Old men dancing

There are old men in various parts of the country dancing.  They are jubilant.  They have reached an age that doesn't come to everyone.  Some of their buddies died throughout the years from wars, car accidents, heart attacks and whatnot.  This group of men all attended the same all-male high school back in the 50's.  They held a reunion of their class a few years back.

I am one of them and since I hadn't seen the old place in years, I thought it was time to go back for a visit.  I didn't expect to feel much in the way of closeness or camaraderie but I did.  It was surprising how close I felt to those guys.

A couple of nights ago, I got a phone call from one of my classmates in our old homeroom, back more than 50 years ago.  He said he was one of the few who thought another reunion would be fun.  That man is a gentle, strong, balanced person and his personality flowed out of the phone.  It is easy to want to encourage a man like that and I did.  He said,"Give us some encouragement."  I wrote an email to quite of few of the group and urged them to rev up their very considerable talents and again hold a reunion.  I debated being forthright and stating that I had no plans to attend, as I had stated to the caller.  I decided it was silly to urge an event be held while stating I would not attend so I withheld that statement of intent.

Since then, such good spirits, such friendliness has emerged in the written replies that I want to attend any event that is held.  As we all look at the roll of the class and see the many names of those now deceased, our good fortune strikes us.  We are still alive and happy to be so. Some comments have been made about the surprise of reaching our current age, the good luck and talents displayed by the group, our gratitude.

If in your neighborhood, you see an elderly man dancing alone, he too may be taken with the fun of being alive, with his own cleverness at having breathed in and out so many successful breaths.

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

Pop-ups and feedback

I spend plenty of time on the world wide web.  There seems to be increasing use of pop-ups.  I do have my browser set to "block" pop-ups but I still get them.  I have heard that many institutions, such as newspapers, have been hit hard by giving their content and stories away for free on the web and are looking for ways to keep all their paying customers and maybe attract more.  One way businesses can create some income is to sell advertisements.

When I am not in the market for anything, a pop-up web page offering a subscription to a magazine or letting me know of a cake sale is an annoyance and an intrusion.  Some marketers seem convinced that if they state an interesting fact ("World Collapses in Sunbeam Assault") and then insert an advertisement for the cake sale before they explain that some nut somewhere had a dream about world collapse, I will appreciate the ad, the craft, the photography, the exciting price, and my basic hunger for cake will combine to put me in a good mood.  It doesn't.  The stubborn ad, with a little box informing me that the ad will disappear very soon, puts me in a ferocious mood.  I don't really try to memorize the name of the advertiser, the company and product in the offer and the web company who delivered this irritant but sometimes I do remember those responsible without trying. When I do remember, they are first on my list of those to be ignored and avoided.

Once in a while, right after getting trapped by bad taste and bad manners, I get a 2nd intrusion asking for my time, energy and good graces in the form of "input" and "feedback" - will I answer a few questions about my experience using the web site?  There are probably nice people who are happy to learn of the nut's dream and of the cake sale and are willing to say so on a scale of 1 to 5.  I realize the other nice people getting low pay for constructing the ad, the web site and the cakes are just trying to make a living.  I, too, am a nice and rational person who resents their efforts and dislikes their results.  Plus, I am not going to buy their cakes.

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

Mother's love

Mother's love can be painful.  The mom worries about your physical and mental and emotional health, not to mention your finances.  She worries that she doesn't love you enough and that she is a bad person for not loving you more.  She worries about your not accepting her advice and your silly idea that you are grown up enough to handle the tricks and pains of the world.  Watch the young surgeon Jackson as he tries to continue to love his famous but pushy mother who is also a surgeon and automatically thinks she knows best for him, herself and everybody else.  Watch Lady Crawley, an American, handle the news that her daughter has had a child who is now getting on in life but the news of her birth and lineage has been withheld from the Lady by the daughter and other relatives.

Watch the mother who loves her son and very much enjoys his company react to the news that the son has met the girl.  He can't stop talking about her and is intending to marry her and live somewhere else with that girl.  When will the mother get to see him?  When will she get to talk to him and share in his life? As a woman who knows the way of the world and people, she assesses the likely future with her son in an accurate way and the result is pretty bleak.  He has basically been stolen. Ok, the mother stole her husband from his mother but that was different.

So much of our typical pictures and discussions of love are about romantic and sexual love that strong non-sexual love tends to slip under our notice.  Mothers can be in serious pain as they try to accommodate new arrangements such as college living far away and new families with new jobs located in new cities. Fathers are famous for looking askance at young men hanging around their daughters but it seems to me that the mother's love tends to be deeper and more visceral.  Young husbands are well-known to be surprised at how much the baby seems to have replaced them in the hearts of young wives.  I guess much of the mother-child relation can be explained by nature's aim to cement the mother's attention on the child for survival and upbringing purposes.  Since mothers need to be able to decode a baby's needs before the baby has language, they may have sharper empathetic abilities than fathers.  Mothers may feel a jolt of pleasure from each utterance of the baby and each step taken.  Each drawing brought home for the refrigerator may tug strongly at the mother's heart.  Don't be surprised if she needs a little time to recuperate after the loss of a perfectly wonderful son to some girl she doesn't know.  If possible, it may be best to get grandchildren on their way.  Grandchildren have a way of delighting a mother who has recently been promoted to grandmother.

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

Salute to arms

Not a salute to combat or military action but to genuine arms, the portion of the human body from the shoulder to the wrist, but sometimes including the wrist and hand.

 

Hands get the glory and most of that is aimed at the fingers.  I admit the fingers are clever and very useful.  They do work hard and quite successfully.  Wrists, too, are very impressive.  I think it is accurate to say that a normally healthy wrist can lock itself in any position, be quite rigid and then relax when desired to swivel and swoop again.

But arms are impressive and contribute all the time, too.  My greatgrandson was part of an experiment with his Cub Scout troop.  Simulating wounds and learning first aid, the boys had splints attached to their arms.  The splints kept the elbows straight, unable to bend.  In that condition, they had to feed each other.  Their arms couldn't deliver the hand to the mouth but they could manage to get a hand to a buddy's mouth.

Wrestlers get very aware of the importance of the movement of arms and the essential contribution of the elbow.  If an opponent can control my elbow, keeping it close to my chest or fixed in any other position, he can essentially eliminate that arm and that hand from action.  That's the thing about arms and their action: they can put the hands where needed anywhere inside more than a hemisphere based at the shoulder.  When you watch any type of "cherry picker" heavy equipment for building construction or fire fighting, you can appreciate the ability to place people at the location in space where they are needed.

I have read that the other primates are more limited in their ability to put their hands on their backs.  If we are limber enough, we can touch fingers from the two hands in the middle of our back with one hand going down the back and the other reaching up.  The arms carry nerves that deliver very high sensitivity to our fingertips.  Our sense of touch is one of the highest in the mammal group.

Of course, my arm is limited to a short distance.  I can't reach something that is too far away.  Oddly, I also cannot reach something that is too close.  I can't reach or even just touch my right forearm with my right hand.  That right forearm is too close to that hand and probably will always be unreachable.  It is very nice that evolution and our primate family developed two hand/arm combos.

One of the best things about arms is their ability to wrap around somebody we like.

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

Write that down!

Writing is often mentioned as a key to being civilized and intelligent.  It is given credit for enabling us to read what people thought 2000 years ago. Ok, to be more accurate, to read what people chose to write down 2000 years ago.  Of course there is a difference between what I think and what I write.  More technically, what I think and what I type.  Well, I am not typing so much as keyboarding.

Writing leaves clues.  Why would she have typed "I love you" if she weren't feeling pretty positive about me?  I bet she really did feel love for me when she wrote that and I bet she still does.  I will just collapse all that into a note to my memory to keep in mind that she loves me.

Some of the problems of communicating by spoken word also cling to writing.  Whether she typed or said,"I love you", was she talking to me?  Did she mean the note to get to me?  Writing has that well-known characteristic of hanging around on whatever material was written on.  Stone tablet, clay tablet, note paper or a digital file, the written "I love you" can get to an unintended recipient.  The writing can fall into completely unintended hands, such as her husband's or my daughter's.  Cardinal Richelieu said," If a man will write but three lines on paper, I will have him hanged as a traitor."  In other words, give me and my lawyers a scrap of writing and we will find an interpretation persuading the government that your writing reveals you as a danger who must be executed.

Writing's bridge over time can serve in other ways.  We not only have writing from 100 or 1000 years ago, we can have it from yesterday and from last week.  Some things, like body weight or mood or blood sugar are best observed over time.  A written record of every day for a month is much more informative than a single measurement taken just now.

Martin Seligman, a psychologist, reports that his students really took to the practice of writing down three things that happened during the day that were good or fun or otherwise positive.  Deciding what to write about and deciding what exactly to write down created a moment of examination that showed the better parts of each day. We have modified the practice into writing down comments in the morning about what happened the previous day.  Doing that seems to make the previous day clearer in our minds.

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

Wisconsin clock/calendar

The door of our gazebo faces east so when our Wisconsin clock/calendar is in direct sun, it is morning.  When the needle on the clock rests on zero, it is winter.  When the reading is up to 50, it is spring.  When it is 75 or above, it is summer.  When there are leaves on the ground under the clock/calendar, it is fall.  When it is too dark to read the clock/calendar, it is night.  Simple and helpful, you can get one of these clock/calendars in your local hardware store or that section of your local megastore.

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

Is death over-rated?

Death is over-rated: so big deal!  I am going to die.  Yes, with my basically primate brain, I am not well equipped to imagine myself in quite a different state, a much more inert existence if the models and examples are followed.  George Alpert, who morphed into Ram Dass, wrote that dying is like selling the old Ford and getting a new car.  Since neither of us has died and since individual results will vary, we are going by our hunches, as we do with most things, especially events in the future.  I cannot report personally on the experience of dying nor that of being dead.  But my mother and my daughter have died.  Both have been dead for several years.  We have some of the ashes of both in our house.  The ashes are still in the containers and look the same, unchanged.  I just checked on them. So still, so inert, so apparently stable.  

When my sister and I made arrangements for my mother's body after death, the funeral home asked us to sign a form to have her cremated as she wished.  It had a number of explicit statements we were to acknowledge.  The first one was something to the effect that we understood that the process of cremation was irreversible.  Once reduced to ash, her body could not be returned to its former state.  But that is the distinguishing characteristic of death itself.  Once solidly dead, we are not alive and we are permanently not going to be.  

As biological creatures, we are programmed to resist death, to struggle onward in an attempt to remain alive.  However, as thinking beings, we can examine our attitudes and expectations.  We can notice if the thought of death is given too much prominence.  We can see that our predecessors include very large numbers of people who have gone through the death experience.  We expect to do so ourselves.  I say let's try to enjoy the opportunities we currently have and not get too excited about the period when we are in a different format than our current one.

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

Happiness rises steadily after 50 - see research

The Economist shows this:

The Atlantic shows this:

Both are attempts to show the research results of plotting age v. happiness.  The interesting thing is that at about 50 years of age, happiness begins to improve steadily.

If you are that age or older, let yourself feel that increasing happiness.  Whether it strikes you as logical or not, evidence based or not, you will probably find that your level of happiness is rising.  If you are younger than 45 and you can feel your happiness level is low, hang on.  Do what you can to nurse yourself to a higher level of happiness.  But keep in mind that you may be  experiencing the lowest natural level of underlying happiness of your life and that it will most likely rise.  We who are older than 50 like to say that the accumulated wisdom and understanding of the years creates more complete happiness but whatever the reason, you can see that the later years are often very good ones. They may be your best ones and possibly for no reason at all.

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

What to do when the situation is impossible

I have been impressed for years with one of the opening scenes in "Beer" (1985).  A man who may been having a mental episode and is definitely depressed and having a bad time, pulls a gun on the bartender and orders all the customers to get into a paper lunch bag he has tossed on the bar.  He is a good shot with that pistol as he proves when a cop rushes in, gun drawn, and the man shots the gun out of the cop's hand.  The customers try to reason with the man, asking him to stop and think.  Not a single customer can anywhere nearly fit in the little paper bag.  The cop's pistol is laying on the bar, quietly being shoved back and forth between customers reluctant to touch it and get involved.  One of the reluctants is tired of having the pistol back in his vicinity and he tosses it in the air, in a random direction.  As luck would have it, the pistol smacks Mr. Desparate in the forehead. The blow knocks him down and several customers leap on him.

So what shall we do when the situation is impossible?  We have many options:

• Forget about the situation and move on to something else

• Wait patiently for the situation to change

• Take a random step and follow up on any fortuitous results

• Fall to your knees and pray that unseen forces come to your aid

• If you have time, offer to pay someone else to solve the problem

That's five options and I am sure you could come up with a dozen more.  Certainly, details of the situation matter.  The threat of being shot is much more immediate while the threat of being audited just hangs around being bothersome.  The immediacy of the situation matters as do costs and benefits involved.  Schools and textbooks often take up complex situations but they usually solve problems that are well defined.  It's what we do when the situation is truly impossible that we use our special intelligence and any breaks luck gives us.

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

What should be done?

My friend wants to be polite and around here that includes being punctual, as in ring the doorbell at the appointed time, neither earlier nor later.  But in-town traffic and country roads are hard to gauge.  Arriving early is very intrusive and frowned-upon as is arriving late.  The friend's house is out in the country where there are no alternative roads near the house.  If conditions are more favorable than expected, is it good manners to drive around the circular driveway in front of the house for ten minutes to use up the extra time?  Or, do you advise waiting quietly in the car?  Or, is it better to simply knock on the door early and be a bother?

David Livermore, in his Great Course, discusses an energetic New York businessman who took a vacation in a quiet waterside Mexican village.  He noticed a fisherman who went out in his boat each day and shortly returned with a big catch of fish.  The New Yorker struck up a conversation, noting that the fisherman usually came in with a big load.  "Oh, yes", said the fisherman,"there are plenty of fish.  Why, I could catch fish all day long if I wanted to." The New Yorker advised him to fish longer and make more money.  He sketched out steps by which the Mexican could become head of a large corporation, owner of a whole fleet of fishing boats.  The Mexican might even get wealthy enough that he could retire and take up residence in a quiet friendly village, like the one they were in.  The Mexican was puzzled by the New Yorker and his ideas.  Should the fisherman stay out longer each day?

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

Masks and preferences we learned

Sometimes, we are depicted as being masked.  A mask may be used to hide our face to avoid being identified.  But the word "persona", Latin for actor's mask, is the root of our words "person" and "personality".  You react to my face as at the same time, I react to yours and to the world as I am perceiving it just then.  There gets to be a typical set of actions and reactions from me.  You perceive most of them and tend to bundle them as what you can expect from me, my personality.

Inside my head, I have sets of admonitions and urges.  Eat when hungry!  Drink enough water!  Keep regular hours!  Exercise!  Get back to that good book!  But as I listen to David Livermore discussing "Customs of the World" in his Great Course, I begin to suspect that I might live quite differently and be happy, maybe even happier.  Uh-oh!  I see a difficulty: once again, I run into the limitation of being only one person, of having only one life, "YOLO" (You Only Live Once).  So, as I hear about other ways to live and work with the world, I realize at my age that I am not going to have the chance to start all over.

Experimentally, I will not have a chance to try changing some of the basic variables human societies use to orient themselves and live a life at other points on several scales of importance.  Livermore and others focus on

Identity—Individualist versus Collectivist

Authority—Low versus High Power Distance

Risk—Low versus High Uncertainty Avoidance

Achievement—Cooperative versus Competitive

Time—Punctuality versus Relationships

Communication—Direct versus Indirect

Lifestyle—Being versus Doing

Rules—Particularist versus Universalist

Expressiveness—Neutral versus Affective

Social Norms—Tight versus Loose

After considering all these cultural variables, it is easy to wonder if anything much is left to be uniquely individual.  I also wonder if everything I have experienced is not only culturally determined but is somewhat arbitrary.  I have an orientation toward punctuality and I am confident I have cut people off or committed other actions in the name of staying on time when it would have been better, more humane and more fun to forget the deadline and chat. So, I not only see a picture of having taken just one path of several possible ones but I carry a suspicion that my choices may not have been the best.  Can I have a do-over?

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

Scattered

The story I read is that the internet is the result of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) interest in rapid dispersal of information to many places so that important information would still be available in the case a documents depository was destroyed. When the now-knighted Sir Berners-Lee had a vision for the network that has now grown to be the World Wide Web of "pages" and videos and sound files, he started our modern information network.  But the basic motivation was to scatter copies of important documents in so many places that it would be very unlikely for all copies to be found and destroyed.  

This scattering approach fascinated me as a kid listening to the story of a man seeing a leprechaun tending his pot of gold.  When the little guy left, the excited man tied his kerchiel around the nearest tree to mark the spot while he went home for his wheelbarrow.  When he got back to the area, the leprechaun had caused identical kerchiefs to be around every tree in sight.  The logic of scattering a distinguishing marker all over the place is a little different from that of duplicating documents for safe keeping of information but the acting of scattering remains.

This scattering seems to have been employed in the recent incident of North Korea and the movie "The Interview".   Once the movie is available all over, in many theaters and through all sorts of movie streamers as in home Roku, Amazon TV and Apple TV setups, it becomes too difficult and expensive to know who has seen the film and who hasn't.  

The idea of multiple sites being of importance comes up again in trying to track down all of a deceased person's accounts and property.  As a young man leaves home, travels to a new locale, gets a job and begins to save his money with a bank, he begins what may be a long and winding chain of holdings.  As time goes by, he may move several times and forget some of his accounts or safety deposit boxes.  After the man ages and dies, it may be a tricky task to track down all his holdings.  His wealth may be scattered to many points.

There are phenomena that appear to be scatterings but are authentically more or less simultaneous occurrences that are semi-independent of each other.  When you invent a popcorn machine that flavors the kernels with a little bit of Pepsi and I invent a similar machine on my own without even knowing you, it may be that conditions where just right to give both of us the same idea at the same time. Knowing whether such simultaneity is coincidence is tricky.

Of course, when divisions of a company or parts of a body act in a coordinated way, we ascribe the simultaneity to the central office or central goals or the brain.

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

Heat energy

My wife's kiln can reach temperatures about 2000° F.  Without that device, our self-cleaning oven gives us the highest temperature we can reach at 900°F.

Heat is a fascinating subject and one that comes to mind easily in the north these days.  Right now, our outside temperature is 5­° F but it was well below zero last night.

I watched Sean M. Carroll, the astrophysicist, talk about dark energy and dark matter in the universe and he often talked about heat as energy.  I know that calculations show that "perpetual" machines often show the energy that escaped as heat, which is why they don't work.

What I found most surprising is the fact that "absolute zero" was calculated to be 273.15° below zero on the Celsius scale.  That figure was arrived at by noting that a gas shrunk its volume by 1/273.15 for each 1 degree drop in the temperature.  The idea has been that heat is energy of moving atomic bits and that at absolute zero, all atomic motion ceases.  However, scientists report recently that they have found a way to inch a bit below absolute zero.  I am not clear on the details but over time, we may be hearing more about this.

This picture show three "witness cones", none of which are conical.  They all experienced the same 2000° heat in the kiln but they are made of different materials.  They are shown in order of their sensitivity to that level of heat, from left to right.

We know that at certain temperatures, humans can function well but at others, they will die.  One web site reports the normal human body temperature to be 97.7 to 100.4°F.  Once in a while, someone outside this range survives but if your inner temperature gets outside that tiny, delicate range, expect not to.

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

Forgetting

It seems that the area of forgetting is part of the lands of the elders.  But forgetting is an interesting subject for anyone.

I read about the golfers who complained that their elderly caddy could not see well enough.  This time they wanted a caddy with good eyesight.  "Did you see where that drive went, Caddy?" "Yes, I did."  "Great!  Where is it?" "I forget."

The Dowager Countess, played by Maggie Smith, was once close to the manly Russian visitor, years ago.  "How close were you?"  "I forget."

It is difficult to tell whether an assertion of forgetting is true.  Personally, I like the idea that as the decades slide by and more and more of life becomes a single stream, that even something as exciting and basic as a love affair might actually be forgotten.

I think there is speculation that every sight, sound, smell, touch and thought is hidden in the brain somewhere but that finding them and recalling them is iffy.  I have read that it is a good thing we forget so we aren't overwhelmed with thoughts and memories. I have also read that recent research indicates that the business of going into another room but forgetting why when you are there is triggered by passing through a doorway.  I keep meaning to remind myself of my mission before leaving the room but I forget.

I do enjoy some work on my habits, physical and mental.  I might focus on the leaving the room deal and learn to pause before exiting the room to give myself a reminder.  I realize that I won't know I have failed to do that until I am elsewhere and puzzled but this is an old problem.  Back in psych grad school, we learned about Edwin Guthrie and his work on situations where training is aimed at changing behavior before an important event occurs.  Maybe I will put a sign on my doorways to remind me to pause and rehearse my mission before exiting a room.

There are people who try to outperform each other in Olympian contests of memory, such as memorizing the arbitrary order of a deck of playing cards.  Books such as "Moonwalking with Einstein" by Joshua Foer can help you get started in such activities if you are of a mind to. I am much better at remembering book titles, author and quotations than remembering family birthdays. I don't learn or remember the records of the outstanding and 'instanding' members of the Packer football team.

Just the other day, I saw a list of things we tell ourselves that don't hold up.  One of the items was "I don't need to write that down.  I'll remember it." I do write things down more than I used to but I forget where the note is.

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

Happy Valentine's Day!

Carol Ann Duffy's poem and Garrison Keillor's text will help mark a good Valentine's Day!

http://writersalmanac.org/

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

Flipped and interaction

I am listening to a Great Course called "Customs of the World" given by David Livermore.  He talks of the need to "interact" with his material.  He says I should discuss what he says with others, in conversation, by email, by making dioramas or acting out skits.  There are multiple ways to use, question, and explore his statements and their implications and any and all of them may help me keep his talks in my memory and my mind.  Working with what he says will improve my grasp of it and maybe give me a bit of sensitivity.  There are many ways to interact with the material, depending on its nature and the tools I have to work with, from speaking to shooting a video.

Good educators have long realized that hearing a message or reading it is not the end of learning it. 

Sometimes, the well-known 'taxonomy of learning objectives", created under the chairmanship of Benjamin Bloom, is used to emphasize that there are other steps to learning beyond memorization or other forms of basic ingestion.

Knowledge - what did he say?

Comprehension - what does that mean?

Application - how can the message be used?  What good is it?  Why are we hearing this?

Analysis - can you see where the message applies in this activity?

Synthesis - can you construct an activity that uses today's message?

Evaluation - what good was today's message?  What are its limitation?  When does it apply?

Some people today talk of the "flipped classroom".  The term refers to assigning basic learning (listening, reading) as homework, to be done outside the classroom.  Then, the classroom can be used for groupwork, projects, discussions, live activities to make the material more completely grasped, embedded, sifted, digested.  In today's world, we might have a classroom of young and older adults learning and engaging in making the lessons more completely part of their thinking and understanding, while at the same time, being open to being called away by their employer or their families or the campus authority's warning of a riot or crime just outside.  Many older educators want all phones down and no one speaking except themselves.  At times, such suppression can result in considerably lower levels of learning and enthusiasm.  It can take a little getting used to not a three ring circus but a ten ring show but such high levels of activity can pay off very handsomely.

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

It is getting late already!

Seasons run from the 21st day of a month to the 21st of another month, three months later.  That is not 100% precise but it is close enough for basic use.  Three months is just the calender, of course, and the weather itself may run slightly differently.  Still, at 30 days per month, we get 90 days for a season.  So, starting from the 21 of the beginning month of each season, we get the approximate mid-point of the season on the 5th or 6th of the 2nd month after the beginning.

season	approx. mid-point
winter	Feb. 5
spring	May 5
summer	August 5
fall	Nov. 5

What this means is that we are already losing winter.  Animals know it: they often get their mating done about this time of the year so that the babies are born at the beginning of a time of warmth.  Humans know it: they often have important celebrations of spring. Seed catalogs are out and gardeners are planning, maybe even starting seedlings inside to get going a bit ahead.  

Today is the 12th and next Tuesday is the famous Fat Tuesday ("Mardi Gras"), the last day before the observance of Lent. I am not Catholic but 40 days of some sort of discipline can appeal to anyone.  My grad school observer regularly gave up all candy from Egypt that comes in a bag.  I am not sure if I will give up anything or not.  I am sure that things are heating up and I might as well face the coming of spring.  

I did prune some of our trees yesterday and I realized that I didn't have a great deal of time left to do that in the cold, before the sap starts to run and the trees bloom.

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

Lynn, Bill Bryson and Henry Ford

Lynn listened to Corduroy Mansions and told me more than once I would like it.  I did and immediately got the 2nd volume and liked it, too.  For her book club, she has been reading "One Summer, America, 1927" by Bill Bryson.  She tried to get me to read it as part of our program of my reading aloud while she does jigsaw puzzles but I wasn't in the mood.  However, just like with Corduroy, bits of Bryson she has been sharing have changed my mood.  This morning, she said she really wanted me to sit down and listen as she read about Henry Ford.  

Ford was not a highly educated man and he had a slew of prejudices.  Bryson says that Ford never traveled much but stayed within a dozen miles of his birthplace.  Ford did not like lots of things:

He did not like bankers, doctors, liquor, tobacco, idleness of any sort, pasteurized milk, Wall Street , overweight people, war, books or reading, J. P. Morgan and Co., capital punishment, tall buildings , college graduates, Roman Catholics, or Jews.

Bryson, Bill (2013-10-01). One Summer: America, 1927 (Kindle Locations 3551-3552). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

He was famously and "defiantly" narrow-minded and ignorant, so much so that the Chicago Tribune called him an "ignorant idealist".  Ford sued the paper and an 8 day trial ensued.  The resultant testimony and questioning by the papers' lawyers was very popular reading.  One man sold pamphlets of the testimony and Ford's statements and they were such popular reading that the sales furnished him sufficient funds to buy a house.  The jury found in Ford's favor but awarded him damages of 6 cents.  The newspaper never paid up.

But he and his car changed the world:

For all its faults, the Model T was practically indestructible, easily repaired, strong enough to pull itself through mud and snow, and built high enough to clear ruts at a time when most rural roads were unpaved. It was also admirably adaptable. Many farmers modified their Model T's to plow fields, saw lumber, pump water, bore holes, or otherwise perform useful tasks.

Bryson, Bill (2013-10-01). One Summer: America, 1927 (Kindle Locations 3605-3607). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Maybe you can see why the summer of 1927 is worth reading about, especially from a writer like Bill Bryson.

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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
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