Oversupply

It seems like yesterday that I asked my most Apple-savvy friend to help me order our first iPad as a surprise for my wife.  He had waxed poetic about the device and showed me statistics that it had sold more units, at a fairly high price, in less time than any other product in the history of business. 

About 30 years ago, I went through all sorts of contortions deciding whether an Apple IIe or an IBM PC was to be our first home computer.  I finally decided on the Apple, as my friend assured me that I was already behind and should have followed his example and purchased this weird contraption called a "Mac".

 

But some checking this morning showed me that it wasn't yesterday at all.  It was close to three years ago. Even without checking, I do know that the iPad is the most recent computing/communication device added to our lives so when I realized that it has gone through several upgrades and modifications, I notice.  For Christmas, I gave the same wife an iPad Air, which meant that her original iPad was not needed.  It was surplus.  It is still a fine machine and she gave it to some relatives who can make good use of it.

 

But that event brought up something that I have been seeing more and more signals about.  I think of the phenomenon under the heading "oversupply".  Having our newest gadget become surplus was just another marker in various fields of oversupply, extra, surplus stuff.

 

I read that the Swiss are considering a guaranteed annual income of $33,600 a year but I can't find when they will make the decision.  I am very surprised to find that there are similar ideas floating in India, Brazil and Namibia.  I am even more surprised that at least in some places both liberals and conservatives can be found in support of the idea.  Liberals tend to think such an arrangement will help the poor while some, I repeat, some, conservatives think it might lower the cost and complexity of government.  The idea seems to be related to the emerging notion that more and more jobs will be done by robots, leaving less and less for humans to do.

The situation might move to where your parents let you know that they really don't want the house in the Amazon rainforest anymore and are wondering if you and your family would like to have it.  Same with that one yacht they have kept in the South Seas.  They really aren't using it and are thinking of giving it and the funds to operate it and support its crew to your brother.  It is a shame to let it go to waste.

Surplus can be tricky.  An older computer or an older yacht, might in this time of strenuous innovation, lack the latest features and include an outmoded design that is no longer used because it is too harmful or wasteful or dangerous. 

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

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

Garrison Keillor's light poetry O, What a Luxury

Garrison Keillor's "O, What a Luxury" is the rare poetry book that gripped me right through to the end.  I got lots of chuckles and smiles.  The book's title poem is a celebration of the joy, the pure joy of urination when one is desperate and it is finally ok.  Some of the poems celebrate the author's political satisfactions and quite a few are beautifully sexy.

I live in a land of plenty of winter snow and cold.  It is 7°F right now with a wind chill of -2 but we expect a temperature of 13° below zero tonight.  So the Keillor poems reminding the reader of the advantages of living around here are welcome. 

Books of poetry are good for traveling since they can be read in snippets and quick bursts.  I don't read much poetry.  My favorites are Ogden Nash, Billy Collins and Wislawa Szymborska.  Nash gets ignored or sneered at but just reading his titles can put me in a good mood. Szymborska won the Nobel prize for literature with her poetry but is not well-known in the US.  She writes in Polish and I have to read her in translation. Imagine trying to translate a world-class poet! Collins was the poet laureate of the US and has read some of his poems to accompanied animated drawings in a fun TED talk.

As an example of the poems in "O, What a Luxury", here is part of a poem called "Case Studies".  It relates the uplifting stories of several people who realized the shortcoming, sadness and deprivation they were burden with in New York city and San Francisco.  They found genuine happiness in St. Paul:

    ...

A strict old Presbyterian,

Said, "Why am I so dull?

Why can't one be merry in

One's heart and soul and skull?

Why follow what John Knox taught

That life is a stone wall?

I'd rather do the fox-trot

So I'm heading for St. Paul."

He went to Minnesota

To find out what life means.

Where we all consume our quota

Of cereal and greens.

Goodbye Calvinism,

And minds that are too small.

A brighter day has risen in the city of St. Paul.

...

Keillor, Garrison (2013-10-01). O, What a Luxury: Verses Lyrical, Vulgar, Pathetic & Profound (p. 64). Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

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

New, Google-supplied search window

My blog has more than 1600 entries and covers about five years, in the latter part, has entries for most days.  So, as with my web site, it contains a record of many thoughts and themes that have occupied me.  When I can't find a reference or an idea, searching for terms related to what I am after in my blog often turns up the answer or clues to it.

I find that ideas from some yoga, Zen and Buddhist thinking are extremely helpful in living happily, without pain and with clear-eyed appreciation for this miraculous and entertaining life.  So, when I read "The Model" by W.H. Auden, I was impressed with the lines about the 80 year woman having seen it all, including the loss of a son, and that life, and its ups and downs, is "is all one."  The old joke about the Zen practitioner saying to the hot dog vendor "Make me one with everything", like the saying by the ancient Roman, Terence: "Nothing human is alien to me" is a short way of saying the birds and the bees and the clouds and us are all one intertwined matter.  We are all related, all "cousins", different arrangements of the same stuff.

I don't know the poem or the poet at all well.  I could not remember the title and I thought the poet was T.S. Eliot, another great I get mixed up with Auden.  I thought there might be a reference in my blog but when I used the search window, it didn't do anything at all.  I have used it many times and was annoyed.  I finally discovered a new search window installed at the very top of the blog page.  It works well and can also be used to share a blog post that you like by using Facebook, Twitter or email.  That window business led to my finding a new book by an author I admire very much, Alexander McCall Smith, writer of many books including the Mma Ramotswe series, "The No.1 Ladies Detective Bureau".  The new book is "What W.H. Auden Can Do For You" and is available on Kindle.  The book is part of a series by Princeton University Press called "Writers on Writers".

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

Moms, authors and all the answers

It has always been a surprise to me that mothers don't seem to know all there is about humans.  I mean it stands to reason.  If you can make one, you must know all about the innards and the workings.  I've never been a mother but I know quite a few and when I ask them questions about the inner workings of a person, they often plead ignorance.  When I think of creators, I also think of authors, just as Dorothy Sayers did.  Her "The Mind of the Maker" was an exploration of the parallel between being an author (she created the Lord Peter Whimsey series, something like Agatha Christie's works) and being God. When I read a good work of fiction, like "Schooled" by Gordon Korman, author of 50 books, I see a smooth creation, a human with a past, present and future.  I find a person with feelings and experiences, so again it just stands to reason that somebody like Mr. Korman or Graeme Simsion ("The Rosie Project") who can create people and furnish them with lives and adventures and feelings and sorrows and triumphs, must know all about them, right?  

Then, I read about authors who drink themselves to death, can't stop gambling, have trouble with the law or debts and I wonder how that can be.  I will continue to explore the question and get back to you when I have some solid answers.

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

Training, challenge and anti-routine

I like Michael Merzenich's stuff: Brain Fitness Program (no longer available as such) software, Brain HQ web site, Posit Science and its blog and site, "Soft-Wired" book.  He has been instrumental in developing insight into brain re-wire-ability and applying that insight to genuine problems, such as focal dystonia, the loss of good body or limb control experienced by musicians and others. He introduced me to the idea of focal dystonia, over-training and the possibility of training one's self into a corner or a deadend, associated with high repetition of movements, as with musicians.  It is important to give the body and mind a variety of tasks, not always the same thing.

His book ends with too many sets of lists, in my opinion, that seem like a list of Chinese exhortations to always be good and never be bad.  The general idea is to give oneself challenges and alternative activities, such as using the computer mouse with the non-dominant hand or writing longhand with it.  Another neuroscientist, Lawrence Katz and his co-writer, have invented the word "neurobics" to describe activities that consciously alter typical routines to require use of other parts of the body and brain, such as searching through a purse for one's keys without looking in the purse and doing other things with one's eyes closed.  They state that smell is a major sense in the animal kingdom but that modern life virtually does without getting important information from the nose.

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

Brene Brown and insights into becoming a man

I have been listening to the 2 hour presentation by Sounds True of Brene Brown called "Men, Women and Worthiness".  She is a highly regarded author and researcher, usually described as specializing in "vulnerability".  To many people, the word is more acceptable than my synonym for it, which is "wound-ability".  If a person is so hardened (usually to protect one's emotional heart from unwanted pain) that very little will touch or move them, they can be described as "invulnerable", unwound-able.  Little boys often dream of being in a such a state, like the one Superman and various cartoon characters are in, where bullets don't penetrate and so forth.

Brown has some excellent TED talks which can be viewed on any computer with an internet connection.  Just Google (or Bing) "TED" and then search for "Brene".

Brown is a qualitative researcher, which means she specializes in listening to what people tell her and trying to extract from their statements, connections and insights.  For several years, she concentrated on studying women's reactions to life but got interested in that of men, too, especially after giving birth to a son.

She was surprised to find that men revealed that their women relatives, lovers and friends did two contradictory things on a regular basis:

• First, they urged the men who were important to them to "open up", to talk about their feelings

• Second, in the background, they consistently showed revulsion toward any revelation of feelings of fear, inadequacy, discouragement.  They showed they definitely didn't like hearing about such feelings in their men.

One man put it: "My wife and daughters would much rather see me dead on my white horse than see me fall off."

My own experience supports this general contradiction in women's attitudes toward men.  I do think that men are naturally more able and interested in immediately converting fear into rage or attack than women are so, there is an ongoing basis for everybody to expect the male soldier to "Man Up" and march toward the enemies' guns.  That conversion trick, sometimes called 'dissociation', is something most males learn early in life and competition.

More excellent insights into men's psychology and the structure of their lives can be found in "Fighting for Life" by the scholar Walter Ong, available on Kindle.

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

Reusable Holiday Reviewer and Appreciator

 

Reusable Holiday Reviewer and Appreciator:

1.    Focus on the dark shape above

2.   Be aware of your body and surrounding without moving your eyes or body

3.   Continue for 3-4 minutes

Reuse daily

 

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

Weird, ill-advised or better?

We live in an age of discovery and innovation.  I would not be a bit surprised if it could be shown that such an age is just beginning.  A professor of religious studies said last week that the ancient Jews had a special relation to the Roman empire and its government  just because the Jews has such a long and recorded history.  He said that in those days, what was old was by that fact alone, precious.  But today, the new is the thrill: I have the latest model.  It incorporates the latest methodology, the latest gizmo, is the latest concept.

I try to stay alert to silly pandering to excitement and reject it.  Taking anything to an extreme seems a somewhat obvious way to 'kick it up a notch', to try for a proclamation of being even newer and more thrilling.  If a movie is exciting with a car exploding, I will make a movie with 10 exploding cars.  My flames will shoot much higher and the collateral damage will be far more extensive. 

So, my first reaction on seeing the schedule at the gym includes "Insanity" is to put the class name down to typical, American, modern loss of moderation and good judgment.  And I fully expect the class to be "over the top", too intensive to be inspiring, healthy or likely to be sustained.

I just looked up the series of DVD workouts by that name.  I see that they have very high ratings.  Maybe I will get a chance to look at one of the workouts to see what I think.  I have faith in Gretchen Reynolds' book "The First 20 Minutes" and the extension of it called "The First 20 Minutes Trainer", where she carefully cites research that moderate exercise has been more beneficial in terms of longevity than either too little or too strenuous.  So, for me, I am doubtful of the need or even value of doing much more strenuous workouts.

But, I am aware that new discoveries and new approaches to goals and problems may indeed strike us as extreme, or all wrong or misconceived, especially when we first hear about them.  As I explore Michael Merzenich's ideas relating to our ability to retrain our brains, to actually extinguish abilities we have and cherish, to search through what we have seen as mental illnesses for places where erroneous thinking or fear or laziness have actually put some people on the path to schizophrenia or depression, I see again how some fully accepted ideas and methods may be modified very deeply, however much those changes shock and confuse us.

-------------------------------------------------

Merry Christmas to all and wishes for a lovely, loving Christmas and New Year

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

The need for fire

Some people have more internal fire than others.  I myself don't have all that much.  Reading Michael Merzenich's "Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change Your Life", I find explanations that basically boil down to the need to challenge my body and brain.  The good thing about some of the modern software and other tools is that they offer a potential of delivering the right level of challenge of the right sort.  But just like exercise and participating in the lottery, you have to buy a ticket.  I have to engage in activity to benefit or improve myself.

I feel good when I think I have tried, put forth a good effort, but I know that all effort is eventually in vain. Still, I guess, as long as I want to accomplish something and am able to try, I should.

I realize that the strength of my determination to do something is related to what I am thinking of doing.  I have little determination to be a supermodel so it doesn't matter much to me that I seem to have zero chance of a life on the models' runway.

I am suspicious of exhortations to try harder since I see so many of them in the world around me.  Besides, the first thing that people try is to exhort, admonish, urge, threaten or otherwise try to challenge and stimulate.  

A friend of mine once said that she disliked the idea that each of us can do and be whatever we want.  Why?  Because if I want to be chairman of the board and I am not, it must be my fault for not trying hard enough.  When you admonish me to try harder to play for the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team, you and I both may be underestimating the barriers of age, height and athletic ability.  Possibly all my prayers and striving and self-punishment will still not get me a place on the team.

On the other hand, effort does matter.  I know that it does.  Merzenich makes very clear that vigilance and effort can be used to improve the functioning of my brain.  I know that "practice makes perfect" or at least a whole lot better.  I have seen the result of exercise on myself many times.

All this brings to mind the "serenity prayer":

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,

The courage to change the things I can,

And wisdom to know the difference.

This is not so easy since I find myself in a world of constant change, where I can do today what I could not do yesterday while being unable to do some of the things I just did a week ago.

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

Working on my brain

It is a simple idea: the voice says either "doe" or "toe" and at 70 milliseconds, it is clear to me which was said.  But after working my way through several stages down to 18 milliseconds, all I consciously hear is "uhh". But I persevere and listen intently.  I am told that trying intently to make my brain work under challenging circumstances is good for it.  My scores have improved and my overall performance is supposed to put me in the 70th percentile of some group but I am not sure who.  I am very confident it is not a group of typical 25 yr olds.

It is just a choice of two possibilities and I assume they are presented randomly, maybe with some conditions attached such as not a single string of the same syllable for too long.  I have worked with products from this company enough that I may have developed a feel for when the offered sound will change.  They say that I should always try since what I can hear and discriminate may be different  from, and more than, what I am conscious of. I sure feel as though some of my progress is from lucky guessing but of course, I would.

Sometimes, the syllables are "ga" and "ka" but they may for all the world sound like "da" and "pa'.  As they come at me fast and last for such a short time, the slightest lack of attention on my part and I really don't know what was said.  At a high delivery speed, I tend to forget if "da" = ga or is my version of ka.  

The difficulties are exactly what my hearing therapists told me I would experience.  The difference between those initial consonants is a high-pitched sound and that is where my greatest hearing loss is.

Another exercise is like the memory game where duplicate decks are shuffled together and laid out in a grid.  I click on a card and a sound is spoken.  I often cannot tell what the sound actually is but my job is to find another card with the same sound.  So, I don't need to know the sound for what it is but only to be able to tell if it is the same as a different card's.

I work on the auditory processing exercises on both the laptop and the iPad.  The iPad touch screen allows me to respond a little faster with my fingers than the mouse.  This is all at Brain HQ, for $10 a month.

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

"They say...."

"They say this cold lasts for 3-4 weeks." I wasn't happy to hear that from my wife.  I think a cold should be over in a week.  Maybe it hasn't even been a week - I'm not sure.  It feels like a week but of course, I think I have 'suffered' forever and mightily when it hasn't been bad, actually.  Still, time to leave, Cold!

I got to wondering if scuttlebutt has been improving in sophistication and useable accuracy.  I think it might be.  As more and more people develop the habit of using the internet with smartphones, tablets and computers, it might be that more comments and guesses are quickly checked with good sources.  About colds, say, the Center for Disease Control and university medical and research centers.  Just in writing this paragraph, I Googled "scuttlebutt" and found it is the cask or barrel where the crew can get a drink of water on a ship, the naval office water cooler, where people stopped and talked.  I was impressed at the number of different, attractive sources of information on the anatomy, chemistry and biology that relate to having a cold and on the current cold and flu situation.

 

As more people carry a smartphone on their person, a mini-computer that can be used for Googling and fact-checking and communicating using many different sites and methods, it seems that general talk and writing might well climb in quality and accuracy.  Gallup and other survey research centers can give a visitor current information that would have required specialized knowledge, access and expense 20 years ago.

Among professors, it isn't cool to just spout opinion.  It is much more acceptable to be able to cite sources and to have current information.  Even though we have to use opinion too and are reluctant to admit it, we are alert to counter-opinion and evidence.  I seem to have too much of a tendency to discount rules of thumb and general talk, but it can be surprisingly correct.  I sure hope I have lost this cold by Jan. 20.

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

Magic today

A group of friends were talking when one said, that unlike ancient times, we don't have magic in our lives today.  I immediately objected.  I didn't repeat the famous remark of Arthur Clarke that any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic but in a way, I totally agree.  I held up my iPad and asked if it wasn't magic.  It clearly is.  The range and power of what it can show, sound, connect to and accomplish is beyond belief, until you get used to it.

One of the most moving audiobooks I have heard is "The Demon Under the Microscope" by Thomas Hager.  As you listen to the conditions in health and medicine in all the years before the late 1930's, you grasp that a scratch, a broken blister, a gunshot wound could all easily lead to unstoppable infection and death. Hager cites the attack on Pearl Harbor as the first time in warfare that infections and death from them were held to a very low number.

We do hear a great deal about over-use of antibiotics today and the rapid change that microbes can make in their genetic components to stay in the business of infecting us.  I don't know much about the situation but I do know that I have read about work on changing the sort of challenge we can give microbes from poisonous ones to genetic ones.  Genetic manipulation might be a whole new tool we can use defeat the little bugs.

Recently, I was given a prescription for antibiotics and at the same time, a prescription for probiotics, meds that would be an attempt to replace friendly or necessary life in and on me that I actually need.  That is the first time I have experienced greater attention being paid to the biological balance of me, so far more or less limited to my gut.  I have seen many references to greater awareness of, respect for and research on the thousands of organisms that live in me and what they actually do.

It is such a commonplace to talk about electronics, cellphones, computers in cars, derivative activities such as Ebay, Facebook, online banking and YouTube that they are hardly worth mentioning but they do constitute another sort of magic.  Magic that 4 yr olds can employ in some of their own lives!

Just as Steven Johnson in "Everything Bad is Good for You" and Clive Thompson  in "Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better" say, we are likely to find that adults and children alike know things, do things and see things that are far beyond what people could do, in say, 1950.  David Weinberg says that today's internet is "Too Big to Know" and he is right.  Further, smart people are trying every day to find new services, new activities, new games that we would enjoy or profit by.

It is not all rosy but we probably do know more about what and where the least rosy parts of our world are than people have ever been able to know before.  I think we might as well expect more magic yet in the coming years.

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

Sound sweeps and circling balls

Here is a link to information about exercises for training, retraining and sharpening the brain.

http://www.positscience.com/why-brainhq/about-the-brainhq-exercises

You can look at that web page to get an idea of what the exercises are like.  Without looking at the page, here is a description of some that I recall doing recently.  Before the Brain HQ web site was developed, there were two Posit Science products, the first aimed at hearning and the second for vision.  The very first exercise Iever did was sound sweeps.  There is a pair of sounds and the exercise is to say whether the first sound was falling in pitch or rising, ditto for the second sound.  Maybe it happens to everybody but after a few, I get a little mixed up as to just what I heard.  The exercise can include very short sounds that are over so quickly you have to more or less remember what you heard to answer.  Doing that again a day ago, I felt as though it was 7 years ago and I was back doing my first run though the program.

Some of the vision exercises are some number of balls circling in space like fish in an aquarium.  After a few seconds, additional balls of identical appearance pop up and the exercise is to stay aware of where the originals are in the swarm.  They don't stay together and get all intermingled with the new ones, even though all are the same in appearance.  

Lynn found that her dreams were more positive and upbeat during the weeks of working on the exercises.  I found that I felt happier and more optimistic doing them.  So, we enjoyed doing them and getting back to them.

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

Frightening

I am surprised at how frightening "Soft-Wired" by Michael Merzenich has been in the later chapters.  I read "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor and that struck me sympathetically.  I could understand the puzzlement and confusion a person would feel if they had a stroke that wiped out many of their mental skills and abilities.  But Soft-Wired discusses aging and its associated slowings and losses.  Since I am definitely in the older crowd, I must be slower and more infirm that I can feel.  My hearing loss and other detectable losses make it clear that I am not immune to the results of aging.  I found Merzenich's listing of things that aren't as fast or as firm or as complete or as accurate as they once were both depressing and scary.

One of his metaphors for the overall process is neglected roads.  He says I can picture the major highways as still being maintained in my brain but the byways, the little pathways are getting over-grown and neglected.  I guess my infrastructure is neglected and the road crews are not willing and able to do the repairs the way they used to be able to.

Prof. Merzenich is one of the main people associated with the Brain Fitness Program (BFP) of Posit Science.  Lynn and I worked through the 40 hour training program about 6 years ago.  We both enjoyed it and felt we benefited from the work.  That program emphasized the value of doing it steadily and regularly.  By the time Posit Science came out with the 2nd product, "Insight", they modified the instructions to a do-as-much-as-you-feel-like approach and I never did finish it.  Both of these products were expensive.  We paid over $600 for the BFP.  Now, the company has a web site and iPad app, both called "Brain HQ".  The pricing structure is different now and the exercises are available for $10 a month, or less expensive per month for longer subscription periods.

The evidence seems to be piling up that training on a computer can indeed improve brain performance.  Some of the exercises are for the ear/brain connection, some for the eye and some for the memory.  Much of the work and theory in the last ten years relating to brain health is connected to the finding that the brain gets its patterns of operation from experience, that we train our brains into much of what they are.  Merzenich emphasizes that questions of why we have difficulty doing something need to be explored in the light of brain plasticity and possible re-training.  It may take surprisingly little training to give ourselves a rejuvenation or improvement in function.

Of course, being able to accept aging and its consequences while still working to be at our best is important, too.  My own doctor takes the position I have seen in other sources: get exercise and use the body regularly in all the ways it is built to move.  Exercise has top billing for brain health so far, even though there are many competing programs and games.

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

Prof. Don Tillman and Capricorn Anderson

Both of the people mentioned in the title today are fictional characters, even though you can "follow" Prof. Don Tillman on Twitter if you want to.  You can get to know the professor better by reading "The Rosie Project" by Graeme Simsion and you can learn lots about Capricorn Anderson by reading "Schooled" by Gordon Korman.

The psychologist Simon Barr-Cohen has a theory that the processes that make human males create beings that more easily think about things and systems than people while human females more easily understand people and empathize with them.  Don Tillman is a professor of genetics and is 39 years old.  He is not married but wants to be.  He is not just sure what the problem is but he realizes that the evidence points to something about him that is "unappealing to women."  The Rosie Project is a work of fiction, set in Australia, and written by a New Zealander who lives in Australia.

As with Alexander McCall Smith's excellent Mma Ramotswe series set in Botswana, The Rosie Project is better listened to, in my opinion, than read.  That way, one gets the effect of a professional narrator who speaks in the Australian accents that strike American ears as an odd way to speak.  The professor is a scientist and tries to go about the business of finding a wife in a scientific way, but in a way that most people who do not have Asperger's syndrome would not advise.  We begin to get a flavor of Tillman's approach to life when we find him explaining to a date that he never "drinks caffeine after 3:48 PM" because of the half-life of caffeine.  I am listening to the audiobook while I drive around town laughing.  You may see me howling in my car and now you know why.

Capricorn Anderson is homeschooled by his grandmother.  They live alone together on a farm off the grid.  But she fell and broke her hip.  She needs extensive care and therapy and the 13 yr. old has to suddenly attend public jr. hi.  He has a sharp mind and a lovely character but there is much learning ahead.  You can catch the story in "Schooled" by Gordon Korman.

"The Rosie Project" is an adult book while "Schooled" is young adult fiction, which I understand is attracting many adult readers these days, as with "The Hunger Games."

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

The poetry of the Old Testament in Handel's Messiah

The fastest, most effective mood-changer I know is music.  For me, a little Mozart, Pavarotti, Joan Sutherland or Kiri Te Kanawa and I am beyond cares.  In that state, high bills, high blood sugar and high body weight are challenging blessings instead of woes.  "Handel's Messiah" is long but filled with bits that stick in my mind, even though I can't read music.  Being the season and all, I put it on this morning.  We have been attending a series by a professor of religious studies who is basing his presentations on "The First Christmas" by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, leading Protestant and Catholic scholars and on "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth" by the scholar Reza Aslan.

As I listen to great voices singing verses from Isaiah, Malachi, Haggai and other prophets who clearly wanted deliverance from enemies, oppression and difficulties, I hear attempts to foresee what perfection would have to be like. The afflicted (blind, deaf, lame) will be healed.  The mountains all around will be "smoothed", the "rough places plain". The valleys will be exalted and it is all going to be great!  I feel as though I can hear people of all sorts of backgrounds and ethnicities singing with power and joy through the ages.

I saw on tv that Japan has societies devoted to the singing of Beethoven's 9th symphony, the one built on the ode to joy.  Maybe they sing the Messiah or just the Hallelujah chorus.

We have our problems and worries in the current age but we clearly have some blessings and wonders, too.  The music, the musicians, the voices all at the ready whenever I want to hear them.  Unbelievable! If you look up the Messiah in Amazon's mp3 section, you can find extremely low prices for the entire oratorio.

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