Ethnic clusters flourish in cities, and the Triangle is no exception. Head down Western Blvd., right around the Raleigh/Cary border, and you’ll be in Little India.

More than just ‘curry here’ and a ‘sari there,’ Little India is a soup-to-nuts community of Indian businesses, including realtors, jewelers, CPA’s, doctors, dance teachers and D.J.’s (Like DJ Garam Masala, I kid you not.)

They even have their own magazine, Saathee. It’s free and includes jokes like this one: “Mafatlal gave his wife a pair of diamond earrings and a necklace on their wedding anniversary. Wife: “But you promised me a new car! Mafatlatl: “Yes, but I can’t find an imitation car!”

Enjoy some highlights of Little India below. As for musical accompaniment, I recommend the Indian grooves of Desi Radio Online.

Udupi Café
590 East Chatham Street Cary, NC 27511 (919) 465-0898

No meat. No alcohol. No website. And it’s one of my favorite places. (That says a lot.)

Natya Academy
www.natyaacademy.com

Drop in Bollywood dance classes are every Tuesday at 7 pm. See you there!

Roopkala Sarees
http://www.roopkala.com/

 ‘Six yards of fascination,” as the cloth is called, can be wrapped, hung, draped and pleated around the wearer’s body creating a look that is at once mysterious, sexy and dignified.

Added bonus: the store’s website links to an animated online temple to Shirdi Sai Baba, a turn-of-the-century Indian guru, mystic and yogi. He may have been the reincarnation of Shiva. And he did a pretty mean headstand.

Only the best gods have multiple appendages.

Biryani House
744 East Chatham Street Cary, NC 27511-6913 (919) 469-0006

Authentic Indo-Pak cuisine: Chicken, goat and lamb; tandoori, biryani and kabab. It’s been called one of the Triangle’s top 50 restaurants, and it’s prices don’t know it yet.

Galaxy Cinema

Technically, it’s not off Western but it’s still close enough and important enough to be in Little India. This epicenter of Indian culture and entertainment, combines the latest independent films with the best of Bollywood.

Palika Bazaar

740 East Chatham Street Cary, NC 27511-6902

The original Palika Bazaar in New Delhi contains about 400 shops and 15,000 people at any given time. This one is smaller, but no less fun for curious foreigners.

You can find much, much more about the area’s Indian community on these sites:

www.sathee.com
www.humsub.net
www.rtpindia.com
www.apnatriangle.com
www.tcanc.org

Pouring drinks. Serving up insights. McKinney President Jeff Jones and CCO Jonathan Cude are mighty talented at doing both. They proved it on January 12, when they worked the bar at Revolution to raise money for the Urban Ministries of Durham. To get their take on bartending, advertising and that blurry area in-between, I asked them a few questions.

Photo by Julia Parris

Which job did you find more difficult? 
 
JC: Bartending is a lot like advertising. They both demand focus, attention and a superior knowledge of alcohol.
 
JJ: But it was way harder to get the right amount of olive juice in a dirty martini than anything I do here every day!
 
How did your respective roles at McKinney helped you bartend?

JJ: Multitasking, problem solving and meeting deadlines – people were thirsty, now!

JC: If I didn’t know how to make a drink someone ordered, I creatively directed one.

What can advertisers learn from bartenders?

JJ: Listen more! People love to talk about themselves and share all kinds of stories.
 
Do Mad Men and women tip well? (We obviously drink well.)

JC: Yes, especially if it’s for a good cause.

The Red Square Recipe. Give it up. Come on now.

JJ: A slow 3-count pour of vodka, ruby red just right, a splash of sprite, a wedge of lime and lots of smiles.
 
Favorite Cheers quote? Mine’s from Norm of course, “It’s a dog-eat-dog world. And I’m wearing Milkbone underwear.”

JJ: Diane: Hate is not the opposite of love. Indifference is.

JC: Throughout high school Sam Malone was my guiding role model. Someday I’ll find another one.

The Last Call:

The duo raised $531.40 for the Urban Ministries. That means between 6 and 8 pm, over $2,500 in drinks were served to a vibrant crowd of socially conscious tipplers.

The best coffee mugs are rarely found sets. (Unless of course we’re talking about wayward mugs that have escaped from their matching siblings.) Nope. The crème de la crème of coffee mugs, at least in my opinion, are the one-of-a-kind gems that I can choose, like an outfit, to match my mood.

My “mugshots”

Some mornings definitely require Leadership Development, Presidential or otherwise. On other days I feel like an MGM starlet ready to roar. Occasionally I'm sure the Centers for Disease Control will put me under quarantine, but mostly I just need a pair of wings.

This holiday season I have a new favorite mug. It’s not in my cabinet, but at the Urban Ministries of Durham’s Community Café, which serves 600 meals a day to the homeless and the hungry. They don’t have nearly enough mugs and chairs, and the ones they do have are pretty worn.

So on December 4th, McKinney’s Seats of Honor program started matching employee donations of $25.  Each gift made sure a guest at the Urban Ministries had a mug to sip a warm beverage from and a seat to rest on. By the 18th, we raised enough money to give UMD 98 new mugs and chairs (or $4,900 if you do the math).

Even if these mugs are part of matching sets, if they don’t have any clever sayings or pictures of cute kitties, for a small stretch of heaven, they will be the favorite mugs of many whose value will increase each day.

Art school, it’s not just for waiters anymore. If you live in the Triangle, it might actually get you a job.

A new study released by the NC Departments of Cultural Resources and Commerce found that the arts, humanities and design fields employ just as many people here as banks do.  Here’s the math on NC’s creative economy:

Approximately 300,000 jobs
$10 billion in revenue
5 percent of the state’s total wages and benefits

To get a little slice of this pie, and a dollop of whipped cream, you’ll need a resume. You could go with a simple Word Doc and Times New Roman font or get a little "creative."

You can almost hear the gobbling from our balcony. After all, the number one source of Thanksgiving’s finest is only an hour or so away from Durham.

We’re talking about Butterball of course. And for all your bird-basting questions, their famous Turkey Talk-Line is there to help, 24 hours a day.

Below are a few “re-creations” of memorable calls.

*The following is only loosely based in fact and any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

CALLER:     My Chihuahua is stuck inside my turkey!
HOTLINE:   Ma’am?
CALLER:     She crawled in by accident. I’ve tried pulling and shaking…
HOTLINE:   Just cut the neck opening wider ma’am.

CALLER:     Is it okay to carve a turkey with a chainsaw?
HOTLINE:   Try the chainsaw’s little cousin, the “electric knife.”

CALLER:     Can I microwave a turkey?
HOTLINE:   We recommend baking it sir.
CALLER:     Don’t got an oven. How long to nuke it?
HOTLINE:   9-10 minutes per pound on medium.

CALLER:    I’ve heard you can cook a turkey in a truck engine. That true?
HOTLINE:  We don’t recommend it. If you do, wrap it in plenty of foil.
CALLER:    What about the motor oil and stuff?
HOTLINE:  That’s why you use the foil, sir.

CALLER:     How long to roast my turkey?
HOTLINE:   How much does it weight ma’am?
CALLER:     I don't know, it's still running around outside.

CALLER:     How do I make my turkey vegetarian?
HOTLINE:   Don’t eat it.
CALLER:     Do you sell vegetarian turkeys?
HOTLINE:   All turkeys are vegetarians.
CALLER:     Okay, cool.

CALLER:     Will turkey make my dog go to sleep?
HOTLINE:   Not to my knowledge.
CALLER:     What about my relatives, how much turkey does it take to really knock ‘em out?

CALLER:     I was roasting my bird and now my kitchen is on fire.
HOTLINE:   Hang up right now ma’am and call the fire department.

So Durham was just named the 5th Best Place to Live by U.S. News and World Report. But the reasons they gave? I’ve heard them a million times before. “Expansive healthcare industry”, “prestigious Duke University,” “a thriving technology hub.” C’mon people, you can do better than that! But they didn’t, so I will.

First off, living here gets you a lot of bang for your buck. According to Forbes, we’re in the top ten for America’s Best Cheap Cities.

We’re the smartest. Yes way. The Daily Beast said so, giving the hyperbolic merger of Raleigh-Durham an IQ score of 170.

We have one of America’s least miserable airports. Another study by U.S. News and World Report gave RDU International a Misery Index Ranking of a mere 10. Take that O’ Hare (47) and San Fran International (45)!

Despite a history richly packed in Tobacco, Durham is actually the fifth most Smoke-Free Metro Area. Granted, you still see lots of old smokestacks and tobacco warehouses (beautiful old brick buildings should never go to waste), but look inside and you’ll find the Golden Belt arts community, our home at the American Tobacco Campus and shopping and dining at Brightleaf Square.

East Durham was named one of This Old House's "Best Old-House Neighborhoods" in both the US and Canada for it’s architecture and sense of community.

Finally, BusinessWeek named downtown Durham one of the nation’s 15 most up-and-coming neighborhoods. I respect this award in particular because it’s easy to build a cookie-cutter community without a past, ahem Cary, but it takes creativity, drive and love to take something old and crumbling and bring it life with coffee shops, wine bars, art galleries, and creative companies—like McKinney!

For pics and people, check out this lovely little video courtesty of Downtown Durham, Inc.

I often eat my lunch in the McKinney café, by grand windows that look down on the brick beauty of the American Tobacco Campus. My favorite sight? A fading storefront with hand-painted lettering that reads, “Lunch ‘Downstairs’ Lunch,” and below this, “Home of the 15¢ lunch. All you can eat.”

I love this sign. To me it says, “we’ve got midday sustenance for ya’ right here. Only a dime and a nickel. Rub ‘em together and make a sandwich.” I think they should resurrect the 15¢ lunch today. For a little pocket change, you could get a shot glass of mac and cheese or a quarter-sized quarter-pounder.

I wanted to find out a little more about this place, maybe even see a picture or too. So I contacted Michael Goodmon, Vice President of Real Estate for the Capitol Broadcasting Company, which manages the ATC.

Here’s the rub: the restaurant never existed.

It was painted, he said, by Michael Brown, a muralist whose done work all over the Triangle.  I was crushed. To me, this was a forgery. Then I started thinking, all those factory workers had to eat lunch somewhere. I dug a little and, lo and behold, there was such a thing as a 15¢ lunch in the ATC.

"The Crowe Building used to house the American Tobacco cafeteria," says Eddie Belk of Belk Architecture. "It had no windows so workers wouldn't be tempted to linger after they ate.” And just what might they have eaten?

15¢ offerings would take us back to 1910 or so and didn’t include French Fries or a free prize. Just simple fare like beans, cold beef sandwiches, eggs, coffee, corn cakes and milk. Not fancy, but it, ahem, kept things rolling.

Postscript

In a strangely ironic twist, the Crowe Building now houses Saladelia, a popular take-away lunch spot with a coffee bar. The prices, sadly, are no longer 15¢.

Money may not grow on trees, but it seems like “value” certainly does. From store shelves to Sunday circulars, the word is used so often, I feel its worth is slipping. This isn’t an effect of deflation, or of the Chinese. Not of insider trading or an old expiration date. Just of being thrown about like a meaningless compliment way too much.

By definition, value is the “importance or preciousness of something.” Monetary worth is listed secondarily, like an afterthought or fine print. Sure I know this; after all I communicate it every day. But it took a very personal incident to feel it.

It was in Savannah, GA by the harbor. I was walking along, saying something perfectly nonsensical to my then boyfriend when he stopped me and opened a small, black velveteen box. Words were exchanged and a yes rung out into the night air, harmoniously blending with the strange and gravely sound of a man asking, “Excuse me sir, wouldn’t ya like to buy that pretty girl a rose?”

Now this wasn’t a living rose, but one made out of a palm leaf, dry and supple. Before my fiancé’ could grab his wallet, the man realized what he had just interrupted. Struck, he looked at me, then looked at Joe and asked him eagerly (regardless of the obvious answer on my finger), “Did she say yes?” Without waiting for a reply, he handed me the palm tree rose and said this was for me, no charge.

I didn’t shut up about the rose for the next half hour. And when I think back, it’s still one of the first things I remember about that night. Money-wise, a dead tree leaf isn’t worth anything next to a diamond. Value-wise, it’s right up there.

Do you really think you'd find Cat Fancy in Bill Gates's bathroom? Oh, no. www.800CEOREAD.com publishes a short-list of the best selling business books in corporate America. So if you want to know what the big-wigs read when they're sitting on top of it all, here are my summaries and personal takes on the top 4 picks as of July 2009.

1)    “Creating Success from the Inside Out: Develop the Focus and Strategy to Uncover the Life You Want”, by Ephren Taylor.

Back-cover brilliance:

“Follow your own path and refuse to be defeated”

Stats: 

Founded GoFerretGo.com, a job-hunting website for teens, when he was only 16.
Became a millionaire before his 17th birthday.
Founded an alternative energy company in 2007
Maintains his street cred by managing the finances of Snoop Dogg and Fat Joe
Likes to be called a “Wealth Engineer” and a “Socially-Conscious Capitalist”

My Takeaway:

Money is the greenest energy source of all.                                                                                                                                                                                                              Aaliyah said it best, “Age ain’t nothing but a number.”
Job titles are everything. I want mine to be “Mental Acrobat and Alphabetical Magician”
He started his first business at age 12. So did I. I took random household objects and attempted to sell them in my backyard to get money for Barbie clothes. My mother was not happy.
Overcome a difficult past. This way, if your business venture doesn’t succeed maybe your memoirs will.


2)

“What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful”, by Marshall Goldsmith

Back-cover brilliance:

“Are you ready for the Succession?”

Stats:

An executive coach to the corporate elite
He helps the successful become more successful.
Has written 24 books on executive leadership
Has also been a professor/leadership coach for his entire professional career.
Does not sell himself short. His bio says he is “A worldwide authority…One of the most influential…preeminent practitioners of leadership…greatest living business thinkers…”

My Takeaway:

All the superlatives in the world don’t make up an ounce of proof of one's accomplishments.
He warns not to add your two cents to every discussion within earshot. I am guilty of this and will from now on limit myself to doodling my reactions to the topic at hand.
Avoid what he calls, “The Three Martini Lunch Syndrome,”—getting too comfortable in past victories, old ideas and leisurely indulgences. While his first two goals are fine aims, I’d like to counter the third with an article from Modern Drunkard magazine praising the strategic benefits of the Martini Lunch. My favorite quote:  “Nothing of lasting import was ever accomplished sober.”

3)

“It's your ship! Management techniques from the best damn ship in the navy” by Michael Abrashoff

Back Cover Brilliance:

"The American Military understands leadership better than most business corporations.”

Stats:

The author is a decorated Navy captain.
He took command of the USS Benfold when it was the worst performing ship in the fleet and turned it around. Now that’s credibility. (Hear that superlative-man?)

My Takeaway:

It’s easier to run a “tight ship” when your employees are all in uniform.
Effective leadership is imperative when your workplace is a guided missile destroyer.
The Seven Dwarves were right after all. You work better if you’re having fun. In his words, “The secret to lasting changing is implementing policies that people will actually enjoy carrying out.”

Nugget of truth. Rather than top-down management, Abrashoff encourages bottoms-up command. “This is your ship,” he would say to each and every one of his sailors. I can see how this self-motivational strategy was revolutionary to the military and how it could be so for some companies too. Thankfully, it’s just the way things are at McKinney.

4)

“Thank God it’s Monday! How to create a workplace you and your customers love” by Roxanne Emmerich

Back Cover Wisconsin Sharp Cheddar:

“Inspiring you. Inspiring workplaces. Inspiring results”

The Stats:

All cheese aside, her bio actually comes with some meat. She was the CEO of her own consulting company, the Emmerich Group, that’s worked with Fortune 500 dives like Lockheed Martin and Allianz.

My Takeaway:

Once again, have a kick-ass job title. Her’s is, “Workplace transformation expert.”
Us busy-bee game-changers don’t have a lot of time. So whatever you do, keep it short. Even her book is only 44 pages long.
“Create significant emotional events.” Apparently a successful workplace has a lot in common with the programming on Lifetime.
“Enroll your employees to become unstoppable.” Does this require paperwork? Nope. Just coffee.                                                                                                                                 “Light That Fire in Your Belly.” No, you don’t need habañeros, just enthusiasm.

What did I learn from all of this? Don't underestimate the importance of the time you spend in the bathroom. And basically, care. Be humble. And take Prozac.

Microsoft’s new search engine, Bing, bills itself as a “decision engine.” In actuality I think it’s more of a “decision French maid”— it organizes your search results but puts things where you can’t find them, all while wearing a cute little outfit.

Case in point. This scene wafts me away to the Mediterranean where a bottle of Chianti awaits. If Bing is a decision engine, then my very first one is to go to Travelocity.com RIGHT NOW!

For indecisive types like me, a real-life adjudicator would put an end to countless hours of grocery store wandering and dead-end dating. Like a pocket protector or a guardian angel, it would help me feel secure in everything I do. Luckily, I’ve got options.

Hunch.com promises to answer any and all lingering questions in my head. All I have to do is answer twenty questions about myself.  (My god, I’m less complex than an IRS form.)

When I feel existential angst, I can check and see if I’m depressed or not on the Sad Scale.

The ol’ Wheel of Food will recommend a lunch spot for me with no supporting evidence other than an address.

For decisions made just the way I like them- without any strategy or common sense, I go to random.org. They boast that, “Most computer programs are pseudo-random...random.org offers true random numbers to anyone on the Internet.”

Onsite applications let you flip your global and historical choice of coin, roll virtual dice and generate a series of random calendar dates.

My coin of choice:

1935 Buffalo Nickel

When I’m in the mood for a little mystical advice, I check the Tarot Reading Widget from Apple Downloads. Its scarily true readings give me the shivers every time.

Of course, I could just listen to my gut, but I’m waiting for an intuition widget to come out with that.