Making the Cut

Hi friends! This is a story that I recently came across and would like to share. Its the story of Sam Arena, a story beyond the call of daily life, a story to learn from…

When I asked the client in my barber’s chair, “What’s it going to be today? Short-back and sides or a song?” he looks vaguely alarmed. I calm him by informing him that I only sing to people I don’t like. He laughs and settles back, but little does he know: singing truly is my passion!

Until I was 15 lived I Italy, where everyone breaks into song at the slightest provocation, so I became addicted to music from a young age. What would life be like, I wondered, without a beautiful song? As I grew into adulthood in Australia, I became nostalgic about the songs of my youth, and by the 1990s, as my wife Mary and I entered our second decade of marriage, I was sitting down with my guitar between haircuts and composing a few songs of my own; love ballads, especially.

When our 13^th wedding anniversary rolled around in 1991, I dedicated two songs ”No One like You” and “You’re Mine” to my darling wife and watched tears run down her face as I sang, “Sam”, she said earnestly, “your songs give me goose bumps. They are too good to be heard by more people than me.”

Oh boy. Mary got my ballads in her bonnet and started pestering various media people about me, her singing barber husband. Two radio stations took an interest and played the songs, and then in 1993, a TV station called. After the programme was aired, I became renowned in our community as the Singing Barber and everyone insisted on hearing my songs in the salon while they got their haircuts. Business Boomed- and the cassettes I’d made of my songs sold out too.

The biggest surprise, however, was still to come. Within days of my television appearance, I received a call from a wealthy Melbourne entrepreneur who offered me a long-term recording contract. It was what any entertainer dreamt of. All I had to was sign. But, what does it involve if I sign? I found myself asking.

The music promoter explained that he would be investing a lot of money to promote and market my songs and me, so my heart had to be in it 100%. I needed to be wholly dedicated and focused on selling my records everywhere. I had to be prepared to travel and perform wherever I was asked and for as long as needed. In order to succeed, I would also be expected to follow their professional instructions.

I had a lot to think about.

My friends and customers all told me to go for it. And then I asked Mary what she thought I should do.

“All your life you have been dreaming of this,” she said, and then hesitated slightly. “Go, Sam, I’ll manage with the family…it will be OK”.

I watched my daughter Giselle and son Benjamin, then 11 and 9 respectively, playing in the backyard. Soon they would both be in high school…and where would I be? I was so accustomed to my family turning to me for love and support, and I loved helping them solve their little hassles in life. I honestly couldn’t visualize myself away from them for more than a week, let alone months on end. If I were to embark on a singing career, I’d only miss them terribly, I’d also certainly miss out on watching them grow up and turning to Dad to “make everything OK”.

I came to the conclusion that signing this contract would put a huge gap between me and my family and me…and I couldn’t bear the thought. My family was my life and it was a pretty happy life at that. I had great health, a loyal and loving wife and two beautiful, kind children. What more can a man ask for?

So I declined the music promoter’s offer and didn’t go on the road to fame. I’m still making music, I am rich in love and 15 years later, I have absolutely no regrets.

Please Treasure Trees

Trees are nature’s wonders, the greatest gift to mankind which the human race has exploited to its benefit, to such an extent that Earth has become a concrete jungle when it must have been going green and clean. Instead, the earth has been cleared of plants, trees, wildlife and all which are parts of nature’s beauty.

I am sure; there isn’t a requirement for me to list out the benefits or rather blessings which the human race has been graciously endowed with, due to trees. Trees have helped man from times immemorial, satisfying man’s need and have now been cleared in large numbers to satisfy man’s everlasting greed.

Can’t we humans realize that we have unknowingly, adversely affected our living conditions as we have now started to borrow our children’s world? We are using up all that is available on Earth in huge amounts and are thereby ensuring that nothing or very negligible amounts of resources, one of them being trees and our immediate surroundings are left for our future generations. This, my dear friends, is a major cause for concern for all.

All that I would like to say is…Please Treasure Trees as these are our lifelines. Without these, we cannot survive. So, friends, for your survival, for your children’s survival, for the world’s survival, let trees also survive and form a major part of our immediate environment. Let’s not make them antique pieces to only be found in museums or just some little patches but let them be a part and parcel of our lives, our environment, and our earth.

Friendship..

Friendship is not a game to play, not a word to say, it doesn’t start in March and ends in May. It is tomorrow, yesterday and everyday…

Source: Twitter

Internet population many times greater than world population

 Internet is growing in dimensions every second, so much so that there are more addresses than there are people on Earth, claims the team behind Microsoft’s new search engine Bing. Bing has put the number of web pages at “over 1 trillion”, while Google had earlier indexed more than one trillion discreet web addresses.

The current global population stands at more than 6.7 billion, which means that there are about 150 web addresses per person in the world. And this could mean that if a person spent just one minute reading every website in existence, then he or she would be kept busy for 31,000 years, without any sleep.

“An average person would need six hundred thousand decades of nonstop reading to read through the information,” News.com.au quoted Bing as saying. Mark Higginson, director of analytics for Nielsen Online, said that the global online population had jumped 16 per cent since last year.

“Approximately 1.46 billion people worldwide now use the internet which represents a solid 16 per cent increase from the previous year’s estimate (1.26 billion in 2007),” he said.

The largest Internet population belongs to China, with 338 million users online, which is more than there were people in the US. However InternetWorldStats.com (IWS), a website that combines multiple data sources, has claimed that China’s online population is more like 298 million.

“With the rates of India and China still quite low, there is ample room for growth in the coming decade,” said Higginson. But, measuring the online population could be tricky-there are servers, users, per capita numbers, and penetration percentages to evaluate. And thus it is difficult to find a single figure to represent the world online population.

IWS combined data from the UN’s International Telecommunications Union, Nielsen Online, GfK and US Census Bureau, and its latest global figures puts the number of internet users in the world at 1,596,270,108. And this is just 23.8 per cent of the estimated 6,0706,993,152 people in the world. But it changes every day.

“In terms of the future, we anticipate mobile to contribute significantly to internet usage,” said Higginson.

According to IWS, the top 5 countries with the most internet users are:

1 – China (298,000,000 users, or 22.4 percent of their population)

2 – US   (227,190,989, or 74.7 percent)

3 – Japan (94,000,000, or 73.8 percent)

4 – India (81,000,000, or 7.1 percent)

5 – Brazil (67,510,400, or 34.4% percent)

 

Source: Yahoo