The logical first question is “Where can I get a half cat?”

So here’s the story.

I live on the outskirts of Austin on a hill. Behind my house is a couple thousand acres of greenbelt. Its protected space full of scrub oaks, cedar, coyotes, foxes, rattlesnakes, skunks, owls and as far as I know, dragons. It’s a beautiful area and wild as hell. Of course, all the critters that live back there are hungry pretty much all the time.

Now add curious, well fed, happy and no doubt stupid, house cats.

They wander back there chasing mice or birds or butterflies, unaware that anything on earth means them harm.

Well, in my neighborhood, they end up as Scooby Snacks.

There is a neverending series of flyers by the mailbox for missing cats that will never be found. They were breakfast.

In the nearly fifteen years we’ve been here, we’ve been through more cats that I can count. At some point some years back, we realized that it didn’t make much sense to get too attached to a cat so we started getting only black, male cats from Craigslist. We give someone $20 and bring home a wonderful kitten and do everything possible to keep it in the house, but with the traffic that flows through our doors, they always manage to get outside. Some come back, most don’t.

Hell, we had one wonderful cat that got out one afternoon and never came back.

Gulp.

So we get these black, male cats and try not to name them for the first year. The good thing is that kittens are a blast and we always have kittens.

Is this cruel? No way. We give them a great life and if they choose to sneak out and move on to the next plane of cathood, that’s their choice.

We’ve got two BMCC’s (Black Male Craigslist Cats) right now that are great. We love them. And we hope they don’t get out and eaten.

But what about the Half Cat.

That’s Rio. She’s your typical cranky, lanky, foul tempered Siamese cat. She’s kinda bony, kinda wobbly and can go from purring to sinking her teeth into your arm with little or no notice.

And she’s over twelve years old and has spent a good half of her life outside. She’s outlived maybe a dozen other cats. She’s been seen a mile from our house, killing rabbits in a friends back yard. She’ll vanish for weeks at a time and come home skinny and hungry and camp out on our bed for a week at a time.

How does she do it? She hates the two black male cats and wont interact. She comes in the cat door to our bedroom and sleeps on the bed all day. When she wants out, she goes. And every time she goes, we never know if we’ll see her again. She can hang around for weeks or months, then slip out into the night and be gone for an hour or a week.

So we’ve grown used to her rhythms. We feed her, pet her, give her whatever she wants and when she leaves, we silently wish her good luck.

Now that Spring is here, she’s been out more. New bunnies and rats and such are cropping up and she’s there to cull the herd. She’s been gone for two days so far with no sign of returning… Will she show up randomly at 3:00AM and jump up on the bed, curl up on my chest and purr all night… Or will she never be seen again. We never know.

What are the lesson I’ve learned from my two and a half cats?

1. Treat every day with everyone you know and love like it’s the last time you’ll see them. Hell, you never know. It COULD be the last time you see them. Whenever I see Rio, I treat her with kindness. Spend a couple extra minutes petting her. She purrs and looks pleased.

2. Live your life for the joy of living, not for safety. Rio does that. She’s very fortunate to have the best of both worlds. A warm, soft bed with food and people who are kind to her, and she’s got the wild world outside the door any time she needs it.

3. The smart survive. Rio is obviously smarter than any cat we’ve ever had. She’s outlived a dozen others in the same environment. I sometimes think she’s got a deal with the coyote herd. I think she brings the new cats out to meet her “friends” and leaves them there to their fate. I’m sure of it.

4. Cowards live long lives if they make peace with their true natures. My two black cats have it made, but in a different way. They stay inside probably because they’ve had the living crap scared out of them from the monsters that live beyond. They’ll live long because they’re cowards.

5. Purr. It makes you happy and it makes the people around you happy. And happy is good.

If you live in Austin, you know Leslie. He’s been a fixture here since I moved to Austin in 1994.

Leslie is, well, WAS, our local crazy crossdressing streetguy. He was an Austin Icon. Everyone in Austin knew who Leslie was. Everyone had a Leslie story. He was perhaps the single most well known person in the whole city. If you do a search for ‘Leslie Cochran Austin” on Google, you get over 10,000,000 results. He ran for Mayor and didn’t come in last.. Several times.

He had an iPhone app. He had fridge magnets.

He had fans.

I was a personal fan. I used Leslie as a prime example of brand development any time I’ve been asked to talk about brand development. I’ve taught about Leslie in universities, to entrepreneur groups and technology symposiums.

He was a hero.

Sure, he was nuts. I doubt anyone would argue with that. But he knew how to stand out and make a different noise. Cities all over the world are full of people living on the fringes. Dumpster divers and street people trying to live off the crumbs we leave behind. Most of them drudge on in obscurity. But Leslie figured out that he could rise above that and improve his meager lot in life. He created a brand that was so unique he made himself a star. And it kept him alive for a very long time.

He died today and he’s all over the news, Facebook, Blogs etc. Hell, I’m writing about him.

If he wasn’t a master at building a great brand, nobody would have noticed.

So a toast to you Leslie, wherever you are right now. I hope you bring come color to whatever lies beyond 6th and Congress.

Everything is balanced between Harmony and War. I’m no Zen Master, but I think this is what they mean by the whole Yin/Yang thing.

Think about this. War is awful. Harmony is good. But you really can’t have one without the other.

Let’s create the perfect utopia of human life and see how long it lasts.

Say you’ve got this harmonic village. Everyone has a place. Everyone has a job to be productive and part of the society. A man makes rope hammocks to trade for food and clothing and everything else he needs… Harmony… Peace…

But what if another guy decides he can make better rope hammocks and is willing to trade them for less food. Now you have War. The two men start to compete for sales. And maybe the first guy realizes he has to do a better job of his craft to eat. So that War spurs better quality. And that better quality spurs more Harmony… One begats the other.

In the animal kingdom, it’s the same story. The lions lounge around in the sun with each other in a pride (Harmony) but they have to violently attack anything that walks by so they can eat (War).

So what. What does this mean to me, the Marketing Guy.

Think about this. You are at War with your competitors. You are competing for customers (you are the prides of lions, the customers are the antelopes wandering by). This is a serious War for limited resources. But how do you win? By creating Harmony with your customers. You give them a good feeling (ahhh…) by doing business with you. They feel good about the value of your product, your service, the compliments they get by owning your product… The list goes on. But without that Harmony, there is no sale.

Then once you realize you MUST create that harmony to win the war, you can start to look at what you sell and how you sell it to see what you can do to increase that harmonious transaction.

I was thinking about MarloAdelle.com. This is the fashion accessory business my wife and daughter run. It’s really turned out to be a nice little business but you don’t have to look far to see the War and the Harmony.

The War is competition. My daughter, Marlo, had just found a girl at TCU (her college) selling exact knockoffs of her designs through a Facebook page to sororities. She offers to make the feather hair fascinators in your sorority colors. It’s an exact knockoff of her business. That’s War right in your own yard. The other layers of War are cheap, made in China knockoffs and the most fickle of things, the whims of fashion. Those are all pretty serious levels of War.

But where is the Harmony?

The Harmony is when a woman looks through the Web site, visualizing how she’d look with the clip. She orders one of these beautiful, complex, colorful pieces to match a favorite outfit. It comes in the mail a few days later, packed in a nice little box. She opens it and looks at the construction, the delicate details. Then she puts on that favorite outfit and places the clip in her hair. Then all day she get’s compliments from friends and strangers on how wonderful she looks. Her heart is happy. Harmony.

As marketers we need to understand how to become a part of that Harmony. How do we make our prospective customers feel good about doing business with us? How do we make them feel good about owning our products, or using our services. How can we begin to understand them. Be empathetic to their wants and needs? When we can start to understand them, we can start to understand what makes them happy, what brings them Harmony… And what brings them to doing business with us.

It’s interesting, once you start looking at everything through the Harmony and War Lens, you start to have a clearer understanding of how to deal with people and circumstances. You can start to understand the motivations of the forces around you. You can realize that you are either in a state of Harmony with you or a state of War. If something directly connects with you, it’s not going to be neutral… It’s going to War or Harmony.

Will you know how to win one and extend the other?

So my wife Loree was downtown last night and we met at Pesche, the most interesting bar in the city. An Ad Guy friend (although he swears he’s a RECOVERING Ad Guy) named Tim McClure joined us for an evening of great talk at the bar. We covered creative thinking, the value of big ideas, gin and Citroens.

We chose Pesche because it’s my favorite bar on the planet and Tim quickly realized it had now become HIS favorite bar as well. Pesche makes a different noise. You walk in and you go back in time a hundred years. Not in a cloying, silly way, but in a very real way. The bar is the full length of the building, the old wooden floor is a genuine old wooden floor. The bartenders wear vests.

But the real treat are the cocktails. The wall behind the bar is fifteen feet tall and forty feet long with every kind of liquor you could ever imagine. There are sliding ladders to get to the top levels. There are probably forty types of gin. There are eyedroppers of strange flavors, jars of eggs, jalapenos, fruit soaking in bottles… A very different scene from most bars.

And the bartenders are artists. They are masters. Each guy there can make hundreds of vintage and outrageous cocktails… most of which you’ve never heard of. They make cocktails with whipped egg whites, absinthe and a dozen other flavors. It’s an experience you won’t find anywhere else outside of Denver at a place called Green Russell. The problem with Green Russell is that you have to make reservations to sit at the bar and you’re not allowed to move your seat. If you stand up to talk to someone, they ask you to go back to your seat or leave. A great way to kill a great concept.

But back to Pesche. They could have been like every other bar in Austin and gone broke in a couple years, like every other bar… But they chose a different path. They made a different noise and truly identified a niche and filled it.

Well, the evening came to an early end. Loree had to head back to The Ranch and Tim had to run, so I wandered down to the corner and sat at a sidewalk table at Halcyon with a bottle of fizzy Italian water and a good cigar and watched the world go by.

It wasnt long before I got a call from another Ad Guy friend, Larry Jolly. I told him I was at Pesche and he said he was on his way. We quickly realized we were talking about two “Pesche’s.”

He was heading to Pecha Kucha.

I was perplexed.

His quick explanation was that it was an art happening thing. Starting in an hour not far from where I was sitting.

Obviously, I had to go.

So I won’t go into a history of Pecha Kucha, but in short it’s a TED Talks type of event with ten artists talking about their work, lives, philosophy etc. They get 20 slides and 20 seconds each. It happens in a dozen or so cities around the world the same night. Great concept. Here’s the link.

As I watched the presentations, I realized something. I’ve always said that an entrepreneur doesn’t see what’s IN the universe… He see’s what ISN’T in the universe, and then fills in those gaps.

It was last night that I realized the same goes for great artists.

And that’s not to say that a skilled painter is a great artist.

Think about it this way. A skilled painter can knock off a dozen Degas paintings in a month. But did the world NEED a dozen more Degas paintings?

A great ARTIST already filled that hole in the universe. Degas did something his own. Something original. The door closed behind him when he left.

Every great artist does that. They do what isn’t already there, and they do it in such a way that anyone who follows them is just trying to duplicate their fete.

So for those of us out there that aspire to be great artists (and that can be anything from music to painting to dance to whatever), find the holes in the universe and fill them with your best work… See if you can close the door behind you when you’re done.

Oh, and be open to random Dualing Pesche’s on a Thursday night.

The Impressionists move me.

Sometimes I’m just speechless. To look into the past through the window they’ve created. I can feel the street they’re standing on, looking across a river at a city long gone. I see what they see, filtered through the lens of their experiences and storytelling skills. I can look at a simple, elegant line they left on the canvas and see that it’s utter perfection and wonder where that line came from. That simple flowing line that suggested a man’s jacket, or a cheek or gesture. I can’t begin to know how they chose that color, or left that line, or used those few simple dabs to suggest so much.

I think they move me so much because they don’t beat me over the head. They give me a suggestion of a feeling and let me fill in the rest. Some of the huge canvases of their contemporaries were amazing things to behold, but not a detail is missing. I don’t have to do anything. I just scan the acre of canvas and every blade of grass is there for me.

I’m not involved.

The Impressionists give me just enough to jump in with them. They invite me into a scene and let me finish it out, or just enjoy what is and what isn’t there.

These great museums of the world remind me that my kind isn’t all evil and power and angst. There are people out there, and there always have been, that are capable of giving us all something beyond our little lives.

Thanks guys. Thanks Monet, Manet, Cezanne and the rest. Thanks Picasso and Van Gogh and Pissaro and Gauguin. I owe you one. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

I came to the sudden and unexpected realization that the coolest car ever built was the Citroen DS. Don’t ask me why. It just happened. I remember going to Europe back in the early 80′s as a 21 year college kid, schlepping my backpack around for the summer. My impression of these bizarre cars wasn’t much.

But I’m a fan of great design. And the Citroen DS is a great design.

If you’ve never seen one, just do a Google search. There are a million pictures all over the Web. There are hundreds of video’s on Youtube. And once you see a picture of one, you’ll know the image has already worked it’s way into your memory.

So why was it great? And it WAS great. Car design enthusiasts the world over pine effusively about the DS. Several polls of auto editors put it in the top five cars ever built. Some put it at the very top. And James May of Top Gear (my favorite car show) has a great video on Youtube where he claims that it’s EASILY the greatest car ever built by anyone.

Well, I won’t go on forever about the technology, but when it was introduced in 1955, it was nothing short of radical. The designers and engineers at Citroen had taken everything done by everyone else, and threw it out the window. They went way out on a limb to create a car that looked nothing like the others with technology nobody else had even considered. The suspension wasn’t big springs and shocks. It was a ball of hydraulic fluid charged with nitrogen. The body was fluid and designed to be aerodynamic. Think back on 1955… The 1955 Chevy was a great car, but it looked like a bloated refrigerator box covered in goofy chrome. The 1955 Cadillac was an even MORE massive, bloated refrigerator box.

It had disc brakes, turning headlights, self leveling suspension that could be raised or lowered at will, it was designed with crumple zones, rode like it wasn’t even touching the ground and got 27mpg.

They made 1.5 million of them and it lasted with very few changes for 20 years.

Amazing.

But beyond all that cool stuff, it was amazing thing to look at. Still, I don’t think anything has matched the thinking and drama of it’s design.

So it’s on my bucket list. I WILL own one. I WILL possess one some day. Hell, I’d never even been IN one till this weekend. I was up at TCU for my daughters first gallery opening and she came in and showed me a picture of one that was parked behind the gallery. Turns out, I see it drive by and jumped out to stop the driver. He works at TCU and we struck up a great conversation about the car. I met him the next day and he let me drive it.

His is a 1968 DS21 Pallas. He’s the second owner and had purchased it from the original owner. A stylish woman in the Hollywood Hills that drove it for 40 years around LA.

It was a blast to drive. The hydraulic suspension system was impressive as hell. He took great delight in speeding over speedbumps (Ft. Worth has a lot of them… college kids in big cars….). He’d aim right for them at 40+ mph and you’d feel only the slightest BMP… BMP… and on you’d go. In most cars, you would have bumped your head on the roof. The DS floated over the bumps easily. Never seen anything like it. And this from a car built before the computers were used to build such things.

My appreciation for this design stems from my main philosophy that in order to do great things, in order to stand above the crowd, you have to make a different noise. Understand the world you’re competing in and then make a brave decision to not be like your competitors. Citroen, as a company, has done this. So you either love or hate their design, but once you see one, you won’t forget it.

Be brave my designer friends.

——
Want more? Here’s a link to the Wikipedia entry…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citroën_DS

And here’s a great piece from James May, the Wookie from Top Gear
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gpUHtRVBn4

I don’t even know how I came across it. It was published in DrunkardMagazine.com back in 2004, and I probably shouldn’t be reproducing it here without permission from lawyers and such, but sometimes ya gotta just beg forgiveness. Anyway, it’s a brilliant piece of writing and there are things we should all take with us.

———

“It took me a long, long time to learn what I now know, and I don’t want that to die with me.”

—Frank Sinatra

Pundits often speculate why the Rat Pack remains so deeply embedded in popular culture.

Some reckon it was because the heart of the Pack, the holy trinity of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr., were peaking in their respective careers precisely when they forged their fateful union. Others claim their rise hinged upon the testosterone-fueled reaction of the fading Macho American Male against the encroaching, decidedly un-macho hippie revolution. Yet others believe it was the diabolical work of vast media conspiracy—the newspapers fed on scandal then, as now, and the Pack gave them all they could stand and more.

Then there are those, myself included, who believe the well is much deeper than that. That the Rat Pack wasn’t just a gang of hard-drinking, easy-loving, high-rolling celebrities who happened along at the right time, but also something much bigger and much more difficult to define—an idea, an ethos, a subconscious creed whose roots extend all the way back to ancient Greece. The Rat Pack was the primal embodiment of the notion that we are not put on this earth to toil until death, but rather that we are here to swing.

Admittedly, their timing couldn’t have been more perfect. The conformist 50’s were colliding headlong into the gooey flower-power movement, and red-blooded Americans were at a loss as to how they were supposed to behave. They were desperate for leadership and suddenly a group of very confident cats climbed up on stage in a small desert town in Nevada to deliver a soused sermon of sheer unadulterated fun. And the world sat up and took notice.

It was January 1960 and they called it the Summit at the Sands. There would be other Summits later, but this was the opening shot of the Swinging Revolution, the party that was heard around the world. After a few straight songs, the show would devolve into something best described as a very public stag party. Songs were perpetually interrupted by wisecracks, political correctness was made a pariah, the sacred audience was cajoled and rousted, the performers openly drank deep from a bar centered on stage like a sacrificial altar. Much of the act was ad-libbed and riddled with inside jokes, and the audience—and the army of press that had gathered—suspected the performers were having more fun than those they were supposed to be entertaining. And they were right.

When they drank the whole swinging world drank with them and drank them in, taking cues as to what was square and what was a gas. Their waves of joy rippled around the globe as they staked out an island of cool in a confused cultural landscape. And, what’s more, they made it look easy.

Even now, decades after their heyday, the ripples are still spreading. Catch the wave, baby.

From funerals come flowers.

It was only after Ava Gardner shoved him into a black sea of despair that Frank was able to transform from a washed-up bobbysox warbler into the undisputed master of the boozy saloon ballad. Dean’s acrimonious (and most thought career-ending) break with Jerry Lewis allowed Dean to step out of the shadow of playing straight-man and into the light of master entertainer of all trades. The traffic accident that cost Sammy an eye lent him a fresh perspective on life (literally and figuratively) that gave him his final boost into super stardom. They’d all been to bombsville and they knew there was always something in the rubble worth taking with them.

Always act like you know what you’re doing.

Even if you don’t. Especially if you don’t. “We ain’t figured out what the hell we do up here,” Frank admitted onstage at the Summit, but by sheer force of gall they not only pulled it off, they made their off-the-cuff goofing around seem like a cool new way of doing things.

Work hard, but make it look easy.

Never let them see you sweat. Swagger beneath the spine-crushing yoke. Never let it appear your limits are being tested because, as Sammy pointed out, once the bastards know your limits you stop being larger than life and start being about the size of an average schmuck.

You get the kind of friends you deserve.

Frank learned that the hard way. During his first rise to the top he behaved very callously, willing to cut throat if it meant a step up the ladder. When he eventually fell off that ladder, very few hands reached out to catch him. During his second climb up, boosted by his Oscar-winning performance in From Here to Eternity, he was not only careful not to step on any fingers, he pulled up a lot of cats with him. His reward? The Rat Pack, baby.

Anytime is the right time for a party.

“Let’s start the action!” was Frank’s eternal battle cry. The Pack didn’t believe in down time, any possible moment was fertile soil for a wing-ding. “I may run for the office of president,” said Frank. “I’ll have a slogan on billboards all over the country: ‘Gimme a bottle and a glass and I’ll get America off its ass.’”

Drink like a man.

Wine was fine with dinner, beer was great for watching a baseball game, but it was hard liquor that powered the Pack. Jack rocks (Frank called it gasoline) was the primary fuel, supplemented with dry martinis and scotch.

There’s always a higher peak.

No matter how high you’ve climbed, no matter how many accolades lay at your feet, you should always be packing for the next expedition. Resting on your laurels is akin to greasing the rails of a sled balanced precipitously on a long, steep slope that goes nowhere but down. Trade in those comfortable slippers for a grappling hook. At different points in their careers each of the Pack had the opportunity to cash in his chips and say, “Man, that was one wild, swinging ride.” Instead they informed the dealer, “Sling ‘em, baby, I’m feeling lucky.”

Broads come and go but pallies are forever.

Romantic love has it’s place, but abandoning your pals for your current fling was akin to selling the ranch to go play a bit part in an Off Broadway western. An army of women marched through the Pack’s circle, they even married some of them, but the circle remained unbroken.

To be a good leader sometimes you have to be a bad man.

Nobody truly respects a thoroughly nice guy. Every great leader has a mean streak and Frank certainly had his. Glad-handing might earn you good will, but respect won’t follow unless they understand that hand knows how to ball into a fist. Frank could be the most giving, generous, and kindest pal in the world, but his clan understood that if you crossed him you’d better know how to duck.

When in doubt, swing.

In both senses of the verb. The Pack were firm adherents of the idea that there are few situations a good right hook or wild party won’t make more interesting.

Learn to take a punch.

Punches come in all shapes and from all directions: emotional, vocational and, yes, physical. Somewhere along the line it became standard behavior to admit your hurt, to cry over your pain, to bemoan the meanies who would do such a terrible thing, and finally to solicit hugs to make the hurt go away. The Rat Pack had a whole different idea. They understood that anyone who steps into the ring of a life worth living is going to get hit. A lot. And when you did, you didn’t run to your corner and weep, you rolled with it and angled for a vicious counter-punch.

Never sweat the small stuff.

The Pack lived within the big picture, they understood that if you were reaching for the stars it didn’t matter if your shoes were untied. Today’s troubles became tomorrow’s punchline. Case in point: When Sammy became suicidally depressed about losing his eye, Frank outfitted the rest of the Pack with matching eye-patches. Sammy cast aside self-pity and got on with his life.

Only take a shot at a pal when he’s in sight.

Trading barbs with pallies is a very important part of the male experience, but repeating the same insults when they’re not around is forbidden. Case in point: Sammy would trade the most insulting of wisecracks with Frank and Dean on stage, but when he took a shot at Frank during a radio interview, the Leader wouldn’t talk to him for two months. Sammy never made that mistake again.

Money does no good sitting in your pocket.

“You gotta spend it,” Frank said. “Move it around.” The Pack knew you earned a lot more interest spreading it thick (the recipients of their legendary largess were especially interested) than letting it sit in a bank. Whaddya angling for, pal, a solid gold coffin?

A lady ain’t a tramp.

A paradox, isn’t it? They called them broads on stage and in each other’s company, and Lord knows they womanized, yet they were very nearly Victorian in manner the rest of the time. Not only did they go for the sending-flowers, opening-the-door, helping-her-into-her-coat routine, they were also more than willing to defend a lady’s honor with fisticuffs. “I may sound old fashioned,” Frank said, “but I think all women should be treated as I’d want my wife, daughters and granddaughters treated.”

There’ll be plenty of time to sleep when you’re dead.

Some broads, as Frank liked to say, look better from the rear, and he felt the same way about the dawn. Throughout his life Frank waged a very personal war against sleep, he hated the very idea of it, he considered it a miniature form of death. It was when the action stopped, when the pallies staggered home, that dark thoughts started seeping in. Avoid it as much as possible.

Never apologize for your pals.

Sinatra mixed with mobsters, Dean associated with that thug Sinatra, and Sammy, for crissakes, palled around with Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan. They, for whatever reasons, saw something in them worth bonding to and never felt the need to explain why. Hey, they may be fuck-ups, criminals and reprobates, but they’re your fuck-ups, criminals and reprobates.

Never rat on a rat.

Bogart, the original Alpha Rat, established that phrase as the gang’s motto and Frank enshrined it. “Pray silence,” was the Pack’s byword, the idea being, we’re all in this shady enterprise together, so who’s going to point fingers? Leave that to the press.

Make the most of your weaknesses.

Frank’s lack of classical training lent him the audacity to experiment with the form until he ended up creating a whole new way of singing. Dean’s ingrained misanthropy allowed him to cut the ties that would have bound him to a single genre of entertainment. You would have thought the entrenched prejudices of the day would have prevented a short, one-eyed, jewish, black man from rising to the top of the entertainment world, but Sammy used the stark spotlight of controversy to showcase his monumental talents. Noted Sammy: “Fame comes with its own standard. A guy who twitches his lips is just another guy with a lip twitch—unless he’s Humphrey Bogart.”

Nobody owes you a good time.

Except you. If you find the company you keep boring, maybe it’s because you’re putting them to sleep. If no one’s ring-a-ding-dinging the bell, get off your butt and do it yourself. It didn’t matter if they were stuck shooting a movie in a small Ohio town or the middle of a Utah desert, the Pack always brought the party with them.

Once you stop moving, you start dying.

Just like sharks. Frank considered impatience a virtue, fully understanding that lying in a rut is an invitation for someone to start shoveling dirt on you. When recording an album, Frank would tell the conductors, “Let’s keep it moving please, because if it bogs down, it’s deadly.” Inertia, he knew, is the death of creativity.

If you can’t do it with class, it isn’t worth doing.

That goes for drinking at a bar, taking a broad out on a date, throwing a party or walking into a room. What exactly is class? It’s the details. Tip like a king and deliver it like a secret. Formal attire but never overstated (Sammy sometimes bent this rule). Never let a pallie wonder where his next drink is coming from. Never yawn in front of a lady and always be quick to light up her smoke.

Better a proud thief than a humble beggar.

Frank and Dean stole from Crosby, Sammy stole from Frank, and the whole world stole from the lot of them. They never asked for permission and they never made any bones about it. They took what it was, made it better and passed it along.

Work to live, not the other way around.

“We’re not setting out to make Hamlet or Gone with the Wind,” Frank asserted in the midst of shooting Ocean’s Eleven. “The idea is to hang out together, find fun with broads, and have a great time.” During the shoot they would drink ‘til dawn, pass out, show up fantastically late on the set, start drinking again, execute each scene in one take, booze it up on stage at the Copa, then, finally, another date with the dawn. “The satisfaction I get out of working with these two bums,” Dino would say, “is that we have more laughs than the audience.”

Rules are for suckers.

“When your opponent’s sittin’ there holdin’ all the aces, there’s only one thing to do: Kick over the table,” advised Dino. Fences are for sheep and the Rat Pack soared above them like eagles. How will you ever know if the rules are even real until you give them a good kick?

Loosen up.

A lot of us should get those words tattooed across our knuckles, as a reminder we’re taking things too seriously. A light heart is the grease that makes uncomfortable situations slide right on by. Frank said it: “If you ain’t loose, you can’t swing.”

Regrets are a dangerous rearview mirror.

Spend too much time staring into that ugly little reflection and you lose sight of the road ahead. Regrets? The Pack had a few, but apparently too few to mention in their collected interviews. Best to just twist that mirror until your gorgeous mug is smiling right back at you. Now, isn’t that a better view?

Love the man in the mirror, because he’s the best pal you got.

“The only person who can hurt you is you,” Frank said. So treat him right, treat him with respect, and most of all, show him a good time. He’ll pay you back in spades.

The world breaks everyone, and those who break sometimes end up stronger in the broken places.

Hemingway preached it and the Pack were true believers. Frank’s post-Ava crackup, Sammy’s automobile crash, and Dean’s multiple divorces all made them more resilient, more eager to win, more willing to lay it on the line. Once bitten, twice bold.

You will know a true pal at first sight.

“You bypass the acquaintanceship stage immediately,” Frank explained. “Either your currents are different and the chemistry isn’t there or else you’re hooked and you’re a friend immediately and in most cases permanently.” Though their personalities were miles apart, Frank, Dean and Sammy hit it off right from the start, and over time they found enough common ground to build an unbreakable union.

Better two pals than a two hundred acquaintances.

Politicians, princes and bigwigs of every stripe vied for a place in their circle and were roundly rejected. Frank, Sammy and Dean understood every human being has only so much emotional energy to pour out and you could either give a crowd a small taste or get a couple pallies loaded. Which sounds like a better time?

Take care of the little guy.

They’d insult powerful politicians, punch out career-mangling newspaper columnists and pick fights with fellow celebrities, but they always took care of the guys who mixed their drinks, dealt their cards and carried their bags. They’d all worn those shoes and knew exactly how they fit.

A man without enemies is a man without character.

Let’s face it, if you stand up for anything, and I mean anything, someone is going hate you. Even saints like Lincoln and Gandhi got whacked. The Rat Pack, the original players, certainly had more than their share of player-haters. They shrugged it off, they knew it was part of the gig. Frank’s favorite toast? “Here’s to the confusion of our enemies!”

Women are, and shall forever remain, a mystery.

Said Frank: “I’m supposed to have a Ph.D. on the subject of women. But the truth is I’ve flunked more often than not. I’m very fond of women; I admire them. But, like all men, I don’t understand them.” And if the Chairman of the Board couldn’t figure them out, what chance do we mortals have?

Live in the now.

The past was where you screwed up and the future is where you die. The now is where you swing. “You only live once,” Frank noted, adding, “and the way I live, once is enough.”—Frank Rich

Copyright 2004 Modern Drunkard Magazine

They were terrible. They were wonderful. And most likely, if you were taking off before sunrise on a Saturday morning to ride up Route 1 with a couple buddies from Long Beach to San Francisco for the weekend, you’d experience both sides of that bike.

I had three of these creatures from 1977 to 1995. I figure I put maybe 200,000 miles on the three bikes and I know them inside and out. One never figures ahead of time that one could become an expert in something so odd, but it happens.

Like I said earlier, if you know of Harleys, you probably know of modern Harleys. The one’s that actually run and have some rather sophisticated engineering. They are also complex enough that when they do break, you’re taking it to a dealer.

The Harleys I’m talking about were NOT like that.

Shovelheads were big, heavy, slow, loud, cumbersome, they didn’t turn or stop and they shed parts at random times. THAT’S the kinds of beasts I rode all over California all those years. Greasy, rattling, engineered by monkeys… That’s the Shovelhead.

But what does that goofy machine have to do with the concept of User Experience?

User.

Experience.

As simple as that. Really.

What defines the user experience for a motorcycle. Sure, it’s a basic form of transportation, but in its finest form, its entertainment. Its a total body video game that grips every sense and involves every ounce of your being.

It also takes you around and lets you cheat when it comes to parking.

But for me, those miserable bikes were a ticket to anywhere, any time. They were a drug, a therapy, a friend, a party waiting to happen.

Or in the immortal words of a tattoo forever blazed on a good friend… “I seek a great perhaps…”

So if we see a motorcycle in it’s highest form as all those things, the Shovelhead was a perfect User Experience.

You HAD to be fully entrenched in it’s eccentric ways to feel that way.

The rear exhaust pipe would rattle loose. You needed a long allen wrench to keep it attached. The brakes would fade, you need a can of brake fluid, a couple small wrenches and a piece of clear tubing to bleed them… The carb would get out of adjustment but if it was idling funny at a stoplight, or the insides of the pipes were too black, you could adjust the carb with your gloves on at a stoplight. Just reach down and turn the idle screw till it sounded better… if the tappets got loud, pop off the covers with a screwdriver and pull out an open ended 9/16th and 1/2 inch wrench and use the kickstarter to get the jug to its bottom position and get the pushrod to a firm turn…

Over the years I got developed a small leather toolbag that had everything I needed to keep it running. A dozen or so tools, wire, extra sparkplugs, some points and a handful of nuts and bolts. I could tear it down on the side of the road and put it back together, usually without many parts left over.

My User Experience was total and complete. I knew exactly what it would do all the time. I knew when it would break and how to fix it. I knew how fast I could take a turn. I knew when it’d lock up or stall or come up with some other diabolical excitement, and I knew how to solve the problem.

It was so easy to work on that I could get to problems easily. There were no covers or plastic goodies to get in my way. Everything was hanging out in the air and common backyard tools could pull anything off and put it back on.

So I was at home with the greasy beasts.

And every time I got out to start it, dump it into gear with a resounding chunk and roll back the throttle, I’d smile. The sound filled any space I was in and every pop of the V-Twin could be felt throughout my whole body. It owned every experience and allowed me along for the ride, but there was always a cost. It gave very few free rides. Something would need a little tweak, but once we both understood each other, we got along just fine.

200,000 miles of just fine.

Thats a million miles in Bike Years.

I finally realized my Bike Karma was way used up. Very few people can ride that far on machines that WANT to kill you and survive. I’m lucky or crazy or stupid or brilliant. You can decide which. I sold my last Harley and bought a BMW for a couple years, then bailed on two wheeled entertainment. Family. Business. Reasons to stay alive.

But about that User Experience thing.

Really good UX means full involvement that’s easy and engaging. My old Shovelheads that that in spades.

If we can build Web sites to be that engaging, we’ll be very successful.

I went Vegan for almost two years. No meat. No cheese. No nothing that was ever part of anything that walked, crawled, swam or waddled. I felt so proud. I felt so socially responsible. I fell asleep at odd hours.

Ya see, while it’s a grand gesture, it’s a serious pain in the ass.

For the past year, I’ve been traveling a LOT doing Dozen engagements all over the country. That means a day of travel, three days with clients and back on a plane. So that meant sometimes living on nuts and berries in airports. Picking meat out of dishes. Eating catered sandwiches that ended up being bread and lettuce.

It’s a serious pain in the ass.

But I pushed on. Made it almost two years and I finally caved. And the first thing I noticed is that I had a lot more stamina. I didn’t have to eat every couple hours. I felt stronger. I felt BETTER…

Go figure.

Not to say that it’s bad. I guess we all find out what works for ourselves. I guess I’m just a bit of a carnivore. Hell, I was in a restaurant and asked the waiter if he had a vegan menu and he looked funny at me and said “you don’t LOOK like a vegan.”

Maybe he was a lot smarter than he looked.

And so does the whole world. Look at Apple. They’ve done very well competing in a business where everyone thought the cheapest would win. But they approached the market with the idea of making truly beautifully designed products and do you ANYONE that doesnt own an Apple product?

I bet you know plenty of people who don’t own a Dell product. And the ones that do, probably brought a laptop home from work and WISH they had a Mac.

So good design works.

Well, recently I was on the hunt for a new coffeemaker. My last coffeemaker had lasted five years and was failing. Lots of bells and whistles that stopped ringing and whistling. So I decided to find out who made the best coffeemaker in the world and WHY it was better.

It was a short study.

Technivorm.

Terrible name. But maybe not if you’re Norwegian. Maybe it means “World’s Best Tasting Coffee…”

So here’s the secret. Coffee tastes best if it’s brewed right at boiling and brewed quickly. So most coffeemakers fail because they throw in a lot of silly gadgets but get cheap on the hearing element. The goofy, science experiment looking Technivorm has NO gadgets but a really big, overbuilt, copper heating element.

It heats up the water uber-fast and uber-hot. You brew a pot of 10 cups in 6 minutes.

And it tastes as good as a fresh cup at Starbucks. Really. Not kidding.
It’s fantastic and there is nothing to break or go haywire. Pour the water in, turn it on and you get a full stainless steel, insulated pot of fantastic coffee.

It’s not cheap. It’s $300 and looks pretty bizarre next to the techno models with all the grinders and timers and facial recognition scanning devices. But it should be making great coffee for many years to come.

Hurray for great design. It wins again.

Now maybe Technivorm should send me a box of coffee filters or maybe a trip to Norway in the summer.