The advantage of being an old man is that you can remember the past. This gives you a different perspective on current events. But if that old man is foolish enough to share his thoughts, the average person will smile tolerantly and pat him on his head and tell him that he is just “a lovable old dinosaur who is out-of-touch and living in the past.”

Screw it. I’m going to go ahead say what I’m thinking.

A few years ago, Big Data was going to change the world. Big Data came and went.

Then we got excited about ideas that were “disruptive.” Slash-and-burn disruption by a bunch of young pirates was going to change everything.

The Blockchain was going to change everything. You couldn’t go anywhere without someone blathering about Crypto and NFT’s.

Now AI is going change everything. And it definitely will, for awhile.

Technology saves money by reducing labor costs, which is just a fancy way of saying that technology allows you to replace people with machines. Unemployment will increase, and Trump will blame Obama.

And so it goes.

I had an appointment in 1977 to meet with a loan officer at First National Bank in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, to borrow $1,000.

The greeter at the bank sat me in a chair in the waiting room. I was 19 years old.

Smart phones did not exist. My only option was to paw through the pile of old magazines on the coffee table in front of me. Can you believe that every one of those magazines was about banking? The banker puts his banking magazines on the coffee table in his lobby when he is finished reading them. And the dentist puts his dental magazines on the coffee table in his lobby. This is how the Business Titans of Smallville keep their costs under control.

And they do it for our convenience.

I began reading a magazine about banking and it catapulted my brain into a tumbling somersault from which I have never recovered. The feature article was about ATM’s, but it didn’t call them ATM’s. It referred to them as automated teller machines.

“The modern bank executive can now reduce his payroll significantly because these new automated teller machines work without pay 24 hours a day, and they never make mistakes.”

My eyes were jacked open so wide that I was unable to blink.

ATM’s were not invented for our convenience! They were invented so that banks could fire 60% of their bank tellers!

“These new tellers require no health insurance, no air-conditioned offices, no telephones, no sick days, and they take no vacations. Your customers will thank you for giving them the ability to make deposits and withdrawals 24 hours a day from a variety of convenient locations.”

The man I saw in my mind was the banker in the old Monopoly game by Parker Brothers. The way to win the game of Monopoly is to gobble up all the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

I played Monopoly when I was young, but I don’t play it anymore.

Parker Brothers began selling Monopoly in 1935. But that game’s origins trace back to an earlier version called “The Landlord’s Game” created by Elizabeth Magie. She crafted her game back in 1904, when Teddy Roosevelt was making his mark on history by curbing the excesses of the richest and most powerful men in America.

Google, Apple and Meta still play Monopoly. As do the insurance companies, the oil companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the medical corporations that control virtually all the doctors. But the version of Monopoly they play isn’t sold by Parker Brothers.

To win, all you have to do is gobble up the things that people cannot avoid, then take everything they own when an unlucky roll of the dice puts them at your mercy. It’s perfectly legal.

Abraham Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt are the Republicans on

Some Writers Think Life is Overrated

William Shakespeare wrote, “This life… is but a walking shadow; a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more: it is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Songwriter K.D. Lang put it more simply, “Life is a sexually transmitted disease and the mortality rate is one hundred percent.”

Some Writers Think Life is an Adventure

Joseph Campbell wrote, “The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”

Susan Ryan said, “We get to show up. We get to step into this story.”

Some Writers Think Life is Simple

Songwriter John Lennon said, “When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.”

Business writer Tom Peters said, “Life is pretty simple: You do some stuff. Most fails. Some works. You do more of what works.”

Some Writers Think Life is About Writing

Nobel-Prizewinning author Gabriel García Márquez wrote, “Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.”

Anne Lamott, the author of Bird by Bird says, “Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.”

Some Writers Think Life is Transformative

Wes Jackson said, “If your life’s work can be accomplished in your lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.”

Studs Terkel wrote, “Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”

Some Writers Think Life is Service

Dr. Albert Schweitzer wrote, “I don’t know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who will have sought and found how to serve.”

Dave Wolverton said, “When you grow up, you have to give yourself away. Sometimes you give your life all in a moment, but mostly you have to give yourself away laboring one minute at a time.”

Some Writers Think Life is Contemplation

A Blackfoot warrior named Crowfoot wrote, “What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.”

The Welsh hobo-poet W.H. Davies said, “What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare?”

Some Writers Think Life is Connectedness

John Donne famously wrote, “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less… Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

My friend Vess Barnes has his own definition of our purpose in life, “To encourage, to comfort, to awaken, and to stretch those who find themselves riding this big ball as it screams thru time in the silence of space. To be a bridge, not a barricade. To be a link, not a lapse. To be a beacon and a bolster; not a bragger or a bummer. To help bring the corners of life’s lips to their...

Open your ads with a big, emotional idea.

Save the details for your web page.

Use parallel structure if you can.

Parallel structure is a writing technique that uses similar grammatical constructions to express related ideas. Patterns of words, phrases, or clauses that are repeated show that your selected ideas are of equal importance. Parallel structure uses clarity and rhythm in writing to create a balanced and harmonious flow.

It is how you can sing to the heart without music.

Parallel structure is a poem that doesn’t rhyme.

Parallel structure is a song without music.

This is parallel structure…

Natural diamonds are rare and wonderful.

Especially when they are perfectly proportioned.

If you are going to ask a rare and wonderful woman

to marry you, be sure that her engagement ring celebrates

a rare and wonderful, perfectly proportioned,

Earthborn natural diamond.

This diamond was born when the earth was formed.

It has been waiting millions of years to be the

undying symbol of your love.

An unspeakably rare and wonderful diamond;

for an unspeakably rare and wonderful love:

Earthborn natural diamonds. Available in only the finest stores.

Visit earthborndiamonds.com to find

the earthborn diamond jeweler near you.

Born, celebrates, waiting, undying…

“Natural diamonds are rare and wonderful. Especially when they are perfectly proportioned.”

1. I suggest Earthborn Diamonds as a name to consider because:

(A) the name clearly indicate that these are natural diamonds.

(B) anything that is “born” is alive.

(C) Your engagement ring also comes alive when it “celebrates” the Earthborn Diamond it holds.

(D) I own the domain name.

2. Let’s examine the central stanza of this 5-part, 4-stanza* song of love:

“This diamond was born when the earth was formed. It has been waiting millions of years to be the undying symbol of your love.”

(A) “Earthborn” is explained in that opening sentence.

(B) “waiting” is the third activity that only a living thing can do, and fourth,

(C) to be “undying,” a thing must be alive, like this diamond, and your love.

3. “Rare and wonderful” is repeated 5 times in just 30 seconds.

(A) It describes the Earthborn diamond.

(B) It describes the woman you love.

(C) It describes the love that the two of you share.

4. This love song employs a writing technique known as parallel structure.

(A) The diamond, the woman, and your love all share specific attributes, and

(B) twice the ad tells us that these diamonds are “perfectly proportioned.”

(C) Due to the recurrent, parallel structure of the ad, “perfectly proportioned” will trigger the mind of a...