tomversation

Beaux Arts Festival: Art and Food

Went with friends to the Beaux Arts Festival this past weekend, held on the University of Miami campus. It’s the beginning of the arts festival season in Miami, if you don’t count Art Basel, which is at the beginning of December. I missed Basel this year, I was in New York.

The Miami Beach Art Deco Festival was this past weekend, too, which I usually never miss, but I didn’t attend that this year, either.

I’m just a tire kicker – a friend called me that yesterday at Beaux Arts, when I approached his art booth. He sells beautiful photographs he takes.

I’m not sure why I don’t buy a lot of art. I guess it started when I covered the news, which was for 15 years – I was too busy trying to “get the story,” that I didn’t shop around for art. But I don’t really have much wall space where I live, it’s mostly windows.

I do buy sculptures and things like that at times, but not much wall art.

Since I stopped editing the daily news, people think I left town. When I was doing the news, I was at everything every day. It was too much really, but it was my job – morning, noon and night, I was there getting the story and photos. Now I don’t do much in town.

Now when people see me, they say, “You’re back!” And I have to tell them I never left. So, there was a lot of that this weekend. I end up talking to some people and my friends who I arrive with scatter, and they end up talking to people they run into, and it goes like that.

A couple of weeks ago there was a parade in town. We all started out together and by the end, we were in different parts of the village hanging out with others watching the parade from our usual/favorite spots.

We mostly eat our way through these festivals, it’s almost like a food festival with art for many of us.

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Pushing drugs at the pharmacy

This Close to Home cartoon from yesterday reminded me of the Publix pharmacy and it was literally too close to home.

Every time I go to pick up a prescription, they try to push other things on me. They aren’t pushing drugs, but they are constantly pushing vaccines and shots.

As I pick up my prescription, the pharmacist says, “Looks like you are due for a flue shot,” or “It’s time for a Covid vaccine update.” Things like that.

It’s sort of sleazy, especially since Publix makes large profits every year. They don’t need to push chemicals on people.

“First quarter sales for Publix Super Markets were $15.1 billion, a 5% increase from $14.3 billion in 2023. Comparable store sales increased by 2.8%,” according to Supermarket News.

A month or so ago I was at the Publix pharmacy and they were pushing a bunch of vaccines and shots on some older man who was there. They just kept hounding him. He didn’t understand what they were talking about and he said he didn’t want them, but the pharmacist kept pushing him with some sort of chart – pointing and saying, “You need this one and this one and this one.”

I didn’t butt in, but sometimes I wish I had said something.

CVS, Walgreens, Publix, they are all the same.

I tried using small mom and pop pharmacies in the past, but every time I did that, they ended up being sold to CVS or Walgreens! I would show up to pick up a prescription and there on the door there would be a sign that says something like, “We are now owned by CVS (or Walgreens). All prescriptions and records are now owned by them. The nearest location is at blah, blah, blah.”

This happened to me three times over the years. Corporate America taking over.

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The name game

I saw this guy complaining about his name on Reddit.

His name is Michael and he prefers to be called Mick, but a co-worker insists on calling him Mike, and this is upsetting Michael, er, Mick.

With all the crap going on in the world today, this is his issue?

I know names are important and they should be spelled right, especially in the press, but what’s the big deal?

My name is Tom, along with Tom, people call me Thomas (my given name) Tomás, the Latin way; Tommy, Tom-o and Tombo. I answer to all of them. I’ve been called worse.

I have a customer named Benlida. I love that name, I use it in my cartoons often, for witches. It sounds like a Witch’s name.

I never met the real Benlida. She orders from my business online and has for years, but I know her name, shipping address, phone number, etc. But I just don’t know her personally, or what she looks like.

Some names like Hugh Jass, Anita Bath, Ima Hogg, should not be and if I had a dog, I think I would name him Oliver. Maybe Olive, it if was a girl.

I think I told you about Richard recently, this dog who was a pet of the people who lived next to my parents.

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I have another newsletter

Yep, I started another newsletter. Blogs are called newsletters now.

I have my cartoon published daily at TomFalco.com, then there’s this Tomversation blog you are reading now. Then there is 10 With Tom, where I have lists of 10 things and also interview people with 10 random questions and the new newsletter is called The Morning Grapevine.

Yep, I’m a busy guy.

The Morning Grapevine is where I share ideas that will inform and help you curate a business. And even if you don’t own or run a business, The Morning Grapevine is fun and informative.

The newsletter features marketing and business news along with fun interviews with people about their businesses – how did they start, how did they get funding, how do they market themselves- things like that. From bakers to artists to Wall Street types, we want to know about them and share their knowledge, which will help us all with what we do whether it’s build things, write, teach, draw or run a large company.

I have a friend I am interviewing now. She’s a well-known artist and she is a whiz at marketing her art. I was with her this past weekend. I would love to share her techniques for selling art and getting clients, who keep coming back for more. I am interviewing her now.

I also want to ask people what they offer when they have Patreon sites as incentives and also when people have Go Fund Me sites. I’ve donated to a lot of Go Fund Me’s – usually for art project and books – and a lot of those have original art and things like that as incentives. But what about other Go Fund Me’s for different projects? I’m interested in that.

I hope you are interested enough to to subscribe to The Morning Grapevine. It’s free. No cost to you. You can check it out here to see what is published so far.

My PBS station has no clue

I watch a lot of PBS. We have two channels here in Miami and I watch them both, but one, I watch more than the other.

I mentioned to a cousin one time that I watch a lot of PBS and she asked, “You like to watch nature shows?”

No. I like to watch all the British tv – Britcoms, dramas, things like that. And I watch a lot of cooking shows. I can barely boil water, but I find them relaxing. When I ran into Lidia Bastianich at Whole Foods in NYC not long ago, I was excited.

I didn’t approach her, but we did rub elbows – literally – it was very crowded in the store that day.

Anyway, I’m writing about PBS’s lack of marketing knowledge, or at least one of my PBS station’s lack of being able to hold donations.

Two times they had money or access to donations from me and they blew it and didn’t make an effort to keep the donations going.

This bothers me no end because they take all their programs off the air for weeks on end and have these nonsense telethons, asking for money to support their stations. They literally antagonize their viewers by taking their favorites shows off and then asking us to donate to keep the shows on. A form of extortion.

Anyway, I was donating $25.00 a month to one of the local PBS stations but all at once, they took my two favorite shows off the air. Not just my favorite shows on PBS, but of all of tv – Doc Martin and Escape to the Chateau. I could watch those reruns of both shows forever.

It bothered me so much that I emailed the station and told them I no longer wished to donate due to the fact that they removed my shows.

I expected them to call me and try to keep me donating and I would then make a deal to split the cost and use half the money for a streaming service or something and let them keep the rest. But you know what they did? They emailed me back and said, “Done, starting next month you will no longer be charged.”

They didn’t even try to keep what they had – the first rule of business – keeping your current customers! And they didn’t call to see if it was really me wanting to cancel my affiliation with them.

And some months before, I was donating one of my cars. But they never came to pick up the car – a Mercedes! I waited a couple of weeks, but they never showed up.

I finally called them and told them they had to come by the end of the week and get the car because I was leaving town for a few weeks . They said they could not come and get it, so they lost the car. They didn’t even try to talk me into not canceling the donation.

So twice, they had donations that they are on tv begging for non-stop and when they had these donations in hand, the cavalierly just gave them up.

I don’t ever like to use this word, but they were STUPID. Totally Stupid.

That’s how you don’t run an organization that relies on charity to stay in business.

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Save the whales; and track them, too

I bought some of these Whale Tracking Bracelets as Christmas gifts this year from Club Ocean. People loved them.

I got a variety of colors, dark blue, light blue and pink.

Originally I thought there was a chip or something in the bracelet that let you track the whale, but there is a card with each bracelet that has the whale’s name along with a QR code which takes you to the GPS where the whale is. If you save that info on your phone, you can easily pull it up whenever you want to check him/her out.

My humpback whale, Merlin, a female, is off the coast of Australia. She is about 45 feet long.

Club Ocean also has other animals you can follow and donate to. There are turtles, sharks, polar bears and dolphins along with the whales. And there are coral bracelets, plushies, caps and other accessories you can purchase.

The bracelets took almost a month to arrive, even though I paid for rush shipping, as I wanted to have them in time for Christmas and maybe the Christmas rush is what delayed the delivery, but they did arrive the day before Christmas, so that worked out well.

Check them out here. and support sea animals and get a cool item in the process.

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Dumping the Christmas tree

I used to do this. I would throw my Christmas tree off the balcony. But I didn’t leave the ornaments on, I would remove those first.

I did it because lugging it down the elevator left so many needles inside the elevator and it was a chore trying to get them all out, so I dumped the tree.

I had a convertible, so when I bought the tree I dumped it in the back seat of the car and brought it home. When I was getting rid of it, I tossed it off the balcony and then dragged it to the street.

I had someone stand downstairs to be sure no one was under it when I tossed it, so there was that.

That’s how I got the idea for this cartoon. Of course it’s funnier with all the ornaments and lights still on the tree.

I no longer throw the tree over because I bought an artificial tree some years back. I wasn’t that crazy about it after I set it up and thought I would just use it a couple of years and then go back to buying real trees, but it’s so easy to just lug it out of the spare room and lug it back, so it’s been the norm now.

My family and I do this gift exchange thing with ornaments. We give regular gifts, but the ornament thing is a game sort of. You get an ornament and wrap it and play that thing where you choose the ornament and the next person can steal it. I think it’s called the “White Elephant Gift Exchange,” but we do it with the ornaments.

For years I would wait till the last minute and go to the store and get the best of what was left. This year I forgot, so I took a good ornament off my own tree and wrapped that. I put it in an old sunglasses box I had and it confused people at the exchange. But when they opened it, they loved the ornament.

This year, no one stole anyone’s ornament and the last gift was a dud and one of my sisters-in-law got that.

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He’s Toast

So I show up on Christmas day to my Nephew’s house, which the family traditionally does every year. I opened the door, and there is a dog staring at me. I asked his wife (my nephew’s, not the dog’s), “You have a dog?” She said, “Yes!”

“When did you get him?” I asked. She said, September.

I then asked, “What’s his name?”

“Toast,” she replied.

“What?” I asked, I thought I didn’t hear right.

“Toast,” she replied. I had to ask, “What did you say, a few times, as I thought I heard wrong.”

Apparently one of the kids named him because he was the color of toast, which I don’t get. Especially since he is gray. I’ve never seen gray toast, even when it’s burned.

It reminded me of years ago. My parents lived in the same house for more than 50 years, so once in awhile, neighbors changed next door. This one time there was a family with a dog named Richard. Yep, Richard.

The first time I heard the lady calling out, “Richard! Richard!” I asked my mother if she was calling her husband. She said, “No, that’s her dog!”

The funny part is I never saw the lady or Richard, but whenever I was at my parents’ house, I would hear the lady calling Richard. He must have gotten out a lot. It sort of sounded like Hyacinth Bucket calling her husband Richard. It was that same tone, “Richard! Richard! Richard!”

I never saw the lady, or Richard. I don’t know why. I just never did. I guess they moved away and that was that.

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Merry Christmas!

As usual, here is my favorite all time Publix commercial. I post it every year at this time.

This commercial ran for a few years from 1987 to 1996 and every time it came on, I would stop what I was doing and watch. It’s part of my Christmas memories of my youth and it’s just one of those things – a song, just like a smell, that brings you back to another time.

The music in Last Train Home is from Still Life Talking an album by Pat Metheny Group, released in 1987.

To this day, when Pat Metheny is performing, he’ll refer to the song as, “The Publix song.”

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My filthy car

We had painters here for a couple of months and they finally finished up this past Friday. They were all nice guys, overly polite and fantastic workers, but enough was enough, we need our building back. I wrote about it here, how it was like having a film crew on top of us all the time.

I would get them coffee and doughnuts and stuff a few times a week, so would other neighbors here at the condo. To thank me, they washed my car on the last day they were here. And it needed it.

I had to laugh because this is not the first time this has happened. Over the years, people have washed my car because it’s always dirty.

I used to go often to a car wash I liked, but it closed and I just never seem to bring it anywhere else to get washed. This guy Jerry comes by the building once in awhile and washes the cars and that’s great. And the best part about bringing the car to the dealership, is that they wash the car before they return it after servicing it.

One time I was sort of rushing them to complete the job and my service writer asked, “Do you want the car washed? That’s what’s holding it up?” And of course I wanted it washed. “Yes!” I shouted. “I’ll wait!”

When I first moved to where I live now many years ago, a neighbor who lived here washed his car all the time. I think he found it relaxing. The day I moved in he was washing his car and he was always do it. He parked right next to me, so I would always notice him washing the car.

One day, he asked me, “Did you notice how clean your car is?” I responded, “Yes, what about it?”

He responded, “I’ve been washing your car. It was so filthy I couldn’t stand it.” He used those exact words.

I was shocked. He asked, “Didn’t you notice?” I said, “Yes, but I thought it was the rain. Whenever I drove in the rain, I thought the rain was ‘washing it.’ “

I don’t think he liked that because he never washed my car again.

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