i just got tunred onto this ted video (by super-sam). i have no idea how i haven't seen it before now as it looks to have been out a few years (7 million plus views long at least). what a presenter! what a delivery! what a message! super strong all around. i watched it last night with marty and bella. when he talked about our need to stop teaching to the average and start raising the average, marty shouted and clapped as if she were in the original auditorium. when he talked about the ingredients to a healthy day (e.g. gratitudes, journaling, exercise, meditation, targeted kindness) bella backed away from me a little bit as she knows these are part of the metrics i track everyday. she knows this well because she has mocked me several times for my little LIFE spreadsheet i'm often found to be obsessively pouring over, by her telling, like gollum over his precious. obviously, i would like to describe it differently but it is close enough to the mark i'm left a mildly impotent to paint a more reasonable picture.

a local community activist, after meeting bella, asked if she could interview bella for an awareness program they were working on. bella agreed and we just recently saw the resultant video.

i'm sure by now you've all seen this video, but still...



this strikes me beyond the well done sentimentality as it points to a gaping hole in my screen policing philosophy, a hole my children are just beginning to discern. the loophole is this: i will allow my children immense access to technology in the name of active creation. and i will restrict, with equal vigor, the time they use technology for numb consumption. as for my criteria of what is creation, they are broad. i'm indifferent if you're plotting out a website, writing a short story, shooting a video or even trying to make a wonky maze in minecraft—if that's the plan, plug in and hack away. conversely, if the agenda is to troll other people's websites, read the stories they crafted, watch their video-making achievements, or play a wonky maze someone else made, time is up, log off, go outside and get dirty.

bella is the first to begin to glean this paradox in her father because even while on restriction from screens, she's noticed any kid with a plan in hand gets greenlit to the machine of their choosing. before you start picking at my methonds, please know one needs more than a fanciful vision to get past the logon screen. outlines, sketches, mockups are the sorts of keys that can make the doors swing wide. lacking that level of planning, a child will be sent off to better collect their thoughts. if they can't get the plan on paper they either weren't serious or they weren't ready.

and if you gave me ten years, i don't think i could have transformed this belief with anywhere near the payload this apple ad achieves in a mere ninety seconds. fully ridiculous. holy smokes are their people good (ahem, creators).

as for me i think i've done about all the creating i've got in me for 2013 so i'll be stepping away to relax by the fire, smile at the dinner table, and tell animated stories with friends and family while lazing on comfy furniture next to lit trees. may your next weeks be rich with laughter, contentment and liesure while we all get a societal kitchen pass to spend time with our friends and families.

see you on january 6th.

p.s. speaking of creating, after entering this post into the database, i noticed that it is the 2,001st entry in the monorail blog. things, good and bad, do have a reliable way of accumalating on us. it's the quiet beauty of the slow drip.

the story i'm after starts at the 28:10 mark (which the video should start at or close to).

we live near a university campus and the students just returned for the new school year. since their arrival i've seen multiple astonishing demonstrations of obliviousness due to "living in their phone-itis". the most glaring case being a guy who walked into a busy intersection at a snail's pace. aside from the slow shuffle of his feet, all of his attention was spent trying to block the glare of the sun from his screen. meanwhile a long stack of cars waited for him to cross the street. i'd say he's mostly lucky the person behind the wheel of the lead car wasn't doing the same thing he was, otherwise all they would have found was a red smear and a shattered iphone.

between blocking traffic, having unusually loud one-sided conversations in public spaces, walking into people, sitting through green lights, slowing down order lines, derailing live conversations (the most unfortunate of the lot for me) and on and on, i think we need a new term to describe such indiscretions because the words we may have used in the past, like, say, "inconsiderate", no longer convey, fully, the numb egotism of this behavior.

stick with it throughout. i imagine you'll be glad you did.

while we were away, musical group karmin took a giant step forward. in case you're not familiar with their story karmin is a musical duo that met in college at an arts school. she studied singing and he studied the trombone. after school they started writing original music and posting it to youtube hoping to get noticed. they gained, as you might expect, exactly no traction with the galactic population so they, in a thoughtful and well executed move, chose to sing covers of songs. the thoughtful part of the move was the female of the duo had a penchant for singing rap songs in the shower so the dude suggested they cover one of those songs she typically only crooned in private. the execution was the other brilliant and more pivotal cocktail ingredient and by nailing the production brought their initial acclaim as the 84 million views at the time of this writing will attest. i'm assuming we can all agree, had they botched this execution/production they might at this very moment be cutting hair, waiting tables and dreaming about how close they were to doing what they loved.

this newfound attention allowed them to return to making original music, something they've done with respectable success. over the summer though they took it to a whole new level with a song that like it or hate it, you'd have to admit is right in the wheelhouse of the general population's taste and consumption needs.

and, if you put them up against the business advice from last week, i think they'd score well. granted we don't know if they'd buy a horse from an amish guy or a hotel from a pakistani, but i'd wager they know themselves well enough to know either of those pursuits would be a rookie move.

exhibit 1 - break-out moment from their small apartment.


exhibit 2 - and after several years of stayin' after it.


exhibit 3 - and lastly, a demonstration that acoustic versions of anything are awesome AND that they are still the two people back in that apartment and can still do a good bit of damage with not much more than a keyboard (this time using an acoustic guitar and wooden box).

i'm a bit of a commencement address junkie. i reckon i've admitted this before. last year my employer put forth one of the best of the year. remarkably, they've come through again with what i'd say, even though others aren't, is again one of this year's strongest offerings. and i'm told by someone on the stage during the talk, the man didn't have a single note or scrap to reference through his thirty plus minute address. remarkably good.

each year as i spin through the selections i'm struck by how good the good ones are (and surprised that the bad ones aren't better--c'mon people, if given the platform you gotta get your obsess on).

last time i was in steamboat the music repeatedly playing in my earbuds was greatful dead's American Beauty. the final episode of freaks and geeks, which i watched shortly before my trip, made mention of this album as being one of the best ever (per the speaker's sense at least). this time while gliding down the same runs, katzenjammer's (a band i recently linked to) songs played on repeat all week. i came to learn of them through a colleague who sent me a link saying "these guys remind me of secret cajun band"--definitely not a sentiment one hears everyday nor one that would fail to garner my attention.

i've been in a state of mourning since the SCB crated their horns for the last time and i had essentially given up hope in finding someone with the a like stage presence and quirkiness. after giving the initial song a listen i had to concur, fully. not only was the sound reminiscent but the energy as well. intrigued, i continued listening and must say the catalog only improved the deeper i dove. rich and diverse stuff.

so i've prepared a modest katzenjammer concert for your end of week enjoyment. i think the below videos do a fair job at showing these young women's breadth of talent and range of personality. i'd recommend both of their albums (a kiss before you go & le pop) as plenty of head-bobbing and finger-drumming goodness exist in each. in no real order.

rock-paper-scissors
while there are better produced versions of this song (official video, studio version, solo version), i like the simplicity of this acoustic version which seems to have been done essentially in someone's driveway.


and anyone who knows me would know i'd be smitten with a song containing the following message for the lyrics alone. shepard's song


i will dance


demon kitty rag


play my darling play


land of confusion


to the sea

for any who might have thought i was serious about wishing to be don johnson, worry not, i outgrew that desire in 1985. my more mature answer would be ben franklin (less 50 pounds) or the blonde trumpeter from my new all-time favorite band: katzenjammer!

they sure do make new humans hyper cute. and for any who have cared for them, you know why.

and i can't ever see a picture of anfer sitting like that without remembering his unique manner of locomotion. i also remember thinking that the underside of his calloused legs, the part in contact with the ground, would ...

last night the south african band die antwoord was in my neighborhood and i went to see them. i posted their breakout video a few years back. a young guy i work with planned on going and offered to get me a ticket. in that i find this small group to have a phenomenally singular and alluring style, i signed up. anyone i told i of my plans said the same thing, "you're going to see them? why?". then they'd say they were weird or strange or odd. i'd say yes they are all of those things which is exactly why i wanted to see what they'd do onstage. in short, it was the most energetic and charged music show i've seen since the secret cajun band were in their heyday. what made the show so special was that you got the sense these guys were thrilled to be performing and immensely grateful for the large show of support. it is my experience that not all performers possess such gratitude towards their craft and/or success. sad and sucky.

i snapped the below image towards the end of the show. what you unfortunately don't see in the photo is the pulsing of the crowd which ninja and yolandi had worked up to a crazed frenzy. really cool to see. in fact, through the show people were throwing things on stage, things like shirts and hats and bracelets. during the peaking crescendo some dude threw his wallet on stage. or perhaps what happened was some guys wallet that fell out of his pants got thrown on stage by someone else. hard to say. either way it is a marked show of support.

yesterday i mentioned eric thomas, a speaker i've been enjoying recently. he's the voice on the how bad do you want it videos i posted a few weeks back. here is another talk he did earlier this year for a company in vegas. it starts a little slow but after the ten minute mark, there's a lot of meat on the bone. great message(s) with a strong style.

here's my new favorite orator, up and coming eric thomas, in a treatment that expertly mixes video and music with one of his better know presentations.

part 1


part 2

i've been sittin' on this one for a few weeks. a past student shared it with me before it exploded. it you haven't watched it yet, it's juicy good, like a just right porterhouse.

a few people named two of this year's commencement addresses as the best, or most inspirational at least. the first, by cartoonist mike peters, happened where i work, the second, by author neil gaiman, took place at an art school in Philadelphia. as someone who dabbles in presentations (and is a commencement speech junkie) i was struck by how stupendously different the two approaches were. peters started out in such a meandering fashion you wondered if he prepared anything. gaiman's talk was so dense the first thing i did after watching it was find a transcript and re-read it marking it up with my symbols and notes like it were an academic text.

while i enjoyed both, gaiman's was rich with insight. in example: that has to be one of the most cogent insights into the professional world ever made. and i know the guy writes for a living but the compact, precise articulation of his concept is breathtaking in a literary and observational sense. if i ever met that guy, the question i would ask him is how he came upon that insight. did it bleed out over months or did it appear in a flash while showering or exercising. furthermore, gaiman demonstrates how life experience blows the doors off most other forms of learning and how the art of introspection is the prism that allows you to understand what unfolds around us. spectacular.

circumstance recently led me to j.k. rowlings 2008 commencement address at harvard. for me, her twenty minute speech surpassed the combined value of all her potter books. mostly because she's pro-failure, something i'm quite ravenous about as of late. my favorite line, of many: next, we just need to figure out how to move this message down from post-college to pre-kindergarten.

also, as i had to remind bella as she shoulder-hacked me crafting this post, the real meat of failure is not in failing itself, but in the building of tools needed to climb out of life's many divots, holes, ditches, cliffs and canyons. so maybe perseverance is the better term. less ambiguous is the fact that the landscape is treacherous and circumstance requires us to travel large swaths of it in the dark.