All I really wanted to do was start a writing habit to see if I could improve, but without fail, my brain got in the way. What would I write about? Where would I write? How could I possibly do something every day?
Then it hit me. I already have a daily Wordle habit. And using the power of habit stacking (thank you James Clear), I thought that I could tie a new writing habit to my daily dose of the word game. And Jourdle was born.
I know the Wordle fad will eventually die, but hopefully this will all last long enough for me to have a habit in place.
For some reason, today’s word made me think of the theme song from the Dukes of Hazzard, which I watched religiously as a kid.
Makin’ their way
The only way they know how
That’s just a little bit more than the law will allow
Through my child eyes, that show made complete sense. Good vs. evil every week and good always prevailed. But looking at it through a more current-day lens, I can’t believe that show was ever on air.
The Duke boys were on probation for running moonshine and they drove around the county in a Dodge Charger with a Confederate flag on the top. And they were the good guys.
They were always tangling with local law enforcement and these disagreements would usually end with a car chase. Meanwhile, law enforcement knew where the Duke family lived, but would never just, you know, wait at their farm for them to come home.
The only female regular on the show seemed to only be around so that she could wear extremely short denim shorts. She was their cousin.
There is a zero percent chance that show gets green lit at any time this century.
The internet is awash in recipe web sites and they all have one characteristic in common that inevitably annoys readers – they all have a long, drawn out commentary or story that accompanies the actual recipe. I’ve never really been bothered by this but one look at Twitter tells me that I’m apparently alone on that island.
Online recipes: If you want my baked tofu recipe for free, first you’re going to read my college essay that opens with “When I was a child I could fly.”
Shout out to the #recipe websites that have "jump to recipe buttons." I don't need to know the life story of the recipe I'm trying to cook. K. pic.twitter.com/iQuSjQDBHX
I’ve had an idea in my head for a while that would turn this model on its head. Hear me out…
Traditional blog with recipes, but instead of the boring stories being skipped so the reader can get to the recipes, I would write completely jaw-dropping stories about a fictional family I’ve made up that people would want to read and share. And at the end – here’s how to make a terrible grilled cheese.
Shawshank is one of my favorites. I’m not unique in that case. It’s a perfect movie that is remote-drop rewatchable and is #1 on IMDB’s top 250 movies list. By all measurements, it’s a great film.
What makes me slightly odd is that my personal #1 is a Tom Hanks comedy from the 1980s. No, it’s not Big, The Money Pit or Turner & Hooch. My favorite film of all time is a dark comedy about a neighborhood on edge with their new neighbors that are clearly murderers – The ‘Burbs.
In college, my roommate and I used to fall asleep to The Burbs every night. I built the first fan web site for the movie way back in 1997. I’ve watched it at least 500 times. To me – it’s perfect.
“Ray, there’s no doubt anymore. This is real. Your neighbors are murdering people. They’re chopping them up. They’re burying them in their backyard.”
For the past handful of years, I’ve evolved into an entrepreneur wannabe. I regularly have ideas for things I’m going to start and web sites I’m going to create, but rarely do I pull the trigger on anything. This doesn’t stop me from regularly scanning the “side hustle” landscape just to see what other people are trying and succeeding at. I have to admit that I’ve never seen “start a catering business out of your home” as a viable side hustle. Probably because I don’t think that it is.
Sure, this nice lady makes it sound really easy, but I have a feeling that the local health department is going to be knocking unless you happen to have a commercial kitchen attached to your house.
You can interpret this how you want, but I think it’s funny that the usage of the word “tease” in books hockey-stick’d starting in the 1980s. I expect that Aqua Net and Mötley Crüe are partially to blame.
The old adage is “He who smelt it, dealt it.” There are other ways to say the exact same thing, but we all know what it means. But is it true? We’ve accepted this statement as fact – a bomb from which there is no recovery. It’s the end of the discussion. But what if it’s just not true? Science is here to help.
Firstly, odor concentrations decrease rapidly with distance from the source, so the person who smells it first is indeed likely to be the offender. Secondly, the expelled air is not only smelly, it is also hot, which causes it and the associated odors to rise after expulsion. So a likely trajectory is towards the nose of the guilty party.”
John Crimaldi, a University of Colorado engineering professor
For those of you with iPhones, Apple recently released an update to iOS that extends the old “Sleep” function to other times of day. Called “Focus,” this new functionality allows you to set different notifications settings based on specific criteria. I recently set up “Work” focus and found that it definitely helps keep focus off of my phone and on my work during the day. I’ve set mine up to turn off all notifications except for texts and calls from my family and also remove all of the red notification indicators on all of my apps. It’s not surprising how less distracting a phone can be without all of the notifications nagging you to pick it up.
There’s a creator on Tik Tok that finds professional sports clips in old TV shows and tries to figure out which game the footage is from. For some reason, my brain finds this interesting because it adds an element of problem solving and research to the intersection of TV and sports. It’s perfect.
This always reminds me a similar project from a full decade ago. A guy named Donovan Strain posted his research on Tumblr in which he determined what day was depicted in Ice Cube’s Today Was a Good Day. Using the handful of specific clues in the song, he narrowed the possible span to 5 years, then 12 days (days the Lakers beat the Supersonics), then 4 days (LA has clear weather with no smog), then 2 days (when beepers were available) and then finally down to 1. The day is apparently completely fictional, but after researching, there is only one day that actually could work to fit the lyrics — January 20, 1992.
Here’s his full research in all its glory and an amazing follow up story that involved Goodyear’s PR firm and Ice Cube himself. And just because I love it, here’s the video so you can have the song trapped in your head all day.
I remember getting up on Saturday mornings as a kid to lay on the couch with my pillow and a blanket and just binge cartoons. It was like an all-you-can-eat buffet. Every channel – all 4 of them – ran cartoons of some kind from 6am until noon. It was a child’s paradise. Sunday was the same routine, but I could sleep in because wrestling wasn’t on until 10. If I woke up too early, I had to watch Tarzan on Channel 11. I didn’t like Tarzan.
My kids have watched cartoons growing up, but not like this. Not like my Saturday morning ritual that I shared will millions of other kids around the country. It was appointment TV before that was a thing.
We cut the cable cord a few years ago and the elimination of all of the cable boxes with the abysmal DVRs inside made it all worth it. I never really looked at it like a cost saving measure but now that stream creep has grown my streaming services to more than I had ever planned for, I’m wondering if there are some ways to save a few bucks.
Knowing that streaming services charge by the month and don’t generally pro-rate a cancellation, I have a plan that I’ll likely never implement because there are too many people in my house that will complain. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t do it…
Go cancel every streaming service you have. Seriously. All of them.
Additionally, whenever you sign up for a new service, immediately cancel it.
You’ll get billed for the current month and your subscription will continue to until expiration and you won’t be billed again.
After that, your subscription will lapse and you won’t be able to watch anymore.
Whenever you want to watch something on that streaming service again, just re-sign up and then immediately cancel.
So if there are services that you don’t watch often, you’ll save the cash for the time that you aren’t using it instead of a large media conglomerate using you as an ATM machine.
