Andrew J. Fletcher

Do banks lose more money to robbery or to stolen pens?

100 Dollar Bill with Pen

While mak­ing a deposit at the bank the other day and real­iz­ing I didn’t have a pen in my pocket, I thought about steal­ing the pen on the deposit counter. This kind of lit­tle theft hap­pens all the time, and we all do it. It’s like doing 51 in a 45 mph zone — we don’t really con­sider it wrong. So I thought, how much do banks spend in a year in replac­ing all the pens that all of us mis­cre­ants blithely walk away with? Is it more than banks lose to robberies?

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Silent Sundays

A few months ago my room­mate Jon Ammons and I were deep in con­ver­sa­tion about some­thing mod­ern and for­get­table and droll when we had the novel idea to res­ur­rect a dead art. Namely, that of the silent film with piano accom­pa­ni­ment. We were not unpre­pared. Jon has a seri­ous and long­stand­ing inter­est­ing in films from the silent era and I have a seri­ous inter­est in music of the same. Realizing that we were strangely well-suited to the task and cou­pled with our  life of the idle pas­sions of bach­e­lor cre­atives, we set upon mak­ing this dream a reality.

I designed the posters, we booked a venue, arranged for a piano, pro­jec­tor and pop­corn, pro­moted and pro­cured press and pulled it off like pros. It was one of the most fun and suc­cess­ful events that I’ve ever been a part of with­out the aid of a well-established band. It’s a hell of a lot of work com­pared to the money I make, but it’s a pas­sion project. Pas­sion mat­ters a lot in my world.

Thanks to all the peo­ple who came out for the shows and espe­cially those who came out for both. We’re doing another Silent Sun­day on March 18. The film is yet to be determined.

Anti-SOPA Solidarity

In sol­i­dar­ity with Wikipedia, Red­dit and other sites my blog will be join­ing the anti-SOPA black­out on Wednes­day, Jan­u­ary 18. Though I don’t receive a lot of traf­fic and my lack of pres­ence on the inter­net will likely go unno­ticed, I feel that this is an impor­tant ges­ture that I can make. The rea­sons that SOPA dam­ages free­dom of speech have been well pub­li­cized, but if you would like to learn more please read this Techdirt arti­cle if you’re a lit­tle tech savvy, or this New York Times arti­cle for those of you who don’t know what DNS is.

If you have a blog or a web­site, I encour­age you to join me and Wikipedia. If you use WordPress.org, you can install a plu­gin that makes this very sim­ple to setup. You can find that plu­gin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sopa-blackout-plugin/

Style Advice for Men

Ricardo Mon­tal­bán is unim­pressed with your efforts.

At risk of sound­ing like a pompous ass, I have style. I believe this because I get a lot of com­pli­ments on my choices in dress. Walk­ing down the street I get asked for my advice a lot, or asked where I buy things, and do I always look this way? I’ve been caught on the street a hand­ful of times by Asheville Street Style, inter­viewed by the Urban News, and reg­u­larly advise my friends on what to wear to meet For­tune 500 exec­u­tives in China or on a first date. Fine, I sur­ren­der already — I have style.

And I’m into that, I’m into what is styl­ish. But — I’m not into fash­ion. I don’t have a well thumbed copy of the Sep­tem­ber Vogue on my night stand, and though I sub­scribe to the Sun­day edi­tion of the New York times, I don’t luridly gaze at the lat­est offer­ings of the major design­ers in the Style Mag­a­zine. I don’t care what’s in or what’s out, if it’s past Labor Day or if it was recently seen being worn by Lady Gaga at Occupy Wall Street. Those are use­less ways to think about what will make you look awesome.

What’s the dif­fer­ence between style and fash­ion? Style is for­ever, fash­ion is for today. Style is acces­si­ble for every­one, fash­ion is passé by the time every­one iden­ti­fies it. Style belongs to you, fash­ion belongs to wealthy hair­less eccentrics in Milan that feed caviar to tiny inbred dogs.

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