Been Around the Block. Got Some Stories. These are Them.
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Several 2025 studies from Baylor College of Medicine and Emory University provide the first experimental evidence that psilocybin and its active metabolite, psilocin, can extend biological lifespan — at least in cells and animal models. These findings appear in the peer-reviewed journal npj Aging (a Nature Partner Journal) and several associated summaries.
June 7, 2023, Mount Shasta, CA: Here’s how to write a book. Done this way, it’s rather easy. And surprisingly quick.
This method took me 40 years to figure out, and it works. My proof is that I’ve published 9 books, written over 500 microstories, 50-60 short stories, 3 novels, and hundreds of thousands of pages of operating manuals, business plans, how-to articles, advertising copy and lots, lots more.
This method makes writing a book fairly effortless. (Each of my nine published books was actually created in only about a week, but these [Read more…]
San Francisco, September 1971: This was the Yellow-Page ad that created Network Answering Service in San Francisco. It worked.
Here’s what happened:
On the lower right corner of this artwork, the artist’s signature is “LEI,” which stands for Steve Leialoha, who lived in the mission district of San Francisco. And if you go get an old “Howard the Duck” comic book. then in the comic book, you will see that the “inker” for Howard the Duck was … Steve Leialoha.
They make comic book artwork in two steps: (1) a guy, using pencil, maps out each page’s layout (and they can make any pencil corrections), and then [Read more…]
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!
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.
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.
Mount Shasta, California, December 28, 2019 — When I was a child and a teenager, I was very insecure. And needing reassurance all the time, in the tough-guy culture of Northern Texas, I became a loud show-off smart-alec, even though I was actually an introvert.
As a result, even when I gained confidence over the years, I had to *learn* how to talk to strangers, and how to approach women. I did learn. However I wish I’d seen this article, which is both simple and [Read more…]
