Journey to the Past
Fifty-seven years ago today (September 13, 1965), The Beatles released “Yesterday.” Paul McCartney wrote it, and he says the song came to him in a dream. Here’s the story from McCartney’s biography Many Years from Now by Barry Miles: “I woke up with a lovely tune in my head. I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder…
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A sequel to the email I sent yesterday re: Dan Kennedy and direct response marketing (archived here in case you missed it). I worked in the newspaper industry for most of the 1990s. By 1996, I was working on the online side. Most newspaper display advertising was (and still is) paid brand awareness. No calls-to-action. No tracking. …
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Imagine pouring your first cup of coffee, grabbing the morning paper, and reading the news: There’s life on the moon. So it went on this day (August 25) in 1835 for readers of the New York Sun. In a series of six articles published over one week, the paper reported that English astronomer John Herschel built…
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We’ve all heard the expression, “The show must go on.” Here’s a “show must go on” story that blew me away. It was a Thursday afternoon last month in St. Louis, MO, USA. Three days earlier, record-breaking rainfall – 9+ inches in less than 10 hours – flooded the town (I told that story here). Another…
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On my 14th birthday, Mom and Dad gave me two 10-packs of Maxell XLII-S cassette tapes. Yes!!!!!!!!!! Greatest birthday gift ever. Back in the early 80s, before CDs or MP3s were a thing, cassettes were THE thing. Affordable. Portable. Swappable. Indispensable. High-fidelity cool I raided my friends’ record collections and taped my favorite albums. I…
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I witnessed a crime yesterday… …and I did nothing to stop it. Melissa, Maddie, and I were enjoying a quiet dinner on the patio at Saigon Cafe in St. Louis when we were interrupted by a high-pitched “Yip, yip, yip.” Startled, I dropped my chopsticks in my bowl of Bun Tom Heo Nuong Cha Gio, turned…
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My great-great grandfather Joseph Ruwitch was born in 1852 in a place known today as Ukraine. Back then it was part of Russia – an area called the Pale of Settlement. It was a massive place created by Tzar Catherine the Great. It was a place the government set aside for Jews… …a place to…
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Back in the early 1970s, I was still a wee lad playing kick ball on the blacktop at Conway School… …when I heard the rumor. Cathy Summers eats her own boogers. (GASP!) I don’t remember who started the rumor, and I have no idea if it was true. But I know the booger-rumor stuck. And…
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Every so often, my buddy Adam sends me a link with a challenge to “email this.” Sometimes it’s a link to a crazy discussion thread on Reddit. Often, it’s a random, funny news story. My favorite “email this” challenge was a news story about status-hungry Chinese big-shots and strippers (more on that in a moment). …
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When Dr. Ruth Allan asked me during a podcast interview to, “tell us about an embarrassing thing that happened to you,” I didn’t hesitate. I’ve deposited piles of embarrassments in my memory bank. But Ruth was interviewing me during the first week in May, so I had to trot out the story of… My humiliating Cinco…
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