Today's weather

An interesting item today is probably the rain and snow.  I remember one year having heavy wet snow on April 4, but today is April 30, the last day of the month.  Still, we have had snow several times today and it isn't noon yet.  Much of the time, weather is not especially interesting but precipitation is attention-getting, especially if you are wearing hearing-aids.  So far, I have not been told that my rather expensive hearing aids are ruined or malfunctioning because moisture has gotten in them. 

My Florida friend, born and raised in New England, said that she expects the temperature at her house to hit 80 or 90 degrees today.  When I said it was snowing at the time, she was amazed.  I am amazed but not in a good way.  

I once read that this part of the country, northern Great Lakes area, often has long cold winters and short hot summers.  Reading that, I thought why would people want to live there.  Yet, I tried for a job here, got the job and we have lived here for 55 years, most of my life.

Two worlds

I often mention books that I like.  Some people have said they especially like to hear about books.  One that has impressed me recently is "An Immense World" by Ed Yong.  It is a reminder that all animals have some tools for knowing the world but no animal has every sense.  Besides, every animal's sense is limited to some extent.  Yong writes:

Humans are animals, too.  Yong says that human vision is an advanced sense in many ways.  And, I have read that human touch, especially with the fingertips, is quite sensitive and sharp.  But between our brains and our use of speech and writing, plus photography of various kinds, we can use what we call our imaginations to accomplish plenty.  We could encompass the world of print or books but we can read, watch a film, listen to a recording and think and make all that add up to a specially constructed "world".  

Just the "world" of fiction attests to our scope.  Inspired by Yong, I think of the book "The Once and Future King", a story about King Arthur.  The wizard Merlin educates the future king and includes in his training a trip to the world of ants.  Surprisingly, the visit shows that the ants obey commands from loudspeakers and carry flags displaying swastikas.

Opera and manners

I am not a big opera fan. I have been to a couple of performances of opera by music students on the local college campus. I still use compact discs to listen to music and they tend to put tunes into my head for a day or so. I find that hearing Pavarotti or somebody in advanced professional music often puts a pleasant and positive slant on my day.  The Elixir of Love is an opera that I often listen to but only the first disc because by the end of that, I am ready to leave the kitchen, where our player is.

I happened to blunder into The Elixir of Love by Donizetti and more or less learned the first part thru repetition and the fact that the performance is in English. The album "Opera's Greatest Drinking Songs" includes the famous toreador song from the opera Carmen.  You can hear it on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5qmSEvDEGs but you have to wait for the preliminaries to be over before the familiar music plays.

I learned the words "Toreador, don't spit on the floor, use the cuspidora, that's what it's for" from somebody sometime.  I don't have an impulse to spit on the floor or anywhere else but when I tried some chewing tobacco in the 6th grade, I learned that it is better to spit it out after some chewing.  I swallowed it and got unpleasantly dizzy and sick.  I have never been around regular tobacco chewers but I understand why they need to spit.  

There has been much written and worried about ChatGPT and related software packages.  I find that the available versions of Google Search can do a credible job of answering my questions without getting into much artificial intelligence (AI).  I wondered who created the spitting words to Bizet's tune.  I tried looking up the history of the alternate words and was bowled away by the number of links related to not spitting on the floor. I still don't know where the words came from.

Wives vs. mothers

I have been interested in books by Robert A. Johnson for a long time. He was a psychologist who wrote some helpful books that informed me in new areas.  I read "He: Understanding Masculine Psychology" and liked it.  When I found he had "She: Understanding Feminine Psychology", I was delighted and read it right away.  

One of the things I especially like about using Amazon's Kindle e-reader is its Highlights file.  I often try to stay alert to highlight a sentence or more that strikes me as a valuable or delightful statement.  There are times when I know I have read a book on a Kindle e-reader.  I look a book up on Amazon's web site, and yes, I own access to an ecopy and I have since a few years back.  I load the book into an e-reader and there are the notes from my reading 5 or 10 years ago.  I press a button and the notes are sent in a single file to my email address.

"She: Understanding Feminine Psychology" was very much about the tensions that often exist between a young man's new wife and his mother.  The mother carried him in her body for months, gave birth to him, nurtured and loved him and raised him.  Here comes this fluffy young thing to TAKE HIM AWAY! Grrrr!  Of course, many people of the feminine persuasion have a deep-rooted practice of showing only sweetness so Mom may smile at her but briefly, cooly, with just the right body language to let What'sHerName know that she has a damned nerve even existing, much less attracting the affections of her son.  Robert A. Johnson wrote:

This drama of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is acted out in every culture and is one of the psychic irritants which can contribute so much to a young woman's growth.

Keyboards and me

I was surprised when I realized that I could not access the internet without an electronic device. Yes, it should be obvious but I was still surprised.  In the late 1980's and early 1990's, I was getting introduced to email.  It seemed marvelous.  I used a computer but I had been using one to analyze data so I guess going through a different procedure and using different symbols seemed quite similar.  

It seemed odd and somewhat uncomfortable to understand that I thought of my friend and I had things to say, I could not say them (via email) without a keyboard, one that was connected to a device that was connected by "magical" waves in something called wi-fi.   Much of this realization happened when I got a message that I was using a connected device that had not been used before.  Would I mind getting a 6 digit code on another device and typing that on this "new" item?  So, they know my devices and can recognize one that works but that I haven't used to access them before.

My greatgranddaughter was irritated when she proudly went to the bank and tried to open an account.  The person working with her explained that her signature on the documents had to be in what she calls "cursive".  She is in the 8th grade and "I had one semester working with this cursive code FIVE years ago!"  

So, I am putting together groups of something called "letters" to form something called "words" on a screen.  I expect similar arrangements to appear in something called "emails" to you and on my blog page.  It has been working and I am glad, but I don't control or even know much of the process that makes my stuff get to you.

I first used a "keyboard" in my own 8th grade in a class on "typing" but our typing was done on that old machine called a typewriter.  I was a very poor typist as far as speed and accuracy goes. I am still not so good but I am doing ok.  I am glad I have the equipment and the electricity and the correct connections between the right wires to write this.

YouTube for books (and other information)

Yesterday, I gave a talk to a few people in the room with me and many people on Zoom.  Much of my talk referred to books.  I am a user of Amazon ebooks and I mentioned that.  I am a user of the Libby app, which allows a person with a library card to borrow library-owned ebooks.  But Kurt, participating in the audience, emphasized how much benefit he gets from pursuing authors and book content using YouTube.  He said that authors discussing and promoting their books often appear in one form or another on YouTube and explain ideas from their books.  

I haven't tried finding a book, a discussion of a book, or an author, publisher or other person who knows the book on YouTube but I applaud Kurt's comment.  I am not a big YouTube user but I realize the service is enormous.  I just looked up "How many people use YouTube per day?". and a recent estimate is 50 billion.  The total human population is 8 billion so some people use YouTube plenty!  You probably know that some people make substantial money being an "influencer", a person who discusses clothes or sports or child care or something on YouTube.  

I did a fair amount of teaching over tv and the power of YouTube seemed strong.  I did a bit of experimenting with putting myself on YouTube, which you can see if you are interested here: t.ly/EFnY  The short link takes you to my uploads on YouTube, which are basically of very little value.  But Kurt's point about getting the ideas of a book through various items you can find on YouTube is a good one.  I intend to try doing some of that myself.

A talk

The presentations recorded by our learning in retirement group take awhile to be uploaded into the Canvas library.  That interval is long enough that we tend to forget about a talk that we missed.  

I have learned from the talks given and from a Wisconsin Public Broadcast original program called "Wisconsin Life" that a community, especially one that includes a college campus, has stories, histories, skilled craftsmen and women that are always of interest.  They just have to be uncovered and written up in good form to be entertaining, informative and pride-inducing.  

I got a call a while back that the organization's calendar was too empty.  Could I contribute a talk? I taught testing and grading, statistical analysis of experiments, educational psychology, educational philosophy and professional reading for personal development for years.  Everyone that attends just about any American school as a student has experienced grades and parental reaction to grades.  So, of course, I should have something of interest to say to older citizens reflecting on their histories and the experiences of their families.

I did talk today and I considered the topic of our unconscious minds.  We humans are pretty good at reasoning and examining evidence for and against an idea but there are many other aspects of our thinking, our traditions and our conversations.  The notes I used are posted in this blog for Wednesday, April 19 under the title of "I am giving a talk…"

I didn't mention the unconscious process of decoding spoken language into meaning nor the process of reading, both reading aloud and reading silently.  Academics and lawyers are famous for preferring written documents to transient speech, which doesn't allow repeated scrutinizing as much as writing.  I saw a book recently that challenged a reader to turn the page and NOT read what was there.  The next page had such large words and so few that the message slipped into my brain before I could stop it.

CNN Photos of the week

On Sundays, CNN usually includes a link to its Photos of the Week.  The pictures of sports events and of political rallies often include humans expressing themselves and experiencing important victories, painful losses and bodily events, like falls and physical twists and turns.  Some Sundays, I am not inclined to mention them.  Other weeks, I include a link to them, like this: t.ly/BJlg

Some Saturday mornings

Some Saturday mornings are meant to be quiet.  Some don't make it.  I try to stay on top of things and pay attention to what needs to be done.  One thing is our yard.  When is the yard crew expected?  I emailed to find out.  Got a quick answer - Now!  So, we are now surrounded by energetic young men driving loud machines, raking and carrying louder leaf blowers behind ever-larger piles of dead leaves and grass.

What about our friend?  How is her spirit?  How is she doing with the load of thank-you notes and cards she wants to send those who have noted her husband's death?  Still working.

How about Amazon ebooks?  I have sent about 900 to friends that I figured would like them.  I figure but I don't check.  About 800 have been accepted but some have not.  Can I get a refund on those not "redeemed"?  When I write "those", I use a plural word since there are several dozen that have been offered for a half-year but not accepted.  Some friends are adamantly against computer files pretending to be genuine books but lack heft and scent.  It is not simple to get hold of Amazon customer service.  The first attempt included being on hold while the man checked with a supervisor.  He seemed to fully grasp what my problem was, but in no time, I started getting refunds for books that I want and use.  No good!  I called again and got another helpful guy.  He, too, grasps the deal and ends the call with the typical "Is there anything else I can do for you?"  I said,"Yes, I have a number of things for a clever person like you.  C'mon over.  You are probably in California, right?"  He said,"I am in South Africa."  Google says that is 8794 miles.

Weights

I didn't think about lifting weights until a high school classmate took me to his gym.  I didn't feel drawn to using the equipment but another lifter asked me how long I had been lifting.  I said I had never tried.  He replied,"Oh, you got natural shit!"  Despite receiving such a motivating invitation, I didn't do anything with weights until I was nearly 30 years old.  From reading somewhere and from other members of the wrestling team, I started to get interested.  

I started thinking about getting a set of weights and using them at home.  But I quickly found that the machines in a weight room make things quick and easy.  I am little and I don't want to look overly muscular but I did learn that weights make a difference.  The machines are quick to set and reset and with a little charting, I could tell what I was doing and how I was progressing.  

I go to a weight room on campus and I try to do so when it isn't crowded.  Despite being way over the hill and being married for more than 60 years to an excellent woman, the weight room can be a trial. The co-eds have remarkable shapes, noticeable shapes and of course, they should.  They are just the right age.  It is disconcerting that they tend to lift and bend in the nude.  Ok, they aren't really nude but somewhere they get these tights that are thin and clingy.  I don't want to be a pain so I tend to keep my eyes on the ceiling but I keep bumping into benches and things. It is embarrassing.

Oh, no!

We don't have time conflicts too often.  The sort of deal where you get a doctor's appointment for two weeks from now only to find that your friend's funeral is planned for the same day and time.  We try to avoid that sort of problem, but as ice and snow melt, trees and plants bloom, things on all sides pick up speed, intensity and passion.  Plus, as our bodies age, worries and actual medical needs increase.  

So, like today, a good friend made a presentation on a subject but at the same time, my book club's monthly meeting met.  It is disappointing when that sort of thing happens.  We try to keep likely time paths separate but we refuse to schedule meetings at totally difficult times.  Because we live where we do, plane trips usually mean getting to the airport at 6 or 7 AM.  Of course that means setting the alarm for 3:30 AM even with bags packed and ready to go.  

There are times we don't use for scheduling purposes but we have good reasons for not using them.  When we went to California, we did set our alarms for 3:30 AM and suffered the next few days because of the hour.  

A long time ago, I read "How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day" by Arnold Bennet (1907).  Just the existence of that book in that year tells me that time conflicts, including painful and damaging ones, loomed up more than a century ago.

 

 

(I am giving a talk on 4/24 and will use these notes)

Out beyond mind

(LIFE 4/24/2023)

The most memorable book: “Incognito” by David Eagleman

Another, maybe more helpful book:

“Seven and a Half Lessons about Your Brain” by Lisa Feldman Barrett


Think of “gut feelings”, emotions, hunches, etc.


Face the many things the brain does: heart beat, blood pressure, physical balance, etc. 

From Johns Hopkins University:

thought, memory, emotion, touch, motor skills, vision, breathing, temperature,

hunger and every process that regulates our body


My kitchen dishtowel. Move your trash can to a new spot.


You can think of your conscious mind (“mind”) as a grandstander that thinks everything comes from it


Other good books that are relevant:

t.ly/0yqJ (short link to a book list on my website)



Also Robert Ornstein's "Multimind": recency, vividness, comparison, significance

t.ly/W2Mo


Depending on your interests, you may find the book and the author’s

story interesting if you take a look at “Why Woo-woo Works” by David R. Hamilton.

We are living in an age of emerging science but people in previous ages had brains and good ideas, too.


Hormones, memories, upbringing, genes also affect us. See

3 books by Louann Brizendine, MD: The Female Brain, The Male Brain, and 

The Upgrade.

Jo Marchant’s “Cure” and Anne Harrington’s “The Cure Within” are helpful, too.


Parents, friends, siblings, teachers may have observed parts and traits you show that are worth thinking about.

Stop it!

It is April 19, nearly a month into spring.  The season is only three months long, but we are still having winter-ish weather.  It is not wanted and I demand better weather.  I don't know if making demands that are without power is a good idea or not, but we would indeed like more seasonal temperatures. It is surprisingly nasty outside.  

I went to the store in cold, windy rain.  I opened an umbrella as I got out of the car and a wind gust immediately inverted the umbrella. It opens and closes with a button.  I pressed the button and the umbrella resumed its normal shape.  I don't mind rain but I try to protect my hearing aids from getting wet.

This photo shows a layer of ice that formed on our deck this morning.  We are having a batch of winter weather late in spring and I am against it.

Pop-ups ads??

I enjoy the newspaper comics.  Today's Ziggy cartoon tells that Ziggy suspects he has been spending too much time online. He is starting to get pop-up ads in his dreams.

Pop-ups, especially ads that jump up in front of text I am trying to read, are especially annoying.  I often close the whole tab immediately when a pop-up gets in the way.  The Firefox browser offers what Mozilla calls 'reader view' which strips away all peripheral stuff and shows just the main part of the page.  Sometimes, that is a big help and sometimes it isn't.  It depends on what I am watching or reading. 

If I save the page to Pocket, another Firefox option, I can sometimes manipulate the Pocket-saved page to get what I want and drop what I don't want.

I tried searching "Are pop-ups in front of text I am reading impolite?"  and found several statements that they have increased reading ads and successfully gotten attention to the desired target.  Sorry to learn that!

Meditating

From what little I know about the readers of this blog, many are not interested in meditation. I can understand that sitting still for x number of minutes sounds less than exciting.  However, doing so can lead to good things.  The practice is the cheapest, most direct way I know to appreciate the miracle that you, your brain, your mind, your conscious mind and all the other thousands of parts of you, actually are.  

A good friend told me yesterday that she found that she can't meditate.  She thought the goal was to sit with an empty mind and her mind keeps supplying ideas, memories, scenes, possibilities - many things to think about.  But please understand that minds do that and it is fine.  One just tries, tries (!) to stay alert and notice what the mind is playing with.  Once notice takes place, the mind owner dismisses that subject and goes back to not dealing with anything just then.  Bingo, here comes another charming subject, person, memory, hope, fear, thrilling sin that could be committed or regretful act that needs to be confessed.  Sorry!  Later - not now.  

Behaving in this way for 10, 15 or so minutes, leads to greater awareness of what is coming to mind, what is seeking thought space and attention.  In other words, what develops is what is being called "mindfulness".  That is awareness of feelings, ideas that are seeking attention.  

In the last few days, I have been going on about the book "The Buddha in Jail" by Cuong Lo.  I downloaded the eformat of the book and read it.  Exciting, interesting, motivating.  I taught one lesson in a prison, at a teacher's invitation and found polite reception. I have the idea that many incarcerated men have led tough trying lives.  The stories and backgrounds that Lo, a Buddhist prison chaplain in the Netherlands, recites show some of the difficulties humans can have being born, growing up and living.

The book has refreshed my interest in practicing mediation and paying attention to what thoughts and feelings come to mind when I do.

Sixty-two years ago

I looked forward to the arrival of my daughter.  We didn't know she was a girl until she arrived.  I wasn't an experienced father but I had a background feeling that me, a wife, and some children would be a genuine family, one that I could work for, enjoy, participate in and be a grown-up citizen.

Yep, that is exactly what happened.  I grasp that we are lucky to have the good fortune to both be equipped with typical tools and substances to create a functioning human.  I sometimes read that nature has two goals in mind for animals like us: eat and reproduce.  Both are complex processes that involve many steps and some luck.  

That little creature that emerged from my wife's body turned out to be intelligent, imaginative and dutiful, quite dutiful.  Her mother once said that little girl followed the rules and if she didn't have a relevant rule, she would create one.  I understand that motivation and am much the same myself.  Of course, human behavior and choice-making can be quite complex.  In addition to drives and goals, memories and fears and habits play important parts, too.  

Over time, the little girl became a woman, a mother and a grandmother. That is a path of development that many people follow and it seems to be a good one. 

Buddhist prison chaplain

I found the book "The Buddha in Jail" by Cuong ("kwong") Lu and I am writing to recommend it.  The author was born in Vietnam but at an early age, his family moved to the Netherlands.  He had an opportunity to meet Thich Nhat Hanh as a young man and was so impressed, he moved to Plum Village in France, Thich Nhat Hanh's home base.  He lived and studied at Plum Village for 16 years.  He became a Buddhist prison chaplain in the Netherlands and the book is the story of that chaplaincy.

Sometimes, Buddhism is considered a "way of life" and not a religion.  Practicing involves meditation, a very good tool for seeing and experiencing the self and one's life.  Many people that wind up in prison have had a childhood more or less guaranteed to lead to troubles, discomfort and despair.

Rooms of my life

I see houses listed for sale.  I get The Week and it includes an area, such as the Texas Panhandle and some houses for sale there. In a national magazine like that, they put houses that are listed for 3 or 4 million dollars.  In that magazine, the final house is "The steal of the week" and it usually is listed for around a half million. A fundamental fact of a house is its total square feet of floor space.  Do I want to save my money, improve my credit rating and persuade a finance company to lend me a big chunk of dough, which I will repay, with interest, over 25 years?

No, I don't.  It was when I first started teaching in a distance education setting that I saw my work space shrink to a computer screen and a connected keyboard.  Some jobs need a workshop and many tools.  Teaching young children with limited reading ability may require limited class numbers so that the teacher can see, converse and evaluate them individually and more closely.  But if the lessons to be learned are in a book or on tape or film, the teacher's work is mostly careful evaluation and assessment.  A spreadsheet listing all student names and showing columns for each assignment is the main tool the teacher uses.  Tracking who has done what level of work is the main activity.  Communication by whatever means with each student about the grade received and what can be done to improve can be by email or text or other means.  The University of Wisconsin was doing "correspondence courses" conducted by mail going to and fro in 1891.  The Wikipedia says that a correspondence course was advertised in the Boston Gazette in 1728.

I don't need a bigger house.  I like having a couple of bathrooms, a kitchen, a welcoming living room and a dining room.  It is nice to have a spare bedroom and an office.  We don't have several young children so we are fine, even if not all that impressive or awesome.

Working on a Chinese campus of 67000 students

I finished "The Dean of Shandong: Confessions of a Minor Bureaucrat at a Chinese University" by Daniel A. Bell today.  

I mentioned at lunch the first chapter, called "Dye and Dynamism". The author, a Canadian citizen who is a specialist in the thought and history of Confucius and his thought, describes the strong feeling in Chinese culture that having white hair is a sign of being, as we say, over the hill.  He explains that having white hair is so frowned upon that he, like other campus administrators, keeps his hair dyed.  But he looks bad with the typical deeply black hair like the Chinese.  He settles for an appropriate brown.

Confucius advocated moderation but not in drinking alcohol.  The Chinese have a white liquor that checks in at "53 percent alcohol" and a milder version of 38 percent.  A common practice is to offer a toast for each member of a group.  Bell reports that drunk driving was a bigger problem but that campaigns and severe punishment has improved the situation.

Bell introduced me to books on "the power of cute" and writes that at his Shandong University, everyone tries to be cute.  I am not all that clear on "cute".  I guess it is true that I tend to know it when I see it.  The Oxford Dictionary says it means "appealing in a pretty or endearing way." He says that written communications tend to include emoji and that he mistakenly used one that depicted a pile of human excrement which he mistook for a picture of chocolate ice cream.

🫠 Melting Face Emoji - I thought this figure was a ghost!  I don't use emoji. There is the emojipedia. https://emojipedia.org

Bell is a student of political science and divides political activity into policy making and ritual.  He explains the burden people who are political symbols carry with the many symbolic and ritual requirements to be present, upbeat and "do nothing."  He states that it is very tiring to do nothing.

Nobody here

I had a feeling I should not go.  I don't practice that religion and I wasn't close to the guy.  I taught with his wife and I like her very much.  But on second thought, I said I would.  Lynn said she was sensing such a switch coming.  

I am glad I went.  It was a demonstration of feelings and fears connected to death and to losing one's partner.  This was also a good case of what can result in any marriage or partnership.  A partner can decline slowly, for a very long time.  We have many theories and stories of what happens when the decline ends.  It is so dramatic and fearsome to change from a living, loving partner to a pre-corpse that we think about all the questions and possibilities.  We develop hopes and recall teachings and thoughts.

I guess more is understood about losing a partner these days.  I read years ago that some psychologists, thinking about shocks to the self, fixed on the loss of a mate as the deepest shock most people experience.  Some weeks back, Lynn went away to visit her brother.  She was gone for a few days.  I was surprised to find how deeply I was affected.  

I like what the book "Incognito" teaches about the large section of me that lives and breathes and matters but that is not much connected to my mind.  We changed the location of the hand towel in the kitchen months ago and I still go to the wrong place to dry my hands.  I should not have been surprised to find that one hand, one leg and one eye were missing in action when she was GONE!  We are a well-known pair for disagreeing with each other but either of us missing will be a BIG adjustment.

One or many

I was all set to learn the secrets of teaching in my junior year of college.  Instead, I didn't feel I learned much.  So, later, when I needed to choose a major in graduate school, I chose educational research.   There is the American Educational Research Association and I was a member for several decades.

It doesn't take long when exploring educational ideas to start thinking "individual or class".  The more we study people, the clearer it becomes that from a careful point of view, each human is unique, the only one.  It is expensive to deal on a case by case basis and there is always the possibility that important truths only emerge when cases, sometimes large numbers of cases, are compared.  Still, attention is being paid to individuals and facts and themes involving them.

I am reading "The Dean of Shandong" by Daniel A. Bell.  (The "A" in his name can be important because there are quite a few Daniel Bells.)  Bell is a scholar of Confucius and explains that ancietn thinker approached teaching individually and focused on the differences and the unique themes, strengths and goals of each student.  Dr. Lynn S. Kirby, my wife, titled her doctoral dissertation "A Reader-Response Analysis of Hypermedia".  When I looked up 'reader-response theory', I found this:

Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work.

I keep running into focus on individual human cases and I like that since the more I know about any one person, including me, the more I grasp that each of us is unique.  I am interested in "Unique: The New Science of Human Individuality" by David Linden and similar sources like "Being You" by Anil Seth.

Personal presence on the internet

Even using a connected device, it is quite possible not to see web pages that you or someone working for you made. It is somewhat like having a large billboard on the edge of town that lists your work hours.  If you get sick or decide to go fishing, it still tells people you are open when you aren't.  It is easy to forget about web pages that state outdated information.  Many people have pages or other announcement tools that they themselves can't open or access or change. Again, out of sight, out of mind.  

I urge people to make a presence on the World Wide Web with a standard-type web address that people can visit.  I suspect if a person goes to the trouble of creating a site and/or a blog, they will be less likely to forget the information hanging out there to the world.  A web thingy, site or blog or both, attracts attention from all over the country and the world.  Here is a list of sources of visitors for my blog for the last 30 days:

United States

1.68K

France

28

Russia

17

Canada

8

Singapore

8

Netherlands

3

Germany

2

Australia

1

Czechia

1

United Kingdom

1

Other

32

Most discussions of blogs and web sites assume the underlying purpose is advertising a business, service or product. My stuff doesn't do that, but it is fun and satisfying, still.  One advantage of writing things about life and thought is that I can search my online writing for a name or term when I am trying to put together a memory.  

You search out all alternatives and possibilities.  My rule of thumb is that there are always more than I know about.  I fall back on Google stuff most of the time.  To get started, it helps with Google to give yourself a Gmail email address.  That opens the door to Google's 250+ services, apps and products.

Easter Sunday 2023

t.ly/GjbH

This day is heavily scheduled so I am sending a link to CNN's Photos of the Week and doing so earlier in the day than usual.  

Hope you have a lovely Easter Day!

Robins and juncos

Today is April 8, almost three weeks into spring.  The weather app on this computer says it is 50° F outside but we still have large patches of snow. We have been having predictions of warmer weather but we haven't seen much of it.  We did see a bed of green daffodil plants in the neighborhood - no flowers, just green shoots.  We do have many robins around and I have seen a junco or two.  The robins stay around here all summer but I think the juncos are on their way further north.  

Hope you have a joyful Easter day!

Context, mood and time

The book "On Repeat" by Prof. Elizabeth H. Margulis is about repetition in music.  Various directions like refrain, chorus and coda are used to repeat.  When I listen to instrumental music or to vocal music, there are often refrains or choruses that I am glad to hear.  I have been listening to Beethoven's 9th for a long time and to the Elixir of Love.  Each CD has been repeated over and over.  Each work contains many repetitions that are wonderful.  

In Margulis's book, she discusses a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.  The story is about a man named Pierre Menard and pretends to be a book review of a book by this Menard.  I have been quite conscious that I myself cannot totally repeat anything at all.  Until I saw her discussion, I don't think I had ever seen a paragraph totally repeated in print.

In Margulis's book, she discusses a short story by Jose Luis Borges.  The story is about a man named Pierre Menard and pretends to be a book review of a book by this Menard.  I have been quite conscious that I myself cannot totally repeat anything at all.  Until I saw her discussion, I don't think I had ever seen a paragraph totally repeated in print.

Weird, isn't it?  When I paste the same passage twice by accident, I get quickly peeved and delete the 2nd one.  Were you able to read the repetition with the same interest and care as when reading the first? In my class for graduate teachers, many of us spent time locating a copy of a book we remember have strong feelings about and tried re-reading it.  Sometimes, we felt very different the 2nd time.

Any action I take occurs in a certain time period, whether a minute or a month.  That particular minute or month is gone, in the past.  I can try to copy it and "do it again" but actually I am using a subsequent period for the 2nd attempt and besides, I am a fraction older than I was during the original.  

The Blue Zone Kitchens by Dan Buettner gave me the idea that people in the "Blue Zones" (regions where the average person is notably long-lived) eat certain foods repeatedly.  The book opened my eyes to the value of certain foods and I have been eating them more often.  I have been working less to have a variety and eating the same plants and morning cereal more.  Once I dropped my conviction that food variety is important, I can eat more of what I ate yesterday rather happily.  Actually, I still think variety is important.  I paid close attention to my diet during my school wrestling days and I read the Japanese try to eat 30 different foods a day.  (Short link: t.ly/L9-r)

The context for repetition matters.  The time lapse between occurrences matters.  I will take the same ice cream again for dessert.

A dean at Shandong University

I found a book called "The Dean of Shandong" and read that a Canadian professor, expert in the thought and tradition of Confusian thought, accepted a deanship at Shandong University in an area of China where the influence and actual descendants of Confucius live in large numbers.  My friend, a graduate of the same high school in Baltimore I attended, is seeing a doctor locally from the Shandong University.  

Google says about this university that it is one of the largest public universities in China, with more than 67,000 students.  I learned in a history of higher education class that in the US, a university with more than 50,000 students is usually too big to walk across between classes.  I know that many older European universities are scattered in buildings quite far off from each other.

The book I am writing about is written by Daniel Bell, a native of Montreal, Canada.  He says he is from a working-class family and certainly didn't expect to be a dean at a Chinese university, a dean of political science, no less.  In the early pages (all I have read so far), he reviews the complex historical relations between the Chinese people and Confucius.  I looked up Confucius thought and found the statement that the main idea is the importance of a good moral character, something that may be missing from much of American politics.  Bell explains that he married a Chinese woman and his studies and her background influenced his direction.  They later divorced but he married again, to a 2nd Chinese woman.

Bell goes through the history of China and Confucius from veneration to the age of Mao, who felt that over-involvement with its history retarded Chinese growth and progress.  Mao and his group tried to destroy connections between its past and modern China but Confucius is making a slow but steady comeback with the Chinese Communist Party.

Adventuring

I went from sneering at the idea of a "gym" class in college on relaxing to practicing meditation. I suspected the ancients didn't do a lot of research and just picked an hour or so as an appropriate time.  Much like I also suspect Quakers picked a duration of an hour as a logical time without trying shorter or longer times.  I also found I could find a single point I could see to concentrate on.  Reading Jade Meng-Tan's books underlined my confidence in short periods and short periods led to several short periods daily.  It was a real help to find the breath as a focus instead of a visual one since it was more restful for my eyes when I used my breath.  That shift led to my being aware of the enormous literature on breathing, including Gay Hendrick's book "Conscious Breathing" and Rosenberg's "Breath by Breath".  

But I was still searching for a good mental stance.  I read the comment by the woman Byron Katie that she was "having the time of my life watching my body fall apart."  Just the other day, I found the article in Firefox's browser service, Pocket, by Edward Hirch called "I am going blind and I find it strangely exhilarating" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/opinion/embracing-blindness-disability.html?utm_source=pocket_saves

Then, two days ago, I saw Jon Kabat-Zinn's new book, "Mindfulness Meditation for Pain Relief."  He is a major source of using mediation for pain and other problems.  As a researcher in a hospital, he took a class in meditation and realized it was a valuable tool for cancer patients for whom no further treatment existed.  

I have enjoyed playing with the conundrum that this instant is totally unique, has never been available to me before, and never will be again.  All of these experiences and sources have led to my focusing on each moment (when I think of it) as an adventure.  You may be aware that I have never died, that I have not lost my sense of balance.  When I do, it will be an adventure!

Shhh!

I know that monogamy is accepted as the best path in most societies these days.  One of my favorite primatologists, Franz de Waal, wrote somewhere that humans have been much more successful, measured by population size, than chimpanzees and other closely related apes.  De Waal says that when one troop of chimps raids another, family members such as daughters can be attacked by fathers who no longer recognize their children.  I found an estimate of the chimp population of 50,000 while the human population is about 8 billion.  

However, DNA and other sources of evidence show that humans are not always monogamous as they like to let on.  We recently watched the movie "Maybe I Do".  It has an interesting plot premise.  A young couple is more and more in love with each other and interested in getting married.  It is time for each of them to meet the other's parents.  We find early on that the four parents have been having affairs, male and female, without anyone yet knowing about such connections.  We also find early on that these affairs are losing their spark, mostly due to aging and declining interest.  The story is acted out by experienced actors Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon, and Richard Gere and William Macy.

Surprise!

I benefitted from my connection to the Boy Scouts as a kid. I think what happened is that I got hold of a copy of the Field Guide and was intrigued.  Then, I got the main document, the Boy Scout Handbook.  I learned that as a beginner, I would be a "Tenderfoot".  If I passed certain requirements, I would become 2nd class, then 1st class, Star, Life and Eagle. Eagle required aquatics like boating and swimming and life-saving.  I was not a water guy, could not swim well, and only made it to the rank of Life.  With my Troop, I attended Broad Creek Camp several times and I was an employee there, too.  The camp held 900 campers a week and each troop camped together at one of the many campsites.  

Today, I wondered how Scouting was doing and I asked Google if there were more Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts.  I was quite surprised to find all sorts of questions and information about both organizations having members of the opposite sex.  I gather that both groups are less popular than they once were, but what really surprised me was the material on girls in Boy Scouts and boys in Girl Scouts.  I understand the idea that the body's sexual equipment is not always complete for one sex or the other and that it is no picnic to be sexually ambiguous or sexually odd.  I joined Boy Scouts when I was 10 years old and was employed by them in my early twenties.  Despite my knowledge of an indistinct line between the sexes and my incessant interest in the female sex, I was surprised at the number of documents and the amount of information about boys in Girl Scouts and girls in Boy Scouts.  When I think of the activities and the work I did in the Scouts, I imagine it went better for the boys and men involved with no girls or females present.  I admit I have no experience with both sexes in the activities and maybe it is as good or even better

Read it, saw it, heard it

We like "Doc Martin", a show from British TV.  We watch it on Acorn, a streaming channel we get with our Roku streamer.  It is a subscription channel and costs about $7.00 a month, maybe less if a year is purchased at a time.  It may be free to watch, possibly with ads inserted, on the Roku streaming channel itself.  With Doc Martin as with "Call the Midwife", and "Jane the Virgin", when we reached the end of all the seasons, we started over and watched it all again. That has been a good practice since the shows are too numerous to recall each one.  We are in our 80's and don't have all that minute memories, anyhow.  

This business of watching them again makes me think of the subject of re-reading a book.  From the book "On Repeat" by Dr. Elizabeth Margulis, I got the idea of comparing repeating an experience of listening to music I like.  It is true that musical compositions do not tend to run as long as it takes to read some books, but for that and maybe other reasons, we tend to play it or listen again more readily that we read again.  I suppose watching a full length movie falls in between.  The likelihood of re-watching a 2 hour movie may be lower than the chance of listening to music over again but higher than reading a full-sized book.  

When we are re-watching, I usually feel "comfortable" with the story as it progresses but I can almost never exactly predict the next scene or event.  Mostly, I don't think to even try.  I tend to feel and appreciate the story and the decisions that characters play instead.  

The question of what remains in the memory after having read, watched or listened is a natural one for a teacher or instructor.  Many high school and higher ed students read and re-read a passage, a chapter or a paper with the purpose of being prepared to answer questions about the content on a test.  In my graduate course "Reading for Professional Development", I encouraged students, mature, experienced teachers themselves, to look back over their lives and see what books made a difference to them.  That sometimes led to a student re-reading a book from earlier decades.  I guess most of the time, the re-reading repeated the positive judgment but sometimes, the more mature reader felt the book did not merit a high rating.

Empty the Gmail inbox

One of my blog recipients has a Gmail inbox that is over the limit in size.  Either some of the contents should be deleted or more space should be rented from Google. As far as I know, Google Drive allows 15 gigs of space but more space can be rented on a continuing basis.  I try to keep my stuff within the free limits.  The free limits apply to Gmail's total (inbox, send, drafts, others), Google Drive and other Google services.  Despite writing a blog post daily for about 95% of the days between April 2008 and now, I haven't had too much trouble with saving my blog.  The thing that expands all the time is the Gmail.  

I arbitrarily chose 1000 saved emails as the "dump!" signal.  The difference between looking at Gmail on a computer and on a tablet such as an iPad is stark.  Computers are much more powerful.  If you haven't seen the difference, try signing into Gmail on a computer and take a look. The interface and its choices and buttons is easier to use on a computer.  I like ASUS computers, including used ones.  They are inexpensive and powerful enough for my use.  I don't play video games and I don't use my computer in competitive games so I don't need enormous space or enormous speed.  

When I am in Gmail on a computer, I can easily see how many messages I have in the Inbox.  When that number reaches 1000, I delete it down to 500.  The interface makes it easy to change the display from 'newest' messages first trailing off in age to "oldest".  The display also makes it easy to select all the email messages on a single page.  In the upper left corner of the Inbox section is a handy set of choices.  If I just click in the box above the choices, one page of messages is selected.  Remember these are the oldest ones I currently have.  They usually are from about one month ago.  Hitting the delete key on the keyboard takes them all out.  (there is a choice to select the entire Inbox contents but I don't do that).  I keep selecting one display page at a time until I get the contents down to 500.  I try to remember to look at the other sections of Gmail, too.  The send messages and even saved draft messages can pile up but not like the Inbox. 

Take a picture!

Because we had a snowstorm last night and it is April 1 today, I have photographs in mind. Sun shining on new, white snow, not dirty or oily, is so striking, especially with a bright, very blue sky, thoughts of capturing scenes and sharing them come up.  We had a close family friend who was a professional photographer.  Probably because of his influence, I got my own darkroom as a 4th grader.  Things are much different now with digital photography, faster and cheaper, too.

If you aren't familiar with "darkrooms", the term means a specially equipped small room where the two step process of developing the "film" took place.  The light, especially sunlight or light from electric bulbs, had to be kept out for fear of ruining the process by which "film" was used to "print" a picture from the film "negative".  

This history of the development of photography is interesting, more so if movies and video-taping is included.  I read that the Black American actress, Queen Latifah, said that she was very careful about not drinking too much on nights out.  She said if she stumbled or fell, pictures of the event would be all over the internet in five minutes.  The role of photography in the death of George Floyd is well-known.  The combination of ready, good quality cameras in pocket phones and software that transmits the picture to wide distribution is an important factor these days.