Saturday, December 31, 2005
The year in review
This year was... a BLUR, lol. Here are the main points that I can still remember:
My little angel girl, the tiny squirrel that had been the light of my life for a year because I could hand-feed and pet her, paid me a special visit that I now think was meant as a good-bye, and then went away, never to return. :-(
Although we'd never seen a possum in all the years we've lived here, one started visiting us, eating the buffet we put out for him right outside our sliding glass door so we could watch him up close... and then another came... and another... and another. :-)
We got digital cable, and a whole new world of channels opened up; I've seen a zillion science and fashion programs, and enjoy always having 30 movies to choose from.
The greatest non-scifi series ever made, "Queer as Folk," ended... badly.
After 20 loooong years, Stephen King finished his "Dark Tower" series... brilliantly.
I had an underwear-related early midlife crisis; my panties and socks are so nice now that I almost want to hang them up on the wall. ;-)
I got a smokin' new laptop.
We've endured more plagues of vermin than the entire Bible describes.
I saved a bird. :-)
Because 2 of my bill payments vanished into the postal ether, I switched to online banking, thus saving a great deal of time, but adding alot of aggravation as I discovered that Bank of America is capable of even more kinds of weirdness and stupidity than I'd previously thought.
I got a 2nd pair of shoes... but haven't worn them yet.
I took over the management of my husband's Blockbuster online account; with ME keeping track of everything, it's amazing how many more DVD's we get, since he can no longer take weeks, or even MONTHS, to get them watched and returned... and with me choosing and prioritizing the DVD's in the queue, we're getting GOOD stuff now (my husband doesn't always agree, but since he's too lazy to make any effort anymore, he's out of luck).
My husband and I were both featured in major publications (I REALLY wish I could tell you about it, but I can't without compromising my anonymity).
The wildly overdue clearing out of my husband's junk, and the organization of our home, have begun.
I met alot of terrific bloggers; be sure to click their links in my list and see for yourself.
I made significant progress with my tech knowledge, eBay acquisitions of collectibles, and, by far the most importantly, my spiritual understanding.
I blogged alot. Every day. Every single day.
Mostly, though, I just lived life at a dead run for 365 days; I wonder how anyone could ever be bored, when there's so much to do, say, think and learn.
I hope you'll have a safe and enjoyable New Year's Eve; I'll raise my glass of eggnog to all of you at midnight.
My little angel girl, the tiny squirrel that had been the light of my life for a year because I could hand-feed and pet her, paid me a special visit that I now think was meant as a good-bye, and then went away, never to return. :-(
Although we'd never seen a possum in all the years we've lived here, one started visiting us, eating the buffet we put out for him right outside our sliding glass door so we could watch him up close... and then another came... and another... and another. :-)
We got digital cable, and a whole new world of channels opened up; I've seen a zillion science and fashion programs, and enjoy always having 30 movies to choose from.
The greatest non-scifi series ever made, "Queer as Folk," ended... badly.
After 20 loooong years, Stephen King finished his "Dark Tower" series... brilliantly.
I had an underwear-related early midlife crisis; my panties and socks are so nice now that I almost want to hang them up on the wall. ;-)
I got a smokin' new laptop.
We've endured more plagues of vermin than the entire Bible describes.
I saved a bird. :-)
Because 2 of my bill payments vanished into the postal ether, I switched to online banking, thus saving a great deal of time, but adding alot of aggravation as I discovered that Bank of America is capable of even more kinds of weirdness and stupidity than I'd previously thought.
I got a 2nd pair of shoes... but haven't worn them yet.
I took over the management of my husband's Blockbuster online account; with ME keeping track of everything, it's amazing how many more DVD's we get, since he can no longer take weeks, or even MONTHS, to get them watched and returned... and with me choosing and prioritizing the DVD's in the queue, we're getting GOOD stuff now (my husband doesn't always agree, but since he's too lazy to make any effort anymore, he's out of luck).
My husband and I were both featured in major publications (I REALLY wish I could tell you about it, but I can't without compromising my anonymity).
The wildly overdue clearing out of my husband's junk, and the organization of our home, have begun.
I met alot of terrific bloggers; be sure to click their links in my list and see for yourself.
I made significant progress with my tech knowledge, eBay acquisitions of collectibles, and, by far the most importantly, my spiritual understanding.
I blogged alot. Every day. Every single day.
Mostly, though, I just lived life at a dead run for 365 days; I wonder how anyone could ever be bored, when there's so much to do, say, think and learn.
I hope you'll have a safe and enjoyable New Year's Eve; I'll raise my glass of eggnog to all of you at midnight.
Friday, December 30, 2005
Today's bits and pieces
I had a lovely surprise today; a marathon on the Discovery Channel of "Going Tribal," the show where British hottie Bruce Parry lives with various tribal peoples and adopts their ways, including things like eating live grubs, taking dangerous hallucinogenic drugs, allowing them to pierce and scar him, and, my personal favorite, walking around naked with them... which means showing his splendid tattooed butt. They DID show a bare-butt episode, so my evening was complete. ;-)
There's a Swiss company called Pat Says Now that's raised the humble computer mouse to an art form; if you look here
http://www.pat-says-now.com/english/privatkunden.php?from=/english/vision.php
you'll see mice that are chili peppers, cats, hearts, brains, dogs, and women's torsos, mice with skulls, cow spots, ducks and fish floating in liquid, and even Swarovski crystals... most of them aren't very ergonomic, but they're seriously cute.
Also cute, especially if you're a cat lover, are the astonishing array of Flash clocks I found on this site
http://www1.ocn.ne.jp/~mirin22t/tokeiDL.html
Yeah, it's a Japanese site, but each clock is next to its code (you need to scroll down to get to the 1st one), so you don't need to be able to read anything; there are 6 pages of clocks, so if you don't have one you love yet, take a look, because there's a bunch of good 'uns.
The last amazing thing I saw today was from the December 2005 Vogue, in an article called "Unhappy Meals":
"When I was growing up, no one I knew had a food allergy. Now, it seems, everyone knows someone who has one. Why has this happened? The answer, frighteningly enough, remains unclear."
"The most widely accepted idea is what's known as the hygiene hypothesis. Food allergies are due to an overactive immune system, which reacts to the protein in a certain food as if it were a parasite and creates antibodies (called IgE) that are specific to that food. The hygiene hypothesis holds that a decrease in childhood illness has left our immune systems with nothing to do but lash out against all the wrong things. In other words, by making our children too healthy, we have put them in danger."
In our arrogance, we've always assumed that we could alter the way our species lived for thousands of years and it would be an unblemished success; the reality is that we evolved to exist in an essentially animal way out in the natural world, and although there aren't many people who think that we'd be better off without agriculture, medicine, and homes in places where the only dangerous predators are of the 2-legged variety, you'd be hard-pressed to find any aspect of our physical, mental, emotional or spiritual beings in which we aren't pitifully weak compared to tribal peoples... that's the price we've paid for becoming "civilized." That'd be a useful thing for scientists to study... but don't count on it happening any time soon.
There's a Swiss company called Pat Says Now that's raised the humble computer mouse to an art form; if you look here
http://www.pat-says-now.com/english/privatkunden.php?from=/english/vision.php
you'll see mice that are chili peppers, cats, hearts, brains, dogs, and women's torsos, mice with skulls, cow spots, ducks and fish floating in liquid, and even Swarovski crystals... most of them aren't very ergonomic, but they're seriously cute.
Also cute, especially if you're a cat lover, are the astonishing array of Flash clocks I found on this site
http://www1.ocn.ne.jp/~mirin22t/tokeiDL.html
Yeah, it's a Japanese site, but each clock is next to its code (you need to scroll down to get to the 1st one), so you don't need to be able to read anything; there are 6 pages of clocks, so if you don't have one you love yet, take a look, because there's a bunch of good 'uns.
The last amazing thing I saw today was from the December 2005 Vogue, in an article called "Unhappy Meals":
"When I was growing up, no one I knew had a food allergy. Now, it seems, everyone knows someone who has one. Why has this happened? The answer, frighteningly enough, remains unclear."
"The most widely accepted idea is what's known as the hygiene hypothesis. Food allergies are due to an overactive immune system, which reacts to the protein in a certain food as if it were a parasite and creates antibodies (called IgE) that are specific to that food. The hygiene hypothesis holds that a decrease in childhood illness has left our immune systems with nothing to do but lash out against all the wrong things. In other words, by making our children too healthy, we have put them in danger."
In our arrogance, we've always assumed that we could alter the way our species lived for thousands of years and it would be an unblemished success; the reality is that we evolved to exist in an essentially animal way out in the natural world, and although there aren't many people who think that we'd be better off without agriculture, medicine, and homes in places where the only dangerous predators are of the 2-legged variety, you'd be hard-pressed to find any aspect of our physical, mental, emotional or spiritual beings in which we aren't pitifully weak compared to tribal peoples... that's the price we've paid for becoming "civilized." That'd be a useful thing for scientists to study... but don't count on it happening any time soon.
Thursday, December 29, 2005
A thing of beauty
I almost missed it, buried in an article of wildly expensive things you might buy for the loved one who has everything in the December 2005 Vogue; a mostly-blurry little pic of a "mocha service" (it looks just like a tea set to me, but what do I know?) of a design so unusual, so lovely, that I just sat and stared at it... and I do NOT normally have any interest in porcelain unless it's in animal form. Luckily, the website for the place that sells them was included... and they've got a pic, a far better one than in the article
http://www.neuegalerie.org/designshop/TABLEWARE6/tableware6main.html
Isn't it GORGEOUS? My 1st thought was that it was like something Dr. Seuss would have made, if he did stuff in black and white rather than in vivid colors; it made me realize consciously that his forms tend to have a distinct organicness to them, which I find appealing in art and design as a whole... did that come in part from my love of his books as a child? Hmmmmmmmmm... Anyways, when I looked closely at the only thing in the Vogue pic that's really in focus, the cup and saucer, I saw that the saucer is actually a flower; this led to me seeing that the "mocha pot" is a gourd, and the sugar bowl is an apple. Only the very edge of the creamer is visible in the magazine photo, but I assumed it was cool too, and I was right; the online pic clearly shows it as being modeled after the opening of a pitcher plant.
The story would have ended there, and not gone beyond my finding something intensely visually pleasing, but Vogue described the service as "a reproduction of a Secessionist original," which made me think that there might be more goodies like this, so I did a little research on that term, and on the designer, Josef Hoffmann. It turns out that "Secessionist" just means the Austrian version of Art Nouveau, which was basically design based on plant forms; Hoffmann is one of the big names associated with it, but sadly, none of the other creations of his that I was able to find photos of had anything like the impact on me that the mocha service did, nor did any other Secessionist pieces... most of it didn't appeal to me at all, in fact. Oh well.
There was a tiny mystery that I discovered in my research; the Neue Galerie website places the creation of the mocha service at about 1925, at which time Art Deco was already in full swing in Europe (but not yet in the USA, oddly enough)... is the date significantly off, or did Hoffmann just feel the urge to make one final, extreme stab at Art Nouveau? I don't suppose I'll ever know, but it doesn't really matter; he elevated those porcelain receptacles to art, and they've entered the list of things I'll get if I ever win the lottery.
It's interesting to me to learn that my preference for "organic" forms extends beyond my passion for mid-century design (the term they used for their flowing, curvy shapes was "biomorphic"), which featured things like amoebic tables and non-rectangular couches
http://www.designboom.com/portrait/noguchi/furniture.html
and doubly interesting to see where some of the influence of that era undoubtedly came from. This takes me back to Seuss' art again, where nothing has a hard edge or a 90 degree angle, where everything from a car to a house looks like it might have grown in an enchanted and slightly warped forest; his art, like mid-century design, creates a vision of a world very different than the cold, sharp, metallic modern one we all inhabit... even though many of the latter things are still seen as "futuristic" a half century or more after they were created. It'd be interesting to see a psychological analysis of the preference for this stuff, given the unrelenting rectangularity of American culture, wouldn't it?
The older I get, the more "visual" I get, the more passionate I get about the artistry of the things that catch my eye, and the more cohesive my visual preferences become; I can only hope that some day I, although possessing no talent whatsoever for art in any form, find something to DO with my "vision"... although, I've gotta say, it's sort of weird to be constantly torn between being a geek, a mystic, and an interior decorator.
http://www.neuegalerie.org/designshop/TABLEWARE6/tableware6main.html
Isn't it GORGEOUS? My 1st thought was that it was like something Dr. Seuss would have made, if he did stuff in black and white rather than in vivid colors; it made me realize consciously that his forms tend to have a distinct organicness to them, which I find appealing in art and design as a whole... did that come in part from my love of his books as a child? Hmmmmmmmmm... Anyways, when I looked closely at the only thing in the Vogue pic that's really in focus, the cup and saucer, I saw that the saucer is actually a flower; this led to me seeing that the "mocha pot" is a gourd, and the sugar bowl is an apple. Only the very edge of the creamer is visible in the magazine photo, but I assumed it was cool too, and I was right; the online pic clearly shows it as being modeled after the opening of a pitcher plant.
The story would have ended there, and not gone beyond my finding something intensely visually pleasing, but Vogue described the service as "a reproduction of a Secessionist original," which made me think that there might be more goodies like this, so I did a little research on that term, and on the designer, Josef Hoffmann. It turns out that "Secessionist" just means the Austrian version of Art Nouveau, which was basically design based on plant forms; Hoffmann is one of the big names associated with it, but sadly, none of the other creations of his that I was able to find photos of had anything like the impact on me that the mocha service did, nor did any other Secessionist pieces... most of it didn't appeal to me at all, in fact. Oh well.
There was a tiny mystery that I discovered in my research; the Neue Galerie website places the creation of the mocha service at about 1925, at which time Art Deco was already in full swing in Europe (but not yet in the USA, oddly enough)... is the date significantly off, or did Hoffmann just feel the urge to make one final, extreme stab at Art Nouveau? I don't suppose I'll ever know, but it doesn't really matter; he elevated those porcelain receptacles to art, and they've entered the list of things I'll get if I ever win the lottery.
It's interesting to me to learn that my preference for "organic" forms extends beyond my passion for mid-century design (the term they used for their flowing, curvy shapes was "biomorphic"), which featured things like amoebic tables and non-rectangular couches
http://www.designboom.com/portrait/noguchi/furniture.html
and doubly interesting to see where some of the influence of that era undoubtedly came from. This takes me back to Seuss' art again, where nothing has a hard edge or a 90 degree angle, where everything from a car to a house looks like it might have grown in an enchanted and slightly warped forest; his art, like mid-century design, creates a vision of a world very different than the cold, sharp, metallic modern one we all inhabit... even though many of the latter things are still seen as "futuristic" a half century or more after they were created. It'd be interesting to see a psychological analysis of the preference for this stuff, given the unrelenting rectangularity of American culture, wouldn't it?
The older I get, the more "visual" I get, the more passionate I get about the artistry of the things that catch my eye, and the more cohesive my visual preferences become; I can only hope that some day I, although possessing no talent whatsoever for art in any form, find something to DO with my "vision"... although, I've gotta say, it's sort of weird to be constantly torn between being a geek, a mystic, and an interior decorator.
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
A surreal day
Our latest Hitchcockian plague of vermin has been fruit flies; we were assuming that they kept coming in every time we bought fruit... until I happened to be standing nearby when my husband opened a rarely-used kitchen cabinet, and saw, to my utter revulsion, that there was a plastic bag in there that was FILLED with the bugs. It turned out to have fruit in it, or the rotted remains thereof, that my husband had stuck in there for no reason he could recall sometime in the past and promptly forgotten; the flies had been living and breeding in it ever since. He took the bag outside and dumped it in the trash, and now the lengthy process of taking everything out of the cabinet, sterilizing it all (to eliminate poop and eggs), and then scrubbing the shelves and other surfaces before putting it all back, is under way; I wish I could believe that he's learned something about how to handle fruit from all of this...
Our new possum showed up again tonight; this may be the tiniest, daintiest, and prettiest possum that ever lived... and I saw testicles on HIM today, so we've been fooled by yet another wild animal as to its gender. He felt relaxed enough to walk around with his tail up rather than tucked down, and to sit near the door, and in both positions the much-lighter fur over the little male protrusions was clearly visible; my husband thinks it's hilarious that I'm lying on the floor examining possum genitals through the glass door, but we DO kinda have to know, so there's no way around it. For the 1st time, the little male ate with another of our marsupial friends; it was the female, and unlike the way she treats the other males, she showed no hint of aggression towards him, even though he ate nose to nose with her, and then gave her bottom a few tentative sniffs... which makes me wonder if she's going to go for this attractive newcomer rather than the larger, more familiar, but less lovely suitors. Regardless of what she prefers, though, I'm betting that the 3 males will run her ragged come mating season.
I got a package today containing 3 Christmas figurines that I'd won on eBay and intended to give to my mother next Christmas (yes, I really DO plan gifts that far ahead); my husband loudly protested the idea of giving a particular one of them up, insisting that we keep it for our own display... a MAN, one who started out with no more love of the cute than any other straight male, pleading for us to not give up an anthropomorphic critter doodad, can you believe it? (Yes, I agreed to keep it; my mother will never know it was originally meant for her.)
The less sleep I get, the more my waking life seems to take on dream logic...
Our new possum showed up again tonight; this may be the tiniest, daintiest, and prettiest possum that ever lived... and I saw testicles on HIM today, so we've been fooled by yet another wild animal as to its gender. He felt relaxed enough to walk around with his tail up rather than tucked down, and to sit near the door, and in both positions the much-lighter fur over the little male protrusions was clearly visible; my husband thinks it's hilarious that I'm lying on the floor examining possum genitals through the glass door, but we DO kinda have to know, so there's no way around it. For the 1st time, the little male ate with another of our marsupial friends; it was the female, and unlike the way she treats the other males, she showed no hint of aggression towards him, even though he ate nose to nose with her, and then gave her bottom a few tentative sniffs... which makes me wonder if she's going to go for this attractive newcomer rather than the larger, more familiar, but less lovely suitors. Regardless of what she prefers, though, I'm betting that the 3 males will run her ragged come mating season.
I got a package today containing 3 Christmas figurines that I'd won on eBay and intended to give to my mother next Christmas (yes, I really DO plan gifts that far ahead); my husband loudly protested the idea of giving a particular one of them up, insisting that we keep it for our own display... a MAN, one who started out with no more love of the cute than any other straight male, pleading for us to not give up an anthropomorphic critter doodad, can you believe it? (Yes, I agreed to keep it; my mother will never know it was originally meant for her.)
The less sleep I get, the more my waking life seems to take on dream logic...
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Today I saw...
Did you know that you can get M&M's with custom messages on them, in colors of your choice? Check it out:
http://shop2.mms.com/customprint/index.asp#
They're expensive, but if you can afford them they'd be a good way to impress your party guests. I'd be interested to know how they chose the colors they offer; what made them decide on 3 shades of green, but only 1, very muted, purple... and on what planet do they think they'll sell the GRAY ones?!! Can you imagine eating GRAY candy?!! :-O
Our beta male possum showed up with a huge patch of fur ripped out of his shoulder; the skin's only scraped a little, but it still looks awful, and he's also scraped up on his nose and around one eye... clearly, there's some fighting going on, and we're getting worried about the alpha male, who hasn't come to eat yet. Since we've got 4 possums now, including the very new one that we haven't seen eating with any of the others yet (and that we think got chased a few days ago, since we heard "barking" and then she ran around our back yard like she was freaked out), we expect some more disruption... I just hope none of them gets seriously hurt.
I saw "Ringu 2"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=149121&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
which is vaguely the Japanese equivalent of "The Ring 2"... all of which (including the terrifying "The Ring") are based on the original "Ringu," I hasten to add-it's the Japanese movie that started it all, although it's very different from American horror movies. I wish they'd done dubbed versions of the "Ringus," because it makes it impossible to get really drawn into the suspense when you're only halfway watching the movie because you're reading the subtitles. It's also distracting that so many aspects of how the movies are put together are different enough from what I'm used to from American movies for me to be aware of them; the suspense-building music is absent, there's no sex, little or no actual violence is shown, and the women are astonishingly demure, speaking practically in whispers, almost never screaming despite it being a HORROR movie... but what seemed the oddest to me was the way they were dressed. In an American movie, there's a minimum level of hotness that even minor characters are expected to have, but the women in "Ringu 2," whether with speaking parts or just extras in the crowd, are all swathed in sober, conservative outfits, such that the only female flesh in the entire movie was the bare knees of a few schoolgirls, and not even they wear any real color. The main character, played by pop star Miki Nakatani, appears in EVERY scene with at least 2 layers of clothing on her upper body; collared shirts buttoned to the throat, and either a cardigan also buttoned all the way up or a sweater vest with a high neckline, all in dark neutral colors. She also wears, in every scene, big, shapeless below-knee skirts in dark, dowdy prints, thick, opaque black tights, and plain, flat black shoes... can you imagine the lead actress in an AMERICAN film looking like that in even ONE scene, unless her character was part of some fanatical religious group?
Remember that old beer ad that had the punchline "Why are foreign movies always so... foreign?"? "Ringu 2," although it had some impressive moments, is mostly summed up by that line. Still, I'm sure I'll end up seeing "Ringu 0: Basudei"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=151791&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
eventually; if I can't develop an appreciation for foreign films from those made by the man who pioneered the brilliant "ring concept," Hideo Nakata, I'll probably never "get" them, and I think I'm old enough now that I should be able to embrace... whatever it is that people see in movies they have to half-watch while reading subtitles (I think people in non-English-speaking countries must have a much easier time trying to watch American movies; with all the sex, fights, sex, explosions, sex, car chases, and sex, they don't NEED many subtitles). Can I count the claymation masterpieces of Nick Park (the creator of Wallace and Gromit)
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/LoadActorDetail.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&listID=998719248&displayBoxArt=true
as foreign cinema and just call it good, lol?
http://shop2.mms.com/customprint/index.asp#
They're expensive, but if you can afford them they'd be a good way to impress your party guests. I'd be interested to know how they chose the colors they offer; what made them decide on 3 shades of green, but only 1, very muted, purple... and on what planet do they think they'll sell the GRAY ones?!! Can you imagine eating GRAY candy?!! :-O
Our beta male possum showed up with a huge patch of fur ripped out of his shoulder; the skin's only scraped a little, but it still looks awful, and he's also scraped up on his nose and around one eye... clearly, there's some fighting going on, and we're getting worried about the alpha male, who hasn't come to eat yet. Since we've got 4 possums now, including the very new one that we haven't seen eating with any of the others yet (and that we think got chased a few days ago, since we heard "barking" and then she ran around our back yard like she was freaked out), we expect some more disruption... I just hope none of them gets seriously hurt.
I saw "Ringu 2"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=149121&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
which is vaguely the Japanese equivalent of "The Ring 2"... all of which (including the terrifying "The Ring") are based on the original "Ringu," I hasten to add-it's the Japanese movie that started it all, although it's very different from American horror movies. I wish they'd done dubbed versions of the "Ringus," because it makes it impossible to get really drawn into the suspense when you're only halfway watching the movie because you're reading the subtitles. It's also distracting that so many aspects of how the movies are put together are different enough from what I'm used to from American movies for me to be aware of them; the suspense-building music is absent, there's no sex, little or no actual violence is shown, and the women are astonishingly demure, speaking practically in whispers, almost never screaming despite it being a HORROR movie... but what seemed the oddest to me was the way they were dressed. In an American movie, there's a minimum level of hotness that even minor characters are expected to have, but the women in "Ringu 2," whether with speaking parts or just extras in the crowd, are all swathed in sober, conservative outfits, such that the only female flesh in the entire movie was the bare knees of a few schoolgirls, and not even they wear any real color. The main character, played by pop star Miki Nakatani, appears in EVERY scene with at least 2 layers of clothing on her upper body; collared shirts buttoned to the throat, and either a cardigan also buttoned all the way up or a sweater vest with a high neckline, all in dark neutral colors. She also wears, in every scene, big, shapeless below-knee skirts in dark, dowdy prints, thick, opaque black tights, and plain, flat black shoes... can you imagine the lead actress in an AMERICAN film looking like that in even ONE scene, unless her character was part of some fanatical religious group?
Remember that old beer ad that had the punchline "Why are foreign movies always so... foreign?"? "Ringu 2," although it had some impressive moments, is mostly summed up by that line. Still, I'm sure I'll end up seeing "Ringu 0: Basudei"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=151791&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
eventually; if I can't develop an appreciation for foreign films from those made by the man who pioneered the brilliant "ring concept," Hideo Nakata, I'll probably never "get" them, and I think I'm old enough now that I should be able to embrace... whatever it is that people see in movies they have to half-watch while reading subtitles (I think people in non-English-speaking countries must have a much easier time trying to watch American movies; with all the sex, fights, sex, explosions, sex, car chases, and sex, they don't NEED many subtitles). Can I count the claymation masterpieces of Nick Park (the creator of Wallace and Gromit)
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/LoadActorDetail.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&listID=998719248&displayBoxArt=true
as foreign cinema and just call it good, lol?
Monday, December 26, 2005
Christmas '05 report
First and worst, the tree didn't get finished until after dinner... an all time low. We did, however, get the stockings up last night, and I had my seasonal pillows for the 1st time in about 5 years thanks to enough junk being taken to storage for me to reach them, so it sort of balanced out. I've got a bunch of other display items that didn't get put out yet, that I haven't seen in 2 years because they didn't make it out LAST year either, and, much as I dislike the idea of putting up more decorations AFTER Christmas, I may do it just to remind me of what I've got... it could save me a fortune on eBay.
Speaking of which; there are a couple of items that'd normally be beyond my price range whose auctions are ending in the next few days, and with so many people still busy with holiday stuff, not to mention out of $, I may have a chance at getting 'em... keep your fingers crossed for me.
We had an unusually good Christmas dinner, not because of the food, but because we watched one of our favorite movies as we ate, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=111116&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
This giant among classics was very advanced for 1967; the central plot is that the daughter of liberal, wealthy white parents brings home a black man and announces her intention to marry him. An interesting sideline is that the person who's by far the most upset is their black maid, Tillie (played by the incomparable Isabel Sanford, aka Louise "Weezy" Jefferson from "The Jeffersons"), and the funniest line in the movie is from her; she marches into the room where John (played by Sidney Poitier, ahhhhhhhhhhhh) is changing clothes, and begins to take him to task for, as she thinks, trying to pull one over on "her" family, with the best part of her rant being, as best as I could type with her talking so fast, "I brought up that child from a baby in her cradle, and ain't nobody gonna bring in any trouble here while I'm watching, and I'm watching you, and if you bring any trouble in here you're like to find out what 'black power' REALLY means!!"... all said with great vehemence right in his face while he cowers in fear, lol. If you've never seen this movie, I highly recommend it.
My final thing to report is; I wasn't expecting to get any gifts, since my husband and I have long since ceased to bother, but I got one anyways. It was 4:30AM, long after any possums usually come, so I hadn't replenished their food, and was in fact closing things down, when our original and still favorite possum showed up; while he ate the little bit of fruit that was left, my husband handed me some luncheon meat to see if I could toss it out without scaring our baby off. He didn't run away, and didn't seem afraid at all as he started picking up the tidbits, so I was emboldened to hold a big piece out and start coaxing him to come and take it; for the 1st time EVER, he approached, sniffed, his little pink nose brushed up against the meat... and then he chickened out and withdrew. Yeah, that was disappointing, but the fact that he ALMOST managed it, that he overcame his fear to the point where he was close enough to have taken food from me, was a HUGE thrill; it should just be a matter of time now before he DOES stay brave and let me hand-feed him, and that knowledge is making this the most exciting holiday season in a long time.
I know that isn't what most people'd call a great Christmas, but it was pretty good by my standards; I hope that whatever YOU did made you and your loved ones happy, and that you're viewing the approaching new year with the same optimism that I am.
Speaking of which; there are a couple of items that'd normally be beyond my price range whose auctions are ending in the next few days, and with so many people still busy with holiday stuff, not to mention out of $, I may have a chance at getting 'em... keep your fingers crossed for me.
We had an unusually good Christmas dinner, not because of the food, but because we watched one of our favorite movies as we ate, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=111116&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
This giant among classics was very advanced for 1967; the central plot is that the daughter of liberal, wealthy white parents brings home a black man and announces her intention to marry him. An interesting sideline is that the person who's by far the most upset is their black maid, Tillie (played by the incomparable Isabel Sanford, aka Louise "Weezy" Jefferson from "The Jeffersons"), and the funniest line in the movie is from her; she marches into the room where John (played by Sidney Poitier, ahhhhhhhhhhhh) is changing clothes, and begins to take him to task for, as she thinks, trying to pull one over on "her" family, with the best part of her rant being, as best as I could type with her talking so fast, "I brought up that child from a baby in her cradle, and ain't nobody gonna bring in any trouble here while I'm watching, and I'm watching you, and if you bring any trouble in here you're like to find out what 'black power' REALLY means!!"... all said with great vehemence right in his face while he cowers in fear, lol. If you've never seen this movie, I highly recommend it.
My final thing to report is; I wasn't expecting to get any gifts, since my husband and I have long since ceased to bother, but I got one anyways. It was 4:30AM, long after any possums usually come, so I hadn't replenished their food, and was in fact closing things down, when our original and still favorite possum showed up; while he ate the little bit of fruit that was left, my husband handed me some luncheon meat to see if I could toss it out without scaring our baby off. He didn't run away, and didn't seem afraid at all as he started picking up the tidbits, so I was emboldened to hold a big piece out and start coaxing him to come and take it; for the 1st time EVER, he approached, sniffed, his little pink nose brushed up against the meat... and then he chickened out and withdrew. Yeah, that was disappointing, but the fact that he ALMOST managed it, that he overcame his fear to the point where he was close enough to have taken food from me, was a HUGE thrill; it should just be a matter of time now before he DOES stay brave and let me hand-feed him, and that knowledge is making this the most exciting holiday season in a long time.
I know that isn't what most people'd call a great Christmas, but it was pretty good by my standards; I hope that whatever YOU did made you and your loved ones happy, and that you're viewing the approaching new year with the same optimism that I am.
Sunday, December 25, 2005
Merry Christmas!! :-)
If you're reading this on Christmas day, you'll have seen a nifty Java window pop up to wish you season's greetings; it's set up to only show once a day per person, so if you want to take a 2nd look you'll need to delete the cookies, which should be listed for my URL in your cookie folder... and if you missed it entirely, don't fret, because I'll do it again for New Year's. I have nothing exciting to report about the installation of the code, for once, because it went perfectly the 1st time; a true Christmas miracle.
I've combed the internet to find the funniest Christmas e-cards, and these are the winners:
http://www.perfectgreeting.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=4162&scid=10446
http://www.perfectgreeting.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=8615&scid=10446
Warning, GROSS: http://websols.com/cgi-bin/ecards/upcardme.cgi?step=1&pic=Seasons/184941639.jpg
My final gift to you is a hilarious spoof on one of our most beloved Christmas songs, "Walkin' in a Winter Wonderland"; here's the tune if you're not familiar with it
http://thomas-distributing.com/midi/christmas/wondrlan2.mid
and here's the spoof lyrics... brace yourself:
Walkin' 'Round in Women's Underwear (to be sung to the tune of "Walkin' in a Winter Wonderland")
Lacy things... wife is missin'
Didn't ask... her permission
I look quite a sight
In corsets so tight
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
In her drawer... was a teddy
Little straps... like spaghetti
Its red is so bright
I'm sexy all night
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
In the office there's a guy called Norman,
He prefers to dress like Murphy Brown.
He'll say, "Are you ready?", I'll say, "Whoa, man!"
"Let's wait until our wives are out of town!"
Later on... if you wanna
We can dress... like Madonna
With falsies so large
We'll get quite a charge
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
Lacy things... wife is missin'
Didn't ask... her permission
I look quite a sight
In corsets so tight
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
You can find an mp3 of a different version of this song here
http://x802.putfile.com/videos/b2-34718572783.mp3
lol
MERRY CHRISTMAS!! XO
I've combed the internet to find the funniest Christmas e-cards, and these are the winners:
http://www.perfectgreeting.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=4162&scid=10446
http://www.perfectgreeting.com/index.cfm?action=view&id=8615&scid=10446
Warning, GROSS: http://websols.com/cgi-bin/ecards/upcardme.cgi?step=1&pic=Seasons/184941639.jpg
My final gift to you is a hilarious spoof on one of our most beloved Christmas songs, "Walkin' in a Winter Wonderland"; here's the tune if you're not familiar with it
http://thomas-distributing.com/midi/christmas/wondrlan2.mid
and here's the spoof lyrics... brace yourself:
Walkin' 'Round in Women's Underwear (to be sung to the tune of "Walkin' in a Winter Wonderland")
Lacy things... wife is missin'
Didn't ask... her permission
I look quite a sight
In corsets so tight
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
In her drawer... was a teddy
Little straps... like spaghetti
Its red is so bright
I'm sexy all night
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
In the office there's a guy called Norman,
He prefers to dress like Murphy Brown.
He'll say, "Are you ready?", I'll say, "Whoa, man!"
"Let's wait until our wives are out of town!"
Later on... if you wanna
We can dress... like Madonna
With falsies so large
We'll get quite a charge
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
Lacy things... wife is missin'
Didn't ask... her permission
I look quite a sight
In corsets so tight
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear
Walkin' 'round in women's underwear.
You can find an mp3 of a different version of this song here
http://x802.putfile.com/videos/b2-34718572783.mp3
lol
MERRY CHRISTMAS!! XO
Saturday, December 24, 2005
A lack of Christmas spirit from an odd source
Brace yourself for this one:
"The wife of the pastor of the nation's largest church said she chose to leave an airplane after a disagreement with a flight attendant, disputing accounts that she was asked to go.
The FBI has said Victoria Osteen, of Houston, Texas, was asked to leave after failing to obey crew instructions. The Continental Airlines flight Monday from Houston to Vail, Colorado, was delayed an hour as a result."
Why would ANYONE refuse to obey the crew of an airplane in these paranoid times? Worse, why would someone with such a high profile as "a child of the most high God" behave that way? What went through her head? "I'm tired of being a goody-goody, so I'm going to cause trouble in a public place"? And what about all the other people on the plane, who had to wait around for an HOUR, thus leading to missed connecting flights and delayed reunions with their families? Why did she not consider them when choosing a time to be a jerk? If I were Joel, I'd be REALLY ticked off... this makes him look pretty bad.
"In a statement posted on the Lakewood Church Web site, Osteen says: 'Regardless of how some have portrayed the situation, please know that it was truly a minor misunderstanding and did not escalate into what you saw or read in the news. Contrary to those reports, it was my choice to remove myself from the situation. Nonetheless, it was a most unfortunate event and I truly regret that it happened.'"
Sorry, Victoria, but NO ONE leaves a plane, voluntarily or otherwise, for something minor, especially 2 days before Christmas... and I find it a little hard to believe that the FBI is lying about something for which there are so many witnesses.
"A statement from Continental Airlines said the situation was resolved and a spokeswoman would not elaborate. The FBI reviewed a report from the airline and determined that no illegal activity had occurred, FBI spokeswoman Luz Garcia said."
What a relief that must be to everyone.
I'm not making this up; I got it from CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/23/pastor.wife.ap/index.html
And it gets better; an article on the Houston Chronicle's site
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3538956.html
has the following claim from one of the Osteens' fellow passengers
"'She was just abusive,' said Sheila Steele, who said she was sitting behind Victoria Osteen. 'She was just like one of those divas.'"
"Steele said Victoria Osteen was upset about liquid on her pull-down tray and asked a flight attendant to have it cleaned. When the attendant, who was carrying paperwork to the cockpit, told her she couldn't do it immediately, Osteen replied, 'Fine, get me a stewardess who can,' Steele said.
She said Victoria Osteen pushed a flight attendant and tried to get into the cockpit. Passengers quoted in the Colorado paper did not address those details."
I hope some other passenger speaks up about all this; could Victoria really have PUSHED someone? Is this the beginning of the Osteens going the way of certain other TV religious figures, who thought themselves above actually following Christ's guidance? It'd be a bummer, if so; I really enjoy Joel's sermons.
Whatever occurred, I very much doubt that Ms. Osteen behaved in a blameless manner, which makes this final quote from the Chronicle particularly sad:
"A church spokesman said the couple and their children left the plane voluntarily after the incident Monday and took another flight to Vail, Colo."
She pulled this stunt in front of her KIDS; way to set a good example for them, Victoria, not to mention way to add to the magic of the season for them... and way to convince people to contribute to your husband's church, that you were willing to cause such a ruckus on your way to a luxury vacation.
We're gonna be hearing about this incident for a while, methinks.
I hope your Christmas Eve is going well; my husband is making a belated surge of effort on the tree, so things are looking up a little around here.
"The wife of the pastor of the nation's largest church said she chose to leave an airplane after a disagreement with a flight attendant, disputing accounts that she was asked to go.
The FBI has said Victoria Osteen, of Houston, Texas, was asked to leave after failing to obey crew instructions. The Continental Airlines flight Monday from Houston to Vail, Colorado, was delayed an hour as a result."
Why would ANYONE refuse to obey the crew of an airplane in these paranoid times? Worse, why would someone with such a high profile as "a child of the most high God" behave that way? What went through her head? "I'm tired of being a goody-goody, so I'm going to cause trouble in a public place"? And what about all the other people on the plane, who had to wait around for an HOUR, thus leading to missed connecting flights and delayed reunions with their families? Why did she not consider them when choosing a time to be a jerk? If I were Joel, I'd be REALLY ticked off... this makes him look pretty bad.
"In a statement posted on the Lakewood Church Web site, Osteen says: 'Regardless of how some have portrayed the situation, please know that it was truly a minor misunderstanding and did not escalate into what you saw or read in the news. Contrary to those reports, it was my choice to remove myself from the situation. Nonetheless, it was a most unfortunate event and I truly regret that it happened.'"
Sorry, Victoria, but NO ONE leaves a plane, voluntarily or otherwise, for something minor, especially 2 days before Christmas... and I find it a little hard to believe that the FBI is lying about something for which there are so many witnesses.
"A statement from Continental Airlines said the situation was resolved and a spokeswoman would not elaborate. The FBI reviewed a report from the airline and determined that no illegal activity had occurred, FBI spokeswoman Luz Garcia said."
What a relief that must be to everyone.
I'm not making this up; I got it from CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/12/23/pastor.wife.ap/index.html
And it gets better; an article on the Houston Chronicle's site
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3538956.html
has the following claim from one of the Osteens' fellow passengers
"'She was just abusive,' said Sheila Steele, who said she was sitting behind Victoria Osteen. 'She was just like one of those divas.'"
"Steele said Victoria Osteen was upset about liquid on her pull-down tray and asked a flight attendant to have it cleaned. When the attendant, who was carrying paperwork to the cockpit, told her she couldn't do it immediately, Osteen replied, 'Fine, get me a stewardess who can,' Steele said.
She said Victoria Osteen pushed a flight attendant and tried to get into the cockpit. Passengers quoted in the Colorado paper did not address those details."
I hope some other passenger speaks up about all this; could Victoria really have PUSHED someone? Is this the beginning of the Osteens going the way of certain other TV religious figures, who thought themselves above actually following Christ's guidance? It'd be a bummer, if so; I really enjoy Joel's sermons.
Whatever occurred, I very much doubt that Ms. Osteen behaved in a blameless manner, which makes this final quote from the Chronicle particularly sad:
"A church spokesman said the couple and their children left the plane voluntarily after the incident Monday and took another flight to Vail, Colo."
She pulled this stunt in front of her KIDS; way to set a good example for them, Victoria, not to mention way to add to the magic of the season for them... and way to convince people to contribute to your husband's church, that you were willing to cause such a ruckus on your way to a luxury vacation.
We're gonna be hearing about this incident for a while, methinks.
I hope your Christmas Eve is going well; my husband is making a belated surge of effort on the tree, so things are looking up a little around here.
Friday, December 23, 2005
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
The fight to get my home decorated for Christmas before the day actually arrives has escalated to a white heat... and as you might have grasped from the title, it's NOT going well.
I'm tireder than I can say of being held hostage to my husband's procrastination and sloth, not to mention his outright refusal to do anything. After breaking his often-repeated promises to get the tree dragged out over the Thanksgiving weekend, and then the weekend after that, and the weekend after THAT, he finally got it up... but in the nearly 2 WEEKS since it got put together, it's STILL not fully decorated, not even CLOSE. Why? Because the ornaments are packed in big boxes that are in big stacks, and there's no room to take them out and just LEAVE them out for ME to use them (as much as I can-I can't do stuff above shoulder level anymore, sigh), so nothing can get done until my husband dismantles a stack and carries over a box. Why doesn't he just do that? Good question. I've hammered him ceaselessly about it, but he's chanted "In a minute" for as long as TWELVE HOURS at a time, and thus day after day, including an entire weekend, have gone by without it being done. To make matters worse, a couple of times he HAS brought boxes out at 3AM and thrown a few things up... and then has the unmitigated gall to complain that I'm not giving up a bunch of sleep to help him out!! At 3 in the frigging morning!!
At the risk of repeating myself; GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
And what excuse does he have for his endless refusals to get to work? None; when questioned, he LIES, and claims that all those evenings that I prompted him every half hour to fulfill his promises of work, when EVERY TIME I went to his study he was screwing around on a forum or on CNN, never happened... alternating with claims that those things were somehow more important than working on the tree, and so it was ok to lie about his intentions of getting to work soon and keep doing them-he can't even be bothered to be consistent or logical about his lies, how's that for rotten?
Worse, there isn't a single one of my hundreds of dollars worth of other Christmas decorations set up either, because they are all, you guessed it, packed in big boxes in stacks with other boxes, where I can see some of them but not get to any of them; worse, the stuff that's currently laid out where those things would go needs to be packed up and put in still other boxes in yet another stack... all stuff that only my husband has the muscle (and height) to handle.
Say what you will about my father, and if you're a regular reader you know that you can say quite alot, none of it good, when my mother announced that it was time to get the Christmas stuff out, he brought out the ladder and hauled all the boxes down from where they were stored up under the roof of the garage and in to the appointed place in the family room... and he did it that day, ALL of it that day, and without coming up with 12 hours of trivial nonsense to do to delay it, either. As my mother needed boxes moved around, or stashed back up in the storage area, he did that too, and right when he was asked, not after endless delays. It's pretty grim that my husband can't do as well as a man that should be locked up like a vicious animal.
So, once again, by the time Christmas Eve rolls around we'll have spent so much time screaming and fighting that we'll hate the sight of each other, and will spend the biggest holiday of the year with gritted teeth. Sadly, I've had to conclude that, although I have literally over a thousand dollars' worth of ornaments, which collectively create what everyone proclaims the most magnificent Christmas tree they've ever seen, this will have to be the last year we put it up; I just can't take another year of having the month before Christmas be non-stop arguing and stress to get the tree (and nothing else) done by the morning of the 25th. From now on, I'm just going to have my husband swap boxes of year-round display items for boxes of tabletop decorations, and I'll set them out myself (except a few that need to be hung up, which we'll most likely just do without) and that'll be it.
I hasten to add that no tears need to be shed about any of this; if all I can complain about is not having a Christmas tree, I figure that makes me one of the luckiest people on the planet. This post is partly to allow me to vent, partly to show the rarely-seen darker side common to many good marriages (as Chris Rock says, "If you ain't never had the rat poison in your hand and stared at it for a good long while, you ain't never been in love"), and partly to show that sometimes you need to just cut your losses and stop pushing to make something work... there's no holiday tradition ever created that's worth weeks of stress and fighting to have, folks, there just isn't, and if you're still doing a meal for 30 people, baking 100 dozen cookies, or anything else that you resent and dislike during what's supposed to be a season of joy and togetherness, I hope you'll take a moment to consider if maybe it might not be better for you and the loved ones you're with at this time of year if you found a way to celebrate that let everyone relax and have fun.
Stranger things have been said to have happened at this time of year, after all...
I'm tireder than I can say of being held hostage to my husband's procrastination and sloth, not to mention his outright refusal to do anything. After breaking his often-repeated promises to get the tree dragged out over the Thanksgiving weekend, and then the weekend after that, and the weekend after THAT, he finally got it up... but in the nearly 2 WEEKS since it got put together, it's STILL not fully decorated, not even CLOSE. Why? Because the ornaments are packed in big boxes that are in big stacks, and there's no room to take them out and just LEAVE them out for ME to use them (as much as I can-I can't do stuff above shoulder level anymore, sigh), so nothing can get done until my husband dismantles a stack and carries over a box. Why doesn't he just do that? Good question. I've hammered him ceaselessly about it, but he's chanted "In a minute" for as long as TWELVE HOURS at a time, and thus day after day, including an entire weekend, have gone by without it being done. To make matters worse, a couple of times he HAS brought boxes out at 3AM and thrown a few things up... and then has the unmitigated gall to complain that I'm not giving up a bunch of sleep to help him out!! At 3 in the frigging morning!!
At the risk of repeating myself; GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
And what excuse does he have for his endless refusals to get to work? None; when questioned, he LIES, and claims that all those evenings that I prompted him every half hour to fulfill his promises of work, when EVERY TIME I went to his study he was screwing around on a forum or on CNN, never happened... alternating with claims that those things were somehow more important than working on the tree, and so it was ok to lie about his intentions of getting to work soon and keep doing them-he can't even be bothered to be consistent or logical about his lies, how's that for rotten?
Worse, there isn't a single one of my hundreds of dollars worth of other Christmas decorations set up either, because they are all, you guessed it, packed in big boxes in stacks with other boxes, where I can see some of them but not get to any of them; worse, the stuff that's currently laid out where those things would go needs to be packed up and put in still other boxes in yet another stack... all stuff that only my husband has the muscle (and height) to handle.
Say what you will about my father, and if you're a regular reader you know that you can say quite alot, none of it good, when my mother announced that it was time to get the Christmas stuff out, he brought out the ladder and hauled all the boxes down from where they were stored up under the roof of the garage and in to the appointed place in the family room... and he did it that day, ALL of it that day, and without coming up with 12 hours of trivial nonsense to do to delay it, either. As my mother needed boxes moved around, or stashed back up in the storage area, he did that too, and right when he was asked, not after endless delays. It's pretty grim that my husband can't do as well as a man that should be locked up like a vicious animal.
So, once again, by the time Christmas Eve rolls around we'll have spent so much time screaming and fighting that we'll hate the sight of each other, and will spend the biggest holiday of the year with gritted teeth. Sadly, I've had to conclude that, although I have literally over a thousand dollars' worth of ornaments, which collectively create what everyone proclaims the most magnificent Christmas tree they've ever seen, this will have to be the last year we put it up; I just can't take another year of having the month before Christmas be non-stop arguing and stress to get the tree (and nothing else) done by the morning of the 25th. From now on, I'm just going to have my husband swap boxes of year-round display items for boxes of tabletop decorations, and I'll set them out myself (except a few that need to be hung up, which we'll most likely just do without) and that'll be it.
I hasten to add that no tears need to be shed about any of this; if all I can complain about is not having a Christmas tree, I figure that makes me one of the luckiest people on the planet. This post is partly to allow me to vent, partly to show the rarely-seen darker side common to many good marriages (as Chris Rock says, "If you ain't never had the rat poison in your hand and stared at it for a good long while, you ain't never been in love"), and partly to show that sometimes you need to just cut your losses and stop pushing to make something work... there's no holiday tradition ever created that's worth weeks of stress and fighting to have, folks, there just isn't, and if you're still doing a meal for 30 people, baking 100 dozen cookies, or anything else that you resent and dislike during what's supposed to be a season of joy and togetherness, I hope you'll take a moment to consider if maybe it might not be better for you and the loved ones you're with at this time of year if you found a way to celebrate that let everyone relax and have fun.
Stranger things have been said to have happened at this time of year, after all...
Thursday, December 22, 2005
An astonishing day
A package came in the mail from the UK today; neither my husband nor I could remember winning anything on eBay from there that we hadn't already gotten, so we were at a loss. The customs declaration on it said "Sweets"; foreign sellers write all sorts of goofy things on those labels to avoid whatever problems their countries might give them for shipping certain sorts of items, so they're rarely any kind of useful clue as to a package's contents. I picked up the box, and it made scary rattling sounds; since most of the things we get from auctions are breakable, I do NOT want to hear anything moving around in a shipping box. I got the brown paper off and revealed a CEREAL box, which isn't remotely sturdy enough to ship stuff across the city much less across half the globe; now I was REALLY nervous. Bracing myself, I opened it up... and it WAS candy!! Package after package of colorful Christmas chocolates tumbled out; at a total loss, I checked the wrappings again, looking for a clue, and found a little return address scrawled in ballpoint pen on the back... I didn't recognize the name, but the city was Aberdeen, and there's a lady there that I've been emailing with for nearly 6 years, so I was able to add 2+2 and get 4. She must have either gone back to her maiden name, or back to her ex-married name so that it matched her sons' last name, because I double-checked my records and found that yes, the address WAS hers, but no, the last name was NOT the one she used on her correspondence; I was going to email her and find out (after thanking her profusely for making such an effort on my behalf, of course)... but I think I'll call her instead. That's not as crazy as it sounds, because thanks to these guys
http://www.1010297.com/
I can call the UK for 3¢ a minute... less than most people pay to call the next city. And, although it's obviously too late to ship anything to her by Christmas, I'm going to get her a bunch of American candy and send it to her ASAP; she and her boys will have it to celebrate the new year with.
The other astonishing thing today came from the movie "Slaves of New York"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=148955&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
when the heroine said something I've never heard used as a description of the way any human being other than myself feels; "To me, having fun is almost identical to feeling anxious." It's being excited about something in general, not exclusively having fun, that does it to me, but it DOES feel almost exactly like anxiety; it'll even give me the same symptoms, such as sleeplessness, intestinal distress, head rushes, and hives. I don't know if that line appears in the book on which the movie is based
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671745247/qid=1135248715/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-8570383-1034463?n=507846&s=books&v=glance
but the author, Tama Janowitz, was heavily involved with the movie, and even had a small role in it, so it's very likely that this concept came from her; some day, when I have time to read books again, I'll check her out. Anyways, see the movie if you get the chance; it got horrible reviews, but, perhaps because some time has passed since the era it portrays, I found it very entertaining.
http://www.1010297.com/
I can call the UK for 3¢ a minute... less than most people pay to call the next city. And, although it's obviously too late to ship anything to her by Christmas, I'm going to get her a bunch of American candy and send it to her ASAP; she and her boys will have it to celebrate the new year with.
The other astonishing thing today came from the movie "Slaves of New York"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=148955&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
when the heroine said something I've never heard used as a description of the way any human being other than myself feels; "To me, having fun is almost identical to feeling anxious." It's being excited about something in general, not exclusively having fun, that does it to me, but it DOES feel almost exactly like anxiety; it'll even give me the same symptoms, such as sleeplessness, intestinal distress, head rushes, and hives. I don't know if that line appears in the book on which the movie is based
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0671745247/qid=1135248715/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/002-8570383-1034463?n=507846&s=books&v=glance
but the author, Tama Janowitz, was heavily involved with the movie, and even had a small role in it, so it's very likely that this concept came from her; some day, when I have time to read books again, I'll check her out. Anyways, see the movie if you get the chance; it got horrible reviews, but, perhaps because some time has passed since the era it portrays, I found it very entertaining.
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Possum report
We had a bad few weeks where we didn't see our original male possum and feared the worst; he finally came back, looking much thinner, so he'd either been trapped and relocated and taken a while to find his way home or had been hibernating... the little female has been vanishing for days at a time, and coming back thinner, so we think hibernating is the more likely answer. We were so happy to see him!! He chomped his food, grinned toothily at me, and brought joy back into my heart; it's foolish to get emotionally involved with wild animals, because a thousand dangers surround them every moment they're away from you, and eventually they'll succumb, but... although the possums show no sign of intelligence (except for the female, of course), they have a great deal of charm, and even my husband, who's not a remotely sentimental sort, adores them.
With the reappearance of the alpha male, we've had to return to worrying about what's going to happen when he encounters the beta male; the latter showed up with a chunk of fur ripped out of his head a week or so ago, and the former had an abrasion on his foreleg yesterday, so it's possible that they've already had a skirmish or 2. Both of them are totally cowed by the female (who's less than half their size, lol), so maybe if they meet up in her presence she'll square them away, but... it's just not natural for possums to hang out with each other, and the males will be territorial about my yard, the food, and the pretty possum girl, so it's a constant source of worry.
They may have had a close call last night; there was some loud squealing from nearby, so I jumped up to see what was going on, the female, who was eating by the sliding glass door, lunged into the landscaping, where she'd stay for the next half hour, and the alpha male came dashing in from the corner of the patio and began running hither and thither as if disoriented. I sprinted from window to window, calling anxiously to him, screaming for my husband, and looking for signs of blood or injury; we were both relieved when he finally calmed down and came over to eat, and an examination revealed not a hair out of place. The beta male was here tonight, and he's ok too, so maybe the squealing I heard was the rats, either fighting amongst themselves and scaring the alpha possum or perhaps fighting with him, since they're supposedly on his menu (although we've never seen him show any interest in them, sadly). The male possums MUST be able to smell each other all over the place around here, so they're aware of each other's existence at the very least; my best hope is that they've decided to just alternate visits and thus share the infinite supply of food.
And speaking of food; while the squirrel girl ran fearlessly to me from the 1st time I offered her a nut, the alpha possum, who's by far the most familiar with me of the shy trio, not only hasn't taken food from me yet, he's been walking away when I try to offer him something... he doesn't RUN away, he eats for another minute or 2 and then saunters off, but the end result is the same. He's reacted the same way to me opening the door and tossing more fruit out when he's run out of food; ignoring the food and pointedly leaving. Last night, though, amazingly, perhaps because he felt safer near me after his bad scare, when he finished all the food he had and I eased the door open and tossed some more out, he sniffed a little (I don't think possums see very well) and then came forward and ate it. HOORAY!! :-)
There's one little drawback to the enhanced closeness with the possums; since, as my husband puts it, they're not "hermetically sealed," I periodically catch one of them crouching in a bathroom sort of way off in the shadows, and they totally ignore my outraged yelps of "Stop that!! Bad, dirty possum!!"... my husband laughs at that, but then HE gets to go clean up the poopies, so *I* have the last laugh. I'd periodically seen suspicious damp spots on the patio, and wondered if someone was piddling out there, but there was never any odor so I couldn't be sure; tonight, however, as I was putting out food, I heard the unmistakable sound of falling liquid, looked to my left, and there was a cascade pouring down from between the slats of the patio cover... and it was NOT raining. I watched in amazement and disgust as the puddle grew; at 1st I thought it might be a rat, as this was before the possums had showed up, but there was enough urine to DROWN a rat, so that left me with it being either a certain filthy stray cat that hangs around here or a possum... and a feline-loving friend assures me that a cat would NEVER climb through foliage on a patio cover and pee up in the air like that, so that means that one of our marsupial buddies had arrived early and had a nap, and a tinkle, on the patio cover. My husband thought this was VERY funny of course; less so after I informed him that he'd have to go clean it up, naturally, but still, anything to do with bodily functions amuses him greatly.
There's a big time gap between this sentence and the previous paragraph, because when I finished it I looked out onto the patio and saw... a FOURTH possum!! This one is very small, and without the bulgy skull of the males, so we assume she's female; her poor tail is damaged in several spots, and it looks like the tip is missing, which broke our hearts, but she's a pretty little thing, and was very brave about eating when she could see and hear me, even though she's not used to me... she even smiled shyly at me. We're thrilled to have a new visitor, and are crossing our fingers that an additional female will make it possible for the males to each feel like they've got all they need, and so not fight.
Christmas came a few days early to the Omni household!!
With the reappearance of the alpha male, we've had to return to worrying about what's going to happen when he encounters the beta male; the latter showed up with a chunk of fur ripped out of his head a week or so ago, and the former had an abrasion on his foreleg yesterday, so it's possible that they've already had a skirmish or 2. Both of them are totally cowed by the female (who's less than half their size, lol), so maybe if they meet up in her presence she'll square them away, but... it's just not natural for possums to hang out with each other, and the males will be territorial about my yard, the food, and the pretty possum girl, so it's a constant source of worry.
They may have had a close call last night; there was some loud squealing from nearby, so I jumped up to see what was going on, the female, who was eating by the sliding glass door, lunged into the landscaping, where she'd stay for the next half hour, and the alpha male came dashing in from the corner of the patio and began running hither and thither as if disoriented. I sprinted from window to window, calling anxiously to him, screaming for my husband, and looking for signs of blood or injury; we were both relieved when he finally calmed down and came over to eat, and an examination revealed not a hair out of place. The beta male was here tonight, and he's ok too, so maybe the squealing I heard was the rats, either fighting amongst themselves and scaring the alpha possum or perhaps fighting with him, since they're supposedly on his menu (although we've never seen him show any interest in them, sadly). The male possums MUST be able to smell each other all over the place around here, so they're aware of each other's existence at the very least; my best hope is that they've decided to just alternate visits and thus share the infinite supply of food.
And speaking of food; while the squirrel girl ran fearlessly to me from the 1st time I offered her a nut, the alpha possum, who's by far the most familiar with me of the shy trio, not only hasn't taken food from me yet, he's been walking away when I try to offer him something... he doesn't RUN away, he eats for another minute or 2 and then saunters off, but the end result is the same. He's reacted the same way to me opening the door and tossing more fruit out when he's run out of food; ignoring the food and pointedly leaving. Last night, though, amazingly, perhaps because he felt safer near me after his bad scare, when he finished all the food he had and I eased the door open and tossed some more out, he sniffed a little (I don't think possums see very well) and then came forward and ate it. HOORAY!! :-)
There's one little drawback to the enhanced closeness with the possums; since, as my husband puts it, they're not "hermetically sealed," I periodically catch one of them crouching in a bathroom sort of way off in the shadows, and they totally ignore my outraged yelps of "Stop that!! Bad, dirty possum!!"... my husband laughs at that, but then HE gets to go clean up the poopies, so *I* have the last laugh. I'd periodically seen suspicious damp spots on the patio, and wondered if someone was piddling out there, but there was never any odor so I couldn't be sure; tonight, however, as I was putting out food, I heard the unmistakable sound of falling liquid, looked to my left, and there was a cascade pouring down from between the slats of the patio cover... and it was NOT raining. I watched in amazement and disgust as the puddle grew; at 1st I thought it might be a rat, as this was before the possums had showed up, but there was enough urine to DROWN a rat, so that left me with it being either a certain filthy stray cat that hangs around here or a possum... and a feline-loving friend assures me that a cat would NEVER climb through foliage on a patio cover and pee up in the air like that, so that means that one of our marsupial buddies had arrived early and had a nap, and a tinkle, on the patio cover. My husband thought this was VERY funny of course; less so after I informed him that he'd have to go clean it up, naturally, but still, anything to do with bodily functions amuses him greatly.
There's a big time gap between this sentence and the previous paragraph, because when I finished it I looked out onto the patio and saw... a FOURTH possum!! This one is very small, and without the bulgy skull of the males, so we assume she's female; her poor tail is damaged in several spots, and it looks like the tip is missing, which broke our hearts, but she's a pretty little thing, and was very brave about eating when she could see and hear me, even though she's not used to me... she even smiled shyly at me. We're thrilled to have a new visitor, and are crossing our fingers that an additional female will make it possible for the males to each feel like they've got all they need, and so not fight.
Christmas came a few days early to the Omni household!!
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Stone babies
Tonight on the Discovery Health Channel I saw a program called "Pregnant for 46 Years," for which the blurb is "Follow two amazing stories of pregnancies that occurred outside the womb. The first story details Zahara's pregnancy that began in 1955. At the age of 75 doctors discovered her unborn, calcified baby that had grown to full term."
http://health.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=114743&gid=0&channel=DHC
I know it sounds more like a National Enquirer story than science, but it's the real deal; that lady carried a SEVEN POUND fossilized mass inside of her for half a century. The explanation is that it was an ectopic pregnancy that, instead of rotting when it died, got covered by a dense, thick layer of calcium by her body to protect itself from the foreign object; what they removed from that poor lady looked like a semi-abstract stone sculpture of a baby. What's even MORE amazing is that this is NOT a unique case, but has appeared throughout the world (Zahara is in Morocco, just FYI):
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Brazil: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-31802000000600008
"A 40 year-old woman of brown skin had a primary complaint of lower abdomen pain. The patient reported regular abdominal growth and healthy fetal activity from a pregnancy that happened 18 years earlier. She had never done pre-natal follow-up. In the third trimester, she had started to feel strong cramps in the lower abdomen at the same time that fetal activity disappeared. She had not looked for medical assistance and some weeks later she had eliminated a dark red mass through the vagina with a placental appearance.
She had experienced the characteristic modifications of breast lactation. The abdomen had started to decrease but retained an infra-umbilical mass of about 20 centimeters in diameter, mobile and painless. A few months before being seen at our service, she started to fell pain in the lower abdomen and looked for medical assistance."
"The abdominal X-ray and computerized tomography showed the presence of an ectopic fetus in a mesentery blood vessel branch, with peripheral calcifications. The ultrasound examinations showed an empty uterus, regular ovaries and the presence of a 31-week fetus (determined from femur length)."
"A hypothesis of lithopedion was made, and because of the clinical symptoms and the patient's desire to remove the mass, exploratory laparotomy was done. After performing parietal celiotomy, an oval tumor was seen with adherence of the right ovary and epiploon. It measured 15 x 25 centimeters and weighed 1,890 grams. It was composed of a calcified ovular membrane adhering to a fetus, which was dissected and proved to be well conserved and partially calcified."
"In the cases related in the literature, the age of the patients on the date of diagnosis varied from 23 to 100 years, 2/3 of them being over 40 years old. The period of fetus retention was from 4 to 60 years. Fetal death occurred between 3 and 6 months of pregnancy in 20% of the cases, between 7 and 8 months in 27% and at full term in 43% of the cases.
Abdominal pregnancy results from the rupture of tubal or ovarian pregnancy with abdominal cavity implantation. The development of lithopedion happens under certain conditions: (1) extra-uterine pregnancy; (2) fetal death after 3 months of pregnancy; (3) the egg must be sterile; (4) there cannot be any early diagnosis; (5) local conditions must exist for calcium precipitation (deposit). The development of this pregnancy is the same as for abdominal intra-uterine pregnancy until fetal death. After this time, dehydration of tissues and calcium infiltration occur.
An abdominal pregnancy that calcifies is generically called lithopedion and can have the following forms: (1) lithokelyphos (litho = rock, kelyphos = shell): only the ovular membrane is calcified and the fetus can be in different stages of decomposition; (2) lithokelyphopedion: both are calcified, i.e. fetus and ovular membrane, as in this case; (3) lithopedion: only the fetus is calcified.
Although most cases remain asymptomatic for years, pelvic pain, weight sensation in the abdomen and compressive symptoms can occur."
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Zaire: http://www.obgyn.net/ENGLISH/PUBS/ARTICLES/Stone_Baby.htm
"The patient is a 37-year-old Zairian female who lives in a village of Malongo at the headwaters of the Congo River. She presented with a relatively asymptomatic large abdominal mass. Examination revealed a distended abdomen with a very irregularly contoured mass present consistent with a large fibroid uterus 28-32 weeks size. The patient was having fairly regular periods. She has had eight previous pregnancies with five living children. Recommendation made for exploratory laparotomy through a midline incision with a working diagnosis of uterine leiomyomata.
Exploration through the midline incision revealed no free fluid present in the abdomen. The uterus and ovaries felt fairly normal to palpation. A large calcified spherical mass was delivered through the incision, enveloped with omental adhesions. At this point diagnosis was thought be possibly some type of splenic or mesenteric tumor. The diagnosis was finally made when a shoulder was delivered along with this mass. Finally, after the adhesions were removed, a four pound calcified fetus was removed. This appeared to be approximately a 32-week intra-abdominal pregnancy which had died and calcified.
In further questioning the patient, she stated that she had been pregnant about three years ago and everything seemed to be going fine, but 'the baby never came out.'"
Korea: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:uSb5Hrf93ZEJ:jkms.kams.or.kr/2002/pdf/04274.pdf+lithopedion&hl=en
"A 63-yr-old... woman was referred to our hospital for a palpable abdominal mass with a 40-yr history... the patient reported that she had become pregnant 40 yr before and that the pregnancy had continued for about 9-10 months with fetal movement and abdominal distension, until she experienced a vaginal bleeding without any signs of labor. Because of poor accessibility to doctors and hospitals, she stayed at home and sought the alternative medicine such as herb medication. After some time, the fetal movement and the abdominal distension disappeared and the palpable mass developed. Two years later, she became pregnant again and successfully delivered a daughter, who was 38 yr old at the time the patient was admitted to our hospital. From history taking, we suspected the possibility of old advanced abdominal pregnancy.
On gross pathologic examination, the mass showed a glistening, stony hard calcified external surface. After decalcification, the mass was sectioned and found to be composed of mummified tissues, bones, and cartilages that were compatible with fetal long bones and ribs. So we concluded that the mass was a lithopedion."
Taiwan (France, UK, USA): http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000106/20000106s5.html
"Doctors at the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei have recently discovered a 'fossilized' fetus in the Abdomen of a 76-year-old woman, suffering from cervical cancer while operating to remove her womb.
According to a an examination report, the fetus was conceived 49 years ago, making it only the fourth such recorded phenomenon, said Yu Chien-jen, chief of the hospital's gynecology department.
Yu said doctors on Dec. 31 found a 20-gram (0.7 ounce) and 12-centimeter-long lithopaedion, the rocklike remains of a fetus hardened by calcium buildup, in the abdominal cavity of the woman surnamed Wu.
Wu, who returned home for rest on Monday, said she first found a tumor in her womb in 1950, but doctors told her that the tumor was benign and did not have to be removed if she did not wish to have more children.
Wu decided not to remove the tumor because she and her husband did not have enough money to support a third child.
It was not until a few days ago did Wu find the so-called tumor was actually a fetus.
Wu and her 83-year-old husband migrated from mainland China to Taiwan in 1950. Wu's husband had been by her side since she checked in the hospital late last month.
Yu said the fetus appeared to have died in the 20th week of Wu's pregnancy when it moved from her womb to her abdomen. The average weight of a 20-week fetus is about 300 grams.
The hospital said their research yielded only three known lithopaedions, and the earliest case dated back to 1582, when a 28-year old fetus was found in French woman.
The other two cases were reported in the United States. In 1995, the Lancet medical journal reported that a 92-year-old woman had a lithopaedion inside her body. In 1999, the Madigan Military Hospital in Washington D.C. said a 67-year-old woman had been found to have carried a calcified fetus for 39 years." (Note: The Lancet is a British medical journal, not American.)
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1348500
"A stone baby, or lithopedion, results when a fetus dies during an ectopic (typically abdominal) pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies. It is not unusual for a lithopedion to remain undiagnosed for decades, and it is often not until a patient is examined for other conditions that a stone baby is found. The oldest reported case is that of a 94 year old woman, whose lithopedion had probably been present for over 60 years.
Lithopedion is a rare phenomenon, occurring once in about 20,000 pregnancies, and with less than three hundred cases noted in medical literature accumulated over some 400 years. Lithopedion may occur from 14 weeks' gestation to full term. The earliest stone baby is one found in an archaeological excavation, dated to 1100 BCE."
http://path.upmc.edu/cases/case128/dx.html
"The appearance of a calcified fetus or lithopedion may be evident if maturation is advanced. This can occur if there is retention of the fetus for many months beyond the average gestation. It is important to remember that a lithopedion does not need to be a twin. In one reported case, a 94-year-old woman was found to have a lithopedion, probably present for approximately 61 years."
Truth really IS stranger than fiction!! :-O
http://health.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=114743&gid=0&channel=DHC
I know it sounds more like a National Enquirer story than science, but it's the real deal; that lady carried a SEVEN POUND fossilized mass inside of her for half a century. The explanation is that it was an ectopic pregnancy that, instead of rotting when it died, got covered by a dense, thick layer of calcium by her body to protect itself from the foreign object; what they removed from that poor lady looked like a semi-abstract stone sculpture of a baby. What's even MORE amazing is that this is NOT a unique case, but has appeared throughout the world (Zahara is in Morocco, just FYI):
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Brazil: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1516-31802000000600008
"A 40 year-old woman of brown skin had a primary complaint of lower abdomen pain. The patient reported regular abdominal growth and healthy fetal activity from a pregnancy that happened 18 years earlier. She had never done pre-natal follow-up. In the third trimester, she had started to feel strong cramps in the lower abdomen at the same time that fetal activity disappeared. She had not looked for medical assistance and some weeks later she had eliminated a dark red mass through the vagina with a placental appearance.
She had experienced the characteristic modifications of breast lactation. The abdomen had started to decrease but retained an infra-umbilical mass of about 20 centimeters in diameter, mobile and painless. A few months before being seen at our service, she started to fell pain in the lower abdomen and looked for medical assistance."
"The abdominal X-ray and computerized tomography showed the presence of an ectopic fetus in a mesentery blood vessel branch, with peripheral calcifications. The ultrasound examinations showed an empty uterus, regular ovaries and the presence of a 31-week fetus (determined from femur length)."
"A hypothesis of lithopedion was made, and because of the clinical symptoms and the patient's desire to remove the mass, exploratory laparotomy was done. After performing parietal celiotomy, an oval tumor was seen with adherence of the right ovary and epiploon. It measured 15 x 25 centimeters and weighed 1,890 grams. It was composed of a calcified ovular membrane adhering to a fetus, which was dissected and proved to be well conserved and partially calcified."
"In the cases related in the literature, the age of the patients on the date of diagnosis varied from 23 to 100 years, 2/3 of them being over 40 years old. The period of fetus retention was from 4 to 60 years. Fetal death occurred between 3 and 6 months of pregnancy in 20% of the cases, between 7 and 8 months in 27% and at full term in 43% of the cases.
Abdominal pregnancy results from the rupture of tubal or ovarian pregnancy with abdominal cavity implantation. The development of lithopedion happens under certain conditions: (1) extra-uterine pregnancy; (2) fetal death after 3 months of pregnancy; (3) the egg must be sterile; (4) there cannot be any early diagnosis; (5) local conditions must exist for calcium precipitation (deposit). The development of this pregnancy is the same as for abdominal intra-uterine pregnancy until fetal death. After this time, dehydration of tissues and calcium infiltration occur.
An abdominal pregnancy that calcifies is generically called lithopedion and can have the following forms: (1) lithokelyphos (litho = rock, kelyphos = shell): only the ovular membrane is calcified and the fetus can be in different stages of decomposition; (2) lithokelyphopedion: both are calcified, i.e. fetus and ovular membrane, as in this case; (3) lithopedion: only the fetus is calcified.
Although most cases remain asymptomatic for years, pelvic pain, weight sensation in the abdomen and compressive symptoms can occur."
WARNING-MEDICAL PHOTOS
Zaire: http://www.obgyn.net/ENGLISH/PUBS/ARTICLES/Stone_Baby.htm
"The patient is a 37-year-old Zairian female who lives in a village of Malongo at the headwaters of the Congo River. She presented with a relatively asymptomatic large abdominal mass. Examination revealed a distended abdomen with a very irregularly contoured mass present consistent with a large fibroid uterus 28-32 weeks size. The patient was having fairly regular periods. She has had eight previous pregnancies with five living children. Recommendation made for exploratory laparotomy through a midline incision with a working diagnosis of uterine leiomyomata.
Exploration through the midline incision revealed no free fluid present in the abdomen. The uterus and ovaries felt fairly normal to palpation. A large calcified spherical mass was delivered through the incision, enveloped with omental adhesions. At this point diagnosis was thought be possibly some type of splenic or mesenteric tumor. The diagnosis was finally made when a shoulder was delivered along with this mass. Finally, after the adhesions were removed, a four pound calcified fetus was removed. This appeared to be approximately a 32-week intra-abdominal pregnancy which had died and calcified.
In further questioning the patient, she stated that she had been pregnant about three years ago and everything seemed to be going fine, but 'the baby never came out.'"
Korea: http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:uSb5Hrf93ZEJ:jkms.kams.or.kr/2002/pdf/04274.pdf+lithopedion&hl=en
"A 63-yr-old... woman was referred to our hospital for a palpable abdominal mass with a 40-yr history... the patient reported that she had become pregnant 40 yr before and that the pregnancy had continued for about 9-10 months with fetal movement and abdominal distension, until she experienced a vaginal bleeding without any signs of labor. Because of poor accessibility to doctors and hospitals, she stayed at home and sought the alternative medicine such as herb medication. After some time, the fetal movement and the abdominal distension disappeared and the palpable mass developed. Two years later, she became pregnant again and successfully delivered a daughter, who was 38 yr old at the time the patient was admitted to our hospital. From history taking, we suspected the possibility of old advanced abdominal pregnancy.
On gross pathologic examination, the mass showed a glistening, stony hard calcified external surface. After decalcification, the mass was sectioned and found to be composed of mummified tissues, bones, and cartilages that were compatible with fetal long bones and ribs. So we concluded that the mass was a lithopedion."
Taiwan (France, UK, USA): http://www.taiwanheadlines.gov.tw/20000106/20000106s5.html
"Doctors at the Veterans General Hospital in Taipei have recently discovered a 'fossilized' fetus in the Abdomen of a 76-year-old woman, suffering from cervical cancer while operating to remove her womb.
According to a an examination report, the fetus was conceived 49 years ago, making it only the fourth such recorded phenomenon, said Yu Chien-jen, chief of the hospital's gynecology department.
Yu said doctors on Dec. 31 found a 20-gram (0.7 ounce) and 12-centimeter-long lithopaedion, the rocklike remains of a fetus hardened by calcium buildup, in the abdominal cavity of the woman surnamed Wu.
Wu, who returned home for rest on Monday, said she first found a tumor in her womb in 1950, but doctors told her that the tumor was benign and did not have to be removed if she did not wish to have more children.
Wu decided not to remove the tumor because she and her husband did not have enough money to support a third child.
It was not until a few days ago did Wu find the so-called tumor was actually a fetus.
Wu and her 83-year-old husband migrated from mainland China to Taiwan in 1950. Wu's husband had been by her side since she checked in the hospital late last month.
Yu said the fetus appeared to have died in the 20th week of Wu's pregnancy when it moved from her womb to her abdomen. The average weight of a 20-week fetus is about 300 grams.
The hospital said their research yielded only three known lithopaedions, and the earliest case dated back to 1582, when a 28-year old fetus was found in French woman.
The other two cases were reported in the United States. In 1995, the Lancet medical journal reported that a 92-year-old woman had a lithopaedion inside her body. In 1999, the Madigan Military Hospital in Washington D.C. said a 67-year-old woman had been found to have carried a calcified fetus for 39 years." (Note: The Lancet is a British medical journal, not American.)
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1348500
"A stone baby, or lithopedion, results when a fetus dies during an ectopic (typically abdominal) pregnancy, is too large to be reabsorbed by the body, and calcifies. It is not unusual for a lithopedion to remain undiagnosed for decades, and it is often not until a patient is examined for other conditions that a stone baby is found. The oldest reported case is that of a 94 year old woman, whose lithopedion had probably been present for over 60 years.
Lithopedion is a rare phenomenon, occurring once in about 20,000 pregnancies, and with less than three hundred cases noted in medical literature accumulated over some 400 years. Lithopedion may occur from 14 weeks' gestation to full term. The earliest stone baby is one found in an archaeological excavation, dated to 1100 BCE."
http://path.upmc.edu/cases/case128/dx.html
"The appearance of a calcified fetus or lithopedion may be evident if maturation is advanced. This can occur if there is retention of the fetus for many months beyond the average gestation. It is important to remember that a lithopedion does not need to be a twin. In one reported case, a 94-year-old woman was found to have a lithopedion, probably present for approximately 61 years."
Truth really IS stranger than fiction!! :-O
Monday, December 19, 2005
Sunday stuff
Joel Osteen went traditional Christian on me tonight; his sermon centered around the idea that everything you take in is recorded in your brain, which is certainly true, and that whatever you see over and over can eventually seem normal and ok to you even if you started out knowing better, which, given the weak-mindedness of many people, is a fair assertion, and that therefore you should try to surround yourself with things that are positive, encouraging and uplifting so that THOSE are the feelings you absorb throughout the day, which is a perfectly good idea... but then he veered off into describing our culture's TV shows, movies, music, games, ads, and even catalogs as things that a "child of the most high God" needs to refuse to see or hear, because those things are unwholesome and bad for you. I've got alot of respect for Joel, and his skill in analyzing the workings of the spiritual world, but the idea that to be a good Christian you have to not go to the movies with your friends, or not flip through the catalogs that come in the mail, and even use the remote to change the channel every time an "impure" commercial comes on, is just plain ridiculous. I guess the honeymoon's over...
I saw Morgan Freeman on "60 Minutes" this evening; he said that he hated Black History Month, that he wished it didn't exist, because black history is part of American history, and since there isn't a special month for whites, there shouldn't be one for blacks either. If a white person had said that, they'd be torn to pieces by a howling mob; it'll be interesting to see if there's a reaction from any of the black leaders about this. I personally am happy to have as many months for different kinds of history as the public wants, so that we can be reminded that all kinds of people have done important things, but when asked how we'll fight racism if we don't have things like BHM, Freeman said something thought-provoking; that the way to end it is to just stop talking about it, because if we're not calling people white or black but just men (or women, presumably), then there's no more racism. People could still think racist thoughts, and commit racist acts, even if we weren't talking about it, but it'd certainly be far less of an issue in general if it wasn't always being talked about... I doubt we'll see it happen in our lifetimes, though.
My quote script came up with the following yesterday:
"There are no facts, only interpretations." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
You've gotta hand it to Nietzsche; he gives good quote. Although I can't imagine that many people take this concept literally, it's undeniable that many things presented as facts are NOT, although they might have been based in facts at some point; sadly, just as the visual processing area of the brain alters what we see so that we don't notice any gaps in our perceptions (this is why we don't see blackness every time we blink), the thinking areas of the brain pad the information we take in with whatever's necessary for us to believe we saw and understood the whole situation, even though if we look at it objectively we know we rarely do. A favorite example of mine is the case of UFO's; most people who've seen inexplicable lights in the sky and call them UFO's make the jump to claiming that aliens were in them even though they didn't SEE any aliens, or any evidence that they were there, or that the lights were ships... we're so programmed in this culture to think that UFO stands for "alien spaceship" instead of just "unidentified flying object" that we see the presence of aliens inside of them as a fact rather than a pretty extreme interpretation of some oddly-behaving lights.
Quantum physics shows us that the very act of observing something, or even having a mechanism observe it, can change it, so how can we ever be sure that what we saw or recorded was the way the thing would be if we weren't observing? We ASSUME that what we see or record represents overall reality... but does it? What if we found out some day that EVERYTHING ever observed through a microscope, telescope, or other scientific instrument was just the tiniest bit off due to "observational interference"? What would that tell us about how well science explains reality?
I saw Morgan Freeman on "60 Minutes" this evening; he said that he hated Black History Month, that he wished it didn't exist, because black history is part of American history, and since there isn't a special month for whites, there shouldn't be one for blacks either. If a white person had said that, they'd be torn to pieces by a howling mob; it'll be interesting to see if there's a reaction from any of the black leaders about this. I personally am happy to have as many months for different kinds of history as the public wants, so that we can be reminded that all kinds of people have done important things, but when asked how we'll fight racism if we don't have things like BHM, Freeman said something thought-provoking; that the way to end it is to just stop talking about it, because if we're not calling people white or black but just men (or women, presumably), then there's no more racism. People could still think racist thoughts, and commit racist acts, even if we weren't talking about it, but it'd certainly be far less of an issue in general if it wasn't always being talked about... I doubt we'll see it happen in our lifetimes, though.
My quote script came up with the following yesterday:
"There are no facts, only interpretations." -- Friedrich Nietzsche
You've gotta hand it to Nietzsche; he gives good quote. Although I can't imagine that many people take this concept literally, it's undeniable that many things presented as facts are NOT, although they might have been based in facts at some point; sadly, just as the visual processing area of the brain alters what we see so that we don't notice any gaps in our perceptions (this is why we don't see blackness every time we blink), the thinking areas of the brain pad the information we take in with whatever's necessary for us to believe we saw and understood the whole situation, even though if we look at it objectively we know we rarely do. A favorite example of mine is the case of UFO's; most people who've seen inexplicable lights in the sky and call them UFO's make the jump to claiming that aliens were in them even though they didn't SEE any aliens, or any evidence that they were there, or that the lights were ships... we're so programmed in this culture to think that UFO stands for "alien spaceship" instead of just "unidentified flying object" that we see the presence of aliens inside of them as a fact rather than a pretty extreme interpretation of some oddly-behaving lights.
Quantum physics shows us that the very act of observing something, or even having a mechanism observe it, can change it, so how can we ever be sure that what we saw or recorded was the way the thing would be if we weren't observing? We ASSUME that what we see or record represents overall reality... but does it? What if we found out some day that EVERYTHING ever observed through a microscope, telescope, or other scientific instrument was just the tiniest bit off due to "observational interference"? What would that tell us about how well science explains reality?
Sunday, December 18, 2005
Check out my new sidebar game
I know, most sidebar games are stupid, which is why I haven't gotten one before now, but finally there's one that tests knowledge, ability to reason, and memory; it's called "LittleNeo's Flag Quiz," and thanks to it I've discovered that, because of my other NeoWorx doodad, "Online Visitors," I've learned to recognize an astonishing # of countries' flags... pretty cool for someone who never took a geography class. You don't have to know that many flags to play it, though, if you understand how countries in the different parts of the world tend to design them; for example, European flags are usually striped, African flags tend to be fancy, and Asian flags often have alot of solid-colored area... it sounds silly, but you'd be amazed at how many right answers I've gotten just with that. It also helps to know what countries control, or used to control, various other countries, particularly the islands, because that's often reflected in the flags; I was VERY pleased with myself for recognizing the flag for the Faroe Islands because I knew, having seen them on the geolocator and looked them up, that they're part of Denmark, and the flag is very similar to Denmark's. Even without being able to use any of those sorts of hints, though, you can still play if you've got a decent memory; with 60 flag displays per game, you can see them all pretty quickly, and each game you can learn a few more. Give it a try; go ahead, I'll wait.
Fun, isn't it? Sadly, getting it installed was FAR from fun. In the News section of the Neoworx site it says "You will find the HTML code in the Members Area," but my problems with doing things on that site continue (don't ask), because the darned thing would NOT let me log in; undeterred, I copied the code from the blog I'd seen it on, swapped in my own member #, and stuck it in my template. I republished, refreshed, and... where the game should have been was a 2nd copy of my "World Wide Clock."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!!
Since both of those things are iframes, I thought maybe they were confusing each other by being too close together, so I moved the game; no matter where I put it, it still ended up being the clock. I found out on a forum that you have to do something with the iframes to have more than 1 on a page at a time, but I didn't understand enough of the explanation to actually alter the code, so I consulted with "Jayson the Tech God," who'd given me the 1st iframe code (see my post of 11-20-05), and, after a couple of false starts, he came up with the idea of sticking "id="id1"" in one of the commands and "id="id2"" in the other, and it worked; the game was finally in my sidebar... well, mostly.
The problem with these free doodads is that there's no standard for whether or not they have imbedded line breaks before or after them, or as to how much space, if any, they pad themselves with, and there's something else going on that makes some of them REALLY not like to be next to each other, because they create a bunch of extra space between them; in other words, I had to do the usual trial and error to get the game spaced properly from the surrounding doodads... which was complicated in this case because the game is different sizes based on whether it's being played or not, and even on the names of the countries listed, and I had to recognize that, stop messing with it, and plan its placement based on its size in the reset position. There was an additional wrinkle, too; at one point, a sliver of the bottom of the box vanished; fortunately, I'd seen that once before, and knew that it meant that, although there didn't seem to be any overlap, there was an invisible margin from the doodad underneath it that WAS overlapping, and I needed to add another line break to fix it... I took what was undoubtedly an excessive amount of pride in how quickly I figured that one out.
So, at last, after more time and trouble than anyone who doesn't read this post will ever guess, I've got a cool sidebar game; I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.
Fun, isn't it? Sadly, getting it installed was FAR from fun. In the News section of the Neoworx site it says "You will find the HTML code in the Members Area," but my problems with doing things on that site continue (don't ask), because the darned thing would NOT let me log in; undeterred, I copied the code from the blog I'd seen it on, swapped in my own member #, and stuck it in my template. I republished, refreshed, and... where the game should have been was a 2nd copy of my "World Wide Clock."
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!!
Since both of those things are iframes, I thought maybe they were confusing each other by being too close together, so I moved the game; no matter where I put it, it still ended up being the clock. I found out on a forum that you have to do something with the iframes to have more than 1 on a page at a time, but I didn't understand enough of the explanation to actually alter the code, so I consulted with "Jayson the Tech God," who'd given me the 1st iframe code (see my post of 11-20-05), and, after a couple of false starts, he came up with the idea of sticking "id="id1"" in one of the commands and "id="id2"" in the other, and it worked; the game was finally in my sidebar... well, mostly.
The problem with these free doodads is that there's no standard for whether or not they have imbedded line breaks before or after them, or as to how much space, if any, they pad themselves with, and there's something else going on that makes some of them REALLY not like to be next to each other, because they create a bunch of extra space between them; in other words, I had to do the usual trial and error to get the game spaced properly from the surrounding doodads... which was complicated in this case because the game is different sizes based on whether it's being played or not, and even on the names of the countries listed, and I had to recognize that, stop messing with it, and plan its placement based on its size in the reset position. There was an additional wrinkle, too; at one point, a sliver of the bottom of the box vanished; fortunately, I'd seen that once before, and knew that it meant that, although there didn't seem to be any overlap, there was an invisible margin from the doodad underneath it that WAS overlapping, and I needed to add another line break to fix it... I took what was undoubtedly an excessive amount of pride in how quickly I figured that one out.
So, at last, after more time and trouble than anyone who doesn't read this post will ever guess, I've got a cool sidebar game; I hope you enjoy it half as much as I do.
Saturday, December 17, 2005
Recursive cursive
Can anyone give me a valid reason for why American kids still have to learn cursive, or why nearly everyone's signature is in cursive even though most of us don't use it for anything else? Why does cursive even still EXIST? What purpose does it serve? Can you write anything other than your signature in cursive without thinking about it? I can't. Even if I really try, I can't remember how to do capital Q's... and G's and Z's... and probably a few others. All I've used it for since whichever grade it was that they stopped requiring all writing to be in cursive is to sign "love" or "love always" and my name on cards, and of course to sign things; interestingly, while most people develop their own style of cursive writing, at the very least for their signatures, MY signature looks exactly the way it did in grade school (with the obvious exception of my having a different last name now, of course)... mine is the only adult signature I've ever seen that still looks like a kid's signature, so that probably means something, but I don't suppose I want to know what.
Cursive DOES seem to be fading away, but it's fighting to survive; just when I think I've seen the last of it, it reappears on a greeting card, or in a hard-to-read font (usually yellow on red or something equally eye-searing) on some teenager's blog, and my hopes of getting rid of it are crushed... maybe it's gotten so outdated that some people think it's cool? I hope not.
If you're from a culture that doesn't use cursive, or that doesn't use the Roman/Latin alphabet at all, I found a site that has a pic of one version of it
http://www.hwtears.com/cursivedeskstrips.htm
and a site that shows the fancier, older-school version of the capitals, complete with animated guides as to how to make them
http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/cursive/animation/uppercase.htm
so you can see how ridiculous it is... can you see any reason for the capital Q to look like a 2? No wonder I can't remember what it looks like!! It's silly to make kids who are still struggling with printing legibly learn a whole different way to write; I can see making older kids learn how to READ it, because they WILL see it periodically, but isn't there a better use of class time than this pitiful duplication of effort? Heck, today's kids will TYPE far, far more than they'll handwrite, so they should be having typing lessons instead of learning cursive... not that I'm holding my breath for American schools to ever show that much logic in the design of their curriculums.
The computer revolution may have an unintended benefit that I hadn't realized until now; it may speed up the elimination of cursive. I don't know if this thought makes anyone else happy... but *I* say good riddance.
Cursive DOES seem to be fading away, but it's fighting to survive; just when I think I've seen the last of it, it reappears on a greeting card, or in a hard-to-read font (usually yellow on red or something equally eye-searing) on some teenager's blog, and my hopes of getting rid of it are crushed... maybe it's gotten so outdated that some people think it's cool? I hope not.
If you're from a culture that doesn't use cursive, or that doesn't use the Roman/Latin alphabet at all, I found a site that has a pic of one version of it
http://www.hwtears.com/cursivedeskstrips.htm
and a site that shows the fancier, older-school version of the capitals, complete with animated guides as to how to make them
http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/cursive/animation/uppercase.htm
so you can see how ridiculous it is... can you see any reason for the capital Q to look like a 2? No wonder I can't remember what it looks like!! It's silly to make kids who are still struggling with printing legibly learn a whole different way to write; I can see making older kids learn how to READ it, because they WILL see it periodically, but isn't there a better use of class time than this pitiful duplication of effort? Heck, today's kids will TYPE far, far more than they'll handwrite, so they should be having typing lessons instead of learning cursive... not that I'm holding my breath for American schools to ever show that much logic in the design of their curriculums.
The computer revolution may have an unintended benefit that I hadn't realized until now; it may speed up the elimination of cursive. I don't know if this thought makes anyone else happy... but *I* say good riddance.
Friday, December 16, 2005
Race, religion, red hair, and medicine
From the January 2006 issue of Discover comes the following:
FDA Approves First Race-Based Drug
"The Food and Drug Administration's formal approval in June of BiDil, a medicine designed to treat heart failure in blacks, ignited a furious debate over the role of race in medicine. The Association of Black Cardiologists, a paid sponsor of the clinical trial, cheered the FDA's action. But the idea that a drug can be race based was roundly criticized by prominent medical researchers who argued that race is a crude and invalid scientific concept.
BiDil is derived from two generic compounds: hydralazine, an antihypertension drug, and isosorbide dinitrate, a blood vessel relaxant. The combination therapy was rejected by the FDA in 1997 because trials showed inconclusive benefits for patients overall. But Jay Cohn, the University of Minnesota cardiologist who developed the drug, had observed that BiDil appeared to be more effective for black patients. So he designed a study of 1,050 self-identified black patients and found in 2004 that the medication decreased their death rates by 43 percent. Cohn and his colleagues were taken aback by the negative reaction among sociologists, geneticists, and ethicists when the drug was approved. 'We thought they'd realize we've found an effective drug for treating an underserved group with a high mortality rate from heart disease,' Cohn says. 'We thought that would overwhelm the racial concerns.'"
I don't know which is more astonishing; that there's a clear racial difference in the effect of a drug, that someone was willing to fund that sort of research, of that anyone would DARE protest the discovery of a med that could save the lives of so many black men.... how is it racist to save lives, or to accept the incontrovertible fact that the med DOES discriminate by race?
"Critics contend that approving a drug for use only by blacks could be interpreted as validating a genetic basis to race that does not exist."
Could it be interpreted that way by people who are already racists? Sure. Does that in any way counteract the many lives that will be saved? Hell no.
"In recent years, researchers have identified subtle genetic differences between populations-such as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans-but these differences aren't as clearly defined as 'black' and 'white.' Even so, scientists hope to use these variations to understand why drugs have different effects in different people. It may be genetics. It may be environment (diet, exposure to pollutants) or sociological factors (access to good health care). Most likely it's a combination of all three. But one thing is clear: Race is defined by society, not by science."
Is it just me, or does that sound a little TOO PC? After all, with any other species of creature, if it has populations with even pretty darned minor differences in coloring or features, they're designated as different sub-species, with their own special scientific names... so why is it that the substantial differences in appearance between humans originating in disparate parts of the world are supposed to be ignored? Most people are PROUD of their racial heritage, and rightfully so as every race has many things to be proud OF, so why would anyone want to take that away by pretending that all those genetic differences are meaningless in humans and only humans?
No scientist would be insane enough to try to use medical data to "prove" that any race is superior or inferior to any other, and since we have eyes we already know that there are differences between the races that are obviously genetic and thus NOT created by society or environment, so what is there to worry about if we discover more ways that the races are different? Those who are trying to make an issue about this need to bring all such thoughts to a screeching halt and focus on the idea that we might be able to save more lives by seeing if other drugs have different effects in different sorts of people; it won't mean that some folks are better or worse than others, just that they'll vary in which drugs they'd benefit the most from... and doesn't everyone deserve the best possible treatment regardless of WHY it's best?
If you're thinking that this is a moot point because there's no reason to believe that there's any other connection between external physical features and anything else medical, check this out; in the November 2005 issue of Discover in the R&D section is "Secrets of Redheads," which makes these astonishing revelations:
"What do redheads have that the rest of us don't? Plenty, say scientists. Two recent studies:
Skin Cancer. Red hair often means light eyes, pale skin, and freckles-plus sunburns and a high incidence of skin cancer. Chemistry professor John Simon and his colleagues at Duke University believe that melanin, the pigment responsible for darkening skin in the baking sun, is more likely to kick-start DNA damage--and therefore cancer--in redheads than it is in black-haired people. The researchers compared the reaction of melanin in red hair and black hair to various wavelengths of ultraviolet light. They found that pigment isolated from red hair requires less energy to undergo the chemical reaction that produces the unstable, DNA-damaging free radicals linked to cancer. The melanin in black hair needs more energy to produce free radicals, reducing their damaging effects under normal atmospheric conditions.
Pain. Natural redheads have a higher pain threshold than others, says geneticist Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University's pain laboratory. Men and women with naturally red hair can withstand 25 percent more electric shock than non-redheads. And painkillers used in childbirth work three times better on red-haired women than on others. Mogil and his team found that the mutant gene that causes red hair, melanocortin-1 (MC1R), also affects how redheads (including mice) react to pain. Now geneticist Ian Jackson of the United Kingdom Medical Research Council plans to study redheads in the hope of developing new painkillers. Connecting the gene to pain was surprising and exciting, Jackson says. 'We thought that MC1R was involved only in hair color.'"
It's not so hard to imagine the existence of painkillers with fewer side effects (or other benefits over currently available kinds) that don't work well on the general population but that could get FDA approval just for use on redheads, is it?
And there's more; even things that aren't necessarily reflected in outward appearance, like religion or country of origin, can indicate that someone may have medically important genetic differences from the general population:
"Tay-Sachs disease (abbreviated TSD, also known as 'GM2 gangliosidosis') is a fatal genetic disorder... Historically, Eastern European people of Jewish descent have a high incidence of Tay-Sachs and other lipid storage diseases. In the United States, 1 in 27 Ashkenazi Jews is a recessive carrier, compared to 1 in 200 in the general population. French Canadians and the Cajun community of Louisiana have the same carrier rate as Ashkenazi Jews, one in 27, and among Irish Americans the carrier rate is about one in 50."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay-Sachs_disease
There's no proof yet that this sort of genetic difference would lead to differing reactions to drugs... but don't be surprised if it does.
In the bad old days, differences between people of different races, religions or countries of origin were seen as reasons to view others as inferior, and treat them in often appalling ways; I'm sure we're all in agreement that THAT must never happen again. BUT, we don't do anyone any favors by trying to ignore or deny that we look different because we come from different gene pools, or that those differing gene pools affect aspects of our health and the medical care that's best for us. There's no need to have philosophical arguments on what race is or isn't, or to debate the rightness of doing research that'll help those in one subset or another of the world's population get medical treatment that'll save their lives; all that should matter to the medical community is that they'll be better able to treat their patients... and that's all that should matter to the rest of us, too.
FDA Approves First Race-Based Drug
"The Food and Drug Administration's formal approval in June of BiDil, a medicine designed to treat heart failure in blacks, ignited a furious debate over the role of race in medicine. The Association of Black Cardiologists, a paid sponsor of the clinical trial, cheered the FDA's action. But the idea that a drug can be race based was roundly criticized by prominent medical researchers who argued that race is a crude and invalid scientific concept.
BiDil is derived from two generic compounds: hydralazine, an antihypertension drug, and isosorbide dinitrate, a blood vessel relaxant. The combination therapy was rejected by the FDA in 1997 because trials showed inconclusive benefits for patients overall. But Jay Cohn, the University of Minnesota cardiologist who developed the drug, had observed that BiDil appeared to be more effective for black patients. So he designed a study of 1,050 self-identified black patients and found in 2004 that the medication decreased their death rates by 43 percent. Cohn and his colleagues were taken aback by the negative reaction among sociologists, geneticists, and ethicists when the drug was approved. 'We thought they'd realize we've found an effective drug for treating an underserved group with a high mortality rate from heart disease,' Cohn says. 'We thought that would overwhelm the racial concerns.'"
I don't know which is more astonishing; that there's a clear racial difference in the effect of a drug, that someone was willing to fund that sort of research, of that anyone would DARE protest the discovery of a med that could save the lives of so many black men.... how is it racist to save lives, or to accept the incontrovertible fact that the med DOES discriminate by race?
"Critics contend that approving a drug for use only by blacks could be interpreted as validating a genetic basis to race that does not exist."
Could it be interpreted that way by people who are already racists? Sure. Does that in any way counteract the many lives that will be saved? Hell no.
"In recent years, researchers have identified subtle genetic differences between populations-such as Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans-but these differences aren't as clearly defined as 'black' and 'white.' Even so, scientists hope to use these variations to understand why drugs have different effects in different people. It may be genetics. It may be environment (diet, exposure to pollutants) or sociological factors (access to good health care). Most likely it's a combination of all three. But one thing is clear: Race is defined by society, not by science."
Is it just me, or does that sound a little TOO PC? After all, with any other species of creature, if it has populations with even pretty darned minor differences in coloring or features, they're designated as different sub-species, with their own special scientific names... so why is it that the substantial differences in appearance between humans originating in disparate parts of the world are supposed to be ignored? Most people are PROUD of their racial heritage, and rightfully so as every race has many things to be proud OF, so why would anyone want to take that away by pretending that all those genetic differences are meaningless in humans and only humans?
No scientist would be insane enough to try to use medical data to "prove" that any race is superior or inferior to any other, and since we have eyes we already know that there are differences between the races that are obviously genetic and thus NOT created by society or environment, so what is there to worry about if we discover more ways that the races are different? Those who are trying to make an issue about this need to bring all such thoughts to a screeching halt and focus on the idea that we might be able to save more lives by seeing if other drugs have different effects in different sorts of people; it won't mean that some folks are better or worse than others, just that they'll vary in which drugs they'd benefit the most from... and doesn't everyone deserve the best possible treatment regardless of WHY it's best?
If you're thinking that this is a moot point because there's no reason to believe that there's any other connection between external physical features and anything else medical, check this out; in the November 2005 issue of Discover in the R&D section is "Secrets of Redheads," which makes these astonishing revelations:
"What do redheads have that the rest of us don't? Plenty, say scientists. Two recent studies:
Skin Cancer. Red hair often means light eyes, pale skin, and freckles-plus sunburns and a high incidence of skin cancer. Chemistry professor John Simon and his colleagues at Duke University believe that melanin, the pigment responsible for darkening skin in the baking sun, is more likely to kick-start DNA damage--and therefore cancer--in redheads than it is in black-haired people. The researchers compared the reaction of melanin in red hair and black hair to various wavelengths of ultraviolet light. They found that pigment isolated from red hair requires less energy to undergo the chemical reaction that produces the unstable, DNA-damaging free radicals linked to cancer. The melanin in black hair needs more energy to produce free radicals, reducing their damaging effects under normal atmospheric conditions.
Pain. Natural redheads have a higher pain threshold than others, says geneticist Jeffrey Mogil of McGill University's pain laboratory. Men and women with naturally red hair can withstand 25 percent more electric shock than non-redheads. And painkillers used in childbirth work three times better on red-haired women than on others. Mogil and his team found that the mutant gene that causes red hair, melanocortin-1 (MC1R), also affects how redheads (including mice) react to pain. Now geneticist Ian Jackson of the United Kingdom Medical Research Council plans to study redheads in the hope of developing new painkillers. Connecting the gene to pain was surprising and exciting, Jackson says. 'We thought that MC1R was involved only in hair color.'"
It's not so hard to imagine the existence of painkillers with fewer side effects (or other benefits over currently available kinds) that don't work well on the general population but that could get FDA approval just for use on redheads, is it?
And there's more; even things that aren't necessarily reflected in outward appearance, like religion or country of origin, can indicate that someone may have medically important genetic differences from the general population:
"Tay-Sachs disease (abbreviated TSD, also known as 'GM2 gangliosidosis') is a fatal genetic disorder... Historically, Eastern European people of Jewish descent have a high incidence of Tay-Sachs and other lipid storage diseases. In the United States, 1 in 27 Ashkenazi Jews is a recessive carrier, compared to 1 in 200 in the general population. French Canadians and the Cajun community of Louisiana have the same carrier rate as Ashkenazi Jews, one in 27, and among Irish Americans the carrier rate is about one in 50."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay-Sachs_disease
There's no proof yet that this sort of genetic difference would lead to differing reactions to drugs... but don't be surprised if it does.
In the bad old days, differences between people of different races, religions or countries of origin were seen as reasons to view others as inferior, and treat them in often appalling ways; I'm sure we're all in agreement that THAT must never happen again. BUT, we don't do anyone any favors by trying to ignore or deny that we look different because we come from different gene pools, or that those differing gene pools affect aspects of our health and the medical care that's best for us. There's no need to have philosophical arguments on what race is or isn't, or to debate the rightness of doing research that'll help those in one subset or another of the world's population get medical treatment that'll save their lives; all that should matter to the medical community is that they'll be better able to treat their patients... and that's all that should matter to the rest of us, too.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
A couple of things about my husband
Time and time again, when I'm having problems with some electronic thing, my husband will show up and press the same button, click the same control, that I've already done 500 times, and it'll suddenly WORK; more astoundingly, he can often just come into the room and approach the recalcitrant machine, and it'll start working. He always jokes "machines fear me, because they've heard from the others about how I take them apart and don't always get them put back together right," or something similar; there's a limited # of times that something that freaky can be funny, though... it's long since switched to being eerie, especially because it's happened over and over and OVER, far beyond what could be seen as coincidence-how many times could something "coincidentally" start working the instant he shows up, right?
Yesterday, I was having problems with the mp3 player on my laptop; I tried every song in the player, and none of them would play, and I tried all the files, which should have opened in the player, and none of THEM worked either... and I tried them repeatedly for about an hour without success. When my husband got up from his nap and stumbled in, and I told him that the player seemed dead, he clicked a song... and it played. Every song, every file, that he clicked on played... and I don't mean that he changed settings or fixed something and they played, I mean he reached over my shoulder and clicked exactly where I'd been clicking.
Today, I was half-watching a comedy thing while doing eBay searches when I noticed that the image had frozen on the TV screen; I figured I'd give it a few minutes to sort itself out and went back to my search. Eventually, I realized that 15 minutes had passed, so I yelled for my husband; while he was taking his sweet time prying himself away from his computer and walking down the hall, I was switching through a bunch of stations, and they all showed a BLANK screen, including the original one when I got back to it. When he emerged from the hall, he turned to the TV... and the picture INSTANTLY came back on. I was screaming, he was laughing... and then he chalked it up to coincidence. {sigh}
A few days ago, I saw the movie "Head Over Heels" (aka "Chilly Scenes of Winter")
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079278/
which shows a couple getting involved, and then the man becomes significantly more in love, and the woman withdraws, eventually going back to her estranged husband; when he asks her why she'd want to be with the man who loves her less rather than the one who loves her more, she says something like "Because with him I feel like less of a fraud." WOW!! I've read alot of explanations as to why people tend to fall out of love with those who love them "too much," but this was a new one, and it had the ring of truth; my own reaction when men have had too exalted of a view of me has been to think disgustedly "You must be confusing me with someone else, because when you talk about me it doesn't sound like you're describing me," and I've certainly heard other people talk with dismay about the unrealistic view a partner has of them, making them think they're not being understood, or that they can't live up to it, etc, and people who have major success at work sometimes talk about how they feel like frauds, so it's not much of a jump to see that someone who's having too much success in getting their loved one to admire them might feel like a fraud... and once they start feeling uncomfortable, the passion would usually fade away fast.
I hasten to add that, unlike most folks, when I'M on the receiving end of partner worship, although I take a dim view of their unrealistic perceptions (people showing illogic and ignoring facts always aggravate me), I do NOT lose interest; instead, I think "This is a great deal!!" and become MORE interested, because the whole POINT of a relationship is to be deeply loved... and there are plenty of benefits to being with someone who thinks you should have everything. There's no trick to making this work; I just never get the discomfort that a "normal" person feels under those circumstances... for which my husband is profoundly grateful. :-)
Yesterday, I was having problems with the mp3 player on my laptop; I tried every song in the player, and none of them would play, and I tried all the files, which should have opened in the player, and none of THEM worked either... and I tried them repeatedly for about an hour without success. When my husband got up from his nap and stumbled in, and I told him that the player seemed dead, he clicked a song... and it played. Every song, every file, that he clicked on played... and I don't mean that he changed settings or fixed something and they played, I mean he reached over my shoulder and clicked exactly where I'd been clicking.
Today, I was half-watching a comedy thing while doing eBay searches when I noticed that the image had frozen on the TV screen; I figured I'd give it a few minutes to sort itself out and went back to my search. Eventually, I realized that 15 minutes had passed, so I yelled for my husband; while he was taking his sweet time prying himself away from his computer and walking down the hall, I was switching through a bunch of stations, and they all showed a BLANK screen, including the original one when I got back to it. When he emerged from the hall, he turned to the TV... and the picture INSTANTLY came back on. I was screaming, he was laughing... and then he chalked it up to coincidence. {sigh}
A few days ago, I saw the movie "Head Over Heels" (aka "Chilly Scenes of Winter")
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079278/
which shows a couple getting involved, and then the man becomes significantly more in love, and the woman withdraws, eventually going back to her estranged husband; when he asks her why she'd want to be with the man who loves her less rather than the one who loves her more, she says something like "Because with him I feel like less of a fraud." WOW!! I've read alot of explanations as to why people tend to fall out of love with those who love them "too much," but this was a new one, and it had the ring of truth; my own reaction when men have had too exalted of a view of me has been to think disgustedly "You must be confusing me with someone else, because when you talk about me it doesn't sound like you're describing me," and I've certainly heard other people talk with dismay about the unrealistic view a partner has of them, making them think they're not being understood, or that they can't live up to it, etc, and people who have major success at work sometimes talk about how they feel like frauds, so it's not much of a jump to see that someone who's having too much success in getting their loved one to admire them might feel like a fraud... and once they start feeling uncomfortable, the passion would usually fade away fast.
I hasten to add that, unlike most folks, when I'M on the receiving end of partner worship, although I take a dim view of their unrealistic perceptions (people showing illogic and ignoring facts always aggravate me), I do NOT lose interest; instead, I think "This is a great deal!!" and become MORE interested, because the whole POINT of a relationship is to be deeply loved... and there are plenty of benefits to being with someone who thinks you should have everything. There's no trick to making this work; I just never get the discomfort that a "normal" person feels under those circumstances... for which my husband is profoundly grateful. :-)
Wednesday, December 14, 2005
When is meat really meat?
In the January 2006 issue of Discover is a blurb entitled "Tissue Engineers Cook Up Plan for Lab-Grown Meat"... isn't that a contradiction in terms? The dictionary says that meat is "the edible flesh of animals," so could something grown in a lab as opposed to in a creature's muscles qualify? Read on and see what you think:
"Last June, in a paper published in the journal Tissue Engineering, an international team of researchers proposed a new kind of food handmade for sensitive carnivores (and maybe even vegetarians): meat that comes from a laboratory instead of a farm."
They make the point so briefly that it almost gets lost, but I think it's a big one; WOULD those vegetarians who've made that choice on moral grounds, because animals must die in order to be eaten, be willing to eat something that animals did NOT die to provide?
"Clinical research scientists routinely grow muscle cells in the lab. And NASA-funded experiments have succeeded in culturing turkey muscle cells and goldfish cells as a potential way to feed astronauts on long space missions."
They want to feed astronauts GOLDFISH?!! I know that NASA has a tight budget, but...?!!
"Jason Matheny, a graduate student in agricultural economics and public health at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues turned this scheme earthward, proposing two methods for growing meat in bulk. One would culture thin sheets of meat, seeded by cells from a living animal, on a reusable polymer scaffold; the other would grow meat on small edible beads that stretch with changes in temperature."
I'm sure this would be a sterile process, certainly far more so than what occurs in a slaughterhouse, but... doesn't that sound sorta icky?
"Currently the process is far too expensive to bring lab-grown meat to the supermarket. A tasty fake steak is an even more distant dream: To have the structure of filet mignon, muscle tissue needs blood vessels, a major challenge to tissue engineers."
BLOOD VESSELS?!! I love meat, and it's part of our natural diet, and hard to get proper nutrition without, but... ugh. I hope they hurry up with those lab-produced steaks, or pseudo-steaks, or whatever they end up calling them; I'm definitely a "sensitive carnivore."
"Still, Matheny says that within several years, lab meat could be used in Spam, sausage, and even chicken nuggets."
Given how little those things resemble meat in the usual sense, it shouldn't be too hard to fake them with the "meat sheets"; heck, considering all the icky stuff that goes into those particular food items to save $, if they could use cheap lab-made "meat" instead, we'd have alot less fat, skin and beaks in our diets.
"Europe has taken an interest. The Dutch government has invested $2.4 million in a project that would cultivate pork from stem cells."
Hasn't there been alot of protest in Europe about so-called frankenfoods? There's no talk about genetically altering the meat cells, at least not YET, but couldn't a case be made that making the cells grow in such an unnatural way might cause... problems? I'd drop dead of shock if SOMEONE didn't end up protesting this; time will tell.
"But will people eat it? Matheny thinks so. 'There's nothing natural about a chicken that's given growth promoters and raised in a shed with 10,000 others,' he says. 'As consumers become educated, a product like this would gain appeal.'"
What planet does this guy come from, where consumers can be EDUCATED, and would act on education if they could be given it? If they tell consumers that the lab-meat is lower in calories, or lower in fat (would there even BE fat in it... they didn't say anything about culturing fat cells to mix in), or carb-free, or has 1 chance in a billion of reducing the risk of cancer, people will stampede to buy it... other than that, their best bet is to just stick it in, quietly reveal it in the ingredients list and leave it at that, so people can't be put off by it.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like there's going to be a big battle about what to call this stuff; meat isn't just a blob of meat cells, it has structure because the cells are part of muscles, which exist in fibers and have blood vessels (cringe), and usually have fat distributed through them... if you created potato starch from scratch in a lab, you couldn't call it a potato, so why should this be different? Heck, if you created something identical to a potato from scratch in a lab, don't you think you'd have to call it by something different so that consumers could tell it from a naturally-grown potato?
If they eventually make lab-meat look, smell, feel and taste like real meat, would it be a valid substitute for meat? Sure, at least for MY purposes... but would any significant % of other people be willing to make the switch? And, would its being identical to meat mean that vegetarians still wouldn't eat it, or will they embrace it because nothing died to make it other than in the way that ALL foods are made from cells that were once living? Hopefully, some vegetarian and vegan bloggers will eventually weigh in on this issue; I don't fully understand their mindset, so I can't guess what they'll do.
Even if they can't make a perfect match to meat, we have to accept that we're over-fishing in too many places, we're keeping chickens and veal calves in conditions too horrible to describe, and in general that it's a nice idea to stop killing animals for food if it can be reasonably avoided, so we should probably incorporate as much pseudo-meat into our diets as possible once it's available; it'd have to be good karma, too, and that couldn't hurt.
My final thought on this topic is of the horror-movie variety, brought on perhaps by having been deeply affected by "Soylent Green"; what happens when HUMAN cells get onto those meat-growing scaffolds, either accidentally or on purpose?
"Last June, in a paper published in the journal Tissue Engineering, an international team of researchers proposed a new kind of food handmade for sensitive carnivores (and maybe even vegetarians): meat that comes from a laboratory instead of a farm."
They make the point so briefly that it almost gets lost, but I think it's a big one; WOULD those vegetarians who've made that choice on moral grounds, because animals must die in order to be eaten, be willing to eat something that animals did NOT die to provide?
"Clinical research scientists routinely grow muscle cells in the lab. And NASA-funded experiments have succeeded in culturing turkey muscle cells and goldfish cells as a potential way to feed astronauts on long space missions."
They want to feed astronauts GOLDFISH?!! I know that NASA has a tight budget, but...?!!
"Jason Matheny, a graduate student in agricultural economics and public health at the University of Maryland, and his colleagues turned this scheme earthward, proposing two methods for growing meat in bulk. One would culture thin sheets of meat, seeded by cells from a living animal, on a reusable polymer scaffold; the other would grow meat on small edible beads that stretch with changes in temperature."
I'm sure this would be a sterile process, certainly far more so than what occurs in a slaughterhouse, but... doesn't that sound sorta icky?
"Currently the process is far too expensive to bring lab-grown meat to the supermarket. A tasty fake steak is an even more distant dream: To have the structure of filet mignon, muscle tissue needs blood vessels, a major challenge to tissue engineers."
BLOOD VESSELS?!! I love meat, and it's part of our natural diet, and hard to get proper nutrition without, but... ugh. I hope they hurry up with those lab-produced steaks, or pseudo-steaks, or whatever they end up calling them; I'm definitely a "sensitive carnivore."
"Still, Matheny says that within several years, lab meat could be used in Spam, sausage, and even chicken nuggets."
Given how little those things resemble meat in the usual sense, it shouldn't be too hard to fake them with the "meat sheets"; heck, considering all the icky stuff that goes into those particular food items to save $, if they could use cheap lab-made "meat" instead, we'd have alot less fat, skin and beaks in our diets.
"Europe has taken an interest. The Dutch government has invested $2.4 million in a project that would cultivate pork from stem cells."
Hasn't there been alot of protest in Europe about so-called frankenfoods? There's no talk about genetically altering the meat cells, at least not YET, but couldn't a case be made that making the cells grow in such an unnatural way might cause... problems? I'd drop dead of shock if SOMEONE didn't end up protesting this; time will tell.
"But will people eat it? Matheny thinks so. 'There's nothing natural about a chicken that's given growth promoters and raised in a shed with 10,000 others,' he says. 'As consumers become educated, a product like this would gain appeal.'"
What planet does this guy come from, where consumers can be EDUCATED, and would act on education if they could be given it? If they tell consumers that the lab-meat is lower in calories, or lower in fat (would there even BE fat in it... they didn't say anything about culturing fat cells to mix in), or carb-free, or has 1 chance in a billion of reducing the risk of cancer, people will stampede to buy it... other than that, their best bet is to just stick it in, quietly reveal it in the ingredients list and leave it at that, so people can't be put off by it.
The more I think about it, the more it seems like there's going to be a big battle about what to call this stuff; meat isn't just a blob of meat cells, it has structure because the cells are part of muscles, which exist in fibers and have blood vessels (cringe), and usually have fat distributed through them... if you created potato starch from scratch in a lab, you couldn't call it a potato, so why should this be different? Heck, if you created something identical to a potato from scratch in a lab, don't you think you'd have to call it by something different so that consumers could tell it from a naturally-grown potato?
If they eventually make lab-meat look, smell, feel and taste like real meat, would it be a valid substitute for meat? Sure, at least for MY purposes... but would any significant % of other people be willing to make the switch? And, would its being identical to meat mean that vegetarians still wouldn't eat it, or will they embrace it because nothing died to make it other than in the way that ALL foods are made from cells that were once living? Hopefully, some vegetarian and vegan bloggers will eventually weigh in on this issue; I don't fully understand their mindset, so I can't guess what they'll do.
Even if they can't make a perfect match to meat, we have to accept that we're over-fishing in too many places, we're keeping chickens and veal calves in conditions too horrible to describe, and in general that it's a nice idea to stop killing animals for food if it can be reasonably avoided, so we should probably incorporate as much pseudo-meat into our diets as possible once it's available; it'd have to be good karma, too, and that couldn't hurt.
My final thought on this topic is of the horror-movie variety, brought on perhaps by having been deeply affected by "Soylent Green"; what happens when HUMAN cells get onto those meat-growing scaffolds, either accidentally or on purpose?
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
You've never heard of it...
... but you've gotta see it.
I saw the most astonishing documentary tonight; it's called "Paper Clips"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=152748&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
which is described as
"Directed by Joe Fab, this documentary chronicles a rural Tennessee middle school's unique class project: finding a meaningful way to honor Holocaust victims. Brought up in a heavily fundamentalist Christian environment, most of the students had never seen, let alone spoken with, a member of the Jewish faith; nonetheless, the children of Whitwell found a poignant method of honoring the slain. Using individual paper clips to represent each life lost in the Holocaust, the students were inundated with contributions from around the world. Eventually, they managed to procure an authentic German rail car, which would become container to the millions of paper clips collected."
No plot outline can capture what made this such a powerful thing to watch, though; what moved me to tears over and over again were the faces of the people involved... children, adults, female, male, Christian and Jewish, every person involved was obviously deeply moved by the connection that was being made, to the past and to each other.
When the Holocaust survivors arrived at a gathering of the townspeople, they looked understandably uncertain of what they'd gotten themselves into, since many such towns are full of anti-Semites, and their hosts weren't sure what to expect either... but then the magic that often occurs when people who think of each other in terms of "us" and "them" get to interact started happening-they began to empathize, and to see each other as human, as being part of "us."
Each survivor stood up and told their story, and their Christian audience listened with rapt attention, and with every sign of grief and dismay, as they tried to take in the enormity of the suffering, and as that suffering went from being abstract to being about people right in front of them; when it was over, these folks who'd never even met a Jew before hugged them and wept. Interviews with some of the teens revealed that they saw those sweet, elderly people as being like their own grandparents, and that they were trying to imagine what it felt like to endure what they did, how they would feel if it were they, and their families, who were the ones who were taken from their homes, shipped in cattle cars, beaten, starved, tortured and murdered, if it was them who lost all their loved ones... they no longer saw Jews as some sort of unimaginable others, but as people just like them.
One of the stories keeps playing in my head, so I'll include it as an example: One of the men who spoke, who was a boy at the time of the Holocaust, was brought to Auschwitz along with his mother and brother, where they encountered the unspeakably evil Dr. Mengele, who sent the boy off in one direction and his mother and brother in the other; the next day, when he still hadn't been reunited with his family, the boy asked a guard what had become of them... and in reply, the guard pointed to the smoke coming from the chimneys. The boy didn't know what that meant, but he soon found out; Mengele decided who would be allowed to live, to work and serve as the subjects of his sadistic experiments, and who would go to the gas chambers, and the boy's family hadn't made the cut.
The entire documentary is deeply moving, not just that one part, and it's fascinating to see how what started out as a way for the children to be taught that "not everyone is white, Protestant, and living in a community where they're protected" turned into a global thing, such that they didn't get the 6 million paper clips they'd hoped for but nearly 5 times that many, plus a library's worth of letters telling the tales of thousands of people's experiences and those of their families, plus, miraculously, the rail car that would become a shrine of sorts... and the way both Jews and Christians were overwhelmed at the sight of it, and by touching it and standing in it, was the other intensely emotional segment of the movie for me.
I don't have anything clever to say about what I saw, and won't cheapen it by analyzing it; like all shining examples of how wonderful human beings can sometimes be, it speaks for itself. I strongly encourage you to watch it; it's currently showing on HBO, and can be rented from Blockbuster and probably other places as well... and as painful as some of it is, it'll leave you with a renewed sense of hope that people of differing religions CAN come to see each other with understanding and love rather than what human history is full of.
I saw the most astonishing documentary tonight; it's called "Paper Clips"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?movieID=152748&channel=Movies&subChannel=sub#Cast
which is described as
"Directed by Joe Fab, this documentary chronicles a rural Tennessee middle school's unique class project: finding a meaningful way to honor Holocaust victims. Brought up in a heavily fundamentalist Christian environment, most of the students had never seen, let alone spoken with, a member of the Jewish faith; nonetheless, the children of Whitwell found a poignant method of honoring the slain. Using individual paper clips to represent each life lost in the Holocaust, the students were inundated with contributions from around the world. Eventually, they managed to procure an authentic German rail car, which would become container to the millions of paper clips collected."
No plot outline can capture what made this such a powerful thing to watch, though; what moved me to tears over and over again were the faces of the people involved... children, adults, female, male, Christian and Jewish, every person involved was obviously deeply moved by the connection that was being made, to the past and to each other.
When the Holocaust survivors arrived at a gathering of the townspeople, they looked understandably uncertain of what they'd gotten themselves into, since many such towns are full of anti-Semites, and their hosts weren't sure what to expect either... but then the magic that often occurs when people who think of each other in terms of "us" and "them" get to interact started happening-they began to empathize, and to see each other as human, as being part of "us."
Each survivor stood up and told their story, and their Christian audience listened with rapt attention, and with every sign of grief and dismay, as they tried to take in the enormity of the suffering, and as that suffering went from being abstract to being about people right in front of them; when it was over, these folks who'd never even met a Jew before hugged them and wept. Interviews with some of the teens revealed that they saw those sweet, elderly people as being like their own grandparents, and that they were trying to imagine what it felt like to endure what they did, how they would feel if it were they, and their families, who were the ones who were taken from their homes, shipped in cattle cars, beaten, starved, tortured and murdered, if it was them who lost all their loved ones... they no longer saw Jews as some sort of unimaginable others, but as people just like them.
One of the stories keeps playing in my head, so I'll include it as an example: One of the men who spoke, who was a boy at the time of the Holocaust, was brought to Auschwitz along with his mother and brother, where they encountered the unspeakably evil Dr. Mengele, who sent the boy off in one direction and his mother and brother in the other; the next day, when he still hadn't been reunited with his family, the boy asked a guard what had become of them... and in reply, the guard pointed to the smoke coming from the chimneys. The boy didn't know what that meant, but he soon found out; Mengele decided who would be allowed to live, to work and serve as the subjects of his sadistic experiments, and who would go to the gas chambers, and the boy's family hadn't made the cut.
The entire documentary is deeply moving, not just that one part, and it's fascinating to see how what started out as a way for the children to be taught that "not everyone is white, Protestant, and living in a community where they're protected" turned into a global thing, such that they didn't get the 6 million paper clips they'd hoped for but nearly 5 times that many, plus a library's worth of letters telling the tales of thousands of people's experiences and those of their families, plus, miraculously, the rail car that would become a shrine of sorts... and the way both Jews and Christians were overwhelmed at the sight of it, and by touching it and standing in it, was the other intensely emotional segment of the movie for me.
I don't have anything clever to say about what I saw, and won't cheapen it by analyzing it; like all shining examples of how wonderful human beings can sometimes be, it speaks for itself. I strongly encourage you to watch it; it's currently showing on HBO, and can be rented from Blockbuster and probably other places as well... and as painful as some of it is, it'll leave you with a renewed sense of hope that people of differing religions CAN come to see each other with understanding and love rather than what human history is full of.
Monday, December 12, 2005
Sunday stuff
Joel Osteen's sermon tonight contained an interesting idea; that God wants you to walk away from all the negative influences in your life before He'll give you the good things He has waiting for you... and He really means ALL the negative influences. Osteen told the Biblical story about how Abram took his nephew Lot, who he knew to be a potential source of trouble, along when he moved when he wasn't supposed to, and thus had troubles, and didn't get the goodies, until Lot was out of the picture, to illustrate that if you fail in the task of rejecting ALL negatives, even to the seemingly forgivable extent of keeping a loved one around who's a bad influence, you'll be out of luck; that's pretty intense, if true. The question this brings up is; granted that the presence of negative energy blocks positive energy from getting to you, does that mean that ANY negative energy, even the tiniest source, is sufficient to block positive energy? If so, what does that say about the power of - vs + ? OR, would it just mean that you can only fully be open to one state or the other, and if you embrace eve the slightest -, your mind isn't receptive to +? Joel may be wrong about this one (conceptually-I wouldn't presume to debate him about the intentions of a God I don't believe in)... but he's usually so dead-on about spiritual matters that it bears thinking about rather than dismissing out of hand.
In case you're wondering; NO, the tree did NOT go up, despite all promises to the contrary. My husband, like all little kids regardless of age, needed a nap, and he never got back up from it; although I could have tried to drag him out of bed, he'd be stumbling around groggy and complaining and not accomplish anything, and then complain he couldn't get back to sleep and so would supposedly be too tired to do anything TOMORROW, either. He managed to procrastinate away another day, but he's getting LOTS of sleep, so Monday night he'd better knuckle down and get to work OR ELSE.
I took a potty break after writing that last paragraph, and when I passed the closed door of my husband's study, where he'd retreated to nap, I heard... TYPING. I flung open the door, and there he was in the dark, in his boxers, typing madly away; when I shrieked in accusation, he claimed that he'd "only" been awake for 15 minutes (translation-over an hour), and that it was somehow ok, because he was going to have to leave the room to pee soon... in other words, he ADMITTED that he was trying to feign still being asleep as long as possible to avoid getting any work done. As you might imagine, I had a few words to say to him on the subject, many of which had 4 letters; he's going to find that his life isn't worth living tomorrow until that tree is UP.
Men, especially those who are squeamish about female bodily functions, will want to skip the rest of this post.
One of the greatest strides in making women's lives easier in modern times was the mass production of various products to deal with menstruation, as a replacement for the handmade wads of absorbent material that had served that purpose since the earliest days of civilization; instead of handling a bunch of bloody rags (or whatever) each month, a woman could use disposable products just like we have for our other excretory functions. The pendulum is swinging back, however, as it always does, and now there's a company that's marketing CLOTH alternatives to sanitary napkins, and sea sponges, I kid you not, as an alternative to tampons:
http://www.lunapads.com/home.php
They've done some commendable things on this site; they show photos of real women, including an older one and a couple of women of color, they show a woman's body that has a poochy tummy modeling a pair of their panties, which are available in black or organic cotton, and in various styles including THONG, their pads and liners come in a variety of cheerful colors and patterns... but... but... IT'S JUST SO DISGUSTING!! They warn that having to change protection in public bathrooms might be problematic, because "some" women might object to seeing and/or to having young girls seeing these blood-soaked nightmares being washed out in the sink; I personally wouldn't object, because I'd be too busy PUKING in the neighboring sink.
Yeah, I understand that feminine care products end up in sewers and landfills, but so do tissues and toilet paper, and I don't want to see cloth versions of THOSE things being washed out in front of me either, nor would I touch them with a 10 foot pole myself; still, if you're a very green and crunchy-granola kinda gal, by all means check them out... just PLEASE don't blog about your experiences if you get them.
In case you're wondering; NO, the tree did NOT go up, despite all promises to the contrary. My husband, like all little kids regardless of age, needed a nap, and he never got back up from it; although I could have tried to drag him out of bed, he'd be stumbling around groggy and complaining and not accomplish anything, and then complain he couldn't get back to sleep and so would supposedly be too tired to do anything TOMORROW, either. He managed to procrastinate away another day, but he's getting LOTS of sleep, so Monday night he'd better knuckle down and get to work OR ELSE.
I took a potty break after writing that last paragraph, and when I passed the closed door of my husband's study, where he'd retreated to nap, I heard... TYPING. I flung open the door, and there he was in the dark, in his boxers, typing madly away; when I shrieked in accusation, he claimed that he'd "only" been awake for 15 minutes (translation-over an hour), and that it was somehow ok, because he was going to have to leave the room to pee soon... in other words, he ADMITTED that he was trying to feign still being asleep as long as possible to avoid getting any work done. As you might imagine, I had a few words to say to him on the subject, many of which had 4 letters; he's going to find that his life isn't worth living tomorrow until that tree is UP.
Men, especially those who are squeamish about female bodily functions, will want to skip the rest of this post.
One of the greatest strides in making women's lives easier in modern times was the mass production of various products to deal with menstruation, as a replacement for the handmade wads of absorbent material that had served that purpose since the earliest days of civilization; instead of handling a bunch of bloody rags (or whatever) each month, a woman could use disposable products just like we have for our other excretory functions. The pendulum is swinging back, however, as it always does, and now there's a company that's marketing CLOTH alternatives to sanitary napkins, and sea sponges, I kid you not, as an alternative to tampons:
http://www.lunapads.com/home.php
They've done some commendable things on this site; they show photos of real women, including an older one and a couple of women of color, they show a woman's body that has a poochy tummy modeling a pair of their panties, which are available in black or organic cotton, and in various styles including THONG, their pads and liners come in a variety of cheerful colors and patterns... but... but... IT'S JUST SO DISGUSTING!! They warn that having to change protection in public bathrooms might be problematic, because "some" women might object to seeing and/or to having young girls seeing these blood-soaked nightmares being washed out in the sink; I personally wouldn't object, because I'd be too busy PUKING in the neighboring sink.
Yeah, I understand that feminine care products end up in sewers and landfills, but so do tissues and toilet paper, and I don't want to see cloth versions of THOSE things being washed out in front of me either, nor would I touch them with a 10 foot pole myself; still, if you're a very green and crunchy-granola kinda gal, by all means check them out... just PLEASE don't blog about your experiences if you get them.
Sunday, December 11, 2005
Christmas cards and Criss Angel
One of the least pleasant aspects of the holiday season for me is doing the Christmas cards. I take a dim view of cards in general, since in the 21st century most of us have access to email and free or low-cost long distance minutes, which are quick, easy and cheap ways to contact people; it was nice to send cards back in the days when mail was the only way, or only affordable way, to keep in touch with distant loved and liked ones, but why do we STILL have to dig through gigantic racks of folded pieces of paper and spend $3 apiece so we can send people sentiments written by a stranger? If we're seeing them in person or talking to them on the phone, we can give our true sentiments to them directly, and if it's not possible to see or call them, we should write out our OWN thoughts and feelings rather than buying other people's... wouldn't YOU rather get a heartfelt seasonal note, paper or electronic, than a factory-made card with a factory-made message?
This bit of sending cards when it's been DECADES since phone calls have been too expensive to do except on extra-special occasions is ridiculous... and don't get me started on the insanity of the concept of sending cards to people you don't care enough about to contact at any other time of the year (see my post of 12-12-04 for my rant about that one). Still, if you don't send them you can hurt people's feelings, so I do it, but I take a minimalist approach; I only send cards to those who've sent ME one, I don't write a note, and I absolutely under no circumstances enclose a LETTER... who's the psycho who thought of that one, and why did anyone else start doing it? If you're in regular contact with a person, they already know everything that'd be in the "Christmas letter," so it's silly to send them one, and if you're NOT in regular contact with them, I guarantee you they have no shred of interest in seeing a summation of the "accomplishments" (most of which are woefully trivial to outsiders) of every member of your household for the year, and why would you WANT to tell them so much about your life in any case?
My final comment on the subject; unless you're desperately poor, don't send flimsy little dime-store cards, and DO get Christmas stamps, nice return address labels, and maybe even seals... if the idea is to spread a little joy, make a valid effort at it. As Scrooge-ish as I may sound on this subject, *I* do all that, and even use a red pen to write out the envelopes and sign our names... but, I also have a stash of freebie cards provided by the many charities we support to send to those who send ME tacky cards-hey, if they send 'em out, they must think they're great, right? If you don't have the time to do it properly yourself, Hallmark lets you pick out cards online, and will add your personal message to each one and mail them out for you... all you have to do is give them the necessary info, and be willing to pay $1 per card for the privilege
http://www.hallmark.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10051&tabOn=products&categoryId=89054&CatIDsList=-2;-105367;89054
If they ever invent a way to make Christmas cards more impersonal than THAT, I don't want to know about it.
And now to a more pleasant subject; world-class illusionist, Renaissance man, and uber-hottie Criss Angel
http://www.crissangel.com/photos.php
This was a banner day, because I finally got my DVD set of the 1st season of "Mindfreak"; my husband's comment about it was, "Is your entire blog entry for today going to consist of 'Criss Angel... oooooooooooooh... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah'?". No, but I WILL point out how nice it is to be able to pause and zoom in whenever he's got his shirt off; now, if he'd only stop shaving his chest!! I watched the 1st DVD while I was doing the Christmas cards, and it made an onerous task much more agreeable; if, as I fervently hope, we get the tree up tomorrow (not the decorations, mind you, just the tree and maybe the lights and tinsel garlands), that'll be when I watch the 2nd disc.
The Christmas tree... it was supposed to have gone up over the Thanksgiving weekend, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. My husband dragged his heels so badly LAST year with hauling out the boxes that the tree wasn't finished until Christmas morning, and our many other decorative items never got brought out at all, which made for a VERY unhappy holiday; cross your fingers for me that THIS year I can maintain the momentum I started with the cards and get the tree process begun so it can all be finished well before Christmas... and who knows, I may even find time for mistletoe.
This bit of sending cards when it's been DECADES since phone calls have been too expensive to do except on extra-special occasions is ridiculous... and don't get me started on the insanity of the concept of sending cards to people you don't care enough about to contact at any other time of the year (see my post of 12-12-04 for my rant about that one). Still, if you don't send them you can hurt people's feelings, so I do it, but I take a minimalist approach; I only send cards to those who've sent ME one, I don't write a note, and I absolutely under no circumstances enclose a LETTER... who's the psycho who thought of that one, and why did anyone else start doing it? If you're in regular contact with a person, they already know everything that'd be in the "Christmas letter," so it's silly to send them one, and if you're NOT in regular contact with them, I guarantee you they have no shred of interest in seeing a summation of the "accomplishments" (most of which are woefully trivial to outsiders) of every member of your household for the year, and why would you WANT to tell them so much about your life in any case?
My final comment on the subject; unless you're desperately poor, don't send flimsy little dime-store cards, and DO get Christmas stamps, nice return address labels, and maybe even seals... if the idea is to spread a little joy, make a valid effort at it. As Scrooge-ish as I may sound on this subject, *I* do all that, and even use a red pen to write out the envelopes and sign our names... but, I also have a stash of freebie cards provided by the many charities we support to send to those who send ME tacky cards-hey, if they send 'em out, they must think they're great, right? If you don't have the time to do it properly yourself, Hallmark lets you pick out cards online, and will add your personal message to each one and mail them out for you... all you have to do is give them the necessary info, and be willing to pay $1 per card for the privilege
http://www.hallmark.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?storeId=10001&catalogId=10051&tabOn=products&categoryId=89054&CatIDsList=-2;-105367;89054
If they ever invent a way to make Christmas cards more impersonal than THAT, I don't want to know about it.
And now to a more pleasant subject; world-class illusionist, Renaissance man, and uber-hottie Criss Angel
http://www.crissangel.com/photos.php
This was a banner day, because I finally got my DVD set of the 1st season of "Mindfreak"; my husband's comment about it was, "Is your entire blog entry for today going to consist of 'Criss Angel... oooooooooooooh... aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah'?". No, but I WILL point out how nice it is to be able to pause and zoom in whenever he's got his shirt off; now, if he'd only stop shaving his chest!! I watched the 1st DVD while I was doing the Christmas cards, and it made an onerous task much more agreeable; if, as I fervently hope, we get the tree up tomorrow (not the decorations, mind you, just the tree and maybe the lights and tinsel garlands), that'll be when I watch the 2nd disc.
The Christmas tree... it was supposed to have gone up over the Thanksgiving weekend, grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. My husband dragged his heels so badly LAST year with hauling out the boxes that the tree wasn't finished until Christmas morning, and our many other decorative items never got brought out at all, which made for a VERY unhappy holiday; cross your fingers for me that THIS year I can maintain the momentum I started with the cards and get the tree process begun so it can all be finished well before Christmas... and who knows, I may even find time for mistletoe.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
A brilliant ad from Old Spice
Like most people, I usually skip over magazine ads without so much as a glance; ad agencies have to be pretty clever to get us to pause in our attempts to get to the next page of an article before we forget the last line we read, and I suspect that they rarely succeed... which makes the occasional ad that's a true attention-grabber something special. I saw such an ad recently in Cosmo; it caught my eye because nearly the entire page is a photo of snowy ground, with a large snow angel mostly above the center line... what the heck could be advertised with a snow angel, I wondered, maybe soup or hot chocolate? The product, a tiny image in the lower right corner, turned out to be Old Spice's Red Zone body wash, with a tagline of "The perfect gift to spice things up." Huh? I looked more carefully at the snow angel, and comprehension dawned; there are 2 sets of footprints leading to it from opposite sides, a bigger set that's obviously male footprints in rugged footgear, and the other set, I kid you not, appearing to be prints from high-heeled shoes, or maybe boots, but definitely with that little hole for each print showing a heel that would be very difficult to walk with in the snow... I know they had to make it clear that one set of prints was from a woman, but did they have to make her a fashion victim, lol? Although it's hard to imagine what sexual act could cause bodies to thrash in such a way as to form a snow angel, much less that could be done quickly enough for the participants to not freeze to death, clearly that's what we're supposed to assume has happened, since there's ONE snow angel, and the 2 sets of prints go off together side by side from its head... and the line about spicing things up has to apply somehow, right? Granted that some elements of the ad are a little goofy, they managed to make me stop and look at it for about a minute, which is a triumph by advertising standards; in addition, I think it'll be effective in demolishing the stereotype of the Old Spice user as being a conservative older man, which was undoubtedly part of the idea.
You can see the ad here:
http://ad-rag.com/1892419a5fe496db0cbc79b16e955623/2004/oct/redzonesnow.jpg
Well, almost; the date shows it as being from last year, and they've altered it since then. In the version you'll see, there are 2 product images rather than the 1 in the newer image, and the footprints are so close together it looks like they must have been walking with their knees tied together, which would make whatever they're supposed to have done to make the angel even trickier; the newer version has about half as many prints, spaced in a more natural way.
Even in the older version, the ad is conceptually brilliant; I bet it's been brought back because it sold more Old Spice than anything else they've come up with. Unfortunately for them, there's no chance whatsoever of my buying any of their products for my husband; my father wore their aftershave.
You can see the ad here:
http://ad-rag.com/1892419a5fe496db0cbc79b16e955623/2004/oct/redzonesnow.jpg
Well, almost; the date shows it as being from last year, and they've altered it since then. In the version you'll see, there are 2 product images rather than the 1 in the newer image, and the footprints are so close together it looks like they must have been walking with their knees tied together, which would make whatever they're supposed to have done to make the angel even trickier; the newer version has about half as many prints, spaced in a more natural way.
Even in the older version, the ad is conceptually brilliant; I bet it's been brought back because it sold more Old Spice than anything else they've come up with. Unfortunately for them, there's no chance whatsoever of my buying any of their products for my husband; my father wore their aftershave.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Some awesome quotes from Laurence J. Peter
Have you ever heard of this guy? *I* hadn't, until I saw that the quote script in my sidebar had come up with the following from him:
"Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame."
If I were going to make a t-shirt for George W. Bush, that's what it would say.
I had to know who'd produced that bit of insight, so I looked him up at Wikipedia and found this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_J._Peter
"Dr Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990) was an educator and 'hierarchiologist,' [a person who studies hierarchical organizations and the behavior of their members] best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter Principle. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and began his career as a teacher in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963. In 1964, Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California. He became widely famous in 1968, on the publication of 'The Peter Principle,' which states 'In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.'"
Of course I recognized the "principle," which is quoted all the time, so I got even more interested, because this was obviously someone who'd managed more than just one perceptive line. Using the link provided by the script, I went to their site
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/laurence_j_peter.html
and found a goldmine of terrific stuff of his. It turns out that he's responsible for a couple of other famous sayings:
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way. "
"When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout."
Heinlein fans will be reminded by that 2nd one of a nearly identical line attributed to HIM:
"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
Who said it 1st? I dunno; I like the rhyming version better, in any case. Here are my faves of Peter's other quotes:
"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
"A man convinced against his will is not convinced."
"A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know."
"As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't."
"Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder."
"Don't believe in miracles - depend on them."
"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise."
"Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen lions-everyone but a school bus driver."
"Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience."
"If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."
"The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure."
"The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance."
"There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."
These are the absolute best:
"Against logic there is no armor like ignorance."
"Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car."
"If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. "
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. :-)
"Democracy is a process by which people are free to choose the man who will get the blame."
If I were going to make a t-shirt for George W. Bush, that's what it would say.
I had to know who'd produced that bit of insight, so I looked him up at Wikipedia and found this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_J._Peter
"Dr Laurence J. Peter (1919-1990) was an educator and 'hierarchiologist,' [a person who studies hierarchical organizations and the behavior of their members] best known to the general public for the formulation of the Peter Principle. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and began his career as a teacher in 1941. He received the degree of Doctor of Education from Washington State University in 1963. In 1964, Peter moved to California, where he became an Associate Professor of Education, Director of the Evelyn Frieden Centre for Prescriptive Teaching, and Coordinator of Programs for Emotionally Disturbed Children at the University of Southern California. He became widely famous in 1968, on the publication of 'The Peter Principle,' which states 'In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.'"
Of course I recognized the "principle," which is quoted all the time, so I got even more interested, because this was obviously someone who'd managed more than just one perceptive line. Using the link provided by the script, I went to their site
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/l/laurence_j_peter.html
and found a goldmine of terrific stuff of his. It turns out that he's responsible for a couple of other famous sayings:
"Lead, follow, or get out of the way. "
"When in doubt or danger, run in circles, scream and shout."
Heinlein fans will be reminded by that 2nd one of a nearly identical line attributed to HIM:
"When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout."
Who said it 1st? I dunno; I like the rhyming version better, in any case. Here are my faves of Peter's other quotes:
"A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to."
"A man convinced against his will is not convinced."
"A man doesn't know what he knows until he knows what he doesn't know."
"As a matter of fact is an expression that precedes many an expression that isn't."
"Competence, like truth, beauty, and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder."
"Don't believe in miracles - depend on them."
"Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise."
"Everyone is in awe of the lion tamer in a cage with half a dozen lions-everyone but a school bus driver."
"Fortune knocks but once, but misfortune has much more patience."
"If you don't know where you're going, you will probably end up somewhere else."
"Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it."
"The best intelligence test is what we do with our leisure."
"The man who says he is willing to meet you halfway is usually a poor judge of distance."
"There are two kinds of failures: those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought."
These are the absolute best:
"Against logic there is no armor like ignorance."
"Going to church doesn't make you any more a Christian than going to the garage makes you a car."
"If two wrongs don't make a right, try three. "
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. :-)
Thursday, December 08, 2005
The "Tom Sawyer's Fence" effect
Nearly every American read Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" in school, so most of you probably know what the title refers to; I don't know if anyone outside of the States would be familiar with it, though, so I found it online for anyone who's curious
http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign/people/TomNhuck/ted.html
Demonstrating as always an impressive grasp of human nature, in this chapter Twain has Tom, a young boy of uncommon shrewdness, escape having to paint a fence by tricking the other boys of his village into doing it for him; he pretends that he's been given some sort of great honor and privilege by being "allowed" to paint the fence, and that he's greatly enjoying doing it, and the other boys, who didn't just fall off the turnip truck and thus should know perfectly well that fence-painting is a CHORE, a hard and unpleasant one in the heat of a summer afternoon, are totally fooled, and so eager to have a turn at it that they PAY Tom to allow them to do it.
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that something so ridiculous would have been put in a book; I couldn't imagine that even the stupidest child would be fooled by Tom's ploy. I'm older and at least slightly wiser now, and I know that making people want something that they shouldn't objectively want, even something that's clearly contrary to their best interests, is EASY; just ask any advertising executive. I know it... and I still think it's crazy, because *I* can always tell when I'm being BS-ed, and nothing makes ME deviate from applying logic to every choice and decision I make.
You're undoubtedly aware that if someone broadcasts how great something is, other people will usually come charging over to get some... but have you ever wondered WHY people react that way? Part of it is that many people are sheep, er, I mean, humans are pack animals who instinctively follow along after whoever takes the lead, at least to a certain extent, and part of it is nature's way of making sure that primitive humans got to eat; I've seen in lots of nature shows how when a primate finds a bunch of food it makes excited sounds, and the others come running because their instinct tells them that those excited sounds mean food... why would we be any different than the lower primates? We're not at any risk of starving these days, quite the opposite, but we're still overwhelmingly influenced, as a rule, when we see other people seeming to enjoy anything; check out some magazine ads and see how often they have people looking like they're in near ecstasy from trivial things like touching a sheet of the right brand of toilet paper or eating the right brand of frozen veggies, and you'll see how well the ad agencies understand this idea.
What brought this into my head was belatedly reading the November 27th "Baby Blues" comic strip
http://www.babyblues.com/Testing/index.php?formname=getstrip&GoToDay=11/27/05
It shows the little girl eating something from a bowl and going "MMMMM" in front of her little brother. When he asks "What are you eating," she replies "Nothing." He says, "Yes you are! What is it?" and she responds "Just a snack." He asks "What kind of snack?" and she says "It's a type of fruit, but never mind, you're too young." He screams "I'm not too young for fruit! Give me some or ELSE!" and she replies "Okay! Okay! Suit yourself!" and walks away while he's chomping, shoving food in his mouth and going "MMMM!" In the final square, the mother is handing her a dollar and saying "I can't believe you got him to eat prunes!" and the girl responds "Hey, for FIVE dollars I'll have him begging for you to let him clean his room!"... and in the background he's still chomping and going "MMMM."
And the "header image" to the strip shows the little boy painting a fence while the little girl sits on a barrel... with both of them dressed in Tom Sawyer era clothes.
Although there's a facet of human nature involved, we're not monkeys, so we can think, can CHOOSE what actions to take; next time you find yourself about to jump into doing, eating, or buying something new, ask yourself if it's what YOU really want... or what you've been influenced by smiling, excited people, real or faked for ads, to want.
http://www.ftlcomm.com/ensign/people/TomNhuck/ted.html
Demonstrating as always an impressive grasp of human nature, in this chapter Twain has Tom, a young boy of uncommon shrewdness, escape having to paint a fence by tricking the other boys of his village into doing it for him; he pretends that he's been given some sort of great honor and privilege by being "allowed" to paint the fence, and that he's greatly enjoying doing it, and the other boys, who didn't just fall off the turnip truck and thus should know perfectly well that fence-painting is a CHORE, a hard and unpleasant one in the heat of a summer afternoon, are totally fooled, and so eager to have a turn at it that they PAY Tom to allow them to do it.
As a kid, I was dumbfounded that something so ridiculous would have been put in a book; I couldn't imagine that even the stupidest child would be fooled by Tom's ploy. I'm older and at least slightly wiser now, and I know that making people want something that they shouldn't objectively want, even something that's clearly contrary to their best interests, is EASY; just ask any advertising executive. I know it... and I still think it's crazy, because *I* can always tell when I'm being BS-ed, and nothing makes ME deviate from applying logic to every choice and decision I make.
You're undoubtedly aware that if someone broadcasts how great something is, other people will usually come charging over to get some... but have you ever wondered WHY people react that way? Part of it is that many people are sheep, er, I mean, humans are pack animals who instinctively follow along after whoever takes the lead, at least to a certain extent, and part of it is nature's way of making sure that primitive humans got to eat; I've seen in lots of nature shows how when a primate finds a bunch of food it makes excited sounds, and the others come running because their instinct tells them that those excited sounds mean food... why would we be any different than the lower primates? We're not at any risk of starving these days, quite the opposite, but we're still overwhelmingly influenced, as a rule, when we see other people seeming to enjoy anything; check out some magazine ads and see how often they have people looking like they're in near ecstasy from trivial things like touching a sheet of the right brand of toilet paper or eating the right brand of frozen veggies, and you'll see how well the ad agencies understand this idea.
What brought this into my head was belatedly reading the November 27th "Baby Blues" comic strip
http://www.babyblues.com/Testing/index.php?formname=getstrip&GoToDay=11/27/05
It shows the little girl eating something from a bowl and going "MMMMM" in front of her little brother. When he asks "What are you eating," she replies "Nothing." He says, "Yes you are! What is it?" and she responds "Just a snack." He asks "What kind of snack?" and she says "It's a type of fruit, but never mind, you're too young." He screams "I'm not too young for fruit! Give me some or ELSE!" and she replies "Okay! Okay! Suit yourself!" and walks away while he's chomping, shoving food in his mouth and going "MMMM!" In the final square, the mother is handing her a dollar and saying "I can't believe you got him to eat prunes!" and the girl responds "Hey, for FIVE dollars I'll have him begging for you to let him clean his room!"... and in the background he's still chomping and going "MMMM."
And the "header image" to the strip shows the little boy painting a fence while the little girl sits on a barrel... with both of them dressed in Tom Sawyer era clothes.
Although there's a facet of human nature involved, we're not monkeys, so we can think, can CHOOSE what actions to take; next time you find yourself about to jump into doing, eating, or buying something new, ask yourself if it's what YOU really want... or what you've been influenced by smiling, excited people, real or faked for ads, to want.
Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Different ways of learning, part 2: mechanical vs conceptual
The overwhelming majority of people are mechanical learners; they learn how to do things one step at a time. Show them the steps for a new task, and they learn the task by memorizing those steps; even before they've learned the entire procedure, they can do whichever steps they HAVE learned without difficulty. If you're like most people, not only is this the way you learn, it's the only way you've ever heard of TO learn, but there's a small minority who learn very differently.
The conceptual learner CAN'T learn a task by memorizing a list of steps (other than in trivial cases of few and/or basic steps); when faced with a new task, the conceptual learner is like Teflon, with every instruction they're given sliding off instead of sticking in their minds. When a 10-step process is demonstrated to them, they MIGHT remember the last step, or sort of remember the 1st one, but won't be able to recall more than that, or be able to partially do the task the way a mechanical learner of even minimal intelligence can after being shown something once; their recollection of what they saw will be a jumble. A conceptual learner with any shred of self-awareness KNOWS that this will be the result of anyone attempting to teach them mechanically, and so will often ask questions about the nature of the task, and of the steps, which tends to aggravate the person giving the instructions because it doesn't seem necessary and takes up time... but if they refuse to answer, by demanding that the learner "Stay focused" or "Just pay attention" rather than giving the information, they can demonstrate until they're blue in the face and not get anywhere. What the conceptual learner is instinctively trying to sort out is, you guessed it, the concept behind the task; when they haven't got it, their mind will be a blank in regards to the task, but once the final bit fits into place and the concept is grasped, they go from being able to do and understand nothing to being able to do and understand it all literally from one moment to the next. (This process occurs, not via any effort at analysis, but on a subconscious level, and then pops into the conscious mind like bread out of a toaster; I don't know how it happens, just that it does.)
The conceptual learner looks like sort of dunce so far, right? They need this extra time and info to do what a regular person can jump right into; isn't that awful? Yeah, it is, when you're a conceptual learner trying to absorb the information necessary to do a task from someone who's insisting on teaching it the mechanical way, and you have to struggle to learn something that's comparatively simple for a mechanical learner to pick up. However, many of the things we need to learn to do are NOT simple, especially when they're totally new to us, and under those circumstances being a conceptual learner is actually an enormous advantage; I'll give you an example of this from my own life (you DID know I was talking from experience, right?):
In college, I took a variety of courses that involved complicated and specialized uses of math; in one such course, because the textbook wasn't quite up to explaining things in enough depth for me to grasp the concepts, I was a regular visitor at the professor's office hours, where he'd hold problem-solving sessions. Because he was very young, and this was his 1st teaching position, he was open-minded about how to teach, and when I explained why it looked like I wasn't following him when he started explaining a problem he was willing to play along and see what happened; our standard procedure quickly became him going step by step, carefully explaining everything, with the other kids nodding and me looking blank when he checked over his shoulder to see if we were keeping up with him... and then when the concept clicked into place, he could SEE it, and he'd toss me the chalk and I'd go to the board and crank the rest of it out while my fellow students watched dumbfounded. When I'd finished, I thanked him and left, because I was DONE; the others would have to stay for sometimes HOURS longer, because they had to get all the steps memorized before they could do it, while my grasp of the concept meant that I could construct all the steps in my head automatically and so didn't need to memorize them. I wasn't just done for that day, either, I was done for the entire quarter where that sort of problem was concerned, because I didn't have to keep re-memorizing the steps for solving it for the tests and the final, I just had to keep track of the concept, and that was easy.
OK, you might be thinking, that'd be a nifty skill, but how often outside of college does a person have to learn stuff that's that complicated? Not often, granted, but there are other advantages to conceptual learning that are more widely applicable; one of them is that by allowing a person to quickly see a "formula" for how a certain category of things are done, it provides them with fast mastery over processes that are fairly simple individually but onerous to learn collectively. For example, when I 1st got online, I was part of several different clubs on Excite where people wanted to learn to use html for text formatting of their posts, and when presented with a few commands by more advanced folks, the others had to have a list and keep referring to it until they memorized the commands, and still would often get the syntax wrong, whereas *I* looked at the commands, saw the concept of how they had to be written (the brackets, quotes, opening and closing, etc), and right away could use them all effortlessly, with no mistakes, and without having to look them up... and when new commands were presented, I just plugged them into the "formula" for html and used them, which the others couldn't do even when I tried to coach them because they didn't KNOW the formula and refused to take the extra step of learning it-they needed to go through a new memorization process for every command. Now, granted, those people may well have EVENTUALLY figured out how html code needs to be written, but *I* went from zero to being seen as the html guru (don't laugh, no one any of us knew had any kind of website of their own then, much less knew how to make or modify one the way most of us in the blogosphere can these days) in a bunch of Excite clubs within a few weeks of seeing my 1st html command, and even after a year none of the rest of them were able to do more than a few things without looking them up, no matter how many times I explained the concepts to them. (An example of this advantage for non-tech people is that a conceptual learner could cook any sort of food they liked by sticking different ingredients into their preparation "algorithms," while a mechanical learner would have to memorize a recipe for every dish they wanted to cook.)
The 3rd advantage to being a conceptual learner is that you can look at stuff beyond your level of knowledge or skill and have a pretty good understanding of it; to use another code-related example, someone with no tech background might memorize every bit of html that I know (it wouldn't be that hard, as I don't know that much), but if you then presented them with the source code for a website, with html, JavaScript and CSS, it's very unlikely that they could make any sense of it, much less alter the code... but I, although not knowing any JavaScript or CSS and very little html, CAN usually look at a line or chunk of code and tell what it's doing, and can ascertain how to make the sorts of basic alterations that're in line with what I know-and I can do it better and faster than my husband, who DOES know basic JavaScript and far more programming in general than I do.
The final advantage to being a conceptual learner is that if you ask the mechanical learner to do a known task, but tell them they need to skip some steps and come up with the same end product, or handle some side issues as part of the process, or do something similar but for which few or none of the known steps can be used, or swap out part of the procedure for a new unrelated thing, or any other kind of significant change, you'd better not have your hopes up for them being able to figure it out, much less figure it out in a timely fashion and then do it correctly. For the conceptual learner, however, this sort of thing is trivial; if you give them a problem that has any connection whatsoever to a concept they've learned, they'll instantly see the procedure that needs to be done and be able to do it with no difficulties.
I've got a college example of this one, too; the professor of one of my most challenging upper-division courses approached me after class on a day that we'd been handed back a midterm that many people had choked on, and said he wanted to ask me about my answer to the most important of the questions (which was the reason for the aforementioned chokage). I flipped to the appropriate page, and he said, "You're one of only a couple of people in the class who got the answer to this one; there were a few others who got partial credit for making a good try in the wrong direction, but most people got a 0 for it. I covered it in class a couple of weeks ago, and I KNOW you weren't in class that day, and it's not in the book, so how did you work it out when the people who'd seen it before couldn't?" I explained to him that the problem posed by the question was conceptually identical to something that WAS in the book, and showed him how I used that concept to do easily what the very bright people in the class who'd studied that particular problem couldn't do at all; he was VERY impressed, and probably reassured that I hadn't done some extreme form of cheating to get the answer, which may well have been on his mind given the circumstances.
This final advantage to conceptual learning is the one that I get the most benefit from, and the one that has made my husband's attitude change over the years from "I wouldn't be a conceptual learner for any amount of $" to "given the choice between staying a mechanical learner or switching to conceptual, I'd pick conceptual." Overall I think it IS a better way to learn, but the entire world is set up to accommodate mechanical learning, with no provisions at all for conceptual learning, and it IS frustrating to not be able to quickly pick up a multi-step process for which the concept is as yet unknown, so I can see how anyone not intimately familiar with a conceptual learner might not perceive any value in learning that way... not that any of us have a choice, of course, as this is inborn and not learned or chosen.
Has any of this rung a bell? Are you or anyone you know possibly a conceptual learner? Keep in mind that anyone of any but the lowest intelligence and beyond early childhood can and does learn concepts, and even the most intensely conceptual person learns many mechanical processes (many of which don't HAVE a concept behind them beyond an extremely basic level), so no one's purely one or the other, but there's still a clear line of demarcation; most people learn lots of little steps from which they might synthesize a concept, and a few of us gather data, derive concepts from it, and then see the individual steps as a result. I hope I'll be able to give at least a few conceptual learners a much-needed explanation for the odd way their brains work... and just as importantly, that I'll give the parents, spouses, teachers or employers of a few conceptual learners some insight into what the heck is "wrong" with them. Conceptual learners will do their best learning when allowed at the beginning to have a little extra time and info to get them to the concept, and can be saved enormous amounts of aggravation later on by not being dragged through further mechanical steps that they don't need, or made to waste time "learning" related things that they can figure out immediately using the concept. I don't suppose I should hold my breath for this idea to make it into our schools any time soon, though...
Here's my final thought; can "The Truth" be perceived via a mechanical process, or a conceptual one, or can both take you there? Is the "The Truth" just a string of facts, or is it made of, well, concepts? hmmmmmmmmmmmm
The conceptual learner CAN'T learn a task by memorizing a list of steps (other than in trivial cases of few and/or basic steps); when faced with a new task, the conceptual learner is like Teflon, with every instruction they're given sliding off instead of sticking in their minds. When a 10-step process is demonstrated to them, they MIGHT remember the last step, or sort of remember the 1st one, but won't be able to recall more than that, or be able to partially do the task the way a mechanical learner of even minimal intelligence can after being shown something once; their recollection of what they saw will be a jumble. A conceptual learner with any shred of self-awareness KNOWS that this will be the result of anyone attempting to teach them mechanically, and so will often ask questions about the nature of the task, and of the steps, which tends to aggravate the person giving the instructions because it doesn't seem necessary and takes up time... but if they refuse to answer, by demanding that the learner "Stay focused" or "Just pay attention" rather than giving the information, they can demonstrate until they're blue in the face and not get anywhere. What the conceptual learner is instinctively trying to sort out is, you guessed it, the concept behind the task; when they haven't got it, their mind will be a blank in regards to the task, but once the final bit fits into place and the concept is grasped, they go from being able to do and understand nothing to being able to do and understand it all literally from one moment to the next. (This process occurs, not via any effort at analysis, but on a subconscious level, and then pops into the conscious mind like bread out of a toaster; I don't know how it happens, just that it does.)
The conceptual learner looks like sort of dunce so far, right? They need this extra time and info to do what a regular person can jump right into; isn't that awful? Yeah, it is, when you're a conceptual learner trying to absorb the information necessary to do a task from someone who's insisting on teaching it the mechanical way, and you have to struggle to learn something that's comparatively simple for a mechanical learner to pick up. However, many of the things we need to learn to do are NOT simple, especially when they're totally new to us, and under those circumstances being a conceptual learner is actually an enormous advantage; I'll give you an example of this from my own life (you DID know I was talking from experience, right?):
In college, I took a variety of courses that involved complicated and specialized uses of math; in one such course, because the textbook wasn't quite up to explaining things in enough depth for me to grasp the concepts, I was a regular visitor at the professor's office hours, where he'd hold problem-solving sessions. Because he was very young, and this was his 1st teaching position, he was open-minded about how to teach, and when I explained why it looked like I wasn't following him when he started explaining a problem he was willing to play along and see what happened; our standard procedure quickly became him going step by step, carefully explaining everything, with the other kids nodding and me looking blank when he checked over his shoulder to see if we were keeping up with him... and then when the concept clicked into place, he could SEE it, and he'd toss me the chalk and I'd go to the board and crank the rest of it out while my fellow students watched dumbfounded. When I'd finished, I thanked him and left, because I was DONE; the others would have to stay for sometimes HOURS longer, because they had to get all the steps memorized before they could do it, while my grasp of the concept meant that I could construct all the steps in my head automatically and so didn't need to memorize them. I wasn't just done for that day, either, I was done for the entire quarter where that sort of problem was concerned, because I didn't have to keep re-memorizing the steps for solving it for the tests and the final, I just had to keep track of the concept, and that was easy.
OK, you might be thinking, that'd be a nifty skill, but how often outside of college does a person have to learn stuff that's that complicated? Not often, granted, but there are other advantages to conceptual learning that are more widely applicable; one of them is that by allowing a person to quickly see a "formula" for how a certain category of things are done, it provides them with fast mastery over processes that are fairly simple individually but onerous to learn collectively. For example, when I 1st got online, I was part of several different clubs on Excite where people wanted to learn to use html for text formatting of their posts, and when presented with a few commands by more advanced folks, the others had to have a list and keep referring to it until they memorized the commands, and still would often get the syntax wrong, whereas *I* looked at the commands, saw the concept of how they had to be written (the brackets, quotes, opening and closing, etc), and right away could use them all effortlessly, with no mistakes, and without having to look them up... and when new commands were presented, I just plugged them into the "formula" for html and used them, which the others couldn't do even when I tried to coach them because they didn't KNOW the formula and refused to take the extra step of learning it-they needed to go through a new memorization process for every command. Now, granted, those people may well have EVENTUALLY figured out how html code needs to be written, but *I* went from zero to being seen as the html guru (don't laugh, no one any of us knew had any kind of website of their own then, much less knew how to make or modify one the way most of us in the blogosphere can these days) in a bunch of Excite clubs within a few weeks of seeing my 1st html command, and even after a year none of the rest of them were able to do more than a few things without looking them up, no matter how many times I explained the concepts to them. (An example of this advantage for non-tech people is that a conceptual learner could cook any sort of food they liked by sticking different ingredients into their preparation "algorithms," while a mechanical learner would have to memorize a recipe for every dish they wanted to cook.)
The 3rd advantage to being a conceptual learner is that you can look at stuff beyond your level of knowledge or skill and have a pretty good understanding of it; to use another code-related example, someone with no tech background might memorize every bit of html that I know (it wouldn't be that hard, as I don't know that much), but if you then presented them with the source code for a website, with html, JavaScript and CSS, it's very unlikely that they could make any sense of it, much less alter the code... but I, although not knowing any JavaScript or CSS and very little html, CAN usually look at a line or chunk of code and tell what it's doing, and can ascertain how to make the sorts of basic alterations that're in line with what I know-and I can do it better and faster than my husband, who DOES know basic JavaScript and far more programming in general than I do.
The final advantage to being a conceptual learner is that if you ask the mechanical learner to do a known task, but tell them they need to skip some steps and come up with the same end product, or handle some side issues as part of the process, or do something similar but for which few or none of the known steps can be used, or swap out part of the procedure for a new unrelated thing, or any other kind of significant change, you'd better not have your hopes up for them being able to figure it out, much less figure it out in a timely fashion and then do it correctly. For the conceptual learner, however, this sort of thing is trivial; if you give them a problem that has any connection whatsoever to a concept they've learned, they'll instantly see the procedure that needs to be done and be able to do it with no difficulties.
I've got a college example of this one, too; the professor of one of my most challenging upper-division courses approached me after class on a day that we'd been handed back a midterm that many people had choked on, and said he wanted to ask me about my answer to the most important of the questions (which was the reason for the aforementioned chokage). I flipped to the appropriate page, and he said, "You're one of only a couple of people in the class who got the answer to this one; there were a few others who got partial credit for making a good try in the wrong direction, but most people got a 0 for it. I covered it in class a couple of weeks ago, and I KNOW you weren't in class that day, and it's not in the book, so how did you work it out when the people who'd seen it before couldn't?" I explained to him that the problem posed by the question was conceptually identical to something that WAS in the book, and showed him how I used that concept to do easily what the very bright people in the class who'd studied that particular problem couldn't do at all; he was VERY impressed, and probably reassured that I hadn't done some extreme form of cheating to get the answer, which may well have been on his mind given the circumstances.
This final advantage to conceptual learning is the one that I get the most benefit from, and the one that has made my husband's attitude change over the years from "I wouldn't be a conceptual learner for any amount of $" to "given the choice between staying a mechanical learner or switching to conceptual, I'd pick conceptual." Overall I think it IS a better way to learn, but the entire world is set up to accommodate mechanical learning, with no provisions at all for conceptual learning, and it IS frustrating to not be able to quickly pick up a multi-step process for which the concept is as yet unknown, so I can see how anyone not intimately familiar with a conceptual learner might not perceive any value in learning that way... not that any of us have a choice, of course, as this is inborn and not learned or chosen.
Has any of this rung a bell? Are you or anyone you know possibly a conceptual learner? Keep in mind that anyone of any but the lowest intelligence and beyond early childhood can and does learn concepts, and even the most intensely conceptual person learns many mechanical processes (many of which don't HAVE a concept behind them beyond an extremely basic level), so no one's purely one or the other, but there's still a clear line of demarcation; most people learn lots of little steps from which they might synthesize a concept, and a few of us gather data, derive concepts from it, and then see the individual steps as a result. I hope I'll be able to give at least a few conceptual learners a much-needed explanation for the odd way their brains work... and just as importantly, that I'll give the parents, spouses, teachers or employers of a few conceptual learners some insight into what the heck is "wrong" with them. Conceptual learners will do their best learning when allowed at the beginning to have a little extra time and info to get them to the concept, and can be saved enormous amounts of aggravation later on by not being dragged through further mechanical steps that they don't need, or made to waste time "learning" related things that they can figure out immediately using the concept. I don't suppose I should hold my breath for this idea to make it into our schools any time soon, though...
Here's my final thought; can "The Truth" be perceived via a mechanical process, or a conceptual one, or can both take you there? Is the "The Truth" just a string of facts, or is it made of, well, concepts? hmmmmmmmmmmmm
Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Different ways of learning, part 1: memory
Here's something that educators don't want you to hear; alot of what we call "learning" is actually just memorization (as opposed to understanding). There are a variety of different kinds memory, and each of us receives a different degree of benefit from each of those ways of storing information... but the way we're taught is NOT tailored to the way we'd memorize/learn the best, which is bad news for kids who vary significantly from the memorizing "pattern" that our educators assume will work for everyone. Here's what I've come up with as the different kinds of memory that might apply to learning:
First, there's visual memory; much of how we teach in this country is based on expecting people to memorize what they see, in other words what they read or what a teacher writes on a blackboard. Sadly, most of us aren't really that great at it; aside from those rare folks with so-called photographic memories, most people have to look at written material over and over to even remember the gist of it, and would never be able to recall it all by memory... that's why students have to study rather than just reading the material once.
Next, there's auditory memory; in the classroom, this obviously refers to listening to the teacher drone on ("lecture"). From early childhood, we learn to tune out people talking at length, so it's more common than not for students, who usually make up a captive audience rather than a group of eager seekers of knowledge, to not be paying attention, and, although their brains automatically record everything they hear, they usually don't remember much of it.
I've got no science to back this up, but I think there's a subset of auditory memory that deals with music; it might be connected to how music is sort of like audible math, such that the part of the brain that handles math ability works with the part that remembers what we hear to format or store the sounds differently... in any case, you probably know people who can't remember a conversation for more than 5 minutes, but who can hear a song once and still sing much of it weeks later, and in general it's pretty clear that most of us can memorize a song far more easily than we could a speech of the same # of words. I suspect that those old "Schoolhouse Rock" songs
http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/
that used to play during Saturday morning cartoons, like "Conjunction Junction" and "I'm Just a Bill," were intended to take advantage of "music memory" to teach kids a little something without them realizing it... I haven't heard any of those songs for 30 years, but I can still sing them, and my husband says the same goes for him, so there must be something to it. For obvious reasons, there's unfortunately not much of what's taught in our schools that can be set to music; virtually all American children learn their ABC's with a song (sung to the same tune as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," did you ever notice that?), though, which is interesting when you think about it.
There's also muscle memory; that term is usually used to refer to how it's easier to do a physical activity that you've done before because your muscles (or rather the part of the brain that controls them) remember how to do it, but it can also be validly applied to ANY use of your muscles. I can recall being told by many teachers that it was important to take notes because when you write information down that means that an additional part of your brain is recording it, and that makes it more likely that you'll remember; I've certainly heard plenty of folks say that this works well for them, but for ME it was always the opposite... if I write something down, it removes it from my memory. I was always assured that this was impossible, as if I was hallucinating, so I was excited when I read a quote from Gore Vidal saying that when HE wrote something down it erased it from HIS mind; I marched down the hall to my mother's room and read it triumphantly to her, and although she'd always denied it when *I* said it, a famous stranger saying it stopped her arguments (sigh). Oddly, typing, which is conceptually a version of writing, does NOT erase things from my memory; I wish I knew if it works that way for Mr. Vidal.
I had the occasional teacher try to push me about taking notes, claiming it was necessary if I was to remember what was said in class; in each case, I'd sweetly inquire, "What do you think my test scores show about what I'm remembering from class?", and they'd hem and haw and drop the subject. The most amusing problem I had in this area was when I was new at a job, and the boss gave me an informative talk about all the ins and outs; he tried to arm-twist me to take notes, but when I told him that doing so would guarantee that I forgot everything he said, he dropped it... and then 1st thing the next day, he announced that I'd be tested on what he'd said. To be even more of a jerk, he made a big point of saying, "You can use your notes, so go ahead and get them out... oh, that's right, you don't HAVE any notes, do you?". His smug smile started fading fast when he handed me the test and I began writing rapidly, without needing to pause to think; by the time he graded it and was forced to give me a perfect score, he was stunned and sheepish. With gratifying humbleness, he asked me how I was able to give the correct answers without notes; I replied, "Because I LEARNED what you told me." He kept shaking his head in amazement, telling me that he'd never seen anyone learn the material in one day before, even with notes; my response was that they didn't learn BECAUSE they had notes, because people look at taking notes as meaning that they don't HAVE to learn right then. He quickly interjected that using their notes they could pass a test on the material; I pointed out that all that proved was that they could read their own handwriting, NOT that they knew any of the information. This concept astonished him, but to give him credit he thought about it and admitted I was right, and that he'd seen plenty of examples of how people who tested fine with their notes didn't know the facts when asked about them later... but when I suggested that he try giving talks without allowing them to take notes, he balked-old habits die hard.
Another facet of muscle memory is one you rarely hear about; when you speak, don't you remember what you say better than you remember the things other people say to you? Talking uses many muscles in your jaw, lips and tongue; furthermore, speech has its own area of the brain, and when you speak you use that area in addition to the one associated with muscle use AND the one for hearing, so naturally you remember more. I found this to be helpful to me when I had to memorize a great deal of material in a short time, and came up with the idea of reading it aloud, recording it, and playing it back, which greatly improved my memorization speed; a couple of friends that I persuaded to try it also had really good results, but it was seen as too much trouble, and, more to the point, too "different" for them to continue using it... old habits, again. It's typical for schoolkids to do a certain amount of reading out loud in class, but it's so time-consuming that this potentially useful way of increasing memory retention doesn't get as much attention as it probably deserves.
So, what does this all boil down to in terms of learning? If information is shoved at a kid in a way they can't store it effectively, that's a misuse of valuable learning time and effort, causes frustration, and might lead to the child disliking the subject being studied because it's being made more trouble and less fun that it could be; if information is NOT presented to a kid in a way that they CAN store it effectively, that's a valuable learning opportunity missed. What should our schools be doing about this? Even a well-funded school would be limited as to how far they could accommodate children's different "memory styles," because they'd have to do extensive testing to ascertain what each kid needed to be able to provide it for them, but one simple thing any school could do is give kids the option to do independent learning (monitored, of course) for any classes that they didn't seem to be benefitting from listening to the teacher in; this would not only give those students more learning opportunities, it'd allow the teachers to give more individual attention to those students who DID need to learn by listening, thus accommodating THEM as well. I would've killed to have had that available in my school days; because I have an exceptional ability to remember things I've read, going to classes was a complete waste of time for me, as all the teachers did even in my expensive private school, and later in college, was cover the material that had been assigned for us to read the night before, which I already knew. It used to tick my father off no end when he'd ask me "What did you learn at school today" and I replied, as always, "Nothing"; no matter how many times I explained the situation to him, he never accepted it, never stopped asking, and never stopped raging about why he was spending hard-earned $ on a private school where I wasn't being taught anything... I could have easily lied, told him what material had been covered in my classes and let him believe I'd learned those things from the teachers rather than from my books, but given his evilness I was happy to give him something to stew about. If I'd been allowed to spend my school days reading supplementary materials rather than listening to rehashing, I could have doubled or tripled what I'd learned with my homework rather than just frittering my life away all day every school day; not all kids will vary so wildly from the norm, but still, imagine how much more they could learn if all of them were allowed to absorb material in whatever way(s) worked best with their memories.
You can use your awareness of the different types of memory to help your kids learn, and yourself too if you're taking classes, or just expanding your horizons; it's time for us to stop being limited by traditional teaching methods and start harnessing the full potential of our memories.
First, there's visual memory; much of how we teach in this country is based on expecting people to memorize what they see, in other words what they read or what a teacher writes on a blackboard. Sadly, most of us aren't really that great at it; aside from those rare folks with so-called photographic memories, most people have to look at written material over and over to even remember the gist of it, and would never be able to recall it all by memory... that's why students have to study rather than just reading the material once.
Next, there's auditory memory; in the classroom, this obviously refers to listening to the teacher drone on ("lecture"). From early childhood, we learn to tune out people talking at length, so it's more common than not for students, who usually make up a captive audience rather than a group of eager seekers of knowledge, to not be paying attention, and, although their brains automatically record everything they hear, they usually don't remember much of it.
I've got no science to back this up, but I think there's a subset of auditory memory that deals with music; it might be connected to how music is sort of like audible math, such that the part of the brain that handles math ability works with the part that remembers what we hear to format or store the sounds differently... in any case, you probably know people who can't remember a conversation for more than 5 minutes, but who can hear a song once and still sing much of it weeks later, and in general it's pretty clear that most of us can memorize a song far more easily than we could a speech of the same # of words. I suspect that those old "Schoolhouse Rock" songs
http://www.schoolhouserock.tv/
that used to play during Saturday morning cartoons, like "Conjunction Junction" and "I'm Just a Bill," were intended to take advantage of "music memory" to teach kids a little something without them realizing it... I haven't heard any of those songs for 30 years, but I can still sing them, and my husband says the same goes for him, so there must be something to it. For obvious reasons, there's unfortunately not much of what's taught in our schools that can be set to music; virtually all American children learn their ABC's with a song (sung to the same tune as "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star," did you ever notice that?), though, which is interesting when you think about it.
There's also muscle memory; that term is usually used to refer to how it's easier to do a physical activity that you've done before because your muscles (or rather the part of the brain that controls them) remember how to do it, but it can also be validly applied to ANY use of your muscles. I can recall being told by many teachers that it was important to take notes because when you write information down that means that an additional part of your brain is recording it, and that makes it more likely that you'll remember; I've certainly heard plenty of folks say that this works well for them, but for ME it was always the opposite... if I write something down, it removes it from my memory. I was always assured that this was impossible, as if I was hallucinating, so I was excited when I read a quote from Gore Vidal saying that when HE wrote something down it erased it from HIS mind; I marched down the hall to my mother's room and read it triumphantly to her, and although she'd always denied it when *I* said it, a famous stranger saying it stopped her arguments (sigh). Oddly, typing, which is conceptually a version of writing, does NOT erase things from my memory; I wish I knew if it works that way for Mr. Vidal.
I had the occasional teacher try to push me about taking notes, claiming it was necessary if I was to remember what was said in class; in each case, I'd sweetly inquire, "What do you think my test scores show about what I'm remembering from class?", and they'd hem and haw and drop the subject. The most amusing problem I had in this area was when I was new at a job, and the boss gave me an informative talk about all the ins and outs; he tried to arm-twist me to take notes, but when I told him that doing so would guarantee that I forgot everything he said, he dropped it... and then 1st thing the next day, he announced that I'd be tested on what he'd said. To be even more of a jerk, he made a big point of saying, "You can use your notes, so go ahead and get them out... oh, that's right, you don't HAVE any notes, do you?". His smug smile started fading fast when he handed me the test and I began writing rapidly, without needing to pause to think; by the time he graded it and was forced to give me a perfect score, he was stunned and sheepish. With gratifying humbleness, he asked me how I was able to give the correct answers without notes; I replied, "Because I LEARNED what you told me." He kept shaking his head in amazement, telling me that he'd never seen anyone learn the material in one day before, even with notes; my response was that they didn't learn BECAUSE they had notes, because people look at taking notes as meaning that they don't HAVE to learn right then. He quickly interjected that using their notes they could pass a test on the material; I pointed out that all that proved was that they could read their own handwriting, NOT that they knew any of the information. This concept astonished him, but to give him credit he thought about it and admitted I was right, and that he'd seen plenty of examples of how people who tested fine with their notes didn't know the facts when asked about them later... but when I suggested that he try giving talks without allowing them to take notes, he balked-old habits die hard.
Another facet of muscle memory is one you rarely hear about; when you speak, don't you remember what you say better than you remember the things other people say to you? Talking uses many muscles in your jaw, lips and tongue; furthermore, speech has its own area of the brain, and when you speak you use that area in addition to the one associated with muscle use AND the one for hearing, so naturally you remember more. I found this to be helpful to me when I had to memorize a great deal of material in a short time, and came up with the idea of reading it aloud, recording it, and playing it back, which greatly improved my memorization speed; a couple of friends that I persuaded to try it also had really good results, but it was seen as too much trouble, and, more to the point, too "different" for them to continue using it... old habits, again. It's typical for schoolkids to do a certain amount of reading out loud in class, but it's so time-consuming that this potentially useful way of increasing memory retention doesn't get as much attention as it probably deserves.
So, what does this all boil down to in terms of learning? If information is shoved at a kid in a way they can't store it effectively, that's a misuse of valuable learning time and effort, causes frustration, and might lead to the child disliking the subject being studied because it's being made more trouble and less fun that it could be; if information is NOT presented to a kid in a way that they CAN store it effectively, that's a valuable learning opportunity missed. What should our schools be doing about this? Even a well-funded school would be limited as to how far they could accommodate children's different "memory styles," because they'd have to do extensive testing to ascertain what each kid needed to be able to provide it for them, but one simple thing any school could do is give kids the option to do independent learning (monitored, of course) for any classes that they didn't seem to be benefitting from listening to the teacher in; this would not only give those students more learning opportunities, it'd allow the teachers to give more individual attention to those students who DID need to learn by listening, thus accommodating THEM as well. I would've killed to have had that available in my school days; because I have an exceptional ability to remember things I've read, going to classes was a complete waste of time for me, as all the teachers did even in my expensive private school, and later in college, was cover the material that had been assigned for us to read the night before, which I already knew. It used to tick my father off no end when he'd ask me "What did you learn at school today" and I replied, as always, "Nothing"; no matter how many times I explained the situation to him, he never accepted it, never stopped asking, and never stopped raging about why he was spending hard-earned $ on a private school where I wasn't being taught anything... I could have easily lied, told him what material had been covered in my classes and let him believe I'd learned those things from the teachers rather than from my books, but given his evilness I was happy to give him something to stew about. If I'd been allowed to spend my school days reading supplementary materials rather than listening to rehashing, I could have doubled or tripled what I'd learned with my homework rather than just frittering my life away all day every school day; not all kids will vary so wildly from the norm, but still, imagine how much more they could learn if all of them were allowed to absorb material in whatever way(s) worked best with their memories.
You can use your awareness of the different types of memory to help your kids learn, and yourself too if you're taking classes, or just expanding your horizons; it's time for us to stop being limited by traditional teaching methods and start harnessing the full potential of our memories.
Monday, December 05, 2005
A grim case of life imitating art
In the movie "50 First Dates"
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=1083372&displayBoxArt=true#Cast
a young woman was in an auto accident that caused brain damage such that her memory "resets" itself every night while she sleeps, so she wakes up the next morning remembering nothing of what's happened since the crash. In 2 scenes at the medical facility for people with brain injuries, we're treated to a patient called "10 Second Tom," so called because that's how long his memory lasts... and it's portrayed as a joke, because who ever heard of such a thing?
Tonight, on TLC, I saw "The Man with the Seven Second Memory"
http://tlc.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=55264&gid=0&channel=TLC
"Once a renowned conductor and musician, Clive Wearing was struck down by a virus that caused massive damage to his brain. Against the odds, doctors managed to save his life but he was left with a memory that spans just seven seconds."
When I saw the title, my 1st thought was of the connection to the movie; my 2nd thought was that, far from being amusing, the real-life version of this affliction would be a fate worse than death... imagine, being hit over and over for the rest of your life by the realization that a few precious moments are all you have, and that they'll be gone from your mind almost before you knew you had them.
He can't read a book or watch a movie, because he can't follow the plots.
He writes in a diary to try to keep track of what he does, but he keeps scratching the old entries out and writing new ones that say the same thing, "I'm awake. Now, I'm awake. Now, I'm really awake"... his own words don't seem real to him, don't make sense to him, because he can't recall writing them.
He talks about not being able to feel emotional pain, because if something causes bad feelings it's gone from his memory before he can suffer; he points out that this is NOT a desirable state of affairs, that not being able to feel is essentially being dead.
The most horrific aspect of this disability was driven home by a story his wife told about finding him crying, and trying to get him to tell her what was the matter, to which he finally replied "I CAN'T THINK."
The vast majority of trains of thought that you have each day last longer than 7 seconds; if you lost all of that, what would there be left? How is it possible to exist in a permanent 7 second bubble, never knowing what's going on, what day it is, what the future holds, living in the eternal now... and knowing that you were once normal, that you were once someone important, and that although your intelligence is still there you can't do anything with it, EVER.
In the earlier years of his affliction, which he's endured for TWENTY YEARS, he was prone to violent outbursts; they said they never figured out why, but how could he NOT be filled with rage and lash out when all he has is 7 seconds at a time?
I can't begin to wrap my mind around the nightmare that is that poor man's life. I can't imagine having to live that way, and I wouldn't want to try; I'd rather be dead. Wouldn't you?
http://www.blockbuster.com/catalog/DisplayMoreMovieProductDetails.action?channel=Movies&subChannel=sub&movieID=1083372&displayBoxArt=true#Cast
a young woman was in an auto accident that caused brain damage such that her memory "resets" itself every night while she sleeps, so she wakes up the next morning remembering nothing of what's happened since the crash. In 2 scenes at the medical facility for people with brain injuries, we're treated to a patient called "10 Second Tom," so called because that's how long his memory lasts... and it's portrayed as a joke, because who ever heard of such a thing?
Tonight, on TLC, I saw "The Man with the Seven Second Memory"
http://tlc.discovery.com/tvlistings/episode.jsp?episode=0&cpi=55264&gid=0&channel=TLC
"Once a renowned conductor and musician, Clive Wearing was struck down by a virus that caused massive damage to his brain. Against the odds, doctors managed to save his life but he was left with a memory that spans just seven seconds."
When I saw the title, my 1st thought was of the connection to the movie; my 2nd thought was that, far from being amusing, the real-life version of this affliction would be a fate worse than death... imagine, being hit over and over for the rest of your life by the realization that a few precious moments are all you have, and that they'll be gone from your mind almost before you knew you had them.
He can't read a book or watch a movie, because he can't follow the plots.
He writes in a diary to try to keep track of what he does, but he keeps scratching the old entries out and writing new ones that say the same thing, "I'm awake. Now, I'm awake. Now, I'm really awake"... his own words don't seem real to him, don't make sense to him, because he can't recall writing them.
He talks about not being able to feel emotional pain, because if something causes bad feelings it's gone from his memory before he can suffer; he points out that this is NOT a desirable state of affairs, that not being able to feel is essentially being dead.
The most horrific aspect of this disability was driven home by a story his wife told about finding him crying, and trying to get him to tell her what was the matter, to which he finally replied "I CAN'T THINK."
The vast majority of trains of thought that you have each day last longer than 7 seconds; if you lost all of that, what would there be left? How is it possible to exist in a permanent 7 second bubble, never knowing what's going on, what day it is, what the future holds, living in the eternal now... and knowing that you were once normal, that you were once someone important, and that although your intelligence is still there you can't do anything with it, EVER.
In the earlier years of his affliction, which he's endured for TWENTY YEARS, he was prone to violent outbursts; they said they never figured out why, but how could he NOT be filled with rage and lash out when all he has is 7 seconds at a time?
I can't begin to wrap my mind around the nightmare that is that poor man's life. I can't imagine having to live that way, and I wouldn't want to try; I'd rather be dead. Wouldn't you?
Sunday, December 04, 2005
A couple of cool blog additions
If you're a long-time reader, you know that I've gone through several Flash clocks, as newer and cleverer ones came out and replaced the older versions; if you check my sidebar, you'll see my latest one... I think it'll be here for a while, because it's gonna take some doing to beat it. First off, it's uber-cute; after all the modern designs, a retro-alarm style is wildly appealing, it's beautifully done, with its shiny chrome, cheerful colors and a shadow, and it has the day and date too... it was love at 1st sight. Second, when I tried to click on it to see if it was linked to a site, a box with a MENU appeared, which gives the choice of "standard ringtone," "cathedral bells" and "cuckoo," and a control that says "Let it ring now!"; I tried the 1st 2 sounds, and was pretty excited... and then I did the 3rd and noticed that the clock, which was faintly visible under the box, had CHANGED. It took a little trial and error, but I discovered that if you click the control to play the alarm and then move your cursor downwards and off of the image, the clock will perform for you; for the ringtone, the little clapper bangs quickly back and forth as you'd expect, for the bells it swings very slowly, and for the cuckoo sound the entire clock changes, becoming, you guessed it, a cuckoo clock, complete with a birdie that comes out and does its thing. Give it a try; go ahead, I'll wait.
The one problem, and there always is one, is with the hourly chime; I made the choice in my customized code to not have one, but it didn't work... worse, it plays the ringtone AND the bells at the same time, and sometimes the bells and the cuckoo at the same time, which sounds kinda grim. I tried taking out the line of code that refers to the hourly sounds, and that didn't help; changing to a version of the code that's supposed to play ONE sound didn't either. If you happen to be reading on here at the top of the hour in the next few days, you'll hear it if your sound is on; I'm guessing that a fair # of people who come in on other pages via search engines, or visit for the 1st time after new posts have gone up and so haven't read this one, will be in for a surprise if they're here at the wrong time, too. I hope I'm not being overly optimistic in thinking this will be handled in a few days; I emailed the site owner about the problem, and it shouldn't be a difficult fix, but... well, let's stay positive and see what happens. (Update: the site owner replied promptly, and it was apparently just a glitch-it works fine now.)
The other new addition was alot of fun to work on. If you go here
http://www.lintukoto.net/banner/index.php
you'll discover a whole bunch of nifty photos, most of them containing signs of some sort, into which you can insert text to make fun customized images; I tried most of them out, with a variety of messages, before picking the one I thought looked the most like it was "real." Because the proportions didn't seem optimal to me, I had my husband crop it down to look more interesting; I had him put the URL back on there, too, just the way it was originally, because it's only fair to give credit where it's due. Take a look at the bottom of my blog, and you'll see the one I chose... right under the pic of Einstein with customized wording that I made a few weeks ago here
http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php
and just realized that I never posted about. It's too bad I've gotta have 'em way down there where most people won't see them, but they're too big for the sidebar and I don't want them across the top of the page (assuming I could even figure out how to put them there), so I try to think of them as rewards for people who read an entire page of my posts.
I hope you got a kick out of my latest enhancements... although, as usual, *I* probably had more fun with them than anyone else will.
The one problem, and there always is one, is with the hourly chime; I made the choice in my customized code to not have one, but it didn't work... worse, it plays the ringtone AND the bells at the same time, and sometimes the bells and the cuckoo at the same time, which sounds kinda grim. I tried taking out the line of code that refers to the hourly sounds, and that didn't help; changing to a version of the code that's supposed to play ONE sound didn't either. If you happen to be reading on here at the top of the hour in the next few days, you'll hear it if your sound is on; I'm guessing that a fair # of people who come in on other pages via search engines, or visit for the 1st time after new posts have gone up and so haven't read this one, will be in for a surprise if they're here at the wrong time, too. I hope I'm not being overly optimistic in thinking this will be handled in a few days; I emailed the site owner about the problem, and it shouldn't be a difficult fix, but... well, let's stay positive and see what happens. (Update: the site owner replied promptly, and it was apparently just a glitch-it works fine now.)
The other new addition was alot of fun to work on. If you go here
http://www.lintukoto.net/banner/index.php
you'll discover a whole bunch of nifty photos, most of them containing signs of some sort, into which you can insert text to make fun customized images; I tried most of them out, with a variety of messages, before picking the one I thought looked the most like it was "real." Because the proportions didn't seem optimal to me, I had my husband crop it down to look more interesting; I had him put the URL back on there, too, just the way it was originally, because it's only fair to give credit where it's due. Take a look at the bottom of my blog, and you'll see the one I chose... right under the pic of Einstein with customized wording that I made a few weeks ago here
http://www.hetemeel.com/einsteinform.php
and just realized that I never posted about. It's too bad I've gotta have 'em way down there where most people won't see them, but they're too big for the sidebar and I don't want them across the top of the page (assuming I could even figure out how to put them there), so I try to think of them as rewards for people who read an entire page of my posts.
I hope you got a kick out of my latest enhancements... although, as usual, *I* probably had more fun with them than anyone else will.
Saturday, December 03, 2005
How good of judgments and decisions do we make?
In the December 2005 issue of Discover is an article entitled "Why Do People Behave Nicely?", much of which deals with why people behave stupidly or badly. Hold onto your hat:
"In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it. Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure."
Americans LOVE jerks; that's why so many of those in positions of wealth, fame and power in this country qualify. We find bad behavior, and those that engage in it, to be fascinating, glamorous, and sexy, and virtuous behavior, and the poor saps who bought the childhood messages that this was the proper way to act, to be dull, boring, even foolish. Every day, you make decisions on who you want to become friends with, have sex with, hire or promote; on whose CD's you want to listen to, whose movies you want to watch, and whose face on the cover of a magazine will make you buy it... and if you're like most people, your choices overwhelmingly favor people who objectively are well into jerk territory rather than those who've shown themselves to be honest, noble, caring, etc.
Given the acceptance and approval we internalize for bad behavior all our lives, it's no surprise how easily influenced most folks are to behave in ways that they KNOW are wrong:
"Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's 'Behavioral Study of Obedience,' published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a 'learning experiment.' The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the 'stranger' is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, 'Please continue.' If the subject still balks, he is first told, 'The experiment requires that you go on,' then, 'It is absolutely essential that you continue,' and then, 'You have no other choice, you must go on.'
By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a 'very strong shock,' some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.
What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled 'Danger: Severe Shock,' administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although 'subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will,' most were willing to do so."
Milgram should NOT have been surprised; *I* wouldn't have been, because I've seen countless examples of the effortlessness with which manipulators can get people to behave in the most atrocious ways, and the men in the lab coats would have had the aura of authority added on to the pitiful willingness of people to act contrary to their supposed moral standards just because someone asked them to... what's there to be surprised about?
Are you certain that YOU would have refused to administer those shocks, or at least the dangerous ones? Ask yourself this; how's your track record of refusing to do what people pressure you to do? How often have you spoken out against things you knew were wrong, compared to how many times you decided to just go with the flow, so as not to rock the boat... or not to draw the wrath of the instigators of evil against yourself?
"For more than a century, psychologists have attempted to get to the root of evil and error. What they have discovered is not encouraging. Milgram and earlier researchers demonstrated that the ability to act rationally can be subverted by crowds or by pressure from authority figures. Recent studies show that humans, even when left alone, are prone to bewildering mistakes and biases."
Unfortunate but true; I'm left with my jaw hanging open on a daily basis from seeing how often people act in flagrant disregard for facts, logic, common sense, fairness, morality and even their own best interests, and I mean intelligent, decent people, not winos in an alleyway or hardened criminals... doesn't anyone give a single moment's thought to doing what's best, what's RIGHT, or do we just blunder forward like blindfolded gorillas?
"Social psychology crystallized in the 19th century around a concern with crowd behavior: Why do otherwise reasonable individuals become irrational or even dangerous when placed in a mob of people? By the middle of the 20th century, social psychologists had widened their research to examine how people can be influenced to make incorrect judgments or cross moral boundaries. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, pitted naive test subjects against a group of strangers who made bizarre judgments about the relative lengths of lines. Pressured to conform to the group, subjects often disregarded the obvious visual evidence and adopted the prevailing judgment."
We're social animals, after all, so I suppose it makes sense that we'd tend to go along with the group, even if what they're doing or saying is ridiculous or dangerous... but it still sucks, and it gets even worse:
"About the time of Milgram's experiment, Princeton University professor John Darley studied why bystanders, when confronted with strangers in distress, sometimes respond by walking away or closing the drapes. Inspired by the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York City murder victim whose cries for help failed to rouse her neighbors to action, Darley showed that test subjects were less likely to aid a stranger if they thought they were just one among several witnesses."
How utterly despicable. It think it also helps explain why people don't intervene when someone is being attacked verbally, online as well as in real life... but I'm not sure I even WANT to know WHY the existence of multiple witnesses would lead to people acting in such an indefensible way.
"Despite evidence of sheeplike behavior, many researchers still assumed that individuals, on their own, could be counted on to be rational and moral. The sea change came in the 1970s, from insights gleaned through economics research. In a series of articles and books, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Amos Tversky rejected the long-held notion that humans are rational actors in a marketplace. Rather than using all the information available and calculating the best decision, they argued, the human mind relies on 'quick and dirty' heuristics, mental shortcuts or rules of thumb, to make decisions."
Not MY human mind, thanks very much; perhaps because I came from an abusive family of origin, and was a pariah at school as well, I had to learn to calculate all the possible effects of every action I might take in order to avoid as much trouble as possible... but then again, I know others from similar backgrounds who don't seem able to make even the simplest determinations of what will lead to the most desirable outcomes, or avoid the worst ones (a grim example was a woman whose ex-husband would beat her if he came home and found that the litter box hadn't been cleaned, who was nevertheless consistently unable to make the choice to clean the litter box before he got home), so maybe it's just what's natural for me to do given my personality. Either way, this is clearly one of those ways I differ wildly from normal folks, psychologically speaking, and explains some of the frustration I experience from bright, educated people seeming unable to look at all the facts and apply logic to them to make decisions.
"people use arbitrary categories to make judgments. On hot August days, for instance, people look forward to the first day in September, as if turning a page on the calendar would suddenly make the weather cooler... people make two errors in this case: They underestimate temperature changes within a month (assuming, for instance, that August will be uniformly hot) and overestimate the changes in temperature that will occur when the month ends.
... We humans have a variety of ways of perceiving ourselves as smarter, more skilled, and more appealing than we are in reality. Most drivers, for example, say they drive more safely than the average person, even though that is a statistical impossibility. People also tend to consider themselves more attractive than others say they are. We tend to underestimate the chance that past events will reoccur, like winning two poker hands in a row (the 'hot hand' fallacy). Likewise, we incorrectly assume that because a basketball player has made the last five shots he will make the sixth. We overestimate small risks, like being killed by a terrorist, yet underestimate much larger ones, like being killed in a traffic accident.
The list goes on: the 'hindsight bias,' the 'systematic distortion effect,' the 'false uniqueness effect,' the 'just world bias,' the 'clouded judgment effect,' and the 'external agency illusion.' And just in case you think you're hip to your own biases, researchers have unveiled the 'bias blind spot,' in which you see biases in others but overlook them in yourself."
In other words, the average person doesn't judge ANYTHING accurately; no wonder so many bad decisions, and thus so many mistakes, get made.
"Human thinking... is of two broad types. There are the snap judgments we make on the fly, like assessing whether a person approaching us on the street is welcoming or threatening. And there are the activities to which we apply the full force of our minds, like preparing a business presentation or solving a math problem. That laborious reasoning has long been assumed to represent the gold standard of human thinking. It is the type of reasoning that social psychologists themselves employ. Test subjects, however, are typically placed in a situation and required to guess, react, or estimate. Later, the researcher analyzes the behavior at length, through the lens of statistics or logic. Whenever there is a disparity, the test subject is assumed to be displaying the error or bias, not the researcher."
Verrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting... but WHY don't people use "laborious reasoning" "on the fly"? It doesn't actually take more than a moment to do for most situations one encounters in daily life, or even for most surprise situations; *I* automatically run multiple scenarios and analyses thereof in my head for everything, because I could be, and was, questioned at length about every move I made as a kid and young adult, and so had to be able to justify how all my choices were based on accurate analyses of all the available facts... yeah, that's not a pleasant thought, but the point is that it's doable in a couple of seconds even for a kid, and it leads to better results, so WHY don't people do it?
Another typical lapse in judgment is how people automatically assume that their preferences, beliefs, etc, reflect those of the majority, which is why those who find themselves in opposition to the results of studies will often proclaim them to be "wrong"... in contrast, you'll notice, to how *I* say that something a study shows is common doesn't apply to ME but NEVER deny the correctness of the findings. This sort of lapse has actually been studied:
"In a now famous study, Lee Ross and colleagues at Stanford University asked students if they would walk around campus wearing a sandwich board that read 'Eat at Joe's.' The test subjects who agreed to do this embarrassing task predicted that 62 percent of others approached to carry the sign would do it. But test subjects who refused to carry the sign thought that only 33 percent of others would agree to do it when asked. Researchers concluded that they had found a new bias in reasoning, which they called the 'false consensus effect'-that people have the naive tendency to project their individual attitudes, values, and behaviors onto the majority."
What's really interesting, though, is a different way of looking at it:
"By definition, most people are in the majority most of the time... Therefore, if you assume that your opinion will match that of the majority, you will be right more often than not."
That would explain why people might reasonably keep believing that others will think and feel as they do in many situations; it should NOT prevent them from grasping that they're not ALWAYS in the majority, though, or from asking themselves how likely they are to be in the majority in individual cases, but I suppose that's too much to ask.
"People don't decide on a strategy and then assume people will act similarly. Rather, they assume similarity and then act on that assumption... this may explain why we do many socially conscious acts, such as taking time to vote even though we know that our individual vote probably won't make a difference. The assumption that people will act like us actually influences our decision to participate.
The result is that there are higher levels of cooperation in groups where people project their beliefs on others."
All well and good, but most of what we do doesn't involve group cooperation, so I maintain that we still need to take a reality break before making judgments.
The last bit of the article that I found attention-grabbing was this:
"developmental psychologist Michael Maratsos of the University of Minnesota argues that the truly troubling revelation of Milgram's experiment was the extent of conformity and cruelty, 'given how little the subjects had at stake.'"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; these so-called experts need to start doing thorough studies of online interactions, which show human nature at its least restrained, because if they did they'd know that people will leap to conform with ugly behavior with NOTHING at stake... and if you don't think that the ringleaders of these online attacks would be perfectly willing to push people to do something physically painful to the victims if a way to do so were available, or that any of the co-attackers would hesitate to go along with it, you've never seen a REAL forum fight.
The absolute bottom line here is that you have the ability to think, and it's up to you to make a conscious effort to use it. It's not difficult to figure out what the right thing to do is, or whether a person whose life impinges on yours is good or bad, and to act appropriately; you just need to CHOOSE to do the figuring out and the acting. For less effort than you probably expend trying to decide what to watch on TV each night, you can wildly improve your judgments and decisions, not to mention your karma (by supporting good people and opposing the bad ones); isn't it worth a try?
"In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it. Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure."
Americans LOVE jerks; that's why so many of those in positions of wealth, fame and power in this country qualify. We find bad behavior, and those that engage in it, to be fascinating, glamorous, and sexy, and virtuous behavior, and the poor saps who bought the childhood messages that this was the proper way to act, to be dull, boring, even foolish. Every day, you make decisions on who you want to become friends with, have sex with, hire or promote; on whose CD's you want to listen to, whose movies you want to watch, and whose face on the cover of a magazine will make you buy it... and if you're like most people, your choices overwhelmingly favor people who objectively are well into jerk territory rather than those who've shown themselves to be honest, noble, caring, etc.
Given the acceptance and approval we internalize for bad behavior all our lives, it's no surprise how easily influenced most folks are to behave in ways that they KNOW are wrong:
"Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's 'Behavioral Study of Obedience,' published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a 'learning experiment.' The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the 'stranger' is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, 'Please continue.' If the subject still balks, he is first told, 'The experiment requires that you go on,' then, 'It is absolutely essential that you continue,' and then, 'You have no other choice, you must go on.'
By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a 'very strong shock,' some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.
What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled 'Danger: Severe Shock,' administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although 'subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will,' most were willing to do so."
Milgram should NOT have been surprised; *I* wouldn't have been, because I've seen countless examples of the effortlessness with which manipulators can get people to behave in the most atrocious ways, and the men in the lab coats would have had the aura of authority added on to the pitiful willingness of people to act contrary to their supposed moral standards just because someone asked them to... what's there to be surprised about?
Are you certain that YOU would have refused to administer those shocks, or at least the dangerous ones? Ask yourself this; how's your track record of refusing to do what people pressure you to do? How often have you spoken out against things you knew were wrong, compared to how many times you decided to just go with the flow, so as not to rock the boat... or not to draw the wrath of the instigators of evil against yourself?
"For more than a century, psychologists have attempted to get to the root of evil and error. What they have discovered is not encouraging. Milgram and earlier researchers demonstrated that the ability to act rationally can be subverted by crowds or by pressure from authority figures. Recent studies show that humans, even when left alone, are prone to bewildering mistakes and biases."
Unfortunate but true; I'm left with my jaw hanging open on a daily basis from seeing how often people act in flagrant disregard for facts, logic, common sense, fairness, morality and even their own best interests, and I mean intelligent, decent people, not winos in an alleyway or hardened criminals... doesn't anyone give a single moment's thought to doing what's best, what's RIGHT, or do we just blunder forward like blindfolded gorillas?
"Social psychology crystallized in the 19th century around a concern with crowd behavior: Why do otherwise reasonable individuals become irrational or even dangerous when placed in a mob of people? By the middle of the 20th century, social psychologists had widened their research to examine how people can be influenced to make incorrect judgments or cross moral boundaries. In the 1950s, Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, pitted naive test subjects against a group of strangers who made bizarre judgments about the relative lengths of lines. Pressured to conform to the group, subjects often disregarded the obvious visual evidence and adopted the prevailing judgment."
We're social animals, after all, so I suppose it makes sense that we'd tend to go along with the group, even if what they're doing or saying is ridiculous or dangerous... but it still sucks, and it gets even worse:
"About the time of Milgram's experiment, Princeton University professor John Darley studied why bystanders, when confronted with strangers in distress, sometimes respond by walking away or closing the drapes. Inspired by the case of Kitty Genovese, a New York City murder victim whose cries for help failed to rouse her neighbors to action, Darley showed that test subjects were less likely to aid a stranger if they thought they were just one among several witnesses."
How utterly despicable. It think it also helps explain why people don't intervene when someone is being attacked verbally, online as well as in real life... but I'm not sure I even WANT to know WHY the existence of multiple witnesses would lead to people acting in such an indefensible way.
"Despite evidence of sheeplike behavior, many researchers still assumed that individuals, on their own, could be counted on to be rational and moral. The sea change came in the 1970s, from insights gleaned through economics research. In a series of articles and books, psychologists Daniel Kahneman, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, and Amos Tversky rejected the long-held notion that humans are rational actors in a marketplace. Rather than using all the information available and calculating the best decision, they argued, the human mind relies on 'quick and dirty' heuristics, mental shortcuts or rules of thumb, to make decisions."
Not MY human mind, thanks very much; perhaps because I came from an abusive family of origin, and was a pariah at school as well, I had to learn to calculate all the possible effects of every action I might take in order to avoid as much trouble as possible... but then again, I know others from similar backgrounds who don't seem able to make even the simplest determinations of what will lead to the most desirable outcomes, or avoid the worst ones (a grim example was a woman whose ex-husband would beat her if he came home and found that the litter box hadn't been cleaned, who was nevertheless consistently unable to make the choice to clean the litter box before he got home), so maybe it's just what's natural for me to do given my personality. Either way, this is clearly one of those ways I differ wildly from normal folks, psychologically speaking, and explains some of the frustration I experience from bright, educated people seeming unable to look at all the facts and apply logic to them to make decisions.
"people use arbitrary categories to make judgments. On hot August days, for instance, people look forward to the first day in September, as if turning a page on the calendar would suddenly make the weather cooler... people make two errors in this case: They underestimate temperature changes within a month (assuming, for instance, that August will be uniformly hot) and overestimate the changes in temperature that will occur when the month ends.
... We humans have a variety of ways of perceiving ourselves as smarter, more skilled, and more appealing than we are in reality. Most drivers, for example, say they drive more safely than the average person, even though that is a statistical impossibility. People also tend to consider themselves more attractive than others say they are. We tend to underestimate the chance that past events will reoccur, like winning two poker hands in a row (the 'hot hand' fallacy). Likewise, we incorrectly assume that because a basketball player has made the last five shots he will make the sixth. We overestimate small risks, like being killed by a terrorist, yet underestimate much larger ones, like being killed in a traffic accident.
The list goes on: the 'hindsight bias,' the 'systematic distortion effect,' the 'false uniqueness effect,' the 'just world bias,' the 'clouded judgment effect,' and the 'external agency illusion.' And just in case you think you're hip to your own biases, researchers have unveiled the 'bias blind spot,' in which you see biases in others but overlook them in yourself."
In other words, the average person doesn't judge ANYTHING accurately; no wonder so many bad decisions, and thus so many mistakes, get made.
"Human thinking... is of two broad types. There are the snap judgments we make on the fly, like assessing whether a person approaching us on the street is welcoming or threatening. And there are the activities to which we apply the full force of our minds, like preparing a business presentation or solving a math problem. That laborious reasoning has long been assumed to represent the gold standard of human thinking. It is the type of reasoning that social psychologists themselves employ. Test subjects, however, are typically placed in a situation and required to guess, react, or estimate. Later, the researcher analyzes the behavior at length, through the lens of statistics or logic. Whenever there is a disparity, the test subject is assumed to be displaying the error or bias, not the researcher."
Verrrrrrrrrrrrry interesting... but WHY don't people use "laborious reasoning" "on the fly"? It doesn't actually take more than a moment to do for most situations one encounters in daily life, or even for most surprise situations; *I* automatically run multiple scenarios and analyses thereof in my head for everything, because I could be, and was, questioned at length about every move I made as a kid and young adult, and so had to be able to justify how all my choices were based on accurate analyses of all the available facts... yeah, that's not a pleasant thought, but the point is that it's doable in a couple of seconds even for a kid, and it leads to better results, so WHY don't people do it?
Another typical lapse in judgment is how people automatically assume that their preferences, beliefs, etc, reflect those of the majority, which is why those who find themselves in opposition to the results of studies will often proclaim them to be "wrong"... in contrast, you'll notice, to how *I* say that something a study shows is common doesn't apply to ME but NEVER deny the correctness of the findings. This sort of lapse has actually been studied:
"In a now famous study, Lee Ross and colleagues at Stanford University asked students if they would walk around campus wearing a sandwich board that read 'Eat at Joe's.' The test subjects who agreed to do this embarrassing task predicted that 62 percent of others approached to carry the sign would do it. But test subjects who refused to carry the sign thought that only 33 percent of others would agree to do it when asked. Researchers concluded that they had found a new bias in reasoning, which they called the 'false consensus effect'-that people have the naive tendency to project their individual attitudes, values, and behaviors onto the majority."
What's really interesting, though, is a different way of looking at it:
"By definition, most people are in the majority most of the time... Therefore, if you assume that your opinion will match that of the majority, you will be right more often than not."
That would explain why people might reasonably keep believing that others will think and feel as they do in many situations; it should NOT prevent them from grasping that they're not ALWAYS in the majority, though, or from asking themselves how likely they are to be in the majority in individual cases, but I suppose that's too much to ask.
"People don't decide on a strategy and then assume people will act similarly. Rather, they assume similarity and then act on that assumption... this may explain why we do many socially conscious acts, such as taking time to vote even though we know that our individual vote probably won't make a difference. The assumption that people will act like us actually influences our decision to participate.
The result is that there are higher levels of cooperation in groups where people project their beliefs on others."
All well and good, but most of what we do doesn't involve group cooperation, so I maintain that we still need to take a reality break before making judgments.
The last bit of the article that I found attention-grabbing was this:
"developmental psychologist Michael Maratsos of the University of Minnesota argues that the truly troubling revelation of Milgram's experiment was the extent of conformity and cruelty, 'given how little the subjects had at stake.'"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again; these so-called experts need to start doing thorough studies of online interactions, which show human nature at its least restrained, because if they did they'd know that people will leap to conform with ugly behavior with NOTHING at stake... and if you don't think that the ringleaders of these online attacks would be perfectly willing to push people to do something physically painful to the victims if a way to do so were available, or that any of the co-attackers would hesitate to go along with it, you've never seen a REAL forum fight.
The absolute bottom line here is that you have the ability to think, and it's up to you to make a conscious effort to use it. It's not difficult to figure out what the right thing to do is, or whether a person whose life impinges on yours is good or bad, and to act appropriately; you just need to CHOOSE to do the figuring out and the acting. For less effort than you probably expend trying to decide what to watch on TV each night, you can wildly improve your judgments and decisions, not to mention your karma (by supporting good people and opposing the bad ones); isn't it worth a try?
Friday, December 02, 2005
Odds and ends #2
I've made a strange and disturbing discovery; if I eat beyond a certain amount of candy, I get nauseous. It's not that I think that either my weight or my health would benefit from unlimited candy consumption, it's just that this year I've also started getting tummy disturbance from fruit and vegetables, and I've developed an increasing inability to eat beyond a certain amount of protein or fatty foods without "cutting" it with bland carbs such as plain rice or potato chips (yeah, I know, but when you start feeling internal distress, if you're smart you'll quickly eat whatever will settle it down) ... it scares me a little, because if "dry salties" and such stop paving the way for other foods to be comfortably eaten, what will I eat THEN?
I saw a show on the Discovery Science Channel called "More Clever Critters" that demonstrated the astonishing problem-solving ability of keas, which are parrots that live in New Zealand; the REALLY mind-boggling thing was that they did the mirror test on the birds, to see if they're self-aware (in other words, if they recognize that their reflections are them, rather than believing them to be other birds)... and they ARE!! It was a big, BIG deal when they 1st realized that chimps are self-aware, because they'd arrogantly assumed that only humans were, and still a big deal when they found self-awareness in other primates, but a BIRD?!! One of the keas actually went so far as to strike various poses while looking back and forth between the body part it was moving and its reflection... and then they showed footage of a chimp doing the same sort of thing, which drove home the point of what level of mental functioning these birds are at. The one part of the test that was missing is where they mark the animals with paint where they can't see it (they're handled in a way that doesn't alert them to the paint being applied), to verify that when they look in the mirror they notice the spots; the keas, being wild birds, obviously couldn't be tested that way, but they really need to try it with some tame ones to be absolutely sure that they're understanding the meaning of their reflections, and aren't just showing some other sort of behavior that mimics recognition.
If you see a connection between being self-aware and having a soul, as I always have, this news about keas proves that at least some birds have them; imagine how lovely a hummingbird's soul would be, if it has one. I read recently that dolphins pass the mirror test too; their legendary willingness to rescue drowning humans had already made me pretty certain that they had souls, and this just backs it up. Self-awareness in animals seems directly linked to intelligence... and that, to me, is further evidence of the soul being made of the energy of thought.
And finally, I've realized something about my collections; my little figurines, stuffies and toys provide me with physical things to be attached to, and thus help anchor me in the physical world... without them, I'd be adrift in a sea of ideas, thoughts, reading, writing, cyberspace, analysis, and spiritual contemplation, punctuated only periodically by my more, um, meaningful interactions with my husband, and those rare times with friends when we do something more than exchange ideas or maybe watch a movie. Most days, if I could operate a computer directly with my gray matter, and science articles and such could be piped directly into it, I could live as a disembodied brain in a jar and not see much difference... except that looking around at my things makes me happy, both because of their attractiveness and because for most of my life I didn't have much of anything, so I'd be much LESS happy without them. I could withdraw to an austere life of poverty in a spiritual retreat on an isolated mountaintop and probably be pretty satisfied with an existence in bare stone rooms, as long as they had digital cable and a decent DSL connection... except that I'd be miserable without my shelves full of collectibles smiling down on me every day. Perhaps that makes my collections a barrier to my ultimate levels of intellect and spirituality; so be it.
If you were wondering where I envisioned my husband would be if I was living in a retreat... he'd be living there too, because he's even more of a natural hermit than I am, and even less attached to the physical world (he doesn't have collections). His requirements for computer equipment are more extreme than mine, and he'd have to be allowed to be helicoptered out occasionally to see some of the noxious no-talent bands he likes perform, which is cheating a little, but overall he'd be happy to just be a lump in front of a screen, and wouldn't mind having to discuss spiritual issues if it meant he didn't have to work or maintain a household anymore. Actually, he had one other requirement, that none of the other retreat-dwellers be less skilled on the computer than he is, so that he wouldn't be stuck giving tech support to anyone but me; he says that his idea of hell is 500 people who don't know how to use their computers, all expecting his assistance.
Anyways; if anyone ever tries to question the wisdom of my having such huge collections, I'll have a pretty slick reply... other than my standard 2-word one, that is.
I saw a show on the Discovery Science Channel called "More Clever Critters" that demonstrated the astonishing problem-solving ability of keas, which are parrots that live in New Zealand; the REALLY mind-boggling thing was that they did the mirror test on the birds, to see if they're self-aware (in other words, if they recognize that their reflections are them, rather than believing them to be other birds)... and they ARE!! It was a big, BIG deal when they 1st realized that chimps are self-aware, because they'd arrogantly assumed that only humans were, and still a big deal when they found self-awareness in other primates, but a BIRD?!! One of the keas actually went so far as to strike various poses while looking back and forth between the body part it was moving and its reflection... and then they showed footage of a chimp doing the same sort of thing, which drove home the point of what level of mental functioning these birds are at. The one part of the test that was missing is where they mark the animals with paint where they can't see it (they're handled in a way that doesn't alert them to the paint being applied), to verify that when they look in the mirror they notice the spots; the keas, being wild birds, obviously couldn't be tested that way, but they really need to try it with some tame ones to be absolutely sure that they're understanding the meaning of their reflections, and aren't just showing some other sort of behavior that mimics recognition.
If you see a connection between being self-aware and having a soul, as I always have, this news about keas proves that at least some birds have them; imagine how lovely a hummingbird's soul would be, if it has one. I read recently that dolphins pass the mirror test too; their legendary willingness to rescue drowning humans had already made me pretty certain that they had souls, and this just backs it up. Self-awareness in animals seems directly linked to intelligence... and that, to me, is further evidence of the soul being made of the energy of thought.
And finally, I've realized something about my collections; my little figurines, stuffies and toys provide me with physical things to be attached to, and thus help anchor me in the physical world... without them, I'd be adrift in a sea of ideas, thoughts, reading, writing, cyberspace, analysis, and spiritual contemplation, punctuated only periodically by my more, um, meaningful interactions with my husband, and those rare times with friends when we do something more than exchange ideas or maybe watch a movie. Most days, if I could operate a computer directly with my gray matter, and science articles and such could be piped directly into it, I could live as a disembodied brain in a jar and not see much difference... except that looking around at my things makes me happy, both because of their attractiveness and because for most of my life I didn't have much of anything, so I'd be much LESS happy without them. I could withdraw to an austere life of poverty in a spiritual retreat on an isolated mountaintop and probably be pretty satisfied with an existence in bare stone rooms, as long as they had digital cable and a decent DSL connection... except that I'd be miserable without my shelves full of collectibles smiling down on me every day. Perhaps that makes my collections a barrier to my ultimate levels of intellect and spirituality; so be it.
If you were wondering where I envisioned my husband would be if I was living in a retreat... he'd be living there too, because he's even more of a natural hermit than I am, and even less attached to the physical world (he doesn't have collections). His requirements for computer equipment are more extreme than mine, and he'd have to be allowed to be helicoptered out occasionally to see some of the noxious no-talent bands he likes perform, which is cheating a little, but overall he'd be happy to just be a lump in front of a screen, and wouldn't mind having to discuss spiritual issues if it meant he didn't have to work or maintain a household anymore. Actually, he had one other requirement, that none of the other retreat-dwellers be less skilled on the computer than he is, so that he wouldn't be stuck giving tech support to anyone but me; he says that his idea of hell is 500 people who don't know how to use their computers, all expecting his assistance.
Anyways; if anyone ever tries to question the wisdom of my having such huge collections, I'll have a pretty slick reply... other than my standard 2-word one, that is.
Thursday, December 01, 2005
Odds and ends
I looked out at the patio tonight, and saw what I thought was our possum boy... and something was wrong with his ear!! I called anxiously to him to get him to look at me so I could see if he was injured... and I saw that this was a different possum, our THIRD. He's somewhat smaller than our male, with lighter fur and what appears to be an oddly pigmented ear; he was a little nervous, but bolder than either of the other 2 had been when they 1st came. He was a perfectly nice looking possum... and I should have chased him away, because when he and the other male encounter each other, they'll fight, and the little female would probably run away, or be chased and possibly attacked. The thing is, possum faces are so sweet in their goofy way, and he was obviously starving, and... and I just couldn't do that to an animal whose only crime was to be hungry enough to come into an area that must reek of the other, bigger male to grab some food.
Possums are solitary animals, aside from brief necessary encounters during mating season; our original 2 are already acting totally outside of their normal parameters by hanging out together, but does that mean that another MALE can hang out here too? I tend to doubt it, especially after the incident I posted about on 11-13-05, when my possum boy was barking protractedly at another possum that was on the other side of the fence, and trying to climb over and get to him... but all I can do is cross my fingers and see what happens next.
I discovered something cool today, a site called Freecycle
http://www.freecycle.org/
from which you can find associated groups in your area, not just in America but many other countries as well, where you can offer up stuff you want to get rid of, and then decide who among those in the group that want it can come and pick it up, be the recipient of things that other members are giving away, and even post requests to be given things... all FREE. The idea is to extend the reuse/recycle idea to stuff that accumulates in the backs of closets, or gets piled on the curb on trash day, especially the latter (because what gets thrown away often ends up in landfills), and to be able to help people out. I'm big on donating unused items to charity, but not every charity takes every kind of thing, and most of them won't send a truck to pick up bigger things (which is why so much furniture just gets thrown out, because no one wants to rent a truck to take a near-worthless table or whatever to Goodwill), and it's a cool idea to be part of a community that allows everyone to give directly to those who have themselves given to others, so... check them out.
My husband and I had an amusing, if gross (no surprise there), marital moment today; we were doing some silly thing with our fingertips touching, and then, because he's the king of flatulence, I pushed his finger, pointing out that that was the opposite of PULLING his finger (that disgusting American game that's supposed to make the person fart)... and he BELCHED, telling me that pushing the finger instead of pulling it caused the fart to back up and come out the other end. I didn't know whether to shriek, laugh, or smack him, so I did all 3. He was very proud of himself, especially that he'd been able to belch at will, which I don't remember him having done before; he then tried to teach ME to do it, but no matter how much air I swallowed, or what sort of throat contortions I did, nothing happened, thank goodness... I'd be dismayed if my body were capable of any such crude noise-making.
Never a dull moment, lol.
Possums are solitary animals, aside from brief necessary encounters during mating season; our original 2 are already acting totally outside of their normal parameters by hanging out together, but does that mean that another MALE can hang out here too? I tend to doubt it, especially after the incident I posted about on 11-13-05, when my possum boy was barking protractedly at another possum that was on the other side of the fence, and trying to climb over and get to him... but all I can do is cross my fingers and see what happens next.
I discovered something cool today, a site called Freecycle
http://www.freecycle.org/
from which you can find associated groups in your area, not just in America but many other countries as well, where you can offer up stuff you want to get rid of, and then decide who among those in the group that want it can come and pick it up, be the recipient of things that other members are giving away, and even post requests to be given things... all FREE. The idea is to extend the reuse/recycle idea to stuff that accumulates in the backs of closets, or gets piled on the curb on trash day, especially the latter (because what gets thrown away often ends up in landfills), and to be able to help people out. I'm big on donating unused items to charity, but not every charity takes every kind of thing, and most of them won't send a truck to pick up bigger things (which is why so much furniture just gets thrown out, because no one wants to rent a truck to take a near-worthless table or whatever to Goodwill), and it's a cool idea to be part of a community that allows everyone to give directly to those who have themselves given to others, so... check them out.
My husband and I had an amusing, if gross (no surprise there), marital moment today; we were doing some silly thing with our fingertips touching, and then, because he's the king of flatulence, I pushed his finger, pointing out that that was the opposite of PULLING his finger (that disgusting American game that's supposed to make the person fart)... and he BELCHED, telling me that pushing the finger instead of pulling it caused the fart to back up and come out the other end. I didn't know whether to shriek, laugh, or smack him, so I did all 3. He was very proud of himself, especially that he'd been able to belch at will, which I don't remember him having done before; he then tried to teach ME to do it, but no matter how much air I swallowed, or what sort of throat contortions I did, nothing happened, thank goodness... I'd be dismayed if my body were capable of any such crude noise-making.
Never a dull moment, lol.
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