Every aneurysm is a reminder.

Joyce tweeted,

Screenwriter on Homicide, The Wire, and upcoming Treme dies of brain aneurysm: http://bit.ly/bj9ogZ

Every aneurysm is a reminder. People are mortal. Life is short. Get on with it. We don’t have as much time as we think.

Every day we must:

1. Eat the best foods.
2. Design the greatest products.
3. Have extraordinary adventures.
4. Be here now.
5. Love.

So if you’re anxious, let it go, this too shall pass.

Beware drift.

Drift is making a decision by not making a decision. Inertia, procrastination, and doing what others tell us to do, are all forms of drift. If you want to be happy, you have to beware drift.

Do not drift. Make your choices carefully and mindfully. Ask for help if you need it.

And remember that though the admiration of people we love is sweet, it’s not enough alone to build the foundation for a happy life. Happiness is a choice.

The designer manifesto.

If it's not there, then make it.

If it's been made, then take it.

If it's been taken, then steal it.

If it's been stolen, then it's not there.

Source:??http://amitkumar01.tumblr.com/post/483922040/the-designer-manifesto

Source:??http://9gag.com/gag/4737/

Pandas: incompetent, inefficient piebald buffoons.

Alan Beattie’s How Each Nation Sinks or Swims??is the original source. I like Jack Ewing’s review:

??

Giant pandas are “incompetent, inefficient, piebald buffoons” that should be allowed to “die out.” Giant pandas evolved to depend exclusively on marginally nutritious bamboo. In economic terms, they’re “path dependent” ??? locked into a situation that limits them. Beattie admires cats, who gave up their free-roaming ways to carve out a niche hunting rats and snuggling with humans.

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Incompetent piebald buffoons? O rly???

The Killer Question: are we humans… or are we pandas?

??

LIFE GOAL: HUG PANDAS!!!

Joyce asked me what my life goal is. I want the trifecta:

1. Money / cash.
2. Fly in a BLIMP.
3. HUG PANDAS!!!

These are summarized in a single glorious tweet:

LIFE GOAL: We need to make money and fly to Chengdu??in a motherfucking BLIMP and hug pandas!

See also: Get yourself a giant panda!

??

See also: Hug a panda! Hug a panda!

One small warning. Benjamin Black says to beware sneezes.

??

Death Bear.

“[Death Bear] never presses clients for details. As a bear, his job is not to make conversation.“

You have to be ready to move on if you’re calling Death Bear….??

Source: Tina Susman, LA Times, “Can’t get rid of your memories? Call Death Bear”

A shadowy, masked New Yorker relieves people of painful remnants of their pasts: love letters, photos, even underwear. To the man under the giant bear head, it’s performance art.??

…

“I was trying to make something that deals with more serious subjects, like grief, pain and tragedy,” said Hill, 32. “I’m interested in making art that can help in some clear-cut way, that’s not just abstract.”

Hill decided that the identity of a bear would provide the right mix of comfort and mystery. It would conjure up images of a cuddly teddy bear but look fearsome enough to ensure that retrievals were solemn events. He bought the Fiberglas bear head online and painted it dark brown.??Snout in front, eye holes over his own, rounded ears pointed skyward.??

…

So far, no clients have asked for their items back, perhaps the ultimate sign of the project’s success.

“I take it back to my cave and it is absorbed,” Death Bear said.

…

Source: http://natehillisnuts.com/3/death-bear/

Death Bear is here to assist you in your time of tragedy, heartbreak, and loss. Let Death Bear help you, and absorb your pain into his cave.

Serving all Brooklyn only,??Text 347-742-2293 for an appointment

Do what you love!

There is NO REASON to do what you hate.

Character is destiny.

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

   — Lao-Tze

Source: http://thinkexist.com/quotation/great_acts_are_made_up_of_small_deeds/214524.html

Get yourself a giant panda!

Back in 2009,??Troutgirl??quoted??Anne Lamott???s??Hard Laughter??to me???

I said that I thought??the secret of life was obvious:
be here now, love as if your whole life depended on it, find your life???s work, & try to get hold of a giant panda.
If you had a giant panda in your back yard, anything could go wrong ??? someone could die, or stop loving you, or you could get sick ??? and if you could look outside and see this adorable, ridiculous, boffo panda, you???d start to laugh; you???d be so filled with thankfulness and amusement that everything would be okay again.

??

??

Life goal: Hug Pandas!!!

Although watch out, because pandas can be floppy…

??

??

Perhaps it’s best to stick with panda babies…

??

??

In any case, panda petting zoos belong on every bucket list…

??

So I repeat: Get yourself a giant panda! You’ll see…

The world needs more awesomeization!

Awesomeization, n. The process of awesomeizing.

Use in a sentence: “Oh… like tres leches cake. It’s just a cake until awesomeization, when you put the three milks on it. Then it’s awesomeized!”

So I went searching for tres leches cake on Flickr, and found one that was too fancy. Joyce says “the following is more like it — just one layer, with the leche soaked in, not the prissy 3-layers with separate layers of cream (fuck that!)…”

I completely concur that the world needs more awesomeization. May our lives be filled with the “tres leches” version of whatever we see, think, and do. 

This conversation started with troutgirl. To which bakadesuyo replied that he’s working on it.

Do brain aneurysms strike Type A people more?

Anecdotally (read: 20 minutes of googling), it does seem like there is some correlation between strokes and Type A personalities. Source: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=type+A+personality+stroke

“Everyone has stress in their life but it is how we manage stress that keeps us healthy. The American Heart Association estimates that about 700,000 Americans have a new or recurrent stroke each year.” Source is the decidedly unscientific: http://askville.amazon.com/Type-personality-taking-break/AnswerDetails.do?requestId=6571384&responseId=6572243

Why am I thinking about strokes again today? Jerry York died recently after being stricken with a burst brain aneurysm. He was very Type A.

“He would rip people apart who didn’t deliver,” an IBM coworker told the Journal in 2006. Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703523204575129692078521812.html

An IBM senior manager described him as “the pit bull who came to sell everything and not approve anything,” according to a Harvard Business School case study about IBM’s turnaround. Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2010/03/18/financial/f092136D21.DTL

Reflecting. Last year, our friend Craig Johnson died. He was very Type A in a different way.

“Craig saw these little companies as his babies that he needed to care for,” says Ms. Chavez, who later helped Mr. Johnson found Virtual Law Partners LLP, an online legal firm. Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125486675503468885.html

These in turn remind me of Jill Bolte Taylor‘s TED Talk. Which reminds me that there’s still so little we know about strokes:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

Strokes also affect plenty of people who are not Type A.

So last year, when Joe Einhorn (http://www.thingd.com/) asked where to donate some money, I asked Joyce what the best options were to contribute to humanity’s collective understanding of strokes and brain aneurysms.

Basically there are two donation options, big or small.  Big is the American Stroke Association, a division of the American Heart Association (http://www.strokeassociation.org).  Small is the National Stroke Association (http://www.stroke.org).  Similar efficiency ratings on CharityNavigator, similar missions, and both take online donations

How can humanity’s brain understand ailments of the human brain? With time.

Will Type A personalities suffer from such hard-driving behavior? Probably. Plato once said, Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

Would knowing there’s a correlation between Type A personalities and strokes, make a Type A person slow down? Everyone chooses how to live, every day of life.

Side note from bakadesuyo:

Type A personality is also strongly correlated with heart disease. Do you know how this link was first identified? It’s one of my favorite scientific stories:

http://www.bakadesuyo.com/whats-the-historically-important-connection-b

Is Facebook worth twice what Yahoo is worth?

A recent conversation on Twitter with Kelly Perdew revealed that…

• Yahoo! serves 10B ads per day.
• Yahoo! tracked 1.6m online users for 8 weeks and found that 90% made offline purchases with advertisers. Their stat according to Kelly? $1 ad spend on Yahoo! resulted in $10 of sales offline.
• Yahoo!’s $6.5b in annual revenues make it currently worth $23 billion.
• CEO Carol Bartz says Yahoo! has 600 million users, and “connecting to people is the bottom line.”

Which got me thinking.

Facebook always had pageviews, but now it has CASHFLOW thanks to Pages & LIKEs, and the ads that connect them.

Facebook LIKEs to do six impossible things before breakfast…

1. Facebook recently figured out its business model, and passed $1 billion in annual revenues,
2. So 2010 is a “serious year” for Facebook.
3. But don’t get sentimental about it….
4. Because Facebook’s revenues are still mostly ads.
5. Then Facebook passed Google in traffic last week.
6. As a result, Facebook could now be worth $40 billion.

Facebook now has much more usage than Yahoo (and the other 98 biggest Web sites combined), on the backs of 400 million users 500 million users. And thanks to Facebook Pages, Facebook will eventually make mo’ money than Yahoo! …

But wait, there’s more:

• Whales and Lobsters: Facebook and Twitter and CASH, oh my!
• Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Make Social Applications
• Top 10 Ridiculous Facebook Pages and More Ridiculous Pages
• Facebook Passes $1.4 Billion in Annual Sales… in 2010
• The Case for a $50 Billion Facebook 
• How Facebook can become Bigger in 5 Years than Google is Today