Don't underestimate our innate powers

Every now and then, I get to see examples of a limit nature puts on us humans.  Every boy is a male and every boy has a mother, interested in protecting him, who is female.  She sees him mimicking older boys doing tricks on their moving bikes.  If she is smart, she tends to avoid observing him on a skateboard, trying to outdo others his age and sex in more daring feats such as leaping in the air with the skateboard and riding it along a hand railing above unforgiving cement steps.

 

A mother may find the drives that propel her son toward flirting with injury, pain and trouble to be inscrutable.  These days, it is definitely possible for a daughter to don elbow pads, knee pads and helmet and start into activities that have a high chance of resulting in scrapes, scars and more serious injuries or even permanent disability or death.

Depending on the boy, his plans and what he feels is a worthwhile challenge, it can be a worthwhile step toward maturity.  If there is an adult male or several near the boy, that person or persons can be helpful in assessing the worth of the risk in football, wrestling, hunting and other activities.  In many cases, taking the risk and emerging whole is essential to development.  The book by the elderly Jesuit scholar Walter Ong called "Fighting for Life" shows that in all cultures, boys of a certain age are given challenges of a physical and threatening sort that they must successfully face in order to pass into manhood.

 

Males who have undergone such challenges tend to be quite conscious of the value of their own eyes, ears, physical balance, judgment and reflexes.  The inner human is always there to be relied on, to guide, protect and serve as a foundation for all activities and challenges.  Morehouse used to say not to forget that we have the bodies honed by 18,000 years of hunting and surviving.

There is a short scene in "Tea with Mussolini" which might help in putting the male drives in perspective.  A young man, maybe 22, is part of a group of British who have lived in Italy for a long time.  The Fascisti are emerging as a dangerous and erratic political force in the country and the Brits would like to escape the country if the Fascists are going to continue to gain power.  The young man's mother has been using her heartsong and loving-worry to convince the young man to pretend to be a girl to avoid arrest, incarceration or conscription into a foreign army.  The sound and scent of military spirit all around makes him want to stop hiding himself.  Eventually, he loses his temper and says he will be part of a charade no more, regardless of the danger or his fate.

Of course, warfare and fighting and derring-do take the lives and bodies of many men but there can come a point when they simply do not care about the danger, period.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

George and Silas

I often urged older people to recall books they have read, to think of one that they felt strongly about when finishing it.  Then, find a copy of the book and take a look now.  It can be fun to compare your memories of the book itself and your feelings about it with how it seems to you today.  About a month ago, I was writing about such a second look, right while we were looking for a book to read aloud.

I recall enjoying "Ivanhoe" in grade 8 or 9 and thinking that Silas Marner was a good story well-written in about grade 10.  I also remember that "A Simple Twist of Fate", a 1994 movie retelling of the story in Virginia instead of rural England, was fun to watch.  The original 1861 story was very sensitively put together, conveyed in psychologically astute language that was restrained and civil, yet insightful about the nature of people and their motives.  The book was written by Mary Ann Evans, who wrote using the pen name "George Eliot".  This was a time when women authors were not to be taken seriously so she concealed her sex. By the way, an excellent book by the Australian professor Dale Spender, "The Writing or the Sex", does an unforgettable job at reviewing the way male critics have embarrassed themselves when reviewing writing they thought was male and then changed their opinion when finding the writer was female.

Two or three weeks ago, we decided to give "Silas Marner" a try for reading aloud.  We finished the story last night and again, appreciated the excellent phrasing and insight into human humility, pride, fear, shame as well as patience, joy, appreciation of opportunities life gives us if we are open to them and are brave enough to accept them, even when they are far from what we expected.

"George Eliot" wrote 7 novels in all and sometime, I may give "Middlemarch" a try.  Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, two accomplished novelists themselves, have pronounced the book "the greatest novel in English".  

On a separate note, Mary Ann Evans is reported in Wikipedia to have lived with a married man for 20 years, causing some comment and scandal.  Upon his death, she married a man 20 years younger than she was.  What's not to like about such a woman in such a time?

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Cookies

We have two kinds of cookies for lunch, cheap and expensive.  The cheap all come from Wal-Mart, the closest grocery store to our house.  Some are varieties of Pepperidge Farm, some World Table Chocolate Caramel, some Walkers shortbread cookies from Scotland and some strawberry or lemon filled Henry Lambertz cookies from Germany.  They are the ones we trot out on alternate days.

On the other days, we split one expensive cookie ($2.25 each) between us.  The cookies, called Nuts2Chew, are hefty and filled with nuts, raisins and craisins.  These cookies come from the hardworking Earth Crust bakers, inside our local food coop.  We end most of our lunches with cookies and fruit of one sort or another.

There are  the third kind of cookies in our lives, too.  Those are the small bits of code that various companies leave on our computers, to track our browsing.  These were originally created to make signing into an account easier and faster.  Most browsers can be set to retain these "cookies" indefinitely or just for that session of browsing the web or to not accept them at all.  I am not a fan of being tracked, although I understand it is pretty difficult to avoid.  Some commentators on the National Security Administration (NSA) surveillance of private citizens have pointed out that tracking companies that collect data about my favorite sites on the web know a great deal more about my typical online behavior than the NSA does, unless, I suppose, I come under special scrutiny.

When you stop to think how the World Wide Web works, you grasp the fact that every time you click on a link, in the results of a Google search or on your church's website or anywhere, you are actually sending a request for a "file" to be sent to your computer.  It is the file that will make the "web page" appear as it was laid out in the browser that you are using.  This means, of course, that the server sending the file must be given the computer's address.  It needs to know where you are if it is going to send you something.

I often start my computing day using Chrome, Google's browser, since it is touted as especially fast at loading and being ready to use.  For a while, I didn't understand why I should "sign in" to use a browser.  However, eventually, I understood that Google will preserve my bookmarks and lots of other stuff (most of which I don't want kept but I do get to pick and choose.)  Most computers anywhere have Chrome on them (since it is free and unobtrusive) and can serve as a handy alternative to Internet Explorer (the blue "e") or Safari on Apple products.  But, once I agree to let Chrome save my bookmarks, they are available on any computer and that can be handy, especially for the way I use my iPad.  After my computer is more or less warmed up and fully loaded, I usually close Chrome and switch to my main browser, Firefox.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Different sorts of ego

I have been enjoying "The Undivided Past" by David Cannadine, read in audio form by Gildart Jackson.  The historian and Princeton professor of history reviews six identifiers that have figured largely in attempts to explain, classify and understand humans.  After emphasizing that religions include a wide variety of divergent sorts of people and that nations even more so, that Marx and Engels's rigorous but misguided effort to demonstrate that social class (proletariat, bourgeois, and aristocratic) were THE preeminent markers of human identity, Cannadine looks at gender.  

There has been speculation about the superiority or inferiority of one of the genders or the other as far back as writing goes.  It seems rather difficult for humans not to assume that one of the genders is better, for many reasons, most of which have been gone over many times and need not be repeated here.  The effort to more or less organize women in women's groups to advance the causes and interests of women, in a political and public way, especially on a national or multinational scale, is fairly recent.  The famous American convention of women, announcing their desires for greater political and legal rights was held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. in 1848.  The Constitutional amendment granting women the vote was ratified on August 18, 1920.  The National Organization of Women was founded in 1966 and is one of several organizations interested in the rights of women.

Cannadine makes clear that great masses of women in this country and others have felt little interest in political and legal issues and that few themes have seemed to be important to a majority of women.  Even the efforts to secure the vote and other rather fundamental ideas have appealed to well-educated, rather wealthy women and other women have made it clear in various ways and times that they felt little unity with the main campaigns and the women involved with them.

My work, starting as an elementary school teacher and working in teacher training for several decades after that, gave me plenty of chance to interact with women.  Having been male all my life but working with many women, including an all-girls camp in two years of summer jobs, I took an early and sustained interest in women's psychology.  One of the memorable books for me was "Sex and Fantasy" by Robert May (1980).  The title makes the book sound a little pornographic but it is actually about the sorts of fantasies males and females tend to have, especially as older children and teens.  He shows that males often think of daring deeds, of the sort that demonstrate bravery, while females often think of caring deeds, as in motherhood.  His emphasis on male pride helped me to conclude that males tend to have more pride and more competitiveness than females.  

Then, as I watched grandmothers competing to see who made the most endearing cookies for grandchildren and young women competing to see who could offer the most arresting views of cleavage, I saw that women have strong wills and rigorous egos but that they may compete in different contests than males work in.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

1500 posts

As of today, Monday, August 26, I have 1500 posts in my blog, Fear, Fun and Filoz.  The first post was March 28, 2008 but I didn't write steadily until 2009.  Since Jan. 10, 2009, I have averaged .89 posts a day, close to one a day.  I always feel that I have no obligation to write, nor any to write about, nor avoid writing about, any particular subject.  My purpose in writing quickly developed into just seeing what was on my mind, what was happening in my life, trying to select from that material, parts that might be interesting to others.

I reserve the right not to write, especially if I am traveling or otherwise engaged in activities or at a location that makes writing and posting difficult or intrusive. Often, what is on my mind is not the sort of subject that most people think about or care about.  The message posted today is about data analysis and statistical prediction.  I find this subject quite interesting and it goes back to the early days of shipping and the invention of insurance.  I have taught statistics many times and I rarely find other people who are interested in the subject.  I know that many classes cover too many topics in an effort to cram it all in.  But from time to time, I do include information about statistics and other topics I am familiar with.

A few weeks ago, I explained that I might take a more relaxed approach to writing, maybe posting every other day.  I received several complaints that reducing the frequency of posts would interfere with the life rhythms of several of my good friends.  Their morning wake-up routines include reading my posts along with their morning coffee.  It just wouldn't be the same without them.  I had little feel for the fact that I was becoming a habit in the life of friends and certainly didn't foresee a call to write from people that matter to me.  I did have a taste of the need to consider other people's feelings and possible alarms when I was unexpectedly unable to write a couple of times.

 

I have never had occasion before to accumulate quite so much writing on quite such a broad range as this blog contains.  I have tried a few little steps toward organizing the topics, or a topic list or a table of contents.  Since I try to write most days and I purposely start each time by asking what is prominent in my life that day, there is bound to be a disconnect  between days.  This page contains links to four files: three related to my blog and one to my PhD dissertation in 1968.  The first file contains the post titles in order of appearance for the first 1000 posts.  Some of the post titles are misleading, often an attempt at word play or a different slant on a topic.  

The best tool for locating a topic or subject is the search window on the blog page.  Trying several different possible search terms will often lead you to the posts you are looking for.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Nate Silver

I am a fan of data analysis, big data or small.  Of course, generally small data sets are likely to be misleading, especially if the data is not collected in a way to represent the population well.  In many studies, the population being studied is not well specified or even specified at all.  During my grad school years, I worked in the University of Maryland School of Education Statistics lab.  It consisted of about 30 desks, each with an up-to-date calculator on it.  They were the size of large typewriters and weighed about twice what a typewriter did.  One of the most meticulous and yet worst data collections we ever ran into in that lab was when two Georgetown medical students came in with a big scroll.  These two had "sacrificed" a lab rat from a batch, one a day for 30 days.  They hoped that we could help them find something interesting and important in the resulting data, taken in about 20 measurements on each animal.  We told them (politely, of course) to get lost.  We had had too much experience with fishing trips, in which no intelligence, model or theory governed the data collection. Just an exercise in key-pressing and going around in circles.

Nate Silver is the data analyst who correctly predicted 49 of the fifty state presidential campaigns in 2008 and all 50 in 2012.  His book "The Signal and the Noise" (2012) discusses predictions, good and many bad.  The worst ones related to the 2007-2009 economic downturn, since missing the seriousness of the situation and its likelihood caused plenty of pain and disruption, and not just in this country.  Silver is a good writer and writes for a general, intelligent audience about predictions of all sorts and how easy it is to slant the data to show what you want it to.

One of the best books on the subject is still the 1950 book "How to Lie with Statistics" by Darrell Huff.  Another good discussion of how ardent people in the midst of this effort or that can be lead astray by their hopes, passions and colleagues in that in "The Information Diet" by Clay A. Johnson, who describes working on the Howard Dean bid for the presidency in 2004.  His campaign workers very, very much wanted their guy to win and Johnson describes how they regularly churned positive and negative information about the campaign so that it looked like support of their hopes, regardless of its "objective" value.

A book that Silver and others mention is the book "Moneyball", which describes the Oakland A's application of objective data in recruiting lower cost athletes for their team in a way that made a big difference and depended less on hunches and rules of thumb.  If you are interested in this subject, two more names that can lead to impressive insights: Paul Meehl and Robyn Dawes.  Meehl had been interested for years in the subject of his book "Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction".  Among other things, he showed that statistical equations did a better job than a panel of expert judges in deciding which applicants for parole would do well and which would wind up committing more crime. Dawes has a number of papers and books that shows that human intuition is not as good as data analysis at many sorts of prediction.

Really good agents

I have read that one of the valuable aspects of life in the US is the people who run the agencies, both governmental and private business.  They can usually be counted on to have the best interests of the customer/client in mind.  I was reminded of this subject when we were on the phone with our financial advisor in the morning and visited our main physician in the afternoon.  Of course, both of these men have excellent support themselves.  Very knowledgeable partners, assistants and secretaries, who are personable and competent.

Our financial advisor has an unusual background, having studied both business and graduated from divinity school.  He has been a full time pastor, a hospital and Hospice chaplain and now runs an expanding finance business.  Our longterm investments are handled by him and his staff.  We are more than satisfied with the managing and advice we have had.

Our main physician is very popular and has a waiting list of people who would like to be his patients.  He is a good line of defense for us between our innocent bodies and the many techniques and technicians who seem to be waiting in the bushes for us, ready to pounce and inundate us with services, probes and prescriptions.  I am confident that some of them have a place in my life but many do not.  I count on the good judgment and common sense of our medical agent, knowing us, our desires and our histories, to help us make use of the items that offer some aid and improvement while avoiding unneeded entanglements, medicines and arrangements that pay off poorly.

Of course, many other people help us regularly: help desk workers, poll workers, street pavers, us legistators, and others but they are mostly anonymous.  They can be interchangeable in that we get assistance from one or another, with no control of who it will be and little memory of who it is that solved our problem.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Donald E. Westlake

I still get a lift from visiting libraries, even though most of the time, I get books by buying them for our Kindles through the computer or the Kindles themselves.  The other day, I went to the library and looked at the end of the alphabet of authors' last names.  I usually look to Donald E. Westlake (and Paul J. Levine) for light reading.  One thing about Kindle books is that they don't have the same book jacket art and information that paper books do.  Besides, I always enjoy handling a book that has been borrowed repeatedly, undoubtedly satisfying quite a few readers along the way.

 

I think Westlake (1933-2008) is best known for his John Dortmunder series but the man wrote more than one hundred books.  I always thought of Westlake as one of my own private discoveries, since I did choose a paper copy of one of his books maybe 10 years ago.  I rely on the jacket inside cover synopsis to help me decide whether I want to read the story or not. When I select a book, decide to borrow it and read it on my own, it feels I discovered the author.  But in the library the other day, I read some of the jacket information on Westlake.  I learned that many readers and organizations had honored him, that many people considered him the finest comic crime author in the country and that his books have been awarded the Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

Another well-known crime novelist, Elmore Leonard, just died in the last few days.  I don't think I have read a single one of his books but I may one of these days.

In the library, I purposely examined Westlake books that were not about John Dortmunder, the thinking member of a gang of thieves who are always planning to make a big score but always run into complications and obstacles they had not foreseen or had discounted. I chose "Money for Nothing", written in 2003.  I found it a gripping story, smooth as a fine whiskey, about a nearly bright young man who starts getting monthly $1000 checks in the mail from "United States Agent".  At first, he is puzzled and makes a few quiet efforts to learn just who is sending this not-unwelcome money but finally just gives up and keeps cashing them.  As the story begins, that has been going on for 7 years, when he finally gets contacted by parties he would rather not be contacted by.

There seemed to be some danger yesterday that I would grow attached to the chair in which I sat and read and read and read.  Very trying adventure!  That book and lots of others are available for check out at the public library near you.  Or, for a little cash, you can download it to your Kindle or computer.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Believing and assuming

I try to stay current with Herbert Benson's writings.  He is the retired MD from the Harvard Medical School who is the main figure for medical and scientific investigation of what can be called "non-mental body responses."  Oddly enough, such responses can include mental ones.  Benson was asked by practitioners of transcendental meditation to look for physical effects of meditation in their bodies, back in the 70's.

Just as there is a flight, fight or freeze response pattern in the body to danger, there is a calming pattern in the body and Benson has been studying it ever since.  His book "The Relaxation Response" (1972) was about the subject of calling forth that calming pattern and he has had several since then on related subjects.  One of the more recent books is "The Relaxation Revolution" about broader applications and implications of regular, deep, conscious relaxation.

I hadn't read his "Timeless Healing" but the other day, I started it.  The part that I remember best is his reports on placebos.  I have referred elsewhere to research on the color of placebo pills that shows particular colors are more effective as placebo pills for particular ailments.  This article on Wired's web site has some interesting information on what appears to be an increase in the effectiveness of placebos.  Naturally, Benson and others interested in the total body and in the connections between the mind and the rest of the body pay attention to the entire phenomenon of fake pills and their effects.

Benson reports research where men who failed to take their placebo medicine regularly as prescribed did not fare as well as men in the same group who did take their placebos as prescribed.  That really gets me but there is more.  Researchers have found that a placebo and a rival medicine may switch places in the final results if the trials are moved to another country.  They have found, for instance, that Germans may react more positively to a placebo for one ailment than Italians do but that a different pill, given for a different ailment may be more effective for the Italians than the Germans.

 

As the article in the Wikipedia on placebos points out, the number and color of the pills, the size of the pills, what if anything is stamped on the pill, the enthusiasm of the doctor for the pill can all affect the power of a placebo or a medicine.  It is very clear that what we believe, what we assume (maybe without even realizing we are assuming) and what we expect can all have very powerful effects on our bodies, our healing and our lives.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Just shut up!

When life gets a bit heavy or confused, it often helps to shut up.  Stop thinking, stop ruminating, stop taking in information.  Just sit still and quiet.  It helps to focus your eyes on some little spot on the wall, something normally insignificant, such as the very corner of a picture or a piece of furniture.  For five or ten minutes, keep paying attention to the selected visual target.  It can also help to consciously breathe slowly and fully while attending to your target.  Such a respite from bills or pains or worries, and equally, from hopes, dreams, plans, needs, and obligations can help put things into perspective.  Being alert to your target, as though you are a cat or a fox ready for it to move can assist in staying focused, relaxed and ready.  While sitting, you can scan your body for tension, often in the face or the shoulders, that you can relax out of.

Some silence/stillness practices are part of various religious traditions.  All the great religions of the world have documents and practitioners of quietude.  You may know that somewhat separately from Western ideas of religion, there are two paths in Chinese thought that go straight back into antiquity, about 500 years before Christ.  One is the path of Confucius, who tried to lay out the correct approach to many aspects of life, such as relations between people and proper conduct. 

The other path, somewhat in opposition to Confucius, is the path of Lao-tzu, the name given to the author of the Tao te Ching, "The Book of the Way".  It is the document of 80-some short passages that begins famously

The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.

The unnamable is the eternally real.

Naming is the origin of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.

Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Mitchell, Stephen; Lao Tzu (2004-07-27). Tao Te Ching (Perennial Classics) (Kindle Locations 182-186). Harper Collins, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

So here is what we might call a secular tradition, one that has lasted more than 2000 years and it basically says "Shush!  Stop with words, ideas, thoughts, plans for a bit.  Take a break from them, precious tools of humanity that they are." You can come back to them, fresh, in a little while.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

When there is too much meaning and significance

When science books recap the basic principles of science, I usually skip over those pages.  One day, I didn't and just looked at what was written.  One of the principles or assumptions science relies on was listed as "independence."  That sounded good and American (yay!) but what did it mean?  The explanation was something like 'if everything is related to everything else, nothing can be studied in and of itself.'

Well, the truth is that everything does seem to be related to everything else.  You know, a butterfly in the Amazon jungle flapping its wings can set up an air current that ultimately affects the weather in Seoul, Korea.  However, given the right time scale, we can often ignore some tiny effects or relations between things, processes, variables and get a general idea of the main influences on Korean weather or anything else.  In statistics and other investigative procedures, the idea of independence is an important one.  Students usually feel comfortable with positive relations (the more of A, the more of B) and the negative relations (the more of A, the less of C) before they grasp the comfort and importance of independence (the more of A, the less of A - who cares?  No effect at all on D).

But for some people and some societies, just about everything has import, meaning, significance. This morning, there were five grackles in my backyard.  What does that portend?  Does it mean something about the cranberry crop?  To paraphrase Professor Harold Hill of "The Music Man", 'grackle' begins with 'g' and that rhymes with 'c' so maybe there is some message the universe is trying to send me about the cranberry crop.  Of course, it might be less romantic but more intellectually brave to just halt the search for meaning in the number of this morning's grackles.  

A fundamental property of many human brains is their ability to search for patterns and connections in any story, material, event or message.  There is plenty of room for human mischief if you leave the interpretations to me or some other official judge, priestess, oracle officer as I may have a tendency to promote the sale of space in my warehouse or my tea leaves with the right messages and warnings.  Of course, in the current time of endless chatter, comment and pronouncement, it is possible to find somebody somewhere "seeing", "feeling", "sensing" just about any message on any topic including quite a few that you wouldn't have thought of by yourself.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Bowls

This bowl was just born at our house yesterday.  Cute little baby, isn't it?

We have all kinds of bowls, from a very large capacity bowl about 2 feet across to little glass ones from France.  Lynn can take a lump of clay that has been properly kneaded and pull a bowl right out of it while it is spinning on her wheel.  The time between a kiln firing ending and the whole thing being cooled down enough to be opened is a tension-filled exciting agitated time.  A firing includes about 6 months of work.  Each piece inside can shatter or explode, not only wrecking itself but some of its neighbors, too.  So complete kneading to remove air bubble is important.  Yesterday, as she waited for the cooling to take effect, she created several new bowls, already beginning the next load for 6 months from now.

I was surprised to read that as most of humanity changed from hunter-gathering to stable agriculture, a food surplus became possible.  Calamities might be better faced with some stored food on hand besides the possibility that extra food could be used to feed those who did not produce food, such as soldiers and professional of various kinds.  However, extra food called for storage methods that could protect food from insects, vermin and infestation by bacteria and such.  Thus pottery enters the picture as important for society and new possibilities.

It took Lynn quite a few years to move from open bowls, such as you might use to eat soup or stew, to jars and objects with tight-fitting lids.  Not only must the lid fit the top, it needs a bit of a lip to fit into the jar for security.  You can see why the iconic canning jars with two part lids that can be completely filled and sealed tight would be an important technical step, especially for those homesteaders out on the prairie where the winters are cold and deadly.

We have the Empty Bowls project locally.  Potters donate bowls they have made and local restaurants provide various soups.  You can attend and select a bowl and a soup for lunch or you can have take-away, with a bowl of your choice and everything packaged.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Household art

We have quite a bit of household art.  Our daughter was a good artist from 8th grade on, when she won a contest at a local art gallery for a painting of Seattle.  (She used her artistic license and left out the famous Needle.)  Her finest work is probably her dragon sneaking up on a village. We have original art done by Lynn and by local artists and professors. Some of Lynn's drawings are of wildlife and some are important locations from her childhood, such as the small farm where her widowed grandmother raised her family of 7 boys.

We are both fans of photography, by us and by others.  We have photos, especially of Hawaii that we took in various locations there.  We have photos of Nova Scotia puffins and amazing double falls in the Columbia river valley of Oregon. We have a Polish paper cutting mounted on the wall and The Letter, sent from a lonely girlfriend in Florida to a lonely boyfriend working in a Maine summer job.  (It's a little too passionate for the living room and is kept behind a door.)

We do have some three-dimensional art.  Well, we have to, with a potter/ceramicist in the family but it is not all ceramics.  One of the first Valentine's gifts I ever bought Lynn was a 18" statue of a skier.  We used to have a nice dancer but she got cracked.  We have a great blue heron, an Arctic owl, a stylized little owl Lynn gave me when my doctoral diploma arrived in the mail.

Of course, we have accumulated many small mementos of this and that person and this and that experience.  My grandmother, an important trip to Montreal and Quebec, Elderhostels north and south on both coasts, a statue from a deceased friend with a photo of him beside it, a Nigerian candle holder not to be mistaken as something from anywhere else, some urns of important ashes. You could write a good synopsis of our adult lives with a history of the household art.  We have more art than can be comfortably displayed.  Our wall are fairly full and our surfaces sufficiently crowded.  That doesn't mean that we have ended all new construction and acquisition.  I personally am especially prone to habitual blindness, not seeing something if it is familiar and in the same place for very many days.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

A new enthusiasm

[When writing this blog, my biggest time-waster is deciding between two or more possibilities for the subject.  Some days, I vacillate and get distracted and the whole day goes by.  That happened yesterday so I am determined to be ready in the morning.]

I am a fan of the leafy green, kale.  Ever since I was a kid, it has been one of my very favorite things to munch.  Way before I learned about carbs, fat and protein, my eyes told me to try eating that strong-looking, inviting green.  Not long ago, one of my favorite food guys, Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the crew at Nutrition Action published a chart of vegetable values.  They did the typical thing and devised an overall score for each vegetable.  The median value of all vegetables listed was 92, for red cabbage.  The score for kale, which topped the chart, was 1389.  The next vegetable listed was spinach, with a score of 931.

This year, Lynn ran into a recipe for lemony kale salad.  She grows kale along with other vegetables in a little garden.  She goes to a local green house in the spring and gets Russian kale.  It grows prolifically and makes many large, smooth leaves.  It is not as curly as the type you meet in the grocery store greens section.

It is quick, easy and delicious to harvest a few of the giant leaves, strip off the stems and heaviest veins, rinse and dry them.  Tear them into small pieces, add chopped or halved cherry tomatoes, lemon juice (third to half cup), Parmesan cheese (half cup), olive oil (half cup) and walnuts. More than appealing!  

You will be making it for company, parties, buffets you contribute to and augmenting lunches and dinners at home. There are 190,000 references on the subject according to Google search.  One said that the salad resulted in the unprecedented request by the dad of the family for kale tomorrow.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

High excitement simulated v. masterful timing and emotional shading

We are often on the lookout for good tv. For us, that can range from the silliness of the "Vicar of Dibley" to the frantic, low-taste of "30 Rock". Even though we have seen every episode of "As Time Goes By", we have begun watching it all over again.  For the last two nights, we have watched the pilot and first episode of "Covert Affairs".

 

If a good show fits in a shorter time slot, we usually prefer that.  We almost never watch a movie or anything else 2 hours long or longer.  As Time Goes By runs about half an hour while Covert Affairs is closer to an hour.  "Time" is about 20 years old while Covert is more like 3 years old.  After a few looks at Covert, my credulity is tired.

I know that women have tons of talents and they prove it every day.  But while I believe in various sorts of gender equality, I also believe in equality of weight classes.  When a experienced male assassin, over 6 ft tall and about 190 lean, mean pounds, is standing behind a 5'2" woman of 110 (shapely!) pounds with a pistol, is she going to be able to whirl, knock his gun aside and knock him over?  Evidently, it can happen.

We understand that the young heroine is very smart and very driven.  She is so promising that she wasn't even given the full training period since her language skills are needed right now at headquarters.  You may have been in headquarters before: that's the place of all shiny surfaces, beautiful people in well-tailored business attire being identified by machines all day.

Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer never find it necessary to toss people to the ground.  They were deeply in love with each other 38 years ago but mail mistakes and the Korean war lead them to believe each was no longer of interest to the other.  Now, after one is widowed and the other divorced, they have found one another again.  They are neither one what might be called "cuddly" people and are not 100% sure they have any current interest in being friends or anything closer, if you know what I mean.

The contrast between the two productions is sharp.  People being shot in the chest versus older people sitting on a park bench talking.  High speed car chases with lots of slipping and sliding and gear changes versus climbing in and out of square, black London cabs with clanky motors.

Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

small town intimacy and national privacy

We like to have our greatgrandson at our house one afternoon and evening a week.  As an older student, he is a school safety cadet and helps little children and large family groups cross the busy streets around the school safely.  When the busy time has ended, he waits for us to give him a ride to our house.  Lynn drove over to pick him up and after she left, he called from his aunt's house near the school.  Because of the weather, he had decided to wait there.  After the call, I called his aunt to say I might have trouble getting Lynn and redirecting her but while we were on the line, I was told Lynn was pulling into her driveway.  How in the world had she known about the unique relocation?

Turns out that as Lynn started to walk into the school, the crossing guard told her that he had decided to go to his aunt's house so Lynn simply drove over there.  Nothing to it, except that the crossing guard has to know and recognize Lynn as his greatgrandmother.  Not a small task, in that his parents, grandparents, greatgrandparents, other sets of grandparents and other relatives make a large group of active contacts and drivers and that is only one of 400 families represented at the school.

I grew up in a city of a million and certainly had no experiences where others knew me and my family that well.  When we moved here from a large city to this town of 25,000, our next-door neighbor had just moved to town from a village of 450, where he had been a banker and resident for decades.  Of course, he was familiar with larger communities but he was still a little overwhelmed by the steady hustle and bustle of his new surroundings.

After more than 4 decades here ourselves, we are used to meeting friends at the library, the grocery store, the polls, the doctor's office - anywhere.  Living in a neighborhood where a woman living several blocks away pulls into our driveway, gets out of her pickup, rings the doorbell and says "I've been wondering if you are feeling all right. I haven't seen you on your morning walk lately" makes us feel that the NSA has a very sketchy idea of neighborly awareness.  Our neighbors know which houses are our relatives, which are our friends.  Go ahead: ask 'em.

--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety