So marketing guru Seth Godin wanted to help everyone out with some spring cleaning. He suggested you call your credit card companies and threaten to cancel if they don’t lower your interest rates. It’s a good idea, but he suggests you’ll save a few hundred dollars.

That’s true–if you have credit card debt. If you don’t have credit card debt, well, it won’t save you anything until you get some credit card debt (which I don’t recommend). I realize credit card debt is pretty standard, especially among my generation. But that should be a bad thing.

Go ahead and get that interest rate lowered if you can, but don’t stop there. Mother-approved spring cleaning would mean paying off that credit card. It might take until the next spring cleaning (or the next one), but that would be worth rejoicing over. Boom.

I don’t really care for Al Franken. I don’t really care for Bob Jones University either. But somehow the pairing is pretty funny.

Al Franken took a “prospective student” to Bob Jones for the whole tour, complete with awkward questions about how students can’t leave campus unless they’re going home or on a mission and how students can’t listen to rock music (not even Christian rock?!). It makes me chuckle.

What’s especially funny is that Al Franken didn’t think a disguise would be a good idea and that Bob Jones was as slow on the uptake as they were. You’d think they’d get jokers like that fairly often.

And anytime you talk about Bob Jones, a trip to their web site is in order.

Continue reading Al Franken vs. Bob Jones University →

According to an NPR story I heard today there’s nearly a 40% chance you can get away with murder. That’s based on the number of murders committed and how many of them remain unsolved. Apparently it doesn’t vary much by location.

You can increase your odds by leaving no evidence and no witnesses. That means doing it at night, outside and with a gun that hasn’t been used in a crime before. A gun also allows greater distance between the murderer and the victim, which minimizes evidence.

All this from Stacy Horn, author of The Restless Sleep: Inside New York City’s Cold Case Squad. You can read an excerpt online.

It seems the getting away with murder bit was just an intriguing hook to keep people listening, but it worked for me. Fascinating stuff, if only I wrote crime novels.

As I’ve been watching Into the West, a TV mini-series about the American West, or anything about that time perioud, it always strikes me how incomprehensible the Native American plight is. How is it that we could slaughter and displace these people so easily?

I suppose most modern stories have a very sympathetic bent towards the Native Americans, and it would help the grasp the perspective of the white man. Communication was a problem and with ignorance came fear. Misunderstandings result in shots firing, and it’s easier and safer to sort it out after the smoke clears. As much as I try to understand that, it still baffles me.

But what’s really sad is that the incomprehensible behavior of humanity in the 1800s is repeated today.

Continue reading Man’s Inhumanity to Man →

Oops. Maybe someone should get on that.

Time has an incredibly interesting article, “How to Get Out Alive,” about human behavior in disaster situations. It seems most people blank out in the face of danger, remaining stunned and bewildered (45% don’t move for at least 30 seconds). About 10-15% of people stay calm and react quickly, another 15% slip into total hysterics, and the rest of us react like deer in headlights. Which usually kills the deer, and it’ll kill you, too.

So how do you get out alive?

Be Prepared
Actually read the safety card and note where the exits are. When an airplane fills with smoke in less than 20 seconds your brain can recall that info