Text Box: By Gina Burgess Executive Director     Okay, I made up that word clusterism. I couldn’t find a word that describes what I’m talking about, so I made it up. Clustering is an economic development tool which was first described by Michael Porter in 1990.     Business or industry clusters are very similar to networking. Networking is when you find out the person you are sitting beside needs exactly what you sell, make, do; or you find out that the person you are sitting next to does exactly what you need or knows someone who can help you with what you’ve been wanting to do for weeks.     Clustering businesses is where each business is very similar. A good example is Hollywood. You can find almost every thing you need to make a movie or video in Hollywood: actors, editors, directors, sound-proofed stages, and so forth. This is an economic and geographic concentration of businesses that have a goal to make movies. Another simple example is the shopping mall which is a bunch (like my technical terminology?) of retail businesses gathered in one easy, convenient location for the purpose of selling products of all kinds.     The beauty of this is that everyone benefits. The shopper has lots of choices within walking distance, each of the stores benefits because of the

Text Box: A case for clusterism...

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Text Box: Women's and Children's Health and Safety Bazaar October 28, 2008 4pm - 7pm Jack Reed Park Picayune, MS Highland Community Hospital would like to invite women and children in our area to attend our Health and Safety Bazaar.  The event will feature health and safety information, Halloween costume contest and other fun filled activities.  For more information please contact Debbie Green (601-798-4711 ext. 1280 / dgreen@highlandch.com) or Amy Esslinger (601-798-4711 ext 1391 / aesslinger@highlandch.com) for further information.   We are asking for volunteers to help organize and work at the event.  If anyone is interested in having a booth call for the community letter and registration form. (We sent out about 350 letters to area businesses).  We have already received 3 booth entries and one corporate sponsor!!!!!! We want this to be a great, fun filled event for all involved.  All suggestions are welcome. Please call if you have any questions.

Text Box: Newsletter Spotlight Text Box:         Something is always happening at the Chamber

Text Box: Investing in the Future

Text Box: Vol. 1  Issue 21   ◊   8/19/08

Text Box: E-ZINE

Text Box: Community happenings and more information are posted on the Community Calendar Copyright 2008, all rights reserved.  

Text Box:               By Gina Burgess Executive Director      Albert Einstein once said that to place your hand on a hot stove a minute seemed like an hour, but to talk to a pretty girl for an hour seemed like a minute—that’s relativity. It’s all relative, and I don’t remember who said that.     However, I have noticed some movie clichés and I’d like to share some with you…     These from Matthew Boice. Everyone falling from a great height is strong enough to grab a non-elastic rope or cable, stopping their descent instantaneously, without ripping their arms off. Also, a superhero in a standing position can catch you 4 feet above the ground without hurting you. The lesson is, just don't hit the ground and you'll be fine. Even though turning on a light doesn't eject the bulb from its socket, giving a person an electric shock will fling him over a counter (there is always a counter or a table or a hand cart) and across the room. Electricity prefers to travel through the air just outside of an actual conductor to give it that neat crackly lightning effect. Castration and groin injuries change the pitch of a man's voice as if he had never had testosterone in the first place. Guns have no recoil.

Text Box: high traffic location. It’s a beautiful arrangement.     What does that mean to Picayune?     It means economic health, faster supply access, sharing resources which would save money in manufacturing. For instance, if we had a manufacturer who needed raw plastic product to make dancing hula girls to sit on our dashboards, it would be a great savings to set up shop next to Heritage Plastics and purchase their little plastic balls. No shipping costs, thus the cost of the dancing hula girls would be greatly reduced. Then the cardboard boxer sets up shop next to the maker of dancing hula girls and that provides a supplier for the hula girls and a buyer to the cardboard boxer. That is called a supply chain cluster.     If we can do that here in Picayune and in Pearl River County, we’d be rich. I’m not kidding. Look at Silicon Valley, Phoenix, Arizona with the optical cables and phone industry, Napa Valley wine county, Antwerp, the diamond capital. So we don’t have diamonds. We have NASA, and Stennis, and we have so much that we can provide.     Sometimes clusters just happen. Most of the time it takes a lot of networking and we can do that.  

Text Box:   No airliner can survive an action movie without a gunshot causing decompression. Luckily, having half the fuselage ripped off will not change the aerodynamics of the plane. A ghost possessing a living person uses that person's lips and tongue to form sounds, but it uses someone else's vocal cords. Some thoughts of my own... It is necessary for the heroine to pant when she’s been scared because this allows the audience to not have to hold their breath. (I thought everyone knew this.) People actually do go into shock at traumatic events like car wrecks and erupting volcanoes but only those that do not have a last name in the credits or who are known as ‘man on highway’ or ‘waitress no. 2’ die. Cars are always crashed end over end or take 3 flips in the air. The reason for this is so that there is a reason for all the fake blood or for the broken ankle which makes it necessary for the female to be carried over 50 miles of desert. Which reminds me that broken ankles, twisted ankles or sprained ankles never swell up in movies, nor do they turn blue. It only takes about an hour and the thing’s perfectly healed.   That reminds me that bruises, cuts, scrapes and vast amounts of blood loss are miraculously healed in the matter of a few moments, but a broken pair of glasses must be mended with a

Text Box:   white piece of tape for the entire movie. Action movie actors can run faster than cars. It only takes 30 seconds to teach someone how to dance good enough to win an award – at the max an hour. And they can do it with a broken ankle. It is perfectly all right to wake up and kiss your mate without brushing your teeth. In the movies there is no such thing as morning breath. It is absolutely necessary in horror movies for the victim to lock all the doors and windows with the homicidal maniac inside the house. Arbitrary endings are out of fashion.... THANK you! It is critical to make a movie from a book that actually had no foul language and put foul language in it for exactly what reason I have no clue. What are some things YOU have noticed

Text Box: Guns have no recoil.