Friday Donuts

Friends, Did you hear Weight Watchers is changing its name to WW? There must be a really good reason to depart from a well-known brand and create the potential confusion with Windstream’s own wholesale division (which also uses those two letters as one of its marks) . It would appear helping people know what you do as part of your name is going out of fashion. KFC had Fried Chicken surgically removed from its name and Starbucks no longer sports the word Coffee in its logo. Heck, even Jo-Ann excised the word Fabrics from its name. Of course the most galling of them all is Dunkin’. Yes, as of January 1 st 2019, they will perform a Donutectomy to their name. Kind of makes me glad I’m working from home today so I don’t have to stop by their store and get all nostalgic. Happy Friday!!

Friends, Purpose. Granted, not everything has one, however, many do. Sometimes there is a good reason for doing something, although it is not apparent. Take, for instance, the Great American Beer Fest’s Safety Team deployment at the Denver Convention Center’s exit stairwell. The common perception is we’re there to catch folks who roll down the stairs. Not so. While this is a reasonable assumption –imagine 15,000 rambunctious folks who may have imbibed several too many 1 oz. beers, storming down this massive stairwell. Not ideal. Once a person starts rolling down, they become a bowling ball and anyone trying to catch them is a pin. Instead, this is your proverbial 1 oz. of prevention. The thing is, to the impaired mind, sliding down a railing sounds fun, not dangerous. So, having someone block each of the 18 “slides” prevents the exit from becoming a bowling alley. In other cases the purpose of things is more straightforward. Take donuts. Their purpose is self-evident. A great tre

Friends, Summer is over. Alright, you’ve technically got one more day to go out and enjoy the season -and what a day it’s shaping-up to be! Driving into the south Denver office this morning, dark mauve clouds hanging over the downtown area had sunrise paint their underbelly a bright shade of amaranth. The backlit buildings, dark diamond-studded pillars, provided a beautiful contrast to the orange sphere rising in the east. The only fly in the ointment is the fact low light pictures taken while driving 55 miles per hour never turn-out right, so memories are all I have of the spectacular sight. The crisp morning air blended with the donuts in my car gave off a subtle rose petal scent, harmoniously complementing the scene. With a forecasted  80 degree high, it’s the perfect day for everything but complaining. If you’re in the office this morning, come enjoy a donut. I realize it’s not Friday yet, but hey, tomorrow’s a whole season away. Happy Thursday!

Friends, Incongruence is all around us, you just have to look for it. Take Ray Liotta’s Chantix commercial . Have you seen it? A macho badass wearing bad foundation and mascara. I can’t decide whether it’s funny or sad. Or take the latest hurricane. Florence is flooding the Carolinas. Might a better Italian toponym be Venice? I suppose you could say Florence is Turin the Carolinas and it will Rome for a while, making them flood like Venice . Then there’s a LinkedIn invitation I received this week. Dracul Rusu from Romania. Sure, Galați county is east of Transylvania, however it’s in the right neighborhood. He has no profile picture, which makes sense, what with cameras using mirrors as part of their mechanisms, his image would be hard to capture. He attended Babes University… how cool is that? Alright it’s actually Babeș-Bolyai University, a bona fide institution with over 40K students. A full-stack software developer, he also drives a cab -among other activities. Alright, so

Friends, Special spaces speak spontaneously. Spartan or splendid, they can spur spine-tingling spells on us. Spend a split-second at a spellbinding spire and something spiritual sparks the imagination. Speaking of inspiration, the sport played with a prolate spheroid’s nascent season can leave us speechless. Spellbound spectators speculate on speedy victory for the equine species representing their team. So, why am I spinning my speech to splice words that begin with SP together? This snapshot might explain it. Spot it? Yes, Spotx, Spaces and Spenga span our spot. Speculate on it over a special treat. Perhaps even a Spudnut donut? Happy Friday!

Friends, In a world where perception is reality, how we shape our perceptions matters. Reality is a complex beast and there are many ways to correctly interpret the same thing -that’s why reasonable people can disagree. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying everyone is right -I also believe many statements are either true or false, and there are outright lies. What I am saying is we need to put things into perspective. The best way I know to do this is to try to understand whether the statement in question is an anecdote or a trend -and try not to generalize and paint in broad strokes. I cringe when a foreigner does a terrible thing and all foreigners are painted with the same brush -or worse, it becomes justification for xenophobic rants and policies. Granted, any crime is terrible and we should aspire to a world without it, however, that anecdote needs to be cast against the latest census data. In 2010 non-citizens were 7% of the U.S. population and only 5% of the prison population