Have to admit, I don’t usually cry at football games.
But watching Ray Lewis dance as time expired in his final home game of an extraordinary Hall of Fame career made my eyes water more than just a bit.
Enjoy:
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“You never don’t know” is what my mother-in-law says when she means “You never know.” It must be said in a Polish accent with the conviction that only a Holocaust survivor could pull off while using a double negative. So by the theory of transitivity, “You never don’t know” equals “You always know.” I’m going with that theory. You always know. If you can tap into your instincts, and distinguish them from anxiety, you always know. “Is he the One?” You know. “Should I have that opening line?” You know. “Should I write that email to reach out?” You know, but you don’t always listen to your gut. You talk yourself out of it. Do you expect greatness to come your way or mediocrity? Or disaster? Murphy’s Law is more about Murphy than about a law of nature. I think Murphy attracted bad luck because he’s always expecting bad luck and it feeds on itself. Of course if you want to attract good luck you have to do the work. There’s plenty of good luck out there and it will come your way sooner or later. You just have to be prepared to seize your luck. Here’s how: Let’s say you’re on a train traveling for the holidays, like I am right now. Let’s say you’re single and you secretly wish that the man of your dreams would sit next to you. You do hold out the hope for good luck. But you also dread the fat lady who talks your ear off or the crying baby that blocks the audio of Gossip Girl Season 2. Even though you’ve already seen it. You are tempted to just put your backpack up on the seat next to you, put on your headphones and go into “Do Not Disturb” mode. If you’re lucky, then the train is not sold out and you will get two seats to yourself. But is that what you really want? If you know that you want more, you may have to put your “Cablight” on, as I call it, and try to show that the seat is available for the right guy. There is a strategy you can employ. Put the backpack up as you scope the crowd passing by. Choose your target. He may not be your Brad Pitt, but pick the best one of the lot of train travelers with your mind’s eye and start your training to attract what you want in life.
But if it doesn’t, get up and move seats. Why? Because you still have hope that there’s a better guy in another car. Because you’re willing to give up the comfort of a window seat near the Café car for the chance of finding something better. Someone better. Like Deal or No Deal with the universe. You believe that the banker has something good in store for you in that briefcase and you’re willing to take risks. In the Harry Potter adventures, they say that the wizard doesn’t choose the wand. The wand chooses the wizard. What it means to turn your Cablight on is that you have to be in an open mindset for the wand to find you. And even if it finds you, you’ll have no idea how to use it unless you train. Train yourself to be bold and push past your comfort zone. And take the train. The only person you will meet if you’re driving in your car is the toll-booth operator. Really?!? The Politics of Pigskin
Check out this week’s divisional matchups to the left. If you’ll notice each team’s logo in the respective matchups has something in common with its opponent. Just a neat observation . Here is an album of all the newspaper frontpages of the cities that participated in Wild Card weekend. [photo album] Trent Williams of the Redskins and the Seahawks’ Richard Sherman converged on the field after the the Seahawks’ victory and it appears that Williams wasn’t in a very good mood. [DC Sports] This is fun: All 256 regular season NFL games ranked by watchability. Check it out. [Deadspin] Do you agree with the way the Redskins’ staff handled RGIII’s injury? [PFT] Here are some storylines to watch going into the Divisional round this weekend. [ESPN AFC] [ESPN NFC] Lest we not forget the BCS National Championship game is tonight pitting the juggernaut from yesteryear versus the perennial powerhouse – Notre Dame vs. Alabama. Who you got? [ESPN] From Keira Hay, [Albuquerque, NM] Journal North:
Click here to read the full article. Being sick with the flu is a double curse. You feel awful physically, of course. But you also view everything in your life through the same miserable, feeble, nauseous lens…making everything around you less beautiful, special, worthwhile or even tolerable. ==== I have cursed at my cold/flu (whatever it is) to no avail. I’ve tried using rare curse words I haven’t used in months –or even years. I’ve tried new combinations and several hyphenated curse words
But not a single curse word, hyphenated or otherwise, or any combination thereof has helped one whit! D*****t! ==== Does anyone know what keys to press to Restore the Brain to Factory Settings? ==== You know your case of this cold/flu thing going around is bad when you see the old Bon Jovi “Dead or Alive” video and your first response to it is, “Dead? Alive? Why such a big deal about the difference?” Having offered my perspective about the shape of a conservative rebound, I will end the year with a bout of wishful thinking about what 2013 might bring, if the stars align in just the right way. Here are twelve hopes for the next twelve months: (1) That George HW Bush and Nelson Mandela have more good health in front of them. They are not a commonly linked pair, but their lives epitomize the values of political tolerance and forgiveness. The elder Bush had his brass-knuckled side, as Michael Dukakis can attest, but he is arguably the last president who regarded election to federal office as a compact for Republicans and Democrats to achieve some rough consensus around the country’s challenges. Some of the deals cut, on federal employment laws and acid rain, looked then and now like sensible compromises; the 1990 tax package only preceded a recession and more rounds of rampant spending. But Bush’s four years were notable for their absence of intense division; it is no accident that he is the only president in my adulthood given the moral credit of never being despised by his partisan foes. And Mandela: what more needs to be said other than that he forged a political peace with a regime that jailed him and snatched the prime of his life away? (2) That the missing cause of 2012, education reform, is discovered alive and intact. For that to happen, liberals will need to extricate themselves from the embrace of the teachers’ unions that have wilted the Democratic reform agenda down to charter schools and not much more; conservatives will need to remind themselves that no other initiative satisfies the right’s goal of upward mobility through self determination more effectively.
Read the rest of… Writes contributing RP John Y. Brown, III: One of the greatest sins we can commit is to have a chance to get to know extraordinary people. And then not take advantage of it. And you never know when the opportunity will present itself. So always be ready to talk. Even when you’re not sure. A picture of a cat siting on a column led to some chuckles from my wife and daughter but then a nice lady with a very professional looking camera decided to take the same shot. I nudged my wife and daughter and said, “Told ya it was a good photo to take.” The woman with the professional camera overheard us and, along with her husband, laughed. And that’s all I needed. Over the next 20 minutes I learned that Matt Chua worked as a VC for 6 years before he and his wife, Erica, dropped out and became professional world travelers 2 years earlier. They’ve visited and written about 30 countries, mostly about economic development but also offering a sort of young person’s Trip Adviser take on each destination. (Think of Albert Brooks’ Lost in America —but working out. And going international) Next year Matt hopes to find himself in Stanford’s MBA program. And deserves to be there. And if that still isn’t enough to pique your curiosity, their website is titled “LivingIF.com” with the tag line, “Living to never wonder, What if.” Now, we are pleased to have Matt and Erica Chua join us as weekly travel columnists at The Recovering Politician, with their first column, cross-posted from LivingIF.com, below. Please help me welcome them to the RP Nation, and come back every Monday at this time to read about their next extraordinary adventure! ===
Incomparable. Stunning. Choose your superlative…none will do the Everest Region justice. Nowhere else on earth is like it. Walking amongst the world’s largest mountains, admiring deep valleys and snowcapped peaks, will be one of your life’s highlights.
Here even view from the outhouses are spectacular… Read the rest of… When a consumer product company wants to know how a new product or new marketing campaign will perform, it doesn’t rely solely on traditional market research surveys. It goes to test markets. It’s the right way to discover how the innovation will go over in real market conditions, without the risk of a national or global rollout. It also provides the test bed for optimizing the marketing mix to support the full-scale launch. Actual market experience, veteran marketers will tell you, never quite matches the results of quantitative and qualitative market research reports and what consumers say they will do behind the two-way glass of a focus group facility. So here’s my question: Why don’t more firms employ the same approach to explore and test newbusiness models? Anyone can map out new business model ideas on paper. It’s easy to do pro-forma analyses of how a new business model might work. And it’s not much more work to write up a fancy report embellishing on the potential of a hypothetical new business model. But until a business model idea sees the light of day in the real world, it is impossible to know if it will really work.
The idea is to move as quickly as possible from concept to prototype to test, and then iterate until you land on a business model configuration that works and is ready to scale. Along the way there will be many failures. The trick of course is to fail fast and to capture learning that can be applied in the next round. Read the rest of… One of the greatest gifts a parent can give a child is not being a role model for achievement (although that is important), or being present at many of their activities (although that is very important, too), or being actively engaged in molding their child to be a good citizen (although that is needed), or being a good financial provider (although that is expected). Rather one of the greatest gifts a parent can give to their children, in my opinion, is regular transparent glimpses into that parent’s humanness. Not showing flaws or foibles for the sake of exposure—like showing off a war wound. But an honest reflection of what that parent is thinking, feeling, and experiencing (to the extent the parent really knows him or herself). In other words, not playing the role of “Father Knows Best” or “How I Became the Queen Bee” But rather the daily role of “Father (or Mother) Tries Hard Most Days and Gets it Wrong about as Often as he (or she) gets it Right.” The other qualities listed in the first paragraph teach children how to “appear” and be perceived by others as successful. But a parent who is consistently transparent can help set an internal barometer for children that will serve them well—helping them to know themselves and trust their instincts. Not just seem to be holding it together.
No one strives to be merely authentic as an end in itself. Or the related traits of transparent and self-aware. We strive instead to be successful, great, courageous, and a dozen other various forms of “achievement.” But authenticity is often the precondition for these so called achievements. And even when it’s not, it is the greatest consolation. A person who has a long resume but isn’t comfortable in his or her own skin, isn’t self-aware or genuine, is a shell of the person who has these attributes but, for the moment, possesses a slimmer resume. The former is more like an automaton–a robot. A well trained animal who performs on cue and is applauded. But the latter is someone who is worth getting to know and who has something meaningful to say. And is leading a life worth living. Not merely seeking to perform a life worth applauding. We at The Recovering Politician are proud to announce that one of our own, contributing RP and former Congressman Tom Allen, has published an outstanding new book, Dangerous Convictions: What’s Really Wrong with the U.S. Congress. Here’s a summary:
Already the book has garnered some impressive reviews:
Click here to review and/or purchase. |
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As he gets about 2 seats away from you, move the backpack and look up. Make eye contact. This will be hard. Be vulnerable for a second and make it visible to him in your eyes. Then look away and go back to Gossip Girl so he doesn’t think you’re a stalker and he knows that you aren’t going to be annoyingly forward. Let him come to you. This should work if you do it right, with confidence and humility at the same time. It probably won’t though. Law of averages.
Jarratt Applewhite is excited. Really excited.
I’m not sure even exist. And, of course, I’ve used the standard fare curse words we are all familiar with and often turn up in
(3) That some influential observer will write the seminal book or article documenting the degree to which modern Democrats have abandoned the political center. For all the hand-wringing over Grover Norquist and the Tea Party, it is today’s House Democratic Caucus that refused to supply a single vote for continuing the Bush tax cuts for all but millionaires, until recently the favored position of Democratic moderates; this year’s Democratic platform that discarded the notion that public policy should strive to make abortions rare; and the current Democratic mainstream that has declared opposition to the Affordable Care Act or same sex marriage—views that thirty- five to forty Democratic congressmen held just a few years ago—as, respectively, stone-hearted or hateful. 
Just talk to any successful serial entrepreneur about their experiences in starting new businesses. They almost never get the model right on the first try. It takes several iterations to find a business model that works on the ground and has the potential to scale. Most will tell you it’s a waste of time writing a detailed business plan outlining all the components and how they’ll interact. The better approach is to sketch out a business model concept on the back of a napkin, build a prototype, and then move as quickly as possible into the market to see whether it holds water.