How To Make People Think You’re Stupid

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People are always asking me important questions about life, and today I’d like to address something that seems to come up a lot – how to look stupid.

While we wish that people would judge us on more, we are simply too busy for that kind of investigation. So, in the absence of an explanation, placard, or sign, we all look through our own filters at your appearance and make a rapid decision about whether to cross the street to avoid you or count you in the circle of trust.

This list is by no means comprehensive. You can add the one’s I left out in the comments section.

Walking Around With Your Mouth Wide Open

A popular look for committed drug addicts and lobotomy patients, the slack-jawed Neanderthal look, often accompanied by gazing downward at nothing in particular, which makes your forehead seem much larger, is a sure fire way to avoid being asked any complicated math questions.

In fact, people who leave their mouths gaping for long periods of time are seen as unpredictable and possibly threatening. It takes fewer muscles to frown than smile, I’m told, so close your mouth, smile and make eye contact once in a while if looking stupid is not your goal. You’ll also discover that fewer insects fly into your opening and lay eggs.

Wearing Your Baseball Cap Backwards

This was cool for about 5 minutes, but so many guys didn’t get the memo that this fashion hiccup has persisted far beyond a reasonable death. Then those pesky capitalist pigs started printing stuff on the back of caps, and gave the “tell me about the rabbits again, George,” look a zombie like extra life.

Most adults regard the cocky refusal to put the brim of your hat over your eyes as a stubborn refusal to grow up, with special emphasis on a lack of awareness that others are laughing at you behind your back, where the front of your hat is.

A close cousin of this one is the Starsky and Hutch 70′s sunglasses perched on my head, the sunglasses facing backwards behind my head but still over my ears, in case a sunburst, death ray, or spotlight hits without warning. Wearing sunglasses at night is just so prickish and annoying it should have it’s own category, but I’ll include it here. If you aren’t Stevie Wonder or maxxed out on meth, take of the sunglasses if they are not covering your eyes – and it’s sunny.

NOTE: This one is mostly committed by 20 something males. Extra stupid points if you are over 30 and still wearing your cap backwards. It’s said that girls mature faster than boys and in this case they outgrow this silly impulse at age 12.

Smoking Cigarettes

Sometime after the Civil War do-gooder liberals in the nanny-state government forced tobacco companies to state plainly on the side of each individual package of 20 cigarettes that they are lethal. Not only are cigarettes the single worst thing you can do for your health, death comes in an extremely painful, horrifying, and ugly way.

I thought this was unnecessary. Who doesn’t know cigarettes are horrible? I figured watching your parents and grandparents die a horrible death would be enough to keep people from starting. I was wrong. The warnings in the side of cigarette packs are useless.

If you smoke, you stink, you make the air around you stink, your butts litter the earth, and we all know you are paying a blue fortune for all these benefits.

Studies show that people who smoke are considered less intelligent, but, less than intelligent people don’t read these studies, because they are out in the parking lot smoking. If this one makes you angry, consider what the people walking past you as you huddle near the door in the rain, in the snow, in the heat, or in a crossfire hurricane, huffing on a paper tube of poison on your break. Los-ing!

Giving Money to Liberal Democrat Politicians

In case you haven’t noticed the Democratic Party has abandoned every principal it held in the 60′s and been taken over by radical leftists, willing to trample the founding document that made The United States the greatest nation in history in a quest to “transform America” into a socialist nirvana that has failed every time it’s tried.

With super majorities in the House, Senate, and an unqualified ideologue in the White House, they have spent more money than every president from George Washington to George Bush, emptied the treasury and borrowed so much money for Communist China, (or existential enemy) that your unborn grandchildren will be paying in excess of 70% income tax just to keep it going.

As unemployment has hit depression levels, bankruptcies hit their highest levels in history, more than 1,000,000 (that’s a million) families lost their homes to foreclosure and as many as 60% are underwater – owing more on their homes than they are worth, the liberal Democrats bemoan their view that the trillion dollar stimulus was not enough.

Reaching into every area of your life from how much water flushes your toilet to the light bulbs you can buy, they are scurrying to pass even more regulations and implement a government takeover of 1/6 of the economy in a health care law that is so bad 1/2 the states in the US are currently suing the federal government because the law is patently unconstitutional. (Isn’t the president a constitutional scholar? Oops!)

Ignoring the biggest landslide mid-term election in history in 2010, and aided by a fawning media that more closely resembles a communist propaganda machine, Democrats are desperately raising as much money as possible to run attack ads based on class warfare and scare tactics (like the pushing granny off a cliff in a wheelchair) because they simply cannot run on their record.

If you give money to these locusts, and fail to wake up and do your own research on the issues, and the candidates, then you not only look stupid, you are stupid. And if you in any way support the reelection of Homer J. Obama you may as well turn your baseball cap backwards, light up a cigarette, and walk around with your mouth open. They’ll be a government bus along for you soon.

How I Nearly Died Last Friday

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The story you are about to read is 100% true.

It’s Friday June 3rd 2011 in Denver Colorado and I’m being held down on a bed on the 3rd floor of the positively named Denver Health Care Hospital.

The ordinary private room is filled with nearly every nurse, resident, orderly and employee on the floor. I am drenched in my own blood and so are they.

The surgeon who had performed a cancer removal surgery on me earlier that morning, was on top of me trying to stop the artery in my neck from bleeding any more. He’s deftly pulling blood clots out of the wound on my neck, and shoving packing into the blood, trying to get forceps on the leak, but I don’t know any of this. All I know is what I can see, hear and feel.

It feels like I’m being pinned down by wrestlers.

My head is jammed to the left as far as it will go, and the smiling nurse who greeted me when they brought me up from the recovery room a few hours earlier is squeezing my free hand and telling me over and over that I’m fine, that I’m breathing okay, and to look at the oxygen saturation level on the monitor. I can’t believe I’m not breaking her hand, because I’m screaming with my mouth closed. She is not smiling.

She is replaced by another nurse for a moment and returns to to inject a big fat dose of morphine into the IV on my left arm – sending me hurtling through space in a dizzy gravity bending sensation of warmth. The stinging subsides but the pain will not. I close my eyes and can no longer distinguish what all the voices are saying as a freight train rushes by my ears.

And You May Ask Yourself – How Did I Get Here?

3 weeks ago a lump removed from my neck biopsied out to be squamous cell carcinoma cancer and a quick series of tests were setup and performed and today’s surgery was scheduled. The cancer I have is “unsourced” meaning that the swollen lymph node they removed earlier can’t be where cancer starts, my plucky lymph node simply captured the cancer cells that leaked out from somewhere, walled itself off and gave it’s life in a losing battle waiting for help to arrive.

The surgery today was to remove the rest of the lymph nodes on the right side of my neck and any other cancer they could find, biopsy the heck out of all the tissues that do tend to be sources for cancer like my throat, tongue, and missing tonsils so that I could then get six weeks of radiation and chemotherapy to “sterilize” my neck and hopefully cure me of cancer.

One of the many interesting facts I’ve learned through the shock of the last 3 weeks is that despite the fact that I never smoked a cigarette in my life, the fact that my parents both smoked heavily (and both died of cancer), married a smoker, played music in bars filled with smoke until I was 30 and smoked approximately 1.5 Navy destroyer-sized battleships full of marijuana at the same time, likely contributed to my cancer. Second hand smoke is now my sworn enemy.

My daughter Rachael drove up from Phoenix to help me through the surgery and take care of Little Dog Too while I was in the hospital, and when they rolled me into the operating room that morning, I was more annoyed than scared about the whole matter.

When I emerged from the operating room I was in a great deal of pain, much worse than the first surgery in the same place. But, they stabilized me and wheeled me up to the room where I was admitted as planned, to spend the night with a drain tube in my neck and monitered on the outside chance that I’d have a leak or infection pop up. I would.

No amount of pain medication would make me comfortable as the morning turned to afternoon and I rolled over on my not-cut-side to try to sleep, a challenge in the best of circumstances with all the tubes, wires, IV, nurse visits and enough beeping sounds to make me feel like I was back in Vegas.

When I Woke Up I Knew I Was In Big Trouble

I couldn’t roll back over on my back, but felt like someone was standing on my neck with a size 14 construction boot on. My neck was throbbing wildly and pressure and pain shot in every direction from the wound into my head, face, jaw and down my shoulder. I tried to clear my throat – I could not. I was choking and could having trouble breathing. I began to panic.

The nurse call button / tv remote fun box was lying right in front of my face and I managed to free my arm and get a finger on the button. You never know what to say into one of these things, and as a former drug addict I’ve always felt a big sheepish about asking for pain medication – knowing that everyone at the nurses station was rolling their eyes and thinking – “really?”

In a hoarse voice that surprised me I said “I’m in a lot of pain – can you send my nurse in?”

But, no nurse arrived. I waited and grew increasingly alarmed about breathing and as I woke up more fully through the morphine I realized my neck was swollen up the size of the elephant man. I pressed the button again and told the may-I-help-you-voice that I was in trouble – I was scared – and that I could not breathe. My voice broke. I was really starting to get scared.

The friendly nurse walked into the room and in one of those scenes from a play where an actor enters the room and is chatting along about nothing-so-much until she BOOM notices what the audience already knows will freak her out – my nurse’s eyes widen and she begins moving around at warp speed, checking everything, every dial, every bit of data and trying to turn my neck to examine the drain causing me to nearly faint from pain, then pressing the button on my monitor herself, saying magical words that had the impact on the 3rd floor of hitting the launch codes in the president’s nuclear weapons football.

People rushed in and out, stuff happened fast, and the surgeon who had been impossible for me to get on the phone and whom getting to see personally was like getting an audience with the Pope, rushed into my room from mid-surgery downstairs in scrubs. along with 1 of his residents.

He asked me how far I could turn my head to the left, which was a pitiful .5 inches maybe, then shoved it all the way to the side and held my head down into the tiny hospital pillow. I felt pressure on my neck where the surgery was and then the shocking sensation of liquid pouring all over me as if someone had dumped a large pitcher of lemonade on my chest. I opened the one eye that could see above the pillow and realized I was feeling my own blood cascading down my body and splashing everyone in sight.

Twilight Zone

The entire time the surgeon never raised his voice, he calmly told me that I was doing fine, that he was about done, (he was not) and spoke his commands to the nurses and staff as if he were working out a stubborn crossword puzzle. His calm voice was incredibly helpful to me. The worlds-most-awesome-nurse took my hand and let me squeeze the blood out of hers, and then shot me full of morphine as the surgeon packed me up with more cotton than the South fought the Civil War over to stabilize me for a trip back to the O.R. to open me up and go back in to find and fix the problem.

Note to the President – Please Stop Trying To Put Healthcare Under Government Control

These people are not like us. Their jobs are not like postal work. Doctors, nurses, surgeons, all of em, are a special breed of human who want to help other humans when we are sick and at our grossest. And they perform miracles.

Any set of ideas or philosophies that end up thinking that hampers their ability to do this is a giant clue that your ideas are bad.

So Rick – What Have You Learned?

In the 5 days that have followed this epic event I’ve had an appointment with the oncologist to schedule the radiation and chemotherapy no one wants to go through, but they seem anti-climactic now, like the Super Bowl is already over, and now I have to play some regular season games that while intense, will never approach the big game already behind me. I’ll find out if that’s true very soon as treatments start in less than 2 weeks.

I’ve been so busy (and in denial) about having cancer that I’d barely told anyone, including my friends and my family, both of whom I want to apologize to right now. I’m sorry.

And, I’ve procrastinated about how to communicate with the people who read my books and articles and have bought my courses and stuff. Many of you are like family to me, and we share so much in creative development.

I Made No Deals With God

While I was in danger, I made no deals with God. I was ready to go – and the life I had was frankly not bringing me much happiness. On reflection I wondered why I was so apathetic about the outcome and now I believe I know why.

I have simply not been doing the kind of work I was capable of, and letting illness and momentum keep me on the sidelines.

I’ll be talking to you more about this new direction in the weeks ahead, but can tall you I AM excited because I think I’ve got my best stuff on the drawing board and that you’ll love it!

I Need Your Help

It is not easy for me to ask you to help me. I am wildly self-reliant and I’ve stubbornly plodded along too many times when a prudent man would stop and ask for assistance, and paid the price.

The link below goes to a page that explains what I’m about to go through, and a button you can click to make a donation via Paypal (or your credit / debit card) to a fund setup to help me get through this.

Since I love to name things, I’m calling it The Save The Butts Project.

There are no pre-set amounts. You can choose to contribute as much or as little as you feel led to give. Or you can fuggeddetabouttait and not give anything. I totally understand.

I’ve assembled some digital downloads, videos, audio, etc that I’ve not previously released, or have sold in the past, as a thank you gift for your donation – no matter how big or small.

Click Here to Donate to the Save the Butts Project

Thanks in advance for your support, generosity and prayers. I’ll be talking with you soon.

Rick

Rachael Butts Rides With A Vengeance

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My daughter was a champion barrel racer when we lived in Texas. I found this video and came up with the idea to merge it with her skateboarding.

The announcer, noticing how fierce she was as a competitor said that after she got dropped from competition accidentally last week she had been “riding with a vengeance.”

That’s my baby! So I put up a picture of her in a kids race when she was in AWANAS – and I realized she has ALWAYS ridden with a vengeance.

Could I love her more?

Here’s a link to Rachael’s website. Rachael Butts .com She is a graphic designer and creates cool custom wordpress sites for cool people.

Happy Birthday To Me

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Happy Birthday To Me! December 22 – Here’s the link to show your love for me http://7littlechoices.com

LOL – I know sometimes I exceed my own maximum of cheeseballness. But, honestly friends, I get these ideas. They come to me like fun little friends and invite me to play.

So, today I started humming happy birthday to me, and then I thought how it could be a metal song, then I started itching to play it, then I thought well I ought to for sure make a video, then the pure pimp in my thought “hey bud – you just put out that ebook – and you shouldn’t annoy your readers with 2 emails today – so let’s combine them!”

And That Is The Anatomy of A Quark

I put my amp on the desk, turned on the isight cam in my mac and fired it up directly into the laptop with one “oops” take.

Perhaps, what has been missing from my O/S is a dialogue with you?

The confusion about what to publish here – or where to put things – has cleared up while discovering the WordPressMU new with Maria Reyes McDavis aka WebSuccessDiva – and through the fantastic support of Felicia Slattery to just be me.

Here is me. For you. For me.

First Penguin In The Water

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I once saw this National Geographic program about penguins and how after sitting on the eggs for weeks without food they were relieved for egg-duty by their mate – and headed straight for the ocean.

But, they stopped short and crowded on the cliff overlooking the sea in fear that a walrus would be waiting below to eat them, until finally one unlucky guy got jostled in by the crowd.

The penguins peered down to see if he was okay – and if he swam around and started eating, in they’d go.

Somebody has to be first.

And, if the stakes are lower than being eaten, maybe this time it should be you?

First penguin in the water

Mr Butts Scandalous NSA Presentation

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The one and only time I was invited, uh, allowed to speak at NSA (the National Speakers Association – not the National Security Agency and Jack Bauer) was at a Winter Workshop in Portland Oregon.

This presentation is NOT for the weak at heart – Rated R – but totally for anyone who wants to leverage their speaking revenues online. Some of the website references are dated but all of the ideas are still very much alive.

Click the play button below to hear the audio:

Netting Huge on the Net For Speakers Audio Part 1

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Netting Huge on the Net For Speaker Audio Part 2

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Attendees: The room was packed with a who’s-who of speaking luminaries and crazy people, bureaus, marketers, and more crazy people. If you were in the room for this live presentation – or know someone who was – PLEASE leave a comment below and share this FREE AUDIO with anyone you think could use the irreverent funny information.

Donna Townsend & Rick Butts

Donna Townsend and Rick in Roanoke Virginia for a speech. Donna was Rick's marketing director and gave the introduction to this presentation.

Introduction: Donna Townsend – my director of marketing

Aweber’s Queer Little Accounting Method

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While Aweber is the flagship of email marketing and list management, particularly among Internet marketers, there are some peculiarities about their mindset that can make them a very annoying business partner. Here are the two that bug me the most.

Long know for their extreme, some say fanatical, adherence to every scintilla of the Can-Spam act, Aweber has been the most stringent about uploading an existing email list to their servers without sending out “ye olde confirmation email.”

Anyone who knows anything about email marketing knows that if you send any existing list a confirmation email your list is going to shrink up like a grape in the sun, and you’ll end up with a raisin in the morning. Now, some will say that you SHOULD prune the list (interesting dried fruit thing going on here – purely unintentional) and that the folks who didn’t want to keep getting email from you who don’t confirm when you move the list are good riddance.

I think that’s stupid and at best willful ignorance.

Email Marketing is All About Timing

Everybody has had the experience of being on a list that you’d ignored for weeks or months – just deleting the updates or the ubiquitous and dirt-stupid “This Won’t Last Long!” obvious affiliate offer subject lines driven by false scarcity IMHBAO. Then one day you happen to see a subject line that sounds interesting or catches your eye. You open the message, are moved to click a link, and voila – you bought something!

And everyone who sends email to their list, whether a newsletter, blog update, or pure offers, has seen someone rise from the dead like Count Dracula and make a purchase. Holy cow, I didn’t know you were even still ALIVE Mr. Used to Be a Happy Blog Commenter / Twitter Chirpster / Facebooke Friendly – and here you are buying my schwag again! Yippie!

Money From Prunes

If you’d have pruned this customer based on open rates, or click-thru statistics you’d have never made the sale, and the buyer would have missed out on the opportunity to get something they wanted. (Ok, I’ll give you that the buyer isn’t really losing out if they never see a particular offer – or are they?) I’m primarily writing this for you and me from the marketer’s perspective.

Everything that happens online is driven by timing. Why do you think a sales letter that at best converts at 2% – 3% loses 98% of the people sho see it. You can run all your Taguchi Split Testing data by me and I’ll continue to insist that anecdotal evidence is that most people online have the attention span of a house fly and that 1000 things can take you away from clicking that buy button.

What Can Distract Someone Online?

  • An inbound text message on their Iphone or cell.
  • A Facebook alert that someone they don’t know just had tuna for lunch.
  • Twitter and all it’s sick and twisted reindeer game apps like Hootsuite.
  • Someone yelling – “come and eat this or I’m throwing it out to the dog!”
  • The dog making a series of “urp-urp-urp” pre-wretching “I’m fixing to vomit” throat sound that can wake even the soundest sleeping human blot upright.
  • Blue screen of death (see Microsoft Windows Support) – Mac users can skip this one.
  • An actual phone call.
  • An actual human visit.

Which brings me in a poorly structured transition to:

The Whole Aweber Stats Obsession Thing

Tom Kulzer - Boy Wonder Founder and CEO of Aweber

Tom Kulzer, founder of Aweber, admitted in an interview that he created the basic sequential autoresponder business at age 12 (okay he was a little older but not much) and it turned into a successful business pretty straightaway. Tom has never had any other business. Tom is brilliant and a super nice young man, but not having had trenchworthy experience in any other business has made him a bit myopic about what his company ought to do/be for the everyday customer.

Their fixation on statistical data and super drill down reports is so thorough and amazing that seriously, I suspect Obama should hire Tom to fix the economy – or at least find out where the $700 Billion Schtimulus money went. But then, Tom has far too much business experience to get a shot at that gig.

But, almost no one I know uses any of that statistical data – ever. Most of us operate Aweber for what we want from it, something to capture emails and let us send broadcast emails when we think up something to send. Frankly, I’ll bet most Aweber accounts don’t even have more than 1 follow up message – failing to use even the auto-responder feature. We know we should use them, but most don’t.

Aweber Bills You For Unsubscribes!

This article began, like most of my rants, on me noticing a disturbance in The Force. My Aweber monthly bill has edged up from $29 to $49 without me doing any major listbuilding activity and I wondered why. Turns out I am being billed for 950 unsubscribes! I called the sales department guy and asked how my tab went up – and he told me I had a list on this account about 1000 people higher than I knew I had.

Why would Aweber charge me for the people who are unsubscribed? Easy, they are getting high on the fumes of the whole statistical thing. The guy actually told me that “some people like to look at that data and figure out which message in their autoresponder got the most unsubscribes.”

Are you kidding me? First, that never even occurred to me and I’ve been making money online for 14 years. Second – I DON’T EVER “like to look at data” and if I ever wrote something that sent the list into an unsubscribe frenzy – prunes away! Good riddance to those people! LOL

Now, THAT’S an unsubscribe – not someone who didn’t even see the new shiny “I’ve moved my list – please please please God click the confirmation link so I can be an Aweber customer too like Ryan Deiss or Perry Belcher?”

Perhaps You Could Tell Me Why You are Charging Me Extra Every Month – Forever?

I asked Mr Helpful if he could delete these deadbeats – repeating my snort that I would never go look at who unsubscribed – much less “enjoy looking at the data.” He said he could and that would save me $20 a month.

But, as for knocking that $20 off my existing bill. No freakin’ way cowboy! We stored that data for you (without asking you or telling you – but charging you) and will that be Visa or Mastercard?

Agree Disagree? Tweet – Facebook and comment below – I’ll reply!

Ali Brown Feel Something Big Video

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The shocking (and hilarious) Ali Brown spoof video has been moved to the Freemium Members Area.

Members click here to login

Not a Freemium Member? Why not? Click here to join.

Mimimalist World View

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Regular readers (and slightly irregular readers) of this blog will notice that everything has freakin’ changed! Well, you voted for change, right?

Choosing a layout for this site has driven me crazy. When I discovered the single column layout for my WordPress theme, it was like Hosanna! Yeah! FREEDOM!

I’m sure the cleanliness is jarring to the eyeball that is used to seeing the cluster-fritz of the typical blog landing page. Conventional blogging wisdom is about monetization and navigation and I found that pursuing the placement of affiliate links and money links and navigational acrobatics only served up a ton of distractions that make it difficult for me to focus on anything.

I’ve opted to create a mega-clean layout – sort of like a single piece of white letterhead with a single purpose, instead of the back of one of those old piece of crap vans you pull up behind once in a while with 250,o00 stupid bumper stickers from 1974 and the busted tail light hanging on for dear life. And, why is it that these denizens from the dump are nearly always brown?

People who sell their services or need to focus on how they get paid, and not on giving visitors a bunch of ways to leave their site, especially for a Hostgator link. I saw a site the other day where the guy (nameless but you know him) markets to newbies (it’s in the name of the blog) and for some insane reason had big giant Adsense blocks on every page – right on the eye-tracking hot spots to boot!

Why on earth would you want to put contextual advertising on your site – on your home page – that pay a 2 cents a click when you could keep the visitor on your page and get them to optin to your email list – or buy a product that makes you $50? Well, since his mentor was the Adsense guru back in the day…

Okay – back to me.

I’m currently ghostwriting a book for a client this month and then got the flu which turned my brain into sort of a cement mixer only it doesn’t turn ’round – and while I’m talking like Lamb Chop I figured I may as well torture my blog and lo and behold I discovered this awesome layout and then was forced to actually clean up the pages – and then – one time – at band camp – I figured WTF let’s just write a little post at 2am since Red Eye is on and someone may actually come here and gross out over the photo of me in the hot tub.

Hopefully tonight I’ll blow the last of the margarine out of my sinuses (hat tip to Wayne’s World) and be able to get back to writing this really cool book. Then I can put the saddle back on the Stardust Factor and buck up to create the course for professional speakers that is about 8 months pregnant.

If I can breathe then tomorrow night I’ll hook myself up to the Sleep Solutions home study sleep test and get to the bottom of this vexing sleep apnea problem – and hopefully get my life back.

Talk soon!

Rick

Brothers from Different Mothers

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Brothers from different mothers!

Brothers from different mothers!

My brother Rodney came to Denver for a big top secret government conference and I was lucky to get a chance to have dinner with him.

Rodney works for FEMA – a highly clandestine X-Files type black helicopter ops type gig for the super-smart uuber geeks. I’m pretty sure he knows both Mulder and Scully, though he disavowed any knowledge.

Rodney and I have the same Father (as far as we know!) and different mothers and are each the oldest of 2 brothers of the old man’s 2 pairs of kids. (No, he didn’t keep them secret from each other – no polygamy here.)

Since 99% of the time I do see Rodney, which is far to rare, it is always in a group setting. I’m not sure if we have ever sat together, privately, and had a 1 on 1 conversation. It was great!

Rodney is a very smart guy, a genuine man in full, and as I learned last night, a really soulful dude.

Family, what a concept. I pretty much live on my little cyber-island, in a fairly monastic world that primarily includes Little Dog. Since I bailed on traveling in 2005, my world is a small one, after all.

I think this needs to change a little.

Ghost Town the Movie

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Last night I was blown away by one of the most surprisingly wonderful motion pictures. Ghost Town looked like a light and funny romp and I love Greg Kinnear and Tea Leoni so I bought my ticket and salted my popcorn.

There were only about 20 people in the theater on a Tuesday night so I had the 3rd row all to myself and I settled in to enjoy a comedy. I don’t usually see comedy films in theaters, preferring to see sci-fi or special effects type films that have BIG SCREEN action. Comedies usually get viewed on cable or DVD.

I laughed and laughed and snorted and squealed like a braying donkey (so much so that people leaving the theater took the time to tell me I had a “great laugh.” Ghost Town is brilliant written and so well acted by the lead Ricky Gervais I couldn’t believe it hasn’t gotten more press. Ah, well, maybe the movie elites were busy with a Britney story.

Creative, fresh, funny and poignant. Gervais plays perhaps the least empathetic human in New York, a dentist who does his work and goes home to be alone. While under anesthesia for a colonoscopy he “dies for 7 minutes” and gains the ability to see, hear and talk to dead people.

NOTE: The Saturday Night Live actress Kristen Wiig who is known for her bizarre interrupting “better than you” routines, and played the producer in Knocked Up, is BRILLIANT as the surgeon who has to reveal to the paranoid Gervais that he died on the table. Her obfuscating dialogue with Gervais is nothing short of comedy dynamite and should be studied by anyone who wants to be funny.

As funny as the movie was I was not prepared for the huge emotional arc that the snarky dentist would go through as he began to see the plight of the dead people who asked him to help them get closure and move on to wherever movie ghosts go.

Gervais had so convinced me of his hard boiled meanness I was nearly blown away as he started to see what was really going on around him.

I have to admit that this film made me look at my own selfishness and self absorption. As I’ve been mulling over my options about where to take this next phase of my life – I’ve gotten so wrapped up in ME that I forgot that there are a lot of other people on the planet too.

When the dentist’s partner sits him down and asks him how being such a total prick is working out for him – and how long he plans to continue with it – it hit me in the chest.

With all the lame and awful films asking for my $10 (and so many depressing brutal films made for twentysomethings) I wanted to find the writer, director, and producer as well as the Hollywood exec who let this film be produced and thank them all.

Ghost Town gave me laughter that released tons of endorphins, entertained me, and had the impact of a great inspirational speech – and it only cost $10.

My Daughter Rachael Video

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I caught Rachael on film for a few moments today and she revealed something to me for the first time – and when she did I just caught the coolest, most special look on her face. I turned it into a video.

You just have to capture these moments when they happen. Rachael is now 25, but you know she’ll always be my “little girl.” I love you Rae…

Rachael Butts Website

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