Blog Archives - Dan Fiorella: Writer @ large

Dan Fiorella

#Hashtag, You're It! - Celeb A Cereal

2/26/2024

Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses. These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something. I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work). I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

Yeah, late posting this one, but since I'm going to miss this week's game, it all nets out. Cereals/Celebrities. It's a tried and true premise. There are hundreds of cereals, but only a handful are actually commonly known or have a decent enough name to make a joke out of it (I'm looking at you Life). I'm finding that while every youngster goes with the recent stuff, from celebrities to movies and TV, as an oldster, remembering pre-1980s pop culture references seems to get me through. So, check out:

Hollywood'a-Could'a-Should'a: Sheer Luck Holmes

2/26/2024

Friends of mine had some very good Sherlock Holmes related news recently and it got to thinking to my interaction with the world's most famous private detective.

In high school and into college, I went into a heavy Sherlock Holmes phase. I remember finding the complete works of the consulting detective at the store I worked at and bought it. Every adventure written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (via Dr. John Watson) between two covers.

I read them all. And watched the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies whenever they popped up on local TV in the pre-streaming age. Then, the media kinda went into a heavy Sherlock Homes phase (once the character went public domain), new novels were written, new movies, new TV shows. There was something about that deerstalker cap and cunning ways that kept drawing me in.

I would say that there was A LOT of new Holmes content created back then. New mysteries. Old mysteries. Real mysteries. Spin-offs and side bars. Even Doyle's son wrote some short stories based on odd references of other cases in the original folio. Some of non-canon stories were getting ridiculous. Moriarty was a time traveler. Holmes was Jack the Ripper. Watson becomes a woman. Holmes has additional siblings. Moriarty was a figment of Holmes' imagination. Holmes and Watson met when they were kids. Then there were comedies and patashes. It was around then I walked into the fray. I wrote a Sherlock Holmes parody short story. It was called "The Adventure of the Angry Author."

It was a very meta-story. Arthur Conan Doyle comes to Sherlock Holmes quarters to demand Holmes quit. We know Doyle tired of writing the Holmes stories and wanted to be known for other works. I thought it was a clever bit and it mocked a lot of the latest stories that were getting published (starting, frankly, with the Seven Percent Solution). These stories all felt they needed to put a twist or spin on the character to make him more marketable or relatable or relevant. I really didn't do much with the story, except thinking up a sequel to it.

A few years later, the college humor magazine I was part of (NYU's The Plague) ran it in its Spring 1980 issue. From there, it got included in some massive data base that gathered up all Holmes literature. Then it took a crazy leap. I got an email from a publisher that saw the story and wanted to include it in an anthology they were putting together. In France. It was published in 2007 in the collection called “Sherlock Holmes Dans Tous Ses États” (still available on Amazon).

Based on that, I decided to upload the English version to my AOL page which existed in the age before blogs and websites. Sometime after, I got an unsolicited email from Legacy Interactive. This is a gaming company that did a lot of games based on TV shows and mystery characters. They had stumbled across my various Sherlock Holmes-related material online and invited me to work on a video game they were creating, a follow-up to their PC game, "The Lost Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." It was a game of puzzles, matching games and hidden objects. They had the people to design that stuff, and needed a plain old writer to come up with plotlines and dialogue for the 16 newest games.

I jumped on it and it turned out to be pretty tough. I had to come up with 16 "mysteries" and suspects. Sixteen settings. The first couple were fine, then it became a little tougher. I resorted to "parody." I researched things that occured back in the 1890s that I could latch onto.

I pulled a Nicholas Meyer, and started to work in real people and events. I brought in other fictional characters. A time traveler for H.G. Wells style tale, or the 1899 Paris Exhibition, the "So Long at the Fair" exhibition. But it was still tough sledding, because I had to bring in various "red herrings," for each story and the Sherlock stories weren't really about red herrings, it truly was about watching how Holmes' mind worked, figured out the clues and how he got his man.

I admitted I really didn't get how my scenarios would be translated into a game. But, I gave them the stories and the programers would take bits from the story, or rework it, to develop their set pieces (hidden objects, matching, word puzzles) to insert into the "plot."

I did get paid. And one copy of the game. I'm not really a video game player, but it was cute and fun and I was happy that my material blended in so well. But, like many of my jobs, it was a dead end and I was not asked back.

But my attachment to Holmes remains. There were other sketches, like "Laverne & Sherlock." I had written "The Adventure after the Adventure of the Angry Author" back in college, which I posted online back in my Themestream days, but I'll have to dig it out and post it here. I've had a a script idea on the back burner forever, "Holmes Alone," which would be like an Abbott & Costello Meet Sherlock Holmes story.

Now, there are new movies making him an action hero. I've seen new series that moved Holmes to modern times. Then moved him to modern times and to NYC. I mean, how many changes can you make and still be allowed to call the character "Sherlock Holmes?"

How long have I been dealing with Sherlock? From grammar school it feels like, elementary, my dear Watson.

Barely Home Companion - New Bush Budget (Feb '05)

2/23/2024

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

I wrote this 19 years ago? Man, here's a skit whose time had come again. I have no memory of this, what inspired it or writing. I had small kids back then and they were always sick, so that could have been part of it. I'd really forgotten about this sketch, otherwise I would have tried to do something with it during COVID. It's not any more stupid than ingesting bleach or sticking a light where the light don't shine.

The idea of wrapping kids in bubble wrap was something I would use again, working on an industrial PSA for safety. I submitted a sample and got the gig, but then I had issues with the "notes" they were issuing and how they wanted to keep repeating the bubble wrap gag, despite me giving them several different variations.

Bubble Boy Wrap

Barely Home Companion - Copyright Pirates (Feb '05)

2/16/2024

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

Once upon a time we used to watch movies on video tape cassettes. The home video market was exploding as people wanted to get the latest release ASAP and for cheap. Enter the video pirates, people who would go into movie theaters and record movies off the screen with their cam-corders. This was before cellphones when sneaking a video camera into a theater could be tricky. I think that's all the context you need to read the bit. It was a hot topic back then and I had attempted to tackle it a couple of times. Just merging the ideas of high-tech and classic pirates was too strong to resist. Who doesn't like a sketch with pirate lingo? PHC, apparently. They didn't bite.

Copyright Pirates

Leave it to the Prose: Countdown to Valentine's

2/15/2024

Got this published for Valentine's Day 2024. It's an adaptation of a sketch, which was turned into a monologue and here becomes...a prose piece, written as a one-sided phone call...a monologue, if you will. Anyway, it's up on the Weekly Humorist site, link below. Enjoy.

#Hashtag, You're It! - Rotton Rom-Coms

2/14/2024

Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses. These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something. I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work). I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

First off, I don't know why they misspelled rotten. Anyway, I went kinda nuts on this one. I pulled up a list of "the 200 best rom-coms" and just worked my way down it, until I just got tired. I did like 20 or so and got a goodly number of them included on-site. A couple of them were pretty good, many of them were kinda lame puns, but I try to bury them in content so they'll remember my name.

Barely Home Companion - Peanut Butter (Feb '05)

2/12/2024

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

Well, here's me attempting to humorously addressing Black History Month. It's just one of my standard goofy historical flashback where some significant seems to take some detours. If you every read about the history of gasoline, it's just amazing how gasoline, a waste product in the creation of kerosine, became the the very life blood of the nation. So, it may have been with peanut butter. Nobody gets it right immediately. Nor did I, as this sketch wasn't selected. Here it is, my peanut butter sketch...

Peanut Butter

Barely Home Companion - New Bush Budget (Feb '05)

2/9/2024

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

Reading this old piece, I had forgotten (in light of recent developments) how awful the George W. Bush years were. His "Compassionate Conservativism" was a real misnomer. This was the proto-type of what the GOP would devolve into; "small' government bent on slashing the budget, privatizing Social Security (which was only stopped by Bush's Wall Street collapse and "The Great Recession.") and education. War was needed to enrich the military-industrial complex (invading the wrong country was simply collateral damage), Halliburton allowed to run amok, bank collapses, huge corporation failures and a glib cynicism. As long as they had theirs, it didn't matter much if anything trickled down to the working class. And PHC was never shy about pointing that nonsense out.

I don't know why I went with a wacky lacky to explain the budget, instead of Bush himself. But I had a lot to say about the budget and the vulture capitalism that was coming home to roost. It's a very topical piece with lots of topical references, some long forgotten. I hope this triggers some of the bleak memories and reminds us the the GOP was always this way, only less rude.

Alas, my venting was for nought, as the piece wasn't selected. After all this time, it still irks me that I can't just say rejected, because no one ever told me "No, we won't be using this." I'd have to listen to the show and check the website to see if it was used or not.

New Bush Budget

#Hashtag, You're It! - Cheese An 80s Movie

2/8/2024

Weekly Humorist, a humor magazine I often submit to and occasionally get in, runs these Hashtag Games on Twitter (X), where they name a topic and we submit humorous responses. These games play right into my gag reflex, so I always throw up something. I've taken to setting my calendar to get online every Wednesday to "play" (and by "play" I mean submit content to their website for free--I like to think of it as pun bono work). I always submit a bunch of them on X (Twitter) and some of them get selected for inclusion to their online site.

I didn't think I was going to do this one. When they say something like "80s movies" my sense of time is so bad, I don't remember when movies came out. I'm like a toddler who says "yesterday" mean could be "yesterday" or "last Christmas." So, I had to google top films of the 1980s, or if a pun came to me, I had to check to see if it came out in the 80s (like Twilight Zone: The Movie). A lot of puns with the word brie, which is an easy one to do. But I came up with a couple of clever ones I'm proud of (see: Twilight Zone). And there were a number of excellent puns by others as well. So join us now as we...

#CheeseAn80sMovie

Barely Home Companion -State o'Union 2005 (Feb '05)

2/2/2024

From 1999 to 2004-ish, I was one of the contributing writers for Garrison Keillor's renowned radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." I learned a lot of things there, mostly how to spell 'prairie." It was a solid gig and I'm proud of my work there. But, like any other job, there were...things...

It was time for the State of the Union address and I decided to go back to that well and see if I could get another skit approved. Reading it down, man, was the GOP already headed down the wrong road. The didn't want to govern, they just wanted to boss people around. The didn't want freedom, they wanted to tell people want they could and couldn't do. Yes, Bush was a buffoon, but the people around him were scary and powerful.

State o'Union 2005

comedy, writer, Dan Fiorella, Daniel fiorella, screenplay, sketches,radio,computer games, television writer