Clearly a creature of great intelligence

This popped back into my head recently when I walked past a group of motorcyclists. Even though these weren’t a bunch of leather-clad harley riders, it seemed appropriate to refer to them as a Gang of motorcyclists. Which got me thinking, what other names do we have for groups of people? And more importantly, what can we make up? Here’s what I’ve got so far, and please please please add your own ideas in the comments.

First, the obvious ones:

• Gang of motorcyclists
• Board of executives
• Legion of fans
• Band of musicians
• Class of clowns (wocka wocka)
• Chain of fools

And now, the new ones:

• Brief of lawyers
• Bundle of babies
• Corollary of mathematicians
• Function of programmers
• Furrowing of farmers
• Hush of librarians (my favorite! courtesy of Sandra)
• Irony of hipsters
• Jam of motorists
• Palin of idiots
• Round of doctors
• Scoop of journalists
• String of physicists

That’s all I’ve got so far. What else can you come up with?

I don’t want to spend too many words on that now, as a transition like that is always a personal and delicate thing. Suffice it to say that I really loved my previous employer (www.yogapro.com), worked with a bunch of great people and learned and grew an incredible amount in just 3 short years, but it came time for me to move on. And somehow amid the job crisis I was lucky enough to do just that. In fact, I had quite a long conversation with a very close friend about how I’ve led a seemingly charmed life, with many major events “falling into my lap,” and whether that meant it was important or not to “seek out” your life’s purpose. But that’s all for a separate post.

Which brings us to the present, where I’m currently working for Greenview Data, a very cool and nerdy company whose office abuts a cornfield and who employs a dog named Otis to ensure that no scrap of food goes un-begged for. I wear a few hats at the company and I’m still feeling my way around, but I’m mainly responsible for managing the website (with a redesign hopefully coming soon) and new social media efforts, which is all a fancy way to say I’m spending my days tweeting and blogging. Thus, not as much attention for my own online social presence. However, in the coming months I should have some more time on my hands (more on that later), so now seemed to be as good a time as any to climb back on the horse. I’m getting ready to throw my hat into the Tumblr ring (tumblr.dgoings.com) so hopefully that will fill the void a bit between here and twitter.

In other news, I still really want a Nook but keep forcing myself to hold off for that sweet Android tablet with the Pixel Qi screen that I’m sure is gonna show up any month now. I’m almost certainly getting an HTC EVO next month, assuming they get more in stock, which will be my fourth smartphone since April ’07 (Moto Q, iPhone3G, myTouch3G) and keeping Verizon the only major carrier I haven’t used in the last decade. And I’m more upset by the World Cup not having instant replay for goals than by the U.S. national team losing.

Of course I filled out several brackets, but this is the one I like the best. Below is also the link to my bracket on ESPN, to show that it was in fact filled out and submitted on time. No fakery hear, just truth.

http://games.espn.go.com/tcmen/en/entry?entryID=5287089

Before

After

Now the difficult part begins. Many of you have already generously donated or pledged to the Mustache-a-thon, and in return I am going to try and grow the best damn 5-week mustache you have ever seen. I’ll continue to update here as things progress.

And of course, if you haven’t donated yet, please consider it. You don’t have to donate much, even $2 would be appreciated. And it’s super-easy, just use the donate button below and use your credit card (no paypal account required). Or, you can always check out my profile page on the official 826Michigan website. You can even donate for some of the other growers there (just make sure you throw me a little something).

And if you’re interested, you can view a gallery of my transformation here.

And, now, they can help school children ages 6-18 improve their literacy, creative and expository writing skills!

I’m going to be participating in the 826Michigan Mustache-a-thon. What’s that you ask? Well, I’ll let them tell you all about it at their official website – http://www.826michigan.org/mustache/. But in summary: author Dave Eggers started the non-profit 826Michigan to focus on mentoring kids in creative writing. It’s a great organization that offers tutoring, writing workshops, seminars, field trips and publishing for Ann Arbor area students and even adults, all at no cost to the students.

The Mustache-A-Thon is an aptly named and equivalently awesome fundraising event, where participants get together and yes, grow out their mustaches for charity! It runs over 6 weeks, during which we’ll start clean-shaven and slowly let our upper-lip hair run wild. No goatees. No soul-patches. And hopefully in return, if you care about education, or creative writing, or just feel bad for the embarrassment some of us may endure, you’ll make a small donation. It’s a mustache cash bash!

So if you’d like to help out, please just use the Donate button below, which will go directly to 826Michigan in my name. And your donations are tax deductible! That’s right, you can get a tax rebate from my mustache. If this wasn’t a charity to support education, I might have said it was too cool for school.

Not sure how much to donate? $8.26 is a great way to start, but even $2 will be appreciated. The A-Thon goes for six weeks, so if you don’t feel like you can make a donation now, you’ll have all the way until April.

You can also be a grower yourself! If you’re in the Ann Arbor, MI area, check out this poster image to see how you can participate: http://dgoings.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/mustache-poster.jpg

The official website will be posting updates as the weeks go by, showing the progress of all the growers. You can check out my personal profile page here, and I’ll also post some updates on this blog. Just to give you some final motivation for donating, I’ll leave you with this – a photo of my current facial hair, which will ALL be coming off, along with a serious haircut, in preparation for this event. That’s right, I’m sacrificing all this manhood and winter-mountain-man pride for the children. All I ask in return is that you skip that double-tall latté tomorrow morning and instead help some kids to become better writers.

Update: Seems that I had the wrong link code for the paypal donate button. Should be working now.