Thursday, May 31, 2007
The Dreaded Writer's Bio
My writers' group had a public reading in May and I was asked to write the Dreaded Writer's Bio. I refused. Yes, it was snotty of me, and completely not kind to the MC. She took it well and introduced me as someone who didn't want a big introduction. Part of my squeamishness about being introduced with a bio is that I'm always introducing myself during presentations at work. I'll just say my name and my title and launch into my topic and people can judge for themselves whether I know what I'm talking about. My other problem with writing a bio is that each audience is different and I can't divine what each wants to know about me. Do they care about my education, my accomplishments, my interests, my family? It's complicated and a four to five sentence bio doesn't do anyone's life justice, so why bother?
On the other hand - and there's always another hand, isn't there? - I enjoy reading author and artist bios. Even if they are only a few sentences. The bio, along with the work itself, always lead me to more questions about the artist or writer, which I think is a good thing. It means I'm interested.
Maybe it's just that I have difficulty with self-promotion. It seems so self-serving. (Well, duh, that's what it's supposed to be!) But, as a kid I was taught not to be boastful, and writing a bio feels a hair's breadth away from boasting.
So, then, Dear Readers, have you ever been in the position of writing a bio? What do you think of the experience? How do you get through it? What do you want to know about your favorite artists and writers?
P.S. And, yes, I did write the bio for this blog, but I felt the way I've just described while doing it.
P.P.S. I suggested to the writers in my group that next year we trade names and we'll write each other's biographies, rather than do it ourselves.
Labels: artist, biographies, blog, boasting, dread, promotion, writers
No Peeking
I felt like someone had been visiting my house, asked to use the bathroom, and while there, had searched through my medicine cabinet. My medicine cabinet, by the way, is quite boring. Lots of vitamins & supplements, an old prescription for Vicadin from when I had my root canal (I took one, maybe two, and hated the way it made me feel), deodorant, shaving cream, mouth guards (also from the root canal), not much else.
The CD I had on in the car was Dave Matthews Band's "Busted Stuff." I wonder if the repairman liked it, or maybe thought I had simpy taste in music. He did turn it down. At least he didn't switch disks.
Labels: car repair, dave matthews band, dmb, flat tire, husband, medicine cabinet, music, snooping
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Weather & Stuff
Memorial Day didn't feel like a Monday - more like a Sunday - but Monday it was. I added a bit to my latest short story upon waking and it was enough to make me feel productive. Monday holidays tend to throw the whole week off. Next week should be even worse for confusing my calendar. I'm taking three days off. My goal is to finish the story I'm working on, maybe start the next (although I'm not pushing it), and do some yard work. We'll see. It depends on the weather.
Labels: family, holidays, knitting, memorial day, minnesota, mourning dove, rain, vacation, weather, writing
Department of Homeland Insecurity
Addendum (May 31, 2007): Surely you've heard by now that the TB guy's father-in-law works for the CDC studying, get this, TUBERCULOSIS! A fiction writer could not have written this situation into a novel without being laughed at for its unbelievability. What are the chances this is sheer irony and TB guy never had any contact ever with the TB lab? And, yes, TB guy has a name. It's Andrew Speaker.
Labels: centers for disease control, department of homeland security, nofly list, tuberculosis
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Amazing Instrument
Labels: happy rubber balls, instrument, music, son, video, youtube
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Does This Make Sense?
Labels: business, commercial, daughter, landmark, marketing
Saturday, May 26, 2007
I Know This Isn't Really News . . . .
Addendum (May 27, 2007): I saw the videos again this morning. The male one was Rocco DeLuca and the Burden; the female one was Rihanna.
Labels: clothing, music, rihanna, rocco deluca and the burden, sexism, vh1, video
Friday, May 25, 2007
Whatever Happened to the Offspring?
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Music Tests
Good luck on the challenge, Musical Grasshoppers!
Labels: music, pitch, rhythm, tests, tonedeaf, tonometric
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Watch the NOS
Young Son Number Two went to the store the other day with a friend and both brought back bottles of the drink you see here. Son offered me a sip and, before I took one, I examined the label. This is NOS, a "High Performance Energy Drink." Anytime I see a drink like this, I want to know what they've put in it. This one has Taurine, L-Carnitine, Caffeine, Inositol, and Panax Ginseng, plus the requisite carbonated water, high fructose corn syrup and a variety of other ingredients. I was a little leary of Son drinking such, especially with all of the added supplements. I grew more leary when I read the warning on the back of the bottle: "Not recommended for children, pregnant women or people sensitive to caffeine." By looking at the second picture above, is it obvious to you that there's a warning on this bottle? If my camera would've allowed it, I would have given you a close-up, so you could see that the warning looks pretty much like the rest of the text with only two lines setting it off from everything else. "Product of Canada" and the "Cash Refund" lines are actually more prominent on the bottle.I showed Son how to read the labels and told him that the manufacturers left off the age of the children who were not supposed to drink this and warned him that he shouldn't make a habit of buying the stuff.
When my husband saw the bottle, he practically shot off like a rocket, but for a very different reason. You see, he recognized the bottle and the word NOS as mimicking the Nitrous Oxide tanks used for adding extra power to engines. Nitrous Oxide is also laughing gas. People (kids!) have used it to get high. It is no accident that NOS Energy Drink looks just like a bottle of Nitrous Oxide - the logo for the drink is taken directly from Holley Performance Products, a company that sells Nitrous Oxide for engines.
Not having any experience with Nitrous Oxide for engines, I had no frame of reference for the NOS Energy Drink. Once my husband pointed it out to me, I thought, Holy Crap! This company is encouraging the confusion between an energy drink and the use of Nitrous Oxide as a drug. Of course, they'll swear up and down that that's not what they're doing, but who are they marketing this drink to? Not old fuddy-duddies like me. They're aiming for a younger audience, one that wants more power in their engines and wants to live on the edge. If someone offered our son a bottle of Nitrous Oxide at a party, he might just think it's the NOS Energy Drink and try it. That, my dears, is irresponsible and dangerous marketing.
Labels: holley performance products, husband, irresponsible marketing, marketing, nitrous oxide, nos energy drink, son, warning
Monday, May 21, 2007
Visible / Invisible
The other article (page 160), called ******* (okay, they are really dots, but I can't get that to show up here - it's supposed to simulate how passwords are seen when entered on a computer), is about Linkin Park's lead singer, Chester Charlie Bennington, and how his email password was stolen by a fan, who used the info in his emails to torment him and his wife. The fan, a woman named Devon Townsend, was caught. She worked for Sandia National Laboratories, "one of the Department of Energy's three nuclear weapons research facilities" (page 164). Scary, huh? Someone a little unhinged working in a nuclear facility. Her reason for messing with Bennington? She had about a half-hour's worth of work to do a day and stalked Bennington out of boredom. The whole incident has understandably scared the pants off Bennington, who has learned not to use his middle name as his password.
The articles taken together prove that navigating privacy issues on the internet is no easy task. On the one hand is a guy who is letting it all hang out; on the other is a guy who started out trusting his fans, but was taken advantage of and now wants some of his invisibility back. What's interesting is that boredom plays a factor in both cases. The woman bored with her job felt compelled to engage in stalking behavior to alleviate that boredom. In The Visible Man's situation, he's attempting to encourage a sense of boredom about his life in order to throw off any remote suspicions that he'll do something wrong.
To be visible online, or not to be visible? It's a conundrum that's going to take a while to shake out.
Labels: boredom, invisible, linkin park, nuclear, online privacy, technology, visible, wired magazine
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Stumbleupon & Writing
There's an essay by Kurt Vonnegut on How to Write with Style . . .
Paul Brians' Common Errors in English, which links to a page of errors for reference (lay & lie are always tripping me up) . . .
One Sentence: True stories, told in one sentence (you can submit your own) . . .
and One Word, which is a site that gives you a word and you have 60 seconds to write about it. Good for shutting off the critic and getting down to the business of writing.
Labels: dave matthews band, english, internet, kurt vonnegut, paul brians, pi, stumbleupon, writing
Saturday, May 19, 2007
FtTP - Buble + Setzer + Aguilera + Stefani
Addendum (May 20, 2007): How's about we add Rod Stewart to this mix? We'd have a PBS pledge week special for sure.
Labels: brian setzer, christina aguilera, frankensteining the talent pool, FtTP, gwen stefani, michael buble, music, oprah, rod stewart
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Ooh, Goody! I've Been Tagged!
8 Random Things About Me . . .
1. I love birds, but free birds, not captive ones, so I won't ever own a bird as a pet.
2. I once gave myself an acupunture treatment - at the direction of a naturopath - to liven up the dead area around my C-section scar. It worked.
3. It is my greatest desire to be musical in some way and my goal is to eventually write a song.
4. When I was in middle school, I had a friend who was the oldest girl among three siblings. Her middle sibling was a boy and her youngest sibling was a girl. I thought that was the best arrangement for children because each was in a special place - oldest girl - middle only boy - youngest girl. I wished for that arrangement of children and I got it - only in the boy, girl, boy version.
5. I was taught not to talk back to anyone and, consequently, openly and verbally disagreeing with someone is something I have great trouble doing.
6. That whole free bird thing? That's the reason I like cats instead of dogs. I don't want to control animals and dogs won't listen to me anyway.
7. Almost every work day for lunch I eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Mostly because they travel well.
8. I've kept a daily calendar journal since 1996 and hope they will be useful when I go down in history. (Is "going down in history" a euphemism for dying? If so, eek! Not to worry. I'm not dying until I'm at least 97.)
As for that tagging part, I don't know too many people who read this blog who also have their own blogs, so I'm going to tag
Rianna - who can answer in the comments section.
I'm also tagging
Kevin at Copyrightings
and
Erich at Dangerous Intersection
although I can't be sure that they check in here. The two people I would tag, Kim and Joanne, have already been tagged, so it'd be kind of silly for me to tag them again.
I'm dreadful at tagging because I read a bunch of giganto blogs that don't take comments. Sheesh! I do enjoy the memes, though.
Labels: acupuncture, birds, blog, cats, copyrightings, dangerous intersection, family, journal, knit whimsies, meme, music, poppy seed heart, tagging
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Shall We Train Him?
Introducing Rotten Spotty. First on the throne, then in the sink. He actually did this in this particular order. I think it wouldn't take much to teach him how to go and then wash up afterwards. Flushing might be a bit of a challenge, however.
Labels: bathroom, cats, rotten spotty
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
The Futurist
Labels: advertising, books, future, futurist, james othmer, nostradamus, reading, trends
Monday, May 14, 2007
Wool Expo
Yesterday, for Mother's Day, the whole famn damily (another example of our family language) went to a Wool Expo in Lake Elmo, Minnesota. It was held at the Washington County Fairgrounds. There were llamas and sheep and rabbits, as well as fiber arts vendors, in abundance. My children bought me some cute, handpainted Joint Venture knitting needles ("made in Russia from Birch and Maple" - "distributed by Peace Fleece") that were all the rage at the Expo. Practically all of the vendors were selling them. My kids also got me two skeins of yarn. I found myself a set of 5 bamboo double-pointed needles that were a steal at $5 for the set.
We visited this Expo years and years ago with the extended family. Our kids were wee ones; our youngest may have been in a stroller. Our daughter, who has a memory like a steel trap, actually didn't remember this event, until we headed over to watch the border collies demonstrate how they round up sheep. That she had a vague memory of. It's quite an amazing feat, with the border collie owners telling us that it takes about 4 years to get a good working dog to effectively work with the sheep. Some people wonder whether the sheep are trained, but three kids were asked to come out and try to pen the sheep without a border collie, just to prove how difficult a task it is. They gave it their best shot, but were unsuccessful until the border collie was called out. The herding instinct displayed by these dogs was fascinating and one of them had a heckuva time letting the others work without her.
A good day was had by all, but I couldn't look at the llamas without thinking of the Llama Song.
Labels: dogs, family, family language, fiber arts, herding, holidays, knitting, llamas, minnesota, mothers day, rabbits, sheep, wool expo
Saturday, May 12, 2007
The Greening & The Purpling
This past week in Minnesota, we have quite suddenly experienced the greening . . .
. . . and the purpling of our trees and shrubs. Looks and smells like heaven.
Labels: green, minnesota, plants, purple
Knitting Goal Achieved
I've done it. Completed my first pair of socks. They're not too bad, but I ran into a couple of problems. They aren't quite the same size. One seems to be a bit smaller around than the other. The other inconsistency is in the toe. You can't see it here, but one of the toe seams runs vertically over the toes; the other runs the proper horizontal way. This is what happens when you don't follow the directions and choose to use 4 double-pointed needles rather than the 5 the pattern actually calls for. Still, they're not bad for a rookie.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Co-op Apartments
Labels: apartment, co-op, housing, minnesota, mpr, renters
Concert
The CandyRat record label sponsored the concert. While Andy and Antoine are both on the label, Jeff isn't, but he did tell us how CandyRat got its name. When the label's owner was looking for a name, he had one in mind and went online to register it as a domain name. The name he wanted was taken, but the domain name registration site gave him a list of random alternatives. CandyRat was one of them, et voila! A record label was born.
Watching Antoine, I swore he had six fingers on his strumming hand - not really - he's just that good. I especially like his song "Toi et Moi," which he wrote for his wife. Andy, whose videos have reached number one status on YouTube in the last half-year or so, played his arrangement of Toto's song "Africa." This was an eighties song, in case you missed it. Very cool rendition. He told us that he just had a chance to meet Toto after they had seen his video of the song on YouTube.
This was a phenomenal concert from another standpoint: the audience. The Cedar is an intimate little place. Seating consists of folding chairs on an open, gym-like floor, with a low stage up front. We sat in the third row. Everyone was extraordinarily respectful of the musicians. There were no lyrics to any of the songs, just pure, complicated music, and that's what we were all there for - not to scream, or be seen, or to jabber on our cell phones telling people about the cool concert we were attending. Even Jeff noticed our demeanor and he said we were too quiet! That's when some audience members started lobbing him questions, which he obligingly answered. And, get this, the whole experience was ours for only $15 per ticket, plus the gas money it took us to drive to the Cities. What a bargain.
Labels: africa, andy mckee, antoine dufour, audience, bass, candyrat, guitar, husband, jeff schmidt, minneapolis, minnesota, music, the cedar, youtube
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Beautiful Day
Labels: beauty, hammock, husband, minnesota, motorcycle, weather
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Family Language
The hubby loves to purposely mispronounce words. He says "red-eye" for "ready" when we are trying to leave the house. He says "cha (say the "ch" as you would in church)-mo (long "o")-mi (short "i")-lee" for chamomile. He does this with lots of other words, as well.
Some of the nicknames we have for our kids: Doodle, Dude, Daughter, Man About Town (or Boy About School), Young Son #1, Young Son #2, Bubby, and Buddy. Those are just the nicknames not based upon their names, but in the sake of privacy for them, I won't be revealing the name-based ones here. We each also have an opposite-sex name for the fun of it.
Young Son #2 calls me Mammy and his father Pappy. He does it with a twang, too. The daughter calls me Bob, which is how Mom comes out when she has a cold. (That's my opposite-sex name.)
The hubby calls me Lovin' Spouseful or wifey; to the latter I reply with husbandy. Of course, we're also full of the Honey, Baby, Sugarcakes, Sweetie names, too. Sometimes, hubby says, "Submit to me, woman!" in a joking manner and I give him a withering look and sometimes an "eff-you" with a smile. He says, "Okay."
When someones says, "Hey, I quacked!" we all know exactly what that means. This was something started in the extended family. Whenever someone has to get up from their chair and wants their seat saved for when they return, they say, "Quack, quack, seat back!" which has shortened to "Quack!"
We go really crazy over our kitties with the special family language. Rosalyn, the gray old kitty, is called Roz, Grumpy Old Lady, Cranky Old Lady, or simply Old Lady. Inky, who is white with black spots (and would have been called Rorscharch after the ink-blot tests if hubby had had his way) is called Rotten Spotty. It's a name my brother coined. Our white kitty was originally called Snowball, then Schmutz, and now goes primarily by Stinky. She is the sweetest cat ever, and we call her that often, too - "The Sweetest Cat Ever." Roz likes to meow at us in a grumpy way and I meow right back. Stinky says "brrrt, brrrt" to us and we "brrrt, brrrt" back. I like to call the kitties my puppies or babies. When we want the kitties to come running, we don't say, "Here, kitty kitty kitty." We make a pss, pss, pss noise. When the kitties start acting crazy and running all over the house (especially Stinky), we say they have brain worm.
Okay, you probably get the picture. Family language: it's worth a college thesis. If you're so inclined, feel free to share an example of your own.
Labels: cats, children, family language, husband, movie, neil gaiman, nicknames, quack, rorscharch, words
Monday, May 07, 2007
Books That Make You Mad
The first was "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything" by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. In the interest of full disclosure, I did not finish reading this book because it made me so mad. First, I slogged through the intro, which seemed to be a repetition of stuff I'd already read elsewhere, i.e. the Internet is making us collaborate more; everyone needs to become more transparent, blah, blah, blah. To be fair, I figured that the book had to start somewhere and had to assume that many readers would be new to its ideas, so I kept going. After the authors launched into how great the current generation is, how so much more creative it is than previous generations, I put the book down. This notion of comparing generations and how great one is in relation to another boils my blood. I wanted to scream, "Who do you think invented the internet and everything that led up to it? Don't you think that was just as creative as what the current generation is doing with new tech tools?" Honestly, I simply can't abide by these judgemental attitudes. It's why I can't stand the term "Greatest Generation" in reference to Depression/WWII folks, or the term "slackers" in reference to Gen-Xers. I don't mind an analysis of generations based upon shared experiences, or short-hand, non-judgemental names, such as Boomers or Millennials, just don't slay entire generations with negative assessments. If anyone has read this book and had a different opinion, please share. Maybe I'll give it another shot.
The second book that made me mad was Nicholson Baker's "Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper." Working in a museum as I do, I have an incredible fondness for bound volumes of our local newspapers. Leafing through these books, which date back to 1892, is pure joy. Baker's book shows how, with the Library of Congress at the helm, libraries have wholesale ditched their collections of bound volumes of newspapers in favor of microfilming. (Round two is here with the current push toward digitization.) In order to easily microfilm these newspapers, the bindings have to be removed. Libraries, including the Library of Congress (LOC), submitted entire runs of our nation's newspapers to this disbinding. Once this was done, the libraries, finding space ever at a premium, decided to sell or destroy the disbound newspapers, rather than box and store the originals. The Library of Congress has even done this with books. All of this should make us furious. The Library of Congress is supposed to be saving the nation's history, not gutting it for the latest fad in reproduction. Their claim has always been that microfilm is a suitable substitute for newspapers that are crumbling to dust. It is not, for numerous reasons laid out in Baker's book, and the vast majority of newspapers are not crumbling to dust. Trust me, I know. I can still use the 1892 newspaper. It's a bit more delicate than later editions, but still very readable and hardly crumbling to dust or anything else.
The Library of Congress has a requirement that authors must submit a hardcopy of their books when they register for copyright. If the LOC is merely going to slice and film, I'd be tempted as an author to send them a little note with my registration, saying that I'm not going to waste money on giving them a hardcopy being as how they don't want it anyway, and offer to provide a digital copy.
Baker's book is excellent in that it makes me mad in an appropriate, how-can-I-change-the-system way. It goes into all sorts of details about the construction of paper (Did you know that mummy wrappings were used at one time in U.S. paper production?), the chemistry of paper, the political and financial maneuverings of certain high-level LOC officials, and raises questions about what we deem important enough to save. Obviously, I highly recommend this book. It will make you mad and it should.
Labels: anger, authors, books, copyright, generations, internet, library of congress, newspaper, nicholson baker, paper, reading, wikinomics
Sunday, May 06, 2007
What I Don't Aspire To
Labels: action figure, aspiration, son, wal-mart
Saturday, May 05, 2007
More on Magical Thinking
Erich Vieth, of the Dangerous Intersection blog, posted about his “trip to the neighborhood psychic store” with his daughters recently. His posts are always quite thoughtful, and this one is no different; however, this particular post left me feeling as though the only enlightened people on earth are those who don’t fall for all that woo-woo stuff like tarot readings, astrology, psychic readings, aura photography, Reiki, and etc. Well, okay . . . .
Let’s just start at the beginning, shall we? I have long been interested in the various woo-woo aspects of life. In elementary school I was checking books out of the library on ESP and my brother and I would conduct tests, one sending thoughts, the other trying to receive them. The results were inconclusive.
My dad, a man who has a chemistry degree, was forever watching programs on the Loch Ness monster and Big Foot and alien encounters. As Catholics, my mom and her mother were equally entranced with the woo-woo. (If you believe in transubstantiation, and a man literally rising from the dead, I think you’re a shoe-in for woo-woo belief.) There was a crystal ball in the house that my sister and I used to try to read. Never could get that thing to work. There was also a deck of cards in the game closet with a witch tending a cauldron and fortune-type sayings on the other side. I now have these cards at my desk.
In high school I went through my astrology phase. I still have the first astrology book that I bought; it’s all marked up with my chart and the charts of friends. I also sprung for an “official” astrology reading, a print-out showing the planets in their various houses and the conjunctions between the planets at the time of my birth. It’s from the American Astrological Association and, if I remember correctly, it cost me the unholy sum of $11 (it was definitely under $20), which was a lot of money for a broke high schooler. During my high school Research Paper class, I wrote a paper called “Astrology and Eleanor Roosevelt: Do They Stand on Common Ground?” Why did I pair Eleanor Roosevelt with astrology? She and I share the same birthday.
Since that time I’ve dabbled in other forms of the woo-woo: aura reading, feng shui, angel readings, Chinese astrology, looking for signs from the universe, meditation, the power of positive thought, reflexology, homeopathy, acupuncture (you might quibble that this is not woo-woo, but come on . . . stick a bunch of needles in your skin and get well?), numerology, dream interpretation, Reiki, and tarot readings. I own two tarot decks and made myself a pack of angel cards. I’ve discovered that a great-aunt, my great-grandmother’s sister, read crystal ball, the very one I had played with as a kid.
This is where I’ve come from, a life filled with magical thinking. And it continues, sometimes in ways that are out of my control . . . .
This past year, two women entered the museum where I work and asked if they could find an obituary. That’s not out of the ordinary, as we assist people with genealogy and obits are a great source of family info. I asked for a name and date, so I could find what they were looking for. One of the women was a little evasive at first. She said she didn’t know a full name or date. All she had was a first name. Finding an obituary using just a first name is almost impossible, and I indicated as much. The other woman, a younger sister of the first, started explaining what had led to their request. It seems that the older woman’s three-year-old son was seeing someone, a woman with a damaged face, and this woman, who had told the boy her first name, was directing him to follow her out of the house. No one else could see this woman. Sometimes the boy indicated that the apparition was in the house. Other times, she was outside beckoning him into the street.
The boy’s mother was a bit sheepish in describing the boy’s behavior. Whenever he mentioned the woman’s name, she would try not to lead him on in conversation and she never brought up the woman’s name herself. She didn’t want to encourage something that was a figment of his imagination. Unfortunately, her son kept seeing the apparition and was doing whatever he could to get out of the house in order to be with her. Extra locks were put on the door to keep the boy in, but the situation wasn’t resolving itself, so the women decided to try to find answers. They wondered, because of the apparition’s damaged face, if there had been some sort of accident involving a woman with this particular first name.
Deep breath. Now, at this point I could have told the woman that I thought she was full of it and left it at that. I’ve never experienced ghosts or apparitions and am completely neutral as to their existence. That means that while I’ve never seen a ghost, I’m not going to deride someone else for claiming to have done so. Regardless of whether this apparition was real, it was obvious that this boy was seeing something and it was having very real consequences, so I decided I would do what I could, all the while thinking this was going to be like finding a needle in a haystack.
I entered the first name and our county into the state’s death database and came up with three hits, which was strange in and of itself. Only three people with this first name had ever died in our county? No way. Of the three, one was quite young. With death date in hand, I went to the newspapers and found the obit. Turns out this woman had died in a car accident that had killed several other people in a spot not far from where the mother and son lived. Coincidentally, she had the same last name as the mother and son, was the same age when she died as the mother standing before me, and had a young son with the same first initial as the boy now seeing her.
The eerie, prickly feeling that overcame me at the time still comes over me today when I think about it. I don’t know how to explain this situation and I don’t even want to try. It simply is what it is.
It’s very easy to think of people who believe in magical thinking (like me) as crazy, overly-susceptible crackpots. We aren’t living in the real world. By golly, if it can’t be proven with a double-blind test, why it simply isn’t so! Unfortunately, a good share of life is subjective and difficult to explain. We cannot drag that three-year-old into a laboratory and prove what he is or isn’t seeing. (By the way, since when has life ever mimicked a laboratory setting, except in a laboratory?) That doesn’t mean his visions weren’t having an effect; they were. It doesn’t mean that somehow we’re “falling” for something when we believe such things. Most of the people I know who believe in or have experienced the woo-woo, are not extreme about it. We chalk such things up to the “Very Interesting” category of life and fit them into our personal schemas without having a need to have them fully explained. My husband once had an out-of-body experience and he is extraordinarily skeptical about most woo-woo phenomena.
Those who attack the world view of magical thinkers are trying to negate some very personal experiences. That disdain is not useful, even if some of us go off the deep end periodically. (What happens when you force someone to let go of something? They hang on tighter, right?)
Rather than approach these various woo-woo subjects as things that must be explicitly proven or chucked as utter hogwash, why not question the origins of them? For example, Ben, who posted this comment on Erich’s Vieth’s post, said, “Why are there only 12 zodiac signs, and how the heck can even ONE person have the EXACT SAME horoscope as me, let along 1/12 of the population?” Why, indeed? Why are there twelve months in a year? Why are there twelve signs in the Chinese zodiac? Why are there twelve inches to a foot? Why are there
As for the veracity of astrology, I think the origins of the system have some pretty solid roots. The sun and moon have an effect on earthly life; why is it such a stretch to believe that the other planets in our Solar System might also affect us? Isn’t it amazing to think that our ancestors recognized these effects (in fact, they were probably much more guided by them than we are) and codified them into a system to show us our similarities? Even if the predictive functions are useless, this is something worth noting.
Tarot cards as a future-divining tool are derided in Erich’s post, yet they have another purpose. They can be used by an individual to tap inner resources in solving a sticky problem. That’s how I use them, anyway. In addition, they are fascinating artifacts from the standpoint of the artwork and the use of archetypes. Once again, here is something of intense complexity developed by our forbearers.
I can’t go without mentioning the Akashic Records, which were also brought up in Erich’s post. I’ve talked about this before, but for those who don’t know, the Akashic Records are supposedly the record of all thoughts, words, and deeds of life written in the ether. Don’t ask me where this ether is kept, or how this stuff gets recorded, but someone imagined this thing they called “Akashic Records” and, I’m telling you, if the Internet isn’t the best example of making this idea real, I don’t know what is.
Ultimately, looking at the origins of the woo-woo will lead us to wondering why human beings are driven to magical thinking. On an evolutionary level, there was probably some advantage to our species in doing so, but don’t ask me to prove that. I don’t have my laboratory or double-blind studies set up.
Labels: a mad variety of woo woo phenomena, akashic records, astrology, belief, crystal ball, dangerous intersection, erich vieth, family, ghost, husband, magical thinking, museum, tarot cards
Friday, May 04, 2007
Talk Show Question #2
If you could be a GUEST on a talk show, which talk show would you choose? Why would you be a guest on this show?
I'd pick Oprah's show hands down for this one. I'd be on for something I had written. Oprah's got the kiss of life for writers. The other show that ranks up there for the same reason is Talking Volumes on Minnesota Public Radio. Either one, or both, hey, I'm not picky.
Labels: mpr, oprah, talk show, talking volumes, writing
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
FTTP - Joss Stone + Corinne Bailey Rae
Corinne Bailey Rae + Joss Stone
Don't quite know why. Both are from the UK, both have been described as soulful singers. Maybe it's nothing more than that.
Labels: corinne bailey rae, frankensteining the talent pool, FtTP, joss stone, soul
Talk Show Question #1
If you could be in the audience of a talk show, which talk show would you choose?
If you're feeling philosophical about it, you can expound about the whys and wherefores of your choice.
For me, if I'd choose either The Daily Show or Ellen; The Daily Show for the wit, Ellen because she seems fun and she dances.
Your turn!
Labels: daily show, ellen, question, talk show
