Recently, my daughter Rachel and I took a vacation to visit friends and family in the Eastern USA. As part of our holiday adventure, we spent a night in world-famous Niagara Falls, NY. This short visit was a high point of our vacation – except for one small disappointment – our accommodations at the Quality Hotel and Suites, Niagara Falls, NY. (Yes, it’s a real hotel.) If you would like a relaxing, restful, clean hotel room for an evening, might I propose an alternate place of lodging? But if unexpected surprises are what you look for in your vacation destination, then the Quality Hotel and Suites, Niagara Falls, NY may be just the thrill ride for you.

Below is a copy of my actual thank-you letter to the hotel after our recent stay. (Disclaimer: the photos below are not actual photos from the Quality Hotel and Suites, Niagara Falls, NY and were not included in the letter I sent. I include them here to give you a sense of the adventure we experienced. – tj) Read More…

Finally a youth sports league has realized that when it comes to our kids, winning isn’t everything. (More on that below.) For too long, we parents have been pushing our kids way too hard, telling them they need to get passing grades in school if they want to get into a top flight college, or nagging them to do their chores now rather than waiting till, say, never, or harping on them relentlessly to practice their piano longer than fourteen minutes a week if they want to do well in their recital next week.

We are constantly pushing our kids way too hard to achieve, try harder, and be nicer to their younger sister, to the point that we are forgetting one fundamental point – that no matter how much of a snot-nosed brat they are when we ask them to help put away the dishes for the third time, no matter how much they whine that “Angela’s parents let her have Internet on her cell phone – why can’t I?”, our kids are all winners in this game called life.

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Life is pretty stressful at times. When I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, I like to find a comfortable couch, close my eyes and listen to a relaxing sound. And no sounds are more soothing to me than the rhythmic sound of ocean waves crashing into the shore or the gentle gurgling of a babbling brook or the soothing hum of 35,000 rabid South African soccer fanatics at the FIFA World Cup, blowing their lungs out with their plastic 4 dollar and 95 cent vuvuzelas. If you still haven’t heard of a vuvuzela (pronounced “Voo-Voo-ZAY-Lah), it can mean only one thing: You’re an American.

Surely by now you must have seen and heard a vuvuzela. Click here to listen to its soothing sound. Now, wasn’t that relaxing? Now just imagine that soothing humming sound TIMES 35 THOUSAND …. for an hour and a half….. non-stop…. without commercial interruption. Originally used to summon distant African tribal villagers to attend community gatherings, the vuvuzela has become synonymous with the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, with its distinctive nonstop, deafening, monotone buzzing sound. The vuvuzela may come in 275 different colors, but they all come in just one note: B flat.

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Welcome back to the thrilling conclusion of my true, unedited story about my fleeting friendship with an Internet Scammer named Mr. Chris. If you missed the last week’s Part I, you can get caught up here.   If you were with us last week, you know that it all started when I received the following unusual email in my SPAM mail folder.

From: kelvin chris

To: (this field was left blank)
Subject: Order Urgent

Hello.  Am Mr. Kelvin Chris and will like to place an order regarding some bleachers from your company to Latvia. What is their price ranges, also your terms of payment as well. hope you answer to my request ASAP. Thank you very much and waiting for your prompt responds. God Bless You.

Best Regards
Mr. Chris

______________________________

I would now like to let you in on a little secret – come in close…. closer… Psst: I don’t actually sell bleachers. It’s a humor blog. View from the Bleachers is a metaphor.

But Mr. Chris wanted to engage me in a bit of Internet commerce with terms most favorable to him. So I could not help but have a little fun by playing along. I never thought he would actually respond back to me after my ridiculously satirical reply. But he did. Oh yes.

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Recently, I made a new friend across Cyberspace: a very nice man named Mr. Chris. Well, at least I thought he was a friend. For a week, it looked like we were going to become best buddies. But sadly this story of fleeting friendship has a heart-breaking ending.

You see, Mr. Chris is a documented Internet Scammer – listed on web sites for trying to con people out of their money by offering to overpay with a bad check or stolen credit card, and asking the victim to send back a check in return for the overpayment. Your classic Internet scam.

What made me suspicious, you might ask? Well, I think it was his first email which I stumbled onto in my SPAM mail folder which lacked any name in the “to” field. His email asked about pricing for BLEACHERS.

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April 22, 2010 was Earth Day. But it was not a very good day for the earth – or for that matter, for BP. That’s the day the an explosion toppled over BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and the blowout preventer failed, causing the earth to begin leaking thousands of gallons of oil from 5000 feet below the surface of the Gulf. In a bit of irony, the original Earth Day was April 22, 1970, thirty years ago to the day of this year’s spill, begun in large measure in response to another oil spill caused from a blowout of a deep sea drill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California.

Last week, the Gulf oil spill disaster surpassed the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill as the worst environmental disaster in American history. BP (the initials, which formerly stood for British Petroleum, have been changed to stand for “Best Polluter”) has taken full and complete responsibility for the oil spill. And by “full and complete responsibility”, BP CEO Tony Hayward went on to clarify that the Deepwater oil rig was owned and operated by Transocean, which, he went on to say was responsible for the safety on the oil rig. According to The London Telegraph, Hayward further clarified BP’s full and complete responsibility by saying, “This was not our accident. This was not our drilling rig. This was not our equipment. It was not our people, our systems or our processes. This was Transocean’s rig. Their systems. Their people. Their equipment.”

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Welcome to installment #61 in my periodic series of business lessons on how you can take your business to never-before-imagined levels of success. In this challenging economy, companies are forced to do more with less and continue to look for ways to squeeze efficiencies, often by means of painful layoffs and other draconian cost controls. I have a better idea: Hug your company’s way to success.

Recently the New York Times reported fascinating findings from a soon-to-be-published research study by scientists at University of California at Berkeley. They measured the level of physical contact between teammates in the National Basketball Association over an entire season. Their conclusion: Teams and individuals that hugged, high-fived and chest bumped their teammates more tended to outperform those that engaged in less frequent affectionate physical contact.

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… is something I know nothing about. Nevertheless, I can’t count the number of times each week people come up to me on the street, at the unemployment office or in the women’s locker room at my gym, and ask me about my blog. Why just last week, there must have been almost two people who approached me. Now that I think about it, he was holding a cardboard sign and seemed more interested in a cash donation to some cause. Read More…

Greetings, Class of 2010. My, don’t you all look so grown up in your elegant caps and gowns and iPods blasting out The Killers at full volume. It seems only yesterday that you were stumbling around in Huggies and toddler booties and iPods blasting out Raffi at full volume. Graduation Day is upon us for millions of American college seniors like you. As has been my tradition for the past 17 years about this time, this week’s post is my annual Advice to you, the College Graduating Class of 2010.

My advice to you? Don’t pay attention to anyone who tries to give you advice…. except for the advice I am about to share, of course. It’s important that you make your own choices in life. So make good ones. In looking back on the choices I made in my youth, I realize I made some poor ones now and then. If I had it to do over again, I would never have taken Latin 3 in high school. My buddy Steve goaded me into it in front of the teacher so I wimped out and told the teacher “okay” (true). Three years of Latin is far more than anyone should ever need unless they’re running for Pope or Supreme Court Justice. In college, I should never have taken Medieval Latvian Studies. That [#bleep#]-ing bastard Professor Yuri Švābe was a cruel old son of a bitch and I wish he would die a painful, wrenching death for totally messing up my GPA… I mean, er, um, I found him to be rather draconian in his grading methodology. Perhaps most of all, I deeply regret rooming with Tony Markowitz of Monmouth, New Jersey for two years in college. Not only was he a complete slob and never did the dishes, but he always smelled odd and routinely ate my Lucky Charms cereal without asking. I urge you to learn from my youthful mistakes.

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Arizona Governor Jan Brewer recently signed into law a controversial immigration reform bill that has stirred up strong emotions from Republicans and Democrats alike. Underpinning much of the debate is the concern by many that this new law will unleash a tidal wave of abuse as racist rogue cops and INS agents target Hispanics – reminiscent of the roundup of Jews in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. There are protests from some unusual corners: Several prominent Hispanic Major League baseball players are asking other players to boycott next summer’s All Star Game (slated to be played in Phoenix) or at least pledge not swing at anything outside of the strike zone.

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