Expanding myself

I write something on my blog (FearFunandFiloz) most every day.  Every now and then, I take stock of why I do that and what it does to me.  I have 5,452 posts written and on the web since April 2008.  Most people I know that tried writing a blog drift away from it after a while.  I believe that most people have something in their day, some reaction or thought or memory or question, that is "worth" mentioning.  It is pretty well established that as babies age, they enter a stage in which they are receptive to language in the form of speech: speaking and hearing.  Our species found out that speech is good but that writing and reading are also quite valuable so they created typical childhood education that starts early with training in writing and reading.

My friend has been standing firm on the idea that the professor of writing, Percival Everett, is an outstanding writer.  Today, preparing for a discussion of Everett's novel "James", I came across a quote that grabbed my interest in writing.  The quote is 

"With my pencil, I wrote myself into being."  

My wife is a member of the artists cooperative Gallery Q of Stevens Point. I have tried to emphasize with her that most important arts are nicely represented in their gallery but one of the most important of all is missing: writing.  Writing and collecting ideas for my blog has been a valuable part of my life since retiring.  Maybe yours, too?

CNN Photos of the week 11/7

CNN Photos of the week 11/7

https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/14/world/gallery/photos-this-week-november-7-november-14

Don't miss Mrs. Bates kissing her husband mid-air.

On our table

We often have pastries for Saturday morning breakfast but today Lynn made us "French toast".  We each had two slices of multigrain bread.  I have read that olive oil is especially good for our health and so our "butter" has olive oil mixed in it.  But it was the French jam and the Stevens Point maple syrup that got my attention.  One from France and one from here, sitting beside each other and both contributing to our breakfast.  Impressive evidence that the world is interlocked and cooperative.

Walking pens

When I come out of the grocery store, I can sometimes see my car parked right over there.  As a kid, I watched cowboy movies in a movie theater.  Sometimes, the cowboy would whistle and his horse would pull himself loose from the hitching bar and trot over to where the cowboy was. I have been on the lookout for ballpoint pens that will roll or fly to where I am, conveniently getting to me instead of making me come to them.  Same deal with that car of mine parked right over there.  I am confident that with smart cars, there will be an app installed on the internal radio/ electronics that will enable the car to hear me call, start up and safely drive to where I am.

Lynn is healing from her 2nd knee surgery

Lynn is healing from her 2nd knee surgery.  She can walk without a walker or cane but when she sits down, she needs to keep her right leg elevated and straight.  It is painful otherwise.  There are many places such as restaurants or theaters where she can't do that.  Her right foot is needed to drive for the brake and the accelerator.  So there are still some rather important limitations to her abilities and I am still driving her to everything.

Special circumstances

https://abcnews.go.com/US/inside-life-sets-identical-twins-now-live-work/story?id=115638942&utm_medium=email

The link goes to a story I learned about in Pocket, an article collection service available to Firefox browser users.  The story is about women twins who married male twins, live near each other and interact often.  That arrangement made me think of what I got out of reading the book called "Tru Biz".  That book is about communities of hearing impaired and deaf Americans, their communities and culture.

One of the important parts of such communities is how each individual communicates.  Some members can hear a little, some can lip-read, some use hand language. Especially when children or teens, the favorite mode of communication can separate the community into sub-groups that favor or reject some modes.

More than once while a member of a college wrestling team, our guys rode a bus to the well-known college of the deaf, Gallaudet.  We were quite aware that the wrestler out on the mat sometimes communicated during the match with the coach by hand signals.  

The article linked above brought my attention to the experience of growing up with an identical twin.  I am confident that such a condition has some pluses and minuses that I have not experienced. 

Item from today's Numlock News

Love Songs

By some metrics, we're in a declining age of love songs. Of the 5,100 Billboard Top 10 hits from 1958 to 2023, 1,040 of them could be called "serenades," or songs about love and devotion sung from one person to another. These are indeed in decline, going from 23 percent of hits in the 1960s and up to 27 percent in the 1990s to a sharp drop to 12 percent of hits in our current era. It's less that love songs overall are in decline, but rather that they're changing in nature. A similar decline is seen in songs about heartache (15 percent of hits today, down from 22 percent in the '60s and 20 percent in the '90s), but songs about other, more ambiguous kinds of love — complicated love, sexually confident songs, love songs about the self, songs about pursuit — have gone from 18 percent of hits in the '60s to 42 percent of hits today. By that metric, once you consider the whole ecosystem, the rate of love songs is flat. 

David Mora and Michelle Jia, The Pudding

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I thought this Numlock News item was interesting and unusual.  In my opinion, the authors use some helpful words where twice they refer to "metrics" used.  As with argument and discussions, the measures and evidence collected and not collected can deeply affect the final result.