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- There can always be a new plan.
- You just need a fresh page and a sharpened pencil.
- Some quiet.
- Some time.
- A decent cup of freshly brewed coffee.
- Build on what was working.
- Be radical about new horizons
Long Form Content
Mark Manson has some good thoughts about ones attention diet -
Long form content should be your bread and butter for news content and the majority of your entertainment content. Long-form content means any medium—Books, Podcasts, long-form articles, documentaries—the key is that shit takes a long time.
I need to read more books. I read a lot of web articles and news stores, but not many books. Even fiction would probably help me. I do listen to a lot of Podcasts, but not many news ones. I rarely watch documentaries, but I’d probably enjoy them.
Ten Stories
Seth Godin has an interesting idea for presenters, “memorize your stories.”
Watch a great performance and you’ll see no artifacts of memorization. Instead, you will see someone speaking from the heart.
This is what it means to know something by heart.
Memorizing the words is half of it.
And woefully insufficient.
My suggestion: Don’t memorize your talk. Memorize your stories. Ten stories make a talk. Write yourself a simple cue card to remember each story’s name. Then tell us ten stories.
Be you.
We didn’t come to hear your words. If that’s all we wanted, we could have read the memo and saved a ton of time.
Bring your heart.
Things
Things happen in seconds. We react to them in minutes. We talk about them for hours. They mess up our days. We tell people for weeks. We think about them for months. They have consequences for years and they change a lifetime.
The Jock-ification of Data
Jack Hamilton, writing in The Atlantic, has a review of a book by Ben Lindbergh and Travis Sawchik called The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players. Apparently, it is a Moneyball version of using “statistical metrics, biomechanical data, and cutting-edge forms of player observation to help players hone their skills.”
The authors argue that baseball has reached a tipping point on player development. They pepper the book with a cast of crazy baseball characters including the loathsome Trevor Bauer.
If Moneyball was “data-fication of jocks,” then this new book is a “jock-ification of data.”
The Unsolved Mystery of the Malibu Creek Murder
Zach Baron has a tremendous story in GQ that you should take some time and read this weekend. The opening is just great.
When a man was killed in Malibu Creek State Park last summer while camping with his two young daughters, it sent the placid Southern California community into hysterics—spawning amateur sleuths, conspiracy theories, and public paranoia. Was it related to a rash of unsolved incidents in the area? But while the tragedy’s aftermath publicly played out like a new season of Serial, there was also a family left picking up the pieces after a seemingly random act of violence. This is a story about what happens when lightning strikes in the most chilling manner imaginable.
He Raped Her
Elle advice columnist E. Jean Carroll has accused President Donald Trump of raping her in her new book, What Do We Need Men For? A Modest Proposal.
The cover story in New York magazine is believable and horrifying. The excerpt is realistic and in any other time would force a resignation.
This is the killer passage –
The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.
I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.
I guarantee you what pisses Trump off the most is the line, “thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain…”
The bottom line is he raped her.
Summer Solstice
Today is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. My wife reminded me this morning. Today, we get the most sunshine out of any other day of the year.
Unfortunately, as I look outside all I see are rainclouds and all I hear is thunder.
So much for the hours and hours of daylight.
Small and Memorable
Michael Wade on small acts -
No matter how small an act may be, if it is kind or cruel and needlessly done, there is a good chance that it will be remembered for many years.
Five Minutes
Right this second, you are reading a post that will more than likely be forgotten in five minutes.
Bodies in Seats
Casey Newton, writing at The Verge, has one of the most upsetting stories in a while. The working conditions of these content moderators for Facebook is appalling. It makes me rethink my engagement with the platform. It should probably do the same to you.
Not Trump
The Orlando-Sentinel, which leans far more Republican than Democrat, is already out with an editorial endorsement for the next President: Not Donald Trump.
The following paragraphs made me smile.
There was a time when even a single lie — a phony college degree, a bogus work history — would doom a politician’s career.
Not so for Trump, who claimed in 2017 that he lost the popular vote because millions of people voted illegally (they didn’t). In 2018 he said North Korea was no longer a nuclear threat (it is). And in 2019 he said windmills cause cancer (they don’t). Just last week he claimed the media fabricated unfavorable results from his campaign’s internal polling (it didn’t).
Maybe his lies will eventually catch up to him. Maybe.
Bunt Double
Matt Carpenter just bunted for a double... yes, you read that correctly! pic.twitter.com/mtJUNpG4ji
— St. Louis Cardinals (@Cardinals) June 18, 2019
That must have been humiliating.
Time for a New Plan
Nicholas Bate reminds us that there is always time for a new plan.
Lyrics Site Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content
Robert McMillan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, has an interesting story about theft.
“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” said Ben Gross, Genius’s chief strategy officer, in an email message. The company said it used a watermarking system in its lyrics that embedded patterns in the formatting of apostrophes. Genius said it found more than 100 examples of songs on Google that came from its site.
Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.
When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”
Being a writer, I hate when I copy and paste something over and the quote marks are all messed up. I try my damndest to fix that and make them consistent. The whole idea of putting some sort of “watermark” to catch these types of thefts is nothing new. Learn more by reading the fictitious entry section on Wikipedia.
Gloria Vanderbilt, RIP
Today I learned the late, great Gloria Vanderbilt was Anderson Cooper’s mother.
I had no idea.
The Art of the Lie
Andrew Sullivan, in his weekly column for New York Magazine, talks at length about how brazen, breezy, and ridiculous Donald Trump’s lies are.
For Trump, lying is central to his disturbed psyche, and to his success. The brazenness of it unbalances and stupefies sane and adjusted people, thereby constantly giving him an edge and a little breathing space while we try to absorb it, during which he proceeds to the next lie. And on it goes. It’s like swimming in choppy water. Just when you get to the surface to breathe, another wave crashes into you.
It’s really difficult for me to wrap my brain around the thought processes of the people who flock to him. Do they care about the lies? Do they admire the lying? Is it all professional wrestling to them with Trump as the Face and Democrats the Heel?
Sullivan raises the alarm again.
He will do anything, we have to understand, to protect his psychic attachment to his own self-interest. Anything. I’ll repeat what I believe: He will not leave his office if he narrowly loses in 2020. He’ll fight — and rally his supporters to fight with him. He’s not Nixon. He’s Erdoğan. When, since becoming president, has Trump conceded anything?A tyrant’s path to power is not a straight line, it’s dynamic. Each concession is instantly banked, past vices are turned into virtues, and then the ante is upped once again. The threat rises exponentially with time. If we can’t see this in front of our own eyes, and impeach this man now, even if he will not be convicted, we are flirting with the very stability of our political system. It is not impregnable.
I think most Americans want him gone, but the only real way to do this is through an election, and the only way to make it have an impact is to beat him in a landslide. I’m not sure it will happen.
The Appropriate Medium
I very much liked Seth Godin’s post today –
We spend all day communicating, and we’ve invented myriad ways to do it. You can buy a stamp, press a button, rent a room or use a microphone. Choose wisely.
Don’t send an email when you should pick up the phone instead.
Don’t send a text when an email makes more sense.
Don’t have a meeting when a memo is more likely to get the point across.
Don’t give a speech when a blog post would reach more people with more impact.
And don’t write it down when it’s better said live…
The Little Things
Michael Wade with some wisdom –
You know the answer to this:
Which makes a greater impression on a person: assistance on a major project or assistance on a minor item that will nonetheless be noticed every day?
There are times when it is very risky to describe any action as minor.
The St. Louis Blues are Stanley Cup Champions
I really don’t follow hockey, but I did watch Game 7 of the Stanley Cup playoffs and rejoiced when the Blues won the whole thing. I have a couple of friends who are long time Blues fans and I’m so happy for them I could just burst.
The best roundup of tweets celebrating the win that I could find were sitting on a St. Louis Cardinals website, Viva El Birdos. Enjoy.