William James on sciences

The following is a quote I recorded some years ago, from Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Students on Some of Life's Ideals- chapter one, by William James.

The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made such mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall do within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently, yet neither will transgress the lines.

Pity some of the supposed scientists, like our old friend, Richard Dawkins, didn't pay attention to what James has to say here.

Fear of Music...and proofreading

I came across a book published in 2009 today at the Library (I was waiting there until my wife picked me up to take me home - I'd just had a tooth out, and was feeling a bit under the weather).

The book is David Stubbs' Fear of Music: why people get Rothko and don't get Stockhausen. Stubbs' argument is that ordinary people now accept modern art in all its varieties, even its way-out, off-the-wall-and-onto-the-floor varieties, but they don't yet accept modern music (and by modern we're talking about music that was created as far back as the early years of the last century, in some case). I haven't read the whole book yet, but I think his case isn't entirely waterproof. There are plenty of visual artists whose work isn't that well accepted, and plenty of great composers from the earlier part of the 20th century whose work is.

Stubbs is more concerned with the Stockhausens, the Vareses and other similar composers, many of whom worked in the electronic music area. The names may be known, but their music generally isn't. (I'm listening to a double CD of Varese now, and certainly it isn't terribly accessible stuff.)

Anyway, I'm not going to write a review of the book as such, but comment more on something that's very odd about it. I've seen books with proofreading errors in them before - they've become increasingly frequent even in an age when spellcheckers are freely available - but I don't think I've ever seen a book where words were meshed together, or out of sequence in the sentence, or where sentences in some cases made no sense whatsoever. And the other major editing problem happens every two or three pages: you'll be reading along and suddenly there's a gap in the line. You think - hmm, that sentence didn't quite finish, and then you find that it's finished on the next line after what appears to be a paragraph indentation.

How could any publisher let this go out into the world looking like this? How could the author himself let it go? Didn't he get any proofs?

I had a look on the Net to see if anyone else commented on it. This is one of the more generous reviews on Amazon.co.uk: This book has its origins in a blog post, and it shows - it really needs the hand of an editor, or at least a decent proof-reader. Nevertheless, it's a decent overview of the position avant-garde music has in contemporary culture, and if it doesn't quite manage to pull its threads together into a sustained argument, there are plenty of ideas and opinions to chew on.

Others are a little less polite. Certainly the book starts out interestingly: it does seem to try and be a potted history of music in the 20th century as well, but it's too disjointed for that. Anyway, I guess if it got me listening to Varese, it can't be all bad.

There's a very full review on Rouge's Foam, which puts the book in perspective in a way I could never do. One line in it strikes me as undercutting the basic premise of Stubbs' book: Unfortunately the ability to experience music meaninglessly is arguably not just rare, but impossible. Sorry, Stockhausen...

Despicable, teeth, health

I went to the movies the other day with my daughter and her son. (Yup, my grandson - you're pretty sharp, aren't you?) The movie, for those who want to know, was Despicable Me, and while it took a little while to warm up, it got itself into a reasonable amusing state by the time it was finished. I think it's one of those movies you need to see again in order to catch up with all the little details that make it interesting.

Anyway I was chewing one of the lollies my daughter had handed over to me and suddenly bit on something that wasn't anything like the jelly texture I'd been throwing around in my mouth. Hmmm...a piece of tooth had broken off. It turned out to be mostly filling when I got it out in the light, and I thought, Okay, that means the dentist can probably just clean it up and cover it over.

Nope. One x-ray later, and the dentist is talking about removing it. Which meant taking casts of my teeth set-up so that they can add another false tooth onto the plate I already wear. At this rate there'll soon be nothing for the plate to hang onto.

Today I've been at home (still on holiday) plateless. Which means the pirate look (gap in the front teeth area) is very easy to display - and very ugly.

While I was on the plane coming home yesterday I finished Tim Parks non-fiction book, Teach Us To Sit Still. I'm not sure where I first came across this - think it might have been advertised on the Book Depository site (did you know that books and magazines are the second most ordered things on the Internet, as far as New Zealanders go? I'm glad I'm not in the book trade anymore.)

Anyway, I'll do a longer review of the book in due course. Suffice to say, it's very well written, full of interesting corners, and metaphors and dreams, but most of all, it presents a picture of a man torn between his two selves (he explains that at one point). The result is that he's in constant pain in his abdominal area. I was interested initially because it was thought at first that he had prostate problems. Seemingly that wasn't the case, but nothing medical seemed to be able to pinpoint what his problem was. The book is about his discoveries in that regard, his 'cures' (not quite cures in the usual sense) and his insights into his own personality. Great reading.

Diet, Pullman, air travel

Who needs to know about the best diet pills ever? There are other ways to lose weight.

Last night I flew into Dunedin from Auckland. We were due to land at 9 pm, and were pretty much on time, in spite of a headwind. In the end we actually landed about 9.30 after half an hour of circling the city. That delay might have been okay, except that every time we approached the airport the squalling winds buffeted the plane around in a horrific way, and anxiety was the major emotion on board. The unfortunate thirty-something man in the seat opposite mine, across the aisle, brought up his dinner, then his lunch, and perhaps even his breakfast. That's not a pleasant way to lose weight, but it's effective. Anxiety is probably pretty good too. I'm sure I was several pounds lighter by the time I put my feet on the ground.

On a totally different tack, I came across this delightful piece by Betty Smartt Carter in the Books and Culture magazine today. It relates partly to Philip Pullman's most recent book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, but it goes beyond that, back into Pullman's famous (children's) trilogy, His Dark Materials.

It begins:
The following is a story that attempts to show how a recent novel could have happened. It is not the story. It is not even a plausible story. Sometimes it reads like fairy tale and at other times like a product of Google Translate. The effect is intentional.

Once there were two brothers from Norwich. The younger brother, Philip, became a storyteller. He had a gift for describing the natural world without sentimentalizing it. The older brother, Pullman, became a teacher and a champion of human liberty. He liked stories, too, but thought they ought to serve a Greater Purpose.

Its tongue-in-cheek style takes the edge of its satire, but only a little.

How to spend a holiday

I'm on holiday for a week - which is going to be interrupted by a course in Auckland (at the other end of the country for those who don't know our geography) which will take four hours, but will cost me an entire day tomorrow. I'm going to take next Monday off in lieu.
The course was an afterthought: I'd been due to go on holiday for a few weeks, but the course notice arrived in my email last week - about Thursday, I think - and foolishly, instead of ignoring it, I showed it to my colleague (my de facto boss) and within a zippity doo of an hour I was booked to go to Auckland and had someone available to pick me up at the airport, transport me to the course site, and bring me back again. (A free early evening meal is now being thrown in as well, so I can't complain.)
As to the holiday, I've now had two days of it, and yesterday wasn't too bad weather-wise, although it got very cold in the afternoon. My wife and I got up early and loaded up the van with accumulated rubbish (accumulated and smelly) and headed out to the tip. The dog came too and was not impressed at being kept in the vehicle while I unloaded it. Frantic was the attitude he assumed.
Then we went and picked up a trailerload of soil/compost from 'Designer Trees' and rejoiced in the fact that the trailer was thrown in for free...for an hour. Back home, and over the next hour we slaved away at emptying the trailer's contents into a couple of our raised gardens. That's hard work when you haven't done it for a while.
While it was still fine we went down to the nearly new Bunning's Warehouse (my first trip - it looks almost identical to Mitre 10 to my jaded mind) and bought some items for the garden. But by the time we got home the weather was turning off rapidly, and none of the plants have made it into the garden yet.
Today's plan was to replace some of the glass in the glasshouse. We measured up, and my wife had some thoughts about perhaps it would be more economical to replace some of the glass with a firm plastic, so that required another trip to Bunning's where we found the sort of thing we needed. We also got some glass for the missing panes out of the roof - the glasshouse had suffered quite a bit of damage in the terrific wind that we had a few days after Christchurch had its awful earthquake.
But today the weather wasn't going to give us any clemency whatsoever, and most of the glass replacement was done in the freezing cold, or with snowflakes drifting down onto us. We got the roof sorted but nothing else at this stage. I spent the other part of the day inside, getting warm again, and avoiding wasting my time looking at sites like those called acne treatments reviewed or how to gain a six-pack in three minutes a day, and worked hard at getting notes typed up for the Varsity course I'm doing. I had to tell myself severely that I wasn't allowed to do any music writing today; the course has been suffering a bit of late because of that.
So I guess you could call it successful, in spite of the weather. I had been hoping for lovely sunny days over this week, but it doesn't look as though my hope is going to be met. Pooh.

For all dog lovers...and others

OK Go has produced another intricate music video - I have no idea what the song's about, and really it hardly matters given the way in which the video works. But anyone who likes/loves/adores dogs will be impressed by the teamwork of the animals in this one.

Not so sharpe, these soldiers

Dark circles under eyes is an odd way of saying something - the lack of 'the' before the 'eyes' gives it a kind of person speaking English as a second language feel. So I'm not sure why a company would advertise themselves with such a link. Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die, to paraphrase Charge of Light Brigade. (This removal of the the definite article is catching.)

Talking of soldiers charging into battle, I've been spasmodically watching the Sean Bean series, Sharpe, on Prime television over the last few weeks - it's on Friday night, so it tends to come at that time of the week when making an effort to do anything else is wearying. I'm not up with the story enough to keep track of who's who, and quite honestly, only Sharpe and one other character, an Irishman - played by Daragh O'Malley), seem to consistently appear (although I'm no doubt wrong about this).

In last night's episode, as far as I could make out, they were trying to conquer some walled city (in Spain?) by first creating a breech with cannon fire, and then sending in men to scale the broken wall. How anyone was ever supposed to survive these absurd break-ins is beyond me, especially when they had no protection from the gunfire coming from the city walls above them. This type of warfare was still in play in the First World War, when sending thousands of men into battle with no armour was the norm. Even the Romans, way back in the year dot, were far more canny. They used shields against the arrows and spears and other weapons, and had some armour. These guys in Sharpe just run straight into the gunfire, and fall over like ninepins in a bowling alley. Absurd.

Of course Sharpe and his core cast of characters survive everything going - which is just as silly as the way in which the warfare is conducted in the first place. (As was the survival of Pete Postlethwaite in this episode: he played a Sergeant with several screws loose, and managed to get away with nothing more than a leg wound - and that was given to him by that arch sharp(e)-shooter, the Irishman who'd such a marksman normally he should have been able to pinpoint a spot on his head and actually hit it. No doubt Postlethwaite lives to chew the scenery another day and eventually come off worst.

Bean was in the Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan, which we caught up with the other night. It proved to be better than expected, though hung on a fairly thin premise. Nevertheless it made the most of its surroundings, with lots of sinister Hitchcock-like moments, and a bunch of people who seemed perversely inattentive to the problem at hand. The two baddies were suspicious from early on; we just couldn't see why they were suspicious.

Incidentally, the imdb.com has had a facelift. There are plusses and minuses: it looks better, but you have to dig a bit further to find stuff that came up much quicker previously.

Clipping coupons

I was reading somewhere on the Net the other day about a woman who saves all the coupons she receives and actually gets the discounts that are offered, thus saving herself a considerable amount of money each week. It's hard to gauge how this works, but then I'm not in the States where coupon clipping seems to be a much bigger deal than it is here. For instance, with New World supermarkets, even though the company regularly sends out these little booklets advertising all sorts of discounts on various grocery items, no one actually uses the booklets; they just take off the back page which has the barcode on it and get the check out girl/boy to zap that. Saves all the hassle of pulling pages out of the book (which is the way it used to work) and presenting each of these individually to the check out chick (a term which can cover the blokes as well, if my son, who worked as one for some time, is reliable in his information). In fact, if other people are anything like us, they just use the same bit of card with the barcode on it for several months, and toss out the booklets into the recycling each time they arrive.

Anyway, all that is a lead into the subject of Billy's Savings Club, which seems to be a kind of online coupon clipping outlet. At the moment they're doing a bit of a promo on moving companies. Billy's is quite a fun site in this regard: under the info about local Tucson movers, say, or a Phoenix moving company, you can discover the good and bad points about these cities (or any others you choose). You might find that the crime rate will put you off, or the pollution (Houston's bad, apparently); the knowledge that Phoenix has over 200 golf courses might be a real incentive to you. (Regrettably, not to me. The last time I 'played' golf, it was a total embarrassment, even to those who remained polite.) This is certainly a little more interesting than tearing pieces of paper out of a booklet; that is, if your ultimate pleasure in life (as it seemed to be in the case of the woman mentioned above) is clipping coupons as hobby, recreation, and employment.

Authentic Theft

Came across the following wonderful quote on the Prodigal Kiwi(s) blog today - no doubt it's already all over the Internet, but let me add it one more time...

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery — celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from — it’s where you take them to.”

Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming.

A Russian flying boat/sea plane/something or other

After I wrote the last post, my cousin, who's presently in Jersey in the UK, wrote and gave me a couple of links to videos of the Ekranoplan KM Caspian Sea Monster. I'd never heard of this seaplane before. It's not a pretty-looking thing, I must say; quite clunky, in fact. And it seems....large - a real monster. The comments on the first video provide some background, although, like so many comments on You Tube, it's hard to pick which commenters actually know something and which are just guessing their way through.

The video below is about 11 minutes - and the commentary is in Russian, so you have to guess what's being said about it. There's an intriguing moment about six minutes in when the thing lands on the sea then slides up onto the sand.

Flying Boats

I've had a bit of a thing about flying boats for some time. It was one of the topics I did some serious research into preparatory to writing an article on it, when I first began writing for publication, back in 1988 or thereabouts. I eventually published an article online on the topic, many years after I couldn't find a home for the original piece.

I actually went on a flying boat - or rather, it was called a 'float plane' - last year while I was on holiday in Taupo. Once it's up in the air, of course, it's no different to any other kind of plane (though the original flying boats certainly were different) but it's the getting off the water and landing (if that's the word) again that's the interesting part.

And talking about research (see paragraph one) I came across this note in the Te Ara Enclyclopedia today while looking up information on Orakei: The first flying boat to be flown in the southern hemisphere took off from Bastion Point on New Year’s Day, 1915. It was designed and built by pioneering aviators Leonard and Vivian Walsh, with the help of their sisters and an engineer. Later in the year the Walsh brothers opened a flying school on the Mission Bay foreshore, training 100 pilots for the war in Europe. Flying boats were an important part of the Waitemata scene until 1989.

Until 1989! Flying boats were barely visible after the 1950s, according to some sources.

On another topic altogether (typical of the style of this blog) I've just been looking at a site that's advertising itself as one of a number of online Elementary schools. The site in the link will take you to a kind of overview of online schools, which is okay, but they also feature on this page something called 'infographics.' These are kind of like those posters they used to have up on classroom walls so that the kids could absorb the information day by day (especially at those times when the teacher was being excessively boring).

However, what slightly amazed me were some of the topics. For instance: 16 Things about Hugh Hefner; Stats on Prostitution; A Gun for Everyone; The Brief Guide to Boogers; A Passion for Beards; Striptease....

To be fair, the infographic on prostitution is not salacious: it shows concern for the fact that huge numbers of women are forced into prostitution everywhere in the world, and that many suffer badly as a result. It also discusses trafficking. The Gun poster is subtlely critical of the excessive number of guns in the US.

But the Hugh Hefner one is something I wouldn't want on the wall of any classroom where my kids were studying, and the striptease one is no better. Neither of these take any sort of moral stance; they're written as though Hugh Hefner's lifestyle was in some way admirable, and equally, the striptease one comes across as though it (and its variants, such as poledancing) were a pretty okay thing. (Have you noticed how many programmes on TV now feature a scene in a club where poledancing is going on, often right up beside the characters who are discussing the latest bit of the plot.)

I wonder why anyone thinks this is somehow educational? Think I'll go back to flying boats - at least there are no moral issues with them....

Photo of RNZAF PBY-5 Catalina XX-T - taken about 1945 - place on Flickr.com by 'Adelaide Archivist.'

Ditchkins

In his brilliantly argued critique of the new atheism, Terry Eagleton ridicules those who treat religion as a purely explanatory entity. 'Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It's rather like saying that thanks of the electric toaster, we can forget about Chekhov.' Believing that religion is a 'botched attempt to explain the world' [quoting either Dawkins or Hitchens - or, Ditchkins, as he melds them] is on the same intellectual level as 'seeing ballet as a botched attempt to run for a bus.'

Quoted in the introduction to Mere Theology, by Alister McGrath, pg ix - original source is Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith and Revolution: reflections on the God Debate, published 2009.

Earthquakes, winds and printers

The earthquake that hit Christchurch yesterday has left an appalling mess, but amazingly, there was no loss of life, thank the Lord - though there were some near misses.

Tonight here in Dunedin, we're having gale force winds; they've been thumping against the house since before tea time, and apparently there are tree branches littering the roads. Our neighbour's fence has collapsed, and if the wind keeps up that won't be the only thing.

The worse part about this wind is that it's supposed to be travelling up the island and will hit Christchurch tonight, or tomorrow. Hopefully it'll wear itself out before then.

On another (non-weather related) front altogether, one of the things about writing blogs regularly is that you forget what you've written a couple of years ago, and when you go back things seem quite fresh to you. For instance, to take a random post, a couple of years I wrote a piece on the WorkReport blog entitled, Poking around the printing world. It discusses a day I had a great deal of problem with the printer that used to be in the office where I work (we've since replaced it, thank goodness). While I don't mention color printing (note the American spelling - that's for those people who think this is the way the word should be spelt), I do go into some detail about the frustrations that the printer was causing. There was a time when I threatened to toss it out the window - we're on the fifth floor - just to let it know it was way out of favour. I never got to do that and see what state the thing would have been in after its lengthy fall - unfortunately. We're too frugal to consider throwing a piece of equipment out the window just to see the mess, however satisfying it would have been!

When I bought the computer I'm typing this on, we got a printer thrown in. Dell were the people who supplied the computer and printer (by a series of confusions the printer arrived some weeks before anything else, and I'm sure I've written about it somewhere on one of my blogs). We installed the printer and it worked well - and then I rang Dell to find out how much the replacement cartridges would be. They were an exorbitant price, and at that time, because the printer model was new, they weren't even available in New Zealand. In the end we put the old printer back into use (it can use recycled cartridges without problem, and they're a great deal cheaper) and the brand new one is sitting on a shelf sulking.

The very first printer I had was a wonderful old dot matrix. We used to use them at work in the shop too. They were extraordinarily fast, rarely went wrong, and would happily print page after page without requiring replacement inks. I'd be using them still today if it wasn't for the fact that they wouldn't have a hope of printing out most stuff you want to print now. Which means that we have to use printers which use expensive cartridges which don't last a fraction of the time the ribbons that used to go in the dot matrix machines lasted.

Progress ain't always progress. But at least the newer buildings in Christchurch stand upright because of newer building codes. That's the sort of progress that's worth having.

Blogger, musicals, and pink diamonds

Along with a bunch of other people around the world who use Blogger I've been frustrated by the sluggishness of their current draft update version. First it wouldn't allow you to update photos from your own computer, and then it began loading something - don't ask me what - at great length before you could start writing anything. Someone on the Blogger help pages suggested using Windows Live Writer to write the blog on and then transfer it over to Blogger once it was set. Apparently WLW gives you a kind of WUSIWUG page (which Blogger does too, though it has a couple of quirks). Anyway, another alternative is just to go back to the old version of Blogger until they get it sorted out. Which I've done.

Well, my collaborator (on the musical we're writing) came round for a read-through on Wednesday. We basically read through with her taking all the female parts, and me doing all the males. It took a little bit of remembering where you were at times, but overall it was a good way to get the feel of some lines that might not have been so clear. I'm hoping to get some other theatrical friends together some time in the near future and have a proper read through, though it's a little difficult in that there are lyrics at various points through the script and these don't necessarily lend themselves so well to a read-through.

One of the characters owns a diamond mine, where she makes a number of the others work for her. Remembering that this is a fantasy, a fairy story, such things are possible, of course. It occurs to me that the mother of the little boy who's the main character could be wearing a diamond ring, just to bring in a bit of irony. I like doing things like that, but my collaborator isn't quite so keen. Still, diamond engagement rings, are fairly common, so there's no reason why the mother shouldn't wear one.

The collaborator and I had some debates over pointing in advance what happens at the end. I wanted just a couple of lines that seemed to be said in an off-hand way but which actually pointed to the climax. The collaborator was not impressed: we compromised after some time with one line which is just a passing comment, and only the most keen ears will connect it up to later events. To me it just gives a kind of neatness to things. There was another similar issue, but it must have sorted itself out as I can't remember any longer what it was about!

The pink diamond in the picture which came from the Argyle Diamond Mine in Australia, is valued at US$450,000. It's colour range is 'flame intense.' Photo by Swamibu

RAK Day

By failing to read an email that came in the other day in time, I managed to miss knowing that the 1st of September was Random Acts of Kindness Day. Admittedly it's becoming increasingly hard to keep up with all the 'Days' that we're supposed to celebrate in a year - I think some group or other has every day covered, and some days are covered several times over.

However, I do support the idea of RAK Day. It acknowledges that we're all in this together; the people around us aren't extras in our personal biopic movie; that however much we may think someone else's life stinks (and ours, by contrast, is virtually perfect) that doesn't make them less a human being, or any less a child of God. Honouring someone with a random act of kindness is good for everyone's soul.

The email I got from the Love Your Neighbour organisation suggests three ideas for starters:

• Pay for a strangers' coffee
• Bake a cake for your neighbour
• Make this the day you play cricket with your kids in the backyard

The last one doesn't really seem like an RAK to me...it's something you should be doing with your kids anyway (although cricket in the backyard at this time of the year is a bit of a non-starter due to the soggy nature of the grass). But paying for someone's coffee might be fun - and might even start up a conversation that helps you see that other person as real, instead of - 'fictional.'

I have this great tendency to invent lives for people I see on the bus or in the street - they'd probably be horrified if they knew what I've made up for them, and it's likely I'm wrong in 99.99% of the cases anyway. I think I'm a great reader of people, but it's possible I'm not!

Baking a cake for your neighbour gives you an opportunity to find out what their door chime actually sounds like as well - so you get to have a bit of additional fun in the process. They get to have fun imagining what that cake actually tastes like before they try it - which might not be so hot if I've baked it.

RAK Day doesn't have to be limited to the 1st of September. You can celebrate this day every day - in fact, you/we/I probably should!

Creating Creativity

Earlier in the month, Tony Schwartz, on the Conversation (one of the Harvard Business blogs) wrote a piece  called Six Secrets to Creating a Culture of Innovation.

It's geared towards those running a business, primarily, but I thought it might be interesting to consider how a loan wolf artist like myself might use the 'secrets.'

The first secret is 'Meet people's needs.'   Well, that's something I have no problem doing: if my inner man says, in the middle of writing something, I'm hungry, I send him off to the kitchen (which is conveniently placed a couple of metres away from my computer).   He can make as many cups of tea or coffee as he likes in a day - or finish off that fruitcake someone obligingly gave me...him.   If my inner man has unmet needs, I know about them pretty quickly, as you can imagine.   I can't always settle them immediately, (especially if the fruitcake was finished the day before) but I do my best.

The second secret (how can these be secrets if he's telling us them?) is 'Teach creativity systematically.'   According to Schwartz there are five well-defined, widely accepted stages of creative thinking: insight, saturation, incubation, illumination, and verification.   I read the blog post the link in the previous sentence takes you to (it's very irritatingly bringing up some oddball codes on my browser) and I don't particularly disagree with these steps.   Although when she (someone called simply, Maria) says, "The first stage of the creative process is finding or formulating a problem. The tricky part about this stage is that it requires creativity in itself," I kinda feel that there's a bit of a catch 22 in there somewhere.   However, these stages are worth considering - once I've dealth with one of my inner man's unmet needs.

The third secret is to nurture passion.   I have to be excited about what I'm creating.  Don't give me some mundane work to do; my inner many won't stand it.  He'll hive off to the kitchen again.

This ties in with the fourth secret: make the work matter.  There's no point giving me a job writing about cashmere mittens for women if I don't have some excitement about aforesaid cashmere mittens - or about women, if it comes to that.   But if you can get my creative juices going when it comes to cashmere and mittens and women (and not necessarily in that order), you're on the way.

Provide the time.  This is the penultimate secret (another secret Mr Schwartz doesn't mention is include slightly more obscure words in your blog posts).   I try to give my creative person all the time in the world.   What does he do with it?  Fritters it away on Twitter or Facebook or writing blog posts of an inane nature, or checking his emails every few seconds, or playing another round of Scrabble online or seeing if anyone's paid him for anything in the last week/day/hour/second.   I can be a slightly tetchy boss at times.

Finally we have: Value Renewal.  Mr Schwartz says that human beings are not like computers; they can't be left on day and night flicking meaningless screen savers across their faces.   Human beings need to expend energy and then relax.  Expend and relax.  In the relax stage they recover their creative juices and get ready for another hack at the problem in question.   And at the same time, miraculously, while they're whiling away time making the fourteenth cup of tea/coffee, or playing 'fetch' with the puppy, or checking out the Guardian sports videos, all sorts of remarkable creative breakthroughs are taking place.   When that cup of coffee is drunk, or the puppy worn out, or the videos have proved to be not as exciting as the Guardian made them out to be, then you'll find that the brain is just itching to go, full of new insights, ideas, stuff you can use.  Or not.


Sometimes this creative incubation stage just doesn't get itself going quite as quickly as you'd like, and a whole day, or week or more can be whittled away while the incubation is going on.   However, you can fool the brain by working on some other totally unrelated project in the meantime, and give it a double job to do: incubate on project one and project two simultaneously. 

The brain may happily mix these up - and according to all creative writers this is a good thing.   Just make sure that at the end of the day that project 1 winds up with creative solutions to itself and not to project 2.  Unless your boss also thinks that's a good thing.  

Photo by velo_city on Flickr.com

Fashion....or not

I've worn bow ties a few times over the years, but never anything quite as garish as the one in the picture.   I'm hard pressed to think what colour clothing would go with it.  A dark suit would become almost invisible, and anything that matched it in any way would rather defeat the purpose of the formality of the tie.  

I'm assuming formality, because I don't know anyone who wears a bow tie in the normal day.  Except University professors in the movies.   They often seemed to wind up with them, though I'm sure it's not part of their uniform, but it appears that those who do clothing design for movies think it is. 

I've got a couple of bow ties that I've acquired somehow, but 99% of the time they sit in the drawer neglected.  The occasions for wearing them are few and far between these days.  I can't even think what I would have last worn them for, in fact.   Possibly some show where I was playing the piano; nowadays I just wear an ordinary tie - ordinary in the sense of it being your regular tie; not ordinary in the sense of design because I have one that has The Scream on it, and a couple that have piano keyboards on them.  Why wear a tie if it's going to be boring?   I really only wear them now when I accompany singers somewhere.   I haven't worn a tie to work since I don't know when.... I certainly never wore one to the bookshop after the first day or so, because my then boss didn't think there was any reason to.   And I've never worn one to work since. 

Ties, like other things that seem to have been around forever, are going the way of the dodo for most of us. 

I remember some writer on one of the Triond sites berating men for wearing a noose around their necks.   Of course women have never worn anything equivalent, like corsets, or bustles or high heels.   Give me a loose noose anyday over the strain of wearing shoes that break my back....

Trafficking

Charities in the UK have critised a police report which they say undermines the problem of human trafficking in Britain.   The report was released by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), and claims there are currently only 2,600 trafficked women across the UK.  A senior police official has argued this figure is more in line with female trafficking statistics for London alone.

A senior police official slammed the report as "amateurish."   The report also claims that there are no women in the UK who have been trafficked in from Africa.

Codenamed Project Acumen, the ACPO report built its conclusions on UK trafficking after interviewing 254 women in London brothels.  It then estimated the size of the problem across the UK based on these figures and information garnered from newspaper reports.

But anti-trafficking charities across the UK have slammed the report, saying it greatly undermines the seriousness of the problem and how it should be tackled.


Cherifa Atoussi from the Child Trafficking Office for Africa [the group may actually be called, Africans Unite Against Child Abuse] said: "This denial is actually empowering the people behing human trafficking. I would like to know what the intention is behind this report and where they got their figures from because they are contrary to what we have on the ground here."

Earlier this month the House of Lords assured church leaders that countering human trafficking in the build-up to the Olympic Games in 2012 was a top priority and that police provision would be bolstered over the coming year to help them tackle the issue.

The above information comes from an article on the Christian World Mission site. 

One of the issues suggested for World Blog Day is trafficking, both of women and children.

Execution of Christians in North Korea

Christian World Mission reports that three church leaders in the Pyongan province of North Korea have been executed.
The Christian ministers, from secret underground churches, were killed by authorities in Pyungsung county in the Pyongan province.  Another 20 Christians were reportedly sent to hard labour camps.
Religion is completely outlawed in North Korea and citizens are expected to worship only their leader, Kim Jong-il [photo at left] and his late father and predecessor, Kim il-sung.
Open Doors - an organisation that supports persecuted Christians around the world - has said that the country is the worst in the world for persecuting Christians. 
The country’s estimated 400,000 Christians are forced to worship behind closed doors.  They face imprisonment, torture or public execution if the authorities discover their faith.
400,000 Christians in a country that is supposed to be one of the most atheistic in the world.   (If that's the word you can use about a place that worships a man.)   This is an extraordinary figure, and shows how Christianity persists even in the face of the most violent persecution.  

James Gibb/the vital place of women (!)

A couple of quotes from The Story of the Otago Free Church Settlement 1848 to 1948 by John Collie.  The first relates to James Gibb, a minister who came to First Church, Dunedin around the turn of the 19th-20th century.

He could work strenuously all day in conferneces and committees and then study hard up to three or four in the morning, the intensity of his zeal being the guarantee of concentration.  When ill-health did seriously threaten him in his prime he cured it partly by defying it and partly by ignoring it.  Ordered to diet, he would munch sweets whenever opportunity offered.   pg 292

Gibb lived to be 78. 

No one who has even a cursory acquaintance with the work carried on in our Maori Field will ever doubt the vital place which women missionaries must always hold there.  More men are required, but they cannot do the work of a woman.  Similarly in the foreign field - the whole work would ultimately come to a standstill without the women missionaries.   pg 278

That the statement above is true is testified to by the number of women who served as missionaries throughout the 20th century.  While they couldn't hold leadership roles in their home churches they were 'allowed' to do so almost as a matter of course in the mission fields (both in New Zealand and abroad).   I remember, when our family was in the Assembly of God Church back in the 70s that there was an insistence that the men were the ones who led the churches.   And then a missionary came to speak.  She turned out to be a little, quiet woman with nothing much remarkable about her, yet she'd been working and leading successfully in the mission field for some years.  The irony of this seemed lost on the male leadership!

Photo of James Gibb courtesy of the Presbyterian Church Archives.

Unread novelists and long-lost typewriters

Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac says today, "It's the birthday of novelist Brian Moore, born was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland (1921). Not many people have read him, but he's considered by literary critics to be one of the most influential novelists of the 20th century. Three of his books have been short-listed for the Booker Prize, but none of them have won. When he died a decade ago in Malibu, his obituary in the LA Weekly began, "THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED AND LEAST fashionable writer in Los Angeles died last week.""

Not many people have read him.  That seems a curious statement, since he was a reasonably prolific writer, with some 27 novels listed on the Wikipedia entry.  Not winning the Booker Prize doesn't necessarily make you an unread author - in fact a lot of people don't read Booker Prize authors for the very reason that they've won the prize.   It usually indicates they're way out, or supra-literary, or so innovative that there's little story to read.   All of which is as much of a generalisation as the statement 'not many people have read him.'  

Talking of being prolific, I sometimes wonder if writers are now more prolific because they use PCs, or laptops, or netbooks or the like.  I know I am, but whether being more prolific necessarily means you're a better writer is another matter.   Blog posting doesn't necessarily bring out the best in you, for starters, and that's where a huge amount of my writing is done these days.   There was a time when I wrote by hand, though it's almost so long ago that I can't remember.   If my writing hasn't been done on a keyboard, it's been done on a typewriter - I taught myself to type almost as soon as I could earn enough money to buy a typewriter.   And a great thundering thing it was too.   Sometime later I bought a portable one, about half the size, and probably less than half the weight.  It was a great little job, but I have no idea what happened to it now - nor what happened to my first typewriter.   Perhaps I sold them....?   Who knows?

John Michael Talbot

Back in the days when I used to run the Christian bookshop, one of the top-selling artists at one point was John Michael Talbot.   He sang simple, straightforward songs he'd written himself, accompanying himself on a guitar.   Most of the albums had subtle background music - and sometimes choirs - adding to the mix.   In fact, I remember one person saying that without these, the music wasn't all that remarkable.   I think that's a bit of an overstatement.   Certainly the additional music made a huge difference in emotional content to the basic simple songs, but not every song had these big background accompaniments, and the tracks that were done in a simple way were often highly effective. 

Like so many artists at that time, Talbot kind of went off the boil in terms of sales, and I haven't thought much about him in recent years.   I'd got the impression that he was a priest or monk, but in fact he's neither.  He joined the secular Franciscan order, but was never a monk.  The entry in Wikipedia tells us that he's now married to a former nun, and that he founded a integrated monastic community of celibates, married people and families called the Brothers and Sisters of Charity. 

In spite of my not hearing much about him, he's never stopped producing albums and has been doing big tours around the US for a number of years.   In the video below he talks about moving into a much smaller scale ministry, one that emphasises simplicity, and which is much more like a road tour without all the hype and paraphernalia; something with an element of serendipity in it, by the sound of things.

The other thing that's noticeably different is the long flowing white beard.   I remember him as having a short beard in the old days, but this gives him the look of a Patriarch.   Interestingly enough, on the video, he sounds like a young man still.  

Juggling

Being a distance student, I don't often go into the University Library here in Dunedin (and this time I've found all the books I need for my essay in the public library, as it happens) but when I do, it always amazes me how many of the students leave their laptops lying around while they go off and chat, or go to the loo, or get something to eat or drink.   I guess if Mummy or Daddy have bought the laptop then the students don't have any sense of having had to work to pay for the thing, or maybe they think that there's a special student laptop insurance that applies in their case - and of course Mummy and Daddy will be dealing with that anyway. 

I've only used my laptop in the library a couple of times, and I don't think either time had anything to do with studying.   It just happened to be a pleasant place to do some writing.   If I remember rightly, one of the occasions was when I was working on the script for the musical.   It was early in the piece, when I was trying to get an overall structure to the thing, before my collaborator came in on the scene and gave the whole venture the real kickstart it needed.

The script is sitting on the computer at the moment, feeling a bit neglected.   Work on the university paper I'm doing has tended to take up most of my brain time, though I'm getting a little frustrated at not getting on with the composing side of things for the musical, and I can see me pushing that into the mix even though I should be giving time to the paper. 

It's the problem of having two interesting things to juggle at the same time.   I've never been terribly good at the actual physical art of juggling, though I did spend quite a few weeks practicing at one point.   Just couldn't seem to get past that stage where you're worrying over what's happening next and into the point where you start to relax.   It's something I'd like to be able to do, because it's quite a healthy thing: not just the physical arm movements, but picking up the balls continually is physically demanding.   Well the balls are still sitting in my wardrobe waiting.....

Photo of Tom James, the unicycle juggler, by Les Chatfield

Creativity and Failure

"Creativity is a consequence of sheer productivity. If a creator wants to increase the production of hits, he or she must do by risking a parallel increase in the production of misses. ... The most successful creators tend to be those with the most failures!" Dean Keith Simonton

Robert Sutton wrote in Weird Ideas That Work, that "in a typical year this group of about 10 people generated just over 4,000 ideas (which they know because all ideas are tracked on a spreadsheet):

Of these 4,000 ideas, 230 were thought to be promising enough to develop into a nice drawing or working prototype. Of these 230, 12 were ultimately sold. This "yield" rate is only about 1/3 of 1% of total ideas and 5% of ideas that were thought to have potential. Boyle pointed out that the success rate is probably even worse than it looks because some toys that are bought never make it to market, and of those that do, only a small percentage reap large sales and profits. As Boyle says, "You can't get any good new ideas without having a lot of dumb, lousy, and crazy ones."'

No one should choose the option of failure deliberately, but trying especially hard to avoid it means taking no chances on change. The better message to get across is that failure is a by-product of risk-taking, and honest mistakes will be forgiven.

All of the above are from an article, Forgive and Remember, by Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He studies and writes about management, innovation, and the nitty-gritty of organizational life.

Scientific tools....inadequate?

Adam Bly in this video is asking whether science is running out of 'scientific' tools to answer the big scientific questions. Maybe the arts will be an answer - maybe the spirit?

Adam Bly is the founder and CEO of Seed, a media and technology company committed to helping advance science and its potential to improve the state of the world.

The cost of the ETS

Muriel Newman writes in her weekly column: 
 
It is very clear that the direct costs of the ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme], in the form of increases in power and petrol and rising prices across all goods and services in the economy, is having a negative effect in these bleak business conditions. How much it has contributed to the increase in 19,000 people who have lost their jobs over the last few months - to take unemployment back up from 6 to 6.8 percent - is difficult to tell. What is not so hard to ascertain is that the decision to implement the ETS was clearly a victory of one-eyed ideology over common sense, thus making a lie of Bill English’s promise that his government is focussed on improving the country’s economic performance.

Read the rest of the article online.  

Wilmington, NC

At one point I wrote a number of posts on this blog about the city of Boise, in Idaho, (just put Boise in the search box above) never suspecting that this year I'd discover that my son's girlfriend comes from there.  Must have been premonition!   She has taught us exactly how it's pronounced, which was one of the foci of my posts in the past.  Good to have these things clarified, even if my son has to fall in love with a girl from the Northern Hemisphere to get it clarified.

There's no such difficulty in pronouncing Wilmington, (the home of Wilmington NC real estate), at least not as far as I'm aware.   Or am I about to get myself involved in a series of discussions about the actual, totally proper, correct pronunciation of the word?   Don't think so.   I suspect it's difficult for anyone who's spoken English since they were one year old to mistake the pronunciation of Wilmington.   It's more of an English word than American anyway. 

I knew nothing about Wilmington (nor Wilmington NC real estate - sorry, but I have to keep throwing that in; it's kind of a rhyming slang), so thought I'd do a little research on the place.   Firstly, it's very likely it's named after Wilmington in England, which is located 12 miles from Eastbourne and has been inhabited since Saxon times. The 12th Century Parish Church is dedicated to Saint Mary and Saint Peter. (That's not as old as the church where my parents-in-law are buried, though, which can clock up nearly a 1000 years.) The local public house is called The Giant's Rest, probably in homage to the Long Man of Wilmington, a giant chalk figure carved on the slopes of Windover Hill. It is one of only two human hill figures in England.

Wilmington NC isn't quite so old, but still has some impressive history: for instance, during the Civil War, the port was a major base for Confederate blockade runners.    A de facto coup d'etat (as Wikipedia puts it, nicely mixing Latin and French) took place there, when a mob ran a number of African Americans out of the town.  During the second world war, the city had a prisoner of war camp, which housed over 500 German prisoners at its peak. 

And for those creative people among you, the city is home to EUE Screen Gem Studios, the largest television and movie production facility outside of California. "Dream Stage 10," the facility's newest sound stage, is the third-largest in the US.  It houses the largest special-effects water tank in North America.

Surprisingly, the city's population is only just over 100,000, something I checked up on, as it seemed a small number of people for a place that has one of the largest historic districts in the country, encompassing nearly 300 blocks.   I mean, the city where I live, which has a population of about 130,000, would be lucky to be able to encompass 300 city blocks (!)

In reply....

About a week ago I copied a letter that appeared in the Otago Daily Times relating to an article on inducing cows.   Someone smarter than me has now replied to that letter in the following way: 

Cows moo and people choose.  Mooing is characteristic and an attribute of cows.  Choosing is an attribute of people.   Cows don't have the right to moo.  They just do.   People don't have the right to choose.   They just do.


The woman who wrote about being appalled that the cow did not have the right to choose to abort her calf is saying it is good as long as you choose.   People choose very bad things at times and society chooses to lock them up because they made the wrong choice.  'A woman's right to choose?'  We have been terminating our children based on a  meaningless slogan.

Pick of the Week

The viral advertisement above was directed by Ned Wenlock of New Zealand based production company HoverLion and at this date (18 Aug 2010) is being featured as a 'Pick of the Week' on internationally renowned Shots advertising website.

Just love the combination of laid-back narration and amusing visuals.

Ribbing

Back on the 30th January I wrote the following in my journal:
Today we went out to get some seaweed from Brighton beach, and that was fine, except that after we’d collected four bags, I went ahead dragging two, hoisted them over the little chain fence between the path and the car, stepped over it and next minute found myself in a heap on the ground, both legs skinned in different places, and the left side of my chest very sore. I wondered at first if I might have cracked a rib, but it’s probably not as serious as that. However, even though we’ve been doing some gardening on this arvo, my chest is still not comfortable.
I’m not sure what caused the fall; can only conclude that I caught my foot on the chain when I thought I was actually over it.
I posted a similar thing on Facebook at the time and got all the sorts of comments you'd expect...only one of them was in the least bit sympathetic.  (I thought I'd posted it on here and was a bit surprised not to be able to find the post yesterday.)  I'm still not sure how it's possible to throw yourself over a tiny little fence, but having done it I can only conclude that it is.
Anyway, having recovered (some time ago) from that painful fall, I went and damaged the same rib(s) on Friday night (!)   
A remote had dropped down the back of one of the couches; my wife was trying to reach it, and I said, 'I'll get it!'   I lent over the back, couldn't quite get it, went to lean over further, slipped, and gave my rib a thump on the wooden top of couch.  I couldn't believe I managed to hit the same spot again.  
It isn't as bad as the last time - plus there are no skinned shins - but it was still rather uncomfortable walking down the hill to work this morning.

Photo of Brighton Beach by Dino Borelli

More on the dog....

I wrote a week or so ago that we'd acquired a dog, and life has been interesting since then, to say the least.   The kitchen is no longer our own particular space.   It's dog home, at least for the time being.   The dining area (which is normally now closed off to the puppy) is extra space for him when he's allowed in there, and when he is, you'd think he'd been given the keys to the kingdom. 
As for going outside: we only have a relatively small back section, a good deal of it taken up with vegetable garden, and some flower gardens.   Nevertheless, this is a huge world to Marley, and brings enormous excitement.   It's full of aromas we can't even begin to imagine.
Cleaning up after him - he's improving in the toilet department - takes us back to the good old days of cleaning up after babies.   There's not a lot of difference.  
I spend a lot more time washing my hands, and I'm sure people think I'm starting to smell like a dog, but...it's all good.

Algebra and I

There was a time when algebra was my favourite maths subject.   And then along came some irritating equation, something that just didn't make sense anymore, and, sadly, algebra and I parted company from that point on.

Not entirely.  There was a point when I lived in England when I used to help a boy with his homework, particularly algebra, because in spite of my first paragraph above, I have a soft spot for algebra.  It used to frustrate me a little that this young fellow didn't quite understand the fact that in order to 'prove' your equation, you had to show the steps that got you there.   He liked to jump from the start to finish, leaving out the middle, where possible.  

Later on I came across a great book on algebra which promised that it would all make sense for me.   The first two or three chapters did....and then I had that same old sinking feeling about the subject that I'd had in school.   No matter how I tried to figure out the workings of an equation, I couldn't get there.   It was as if the writer was doing the same thing as my young friend: jumping from Al to bra with no ge in the middle.

Nowadays, it appears, you can get help online for such things as 4th grade math, 5th grade math and pretty much every other math between, before and after.  Of course you pay a monthly subscription, and you have to take that into your mathematical household equations, but that aside, it must be great to go online at 11 pm, when your Algebra 2 is due in first class in the morning, and know that there's someone who understands your problem.   That is, after your parents have given up trying to figure it out.

Parents, after they've left school and maths well behind, can cope up to about the level of adding fractions and then everything they were ever taught goes out the window.   Unless they happen to be like my geek of a son, who reads maths like I read a novel.    He's the sort of person (probably) who knows what the formula for volume is, or someone who finds graphing linear equations meaningful.   (I don't; I just grabbed the phrase from somewhere to make this sound impressive.)


Maybe I'll dig that old algebra book out, and see if I can get beyond that problem point.   By now, maybe, my brain will have caught up with what I was missing when I was younger. 

One lives in hope.

Serial tweets

Alan Jacobs wrote a set of serial tweets saying the following: 

Why I don't write posts on hot issues people think I ought to have opinions about. See the 2nd paragraph especially.

When I see people desperately trying to pick fights with someone as gracious as @reihansalam [on Twitter], that previous tweet is confirmed.

The interwebs seduce us into trying to solve all problems by argument, because argument is what the interwebs can do.

One of my chief goals in the coming year is to learn to have a meaningful online presence that doesn't involve debating issues...

...because the way we have defined "debating" and "issues" in our online lives is destructive of the social fabric.

The challenge is to learn to *be* in a certain way online, rather than always challenging or making a case. Blake: "Enough, or too much."

Online "debates" don't just hurt the social fabric, but also the selves who depend on the adrenaline jolt of disputation.

All addictions make people destructive and self-destructive. The junkie needs drugs; the online "debater" needs enemies.

The cow has no choice

A woman who shall be nameless wrote a letter to the Editor of the Otago Daily Times - it appeared today, the 10.8.10.   Her letter misses the point of Simon Cunliffe's article, I think, and gives an odd response to his argument. 

In speaking of the outcry about the practice of farmers inducing premature calving so as to synchronise births and therefore increase milk production, [Simon Cunliffe] states that a discreet veil of silence is drawn over the 17,000-18,000 abortions carried out each year in this country. It seems an analogy is being drawn between the two situations, with an accusation of hypocrisy implicit, perhaps.

I was quite appalled to be informed of this common practice of inducing the premature birth of healthy calves. I am also a strong supporter of a woman’s right to choose, including abortion, when faced with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. These two situations are not analogous. The key difference is choice. Clearly, the cow has no choice in the matter whatsoever.

Topsy Turvy!

One of my former customers who now lives in Australia, sends a note about his latest blog posts most weeks.  This particular blog (The Inspiration Room) has wide range of media material on it, but the particular section that comes up relates to videos and stills from advertising campaigns - ones we never see here in NZ for the most part. 

In a recent post he put links to a couple of videos from Johannesburg.   One was part of an ad campaign, the other a longer follow-up.   They relate to the Topsy Foundation which works with people who have HIV AIDs.   In the ad, a woman called Selinah is seen deteriorating from a healthy state to advanced AIDS.   But in the follow-up she is once more healthy, with normal weight.   The only difference is she's having to use a stick to get around. 

The reason she's healthy again is that she's had anti-retrovirals (ARVs) administered.   The AIDs symptoms are virtually reversed. 

You can see the two videos on the Topsy site.

Marley & Me

The other day we bought a puppy, a Pomeranian cross.   For some reason by the time I got home from work he'd acquired the name, Marley, which seemed to suit him just fine, in spite of the fact that at present he's little more than a couple-of-hands-lengths piece of creamy brown fluff. 

My daughter had a book called The Dog Whisperer, by Jan Fennell.   My wife has been reading it and picking up tips about training the puppy.   So far things are going well, helped by the fact that the little bloke is pretty amenable anyway. 

A friend of ours called up to see the puppy.  She's a great dog lover herself, and brought with her a DVD of a movie called Marley & Me.   Our friend probably enjoyed the movie a good deal more than we did, but we cringed at the way in which the labrador in this film is allowed to wreck everything in sight, chewing up furniture, books, carpets, floors, walls, and more.  Kathleen Turner, who gets fourth billing in the cast, has a three minute scene as a dog trainer.   This dog is even too much for her.   (Why they don't try another dog trainer is beyond me.)  This dog is never given the slightest bit of discipline.   The married couple, played by Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson, react to his every piece of wrongdoing with mild expressions of surprise, and seem won over by his (very) occasional moments of tender loving care for them and their kids.

Apparently this movie was based on a bestseller in which just such a dog featured.   The book was based on bi-weekly columns in which his exploits were given prominence, and won for the newspaper a huge following.  (This must have been some time ago; newspapers are lucky to increase their readership at all these days.)  I can only think that the columns/book must have been a good deal more amusing than this movie.  It never knows whether it's supposed to be a comedy (dog pulling owner through all sorts of 'funny' settings), a schmaltzy piece of family history, a story about the ups and downs of marriage (nothing particularly drastic), what happens when a person writes a column but wants to be a reporter (Wilson's character seemed particularly dense at this point) or...who knows?   My wife asked: who is this film meant for?  

I checked out what Roger Ebert had to say.  He coped with it, but I don't think it's his favourite movie of all time.   But I was amazed by Stephanie Zacharek's review (she writes for Salon.com).  Normally this woman will see through anything that's intended to pull the audiences' heartstrings in a cheap fashion, and she begins her review by discussing that.   But perhaps she's lost an important pet at some time; whatever the reason, she gives the thumbs up to this movie.

Well, we can't agree all the time, Stephanie.

When the medium fails...

Paul Fromont on Prodigal Kiwi(s) pointed me to Barry Taylor on Nevermind the Bricolage who pointed me to Brian Eno who wrote (somewhere):
 
"whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits."

Protecting, or not protecting, Intellectual Property

Julia Kirby has written an interesting article, published on the Harvard Business Review, called Why China Might Never Protect IP - that's Intellectual Property, to you and me.

China plainly has a different view of what belongs to whom. Or perhaps they have a different view of theft. But what Kirby points out is that even in the Western world now people are focusing increasingly on openness, a way in which when I create something that you can use or develop, I just let it go for free. Linux is an early example; Wikipedia is a later one, and one that has those people who think you have to make money out of everything still scratching their heads over.


Newspapers are learning the hard way that people aren't interested in being 'special people' who can read the 'special' news by paying a subscription for an online newspaper. Some will - that's fine. Most people who use the Internet have an innate sense that if newspaper A online isn't free newspaper B will be. Guess who gets read?

One of the comments on Kirby's article calls the article drivel. I just read through Seth Godin's alphabetical list of ;post-industrial' words. He introduces it by saying:

New times demand new words, because the old words don't help us see the world differently. Along the way, I've invented a few, and it occurs to me that sometimes I use them as if you know what I'm talking about.

Yes, he has invented a few, but not so many that we don't understand what he says. And his list isn't that unfamiliar. Anyway, one of his favourite words/phrases is the 'lizard brain'. My suspicion is that the person who called Kirby's article 'drivel' was being driven by his lizard brain when he wrote his comment. Kirby and Godin would mostly agree with each other's 'worldview' (another of the words on Godin's list, and definitely one he hasn't invented!)

We're in an extraordinary transition time in terms of property of all sorts; greed and endless profit is no longer the motivating factor for many people. It'll be interesting to see how it all pans out, and at the speed with which things are moving, I may still be around to see what happens!

Anne Rice and Blog Posts

Anne Rice, the author, has been in the news lately - at least in the States.   Her renunciation of Christianity (again) has apparently hit the headlines, because it always seems to suit the media to trumpet somebody who's put the boot into Christianity.   That's their preferred modus operandi.  

No doubt everyone and his brother (and her sister) has been blogging about it, so I may as well join the club.  However, I'm not going to say anything new about it, since I don't know anything new (or even anything more than I've read).   I'm just going to pass you on to two writers, one whose blogging I read a good deal and the other whom I've never heard of before (but comes recommended by Alan Jacobs, another writer I read a good deal) and let them speak for me. 


Firstly, the Alan Jacobs recommendation: AKMA, who's written a post called, On Giving Up. 

The second piece is by Richard Floyd, who always seems to write good sense.   His post is called My Top Ten Reasons Why Anne Rice Would Hate the United Church of Christ.  If you want a little more background to this post, read his previous one as well.

Myers-Brigging my blogs...

A post on Prodigal Kiwi(s) said they’d tried an analysis of their blog via a site called typealyzer.

Never one to miss such an opportunity, I tried it on this blog and came out as ESTP - The Doers, with the following explanation:
The active and playful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.


The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

Of course it’s only analysing the first page of the blog, so it depends which posts you had on it at that time.

The National Mission blog, which I compile, came out as INTP – the thinkers - and had this explanation:

The logical and analytical type. They are especially attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into. They are great at finding subtle connections between things and imagine far-reaching implications.


They enjoy working with complex things using a lot of concepts and imaginative models of reality. Since they are not very good at seeing and understanding the needs of other people, they might come across as arrogant, impatient and insensitive to people that need some time to understand what they are talking about.

My Travel blog came out as an ESFP.

You’ll note that not one of these matches up with what I came out as at the Myers Briggs day we did recently: ENFJ !!