Music and Friendship
I remember reading an interview with Kurt Cobain many years ago in which he lamented the use of music by most teenagers as a means of determining who their friends would be, or using their friends in order to determine what music they should be listening to. He felt that the music an individual chose to listen to should be a reflection of them as a person. Music as art is "I", not "we", in...
Souvenir Shop
The economy of the town I live in is driven primarily by tourism. That means that along the main street, there are a bunch of little shops selling T-shirts and other SWAG that's embossed with the name of the city. There's lots of little items that are supposed to remind you of the time you came to visit our little beach town. They're selling souvenirs. As I was walking down main street yesterday, I passed...
Is There A Past In That?
Before we embark on new ventures or commit to new fields too heavily, we ask: "Is there a future in that?" Naturally, you want to make sure what you're doing is worth the time and effort that you're going to be putting into it. A different question you should ask yourself might be: "Is there a past in that?" More specifically, is any of your past in the project? Ask yourself if you're doing this...
Synchronicity and Sponsorship
One of the hardest parts of running any business is finding new customers. It's a matter of getting your message to the right people. Timing is important, too. If you're running a pizza parlor, you can probably run ads on local television stations around dinner time, flash a phone number on the screen, and, provided the pizza itself is bearable, you'll probably do pretty well for yourself. There's probably potential for small businesses to do...
Where's the Cough Medicine?
If you're running a small grocery or convenience store, why is the cough medicine hidden in some random place back amongst the rest of the merchandise in your store? Think about the people who are coming into your store and looking for the DayQuil...they're probably: 1. In a hurry to get what they came for and leave.2. Infirm. Why sandwich this stuff in aisle 9 between the shampoo and soluble fiber? Sure, I know that's...
Screw Bingo
I'm talking about the game with the little spinning cage of balls and the cards with the letter-number combinations on them. Each player has a card, the person running the game picks a ball at random from the cage and calls it out, and if the player has that combination on their card, they cover it. Five covered squares in a row on a card is a winner. The one virtue of any game that...
Waste Not, Want Not
Of all the material things to which this maxim could apply, of all the situations where this could lead to a more efficient use of scarce resources, the best place to apply it is to your own spare time. If Burt Bacharach was right, there's a dearth of love in the world. But if there's one thing that there's just "too little of" for each of us, it's leisure time. And what we need is...
Your Enemy's iTunes Library
Would you take a music recommendation from someone that you hated? Would you consider listening to the iTunes playlist of someone you completely despised? Would you watch a movie if a personal enemy of yours told you it was good? Why or why not? Most of us would be inclined not only to not listen to the music of our enemies, but to strictly avoid listening to it at all costs. Even if we end...
Karoke for Charity
A suggestion for the very small charities working to do fundraising in your local communities: borrow a Karoke machine from a friend and hit the bars on Friday and Saturday nights. Then, invite people to Karoke by paying a small fee (which will go to your charity) for privilege of singing. Better yet, have people who want to sing set prices for how much it will cost to get them up on stage to sing...
Modern-Day Beggar's Opera
Usually musicals have songs and lyrics that are composed entirely for the musical, that fit into the flow of the story. Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote the music for The Phantom of the Opera, and the songs are a series of songs with words that all fit in the storyline. Story, then songs, in that order. Moulin Rouge was a whole different kind of musical. The songs in it were not written just for the movie;...