Everyone from philosophers to poets to Hallmark Cards try to define life. I've read quite a few of each, but frankly wake up each morning with a whole different conclusion. I suspect the explanation to life is a moving target.
Take Chekhov: "Life is a tragedy filled with joys." On rainy days and Mondays, I agree. Then there's The Bard: "Life is a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." That hurts. The gang at Hallmark see life as everything from a chirpy new morning to a baby's gurgling smile. If only.
Then you scan the day's headlines.
Women now more likely than men to get tattoos ....plans to use cow stem cells to make test tube hamburgers...hackers perfecting cyber-warfare...with 8% unemployment, 600,000 jobs go unfilled because workers lack skills...scientists at University of Nevada say political choices hardwired so why have primaries...football fan sues San Diego for right to use the F-word at games...Miami overtakes Detroit in race for most-miserable-city....Chicago Cubs camp high on pennant hopes.
When life deals you a mixed hand like this in your morning news, well it's hard not to feel a little silly. Spinning here on a planetary glob in space with billions of slightly evolved blobs all simply struggling to survive.
I used to visit this corner tavern in my old west side Chicago neighborhood. My brother advised me to stop trying to figure life out, and simply share a brew with those who had already stopped. My very first visit was a surprise. The owner had another Chekhov quote over the bar: "Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass."
I'm not sure those words would have made as much sense posted in a school or a church. But in a tavern with fellow puzzlers, it cleared up a lot of the mystery for me. As for my drinking comrades, they'll have to post their own blog
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
ARE YOU PROUD OF PITHY? YOU SHOULD BE!
I have a dear friend who's a lawyer. I don't hold that against him, and he doesn't hold it against me that I'm not. One of the things we have in common are words. He, as seems most lawyers, loves them in great quantities. I prefer pithy and to-the-point. Therein lies a story repeated daily across the world.
Take Rush Limbaugh [please!]. Today's headline reads: "A Rush To Leave Limbaugh." Short, cute, to the point. My friend says you can't stop there, you need all the facts. My answer is I've got the only fact I need right in that headline. Actually headline after headline. You see, while you can't headline a scientific report or a historical biography, you can the daily drone of daily news.
The pithy and to-the-point is an art-form. Consider political wits like Bill Maher (liberal) and Dennis Miller (conservative). They can, in one slashing line, cut through mounds of political blubber to hit the very nerve-center of wordy issues like contraception, gay marriage, and taxing the rich. To prove the point, watch -- sympathetically -- as wordy politicians try to stand toe to toe with these wits on a stage or in front of a camera.
This is not to say brief is always better. But it most emphatically is to say it takes a keen mind to find the bottom line to what the bubble-heads try to say speech after speech. Or as Mark Twain once told his audience: "I'm sorry I took so long, but I didn't have enough time to make my speech shorter."
Talking about contraception, there was a recent headline about a New Orleans sanctuary where two chimpanzees became pregnant even though all the males had been given vasectomies. The newspaper could have offered a detailed medical analysis. However, do I really need to know all those facts when I can't tell one chimp from another? A much better and shorter story would be: Can the chimps tell one of us from another? Or, frankly, do they even give damn?
You see, my friends, we are inundated with billions of daily words and bytes. And yet the dazzling growth in the quantity of facts offers little assurance their quality has grown as well. Take another example of where to-the-point has a point. NASA astronomers have detected a 460-foot-wide asteroid heading our way. There are oodles of delicious facts they can present. But really now, fellas, all I need to know is your target date. February 2040. Frankly, that means anyone over 60 like me doesn't have to give a damn.
Take Rush Limbaugh [please!]. Today's headline reads: "A Rush To Leave Limbaugh." Short, cute, to the point. My friend says you can't stop there, you need all the facts. My answer is I've got the only fact I need right in that headline. Actually headline after headline. You see, while you can't headline a scientific report or a historical biography, you can the daily drone of daily news.
The pithy and to-the-point is an art-form. Consider political wits like Bill Maher (liberal) and Dennis Miller (conservative). They can, in one slashing line, cut through mounds of political blubber to hit the very nerve-center of wordy issues like contraception, gay marriage, and taxing the rich. To prove the point, watch -- sympathetically -- as wordy politicians try to stand toe to toe with these wits on a stage or in front of a camera.
This is not to say brief is always better. But it most emphatically is to say it takes a keen mind to find the bottom line to what the bubble-heads try to say speech after speech. Or as Mark Twain once told his audience: "I'm sorry I took so long, but I didn't have enough time to make my speech shorter."
Talking about contraception, there was a recent headline about a New Orleans sanctuary where two chimpanzees became pregnant even though all the males had been given vasectomies. The newspaper could have offered a detailed medical analysis. However, do I really need to know all those facts when I can't tell one chimp from another? A much better and shorter story would be: Can the chimps tell one of us from another? Or, frankly, do they even give damn?
You see, my friends, we are inundated with billions of daily words and bytes. And yet the dazzling growth in the quantity of facts offers little assurance their quality has grown as well. Take another example of where to-the-point has a point. NASA astronomers have detected a 460-foot-wide asteroid heading our way. There are oodles of delicious facts they can present. But really now, fellas, all I need to know is your target date. February 2040. Frankly, that means anyone over 60 like me doesn't have to give a damn.
Monday, March 5, 2012
FACEBOOK: WHERE ACTUAL YOU MEETS VIRTUAL YOU
Pretty hard lately to know when you're seeing and experiencing the actual thing. Versus the virtual thing. Or is there really any longer any difference between the two? On Facebook the two meet, interact, overlap, often become one and the same.
Consider how we use Facebook on-line to do almost the same things we do in-life. Project our image, flash our talents, hide our blemishes, search out people with whom we can share, maybe pitch a few of our best thoughts, sometimes annoy or be annoyed, and occasionally get rebuffed as in "deleted." Sounds pretty much like my actual 9-to-5 world.
There are, though, some who fret about Facebook and security. As if there actually is any virtual security left. Come on folks, anyone who knows how, can already find out who, how, where, when and why you exist. This capacity is the tip of an iceberg known as cyber-marketing and cyber-warfare. Take comfort in the fact neither of us is probably that important to anyone else.
Perhaps Facebook is just one more step in the evolution of human ingenuity to extend ourselves. Say like the way the hammer and the pistol extend our hands; radio and television extend our speech; and our kids and grandkids help extend us.
Here's another way of looking at it. Some believers believe immortality not as a place but as being remembered by those who survive us. Working from that belief, anyone of us who has left behind our words, music, art or handiwork has thereby become immortal in the minds and hearts of those left to care. From Homer, Shakespeare and Bach, to Jefferson, FDR and Sheila.
Who's Sheila...? Look close in Tom Cruise's breakout movie "Risky Business." Tom has of course become immortalized on those reels of celluloid. But in one classic scene, my actress friend Sheila has achieved the very same status. She is the school nurse where Tom is sent after a skirmish. Without a single line of dialog, her quizzical reactions to his plight have already become immortal in the minds of anyone who's seen the film.
Whenever I see it, I think of all the ways in which you and I are being captured in these digital days. Why it's virtually impossible for any of us not to actually become immortal...!
Consider how we use Facebook on-line to do almost the same things we do in-life. Project our image, flash our talents, hide our blemishes, search out people with whom we can share, maybe pitch a few of our best thoughts, sometimes annoy or be annoyed, and occasionally get rebuffed as in "deleted." Sounds pretty much like my actual 9-to-5 world.
There are, though, some who fret about Facebook and security. As if there actually is any virtual security left. Come on folks, anyone who knows how, can already find out who, how, where, when and why you exist. This capacity is the tip of an iceberg known as cyber-marketing and cyber-warfare. Take comfort in the fact neither of us is probably that important to anyone else.
Perhaps Facebook is just one more step in the evolution of human ingenuity to extend ourselves. Say like the way the hammer and the pistol extend our hands; radio and television extend our speech; and our kids and grandkids help extend us.
Here's another way of looking at it. Some believers believe immortality not as a place but as being remembered by those who survive us. Working from that belief, anyone of us who has left behind our words, music, art or handiwork has thereby become immortal in the minds and hearts of those left to care. From Homer, Shakespeare and Bach, to Jefferson, FDR and Sheila.
Who's Sheila...? Look close in Tom Cruise's breakout movie "Risky Business." Tom has of course become immortalized on those reels of celluloid. But in one classic scene, my actress friend Sheila has achieved the very same status. She is the school nurse where Tom is sent after a skirmish. Without a single line of dialog, her quizzical reactions to his plight have already become immortal in the minds of anyone who's seen the film.
Whenever I see it, I think of all the ways in which you and I are being captured in these digital days. Why it's virtually impossible for any of us not to actually become immortal...!
Sunday, March 4, 2012
DARWIN HELD FOR RANSOM
I'm sorry, but to hell with Kansas!
The fight is over, ladies and gentlemen of your repressed district school boards. Darwin's theory is no longer simply a theory. Evolution has proved it's one of history's most important scientific discoveries. So please stop sucking up to your parents' most repressed fears about monkeys, flying or otherwise.
However, not content with their well earned victory, some evolutionary biologists are now holding Darwin for ransom. They want their victory to be much larger than simply explaining how species like ours progress. Mark Pagel wants evolution to largely define who we are. Not the way the ancients did with their Olympian gods & goddesses. Nor the way modern psychiatry does with their Ids & Libidos. Pagel proposes it's pretty much all about our genes.
Pagel, himself an accomplished biologist, is no Glenn Beck parading silliness for science. In his new book, "Wired For Culture," he makes a strong case for you and me as Salmon struggling upstream. Fighting against the odds of life so our genes will somehow be spawned and thus survive.
So forget the moneys, Board & PTA presidents. It's the genes you have to protect your kids from! If, that is, you wish to design their education into your own generation's image & likeness. A tradition especially strong in America where locally boards decide the curricula, the books, and the teachers.
Professor Pagel -- who has no children attending Kansas schools, because he lives in England -- tells us "our bodies are just genes' ways of making more genes. In effect, our bodies are survival machines that carry genes from us to the next generation. In turn, the culture of the next generation is just another way of making more genes."
Checking my grand-childrens' eyes, ears, hair and world-views, the professor may be right. But only as far as he goes. Where he stops is at that fundamental who/how/why question about the genes themselves. Seems to me as long as biology refuses to meet those questions, schools boards in Kansas will continue to hold Darwin for ransom. Preferring to have their children think of their genes less like Salmon and more like gifts.
Say, maybe Kansas could start a third party for this year's culture wars.......
The fight is over, ladies and gentlemen of your repressed district school boards. Darwin's theory is no longer simply a theory. Evolution has proved it's one of history's most important scientific discoveries. So please stop sucking up to your parents' most repressed fears about monkeys, flying or otherwise.
However, not content with their well earned victory, some evolutionary biologists are now holding Darwin for ransom. They want their victory to be much larger than simply explaining how species like ours progress. Mark Pagel wants evolution to largely define who we are. Not the way the ancients did with their Olympian gods & goddesses. Nor the way modern psychiatry does with their Ids & Libidos. Pagel proposes it's pretty much all about our genes.
Pagel, himself an accomplished biologist, is no Glenn Beck parading silliness for science. In his new book, "Wired For Culture," he makes a strong case for you and me as Salmon struggling upstream. Fighting against the odds of life so our genes will somehow be spawned and thus survive.
So forget the moneys, Board & PTA presidents. It's the genes you have to protect your kids from! If, that is, you wish to design their education into your own generation's image & likeness. A tradition especially strong in America where locally boards decide the curricula, the books, and the teachers.
Professor Pagel -- who has no children attending Kansas schools, because he lives in England -- tells us "our bodies are just genes' ways of making more genes. In effect, our bodies are survival machines that carry genes from us to the next generation. In turn, the culture of the next generation is just another way of making more genes."
Checking my grand-childrens' eyes, ears, hair and world-views, the professor may be right. But only as far as he goes. Where he stops is at that fundamental who/how/why question about the genes themselves. Seems to me as long as biology refuses to meet those questions, schools boards in Kansas will continue to hold Darwin for ransom. Preferring to have their children think of their genes less like Salmon and more like gifts.
Say, maybe Kansas could start a third party for this year's culture wars.......
Saturday, March 3, 2012
HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE
The original "How To Win Friends & Influence People" has been a 15-million best seller ever since it came out in 1937. Since then -- even long before then -- its core formula has been a winning one for shamans, oracles, gurus, how-to-authors and positive-thinking writers alike. Why...? You know why...! They all offer you the golden goose to ride through life dropping golden eggs wherever you venture.
This is not to kill the goose. But have you ever been backstage during one of these big-name seminars whose flashy titles range anywhere from"You're The One" to "Bring On The World." It's not unlike peeking behind the Wizard's now-infamous curtain. A band of brothers who have each made their fortune in different ways, and are here joined at the hip of their bulging personal portfolios. CEOs ...retired generals...Hollywood action heroes....hot selling authors...and occasionally some warrior-women who can talk the talk with the best of the boys.
You've heard of candidate's "stump speech?" That's what these folks are working from. The gig is easy and the pay is extraordinary. Most of them jet in that morning, do their thing for the cheering audience, then jet out that night. What's known among the rich-and-famous-in-sales as a "quickie."
Is this to say these are con-artists? Not really. Having worked with many, I have to believe they half-believe their own story of living-the-American-Dream. And if that dream grows a little larger with each seminar...well, what the hell. Your very princely presence should be enough for the hungry little guys in the audience to feel their pricey registration fee was worth it.
Oh, about the title above. As a contract speech writer, I can bear witness that the easiest way to lose friends and alienate people like these is to imply, even politely, they just might want to admit something to their zealous audiences: "Me telling you how I got rich is no guarantee you will too. Or that you should walk away believing rich is the same thing as success. "
No surprise....! Not one of them I know has ever said this.
This is not to kill the goose. But have you ever been backstage during one of these big-name seminars whose flashy titles range anywhere from"You're The One" to "Bring On The World." It's not unlike peeking behind the Wizard's now-infamous curtain. A band of brothers who have each made their fortune in different ways, and are here joined at the hip of their bulging personal portfolios. CEOs ...retired generals...Hollywood action heroes....hot selling authors...and occasionally some warrior-women who can talk the talk with the best of the boys.
You've heard of candidate's "stump speech?" That's what these folks are working from. The gig is easy and the pay is extraordinary. Most of them jet in that morning, do their thing for the cheering audience, then jet out that night. What's known among the rich-and-famous-in-sales as a "quickie."
Is this to say these are con-artists? Not really. Having worked with many, I have to believe they half-believe their own story of living-the-American-Dream. And if that dream grows a little larger with each seminar...well, what the hell. Your very princely presence should be enough for the hungry little guys in the audience to feel their pricey registration fee was worth it.
Oh, about the title above. As a contract speech writer, I can bear witness that the easiest way to lose friends and alienate people like these is to imply, even politely, they just might want to admit something to their zealous audiences: "Me telling you how I got rich is no guarantee you will too. Or that you should walk away believing rich is the same thing as success. "
No surprise....! Not one of them I know has ever said this.
Friday, March 2, 2012
ONCE UPON A LIFETIME -- NAMELY OURS
Most of us live in America. Usually grateful for the chance. But if someone not American were to ask, "How do you picture yourselves in the world?" what image might you use? I submit there may be only two from which to choose. As a great frontier OR as a small life raft.
Each image is somewhat fundamental to our perception of ourselves. But which is more valid? For generations -- and now for ambitious capitalists and candidates -- the frontier image perfectly captures the American cowboy spirit of rugged individualism. But then, as our world and its frontiers have shrunk, there are those like the President who talks about "we're all in this together." Together as in a stout little vessel struggling through an ocean of domestic and diplomatic crises as great if not greater than ever in our history.
No doubt about it. A frontier is the splashier of the two images. And it made sense for the first few hundred years. But now in a complex age of globalization, it's hard to believe any one nation can ride alone tall-in-the-saddle. In the last 25 years, every act of terrorism, financial meltdown, and international competition has made even the cowboys on Wall Street and K Street realize, yes, "we're all in this together." Something like a life raft in which everyone survives best if everyone else does.
But wait! This image isn't so very new and different after all. It was Benjamin Franklin who warned his ambitious fellow freedom fighters: "We must all hang together, or we will assuredly all hang separately."
I'm guessing that, in their passionate rugged-individualism, some of our capitalists and candidates may have forgotten that piece of all-American advice.
Each image is somewhat fundamental to our perception of ourselves. But which is more valid? For generations -- and now for ambitious capitalists and candidates -- the frontier image perfectly captures the American cowboy spirit of rugged individualism. But then, as our world and its frontiers have shrunk, there are those like the President who talks about "we're all in this together." Together as in a stout little vessel struggling through an ocean of domestic and diplomatic crises as great if not greater than ever in our history.
No doubt about it. A frontier is the splashier of the two images. And it made sense for the first few hundred years. But now in a complex age of globalization, it's hard to believe any one nation can ride alone tall-in-the-saddle. In the last 25 years, every act of terrorism, financial meltdown, and international competition has made even the cowboys on Wall Street and K Street realize, yes, "we're all in this together." Something like a life raft in which everyone survives best if everyone else does.
But wait! This image isn't so very new and different after all. It was Benjamin Franklin who warned his ambitious fellow freedom fighters: "We must all hang together, or we will assuredly all hang separately."
I'm guessing that, in their passionate rugged-individualism, some of our capitalists and candidates may have forgotten that piece of all-American advice.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
MY MIND'S MADE UP, DON'T CONFUSE ME WITH THE FACTS
Harry Warren wrote the musical hit "You're Getting To Be A Habit With Me" the same year the Great Depression hit its lowest point, the same March I was born, and exactly 50 years after philosopher William James wrote: "Ninety-nine hundredths of our activity is purely automatic. Life is nothing but a mass of habits." Big year, 1931...!
I doubt there's any significance to these co-incidents, except to say all three of us are still around. Well, in James' case, he's not but his psychological principle is. Our habits dominate our thinking. Even long after they make any good sense. A few familiar ones:
* Habitual labels -- Democrats get us into wars, Republicans keep us out; Catholics vote their faith; WASPs vote their pocketbook -- hardly fit today's society if indeed they ever did
* Another habit is to assume we have entered an age of more workers than jobs. In fact, demographers project the world's supply of working-age people will soon be shrinking
* A favorite habit of politicians is to portray small businesses as the main engine of job growth. In fact, although 90% of our companies are small businesses, their combined enterprises account for less than a fifth of all US jobs
* Ask any gambler and they will habitually reassure you about a hot hand. However, reading statistical experts like Daniel Kahneman, they prove that "while collections of random events do behave in a highly regular fashion, any causal explanations of these events are inevitably wrong." Betting a hunch rarely earns the player a bunch at the end of the night
* One more habit that was popular back when I was born. Expect Italian babies to have dark eyes like their mothers. I have blue. But before you scandalously start wondering about that, Dad was one of those princely blue-eyed Sicilians. So everything checks out
Of course everything here is totally open to debate, because you see, if Quantum Mechanics is right -- hell, we don't even know which parallel universe you and I are in! Right, Harry...?
I doubt there's any significance to these co-incidents, except to say all three of us are still around. Well, in James' case, he's not but his psychological principle is. Our habits dominate our thinking. Even long after they make any good sense. A few familiar ones:
* Habitual labels -- Democrats get us into wars, Republicans keep us out; Catholics vote their faith; WASPs vote their pocketbook -- hardly fit today's society if indeed they ever did
* Another habit is to assume we have entered an age of more workers than jobs. In fact, demographers project the world's supply of working-age people will soon be shrinking
* A favorite habit of politicians is to portray small businesses as the main engine of job growth. In fact, although 90% of our companies are small businesses, their combined enterprises account for less than a fifth of all US jobs
* Ask any gambler and they will habitually reassure you about a hot hand. However, reading statistical experts like Daniel Kahneman, they prove that "while collections of random events do behave in a highly regular fashion, any causal explanations of these events are inevitably wrong." Betting a hunch rarely earns the player a bunch at the end of the night
* One more habit that was popular back when I was born. Expect Italian babies to have dark eyes like their mothers. I have blue. But before you scandalously start wondering about that, Dad was one of those princely blue-eyed Sicilians. So everything checks out
Of course everything here is totally open to debate, because you see, if Quantum Mechanics is right -- hell, we don't even know which parallel universe you and I are in! Right, Harry...?
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