Only famous people get diseases...

I am sitting here in the hotel lobby reading USA Today, and once again I see an article/ad trying to "put faces" on a disease. Now I understand that a lot of it has to do with visibility... for some reason society has this fascination with what happens to celebrities, even if it is on the morbid side. When I see an ad campaign like this, the first thing that pops into my head is "this disease has been around forever, why does it take a famous person developing it to bring it to the public's attention?"

Case in point. Michael J. Fox starts to show symptoms of Parkinson's. Now don't get me wrong, Parkinson's is a debilitating disease that no one should have to deal with. However, my perspective was that all of the sudden, because he was developing it, it was now "important" to get information out about it. In reality, we should have been increasing awareness of the disease even before this.

So, where was I? Oh yes, on the front of the second section of USA today was an ad from the American Lung Association for the "Faces of Influenza". According to the CDC, influenza affects between 5 and 20% of the US population. Now, with an estimated population of 300,000,000 people, that would be nearly 60,000,000 cases of influenza. Yet, the "faces" shown for the ad are two actors, an actor/psychologist, the US assistant secretary of health, and an olympic gold medalist. And, I actually just looked at the caption under the US Assistant Secretary of Health, and it actually says...

"... has joined celebrities and not-so-famous Americans to help the American Lung Association...".

OK, so I added the bold and italics, but I would be willing to bet that it is these not-so-famous americans that volunteer their time and effort for the American Lung Association.

So, where are their "faces"?

And the funny thing is, those same people who volunteer their time and effort do so without the expectation of having their picture in USA Today...

It just keeps getting better and better...

From the title song...

"What are you afraid of, failure? So am I. Has been implies failure. Not so. Has been is history. Has been was. Has been... might again."

Pretty darn cool coming from a "Has Been"

Absolutely awesome! Last year at our division Christmas party, we did a "Chinese gift exchange." This is where you draw a number, the first person picks a gift and opens it. The second person can either open a different gift, or steal the first person's gift. This goes on until the last gift is opened.

OK, so I won't bore you with any more of the details... Lets see, where was I? Oh yeah, last year, someone brought in "The Transformed Man" by William Shatner. Seems this was a spoken word CD that Shat had done back in 1968. One of my favorite artists is Ben Folds, and I knew that Ben had done some work with Shat, so I thought that it would be cool to have "The Transformed Man" in my collection. Everyone thought I was absolutely insane for actually stealing the CD from someone else. Needless to say, I didn't have to worry about anyone stealing it from me.

Fast forward to this year. For our Christmas party, I bought a copy of "Has Been," the album that Ben had arranged for Shat back in 2004. When I bought it, I thought "Cool, I wish they had two copies..." Well, I had forgotten that I would have a chance to steal that very copy for little old me. Again, it should be obvious that I didn't have any trouble getting it back for myself.

Now "The Transformed Man" was complete and total kitsch. Thanks to Ben, "Has Been" actually has substance. Shatner does a great job, and with Ben's arrangements backing him up, it is hard to believe that it could be this good.

And of course there are a couple of standouts. You have to love a song that starts out:

Live life.
Live life like you're gonna die,
Because you're gonna.

OK, while this may seem twisted and morbid, the tongue-in-cheek nature of the song is driven home by the list of folks who have "left us"...

Johnny Cash, JFK, that guy in the Stones
Lou Gehrig, Einstein and Joey Ramone.

And wait, it's even better. There is a gospel choir in the background that sings "You're gonna die," and while he is reading the list of folks who have left us, the choir chimes in with "dead" after each line, and follows up Joey Ramone with a soulful "Joey Ramone". And at the end, the choir sings a list of diseases in the background...

Lung cancer, heart attack, diabetes, drug overdose, choke on a chicken bone, hit by a
lightning bolt, spider bite, airplane crash, car wreck, a cap in your ass.

The other standout is "I can't get behind that." It is an almost stream-of-consciousness piece done with none other than Henry Rollins. It would be almost impossible to capture everything without copying it verbatim. Suffice to say, after going through this list of things they "can't get behind," Shatner says:

I can't get behind so-called singers that can't carry a tune, get paid for talking, how easy is
that? Well, maybe I can get behind that.

OK, I'll stop there and let you check it out for yourself if you would like. All that I can say is that I am very glad that I stole this back...

It's the simple things...

So, there I am talking to my neighbor Buck. Buck is the kind of guy that would do just about anything for you, and not expect anything in return. A few weeks ago, Buck cleaned up the leaves that were out in the cul de sac. No one asked him to, he just did it. And believe me, there were a lot of them.

I finished talking to him, and he went inside. As I finished raking up the leaves in my own yard, I realized that I had forgotten to tell Buck "thank you" for cleaning up the cul de sac. When he came back out to leave to pick up his wife, I stopped him and thanked him for cleaning up the leaves. He said, "You know, I have cleaned up the leaves in the cul de sac for 9 years, and you're the first person to thank me."

I'm really glad I said thanks...

It's about time...

Yet another one of those plain and simple truths that hit me like a ton of bricks.

It's time to start getting rid of a lot of the unnecessary, unwanted, unneeded baggage.

The journey forward will be a lot easier without the extra weight.