Sunday, October 25, 2015

Girls and their secret power

I have worked with girls and women all my life.  As his brother mansplains in "My Name is Jake", girls are not like us.  They aren't men.  They don't think like men.

Of course, like men, they differ, one from another.  They are not all alike.  So, anything you think applies to girls probably applies to some of them but not to others.


It has been my experience that girls follow directions more completely and fully than most men.  My friend has a robotic vacuum cleaner.  To learn to use it, she can watch a DVD that shows how to operate it.  She got around to watching it.  She was surprised to see how dressed up in tight pants and high heels the woman was when she started up the machine.  She got all dressed up, earrings and eye-liner and all, just like the video lady.  It worked just fine, so it is a good lesson in following instructions.


The media often gives women the idea that they simply must have body shapes like this

Image result for beautiful woman

if they are going to be attractive to men.  That is a mistake. The body shape can catch a male eye, to be sure, but what happens right afterwards is probably more important to most men.  


I advise using the female ability to follow directions.  If she says to a man, "What do you want me to do?" or "How can I please you?", she may find that the man has difficulty breathing.  The sooner he learns that what she implies, that she is ready and willing and able to take directions from him, for say 15 to 30 minutes, the sooner he is likely to be fully charmed by her. See, it is not the looks so much as the compliance.  


The book "Sex and Fantasy" by Robert May (1981) showed long ago that a fundamental part of much female thinking is caring for others while a fundamental part of male thinking is ego, how marvelous I am.  So, a woman with any body shape who expresses an interest in following his directions and wishes is very likely to ensnare a man's mind and allegiance.  In this time of female assertiveness and independence, it may not appeal to one woman or another to use this technique but it is ancient and powerful.  I suspect this approach was a main part of Cleopatra's famous effect on both Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.




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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Please sign in

The online companies want to have a close relation with me.  They want to send me updates and information about their fabulous bargains and hot gossip about the escapades of their employees.  But first would I mind signing in?  Just type in my logon, user name, phone number and ZIP code.  Then, type in the password for the account.  

Everybody these days wants a logon name and a password from me.  In case someone steals or guesses my password, my communication will be better protected if I would use two-step verification.  That is the process where they send a random number to my phone and I read the number and type it in when I sign on.  

See the problem is that my phone is secure, which means that I have to enter my phone logon and password into it for security.  But to have better security, I need to get a random number (for extra security, they send a number with 25 digits) to my email and I have to enter that number into the phone to get the random number to enter into my two step email verification.  I hope you can securely and fully grasp the high level of security I have.
--
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
Twitter: @olderkirby

Friday, October 23, 2015

Three "W" words

Wahhabi, Wahhabism - very conservative Muslim sect

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#newwindow=1&q=wahhabism


wasabi - Japanese hot sauce or dip

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#newwindow=1&q=wasabi


wabi-sabi - Japanese aesthetic philosophy honoring whatever is old and maybe a bit beat-up

https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#newwindow=1&q=wabi+sabi


These three "W" words are not identical but very similar.  In addition, they are not typical English word so it is possible to get them confused.


I don't know much about various Muslim sects.  I read that much of the "wasabi" we get in the US is not the real thing since the demand is very high.  I know a little about the veneration of old, scarred things and being one myself, I recommend respect and appreciation of things that are venerable and wrinkled.





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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Weight loss idea

The subject of body weight can get to be important as one ages.  Some of my friends are finding their weight keeps falling while others don't like to be as heavy as they are.  I am reading "Catching Fire" by Richard Wrangham.  It is about the place of cooking in human evolution.  The usual criticism of focusing on cooking is that food contains a given amount of energy and cooking doesn't change that.  But more and more, researchers and scientists are focusing not on how much energy is in an apple but instead on the question of how much energy the digestive system extracts from eating an apple.


I am not very far along in the book but it is clear that a diet of only raw food gives the eater fewer calories into the body than one of cooked food.  The author is a professor of anthropology at Harvard.  He has tried doing what chimps do: eat monkeys raw that the chimps have caught and killed.  He reports that eating raw meat is hard to do. Personally, I am not interested in eating or even having a single bite of raw meat.  I know that steak tartare is popular in some places at times but I am not interested.


"Catching Fire" is about the effect on human diet, nutrition and eventually on human development and evolution from cooking.  The evidence cited so far in the book makes it clear that in just about any circumstance, cooking food causes more of its nutritional value to be transferred into the human body.  Modern experiments eating raw food steadily show weight loss, even to the point that women get so thin that they stop menstruating.  So, weight loss?  Eat raw.  But, not meat, ok?



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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

A hard part of becoming a teacher

Will you marry me? [This is Gary, my boyfriend]

I hate you!

Being a policeman

Show up every day? At this hour? [Teaching is not just having a 10 AM class]


For many years, one of my main jobs was to work with college students to get them mentally prepared to become teachers.  As I looked at the Time magazine cover article on millennials as parents, I thought of some of experiences that tended to stand out for young, smart, energetic people moving toward being responsible for students, classrooms and learning.


Many students who want to be teachers are female.  I am not, so I was surprised to learn how often they had pictures of being adorned by students.  It may be more natural for males to expect competition and resistance to authority.  I didn't have a great deal of trouble with classroom manners and discipline but I expected some.  I didn't expect to be adorned and I was not seeking a warm relation.  I was expecting tempers, fatigue, and occasional high spirits, pranks and jokes.  I remember the serious and pained face of the 5th grade boy who told me he wasn't feeling well and showed me his vomit on top of our pile of composition paper. I tenderly put my arm around him but he reached out and picked up the rubber fake.


In my experience, the part of teaching that tended to be the most difficult for most students was the negative part.  Bosses don't like to fire people and teachers don't like to be bad guys either.  However, good sense, good manners and sometimes basic morality can and do get violated in school.  The teacher is the main person to spot such problems and put a stop to them.  The situation is similar to that of a parent of a teen who has to lay down the law.  When the same law has been violated before, a penalty, a grounding, some pain, loss or punishment is called for, but that doesn't make it fun to administer, to stand behind and to enforce.


Whether the young person is 3 or 13, they are quite likely to make their displeasure with pain, loss or punishment very clear.  When a youngster says through gritted teeth,"I hate you!", it can hurt the disciplinarian.  It is usually counterproductive to say that such a comment hurts, even when it does. Trying to be reasonably friendly after a suitable time with the rules violator may offer a chance to get rebuffed, which can hurt again.  In my experience, it is this policing aspect of teaching that is most often difficult to accept and become used to.  More so, since we all want kindhearted teachers who appreciate young minds and personalities so we select for the very student teacher who is indeed going to be a little wounded by hatred, temporary or not.



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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

The development of us and cooking

In the last three weeks, I have run into many salutes to cooking.  Not the pleasures of the table, nor the pleasure of keeping the ol' bod alive and functioning but the use of fire to change the chemical composition of food.  Until recently, I thought of fire for light at night and heat when needed.  Here, halfway to the north pole, we are aware of the need to conserve body heat or die.  But a local retired dietician, a video from the Australian university of New South Wales, a TED talk by a brain scientist and the impressive book that several friends urged me to read, "Sapiens", have all pointed out that only humans cook.  They all say that we have big, energy-consuming brains that would require 5 to 9 hours a day of eating without cooking.  The basic idea is that high calories foods such as wheat, rice and potatoes don't yield those to the human body without being cooked.  


You always hear that we are the only animals with this or that: language, writing, photography, musical instruments, cars and what not.  I am reasonably confident that you can say we are the only animals that cook.  Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and more, examined the culture of the dining table and the manners of the table.  Another writer in this area is the interesting Margaret Visser.  She is the author of "Much Depends on Dinner", which I listened to but is available as a book on Amazon and an audio book and a downloadable PDF file from the internet.


But as of about 2009, the Harvard "biological anthropologist" and primatologist Richard Wrangham said in an interview in Discover magazine that until the last few years, little or no research had been done on the difference to a human body between the calorie extraction of cooked food and raw.  He is the author of Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.  He says in that interview:


About 25 years later, it occurred to me that my experience in Gombe of being unable to thrive on wild foods likely reflected a general problem for humans that was somehow overcome at some point, possibly through the development of cooking. (Various of our ancestors would have eaten more roots and meat than chimpanzees do, but I had plenty of experience of seeing chimpanzees working very hard to chew their way through tough raw meat—and had even myself tried chewing monkeys killed and discarded by chimpanzees.) In 1999, I published a paper [pdf] with colleagues that argued that the advent of cooking would have marked a turning point in how much energy our ancestors were able to reap from food.

To my surprise, some of the peer commentaries were dismissive of the idea that cooked food provides more energy than raw. The amazing fact is that no experiments had been published directly testing the effects of cooking on net energy gained. It was remarkable, given the abiding interest in calories, that there was a pronounced lack of studies of the effects of cooking on energy gain, even though there were thousands of studies on the effects of cooking on vitamin concentration, and a fair number on its effects on the physical properties of food such as tenderness. But more than a decade later, thanks particularly to the work of Rachel Carmody, a grad student in my lab, we now have a series of experiments that provide a solid base of evidence showing that the skeptics were wrong.




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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Monday, October 19, 2015

Error day

My sister never got the e-book I sent.  Turns out she had changed email accounts but I hadn't noticed.  She and Amazon and I got it all straight.

Lynn called.  Please bring the big, black book.  It is the one on natural history.  It's on her side of the office.  Found our only book on natural history.  It is green and on the end section of the shelves, neither her side nor mine.


Found I had stained the front of my shirt with lunch juice.  Changed into a clean shirt and sprayed the stain.  The compost pail needed emptying.  Some onions stuck on the bottom when I dumped it in the bin.  Wrapped it sharply to dislodge the sticky skins.  Black deteriorating goo sprayed on my shirt.  Changed into a clean shirt and sprayed the stain.


Ok, guys, I'm ready for the next round.



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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Fwd: Your ebook bargains for Sunday

I joined BookBub about 6 months ago after hearing about it.  Many of the offerings are not to my taste but it often has something of interest.  The books that are said to be "free" are usually part of the Kindle Unlimited program that allows Kindle users to borrow up to 10 of the e-books in the program for unlimited time.  Many good books are part of that program.  I am sending this out today because it contains an offer that is probably only good for today for the 10% Happier book by Dan Harris.  His is not the only book on meditation and may not even be the best one but it is one of the best, covers lots of ground in a non-religious way that can be maximally open to all.  And today it is again on sale, as it was the other day, for $2 in download form.  Normally, I only send something out once a day but this deal will probably not last.
Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety

Twitter: @olderkirby

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: BookBub <info@bookbub.com>
Date: Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 9:20 AM
Subject: Your ebook bargains for Sunday
To: olderkirby@gmail.com


Your Deals: Daughters of the River Huong by Uyen Nicole Duong. "An excellent choice for readers who love Lisa See's novels" (Library Journal). Follow four generations of Vietnamese women — from royal companion Huyen Phi to rebellious Simone in modern-day America. A splendid tapestry of family and history.
BookBub Your Deals  
Daughters of the River Huong by Uyen Nicole Duong Daughters of the River Huong
By Uyen Nicole Duong
 
"An excellent choice for readers who love Lisa See's novels" (Library Journal). Follow four generations of Vietnamese women — from royal companion Huyen Phi to rebellious Simone in modern-day America. A splendid tapestry of family and history.

$1.99 $3.99
Amazon  
 
Literary Fiction
Steamy Kitchen's Healthy Asian Favorites by Jaden Hair Steamy Kitchen's Healthy Asian Favorites
By Jaden Hair
 
This "down to earth" (Ree Drummond) cookbook from a popular blogger and chef delivers 120 "incredibly flavorful recipes" (Ming Tsai). These healthy, easy, and beautiful dishes — like Korean tacos and Vietnamese summer rolls — are perfect for family meals or entertaining!

$1.99 $12.99
Amazon   Apple iBooks
 
Cooking
10% Happier by Dan Harris 10% Happier
By Dan Harris
 
In this "brave, completely engaging, and often hilarious book" (Booklist), a television anchor and reporter shares how he used meditation to reduced stress and became happier. A #1 New York Times bestseller with over 1,200 five-star reviews on Amazon!

$1.99 $10.99
Amazon   Apple iBooks
 
Biographies and Memoirs
Sugar in My Bowl by Erica Jong, Ed. Sugar in My Bowl
By Erica Jong, Ed.
 
A "fierce and refreshingly frank collection of personal essays" (Kirkus Reviews) edited by the New York Times bestselling author of Fear of Flying. These riveting explorations of gender and sexuality "penetrate a secret space in our brains we so often neglect" (Forbes).

$0.99 $10.99
Amazon   Apple iBooks
 
General Nonfiction
The British Empire by Stephen W. Sears The British Empire
By Stephen W. Sears
 
From an award-winning historian comes a comprehensive chronicle of the British Empire's growth in the 19th century and its dissolution in subsequent years. Follow this captivating story of a civilization, its people, and the impact they had on the world at large.

$2.99 $9.99
Amazon   Apple iBooks
 
History
The Headmaster's Wager by Vincent Lam The Headmaster's Wager
By Vincent Lam
 
In 1960s Saigon, lonely Chinese headmaster Percival finds solace with beautiful, French-Vietnamese Jacqueline — only to learn there's no escape from the war raging around them. "Sumptuously plotted" (The New York Times Book Review).

$1.99 $11.99
Amazon   Apple iBooks
 
Historical Fiction
The Shameless Hour by Sarina Bowen The Shameless Hour
By Sarina Bowen
 
From a USA Today bestselling author: Bella is confident in her sexuality; Rafe is a shy virgin. After an impromptu night of passion, Rafe must get over the ensuing awkwardness and be there for Bella when she becomes the target of a cruel prank…

$0.99 $3.99
Amazon   Apple iBooks
 
New Adult Romance
Angel Dance by M.D. Grayson Angel Dance
By M.D. Grayson
 
Private eye Danny Logan is hired to track down Gina Fiore, an old flame who's gone missing. But as he begins to investigate, he uncovers a plot far more dangerous than he'd ever imagined...

Free! $2.99
Amazon  
 
Crime Fiction
The Chihuahua Always Sniffs Twice by Waverly Curtis The Chihuahua Always Sniffs Twice
By Waverly Curtis
 
When a wealthy widow leaves her entire estate to her dogs, PI Geri and her talking Chihuahua Pepe go sniffing around for a villain who might be trying to kill the pooches. A hilarious cozy mystery that's "a whole lot of fun!" (The Seattle Times).

$1.99 $7.59
Amazon   Apple iBooks
 
Cozy Mysteries
Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton Pirate Latitudes
By Michael Crichton
 
An unforgettable tale from the #1 New York Times bestselling titan of suspense who brought us Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain! Eyeing a ship filled with gold, Captain Charles Hunter and his crew embark on a legendary attack. "Crichton's ultimate adventure" (San Francisco Chronicle).

$0.99 $4.99
Amazon  
 
Bestsellers, Action and Adventure
Invite Your Friends
Do your friends love to read? Invite them to join BookBub today!
  Send Invitations
Prices may change without notice, so please verify that the deal is still available before downloading. You are receiving the United States edition of BookBub and some deals may not be available outside this region.
This email was sent to olderkirby@gmail.com.

BookBub · 1 Broadway 14th floor · Cambridge, MA 02142 · United States

Unsubscribe | Update Preferences
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Note to Millennials and others

I know it is hard to believe but your parents, your grandparents, your pastor, priest and rabbi were not stupid.  True, they weren't on Facebook and they didn't Tweet.  Believe it or not, they did believe in freedom and they knew its joys.  However, just like you, they learned, one way or another, that life is better with the right disciplines in it.  Some discipline about thrills and seeking them, some discipline about tolerance for the very ideas and behavior that you have already totally proved to be wrong for yourself and all others, some discipline for picking yourself up time after time and starting over on what really needs to be worked on, some discipline for recognizing that some things have been tried enough and need to be dropped and unlearned. 


I realize any large group is not uniform and that some of you have very different needs from those I am pointing to here.  It is possible to be too rigid, too disciplined and if  that applies, you need to relax a little.  I mostly urge you to keep your eyes open for whatever you are convinced is wrong or stupid and check every now and then to see if you might have overlooked any part of that which isn't so bad, which be a good idea to tolerate or even adopt.  Just because your father believed something doesn't guarantee that it is all wrong.


Secondly, I bring you some tough-to-swallow news.  It is something that every eager, energetic, intelligent ready-to-go teacher has to learn.  (Don't scoff just yet: we are all teachers at various times and places throughout life.) The hard news is that YOU CAN'T DO IT ALL RIGHT!  Parenting, teaching, political activity, management - they all involve complexity and individual difference and independent thinking to the point that no matter how lovingly or carefully or scientifically you carry out your mission, you cannot avoid some mistakes, some criticisms, some false moves.  Besides, as you may have already seen, you may get a bitter criticism today for something that you are thanked for next year or next decade.  As the Roman gladiators said to the emperor, "we who are about to die salute you" and we wish you joy and the best of fortune.  We already know that you will make some mistakes and we stand ready to console you.




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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Business and repeat business

Two special moments - finding an author that is a pleasure and (2) finding a second or more books by that author.  I found "Superior Justice" by Tom Hilpert and liked it.  I read the book about the time of the news about young black men being killed by police.  Hilpert's book made clear that police can plant evidence, destroy evidence, bribe prisoners to say you confessed to them and lie about what they have heard you say.  The book was well-written.

 

This morning, I got to the culmination of my second Hilpert book, "Superior Storm".  I didn't think I would be interested in reading several chapters depicting a bad storm on Lake Superior but I was.  Again, the book was well-written, the main character, a Lutheran pastor, is persuasively pictured as an active man with a full complement of brains and muscles and a professional approach to helping people understand themselves and their lives.

 

It is a pleasure to find a new author who writes what I like and it is a second pleasure to find further books by that same person that are available.  

 

The L.I.F.E. group had a session today in which those attending suggested additions to my page of characters who have managed to be in two or more books.  The additions are on the second section of this page: https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/characters-that-i-have-revisited?pli=1



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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Friday, October 16, 2015

Music and books through the air

I am listening to Joseph Menn's "All the Rave: The Rise and Fall of Shawn Fanning's Napster", the peer to peer file sharing service that began in the summer of 1999 and ceased operation in 2002 amid rigorous lawsuits. I am interested in music and the changes wrought by technology.  I don't listen to much modern music.  I happened to catch the pair of singers called Mamuse on Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion so we have their album "All the Way" on our iPods and I listen to that once in a while.  Otherwise, it is Mozart, Rossini and Beethoven and their ilk.  

I used television, email, and web pages to teach for about a decade and I was my campus's first director of academic computing.  I am interested in new technology and I know new inventions can have sudden and gripping effects, quickly turning a business upside down.  Futurists like to imagine the best firm in the US for making buggy whips and the effect on their business of the founding and growth of the automobile industry.    


I try to keep my eye on ebooks, as sold by Amazon for Kindle and by Barnes and Noble for Nook.  I am interested in similarities and differences between electronic transmission of books vs. of music.  In both cases, adding in files sent over the internet to equipment that can show or play them has definitely changed the business or buying opportunities.


As I understand it, music has never been a high-paying possibilities for most musicians so I think it is especially important not to steal copyrighted music.  I can't see using software that strips out the digital rights management parts of recordings or files of books, which is unequivocally stealing and immoral behavior.  When music or writing is offered freely for no money, that is a different situation.  I write this blog for free but no one can see it unless they have access to the internet or email, which requires money.  A big difference between my work and that of most musicians and writers is I am not trying to make a living from my writing.  


I love that I can get books and music from the air.  Just about all my music came from CD's before I loaded it into iTunes.  A little of it was downloaded in mp3 or mp4 format and paid for.  I try steadily to avoid buying a paper book.  I only want those that are in Kindle form, which is free of weight, the need for physical space or doesn't need dusting.






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

Twitter: @olderkirby

Popular Posts

Follow @olderkirby