Next Friday you'll find me, and probably hundreds of others, at a certain white building with a "Hot" sign in front of it. Why? Because they're giving out a free doughnut to every customer in honor of National Doughnut Day.
Anyone who's been watching WXII this week knows that they're making a serious push to raise food for Second Harvest so that kids won't go hungry this summer. One of their morning show members, Kenny Beck, has been doing goofy stuff like the chicken dance in exchange for financial donations. I asked him via Twitter what it would take to get him to shave his head and he said $1,000. When I indicated I might be serious he said he was too, and we agreed to a low setting on the clippers (not bald, but pretty short).
This dovetails nicely with the food drive that my office is doing for Second Harvest and I thought that if Mr. Beck has the guts to do it, then so should I. So here's the deal:
So that's it. If you want to see Kenny Beck and me get our heads shaved then email me at jon.lowder AT gmail.com, or call me at (336) 899-0238 to arrange donations. You can also simply mail a check made out to Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina and write "Make Kenny and Jon Shave Their Heads" in the memo field and mail it to me at:
Triad Apartment Association/Attn. Jon Lowder
3407 West Wendover Ave., Suite E
Greensboro, NC 27407
Of course you can mail it directly to the Food Bank, but if you want it to be counted towards our impending baldness you need to send it to me so I can keep track of our progress.
Also, I've also set up my very first Facebook group for the cause. If you visit it you can see one of the worst pictures ever taken of me Photoshop'd to show me bald. Like I said, it's gonna be ugly.
FT.com columnist Martin Wolf explains the current international economic environment with a play on Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper:
Everybody in the west knows the fable of the grasshopper and the ant. The grasshopper is lazy and sings away the summer, while the ant piles up stores for the winter. When the cold weather comes, the grasshopper begs the ant for food. The ant refuses and the grasshopper starves. The moral of this story? Idleness brings want…
As it happens, in the wider world, there are other ant nests. Asia, in particular, is full of them. There is a rich nest, rather like Germany, called Japan. There is also a huge, but poorer, nest called China. These also want to become rich by selling goods to grasshoppers at low prices and building up claims on grasshopper colonies. The Chinese nest even fixes the foreign price of its currency at a level that guarantees the extreme cheapness of its goods. Fortunately, for the Asians, or so it seems, there happens to be a very big and exceptionally industrious grasshopper colony, called America. Indeed, the only way you would know it is a grasshopper colony is that its motto is: “In shopping we trust”. Asian nests develop a relationship with America similar to Germany’s with its neighbours. Asian ants build up piles of grasshopper debt and feel rich…
Yet there is a difference. When the crash comes to America and households stop borrowing and spending and the fiscal deficit explodes, the government does not say to itself: “This is dangerous; we must cut back spending.” Instead, it says: “We must spend even more, to keep the economy humming.” So the fiscal deficit becomes enormous.
This makes the Asians nervous. So the leader of China’s nest tells America: “We, your creditors, insist you stop borrowing, just as European grasshoppers are now doing.” The leader of the American colony laughs: “We did not ask you to lend us this money. In fact, we told you it was a folly. We are going to make sure American grasshoppers have jobs. If you do not want to lend us money, raise the price of your currency. Then we will make what we used to buy and you will no longer have to lend to us.” So America teaches creditors a lesson from a dead sage: “If you owe your bank $100, you have a problem; but if you owe $100m, it does.”
In school we were always taught that when writing your introductory sentence was key. Its purpose was to draw in the reader and set the stage for the rest of the paragraph. I believe this story offers as fine an example of an engaging introductory sentence as you're going to find:
The Brevard County doctor who was arrested for groping a woman while dressed as Captain America with a burrito in his pants will not go to jail.
So Arizona education officials want to reassign teachers with heavy accents so that they aren't teaching students who are learning English. The story's here and the first comment on the story is this:
Have you spoken with any college aged students lately? The number of functional illiterates in our primary and secondary school system is disheartening. Unless these students can hear English spoken correctly at home and on the street, yet alone taught it correctly in our schools we should all start calling it "bassetball" or say "ax" instead of ask, or perhaps we can all "boat" instead of "vote"??? how much further down do we have to lower our standards to allow for "the acceptable " lever of mediocrity?
"Lever of mediocrity?" "Yet alone?"
Pot, meet kettle.
Those of you who have never seen I Love Lucy re-runs won't know what the title of this post is referencing, so just keep in mind that during the early days of TV married couples were always depicted as sleeping in separate twin beds. Apparently here in North Carolina they want to keep that tradition alive, because according to this list of stupid laws in each American state:
In North Carolina "All couples staying overnight in a hotel must have a room with double beds that are at least two feet apart."
I read the front page article in the Winston-Salem Journal about the public airing of grievances by UNCSA's outgoing conductor at his final concert and thought, "I wonder if it felt as good to vent his spleen as he expected it to?" Who hasn't daydreamed about letting loose like that at their boss/teacher/nitwit co-worker in a big public venue?
Back in the mid-90s I worked for a company that could best be described as a soul sucking black hole run by amoral jackals. I fantasized about calling my bosses on the carpet at a large company function and listing their various misdeeds in excruciating detail. Alas I just quit and went to a better job, but to this day I wonder what it would have felt like to let it rip.
BTW, check out all comments on the article about the conductor's rant. Based on the number you'd think the article was about an illegal immigrant representing the ACLU in a protest against sectarian prayer at the county commissioners' meeting.
We have family visiting for the weekend, one of whom is my one year old niece. I tried to help keep her occupied at breakfast by giving her a "horsey ride" on my knee. When my kids were little it was a tactic I used quite often, usually while humming the theme to Bonanza which only served to confuse them since they'd never heard of the show. Anyway, I figured some things are timeless and that making my niece feel like a female version of Little Joe would work as well as it did with my kids.
Not so much. She kind of got this glazed look in her eyes, and as soon as I put her down she went running for her mother. I guess I've earned the title of scary uncle instead of fun uncle.
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One of the things I like about minor league baseball is the fact that the teams have some t-e-r-r-i-b-l-e names. I don't like the names as much as I like the cheap tickets and beer served in the bleachers, but I still find them quite entertaining. Still, I have to wonder what the owners of the Giants' AA affiliate in Richmond were thinking: I give you the Richmond Flying Squirrels.
For the second time in three years a West Forsyth H.S. math teacher has been named Teacher of the Year in the Winston-Salem Forsyth County School system. Hopefully this means my kids will leave H.S. with a much stronger grasp of the subject than their old man has.
Congrats to Heather King for the recognition.
Befuddled 