Office Space

If you watch Office Space (or I'm sure any other movie) enough times, you begin to detect certain nuances you might not catch in the first two or three views.  One I remember clearly is the first time I noticed what Michael Bolton was doing in the Chachki's scene near the beginning of the movie.  Notice that the entire time him, Peter and Samir are in there, he never once picks up his cup of coffee and drinks it.  No, he spends the entire time just tearing sugar packets and dumping the sugar into his cup!

Another thing that always bothered me (until I figured it out!) is this: in the scene where Peter's sleeping in on Saturday and ignoring all of Lumbergh's messages, he finally does get up, the phone rings, and it's Ann on the other line.  She wants to know why he's not at work like he's supposed to be.  Question -- although we can gather that he probably told her in between the time he leaves the office on Friday and they go to see the therapist, he was being forced to work on Saturday...why's she calling him at home if she thinks he's at work?  The altruistic side of me would say she wanted to let him know about something, decided not to disturb him at work, and was just going to leave him a message on his answering machine.  But, as events show, Ann's not exactly the sensitive type. 

My theory's that Lumbergh, after his 17 attempts at reaching Peter, finally tried to find out what happened to him by calling Ann.  And how pray tell would he happen to have Peter's girlfriend's phone number?...

"Oh, and one more thing........I'VE BEEN CHEATING ON YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

:)

List of My Favorite Cities Lived In and/or Visited

Boston
Haifa
San Francisco
Los Angeles
Washington, D.C.
Prague
Tokyo
Osaka
Kyoto
Amsterdam
Antwerp
Paris
Budapest
Honolulu
Toronto
Montreal
Philadelphia
Guadalajara
London
Dublin
Galway

List of Major League Ballparks I've Attended:

Oriole Park at Camden Yards (Baltimore)
Fenway Park (Boston)
Progressive Field (Cleveland)
Angels Stadium (Anaheim)
McAfee Coliseum (Oakland)
Wrigley Field (Chicago)
Olympic Stadium (Montreal)
Shea Stadium (New York)
RFK Stadium (Washington, D.C.)
Nationals Park (Washington, D.C.)
Chase Field (Phoenix)
Turner Field (Atlanta)
Candlestick Park (San Francisco)
AT&T Park (San Francisco)

Have also been to games in Japan (Koshien Stadium) and The Netherlands (Amsterdam)

Why Did I Become Conservative?

A question I'm sure that has been on several of my friends' minds over the past 10 years.  Let's put it simply -- as George Bernard Shaw once said, "Anybody who's not a conservative at 40 hasn't got a brain.  And anyone who's not a liberal at 20 hasn't got a heart."

Also, again to put it simply...missing by 20 minutes being at the epicenter of a suicide bombing attack while living in Israel tends to change your perspective on things just a little.

Inspire Me Culturally

www.inspiremeculturally.com is now registered under me as a domain name.  Next comes the task of building out the website.

The Red Sox swept the Padres this week.  Games were on 1090AM San Diego.  Padres are up there with the Cubs, the Indians, the Rangers, the Nationals/Expos, the Brewers and the Mariners as the most championship-starved teams in baseball.

Argo

Finally rented and saw Argo last night.  Probably the most intriguing thing I found about it was something it brought to light.  Back then, even the thought by nearly all Americans that we could be so deeply hated/despised by another people was completely foreign.  "What, people in other countries hate us?  What the heck are you talking about?  We're America -- the great friend and protector, out to rid the world of evil Communism and like-minded doers of evil."

Again, this movie did what I thought was an incredible job of bringing to light how at the time, we as a people just could not even fathom the thought of such a deep-rooted hatred of America, her values, and her ideals.  The Iran hostage crisis to me, spelled the end of the American World War II hangover.

And yes, I thought it was overall a great movie that deserved all of the accolades it has received.

Acceptance of Vices

Every place, it seems, has its own acceptance of a certain vice.  Growing up in Massachusetts, I think the socially accepted vice was real hard-core drinking.  In Washington, DC, it is nerdy social ineptitude.  In San Francisco, it's marijuana use.  In Israel, it was smoking.  And here in Los Angeles, I think it is unfortunately, the use of any controlled substance. 

I witnessed the behavior yesterday of someone who was obviously under the influence of something.  And I realized just how socially acceptable it seems to be here.  San Francisco was different.  There, of course, all kinds of drugs were (and still are) done.  But the only one that was socially acceptable was pot.  Here, it is a different scenario, unfortunately.

Entrepreneurship

When you're an entrepreneur, there really just don't seem to be enough hours in the day.  I mean really, where does the time go?  I have been up since about 5:40 this morning, and the last six hours seem to have just flown by.

I tried reading How to Win Friends and Influence People, but to be quite honest, I feel as if I've been reading at least shadows of it for 20 years now.  Granted, that book was truly the first of its kind.  But after 20 pages, I decided that I didn't think I was going to learn anything new from it that I've not already been exposed to in my management/leadership career.

The KG/Pierce era is almost officially over.  At least we got one title out of it.