Recession: Not necessarily a bad thing

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Michael S. Hyatt has compiled a list of ten benefits of the current recession:

   1. It causes you to get more creative.
   2. It forces you to make the tough decisions.
   3. It thins out the competition.
   4. It makes you realize you can’t take anything for granted.
   5. It reminds you that real wealth isn’t about the stuff you own.
   6. It fosters out-of-the-box thinking.
   7. It makes it easier to abandon business-as-usual.
   8. It brings you back to the basics.
   9. It accelerates change.
  10. It causes you to be less wasteful.

"While you may not be able to control what happens with the economy, you can control your own mental focus. Usually, this determines whether you feel anxiety and fear or peace and hope."

National Socialist Movement (Nazis)

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A  rag-tag group calling themselves the National Socialist Movement were in town last weekend. Missourinet reporter Steve Walsh covered the brief march and rally on the steps of the State Capitol. This is my favorite photo from those he snapped.

Are the two young girls at the lectern singing? Perhaps America the Beautiful? Or some German beer hall song? Could they be making a speech? ("What the Neo-Nazi movement means to my junior high class")

How fucked up will the little boy (seated) be as he gets older. Mom thinks she’s doing him a favor, teaching him to hate.

Some are holding their hands over their hearts, others giving the old Heil Hitler stiff arm. But, shit, there was no time to rehearse and it was cold and… fuck it, we’ll just look tough in our SWAT gear.

Twitter: 140 characters, 0 thought and effort

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TwitterlogoI haven’t said much about Twitter of late. In part because it’s just too exhausting trying to explain it. But I’m relying on it more and more. It’s the one social networking tool that seems to work for me.

smays.com (the blog) is where I think (a little) about what I want to say before I post it. http://twitter.com/smaysdotcom is where I poop out 140 characters without using any neurons whatsoever. It’s so easy, in fact, I’ve have twittered almost 2,000 times.

Increasingly, Twitter is how I keep up with many of my online pals. If you decide to give Twitter a try, let me know. But please don’t ask me to explain it or justify my interest in this tool. I wouldn’t know where to begin.

If you don’t have time or inclination to blog, you might consider giving Twitter a try. Do it for a week. If you’re a regular reader of smays.com, follow my Twitter feed for that week instead.

The Tribal Fez

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Seth Godin defines a "tribe" as: "a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate."

One my favorite tribes is The Order of the Fez. A short bus full men who like to wear fezzes. We communicate via blog and email. The notion of a "leader" is somewhat antithetical to fezorocity (our defining Force), but since I maintain the blog I perform that role as needed. More of a recording secretary.

This weekend two of our members sent a music video that nicely captures what the OOTF is about.

Study Shows Wide Benefit From Statins

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Back when Henry was my doctor, he put me on a cholesterol-lowering drug. My level wasn’t all that high but he believed there were significant benefits from getting  it as low as possible and had read of other benefits.

From a story in the New York Times: "A large new study suggests that millions more people could benefit from taking the cholesterol-lowering drugs known as statins, even if they have low cholesterol, because the drugs can significantly lower their risk of heart attacks, strokes and death." And, "…half of heart attacks and strokes occur in people without high cholesterol."

So, along with my fish oil and vitamin C, I take a little blue statin pill every morning. The cost is about $4.00 a month.

Newsroom change

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I only snapped one photo of Bob Priddy in action on election night. Through studio glass (you can see my reflection in this larger image) with producer John Simms in the background. MacBook Pro and video camera are streaming live video to Ustream. Big screen TV’s on the walls, high-speed connection to the Secretary of State’s website with up-to-the-minute returns.

When I joined the company in 1984, Bob was still writing stories on this manual Royal typewriter (below). Audio was captured on reel-to-reel tape recorders and “dubbed” to analog carts. We had a UPI printer spewing out the news (on long rolls of paper), and election returns were phoned in by a reporter sitting in the Secretary of State’s office.

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Can’t imagine what we’ll have in four years. Bob Priddy’s memory of those days is better than mine:

“Actually, we were using cassettes, not R2R in ’84. We relied on UPI for election returns with reporters at various gatherings of candidates. We didn’t put anybody in the SOS office until the Presidential primary of ’88, after studying what AP and UPI did in the 86 general election.”

Found pup

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Founddog450While waiting for George to join us for our Saturday morning gab-fest at the Coffee Zone, Tom and I saw a small dog run into the street. Lots of traffic and the dog seemed to have not street-smarts. Just ran down the middle to busy intersection.

I went out to try to help get her out of the street and succeded with the old pretend-you-have-a-treat-in-your-hand trick. When I picked her up she was frantic for a bit but calmed down. I took her into the Coffee Zone thinking the owner might come looking. Didn’t happen so George drove us to the shelter. Turns out she had been picked up a week ago and returned to owners.

Who apparently let her get out again. A scan of her chip confirmed and the owners were called again. I didn’t know dogs could have blue eyes.