International Book Week

I keep seeing in the last few days statuses and posts about the International Book Week. According to Wikipedia, this is not a formally established event, but anyway let's play the game:

It’s international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don't mention the title. Copy the rules as part of your status.

"I take back my previous statement; he really is a terror."

P.S. It took me a while to join this movement because I actually didn't know how to go to a certain page on Kindle, as this device displays the percentage of the book that you read until now, not the actual page number. Luckily a fellow reader helped me with that, as it seems I'm a dumb e-book user, I just read and press next page until I finish the book, so far I didn't use any other functions of my Kindle. Also, I choose the post from the book I read at this moment, not just from the physically closest book around me. I really hope people read more books than just a random sentence once a year, I surely do.

Open

Open is much more than a book about tennis, it's rather a bildungsroman on how Agassi grew out of the tennis life that was forced upon him into a respectable person with lots of money and good understanding on how to use them in life. So if you want to know what it takes to succeed and how easily you can fail go ahead and read this book. Meanwhile I read an interview (here in Romanian) with Florin Mergea, the most talented Romanian junior in many years, who didn't manage to kick start his career as a professional tennis player, but not is having a come back.

Brands and marketing

The classic way to promote a brand is to associate it with other figures that people like and trust. So Uniqlo, a fashion retailer from Japan, chose the same strategy and got endorsements for their brand from two famous characters: Novak Djokovic, currently ranked number two tennis player in the world, and Maru, the cat with 175 millions visualizations on YouTube.

Here are the two endorsements:

Now I have a little bit of a dilemma: should I continue with my tennis lessons (especially since I recently bought a racket similar to the one used by Djokovic), or should I start posting videos with my cat on YouTube?

Rock me with a cello... or two

Did I really go to RHCP or something?

Yes, but I was just lazy to post about it until now :) It was not the perfect concert, but nevertheless I'm glad I had the opportunity to see such a great band live. I read on Wikipedia that when they first became famous the guitarist of the band was so overwhelmed that he left the band in the middle of a tour. Then he returned, but 2 years ago he left again tired of touring the world. Actually it can be seen that the band is not even now totally comfortably with the large crowds, they didn't even try to engage the people to sing along the chorus parts of any of their songs. This was the first concert on the new stadium from Bucharest (National Arena) and the bad news is that the acoustic of the stadium is not very good, having an annoying echo.

I liked the jam sessions between the songs (at some point they told to one another to remember a piece they played that could lead to a new song) and the fact that they don't have a fixed setlist for the concert, so you can expect almost any song (expect for the songs from "One Hot Minute" which was the album they made after Frusciante left in 1992, but which I like very much being the first that I listened from RHCP) to come up. Just to get a feeling of the concert here is my all time favorite song from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Can't Stop live in Bucharest: