Jack Crack

Broadcaster Jack Brickhouse once said of the Cubs, "Anybody can have a bad century."

The man had foresight. Keep in mind that he said this only 75 years after the Cubs' last championship!

Who Says Kids Can't Multi-Task?

"As you would expect, the kids in the room without the toys watched the show playing on the T.V. about 87 percent of the time, while the kids with the toys watched only about 47 percent of the show. Kids are distracted by toys. But when they tested the two groups to see how much of the show the children remembered and understood, the scores were exactly the same. This result stunned the researchers. Kids, they realized, were a great deal more sophisticated in the way they watched than had been imagined. 'We were led to the conclusion,' they wrote, 'that five-year-olds in the toys group were attending quite strategically, distributing their attention between toy play and viewing so that they looked at what for them were the most informative parts of the program. This strategy was so effective that the children could gain no more from increased attention.'" -- Malcolm Gladwell

I've got a staff meeting on Monday morning. I'm bringing my toys!

Laws of Learning

"I'm a believer of the laws of learning: explanation, demonstration, imitation, correction, and repetition." -- John Wooden

Put another way: Tell me, show me, then let me try. Oh, and point out when I screw up.

Directions For Success: See, Believe, Repeat

"I would sit quietly for 15 or 20 minutes before the game in a secluded part of the stadium and create a moving picture in my mind of what was about to happen. I'd call up images of the man I was going to cover and visualized myself stopping his moves. That was the first part. The next step, which was much harder, was to lay back and not try to force the action once the game stated, but to allow it to unfold naturally. Playing basketball isn't a linear thought process: 'Okay, when Joe Blow takes that funny drop step over there I'm going to jump in and do my Bill Russell imitation.' The idea was to code the image of a successful move into my visual memory so that when a similar situation emerged in a game it would seem, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, like deja vu all over again." -- Phil Jackson

Non-Terrorist Nearly Kills Movie Outing

A maintenance man mistaken by an observer for a terrorist caused a wave of panic in the McDonald family as a crucial movie outing was tragically delayed.

At 4:30, State Farm loudspeakers announced that weather conditions required emergency evacuation procedures to be followed. Noting puzzlingly clear skies above, Joe headed through the Corporate atrium in anticipation of a 6:00 dinner & movie date with Dena, Troy, Dona, Kelsey and Lane. The scene his eyes found was unlike any he'd ever seen.

Instead of employees drifting out the door to kick off the holiday weekend, there was a crowd near the doors being directed for calm by an official-looking man. When Joe saw two officers with guns at the ready, instinct kicked in.

"I might be late for dinner," he thought gravely.

Some 2,000 employees were herded hastily into the basement, as the rumor mill churned out a report that a camoflauged man with an assault rifle had been spotted in the executive tower. Minions and executives alike huddled in the underground tunnels, gripped by the thought that it was all a mistake.

Resourcefully, Joe got word that a nearby office had a land line, and phoned Dena's voice mail urgently. His voice held the tone of a man who might be speaking to his wife for the last time this hour.

"If I'm not there," he said, "go on to dinner without me, and I'll meet up with you there."

As the minutes stretched into an hour, emotions intensified. Infested with sugar fueled by a complimentary pop cart, cries of laughter and banter about weekend plans reached fever pitch.

Then, in a flash, it was over. The public address system blared that video surveillance had revealed a maintenance man carrying a length of pipe. Convinced that this was less than a red level threat, all were dismissed.

Here's The Hang-Up

"I love my phone machine. I wish I was a phone machine. I wish if I saw somebody on the street I didn't want to talk to I could just go, 'Excuse me, I'm not here right now. If you could just leave a message, I could walk away.' I also have a cordless phone. You get mad at somebody on a real phone, 'You can't talk to me like that!' BANG, it's over. But a cordless phone - 'You can't talk to me like that! All right now, let me just find that little thing to turn this off... Just hang on, I'm hanging up on you.'" -- Seinfeld

Gold Box

Columbia Records advertising had been an abject failure. Then in 1977 they launched what they called the "gold box" campaign. A series of T.V. commercials told the "secret of the Gold Box." Viewers were told that if they could find the gold box in their issues of Parade and TV Guide magazines, they could write in the name of any record on the Columbia list and get that record free.

The ploy was wildly successful! It drew viewers into the game. People love to play. Give them an excuse to, and find success.