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So I do this all the time. It’s been a part of my regular morning routine and then I saw that this guy has got it all written down: . That’s what it says.

So I get up, go downstairs, feed the dogs, let them outside and then I have a routine because I want to try to get going and start getting oxygen to the brain by doing this: queuing Andrea Bocelli’s “Con te partirò.” Imagine me naked OK — put black boxes over parts you don’t want to see as long as you’re picturing this in your mind — as I throw my arms in the air, fingers wide open, going spread eagle (push that black box down a little bit Shari!). Deep breaths as I sing (or scream) alongside Bocelli during some stretches.

“I’m kind of sold on this idea,” Joe Wallace, the producer of The John and Shari Show on łÉČËXŐž 97.3 FM, told me.

“But why didn’t you pick a more up-tempo song so you can get your blood running,” co-host Shari Elliker asked me. “What is this, a ballet? Are you doing some kind of Tai Chi to this? Do you just sort of glide around the room?”

First off, my cold-hearted co-host, I love that song (which can most recently be heard as the music for this year’s Academy Awards’ “” segment or more famously as the climactic conclusion of “Step Brothers”).

Secondly, if you want to hear the truth — I took a year of ballet in college. So I do a little something a little a couple PK turns I might go into fourth position or fifth position. Rond de jambe, rond de jambe. Some complete PK turns and then I might do a few leaps or something, I can’t remember what those are called, and then I get into the shower.

Shari asked me if I ever vary it up. Do I get tired of that same song every day? The answer is no, I just turn it up louder.

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I’m serious, you got to get the oxygen to the brain. You got to get going. There’s like a whole breathing thing and everything else that goes with it. I’m telling you, you just got to embrace the gratitude. Embrace all your gifts, all your challenges. Shari had a friend who told us when she wakes up every morning, the first thing she says is “thank you for letting me live another day.” That’s a good start, but she needs to do it with some Andrea Bocelli blaring throughout your morning routine.

Listen to John Curley and Shari Elliker weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on łÉČËXŐž Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Saturday, I’m feeling sort of down. I haven’t been able to jump in the water cause it’s all frozen over. And my neighbor sends me video of her mom, who’s in her late-70s, and her friends, also in their late 70s, going across an ice covered road to deliver home-baked cookies to all of the truckers that are stuck there on I-90, waiting to get onto I-90, near the Safeway in Cle Elem.

These women were carrying packages of fresh baked cookies and soup to these guys — there are about 15 or 20 trucks just sitting there.

So I went to the burrito store and bought $250 worth of burritos and delivered hot pork burritos with mild salsa to the guys parked along the side of the road

— John Curley and Shari Elliker (@JohnandShari)

As you know, or maybe you don’t know, these truckers don’t make any money when they’re just sitting there. They’re not rolling, they’re not putting miles on, it’s just costing them money.

So I decided to do something.

I called up and I bought 15 burritos, and I went there and gave out burritos to these guys.

And it’s really amazing. I came home, I felt great. I just felt so great. It was a bit of effort because you had to go back and get them and hand them out, but it was amazing — it just gave me a high for the rest of the evening.

John Curley describes his trek to the outhouse in 4 feet of snow

I’m not doing this as a braggy-brag thing. I’m just saying it was interesting to see the dynamic, sort of the chemical change in my brain. I’ve experienced it before — volunteering really does blow you out of what you’re thinking about yourself and makes you put yourself into someone else’s shoes.

I was inspired by someone else’s generosity, someone else’s thoughtfulness, so it is the contagiousness of kindness.

Listen to the John Curley and Shari Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on łÉČËXŐž Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

At least one former Evening Magazine host has met Jeff Bezos …

I’ve had only one run in with him.

We used to do this thing called “Best of Western Washington.” We went to give him a plaque for winning “Best Boss.”

We hand him the plaque. And he says, “Oh, hey, this great. Uh, wow. Um, I want to thank all the, –”

He looks down at the thing.

“I want to thank all the readers of your magazine for this award.”

Green-eyed monster gets between Dori and John Curley

He had a weird laugh, which he doesn’t have anymore. He got rid of that. Can you get plastic surgery on a laugh? I don’t know. That’s his whole thing. He even gave us a couple of those laughs and then looked into the camera, saying, “Well, geez, I’d like to thank your readers for this amazing award.”

We thanked our readers as well.

Listen to the Tom and Curley Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on łÉČËXŐž Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

The downtown Portland Marriott hotel was recently the site of an autopsy. The event, billed under the Oddities & Curiosities Expo, was sponsored by a media company called Death Science, Portland’s KGW8 . Attendees could purchase admission for $250, or $500 for “VIP” access.

As a performer myself, I think I would be OK with this, if you want to dissect my body. But Marriott? Come on, I could go a little better, maybe Four Seasons.

It would be my final performance.

But, hopefully, I’m worth a little more money. I’d like to see the secondary market go a little higher on those tickets, like $1,500. I want people out front scalping, you know?

“Well, yeah, if they were at the Ritz Carlton maybe, and then they had a very special room and better lighting and nicer seats. And maybe it’d be like the chef’s table where you could sit way up front,” łÉČËXվ’s Cheri Trusler chimed in.

Sure, make it a show. Give me the guy flipping pieces of my organs up into his chef’s hat.

Again, if that were me, that’s what I want. I want the comedy, I want the sadness, and I want one of my organs turned into a volcano and set on fire like they do up at Benihana.

Listen to the Tom and Curley Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 7 p.m. on łÉČËXŐž Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Dad,

Before I pick up the shovel, I pick up the pen and write you this letter entitled: “Things you taught me.”

I learned from you “That life is good and so are most people.”

Whenever I would comment that someone seemed nice you would say “Hey John, you will find most people are nice. There are a few jerks out there, but basically the world is filled with good people.”

Traditions play an important role in life

The yearly trips to beach were full of your traditions. From spotting sand on the side of the highway, to “shooting,” as you like to say, into Cooper Kettle Fudge for two boxes — one vanilla, one chocolate. And of course, a weekly trip to Dots for jelly and cream donuts.

One of my favorite beach traditions you did was turn off the waves. You would come into our rooms at night and tell us that by throwing the light switch you were turning off the waves. You did this so we didn’t fret about missing any good ones while we slept.

Work hard

When I was really young, I use to rush downstairs in the morning to say goodbye. I often missed you. But the scent of Brooks Brothers Bay Rum lingered in the air. You were off to work. You would come home tired with the top button of a white shirt undone and your tie pulled slightly to one side. I told you about my day and you would smile and laugh and pick me up.

There were yellow legal pads with numbers scrawled all over them around the house. You were always thinking, planning, always working. You taught me that work had rewards. Not just the obvious, being money. But sometimes a Reese’s peanut butter cup was the greatest payday after a half a day of raking leaves on chilly autumn afternoon.

You taught me how to make others laugh

One of the greatest sounds I know is the sound of your laughter, dad. My kids talk about grandpa’s laugh, a lot. When I was young, to get you to laugh was a rare and special prize. Your sense of humor is sharp and quick and smart.

You were never an easy laugh, but a great laugh.

Here are two of your favorite punchlines:

“I guess some people just don’t know how to tell a good joke.”

“You’ve done nothing but complain since you’ve been here.”

Don’t Worry

You said once, “Worry is not a verb.” It was your way of teaching that nothing comes of it. It doesn’t fix things or make progress. It is just a state of mind with no real action forward.

Talk to everyone

We could not go out without you engaging in some conversation with a stranger. The woman behind the checkout stand at the market. Or the guy who would pump our gas, back when they use to do that. And it wasn’t just that you talked with them. You treated them all with respect no matter how simple their job was. You recognized them as people. No better, no worse than you. Treat strangers with respect.

How to pray

I would watch you after you received communion at Sunday mass. You would kneel and put both your hands over your face. I would look at you in amazement. Here you were, the biggest, strongest, smartest person in the world to me, humbled by something more powerful than yourself.

I could go on and on. I’ll just leave it at this. The lessons you taught, I have taught my kids and together we made the world a slightly better place than we found it.

Love, John

Listen to Tom Tangney read John’s letter to his father (Aug. 1, 2017).

¸éˇĄł˘´Ą°ŐˇĄśŮ:ĚýConsultant says we can’t just lock up Seattle’s homeless

I did the math. Take his net worth () and divide it by $30 million. How generous is it?

Well, if someone with a net worth of $80,000 gave a $120 gift, would we be making a big deal out of it? That’s the equivalent.

OK, OK, I know it’s not entirely equivalent. I understand his foundation gives a lot of money but let’s not all be so dazzled when all the zero’s get added.

For me, it’s thanks, Paul, for building the thing – though I’m a little skeptical about what he’s getting in return – but who’s ultimately still gonna pay for it? We are. Once you build this thing, someone needs to pay the ongoing expenses. Where will that money come from?

My co-host Tom Tangney had an answer to this:

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Here’s the thing. This shouldn’t be a surprise. If you’ve talked to any structural engineer, never in the history of anything being constructed, has anyone tried to take a floating bridge and place a hard train track over the top of it.

As George Kargianis and Phil Talmadge wrote in a decade ago, the weight of the rails and equipment mean that the bridge would be at 98 percent of its load-carrying capacity, leaving a 2-percent safety factor. Thus, if there is some type of weather condition, or just wear and tear on the bridge, you’ll eventually have the thing crash into the water — .

What’s my co-host Tom Tangney’s take on all this? “It’s pretty cool. The scientific engineering behind this is truly astonishing.”

But they haven’t done it yet. On paper, yes, it is cool. The science is absolutely incredible. But is it necessary? The amount of money that someone can continue to throw at a project is endless.

Think about this: Eventually, we might get the train to go across the bridge, but could we have found a more cost effective way to move 2 percent of the commuters? Why not a bus? Then you don’t have to spend the additional $250 million in order to somehow connect the two pieces of floating bridge with giant cables.

So, of course, Tom counters: “This will happen without causing any delays or a tax increase! You have a contingency fund set up and this doesn’t take all of the contingency funds. That’s why we have contingency funds. So the fact that they’re not asking for a tax increase and it won’t cause delays, is something to be remarked on as well.”

My retort: If that contingency fund had not been used, where would that money go?

My point is that past performance is a pretty good indication of what’s coming. Every time Sound Transit builds something, it is either over budget or way past the delivery date. And this is another example: They underestimated the budget on something that has never been done before.

Mark the time and date: The Sound Transit folks will come back to us again and say they need more money out of the contingency plan to do something else on the I-90 bridge.

Will I get a chance to say I told you so?

If you are one of those, , you have to register in the state of Washington. This is the kind of oppression that will cause a lot of people to throw themselves onto a jerry-built raft, get into the current and hopefully make it to Florida.

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Anyway, if you’re in any of those occupations, you had to be registered, go through some licensing stuff and the state would somehow be able to follow up on whether you were doing a good job. The policy is about 40 years behind the times.

What HB 1361 tries to do is open this up to create a government website like Yelp, so the customers would actually be the ones that respond to whether or not the person is doing a good job. The number of people who complain about landscape architecture goes up every year single year, but how many times has the state sent somebody out to look? Answer: Zero.

Sounds smart, right? Tom Tangney says no. He’s wrong, but here’s why he thinks that.

But more important than Tom’s ignorance: I went up to Olympia to testify in front of the . I cracked this zinger first:

It took a bit, but the joke eventually got there. Then I tried again:

Come on! That Lt. Brad Owens playing the saxophone is comedy gold. I have sold that so many times at different auctions – that is like right down the middle. One chuckle?

Maybe I should have taken a pie in the face and squirted Representative Kirby with some seltzer water. Maybe next time.

The problem with Friday’s violent UW protest lies with whoever was in charge of keeping it under control. You messed up; you let things reach a boiling point.

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This was the free speech that was allowed Friday.

— Tom and Curley Show (@TomandCurley)

People at the UW protest were shouting “shut it down.” And they did. The protesters shut it down. Milo Yiannopoulos was supposed to start speaking on a University of Washington stage at 7 p.m., but there were about 15 masked anti-fascist folks with other plans — they were the real fascists that night.

The UW protest

Here’s what happened: There were these metal gates with an opening of about 6 feet. You were supposed to file between the metal gates and through the doors. Fine. But 15 of these knuckleheads who came with the UW protest — all dressed in black and apparently have a problem with free speech — slid in front of the opening. I was standing there when they did. They blocked the opening of the gates and there they stood.

— Tom and Curley Show (@TomandCurley)

The clock jumped from 7 p.m. to 7:15 p.m., then 7:30 p.m., and 8 p.m.; ticket holders like myself stood peacefully waiting to see Milo. Why, at that point, didn’t police go in there and remove the 15 protesters blocking the entrance? Because the police were disorganized.

Beyond blocking free speech through this weird circus, there was also violence. If you walked up to get a picture of the protesters, they would grab your camera, pull you in, throw you on the ground and beat you up. It took a lot of guts for anyone who dared wear a Make America Great hat because the protesters don’t like the that, so they run up and tear it off your head, throw it on the ground and rip it up – because they are very tolerant like that.

That’s what current free speech is all about: One group determines that certain people are not allowed to see or hear certain things and scream at them until they go home. And it worked because instead of making a decision for ourselves, we stood out in the cold for an hour and a half and things got more and more tense. And I never got in.

I almost got into a fistfight

How tense was it? I got into this childish 4th-grade back-and-forth after a young man touched my camera. At one point I said to him, “Let’s have a clear understanding, this is a public space. I’m allowed to be here and allowed to record you. If you don’t want me to record you, just walk over there.” He said to me, “You can’t record me, I’m telling you not to.” So we got into a public space argument.

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He went to grab my camera and I said to him: “I’m going to make this really clear so you and I have an understanding. If you touch me one more time, I’m going to assume it’s assault and at that point, I’m going to touch you back. Do you understand? Are you OK with that?”

He walked away when I put a microphone in front of his face.

Winner and loser

So who won and lost in all of this — besides the guy who was shot?

Milo lost in the short-term but wins overall. I tried to tell one of these protesters, you’re probably doing more for Milo than you want to. But they don’t quite get that.

Here’s the way it works so that some people can justify the action of shutting down the event: They assume anyone that might want to see Milo or voted for Trump are as follows: racist, horrible people who are all about hate. So if you’re anti-hate, you’re anti-Republican, or whatever group you want to put them in. And once you dehumanize them with name-calling like “Nazis,” “fascists” and “bigots,” you take away their rights because they don’t deserve them, according to you.

Congratulations protestors, you’ve trumped hate with more hate.

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Here is how it would go: We take that $50 million dedicated for the homeless and divide that out for the population of Seattle. We then send every voter vouchers for his or her share. Then, people can go online to a GoFundMe page. Each of the homeless people can create their own page. We can then each donate more directly to these homeless people to support them and their life. This could be for housing, money, maybe some job training.

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This way, rather than the money going through a bunch of different processes in the city’s bureaucracy, you go right to the people.

This idea of bypassing the middle-man with a more direct process was actually brought up in the UK in the 1990s. Basically, the idea was to adopt a poor person. If you adopt them, then you care about them more on a personal basis.

Or, of course, we can continue with the way we are going, which is garbage, feces, and tents along the highways. We’re talking about helping people, yes?

Well, here is how my co-host Tom Tangney responded to my proposal.

I commend the guy right behind me for cheering, the guy right in front of me, not the guy to the right of him or everybody else in our row during . There was no cheering whatsoever. They were mostly on their phones taking selfies.

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If you come to the game we play an active part. If you’re a 12, cheer! If you’re in the front row and not being loud, sorry, you’re going to have to give up that spot. There is something you need to do as somebody who has paid hundreds of dollars per ticket in hundred-level seats.

If the day after a game it doesn’t sound like you were gargling with razor blades, you didn’t give enough. If people don’t think you are coming down with a cold, you didn’t give enough. And I also saw Saturday something I thought I’d never see: People cheering when we had the ball. We should be quiet as a church when Russell Wilson is in shotgun. And if people are cheering when we have the ball, I don’t want to live in that world.

I think part of our performance as 12s needs to be taking a hard look at ourselves and decide what we are as a team. Especially those people sitting next to me. You have to have energy. It’s not about eating hot dogs and sipping wine.

There were a couple times on the line where Michael Bennett was pumping up his arms telling everyone to GET UP and asking WHERE ARE YOU? They’re not doing it, they’re not yelling the way they normally yell. Either that or I’ve lost some of my adult hearing. It just doesn’t feel as loud.

We can all learn a little from my son. This is how it should be done.

Sales were good over the holidays in Macy’s, but there were major layoffs with 68 stores closing around the country, including shops in Everett and Kelso. And Macy’s isn’t the only department store in .

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It reminds me of the “Frankenstein Theory” that I learned from dad. Basically, that at a given moment in the marketplace, Frankenstein rises up on the table, reaches out and grabs the consumer by the throat and grunts out what the price is: No discount, no sale, no nothing.

I remember one time we went to make a sales call at Montgomery Hospital and they were beating us up over one penny on cotton balls. My father slapped his fist down on the table and yelled to the purchasing agent, “You are creating a Frankenstein! You are running us out of business, you are running Owen’s & Minor out of business, you’re running Brotherston out of business (these were all providers of medical supplies ) by beating us up for one penny on stuff.”

My father then predicted that some company – let’s call it ABC Medical Supplies – would go to become the only ones left and take over. That they would rise up from the table like Frankenstein and then places like Montgomery Hospital wouldn’t be the one dictating the price. The Frankenstein ABC Medical would dictate the price.

Is Macy’s the start of Frankenstein?

Does a Frankenstein sales position start to evolve at some point when Amazon wipes out all competition? Where it rises up from the table after slaying all of its competition, and say, “OK, everybody, I know you’re shopping for the best price – here it is. Got a complaint? Try going somewhere else!”

And then my $40 shirt becomes a $400 shirt.

Nah. Because these Frankenstein companies still have to be careful, too. If the price gets too high, then competition says there’s some place in there for us.

But until that time comes, I am weary that they become the one store to serve everybody. I prefer Macy’s ties.

You’ve got three buckets and 24 hours in a day. You should fill the buckets with eight hours of sleep, eight hours of work and then eight hours of something else. That third bucket, that’s the one you need to fill with hobbies and interests outside of sleeping and working. You know, sailing or woodworking or dog grooming – my knowledge of this stuff is limited. Think of the theory like the Pennsylvanian’s version of Henry David Thoreau’s aphorism: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and die with their song still inside them.”

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If you have disproportionately too many hours in the middle tub, you end up having an empty, or near-empty bucket somewhere else. Then, when you “retire,” you turn to the third bucket and ask, ‘Well, what am I interested in?’ Too often the answer is “nothing,” because you have filled the middle bucket with nothing but work. That’s why the 8-8-8 gives you a balanced life and will help you find work more rewarding.

My third bucket? I don’t have one. In fact, I sold that third bucket and took the extra money I made so I could have a bigger middle bucket. Between the radio stuff and my auctioneering gig, I work 70 or 80 hours a week. This is why my list of hypothetical hobby ideas ends at dog grooming.

My advice: if your job bucket is not satisfying, you’d better get a nice sturdy third bucket and fill it with something else. That’s what I’m trying to work on in 2017.

Then again, I just read about how the Russians invented the idea of retirement as a way to get old people out and new blood in, even though most studies nowadays show that if you retire too early or retire at all, you’ll end up dying.

So, my revised advice: Keep hammering away, nose to the grindstone, shoulder to the wheel, all the way through until finally you pass away on the job. And then later retire.

That way, you’ll end up yelling at co-workers for not filling up the copier.

I lean Libertarian. Basically, I want the government to leave me alone. If we’d had a decent third-party candidate other than Gary Johnson — who had a remarkable inability to name a foreign leader that he respects or identify a particular city in Syria — maybe we could have shocked the masses. Or, maybe, if the media had allowed a third-party person on the debate stage and point out the major differences between the two primary candidates, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Problem is, the media doesn’t cover moderate.

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David Brooks is a moderate Republican that I respect. He’s more reflective than he is political. His New York Times piece paints a picture of where we are and where we’ve been. He says how this has been a nasty two years and describes what he hopes the future will be.

He’s right when he speculates the wacky Trump wing of the Republican Party will continue to dominate. The white working class that feels they’ve been left in the weeds while everyone else prospers. Then there are the Democrats, who basically will be pulled further and further to the left by the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warrant crowd.

This was a summons for a true third party. Brooks says it would consist of the elite class that has been running things but would actually acknowledge the difficulties of the white, working-class and minority voters. An upstanding, righteous and open party that is open to things like free trade and isn’t anti-immigrant. You know, someone in the middle who says, neither one of these are good solutions but we could borrow something from Trump and borrow something from Hilary. We put those two things together and I would be this option for you.

But who knows? Nothing happens in a vacuum. Like an old homeless woman, Hillary Clinton will be carrying around a giant shopping cart of controversies that will plague her for four years, to the point that people will be so sick of it that it will open up an opportunity for a third-party candidate.

Until then, the fault lies with us. The media. Because nobody cares about a dumpster until you set it on fire.

The good senator, and better friend, died Tuesday at the age of 54 after a battle with cancer.

Andy always described himself in three buckets. It was: first I’ll learn, then I’ll earn, then I’ll serve. Those were the three buckets of his life.

He learned by going to Princeton, where he was an outstanding student. Then he earned, working at Microsoft, where he made a lot of money. Then he decided to spend more time with his three great kids and beautiful wife, Molly. And he did. He coached the kids in soccer; he was a wonderful family man.

Then, in 2009, he wasn’t feeling well — coughing a little bit, lacking energy. He couldn’t walk up steps without losing his breath. Doctors did tests and found out he had Stage 3 cancer in his left lung.

He battles the thing, but the chemo and radiation were only working to a point; things weren’t looking good.

But because Andy is a researcher, and a bit of a wonk, he went online and talked to his doctors at the University of Washington and they find an experimental drug. He takes it and, within two weeks, is out jogging with his wife. He beat the thing. He saw it as the second chapter of his life and he dove completely into that third bucket, which was to serve. This was a second chance and he chose to get involved. He ran for senate and won, doing admirable work on both sides of the aisle.

I texted him a question during my radio show a few weeks back and he responded that chemo was kicking his butt and that he couldn’t answer at that moment. I called him afterward and he apologized for not being able to help. As if he had something to be sorry for. I talked to him again two weeks ago and he said he was feeling better and was making the turn. I think he had kept the sad truth from most everybody.

Andy was a friend of the show, not only because he was such a great guy but also because he managed to be someone both Tom and I could agree on.

To me, Andy was a guy who had come from the private sector and decided he was going to serve. His stance: Taxpayers first, government second. I align myself with those same principles.

Tom, he aligned himself with Andy, a political opposite, because of Andy’s idealism — proof that you can be a good person and still work in politics.

I’ve been a public servant, and I disagree with Tom on a lot of things — except when it comes to Andy. Because, here’s the deal about Andy: he never spoke an ill word about anybody.

We lost a great potential leader on Tuesday. We’ve been robbed.

While we waited for more illegal deals, I turned and asked, “Why not just legalize this stuff?”

That began a whole conversation with two people who are in the business of stopping “this stuff” from happening. One of the officers told me saw where I was coming from, but that, in essence, it would be giving everyone permission to destroy themselves.

Here’s the thing. I’m a Libertarian. My view: You do you.

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I always point to what happened during prohibition. When all of a sudden we decided to stop selling alcohol, the number of murders spiked, crimes and organized crime went up. When they cut prohibition, rates of robbery, burglary, murder and assault went down, according to an analysis by the Cato Institute.
So let’s legalize it all. If you want to inject junk into your body, good for you. See you later. That’s your choice, society has no right to stop you. My right to swing my arm ends at your beautiful nose.

My co-host Tom, a bleeding-heart liberal, is slightly skeptical. He says this attitude means I have no sympathy for an 18-year-old kid who gets addicted to heroin and dies. That’s not true.

We know personal stories – like Penny Legate losing her beautiful daughter to heroin — and thousands of others that are terribly sad. I just don’t think more government fixes the problems. Or more police.

Would you arrest somebody with diabetes who is having a diabetic shock on the street? No. You’d call an ambulance because he or she has diabetes. If somebody’s got heroin and injecting it into their system, they are sick. You do not put a sick person in jail. You put a sick person in a hospital and give them medical treatment. To continually pick up a sick individual and jail them, how are you affecting the sickness? Zero.

It costs tens of thousands of dollars to pick somebody up out of the gutters, put them through some rinky-dink court system, and send them back out on the street. We are subsidizing the habit by not treating the sickness so that we can facilitate this criminal idea that makes people feel good that we’re rounding up drug users and putting them in jail. It doesn’t do anything for anybody.

Even in the rich confines of Sammamish and Issaquah, we have a heroin problem and these kids have all the money but are missing parents that are involved in that part of their lives.

“If we legalize it, though, we’d have even more deaths on our doorsteps in those cities,” Tom countered.

But would we? Or would we have less death because we could take some of the money spent on criminalization and use it for treatment?

That’s why I say we put down the binoculars and handcuffs and legalize it all.

I saw this piece about self-help guru James Altucher in and am trying to figure out how to implement his philosophy into my own life. I don’t really know how to pronounce his name but I had a lot of time over the weekend while flying all over the country, so I listened to a bunch of his podcasts.

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This guy has made and lost millions of dollars. Failures, successes and everything in between. Now, he has basically got his entire life down to about 15 things, all of which can fit into a knapsack.

I find the whole idea absolutely fascinating. Maybe it’s the better way to go.

Althucher is all about finding happiness and making choices for himself. He advocates being your own boss as much as possible, being entrepreneurial, and being able to take care of yourself. He says not to go to college — that you’re better off putting that money away and traveling the world, learning other cultures, using that information to become an entrepreneur.

A lot of people are really uncomfortable with the stuff he says, but he tries to break the entire paradigm that you don’t have to go to work for someone else or do things for other people. Do stuff for yourself and you’ll find yourself to be that much happier. And if you reduce your expenses you don’t have to make that much so that you can be happier.

There was another eye-opening point from his Ted Talk: That while kids laugh an average of 300 times a day, the average adult laughs … can you guess? Nope, less. It’s only five times per day.

Isn’t that interesting? That if a kid can laugh 300 times a day, why is it that we don’t have the time?

He has a ton of ideas – a bunch of which aren’t good – but I do like a fun Craigslist ad he put out that claimed he’d had a major head injury, recovered and found myself to be psychic. He asked people to send in any questions they wanted answered. He said he received tons of response; that it was a way of starting relationships with people. Yes, it’s a little deceptive but he says it’s important to have people around you who love you, to cultivate those things because those are the people who care about you. And if you care about them then you’ll take of them and, thereby yourself, which will put you in a more positive place.

There’s another interesting exercise of his that you should try.

Close your eyes for a moment and think about the last time you were happy — really, really happy. I go back to when my daughter, Charlie, was born. When you stop and think about that moment, you are actually back there. And when you’re back in that moment, you begin to feel those feelings from 13 or 14 years ago. And when you’re feeling that, you’re actually reliving that happiness and chemical changes occur in your body. The idea is that your thoughts are your feelings and your feelings are your actions — think good things, feel good things, do good things.

It’s a simple philosophy, but we’re all better off if you’re able to do that, as opposed to thinking negative thoughts, which turn into negative feelings and actions.

I say this because most of the rules and regulation they adopt are in favor of the employee as opposed to the employer. That’s specifically true with the Seattle council’s proposal for a to protect workers from erratic schedules.

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The concept comes from a bunch of employees who have complained about the lack of turnaround time between shifts and the want for existing employees to be offered additional hours before new workers are hired.

Costing the Seattle employer

An example: They had me scheduled on a Monday to work until 11 p.m. and then have me scheduled on a Tuesday starting at 6 a.m. Thus, I’m not getting enough time to recover. So, reasonably, they want something like a 10-hour break.

If a Seattle employer can’t give them that, they’ve got to pay the employee something extra. Another proposal is to mandate that schedules are made two weeks in advance. If for some reason an employee is put on the schedule but ends up not being needed, the employer owes half of the hourly wage for each hour cut.

In other words, they want to make life more comfortable for the people who work.

But where is that money coming from? You have to produce. You have to flip 100 hamburgers in an hour. At the end of that time, you’ve sold those burgers, money comes into the till and you get a piece of that. Problem is, the city council is going to charge the employer extra because of a scheduling issue. I would love to find out I was kicked off the schedule and get paid.

What we will ultimately find is an unwanted third party hovering around this relationship: Employee, employer and government. The government is going to come in and look at the people who are working and will say, “Yeah, it is too difficult to get fewer hours of sleep so we’re going to try and make things fairer and better for you.”

Here’s the thing: Whenever you make work more difficult for employers — – you will find a higher unemployment rate because it is harder fire, hire and run a business. If you were to have the city council take a look at the profit-loss statement of many of these businesses, they’d likely find the Seattle employer is making 2, 3, or 4 percent at the end of the year. Seattle elected officials always seem to assume that all employers are rich and that the employees are given no mercy. But if they looked and saw how much money many of these business owners actually make at the end of the year, maybe they would be more sympathetic. Instead, they have this basic bias built in that the employee is good and the employer is bad.

łÉČËXŐž Radio’s resident historian Feliks Banel thinks my characterization is over the top.

“Why would they be anti-business?” he asked me. “The city would collapse without businesses.”

My answer: This city is lucky that the engine itself is so strong and dynamic that it can put up with the barnacles of the city government. It’s almost like a giant ship, with the engine so large that even with all the crud hanging on the bottom of the boat, it’s still able to crank along.

It’s quite simple and all it will take is a Phillips or flathead screwdriver.

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Simply remove the signs on the doors of the bathrooms.
The signs were placed there originally to tell people of a particular gender that this is where they need to go if they would like to walk into a room, whether it be a bathroom or a locker room, where everyone else in that room will be the exact same gender as them.

The sign was placed on the door to avoid confusion or embarrassment and to give some sense of privacy.

Since privacy is now second in line behind people’s feelings, let’s just get rid of the signs. That way no one can be judged for being in the wrong locker room.

I am going to explain the entire food stamp story by telling you a story about bananas and Costco.

On Thursday, there was a big brouhaha because the House passed a bill that would make around $4 billion in cuts annually over 10 years to the almost $80 billion-a-year food stamp program, for a total around $40 billion to be cut from the program. One out of seven Americans currently uses the food stamp program.

At what point would you say, I think the program is out of control? Would one out of six be too much? One out of five? That’s what it gets down to, at what point do you say, there are too many people on it.

Right now, we’re saying it’s OK for the government to feed one out of seven people. If we got to where 50 percent of the people are eating for free, while 50 percent of them are paying for them to eat for free, would that be a problem? Is that the point where you say, hey there might be more people duping the system than are actually in need?

This is where the bananas come in.

When you run a marathon – and I have run many – as you come through, they give you a medal and then you are dispersed into this extra holding area where friends and family can meet you and congratulate you on your big accomplishment. There is a big table of bananas there, and there is a guy standing there who says, bananas are for runners only.

Why do they have to remind people that the bananas are for runners only? Because your uncle, who came to watch you run, is going to come and take the banana. When he takes a banana off the table, he is taking a banana from one of the runners.

Why do they also have to restrict the number of bananas for runners only? Because they have a limited number of bananas. They have a certain number of bananas for a certain number of runners, so what they’re establishing is need.

They see the medal around the person’s neck. They see that the person has run 26 miles and they establish need.

Here’s what I am saying as a libertarian: establish need. Establish need that the person needs it and once you establish that, then you can make this program far more efficient.

What is wrong with efficiency? The efficiency that happens on the banana table can then be repeated right here in every single city across the United States. Clearly establish need.

Because here is what the bill says, the bill doesn’t say that they’re cutting and taking food out of people’s mouths. What the bill says is rather than us writing a blank check, state of Washington, we’re going to ask you to do this: please make it a little harder for people to cheat the system. That is where the savings will come in.

If you are dependent only upon yourself, you have no kids dependent upon you, and you can work, then they’re asking for this: work. Either do 20 hours of work or you can get into a job training program that the government will setup for you. Either way it is, it just can’t be a free handout.

The federal government, Congress and the Republicans that put it forward, are asking for a better job to be done in establishing need.

The way it is set up now, it’s the Coscto lady at the end of the aisle handing out mini weenies. She doesn’t give a crap whether you take 10, 30, 40. Her day is 8 hours long and when she runs out of weenies, she reaches down and she gets more weenies. She has absolutely no concern as to whether or not you eat that weenie and then go ahead and buy a box of weenies. She’s just handing out the weenies like they’re nothing but weenies, and that’s the way we have it set up right now.

Let’s fix it for the people that need it – that’s the runners and the bananas – and those that don’t, let’s get your uncle away from the banana table who’s just taking it just to take it. Because unfortunately, you’re going to eventually run out of bananas or people are going to get mad and say, I’m sick and tired of the entire system.

Taken from Friday’s edition from The Tom and Curley Show.

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