All others may be
excused.
This excusal is
something like my Catholic obstetrician of long
ago who said the Catholic students
learning to be doctors were excused from
the contraceptive lecture.
Seth Godin says that everybody ought to blog. He’s not
far off considering the number of bloggers out there. Godin blogs EVERY DAY. That’s hard to imagine producing at
that level, but then he doesn’t follow the adage that a blog ought to be some
3,000 words long. Good for Godin. Sometimes his blog is only a few lines, sometimes
4 or 5 paragraphs. That’s my kind of blog, Say it, get to the point, and get
off.
Someone caught me online the other day with a free Health
book. Husband dear was listening to the audio for a while then abandoned me and it. I wanted to find out the catch. Thirty
minutes later after (the doctor) told me, then retold me, then told me what he told
me, I realized that his free book was signing up for a newsletter subscription. Of course, it was with auto-renew. Got
ya!
Must we be tricked into buying something?
Offer me the book. I might buy it. But then an ongoing
subscription would add up to a whole lot more money than a single purchase of a
book, and people are reluctant to spend 20 bucks for a book. They will, however, spend $49.99 for a subscription that will
go on and on. You figure.
This morning I learned via Godin that Amazon sells
junk. Rats. Good old Amazon. They sell good stuff too, but it is more like
buyer beware. The reason Amazon can sell junk is that they have no shelf space
needed to advertise their wares. In a store, one must prove that their product
is viable to gain a place on their shelf. After that
it must sell, or it’s gone.
When I saw a Shark Tank where one of the sharks INVESTED
in a pimple popper simulator, I was bowled over. The pimple popper site got
something like a million clicks. Try to compete with that.
If I don’t sell 200 copies of my book, The Frog’s Song—coming out May 17, 2019,
the publisher will drop me. Think I can do it?
Do you ever wonder what message you have to give? I
remember and have quoted Richard Bach many
times: “Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if
you’re alive, it isn’t.”
Tomorrow would be Martin Luther King Jr’s 90th
birthday. It looks as though it will be celebrated on the 21st, the third
Monday of the month—when my first born child was in school, somehow it used to
fall on her birthday which would be today.
Shortly before King died,
he talked about living until the age of 90. “You
may be 38 years old, as I happen to be,” he
said, “and one day some great opportunity
stands before you and calls upon you to
stand up for some great principle, some
great issue, some great cause. You refuse
to do it because you are afraid…well, you may go on to live until you are 90,
but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90.”
Martin Luther King Jr Memorial
Here is an
incredibly beautiful video and song, “Starry Starry
Night.” Lyrics over Van Gogh paintings. A blog reader sent it in
response to my last blog and comment about Vincent Van Gogh.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?
We need some laughs--Let's not get too serious.