Making the paper

The Deseret News told me that they are going to give me a regular column in print. It will run everyother week but they'd like me to submit something every week even though some of those posts will probably just go on line. This is a very good think. I think I'm going to put a link to my blog in my next column, so if all of you would please clean up the place, that would be nice. I'm hoping we'll get company.

I just wrote one today about the movie "Inception" and dreams. I don't think that will be the one they run tomorrow, for two reasons. I haven't actually sent it to them and I'm hoping they'll run my Christmas miracle column.

It looks like I'm going to have a regular column in the Deseret News. They haven't decided where they'll put it but it will probably be online. They ran my first one on Nov. 23 and it drew more than 5,000 hits. This is a good thing. I'm hoping I can move to Maui by my wife's birthday in February. I'll need to get famous, however, to do so. I'm doing the blogging, facebook and twitter stuff in hopes of getting people to go to the story and click on it. I just need to save up enough money right now so that I can go to Maui. Here's a link to the website: http://bit.ly/g7TIuV.

Have a happy Thanksgiving and stuff.

Business Week

Is there anyone still out there?

If so, I'd like to encourage you to follow the Jon M. Huntsman School of Business blog. We are blogging about Business Week this week and for those of you who have been searching for a blog about Business Week, this is the one you should read. We have lots of bloggers who are wicked excited and they use exclamation points and all sorts of stuff. I hope you have time to check it ou.

It’s possible I’m having some trouble with the concept of blogging in that I’m guessing that if you have a blog, you should actually blog. I have some good excuses for my lack of updates.

I have this thing called a job. They want me to work everyday, everyday and everyday. Sometimes my head hurts and – guess what – they still want me to work.

Since I blogged last my world has been filled with two giant projects. Like Rush Limbaugh at a poetry reading, I’ve had trouble ignoring these projects and pretending I’m having a normal life.

The first thing I’ve been trying to do is “kill the beast.” I am supposed to write and edit a grown-up magazine I call “the beast.” I call it the beast because it stalks me, makes my life a living nightmare and never is completely finished. Just when I think it is done, someone comes by with new ideas to improve it. This is all complicated by the fact that I have to do humorless writing in the beast that includes sentences with subjects and verbs and commas in the right places.

The other night I dreamt that 95 percent of the students and faculty at USU had turned into flesh-eating zombies. While I was a little concerned about the prospect of having someone attack me while walking across campus, I was mostly peeved that I’d have to rearrange the magazine again to make room for a story about the zombie outbreak. I was also afraid of offending the administrators and alumni who were already zombies.

And that’s just what my life has been like if I can sleep.

The other big development is that Stephen Covey has come into my life. He didn’t come in the form of new insights from one of his many books, as he always has in the past. He accepted our invitation to become a professor at the Huntsman School of Business, which was a big deal that required a big announcement. Whenever PR people do a big announcement, they create all these materials and then send them around to each other making changes in them until minutes before the big event begins. We prepare large press packets, chock full of approved verbiage, for the press and feel quite good about ourselves if they don’t throw them away before they leave the event.

I also got a chance to interview Dr. Covey in his home, which to me was a wondrous and frightening thing. It turns out he has a real life with nine kids and 51 grandchildren and he loves them way more than anything else. He’s all centered on the right things, which means that he has no problem meeting presidents and all sorts of important people who, it turns out, all want to meet him.

I managed to spend an hour and a half with him at his home and afterward he still wanted to be associated with our business school.

Excuse me, do I get any credit for acting like a grownup for so long? No.

A little bit of me leaked out during the encounter. I told him the story of me trying to take credit for the name of his famous book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I have said that back in the olden days when I was at BYU and he was my professor, he came to me with the proposed name of a book, Two Things You Should Never Do. I have tried to convince some people on his staff that I was the one who gently suggested that he call his book, instead, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Dr. Covey laughed at my alternative universe story, which is a good thing.

Dr. Covey has quite the sense of humor and a laugh that is truly infectious. He’s also a practical joker. I’ve put some stories about this side of him in my magazine but they may not be in there when the magazine is eventually printed. Magazines like this have to be reviewed, filtered and analyzed by a lot of people. Humor just sort of leaks out in the process like a cup with a hole in it on the side that sprays your shirt without you noticing it. Not that that has ever happened to me.

The remarkable thing about all of this is that while I did this I continued to push ahead in my Biggest Loser contest and when it finally came to an end last week I was still not the biggest loser at USU. I took second place overall. I have lost 34.4 pounds. For those of you unfamiliar with weight loss, 34.4 pounds is past 30 pounds and 30 pounds is the average weight of what I used to eat on a Friday night. I have been trying to lose 30 pounds since I was two months old and learned, through the use of colorful charts my parents held over my broken bed, that I was overweight.

I’m going to keep losing weight until I am no longer a fat guy and then I’m going to continue until I become a small tiny guy, like a plastic army-man guy and I’m going to go on Jay Leno or get a part in “Toy Story V.” I’m also going to kill the beast and, I suspect, I will soon become best friends with Dr. Covey. I have offered to let him use my office and the hope that he’ll take me up on the offer has given me a new reason to come to work.

I’d get all tired and discouraged and he’d say, “Be proactive!” and “Synergize!” and I would and we’d become such good friends.

(Cut to scene with Dr. Stephen Covey and Not-Doctor Steve Eaton running down the beach, laughing, in slow motion. A huge wave hits and my small plastic body washes away as my tiny voice screams out, “Save me! Save me!” And of course he does just seconds before the staggering zombies arrive and …)

Okay, okay, I’m still dreaming. Laugh if you must but when you see the international best-seller, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Beast Killers in your local bookstore; look for my picture on the cover. I’ll be the tiny one in green and the only one holding a plastic rifle.

I'm not the biggest loser on campus

Note to readers: I have some good news and bad news for those of you who used to read my columns. The bad news is that when you write a blog, it turns out, there are no limits on the length of the column you write. These columns could be longer than what you are used to. The good news is that they won’t be going through an editor, which means there will be more typos in them than usual. I know how much we all enjoy finding typos in published material.

I am not the Biggest Loser on USU campus. There are a number of people who would argue with that statement but they shouldn’t waste their breath. I can prove them wrong.

Just over two weeks ago I entered USU’s Biggest Loser contest. It’s exactly like the one on TV except that you win free socks instead of $250,000 and at the end of the contest you don’t get to rip up a giant picture of you when you were fat. Actually, there are more differences.

This one is run by wise, skinny, healthy people who believe that you should not lose more than two pounds a week and that you should make “lifestyle changes,” which is code for, “No more eating out of buckets.” And they do have some nice prizes like free meals on campus if you don't say the word mayonnaise and stuff like that that nice people have donated to help us out.

Last Thursday they announced our rankings after the first week and I was in second place, which means that I lost some weight and did what they told me to do. You get more points for being obedient than you do for losing weight.

We have classes where imported wise healthy people talk very slow to us, trying to help us understand that food that tastes good is bad and that weight lifting must be slow and painful if it is to be done correctly. We all know these things but we take careful notes and do our best because we want to be skinny people too.

I have thought of challenging them on key things they teach us that just don’t make sense but when you weigh roughly the same as a Volkswagen bug, it’s hard to effectively win such an argument.

I now have a nutritionist who is helping me change my ways. She is the most amazing listener that I have ever met and very good at her job. She has, however, lost touch with some of the basic joys of life.

For example, here was something that was a part of her PowerPoint presentation one night. I’ll test you with it. She put a picture of an advertisement on the screen. A pizza place was offering a large pizza, four cookies, bread sticks and two litters of Pepsi for $14.99.

Quick. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Of course, it’s a good thing. It’s a joyous thing. Turns out, she said it is an evil thing, in fact it is a package deal full of evil. She was so outraged by it that I think she wanted us to storm the pizza place to demand the ad be rescinded. I finally asked her to remove the visual aid, a request she probably interpreted as evidence that we could no longer bear to see such advertising filth. I didn’t look around but I’m guessing there were other members of the group trembling, clutching their little water bottles and crying just like me.

The most difficult change of all the things she has asked me to do is to no longer eat while I’m watching TV or reading the newspaper. This is a change that just feels unbelievably wrong. I feel like a Republican at a soup kitchen or a Democrat on a budget. I’m grumpy. When I’m eating, sometimes I just start talking to family members who are around, which upsets and confuses them, driving them from the room. And other times I’m forced to just sit and think while I eat. I think about important things like, what would happen if the characters from Lost suddenly came across the characters from Gilligan’s Island?

I paid to be a part of this program and they have connected me with a trainer who makes me do the strangest, most humiliating, painful exercises I have ever done. I like him, in part, because I think he time traveled from the 60’s and has long hair and a beard. He also laughs a lot, encourages me and never calls me names. I do fear the laughing part may be sparked by the fact that it seems likely many of the exercises he has me do are only for the entertainment of the other trainers in the gym. For example, there’s one he calls the “fire hydrant” and I don’t think I’m the fire hydrant in the drill.

They also had us work out once with the Army ROTC guys. They were surprisingly kind for military types and they never shouted at us or made us do push ups while they were spraying us with a hose. We worked out at an indoor track and I was concerned that people would think that the Army was so hard-up for recruits that we had all been accepted into the program. I mentioned this to one of them and he said, “We’d be proud to have you in the Army.”

Wasn’t that nice?

I found out that these guys work hard in college exercising, studying and stuff only to graduate and go overseas into life-threatening, scary situations. It made me want there to be fewer life-threatening, scary situations in the world.

They invited us to work out with them every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. and I have several times planned to go but, it turns out, 6 a.m. is very early in the morning. My hope was that I could go, work hard and earn their trust and then teach them things that would help them. For example, they do lots of exercises that are very painful and when they count, they count wrong. For example, four push ups equals just one push up. This was a problem I picked up on right away because my push up count, which is not high, was even worse in the military world.

I woke up this morning with a number firmly fixed in my head: 12.6. When you haven’t stayed on a diet for more than two hours or consistently lost weight in years and suddenly you start making progress, you become quite fixated on the amount of weight you have lost. Today if someone asks me my name there’s a very real possibility I’ll say that I’m, “12.6.”

Today I’m at the 12.6-pound mark. This is something I can’t stop myself from telling people. I can work it into any conversation and I know I should just keep it to myself because people look at me like I’m a Volkswagen that thinks it is a Porsche because it lost a hubcap. It’s not much but I’ve noticed that my shirts don’t rip if I laugh and the car has stopped scraping the pavement when I turn to the left.

I’ll try not to make my blog about the weight loss thing all the time but sometimes there are victories I have to share and my understanding is that blogs are for people who want to pretend they are sharing with others. That’s me. Today I want to share the fact that I’m not the Biggest Loser on the USU campus, but I hope that soon I will be.

New stuff is coming this week. I promise. My attorney said that I should assume a low profile until the district attorney decides if he is going to press charges. I'm not worried so far about any of my "followers" turning me in. I look at the 15 followers I have now and I think at least 12 of them have records themselves and at least one of them is now being sought by police.

Tomorrow I'm planning on working out with the Army ROTC. I've joined a contest at USU called "I'm the biggest fat loser in the world contest." I paid money to do this. I've seen how this turns out on TV. You win $250,000 and you get to rip up a picture of yourself when you were fat. This sounds very good to me.

I already did a mini Army ROTC boot camp for losers last week. I'll tell you about that later.

Can any of you out there tell me what happens when I do a post? Do you automatically get an update? I'm concerned that if I blog too often this will become like twitter on steroids for all of you.

I plan to post some old columns on my new blog site because it is a very effective way of making words appear here without me doing any work. I have about four years of columns to chose from but I stumbled across this one. I think it is significant because it was written in early 2008 and it shows that I came up with the idea of the government giving money away almost a full year before Congress did.

If I ever regain my sense of humor, I'll start posting some brand new stuff here. Right now I'm just focused on raising $25.

If we played the game my way, we’d all win at Monopoly

STEVE EATON

Published: January 27th, 2008 01:00 AM

I think the problem I am having with life is that there is no Free Parking. I used to rule the world in Monopoly. We didn’t play by the actual rules. Our rules were better. At least everyone felt that way until my smarty-pants son, Jackson, went out into the world and came back with a whole new fun-sapping view of the game.

He said that when other people play Monopoly, they don’t put any money in Free Parking. Nothing. We used to put everything we paid into the middle of the board and that pile-o’-cash would go to whoever landed on Free Parking.

This, of course, could change the direction of a game just like a fire hose could change the direction of a paper airplane in flight. It allowed me to play recklessly. I would invest everything I owned in houses and hotels, and we had no limits as to the numbers of them you could build. We used Legos for hotels and built skyscrapers.

It was a joyous lifestyle and I nearly always won because other family members would approach the game in a grown-up, responsible way and try to save their money. I would come barreling through like Godzilla in New York and get my way with everything.

Jackson came back from the outside world and insisted we play by the real rules. Suddenly the game I used to play to escape from my life, was a lot like real life. I realized I’d have to save my money or I’d be rudely ejected from the game. It was like discussing the need for dental work while on vacation. It sucked the joy right out of the game. With my son’s new rules, I had no hope.

That’s when I realized that that’s what I’ve been missing in my life – Free Parking. In Monopoly there are usually some players who get lucky and land on lots of stuff. They get Monopolies and season tickets to the Seahawks. There’s always one player, however, who gets Water Works and Baltic Avenue and that’s it. The rest of his life is spent traveling about the board hoping that he’ll will soon be thrown in jail or win second prize in a beauty contest.

That’s pretty much what’s happened to me, except that I have no hope of winning second prize in a beauty contest. Sure, I’ve got Baltic Avenue and Water Works, but in this game I’m just doomed to wander through life as an old metal shoe unloved by anyone except the presidential candidates who can feel my pain. No one ever knocks on my door and says, “Hey buddy, I just landed on your property and you’ve got a house, so here’s 200 bucks.”

I think we need a national Free Parking. There should be some hard cash method of collecting money and throwing it in a silo somewhere. This is not the kind of thing that could be done electronically. It would have to be a system built around piles and piles of real cash. So much cash that if you hit Free Parking you’d have to get a wheelbarrow to haul it away.

Everyone would have a crack at it and when they hit it, well, they’d end up putting the money right back into Free Parking because they’d be the ones buying the season tickets and pizza for everyone. There’d be no need to worry about running out of money. There’d always be the hope that you could hit Free Parking again.

Just think about it. If you woke up tomorrow and had the hope that maybe, just maybe, you’d roll a 10 and hit Free Parking, wouldn’t that give you a tiny bit of incentive to get out of bed?
Now I know some of you are saying this is nothing more than a lottery. No, it’s not. No one ever really hits the lottery. Who do you know personally who has won the lottery? No one. With a Free Parking system lots of people would be striking it rich.

“Honey, I’m home,” I’d say. “I hit Free Parking again today and quit my job.”

“That’s nice,” my wife would say. “Leave the wheelbarrow outside this time, please.”

The real problem here, of course, is that this game is already under way and the players with all the property are not going to like changing the rules. They’d be happy paying someone to go down to Free Parking to haul back the cash for them, but they’d get quite cranky if they saw one of us poor shoe people walking away with cash falling from our pockets.

Still, we should make the move now because we have the presidential candidates on our side. They know what real Americans want. Think about it: If just one candidate came up with a Free Parking proposal, the news people would make fun of him or her on the news that night and then, suddenly, the next day … oh, we’d have a real front-runner.

The people with the Monopolies will laugh but they forget how many poor shoe people are out there. They forget who is paying the rent. The first thing they’ll notice is all the cheerful people walking about. Next, they’ll notice a giganto hotel on Baltic Avenue. By then it will be too late. You and I will have bought all the wheelbarrows. It will be a whole new game.

I need $25 fast

This is my first post on the Flaming Pandas blog site. Sterling Morris, a student at USU who knows stuff, showed me how to do this.

Eventually I will post some of my old columns and some new columns here. Google will place ads along side of my postings based on my content. So, I would suspect my first ads will be targeted at people who like to set animals on fire.

I guess I should be careful about what I post. If I talk about Obama, I'll get liberal ads and if I talk about Rush, I'll get conservative ads. I wonder what I'll get if I mention Bozo the Clown or miracle leaders. Probably the same thing I'll get from Obama and Rush. Notice how clever I was in that reference. Republicans will read it in one way and Democrats in the other way. Although I'm guessing Republicans will be suspicious and decide to be offended. It looks like I'm about to get all political ads.

The reason I'm finally doing this after putting it off for a full year, is that today I need to raise at least $25 for a new wrist watch I want to buy. I really have to buy it. It's calling out to me and many of my other wrist watches don't work anymore because the batteries are dead. When I used to have a column in the Herald Journal and the News Tribune I would get tons of money each month. I was rich.

I want to be rich again - starting today.