My first ever youtube link.

Life is Good

When Nurit and I were in Arizona we bought a glass art collection. We spent yesterday hanging it.

It took all afternoon.

We didn’t break any pieces and the final result was worth it:

Life is Good!

We bought it from LeKAE Galleries in Scottsdale. The owners David and Linda Sherer were very helpful, thoughtful and were just the right amount of attentive. It (glass wall sculpture?) was created by Michael Orr of Maui, he does not have a web site.

Here is a picture of the living room with the new art:

Life is extremely good!

This is one of my best ideas in a long time. You know about “Rescue Dogs” and you have seen (If you live in Southern California) trees full of fruit in peoples gardens that will go to waste because nobody can be bothered to pick it. You may have seen Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable Miracle about the benefits of organic, local and fresh food.

This idea puts all these trends together. It is a simple idea really: Make Jams, Jellies, Relishes etc. out of backyard fruits and sell them as an environmental alternative to corporate farmed, machine picked, processed and preserved products. Rescue fruit is local, organic and helps everyone in it’s path to your bread.

Rescue Fruit

The flavor alternative in a world gone bland.

RescueFruit.com

The target market would be local high end restaurants and internet sales. It would be necessary to have a really good web site that sold the idea before it sold the product.

A backyard tree with excellent free fruit

The name “Rescue Fruit” is so good that I have violated my own “I don’t do business anymore” rule and bought the name RescueFruit.com.

This is the business plan:

• Year 1 and 2: Make some product and sell it under the FDA small producer exemption, self finance. Work out the website, the publicity, the recipes and the trade dress
• Year 3 and 4: Use investor money to build a small plant and develop markets and systems.
• Year 5: Sell for a lot of money to a big food company.

The business model is Tom’s of Maine or Samuel Adams Beer.

Rebecca is at the Kite Festival in Washington DC this weekend.

I’m Jealous.

The image above is uploaded directly to the blog rather than through flickr. Let me know if it works.

Here is a link to Joel G’s photos from Curacao.

One of Mark Z’s pictures as a teaser

Joel figured out how to fix the light in many of the shots so that the red isn’t filtered out. He can also give you a lesson about being sure that your digital camera housing is closed before taking the giant stride.

Great Pictures Joel!

It seems like every month another politician gets caught with his pants down. It is always the men. Which could be another reason to elect women but that is another story.
Elliot Spitzer hired prostitutes. His successor David Paterson admitted to extra-marital affairs on his first day in office. In the Senate last year Larry Craig and David Vitter had sex scandals. And the list goes on and on all the way to President Clinton (the first) and Monica Lewinsky.

Elliot Spitzer

To turn this litany of bad behavior into numbers, without doing to much research, lets stipulate that there are about ten promiscuous politician events a year that make it into the papers. To put that in perspective we have to know the size of the universe. Again lets make it easy and estimate. Add up all of the Governors, Congress-people, Senators, Cabinet members, Top General and Big City Mayors and there are about a thousand leaders in public life who would make the national news if caught with their pants down.

Larry Craig

Do the math: 10 out of 1000 is 1%. Not too promiscuous. But the wise reader will say “Yes but this is only the ones that get caught. There are many more who get away with it.” How many more? Nobody knows, but we can estimate a range. On the low end we can say that because the press and the competition are so alert half of the philanderers are caught. So the total is 2%. Or we can say that for every cheating male politician caught there are nine more who don’t get caught. In which case 10% of the top politicians are cheating, lying, oversexed scoundrels. 10% seems possible, but surprising for two reasons. First it is lower that the average cheating rate for the entire population. The national cheating rate is variously reported to be from 20 to 35%. And second; these men are under constant scrutiny from a press craving any scandal and their political rivals looking for any advantage and nine out of ten of them are getting away with it.

Monica Lewinsky

As is often the case the numbers, even the rough approximations above, tell us a different story than the impression left by the stories we hear on the news. Yes some politicians have sex when they shouldn’t with people they shouldn’t but it is not as prevalent as we thought.

Early spring is the best time to visit the Torrey Pines State Preserve. Even though it is located in San Diego City it is a very different seafront wilderness area.  What a delightful surprise.

Lillian and I went for a four mile walk on the excellent trails at Torrey Pines on Monday.

We saw some amazing wild flowers as well as the pines, cliffs and ocean views that make the preserve so popular all year long.

To see a nice run of pictures I took on our visit to Torrey Pines click here.

Lillian used the digital photos we all took on trip to the Galapagos Islands last summer and made them into a beautiful book.

She did it online using MyPublisher.com. She incorporated captions, the ships daily schedule and pictures from the ships log as well as the ones we took.

Any reasonably diligent person can build a book like this (this is where the business opportunity occurs) but you have to learn how and you have to practice.  I believe there is a significant portion of the population who would like a beautiful, personal, photo memory book like this but don’t have the time or courage to get up the learning curve to get it done. If they could give a “Memory Reporter” the photos, some documents and an hour or so of their time to generate the flow and the captions they could get one of these wonderful books. I think of it as a reporter type job.

Events that you might buy a Life Book for:

• Family vacations
• Anniversaries (fiftieth)
• Big Birthdays to celebrate a life
• Wedding, with all of the ancillary parties
• Charity Events as a gift to the Honoree

The cost would be dependent on how much of effort went into it the production.  But could be known in advance and calculated in advance from an online look-up table.  It would be expensive but not out of reach for millions of families.  I’m thinking in the $200 range.  Most of the work would be done online with a phone call to add the captions.  This is a big idea.

“A coach is someone who can give correction without causing resentment.”
John Wooden

UCLA Basketball Coach Retired

Coach Wooden’s Official Web Site

There was a lunar eclipse during the Codger Divers visit to Curacao. We used this auspicious omen as an opportunity to have the official opening of the Rotter Observatory at Curacao.

The observatory is named after Howard R. who designed the viewing platform and installed the Dual Optical 500 Micrometer Scope. You can see him on the right in this picture adjusting the optics on the DO500. On the left is Peter B his assistant on the installation.

This another view of the Rotter Observatory in operation.

The Rotter Observatory Directors during the grand opening ceremonies:

And finally for those of you still interested the official adult beverage of the Rotter Observatory at Curacao is:

Delirium Tremens