Marc’s Musings

I think I live with a mini-Buddha. Here’s a snippet of a conversation I had with my 3 year old daughter.

3 year old: Well, some people do and some people don’t.

Me: Wow, that applies to so much of life.

3 year old, turning toward me with a sage look: Yes. To so many lives.

Wonder if it’d be lucky for me to rub her belly…

Great article in today’s MorningSentinel about keeping down gas prices by shopping locally. In the article, one person is quoted:

“The whole point of this is to make people stop and think,” Edgerton said. “One Sunday evening, I needed one item that was $4. I live in Bowdoin, and if I drove down to Topsham it would have, for me, been equivalent to a tank of gas. Or I could go to our little local general store and pay $1 more for the item, and my gas would cost about 75 cents.”

Exactly!

When we did our “gas pay down.” the gas station owner said people were driving huge SUV’s from other communities to get the gas thinking they were getting a bargain. 25 cents off was a big deal, but not if you get 10-12 mpg and drive 20-30 miles one way to get it!

The kicker? When they found out the gas was gone, they drove away without filling up. Cost of entire 40 mile round trip at 10 mpg on that day? About $15.20.

It’ll be a huge change for us in Maine to start thinking less regionally and more locally. But it will be great for our communities!

One final quote from the article:

Chain stores return very little of what their stores take in back to the communities where they operate, she said. A recent study in Maine by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that only 14 cents of a dollar spent at a so-called “big box” store remains in the state’s economy.

In contrast, the study found that independent retailers spend more than half their revenue locally. They bank at local banks, hire local accountants, advertise in local media and require many other local services that chains do not.

Just when I think I’ve drunk the Web 2.0 Kool Aid, people like Chris Brogan, Rob Hatch, or Chad Norman fill my cup up with more!

So today, I read a post from Chris Brogan on FriendFeed.

So if you’re on FriendFeed, I’m at: http://friendfeed.com/marcapitman

So Cuil got press today. It’s a search engine started by people that left Google. Supposed to be oodles better.

I wasn’t impressed.

Call me an egotist but when I searched on marc pitman, I didn’t come up in the first page but the obscure movie actor with my name did. I’ve worked hard over the last decade to make sure I’m in at least 50% of the top results. So it’s weird to not be in it at all. And “Marc A. Pitman” showed no results.

And for fundraisingcoach? Not even my own site www.fundraisingcoach.com came up! It comes up with obscure link farms and other questionable URLs.

So much for indexing billions of pages. And it seemed slow too.

Apparently, Cuil is picking up all the bottom dwellers the other search engines have long since learned to ignore.

Ike Pigott nailed it in a tweet just now:

You’re not missing much. Cuil is Google’s little cousin who’s into Goth but too chicken to get piercings. Google Dark.

I’m pleased to be sticking with Google, thank you very much.

Got one of those new Orange Mango Vivanno smoothies from Starbucks today.

At least it doesn’t really clash with my Prius’ seats or floor. *sigh*

Guess I won’t be able to be as edgy about the kids spilling food in the car!

Last week we logged about 1400 miles on our car.

Yep, one thousand four hundred.

And thanks to our Prius, we averaged between 51 and 52 miles to the gallon.

Travel is still more feasible at that mileage! Our Windstar would’ve cost us oodles more!

There was a great joke on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! this morning. Well many, but only one about Inbev’s purchase of Budweiser.

Evidently, the deal was sealed when Inbev, the company behind Bass Ale and Beck’s, promised to not mess with the Budweiser formula. Apparently there was concern that Inbev might change Budweiser to make it actually taste like beer.

I’m here in DC having given a 4-hour pre-conference session on “Marketing and Fundraising for a Small Shop” at the American Marketing Association’s Nonprofit Marketing Conference. We had a great, lively session.

The best part is I get to be here with my 8-year old son. We’ve gone to the International Spy Museum and the ever popular Air and Space Museum. And tonight, we played Battleship at a very posh restaurant at the Mandarin Oriental.

It used to be that everytime I came to DC, I could feel the power saturating the city. It was heady. And easy to get caught up in.

This time, I sense none of that. So I’m wondering if I’m getting more mature…or more naïve .

I firmly believe God talks. And that dreams are one of the ways He talks. But apparently I can’t understand the language yet.

I few weeks ago, I woke from a dream specifically remembering “47:20″…I think it was a time in the dream. But when I woke, I knew it must refer to Scripture.

Do you know how inconvenient it is to find what books have 47 chapters and then of those which ones have 20 or more verses? Oy.

So today, I decided to BibleGateway.com it. Very easy!

Here are the results for the only 2 47:20’s in the Bible:

Genesis: So Joseph bought all the land in Egypt for Pharaoh. The Egyptians, one and all, sold their fields, because the famine was too severe for them. The land became Pharaoh’s,

Ezekiel: “On the west side, the Mediterranean Sea will be the boundary to a point opposite Lebo Hamath. This will be the western boundary.

Clear as mud, huh?

Wish I’d checked this earlier. I might have remembered the context of the dream!

(The one from Genesis is, for me, one of the saddest passages in the Bible. The next verse says that Joseph made all of Egypt slaves to Pharoah. How ironic that a few centuries later, the descendants of Joseph become the slaves, isn’t it?)

A friend just emailed me this great CNN article about how young evangelicals don’t fit the “evangelical” stereotype. Or a political party.

These two guys are out promoting a book Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals. But this is more than selling books. Here’s a quote from CNN:

Back on stage [Shane] Claiborne takes the crowd through a multimedia presentation.

“With the respectability and the power of the church comes the temptation to prostitute our identity for every political agenda.”

It’s nice to see evangelicals questioning the lock-stock-and-barrel acceptance of partisan politics.