Humor of the Day

Posted inHumor4 Comments on Humor of the Day

I must be in a good mood, because I’ve laughed pretty hard already this morning. I should be prepping for my speeches tomorrow in San Antonio, but instead I moved through my RSS reader and came across these gems of lines:

1. More evidence that kids today are soft:

The New York Times Magazines revisits the first episodes of Sesame Street, the packaging of which warns that the shows "may not suit the needs of today’s preschoolers." The writer discovers an abundance of "disturbing" content in early Sesame Street, such as one scene where "two brothers risk concussion while whaling on each other with allergenic feather pillows."

2. My friend Ross Carlson has a nice tech support rant on his blog. I worked with Ross (and got my ass kicked in guitar hero more than once) when I was living in Colorado with the Mobius gang. Money graf:

"Call Microsoft!" I exclaim, what the fuck for? "You built the machine, not Microsoft, they have no fucking clue what network card is in it!". She puts me on hold for 5+ minutes and comes back with the same answer, call Microsoft. Ok, clearly this isn’t going anywhere so I ask for a supervisior. Again hold. Again "sorry, they are busy, call Microsoft". I tell her no, that isn’t an acceptable answer, "I want a fucking supervisor and I want them right now".

All of us have dealt with non-English speaking reps before, and all of us have demanded supervisors. A few months ago, I told Earthlink I had filed a lawsuit against them in San Francisco small claims court, just to get somebody to do something for me. Tech support and travel horror stories are the ultimate bond among humans.

3. Texas Monthly has a piece on Jenna Bush and her new book, and it has some of the late night comedian lines on her:

Conan O’Brien: “Jenna’s written her book for children, which is a good thing. Now her dad will be able to read it too.” David Letterman: “It’s going to be an expensive wedding. I guess it’s no surprise the three-billion-dollar contract is going to Halliburton.” Jay Leno: “Jenna announced her engagement two weeks ago, although President Bush knew about it over a month ago from some wiretaps.”

OK – enough humor for today – time to pack my suitcase.

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Writers / Entrepreneurs Are Always Watching People

Posted inWriting6 Comments on Writers / Entrepreneurs Are Always Watching People

Someone smart told me this the other day:

“Writers are always watching people. In order to have output, we need to have input.”

I love people who observe their surroundings and try to make sense of it. I love people who load up on input (people, books, ideas) and then process it, analyze it.

A similar thing could be said about entrepreneurs: Entrepreneurs are always looking for problems. Always looking for things that can be done easier / cheaper / faster. They look at the world through the lens of improvement.

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Welcome new readers of this blog. You can learn about my book here. You can subscribe to this blog with this RSS feed. Here’s a welcome page with a list of “best of” blog posts. You can email me. Thanks for visiting.

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Colleges Recruiting Students for Chess

Posted inRandom3 Comments on Colleges Recruiting Students for Chess

I played competitive chess as a kid. It was a hobby to which I devoted a good deal of time — going to tournaments, reading books, re-playing my games. In the past year I’ve tried to re-ignite my passion. I read and loved David Shenk’s "The Immortal Game". I’m playing several correspondence games on RedHotPawn.com (email me if you want to play). And there are some talented players at Claremont who I am learning from.

But reading articles like, "Rah! Rah! Block That Rook!" in The American (a new and surprisingly interesting magazine), about colleges recruiting stand-out chess players like they recruit basketball players, reminds me how much more I would have to practice to even come close to playing for the vaunted University of Texas at Dallas chess team. Heck – UT-D offered chess prodigy Ray Robson a full scholarship when he was 10 years old. Wow.

Worth reading for any chess fan.

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Here’s a Portfolio article on Kasparov and whether life imitates chess.

Here’s one of my favorite chess quotes: "A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality."

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Links Around the Web

Posted inRandom3 Comments on Links Around the Web

Recent links of note:

* From the Department of Insanity in Higher Ed: "Brandeis is working hard to ensure that its faculty is properly sensitive and that its students are properly empowered to punish professors who they determine are not sensitive enough." Yes, sensitivity training for a professor who offended a student. Read it and weep.

* Bilingual America: More signs that schools are teaching students Spanish alongside English (NYT). David Shenk adds that bilingualism affords enormous cognitive benefits.

* The PayPal Mafia: A fun story on the powerhouse PayPal gang who have gone on to dominate Silicon Valley (Fortune). The success of their employees and corporate culture is just stunning and worthy of study for any entrepreneur.

* Teen sex and delinquency: The earlier you lose your virginity the less likely you are to become delinquent (WashPost). Early sex has a genetic basis, namely in one’s propensity to take risks. If you engage in early sexual behavior maybe you avoid other worse alternatives. Kids on average lose their virginity at age 16.

More than 3,500 bookmarks over on my del.icio.us page.

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How to Improve America’s Image

Posted inAmericanism2 Comments on How to Improve America’s Image

Fred Kaplan of Slate solicited over a hundred suggestions from readers (mostly Americans living abroad) on how to improve America’s image in the world. The ideas are good and interesting but not terribly surprising. I second the thought American personnel in U.S. customs or embassies need to be much friendlier. Excerpt:

And so the most prominent suggestion on how to improve America’s face in the world—a suggestion made by well over half of those who wrote me—is to send the world more American faces and to bring more of the world’s faces into America.

In other words, these readers say, there should be a vast expansion in the Peace Corps, in Fulbright fellowships, and, above all, in student-exchange programs.

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