Midway & Memorial Day Weekend

Cable TV was a luxury for my family when I was a kid.  I don't know when cable TV was invented, but my parents didn't get it hooked up until the mid-80s ... I don't even remember the exact year.  If I were to guess, it'd be 1985 or 1986.  Anyway, the coolest thing about cable TV were the movies!  Back then before TBS was a comedy station, it was a movie and Atlanta Braves baseball station.  So I would spend my summers watching movies on TBS and then flipping back and forth between WGN and TBS watching Cubs and Braves baseball.

With Memorial Day weekend, TBS would usually air the movie Midway or Tora, Tora, Tora.  I loved these movies!  My parents would often remark that my (much) older brothers would replay the battle of Midway with these little wood blocks.  I remember finding those blocks in our first home's garage.

On Saturday, my wife took one of our kids out on a date and errands.  While they were out, my oldest son and I were watching TV.  We started watching the Texas Rangers plays, but then started flipping channels and landed on the AMC channel which was playing Midway.  We caught it about half-way through - right in the thick of the battle.  I didn't know if my son would like such an old movie, but we watched and he was hooked. Yeah, the special effects aren't great ... or the original film footage they spliced in was kind of grainy ... but it was still great action and it was history.

Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Tipping Point was a very interesting read.  It read quite a bit like a marketing guru how-to book more than anything else.

This book talked about quite a few things ... Hush Puppies, the STD epidemic in Baltimore, the crime wave in New York city and how it all came to a halting stop, suicide in Micronesia, teenage smoking rates, Sesame Street, Blue's Clues, Gore-Tex, the rule of 150, Airwalk shoes, the Good Samaritan 'test' and on and on.  The book was full of stories and what it was about those unique stories that made them examples of tipping points.

And this essentially was the author's point ... that we tend to think we need complex solutions to our big problems, when in fact, all we need is to think about the situation a bit ... really understand it and then more often than not, a "band-aid" solution will fix it.

His closing remarks in the afterward were very interesting.  He said that with the explosion of the Information Age, we all need to beware of isolation and information overload.  The people who will really help us in this new age will be the Mavens.  If we can find Mavens, then the market or epidemic you are trying to start will be successful.

Restaurant Rave: Mooya

Get the Iceburger!

I'm a sucker for a good burger every now and then.  Steak-n-Shake and Culver's are two of my favorites.  Last summer, I ate at In-n-Out for the first time - that was pretty good too.

So when I saw a Mooya open up just down the street from where I live, I decided I needed to check it out.

After a Cub Scout pack meeting one night, I took my boys to Mooya to get some shakes.  The shakes were pretty good.  I like Culver's better.  Of course, being an ice cream fanatic, I'm fairly picky about my ice cream.  But the boys loved it.

A week or so later, another opportunity presented itself to go to Mooya.  This time I ordered a burger and fries.  Generally speaking, I try to have a bare minimum to nothing in the carbs category - so I was feeling a little anxiety about getting a full burger.  I figured I could just eat everything but the bread.  But as I was ordering, I found that they sell what they call the "iceburger" which is just their normal burger, but the buns are replaced with giant pieces of iceberg lettuce.  I was very happy with the iceburger.

Their fries are pretty darn good too.  So if you see a Mooya near you, go check it out.