Category: Stories

Biggest Rattlesnake Ever

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Whoa, i just got sent this.  Apparently in south Jacksonville, near the St. Augustine outlet in the new KB Homes subdivsion they found a 15 foot Diamondback rattlesnake.  That’s right, 15 foot!  Apparently it’s the biggest every caught on record.

Some facts about this snake:

  • One bite from a snake this large contains enough venom to kill over 40 full grown men
  • The head alone is larger than the hand of a normal sized man.
  • A bite from those fangs would equal being penetrated by two  1/4 inch screwdrivers.
  • A snake this size could easily swallow a 2 year-old child.
  • A snake this size has an approximately 5 and 1/2 foot accurate striking distance. (The distance for an average size Rattlesnake is about 2 feet)
  • Judging by the size of the snake, it is estimated to weigh over 170 pounds. How much do you weigh?

What People Will Do for Laker Tickets

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I have a friend, let’s call him “HotRod” who had tickets for this Thursday’s Laker game. Unfortunately, he couldn’t go. So, he put the tickets up on Craigslist. He was expecting some nice cash offers as it’s game 5 of a big series. Here was his favorite response:

Whoa. You can guess what his response was. Of course we want to see pictures. Hotrod replied,

These are the 205 tickets. Hmmm…I’d need to see pics before deciding. I usually take cash.

to which the guy replied

i understand they’re good tix, but like i said, we’re HUGE fans

And then sent these photos

It is AMAZING what people will do for tickets these days

Into the Fire: Startup Life

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There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Everyday he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still he could not achieve the beauty he desired and imagined was possible in a glaze. Finally, having tried everything he decided his meaningful life was over and walked into the molten heat of the fully fired kiln. When his assistants opened up the kiln and took out the vases, they found the glaze on the vases the most exquisite they had ever encountered. The master himself had disappeared into his creations.

Working within a company so long, it’s easy to see how your blood and bone can become part of the product and ultimately make something truly unique.  Giving a company your all, walking into the fire is both painful and pretty romantic.   The poet, David Whyte talks about this proverb, saying:

Work is the very fire where we are baked to perfection, and like the master of the fire itself, we add the essential ingredient and fulfillment when we walk into the flames ourselves and fuel the transformation of ordinary, everyday forms into the exquisite and the rare.

It’s an interesting analogy because in you can see that the potter, in disappearing into the kiln, he created something he loved and something truly special, but he also dies.  In doing his work he ceases to be a person that the rest of the world can interact with and relate to.

Such is the life of working on a startup

(thanks to Jerry Colonna for writing about this first)

25 Random Things About Me

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I got tagged in Facebook to do one of these lists.  I really enjoyed reading some of my colleagues and some of my old friends from high school so i thought i’d put one together.

The rules are that once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged or however many you want. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

Here are my items:

1. I don’t like fruit (with the exception of apples) and i’m happy that my sister’s the same way. It makes me feel less strange.

2. I tend to get around. I’ve been to 49 states and hope to get to the final one, Mississippi, sometime soon.  Since college, I’ve lived in Virginia, New York, Washington DC, Boston (sort of), and now Los Angeles.

3. I have no toenails on my 2 little toes.

4. I was born in NY, then moved to CA, then moved to Texas before i finished my youth in Minnesota.

5. I grew up in Minnesota.  When i moved east in 1996, i felt like a Midwesterner.  I then lived on the east coast for 11 years.  When i moved to California last year, i felt like an Easterner.  After a few years here, who knows who i’ll be.

6. i’ve never broken a bone. I attribute this to my love of milk.

7. I love the extended Lewis Family clan and feel so fortunate that i have such great cousins, aunts and uncles.

8. When i was younger I used to dress up like a ninja and wonder around in the woods with my brother.

Continue reading “25 Random Things About Me” →

Hollywood story

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I’m reposting this from Marc Andressen’s blog. It is a story from Paul Zollo’s book Hollywood Remembered, an oral history of the movie industry. A great story about drive and commitment.

A 2001 interview with A. C. Lyles, a producer at Paramount who was born in 1918 in Jacksonville, Florida and worked at Paramount for over 60 years.

When I was 10 [in 1928] I wanted to make movies…

I had seen a picture called Wings — the first and only silent picture to win the Academy Award — with Clara Bow… and a new fella named Gary Cooper [who subsequently became a huge star]. I went and just fell in love with that picture. It was a Paramount picture playing at the Paramount Theater [at the time, the studios owned the theaters] in Jacksonville. I had seen that it said Adolph Zukor Presents, so I was in awe of Adolph Zukor [the founder and CEO of Paramount]. I spoke to the manager of the theater that day [to see] if he would give me a job. And he gave me a job handing out leaflets…

After four years in the job [he was then 14] I eventually met Adolph Zukor… when he came to Jacksonville. I asked him to let me come to Hollywood to work for him. He said, “Well, you’re just a kid, but you’ve been working for Paramount now for four years at the theater. So you finish high school, keep in touch, and I’ll hire you when you get out of high school.”

Now that was extremely kind of him… when he said to keep in touch and finish high school, my main objective then was to finish high school. But the most important thing was writing him a letter every Sunday. He didn’t tell me to write him every Sunday, he just told me to keep in touch. So I wrote him every Sunday for four years.

He didn’t write back — I didn’t hear from him but it didn’t matter. I never lost confidence or lost courage. I just knew he was looking forward to my letter each week as much as I was looking forward to writing him.

One day Gary Cooper came to my hometown. I was writing movie news for the hometown paper. I saw Mr. Cooper and I told him I would be out here in Hollywood to work at Paramount as soon as I got out of high school. And there again, for some reason, he took a quick liking to me. I told him about my letters to Zukor every Sunday and he asked me what I would be writing about this week, and I said, “Oh, about meeting you, Mr. Cooper.”

So he said, “Give me a piece of paper.” So he… wrote a note to Adolph Zukor saying, “I’m looking forward to seeing this kid on the lot.” So I wrote to Mr. Zukor telling him I had met Gary Cooper and enclosed the note to him.

Then I heard from Mr. Zukor indirectly. A woman named Sidney Brecker, who was his secretary, wrote to me and said, “Mr. Zukor has been receiving your letters. But he feels that you don’t have to write every week. If you wrote once every three or four or five months, that would be enough.”

Well, that didn’t discourage me at all. I continued to write to Mr. Zukor every Sunday. But I also had a new pigeon, Sidney Brecker, his secretary. So I wrote her every Sunday too. My whole main objective all week was what I was going to write to Mr. Zukor. Then I had to write another original letter to Sidney Brecker…

I wrote [Zukor] a letter every Sunday for four years, keeping in touch. The day I got out of high school [in 1936, in the heart of the Great Depression], I was in a day coach headed for Hollywood, where you sit up — probably four days and four nights. I had $48 in cash that I had saved up, and two loaves of bread, and two jars of peanut butter and a sack of apples, and I headed for Hollywood. Got off the train downtown, took the streetcar straight to Paramount, and told them at the gate to tell Mr. Zukor I was here.

And I’ve been here ever since.

Bear jumps over bridge and lives

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This bridge is on the Old Donner Pass Highway . It has spectacular Sierra views and views of Donner Lake and Donner Pass on Route 80.  A bear was walking across Rainbow Bridge (Old Hwy 40 at Donner Summit, Truckee) on Saturday when two cars also crossing the bridge scared the bear into jumping over the edge of the bridge. Somehow the bear caught the ledge and was able to pull itself to safety.Authorities decided that nothing could be done to help Saturday night so they returned Sunday morning to find the bear sound asleep on the ledge.  After securing a net under the bridge the bear was tranquilized, fell into the net, lowered, then woke up and walked out of the net.  It’s pretty amazing.

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Hippo craziness

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This is a bizarre story of a family that keeps a pet hippo. Not only is it a pet, but they feed it in the kitchen, give it a massage at night and have it sleep under blankets.

“i can’t tell if she sees me as a hippo or she sees herself as a human”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3NueKXS6dk]

Bo Jackson is Legendary

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When i was a kid, i loved Bo Jackson. He was the first dual-sport athlete and not only did he play 2 sports, he dominated them. In one season he was voted MVP of both the MLB all-star game and the NFL all-star game. Imagine being that good at both sports. He was also the first sport celebrity. The “Bo Knows” campaign preceded all Jordan’s Nike coverage and set the standard for all the mass-marketing we see today. The room i grew up in with had over 30 posters and after Michael Jordan (5 posters) Bo had the most coverage (3).

Bo Knows

Given all that, you can imagine my delight when I saw this great article (click here) in the Kansas City Star about Bo. It brought back all the memories. The article filled with great anecdotes. Some of my favorites:

Bo said he was just another guy. He wasn’t some sort of folk hero, like John Henry or Pecos Bill. No, he hurt like other players. He made mistakes like other players. He struck out a lot. He wasn’t forged out of steel, and he couldn’t outrun locomotives, and he couldn’t turn back time by flying around the world and reversing the rotation of the earth.

“I’m just another player, you know?” he said.

Then the game began, Royals vs. Yankees at Yankee Stadium.

First time up, Bo hit a 412-foot homer to center field.

Second time up, Bo smashed a 464-foot opposite-field home run. Longtime Yankees fans said that ball landed in a far-off place where only home runs by Ruth, Gehrig and Mantle from the left side ever reached.

“Colossal,” teammate George Brett would say. “I had to stop and watch.”

Third time up, Yankees manager Stump Merrill walked out to the mound to ask pitcher Andy Hawkins how he intended to get Bo out this time.

“I’ll pitch it outside,” Hawkins said.   “It better be way outside,” Merrill replied.

Hawkins threw it way outside. Jackson poked the ball over the right-field fence for his third homer. The New York crowd went bananas.

Some other good little notes in the article are below. Seriously if you knew Bo or you didn’t,  you should read this article, he was a total freak

  • Bo Jackson’s first major-league home run flew 475 feet.
  • July 29, 1988: Bo Jackson was facing Baltimore’s Jeff Ballard. He called timeout and stepped out of the box. He adjusted his batting glove when he realized that the umpire did not actually grant his timeout, and Ballard was throwing the ball. Jackson jumped back into the box, swung that bat and … yeah. He hit a home run.
  • July 11, 1989: All-Star Game in Anaheim. Bo Jackson led off with a monstrous 448-foot home run to straightaway center field — it cleared two fences out there. “Unbelievable,” Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn would say. “I got a piece of it,” Bo would say.  The next inning, he beat out a double-play grounder by running to first in 3.81 seconds — one of the fastest times ever clocked for a right-handed hitter. He stole second base (becoming only the second player to hit a homer and steal a base in an All-Star Game, with Willie Mays). He scored the game-winning run. He was selected MVP.

The Biggest and Baddest Pig Ever

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I just read this story where  an 11-year-old boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet 4, from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.  He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

The story i wrote about the Biggest and Baddest Bear has gotten a tremendous amount of attention. I’m curious what those readers would think of this.