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I have a friend, Bob Muzikowski. He started the world’s first inner city little league in New York City.

You’ve probably never thought about it, but kids in the inner city don’t “do” little league. Their non-soccer-mom moms don’t have soccer mom vans and they have no money for baseball uniforms.

And since all the “men” are selling drugs on the street corner, there ain’t no coaches either. Nobody’s got a baseball mitt and baseball bats are used for gang banging, not baseballs. Sad state of affairs.

Bob, who was a reasonably well-to-do financial planner in the Big Apple, decided to do something about this.

Illinois threatened gov’t regulation of home school (BAD) and this is how home schoolers responded: They headed down to the capital in DROVES. This pic is the overflow. Affiliates must defend our turf the same way:

Google offered $6 billion and Groupon turned the offer down.

I know Brad Keywell, the founder of Groupon and I have good wishes for him. (Kudos to Brad for helping sponsor TEDx Chicago in September, by the way.) Furthermore if he desires to build his own multi-billion dollar empire instead of folding his store into Google’s tent, more power to him.

But you can be sure Google’s gonna give Brad a run for his money.

When I was 21 I had a decent warehouse job working for a very large wholesale company, W.W. Grainger. I played a practical joke and sent a rogue fax to another branch.

It was a funny joke until my boss, who was actually a good friend, was forced by his superiors to dismiss me.

I went home thoroughly dejected. I felt like a massive failure. I endured a phone call to Laura’s parents, telling my father-in-law of 10 months the story of how I’d just gotten ousted from my perfectly respectable job.

Firing #1.

CPV Traffic, or Cost Per View, is a hot form of paid advertising that works very well especially in high-traffic and consumer categories. It may also work in high-volume B2B markets. You can buy traffic VERY inexpensively and it is quite well targeted.

Roundtable member Susan Kruger sent me this. Her husband Brian is a teacher and a student at his school is a junior meteorologist. With our giant blizzard brewing in the Midwest, this is timely:

Guest Blog Entry from John Fancher, who’s riding shotgun with me in our Autoresponder Boot Camp. One of my favorite musicians, drummer Mike Portnoy, names Frank Zappa as one of his all-time heroes. Mike and Dream Theater did a concert with Frank’s son Dweezil Zappa here in Chicago in ’09. It was stellar. John, let ‘er rip! Frank Zappa dedicated … Read More

Last week I spoke at Entrepreneur Magazine’s Growth Conference in Atlanta. Many sessions were packed and afterward a group huddled around me and peppered me with questions.

#1 Question: “Why should I spend money buying clicks when I can get traffic from LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc? And for that matter, why shouldn’t we just try to get free search engine traffic?”

On a plane the other night a guy told me his wife worked for the Cicero Illinois public schools. Her school was severely overcrowded. She taught first grade and had 40 six year olds in her class.

40 kids. One teacher. Scary.

Cicero has been well known for government corruption since the days of Al Capone, the Mob Boss whose built his headquarters there. Today the folks who award government contracts in Cicero still have summer villas in Italy, while Latino families who have any aspirations for their kids move to a different school district before their children hit high school.

QUESTION: Who’s more guilty of squandering money:

My first job out of college was designing speakers for the major car makers. I designed the speakers in the ’94 Ford Probe, the ’95 Acura Vigor, the ’95 Jeep Cherokee and the ’96 Civic. Our factory in NC churned out 70,000 low-cost car speakers every day.

One of my friends, who knew how much I loved $10,000 stereo systems, asked how I felt about designing a speaker that had to cost $3.78 and the price of every part was calculated to 1/100th of a penny.