Showing posts with label Ben Stein. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Stein. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

This Is Me This Isn't Me

This is me.

This isn't me.

This is me.

This isn't me.

This is me.


So is this and this.

This is not me.


I was online one night, logging into Hotmail or something, and this guy was in an ad. Is that creepy or what?

When I taught in the local school system, students told me I looked like the librarian. Every day, students told me I looked like their librarian. A couple of weeks in to the semester, I took a class to the library, and the librarian and I both did a double take. I looked like the librarian.
I would bump into students at the store and they would tell their parents, “there’s our librarian.”

I know of lots of people with my name, a couple of writers, a hockey player, and that is weird, but finding people who look like you, I mean really look like you, that’s really weird.
Has that happened to you?

P.S. This isn't me, either, no matter what some friends say.

Neither is this guy....


Friday, February 17, 2012

A Word In Your Ear



Like some of you, perhaps, I used to wish I had been born 10 years earlier, so I could have been part of the music scene I just missed, the rise of all my favorites: Elvis, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, Ricky Nelson. But now, with the fantastic audio technology we have today, I'm happier than ever to be alive. The irony is that I rarely listen to music anymore.



I have 86 audio books, not counting the cassettes, 50 of which are in my iTunes library. I have apps on my iPhone that link me into many, many more - hundreds of titles, most for no charge. I can easily move from A Christmas Carol to Anne of Green Gables to As A Man Thinketh to The Psychology of Achievement to Ben Stein's How to Ruin Your Life.



I listen to them all the time when I'm alone: when I shave and shower, when I iron my shirts, when I clean the kitchen, when I drive by myself.

Every day I have those delightful moments of inspiration and motivation and education, when the best thoughts of others stick in my head and make me a better teacher, a better husband, a better man - all while doing other things.


Today I'm listening to Lonesome Dove , my favorite book, which at 36 hours is not enough. I just finished Made to Stick and Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. A wonderful lecture on rhetoric was a recent favorite, plus a couple of Michael Crichton novels, and a used, 18-disc copy of All the King's Men, which I got for $4 at a flea market.

Our Audible.com credits restock in a couple of days. My wife recently finished Water for Elephants, The Help, and The Kitchen House, and is today listening to Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.

I have The Dream of Reason and Richest Man in Babylon queued up in my library, as well as a David Baldacci novel.


Maybe I did miss out on being nothing but a hound dog hanging out at the soda shoppe with Little Susie after school, but I sure enjoy the immediacy and convenience of audiobooks.
As Jim Rohn says, miss a meal if you have to, but don't miss a book.
I couldn't have said it better myself.

How about you? What are you listening to these days?

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