On Wednesday I went to a "Power Within" conference with others from work - the keynote speaker was Bill Clinton. The other speakers ranged from not bad to excellent - Peter Gruber, former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment and now head of Mandalay Entertainment (he also produced Rain Man and a slough of other films), one of the authors of Freakonomics, Herb Cohen (How to Negotiate Anything - he was hilarious!) - to name a few.
Bill spoke for about an hour, mostly about his NGOs and how - now that he is no longer president - he can actually accomplish things without having to worry about how it will affect his approval rating, etc. His message was simple - be more afraid of failure than of inaction - and he was quite a moving speaker. He pointed out that he visited Canada more than any sitting US president, that he loves it here and joked that he's been here so many times this year that Martin called him up and warned him that if he came once more he'd be subject to Canadian taxes. He also said that this was fair, considering Bush had given him 4 tax cuts he didn't need or want.
Thursday night a few of us went to see Tom Phillips perform in Hank Williams - The Show He Never Gave. It was at the Ironwood and it was quite good. I'm not a huge fan of honkeytonk but, much like I felt after watching Ray, you get a sense of how many songs he wrote and how they have had such an impact on everything. Tom was good, though he admitted after the show that he has to sing a whole lot higher than normal to play the part and that it's quite tough.
I'm off to Toronto tomorrow just for the week - back Thursday.
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