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I recently completed a campaign for United Way here in Greenville County. The photographer, Kevin Bana, is out of Chicago. Extremely talented guy. I think the images are stunning.

We did six posters. They all feature real people and real stories, save one. The child was a model. We couldn’t use a real kid for a message about child abuse.

The idea stems from the United Way positioning themselves as a barrier. They keep bad things away from good people. For that we used yellow police tape as a device. The ads were recently featured on adsoftheworld.com.

I’ve been meaning to post these posters for awhile. This is a campaign I did at work for a pro-bono account called The Family Book Project. They collect books and give them to underprivileged children and adults at shelters and rehabilitation centers here in Greenville County. Richard Salais, who was the art director on these, was great to work with. Talented guy. Chris Stanford was the photographer, guy out of Atlanta.

The idea for the campaign came from all these statistics we found about reading proficiency and social ills like teen pregnancy, homelessness, and crime. The posters awards won several local gold ADDY awards as well as a few gold district ADDY awards, including a Special Judges Award in their community service category.

Bill Bryson, in my opinion — for whatever that is worth — is the funniest writer in America. I’ve read several of his books now, and all them keep me laughing, sometimes out loud, which is a rare thing. Few books make me laugh at loud. And it’s over the simplest things, really. I distinctly remember laughing so hard at one point during In a Sunburned Country, Bryson’s travel book of Australila, that I was literally crying. The story was of how Bryson had fallen asleep in a car as a family drove him around some city in Australia, giving him a tour. That doesn’t sound like fertile comic soil, I know, but Bryson had me rolling, let me tell you.

His most recent book, a memoir of his growing up in the fifties in Des Moines, is no less hilarious; although this one is slightly more sentimental since Bryson is talking about personal experiences and those most near and dear to him. Turns out Bryson’s parents were both writers also, journalists for the Des Moines Register, a prominent paper in its day. His father was in fact one of the greatest sports writers of his time, according to Bryson, and I enjoyed those bits of the book in which Bryson recounted great moments in sports history that his father was privileged enough to witness and write about.

I also enjoyed those parts of the book that explained what life was like in the fifties, a time that’s obviously foreign to me. Before listening to this book, all I knew about the fifties was what I had learned by watching the movie A Christmas Story, that narrated, campy film from the eighties. So maybe that’s why, in some places, this book felt like A Christmas Story. The individual stories were different, of course, but in some instances the reader could have replaced Bill Bryson’s name for that of Ralphie, the title character of A Christmas Story. The two seemed almost identical: somewhat nerdy, obsessed with sex and comics, forced to eat gross food. Even the peripheral characters seemed the same. The stern, heartless teacher. The school bully. The scatter-brained mother. The father with eccentric behavior. It all felt very familiar.

But I didn’t mind. It had me fascinated throughout.

Bill Bryson read the book. Some people don’t like his reads, but I do. I’ve listened to several of his books this way, and I think it works very well. Bryson has such a dry wit and teddy bear of a voice that you can’t help but like the guy. He’s completely unintimidating. Like a cool college professor who you bump into at some coffee and who, over cups of hot chocolate, must tell you the all about the funniest thing that happened to him that morning. And because Bryson’s stories are always funny, you’re more than eager to pass the day, sitting at his feet.

And the man can write. He makes language seem so effortless, so breezy. I sit and listen in awe. Some of it, is brilliant. A kind of easy going conversational prose. I’ll try to imitate the best I can for the rest f my life, I assure you.

So get this book. Or better still, get the audiobook. Listening to it is like meeting Bryson in person and becoming the closest of friends. And he, with all those memories and experiences, is an entertaining friend, indeed.

16 Blocks has a brilliant premise, and when I saw the trailer I was so excited by it that I thought I might actually go out and see this movie at the theater. We go to the theater so rarely that this was high praise indeed. Lucky for me, I didn’t pay ten bucks to see it at the local multiplex. If I had, I would’ve have been extremely annoyed and perhaps even demanded a portion of my money returned.

16 Blocks stars Bruce Willis as an aging, creaky-kneed, alcoholic city cop who’s given the routine assignment of taking a criminal witness (Mos Def) from his prison cell to the city courthouse 16 blocks away to testify in a murder case. What neither Willis not Mos Def knows is that hit men have been hired to wax Mos Def in route and prevent him from ever reaching the witness stand. And that’s only beginning. Turns out there are dirty cops involved (naturally), and before we know it, Willis and Mos Def are runninng from the very people who should be protecting them.

With the exception of Mos Def’s nasaly voice, the first hour of this film is excellent. The scene in which the hit men strike while Willis is buying a bottle of booze is classic cop suspense. I loved it. And Lauren did as well.

But then, three quarters into the film, the situation becomes so implausibly stupid, that the entire movie pops like an over-inflated balloon. And what was so annoying about this gaping whole in the plot is that it could have easily been resolved. I mean, the answer was right there in front of us. Why the director and writer insisted on “the bus scene” (and you’ll know what I mean when you see it) still mystifies me. It was so utterly stupid and out of character that I actually laughed. Well, first I got angry; then I laughed.

After that, I couldn’t get back into the film. And the alternate ending, which thankfully wasn’t included in the film, was so headache-inducing stupid that I couldn’t understand why’d they’d even include it as an option on the DVD. It was like saying, Here, look how stupid we almost were.

Maybe they included it so we’d say, “Well at least they didn’t put THAT in the film.”

Which is too bad, really. Bruce Willis was great. This could have been a great movie throughout, but it wasn’t. It was a bummer.