It’s worth a trip to Cincinatti just to visit Jungle Jim’s International Market. It’s a stimulating experience with a surprise on every aisle. You know you’re in for a treat when you find a place where someone cared enough about your happiness to install Port-a-potty doors as portals to the restrooms.
You can tell when someone is smiling by the change in tone in their voice. When we smile our cheeks are pulled back, reducing the size of the mouth cavity, thereby raising the pitch of vocal track resonances. Once I get a little free time I think it might be a good idea to analyze this shift in spectrum and design a “smiling” filter setting for audio mastering, to make music smile.
The Acoustic Origin of the Smile, by John Ohala.
Mission in a Bottleby Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff, co-founders of Honest Tea. This is another in a series of very interesting books I learned about by listening to Dan Pink’s interviews in his podcast “Office Hours” series. Dan puts it well: “Seth and Barry have crafted a rich and compelling story and told it with the perfect blend of inspiration and humility. For anybody who has started a business—especially those considering an entrepreneurial path Mission in a Bottle is a must read.”
One of the many cool things about the book is it is written in comic book form.
I enjoyed a recent episode of the “This American Life” podcast, about who is in the tribe and who isn’t Here’s a bit of the transcript, where the author of The World Until Yesterday describes how meeting new people is a new phenomenon created by modern societies.
Jared Diamond: “The idea that you could just wander around and meet someone is utterly impossible in New Guinea. If you ran across a strange person on your land, that could only mean that they were there for some bad reason. They were there to scout out your land for a raid, or to steal a woman, or to steal a pig.
And so if you ran into a strange person in the forest and you couldn’t run away from him, you came around a corner and there he was, then the two of you would sit down. And you’d have a long conversation in which each of you names all your relatives, trying to find some relative in common which gives you a reason not to kill each other. And if after two hours you haven’t found any relative in common, then one of you starts running or you try to kill the other person.”
So next time you meet someone, realize it’s in your genes to find common ground with them. Sit down and find out what you have in common before you go any further. If that fails, I suggest that you take off running before they try to kill you!
I was in CVS Pharmacy picking up my meds and saw these two signs. I couldn’t shake them from my memory and had to go back another day to snap pictures. The way the exit sign is labelled makes me wonder, is it an exit, or not an exit?
What interested me most, though, was whether I could really get my money back if I buy a beauty product and it doesn’t actually make me beautiful.
Has anyone ever tried to get their money back? If you've done it, please let me know how it turned out.
Forget about vanity license plates. Get yourself a vanity car!
How about this? It would work best on a car that has the license plate pretty flush to the back of the car, no deep recession, and if the color is the same color as the background of the license plate. For example, you have a white license plate with black lettering, and a white car. Then you could carefully paint in the same font and size as the letters of the vanity plate, but with a whole phrase, where the license is just part of it, like:
with “I’d rather b” painted to the left of the the plate, and “g the piano.” on the right, and the plate itself saying E PLAYIN. To make it maximally cool, the plate itself shouldn’t make sense. Please send a photo if you do this!
The Wizard of Oz is a perennial favorite, sentimental, inspiring, and cherished for its simple truths. Going a little deeper, others have uncovered themes in the story revealing a political allegory. What interests me is what happened after the movie ended, following the clues that the story was not going to end happily ever after.
Dorothy and Toto later in life
Just watched “Veducated” on Amazon Prime streaming video, which gently makes the case that a meat/dairy diet is unsustainable in light of the world’s growing population, and cruel to animals. “Part sociological experiment and part adventure comedy, Vegucated follows three meat- and cheese-loving New Yorkers who agree to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks. Lured by tales of weight lost and health regained, they begin to uncover the hidden sides of animal agriculture that make them wonder whether solutions offered in films like Food, Inc. go far enough. This entertaining documentary showcases the rapid and at times comedic evolution of three people who discover they can change the world one bite at a time.”
Authorities are investigating an apparent hacking of the Emergency Broadcast System. Those watching Public TV 13 Monday afternoon or the Bachelor on ABC Monday night may have seen a message come across the screen saying “Local authorities in your area have reported the bodies of the dead are rising from their graves and attacking the living,” the message warned. “Do not attempt to approach or apprehend these bodies as they are considered extremely dangerous.”
Sometimes you get an invitation from someone, but you’re just not up to it, but want to let them down easy. You might want to have a few of these ready just in case necessity arrises. If you know of others, please respond.