InstaPunk Returns

  DISCLAIMER: If you’re anything like me (attentive to the things I’m attentive to), you’re behind the curve in this whole podcasting phenomenon. I’d seen short clips of podcasts at ‘X’-Twitter, heard about the land office business Tucker Carlson was doing right after he left Fox, and didn’t pay that much attention to people like Joe Rogan until Barron Trump suddenly got credit for stealing the media narrative from the alphabet media (ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, PBS, NYT, WAPO) during the election campaign. Honestly, I’d regarded solo “pundits” filming themselves being smarter than everyone else as an opportunity for satire rather than serious analysis. Why this disclaimer. I have put my own oar in the podcasting water. Several times. Trying to figure out how normal people could produce a regular series of programs on their own hook. So I took a crack at it on the down low. I wake up early, long before dawn, so I experimented with filming myself on the iPad. Without a printer I coul...

  If you’re the sort who likes to cut to the chase, you can skip “The Prelude” and scroll down to “The Point… Finally.” Obviously, I think the prelude part is an important part of the story, but I have no objections if you read in reverse order. Pretend you’ll come back read what you skipped, then don’t. I’m okay with that too. THE PRELUDE You have to understand that everything I do or create is done on the cheap. It’s not just my Scottish blood, it’s authentic penury. I pay for Word and two websites I can’t afford to let go. The rest of my software is free, or has been, for 20-some years now. I do my video work on a GIF app, a voice recorder, and a free movie app. I do my most of my graphic ‘artwork’ in Word, with enhancements from a phalanx of free image processing apps that are no longer updatable without running afoul of the dreaded ‘in app purchases’ warning at the Apple App downloading site. All my hardware is old or out of  commission (I haven’t had a working printer in...

The head shot is from after I quit the corporate world, a disheveled writer in sweats, and the suit  pic is the uniform I wore for years, charcoal suit, white shirt, and monochrome tie, usually silver. The very thought of writing this post makes me nervous. For it to be truthful, it will have to be full of the pronoun “I,” because my career in the business world has been a series of unique experiences in which my work made a difference far beyond my expectations. Five times I have worked out of headquarters offices, here and abroad, sometimes as an employee in a cubicle and others as a management consultant with one large principal client. My participation was always deep involvement in big things underway, but also always some distance apart from the office politics of the people I was working with. That represented a rare opportunity to observe and study how things work in such centrally controlled environments. Why I believe I have some insights about the difficulties of effecti...

  Click on the pic. It leads to a post describing a Tom Hanks skit on SNL.  That’s  what this post is about. More precisely, it’s about who this very  fortunate man really is under the greasepaint. He’s not James Stewart. Have you clicked and read the story about Hanks pissing off half a country that’s always wanted to love him? The caption might be a little overstated, true as it is, but it’s only one of three things this post is about. Tom Hanks, sure. But also the fact that I’m thanking him at the moment for making me do some long overdue reclamation work on a piece that has been effectively lost for a couple years now. I’ll get to the third thing later. The stupid Hanks performance reminded me that I had written a satirical piece about him that got effectively lost when one of my biggest blogs suddenly lost all its formatting in some administrative change by its provider, who were still billing me but could not be reached for troubleshooting services. They’d been...