We needed tough lessons as children. An occasional playground fight was expected as the norm, and if we complained to our mother that we were being teased, we were treated to this glorious aphorism: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” My mom used to say that all the time, one of the seemingly endless adages she had at her disposal to deal with any of life’s problems. To this day I think long and hard about the practical application that dogma had on my life.
The idea that you could actually choose whether or not to be hurt by words: that was huge for me. Even though it has been repeated ad nauseam for generations, “sticks and stones” really is a powerful bit of philosophy to a kid. That’s one of the great things about being a parent: you can spout nothing but clichés, and yet, to your child, you come off as one of the great thinkers in Western culture.
–from MEAN DADS FOR A BETTER AMERICA, by Tom Shillue
I don’t know if I even posted this video before -I shot it a year ago. Martha was riveted to this scene from the original Prince of Egypt. But I really don’t think she appreciated the dog being thrown overboard.
I just stumbled across this - I think it was some story that referenced Valiant Pharmaceuticals- and I said well, “Stuart Varney is a big fan of one of their products…”
I remember on the first take, I was rushing at the end and the way it turned out, made me laugh, so I just kept it in.
I showed it to Stuart later and he got to kick out of it
Thank you for reminding me. I wanted to talk about our post-show hangout in Memphis and here it is:
“Worshiping at the Temple”
Of Steel and Iron.
At the turn of the century (yeah, sounds crazy to me too!), or actually just before, I was hired by a company called ‘UUNet’.
‘UUNet’ was an internet services company. For about a decade, from the beginning of ‘dial up’ internet, until ‘hard wired’ internet became ubiquitous, if you had ‘dial up’, you were using ‘UUNet’.
It doesn’t matter if you had ‘Dell’, ‘Earthlink’, or ‘AOL’, ‘UUNet’ had 95% of the ‘dial up’ market, they just slapped a different brand on it.
I was there to build a system in which they could receive their local phone bills and pay them electronically. Upon my arrival, they had a full time ‘data entry’ staff of 300, and they couldn’t keep up. The paper phone bills would arrive in ‘ Reams’. Copier/Printer paper card board boxes.
A single bill, from a single area of NYC could be 1-2 of those boxes.
They were entered into a database, line by line, by hand.
Shortly after I arrived, the company was purchased by ...
