I’ve been thinking about leadership over the past couple weeks in terms of how one may rise to the challenge of inspiring and motivating their teams… as well as how to avoid the Peter Principle of being promoted to a level of, well, incompetence. And when you read about leaders who were so very incompetent, you wonder why they’re often more studied than leaders who succeed… because not all of these studies come from the…
Continuing on the trend of looking back to some of the posts I referenced for my blogiversary last week, CGP Grey’s video ranking different state flags is still a great watch, but there’s Minnesota has a new flag! Alas, his videos about the initial finalists and the final design are for backers only, but you get quality critique for the final three: I long for more of the boring-blue-background-with-seals flags to be supplanted, but I…
What a difference 60-odd years makes! Well, okay, I would wonder how things wouldn’t change in 60-odd years in a particular area, but Jill Devine did an article this past December for Northern Virginia magazine that’s chock full of photographs and various milestones of how the region has changed… in many ways quite dramatically. For locals and naturalized locals, it’s sure to trigger some memories.
Coming off my blogiversary post on Saturday, I was catching up on some TED/TEDx videos and one of them made me think of the originality post I talked about re-visiting within the next year. The speaker not only touches on fantasy tropes being tropes and therefore not original, but also about the not unheard of concept that fantasy helps understand reality. In fact, it’s not just fantasy, there’s science fiction as well. And I see…
It’s been 10 years since I relaunched this website. On the one hand, I find it hard to believe. Perhaps not as hard as some of you find it hard to believe. Or perhaps you’re stuck on the fact that I use the term “blogiversary,” but if you’re one of my seven or nine usual readers, you’ve come to expect that kind of thing. Anyway, the 10th anniversary is traditionally the “Tin” anniversary, which really…
Anyone who’s gone through a family member’s belongings after they have passed knows the many emotions it may stir. And then, for many of us, there’s all the stuff we’ve accumulated… which would not be a nice to leave someone to go through. But then what do you do with all the stuff? A longform article about this would be nice. A longform article by a novelist used to elegantly weaving sometimes conflicting, sometimes ephemeral…
Having grown up regularly attending live theater and later doing it myself, I was keenly interested in what impact COVID made during the beginning outbreak of the virus and what theaters would do afterwards. Well, now we’re in the afterwards and Angie Ahlgren has an article for American Theatre that is close to my heart, because it focuses on the “hub of the wheel” of any good theater production: the stage manager. As someone who…
I’m interrupting my usual posting cadence for those seven or nine regular readers who might also have a number of Kindle purchases. Basically, as of February 26th, Amazon is removing the ability for you to download purchases as copies over which you have full control. For more information, you can check out Andrew Liszewski’s piece for The Verge that, like many of us, you may have missed on Valentine’s Day or read David Gewirtz’ article…
This Valentine’s Day, have you considered LEGO? If you or your significant other have considered this as a gift, you are more statistically likely to have a lot of LEGO bricks around your domicile. And that means you should have a way to organize the LEGO bricks you have. Enter LEGO enthusiast Tom Alphin and his LEGO Storage Guide over at Brick Architect. You can begin at the beginning, but this guide came on my…
Amidst all the changes happening in America at the moment, I suppose “ghost jobs” aren’t on the top of some people’s concerns, but for anyone needing to find a new place to work, the increased existence of ghost jobs is something to bear in mind. CNBC has a nice 12-minute piece from last August that walks through what now can account for four out of every 10 job listings. What I like about the newspiece…