Just Do It or Git Er Done?

I have a diploma hanging on the wall, of what my wife describes as the “orange room”,  a brightly painted, bedroom cum office in the basement of our house. The diploma confers on me the degree of Master of Arts in fancy Gothic script, and I sometimes look at its framed gravitas with no small sense of pleasure.  This satisfaction stems from the fact that I earned this degree in middle age and is a culmination of a lifetime of formal and informal schooling at a variety of institutions on both sides of the Western Ocean.

                However as much as I enjoyed my experience at graduate school,  with papers written, presentations given and a thesis carefully constructed, much of what I learned seems to have disappeared into the ether. For all the text books I have pored over and business models   studied,  the thoughts that stick in my mind the most, increasingly seem to be the those sayings uttered by people who didn’t spend a lot of time navel-gazing at University.

                Several years ago I started the habit of entering a quotation or saying in my Outlook calendar, so that when I got to work, a reminder would pop up with something motivational to go along with my morning coffee.   Initially, I would search the web for quotes from philosophers that sounded profound and weighty.  For example, every weekday morning for several months, competing Soren Kierkegaard quotes would show up on my calendar.  “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” and “Life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced”   Which of course sounded good at first reading, however I didn’t have the time to ponder the deeper existential meanings before the reality of the workday intervened.  Other quotes came from my favorite poet, Rudyard Kipling, which meant that “If you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs and blaming it on you…..”  and If you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run….”  were both Outlook regulars.  As good as they sounded, neither did much either for my insecurity or procrastination.

                After a while it dawned on me that I was hearing more practical profundity from regular folks than I was getting from the Great Thinkers of the Ages.   I enjoyed the first moment of clarity when I was vacationing in North Carolina several years ago. After a hard day at the beach, I was lying on the sofa watching a program about Bass fishing.  Now, I have never been much of a fisherman, but was too lazy to find the remote and change the channel.   I watched as a moribund Bass fisherman plaintively asked the presenter Billy Bob (we will call him) why things weren’t getting better for him.  Billy Bob looked at his whining student squarely in the eye and said “For THINGS to get better, YOU have to get better”   I aroused myself from my stupor and wrote this down immediately.   Years of studies in organizational motivation had been clearly and neatly summed up by this TV fisherman a few choice words.  Needless to say it went on the Outlook calendar as soon as I returned to work.

                The following year I was flying into Salt Lake City on a ageing Delta Airlines DC-9 and was sitting next to a biker looking guy of about 60, who told me that the last time he had flown was when he was on his way to Vietnam, probably in this very DC-9 forty years ago!   I laughed and we got to chatting.  He told me that he was on his way back to his job in the salt mines. Now usually when people use the term “another day in the salt mines” it denotes any employment that people find arduous or boring, even if it’s just in an office cube. This time however, he really DID work in a salt mine somewhere on the Great Salt Flats of Utah, and was picking up his motor cycle (his preferred choice of transportation) at the airport.  During the course of the flight he gave me the Cliff Notes on his life, good and bad, marriages divorces, triumphs and mistakes.  I asked him if he harbored the wish that he had done things differently. He looked me in the eye and shook his head. “You can’t live your life for another man’s dreams” he said firmly. This time I scrawled it on the back of a napkin before it found its way to my Outlook Calendar.

So whether it was a supervisor wandering into my office after a particularly hard week and saying “Get over it, get on with it” or a friend opining that “Working at his company is like “Making love to a porcupine – one prick working against thousands”   I learned to listen more closely to the all those sayings born of hard experience, resilience and wisdom that didn’t show up in a 1001 Quotations by Famous People.  After all, whether it was Wieden & Kennedy the advertising agency that developed Nike’s famous slogan “Just Do It” or the comedic interjection of Larry the Cable Guy’s “Git Er done”; at the end of the day, they both essentially amount to the same inspirational catchphrase.

I’ll put them both on the calendar.

More from the Albion Bulldog shortly..

An Inconvenient Sale

An Inconvenient Sale 

Recent news story:    Former Vice President Al Gore sells his struggling Current TV network to Al Jazeera for $500M.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/al-gore-sell-current-tv-al-jazeera-article-1.1231907#ixzz2LAt5gdNv

Yes, that Al Gore, the same Al Gore who stood in front of a cartoon earth and sun less than 10 years ago, to explain to us rubes that our ice cream would melt faster in the future if we didn’t stop using  Evil Fossil Fuels.  And lo it came to pass, just a few years later, that the expansive prophet of climate-doom sold his Current TV to Al Jazeera, a network which is entirely backed by fossil fuel money.

Mr. Gore, of course, saw no conflict in this sale, praising Al Jazeera for having the “highest quality, most extensive, best climate coverage of any network in the world.”  Most American’s however probably don’t turn to Al Jazeera for updates on the plight of the polar bears, if indeed they turn to Al Jazeera for much of anything at all.

Why Bulldog, you might ask plaintively, isn’t it a tad hypocritical for Ali G, to make a reported personal $100m by selling his TV station to Big Oil?   And it doesn’t come much bigger than Qatari Oil. They have 15 billion barrels of proven reserves which are forecast to last for another 23 years.  Now call me crazy, but I don’t think that it’s in the Qatari’s best interests to start promoting wind farms and urge us to bicycle to our jobs at the commune, when they sitting on big barrels of the black stuff.

Al Gore and Hypocrisy of course are well acquainted. Even while Al was lecturing the rest of us on our profligate use of carbon dioxide, his own Mansion outside of Nashville, Tennessee had an energy use, measured by kilowatt hour, 20 times the national average.  And then of course there was the 2009 Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change at which over 1,400 Limousines were used for the delegates with a grand total of 5 …yes 5 electric or hybrid vehicles. The estimated CO2 expelled over those three days was equivalent to that of a city of 250,000 people.

So this begs the question, why in the name of Al-lah, does the media and certain sections of a gullible population continue to accord this man the status of  a real scientist  when it comes to questions of anthropogenic global warming?   Good question, because even scientists who are invested in discovering the causes of recent global warming, feel that Al Gorzeera does not help their cause with wildly inaccurate predictions of rising sea levels and other speculative doom-mongering.

The answer, as far as I can tell is this; since Al is a darling of the environmental left, whose mantra appears to be, if we can scare enough people into buying into our progressive policies regardless of the truth or cost, then our job is done. So Al became a talisman for that effort. Ready to be whisked around the world on emissions-spewing aircraft and in emissions-pumping limos in order to tell the world’s population to follow policies, that Al himself ignores.

Mr. Gore has already appeared on several programs and in several publications, eager to defend himself against charges of hypocrisy and greed. However as much he tries to rationalize this sell out to Big Oil, he comes across looking more and more desperate.  If he stood up and said “look I am fading ex-politician, recently divorced, and I’m just trying to make a buck in a capitalist society” Then I would have a lot more respect for you Al.

More from the Albion Bulldog soon.

Hollywood Control

Hollywood Control

                After the recent tragedy in Newtown, several Hollywood stars came out strongly in favor of stricter gun controls.   I’m shocked.   This is a group of people (mostly politically liberal) responsible for a relentlessly violent media, awash in no-consequences gun play and casual indifference to human life.  Why on earth would they want to restrict the use of firearms, when after all, an increasing percentage of their movies are reliant upon their blasé exploitation.   Instead of gun control, perhaps now is the time to impose some common sense measures on this other, more dangerous industry.  Let’s call it “Hollywood Control”.

On a weekly basis, millions of honest, hard working Americans are, let’s face it, subject to a horrendous body count whenever they go the local Cineplex, even if it’s just during the coming attractions.  Hopefully by building a coalition of concerned citizens groups we can crack down on these vacuous and violent images once and for all.  After all, the Founding Fathers, even in all their wisdom, could hardly have foreseen Die Hard 15 – The Retirement Years, when they carefully penned the First Amendment over 200 hundred years ago. And who would have thought that the right to freedom of expression would have to take into account the bloody predilections of Quentin Tarrentino.

So I have a modest proposal to introduce measures that will help restrict first amendment rights and lessen the thousands of murders depicted in Hollywood movies on an annual basis.  After all, other countries’ film industries show just a small fraction of the killings that Hollywood perpetuate every year, and we would be wise to adopt their measures.

                First, we should introduce a system of universal background checks for moviegoers. It’s simply not good enough that we currently restrict the rights of those persons, 17 years old and under, to hear the work “shit” outside of high school, or see a bare breast outside of Internet porn.  We need to make sure that no one can have access to unlimited carnage unless they have passed a comprehensive background check with a 7 day waiting period.  This will allow us time to make sure that mentally ill or potentially violent persons are not subject to Django Unchained or Texas Chain Saw Massacre at Home Depot.

                It would be also be helpful to limit the size of the film containers used to screen the movies.  A smaller reel will help us reduce the exposure of mindless and boring shoot-outs to a helpless and impressionable populace.  And last, but most important ,we need to enforce the crackdown on so-called “Assault Films”  This is where we go the local art theater, expecting to see a genteel period romance and all of a sudden we are “assaulted “ by  a trailer starring a geriatric Arnold or Sylvester firing multiple weapons systems.

 Cynics among you might say; but Bulldog, won’t criminals just circumvent the system by illegally passing or downloading bootlegs at illicit movie shows?    It’s possible of course that citizens will do anything to get their hands on these blood-soaked tales, but I say why worry about the Constitution when we need to protect people from the evil doers in Hollywood. Besides, what could go wrong?

More from the Albion Bulldog shortly!