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There’s always something to howl about.

Category: Casual Friday (page 21 of 25)

October 13, 2007

Total eclipse of the Suns . . .

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have lived in Phoenix full-time since 1993, but, until tonight, I have never once been to a Phoenix Suns game. Other than poker, basketball is the only sport I like, and I love the Suns, I’ve just never made time to go see the home team play. Tonight’s is an exhibition game. My niece is part of the half-time show, and she scored us free tickets. I’m not all that big on crowds and noise, but we saw the world-champion Phoenix Mercury under similar circumstances this summer, and it turned out to be painless and fun.

The painful part about the Suns is their flawless talent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The fans live in a perpetual state of heartbreak, crestfallen by past disappointments but still somehow convinced that this time will be different.

Cheryl Johnson ran a video of this tune yesterday, and below you’ll find a different version. The songwriter is Jim Steinman, who wrote all of those teutonic anthems for Meatloaf. For the Suns and all they will do to us again this year, this is Bonnie Tyler expressing Steinman at his heartbreaking best:

September 19, 2007

Heaven is made real when the weather breaks in Phoenix

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

The weather broke “officially” last Tuesday. I could see it in the quality of the light, but we had lingering humidity from a Gulf hurricane. The last of that fell as rainfall on Monday afternoon, and by dusk it was obvious that the Arizona Monsoon was over.

It’s 97 degrees and nine percent humidity right now, and you have no way of appreciating how wonderful that is unless you live here. With the occasional break for light rainfail, we’re looking at ten solid months of truly heavenly weather.

The Monsoon is brutal, but it only lasts for two months. The trade-off is this: Crisp, clean, dry air, with light of a clarity and perfection you can’t achieve in a studio. In Phoenix, you can train your eyes to see the quality of the atmosphere by the color of the sunlight. On a perfect day — and they are legion — the shadows are sharp enough to cut your eyes.

The rest of the world dreams of heaven. In Phoenix, we live it…

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September 18, 2007

World Cup Real Estate

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

Time for blogging is often hard to find. Most posts are begun on one day and finished some other, and usually it’s for the best. I started this post yesterday, and it got a bit gummed up. Nineteen hours and one Kris Berg post later, and I’m good to go. And there are important things happening in real estate, but sorry Greg, there are no big thoughts in this post. This is simply my entry for the Dumbest Post of the Week category. 

Kris uses chicken soup, my unlikely source of inspiration and motivation comes from rugby. Yes rugby. That is the sport of kings, isn’t it? Well then, it’s the sport of titans.

I discovered rugby last Sunday and now that I know the truth, and I’ll step up and say it- rugby is the greatest sport invented. I don’t know the rules. I don’t know the terminology. I don’t know the teams or the players, but sitting in front of the big plasma TV, none of that matters one bit. Here’s what I see: Two teams of grown men completely driven to play a sport that is both brutal and strategic, physical and mental, dependent on both teamwork and individual skills, and requiring both tactical knowledge and gut instincts. And it is beautiful to watch.

There is a ball, of sorts. It’s thrown, kicked, pitched, or carried toward a goal. Players get tackled and men often pile on top of the ball. In a football game that would be where the play ends. In rugby? I don’t know what happens. Sometimes the play ends but often, just when you think it’s over, you are waiting to hear a whistle. You wait for a referee. You wait for the players to unpile themselves and…It doesn’t happen. Seconds pass. What is going on in that pile? Where’s the whistle? Where’s the ball? You are waiting, willing something to happen. Then, from the bottom of the mound of players, the ball comes flying forth to be kicked or pitched or carried forward once more! It’s such thrilling madness! Who would play such a sport? What would motivate grown men to participate in such an intense spectacle of sheer Read more

September 15, 2007

I invented a brand new social networking technology today, so, once somebody implements it, I want my iRadio for free

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. Even so, here’s a cool idea I had today.

First, art is selection. You have to stand back, because I can define art seven different ways in seven seconds. But one thing that art is is the selection of seemingly disparate elements into a pleasing whole. In this way, disc-jockeying can be seen as an art form.

Second, social networking can be viewed as communication by shared creation — collaboration.

So: Imagine an iPod-like device that allowed you to broadcast your music over, say, a 25 yard radius. You are now a DJ for anyone who wants to tune into your hyper-hyper-local radio show.

As an elaboration, imagine the each one of these iPod-like devices could work as either a sender or a receiver of hyper-hyper-local radio shows.

As a further elaboration, imagine that self-selected groups of people could create temporary networks of these iPod-like devices. In the receiving mode, each would retransmit music sent by the device in the transmitting mode, slightly expanding the transmission radius. The user of the transmitting device could elect to continue transmitting or could pass the baton of transmission along to another device in the network.

In this way, a group of people could DJ for each other, each sharing the best of their music collections with the others, each taking a turn as the creator of the collaborative artwork.

Picture a group of early-morning joggers or bike-riders. How about semi-sorta-suburban-strangers on a commuter train? Stuck at the airport? You can recruit volunteers to share in the misery.

iRadio? iBroadcast? iAmADJ? I think this could be a lot of fun.

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September 11, 2007

Would you trust this man with your most precious investment?

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Four hundred families a year do. Believe it or not, that’s our own Russell Shaw in his salad days as a radio comedian in Phoenix in the mid-seventies.

Derrick Bostrom, of the band The Meat Puppets, maintains a virtual shrine to a radio show called Love Workshop:

“Love Workshop” was a fifteen-minute comedy program that ran on KDKB-FM radio in Phoenix, Arizona for most of 1976. The show was always somewhat of a mystery to me. During its brief life, “Love Workshop’s” hosts, Vern & Craig (Todd Carroll and “Wonderful” Russ Shaw) were my heroes, They just seemed to appear out of nowhere all of a sudden, offering the kind of savage humor I idolized in the “National Lampoon,” only they were right in my own backyard. And then it disappeared just as quickly.

The site is a weblog, of course, and today Bostrom reprints an old interview with Russ. Bostrom has also managed to collect recordings of Love Workshop episodes, which you can use to spice up your Russell Shaw MP3 collection.

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September 2, 2007

Rufus Wainwright sings “Hallelujah” + Leon Russell sings “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”

by

Mega-Producing Realtor

Author website

OK, it looks like BloodhoundBlog is going to have a music section after all. Here is a link to Rufus Wainwright singing one of the most beautiful songs ever. There are a number of artists who do this song, I believe his version is even better than the one by Jeff Buckley.

My favorite artist, this lifetime, would have to be Leon Russell . Here is a video of one of his monster performances, singing the Stones classic, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” combined with The Coasters hit, “Youngblood”.
This was from the Concert For Bangladesh recorded and filmed in 1971.

Enjoy.

August 31, 2007

Mucho con gusto: Celebrating human independence in open defiance of Labor Day

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have more than too much work to do, including attending to all the controversy I’ve stirred up, but I pride myself on knowing when I need to stop, if only for a few hours. We’re kidless for the weekend, but we’re on the cusp of being infested by way too much family, so I’m going to grab for all the gusto I can, while I can.

Here’s Mark Knopfler, just blistering on what looks like a Paul Reed Smith FatStratClone (that is to say, a really kick-ass custom-made guitar):

For Teri Lussier’s daughter, Rian, here is an excruciating catharsis:

The examined life is having the courage to purge your own character of mediocrity, not punishing other people for having indulged their fears of greatness.

This is me, a memo from forever:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger — over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded alive — deprive you of all of the rest of your values. This is anegoic, acting contrary to the true needs of the self.

One of my favorite memories is of a Labor Day years ago. My son and I were out riding our bikes and we rode to a CompUSA to see all the latest software. The store was packed. Middle managers poring over the PERT packages, programmers pawing through hefty manuals, yuppie couples testing eduware with their little yuppiekinder. Labor Day is a holiday established by people who hate human productivity, who hate the human mind. It is a day set aside on the calendar to celebrate and sanctify indolence — and violence. And there in the CompUSA were the men and women of values. The people who know that to be more Read more

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Inventing Real Estate 2.0

Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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