I’m a Proud Alumnus

1 Reply

As a graduate of George Mason University I was somewhat surprised to find a link to this Sextravaganza story on Fark.com.  Not that GMU is a conservative campus, but it isn’t exactly a big party school. 

The last time I can remember anything even remotely risque occuring at GMU was when Anthony Kiedis and Flea from The Red Hot Chili Peppers were arrested for flashing some coeds after their concert at the Patriot Center in the early 90s.

Not that GMU is a small school (28,000) students, but most of its students are commuters so there isn’t the same, uh, social scene that you find at other similarly sized schools.  Heck it still doesn’t have an NCAA football team, not even Division 1-A (they have a club team), so this kind of notoriety is the only way anyone outside of the DC area will ever hear about the school.  Better notorious than anonymous I guess!

English as it Spose to be Spoke

Leave a reply

Rapper 50 Cent has a manager named Sha Money XL. Quick aside: I really miss the early rap days of the much more interesting monikers of Ice Cube, Tupac Shakur, and the oxymoronic Biggy Smalls.

Anyway Mr. XL was recently held up at his barbershop in Queens, New York which was a newsworthy event for AllHipHop.com.  So of course they interviewed him and that’s when he said:

“N***as ain’t
  shoot my whip up, they did set me up,” he said. “I’m still in the
  hood and got a scope on all these jealous bitch a** n***s in my ‘hood
  that ain’t happy for me. [They] wanna eat try [to set me up] again – I
  will feed them.”

Oh. And then he talked about he’s the only HipHop mogul from Queens who’s stayed close to home.

"Steve Stoute, Clue
  and Irv [Gotti] blew and never turned around. Here I am doing the opposite and
  that’s the love I get? It’s all good. I’m still breathing – God bless
  that, [I’m] still rich, back to Jacob for a bigger bezel and bigger piece,”
  he continued. “I’m still in the hood and n***as know that but famous words
  from [50 Cent] – ‘f*** the hood.’

Nuff said.

Brat Pack Rocks

Leave a reply

Last Saturday Celeste and I went to Greensboro to see my cousin’s band, The Brat Pack, play at The Clubhouse.  They are a cover band doing a lot of 70s, 80s and some 90s stuff all of which is very "dance-able."  Which of course means that they attract lots of women who dance and lots of guys who watch them dance.

My cousin, Jeff James, plays bass (very well I might add) and the whole band does a great job.  If you’re looking for a good night out here’s a schedule of their upcoming gigs:

APRIL 29TH
THE RINO CLUB
DOWNTOWN GREENSBORO, NC

SATURDAY MAY 7TH
FINLEY’S
HIGH POINT NC
(HP UNIVERSITY GRADUATION PARTY)

MAY 13TH
THE RINO CLUB
DOWNTOWN GREENSBORO

FRIDAY MAY 20TH
THE DOUBLE DOOR
LAKE NORMAN NC
(RACE WEEK

UNDAY JUNE 12TH
OAK HOLLOW MALL
HIGH POINT, NC

SATURDAY JUNE 18TH
THE DOUBLE DOOR
LAKE NORMAN
CORNELIUS, NC

FRIDAY JUNE 24TH
FINLEY’S
HIGH POINT, N.C.

SATURDAY JUNE 25TH
THE RHINO CLUB
DOWNTOWN GREENSBORO

Acronymania – Or How My ADD Works

Leave a reply

Many times in my life I’ve wondered if my short attention span is a positive or a negative.  The answer, of course, is that it depends.  Take this morning.

I was catching up on my blog reading when I came across this post on Steve Rubel’s excellent PR-related blog, Micropersuasion.  It’s about how Major League Baseball is partnering with Six Apart, the company that provides Typepad the service I use for this blog, to enable baseball fans to create their own blogs for a cool $50 a year (okay, $49.95).  The site is called MLBlogs.

Now the reason I was doing my blog reading in the first place is that it was taking one of my applications more than, oh, three seconds to load.  So I thought I’d multi-task and check out the old blog reader.  There I saw Steve’s post, read the words "baseball" and "blog" in the same sentence and decided I had to read about it. 

I’m halfway through the post when I realize that Steve’s description of what his PR firm is advising its clients to do with blogs (Find, Listen, Engage, Enable) has an ironic acronym, FLEE.  I mean, what PR firm wants the message to its clients to say FLEE, even subliminally?  So I write a quick comment pointing out the ironic acronym and not five minutes later Steve replies.

So thanks to my ADD I’ve written a comment on one of the world’s uber-blogs (Steve is quite influential in blog, PR and media circles) and got a reply comment from the uberblogger himself!  This has to be a good thing, right?

Then I look at my watch and once again I’m behind schedule.  There you have it.

The Curse

6 Replies

Call it the Jon Lowder Curse:

1972 – Jon moves to D.C.  Neighbor’s townhouse burns down. Washington Senators become Texas Rangers.  The Redskins get thumped by the Dolphins in the Super Bowl (January, 1973).

1978 – As an exception to prove the rule the Washington Bullets win the NBA championship.  After that Washingon joins the Clippers as one of the worst franchises in the NBA for close to 30 years.

1980s – Early 90s – Okay, it wasn’t all bad.  Redskins are one of the dominant teams in the NFL as they win three Super Bowls, but then…

1984 – Jon graduates from Capital Lutheran High School West.  Two weeks later the school goes out of business.

1989 – The Texas Rangers (see 1972 Washington Senators above) are purchased by a consortium led by George W. Bush
in 1989, which helps catapult him to Governor of Texas in 1994 and
President of the United States in 2000.  Consequently bad public
speaking becomes the order of the day (even most Republicans admit
that), my mother’s blood pressure rises exponentially and trees experience
lots of bark loss as they are hugged relentlessly in protest.

2004 – Jon moves to Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  Montreal Expos become the Washington Nationals, and Northern Virginia climbs to number 11 on Inc. magazine’s Best Places while Winston Salem plummets to 234th place.

The Washington Wizards (nee Bullets) make the playoffs for the first time since 1997, and the first time not as the lowest seed since the early 80s.

And in a direct continuum from the 1972 reference above we endure an endless presidential campaign featuring two of the worst public speakers in the history of US politics.  Worse, we are forced to admit that our country’s fate was left in the hands of Ohio, the Florida of the north.

Now be nice or I’ll move to your neighborhood and bring the locusts with me.

Back to 1999

Leave a reply

A new service called Insider Pages takes the concept of a  referral network, i.e. asking your friends for the number of the contractor they used for their addition last year, and then lets you add your own recommendations. 

Basically it’s just a referral network that you can build for yourself, invite your friends to contribute, and then add your own ratings, comments, etc.  In other words it is highly dependant on its users building it up to what some call "critical mass."  I tried searching for a plumber in my area (North Carolina) and it came up with two sponsored listings in CA, along with this note: "We are working on getting reviews
for Plumbing Contractors.
Please add a recommendation to help get us started."

Feels like 1999 all of the sudden.  I’m pulling every dime I can out of NASDAQ…well I would if I had any dimes in it.

Inc’s Best Places

Leave a reply

This month’s issue of Inc. magazine has a list of the best places for doing business in America.  The list contains 274 cities and ranks them using a formula that measures job growth.  To measure growth they looked at current-year growth, average annual growth over three years and growth over the first and second halves of the 10 years ending September, 2004.

Unfortunately for the NC Triad (Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point) it ranked 234, down from 147 last year.  It really isn’t a surprise given the hammering that the prominent industries around here (textiles, furniture) have taken.  It will be interesting to see what effect the new Dell plant being built here will have on next year’s ranking.

Me being a glass-half-full kind of guy I look at the Triad as a great entrepreneurial opportunity.  Why?  Lower costs (rent is cheap, labor is abundant, and wages are lower due to low cost of living), good infrastructure, good local universities, and great quality of life.  You also have easy access to other metro areas (1 hour to Charlotte, 1 1/2 hours to Raleigh-Durham, 45 minute flight to DC and Atlanta), so you get the benefit of their business without the traffic. So if you’re an entrepreneur come on in, the water’s great.

Speaking of DC: My old stomping ground, Northern Virginia, leapt from 54 last year to 11
this year.  The magazine attributes it to all the war spending, and
interestingly separates Northern Virginia from DC (28, up from 29) and
the Maryland Suburbs (29, down from 25).