Based on my history, I think you could say that I have pretty awful luck when it comes to messenger bags. One of my first messenger bags came free of charge with a subscription to a now defunct magazine called Cargo that was meant to be the men’s version of Lucky magazine, a shopping magazine. I honestly got the subscription because it was ten dollars and came with the bag.
The life of a teacher is a difficult one. Many people think that they have it easy — school ends at three, they have the whole summer off, and who can beat that for a job? What the people who think this way do not take into consideration is that the teacher, leaving the school at three, then has a stack of homework to grade and tests to score and lessons to plan. The lessons that a teacher plans for their classes every week has to not only cover the material that the school requires but ideally engages the children in the classroom and keeps their attention.
I recently got a prepaid card from American Express — part of the Serve line, that allows you to send and receive money from friends on Facebook. I got it primarily because it promised in game rewards for a game I particularly like on Facebook. I wanted to see how well it worked and so I put a little money on it and went to Starbucks to get my wife Elizabeth a surprise drink.
The following day, I was surprised to receive a call from American Express Serve Customer Service. They told me that they had been notified that I had left my card at that Starbucks and when I looked in my wallet, it was of course not there. I’m not sure why I thought it might be there. I was extremely grateful that they reached out to me and I also thought it was fantastic that someone at the Starbucks store had called American Express to let them know that the card was there.
In the time of author Charles Dickens, there was a scary institution known as a debtor’s prison in which a person, if they were unable or unwilling to pay off a debt they owed, would be put into prison as a way of making up the debt. In the United States they were outlawed in the 19th century as they did not seem to help anyone and certainly did not bring the person out of debt but it seems even in 2012 the debtor’s prison is alive and well.
I was talking to a financial planner friend of mine the other day, and one of the standardized questions he asks clients and potential clients is if they had to, could they come up with a thousand dollars in one day for an emergency?
When one thinks about the history of music distribution and consumption over the years it is a fascinating one. For the majority of the history of music the only way that one could hear music was to either have access to some kind of musical instrument (even if that instrument was the voice) or to be physically present for the playing of music. Recorded music came in the form of sheet music that was sold in stores and eventually wax cylinders that contained the beautiful music fans so longed to hear in the privacy of their own home. Skip ahead to the different formats of music and how many times The Beatles discography has been made available (quite a few) and we land on the present moment, where warehouses full of music can sit nicely on a few terabytes of hard drive space.
When I was in eighth grade, there was a large poster hanging on one of the walls with the image of Michael Douglas on it and a long speech about greed. I had no idea what it was or why his face was on it but it was an interesting speech, albeit one that went against everything we were taught in school. The speech taught that greed was good and important. We were taught in school that greed was bad and that sharing with others was good and important.
I’m not certain if Native American Gangs or casinos owned by Native American tribes do more harm to the heritage of a once proud nation. Both gangs and casinos serve two evil masters — money and power — and in the end, the result is always emotional evisceration and a disgraced death.
We are well aware of the excellent help that celebrities provide when the need is there — whether the help is for PR purposes or not, or whether other celebrities actively try to discourage you from helping, the help is there and can make the difference between a charity receiving hundreds of dollars versus hundreds of thousands of dollars — even if most of the money ends up coming directly from the celebrities themselves!
He was a Golden Boy with good hair.
All the ladies loved him, and he loved them back, even though he was already married with children.
Berkshire Hathaway has a problem. No, it isn’t their “Official Home Page” website that looks like it was designed by a third-grader in 1991 — note the ubiquitous link to Geico insurance in the footer; and no, it isn’t the choice of using standard “visited links” color as the active “UN-visited links” color default, either — the Berkshire Hathaway problem is actually one of moral decay in the falsely avuncular personality and faked “Aw, shucks” leadership style of Warren Buffet.
I don’t think there’s any doubt now that the GOP is the Party of Punishment. Republicans relish their ongoing, self-mandate, to publicly humiliate and destroy anyone who doesn’t go along with their party plan. The latest victim of their wrath is University of Wisconsin Professor William Cronon.
Think of the mighty Vincent Van Gogh — the beautiful paintings, the idea that he cut off his ear due to illness, the many hours people have spent staring at his art. Think of Van Gogh sitting in a floating rubber tube, sipping on a champagne cocktail while enjoying fresh escargot. Only one of these thoughts has any relation to reality, and it is distinctly the first one and not the second. While his artwork has been enjoyed by generation after generation and people spend money without even thinking about it about works like “Starry Night” on t-shirts, postcards, etc. Van Gogh did not actually make a viable living from selling paintings.
Yesterday, a bunch of B-List celebrities decided “to die” to save the world: It was “Celebrity Opt Out Day” if you will. These faux-celebs wouldn’t really be dead, though. They’d only be pretending to be gone — by not posting anything to their social networks like Twitter and Facebook — but we were supposed to be upset that they were dead so we’d donate our money to their cause of healing lives from HIV/AIDS in Africa and India. Great notion. Terrible execution.
