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Think of Las Vegas and you think of music, right? Elvis, Wayne Newton, Tom Jones. But where do you go when you want to see concerts by bands and artists whove hit the charts within the last twenty years?

The best place to see concerts in Vegas is without a doubt at the MGM Grand Garden arena, though the House of Blues at Mandalay Bay is a very close second. In fact, the House of Blues has a vociferous fan base that swears its much better than the Grand. The House of Blues features attractions that just arent going to make it to the Grand, at least not yet. MGM gets the big names like U2 and the Eagles, while the House of Blues gets the really interesting bands like the Dropkick Murphys. Either way, both venues have played a role in making Vegas a top destination for currently popular acts.

Theres only one thing in Las Vegas thats louder than a rock concert and you really dont even have to move your head as much. Some might consider it a strange relationship to marry Vegas and Nascar, but then who ever thought Vegas and punk rock would get married? The Las Vegas 400 has quickly settled in as one of the citys top local sports events. Of course, its not called the Las Vegas 400 anymore, but why give a certain car company free advertising when you dont have to. If watching cars go in a circle for three hours isnt your idea of fun, then you can always check out the National Finals Rodeo. This 10-day event features all those things that make rodeos what they are: roping, broncin and clowns slipping on cowpies. Who wouldnt prefer that to Nascar? Then again, Nascar features car wrecks at 150 mph.

Oddly enough, Las Vegas has no major professional sports team. Perhaps the Saints will eventually make the move if certain congressmen have their way and New Orleans isnt rebuilt. Until then, Las Vegas is the name and hockey is the game. Whaaaattt? Las Vegas has a hockey team? Yes. But thats not the really weird part. Las Vegas has a hockey team, the Wranglers, who play inget thisthe East Coast Hockey League. Theyre not bad, either, making it into the playoffs in their first year in town.

But lets face it, we all know that when it comes to sports in Las Vegas, there was, is and always will be just one show in town. The Running Rebels of UNLV. Sure, they havent been a bona fide contender since they had to start playing by the same rules as their opponents, but memories of past NCAA Tournament glory keep bringing the fans back.

// posted by g60652 @ 11:07 PM 0 comments

I started fishing a little lake just south of Somerset, Ohio, called Clouse Lake about 35 years ago. Matter of fact, when I first started fishing it, I fished with a fly rod. One day, I was fishing and noticed this older gentleman trying to get a little plastic boat on his car after a hard day's fishing. He was using a fly rod too. We began chatting and discovered we lived about 10 miles from one another. He lived in Pleasantville. As the conversation closed, he said he would call me sometime and we would go fishing together. I thought "Yeah, I bet he calls me". Imagine my surprise when he called two days later and wanted to know if I wanted to go fishing with him the next day.

Earl and I became good friends, we fished Clouse many times and about every other place that we could find, that held water. He was an excellent fly fisherman. There was only one thing wrong with Earl, he liked to catch bluegill. Actually, he loved catching Bluegill. He showed me how to clean bluegills in a matter of seconds. Here is how he did it. First, he got out his board and filet knife. He would scale the fish. Second, He would cut around the head but not clear through. He would leave just a piece of meat right under the head. Then he would twist the head and pull and the whole insides would come out at one time. He could clean bluegill faster than anyone I have ever seen.

One day, I got teasing Earl about fishing for bluegill, I told him the only reason anyone would fish for bluegill is because they couldn't catch a bass. I have to admit, I had seen him catch bass on his flyrod while fishing for bluegill. Anyway, Earl said to me that he could catch bass anytime he wanted. I just laughed. So, Earl put on a little bigger fly and threw it about a dozen times and out comes a bass. Not only was it a bass but it weighed about 6 and 1/2 pounds. He just looked at me and smiled, never said a word, then threw it back. I was dumbfounded, to say the least. He then went and tied his little fly back on and fished for bluegill some more. I sat in shock the rest of the day.

I learned two lessons that day, one was never to run my mouth about people who like to fish for bluegill and the second was, right when you think you have the bull by the horns, some old fellow is going to show you different. By the way, I never teased Earl about his bluegill fishing again. Earl passed away not too long after that, I was one of the last people he asked for. I miss you my friend.

Did you know a large mouth bass and black bass really are not a bass? They are in the sunfish family.

Clouse Lake is on RT668 out of Somerset, Ohio. There are some nice bass there and I have seen some in the 5 pound range taken right below the dam. There is a boat ramp on the south side of the lake...a smaller boat is more suitable.

// posted by g60652 @ 7:45 PM 0 comments

In this second of a two part series we're going to discuss what can be done to balance between child care and giving your child the attention he deserves.

To balance out the care your child gets between the child care center and yourself, assuming that both parents have to work or in the case of a single parent, there are several things that can be done.

This isn't always easy, but try to work out a flexible work schedule with your boss. If both parents work a day job maybe you can arrange to have one of the parents working either at night or a staggered shift, say starting at noon and working to 8 or 9. This way one parent will be home with the child most of the morning and the other parent can be home with the child all evening, leaving only a few hours each day that the child is actually in the care of a day center. This may not seem like much but every hour is something.

Another thing a parent can do is see if it is possible to take the child to work with him or her for at least a couple of days a week. Some work places actually have daycare facilities inside. While it is true that the parent will be spending most of the time working and not with the child, there is still the ride to work, lunch and break times and the ride home that they can spend together. Just this little bit of time to break up the day can make a big difference in your child's disposition, especially if he is old enough to look at the clock on the wall and know that in a short time mommy or daddy are going to be picking him up for a nice lunch together.

If neither of those are an option then there is another alternative that is actually becoming very popular especially among mothers. That option is to become a Work At Home Mom or what is commonly referred to as a WAHM. A work at home mom is just what it sounds like, a mother that does her work out of the house. Today, with the advent of the computer, this is easy to do. There are many legitimate opportunities a mother can find on the Internet that can pay her for the work she does at home, from stuffing envelopes to typing ads. Of course she has to carefully check out each opportunity before getting involved, as there are many scams out there, but once she finds something with a good reputation, usually a company that is a member of the BBBOnline, she should be able to make a decent enough income to justify her staying at home. It may not be as much as what she would make in an office but when you factor in that there are no transportation costs, no lunches to pack, etc., the income may be more than enough to get the family over the hump.

The bottom line is this. We don't have children to dump them in a daycare center. Children need their parents. There are ways to make that happen. It just takes a little effort and a little compromise.

// posted by g60652 @ 4:22 PM 0 comments

The Plain old Weird
I don't normally use the word weird because its meaning is too encompassing. It is one of those words that can be applied to all things, all people and all situations depending on the angle of observation. This is precisely the reason I am using it now because EVERYTHING to do with getting rich, i.e. the road to it, the inheritance of it, the use of it, the spreading of it, the earning of it and the giving of it depends on something that is weird.

What do I Mean?
Here are some synonyms for weird: strange, odd, bizarre, peculiar, uncanny, eerie, creepy, unusual. But dont misunderstand, wealth itself is none of these things, it is the journey (short or long) that takes one to it that I am describing as weird and moreover I am saying that all such journeys are weird. So let us all try to understand this weird journey. To add a little humour to our discussion, Im going to paraphrase what Rockefeller said when he was asked what the secret to wealth was. He replied: "To bed early, rise early and strike oil."

The real meaning behind this statement, to me at any rate, is that the question is absurd. There is no secret. It is not mechanical. There is no set of instructions that guarantees wealth if you follow it. This is why the road to wealth is ALWAYS, without exception, weird.

Consider the following formula that I've devised to explain this:

M = ETW O

You many read this as follows: Money equals Effort times Time times Weird minus Outgoings. The left hand side of the formula is purely materialistic whereas the right hand side is humanistic. A person puts in effort and time. We can scale the effort as a number between 1 and 10 inclusive. So anyone with an effort factor of 1 is very lazy whereas an effort of 10 means he or she works very hard. As for time, we'll make this a number between 1 and 24 to represent the average time spent on this activity in any one day.

We can apply this to anyone who is doing something to make money. Lets straight away apply the formula to someone who has an ordinary job which pays an average salary. Let E = 5 and T = 8. So for one day we have:

M = 5x8xW - O = 40xW O

But what possible number shall we give the weird factor. This really is the unknown because it is not limited to the amount of possible effort or the number of hours in a day. So what is it? Well, for this type of activity, i.e. an average job, the weird factor largely depends on the market value for that particular job. But without going into all of the different types of job and how well each pays, we can scale the weird factor to a number between 1 to 100 where 1 represents the lowest paid and 100 represents those in the highest wage bracket. But we really want a scale that can represent all people in all activities, not just the plain old employee. As it turns out, there are really only two divisions to consider. Those that work for others and those that work for themselves. So we need only consider two scales. Those with jobs as weve already stated are in the 1 to 100 scale but those who work for themselves, the scale is, and youll get a shock, -1000 to 10000. Yes, the scale must start from a negative number because working for yourself is risky which means you may in fact lose money but how much you lose is controlled largely by other parties such as creditors. At the same time the rewards are potentially phenomenal. All we have to do now is subtract the outgoings and we have found how much money we have made in one day. So getting back to our ordinary employee to whom we may attribute a weird factor of 6 gives us:

M = 5x8x6 O = 240 O

The outgoings aren't that important because this is probably the easiest factor to control since we can choose to spend or save. So for someone who does not save, the daily outgoing number is close to the earning or more if there is some borrowing involved.

In case you are still wondering where lies the secret if there actually is one, I can now reveal it. The only thing in the formula that is the LEAST in our control is the weird factor. It also explains why it is possible to have two neighbours living in the same area, earning more or less the same in their jobs, with a comparable set of financial responsibilities and yet there is a very great difference in the amount of money that each has. This brings us to a fundamental question:

Are we BORN with a high weird factor or can we influence it to go up or down by our behaviour, thoughts and actions? It is clearly an individualistic factor.

If it is fixed at birth, it has no prospect of ever changing. In other words, there is no possible chance on this planet that you can become rich if your weird factor is low. However much effort and time you put in, what ever degree of frugality you adopt, it simply will not happen.

On the other hand, if the weird factor is something that is in our control, however unyielding it happens to be, there exists the probability that we can do, think or behave in ways that can help us in our lives. I think that it is possible to devise similar formulae for non-monetary aspects of living such as love, leadership, influence, power, fame, intelligence, talent, etcetera. But let's not go off on a tangent and stay with money.

So Which Is It? Predestined Or Changeable
To answer this question we need only examine the evidence, and there is rather a lot of it if you know where to look. Youll find the answers in a place called history. But not world history. I'm talking about the history of every one of us from birth to the present moment. Let's conduct a little thought experiment using a fictitious individual's life as example. I want to present to you 5 randomly chosen scenarios out of the infinite that is possible with every one that is born on this planet. Don't forget, the individual is the same, it's only the circumstances that are different.

1. Born in 1970, went to school then to college and took business studies which culminated in a thriving business in real estate.

2. Born in 1970, went to school, dropped out, took interest in antiques, specialised and became an expert in fine art and now runs a chain of outlets.

3. Born in 1970, had an accident at 10, lost the ability to speak and longed to discover a way to help all such people and invented the speaking machine. Needless to say, wealth was only around the corner.

4. Born in 1970, lost both parents at an early age and suffered much in the hands of foster parents. This led to an internet business that drove all such people to the website which grew to something like one million hits per month. Advertising revenue came flooding in.

5. Born in 1970, left school without qualifications and took a job delivering parcels for a small local company. Within 5 years gained invaluable knowledge of the area and the business. Within another 5 years a single rival business was set up that could do the job more efficiently and more cheaply. Soon, there were branches in every major city in the country.

It certainly looks as though whatever the circumstances happen to be, this person is destined to make it one way or the other. Do we conclude then that who ever it was, the weird factor was extremely high. No. Definitely not. In every case there was something that this person wanted to do but it was never to make money. It was to help people in some corner of life or some avenue of interest. Money MUST BE, without exception a bi-product NOT the driving force. It must be SECONDARY to the activity itself. I believe that there is a hidden law which says that if you do something purely for money you will never get much of it. If you do something for other people to help them or to teach them or to make their lives a little easier in some respect, this law GUARANTEES unexpected returns and guess what - those returns might not even be financial but immense satisfaction which leads to happiness and contentment directly, instead of through wealth. And yes, happiness CAN be attained through wealth.

I firmly believe that the weird factor goes up as soon as we do something because we genuinely want to help people in some way, however insignificant it happens to be. But the greater this help is, the more number of people it affects, the higher will this factor go and there really isn't an upper limit.

// posted by g60652 @ 1:02 PM 0 comments