Christmas Day


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Thoughts While Not Shaving

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Cleaning out my work emails recently, I came across one I'd been saving for years. It was a mass email from some guy off in middle-management somewhere who was a big fan of a weekly email quasi-blog called "Thoughts While Shaving."  The author, Len Fuchs, compiled his emails into a book called " Thoughts While Shaving: Common Sense Leadership Principles ." The concept is pretty clever - you picture the guy standing in front of the bathroom mirror, raking the stubble off his chin and experiencing daily epiphanies about leadership and management ("Leaders are influential, even when they are not the number one person in the organization"), and even about thought itself ("Ideas that initially appear to get in the way often lead you to someplace new and better"). Then he jots down these epiphanies in the form of a quasi-random list of principles (#170 - "Leaders know that success is not random"), and starts cashing the royalty checks....
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Those Noisy, Pesky, Horny Cicadas

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May 2013  I’m sitting in my sunroom on a warm afternoon, looking out across my newly green backyard and the ravine that cuts through our neighborhood. I’m awaiting, with a creeping sense of dread and resignation, a benign but loud invasion.  The 17-year periodical cicadas (Brood II) are due to crawl up from underground around these parts, as soon as the ground temperature hits and maintains 64 degrees.  Soon.  A few precocious cicadas emerged in the past couple of summers, much to the evil delight of our cats, who regarded them as toys to be brought inside and batted about.  I know many people look forward to the cicadas. And I know they’re essentially harmless. ( Even delicious , some say.)  I certainly don’t regard them the same way I regard, say, roaches or spiders or ants.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.  Cicadas are often mistakenly called  locusts   –  but really, they’re not even c...
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Tips for the Creatively Constipated

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