His Royal Trekkerness

Check it out! King Abdullah of Jordan was once on Star Trek: Voyager. Too funny.

PEZ Paradise

There's a PEZ museum in Easton, Pennsylvania, only 68 miles from my home.

My mission is clear. As soon as I finish these 44 pages of Donald Duck, I must go to see these PEZ dispensers. (I'm not so excited about the Crayola factory next door. I've had enough of coloring.)

What, Me, Funny?

I needed an inker for a fill-in issue of the comic book that I edit. My pal Mark recommended one, and Bobbie corroborated the man's skill and reliability, so I dropped him a line.

Dear Inker Guy:
My name is Marie Javins and I used to be an editor at Marvel Comics and now am editing blah blah blah and so on.

He responded that he was indeed looking for work, but also that I had sent him a letter in 1994!

Dear Marie:
You may not remember, but you sent me the attached letter in 1994, when I was living in Huber Heights, Ohio.

I'd never seen the attached letter before in my life! But clever "me" had gone and made a funny little quip at the end. The gist of the letter was "Thank you for your samples, I got nothing for you, but it's always nice to hear from a denizen of America's largest brick home community."

And then I'd signed it. Except I hadn't. But I knew instantly who did, as did Mark and Bobbie when I told them about it.

Polly, you scamp. My assistant editor at the time had no doubt been going through the slush pile and was trying to amuse herself and the poor souls whose days she was ruining as she rejected their samples. She'd later gone on to a long career in writing some of the wackiest Marvel "Bullpen Bulletins" of the decade. She's currently employed as a successful freelance copy editor, except when she's touring with her band.

I wonder what else "I" wrote in 1994, while cutting a swath across the pile of submissions...

Sultan's Angels

This photo always makes me laugh. It's me, Nikki, and Didja in Darra, Pakistan, in 1998. We were on an 8-week Dragoman trip from Kathmandu to Damascus, and we visited a town where the primary business was making knock-off guns. The guy behind us is Sultan.

We giggled a lot as we adopted a Charlie's Angels pose with these weapons of medium-level destruction. The locals laughed at us too.

I just scanned in another photo to show the reality of the situation--all our cameras and tourist junk are just off to the side.

Deadline Madness

Today one of my Donald Duck editors made the following observation:

Wow, I was looking over the pagination lists and you've got... ::counting:: ...44 pages due on Wednesday!

I really was much happier not counting.

whimper.

More Ro Art

Roberta has gone and done more of that art-stuff that she likes to do. This one doesn't really exist; it's a proposal for a mural completed as part of a month-long fellowship program at the National Academy of Art.

I like how Ro's mural looks like a tangle of horizontal motion lines, just like subway trains. I wish someone with funding money would see it and ask her to put it up at the 77th Street 6 station for real.

I guess if that super-rich funding person were reading this blog, they'd have taken me to lunch already.

Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition

My mother left this rhyme about my car on the Comments in the previous entry. As my loyal 1990 Ford has just transported me to Virginia and back over three days without complaint (and at 30 miles per gallon!), I thought it deserved center stage. (Please overlook the fact that the brontosaurus has been de-existed by scientists.)

The car known as Henry the Taurus
Is strong as an old brontosaurus
He has no AC
So it's hot in the city
But at least it's cool here in the forest.

In other Taurus news, it seems that Henry the Taurus was born in the Year of the Metal Horse. This means that he likes to roam.

I was born in the Year of the Fire Horse. My Berlin adviser has an astrologer friend who told him that us Fire Horse Tauruses:

"Cannot obey a system which other people have shown to work before, and always have to do it our own way. This is why the women are considered unmarriagable."

That explains a lot.

Ford Potluck

I'm getting a late start after editing Kuwaiti comics all morning, but now I get to go drive Henry the 1990 Ford Taurus to my mother's in Virginia, deep in the Shenandoah Valley.

Henry is an incredible car, acquired in 2002 in Torrance, CA, and named by Turbo the Aussie. Turbo and I bought Henry on my birthday (because Henry and I are both Tauruses, which seemed as valid a criteria as any when going into the crapshoot used car marketplace) for $903 after fees were paid by the seller. The seller had bought two cars at an auction by accident. Since he got Henry—who had been a steadily maintained fleet vehicle—for $400, the seller did all right by us.

We did all right by him too, as Henry took us across the U.S. for May, June, and July. The only problem was that we lost the air conditioning in Austin.

And Henry still doesn't have a/c, which is sounding really unappealing today.

I'd take the bus, train, or plane if there was a bus, train, or plane. But the only way to the middle of the Shenandoah Valley is by car.

Every time I drive old Henry anywhere, I expect that it's his last trip. I am always astounded that he makes it. After all, he's 16 years old, not young for a car.

I have AAA, the deluxe membership. I hope I don't end up sitting in a hot car by the side of the road somewhere in Pennsylvania, waiting for a tow.

Dear Travel-Blog Woman:

Found a question in my e-mail this morning, one that I am asked frequently. I was writing back a long rant (hoping my editor isn't too mad at me since he'll read this and know my deadline was yesterday), when it occurred to me to post it for anyone who was curious.

Q: I’m in the process of getting ready to venture out for a 12-18 month RTW trip end of this year, and was interested in how you approached some of the sponsors on your site, and what assistance they provided you with?

A: The best advice I can give on sponsorship is: Don't bother.

I did score well on a few points, but I had to work at it and for the most part, free things are a mixed blessing.

To get anything for free or discount, you have to give the sponsor a reason to support you. In other words, what's in it for them?

If they simply get the satisfaction of helping someone do a cool trip, they might give you a small percentage off of a product in order to acquire your business. But that's it. They gain, you gain. (Except you don't necessarily, more on that in a minute.) The fact is that plenty of people take RTW trips, and simply doing it offers no incentive to anyone to sponsor you. There's enough people doing RTW trips to support several businesses that specialize, which can be a bit disappointing to those on their once-in-a-lifetime trip, which is of course, special to them and all their loved ones.

If you have a website, they'll only gamble on you if you can prove that you have a built-in readership, a professional site, and a compelling reason for them to bother. I produced a glossy press kit prior to MariesWorldTour, and when I launched this, there was no such thing as blogging software. Now of course there are hundreds of travel sites out there and plenty of RTW blogs, all competing for attention.

So assuming you have a great outlet, such as a professional website with a few thousand readers, or a magazine that is guaranteed to publish your work, or a cable TV show, and you produce a glossy press kit, you could perhaps get such things as:

-free or discounted travel products
-free or discounted outfitter trips
-trips at cost

But beware the freebie! I had some incredible trips and some disorganized nightmares, but when someone gives you something free or at a substantial discount, you are stuck in the spot of being beholden to them. Really high-end publications won't even allow their staff to accept junkets, but realistically, at my level you must accept freebies unless you just want to watch people leave on safari and then try to imagine what their trip is like. But you're stuck then. Say the trip sucks. Well, morally you have the right to say so. But realistically, can you do that? You will have met some nice employees for the company, people who treated you well and understood your mission. Now can you really go out and say "This company is a disaster?"

Examples:

-I had a phenomenal canoe/camping trip in Zimbabwe. Wrote a positive article about it. Everyone was happy. This was with Zambezi Canoe Safaris.

-I went on a disastrous safari in Botswana. The vehicle was inadequate, the staff clueless, the itinerary vague. I abandoned the group and left early on the public bus. Three of the other five clients left a day later. In this case, the marketing director of the company had bent over backwards to help me. Now what to write? And I don't even want to say who it was with, because maybe they are usually quite good and this was an exception.

And on the product front, if you wouldn't buy it without the discount, don't buy it with the discount. It's dead weight, something you have to carry on your back. I got one of those chicken-wire covers for my backpack. Did I ever use it? No. In the end, I gave it to my pal Lynne to take home for me, and I never thought to get it back from her. It's probably still in her storage unit in Slough.

JetCityJimbo once said it best after he'd gotten a substantial discount on a trip-gone-bad.

"In the end," he e-mailed, "they paid me NOT to write about it."

Once A Queen

Speaking of cool postage stamps, I picked up this King Hussein and Queen Noor one in Jordan in 1998.

King Hussein's unfaltering commitment to humanitarianism, compromise, and consensus is known throughout the world. But I didn't know much about Queen Noor until I started reading her autobiography.

Queen Noor was educated at Princeton and was part-Swedish, part-Lebanese, and all-American before she met King Hussein. Her education was in urban planning so she was able to put this to use, first at a job in Iran and then later in Jordan where she happened to meet one of the world's most eligible bachelors. She helped institute dozens of development programs in Jordan. For years, she lobbied hard for better understanding between the US and the Arab World.

I was interested to read that after her miscarriage early in their marriage, King Hussein couldn't face the trauma. He could face the responsibilities of the world and could help others, all while handling the stress of developing Jordan and concurrently negotiating with the entire world, but he just couldn't handle personal grief. He shut it down and moved on to more global issues.

I'm still in the middle of the book, where she talks about the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. She wrote about the numbers of refugees arriving in Jordan. Nearly 3 million people all totalled. Many of these had been working in Kuwait--Filipinos, Egyptians, Pakistanis, Palestinians, etc. One of them became Queen Rania. She attended high school at the same school as a pal at my Kuwait office.

There is a new Queen, but that doesn't mean Queen Noor is out of a job. She still gets to be Queen, not King-Stepmother or something like that. King Hussein's mother was still Queen when Queen Noor was Queen. When you're Queen of Jordan, you get to stay that way. Which is good for Jordan, because Queens work pretty hard there and there's plenty of work to go around.


Obligatory Dead Sea float with Marie, 1998