Not sure how I missed it.......................

 

.................but Diana Rigg's birthday was on July 20th.

In the background.................

Jefferson Airplane..........Surrealistic Pillow album

 

You know it is...................

 

..........a great time to be alive when the genius of Lionel Messi is on display all over You Tube.

Choose...........................

 Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior.

Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.

Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.

I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.

 I wish all who read this a very happy Thanksgiving. Yes, even the jerks; it’s never too late to change. Remember to thank America for maximizing your opportunities. But it is – inevitably – capricious and sometimes venal in distributing its rewards.

Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.

Warren Buffett, from his last annual letter

thanks Chris

As a once-upon-a-time history major........

 

.........I am a firm believer in The Great Man Theory.

In the background...................

Sam Cooke.................. Greatest Hits album

 

One of the greatest...........................

 

...............................letters ever written.

Fifty years ago...................

       Hank Aaron breaks the Babe's home run record

 

Fifty years ago.............................

Marshall Tucker Band..........Where We All Belong album

Gone but not forgotten..........................

...............................Tommy Smothers

 

A national treasure passes.................

  ................We were blessed to have him around for as long as we did.

expanded horizons.......................

      I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer.  My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots.  William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .

Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people.  I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer.  I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor.  By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.

     Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers.  Anyway, writing is not a competition to me.  Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller.  I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Question answered....................

 Parents, teachers, coaches, and guidance counselors bombarded me with the same question: "What are you going to do with your life?"  I didn't even want to think about that when I was fourteen.  My teachers called me a daydreamer.  They would write comments on my report card like, "He seems to live in a fantasy world and prefers that to paying serious attention to serious subject matters that will prepare him for life."

     The life they were so hell-bent on preparing me for bored the living shit out of me.  It seemed way too serious.  I saw more meaning in the mysteries of the ocean and the planets than in theology or religion.  I was too busy figuring out ways to skip school, go diving, and get laid.  My heroes were not presidents, they were pirates.  Emerging from adolescence with a healthy "lack of respect for the proper authorities," and a head full of romanticism and hero worship, I was able to come up with an answer.

    Q. What are you going to do with your life?

    A. Live a pretty interesting one.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

     

One of the great ones...............

Michael Stanley Band..Stagepass/Let's Get the Show On the Road

 

A paean to..................

........................................ Booker T. Jones.

 

In the background.................................

The Four Tops...........................The Ultimate Collection

 

Four hours and forty-four minutes..........

 .....................................of musical blissfulness.  Thank you!

Checking in with Jim Collins again.....

Greatness is not a function of circumstance.  Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.

The good-to great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment.  Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away.

. . . the good-to-great transformation never happened in one fell swoop.  There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle movement.  Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel in on direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.

-Jim Collins,  Good To Great:  Why Some Companies Make The Leap . . . and Others Don't

Gone, but not forgotten.........................

Tim Conway transitions on.

Here is a sample of his work (with Harvey Korman)



photo via

Rightfully...............................

.....................................................recognizing Richard Feynman.

"The man happy in his work is not the narrow specialist, nor the well-rounded man, but the man who is doing what he loves to do.  You must fall in love with some activity."

-Richard Feynman