The beat in the background

She is tough, she is competent, she is professional.  Sandra Bullock plays a woman FBI agent in the 2000 film "Miss Congeniality".   Lynn recalled the  part where the agent realizes that another agent is getting attracted to her and in a somewhat blatant and un-feminine way, taunts him.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwrEnPYHsyQ

I enjoy the contrast between full-body feminism that is part and parcel of being a beauty queen and shooting, judo and stalking bad guys.  I very much like the human female form, the female voice and female personalities.  I realize they differ and are not all carbon copies of each other, which, to me, is a large part of general attractiveness of the gender.  

We found the movie on Prime TV and watched it.  The depiction of a pro policewoman trying to mix in with beauty pageant participants, for the purpose of having a trained police officer on hand, is the fun of the somewhat silly movie.  I am old and critical so anything about proper behavior or beauty contests may get me wondering about how much the idea holds up and under what circumstances the view might not apply. 

Lynn commented that the agent played by Benjamin Bratt was always picking on Sandra Bullock's character, disrespecting her and downplaying her contributions, ideas and skills until she undergoes a makeover, wears heels, and a tight knit dress.  Lynn said the message is that you have to be pretty to be liked. I don't know as much about being pretty or liked as she does, but I wonder if I can't amend the message to simply "if you want to be liked, like".  I am confident it isn't that easy or simple, but I am also confident that being attracted and being attractive is a more subtle and persistent a part of us than we realize.

Readers’ blogs

I fear the day that all the readers of this blog write blogs.  I just know they are going to want me to read their writing.  After all, they read mine.  I email about 80 people daily copies and about 50 people a day look at the blog web page of Fear, Fun and Filoz.  Right now, I am getting about 20 emails a day and most of them are ignorable ads.  But what if all this blog's readers and viewers write their own blogs?

I will pick and choose, I guess.  If they each have titles, I will try and use the titles and reactions to them to pick ones that are good, or profitable, or intriguing.  It is definitely possible that more readers will write or comment or send pictures or videos than I will have strength or time or energy or motivation to read, or even skim.

I find that I am definitely reaching my limits.  I am approaching the (likely) final years of my life.  I already have 3000 books, not counting the ones sitting on shelves here.  I guess about 75% of that collection, like most of the books in the local public library and the local university, are uread.  I have about 2500 articles saved in Pocket.  There are many movies on Netflix, Prime TV, Acorn and PBS that I still haven't viewed.  Some of the good ones have GOT to be looked at a second time.  I read too much.  I sit too much.  I don't hoe the fields or milk the cows or fight the enemy.  I don't keep accounts balanced.  I am already occupied and I doubt if I can fit much more into my waking hours.  So, if you are going to write a blog, make it succinct, please. 

Wiped clean 2.0

We got our first home computer in 1984.  I know, a scary year to get into computers.  A decade or so, later when the UWSP chancellor ordered computers for every faculty member, some said they didn't want a spying tool on their desk for the administration to use to watch over them.  The idea is still around and it probably has more weight behind it now, with my personal data being sold to the Russians and all.  

You probably know that computers, control, confinement and cruelty can be mixed together in frightening stories and anecdotes.  I just looked up "Hal, the computer" on YouTube and quickly found the episode in the 1968 movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" where the smooth voice of smart and controlling Hal says, "I am afraid I can't do that, Dave" in the movie.  You probably also know that fire, electricity, language, speech, writing, guns and sharp instruments can be frightening, too, and damaging, even.  It can still be fun and profitable and convenient and exciting to have and drive automobiles, take rides in jet planes and cook at high temperatures.

Not all headaches and difficulties come from malevolence or malfunction.  Trying to empty out my Kindle, just to drop the number of distractions it presents may be difficult.  If the designing team and the programming team decide that it would be a sweet service to me to restore my Kindle as it was after I try emptying it, I can run into obstacles getting to the situation I want.   Some smart machine somewhere could quickly memorize what I have jammed into my reader and keep "restoring" to the last way it was before I tried to simplify things.

During that first year of home computing, I had a strong feeling of a disaster when I accidentally blanked a disc of my course notes and handouts.  "Oh, no"!  Not my important notes!  Within 15 minutes after blanking the wrong disc, I realized I would always rewrite and revise and never actually have the need to use what had been on it.  My recent experience of emptying my Kindle reader and worrying that machines somewhere might "helpfully" restore it as it was, showed me that I want to preserve my ability, my right and my tools to wipe things clean and restart.

Reviewing together

Lynn writes the main events of the year during each Christmas season in her annual newsletter.  In straightening and culling (librarians also call it "weeding") her stuff, she looked at her collection of previous Christmas seasons, which are a short version of our history.  Today, she read the letter from 1993.  

I have memorized the date of the earlier year in the '60's when we moved to Stevens Point.  It was a big year for us since we moved to the edge of the north woods, into more snow than we had experienced before.  It was a change from a large urban area to a smaller community, smaller than I had lived in before.  But for me, the 1990's were lively but somewhat undated.  Hearing the rundown of the events during some of those years was wonderful.  

People often reminisce over photos of kids and family events but written descriptions can be stimulating and moving, too.  When Lynn went to grad school for her doctorate, she drove the 100 miles home most weekends.  Sometimes, I stayed in her tiny apartment instead.  It was split-community living.  Then, she got a job 120 miles away in a beautiful part of the state.  I kept teaching at Stevens Point but I also taught in La Crosse.  More split-community living.  After a while, things worked out so that we both lived and worked in the same community. But there were adventures and trials and accomplishments along the way, and it was sure fun to be reminded of them.

We have lived together and known each other for more than 60 years, but I still marvel at what she remembers and manages to get me to recall in my own mind that I can't think of alone.  Just yesterday, a friend with a degree in history and I were agreeing that it is not possible to have an experience without grasping certain aspects of it that another person skips.  It is not possible to have all the awareness and impressions that another person has.  I imagine that is even more true when a person is older and has more memories, associations and beliefs to add to, contend with, and contrast with.

Holy troubles

I got in the mood to re-read Ecclesiastes.  I got out my King James version and read all 12 "chapters" of the short book.  I guess my mood was urged on me by watching the Disney film Coco for a second time.  The animated film can be emotional, at least to a small extent for me.  It depicts a young boy's search through the regions of the afterlife, the first region for those still remembered by the living, and the second more of a wispy area where one drifts off when no living person remembers a given deceased person. His visit and related ideas are connected to the Day of the Dead of Mexican tradition.

Ecclesiastes is said by several authories to be controversial, and in places self-contradictory.  I think I can sum up its message as 

"Nothing lasts", 

"You will die someday" and 

"You will be forgotten".  

I think all three parts are true, fully acceptable and natural.  When I read the King James version (1611), there are many verses I don't understand.  So, I tried looking at the New International Version (1978 and a couple more afterwards).  I wound up trying to download the NIV Study Bible into my Kindle.  It is an old Kindle version, not currently sold new.  That book and both of my Kindles kept reloading and updating once I tried to get a book I had paid for.  It got super frustrating.  I tried lots of tricks and ideas, but nothing helped.  I called Amazon customer service and got a nice, understanding person who could suggest nothing I hadn't tried already.  

I sent away for a refurbished version of my favorite Kindle.  It came today and maybe if I stay away from the NIV Bible and just read sex and murder, things will work out.

Moon

I try to be aware of my reactions, even those that are very light and quick.  So, when she said she would be interested in the Nova program "Back to the Moon", I felt a flash of boredom.  The moon?? Old news!  We've been there!  But I have learned that it not only keeps good relations to go with her choices, it pays off for me besides maritally.  

Just another time when I am glad for her taste and her impulses.  Once, in Hawaii, we walked through a lava tube, underground tunnels created by lava flows and since cooled.  Who knew that the same interesting phenomena are found on the moon?  I didn't even realize that finding water on the moon was very important for a number of reasons, a big one being if humans were going to live there, even for 6 months or so, it would really help if water was available.  

I did know that the moon is smaller than Earth and therefore has less gravity.  The difference is one sixth.  So, a one foot jump would be about 6 feet on the moon.  I didn't realize that a bulldozer on Earth relies on its weight to push soil and rocks around.  The video shows new designs and concepts required to do construction on the moon since soil and rocks are too hard to push out of the way in much lighter gravity.

For various reasons, the moon would make a fine space exploration launching platform.  There has been a resurgence of international interest in the moon on the part of (in chronological order): the Soviet Union, the United States, Japan, the European Space Agency, China, India, Luxembourg, and Israel.  Private companies are also involved: Astrobotic, SpaceX (Elon Musk), Blue Origin (Jeff Bezos), Sierra Nevada Corp and Lockheed Martin.

The program stated that iron and titanium have been found in good quantities.  Lynn already foresees looting of the moon and making a big mess there.  But we know that is not going to happen.

So so slow

I took a typing class in 8th grade, about 70 years ago.  I wanted to learn ways to make writing that was clear and easy to read.  I didn't realize going into that class that it was basically structured for those who would type from notes or handwriting.  I didn't realize that composing from my head to my fingers on a keyboard was not the sort of typing envisioned for the class nor by the authors of the text.  We did calculations in that class to determine our typing speed.  I always came up as a slow typist, one or two words a minute.  

In those far-off days, of course, the typewriter had an ink-saturated ribbon and the keys struck the ribbon, leaving a mark in the shape of the letter on the paper.  

https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/search?q=typing

I realize that typing, transmitting to other machines, searching for information and other tasks are performed by computers at much higher speeds that I can do them.  I am impatient about nearly everything so I notice when a machine takes longer to do something than I want, or than I expect.  I don't notice when I take several minutes and the machine calmly waits, on the alert the whole time.  I notice when this computer takes a while, probably less than a minute to switch to another program, one that is already open.  But do you realize how long a minute is?  

My car starts fast enough.  Our garage door opener works quickly.  I don't seem to have other machines or processes that drag on, one second after another.  I do believe in a principle that I call "C'est moi".  It's me, not the machines.  I decide how long something "should" take.  I decide when the expected time period has passed by.  I decide that I am being cheated by a slow machine.  I am fully aware that George Washington (yes, Happy Birthday, George) never had to wait and wait for his spreadsheet to finally decide to open up.  

Concepts and words and other wisps of smoke and air

The weekly Library of Congress bulletin said this morning that Feb. 18 is the anniversary of the mayor of Charleston, South Carolina turning control of the city over to the Union general Schimmelfennig.  The news today mentions electricity bills far higher than usual being delivered to some Texans because of extraordinary actions taken to deal with the recent extra cold storm and consequent disruption of typical Texan power delivery.  

I got to wondering if anyone along the line between extra emergency expenditures and the delivery of bills of inordinate size to the customers thought about the effect of unusually large bills. I hope somebody went to a supervisor and mentioned the large and unusual amounts.  I also wondered about the mechanics, the politics and the communications involved in surrendering a city to an invading (and hated) army.  I have mentioned the little book by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University titled "7 ½ Lessons About the Brain".   The final lesson is that our brains can create reality. She writes about "made up" things such as laws and cultural practices and language. 

I have been quite conscious of all the things on my mind that have to do with human costumes and ideas.  It is true, I think, that a great deal of my life concerns human inventions that have no material existence.  Much of our talk about politics relates to vast immaterial ideas such as "freedom", "communism", "liberal", "conservative" and many other terms.  When a large and lively community (population about 300,000 at the time) such as Charleston, South Carolina surrenders to an invading army, there are likely to be some people inside the city that don't get the word that the city is now in the hands of the Union army.  When a number of Texans, already cold and unhappy with their lack of heat and electricity get the word that they owe $7,000 for recent energy costs, there are going to be some people who are outraged and confused.

So many things that concern us in life relate to concepts and ideas that I picture something like cyberspace, only bigger and more complex and more diverse.  All the names we use for people, places and things are in this language-space but so are many words for immaterial concepts that matter and can affect us deeply but are not physical, such as feelings, plans and purposes, not to mention fantasies.

Thanks, Coronavirus ???

People who have had to put funerals and graduations and weddings off to try to keep Covid-19 infections down are not beholden to the dumb bug for the trouble and disappointment it is causing. They may be in no mood to count their blessings or consider anything positive about the bug or the effect of it spreading around the country and the world.  I imagine good writers and alert researchers are assembling anecdotes and statistics that do show some fortuitous effects of it and of our attempts to contain it.  

Of course, we all know about working from home and using Zoom to see each other.  There are benefits of both and of not having to stand out in the winter cold, waiting for the school bus.  It is quite clear that being online and visible to others is not the same as being in a group at a good table in a nice place.  Several cartoons have depicted the online participant wearing a nice top in front of a webcam carefully aimed at parts of the house that don't look too bad with the dog playing beneath slippered feet.  

Many writers and thinkers through the ages have focused on the parts of us that are passions and compared them to parts of us that seem more purely brain power like imagination and analysis.  The excellent series Hacking Your Mind on PBS and on Amazon TV reminds us in four episodes that our long-time biological impulses affect our thinking rapidly and deeply.  That same series mentions the work by the team of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in showing built-in tendencies we have that can direct us toward sugar, fat, salt, fights, dangerous driving and jealousies quickly and subtly.  Several authorities give the advice "Slow down" to try to see if an impulse should be followed or fought.  Coronavirus, in some ways, has enabled us to do some of that.  

Lisa Feldman Barrett has a nice little book called "7 ½ Lessons about the Brain" and they are good ones.  The first lesson is that our brains are not for thinking.  Oh, yeah?  Well, what are they for, then?  They are for running the body and all its systems, like breathing (keep it going!), digesting, seeing, not falling over or out of your chair, etc., etc. When the virus shuts down a favorite store, we get a chance to consider what is happening and how we can work around the loss of a possibility. We get the gift of looking at alternatives.

I am steadily getting gone

I taught at the local university for 37 years.  I had plenty of opportunity to get to know people all over the campus.  I taught undergraduates who were working to become teachers in grades K-12.  I taught graduate teachers working on master's degrees or getting professional advancement credits.  I retired in 2005, 16 years ago.  Lately, I have seen evidence that many of the people I have known have moved or died.  Quite a few have retired and it is very common for Wisconsin retirees to move to a southern state.

I watched the Pixar film "Coco" and enjoyed it.  It is about dying and what happens after death.  According to the film, my soul may reside in a pre-heaven as long as I am remembered by any living person.  But when all living people have forgotten about me or never knew me, my soul will float off into formlessness.

It is not just people and contacts.  It is also fashions and popular words and phrases:

"Bigger than a bread box. 

Banned in Boston. 

The very idea! 

It's your nickel. 

Don't forget to pull the chain. 

Knee high to a grasshopper.

Turn-of-the-century. 

Iron Curtain. 

Domino theory.

Fail safe. 

Civil defense. 

Fiddlesticks! 

Cooties. 

Going like sixty. 

Don't take any wooden nickels. 

Heavens to Murgatroyd!" ("Toward the Light" Vol. 28, Issue 16)

I don't seem to weigh less but as with some cartoon characters, parts of me are missing or transparent.  More and more, I am not entirely present.  More of me has ghosted off, a little at a time.

Bob Anastasi

I learned of the death of a good friend today.  I knew he had been ailing for a while. I have reached an age where it is always rational to check about friends.  More and more of my pillars and markers are exiting from this life.  Each is unique, not only in personality but also in history.  No one else anywhere at any time means the same or has meant the same.  I know you can't help it but I really would appreciate it if you didn't leave.

When I was a freshman, Bob Anastasi convinced a group when I wasn't even present, that I was the freshman they should include in a group going to New York City to represent our school.  When I was a senior, Bob was partnered with me to student teach together in the campus lab school.  In between, I learned that Bob was steadily loving, pleasant and very good company.  50 years after we graduated, Bob and Wanda had us stay with them while we attended a reunion of our college class.  

You can see why he is a marker of important milestones in my life and how I, along with an army of family, friends and admirers, are already missing him.

Books that have helped

I got an email from an organizer asking for a presentation for seniors. I thought of what I might say that could be valuable and I came up with some books that have helped me.

1. Incognito by David Eagleman

2. The Improbability Principle by David Hand

3. Books by Chade-Meng Tan: Search Inside Yourself & Joy on Demand

4. Final Gifts by Callahan and Kelley

5. How to Lie with Statistics by D. Huff

6. Breath by Breath by Rosenberg

7. Caste by Wilkerson

8. 10% Happier and Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics by Dan Harris

9. Exercised by Daniel Lieberman

10. Gutenberg to Google by Wheeler

11. The 10,000 Year Explosion by Cochran and Harpending

Curious

The historian Walter Isaacson had written quite a few books.  I have read his books on the Wright Brothers and about Steve Jobs.  Yesterday, I downloaded a collection of writing by Jeff Bezos.  The collection has an introduction written by Walter Isaacson.  Human flight, smartphones and many other Apple products and online buying through Amazon.com have all had a big effect on our world.  In his introduction to the Bezos writings, Isaacson tries to note properties that are needed to make a big change in the world.  

The topic touches on one that my friend and I re-considered for the umpteenth time this morning.  She is a professor of special education and has long experience personally with educational difficulties herself.  She is unhappy with standardized tests and she has good reason to be.  I taught a course on school testing and grading for years. If you want to read some of my ideas about school testing and grading, download here: 

https://sites.google.com/site/kirbyvariety/kirby-tests-and-meas-book

We can point to a modern, especially American, desire for certainty and verification and remember the influence of science and an aura of clarity when we consider testing that seems to produce the essence of an individual in a single number.  So, you may feel that you have all there is to know about me once you know my IQ.  

Isaacson, like many historians, seems to avoid too much fascination with capturing the essence of a person with numbers.  Of course, outside of numbers, we run into murkier judgments and contradictory opinions.  Since our conversation and my awareness of myself and of my friend, I am interested in the important qualities that lead to a good life.  Isaacson writes:

The first is to be curious, passionately curious. Take Leonardo. In his delight-filled notebooks we see his mind dancing across all fields of nature with a curiosity that is exuberant and playful. He asks and tries to answer hundreds of charmingly random questions: Why is the sky blue? What does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? Do a bird's wings move faster when flapping up or when flapping down? How is the pattern of swirling water similar to that of curling hair? Is the muscle of the bottom lip connected to that of the top lip? Leonardo did not need to know these things to paint the Mona Lisa (though it helped); he needed to know them because he was Leonardo, always obsessively curious. "I have no special talent," Einstein once said. "I am only passionately curious." That's not fully true (he certainly did have special talent), but he was right when he said, "Curiosity is more important than knowledge." A second key trait is to love and to connect the arts and sciences. Whenever Steve Jobs launched a new product such as the iPod or iPhone, his presentation ended with street signs that showed an intersection of Liberal Arts Street and Technology Street. "It's in Apple's DNA that technology alone is not enough," he said at one of these presentations."

Invent and Wander (pp. 1-2). Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.

Quotations

I got to thinking about quotations that matter to me.  I know there are probably many of them but I haven't tried to collect them.  I remember that the first hardback book, probably the first book of any kind I bought, was Best Loved Poems.  I have lost that book now or given it away and I can't find the exact reference or title.  There are many collections of best loved poems.

I have been writing my blog, nearly daily, for 12 years but that doesn't go back very far into my life.  I tried searching the blog pages (4121 posts) using the search window and just a quote mark (") but that didn't work.

I know I have remembered the quote from a psalm "It is He that hath made us and not we ourselves."  That seems to let me off the hook when I lose my temper or act childishly.  I am confident that there are many other quotes in my head but I am having trouble finding them.  

I do have a reading list from 1983 online.  I thought maybe reading the titles of books that have mattered might bring to mind some good quotes.  Not much luck.  I did have a book of well-known quotations but I have lost that, too.  I do remember parts of Ogden Nash's odd poem "The Strange Case of Mr. Donnybrook's Boredom":

https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/2012/02/strange-case-of-mr-donnybrooks-boredom.html

I am mildly interested in the psychology of "end times", "the end of the world" and the Apocalypse. So, in my high school days, someone announced the imminent end of the world, I thought of the Psalm 46.  I requested to be the Bible verse reader for that morning and read that Psalm but I had to use Google just now to find the Psalm that mentions "though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea."  

I often feel that Ecclesiastes is my favorite book of the Bible, mostly because it seems to tell important truths about life, such as in a mere 500 years, we will be forgotten by any humans still living at the time.  The famous opening lines of that book of the Bible: "Vanity! Vanity! All is vanity!"  I just realized while Bibling around that I often think of "The woman that thou hast given me, she did offer and I did eat", said in response to God's question Did you eat to the tree of knowledge that I expressly forbade?.  The answer is a nicely recorded attempt by man to blame her and God.

Short, long and medium comings

A friend wrote today about using selected quotations as inspirations to try to live better, to handle his shortcomings better.  As a short guy, I feel familiar with shortcomings.  I was quite unhappy when in the 7th or 8th grade, when I realized I had probably attained all the height I was going to have.  Of course, shortcomings can pop up in many areas, not just physical height.  

Especially with modern men, I wonder about longcomings.  A shortcoming is a fault, such as losing my temper easily or being too loose or too tight with money.  By contrast, consider a longcoming, a particular strength or virtue that one tends to exhibit.  It seems difficult for any of us to observe  strengths and virtues we exhibit.  Just about any good quality or habit that I often demonstrate I can pooh-pooh talk down, dismiss.  I can find better examples than I am and tell myself that I don't do as well as them, that I am not really an example of such and such a good quality.  

I want to just gently accept that I tend to be generous or calm or whatever good quality my wife and kids and friends tell me I show.  

This general subject, my goods and bads, very much relates to much Christian religious practice.  Given the right mind set, I might have decided long ago that ANY good things are part of the messages from Satan or from my sinful self or my bottomless male ego.  At my current sceptical age, I would like to be a little more accurate and note my longcomings as well as my shortcomings.  Further, I posit middle-comings, properties or propensities that are neither especially poor or wonderful but that are characteristic.  For me, such a middle coming might be steady interest in eating good-tasting, high nutrition foods without getting into morality or Body Mass Index.  Or, in search of another example, a middle coming might be steady and interested awareness of the time of day and relying on the clock hour to direct myself to food, drink, rest, reading or tv.  

Worldwide web irritants

The book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1982) is written by a former Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin.  That is the book that taught me about pseudo-events, happenings of little or no importance except as content of announcements and as attention getters.  The first example I heard about was Senator Joseph McCarthy's practice of announcing that an announcement would be made tomorrow afternoon.  If a busy reporter made his way to the indicated location tomorrow afternoon, he would find that an announcement was indeed made.  The announcement announced that an important announcement would be made the following day at 10 AM.  

I might feel that any news item was the same old stuff and not really of any interest.  But to learn that the item was the same old thing, I need to pay some attention.  If you are trying Pavlovian conditioning on me, you might develop a habit on my part of reading the announcements from your office.  I might even be disgusted with the time-wasting you promote but continue to check things from your office, just to see if you continue in your irritating ways.  

The worldwide web, with its Uniform Resource Identifier (the familiar URI, for instance of this page, the "web address", the information that usually starts with and gets a connected computer to this page http://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com

is a relatively new medium of communication.  Bad manners and irritating practices happen.  

Reading rooms in libraries are usually quiet and mannerly.  But take a stack of single sheets advertising your tavern or your baked goods into the reading room and just walk along, dropping one sheet across the page someone is reading.  See what sort of reaction you get.

As you may know, these days, it is not uncommon to experience the same impolite intrusion when reading on the world wide web. You are reading along and suddenly an ad for a sale of winter coats or new cars plops itself across what you are reading.  You can take the diversion and read the intrusion.  You can, in irritation, close the web page and move to something else.  

You can use the Firefox browser and do a right click to get to the short menu and save the page into Pocket.  You can find and learn to use Reader View which just shows the main page connected to that address and not inserts or videos.  You can imagine how much more irritating an irrelevant interruption is if that interruption merely announces an important interruption coming up in 7 minutes from now.

You may know that to make a page-like presentation of words and pictures, the computer housing the page code needs your computer identification to send it the page code.  If we can keep you on our page a bit longer, we may be able to scoop up more information and sell you the car you have been wanting.

Trails taken

My book group of men discussed Tara Westover's book, Educated.  It is about being home-schooled since for religious reasons, public schooling was considered a threat.  Tara Westover eventually attended Brigham Young University and earned a PhD in history from Cambridge University in Britain.  Dr. Westover has a web site 

https://tarawestover.com/

She is currently a fellow at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard.  Her book, Educated, has been on Amazon's best seller lists for 154 weeks, or roughly 

three years.  

Much of our book discussion was about rigorously held beliefs and holding onto them tenaciously.  If I believe I have been directed by God to lead an army against others and you believe I have not been, you may well feel that I have been misled by pain or fear or ego or head injury.  Questions of what to believe can be considered separately from questions about what parents should do for their children and their future.  Of course, family politics and family relations are likely to figure largely in questions of love, loyalty, affection, friendliness and life plans.

Leaving the Saints by Martha Beck, Leaving the Witness by Amber Scorah and other books by women authors are often partially reports of parent-child relations as well as relating to morality, mortality and the future.  Robert Johnson's He and his book She are helpful for emphasizing typical differences in life plans and experiences between men and sons as opposed to women and daughters.  I learned that today is the birthday of Judy Blume, author of many books, among them Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret.  My wife was an elementary school librarian, a librarian for high school and a professor of library studies.  She said today that she has experienced ardent objection to books where the objector has not read the book.  Because of issues mentioned here, I read a third of Are You There, God and have not found much about religion.  So far, more of it is about anxiety of a 6th grade girl worrying about developing the body shape she wants and making friends in a new school.

Memory

Older friends and relatives worry about their memory.  Is the brain going to continue to work in the way we are used to?  We already have senior moments.  What is your name, again?  I know I know your name and I am so embarrassed that it won't come to me.  

I wrote about memory two years ago

https://fearfunandfiloz.blogspot.com/2018/08/memory-mechanisms.html

I don't say that my memory is much better today but I don't think it has deteriorated.  

It can be helpful to think about research that local current memory can be affected by walking into a different room:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=why+walking+through+doorways+causes+forgetting

I advised my sister the other day to keep a pad and pen handy.  Actually, it may be a good idea to keep them in your pocket or the pair of them in every room.  The point, at least for me, is not to write down much.  I usually only need a single word, or maybe a couple, to think about the SUBJECT.  You may have heard of research that says that walking through a doorway can affect one's memory and attention to one's thoughts and current focus of interest.  So, stop at every doorway and jot down a) why you are in motion and b) what subject or topic is on your mind currently in case it slips away.

How many people can I know?

I read this morning of a French nun who survived the 1918 influenza and just healed from the Covid-19 on her 117th birthday.  Just last week, I learned of the book The Longevity Economy by Joseph F. Coughlin, about the ever increasing life spans being experienced today. 

At the same time, I see that worldwide communication and news outlets are opening more and more doors and views and needs and hopes.  As the books Too Big to Know and Everyday Chaos by David Weinberger show, knowledge, opinions and causes, not to mention groups and alliances, emerge and seek members more and more broadly and rigorously and imaginatively.  

I got to thinking about how many people I can actually know simultaneously.  The definition of "knowing a person" matters, of course.  I can see how a man like our 45th president could attend a rally of 7000 - 9000 and think more people like him than do.  I wondered if a person lives to age 85 and gets to know an average of 1 new person a day, how many people would that make?  365 days times 85 years = 31025 people, 31046 if you use 365.25.

Somewhere, I got the idea that a typical number of people a person "knows" is 150.  I have more than 800 names in my contacts database but I do find that some of the names are of people I can't recall.  I looked up the question of how many people one person can know and found ambiguous answers, of course.  Recent research shows that people can reliably tell which faces they have seen before and which they haven't with 5000 faces.

Numbers of this size get me to thinking about familiarity with statistical thinking.  I think the best book I know for developing such thinking is  "The Improbability Principle" by David Hand.  I began this post with longevity.  Long lives increase both contacts and years to forget contacts.

Get published!!

I can't say that I know much about poetry, or even what it is.  I have read poems and memorized a few.  I get the feeling that "poetry" is deliberate, careful language that aims to be effective and impressive.  I am scheduled to meet with some people interested in both poetry and prose next week and I saw a book called The Hatred of Poetry for a good price.  I downloaded it for Kindle and read this by the author who is also the editor of a poetry magazine.  Here he is discussing the idea and worth of being able to honestly said that one is a "published poet": 

I have three letters here that contain the sentence, "I don't know how long I have." I also received multiple letters from prisoners who felt poetry publication was their best available method for asserting they were human beings, not merely criminals. I'm not mocking these poets; I'm offering them as examples of the strength of the implicit connection between poetry and the social recognition of the poet's humanity. It's an association so strong that the writers in question observe no contradiction in the fact that they are attempting to secure and preserve their personhood in a magazine that no one they know will see. It is as though the actual poem and publication do not matter; what matters is that the poet will know and can report to others that she is a published poet, a distinction that nobody—not Death, not the social death of exclusion from the Law—can take from her.

Lerner, Ben. The Hatred of Poetry (p. 15). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

When these letters were written, I don't know.  The Hatred of Poetry is copyrighted in 2016.  

I guess sometimes people are seeking personal worth and the verification of their worth.  Often serving an approved purpose such as living for God or for a noble cause satisfies that need.  If personal popularity and fame are high, the acclaim of others may assure us that we matter.  

Depending on the definition of being published, a person can get published right away on 

Blogger - www.blogger.com

Wordpress https://wordpress.com

Google Sites https://sites.google.com

Occupation

Normally, reading 

But then her husband died, and soon after that her mother died. Chopin was depressed. Her family doctor thought she was a very good letter-writer, so he encouraged her to try writing fiction as a way to stay occupied. (from Writer's Almanac 2/8/2021)

would not have meant much to me but during the virus lockdown, I certainly noticed the language and the idea.  

Just as knitting or painting or woodworking can serve to engage the mind and modify the mood, so can writing.  

I have read many stories so I might be able to create a good romance or murder case in my mind.  I took a writing course as a sophomore and found the burden of deciding how to endanger a perfectly innocent hero and then credibly guide him back out of danger too heavy.  I even had trouble deciding whether he carried a 45 caliber gun or a good hunting knife.  Ever since that course and my difficulties, I shied away from writing any fiction.  

But if I get put into solitary, I might try creating a really good story featuring a likeable hero and his struggle with something or other.  It might be crashing in the desert or the jungle or the steppes and trying to survive while getting out of the bad situation.  I wouldn't much care, I don't expect, if the writing added up to a lovely book, one that was well-received.  I would just be using my brain to keep myself occupied.  I realize I might have trouble getting pen and paper or some other writing materials.  

A Hungarian woman, known in the West as "Edith Bone" was kept in solitary for seven years by the government. She wrote a book called "Seven Years in Solitary" about her work to stay occupied and engaged.  There are references to the book in many places on the internet but copies of it are very scarce.  I met the book as a library page but in my high school days.

Whether the situation is being alone in some isolated place (such as your house during pandemic) or being incarcerated in solitary confinement, the activity of keeping the mind engaged is important.

Good idea!

Sometimes, events chain out of control.  Committees can have that happen.  You have a group of ten people.  One of them writes a really good statement that settles everyone down and shows how to handle a sticky problem.  The outstanding quality of that statement grips everyone and they feel gratitude.  One person replies to all but writes to the good statement author, expressing a note of genuine appreciation and admiration.  Everyone reads the appreciative note and recognizes the high quality of the really good problem-solving statement.  The other eight people become sensitive to possibly looking crude and unappreciative of good thinking and good writing.  Each of them also sends a thank-you to the really good author.  

One of the last people to express appreciation and admiration also names a few of the previous thankers as notably good gratituders. Uh-oh, some of the earliest writers realize they never expressed thanks for the good thanking that has gone on recently.  Some of them write to all members expressing thanks for one or more of the early thank-yous that were especially well-written and warm.  It can take quite a while for the waves of appreciation to quiet down.

The phenomenon of chaining thanks to thankers for thanking thankers reminds me of the Lake Wobegon July 4th parade.  The drum and bugle corps stopped by the officials' bandstand to play a couple of pieces.  While everyone was standing there playing, one member zipped up on the stand and took a picture of the whole corps.  When the one member re-took his place, the girl next to him realized it was a good idea.  She zipped up on the stand and snapped a great shot of the whole group.  You guessed it: one after another, each corpsperson got up on the stand and took their own shot of the corps while everyone held their place.  It was only polite.