Nursing a grudge is a form of worry, and in the wisdom of Erma Bombeck, “Worry is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.” Nursing a grudge is like that. – Indy Beagle  

Riyaz Adat was on death’s doorstep, withering away in excruciating pain in the transplant ward of Toronto General Hospital. This week on a special edition of Monday Morning Radio, roving reporter Rotbart narrates the uplifting true story of Riyaz’s miraculous survival and recovery — reading from the Christmas book Rotbart and his wife, Talya, wrote […]

Iris Sybil Pylant was the mother of Roy’s mom. – Indy Beagle

    “It is only rarely that one can see in a little boy the promise of a man, but one can almost always see in a little girl the threat of a woman.” – Alexandre Dumas   Would you like to read a little Christmas booklet the wizard wrote about Jesus, the Wise Men, […]

Garrison Keillor reads a poem about a woman, “In a Prominent Bar in Secaucus One Day” by X.J. Kennedy

    “We all know we’re going to die; what’s important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this.” – Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

  “For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new.” “Enough ink has been spilled in quarreling over feminism, and perhaps we should say no more about it. It is still talked about, however, for the voluminous nonsense uttered […]

  “No matter how happily a woman may be married, it always pleases her to discover that there is a nice man who wishes that she were not.”– H. L. Mencken

  Two women meet. The first one cries, “What have you done with your hair? It looks like a wig.” Her friend answers, “It is a wig.” The first replies, “Well, you’d never know it.” – John Steinbeck

“Men always want to be a woman’s first love. Women have a more subtle instinct: What they like is to be a man’s last romance.” – Oscar Wilde “When a man becomes familiar with his goddess, she quickly sinks into a woman.” – Joseph Addison

    “A mother takes 20 years to make a man of her boy, and another woman makes a fool of him in 20 minutes.” – Robert Frost “Most Men who rail against women are railing at one woman only.” – Remy de Gourmont

  “I used to think that these patterns of sex differences resulted mainly from average differences between men and women in innate talents, tastes and temperaments.” “After all, in talents men are on average more mathematical, more technically minded, women more verbal; in tastes, men are more interested in things, women in people; in temperaments, […]

  “The desire of the man is for the woman, but the desire of the woman is for the desire of the man… – Germaine de Stael (1766-1817) “A beauty is a woman you notice; a charmer is one who notices you.”– Adlai Stevenson “A man is already halfway in love with any woman who […]

“Dancing is wonderful training for girls, it’s the first way you learn to guess what a man is going to do before he does it.”– Christopher Morley (1890-1957) “She plucked from my lapel the invisible strand of lint (the universal act of woman to proclaim ownership.)”– O. Henry (1862 – 1910) “Women’s virtue is man’s […]

  “Women are never stronger than whenthey arm themselves with their weakness.” – Marie de Vichy-Chamrond, Marquise du Deffand(1696 – 1780)

    “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.” – Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Yesterday my friend Tucker Max announced an interesting moment in time. After being silent for 10 years, he is about to write a memoir of that decade, and a dozen people are going to get to be part of that process with him as he mentors them into writing their own memoirs as well. Tucker […]

Volume one of “Memoir, Correspondence, and Miscellanies” was written by Thomas Jefferson at age 77, and includes a journal kept by him while Secretary of State during Washington’s administration. The other three volumes consist of voluminous correspondence, ranging from 1775, after blood had been spilt in Boston, to June 1826, only ten days before his […]

NOTE: When you click this image, be patient as the next page will load slowly. It is a Hi-Rez image (8,400 pixels by 11,200 pixels) of page 1 of the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. I suggest you pull that Hi-Rez image onto your computer before clicking forward to pages 2, 3, and […]

Chris McShanag has worked alongside two physician entrepreneurs to build a business that provides virtual assistants to doctors, dentists, and veterinarians. The service worked so well that Chris and his partners finally realized it would work for any company. Many business owners contemplate moving from one business niche to another, but very few actually do […]

Sylvester Stewart Stone “In the story before my story, F. L. Haynes, Fred to those who knew him, went to Denton, Texas to set up the St. Andrew Church of God in Christ. The Church of God in Christ was a Pentecostal denomination with roots in Tennessee, only a few decades old at that point […]

www.1776.house

The cover is about 11 inches. The pages are approximately 10.75 inches.

I don’t know if he was was an American Patriot or a British Loyalist. All I know is that he owned a 1726 edition of “The Gentleman Angler,” a leather bound book on fly fishing. That book was 50 years old when Thomas Jefferson penned the Declaration of Independence. Speaking of Jefferson, that same fly-fisherman […]

CONFESSION TIME: I’ve always been a fan of the Bee Gees. But I gotta say, I think I like this young woman’s interpretation better than the original. Listen to both and see if you agree with me. The melancholy tone of her arrangement takes me to that same place Antonio Carlos Jobim takes me with […]

“Two Wise Men and Justin Bieber, with Snacks”by Tim “Eye-of-the” Storm, of mauiart.co

Good business ideas often die on the vine because of the cost and logistics of bringing those ideas into reality. Uzair Ahmed saw all these missed opportunities, so he figured figured out how to use technology and automation to make these good business ideas come alive. Uzair tested a high-tech, low-overhead system to launch a […]

This New Yorker cover is December 22, 1951, by W Cotton.The Wise Men & the Light of Christmas, to the right, is by Jim Serret.The tiny sculpture of The Old Man and the Sea is, of course, by Jane DeDecker.

“You did a great job, Indy. Your question was about whether I was going to teach an updated “Pendulum” in 2024, right?” You have a good memory, Roy. “Touché. I see what you did there.” So are you? “It depends.” On what? “If enough people want it and let Wizard Academy chancellor Daniel Whittington know […]

Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel after Hamilton announced that he was going to “waste his shot” by firing it high into the trees. Having fulfilled his promise, Hamilton stood there while Aaron Burr calmly shot and killed him. I could find no record of Aaron Burr ever having owned the […]

George Simpson Eddy published his chronicle of the 1350 books in the personal library of Benjamin Franklin in a publication of the American Antiquarian Society in October, 1924. On page 19, we read, “The Doctor [Franklin] was a friend of Baskerville, the famous English printer, and bought many of the books printed by him. He […]

Alexander Hamilton’s copy of Don Quixote was published in Amsterdam in 1755 by Arkstee et Merkus. In January of 1795, Congress was debating The Report on a Plan for the Further Support of Public Credit. Alexander Hamilton wrote to a letter to Rufus King, dated February 21, 1795, saying, “To see the character of the government […]

John Adams was Thomas Jefferson’s friend – and nemesis – and like Jefferson, he was obsessed with Don Quixote. In David McCullough’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on John Adams we read, “Another child, Thomas Boylston, was born in September of 1772, and again Adams was off on the ‘vagabond life’ of the circuit, carrying a copy […]

On September 17, 1787, when George Washington finally saw the Constitution of the United States of America adopted after four months of intense debate in Philadelphia, he immediately went to a bookseller and paid 22 shillings, six pence for a copy of Don Quixote de La Mancha. According to MountVernon.org, “this seventeenth-century Spanish allegory does […]

“We stopped for coffee afterward, and I asked Jacob why, given his skill at seeing and showing the world as it was, he never wanted to draw the particulars of this world as it is, the world that we found ourselves in, where people met at endless dinner parties. He drew his kids, beautifully, but without […]

Irwin Michnick, the Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish furrier from Ukraine, was a jazz musician who wrote radio commercials and advertising jingles for companies like L & M cigarettes and Ken-L Ration dog food. Bob Levenson was a copywriter at Doyle Dane Bernbach who needed a tune to go with the words, “Everybody doesn’t like […]

“The charge that Obama threatens American exceptionalism is daft. He is, after all, fond of declaring, ‘In no other country on Earth is my story even possible.’” “Things hit rock bottom when conservative Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker flayed Obama for not using the words ‘American exceptionalism’ in his 2011 State of the Union speech, […]

The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia at Monticello.org says, “Don Quixote was one of the few works of fiction that Thomas Jefferson was clearly partial to. He used the text in its original language to learn Spanish, and had his children do the same. Jefferson owned a number of different editions over his lifetime.” Monticello.org also lists […]

Why not a meadow?Why not a little clearing and a streamto wade in? Why not take our pants off,a little respite from our partnerswho couldn’t see us, who’d never see usno matter what we did? What we did was wrong,the way we did it. It was miraculous, it took hold long afterwe trudged back to our […]

  “Okay, Indy, what’s your question?” Are you going to teach an updated Pendulum in 2024? “I haven’t decided.” What does it depend on? “Lots of things.” Like what? “Show us what you discovered about Don Quixote and the founding fathers and I’ll tell you at the end of the rabbit hole.”

UX stands for “user experience,” and a deep understanding of it has allowed Satyam Kantamneni to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in additional income for his clients. Think of it this way: if you could experience your business the way your customers do, you would know exactly what to change to make it a […]

I subscribe to surprisingly few online things. delancyplace.com is one of them. This is what they sent me on November 30th. – Indy Beagle Seven-year-old Truman Capote, abandoned by his divorced parents, is taken in by depression-poor cousins in the rural South. One of these cousins, a distant, elderly cousin, becomes his closest friend and […]

SHOUT OUT to Morty Silber of Montreal for sending us this. – Indy Beagle & The Tiny Tribe  

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My Dad died 3 years ago. He worked hard in construction – seven days, most weeks – to feed his 6 kids. And he played ‘drums’ every waking hour. Everything was a song and a rhythm inside his head.  Dad didn’t give direct advice. He was a “show, don’t tell” guy. I asked him for […]

Tom McDowell is a friend. He is also an important artist. And now I have another friend who is becoming a big deal in the art world. I told you last week to keep your eyes open for a special painting from Tim “Eye of the” Storm. This is that. Fantastic Christmas gift.Professional, archival quality.Vivid color.Detailed […]

Every day, 3,000 new people decide to get into the game of online selling. Ninety percent of them – 2,700 per day – will never make a sale. Matthew Stafford knows what they are doing wrong and how to fix it. Matthew’s magical formula for won’t drive potential customers to a website, but it will […]

Check out good brother McDowell – alias Brannan Rock – on Instagram, or at Saatchi Art, or at brannanrock.com.  “Psychoanalysis is the study of secrets people keep from themselves.”

The Two Times We Read Don Quixote When a nation is pursuing a beautiful dream, the artists of that nation will paint, and sculpt, and write plays about heroes who fight against impossible odds. And they will cheer for Don Quixote, a visionary hero who saw beauty, justice and honor in a common village girl […]

  Being an entrepreneur is like a man riding a lion. People think, “This guy’s brave.” And he’s thinking, “How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?” Radio ad #3 for Billy Cline’s hot new company YourNewDoor.com

“The worst poverty is not to live in a small house, but to live in a small world.”– Roy L. Smith

Springtime pierced the pale heart of winterwith a shout of green and a blade of grass. The mumbles of summer are wooden wagon wheelsbanging hollow in the dust far away. Autumn sings of passage with a tear in her eyeas the quail fly up for the hunters. The white of winter is a splinter under […]

Hey, even if you have seen this before,you need to take a moment to watch it again. “Why” Did you ask me why? “Yes. Yes, I did.” Because it will lighten your mood andamaze you a tiny bit and help you have a better day. “Okay, then, I’ll do it.”

  It’s the final dance in Dirty Dancing. But they’re dancing to The Muppet Show theme tune. Heh, heh, heh. – Indy Beagle

  He started with $200,000 in 2018. Today it is $200,000,000. You can do it, too. Bronson Hill heard Warren Buffet say that people will work the rest of their lives if they don’t find a way to make money while they sleep. This week, Bronson reveals to roving reporter Rotbart his successful strategies for […]

Q: Why are they called “the dog days of summer?” A: The star Sirius – the brightest star in the sky, by far – is colloquially known as the “Dog Star” reflecting its prominence in its constellation, Canis Major (the Greater Dog). The heliacal rising of Sirius marked the flooding of the Nile in Ancient […]

    I found the Pillow of Time, laid my head on it, went to sleep, and was immediately at a concert featuring the Ozark Mountain Daredevils in 1975. I still had my iPhone with me, so I recorded part of it. Take a look. I woke up, had a midnight snack, went back to […]

  George Harrison wrote the song. He died in 2001. In 2004, his son Dhani got together with some rock legends to do a tribute performance of George’s song, “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.”  You will notice Prince standing off to the side for the first half, then he steps to center stage at about 3:20 […]

    People are resistant to change. “If you have a really new and creative idea and people don’t hate it, they weren’t listening.”– Mark Fox Being joyful isn’t what makes you grateful. Being grateful is what makes you joyful.”– Ann Voskamp Mark Fox was the youngest Chief Engineer in the history of the space […]

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.”– William Strunk “I’ve found that when a talented writer is operating with such wild poetic energy, such freedom from academic rules, […]

Do you remember what Jerry Seinfeld said about “making a charm bracelet”? Essentially, you notice a connection between two things, and then you add other things that have a similar connection. Steve Jobs and Brian Sanderson agreed that this was the essence of creativity. Jesse Case saw a connection between two things and then made […]

Freedom Day, according to Jeff Kikel, is that juncture in our lives when work becomes optional, not a financial necessity. His formula begins with a shift in your mindset regarding your relationship to money: “It should work for you. You should not work for it.” If the idea of working for pleasure rather than necessity […]

“They were an incongruous pair, but everyone seemed to argue that history had made them into a pair. The incongruities leapt out for all to see; Adams, the short, stout, candid-to-a-fault New Englander; Jefferson, the tall, slender, elegantly elusive Virginian; Adams the highly combustible, ever combative, mile-a-minute talker, whose favorite form of conversation was an […]

Today, when the wizard was talking about The Function of Fiction, Doris Lessing chimed in and said, “There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth.”  This brand-new, 60-second radio ad has been on the air for less than a week, but magical things are happening in Florida because of it. © […]

“If Don Quixote returned today with the same wild ways of knight errantry, it would be the knight errant that was sensible and the world all around him that was crazy… The rational world has turned out much more irrational than the Dark Ages… The nations have found more nonsense and nightmare in the building […]

    Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life.“ For real..

Data: Civic Science 2019 – Lots of marketers worry about brand haters. I mean, they sure seem vocal, and word-of-mouth is important. But 99% of the time, haters aren’t your biggest issue. The good folks at Civic Science surveyed over 26,000 people about their opinions of Dick’s Sporting Goods and R.E.I. (the 2nd and 11th […]

“The Old Man and the Sea is the story of a fight between an elderly, accomplished fisherman, Santiago, and a really big fish. Like… HUGE. The story opens with Santiago suffering eighty -four days without catching a fish because he’s the unluckiest son-of-a-bitch on planet earth. Honestly, if you were in a boat for eighty […]

  Nick Barrett’s invention is only as long as a paperclip and as thick as a quarter, but it won the $10,000 prize for “coolest product” at this year’s National Retail Federation trade show. Monday Morning Radio co-host Maxwell Rotbart says inventors and entrepreneurs can learn a lot — and save themselves huge headaches — […]

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The wizard promised that I would show you the speech that Steve Jobs made when he returned to save Apple from extinction and make it the first company in the world to achieve a 1-trillion-dollar valuation. And you’ll find that video below. But I should also point out that today’s Monday Morning Memo sprang from […]

In a short, just-published essay, the brilliant Leah Bumphrey explains the true use of artificial intelligence in a summary that I can only say is dazzling for its insight. Click the image of the robot below to see what Leah has to say today. Aroo, Indy Beagle

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“Enchantment! If disenchantment is the loss of myth and illusion in our lives, then what is the chant that calls those essentials back? An ongoing enchantment is at the heart of ‘Calvin and Hobbes.’ It’s at the heart of ‘Don Quixote’ and ‘Peter Pan,’ too. These are stories about difficult and not infrequently destructive characters […]

  Zeynep Ekemen is the founder of a company that sells antimicrobial film for high-touch areas, such as door handles, elevator buttons, and staircase rails. A few years ago, sales of her product took off like a rocket… then fell like a rock when Covid was no longer part of the daily news. Listen and learn as Zeynep explains […]

Léon Cogniet  (1817)  “The Artist in His Room at the Villa Medici, Rome”

Tom and Jeffrey and I were texting about politics the other day when a little dog ran into the road and Tom swerved violently to avoid him and landed us smack in the middle of a discussion about professional wrestling. When I was a little boy in grade school, Danny Hodge was the king of […]