Posts Tagged With ‘ Mark O’Brien ’

Your friend and mine, Dennis Pitocco, sent me this photo of a watering hole near where he and his wife, Ali, live in Tampa, Florida: People who think Irish pubs and grills are a dime a dozen are most likely correct. But they probably don’t know why there are so many or why they’re called pubs and grills. So, as a public service, I’m going to break it down for you. Start With the Pubs The reason there are so many Irish pubs is that drinking for Irishmen is an Olympic sport. Even the amateurs are pretty competitive. There is, for instance, the story of the Irishman who, while visiting the... Continue Reading

I read a press release the other day saying W.C. Fields had been appointed President Biden’s Chief of Staff. When asked what his specific advice was for the President, Mr. Fields said, “Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.” As it turns out, that seems to have been translated into the President’s domestic policy on all fronts. Here are just four examples, the first two on energy. The first is from Robert Bryce from a post on Substack. The post is called, “The Iron Law Of Electricity Strikes Again As Vietnam Boosts Coal Burn”(hat tip to my friend, Jim Vinoski, for... Continue Reading

Why don’t people just call me? I’ll never understand. I wonder that quite often when something that would have been evident to a blindman wearing a blindfold is presented as something revelatory or epiphanic. The latest case in point is a piece from LinkedIn news called, “When office brainstorms go bust”. Here’s the gist: It turns out that solitude — not unstructured group brainstorming — is often the best starting point for big ideas. Experts tell The Wall Street Journal that the pitfalls of office life, which can include “blabbermouths with mediocre suggestions and introverts... Continue Reading

A popular expression says, “Everybody’s got a story.” I’m luckier than most, I have many. This is a collection of them. It’s necessarily incomplete because I’m still on the planet. As long as that remains true, I’ll always have more stories. I hope you enjoy these. CLICK HERE TO GRAB YOUR PERSONAL COPY Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/ Continue Reading

In the Friendship Bench conversation that took place on Thursday, June 1st, JoAnna Baanana and Kamla Dasrath facilitated an engaging discussion of astrology. During the session, Roger Martin asked how it was that the placement of the sun, the moon, and other celestial bodies at the moments of our births could influence the human beings each of us is. (I deliberately didn’t write happens to be lest there is no element of happenstance about it.) By way of responding to Roger, Victor Acquista cited myriad forms of energy we know and recognize, given the ways in which their effects are made manifest... Continue Reading

Author’s Note: In digging through my archives recently, as I recounted here, I came across another piece I’d written many moons ago. My sons were born in 1983 and 1986, respectively. The elder was going to basketball camp every summer, starting at age nine. The younger started playing soccer before the age of nine and started playing basketball in sixth grade. They were avid sports followers and often knew of things transpiring in the world of sports before I did. They still do. Given the drug-related sports news in 1997 and in years before, I was compelled to write this piece. In re-reading... Continue Reading

As I’ve written previously, I have a very difficult time separating hate from ignorance. I take hate to be a subset or a symptom of ignorance. Ignorance can scale, of course. It can be as small as one Hibernophobe burning down my house. It can be as large as one power-mongering lunatic attempting to create a master race, or as large as another power-mongering lunatic attempting to create a collectivist Utopia. But hate and ignorance possess a corrosive energy that eventually causes them to decay from within. Kenneth Burke called man the symbol-using animal. And so it is, that symbol-using lunatics... Continue Reading

Author’s Note: As I was creating the video that appears at the end of this post, I was recalling a piece I’d written some years ago, inspired by something I’d witnessed in a gym. Thanks to a portable floppy-disc drive and my pack-rat compulsion to hang on to my old floppy discs, I was able to find the piece. I had no idea it was almost 30 years old. But, as we know, time flies …. While the video I created is intended to commemorate Memorial Day 2023, the sacrifices we honor on Memorial Day are ultimate manifestations of giving without season. The only way we can repay our debt to those... Continue Reading

After seeing the phrase, toxic narcissism, for about the two-millionth time, I did a search on signs of a narcissist. Since the browser I use is Brave, and since Brave doesn’t use Google, I don’t know how many hits I got. But I did learn this: Depending on the source you choose, there are between five (WebMD) and 21 symptoms (Mayo) Clinic) of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD because where would we be without abbreviations?). I don’t know all that much about the DSM 5. But if the folks who compile that thing ever ask for my opinion, I’m going to humbly suggest they stop splitting... Continue Reading

Notwithstanding the myriad of political diatribes I occasionally author in this column, it isn’t my intent to comment on politics particularly or exclusively. Politics is part of a larger discourse — even an inseparable part — but it is no more than a part. Because of my curiosity about all things behavioral and linguistic (and the inextricable relationship of the two), this particular post is about depression. I’ve written this post because of the proliferation of depression in the popular vernacular, and it refers not to economic depression but to personal, psychological, perhaps clinical... Continue Reading