A digital commonplace for a Regular Guy called Charlie Pharis
I know Hamlet was contemplating suicide – and I’m not – but i do like that line from Hamlet tonight…
To sleep! perchance to dream…
The best Unwind I know of is lying down, and sleeping all night long for a change! See you at the Y bright and early in the morning!
Reading Proverbs 20 – among other things – today…
A farmer too lazy to plant in the spring has nothing to harvest in the fall.
Form your purpose by asking for counsel, then carry it out using all the help you can get.
Love and truth form a good leader; sound leadership is founded on loving integrity.
I actually saw one of these on a car at Starbucks this morning. The Starbucks guy got in and drove off.
Now, the great thing about our country is that anybody can grow up to be President. The other great thing is you can vote for whoever you want to (as long as they are Constitutionally qualified). But I’m reminded of two things when I see this sticker, in no particular order…
900+ FBI files.
Her mouth was moving, wasn’t it?
Who said you never win anything?
Most of you have heard about InBubbleWrap, a very cool project from the folks over at 800-CEO-READ. Here’s the gist…you sign up, check out the cool stuff they give away daily, enter, and then watch and see if you win. That’s it, that’s all there is to it! Well, you do get some pretty good ideas/inspiration for things to think about, add to your Wish List, or whatever.
Anyway, I signed up just before Christmas, and – voila! – I’ve already won twice! Cool, huh?
Get thee to InBubbleWrap, and sign up! You could be the next InBubbleWrap champion!
I know most of you have seen heard experienced the Honda commercial in which all the sound effects are made by a choir of humans, haven’t you? Very, very cool…
That title jumped off the the cover of the latest issue of Best Life magazine yesterday, so I picked up a copy, and I found the excellent article “Chasing the Athlete Within” by Charles Hirshberg. Looking for anything to help me stay motivated in my pursuit of middle-aged flabby fitness, I jumped right on his article. And I found this great and relevant quote on page 45…
So in my 40s, as I stared at my humped, flabby self in the mirror, it was as plain as the ample nose on my face: What I hated was not exercise at all but the tight-jocked, trash-talking, mean-a** sports culture that often surrounds it.
Yep, it’s time for another installment of Guy Kawasaki’s wisdom. Check his post about public speaking. I love this line…
I hope that many of you are are called upon to give speeches–it’s the closet thing to being a professional athlete that many of us will achieve.
It’s also a great post because it points the way to this article by – ready for this? – Mike Evangelist on what it’s like to prepare to be a part of Steve Jobs’ keynote speeches.
Remember a few years back when Fellowship Church made the news for painting the church name on the roof?
They were trendsetters, apparently!
Today marks the 300th birthday of Benjamin Franklin. I’ve read his Autobiography, but I plan to jump back into it again today in honor of his 300th.
After leaving the Y this morning, I stopped at Starbucks to hang out/work/look busy and I did something I’m not in the habit of doing: I read the New York Times PRINT EDITION! (I gotta tell ya…I love reading the news digitally, but there will always be a certain charm, if you will, about thumbing through actual pages and getting the ink smudges on your fingers.)
Anyway, I read a pretty neat little op-ed contribution by Stacy Schiff all about Dr. Franklin.
Here are some clips…
Franklin was, too, the founder who came the furthest. He alone spent six decades as a British subject before embracing the revolutionary cause, to which he applied the zeal of a convert. He neither hailed from an elite nor subscribed to one.
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For all his ingenuity he was less a manufacturer of ideas than a purveyor of them…
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Where it is unclear if James Madison even had a personality, Franklin is all pluck and charm. Irony was his natural idiom.
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He was equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan and Bugs Bunny.
Schiff includes this rather obscure, but still apropos quote from Franklin himself…
We are fighting for the dignity and happiness of human nature. Glorious it is for the Americans to be called by providence to this post of honor.
More from Schiff’s article…
A few years later he offered up what may be the best one-line definition of this country. The New World, he asserted, judged a man not by who he was, but by what he could do. And what Franklin could do was staggering. His legacy is not a political philosophy but a protean existence, act after act of bold curiosity, brash risk-taking, raw ingenuity. Once those constituted a definition of the American character. Today they would more likely be termed “hypomania,” a fair diagnosis for any individual who manages single-handedly to found a library, fire company, police force, hospital, university, insurance company, sanitation department and militia.
Schiff concludes with this…
How dear is he to us? Well, who would you rather have in your wallet, George Washington or Ben Franklin? He makes us feel rich.
Happy 300th, Ben! You do indeed make us all feel rich…