“Do you just Google weird [stuff] to do in Virginia?” – anonymous friend My latest life experiment has been a strange journey into the world of transcendental meditation. Strange the best word […]
This is the Golden Age of Radio – How podcasts can change your commutes
The golden age of radio was not the 1920s (or whenever) when families would huddle around giant wooden transistors listening to fake stores about aliens. The golden age of radio is happening […]
Brazilian Jiu Jitsu
A vein bulged from my forehead, looking like it was going to burst. My face was beet red, and I was getting sleepy. This was all on account of the instructor’s thigh […]
Get to Know Me, From My Company’s Portal Blog
This month my company featured me on our portal in a blog-style interview. I thought I’d share since I haven’t posted much about work lately. Here you go: Get to Know John Demma We […]
3 Quick DIY Life Hacks to Save You Money
People seemed to like my personal finance posts from the past few months about things like getting rid of cable and saving money on food, so I figured I’d share some other […]
Expense Savings Go Right to the Bottom Line
You may have heard someone say that expense savings go right to the “bottom line”. What does that mean? What is the bottom line anyway? For a business, the last line on […]
How We Saved $1,000 Per Month in Food Cost
Studies like this one from Gallop show that the average Joe is spending $151 per week on food. For two adults and two kids (let’s say the kids cost 1/2 that […]
The Great Man Myth: Or how the Simpsons and Tolstoy will calm your nerves when meeting Rick Flair
I don’t have any interest in meeting celebrities. I met Rick Flair once. He came to my bar after a night of performing at the XL Center – still had his boots […]
Gut Check – Getting Back Up
This barber, he had to be seventy, was telling me once while trimming me up how he just had a whole bunch of cancer surgically removed about a week earlier. Tough old dog, I […]
Management Skills: Create Symbiosis
That’s a picture of a cute little clownfish, we’ll call him Remo, swimming among sea anemone. Most fish would not be feeling too good right now, because those cool looking tentacles of […]
Modern Machiavelli: How to be a 21st century prince without selling your soul
Is it better to be feared or loved? Do the ends justify the means? Is all fair in business and politics? Machiavelli says, “Yes.” You may have heard of the book The […]
We All Know About the Same: Nothing
I’m a fraud and so are you. We run around pretending we know a thing or two about a thing or two. And we’re surround by all of these experts on subjects […]
Future Predicting: A bad business to be in
This was my tweet just minutes before kickoff of this past Sunday’s Super Bowl: Privately, also just before kickoff, I was quoted as saying, “If I was rich I would bet $200,000 […]
Strategy: Cortez the Killer
In 1519 Hernán Cortés the Conquistador led a flotilla of 11 ships to the eastern shores of Mexico against the direct orders of his superiors. You see, power and hubris had driven […]
Genealogy, Ancestry.com, and (you probably already stopped reading)…
Nothing, and I mean nothing, puts people to sleep faster than talking about the most boring of my boring hobbies: genealogy. Of the nearly 500 people in my family tree, only two of […]