Life as a Fruit Tree

My mother found the top picture of me at age 25 and gave it to me this Christmas. I was astounded at my son's likeness to me; that's him in the lower picture at age 22.

As Michael Jackson Once Said.......

............Chummone

I Must Be A Twit

..........if that's what you call someone who can't figure out Twitter. I'm just Tweetarded I guess.

I'm Thinking of Going Hiking

My buddy Mark says he knows some good spots for hiking. I wonder if my family will miss me while I'm out communing with nature?

Entreprenerds

How geeks make money.

Climax is NOT Just a City in Michigan

The Today Show had a story this morning about a Belfast Medical team that had developed a treatment for men who suffer from premature climax. It was an interesting story and the evidence shows that the treatment has, and will, help countless couples, but I don't believe that men "suffer" from this condition. I think the women in their lives suffer, not them.

Business Finance 101

Companies measure their potential for growth by evaluating their Earnings to Assets (E/A) ratio. This ratio gives them a measure of how much of the money they spend on expansion comes from their profits or from borrowing. Growth cannot be sustained with excessive borrowing so the higher this value is, the better.

Also, nearly every corporation in the world touts that their employees are their biggest asset. With this in mind let's examine ways to improve E/A ratios. If earnings are driven by the market and the market is down, what would a company have to do to increase its E/A? You do the math.

Adventure Vacations

A lot of news shows like to showcase what we fondly call "adventure vacations", where people get some restorative benefit by risking their lives involved in dangerous activities. Today on Weeked Today I saw a story about a company that sells week long vacations where you "swim with sharks". In good journalistic style they tempered the positive aspects of this activity by reporting about a guy who bled to death after being bit. Personally, driving to work everyday is dangerous enough for me.

There are any number of other adventure vacations people can have that involve some verb performed with some noun. A short list might be climbing with Sherpas or hiking with snow shoes or skydiving with instructor or jumping with bungee or hunting with shotguns (Dick Cheney). This year I've decided to take adventure vacation. I think I'll run with scissors.

Chillanthropologist

Young people today..............they have a knack for making descriptive words by combining two or more words. Like my sons and I were sitting around chillaxing at our hotel on our first night in NYC. I particularly like combining the word chill with other words and fancy myself to be a chillanthropologist; a person who studies how people chill. If you think about it, the chillanthropology profession has been around a long time. In my day we called them gurus.

Hershey's Squirts

The weather was nice this past weekend. It was warmer than it has been in a long time. It's probably safe to say that the hot chocolate season has ended, which makes me think of how I make hot chocolate and how I might describe it.

Big Cities

Now that I've had the NYC experience it's nice to reflect on that experience and compare it to others I've had. I've been to a number of big cities in my lifetime. The list includes London, Chicago and LA, but the only city with a similar crush of people that I've visited is Mexico City. Driving in either city is not for the timid and even if you are brave enough to drive, there's no place to park once you've arrived.

The traffic is very similar in both cities except there are no people wandering in the streets of NYC selling soft drinks and snacks to hapless drivers stranded in the crawl. I do believe there are more people in NYC who speak Spanish as a first language, though.

Happy Birthday Greg

Greg and I went to see the Weekend Today Show yesterday on our last day in NYC. It was his birthday. Coincidentally it was Lester Holt's birthday too. What a thrill for Greg to get happy birthday wishes from Mr. Holt on national television. He told me after the show that he'll "have bragging rights at school tomorrow".

We stuck around long enough to get a mug shot with Peter Alexander, who was at the news desk that day. The crowd on the plaza quickly thins once the "Big Names" go inside. That concept wasn't lost on Pete since he had to introduce himself to us by name before we got the snap shot. A good time was had by all.

Good 'Ol What's His Name

Me and my boys are in NYC today. The older one, Joe, has an interview at a medical college named after a famous guy with bushy gray hair and eyebrows and mustache that match. I've got it narrowed down to two potential names. I hope my Garmin can find the right one so we won't be late.

Miracle on the Hudson

Cities in New York

I'm going to New York City this week and it made me think about cities in general and the people who live in them. New York is an "er" city where the people who live there are New Yorkers. Other "er" cities would be Detroit, Berlin, London and Cleveland.

Other cities are "ian" or "an" cities. Paris is an example where the people are called Parisians. Others that come to mind are Philadelphia, Chicago, Rome, Atlanta and scores of others.

What do you call the people from Coxsackie?

Mushrooms

To most of us mushrooms are a fleshy, spore-bearing fungus that humans use for a variety of reasons, mostly as food. Besides the obvious images we have of mushrooms as foods, medicines, dyes and psychotropic agents, mushrooms can inspire other images.

Shiitake can be for folks who don't take shii from anyone. If I have Portobello on my pizza I'll get a portly belly. In Germany you can order dinners with either Pilz or Champignon; who wants to swallow some bitter pilz when they can have the Breakfast of Champignons.

The Dating Scene

Just for grins I went cruising on eHarmony to check out the available ladies on the market in Kabul. These girls were looking for a Sheik or Imam with a little extra room in the tent for some free spirited fun loving companions. These girls like hiking, camping and occasionally hunting or other outdoor activities like laundry and raising children. They love warm summer nights and long walks on the beach.

Oldest Footprint

AOL dot com ran a cover news story yesterday titled "Oldest Human Footprints Found". It had the photo above next to the headline. It grabbed my attention and I thought I'd be reading a fascinating story about a human footstep that was dated at about 1.5 million years. Come to find out that the real story was about a 140 year old guy from a nursing home in New Jersey who had wondered off in a demented state. The authorities were able to find him by following his footprints in the mud outside the nursing home.

Well, Governor

There are a few pundits out there these days that are speculating that the Governor of Louisiana wants to run for president of the United States of America. He would then join the ranks of other nicknamed presidents like, George "The Father of His Country" Washington, Thomas "The Sage of Monticello" Jefferson, Abraham "Honest Abe" Lincoln, Richard "Tricky Dick" Nixon, Bill "Slick Willy" Clinton and George "Dubya" Bush. What would be a good nickname for our friend, the governor? Bobby "Catfish" Jindal has a nice ring. I wonder what Jim Hunter would say about that?

Winners at the Golf Outing

Company golf outings are a great place to meet and socialize with your colleagues, especially if you work out of the office at a customer location. It's pretty hard to impress your bosses if they never see you. Actually, you can be more productive without meddling from the boss, which is a good thing, but that's another story. I went to my company's golf outing last summer so as not to be completely invisible and possibly score some points in case there is a need to choose new sides in the proverbial corporate baseball game.

The event was a round of scramble golf with adult beverages and snacks at strategic points along the course followed by a lunch, management doublespeak and door prizes. This was the event where I got to break bread with my new Gymboree buddies, Jim and Russ. The day was hot and eighteen holes of golf had taken their toll on me. By the time I had a couple beers and a bite to eat, I was practically sleeping sitting up. Not to miss out on the prizes, I gave my ticket to one of the guys at my table and asked him to collect my prize, should my number come up. It was a long drive home.

I had almost forgotten that I was in the running for a door prize until my friend called me to tell me that I had won a Detroit Redwings T-shirt. I had seen the shirt on the prize table and thought to myself that it was better than a sharp stick in the eye. He would come down and drop it off to me later in the week. While we were chatting he told me that he had also won a door prize. His prize was not a Redwings T-shirt but four box seat tickets to a Detroit Tigers game at Comerica Park....... and a parking pass. How lucky could he get? What are the odds that he was holding two tickets and his was the one that won one of the big prizes? :)

A Tasty Oscar

A. R. Rahman won an Oscar for Best Original Music Score for "Slumdog Millionaire". Word is that the music was great, but I like his noodles. They go great as a side dish in meat entrées and I ate a lot of them when I was in college.

Hard Times and Thrift

You can't go anywhere lately without hearing or seeing some news about our broken economy. Hard times are starting to hit close to home and seems to be spreading. One of my friends told me yesterday that thrift is becoming more in fashion around his house. He told me he finds himself reusing sandwich bags, which he'd never done before. That's probably a good idea unless you've already used it to pick up pet droppings.

Thanks to blogger EUREKA POZ for the image.

Ransacked

I came home once and discovered that someone had come into my home and stole some money and jewelry from my bedroom. I called the police and when they arrived I let them in through my kitchen. They said, "wow, this is worse than I thought. They completely ransacked the place". I said, "no officer, I discovered the missing items while looking for my cuff links".

Super

I'm ready for the big game today. Are you?

A Special Christmas Wish

I watched Christmas Vacation today and was reminded of one of the best movie quotes, ever. Consider this my special Christmas card to the blogosphere.

Christmas Memories

Today is the last day of work for me before the holidays. The guys I work with have a tradition of having a White Castle slider-fest breakfast on the last day of work for the year. This year was no exception, only it brought back some painful memories for me. You see, last year I spent Christmas day and the next ten days in the hospital for an appendectomy and other complications. The guys reminded me of the event and suggested that maybe it was the sliders that induced the appendix attack. That would explain a lot. I remember the surgeon telling me after the operation that they found something lodged in my appendix. He wasn't sure what it was but it smelled like onions and cardboard.

I did lose twenty pounds last year while I was in the hospital. Unfortunately, I think I've gained forty of it back this past year.

Happy Holidays to One and All!!!!

So that's how they do that..........

If you're like me you get a letter, almost daily, from some barrister in some west African country trying to make contact with me so that he can give me some inheritance from some relative I'm not really sure I have and that if he can't make payment to me the money will be lost. These notes are, to say the least, very suspect as to their legitimacy. I have recently discovered, however, that these emails are part of a program to give poor children around the world a personal computer so that they can communicate with the world at large. It's called the xo-laptop program. Their local government came up with the idea to randomly send emails out to people in the first world as a way for these school children to practice their foreign language and typing skills.

So the next time you get one of these emails, please reply. These children need your support so they can learn about the world. Heck, use some of the inheritance money to buy a bunch of these xo-laptops for other children.

Good Dad

My son Joe, the future doctor, has use of my Oldsmobile Alero whilst he is away at school. He mainly uses it to bring his laundry home on the weekends or to drive his girl friend to and from work or the occasional road trip to party with his high school posse at any number of college campuses throughout the Great Lakes region. Fortunately for him, but unfortunate for me, he pays more attention to his studies than he does to the upkeep of the car. Yes, it's broken and the repair bill is more than the value of the car. Ouch.

The Plan B for family transportation, and I hope it's temporary, is to let him use my Passat and for me to borrow my mother's 1996 Buick Roadmaster, like the one in the picture above. I know that it's a parent's duty to make sacrifices for the benefit of their children, but I'm thinking that this blow to my image (self image that is) may be too much for me to endure. With the Passat I could delude myself into thinking that I am sporty, green, fuel efficient and somewhat hip; hey, it's my delusion. Now, I'm that grumpy gray haired dude blocking traffic in the grocery store parking lot. I feel the urge to only drive while wearing a gingham fedora, hands fixed at the ten and two position. Next thing you know, people will tell me I smell funny. Let me stop writing and start working on a plan that fixes my image problem.

Dave, I used the word whilst and I could have used it twice. It's my British heritage :)

Where do they come from?

It never fails. Whenever I get in line at a cashier stand, they are always there. That person, with a big floppy purse with three or four wallets inside, all with coin carriers. That person who fumbles to find exact change amongst the litter, random packs of gum, paper clips, lipstick and other sundries. You'd think they were giving something away or offering a discount for having exact change, but they're not. That person always seems to have more than enough time to make small talk with the cashier, about the crowds or their pets or the kids or just about anything; oblivious to the mounting throngs of impatient customers backing up behind them; me included. These same people, I know for fact, never make eye contact with anyone when they're out in public and go out of their way to go out of their way to avoid strangers, but are as friendly as can be when I'm in a hurry to make my purchase, place my order or get some help. They come in all ages too. I thought that maybe just the older ones have this strange social ritual, but I've discovered that that is a misguided assumption.

Do you know anyone like this?

Irritated Sclera

I had a bad case of blood shot eye the other day. One of my friends accused me of smoking pot. I told him it was my alergies. He said, "what are you alergic to?" I said, "pot".