The Coltons Point Times: July 2014

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Goodbye Norma Jean - Marilyn Monroe is Back

Marilyn Monroe was murdered 52 years ago, August 5, 1962.

Perhaps the greatest American Icon of all time, Marilyn Monroe was

America

's sweetheart, poster girl, cheerleader, pin up queen, singer, movie star, the object of lust, devotion, miles of newspaper and magazine print and the most imitated person of all time.

But that does not even begin to describe this blonde bombshell who dominates the world even today, five decades after her death. You see, one of these days some smart prosecutor will reopen the Marilyn Monroe death case and the truth will finally come out and don't be surprised to hear the mafia, politicians, the Hollywood Rat Pack, President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and who knows who else dominating the news.

Yet this time it will be different. Before her enemies, those who killed her, controlled the media and film industry and made certain only their side of the story was heard. Thanks to the Internet and Marilyn's astounding popularity with Baby Boomers and their kids (the Millennia generation) when her tragic death is relived there will be overwhelming interest on the worldwide social media through the Internet.

Mainstream media, Hollywood, Madison Avenue nor politicians control the Internet this time and they sure as Hell don't control the Baby Boomers and their heirs. You see, Marilyn is alive and well in the minds of the youth and Baby Boomers of the world who grew up with her or adopted her as the role model for modern women and girls.

Don't believe me, just look at the hundreds and thousands of Marilyn products flooding the market. Most of the world was not aware that Marilyn and her image and persona have been the subject of bitter court fights that lasted until a Federal Appeals Court finally settled the issue in 2012 by stating what Marilyn stated in life, she belonged to no one but the public she tried so hard to please.

It took 50 years for the federal courts to rule on her "image and persona," and now her story can finally be told.

Still, she has always remained with us because of her unique American story. A mother who was sent to a mental health institution while her daughter was sent to foster homes and an orphanage. She never knew who was her father. She created an alter ego to help her through the loneliness.

Her alter ego would one day become a star and Marilyn spent her entire life preparing for the moment. She created the most rigid workout program and diet in existence while a teenager to prepare her physically. But through it all shone the innocence of Norma Jean who loved children, loved animals and loved to make people happy.

In time she went to work in a defense plant during World War II and was accidently discovered by a photographer working on the assembly lines. He was trying to generate interest in the war effort by finding a poster girl and did he ever succeed. Marilyn has been America's poster girl through World War II, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan during the last 50 year and no one has knocked her off her pedestal.

Look at the continuing interest in Marilyn. Her last dress sold at auction two years ago for $5.54 million breaking the previous record from 1999 of $1.26 million paid for another Marilyn dress which was more than four times higher than the previous record. Marilyn doesn't just break records, she smashes them into oblivion.

After her discovery as a pin up model she quickly established herself in the movies and every major male star at the time wanted to be paired with her including Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Jack Lemon to mention just a few.

From being a homeless orphan to world famous movie starlet Marilyn was the perfect American success story. But waiting for America's Sweetheart were the predators of Hollywood and the strange combination of mafia and politicians who coveted her. She married America's favorite Yankees baseball hero but immediately realized their careers made marriage impossible yet Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn remained best friends and were planning to remarry just a couple of weeks after her death.

Two people in life befriended her, Joe DiMaggio and Milton Greene, her favorite photographer and business partner as she became the first woman in Hollywood to own her own movie production company with Milton.

Hollywood, the mafia and powerful politicians used enormous power and prestige to entrap Marilyn and failing to succeed, they killed her because she knew too much. That story is yet to surface but the time is finally right to tell Marilyn's real story, identify those who took her life to save their careers, and make her far more famous than she is already.

Can you believe someone should become so dominate in the world enduring for over 50 years and the best hasn't even been told yet? And can you believe Marilyn was just 36 years old when she was killed?

Bigger in death than life? Hardly? She had only just begun in life. Now it is time we heard her story rather than versions of all those whose agenda was not protecting Marilyn but those who made her a victim. Justice has yet to be dispensed. Then Norma Jean can finally rest.

America

's number one sweetheart, movie icon and innocent victim will be coming back to finish what she started. As Norma Jean said, Marilyn Monroe belongs to no one but the people.

Friday, July 25, 2014

CPT Twits from the Book of Jobs

Steve Jobs that is. Founder of Apple. America's last revolutionary.
February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011.

His most famous quotes from the Book of Jobs...

1) “We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it.”

2) “That’s been one of my mantras — focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex; you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.”

3) “Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other opinions drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

4) “I think if you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

5) “Quality is much better than quantity. One home run is much better than two doubles.”

6) “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

7) “Sometimes when you innovate, you make mistakes. It is best to admit them quickly, and get on with improving your other innovations.”

8)When you’re a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”

9) “Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

10) “My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other’s kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That’s how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they’re done by a team of people.”

11) “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”

12) “What a computer is to me is the most remarkable tool that we have ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds.”

13) “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… The ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… They push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

14) “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

15) “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

16) “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”

17) “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.”

18) “Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.”

19) “If you want to live your life in a creative way, as an artist, you have to not look back too much. You have to be willing to take whatever you’ve done and whoever you were and throw them away.”

20) “Ultimately, it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you’re doing. Picasso had a saying: good artists copy, great artists steal. And we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas, and I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

Former Apple VP of Worldwide Marketing Communication Allison Johnson said the two words Steve Jobs hated most, the most “dreaded, hated” words at Apple under Steve Jobs were “branding” and “marketing.”

“In Steve’s mind,” she recalls, “people associated brands with television advertising and commercials and artificial things. The most important thing was people’s relationship to the product. So any time we said ‘brand’ it was a dirty word.”

On the subject of marketing, Johnson says that “marketing is when you have to sell to somebody. If you aren’t providing value, if you’re not educating them about the product, if you’re not helping them get the most out of the product, you’re selling. And you shouldn’t be in that mode.”