Building from a simplistic children’s story, the tortoise and the hare, Poscente takes readers on a journey exploring the notion of speed in today’s society and breaks down myths about speed. He begins by examining the concept of “time” and how we have traditionally define/organize our time. Poscente opts for a new notion of time, building on values rather than the traditional work-home-leisure paradigm.
The take home message is that one should develop efficient and fast ways to deal with the mundane tasks in order to allot more time to fun, creative tasks and family. Poscente does concede that that speed isn’t necessary for success in all circumstances and utilizes a metaphor to expand on this:
Those who resist speed and succeed nonetheless are referred to as Balloons (e.g., speciality shops)
Those who embrace speed but accelerate out of control with no clear plan or direction for how to utilize their speed are referred to as Bottle Rockets (e.g., Dell Computers)
Those who require speed but resist it are referred to as Zepplins (e.g., Kodak)
Those who embrace speed with a clear direction/plan are referred to as Jets and serve as a exemplar for business strategy in today’s society (e.g., Google)
Like I liked how the book was structured with small but insightful chapters. The use of metaphors and case study analysis in this book was also well executed and facilitated understanding. The practical tips and strategies for embracing speed presented to the reader provided excellent advice on how to become a “Jet.”
Dislike I found some parts of the book, although insightful, were repetitive. Considering the topic, I would have appreciated greater directness and conciseness.
Applications & Lesson Learned This book has great applications in the workforce. By examining your circumstances and the nature of your work, you can determine how best to use speed to your advantage and succeed. It is also important to keep in mind that speed and direction need to come from not only at the individual level but also the organizational level.
“If we truly want to soar, we have to understand our authentic purpose, be nimble and open to opportunities, be free of clutter and drag that can limit our potential, and seek our speed in unique and innovative ways” (p. 209)
I sat down to write this blog entry, not so much for your entertainment, but more because I wanted to chronicle what I thought was a really fun journey in my life (it’s really just my way of giving shout-outs to all the people that showed me a good time in the past three months). This summer I’ve resorted to posting much longer blog entries with much less frequency than I did during the season. This is because I had less basketball-related stuff to talk about, which caused me to basically wait for something to happen. When nothing did, I decided to write about personal events in my life instead of the end of the bench events in my life, and because I usually waited awhile to post, I thought I’d write a little extra each time to make up for it.
With that being said, the following (including Part II) should be the final in the pattern of long, off-topic blog entries. I am now back on campus and have started what is basically practice, meaning a steady dose of basketball will now be present in my life until April. This particular blog entry is way too long to post all at once, so I decided to post the first half now and post the rest when I finish it. Also, there promises to be a pretty important announcement at the end of the second half of this entry, so definitely open up the second part when it’s posted, skip the blog altogether, and just scroll down to the good stuff (at least that’s what I’d do).
Every college-aged male I’ve ever met, regardless of their race, their creed, whether or not they like Creed, or which of the over 60,000 combinations they get when they go to Chipotle behaves in the same manner when three certain situations present themselves. The first is that we will place the blame of our farts on someone else standing close to us. Unless, of course, we think it breaks some sort of record on the disgusting scale in which case we will announce to everyone within a 5-iron radius that we are more of a man than the rest of the world combined. The second thing we do is develop our own barter system amongst our friends that is usually anchored by the proposal of “If you buy the pizza, I’ll buy your beer at the bar tonight.” This almost always ends up being an awful deal for the pizza buyer, as he spends $20+ on the pizza, only to see his hopes of getting free beer all night come crashing down when the beer buyer gets the first round and quickly scampers off into the night with an average-looking co-ed he met five minutes before. While both these scenarios are pretty much spot on, neither of them have anything whatsoever to do with this particular blog post (meaning you really could have just skipped this entire first paragraph altogether). The third thing that we do, however, absolutely does.
When a man is 18-25 years old, society tells him that it’s time for him to line up the rest of his life. This is usually the age when men figure out what job they want, where they might want to live, and which woman they want to blame all of their neighborhood Couples Game Night losses on (sidenote: it’s perfectly acceptable to break up with someone based on their performance in charades or Pictionary). Because of this pressure, men in my age group feel the need to outdo one another. How are you supposed to get the best job, house, or woman if you aren’t even smarter, richer, or more charming than any of your friends? It can’t happen. This is why all college-aged men (more like all men, am I right ladies?) fabricate absolutely every story we ever tell. Whoops, I think I just let the secret out.
Perhaps saying we fabricate isn’t exactly the best way to describe what we do. It’s not that we get calls from our grandmas and moms and then brag to our friends about how the ladies won’t stop bugging us (at least I don’t think anybody other than me does that). Instead, we believe (and that’s the key—we truly believe) that everything we do/did/would have done is the most compelling and interesting thing to ever happen to mankind. We’re the types to go out for a few drinks, hit on girls way out of our league, go back home with the same group of guys we originally went out with, play Halo until 4 am, and then tell everyone that wasn’t with us on that particular night that we had “the craziest night EVER.” We’re also the type that say things like “if Steve hadn’t dropped out of high school and if Tommy didn’t tear his ACL in the third game, we would have steamrolled everybody and easily taken state my senior year.”
To accompany this notion that everything we do is the best, we also are quick to point out that everything someone else does is “weak” or “lame.” For example, if Andre The Giant was drunk with a group of college-aged guys, everyone around him would undoubtedly call him a “lightweight” for being drunk after drinking only two barrels of beer and a bathtub of wine. Guys my age, myself included, are nothing more than one-uppers who always think that what they did last weekend makes The Hangover look like a tea party and honestly believe that their circle of friends in high school were “seriously the biggest badasses ever.” If you don’t believe me just ask some guy you know in my age group how his weekend was and do your best to not laugh when he inevitably pulls a Barney Stinson and uses the word “legendary” in some fashion.
As I’m sure you can probably figure out, it’s impossible for every guy in the world to have the craziest night of all-time every single night. But we don’t care. We truly believe that we are the biggest party animals to ever live, just because one of our friends had one too many last night and asked a girl if he could smell her face. We do this because it’s our way of convincing ourselves and others that we matter in this world. “Sure I’m basically incompetent at every job I’ve ever had, but if coach wouldn’t have screwed me in high school I could have easily gone D1 and ended up in the league.” To be successful in life, you sometimes don’t have to be the most talented, best looking, or most charming person. You just have give off the perception that you are, which is achieved through convincing everyone you talk to that you are literally the most interesting man in the world. With that in mind, let me tell you why I seriously had the most legendary summer ever.
At some point in life, virtually everyone makes a vow to themselves to do something. These vows are usually made on New Year’s Day or Ash Wednesday and are broken a week later because chocolate is just too delicious and turning on the safe search feature in Google Images for 40 straight days is borderline impossible. But there’s another kind of vow that young, single people make to themselves. We all seem to convince ourselves that each and every summer we’re going to have “the time of our lives” or some other cheesy line that you’d hear in High School Musical (not that I’d know or anything). We talk about travelling the country/world, eating fried anythings at a county fair, and working on a farm for a widowed cougar who probably doesn’t understand the concept of the age of consent. Like the previous vows, though, more often than not these promises go unfulfilled (the Summer of George being the prime example). We all get jobs stocking shelves at Wal-mart during the midnight shift for $7.50 an hour, which seriously hampers the fun-having potential of the summer. Suddenly instead of talking to our friends about how we’re going to buy a season pass to Cedar Point and ride Millennium Force “like ten million times” we start talking to our friends about how disgusting the mole on our co-worker’s back is and how badly we want to kick our shift manager in the nads. Because I’m graduating from Ohio State next spring and because I plan on joining the real world shortly thereafter (“pssh, good luck in this economy!”), this past summer was the last true summer of my life. In other words, it was the last summer I could act recklessly and still be able to somewhat justify it. That’s why I made yet another promise to myself that even though I was taking summer school full-time, this summer would be the best one yet. Only this time I made sure that it really was.
Excluding meteorologists, astronomers, and all those other nerds who study the rotation of our planet, pretty much everyone agrees that summer begins with Memorial Day weekend. With that in mind, I decided to start my summer off right by going to the Indianapolis 500, which is what absolutely everybody in the Midwest should do each and every Memorial Day weekend. I devoted an entire blog entry to my experience, so I’m not going to be redundantly redundant with my redundancy, but I will reiterate why the Indy 500 is a sporting event that everyone should witness at least once in their lives.
Most people assume that the Indy 500 is only for people who like racing and kissing their cousins, and while there certainly are more than enough cousin-kissers present, you don’t have to like fast cars and incest to have a good time at the race. All you really need to have fun is an open mind and an understanding that you probably will get sunburned. Outside the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on race day is like five college football tailgaters (or ten if your team sucks, and twenty if your team is Indiana) rolled into one, in terms of both the number of people and the number of foods that will send you into cardiac arrest. The people at the 500 are incredibly friendly, even if they do charge you 20 bucks to park in their driveway that’s two miles from the track. The weather is pretty much perfect year after year, except for the years that it’s not. And the race itself is a heart-pounding sight for those who have never seen an auto race live. The Indy 500 is not so much a sporting event as it is a cultural happening, which is what keeps me coming back every year. Despite the fact that most of what I write isn’t meant to be taken all that seriously, I’m completely serious when I suggest that you make it a priority to go to at least one Indianapolis 500 in your life. There’s an 80% chance that it won’t let you down.
Just like the Indy 500 is a must for me each summer, waking up at the buttcrack of dawn and spending an entire day on a body of water at least 100 miles from my house is also a must. That’s why I decided to make my next big adventure of the summer a whitewater rafting trip to the Ocoee River in southeastern Tennessee. I already briefly touched on my experience in another blog entry, but I think I may have failed to fully explain how awesome of a time I really had.
After staying in a nearby hotel the night before, my brother, Keller, and I showed up at our rafting company’s station/outpost thing at around 8 in the morning with adrenaline running through our bodies and big wads of eye boogers in our caruncles. We were one part excited, one part tired, and however many parts remain nervous, because the closest any of us had come to anything rafting related was when I interrupted Bill Raftery midsentence to tell Verne Lundquist that I really enjoyed his work in Happy Gilmore. To make matters worse, we completely ignored the safety presentation, which consisted of the guy in charge basically telling us what not to do, because we were too busy telling jokes that were centered around the plot of Deliverance. Luckily for us, we had the best rafting guide any of us had ever had.
I’ve already outlined why I think Joe Cope should win some sort of award for his river-guiding excellence, so please forgive me for coming across as having a man crush on him (if he didn’t have such dreamy eyes it would be a lot easier). Joe knew every rapid of the river like the back of his hand, ya know, if he were the type of guy to look at his hands a lot or something. Because of this, he knew when we would be able to tip the raft if we all leaned a certain way, which may not sound like fun to you, but I assure you that there are few things in my life that have been more exhilarating than falling out of a raft and floating down a series of class 5 rapids. Just like my first marriage, it physically and emotionally hurt like crazy and gave me a few scars that are still in the healing process, but in the end made me a better person and was therefore worth it. Other than being an expert raft-flipper, Joe didn’t have a problem with me splashing people in other rafts, announcing to everyone on the river that I was peeing, or doing anything else that only a 12-year-old and I would do. Basically all it takes for me to like someone and have a good time is for them to allow me to act like a child. This is why I loved my whitewater rafting experience and just figuratively batted my eyes at Joe with this entire paragraph. Anyway, like the Indianapolis 500, I strongly urge all of you to give whitewater rafting a try at some point in time.
Following the whitewater rafting trip, Keller and I traveled to Hagerstown, Maryland to watch our former high school classmate Drew Storen pitch in a minor league baseball game. Drew had just been drafted into the MLB and was starting out by playing for the class A Hagerstown Suns. Because I currently live in Columbus (home of the AAA Clippers) and am originally from Indianapolis (home of the AAA Indians), I had been to my share of minor league games. However, I quickly realized that not all minor league games should be treated equally.
Anyone who has ever been to both a minor league and major league baseball game will tell you that what sets the two apart is that people are actually interested in the baseball at major league games (with the obvious exception being Marlins fans). The truth is that nobody really cares whether or not the Hagerstown Suns pull out the W on that particular day or where they are in the current standings. Nobody really cares that Corey Cartwright’s torn biceps is going to put him out for the season and will make the Suns bullpen a liability. And nobody really cares that the Suns third base coach is a little too aggressive and causes too many guys to get thrown out at home. What people do care about is that next Tuesday is Dime-A-Dog night and a thirty minute firework show will follow the game, at which point all kids under 12 can run the bases provided they brought their report card proving they got an A in at least one class.
For the most part, there is an inverse relationship between the outrageousness of the promotions at the baseball game and the level of baseball being played on the field. Major league teams and some higher level minor league teams don’t need to come up with ways to get fans to come to their games (again, except for the Marlins) because the steroids that the players take already do that for them. The rest of the minor leagues (and especially single A minor league teams) need to be creative to get butts in seats, though. This is why I truly believe some of the most creative minds anywhere are working for minor league baseball marketing departments.
I went to two Suns games while in Hagerstown and was exposed to twenty wrestling theme songs, two fireworks shows, one sack race with children, one game that involved grown men wearing baby bonnets and diapers, and one enormous beer tent down the left field foul line. There were times that it seemed as if baseball was being played only to serve as entertainment in between different promotions. I watched a man sing “Man! I Feel Like A Woman”, I saw little kids try to cheat one another in a barefoot race, and I witnessed a guy dressed as a cowboy (try to) dance to “Cotton Eyed Joe.” Going to a low-level minor league baseball game showed me that baseball games actually can be fun and people in Hagerstown, Maryland lead really boring lives, which is why they come out to the ballpark to celebrate National Egg Toss Day. Needless to say, I find minor league baseball far more entertaining than major league baseball which is to say I find three-legged couples races in which the boyfriend/husband is completely hammered more entertaining than watching Craig Counsell lay down a well executed sacrifice bunt.
Before I get to the YouTube for this entry, I wanted to give a shout-out to Brian in the Trillion Man March for making a pretty awesome CLUB TRIL sign for the set of College GameDay this past Saturday. I had to go to campus to run an errand as GameDay was setting up and was pleasantly surprised as I walked by the set to find Brian close to the front row representing Club Trillion on national television. Here’s a picture for all of you who may have missed it.
The newest podcast with Darren Rovell is now available on iTunes or by simply scrolling down and clicking the play button. I had CNBC's sports reporter on to talk about how we originally crossed paths at the 2007 Final Four, why Twitter is actually pretty useful, and how hard it is to perform on basketball's biggest stage. Also, Darren introduces me to noodling, which is not as disgusting as it sounds but is every bit as awesome as it sounds.
I looked everywhere but couldn't find a picture of Darren pointing at himself with his thumbs. Looks like the thumb pointing streak ends with the Streakmaster, so if you're a fan of irony you can at least be pleased with that.
Darren's blog, Sports Biz with Darren Rovell, can be found by clicking here. Also, Darren's Twitter account, which is more entertaining than anything business related ever should be, can be found here. Finally, you can watch a monkey ride a Segway by clicking here. I think that just about covers all the important links.
The Club Trillion Podcast (new name has been picked and should be revealed soon) now has almost 15,000 subscribers which means either everyone in my family created 3,000 iTunes accounts or the Trillion Man March is awesome. I'm thinking the latter is more feasible, but only barely. Seriously, a big thanks goes out to all of you who continue to listen and continue to lie to your friends by telling them it would definitely be worth their time to check out the podcast. For all of you who are new to the party, you can subscribe through iTunes by going here and clicking on the Subscribe tab.
Title: Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High Authors: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler Rating: 4 stars out of 5 Available Online [1] For more than 25 years, Patterson, Grenny, McMillan, and Switzler researched people in the workplace. These authors found that what makes someone an effective colleague is the way they manage their conversations. The authors studied these conversations and took detailed notes when they were having crucial conversations. The authors offer some basic steps for how to manage crucial conversations. First is to identify when a conversation is turning crucial. One way to do this is by your own physical signals (e.g., Is your stomach getting tight? Are you eyes drying up?).
Once a crucial conversation is recognized the authors suggest to “start with heart.” What this means is to dig deep down inside and figure out the message you’re truly trying to get across. Often in a crucial conversation you can become defensive and your message may get lost or never get sent because the focus turns to defending. If you can recognize that a conversation has turned crucial and stay focussed, then you can learn to avoid being defensive and stay focussed on the message you’re really trying to get across. If your conversation partner begins to get defensive, this is one way to recognize that they do not feel safe in the conversation. When someone is feeling unsafe, they are likely not hearing your purpose. To return to a safe conversation, the effective conversationist has to guide the conversation back to a mutual purpose; if both parties can agree on one goal, it makes the conversation safer, with both parties more likely to hear what one another has to say.
Like
One of the best things about this book is the use of examples for various situations. This book is not just useful in a work setting, but also applies to conversations with spouses, family members, and friends.
Dislike
The authors did a very good job of getting the point across in the first few chapters, however after that the advice seemed a bit repetitive.
Lesson Learned
Practice makes perfect. Just as trying to remember to sit with good posture may take a conscious effort so too does staying in tune to your emotions during conversations when they turn crucial. It’s easy to prepare yourself for a crucial conversation when you are expecting one, but as conversation escalates and emotions get stronger, it is easy for conscious effort to control your emotions to fade. Just as you may sit down extend your back, put your shoulders back, and focus on good posture, once you begin working on something you may realize a few minutes later your back is slouched and your shoulders are forward. If you are in the middle of a crucial conversation and you suddenly become aware that your emotions have taken over, take a few minutes to regain your composure, take some deep breaths, and start back into the conversation. Over time, forming some of the habits in this book should become natural just as good posture is more natural for someone that practices at it, such as a ballet dancer or physiotherapist.
Ruling Conservatives have been reluctant to commit to what would be a huge project to connect Québec, Montréal, Toronto, and Windsor.
Early this year, the Canadian Conservative Party came close to losing its control of the federal government after the Liberal, New Democratic, and Bloc Québécois parties suggested that they would demand that their collective legislative majority be honored. In Canada, the party with a plurality of seats is traditionally rewarded with the Prime Ministership even if multiple parties on the opposing side have more total representation in the Parliament. In the past few months, Conservatives, led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, have attempted to soothe the masses by appropriating cash to major projects throughout the country — Toronto received huge grants for several light rail lines and the proposed Québec-Windsor high-speed rail link garnered preliminary support.
Months have passed and there has been no added commitment to the fast train project, so the opposition Liberals, seeing a winning issue, have jumped on the bandwagon, hoping to make a new rail connection a central feature of their campaign in the next federal elections, which will likely be this fall next year. The Conservatives continue to suffer from significant unpopularity in Canada.
Though the issue of a train between the largest cities in Ontario and Québec provinces has been studied dozens of times and despite the fact that the metropolitan areas around Toronto and Montréal, just 550 km apart, house more than 1/4th of the country’s population, Canada has never made a strong commitment to fast rail. A concentrated investment would allow for service between the cities in 2h15, far less than the five hour trip required today on VIA Rail Canada. Ottawa, the nation’s capital, is ideally located between the two. There are cumulatively 60 daily round-trips offered by airlines directly between the cities. This is a corridor that demands high-speed rail.
Adding such a program to the Liberal electoral agenda may inspire growth in the party’s ranks in Ontario and Québec, though inhabitants of Alberta may be inspired only if the Party pushes a less effective Edmonton-Calgary link. It’s hard to see how people in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and the country’s other provinces will be inspired by any talk of high-speed rail, since no one is discussing the possibility of a cross-Canada connection.
The New Democratic Party, positioned to the left of the Liberals, has been advocating for fast trains for years, as has the Bloc Québécois, though the latter group, focused on Québec sovereignty, seems more interested in a Montréal-New York link than a line to Toronto. As a result, new voters seem likely to be attracted to the Liberal Party from the right, rather than the left, since it is from that side of the political spectrum that the Liberals have lost most of their support since the heady days of the early 1990s.
It seems hard to argue with the Liberal plan to support high-speed rail, though there’s no reason to think that Conservatives won’t hijack the idea if popular support for the project gains steam. Though their political future is very much in doubt, English Labourites have come down strongly on the side of a new north-south high-speed link after months of opposing Tory efforts to promote the project. Nonetheless, when the next government comes to power in Canada in early 2011, it seems likely that we will see a politician on the left in the Prime Minister’s seat; the Liberal Party’s new-found support for high-speed rail is a good first step for what will have to be a major undertaking. This is especially true because political support now must be strong enough to withstand a public backlash against the project’s likely C$50 billion cost later.
Disclamre: In honour of Canadians everywhere (but mostly in honour of the Canadians in Canada), I have decided to write this entire blog post in pseudo Canadian-English, which means every wourd that usually ends with “-er” will now end with “-re” and every instance of “or” in a wourd will now become “our.” So please excuse what you perceive to be a bunch of typos in this blog post. And don’t wourry, I don’t understand why Canadians do it that way eithre.
When I initially found out that we were going on an international trip, I was pretty excited about the oppourtunity to travel wourlds apart and make fun of people to their face because they don’t speak English and therefoure wouldn’t have any idea of what I was saying. But then I found out that we were going to Windsor, Ontario (which is literally as shourt of an international trip from Columbus as you can get) and I understandably lost a little bit of my enthusiasm. Aftre all, Canada to me was nothing moure than that big chunk of land nourth of America that tries to fit in but is nevre quite fully accepted at the adult dinnre table (or is that Alaska?). I heard Canada and images of Nickelback and Stephen Abootman flashed through my head, which I’m pretty confident are the Canadian equivalents to America’s Psychostar and Glenn Beck. Simply put, I didn’t respect Canada because I failed to see a reason to do so. It was country that really hadn’t done anything for me othre than produce Pamela Anderson and that one band that made that one song I used to rock out to in juniour high. Then I realized, yet again, that I was completely off with my assessment.
Within ten minutes of being in Canada, it became strikingly obvious to me that the part of the country I was in really wasn’t any different than Ohio or Indiana. I saw cournfields, McDonald’s, and guys in wife-beatres. I saw kids loitering and causing mischief at malls, pregnant teenagres, and way too many auto repair shops. Hell, I even saw some houses flying American flags. If it weren’t for the rampant use of the metric system I would have been fully convinced that I was still in Ohio. But instead of being upset that my international trip took me to a place that was essentially identical to where I had just come from, I used the oppourtunity to scold myself for being an ethnocentric jerk.
What was so troubling about Canada for me in the past was that the national flag has a maple leaf on it, which simultaneously proclaims to the wourld that Canadians are good at making syrup and should, undre no circumstances, evre be taken seriously as a wourld powre. What’s wourse is that the hockey team from the most popular city in Canada is named aftre the maple leaf on the flag (Toronto Maple Leafs), which reeks of unouriginality. Can you imagine an All-American city, like Dallas for example, having a hockey team named aftre a feature of the American flag? I sure can’t, because, along with racism and a seemingly unlimited amount of television channels, America is synonymous with ouriginality. Canada, howevre, is apparently all about their maple leaf, which despite what I ouriginally thought, is actually not a bad thing at all.
Aftre crossing the bourdre into Canada at around 10 pm, we drove at least anothre hour to the small town of Kingsville on the shoure of Lake Erie, which is the southernmost town in all of Canada, accourding to the locals. I assumed that because Kingsville was the Florida of Canada there would be flocks of sexy Canadian co-eds looking for a good time. I was wrong. Instead, when we came to town we were greeted by the three 125-year-old barren cottages that we would be calling home for four days. To put that in perspective, if you were bourn the day the cottages were built, you would have been 28 when Titanic sank. Yikes. Aftre getting off the bus and giving the cottages a closre look, everyone on the team agreed that we completely expected an axe murdrere to butchre us and sell our ourgans on the black market as soon as we all went to sleep.
I woke up the next mourning and aftre checking to make sure my pancreas was still where it was supposed to be (note: I have no idea where my pancreas is supposed to be), I decided to scout out our living arrangements a little moure. There was a walk-out, albeit stupidly dangerous balcony from my second floour room that had a really sexy view of Lake Erie. There were fire pits and trays of home-grown fruit and vegetables laid out around the cottage. There were fishing docks and pictures/decourations that even my grandma would find outdated. Aftre I examined the place during the day, I realized that it was actually a nice little getaway that I would describe as “quaint” if I were also the type of person who used wourds like “catawampus” and “whippersnappre.” That’s when it hit me that my perception of Canada was way off.
It’s undeniable that Canada lacks the certain swaggre that America has, which explains why America is thought of as one of the most powerful countries in the wourld and Canada is thought of as America’s neighbour. But what’s interesting about Canada, as far as I can tell, is that it is a country that actually enjoys its irrelevance on the scale of global impourtance. Staying in the cottages on Lake Erie exposed me to a lifestyle that may not represent all Canadians, but certainly left a lasting impression on me. The Canadians I met are as carefree as can be, which explains why they don’t try to take ovre the wourld like some people argue America is attempting to do. Because of this, Canada isn’t hated by the rest of the wourld and doesn’t have all the domestic problems that America has. Sure you can’t tell me how powerful the Canadian dollar is right now, but you also can’t tell me the last time Canada was involved in a news-wourthy conflict, othre than the Montreal Screwjob of course. I’ve always viewed Canada as a benchwarmre in the game of wourld powre, but in doing so I thought of them as the fat kid on the 7th grade football team with asthma, who is on the team only because his mom doesn’t get off wourk until six and can’t affourd an aftre-school babysittre. In reality, Canada is like I am on the Ohio State basketball team—completely content with being a benchwarmre because it’s really not that bad of a life and pretty good friends with some of the bettre playres. I’ll nevre be thought of as a star basketball playre, but I also will nevre get blamed for a loss or really get criticized at all about my basketball-playing abilities. This is why I now completely respect Canada.
Some of you are probably thinking things like “If you love Canada so much, why don’t you marry it?” and “This is America. Love it or leave it.” I see where you’re coming from, but make no bones about it, I’m as much of a diehard American as you will find. I listen to country music, I’m not afraid to grow out my mustache, and I love apple pie almost as much as Jim Levenstein. I’m just simply saying that maybe we can learn something from our neighbours to the nourth. As far as I can tell, Canada is basically America anyway, only with free health care and double Big Macs and without warm weathre or any sourt of entertaining spourts othre than hockey (at least the part I went to is).
The maple leaf on the Canadian flag used to tell me that even though they play hockey, Canadians are basically a bunch of pansies. Now it tells me that Canadians are laid-back people who would rathre grow their beards out and catch fish with their bare hands than bothre with wourld affairs. So Canada, I’d like to apologize for the first 22 years of my life. I took you for granted and failed to see that you are something moure than a big piece of land that America can use when we eventually overpopulate our country. Americans can learn from your laid-back ways. Maybe if we keep our nose out of othre people’s business like you do, dirty rumours won’t spread about us that say we hooked up with the varsity quarterback in the men’s bathroom during study hall last week. Still, I’m not saying I prefre Canada ovre America or anything crazy like that. I just think that Americans can take a thing or two from Canadians and can, in turn, make my favourite country in the wourld a safre, friendlire, and ultimately bettre place to live.
The second podcast is now available for listening or download. We had Jason Gilbert on, who is better known for being ESPN.com's Streakmaster. He and Mark discuss the inner workings of the Streak, how to get yourself into a camera shot you weren't invited to be in, and the desire to be the guy in a Taylor Swift song.
Photo courtesy ESPN/Julianne Varacchi Contrary to popular belief, Club Trillion does NOT have a "point at yourself if you're on the podcast" picture policy.
As usual comments and suggestions are welcome. Once you get done listening to the podcast, head on over to The Streakmaster's site, http://www.thestreakmaster.com, and give it a gander. Also, the Club Trillion group Mark mentions in the podcast can be found here.
We have some more solid guests lined up for the next few weeks, but don't think they are going to replace the blogs. There should be another one up within the next day or so, and the podcasts from here on out should serve as supplements to the regular blogs.
The first podcast had a great debut on iTunes. You can find the podcast in the iTunes directory here, and getting the podcast available for the Zune is something we are going to try and do soon.
