Thursday, December 1, 2016

Conroyisms – Part 6

  • You can never save enough on a want to rationalize the purchase on price alone.

  • What does the early bird do with all of those worms?

  • Happiness takes effort and without effort the default is misery.

  • Isolation and apathy are poor substitutes for contentment.

  • When making plans the best tactic is to be flexible.

  • If a task is not worth a 100% effort then give it none.

  • Proficiency at prioritization is a prerequisite for progress.

  • When in doubt use logic instead of emotion.

  • Faith can be more powerful than logic but it comes with a price.

  • Show me a broke person and I’ll show you a person without a life plan that has poor budgeting skills and a victim’s mentality.

  • Our ability to rationalize a poor decision is both a virtue and a curse.

Tuesday, November 15, 2016

What Could Go Wrong?

While driving on 1-35 I noticed Pyro City Fireworks in Eagleville, MO. It is a gas station that sells BBQ in the front and a fireworks store in the back. 

They do have a no-smoking sign on the building. I hope people pay attention to it!

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

Conroyisms – Part 5

  • A “near miss” is actually a hit.

  • Defining oneself by the type and brand of alcohol consumed is an example of effective marketing meeting low self-esteem.

  • Everyone I follow on Facebook that is a runner eventually gets a serious injury–do they not notice the correlation?

  • Atoms do not actually touch each other as their electrons repel each other and this force increases exponentially as the distance between them decreases. So when you sit in a chair you actually levitating above it- just not very high.

  • It is your ability to transform your dreams into goals, and your focus on them, that will determine your happiness in life.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Symbiotic

I was picking up license plates for a new car in Adel, IA and noticed a sign on a building across the street. The sign was for a bar with the prosaic name Hideaway Lounge. It was a bar, i.e., a business where people make a profit off other people’s chemical dependency.

But it was the other business that really caught my eye, a 24 hour crisis center. How ironic that a bar and a crisis center are co-located.

It is an obvious symbiotic relationship but is it mutualism, commensalism or parasitism?  An additional irony is the address: 911.

Monday, August 15, 2016

Conroyisms – Part 4

Some of the things that make me stop and think “Really”:
  • License plates with stickers in multiple places besides the lower left corner.

  • People that refuse to get a computer or use the Internet.

  • Parents with children with more alcohol than food in their cart.

  • Graffiti.

  • Broke people driving new cars and living in big houses.

  • Sports fanatics that can recite sports score and stats but couldn’t name a single person in the Cabinet, their U. S. Congressman, state legislator or state senator.

  • Rap music with profane and violent lyrics.

  • Computer viruses.

  • People that say, “Don’t judge” since good judgment is what keeps us safe.

  • Why it is called Happy Hour?

  • “Reality TV” since it is anything but real.

  • National Public Radio.

  • People that define themselves by a brand of beer or a sports team.

  • Real estate developers that go broke to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in little old Des Moines.

  • Rekha Basu and the Des Moines Register in general.

  • Professional Sports

  • People that don’t vote.

  • The attempt to require equal outcomes regardless of talent or effort.

  • High heels on snow boots.

  • Dog parks.

  • Housing projects that are meant to help people but instead put them in unsafe neighborhoods.

  • Adjustable rate mortgages when the fixed rate is below 3%.

  • Aged liberals – I give them a pass until 35.

  • Brittney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and Paris Hilton as role models.

  • Maintaining 80,000+ U.S. troops in Europe.

  • Save the environment bumper stickers on Escalades.

  • Smart cars.

  • Automated answering systems that lead to nowhere that I want to go.