A “Grabber” for Mail:

A “Grabber” is a tool that extends your reach to pick up things. Old-fashioned grocery (and other) stores had stock shelves far above eye-level, and we used Grabbers to pull items off those high shelves. Today, Grabbers are mostly for the disabled, and for people who cannot bend down to pick things off the floor. There are several types of Grabbers. They use stickum, magnets, wide-spaced pincers or tight pincers. None of them, in my opinion, is suitable for picking up mail.

Not only that, it's hard to try to search the web for a grabber that might be suitable for mail. Try it and you'll see.

At the moment my back is recovering from an incident that has left me rather stiff. Struggling with my Grabbers to get the mail off the ground is doubly frustrating because I am sure I know what a genuine Mail Grabber would look like. It would have a slender flat hand with a small depression in it, to slip under the mail. Its other side would press a blunt point into that depression, holding envelopes in place without dropping or piercing them. Inventors, please take note!

The New “Photogenic”

You may not have thought about the issue I'm about to raise. Possibly no one has. I've worked a lot with Video. I've been mulling the issue about in my subconscious for twenty-five years and I know I'm right, so please pay attention.

The question is, whar sort of person do you want, to represent your company in ads, or to be a new anchor on TV, or any sort of movie or TV star? You want them to look good, appealing, attractive, intelligent. In fact, every time someone pauses the video and looks at a stop-frame, you want your star to look good THEN.

And there's a problem there. When you watch people in a video or on TV, you see their expressions. But you do not see the micro-expressions between their expressions, the moves their faces make to get from one look to the next, unless you pause the video at an inopportune moment.

Some people look truly ridiculous in those in-between stop-frames. Dumb. Goofy. Confused. Even: Guilty. Try a few stop-frames on your favorite TV and movie people, and see what you get.

Chances are you've been seeing these revealing stop-frames and you never stopped to think about them; but your brain did. And you've judged those people for their stop-frame looks.

I want my TV star or ad representative to look smart or attractive at every stop-frame. And now that I've mentioned it, so will you.