WOES OF BEING A WRITER IN A RECESSION

Whenever anyone quotes anyone else, they usually do it to sell their point. But here's a quote from that feisty philosopher Bertrand Russell which almost anyone should be able to buy: "Every person, wherever they go, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with them like flies on a summer day....!"

Sometimes it's hard to cut through these clouds to see the world as others do. Because others are seeing that world through their own clouds. And so it is that in our intensively over-reported culture, we're often choked with more informational dots than we know how to connect.

And yet connections can be made be most writers if we try hard enough. Consider these five seemingly disparate dots of news --

* Rising oil prices have triggered the sharpest decline in driving since the invention of the automobile. Annual rates have fallen by 123 billion miles from their peaks [USA Today]
* The European airline Ryanair plans to offer cheaper standing-room tickets. Passengers will be buckled to a metal pole [La Figaro]
* In nations like Japan the demand for porno videos on mobile phones is so heavy it's leading to rationing during peak hours [Bloomberg.com]
* A Turkish TV station is promoting a new game featuring a priest, a rabbi, a Buddhist monk and an imam competing to convert each week's volunteer group of atheists [TV executive Seyhan Soylu]
* In Latvia, a credit company is offering small loans to cash-strapped customers with a clause pledging "my immortal soul" if they don't repay the loan [the Kontora Loan Company of Riga]
At first blush -- and these news stories do tend to make you blush a bit -- these five dots have nothing in common. However, there's always a serendipitous writer's line to be found connecting the dots under our mysterious heavens.Following a transcendetal-meditation meal at a local Himalayan restaurant, the connective lines grew clearer
In the first three dots, the global recession is obviously shifting customer habits to new alternatives in living styles. Which, in turn, is shifting Turks and Latvians to new alternatives in dying styles. The Turks and Latvians seem to be saying -- when things get bad down here, it's time to start thinking about up there.

Now maybe you wouldn't connect these dots this way, but then you didn't just have a seven-course Himalayan dinner.