Tony Brewer

Have you ever attended a business function put on by your company where the company had motivational speakers put on a presentation?  Have you ever wondered how organizations line up Celebrity Speakers to make presentations like that at their functions?  Well, these speakers have booking agents!  You can’t simply call up the famous person and say “hey, I want you to come speak at our graduation ceremony” (for the most part, anyway!)  You need to find their booking agent.

In this day and age, with the Internet at our fingertips, that kind of info is easily obtained.  Not like in the “dark ages” where you relied on the local telephone book yellow pages!  The Creative Artists Agency has many famous celebrities available for speaking engagements.  Part of their service includes helping you to figure out which speaker would best fit the needs of the occasion.  I think that’s a pretty good service.

Graduation season is here!  I have received seven graduation invitations in the mail from various friends and family members!  So now begins the search for the perfect graduation gift for each of them.  Some of them I am very close to; others I only barely know.One of the things that always stumped me in the past was what to give someone as a graduation present.  I don’t want to be one of those people who just gives the graduates a “really nice” pen and pencil set!  That’s a cop-out!

Only recently did it occur to me that one of the best gifts someone could receive at that age is a high quality luggage, like tumi luggage!  Most graduates are going to be “on the move” in one way or another.  They may be going off to another school, or moving to another city to pursue a career.  Of course, you need to make sure that the graduate IS planning to go somewhere!  A gift of hartmann luggage or briggs and riley luggage to someone who plans to just stay home with the folks forever wouldn’t appreciate a gift like that at all!  But for the up-and-coming graduate with big plans is going to need great luggage to take his (or her) belongings along!

I was reading on the Reuters.com website that researchers are working on a new material that converts heat into electricity. The hope is that using this material will help cars get more miles to the gallon. According to the article, only about 25% of the energy produced by a typical gasoline powered engine is used to move the vehicle, and the rest escapes through the exhaust pipe. The researchers are hoping that this new material will enable the car to recycle some of that escaped heat into energy that will power the car. That would be awesome!

One day last week I was driving to work and was listening to the morning show of my favorite radio station. I was interested to hear the announcer tell us the interesting tidbit of the day; the smell of crayons lowers blood pressure. Well, I had never heard that before! My father suffers from high blood pressure, so I was very intrigued to learn more.

I have spent about the last 20 minutes on the Internet, using different search engines, trying to find some reference to “proof” that the smell of crayons reduces blood pressure, and I’m sorry to say that I can’t find any. So, if you know of “proof” on the Internet (not just some blog) please let me know!