Thursday, November 29, 2007

Another Good Quote

A nice quote from Madeleine L'Engle, who would have been 89 today:

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."


Wednesday, November 28, 2007

The Song on the Radio

Right at the present moment, BBC 6 is playing "Pretty Vacant" by the Sex Pistols.

Somehow it sounds different on the BBC.

Pretty cool.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Don't Make an Analogy You Don't Understand

Good grief. I came across this today and I'm having a hard time imagining how this guy could have any less of an idea what the suicide squeeze is:

For sports fans like George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice, the Annapolis meeting is the diplomatic equivalent of baseball's suicide squeeze bunt play: in the last inning of a nine-inning game, with runners on base and everyone wound up with anticipation, the manager tries a daring move that puts all the runners in motion while the hitter taps a soft bunt that aims to bring in a run and win the game.

The suicide squeeze is one of the most exciting plays in baseball, perhaps in any sports. But it usually fails, because it is based on a combination of desperation and offensive deceit that rarely add up to a winning strategy.
For the record: The squeeze play does not occur only in the 9th inning; it does not involve starting all the runners, and it usually is successful - 86 percent of the time.

I Think I'm in Pittsburgh

Every now and again I check my blog stats through Blogger, just to see if anybody ever visits this silly thing. (Surprisingly, people sometimes do. I get maybe two or three hits a day, and my Technorati rank has soared all the way to 8,911,336.)

For a few weeks I'd been noticing that the blog was getting regular hits from Pittsburgh, which was odd because I don't know anybody in Pittsburgh and I've never even visited there.

Still, I flattered myself that there might actually be somebody in the Steel City who found my blog so interesting as to become a regular visitor. Wow! I have a public!

But yesterday I noticed something else. I've been getting almost no hits from Illinois. Lots of hits from Pittsburgh, no hits from Illinois. Hmm.

There is only one explanation I can think of for this: My Internet connection must have been rerouted, and my mysterious reader in Pittsburgh is ... me.

So I guess that's where I am now. Pittsburgh. If you're every traveling through, stop by and, umm, say hello.

Monday, November 26, 2007

One for The Quote Book

"You don't have to leave my side, but you do have to let me pull my underwear out of my butt."

- Mari-Rose, Nov. 24, 2007

A Little Late For Thanksgiving, But...

On the table at Alice's Restaurant:

Cream of Salt and Pepper Soup

(Yes, it's the Alice and the restaurant.)

Monday, November 19, 2007

Glam Rock Lives!

I'm getting behind the times. Something is happening under our feet, and I didn't even notice.

Apparently that ill-advised G-N-R tattoo you've been trying to hide all these years is becoming a badge of honor:

Call it “hair metal” or “mullet metal,” even “butt rock,” or worse, “cock rock.” But whatever you say it is, and whether you listen to it or not, 1980s-style heavy metal is here again.

Rockers everywhere have embraced the heavy-metal thunder. Again, at last, L.A.’s Sunset Strip looks on any given night like the video for Mötley Crüe’s “Girls, Girls, Girls.” You can rest assured that now it’s safe to roll down J Street bumping Whitesnake while belting out the lyrics to “Here I Go Again” with your windows open.

Bands such as Whitesnake, Dokken, Dio, Iron Maiden (with Bruce Dickinson) and Judas Priest (with Rob Halford) have recently reformed (or have come out of hiding) and are either working on new albums or on tour.

What does it all mean? It means what it meant the first time: not much. So how about just enjoying it? Grow out that hair, slip on those cock-rock boots and drop the needle on your favorite metal masterpiece.
For those about to rock, we salute you.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

Your Quiz for the Day

Did the following headline appear in a major mainstream newspaper, or in The Onion?

Surfer dude stuns physicists with theory of everything

Answer here.

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

On Creativity

After the death of Norman Mailer, who was noted for his tendency to swing for the fences and either hit a home run or embarrass himself, Joel Achenbach has blogged a two-part series on creativity, titled "When Genius Bombs."

I'm going to quote it at length because I like it so much. Emphases are mine.

Geniuses mess up too. This is a phenomenon that permeates the creative world.

There is bad Beethoven. There are failed Picassos. There are incorrect theories by Albert Einstein. Duke Ellington would be the first to say that some riffs worked better than others. In the 1940s Orson Welles made both the instant classic "Citizen Kane" and the instant trivia answer "The Lady From Shanghai."

Just because you are a great composer named Wagner doesn't mean that everything you do will be Wagnerian.

(snip)

The problem with "genius" is that it doesn't give the great talents their due for working hard and plodding through difficult problems and taking chances and knowing which ideas to dump and which to deliver. Geniuses create the same way total ding-dongs create. Geniuses still have to put on their paint one stroke at a time.

Picasso would paint something, look at it -- at this point it would fetch a staggering price simply because it was a Picasso -- and then just paint over it, start again, because it wasn't good enough.

W.H. Auden once said, "The chances are that, in the course of his lifetime, the major poet will write more bad poems than the minor."

(snip)

George Bernard Shaw talked about the "field theory" of creativity, borrowing a term from physics. Good ideas do not exist alone but in a larger field of imagination. As a young man Shaw wrote five novels. Can you name one? Shaw had to work through his novelist phase before he could arrive, in his late thirties, as a playwright.

Shaw believed in productivity -- just keep writing, was his advice to everyone. Norma Jenckes, a Shaw scholar at the University of Cincinnati, says Shaw's attitude was that "you had to write yourself through all sorts of things, and then something might become your masterpiece."

Herein lies the lesson for everyone, the pros, the amateurs, the dumb-dumbs, anyone who has ever tried to think creatively. Humans are by nature a creative species, but we have to learn to manage our creativity, feed it, weed it, prune it, whack it back if necessary. We have to forgive our mistakes. No one is always brilliant.

Children instinctively know this. It is only as they grow up that society drums into their little noggins the fact that they're without real talent and ought to put down the crayons and the finger paint and learn to watch television like everyone else.

(snip)

The academics who study creativity have concluded that geniuses come up with ideas and analyze situations pretty much like everyone else. "Nobody is a genius simply because of the shape of their head and their brain," says Howard Gardner, a professor of education at Harvard. "People get ideas. Nobody knows where ideas come from. And they try to work them out. And people who are the best artists are very good working out the implications of those ideas. But it's not the case that every idea is a good idea."

(snip)

Within a field such as math, someone can be good at one thing and inept at another. The mathematician Henri Poincare could not add. He wrote, "I must confess I am absolutely incapable of doing an addition sum without a mistake."

(snip)

Mark Rosenthal, a curator at the National Gallery, applies the rule to artists: "The really good ones are trying extremely hard every time out. They're always trying to make a masterpiece, they're always trying to do something wonderful."

He says that being creative is a lonely job. Every artist's studio is the same. There is one chair. The artist paints half the day, and sits in the chair the other half of the day, looking critically at the art. "There's only one chair because artists work alone. And they sit there. I'm sure if we could be transported back to Rembrandt's time, it'd be the same thing. There'd be one chair."

(snip)

Robert Sternberg, a Yale psychologist and co-author of "Defying the Crowd: Cultivating Creativity in a Culture of Conformity," says creativity has three aspects:

1. Synthetic. You have to generate ideas. Geniuses come up with a lot more ideas than everyone else. "In most fields, the people who really are well known are prodigious. They're large-volume producers. But you don't even realize that in their repertoire is a lot of junk. You just don't hear about the junk," says Sternberg.

2. Analytic. You have to know which ideas are the good ones. J. Carter Brown recalls the prayer that the esteemed art critic Bernard Berenson used to say: "Our Father, who art in Heaven, give us this day our daily idea, and forgive us the one we had yesterday."

3. Practical. You need to know how to market the idea. How to pitch it.

(snip)

Leon Botstein, the composer, says you can't plan your breakthroughs. You just have to keep plugging away, and wait, and hope.

"Breakthrough is not when you want it, it's not when you expect it. It's a function of the constant activity. It is only the constant activity that generates the breakthrough."

And what causes the constant activity? It's not money. It's not glory. It's an "inner necessity," he says. Unless you have this inner necessity to create, you'll probably never do anything of brilliance, Botstein believes.

"Without constant, almost irrational, obsessive engagement, you'll never make the breakthrough," he says. "The difference between you and the person you consider great is not raw ability. It's the inner obsessiveness. The inability to stop thinking about it. It's a form of madness."

So this is what separates the great ones from the rest of the world. It is not simply that they are smarter, savvier, more brilliant. They are geniuses because they can't stand to be anything else.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

A Good Poem

"I Used to Be But Now I Am" by Ted Berrigan. My favorite lines:

I used to be part of the problem,
But now I am the problem.




Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Moooooo....

Ye gods:

A cow plunged from a 200-foot cliff onto the hood of a minivan on a highway in central Washington state, according to police.

The car's occupants, Charles and Linda Everson, were not hurt in Sunday's accident, but the cow was euthanized at the scene.

"If the cow had fallen a split second later, the animal would have landed right in their laps," said Jeff Middleton, criminal deputy of the Chelan County Sheriff's Department.
You wonder what the cow was thinking...

In similar news, last night while driving home on Old Route 66, I had to come to a complete stop because three deer were in the road. They were like the three bears: one big, one middle, one small. The little one just stood there in front of my car but eventually it joined its parents, big brother/sister - whatever they were.

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Unhealthy

Scary:

Children who are on the path toward obesity have some worrisome cardiovascular disease risk factors as young as age 7, according to researchers tracking early childhood weight fluctuations.


What To Eat?

The answer, as it turns out, is food.