Pow! Right Between The Eyes! Andy Nulman's Blog About Surprise

Wired's Mystery Mag--A Full Issue of Vindication

This month's Wired magazine dedicates its entire issue to "Mystery," and is guest-edited by a master of Surprise, the ridiculously over-talented creator/producer/director J.J. Abrams. 

As all FOPs know, Mystery is part of the Surprise family;  a first cousin, I believe, if my family tree diagram is correct.  One sets the stage, while the other delivers what usually hits one, well, right between the eyes.

That said, not only has the theme brought a swift current of buzz to a moribund medium (a magazine printed on paper!), oft-dismissed of having one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel, but obviously vindicates a lot of the ramblings that have filled this space for 701 posts now. 

Here are two quotes from the issue that I happen to adore.  The first is from an article about the psychology of magic, featuring a very intellectually-verbose Teller, the usual silent partner of the Penn & Teller team:

Unless Teller sees the symptoms of astonishment--mouth agape, eyes widened, pupils dilated (a.k.a "The Surprise Face" here)--he doesn't consider the trick a success. 

"The magic show is a competition," he says. The audience is trying to figure you out.  They aren't suspending their disbelief, they're trying to expose you as a scam artist."

And this from the piece penned by Jacobs himself, talking about the ultra-secretive film trailer to the Surprise hit Cloverfield:

"When the trailer hit the screens right before Transformers, people freaked out. Not necessarily because of the content of the trailer, but because it was a surprise—they knew nothing about it beforehand.

"That was the point: The intended effect was to make a teaser trailer that actually teased. It worked like gangbusters, all because we hadn't prepublicized the film on entertainment shows and in magazines.

"It was a small experiment that proved what most everyone knows: Having all the information isn't always better."

Got A Minute?

You're uber-passionate about a subject; in my case, Surprise.

You walk the talk by incorporating it into your business and personal life incessantly

You write a blog for three years, and deftly spin that blog into a book.

And you hope that some of it cuts through, rubs off, makes a difference.

And then you get an email from a kindred spirit named Jeremy Epstein, who never stops marketing, and who wants to set up as time to talk with you.  The email states:

I’m driving to/from NYC on Thurs- 4/23 (live in DC) and always schedule calls along the way.  Would either of these slots work for you (EST)?:

8.11am-8.39am (early bird option)
9.37pm-9.58pm (night owl option)

Jeremy doesn't just "get it" (see the French Deli post that I suspect influenced his rather off-beat meeting times), but he uses it.  And he brands it, as well.  What a difference a minute makes, indeed.

Thus he cuts through the clutter of my schedule, and proves to be time well spent.  All 26 minutes and 32 seconds of it.

Well done, Jeremy.

Take Two

Ran this close to three years ago,  but given the subject matter of the past two Pow! posts, it deserves an encore. 
What better way to mark this blog's 700th post than with the return of The Speedbandidts:

Surprisingly Slow

Surprise.  Useful to sell stuff indeed, but the power of Pow! is equally as effective in other, more socially-relevant arenas as well, most notably our dangerous roads.  Wrote about this in the Pow! book (excerpt below), but I was delighted to see that the spirit of Shock-to-Slow continues which is very different from "Shock-to-Stop," which we highlighted yesterday).  This from Adam Tuss at WTOP, a Washington, DC radio station:

LOUDOUN -- Behind the wheel, you want the least amount of distraction possible. So why is a local transportation agency painting crooked lines on the road on purpose?

The Virginia Department of Transportation says it's part of a safety campaign to get drivers to slow down in a high pedestrian and bicycle area.

"It is a low cost strategy to get motorists to slow down as they approach the bike trail and pedestrian path," says VDOT's Mike Salmon. "While at first motorists may be a little disoriented, the main point is to get them to pay attention and slow down through that area."

VDOT says similar programs have been successful in the United Kingdom and Australia. The transportation agency will study the zig-zagging lines for a year and see if they actually reduce speeds.

Here's the excerpt that inspired this post, and my continual interest in seeing Surprise used as a do-good device:

Another social issue taken by Surprise is that of reckless driving. 

To shock the system and force drivers to reduce their speeds through a busy intersection in Cambridge, Mass., city officials called on artist Wen-ti Tsen, who came up with a 20-foot circular mural painted directly on the asphalt.  The out-of-context-ness Surprised drivers into slowing down, if only to appreciate the work.

“I know I slow down,” said Lillian Hsu of the Cambridge Arts Council.  “There’s something in the road, so there’s a moment of confusion and you slow down.  Then you see it’s flat and you drive over it.”

Taken one step further, flat plastic optical illusions of pyramid-shaped 3D speed bumps were laid down in the middle of high-trafficked roads in Philadelphia and Phoenix. 

“At a mere $60 to $80 each, they cost a fraction of real speed bumps (which can run $1,000 to $1,500) and require little maintenance,” said Richard Simon, deputy regional administrator for the U.S. Highway Safety Administration.

The moral of the story, and of this post? 

SLOW DOWN, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!

Busting The Budget

One of the four main theories of creating Surprise is that "Little Things Mean A Lot.'

Well, this is KINDA a little thing...but could be construed as a big thing, I suppose, depending on how you look at it.

Anyway, crass it may be, but effective it seems to be as well.

Disproportionately effective, one may say. 

Watch the video, and YOU be the judge...

Good Vs. Evil In Your Gameroom

 The ElevenForty Company of Edinburgh make some Surprisingly outlandish products, including custom cufflinks featuring left and right three-dimensional profiles of you and/or your loved ones (even your dogs!).  These days, the buzz is all about the Opus, the world's most expensive table football game ("Foosball" for us here in North America), handcrafted in etched glass, stainless steel and your choice of precious woods. 

What's MORE, given the company's Doppelganger technology, ElevenForty can customize your team to include family, friends, celebs, you name it, as long as you provide a half-decent photo to use as a reference.

But what's MOST, is the special edition "Good vs. Evil" Opus being sold exclusively by the site 20Ltd. (an old fave here at Surprise Central).  For THAT edition, the company has drafted a line-up of do-gooders and the dastardly to engage in the eternal struggle between what's right and what's wrong. 

Kicking for the baddies are SOBs like Lucifer, Vlad the Impaler, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, Caligula, Jack the Ripper and Lady MacBeth, while Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Mary Poppins, Flash Gordon, God and Santa Claus are part of theline up for the hallowed and haloed. 

At 17,000 British Pounds, this game ain't for everyone, but if one could "fix" the matches so that the good guys always win, it may be worth it, if only for the benefit of our collective psyches.

Surprising Superheroes

This kinda goes against the grain because it's being telegraphed so far in advance, but after seeing his movie being pirated and previewed, Gavin Hood, director of the upcoming X-Men Origins: Wolverine, is using the Time-Bombing technique to drum up attention. 

Says he of his film that opens next week:

"Don't leave before the credits are over. Now I say that and I better not be in trouble, because you do realize that I'm not done with the editing process and the studio still has to sign off on everything. But, yes, Hugh [Jackman] and I have a couple Easter eggs somewhere in there."

Find out more and follow the story on Brent Sprecher's ComicBookMovie.com.  Please Lord, don't let the Surprise be a Hugh Jackman musical number in top hat, tails and claws...

I'll See You At Home

A favorite Pow! alumnus, Jeff Gruia of the Seeqa Eyeglass empire, is applying the "Taking Things Out Of Context" Surprise Marketing tactic to drive his business forward in tough times. 
 
Instead of waiting for customers to seek out  his high-end reading glasses in boutiques and upscale department stores, he's "taking the mountain to Mohammed" so to speak by selling his wares in home parties. 

Previously the domain of lesser-cost products from folks like Avon, Amway, Tupperware or a myriad of adult-oriented fashion and uh..."accessories," the advent of Botox parties and gatherings of gold-sellers has moved the price point up a notch, opening the doors to people like Jeff and his colorful frames and lenses.

Sounds obtuse, but that's the point in generating Surprise.  A new reason to get together coupled with a real-time social feedback look (i.e. "Those look great on you!" etc.) has made Jeff's latest risk a winner.

You can book your own reading glass party by calling Jeff at 1-877-448-8898...and as a little bonus, you can read up on him in this excerpt from my Pow! book below:

Jeff is the head of Seeqa International, an eyewear manufacturer which specializes in upscale fashion reading glasses and reader frames.  One day last year, from out of the blue, he called me (perhaps knowledgeable of my obsession with sunglasses) and asked for help with this problem.

“I watch shows like CSI and Law & Order all the time, and I always see my competitors’ frames on their characters,” Jeff complained.  “Is there a way I can get my glasses onto the people on these shows?”

“Sure,” I said.  “I can turn you onto a product placement consultant.  They’ll charge you about $100,000 and ask for an equivalent amount in product samples.  Let’s say they do their job really well—your frames and glasses will be seen all over the primetime players you covet.

“However, you’ll still be faced with the real problem,” I continued.  “Nobody would know that they’re yours.  In fact, if you started this call by telling me that the glasses I see on these shows right now are yours, I’d probably believe you.  I wouldn’t know the difference.”

Despite their color and unique designs, Seeqa glasses are rather undistinguishable from the competition.  And at $100 or so a pair, they are in the high-end of non-prescription readers, thus an easy mark for cannibalization by lower-priced, discount-store copycats.  The problem wasn’t getting them on TV screen; the problem was getting them on the radar screen.

So as a public service to a really nice guy, we spent some time “deconstructing” his true problem.  We looked at price, sourcing issues, lens power, fit, packaging, placement at the retail level (they’ve cracked some major names, like Neiman-Marcus and Saks), before finally being blinded by the shiny object: 

Why people wear them.

“Obviously, reading glasses are worn to read, but to read what?” I asked Jeff. 

At first, he didn’t get it, but then we started to list what people read with his—or any—glasses.  Summer “beach novels.”  Financial statements.  Music.  Love letters.  Blogs.  BlackBerries or cellphones.  Books on Surprise marketing. 

That “what” instead of “why” was the piece of the puzzle to concentrate on.  Instead of just being another purveyor of “fashion eyewear,” Seeqa could develop a line of “Lifestyle Eyewear.”  I’m sure you’re already picturing the different frames that could make “Business Glasses” or “Love Lenses” or “Mobile Eyes” stand out in the marketplace, and give rise to new designs in each category every year.

Then all Jeff would have to do is wait as the folks from Jerry Bruckheimer Productions and Dick Wolf Productions, producers of CSI and Law & Order respectively, call him for glasses for their shows.

Pow! Gets Stylin' With WWD...and Other Memorable Appearances

Been a good week to be a media whore.  Lotsa action and reaction to Pow! as a concept and as a book.

To start, while some may fancy an article in Time Magazine or the Wall Street Journal, THIS business author got his mega-thrill fix by being featured in a piece on Pow vs. Wow Surprise Marketing by Valerie Seckler in the bible of style itself, Woman's Wear Daily.  What's more, as you see  below, the article was aggregated on the Conde Nast Portfolio site's front page.  You can read the whole thing by clicking here.

 

Then, we head on over to Customer Management IQ for an interview with publisher Blake Landau.  I go into it expecting a snoozer, but the bubbly, adorable and effervescent Blake (just look at that sweet smile!) renders the process a blast.  The end result can be read by clicking this link.

Finally, it's onto the left coast to Vancouver's Brad Brooks and his eponyomously-named show on CKNW 980.  This was a marathon, but one that passed like a 100-yard dash thanks to the way he was prepared (must be that producer of his!) and his obvious enthusiasm about Surprise and its effect on business today.  Best of all, he actually read the book...or seemed to have read it.  You decide by listening to our chat by clicking on the MP3 logo atop the page this link takes ya to.

More to come, I hope. Really flabbergasted about all the support...

Susan Boyle--The New Queen of Surprise

A month ago, Susan Boyle was an unemployed, middle-aged everywoman with a magnificent voice.

Today, she is a world-wide sensation. 

(If you're the last person on earth who doesn't know who I am talking about, click on the two superfluous links in the sentences above.)

Such is the power of the Internet, right?

Such is the power of word-of-mouth marketing, right? 

Such is the power of social networking, right?

Nope.

Such is the power of Surprise.

Without it, there is nothing to network. 

There is nothing to talk about. 

No words to spread, nowhere. 

Face it folks,there are tens of thousands of people equally as talented as--more talented than!--our dear Susan, all who can also be found singing on YouTube. 

But Susan Boyle's story is not one of talent.  It's one of Pow!

"Without a doubt that is the biggest surprise I have had in three years of the show," gasped Britain's Got Talent judge Piers Morgan to Susan's breakout performance on the show. "I'm reeling from shock."

The dichotomy between the expectation set by Susan's frumpy appearance and the angelic sounds that emanated from her lips is what set the world on fire.  It's a textbook case of one of the key Surprise-generating tactics--Play Against Stereotypes. 

I couldn't be happier for Susan Boyle.  Not only did she destroy all preconceived notions, but her success validates the raison d'etre for this blog. 

Two Fast Pow!s

1)  Wanted to see how long it would last, but Surprise seems to have found a place mainstream as Time Magazine incorporates a pseudo Surprise-meter with its weekly "Pop Chart," which tracks the week's news items on a scale that ranges from "Shocking" to "Shockingly Predictable."

2)  Embodying the spirit of risk-taking necessary to create bottom-line enhancing Surprises comes the slogan for the upcoming Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr. flick "The Soloist":

"No One Changes Anything
By Playing It Safe"

Wear This Blog--Pow! Jeans Have Arrived

This is more than kinda cool.  As promised, Parasuco Denim Legend, proud outfitters of yours truly, this blog and my Pow! book, have officially released the Pow! Jean onto the market. The tight-fitting, well-creased blue-black denim is available all over, including Parasuco's stunning SoHo concept store on Spring Street in NYC (and on their way to winners of the 200 Blogger Challenge).

Gotta hand it to Sal Parasuco and company; they're not just putting out the jeans above, they're walking the Pow! talk with stunts like ice-melting hot styles at Fashion Week and projects like a Parasuco Hotel. Guess they read the book...

Fun House Cinema

Was sent this by a number of FOPs (Friends of Pow!), most notably the prolific Adam Lawrence--the story of Austin, Texas's wildly Surprising Alamo Draft House, a movie theater that's as entertaining as (if not more than) the films they screen.  I quote directly from the source, Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell's Church of the Customer blog, one of the best in the business:

Many movie theaters say they're in the exhibition business, which is one reason why many movie theaters are not entertaining. But the Alamo Draft House movie theater in Austin, Texas continues to inspire with its innovations of fun, which it calls signature events (including Surprise Central's fave, "Air Sex"). Two examples within one week:

1. Renegade Karaoke.
The Alamo rented a bus to drive around Austin filled with customers who, with the assistance of a mobile sound system, sang karaoke amidst surprised onlookers at Starbucks, a police station, a fitness class, and a busy intersection. The theater brought along a video camera to record the fun and compile a 4-minute highlight reel which will, naturally, be shown as entertainment before movie showings.

2. A secret world premiere of the new Star Trek film.
It was billed as a big-screen showing of the 1982 Star Trek classic, "The Wrath of Khan," with an opportunity to see 10 minutes of the new "Star Trek" film. But 10 minutes into the showing of Khan, that film mysteriously "broke." Out walks Leonard "Mr. Spock" Nimoy. He suggests the theater show the entirety of the new Star Trek film. It was all a ruse to host an unexpected world premiere among hard-core fanatics of the franchise. How fun is that?

Compare this to the usual uninspired insipidness offered by your local multiplex...and tell me where YOU would rather see your next film.  When's the next flight to Austin?

Eat This, Mofos!

Gotta love this brazen display of big balls.

As a follow-along from last week's post about criticism and how to deal with it comes this story from San Francisco's 7X7.com blog about the city's trendy Pizzeria Delfina.

Seems that the resto was on the receiving end of some vicious tearing-of-a-new-asshole by reviewers on Yelp!  Instead of retreating or trying to hide the critiques, Delfina's actually collected some of the nastiest one-star quotes, printed them up on t-shirts, and gave them to their wait staff to wear defiantly.  As 7X7 put it: "Instead of simply bitching about Yelp, they've made Yelp their bitch."

Check out one of these dissing-the-dissers shirts:

Incredible.  Love this.  We all should be able to face our opponents with such open contrary confidence.

Self Improvement

Last summer, when I sat down to write Pow!, one of my main goals was to give the book a wider audience than just “marketing types.”  Not that there’s anything wrong with a good marketing book (just ask Seth Godin, or Jack Trout, or Andy Sernovitz, or…), but I always felt that the lessons of harnessing and exploiting Surprise had wider, more interpersonal, more universal applications.

So, cut to the Barnes and Noble store in The Grove, L.A.’s elegant “theme town” shopping center.  Killing some time there before last week’s taping of The Late Late Show, I popped into the store to sign some books.

Yuri, an incredibly helpful associate there (that's him with me at right), pulled one (!) out of the “Marketing” section of the store, but couldn’t locate all the others that were still listed in inventory.

“Must be some kind of mix-up,” he shrugged, as I dejectedly made my way towards the door.  And then, talk about a Pow! Moment—there, on a coveted table position at the front of the store was the book, next to classics like “Getting Things Done,” “Good To Great,” “Made To Stick” and “F.I.S.H!”

Best of all, the sign on the table didn’t say “Marketing” or “Business”...but “Improve Yourself.”

I'll take that.

The Good News About Bad News

This is the story about a bad review.  A bad review of my Pow! book.  (The first after a string of raves he says defensively.)

Two of them, actually.

Well, make that one of them in the end.

The first comes from a guy named C. "Coffee Man" Reich on Amazon.com.  Holy jeez, he didn’t just critique me and the book; he reamed me with an industrial-strength roto-rooter.  I found it hard to walk for two days.  At least he liked the cover...

Such is life, though.  I learned two tough lessons while running a live entertainment event and producing its TV shows for 15 years and running a mobile media company for 10:

1) If you put something out into the world, it is open to criticism
Unless you’re comatose and hermetically sealed inside some bubble, bad reviews are part of the terrain (even then, someone may make some crack about the way you are sleeping).  They may sting, but bad reviews are as natural an occurrence as the sun rising.

2) No matter what you do, you’ll never please everybody
To comfort some of the younger, nervous, first-time show producers working for me at Just For Laughs, I would tell them that even if they cured cancer, someone somewhere will complain that you are contributing to the world’s over-population.  There's no such thing as a 100% unanimous win.

While I don’t necessarily agree with Coffee Man's opinion, I am in good company on his Amazon shit-list; other people lambasted include Leonard Cohen, Ram Charan and Norah Jones.   Meet you at the bar to commiserate (Leonard, you sing first).  

The other review story had an intriguing twist.  One afternoon a couple of weeks ago, my phone rang.  At the other end was a man named Jeff Sexton, who opened up the conversation with:

“You don’t know me, but I owe you an apology.”

Sexton went on to explain that he, too, had laced into me on Amazon…but did so after reading only the book’s first 100 pages or so. 

Continuing through it (a curious yet appreciated action, considering how many times I have given up on books that disappoint 100 pages in), Sexton ended up digging Pow!  A lot.  “I’ll change my review on Amazon if I can,” he pledged…and true to his word, eventually did.

I’ll take that.  But even if he didn’t, I would’ve taken it, too. What choice do I have...other than copping out by blocking my ears and covering my eyes?

So, as a hardened vet of lobbing goods and services into the whims of the public arena, here’s some advice to those who will (and face it, these days, with access to information and outlets for opinion so omnipresent, EVERYTHING we do will be subject to public whims sooner or later): 

When it comes to critics,
you should listen to them
...but you don’t necessarily
have to hear them.

What that means is that you need to establish your own acceptable level of signal-to-noise ratio.  Even the most mean-spirited disembowelment of your work contains a grain of something you can learn from.  The tough part is to not let the crap overtake said grain, thus the discipline of listening to what to improve while shutting out the noise.

Yeah, I wish everyone loved everything that I did.  At Airborne, with Pow!, in all walks of my life.

I also wish I were a 6-foot-three, 24 year old, independently wealthy, academic athletic rock star. 

The chances of both happening right now are the same.

But if I want people to learn from me, I have to be willing to learn from them.

No matter how they deliver the news.

Time-Bombing to Save Wildlife

An eye-popping, textbook example of the Surprise Marketing technique of Time-Bombing, for the World Wildlife Fund, from DDB in Brazil:

The Apple Doesn't Fall Far From The Tree

Check out my elder son Aidan's musings about improving the middle-seat flying experience. 

Wonder where he gets crazy ideas like these?

Bright Start, Sad Ending

Most FOPs know that I’m no fan of April Fool’s Day, but the folks at Airborne took advantage of the serendipitous timing of the day with the opening of the Wireless Industry’s semi-annual CTIA conference to pull off another one of our major “What Will They Think of Next?!” Pow! operations.

Here was the plan—parodying the sponsorship overload of most such conferences, we printed up 1,000 stickers proclaiming Airborne Mobile to be the official sponsor of the event’s elevators, bathroom breaks, shoeshine stands, garbage cans, coffee carts…even all the event’s signage itself.  The stickers were bold, colorful and impossible to miss.  They were also backed by easy-to-remove adhesive, so we wouldn’t get busted for vandalizing property. Here's one:

To cut as wide a swath as possible, we also printed up generic stickers with blank space so we could customize with a Sharpie as we went along (a la “This Escalator Sponsored by Airborne Mobile” and “This Water Cooler Sponsored by Airborne Mobile”).  No inanimate object could escape our whirlwind.  Check out a couple more pix, and keep reading after ‘em.

 

We did a dry run on March 31st, and it went like clockwork.  Running a covert operation with four Airborne cohorts was a blast, the shoeshine people loved us (we gave ‘em each $20 to decorate their stands), and we watched with glee as our handiwork brought smiles to the faces of those who passed them by on the relatively quiet pre-conference day.

We were all set for full-press deployment the following morning.  We were to gather at 8:00 a.m. on the official opening day of the conference (April 1) and plaster the place; a visually-explosive operation back-stopped by a hilarious press release that would hit the wire at 9:00 a.m., proclaiming Airborne as the new title sponsor of the entire CTIA conference (overshadowing giants like Microsoft, RIM, Samsung, Motorola and their brethren), and filled with made-up laudatory quotes attributed to the association’s CEO and President Steve Largent.

But then, just as I’m leaving the Convention Center for the day, someone asks me: “Did you hear what happened to Mark?”

Tragically, sadly, my friend Mark Desautels, the high-ranking CTIA exec who shepherded Airborne into the wireless space over a decade ago when we were a wobbly, 10-person start-up, had died late the day before of a massive heart attack while playing golf.

Despite months of planning, with only hours to go before pressing “Play,” there was to other choice—out of respect to Mark, his family, Steve Largent and CTIA, we aborted the operation and cancelled the press release.

The moral of the story?  In business, in life, no matter what your plans, the only one that matters is to do the right thing. You can cross all your “t”s, dot all your “i”s, check and double-check, and sometimes your best laid plans have to be laid off due to circumstances beyond your control.  While there was a very brief debate about us going ahead with the operation, we realized that the downside of being considered a bunch of insensitive idiots grossly outweighed any upside we could’ve mustered. 

Desautels was a great man, with a history of successful lobbying for an industry he helped grow.  A truly good-natured soul who would’ve roared at the sticker/sponsorship stunt, he is now linked to it, if only within the confines of this blog.

Mark, you will be missed.  This one’s for you. 

Poker About-Face

Spent a few days in Vegas last week at the CTIA conference, and one of the things that struck me was the extreme misery of poker players.

While waiting in a snaking line to pick up tickets for a show at Bellagio, I spent 15 minutes peering into the casino’s Poker Room, where a sizable tournament was taking place.  Now while I’m not much of a gambler, I do understand the need for a “Poker Face”…but when you see 'em en masse, the result is staggering, and quite hysterical.  Imagine playing cards on death row…without the camaraderie.

You gotta figure, in the tradition of Pow! Tactic #5 (“Look In The Rear-View Mirror”) and doing things backward, that there’s an opportunity for the next great Poker champ to swing things around and be uber-expressive; so much so that in the unabashed over-the-topness, he or she accomplishes the same objective of not letting opponents know what cards are being held.  (If the fashion world can have Beth Ditto, why can't the poker world have a Johnny Wildman?

Imagine the fun of televised Poker tournaments—now a cross between a funeral, a statistics class and a gunfight at OK Corral—if one of the players grimaced, made goofy faces, laughed, snorted, gestured and generally just lit up the room.

He or she may not live long, but the sight would most definitely be an entertaining one…for as little as it lasts.

Taxing Times Indeed

It starts off foolish, but April gets damn serious real fast thanks (!!!) to tax season in both the USA and Canada.  Given the state of the economy and investment portfolios, having to lay out additional funds this month pours industrial-strength road salt into our gaping wounds.  Even for those of us lucky to get a refund, the "pennies from heaven" could've and should've been in our hands anyway at an earlier date.

All this said, perhaps one of the most tell-tale quotes I read about the whole financial mess we're in comes from Time Magazine's Justin Fox, who said in an optimistic rant about the bright side of our plight:

"It may also teach Americans, for a few decades at least, that buying and selling houses and financial instruments doesn't bring lasting prosperity.  What brings prosperity is work."

One more day and it's the weekend.  Enjoy it.

No Fools Are You

Welcome to the Third Annual
Pow! Right Between The Eyes
April Fool's Let-Down.

STILL no jokes.  No pranks.  No "gotchas"!

And not because I'm a spoilsport or Springtime Scrooge. 

It's just that you expect Surprises on April 1st.

And expectations are the enemy of Surprise. 

In fact, it's a paradox.  You can't expect what you don't expect. 

So sorry to be a wet rag, but at Surprise Central, it's just another day.*

Uh...you weren't expecting this, were ya?

*(At the CTIA conference in Las Vegas though, things may be VERY different.  Check in here in a few days and see.)