CHAPTER THREE “Park here,” said Aloha. I looked at her. I looked at the water. I looked at her. I looked at the water. “But we’re 200 feet away from the water’s edge.” She replied, “High tide,” as she reached up and twisted the key to turn off the engine. “Stay in the truck for […]

Would you like to start at the beginning of Manley’s book? Here’s how to do that. Next week, Manley will begin the final chapters of this adventure. You’re going to love how it ends, I think. – Indy

“What did I miss?” asked Alfie as he hopped down from the glovebox lid onto the seat between Bali and Ha’i. Bali answered, “Look out back.” Alfie scrambled up and peered over the seatback to see Floyd singing Row-Row-Row Your Boat in rounds with the seven blondes. “….merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a […]

“It is books, poems and paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge. Oscar Wilde referred to this phenomenon when he quipped that there was no fog in London before Whistler started painting the Thames.”– Alain de Botton, The Architecture of […]

“In medieval Japan, poets and priests directed the Japanese toward cherry blossoms, deformed pieces of pottery, raked gravel, moss, rain falling on leaves, autumn skies, roof tiles and unvarnished wood. A word emerged, wabi, of which no Western language, tellingly, has a direct equivalent, which identified beauty with unpretentious, simple, unfinished, transient things. There was […]

I’ve been looking into “prefiguring” in the Bible.  Isaac as Jesus because the son was sacrificed and carried his own wood. Joseph as Jesus because he was betrayed for silver, and the cupbearer and baker were prefigures of communion and the two thieves on the cross. Cupbearer forgot him. Jesus told the thief he wouldn’t […]

Indy’s Day Off by Indy Beagle Spraytan and Boxwine arrived in a white Cadillac convertible fringed in blondes.  Boxwine slid out the convertible’s passenger door and reached for the nozzle while I was filling up my new Hudson pickup on the other side of the pump. I gave him a steady stare. “What have you […]

The Bounce: How High? How Long? The 2021 we’ve all been waiting for has not yet begun. I was reminded of this when I received a meme from a friend. It said, “Omg, what’s the first thing you’re gonna do when YOU get the vaccine shot?? You’re gonna go back home, wait a month, get […]

Spraytan and Boxwine arrived in a white Cadillac convertible fringed in blondes.  Boxwine slid out the convertible’s passenger door and reached for the nozzle while I was filling up my new Hudson pickup on the other side of the pump. I gave him a steady stare. “What have you done?” “We’re headed to the lake. […]

Change Management, Fri. Jan 8th.Things are definitely changing. One option for dealing with change is to flail your arms like a drowner. Another option is to manage change with the grace of a synchronized swimmer.– Dr. Richard D. Grant Martinis & Marketing, Tues. Jan 12thHurl your enterprise forward in one epic, hard working day – you’ll […]

Devin “Spraytan” Wright with Ozzy Osbourne, when Devin was in the Navy. (Or was this when he sang with The Village People?)

Yes, my heart has been broken. Bet you think I’m going to tell you about the man who broke my heart. No, it was not a man who broke my heart. It was my best friend. I thought she was my best friend for many years. When we were younger she asked to come live […]

Read “Glenn Beck’s Regrets” in the January, 2017 issue of The Atlantic. The wizard began teaching this stuff in seminars in January, 2004, and began writing Pendulum in 2010. If you want to skip ahead to where we are now, begin reading at page 236. Keep in mind that the zenith of the “We” (and […]

The wizard began teaching this stuff in seminars in January, 2004, and began writing Pendulum in 2010. If you want to skip ahead to where we are now, begin reading at page 236. Keep in mind that the zenith of the “We” (and the beginning of the 20-year downswing toward the beginning of the “Me”) […]

Friends of mine, Deacon Blue (after Donald and Walter of Steely Dan), wrote this song during lockdown. I’m not entirely sure that Glasgow is the City of Love but I guess it works for wherever you come from. Apparently the video is phenomenal if you are high. 128 BPM… great for playing air drums and […]

I guess you could say that I taught myself how to drive. It was in a ‘49 Ford pickup truck, standard shift. It was Mama’s pickup and Dad’s extra duty pickup. We only had pickups. Dad said if you couldn’t haul ice in it, it had no place at our house. I don’t remember exactly […]

A gentleman who possessed a large personal library was asked a too-familiar question by a visitor to his home. A question so often posed to those who own a lot of books – “And have you read them all?” But this wise collector faced his visitor with an astonished look and simply replied: “No, and […]

You want to start at the beginning of Manley’s book? Here’s how to do that. Next week, Manley is going to give us #7 of The Seven Things Worth Tattooing Inside Your Forearm.  – Indy

I have combined the questions: “What is the hardest thing you have ever done?”and “What was your wedding like?” They are closely related. For my wedding we eloped to Pauls Valley, OK. He was 18 years old. I had been 16 years of age for two months. After locating the Justice of the Peace in […]

For the past several years, I have been teaching that our ‘thought’ determines our ‘beliefs,’ which determine our ‘decisions,’ which determine our ‘actions,’ which determine our ‘consequences/results.’   My question has become, “If ‘thought’ is the basis of our results, WHO is doing the thinking?”   For the vast majority of people, it is their […]

Most people who talk about community building want to romanticize it, or worse, they want to make it into a series of actionable “steps” without heart. Laís de Oliveira explains the required actions in amazing detail, but she does it with a sensitivity and a wisdom that can only come from experience. Here’s a perfect […]

Just in case you skipped this video earlier, I’m going to give you a second chance. – Indy Mary nodded Pa rum pum pum pum The ox and lamb kept time Pa rum pum pum pum I played my drum for him Pa rum pum pum pum I played my best for him Pa rum […]

    Roy and James, December 28, 1976

Change Management, Fri. Jan 8th.Things are definitely changing. One option for dealing with change is to flail your arms like a drowner. Another option is to manage change with the grace of a synchronized swimmer.– Dr. Richard D. Grant Martinis & Marketing, Tues. Jan 12thHurl your enterprise forward in one epic, hard working day – you’ll […]

  Wizard Academy’s Crowded Barrel distillery was mentioned in Forbes last week! Crowded Barrel was the world’s first distillery to make whiskey from crowdsourced recipes. The self-selected Whiskey Tribe votes on what to do, and then the Crowded Barrel does it!

You want to start at the beginning of Manley’s book? Here’s how to do that. Next week, Manley is going to give us #6 of The Seven Things Worth Tattooing Inside Your Forearm.  – Indy

Mama Py had a vegetable garden. Bright rays of color would shine from her kitchen windows as she prepared tomatoes, okra and corn on the cob with bowls of beans and fried potatoes. Her kitchen table glimmered like a leprechaun’s pot of gold. Then Daddy Py would arrive with a tinfoil bundle and two mysterious […]

My trip to China is the farthest I have traveled. I was super excited to go to China. I am partial to Chinese and Japanese art and have several pieces. If I didn’t know better, I might wonder if I had Chinese or Japanese ancestors. When I arrived in Beijing, the city was getting ready […]

I, for sure, would prefer to have an adventure than to read about one. One of my best adventures was a trip to Egypt when many chose not to go. I went to Egypt in late February, 2003. President George W. Bush, had given Iraq a deadline of March 19 before attacking. None of my […]

Reading the title of this essay, “What Would You Have Me Do?” might cause you to imagine me defending myself, saying in effect, “I had no choice.” But I want you to hear those words in an entirely different tone of voice. “What would you have me do?” is a quiet question that I often […]

Give this video its full 2 and 1/2 minutes and you will experience the persistence of memory. Sent to us by Wizard of Ads partner Monica Ballard. Mary nodded Pa rum pum pum pum  The ox and lamb kept time Pa rum pum pum pum I played my drum for him Pa rum pum pum pum I played my best for […]

There is a point in the book, near the end, when Bendiner has finished his tour but not yet been allowed to leave the aerodrome: “How stupid, how cruel to let me stay alive and safe among those who are still hostages to death. No surgeon would leave an amputated limb near the living patient.” […]

“In a bombing run over Kassel, Germany, Elmer Bendiner’s B-17 bomber was barraged by 20-millimeter shells which resulted in direct hits on their gas tanks. But none of the shells exploded. The next day, the maintenance chief found 11 shells inside the gas tanks, any one of which should have taken the plane down.  When […]

‘Out, Out—’BY ROBERT FROST The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the sunset far into Vermont. And the saw […]

  In manufacturing — especially when I was a production manager — the big craze was “lean.”  Lean manufacturing as a spin-off from the Toyota Production System was all about eliminating waste from the system.    Waste in the form of defective products. Waste in terms of WIP (Work In Progress). Waste in terms of […]

Here’s that link. You’ll have to scroll down a bit to find the quote. After you do, be sure to hit the back button to come back here and continue down this week’s rabbit hole.

And then there are O’Malley, Duchess, Berlioz, Toulouse, and Marie from Disney’s The Aristocats

   

You want to start at the beginning of Manley’s book? Here’s how to do that. Next week, Manley is going to give us #5 of The Seven Things Worth Tattooing Inside Your Forearm.  – Indy

In her book, The Cloister Walk, poet Kathleen Norris quotes a Benedictine monk as saying, “God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systematic theology.” The psalms are different. They speak to life in ways other scripture, doctrine, and theological presuppositions are not able. The psalms are poetry. As such, they […]

In February, my reports took over most of my responsibilities and asked me to spend more time with our front-line team members to encourage and mentor them. That was definitely outside this introvert’s comfort zone, but I was convinced it was best for my company. I took a deep breath, stuck that introversion in a […]

The changes in the last 75 years have been so many and so astounding, it’s impossible to acknowledge them all. I mention cell phones first because they have made such an enormous impact on all our lives.Practically every person in view has a cell phone either to their ear or staring at one.Even children have […]

Do you have a deep-seated belief, but you’re not sure where it came from? I have passionately rejected the idea of goalsetting for more than 50 years, but I’ve never understood why I felt so deeply about it until just a moment ago. Welcome to Sunday morning, November 29, 2020. The word “goal” has a […]