Poets Day US

No, it is not a line that the lead guitarist uses to pick up young ladies at the Cedar Street Courtyard in Austin (well not that I know of, and if it isn’t, it should be) but more a question. Do you have some Spazmatic in you? I guess it would help if y’all knew who The Spazmatics are. Well you could Bing them (I now have Windows 10 and apparently I cannot write the G word any more) but instead let me take you on a journey of sight and sound using the wonderful medium of typed letters arranged into something that smart people call words. The Spazmatics are a 80s cover band based in Austin (but you can start a franchise in a city near you) that play every Wednesday night at Cedar Street and also have other gigs (one would presume). They dress thematically – bass player wears a skid lid, lead singer has a foam neck brace, lead guitar looks like a vertically challenged Bjorn Borg and the drummer dresses like an 80’s nerd (if he was to dress present-day nerd he would most lik...

I love Anthony Bourdain and his CNN show Parts Unknown. I am not a foodie by any stretch of the imagination so I am not watching it for the food, more the people he meets in the places he goes. Vicariously I have been places I might never visit, some that I have visited and some that I don’t particularly want to. The best part of the show to me is the journey he takes me on, not just geographically but also personally, meeting a variety of characters on the way including punk rock singers in Guam to fishermen in the Greek Islands. This week’s inspiration was from a recent show I watched about Greece where, whilst sitting around a table with some Greek political satirist singers, one of the ladies stated ‘Don’t tell me what you ate, tell me who you ate with’ (should that be whom, not sure, ask that kid on Alan Partridge, he probably knows). I added the dramatic pause at the end because, you know, it makes it funny (and a little dirty) :) So where are you taking us this week James...

Tell you what, those old Greeks were smart bastards (the current ones not so much) – not that good at rugby but they do get the whole team concept pretty well. I just returned from the latest Poets Day Roadshow and there are most likely a few new blog readers this week (there better be) so just a quick reminder about what it is you are wasting time on today. This blog is a bit like Sesame Street, a bit of fun with maybe a little bit of learning but with less dick jokes and way less subtext. It is the ramblings of a kiwi who might have been there and done that or might just be doing this as Obamacare doesn’t cover decent therapists. Anyway, to this weeks theme, and surprisingly enough it is about working as a team – in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Now for those of you who have read more than one of these blogs you might recall a brilliant (no ego issues here) blog from last year about changing team's cultures, starting with getting...

This one is going to be quick and deep – just the way she likes it :) A couple of months ago The English Major had a social gathering to celebrate his marriage.  It was one of the big anniversaries, 3 months I think--pretty sure that is when the blow jobs stop or something like that. Anyway at said social gathering I bumped into a couple of, well, not sure if I can call them gentlemen, so I will go with blokes who have the same issue as me. Apparently it is quite a common issue and it gets worse as you get older or once you have kids. I mean there is nothing worse than having the vessel but no ability to use it, after a while it seems like you might never get to use the damn thing again. We 3 discovered that this issue was something that we didn’t need to go through alone so we decided to form a support group for local men in the area. It was time for other men to know that they were not alone in this and that they had people that would support them and knew what they...

It’s funny that often when I try to write this malodorous drivel I have an idea of what I want to say here and how I want to say it then something happens that changes the whole tone of the blog. This weeks blog was going to be entitled ‘Just keep swimming’ – one of my favorite inspirational sayings, but I realized that maybe three lines from a cartoon fish may not be as inspiring to some as it is to me – however let me explain why it resonates anyway. So I love to fish, my favorite spot in the world pretty much is on the back of a boat fishing in the Bay of Islands, more specifically around Hole in the Rock pulling lures through schools of working fish, catching meat for dinner. I had a white (well it used to be white) golf shirt from the Empire Tavern that I used to wear as my fishing shirt and if you ever saw me out there most likely I was sunburned, covered in blood with a huge smile on my face ​​listening to Hot August Night. Anyway, enough reminiscing. Funny thing about ...

It is a great thing when you are in sales to have attributes that make you stand out from the crowd, a hook if you may, but sometimes it seems that all people care about are my attributes and they cannot see the real me. For years I have felt that people just care about my most prominent attribute and not about me and quite frankly I am starting to get frustrated by it. There is more to me than what you get from a quick first glance, a quick first impression and judging someone’s worth by their attributes really can be demeaning to you and to me. Sure I may have had some augmentation done over the years but it’s not like I just thrust it out in your face, well maybe after a couple of drinks. I do admit it is nice to be noticed in a world when first impressions count but there is so much more to this book than just the cover. There is a heart, a soul, a mind, an intelligence, a professional human being with hopes and dreams and aspirations.  But does that matter to you? My ey...