SWCAMBORNE

Las Vegas has Paris, New York, New York The Venetian and Caesars Palace.

The next big resort has to be The Holy Land Casino, Spa and Resort.

It could have the Dome of the Rock Arena, The Western Wall Casino and the Dead Sea Spa. You can have Falafel and Bagels at the Bethlehem Breakfast Buffet, walk on water at the Sea of Galilee Aquatic Center and don’t miss the nightly Jericho City Walls Light Show. Plenty of shopping on Ben Yehuda Street, in the Arab Souk and in the Tel Aviv Mall. The awe inspiring Stations of the Cross would be along one side of the front lobby which would also diplomatically display a reproduction of the spot where Mohammad ascended and an artists re-creation of the Second Temple. All the architectural details will of course be finished in Jerusalem Limestone.

It will not be possible to make everything perfectly harmonious with the tenets of all three religions for whom the Holy land is sacred. For instance gambling, drinking and alluring women will be not only be allowed they will be encouraged. Expressly forbidden at the The Holy Land Casino, Spa and Resort will be: the expulsion of money changers, throwing Christians to lions, and of course weapons and checkpoints.

The Holy Land Casino, Spa and Resort another brilliant idea from swcamborne.com. Thanks to Alan, Sandy and Nurit for helping to create of this idea. We have the ideas you do the work to develop them.

Photos courtesy of Vegas.com.

“He who laughs, lasts.”

Benjamin Franklin

1706- 1790

More Franklin Quotes

Here is a combination idea for a low cost fund raiser for charity.

First idea: My friend Joe Rogers runs a fund raiser for Save Our Youth Center (SOY) in Costa Mesa, CA.  He works quite hard on it every spring.

Second idea: I was talking to some friends about the fantasy football league they play in and how much time they spend on it.
The synthesis: It  struck me that you could connection these two ideas and create a:

“Charity Fantasy Golf Tournament Fund Raiser”

• It could happen on a rainy Sunday in the winter.
• The participants could bid to buy players for their foursomes.
• The scores on each hole would be posted every 15 minutes during the tournament.
• Scores would be determined by random draw of actual scores from the same hole in past tournaments.
• All proceeds would go to the Charity.

There is an opportunity for some one to create this product if it doesn’t already exist.

The left fears that federal surveillance of international phone traffic is a constraint on our constitutional rights.

The right fears that as Robert Samuelson said in the Washington Post: “campaign finance ‘reform’ is a dagger in the heart of the First Amendment.”

With all of this worrying from both sides I’m feeling pretty good. We can do both of these tasks better and we will. Our system was set up to move slowly and give a large influence to the established powers. Eventually however change happens and if we look from far enough away we can see progress toward more freedom and more justice for more people.

During our recent remodel we used the garage to store all kind of things that usually had homes in the kitchen. In fact we had the kitchen in the garage for six months. It was not fun. But the remodel turned out very well and we are very happy with our new soft modern look in the new family room and kitchen. But this article is about reclaiming the garage. Every available space had been stacked with things that were homeless.

Debris and detritus in the garage/workshop

The east bench before

Our garage has never been for cars. It has for most of the twenty plus years we’ve lived in the house been part storage and part workshop. This tidying/cleaning process is intended to recover some of the space shown in the pictures above for the workshop.
I have three different tidying, organizing, cleaning techniques that I use. Which method I use is situation dependent. When the mess is this bad I use the rule of tens. In the area that needs tidying I pick up the ten most egregiously out of place things and put them away or throw them away. For things that have to be put away somewhere else I stack them out of the area to be taken care of later. I count the items in my head and when I reach ten I look at the progress and time permitting start over.
The rule of tens works for big messes because it allows maximum progress with minimum effort and it has pre-set stopping points. At the end of putting away ten things you can always see real progress and then establish a new baseline to work from.
This is what the workshop area of the garage looked like at the end of two hours:

The new workbench after

the east bench after
Progress is being made. Next step the storage area of the garage.

Maybe 30 years ago a company called Ook from Germany changed how people hang pictures. Before Ook you used nails and they were almost free.

After Ook you used “professional picture hangers.” They were much better and much, much more expensive.

$1.50 picture hanger
There is an opportunity to do the same thing with the little protective feet that go on the bottom of chairs and other furniture on fancy hardwood floors.

We have beautiful new hardwood floors in our kitchen and family room. They look great but scratch really easily.

I have been putting on the best available felt pads but they are not ideal. The felt is soft but not a very good cushion and the adhesive fails regularly.

The ideal pad would have an epoxy or other super glue like adhesive and a molded urethane shaped contact surface that was a variable ILD construction. ILD is a acronym for Indent Load Deflection. In a much larger format it is why beds have springs and pads. The pads design is not the critical thing however it is the marketing. People who spend ten thousand dollars on a beautiful floor will be more than willing to spend hundreds of dollars to protect it. And in fact they want to spend the money to protect their floors.

In Santa Fe we bought a garden sculpture/mobile from a very nice young man, Ben Malley at Wiford Gallery.

I finally arrived and I finally installed it. When the wind blows it turns and reminds me of flowers. When the wind doesn’t blow it just looks like a very nice copper sculpture in the garden. The manufacturer is Whitaker Studios in St George, Utah.

Happy New Year!

“Contacts is everything.”

Scott Herrera

This is an intentional grammatical mistake to make the reader think about contacts like flocks of birds. You need to have lots of contact for them to be everything. One contact is worse than none.

Pencils don’t have lead in them. What we call the lead is actually a piece of graphite. Graphite is carbon. There is no lead in pencils.

Having said all of that that there is an opportunity for a pencil marketer to advertise a “100% graphite pencil.” It could claim accurately “now entirely lead free.”

We visited the Cumberland Pencil Museum in Keswick, England in July and I had the germ of this idea but it was the recent scare about lead in toys that made me think again about marketing “100% Lead Free Pencils.”

The novelty product of course would be wood pencils with absolutely nothing inside them.  But regular pencils could rightfully make the claim and get the pencil business of the worrying class.

This morning the number of hits on Swcamborne.com went over 100,000!

PRETTY REMARKABLE

If I could type in color I would.

In the next year I’m going to try and make the blog more interactive. If you have any ideas or favorite subjects you would like me to write more about. Send me an email or make a comment below.

Thanks to everyone who helped me reach this milestone in just two years.