Category: Hmmm….

food for thought

Web Humor: Silly or Scary

The following, emailed to me by a friend who is not usually prone to disseminating such things, is either really silly or very scary. Perhaps both.

What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How can we achieve 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here’s a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:
H-A-R-D-W-O-R-K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and
K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,
A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

On the other hand,
B-U-L-L-$-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.
A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that, while Hardwork and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, it’s the BULL$HIT and ASSKISSING that will put you over the top !!!

D-E-V-R-A, alone, only gets you 50%, but D-E-V-R-A-D-O-W-R-I-T-E gives you 144% of your minimum daily requirement. (Of course T-E-R-R-Y-T-E-A-C-H-O-U-T scores even higher — 179% — so what else is new? Cheers TT, here’s to you — may you remain in the stunned but happy state of grace to which I will continue to aspire.)

Awe and Admiration

Friends and even some acquaintances often comment that they are amazed by my schedule and stamina, the number of projects I juggle and so forth. I know people who work far harder than I do, so I assume that this “awe” is inspired by my cancer encounter and living with multiple sclerosis. It’s nice to get compliments, a good ego boost and all of that, but I’m not really so impressed with myself, especially when there are others whose struggles are much greater. Today I read a story on NPR’s website about a woman, Ms. Morant, who knows far better than I what it means to keep going. She lives in a brick row house in Washington, D.C. where she cares for her 89 year old sister and her 95 year old brother. After 20 years her sister is in the end stages of Alzheimer’s and over the last six years her brother has had several strokes. Ms. Morant, who has been caring for them the whole time, is 101 years old. Now she is truly worthy of awe and admiration. Here’s the link to the NPR page with the story, photos, and audio.

I Just Don’t Get It

I just read a scary article online: Without a Song: Just how much music can a nonmusician make? Here’s a snippet:

Their goal is more ambitious than helping novices become better listeners: they want to catapult people with little or no training into the ranks of composers and performers.

“It’s a shame that people have to sit in an audience and be passive,” says Elaine Chew, an accomplished pianist and assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering at the University of Southern California. Chew has performed in venues ranging from Singapore to Slovenia, and has accompanied cellist Yo-Yo Ma. More recently, she’s been focusing her energies on enabling nonmusicians to experience the thrill of performance.

Why? And is listening to music a passive experience? (Is any activity really passive?). Does she really mean to imply that listeners feel no thrill?

Maybe I’m just too old and stodgy to appreciate this, but I cannot imagine that I would find it thrilling to drive music.

Chew has yoked a steering-wheel console to a computer system that lets a user “drive” a piece of music, manipulating the tempo with an accelerator and brake pad. The visual display is like a race track whose curves prompt the driver to slow down or speed up, shifting the musical pace along with the car’s movement through space.

I just don’t get it. Do you?

Time Traveller

I just started reading The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. The story is bizarre but the writing is lovely. In the prologue the premise is explained: this guy comes and goes from the present quite suddenly and without will, travelling in time, while his wife leads a normal linear life. When I read the last two sentences of the prologue, however, I thought perhaps they might have been uttered by an artist who lives so much in and for his or her art that other people are often excluded. Here are the two sentences:

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

On a much less poetic note, actually more political, it seems that we are all going backwards in time to an era of censorship and fear. The thought police are visible today. The AP Wire reports

The FCC said an episode of the CBS crime drama ”Without a Trace” that aired in December 2004 was indecent, citing the graphic depiction of ”teenage boys and girls participating in a sexual orgy.”

CBS objected, saying the program ”featured an important and socially relevant storyline warning parents to exercise greater supervision of their teenage children.”

Some perspective is provided in a related NY Times article

Many complaints are lodged in large numbers by organized groups and not by independent viewers

Big Brother

I received an email yesterday from amazon.com.

Devra Hall, Amazon.com has new recommendations for you based on 169 items you purchased or told us you own.

I don’t keep track of how many books and CDs I buy from amazon, let alone which titles, but they do. Still, unless they read DevraDoWrite (which I doubt), they have no idea what “items” I own beyond those that I purchase from them. And I don’t even own all of those — many were bought as gifts. They don’t seem to differentiate between books that were shipped to me and books shipped elsewhere. Nor, I suspect, do they weigh when the purchase was made. A topic of interest to me few years ago may no longer be on my mind.
Here are a few of the titles that they recommended for me:

  • Writing for a Good Cause: The Complete Guide to Crafting Proposals and Other Persuasive Pieces for Nonprofit
  • Fall Down, Laughing : How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn’t Tell Nobody
  • Love and Its Place in Nature : A Philosophical Interpretation of Freudian Psychoanalysis
  • Happiness, Death, and the Remainder of Life (The Tanner Lectures on Human Values)
  • Strange Pilgrims: Twelve Stories (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century)
  • The Cornish Trilogy
  • Fat Pig : A Play
  • The First Year-Multiple Sclerosis: An Essential Guide for the Newly Diagnosed (The First Year Series)
  • Base Instincts: What Makes Killers Kill?
  • Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer: How to Win Top Writing Assignments
  • Doubt (a play)
  • The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency As a Freelance Writer in Six Months or Less
  • The Pillowman: A Play
  • Lives of Extraordinary Women: Rulers, Rebels (and What the Neighbors Thought)
  • Demystifying Grant Seeking: What You REALLY Need to Do to Get Grants
  • Bartok: The Piano Concertos ~ Pierre Boulez
  • The Kite Runner

    • While many of their suggestions were obvious — I recently bought a book on grant writing, hence suggestion #1, and I’m sure I bought a book about MS when I was first diagnosed back in 1999 — the basis for other suggestions mystified me. I finally figured out that the play recommendations stemmed from a purchase I made for someone else — I bought a copy of Frozen for a friend and apparently other people who bought that play also bought Fat Pig and The Pillowman, or maybe they just figure a play is a play is a play.

    Today I got another amazon email with a recommendation that makes no sense to me:

    We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon also purchased books by Patrick McMullan.

    I had purchased Zafon’s book last summer at the recommendation of Rifftides and enjoyed it very much, but what that novel about the son of a widowed bookstore owner in 1950s Barcelona has in common with Patrick McMullan’s “collection of more than 1000 photographs of the quintessential human act—the kiss…” I cannot fathom. I guess I’ll just have to take it at face value — a couple of people happened to buy both titles.

    Why am I boring you with all of this? So we can all think about the double-edged swords also known as technological innovations. Is it a lovely convenience to have someone (something?) keep track of your tastes and sift through the onslaught of incoming information, or not?

    Passing Judgement

    I recently heard a pianist who has great facility, a voluminous repertoire, and knows all the correct chord changes. I heard someone describe this musician as “a cocktail pianist,” but I disagree. I heard a depth of harmonic understanding far greater than that which I’d expect from “a cocktail pianist.” So why then did the performance leave me cold?

    Several reasons, including a lack of swing and an overabundance of cleverness. The music was so busy going here, there and everywhere that it never found a groove, and I could never get a good foot-tap going. But most off-putting was that I could hear all the hard work that was going into the performance. With each lean into the piano and up-tic of a shoulder I could see the brain gears engaged and grinding away to create intricate segues between tunes and find just the right bar into which a clever musical quotation could be inserted.

    I closed my eyes, but even then the performance was painstaking, and therein, I believe, lays a problem. Great works — be they musical, literary, fine art, or theatrical — should feel effortless. We the audience, want to experience the end result, at least at performance time. I add that “at least at performance time” caveat to acknowledge our interest in behind-the-scenes processes – an attraction well plumbed by ArtistShare. But when we see or hear the heavy lifting and mental machinations during a performance, when we see the man behind the curtain, the magic disappears.

    So, if the appearance of effortlessness is one criteria for a great performance, what else? What makes an artist great rather than average?

    • Superior technical skill?
    • Emotional presence?
    • Unique sound or style?

    I would posit that many artists have one or two of these attributes, but that only those few who have the whole package become the great masters or legends in their field. Having said that, I must also acknowledge the point made by Owen Cordle, jazz writer for the News and Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and also JazzTimes. In an account shared online courtesy of Rifftides, Owen writes “Sometimes the spirit of a thing can give you hope and heal you even when the source isn’t perfect. ” I agree. Here’s another excerpt (read the full account here):

    This may sound odd, but part of the joy came from watching Lou grab bits and pieces of the heads and sometimes feel his way through the first improvised chorus or part thereof and then nail the chord changes solidly the next time around. He was fallible and human but a quick study. And that was the beauty of it — recovery, ingenuity, memory and the musical ear in action on the wing.

    I’d likely have felt the same way had I been there. What leaves me cold is not so much the awareness of the “work” being done as the purpose of that work. When the goal is communicating the essence of the music, all is well, but when the stylistic trappings, technique and cleverness become the point unto themselves, then all is lost. This is true of great writing as well as great music; if the style screams “look at me,” it is usually to cover up some deficit. I’m hoping that some of my esteemed colleagues and DevraDoWrite readers will weigh in with their thoughts via email.

    And here’s one more thought to consider. Should an artist’s personal reputation matter? Whether factual or speculated, based on press or personal knowledge, should anything other than the person’s artistic ability influence our choices of consumption? Clearly publicity and advertising do influence us, but should that be so? Perhaps I am missing out when I refuse to pick up a book by Frey just because I think he’s a liar. Being a liar doesn’t preclude being a good writer, at least not technically. And I won’t even consider reading a book by someone named Cupcake, partly because of the Frey fallout, partly because of her name, and partly because I’m sick of the look-at-my-sorry-life-now-better memoirs. None of these are good reasons to dismiss a work unseen, but hey, I’m only human and that’s my reaction. I’m glad I became a Sinatra fan before I heard that he wasn’t always such a nice guy. It’s also a good thing I read “In Cold Blood” before I found out that Capote made stuff up and exploited his subjects and Harper Lee too. Hmmm.

    Confirmation Bias

    Defined in an article I read this morning online, confirmation bias is:

    … when we only read material, attend events, join organizations or hire employees that match our own backgrounds, experiences and beliefs. It’s when we screen out information we might not agree with.

    It’s an Op-Ed piece by Cheryl I. Procter-Rogers, President, the Public Relations Society of America that relates to the challenges public relations professionals face when we-the-people have the ability to so narrowly focus our attentions — after all, there’s little point in preaching to the choir.

    Her concern, which relates equally to advertisers, is of little concern to me as I am always looking for ways to filter out the sales pitches, whether outright advertising or advertising via subtrafuge, ie pr. (Yes, I used to be a publicist.) However, she does raise an excellent point about the downside of such filtering:

    I speak often to our members about the unintended consequence of confirmation bias on our society—more intolerance and even less understanding of our differences. Thanks to the Internet, TiVo and Sirius satellite radio, one can have one’s biases validated daily by self-selection.

    That is something worth thinking about….and, all together now, that is why I love blogs and the serendipity afforded by the Internet.

    I’ve Got Mail: Really Scary and Really Cool

    I remember reading George Orwell’s 1984 — the year was 1968 and I had not yet turned thirteen years old. Fourteen years away – more years than I had theretofore been alive — seemed like eternity, and I never thought then that any of those things could or would ever happen. In this morning batch of emails, I received this:

    Ordering pizza in 2010

    This could be scary if it wasn’t funny!?
    Be sure that your speakers are on and the volume is turned up.

    For a look at what ordering pizza in the year 2010 will be like, click below:

    http://www.adcritic.com/interactive/view.php?id=5927

    This could easily happen — not in some far off distant future, but right now, today. It might not be legal (yet), but the technology to do this is already exists. Scary, if not downright horrifying.

    On the not so scary and kinda cool side of life, a DevraDoWrite reader sent in the following email to share:

    You may recall the Charles and Ray Eames short film titled “Powers of
    Ten” shown in school science classrooms many, many years ago. Non-Baby
    Boomers may have seen the film during an Eames design retrospective or
    at a museum. Here’s a link with info about how the film was made:
    http://www.powersof10.com

    The link below is a Web-based equivalent of the Eames film,
    incorporating modern scientific theories of cosmology and sub-atomic
    structure. Like the Eames film, it stops short of illustrating the
    more exotic extensions of either “extreme.”

    Both the Eames work and the Florida State re-work of the same material
    are awe-inspiring.

    Chipping Away

    “It is horifying that we have to fight our government to save the environment.” — Ansel Adams (1902-1984)

    “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” — Joni Mitchell (“Big Yellow Taxi”)

    These quotations may seem to some to be on the lighter side, but what disturbs me is that these words were uttered decades ago and nothing has changed. The government and its corporate cronies continue to line their pockets at our personal expense. Over these decades we have had both republican and democratic governance, so this is not so much a partisan comment as it is a concern for our inability to care for people, average people like you and me and the many many others who have less than we do.

    Stateline reports:

    “The overall federal education budget would be cut by $3.1 billion, or 5.5 percent from 2006 levels. Much of the cuts would come from scrapping 42 education programs totaling $3.5 billion, including programs for the arts, state grants for vocational education, Perkins loans for low-income college students and the Even Start literacy program for poor families. “

    Bush’s budget cuts would fall near Main Street (The Christian Science Monitor, February 9, 2006)

    NEW YORK – Chief Joseph Estey in Hartford, Vt., won’t be replacing the 15-year-old guns worn by his officers or buying new digital cameras for his police cruisers.

    In New York, the Head Start program on the Upper West Side may have to start laying off staff members and eliminate the program for children with special needs.

    In Seattle, the fire department, already constrained by a tight city budget, won’t be getting federal funding to put more firefighters on each truck as it had hoped.

    More than at any time in the four years of the Bush administration, Main Street will be feeling the impact of the federal budget if the president’s spending plan is adopted.”

    No, I am not an isolationist, but there is much to be said for the argument that if we don’t take care of ourselves, we won’t be in a position to take care of anyone else. And yes, our relationships abroad are very important. Mr. Rifftides speaks out for Voice of America (here) and we must consider doing likewise. We also must speak out, vote with our wallets, and vote at the polls. And perhaps most important, we must speak to each other. Common wisdom often suggest that we refrain from discussing religion and politics, but perhaps now, more than ever, we should stick our necks out and engage in discourse. You never know, you might sway an opinion here or there, or at least encourage people to think for themselves rather than simply accept the “spin” presented as facts.