Isn’t that how the rhyme goes? “Thirty days hath February…”
Month: February 2023
Attention newly-arrived Floridians! The weather may be sunny and pleasant right now (today it’s a mix of sun and clouds, with temperatures going up to 30°C / 86°F), but this will come in handy in a few months when hurricane season returns.
Also: I feel a Taco Warning coming on.
I have just one question: He brought the inflatable mattress and fluffy slippers — why no blanket? That’s very clearly the Orlando airport, which is overly air conditioned.
Also: Kudos to the Orlando airport’s social media team for this response:
John Stuart Mill was right: “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are Conservatives.”
I volunteered to help out at Masterminds Tampa Bay’s booth at the Synapse Summit 2023 conference yesterday, where Masterminds team moderator Vadim Davydov worked his photographic magic creating professional headshots for a long line of VIPs. It was my job to help get them registered and lined up for their sessions.
Masterminds Tampa Bay is “The Other Bay Area’s” Mastermind group, a peer mentoring group aimed at entrepreneurs and techies looking for connections, support, advice, assistance, resources, and so on. Many metro areas have Mastermind groups, whose name comes from The Law of Success by Napoleon Hill, a book that’s nearly 100 years old, where he defined the Mastermind Principle as:
“The coordination of knowledge and effort between two or more people who work towards a definite purpose in a spirit of harmony…
No two minds ever come together without thereby creating a third, invisible intangible force, which may be likened to a third mind.”
If you’re interested in the rest of Napoleon Hill’s definition of the Mastermind Principle, it’s summarized pretty well in this article. If you want to hear it in Hill’s own voice, watch this video:
Vadim’s lighting setup is a key part of why his headshots look so good…
…but more important are the instructions he gives you as you pose:
- “Follow my finger!”
- “Close your mouth!”
- “More sexy! Okay, too much sexy! Less sexy!”
- “Stretch your neck! Think turtle! Turtle, turtle, turtle, turtle!”
- “Squeeze your butt cheeks! Shake your booty!”
The instructions may sound nonsensical and hilarious, and he gets you into poses that you’d never do naturally, but they work. I kept telling people to just do what he says and to trust the process. And he kept cranking out gorgeous result after gorgeous result.
At 4:27 p.m. after nearly 8 hours of shooting, the last person in line had come and gone. That’s when I asked Vadim “Can you do one more — namely, me?”
He smiled and obliged. The official photo isn’t done yet, but every photo he took was displayed on a couple of screens in the booth. I took a couple of shots of these screens, and even these previews are great:
I can’t wait for the official shot! In the meantime, these are my new profile pics.
Thanks, Vadim, and thanks, Tampa Bay Masterminds for taking me on as a booth volunteer!
And once again: if you need to look great in a headshot, you want Vadim Davydov!
“Fuck around and find out,” the expression goes, and with the recent derailment and explosion of a train with tanker cars full of vinyl chloride near East Palestine, Ohio, we’re definitely in the “find out” phase.
(In case you were wondering, most of the vinyl chloride made is used to produce its cousin, polyvinyl chloride, a.k.a. PVC, which is used to make lots of things.)
The “fuck around” part is from a few years back, in the United States conducted an experiment in democracy by putting a trollish narcissistic con man at the head of the Executive Branch. It appears to have been one of many measures meant to undo legislation and other changes from the administration of Barack Obama, for whom Trump held great contempt (and made no secret of it). You can find out more in these articles:
- Fortune, September 24, 2018: Trump Rolls Back Train-Braking Rule Meant to Keep Oil Tankers from Exploding Near Communities
- Oregon Public Braodcasting, December 6, 2017: Oil Train Safety Rules Getting Rolled Back By Trump Administration
- Gizmodo, September 25, 2018: The Trump Administration Is Rolling Back Safety Regulations for Explosive Oil Trains
- DeSmog, December 10, 2017: The Trump Admin’s Misleading Justifications for Repealing This Oil Train Safety Rule
- WNYC, February 26, 2018: Trump Rolls Back Numerous Transportation Safety Regulations
