After winning the lottery earlier today, I decided to buy something fun…
Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
Trends of the Times
More and more, front yards are filling with inflatable Christmas figures.
In the past year, it seems people are getting creative with the use of their figures in adverts and dioramas.
Examples below:
Business as usual
Sad news in the business world of motivational business — the death of Zig Ziglar.
I think I only saw Zig speak once, at a weekly sales training session for Southwestern Book Company in Nashville, TN, back in the summer of…1983? He and others we heard, such as Dave Dean and Og Mandino, encouraged us to think more of ourselves than we normally tend to think.
All of us have an internal conversation — a running commentary — in our thoughts. How we focus that conversation and the resultant feelings is what makes motivational speakers so popular.
We don’t know what squirrels knocking hickory nuts out of trees are thinking to themselves (“Gotta remember where that nut fell to the ground 100 feet below…and that nut…and that one…wait! Was that the shadow of a predatory bird? Ooh, that skin patch itches. Must scratch my back. Let’s see…which nut was I trying to track last? Hmm…”) but they probably don’t need a lot of motivation to stop negative thoughts in their heads (“Why bother gathering nuts? I’m just going to grow old and die, anyway!”).
My business hat off to Zig for giving the motivational industry a big boost in his heyday.
My hat’s off also to Eric Thelen at Southern Experience, Inc., whose “customer first” mentality gave my wife and me the opportunity to purchase wonderful pairs of 50-yard line seats for the last two Univ. of TN football games we attended, handling a refund for an accidental double-charge without blinking an eye.
Thanks to Paula at Walmart; Sean at Rite-Aid; Andrea and Miranda at Beauregard’s; Joe, Catherine, Jennifer and Harold at Kinesthetic Cue; and others whose names escape me at this moment.
More news as if my father was alive and reading this blog…
The newly elected leader summoned his opponent to the government palace for the sole purpose of subtly implying that the leader was going to issue an edict to eliminate all white males and impregnate all white females by nonwhite males as part of a package of royal/dictator executive orders if the leader didn’t get cooperation from his opponent’s political cronies, the majority of whom are white males.
Of course, the cronies willingly sacrificed the opponent, saying one white male was sufficient sacrifice to prove they weren’t backing down to subtle, covert or overt threats. The only sacrifice they are willing to make is reduction of touchy-feely public/government social programs like food stamps, contraceptives, and theoretical science education.
Everyone agreed that spreading rumours and innuendo was vital to clouding the facts that the largest nation-based economy wasn’t doing badly compared to poorer/more polluted areas of the world, even though the global economy doesn’t care about nations except when laws impede trade/profits.
More as it develops…
Due to climate change…
Due to climate change, Santa Claus has announced that his hideout at the North Pole, for the longest time resting on a solid base of ice, has been moved to an underwater facility, designed to resemble the Atlantis structure from the James Bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me. Don’t forget to buy the merchandise in time for Christmas gifts!!!
Film producers are working on the rights to the book, Waterworld 2, which documents the chase of Santa Claus by a gang called the Notorious Nefarious Nincompoops intent on getting their clutches into the Claus underwater fortress, saved at the last minute by an old warrior played by Kevin Costner along with his young sidekicks, played by unknown actors we’ll probably never hear from again, with a has-been starlet providing a thin plot as a love interest that makes no sense.
Let’s see…I need a place to hide my money
First, Do No More Harm Than Is Absolutely Necessary To Do No Harm
The men sat back in their leather chairs, cigar smoke gathering in layers below the ceiling.
“Boys, this is the way I see it. We gave the women the right to vote. A few decades later, we paid some kids to crash planes on 9/11. From my point of view, we’re right on schedule. Any objections?”
“Why are you so certain this will work?”
“Why? Because it always has. We enfranchise and disenfranchise various portions of the population to keep them off-guard and forever picketing city hall for the same rights they’ve lost and gained so many times they can’t remember.”
“If only this next one happened in my lifetime…”
“Anyone else with a question?”
“Yes. So let me get this straight. Your schedule shows us implementing Sharia law in Western countries within 100 years of 9/11/2001, thereby reinstating the role of men as supreme leaders…?”
“Uh-huh…”
“But it doesn’t bother you that our religion is pushed off to the side?”
“What do you mean?”
“Isn’t Sharia law the antithesis of ours?”
“How so?”
“Well, our religions are not exactly best friends…”
“Abrahamic, Ibrahamic, call it what you will. At the end of the day, it’s patriarchical and that’s all that matters to us men. Right, boys?!”
The yellow-orange glow of burning tobacco sticks bobbed up and down.
“Next item on the agenda — determining which families get first dibs on occupying the initial Martian colonies. Any suggestions?”
“Well, hadn’t we better make sure the women we send with those families are self-sufficient if need be but ultimately dependent on men?”
“Of course, of course. As you can see from the list I gave you, the men and women from which you will choose the best candidates have been sequestered into isolated subcultures for three generations, allowing us to control their thought patterns, dietary preferences and genetic tendencies with 99.99966 percent accuracy.”
“I don’t know. Six sigma sure leaves a lot of room for error. I’d feel a lot more secure if we had a 10-sigma process in place.”
“You get what you pay for. Gentlemen, anyone want to raise the stakes to ten sigma?”
“I’ll put a wager on seven.”
“Eight for me!”
“Okay, anyone for nine? No? Okay, going once, twice, sold! Eight sigma. By my calculations we need an additional half a billion dollars for seed money to get this started.”
“I’d still feel more comfortable with ten.”
“And if you can cough up 100 billion dollars, we’ll give you ten sigma.”
“Let me think about it…”
“Sure thing. We’ll table it until next week’s Committee meeting. Now, looking at the list, are there any objections to the list of potential candidates?”
Cross-Market Products That Don’t Work
In an era of cross-market products, where politicians should wear jackets showing their list of highest campaign donors to help us figure who’s buying the legislation being shoved down our throats sold to us as a bill of goods good for us, there are some products that shouldn’t reach the market.
Example below:
Thirty-one years ago…
Tired of turkey and dressing for dinner, my wife and I treated my mother to a supper of pizza a few days ago.
At the table next to us sat a family celebrating a child’s birthday.
After we ate, we spoke to the family and discovered they lived about 20 miles away from my wife and me in north Alabama.
Quite a coincidence, eating at the same restaurant 300 miles from home, it seemed.
Then, the grandmother at the table spoke up and said she recognised my mother who, as it turned out, had taught the 37-year old man with graying beard whose son’s birthday was sung by the pizza restaurant staff a few minutes before.
There we stood, watching a couple with a six-year young boy, recalling when the father was six 31 years before, under the tutelage of my mother.
On the ride home, my mother described what she remembered of the man when he was a boy — smart, skinny, shy — who is now an engineer working for our government’s military.
In our country, a popular phrase called “fiscal cliff” hangs in the air, with hints of government military cutbacks threatening to dampen celebrations of birthdays for little boys who depend on their parents’ government salaries to support local restaurants.
The “trickle down theory” is no longer popular but applies in many different ways, from the effect of a first grade teacher on a boy’s future to the effect of political wrangling on the income of restaurant workers.
The future is in our hands, which are the signs of the effects of the past.
Time is irrelevant. Action is everything.
13674
“We hit the major number today.”
“Aye.”
“Does it mean…?”
“Aye.”
“I see…”
“Aye.”
They continued up the mountain, distant valleys peaking between breaks in the trees.
They stopped at a signpost indicating the elevation. “Fourteen thousand feet. Finally!”
“Aye.”
She wiped her brow. “Sorry, that’s me sweat I wiped on ye, ain’t it?”
“Aye.”
She looked at her satellite phone, the signal strong enough to make a call.
“Allo?”
“Yes, it is 13674.”
“Already?”
The voice of a creaky old man standing beside her answered before she could. “Aye.”
She closed the connection on the phone.
“You always interrupt me, don’t ye?”
“Aye.”
She stared at the felt hand puppet, its face gray and gnarled, its body hidden in folds of brown fabric like an elderly monk.
She thought to herself. “They say I talk to myself out loud but I know better. I hear the spirits of others and repeat them like a squawking parrot, that’s all.”
“You’re just as alive as the rest of us, aren’t ye?”
“Aye.” The puppet didn’t blink an eye, never changing its expression, half scowl, half smile, as if the punchline of an untold joke was on the tip of its tongue.
She sat down on a rock, removed the puppet and placed it in a special sleeve of her backpack.
“Mister ‘Aye,’ it’s time I replace you with a new friend — the ‘Guru on the Mountaintop above the Clouds.'”
“Good afternoon, little lady, how are you this lovely cold day?”
She nodded back to the puppet. “Just fine. I have a few questions for you.”
“And I might have a few questions in response. What do you want to know?”
“Why is 13674 significant?”
“The real question, little lass, is, ‘Why is 13674 not significant?'”
She stood up from the rock, brushing pieces of lichen from her faded blue jeans.
Sighing, she continued hiking up the trail. “A few more thousand feet to go!”
A muffled voice spoke behind her. “Aye.”
treetrunkdings 