point, you reject the team if they have not improved, according to his view, forcing management to make changes that increases victories.  If not, why attend the games?  He makes a strong point.

He goes on to suggest Cubs’ fans attend games more for the experience – partying, hanging out, sun bathing, eating bratwursts – rather than actually living and dying for the outcome.  When you think of “having fun” at the ballpark, that doesn’t include a suicide watch after losses.

The St. Louis Cardinals, in contrast to the Cubs in Major League Baseball, have real fans, according to my buddy.   They are considered the best and most knowledgeable fans in baseball, but will not attend if ownership doesn’t support the team with quality players.

He remembers a time sitting in old Busch Stadium in St. Louis (1974), in the box seats and being able to hear the phone ringing in the press box because the place was so empty.  You can image how bad the birds were then.

Today, the stadium is packed nightly.  They don’t win the World Series every year, but they’ve won their share and push other teams through the playoffs.  That’s success, and the fans expect it.  There is a product and brand on the field that they respect and follow.

Cub fans are the opposite.  If they loved their team, shouldn’t they stop going to the stadium to show their disgust with the results year after year?  That’s what a fan would do instead of a pseudo-fan.  Not showing up to games would push ownership to improve the team and put a competitive unit on the field.

Since the money keeps pouring in to watch the team lose year after year, management has no real incentive to improve.  So the Cubs wallow near the bottom of the standings, their followers getting good suntans and catching up with friends and maximizing their beer and food consumption.

That’s enough to make them content.  But content shouldn’t be enough.