I’ve been helping my friend Taisir feed and care for a blog for his coffee shop. It’s a labor of love and I’m there every morning anyway. With help from Phil we got his domain in place.
In time, we hope to build an online community to compliment the one he has built with his customers.
It was in this spirit that I stopped by Our Ink Don’t Stink and got my first body art.
UPDATE: The website where the image above was created no longer exists. But I did find what appears to be the source image.
There. I said it.
Given what we all know about the waste, corruption, inefficiency and stupidity of the people that run our government… and what we don’t know… a big chunk of what we all pay in taxes every year goes down the shitter or into some politician-turned-lobbyist’s pocket.
Remember the story about the $8.8 billion dollars (360 tons of cash) shipped on palettes to Baghdad? Pissed away, stolen, unaccounted for. My money was on one of those palettes. Along with yours.
You bet I’d cheat on my taxes if I knew I could get away with it. But I wouldn’t think of it as cheating. Because I would do something good (for others) with the money. Yes, I think I can help more people than the nimrods in DC. All I lack is the larceny and the nerve.
When I came home for lunch yesterday, Barb was watching the Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). The original Johnny Weissmuller/Maureen O’Sullivan classic. I grew up on Tarzan movies. I came in on the scene where Jane and her father had been captured by pygmies who took them back to the village where they planned to drop them in a pit with a giant ape. This clip runs about 2:50.
If I could rent a time machine for just a few days, I’d go back to the filming of this movie, specifically to those breaks in filming when all the little people were standing around, waiting for their next scene. Everyone in costume with bones stuck in their pygmy wigs.
“Have you heard about this Wizard of Oz project? Word is they need a bunch of us to play Munchkins.”
“What the fuck is a munchkin?”
Viet Nam wasn’t going well. We needed more “boots on the ground,” so they re-instituted the draft on December 1, 1969 with a lottery. Low number, you’re on your way to Viet Nam. High number, you’re okay. My number was 213 (out of 365). The draft was frozen at 195 in December of 1970. I dropped out of law school the next day.
In 1968, we had 536,100 troops in Viet Nam (compared to our 140,000 in Iraq). If we had the draft today, the war in Iraq would be over by the Fourth of July.
Twitter pal Matthew is at a party, grooving on tunes from my era. (We need a term for drunk tweets. Dweets?) I’m flashing on music from my era, specifically, 1968:
Hey Jude, Beatles
The Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding
Sunshine of Your Love, Cream
Mrs. Robinson, Simon Garfunkle
Hello, I Love You, Doors
Born to Be Wild, Steppenwolf
Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Stones
You Keep Me Hangin’ On, Vanilla Fudge
White Room, Cream
Think, Aretha Franklin
Piece of My Heart, Big Brother and the Holding Company
Suzie Q., Creedence Clearwater Revival
Best thing about being 60? Being 20 in 1968.
The hopelessly clueless should avoid letting Seth Godin know:
“You can contact just about anyone you want. The only rule is you need to contact them personally, with respect, and do it months before you need their help! Contact them about them, not about you. Engage. Contribute. Question. Pay attention. Read. Interact.
Then, when you’ve earned the right to attention and respect, months and months later, sure, ask. It takes a lot of time and effort, which is why volume isn’t the answer for you, quality is.
That’s a great way to get a job, promote a site, make a friend, spread the word or just be a human.”
“The best time to look for a job next year is right now. The best time to plan for a sale in three years is right now. The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.” [Full post]
The only sales I’ve ever done was in the form of affiliate relations for our networks. Whenever a new GM took over at a radio station, I felt like the clock started ticking. My challenge was to meet, get to know and earn the trust of the new boss BEFORE I needed something from him/her. There’s just no shortcut to building trust.
Qwitter lets you keep track of how many cigarettes you smoke each day; keep a journal of your thoughts an feelings (“I’d KILL for goddamn cigarette!”); view your progress and follow and support other fiends.
All kidding aside, I can see how this might actually work. If I tweet, “It’s three o’clock and I have not smoked all day” …and my friends George sees that, it might help him hang on.
I could see this working for any number of support groups. “I’ve lost 5 pounds this week and had 3 Ritz crackers for lunch.”
Famed as the “World’s Most Dangerous Hike”, El Caminito Del Rey (The King’s Little Pathway) is a one-meter wide walkway traversing a gorge, over 100 meters above the torrents below. Malaga, Spain. Another (more recent) video.
“I don’t know how many nukes the United States has pointed toward China, but one would be too many. China isn’t going to attack its biggest customer. And in the unlikely event that some other country attacks China, we’d offer military assistance in a heartbeat. There’s too much money at stake on both sides.”