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For more true-life adventures in Texas, California, St. Louis, England, Paris, and outer space, you can always just googsearch “Adventures of Bloggard” and find more peculiar microstories about this strange journey.
My Debt to Switchboards
San Francisco, September 12, 1976: This is called a switchboard.
In Henrietta, Texas, in the upstairs (outside staircase, on the right) of the building at Bridge and Gilbert, on the corner of the courthouse square, was the phone company before dial phones were available. that was the phone company before the new building was built over by the Methodist Church, and before the time Mac McGilvray ran the phone company. [CLICK HERE TO SEE THAT BUILDING TODAY] In that upper floor were several switchboards, and that’s where the operator(s) were before the advent of dial-phones. You picked up the phone and asked Gladys to connect you to the Watson’s house.
After dial-phones, high school, and heading off to North Texas State University, I learned to operate a switchboard when I worked at Holiday Inn in Denton, and switchboards were still widely in use in the hotel/hospitality industry for inter-room and inside/outside calls for decades after that.
Years earlier, starting back east, the very first answering services had been created when some entrepreneurs obtained AT&T switchboards, and located themselves in a calling area (ie: near the “central office” where calls are switched, serving one particular neighborhood, identified by the prefix of the phone number. In Henrietta, I think it was Evergreen, but I’m not sure I’m remembering correctly, because San Francisco also had Evergreen exchange, north of Golden Gate Park.)
These first answering services worked like this: They had the phone company wire an extension of the business’s phone and the two wires were connected to ONE of the holes in the switchboard. In this way, when the business was closed, the calls were also “ringing” on the small red light beneath that hole. At the back of the console, shown above, you see the red objects which are plugs. You grab the left-side plug of any pair of plugs, shove it into the hole and now your headset (if you’re the operator) is live as you’ve just “answered” the call, like people at home do when they lift the receiver. Now the caller asks for the Watson’s house, or for room 117, and you plug the right-side plug of that pair into the Watson’s plug or room 117’s plug, and flip the small toggle switch in front of that pair of plugs. This rings the target phone at the Watson’s or room 117.
When the Watsons or room 117 answer, you flip the toggle another way, and you are removed from the conversation. You get another red light when the parties hang up.
All answering services around the country used switchboards to provide answering service to businesses right up until 1976 in San Francisco, when one day I got an advertisement falling out of my phone bill. It was for this new feature, “Call Forwarding.”
I was stoned at that moment and picked up the advertisement, and then said to myself. “I could use this to build an answering service, without the need for a switchboard.”
And … that’s what I did. The beginning of Network Answering Service.
A few years later, and 80% of the answering services in San Francisco had transitioned away from switchboards, to call-forwarding and new types of equipment.
That’s how it happened. Thank you, switchboards!
What Goals Make You Happiest?
Mt. Shasta, California, June 15, 2022: When I was 26 or so, I figured out a handy truth …
a) Havingness goals, once met, most often satisfy for a few days or a few weeks.
b) Beingness goals may bring benefits, but if you try to dwell in satisfaction, then you’re no longer in that beingness, so you usually spend little time experiencing the satisfaction of attaining a beingness.
c) Doingness goals can satisfy as long as you’re doing the thing you intended to do.
For example, years ago in Dallas, one particular day, I found myself uncomfortable and ill at ease. And after a few days of pondering realized that I’d accomplished the goal for which I had gone to Dallas, and that I needed a new goal–because humans function well when seeking a goal.
And so I chose “creating music” because that is a doingness goal, and you can never reach the end of creating music.
It worked.
Easy-Peasy Exercise and Eating – Stay Trim, Strong, and Healthy
After failing, since age 26, to find an exercise-and-eating method that worked well and that I could keep up, because I never actually quit trying, not long ago I stumbled across a combo that works for me: (Exercise = X3Bar stretchy bands 15 minutes is the main part.)
Eating: Turns out that fast-converting carbs are my nemesis. Once I have more than about 30-50 grams of “fast carbs” like breads, potato, sweets, then I have the “gobbles” for the rest of the day. Further, these carbs make me feel bad, and I grew fatter and fatter from 40 up through almost 75 years old. (Picture to the left is me at age 40.)
Not because of any real wisdom but really through accident, I found a “gradient” of changing things that made each step easy, and yet it took me in just a handful of months to a low-carb diet largely free of processed foods and fast foods, a daily intermittent-fasting schedule of eating within an 8-hour window, and 14 days during the month when I fasted completely (no food, no juice, no broth),
Seen in retrospect, it’s become clear why this sequence worked —
THE HIDDEN “FOOD” THAT DOOMS YOU TO BEING FAT
a) First, get OFF the fast-carb roller-coaster. You will NEVER be healthy eating todays high-carb diet. The invention of agriculture was destructive to individual humans, but elongated the survival of the species. But, the body body wasn’t originally designed on such a diet. Recent changes from big agriculture and big business have made carb-heavy foods even more addictive and more damaging. So the first step is — how to cut the foods that have you addicted and ruin your health?
The answer is to find low-carb veggies and clean protein, and TANK UP all day long. After some number of days, your urges to gobble grains and sweets will diminish, and (by avoiding processed foods) you’ll avoid poisons which trigger over-eating (like MSG) and hidden sugar.
Don’t be afraid of eating fat. The energy from fat will keep you feeling satisfied, and you’re replacing sugar/grains with fat as your main energy source. Just make sure they are the clean and healthy fats. There’s lots of lies in food marketing. For example, Canola Oil is a manufacturing byproduct, Crisco is harmful, “vegetable” oils are mostly bad for you, as are most commercial salad dressings with soybean oil, and as is margerine, and any “low-fat” imitation fat.
If it’s a fat without manufacturing, it’s probably OK: olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, and butter are all pretty good for you. Others aren’t. They were made up to make money for their makers, not for your health.
You want to get your carbs UNDER 40 grams a day. To calculate, here’s a free tool: https://cronometer.com/
Use it till you got this down. Note: three normal corn tortillas are about 45 grams of carbs. But you can tank up on salads, soups (without potato or grains), and stir-fries of the right ingredients. All leafy greens and the sulphur veggies, and many others. So for example: huge salad with seeds and healthy salad dressing, curry made with cauliflower and spinich or other greens and coconut oil, soup made with chicken carcass and all the healthy veggies you want. All these will fill you up with high nutrition and satiety, without addictive, fast-converting carbs. All the steaks and chicken and pork you want, avoiding additives as much as possible.
THE EASY WAY TO DROP WEIGHT WHILE EATING TONS OF FOOD
b) As your compulsive urge to over-eat fades away, choose an eating window for every day. Instead of eating all day and all night, eat ONLY within a 6-hour to 8-hour window. Eat TONS so you cannot be hungry. And in a surprisingly short time, you’ll find it’s actually easy to only eat within this window, which is MUCH closer to how we ate over 100,000 years, and for which the body was originally designed.
If you have to, you may need to start with a longer window (eg: 10 or 12 hours) and then when that’s comfortable, narrow it down.
LIVE LONGER, AVOID ALZHEIMERS, KEEP YOUR IMMUNE HEALTHY
c) When the 6-hour or 8-hour window becomes easy — probably a matter of some weeks since you began this … Try a ONE day fast.
I discovered that it wasn’t a big deal. Seemed weird, but I wasn’t particularly hungry. To make it really easy, start your day with “Bulletproof Coffee” (look it up), which is black coffee with butter, or MCT oil or coconut oil added in. This gives your body some fat, producing satiety.
And once you can do a one-day fast, then you can do another one. My first step was to fast one day on the first and 16th of each month. After a couple months of this — easy peasy — you can add another day or two. Once this was comfortable, I thought to try a 3-day fast. Holy cow! It wasn’t all that troublesome.
Now at this point, your body is already making your immune stronger, and autophagy is starting to kick in, which recycles dead and damaged cells, and the study above suggests you’re getting some protection from Alzheimers.
You just keep adding some more fast days. I finally got to a 3-day fast on the first and 16th, then three one-day fasts in each two-week period. And … it’s bloody easy, energy goes up, sleep gets better.
EXERCISE FOR BETTER STRENGTH, ENERGY, AND SLEEP
d) Now, I combined this with an exercise plan. I do not know if this is essential or not, but that’s what I did. I purchased the X3Bar system, which is heavy duty bands and a short routine of 4 whole-body exercises most days, takes 15 minutes, and takes your muscles to exhaustion in a clever manner, with super-low chance of any injury.
Now, because my work is sedentary, I found that a couple more very short exercise periods kept me awake better. I added a walk up the hill behind my house in the morning, and when that became comfortable after a month or two, then I began short bursts (sprints), and now it’s a couple blocks of hill sprints. I wear minimal clothing, because low cold strengthens the immune system, and the impact of the sprinting is good for bone density. And this takes under 10 minutes.
And then I added a brief kettlebell session in later afternoon, kettlebell swings and presses just enough to make me breath heavy.
That’s it. I dropped 70 pounds fairly quickly, got stronger, sleep better and my mood seemed to improve as well.
IF YOU GIVE IT A TRY —
If you try it, I’d love to hear your experience.
How to Network Effectively
If you’re in business, or even if you’re not, networking is usually a part of getting along well, learning new things, meeting new people. And there are some tricks to it. This article contains (almost) everything I’ve learned from a lot of study and decades of practice. For anything from “picking up chicks” to “establishing new business contacts” these simple techniques will make you twice as effective, and it will be fun as well …
I found this article on Medium (a wonderful place to find fascinating articles). The article is by Michael Thompson. In turn, he’s reporting on a fascinating new book. Here’s what he says …
Like a lot of people who end up being great at their job, Robin Dreeke became obsessed with learning how to better connect with people because initially, he wasn’t very good at it.
As his career advanced, this drive served him well. Prior to starting his own executive coaching business, People Formula, Robin led the FBI’s Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program.
When it comes to creating connections with people and building trust, Robin’s learnings run deep. But after reaching out to let him know how much I enjoyed his tips in his book, “It’s Not All About Me“: The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone,” he was kind enough to give me the green light to share some of his techniques along with some of the ways in which I’ve gotten them to work for me.
The ‘Line Seizer’
3304 Geary Boulevard, San Francisco 1980’ish — When we opened Network Answering Service in my studio apartment in 1976, it was because I’d realized that the phone company’s new “Call Forwarding” service would enable me to build an answering service without the need to buy a switchboard, which also needs a LOT of costly wiring. The downside of my method was that when our phone rang, the incoming call could be for ANY of our clients. But who?
So we’d answer, “Network Answering Service, who are you calling please?”
Oddly enough, this worked rather well, and so we grew.
But when we outgrew my studio apartment at 3rd and Anza, north of Golden Gate park, we had to [Read more…]
Koko Taylor in Paris
Paris, Summer 2001: On the way to teach a class at the Belgian E-Tap Seminar, my flight paused in Paris, and so did I.
In the Montparnasse district (“arrondissement”), I had a narrow hotel, whose view of the street below my second-floor room revealed a hustling little shop of fresh produce, several ambiguous doorways, and a musical trio busking for money in colorful costumes. It was all so colorful I could just spit in a delirium of foreignicity.
In the morning I would carry my Megatar over to Le Bass Shoppe, where the proprietor would express quiet interest, on which I would later fail to follow up most completely.
Last night, arriving late, I’d had a late supper at the nearest cafe, and it could have been the same place where Hemingway and Picaso and Satie and Coco Chanel and Kay Boyle created the world of art once upon a time.
Last night, jet lag fagged and flattened me, but tonight? What to do tonight?
And so it was that, in the little newspaper I’d picked up, and pretended I could read, when I found the notice for Koko Taylor playing at a club just up the main drag, I yelped with pleasure, and almost dropped my teeny-weeny little cup of coffee, and altogether lost my cool and artistic demeanor, right there at the teeny-weeny table on the sidewalk beside the cobblestones of the arty little street. Oh, it was precious!
I wandered around during the day, viewing many olde and beautiful things, tired feet unable to stop me, with Les this and Le that. Even my map grew tired, so after a resty nap I woke and found the day’s light fading. Over a daring and bohemian snack from the shops up and down, it was showtime!
Koko Taylor is a blues and rock legend. Her music was introduced to me by a pal back in Dallas, who would listen to nothing else when smoking green hand-rolled cigarettes, and he was always smoking them. I can no longer remember his name, in fact find it difficult to remember much about those days except for two things.
One was that he confessed to me that as a child he’d been terrified of the destroying robot in “The Day the Earth Stood Still”, a movie where Michael Rennie, dying, tells Patricia Neal certain words to speak to the robot, Gort, so that Gort would stop blowing up the earth. My friend said that he was so terrified of Gort that he memorized the words. We repeated these words, and I can now remember them, too.
And just in case you ever run into this situation, here are the words you will need:
“Gort. Klatu baratu. Klatu baratu.“
Get it? Got it? Good!
Now we won’t need to worry about that.
The other thing that I remember is the Koko Taylor song “Wing Dang Doodle.” In case you haven’t heard it, it’s a romping stomping kind of song, a pushy and relentless rocking rhythm, and the words go like this:
“We goinna kick out all the windows!
“We goinna knock down all the doors!
“We goinna romp and stomp till midnight!
“We goinna fuss and fight till dawn!
“We goinna have us a WING DANG DOODLE
“All night long!”
There’s more, but you get the picture.
T
he club was dark, smoky, and the narrow lobby hadn’t prepared me for the long bar behind, and huge floor, covered with tables, and full curtained stage beyond. I had whisky. It wasn’t long before the curtains were drawn back … and the show was rocking! Koko was belting out the songs.
The French love blues. It’s a natchul fact.
Before long, the whisky took more and more effect. I was yelling and hooting. So was the rest of the crowd. It was a lot of yelling and hooting. A whole lot of yelling and hooting. The entire room was shaking. The band was weaving back and forth, and the sound bouncing from the walls and ceiling in the absurdest manner.
Everything became funny. Funny, funny, funny.
Everyone around me was talking. I was talking. We were all talking. We were all laughing. Was I speaking French? Talking now! Did they speak English? Couldn’t say. Didn’t matter much. Talking, talking, talking.
I recall, much later, weaving my way in the chill night air. These streets stay open late, bright blinking neon, though the little shops were dark, shut up tight.
There was a late dinner of coffee and mussels, at a bright shop on the corner. The proprietor was Belgian. The mussels from Brussels.
Somehow I made it to my room. The circling night faded slowly away. I slept.
Creating Your Reality
Today I was online reading something, and I was *so* tempted to respond in argument with something that someone said.
Even knowing better, I find it hard to stop myself, all too often.
And my particular reason for desiring to restrain myself is this —
A) We greatly create our own experience of life (our reality) by the thoughts we harbor in our heads. Some say these thoughts actually create reality, but for certain they create our experience of life.
B) If you create ill-will thoughts, no matter where you intend to aim them, you are creating ill-will thoughts. And it’s in YOUR head.
C) You suffer as a result of the painful thoughts in your head, and it paints your picture of your universe, and you create your painful experience of life.
D) The more you focus thought on negative stuff (problems and pain), the more you overlook (or miss) many of your opportunities, and you miss out on enjoying the bliss you could be enjoying from your life.
E) So it boils down to — It’s your gun. It’s your foot. Do What Thou Wilt.
Want to live in a world of devils? Or a world of bliss? Although it may seem strange the first time you hear this, with a bit of practice, it is actually possible to control your own mind, and your thoughts WILL create your happiness (or suffering) in this life.
(A word to the wise is sufficient. Let he that hath ears hear!)
🙂
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