Tommy More tales: Vodka, lemonade and laughter don't mix

In honor of my friend Bill Clair, who died June 16, I've also posted this on my poetry website: www.robertschwabpoet.com.

It is the first in a series of "Tommy More tales" I hope to post in the future if contributors will e-mail me stories I can rewrite and post for everyone's entertainment. I believe the statute of limitations will have run out on all but the most serious crimes.

Bill Clair, Ed Nowak and myself shared a Falco's pizza one night long ago in Bill's garage where he prepared his big red Chevy convertible for a trip to Lake Geneva over Fourth of July weekend.

We were planning to take a formidable supply of pink lemonade mixed with vodka to drink in the car on the trip, and actually started drinking some that night. We wanted a pizza and Bill would have none but a Falco's pie, which I argued was too greasy, having once watched a Falco's cook pour grease (or oil) from a pitcher onto a raw pie before he popped it into the oven.

Palermo's wasn't good enough for Bill. So we ate and drank our fill well into the night before rising for the trip.

We took off in mid-morning and by about 11 a.m. came to a stop light on U.S. 12 north of Chicago next to a tall pickup truck with three other guys riding high and looking down at the jug of pink lemonade we were sharing.

"Where you guys going?" said the driver of the truck, enjoying the sight of three youngs guys already pretty wasted and driving under a hot, summer sun in an open convertible.

"Geneva," I said to him from the shotgun seat. "We thought we'd watch a little National Guard action and take in the bikinis," I added, which cracked up both the guys in the truck and Nowak and Clair beside me. A year earlier, Wisconsin's governor had called out his National Guard and police dogs to quell rowdy youths who were celebrating the holiday too raucously. We three had been there then, too.

 "Why don't you guys follow us and come along," I cracked. "We got plenty to share!"

Now Bill Clair was always known for his smile and easy laughter, and Ed Nowak, otherwise called "Dude," remembers him for the contagiousness of that laughter, especially when Billy kind of howled when things really got funny.

Dude started to choke as he laughed, and then cough -- and then wretch, as everybody else, including the guys in the truck, laughed harder and harder and the choking got worse. Until Ed puked, which was no laughing matter inside Billy's sparkling clean red convertible.

Besides that, Dude's vomit was pretty much marked by tiny bits of green peppers cut in perfect squares, lumps of Italian sausage and other liquid that Bill was very unhappy about seeing spread over the rubber mats of his clean car.

"I told you that pizza's too greasy," I said.

But Bill wasn't laughing anymore; he roared away from the green light, cut in front of the truck and looked for a pullout from the highway so he could quickly get the car cleaned up. And Dude, too.

E-mail me with your tale from Tommy More at rschwab@robertschwabpoet.com.

Republicans, Weiners and my friends

Obama signs health-care bill

A friend -- you may remember Eric Marburger from when I wrote about him last October -- asked yesterday, during a croquet game whether I was planning to watch the Republican presidential campaign debate last night.

I wasn't, and this morning reading about the debate I realized why. It doesn't matter. Look at the potential nominees and it becomes clear not one of them will have a ghost's chance in hell of beating President Barack Obama.                                                    Photo credit: www.sodahead.com

Unless, perhaps, the nominee is U.S. Rep Michele Bachmann, who announced her official candidacy at the debate.

If Republicans nominate her, the country might entertain the idea of electing the first woman president, but then a majority of voters would also reconsider her Tea Party affiliations and vote for the incumbent as the lesser of two evils.

It seems every presidential election comes down to that kind of decision in modern America.

Besides that, by November of 2012, Obama will have proven himself a president who acts in the best interests of all Americans, not leaving out even those who oppose him.

One element of the debate last night proves my contention. I'm depending on New York Times coverage published in the Denver Post when I quote former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney who said during the debate: "What you're doing will not work. It's a huge power grab by the federal government."

That's nonsense and Romney knows it. He was talking about Obama's health-care legislation and even conservative-minded Tea Partyers will realize the benefits universal health-care coverage will provide them by the time the election rolls around. By then, too, all Republican opposition to the plan will be seen for the lie that it is.

Affordable health care for all the people of the United States will be just as laudable a goal in November of 2012 as it was during November of 2008 and all through 2009 and 2010 when the Congress debated the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and Obama signed it.

Calling it "Obamneycare" will just remind people that the president, like Mitt Romney when he signed similar legislation in Massachusetts, was thinking of all the people in America, not just the rich and not just the poor, but all the people who make up the great middle class.

We need universal health care in America; the president's plan protected the private insurance industry and offered health-insurance availability to 30 million uninsured Americans. It was a compromise position, but he got it enacted into law, and a grateful electorate will reward him with a second four-year term.

Even the idea of a woman president won't overcome that perception when we go the polls in 2012.

Now, about Weiner. New York Rep. Anthony Weiner made all kinds of headlines except one over the past few weeks. Another friend, I won't say who, suggested I write this headline for a blog post I might write about Weiner: "It really was Weiner's wiener!"

I hope my other readers appreciate my discretion in containing the headline to a single paragraph here.

How to make money on the Internet! The new normal

Dave Taylor

Dave Taylor is a business expert in Internet communications.

He is a co-organizer of Front Range Bloggers, a teacher and a public speaker who last January in Las Vegas told an audience of bloggers, website operators and other techies to enjoy the life they've made for themselves despite the digital speed and pressures of the world where they have chosen to work.

"The Internet will survive without you for a day," he told a hundred "affiliates," who are people paid by the click for hosting advertisers on their blogs or websites.

"Try to have no-work days," he said, "or no-e-mail afternoons."

That's an odd message for the closing keynote speaker at a conference called "Affiliate Summit West," where most attendees had come to learn how to make more money on the Internet, not less. But bloggers and website operators are more than just ad-sales people.

They are writers, software developers and independent contractors of all sorts, trying just as hard to make a buck from their expertise as business consultants in management, engineering, marketing or politics.

In fact, many white-collar consultants -- whole businesses for that matter -- are becoming bloggers and website operators in order to extend the market for their wares to the Net. It's the new normal.

Taylor is an expert in the new normal.

I sought him out to ask how to monetize a website or a blog because my own effort to add advertising to this blog over the past 18 months can best be described as a frustrating exercise in learning what I didn't know.

I have learned, however, that you have to ask the right questions, and one of the ways I learned that lesson was by going to one of Taylor's popular websites: Ask Dave Taylor!

On the site, Taylor offers "free tech support" to all kinds of computer users, answering questions like this one running on the site right now: "How do I install an ad blocker in Google Chrome?"

Click on the link to get Dave's answer, but even if you don't and you still spend much of your time in front of a computer screen during your workday, you must realize how often you could come up with a similar question about your machine and not know where to go for help. Go to Ask Dave!

That's where I went first with my question about how to monetize my blog. It's a question most every blogger wants to know the answer to because most hope to make a living from their work.

But Taylor's answer, made to me in an interview, indicates a more complicated business analysis than a blogger might expect. You have to think about what your blog and website is doing for those who read it, Taylor said. And like everything in small business, doing something new on your computer becomes a learning experience in itself.

Taylor told me he was reluctant at first to put ads on his sites, fearing, as a writer, that he might over-commercialize them. Thinking through the process, however -- he has an MBA so the thinking was very businesslike -- he put some ads up on one of the sites (Ask Dave!), and soon realized he could pay his mortgage with the money he was making by showing the ads.

The first ad network Taylor used was Google's AdSense, an ad-placement service the giant search- engine company provides qualified bloggers. The service automatically selects and places ads on sites whose readers might have an interest in the advertisement. The blogger or website that hosts the ad is paid a portion of what Google is paid when a reader on their site clicks on an ad.

Taylor signed on with AdSense years ago, but because of the amount of traffic he has generated for his Google advertisers since then (all those people asking computer questions), he has been invited to be an AdSense premium publisher, meaning he gets special help and added services from the AdSense team to maximize the impact of his ads. That means both Taylor and Google make more money.

But Taylor runs another website (he has four) where he runs no ads at all. The Business Blog @ Intuitive.com is a business-management blog that discusses topics like: "Understanding the Legal Structure of Business," a guest-written piece currently posted there by Taylor to help Intuitive.com readers understand an issue related to starting a business.

Taylor's success as an Internet businessman and his successful monetization of websites depends on one word in that previous paragraph: HELP.

It is a part of Taylor's overall business and Internet philosophy. A blog that tells it's readers over and over again, "Here's what I'm going to sell you today," he says, "turns off most people, and it ends up not being successful."

"It's not sell, sell, sell," that makes your blog successful, he says, "It's help, help, help."

Ask Dave Taylor! does that directly, while Intuitive.com does it more intuitively, or indirectly, Taylor says.

"The Intuitive.com site is very much designed as an indirect revenue stream for me," he said. Articles there support his reputation as a teacher and business-management consultant, and spawn consulting contracts and speaking engagements for him.

The ads on Ask Dave! produce direct revenue when readers go there, "get the answer to their question," see an ad that interests them, "and leave" the site happy, Taylor says. The good experience will probably bring that reader back when a new computer question arises, ever increasing his traffic on the site and the number of eyeballs delivered to the advertiser.

"Generating traffic is all about pushing really good content, and then recognizing that you're not flying solo on the Internet, but you're actually a part of a larger ecosystem," he says.

That ecosystem not only includes millions of readers looking for help -- from crafts people who sew quilts to entrepreneurs hoping to launch a new startup -- but also thousands of experts willing to offer free advice or paid-for counsel.

You become known in the ecosystem by interacting with as many players as possible, Taylor said.

"It's really important for you to look at other blogs and other sites and make sure that you're known and visible and helping people on other sites," he said. "I don't care how successful you are, there's very likely someone who is more successful than you, who has more traffic than you and more visibility, and considered more of an expert," he adds.

"If you know who these people are, then you participate off their site, you leave comments, you e-mail them and ask if you can write a guest post.... [It's] a primary way to generate new traffic" back to your own site.

Finally, there's a reason Taylor was speaking to an audience of techies at the "Affiliate Summit West" in Las Vegas in January. Monetizing a website invariably puts you in front of a computer screen and requires a certain -- and increasing -- amount of computer savvy.

"You're right," Taylor told me. "If you are someone who is much more comfortable sewing a quilt than using your computer, then you are going to have a really hard time with Google Analytics."

Google Analytics is another service the search-engine company provides bloggers it hosts (including me). The service tracks page views your blog receives, and it can tell you various things about who is reading your blog. These demographics are important to potential advertisers, so the Google AdSense team uses the stats to qualify bloggers for certain advertising programs.

"Google Analytics, like everything else that Google has," Taylor said, "is very much predicated on geeky data collection, not on user-friendly, understandable outputs."

"I mean I look at analytics sometimes, and I'm pretty confused," he added. "And I consider myself pretty savvy in the tech space." That's just "the way it is," he said.

It's the new normal, dictated by a digital age. That's why Dave Taylor was telling the techies in Vegas to look up on occasion, and smell the roses.

Denver mayor's race spawns a business solution

Poll results putting Michael Hancock in a 10-point lead over Chris Romer in the Denver mayor's runoff spawned a quote from a Romer supporter that suggests a national solution for excessive executive compensation.

Claire Brockbank, the Romer supporter, was quoted by the Denver Post, saying, "I don't get the sense Hancock has private-sector experience, and, to me, being mayor, that's a CEO job."

Great quote, but consider that mayoral CEOs across the country are paid considerably less than private-sector CEOs and yet often perform at a much higher level since they face electoral accountability on a regular basis.

Why not bring private-sector CEO compensation down to the level of major-city mayors across the country, based on the argument that whenever someone rises to the level of competency necessary to run a corporation in America they should be willing to serve the best interests of the company based on an altruistic instinct of public service.

After all, the efficient operations of our nation's corporations  -- who are considered the equal of individual people nowadays, at least by the U.S. Supreme Court -- benefit the common good and "promote the general welfare" of all citizens, just as the preamble to the U.S. Constitution asserts.

I watched "Too Big to Fail" and "Inside Job" last night, the two film studies of the 2008 financial crisis, and executive compensation was mentioned as an issue in both. The heads of our country's largest banks protested in both films any government attempt to limit a company's ability to pay whatever it takes to recruit the kinds of brains that got us into the financial crisis of 2008.

I say, though, at the CEO level, the individual executive is essentially doing the nation and the company a public service and should be paid as such. Lower-level execs, in order to prevent the feared brain drain, could be recruited at limitless salaries if the lower-paid CEO signs on to that strategy being in the best interests of his or her company. And the country, for that matter.

Now, to go beyond that single topic for this post, I would also like to point out to my cousin Roger Wehling that Hancock's lead -- a surprise to both of us I think -- might be a reflection of voter discontent with politicians who seem to have their success handed to them by virtue of unmatchable campaign funding and pre-politics name recognition.

Voters want today's elected office holders to accomplish through public policy what change can be interpreted from the popular support they received in their election.

For Obama, it was universal health care. For Hancock it's going to be a fair shake for all citizens, not only those with insider status or pre-existing political clout. If Hancock is elected, he'll have as difficult a time producing for his supporters as Obama had producing a public option.

Politics is no longer an easy game to play in America.

And finally, the headline in the Post that elicited from me a shout out: "Egypt opens Gaza crossing."

Hooray! Hamas has to realize now that peaceful, nonviolent political action -- which, having taken place in Egypt, has led to the opening of the crossing and will lead to the eventual dismantling of the Israeli blockade of Gaza -- is the most effective opposition to Israel they will ever be able to adopt.

Violence is for thugs. It never accomplishes any nation's ultimate, legitimate goals.

Back to the Chemo Room

Results of the PET scan came in yesterday, and the cancer is still with me, growing, unfortunately, but ensuring my membership in the Chemo Room.

What can you do? You have to keep fighting! A lot of people are dying in the world today: tornadoes, suicide bombs, soldiers, tsunamis. An associate in the media industry, Chris Power Bain, the former director of communications for the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce, died Monday. She was 57 and had been battling lung cancer, according to today's Denver Post.

Chris was at the chamber for a time while I was at the Post and we developed a professional relationship that now is a pleasant memory. But you don't expect to read about such professionals dying at such a young age. And yet the Chemo Room teaches you it is all too true.

That's why you don't have much choice but to fight your cancer. If you don't, it takes you away.

My oncologist, Dr. Thomas Kenney, working out of Porter Hospital, is going to touch base with friends at the University of Colorado Cancer Center to determine if any clinical trials conducted there might be appropriate for my further treatment.

Otherwise I'll probably be going back on a mix of chemo called FolFox, which I really don't like. It tears you down over the long haul -- it was part of my first six-month round of chemo -- and caused neuropathy in my feet and lower legs that still bothers me today when I'm cutting the lawn or playing croquet.

I'm 64. About to enter my fifth year of fighting colorectal cancer, which means I'm so far about average at besting the odds of survival since diagnosis. About half of us make it this far, and half don't. If I make it through the fifth year, I'll be doing better than most.

And I plan to make it. One thing you find out about yourself when you are recruited into a battle for your life is that while death may be around the corner, living feels pretty good. The time you spend fighting is the time you have still to accomplish something in this world, and you keep in mind what I once wrote at ColoradoBiz: dying puts a period at the end of the sentence that is your life, so you better try your best to make what you do a good story.

That's this writer's take on it. There are millions of good stories out there to tell, and I want mine to be one of them. In the meantime, I'll try to keep telling some of the others.

One of the last things Chris Power Bain worked with me on was a chamber white paper that suggested health care for the poor, usually dispensed in hospital emergency rooms, raised the cost of health insurance because hospitals charged insured patients enough to make up for the free care they were giving away to the uninsured.

A lot of snow melt has gone under the bridges of Colorado since Chris and my discussion about such issues, and yet this country still faces the same problem, and opponents of what is called Obamacare still are trying to dismantle the only attempt this country has ever mounted to solve it.

They say chemotherapy clouds the mind, but I think mine is still sharp enough to ask: What's up with that?

It's amazing how well you can feel when cancer is growing inside you and the doctors are still trying to keep it from taking over your body. The side effects of the medicine (poisons) they give you are what put the struggle in the battle when you fight cancer.

But whiskey makes you frisky, and I'm feeling just fine.

Living, writing stories, and solving problems has been what my life in America has always been about. Lord willing, and the creeks don't rise enough to wash us away, I'll be doing that still for some time to come.

And then you can put that period at the end of this sentence.

Monetize your blog! It won't take forever

Pat Wiesner

A victory! After months and months, with the help of a friend who took a few minutes on the telephone to talk me through a computer procedure, I have finally discovered one way to monetize this blog.

Look in the upper left column and you'll see my first gold sponsor: Pat Wiesner, my old boss from ColoradoBiz, a retired small-business publisher who has an abiding interest in helping the people who worked for him become successful.                                                   Photo credit:cobizmag.com

He still writes a column on management in the magazine, and helping employees become successful has been one of the management principles Pat has most persistently advocated over the years. He does it again in this month's column as he finds a business application for the best dog trick he has ever seen.

He writes: "In any case, here comes the business tidbit to think about. I will never forget Bella. Everyone who wants to cut a wide path in business has to have some of that "I'll never forget" mystique. The boss you will never forget because in addition to all the other things his mind was on, he had a keen interest in the career health of all his people, and because of this he had the best people."

Pat agreed to be my first sponsor and put a check in the mail before I had even had a chance to meet with him. But that check represents the first successful attempt by me to "monetize" this product, which I have been writing for two years and represents what I call the "new journalism" of the 21st century.

My point? Another friend, Tim Correll, suggested when I figured out how to monetize this blog, I write about it so other writers and small business owners could learn from my experience. That experience has been long and hard.

Google, which hosts the blog, has an advertising program called AdSense that its bloggers are supposed to be able to hook into. I started trying to work that process in February but recently was turned down for an AdSense account because my page, the one you are reading, was not designed quite right for Google advertisers. I'm still trying though.

In the meantime, I asked participants in a recent Idea Cafe for other suggestions. Henry Dubroff, another old boss, suggested I find people and companies to sponsor the blog. Great! But I still had not figured out how to acknowledge those sponsors on this page.

John Wren, who hosts Idea Cafes at the Panera Bread store on Grant Street near the state Capitol every Friday afternoon, took ten minutes this week to talk me through finding the right widget to use on this blog to show that Pat Wiesner had become my first sponsor. Victory!

And as with any victory, there are a few lessons to be learned from the experience:

First, realize how dumb you are and ask people for the help you need. I've been described as "plodding," and praised because I keep "plugging" my way toward journalistic and other business solutions. So be it. If that's what it takes to get a story or to create a small business, I won't be afraid to admit what I don't know, and I will find the answers to my questions.

Second, this relationship thing that business gurus keep preaching can work for you when you are trying to start a business. All the people who helped me here were long-time friends and business associates who, in time, were able to answer the questions I was finally able to ask.

Third, it's sometimes amazing how long it takes to solve the simplest of problems when you don't know what you don't know.

I'm going to continue writing about what it takes to monetize a blog. It's the new journalism of the 21st century! Keep reading.

Preemptive war and other nonsense

Has former President George W. Bush's preemptive war doctrine been repealed or rescinded?

The New York Times editorialized yesterday against an expansion of the war powers of the president, a House Republican proposal the newspaper said would "authorize the military to pursue virtually anyone suspected of terrorism, anywhere on earth, from now to the end of time."

First you have to admire the Times' august tone in an era of newspaper degradation. No one in newspapers but the Times would write about all eternity with as much confidence.

But reading the editorial reminded me of a time when I stood up at a Brownstein Hyatt & Farber-hosted luncheon and asked now retiring PBS newsman Jim Lehrer if the Bush doctrine could be repealed. Lehrer gave a not-so-clear answer, but at the time anyone who questioned Bush was suspect of less-than-quality patriotism, so you could expect obfuscation at almost any turn.

The Republican effort to expand the president's war powers, however, shows that neo-con forces in government are still alive and kicking. No matter they cost us a war in Iraq that was unneccessary, a trillion dollars, and the lives of 4,000 soldiers. WMD? What WMD?

The USA has always had a number of nationalist/colonialist/expansionists within the reaches of power in Washington D.C., but history has shown every time they exert power in behalf of their philosophy, the nation and its people end up losers.

Peace is a better pursuit. Peace leads to prosperity, and prosperity is our best defense against our enemies. No one repeals a president's foreign-policy doctrine, but preemptive war was a preemptive loser. Better we battle enemies we see than those we imagine.