I have nothing against Paris Hilton. Nor do I have any positive feelings. She’s just… there.

Allow me to to bring your attention to newscaster Mika Brzezinski.

Recognize her last name? He’s her father.

I’m making my grad students write pitches. It gets them to draw on research skills they have acquired, and it prepares them for the lucrative freelance lifestyle.

At the same time, I just finished a pitch of my own. Michael, Mark, and I have built a proposal for the Jewish vet memorial. We kicked ass, and we’ll submit it Friday in the hope of taking names later. We have a good mix of talent. Michael handles the business, Mark handles the film, and I impressed them both with my writing.

I was brought on board to handle research primarily. Neither Michael nor Mark had seen anything I’ve written, but I may have carved out a new niche.

Bonus booty:

My fascinating sister-in-law found a woman on the Mountain View, Calif. Freecycle who was giving away three “gorgeous” colour photos of a B-24 and a B-17 in flight, “Warplanes” (WW I to 1989) and “Ghosts of the Sky” (WW II) videotapes, and a U.S. Army Air Force Flying Goggle Kit with eight lenses.

She asked me if she should pick them up for me, and I told her to HURRY!

I should have them next week, when she comes to visit. We’ll have to convince her and her friend to come out dancing. It’s be awesome walking into a place with three women towering over me.

I received word today that the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) has denied me a travel grant to attend our book launch for “Avia S-199 in Israeli Air Force Service” in Anaheim in August. My work was judged insufficiently literary.

I expected this, although the CCA agent who would present my grant application told me it was worth a shot.

The problem is that our book is straight history. All grant programs in history work at the academic level and are meant for students and full-time faculty. The CCA is the only agency that would consider funding a work of non-fiction outside universities. There’s no workaround – my efforts fall through the cracks of nearly overlapping sources of funding. And I can’t afford the $1,000 or so it would cost to fly down and stay a couple of days.

I will look into holding an event at the Jewish Public Library in Montreal, perhaps as part of Jewish Book Month (November). And I want to find out what I could do at Toronto’s Jewish Book Fair that same month.

At the very least, I hope this book will qualify as a first book for funding requests for further work. Pyrrhic, yes, but that would be a victory nonetheless.

Back to working on the template for our documentary….

Bonus searches:

Three particularly noteworthy Google searches brought surfers to my pages recently.

1) “dilaudid in ass”: That one’s self-explanatory, and might depend on the individual’s pronunciation of “analgesic”. I think “Scrubs” used that joke.

2) “cell phone got wet in tent camping”: Thanks to the past tense, what springs to mind is that a camper’s cell phone got wet and the searcher wants to know if the phone can be saved, but that doesn’t explain why the location is important. This search is only a teaser for the next, though.

3) “how to unlock a minivan with the keys in side”: Marvelous! There’s three kinds of foolish there. The simplest is the unnecessary space that divides the word “inside”. The next grade of foolishness is the inciting event: locking your keys inside your van. Yeah, we’ve all done it, and, yeah, we’ve all felt silly about it, but commonality is not a mitigating factor. The foolishness teased by the previous comment is the specification of the location of the keys. Would this search turn up more useful results than “how to unlock a minivan with the keys in sewer” or “how to unlock a minivan after neighbour’s okapi ate keys”?