Lebron's "Chalk" Ad, the Power of Ritual, and Free Coffee

I saw this great new Nike ad by Lebron James, where they draw from his pre-game ritual of throwing the scorer's chalk into the air to show other people bringing that ritual into their daily lives (after being influenced by Lebron, of course, and his Nike shoes). It's pretty sick, and the song (Candyman by Cornership, from their 2003 album "When I Was Born for the 7th Time", which also has "Brimful of Asha" on it, probably their most famous hit) is tasty delicious. Check it out HERE. And here's the video:



I have thought a lot about the power of ritual in starting a company and as I've continued to define and redefine the way I want to live my life. It has become particularly interesting to me through the lens of religion, as Krista and I have begun to form the habit of Sunday morning church service at a fairly progressive Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park (called the Cafe, it has a rock band and is not IN a church). Having been forced-fed religion from 1st-12th grade (1-8 at Our Lady Queen of Peace and 9-12 at Edgewood High School), I took what I liked to call a "break" from religion for the majority of college (despite attending a Jesuit school in Boston College) and thereafter. BTW, Chris Farley was a graduate of Edgewood--and my friend Steph McCoy lived in his neighborhood and has some funny stories about him.



In fact, it wasn't the abstract concept of a "God" that ended up getting me through the doors of the Cafe service. It was coffee and the fact that we had a lot of our closest couple friends who attended regularly. After the service, we'd wander Menlo Park and typically go get a breakfast and good conversation from Cafe Borrone (I call it Bor-ron, Dave King calls it Ba-ro-ney (like baloney)...who knows?). Krista would go more often than I would--I would sometimes exercise my right NOT to go, possibly just to prove that I didn't HAVE to go, as I used to HAVE to go to religion class and church at school. There's another lesson on the power of having a choice in there, but I'll leave it be for tonight.

As we graduated from Stanford, many of our churchgoing friends moved away (not all though! We still get to go with the Houghtons and the Kings every now and again, to my delight; today we were reserving seats for the Houghtons, who were running late for the service due to a last-minute-baby-schedule-adjustment, and I kept eagerly looking at the door when people would come in, hoping they wouldn't cancel entirely), and we moved a half hour north to Burlingame. But after getting settled in, we began to go back to Menlo early Sunday, and re-established our routine.



Even now, I continue to tell myself that I go in the morning for the "free coffee" (even though Krista tends to give money as we leave and I get my 2nd cup). I still haven't really opened up as much to the "God" part of it internally, but I've become really interested in the symbols and stories and rituals that the Church uses to convey messages that stick. It's also a great time for me to (try to) disconnect from my day to day startup worries, which all too often follow me all the way through the weekend, and to get a much bigger perspective of the issues I am personally dealing with.

That's the power of ritual, as THIS LINK points out so well: ritual gives structure to chaos. Whether it's a Friday all-hands meeting or Sunday morning church, it can help you when you're feeling a little lost at sea.

Final note: this post was intended as a post more about the power of ritual, but it turned into a bit of a spiritual expose. Oops. At least I know I'll get a Laurie Bolden post out of it! :)

Also, I want to point out that I am SO GRATEFUL for my educational and spiritual upbringing--I loved Queen of Peace and Edgewood, and would never change a thing about those experiences. I owe a TON to my parents and teachers and sisters for those great experiences.

Great Music: Some Badass Guitar by Rodrigo y Gabriela

Serendipitously, a talented duo named Rodrigo y Gabriela that I was first exposed to at the Outside Lands Festival months ago (highly endorsed by my friend Shayna), came on tonight as I did random online reading. So I thought I'd share a couple videos about them, since they are so very badass.

Here's probably my favorite song of theirs, Tamacun:



Another great song, Diablo Rojo:



Also, I'd like to note that the videos do NOT do their live performance justice. If you were to, say, watch them perform in the late afternoon in the middle of a beautiful park in 70 degree weather with a HUGE speaker system, it would be very different than listening to them with the tinny apple headphones or laptop speakers you're currently using. :) They do this really cool camerawork where the camera shoots along the neck of the guitar so that you can see the speed at which their hands move; it's hard to describe, but incredible to watch...so what are you waiting for? See if they're playing near you anytime soon by checking out their website.

Travel for Thanksgiving...and Thanks

It's 11:52 pm on Thanksgiving Eve (why don't they ever call it Thanksgiving Eve, btw?), and Krista and I are doing various errands on our computers as we get ready to call it a night.

We're in Naples, FL, with Gary and Nancy. I had to work yesterday and most of today, even though I had hoped not to, so the vacation has really only just begun (and we leave on Friday!) At least the last 8 hours has been nice and restful; Gary made "Ducat's Bucket", a favorite childhood dish of Krista's, which is a special mussel and clam dish. And then we watched the original Father of the Bride, which was almost exactly the same as the one with Steve Martin that we all know. Involved in planning weddings as I am, I

I was just reading some random Thanksgiving day facts, as well, and I learned that the average American consumes 4,500 calories on Thanksgiving. Wow. I'm aiming for 5,000.

Here's a great little video I just found that will hopefully make at least one person laugh:



Happy Thanksgiving, and thanks to all my friends and family for everything.

Just Like College Again (for a day)

This weekend a couple of close friends, Mr. Jonathan Bolden and Mr. and Mrs. Timothy and Chandler Murphy, happened to be in town. Today felt like college again, as we had lunch with a bunch of friends from school in downtown Burlingame (like lower dining hall at BC), then JB and I went on a quest to borrow a replacement cellphone (from a generous Sarvesh Regmi, another friend from Stanford).

After that quick errand, we came back to our house and watched some football while we chatted, browsed stuff online, and had a beer. Soon thereafter, Krista and Jenny King came back from their own errand, and we just hung out for another hour until Dave King and Chris Harris stopped by. We watched a little more football, then walked over to Barracuda's in downtown Burlingame to meet Scott Crumrine for some sushi.

It's pretty rare these days that 1) we have friends just hanging out at our place, unplanned and unexpected (but very welcome) 2) we hang out with just 1 person in a couple rather than in precise couples and 3) we have no specific agenda and can just relax. In other words, I feel like we've gotten to the point where even our social life has become planned, rather than just going with the flow as we used to be able to do in college with 100 of your closest friends living within one mile of you.

Maybe it can't return to that type of social life, but I sure wish it could. I can just imagine living in a little gated community of all my closest friends, by a cool downtown area. It would be pretty sweet if we could make that happen.

Late Nights OR A Walk Down Memory Lane Episode 2

I stayed up till 4 am last night doing work. It was getting cold, so I made myself some tea, and chatted with some friends/coworkers as we all worked into the night. I enjoyed it, actually, quite a bit. I used to do it all the time when we first started 750, but those types of sessions became more and more rare as I went from re-building apps to talking to REAL people (who like to wake up early so they can go home early, oddly enough).

I actually wasn't that tired even though I woke up at 8:30 this morning. I suspect tomorrow I will feel the real fatigue.

Tonight Krista took my computer away, turned out the light, and then noted (as I rubbed my eyes and yawned), that just as I always have joked that my mom is easy to put to sleep--just push her onto her side, and she will quickly begin to rub her own eyes and yawn--she can do the same thing by taking away my computer, turning off my music (I was listening to Ma$e before), and pushing me on my side.

Pretty funny. Which brings me to a brief anecdote (Matt would be proud) about baby chicks.



It also reminded me of one of the (many) things about my mother that always amused me. When we were younger, we had a tank of baby chics that we took care of around Easter time in our backyard. I recall then, and even later, how my mother would always say: "baby chicks are SO dumb; all you have to do is push them on their side and they will automatically fall asleep". When I was in college, I realized the irony of this statement given the fact that my mom actually exhibited the EXACT same tendencies as baby chicks.

And just check out this video--hilarious. Reminds me of college.

Dominating Haase, Harris, and Bolden (in Warfish)

Turns out my favorite online game of risk, warfish.net, allows you to embed the video of your game. Check out the recent domination I had in this game.

Red: Harris
Blue: Me
Maroon: Bolden
Pink (in honor of Ashley): Haase

Please note how I toy with Bolden and Haase at the very end (note you will have to
scroll right to see the whole board--you can't shrink it to fit a page):

Corner - by Jai Uttal (& the Pagan Love Orchestra)

Another song I discovered on Friday Night Lights (Season 2, Episode 4) is entitled Corner, by an artist named Jai Uttal. I can't find the song on Lala, but did manage to find it on iTunes (so still a bit of a way to go before Lala catches up to iTunes completely, I guess).

Click HERE for a sample of it on a random website.

And HERE's some more information on Jai Uttal, who appears to have a bunch of music that has been widely used for yoga (what luck!).

His specialty is the sarod, a 25-string instrument that seems similar to the sitar (picture below).

Jose Gonzalez - Teardrop (& My Obsession)

I've been pretty obsessed with Jose Gonzalez recently--his music is just so cool, in a folky ethereal way. Checkout this awesome video of the song "teardrop", which has religion all over the place (the flying jesus is my favorite part)



And for those of you music buffs who said: "Hey, that's a cover of a massive attack song, not an original!" here's the original:



It's pretty compelling as a song and video. It's a fetus singing about its own abortion, according to critics. Here are the lyrics:

Love, love is a verb
Love is a doing word
Fearless on my breath
Gentle impulsion
Shakes me makes me lighter
Fearless on my breath

Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath

Nine night of matter
Black flowers blossom
Fearless on my breath
Black flowers blossom
Fearless on my breath

Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath

Water is my eye
Most faithful mirror
Fearless on my breath
Teardrop on the fire of a confession
Fearless on my breath
Most faithful mirror
Fearless on my breath

Teardrop on the fire
Fearless on my breath

Stumbling a little
Stumbling a little

That led me to look closer at Obama's policy on abortion, which I found conveniently summarized here.

Sort of a cool exercise. I spiraled from a piece of media into a concept into a current event about that concept, and learned some new things at every step of the way. It happens all the time to me (I was called Kurious Keintz in college for a reason), but I've never really thought through the sequence before. It also summarizes how I learn best--spiraling towards the truth. A truth spiral. I like that concept.

Also, I saw a comment on the Jose Gonzalez YouTube video that the teardrop version by the Elbows is even better, so here it is:

Girl Talk - That's My DJ

I LOVE lala...the ability to embed a single song in my blog is amazing. And if they had great data around who was using that (ie, combined with Facebook...like iLike), that would be pretty amazing data for the record industry to have.

And, how awesome is this song? It doesn't start out as my favorite Girl Talk song, but at 40 seconds, combining "Bring em out" with "That's my DJ" is brilliant, and just works.

MJ: Failure leads to Success

Just saw this video, somehow, on YouTube. Inspirational, to say the least.



Man, Nike makes great advertising.

And aren't sports such great metaphors for startups and life in general?

Music Review: Storm by Jose Gonzalez

Over the last several weeks, Krista and I have become die hard Friday Night Lights fans. On more than a couple nights, we've stayed up pretty late (even for us) watching several episodes of the show at once, courtesy of netflix, netflix watch instantly, or hulu.

Over the last few episodes, one particular song has struck me as incredibly compelling like songs do every now and again. Eventually, I was able to locate it, and using Lala, I can now embed it in this blog post so everyone can check it out (pretty awesome service, btw. I love that the music industry just gave the rights to this company in an attempt to create a competitor for itunes :) ).

Anyways, check it out and let me know what you think. For those of you (BOLDENS) that like Bon Iver, I think you'll be impressed.

As for Krisa and I, we're off on the redeye tonight for the Packers/Vikings rivalry weekend in Minnesota, courtesy of my buddy Tim Murphy. It's going to be awesome.

Powered by Lala

Do the Bartman + History is Made

Randomly, after sending out some emails to finish off the day, I had a memory of one of my favorite songs back in the day: "Do the Bartman".

So I searched for it on YouTube and here it is.



STILL so catchy. MJ at his (near) best.

In other news, America has officially elected an african-american president. It's a proud day for our great country, as Obama himself noted in his victory speech:

"If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer."

Pretty cool.

On Beyond Zebra

Over the course of MBA, Krista and I began to attend church more and more regularly at a progressive presbyterian ministry called "The Cafe", operated by Menlo Park Presbyterian Church.

I'll hold off on the full background (I was raised Catholic by schooling, sort of was in religious denial for a few years, but then found myself drawn back to the ritual of sunday church when krista began wanting to go, along with many of our good friends from school forming a community around the event), but today's sermon centered around a Dr. Seuss book that I loved.

I have come to respect religion's ability to convey meaning and teach lessons to people in such an effective manner--always through stories such as Dr. Seuss. My thoughts, as always, come back to how this can apply in my career as an entrepreneur, as a leader of a team of individuals.



The lesson about pushing beyond one's comfort zone, as shown by "On Beyond Zebra", is one that I love, especially in its ability to inspire people to WANT to push and learn more. I tend to take a fairly workmanlike approach to this--constantly seeking to improve in little ways, with little inspiration behind it--but I realize that I would probably be better served focusing more on inspiration and emotion.

Anyways, here are the words from the book:

Said Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell,
My very young friend who is learning to spell:
“The A is for Ape. And B is for Bear.
The C is for Camel. The H is for Hare
The M is for Mouse. And the R is for Rat.”
“I know all the twenty-six letters like that…
… Through to Z is for Zebra. I know them all well.”
Said Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell.
“So now I know everything anyone knows.
From beginning to end. From the start to the close.
Because Z is as far as the alphabet goes.”

Then he almost fell flat on his face on the floor
When I picked up the chalk and drew one letter more!
A letter he never had dreamed of before!
And I said, “You can stop, if you want, with the Z.
Because most people stop with the Z.
But not me!!!
In the places I go, there are things that I see
That I never could spell if I stopped with the Z.
I’m telling you this ‘cause you’re one of my friends.
My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!”


“My alphabet starts with this letter called YUZZ.
It’s the letter I use to spell YUZZ-a-ma-TUZZ.
You’ll be sort of surprised what there is to be found
Once you go beyond Z and start poking around!
So, on beyond Zebra!
Explore!
Like Columbus!
Discover new letters!
Like WUM is for Wumbus,
My high-spouting whale who lives high on a hill
And who never comes down ‘till it’s time to refill.
So, on beyond Z! It’s high time you were shown
That you really don’t know all there is to be known.”

“Then just step a step further past Wum is for Wumbus
And there you’ll find UM. And the Um is for Umbus
A sort of Cow, with one head and one tail,
But to milk this great cow you need more than one pail!
She has ninety-eight teats that give milk quite nicely.
Perhaps ninety-nine. I forget just precisely.
And, boy! She is something most people don’t see.
Because most people stop at the Z
But not me!”



“If you stay home with Zebra,
You’re stuck in a rut.
But on beyond Zebra,
You’re anything but!
When you go beyond Zebra,
Who knows…?
There’s no telling
What wonderful things
You might find yourself spelling!”

“Like QUAN is for Quandary, who lives on a shelf
In a hole in the ocean alone by himself
And he worries, each day, from the dawn’s early light
And he worries, just worries, far into the night.
He just stands there and worries. He simply can’t stop…
Is his top-side his bottom? Or bottom-side his top?”
So you see!
There’s no end
To the things you might know,
Depending how far beyond Zebra you go!

The places I took him!
I tried hard to tell
Young Conrad Cornelius o’Donald o’Dell
A few brand-new wonderful words he might spell.
I led him around and I tried hard to show
There are things beyond Z that most people don’t know.
I took him past Zebra. As far as I could.
And I think, perhaps, maybe I did him some good…

Because, finally, he said:
“This is really great stuff!
And I guess the old alphabet
ISN”T enough!”
NOW the letters he uses are something to see!
Most people stop at the Z…
But not HE!

By: Dr. Seuss

Also checkout "Seussville" for some more waste-time-online-fun: