Howard's blog

The average 2009 salary for CEO’s of the Fortune 500 was $11.4 million. That is, if you take the salaries of the top 500 dogs of the top 500 companies, add them all together and divide by 500, you get $11.4 million dollars. Per CEO. Per year. And that one year was 2009 – a year when the United States economy was struggling with unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies. Oh yeah, and there’s this: Of the 500 top executives in the U.S., 12 of them are women. 488 men/12 women. (Source: Institute for Policy Studies)

Lately, life has been frothy. Bubbly. Light, buoyant, supple. Very much like whipped cream, sea foam, the head of a well-brewed beer or the topping on a really good cup of cappuccino. Not unpleasant. Not at all. Not lacking in a sense of stability or constancy. Simply filled with air. Ventilated. Lots of tiny holes in the fabric of my thoughts, ideas, fantasies and even actions.

Holes, of course, imply emptiness. Space. And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it’s just a kind of spaciness that I’m feeling in everything these days. Not any big black hole of barrenness or meaninglessness. None of that struggling singer/songwriter self-indulgent stuff. It’s not at all a feeling of futility; but rather a sense of possibility: openness to what might be.

FROM NATIONAL COALITION OF GIRLS SCHOOLS
Review: A Precious Window of Time: A Manual for Teaching and Nurturing Middle School Girls, by Howard Hanger and Dr. Vicki Garlock.

When Howard Hanger’s two daughters were approaching middle school age, he knew they were entering a very important developmental phase, one that could have an enormous effect on their self esteem and confidence, so he started Hanger Hall, an all-girls middle school, just for them.

“We shape clay into a pot,” declares Chapter 11 of the Tao Te Ching, “but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.” And just in case you missed the Asian line of reasoning, Honorable Lao Tzu (assumed author of the Tao) continues, “We hammer wood for a house, but it is the inner space that makes it livable.” And then, to tie it all together, the wise Ching chicken lays this lovely little enigma egg, “We work with being, but non-being is what we use.” Another translator teased it out even further with, “Being can provide a condition under which usefulness is found; but nothingness is the usefulness itself.” You might want to read that over one more time. Sometimes, we Western Civ. folk chug a bit slow on the philosophical choo-choo.

You got your front door, back door, side door and screen door. You got a storm door, trap door, closet door, secret door, barn door and service door. Then there’s bathroom door, revolving door, sliding door, automatic door, accordion door, store door, pet door, cabinet door, car door, church door, French door, Dutch door, swing door, fire door, garage door, open door, closed door, next door, Christian Dior, show-him-the-door and pompadour.

So many doors, so little time.

Q. What did one mushroom say to the other?
A. I may not look like much, but I’m a fungi.

There are over 110,000 kinds of fungus on this planet. Probably a whole lot more. One of those 110,000 is called Saccharomyces Cerevisiae. Go ahead, say it out loud. Try to pronounce it. You can do it.

Now, you won’t catch Saccharomyces Cerevisiae growing fairy rings in your back yard. You won’t see it attaching itself to rotting logs on your next romp in the woods. The truth is, you won’t see it anywhere. Not anywhere. And yet, it’s everywhere.

In the music industry, a “crossover” is a term used for a tune or an artist that “crosses over” from one musical market to another: a big country tune that also rocks with the rock n’ roll audience, or a pop artist that pops up in the inspirational sales department. Crossovers are very popular in the song biz, of course, because they sell more CD’s, DVD’s, sheet music and concert tickets. Crossovers make record producers, song-writers, musicians and a bunch of lawyers very rich. If you can get someone to be the twang-king idol of country-western listeners and the hunka-monka wailer of MTV pop rockers, honey, you got your self some honkin’ assets and affluence comin’ your way. Willie Nelson is a crossover artist, as was Elvis Presley.

 As far as we know, humans have always been big on miracles.  Always big on believing that more is possible that what we were taught.  More than what we have experienced.  More than we logically assume.

Best-selling author, Tom Robbins, has just released a new children’s book entitled, “B is For Beer.” He describes this new opus as “a children’s book for grown-ups and a grown-up book for children – a far-reaching investigation into the limits of reality, the transformative powers of children, and, of course, the ultimate meaning of a tall, cold brewski.”

As far as we know, humans have always been big on miracles. Always big on believing that more is possible that what we were taught. More than what we have experienced. More than we logically assume. We humans have consistently at least wanted to believe that sometimes things happen which are outside the laws of nature. (Assuming, of course, that anyone understands all the laws of nature.) Some folks call these miraculous happenings, “acts of God.” Some refer to them as, “unexplained phenomena.” Asheville La-la’s or those who spent too much time in the 60’s might call them, “alien-induced,” “cosmic-mind-controlled,” or “vortex spin-offs.”