All others may be excused.

This excusal is something like my Catholic obstetrician of long ago who said the Catholic students learning to be doctors were excused from the contraceptive lecture.

Seth Godin says that everybody ought to blog. He’s not far off considering the number of bloggers out there. Godin blogs EVERY DAY. That’s hard to imagine producing at that level, but then he doesn’t follow the adage that a blog ought to be some 3,000 words long. Good for Godin. Sometimes his blog is only a few lines, sometimes 4 or 5 paragraphs. That’s my kind of blog, Say it, get to the point, and get off.

Someone caught me online the other day with a free Health book. Husband dear was listening to the audio for a while then abandoned me and it. I wanted to find out the catch. Thirty minutes later after (the doctor) told me, then retold me, then told me what he told me, I realized that his free book was signing up for a newsletter subscription. Of course, it was with auto-renew. Got ya!

Must we be tricked into buying something?

Offer me the book. I might buy it. But then an ongoing subscription would add up to a whole lot more money than a single purchase of a book, and people are reluctant to spend 20 bucks for a book. They will, however, spend $49.99 for a subscription that will go on and on. You figure.

This morning I learned via Godin that Amazon sells junk. Rats. Good old Amazon. They sell good stuff too, but it is more like buyer beware. The reason Amazon can sell junk is that they have no shelf space needed to advertise their wares. In a store, one must prove that their product is viable to gain a place on their shelf. After that it must sell, or it’s gone.

When I saw a Shark Tank where one of the sharks INVESTED in a pimple popper simulator, I was bowled over. The pimple popper site got something like a million clicks. Try to compete with that.

If I don’t sell 200 copies of my book, The Frog’s Song—coming out May 17, 2019, the publisher will drop me. Think I can do it?

Do you ever wonder what message you have to give? I remember and have quoted Richard Bach many times: “Here is a test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.”

Today is Martin Luther King Jr’s 90^th birthday. It looks as though it will be celebrated on the 21^st, the third Monday of the month—when my first born child was in school, somehow the celebration of it used to fall on her birthday which was the 14th.

Shortly before King died, he talked about living until the age of 90. “You may be 38 years old, as I happen to be,” he said, “and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause. You refuse to do it because you are afraid…well, you may go on to live until you are 90, but you are just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90.”

Here is an incredibly beautiful video and song, “Starry Starry Night.” Lyrics over Van Gogh paintings. A blog reader sent it in response to my last blog and comment about Vincent Van Gogh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxHnRfhDmrk

How about a little tee-hee, let’s not get too serious.