Greeting Card Campaign: 10-14 International Dessert Day

Click on this link to download the card.

October 14^th is International Dessert Day. On International Dessert Day you get a day off from your diet. Pick your favorite dessert, cake, pie, cobbler, ice cream, bon-bons, you name it. After all, it's a holiday and, as everyone knows, food eaten on a holiday has no calories. What's also cool is that October is National Dessert Month in the good old, overweight United States, so eating sugary snacks this month constitute a patriotic act, at least for Americans. Tough luck all you furriners. We get a whole month!

And speaking of sweets, why not celebrate by printing up this sweet International Dessert Day card and giving it to your sweetie pie with something sweet and tasty.  Just click on the caption below the picture of Dessert at the top right.  The link will take you to a pdf file in Google Docs. Remember, instead of printing from Google Docs, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "Download" and copy the file to your own computer.  Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you use and print the card from there. For some reason Google Docs doesn't handle fonts well, even though they are supposed to be embedded in the PDF document itself.

This is a side fold card, so when it prints, be sure to tell your printer it's in "landscape" format so you get the whole file. Flip it on the short side to print double-sided. Much quicker that way. Now go make yourself a treat - something international perhaps!

© 2013 by Tom King

Greeting Card Campaign: 10-12 Columbus Day

Click here to download card.

It was fourteen hundred ninety-two that Columbus sailed the ocean blue.  Since 1937, October 12^th has been Columbus Day in America. FDR made it officially a national holiday.  Scheming bankers and postal workers however, got the feds to shift the date to the second Monday in October so that they would be sure and get a day off every year.  But October 12^th is the traditional date since that is the date Columbus stumbled ashore on a small island in the Bahamas which he named San Salvador. Later he apparently forgot which island that was because no one knows which it is to this day, although one of the islands was later renamed San Salvador because someone had a theory that this island was where Columbus first set foot on dry land anywhere near America (which took it's name from Amerigo Vespucci, a rival of Columbus's who had a better public relations team). 

Moral of the story - if you want the place named after you - be the guy who draws the maps!

To celebrate Columbus Day, why not send your most important discovery a card to tell her how glad you were to find her?  Just click on the caption below the picture of Columbus at the top right.  The link will take you to a pdf file in Google Docs. Remember, instead of printing from Google Docs, click on "File" in the upper left corner, then select "Download" and copy the file to your own computer.  Open it with Adobe PDF Reader or whatever PDF reader you use and print the card from there. For some reason Google Docs doesn't handle fonts well, even though they are supposed to be embedded in the PDF document itself.

This is a side fold card, so when it prints, be sure to tell your printer it's in "landscape" format so you get the whole file. Flip it on the short side to print double-sided. Much quicker that way. 

There's one thing you have to do with this card.  On the inside it says "That was nothing compared to what I discovered in _________.  There's not actually a blank there but I left room for you to write in the year you first met her.  A black Sharpie works best.  I used a First-grader font so it shouldn't be hard to match. 

Now plant that card on her bedside table like Columbus planted his flag and let her know you've claimed her for always and forever.

© 2013 by Tom King

Stop Social Media Bullying NOW!

If you "do" Facebook or other social media sites you'll recognize the species of message that I'm talking about here.  You may have "shared" one or posted an original one following the same formula.  Have you ever posted something that says something like this:

• "Are you against (insert something awful here)?  I bet 50% of you don't care enough to repost this."? 

It might say 99% of you (my cold-hearted friends) won't care enough about this awful thing to take the time to share it with your 1,788 Facebook friends. Whatever it says, if it ends in a guilt trip trying to induce you to fill up other people's email boxes or Facebook pages with endless versions of this stuff, it's a form of bullying. In essence, the underlying message says, "Do this or you're not my friend" or "Do this or you're not a good person", "Do this or you aren't one of the cool people" or one of the more specific versions -- "Do this or you don't love Jesus."

Any way you share these sorts of messages, it's little short of playground bullying. I don't mind if you ask em to share, but don't try to lay a guilt trip on me. It works with people who are desperate to have friends or to belong to a certain set of cool people.

Me, I'm suspicious of any group that would start something like this that resorts to intimidation to get people to do things for them. Of course, many Facebookers wouldn't understand that if they happened to be one of the cool kids or one of the several garden variety bullies back there on the playground. To bullies and their terrified toadies it would simply seem like an effective marketing tool.

I recognize the technique.  I was the kid with the broken horn-rimmed glasses with tape on the bridge who made good grades that the Neanderthal's who worked for the cool kids liked to stuff in lockers.  I was a target K-10.

What really blows me away is that one of these posts is running around on Facebook intimidating people in order to get them to pass along a post that says they "hate" bullying. The last paragraph suggests that only a cold-hearted bully wouldn't "share" the post with everyone on their friend's list. Many people pass it along from guilt. Who wants your friends to know you don't hate bullying after all?

The problem is that they're just surrendering to another kind of bullying when they hit that "share" button. When they do that, it only encourages social media bullying to continue.

Let me tell suggest a response to this kind of bullying. Just stop passing this stuff along. It's bullying plain and simple. It's like saying, "If you hate annoying Facebook posts, share this with all your friends!" 

Let me suggest another strategy. If you really hate bullying, don't share this kind of stuff. Jesus will still love you. Pass along this post instead. No pressure. You don't have to. You won't get bad luck if you don't.  Angels won't deflate your car tires and you will not develop genital warts!

Plenty of good people don't want to pass this stuff along and shouldn't be made to feel bad about it if they don't.  It's a big time suck and a huge waste of time. In what way will a Facebook post put a stop to bullying? Besides, few of your friends will "like" a post like this one and fewer yet will pass it along. The response will likely be underwhelming without all the tacked-on guilt!

Besides, it's enough to simply not pass this kind of stuff along. It does no good and only reinforces knuckling under to social bullies.

As Mrs. Reagan used to say,  "JUST SAY NO!"

Tom King © 2013