The thinking is...

Political Glow

2010-10-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

Check it out.

On the Utility of Mathematics

2008-05-23T17:56:00.000-07:00

I just had an interesting exchange with the grandmother of one of my PreCalculus students. She came into the classroom and looked at all the symbols and whatnot on the board. Then she said, "So tell me, how does all this math help you in your life?"

I said, How does music help you in yours? They are the same thing.

Math thinking

2008-02-20T21:48:00.000-08:00

Stand by...

old guy thinking

2007-09-13T22:43:00.000-07:00

When I was young I knew everything.

Now I'm old and I know very very little. Replacing knowledge is opinion. I had opinions when I was young, as well as certainty, but they weren't the same opinions I have now.

To my children I apologize for the blunders their father made that they had to live through.

Here's what I have learned after 36 years of being a father, 33 years as a teacher...

It doesn't matter if you eat all your beets. All that matters is that you share food with people who love you, and who you love. Same with veggies in general. When the time is right you will develop a taste for them.

You don't have to eat with a fork when you're little. It's a handy tool and when you're ready you'll pick it up. All that matters is that you share food with people who love you, and who you love.

Doing well in school is nice because learning is fun. It is the brain's endless hobby. But if you are in a setting where learning isn't fun, it's perfectly reasonable for you to ask to be excused. That's not the same thing as refusing to rise to a challenge or to overcome a barrier, but learning is fun and if that is not your experience in school then something is wrong with school, not you.

Until high school, homework is irrelevant and steals time away from more important learning - unless it's some sort of project that you embrace and that your parents or friends embrace with you. Learning is a social activity primarily. From time to time it is a great solitary process, but not as a rule. When you're in high school the value of homework is that you take the time to reflect on neat stuff that class periods don't give you the time to reflect on. Homework is best done jointly with a friend. Doing endless pages of rote calculations (I teach math) does not make you a better person, student, or doctor. Doing repetetive boring work does not build charcter, it crushes it.

Question authority, just like the bumper stickers say. Not because authority is wrong but if it can't answer your questions properly then it's not authority but bullying.

Rules are agreements we make with one another. Most often life is easier if you share agreements with those around you. But there is no rule that says "Daddy knows everything" (sorry, you guys) or that if you're the guy or the dad or the woman or the mom that you have to be obeyed. Leadership does not mean telling people what to do, but making agreements with them about how we will all do it together.

Just because you start something does not mean you have to finish it. You don't. You can change your mind, or take a breather. That's fine.

That said, don't make promises you don't intend to keep.

"Nice" is better than "smart" any day. And if you have a clever wit don't ever use it to make yourself look good at the expense of others. Laughter can be vicious and cruel when used in this way and nobody likes that no matter how hard you make them laugh.

You are here first and foremost for yourself, not for other people. The trick is that you only become yourself or grow to like yourself by giving yourself to other people. It's a strange thing but true.

Love is not just a feeling. It's an active verb. Don't ever forget that.

You don't owe anybody anything that is burdensome unless carrying the burden makes your heart sing. Having one's own children makes the heart sing, in my experience. A life best lived is, in fact, lived for others. This is a conundrum, at least on the surface.

Here's a funny thing I have learned that I cannot explain or even articulate very well - you must learn to listen to your heart rather than your mind. Your heart knows truth, while your mind is easily confused.

These are true statements, in my heart's opinion.

Alex-less thinking

2007-09-12T21:51:00.001-07:00

Alex the African Grey parrot is dead.

This is a loss to many people, and a loss to me. For 31 years (out of an anticipated lifespan of 50-70 years) Alex has been blazing trails in science. He was purchased in a pet store in Chicago on July 5th, 1977 by a researcher named Irene Maxine Pepperberg. She deliberately allowed the store manager to pick out the bird from a group of 12-15 month old African Greys. She wanted the selection to be reasonably random as she wanted to study the ability of such birds (renowned for their ability to communicate since the time of Aristotle) to actually do so under scientifically controlled conditions in order that she might understand their cognitive abilities.

Lots of birds can learn to imitate sounds. I have heard that if you split the tongue of a crow it can learn words, although I have never seen such a thing and cannot understand how such a discovery could ever be made. Myna birds talk, in the sense of reproducing sounds they have heard, although there is no apparent communicative intent. I own an eclectus named Charlie who says "I love you," "Gloria" and a bunch of other stuff mostly in Korean. (He spent his formative years in the house of a Korean friend of Gloria's.) None of what he says seems to have communication as its intent, although some may disagree. Charlie, when I challenge him, has yet to do so.

I heard about Alex several years ago from my friend Liz Lee. Alex, she told me, could use words to communicate ideas, and could put together words he already new to express new thoughts. I'm not sure I entirely believed her at the time, but it really stuck in my mind. An example (true) is this: Alex had learned to describe objects by color, shape, size, number and several other attributes (read the book.) One day he was given corn on the cob to eat without being given its name. The next day he asked for "more long yellow... more long yellow...'

I like ideas. I love math and teach it because it is the study of the interplay of pure ideas stripped of the mundane reality of specific meaning. (My interest is evidently in what is called pure mathematics rather than applied mathematics in which I have little interest. I don't wish to debate the relative merits of either. I'm old and can love whatever I want. Forgive me Mr. Kite, for thinking your very astute intelligence will have the necessary counter-examples. Logic will no longer change my mind, completely overcome by my affection.) To examine the thinking processes of a bird seems to me to be examining the interplay of pure ideas, and of ideas formed in a very alien brain. (Think T-Rex. That alien a brain.)

So Alex enthralled me and I bought and studied Dr. Pepperberg's very scholarly book, The Alex Studies. It is wonderful, although it ain't casual reading.

It's fascinating and I immediately understood that it was necessary for me to get an African Grey to live with me. Last Christmas I got one as a gift for Gloria. I called her to give her the good news. She declined the gift, sensibly enough, so I bought the bird as a gift for my dog Vinnie. I named the bird Scipio after Vinnie declined to offer any name other that "Arf," which isn't right for a bird.

Scipio, now known as Skippy, is a male. I learned this by paying big bucks for a DNA test, the only way to kn ow for sure short of watching who gets on top under the right conditions, which are not about to be offered.

I planned a sabbatical during which it was my intention to teach him everything that Alex knew, and more. Alex was my ideal, the goal, the dream. He set the bar and he set it very high.

The night before dying he said something approximating this: "Will you be in tomorrow?" to which the answer was "Yes', Ill be in tomorrow." But tomorrow morning, he was dead in his cage. Nobody yet knows why but his vet is returning early from vacation to try to figure it out.

I find the world a smaller place without him. Skippy seems relieved.

Lazy Thinking

2007-07-28T17:34:00.000-07:00

I'm on vacation. Sleep, eat, surf (the web), sleep, eat, surf (the web.)

Fin de Siecle Thinking

2007-07-28T16:12:00.001-07:00

Alright, fin de siecle is an exaggeration... It might be fairer to say simply "turning a page" but somehow it feels a bit more consequential than that.

I just finished a four year stint as director of a summer school. Capital S summer school. 4200 students, K - 12. SIx weeks, 3 million dollars gross, the most outstanding programs and teachers I have ever seen.

Directing it was exhilarating, but exhausting. The six weeks are the easy part, the really fun part. Staffing it, looking after the logistics, that's the hard, tiring and stressful part. Faced with some health issues that gave me pause to reflect on the meaning of my life I decided to step down, take a year's sabbatical and go back teaching, which is what I love to do.

So I was expecting that yesterday would be my last day at work for a year. But it won't be. I was asked to fill in for a math teacher who was transferred at the last minute. I was delighted to agree to do so. (But keep it secret. Conventional wisdom is that I am making a huge sacrifice and "taking one for the team." That's not the case at all. I was almost dreading the sabbatical and wasn't entirely excited by the projects I had undertaken to complete while on sabbatical.)

So I have 3 weeks off and then back into the classroom.

Here's the kicker. I will be teaching pre-calculus, and I haven't looked at that stuff in 40 years.

Heads up.

Bird thinking

2007-06-13T17:28:00.000-07:00

I cannot explain it, but I've always been fond of birds. I am not an actual birdwatcher with a tally-sheet, but I can identify birds by sight, by sound and by flight pattern. On my last birthday I received a number of books about birds from my children. That pretty much makes the point.

While I have from time to time owned canaries I have always felt badly about putting birds in cages. It don't seem right and it don't seem necessary.

Fast forward to three years ago. A friend of my wife's, on his way from California to Guam, asked if we would put up his two birds - a parrot and a cockatiel - for the month of quarantine required by Guamanian law. Sure we would.

We've had the birds ever since. And any number of dilemmae (?) and bad plans have hatched from the situation.

I don't like to see birds in cages. My wife (was) absolutley phobic about birds loose in the house. So everyday I'd take the birds out of their cages briefly and play with them in a quiet corner. Playing with a cockatiel is not very complex, playing with a parrot (an eclectus in this case) is moreso, as you will see. My wife sat on the far side of the room nervously while the birds were out of their cages.

Then I went to Russia for a week or so, like you do, and when I got home, Gloria was completely in love with both birds, and they with her. In particular the parrot Charlie was, and still is. Disturbingly in love with her. From time to time he gets physical, lovingly humping her arm while encouraging her with the words, "C'mon! C'mon! C'mon!" Sort of reminds me of being a teenager in the back of a car, but it's my wife being seduced by a bloody bird.

I am not making this up.

So then we started leaving the birds out of their cages almost all the time, and the cockatiel just walked out the back door and was gone. We replaced it with two cockatiels. One of them just walked out the back door. We replaced it. Then the other walked out the back door. We replaced it. Then the next... You get the idea. I am populating Kailua with cockatiels to the dismay of everybody who has any sense of responsibility whatsoever.

Last Christmas I went to the pet store on Christmas Eve to buy my dog Vinnie a present. I bought him an African Gray parrot, which he named Scipio.

So now there are two parrots and one cockatiel left. They have cages but when I get home everybody climbs out and walks around the house leaving deposits. The cockatiel from time to time wants to be on my arm, but Scipio drives him away. Charlie wanders out into the backyard and climbs up on his favorite chair. When Glo gets home he preens himself, checks himself in the mirror, licks his hair back and then goes looking for her. "C'mon, c'mon, c'mon."

Scipio rides my shoulder and snaps at anyone else who comes near. My shirts are terribly stained and will have to be replaced on a rolling basis.

It's a life for the birds and I'm quite partial to it.

Reptile thinking

2007-05-29T15:18:00.000-07:00

I have nothing to add to this picture, I just love the picture.

Zo-lofty thinking

2007-05-28T14:50:00.000-07:00

I am reaching zo-lofty heights.

On May 14th I saw my surfer-dude doc and started on zoloft.

Today is May 28, and I am feeling so much more alive than I was only two weeks ago. That's pretty cool - better living through modern chemistry, no irony intended.

Think of all the people you've read about who suffered from "melancholia" and had no way out. They had to drag themselves through one long black day after another.

Around 400 BC Hippocrates described "all fears and despondencies, if they last a long time...." as being symptoms of melancholia. That's a good description. This time it was the fear that got my attention.

And so, zoloft. The first week was grim but I had the hope of knowing the zoloft would kick in sooner or later. During the second week I felt fear, but less often, less chronically. Today I am feeling pretty good. Able to complete tasks, multi-task from time to time, don't feel as stupid or as useless as I felt only two weeks ago.

I think of the people I see who are obviously ill, living on the streets. (See Zoot's post on passport-hunting for a good description.) How horrible! I cannot imagine dragging myself day after day through such a terrifying and bleak existence.

But enough of that for now. The tree in my backyard is producing fresh green shoots. The trade winds are blowing. The pool sweep is working its little heart out keeping the water clean. There is a heron standing on the pool deck eyeing the pool sweep. The first game of the Stanley Cup will start in an hour and a half. Life doesn't get much better than this.

fishy thinking

2007-05-18T22:44:00.001-07:00

It's a fish eat fish world out there.

I wonder what fish say to one another, and whether or not one gender bullies the other.

Fish use gestures, colors and pheremones to talk. I'm guessing they say stuff like... are you ready?

"Huzza huzza!"

"Piss off!"

What else is there to say, in the broad scheme of things?

I fancy you. Leave me alone. Beat it. That kind of sums up everything.

At its most basic life is quite simple.

See the posts by Zoot and Fiona on the same picture.

Tardigrade thinking

2007-05-18T22:43:00.000-07:00

This afternoon Glo and I went out on the ocean. Haven't done that much since I left the navy, come to think of it. In Kaneohe Bay, on the windward side of Oahu. Saw one turtle, no sharks, waded around on a sandbar for the better part of an hour. It was very uplifting. While strolling across a huge, barely-submerged sand bar, I got to thinking about what was living three or four feet below the sand, and that, of course, led me reflect upon tardigrades.

I used to have an interest in tardigrades, back when I was teaching grade anything at all in British Columbia.

In the spring when the bloom was on I would recreate every swamp in the area in a huge collection of aquarii (?) in the back of my classroom. I'd round up every microscope in the whole school and whatever age kids were being subjected to me would spend weeks studying daphnia, copepods, mosquito larvae, caddis fly larvae, whirligig beetiles, diving beeteles, freshwater snails, leeches... everything we could find. On a few magnificently memorable occasions we found amoebae or parameceums. (I'm just adding an 's' at this point. I have no idea what's the correct pluralization.)

Parameceums were cool but amoebae were the coolest by far. They slithered through, between, over, under, and around like pale grey ghosts, ectoplasmic entities without shape. Form without shape, come to think of it. Interesting. Linguists, does that work?

But we never found a tardigrade. I knew they existed because, along with all the microscopes, I had stolen every book in the school on swamps and ponds and freshwater life, every field guide to anything even close. I read about, and then became eager to find a tardigrade. Never did, though.

Tardigrades are also called water bears, because they look a little teddy bearish. They are, in scientific terms, a phylum of their own. There are 35 phyla, into which all living things are divided. Vertebrates (think "animals" as we loosely use the terms... bunnies, lizards, humans...) are one part of one phyla. Tardigrades are their own. There are about 750 species known.

There is a beautiful video of a tardigrade in motion, which you can find by clicking here.

Hobbyist thinking

2007-05-18T12:46:00.001-07:00

You know those applications that you fill out, the ones that ask you to list hobbies and whatnot? I'm always interested by what interests people, and often surprised.

Tae-Bo, for example. This appeared on the application of a young man I was interviewing for admission to a private school. Tae-Bo is a workout regimen developed by somebody claiming the name Billy Banks. It was for a time adverstised through late night infomercials. This boy was about 16, and he was really stuck into it.

I can't, at first blush, think of anything I've ever done that would qualify as a hobby. In fact I've not thought much about what makes a certain pastime a hobby as opposed to a passing fancy, a time-filler, a distraction. Probably they are all more or less synonymous.

I looked for lists of hobbies, and found one that is a pretty short list to my way of thinking, but diverse. The usual - woodwork, drawing, candle making... and then plumbing appeared, something called DIY, and French Literature.

I got to thinking about the things on the list, some of which I have done from time to time, and I realized the ones I liked most (not that I ever stuck with any of them) had the quality that they transported me out of my daily routine for prolonged periods of time, and left me feeling relaxed, accomplished, and re-energized. They were fulfilling and in some strange way rewarding.

Plumbing began to make sense. Nothing more satisfying than clearing a plugged sewer line or installing a new toilet. And then looking for more of both.

DIY, it turns out, stands for Do-It-Yourself, which is a TV network that showcases programs on, well, figure it out for... you know...

At this particular moment, waiting for the zoloft to kick in, a hobby is most desirable and I am glad to have discovered blogging.

Blogging is a little more accessible than French Literature, n'est ce pas?

Amazing thinking

2007-05-16T18:55:00.000-07:00

Wow!Some things are amazing. This solar picture is, but it has nothing to do with the subject of this blog, funnily enough. (I'll explain the chimp in a minute.)

Laughter is amazing. What a curious physiological response it is. The study of it is called gelotology, from the greek "the study of geloto." Really. Geloto means laughter. In the gelotolgy sub-culture there are many gelato jokes, gelotologists being a good-humored group.

There is some evidence to support the notion that laughter exists in non-human species, including primates, dogs, and rats. In all species it seems to be contagious and inspires light-hearted, playful behaviour from those who hear it. (Of the same species, I presume. I cannot claim that the sound of rat laughter ((which always sounds derisive to me)) inspired me to behave in a frolicsome manner. Quite the contrary.)

I recall reading of a strange research project conducted years ago. Some Anthropology professor sent his poor grad students into the subways of New York to test the responses of people to chimpanzee threat displays. (I'm sure there was a large grant behind this - why else would you do it? And who but a grad student would agree to do it?)

A chimpanzee threat display looks quite a bit like human laughter - wide open, grinning mouth, lots of teeth. When you see a chimp making such a face , as you did above the solar picture, I'm guessing you would smile, thinking erroneously that the chimp was laughing. Or am I the only one?

Here is the value of modern research. When the grad students sat across from someone in a subway in New York, imitating such a face and holding the pose for some length of time, few people grew frolicsome, if any. All the rest said piss off, or rude words with a simlar intent.

A stellar response by any measure. Amusing to reflect upon, amazing because it really happened.

Renard thinking

2007-05-16T18:11:00.000-07:00

I saw a red fox when I was about 11 years old. It was trotting through London on its way from one park to another. It looked perfectly at home, checked for traffic before crossing the street, didn't pay much attention to the passers-by. Only I thought he was unusual, as far as I could tell. Perhaps he was visible only to me.

According to Wikipedia there are over 20 million of them scattered around the world. I spent an afternoon north Aarhus, Denmark a few years ago in a forest with a fox warren right there - all sorts of entries and exits scattered about. Despite my efforts to blend into the background and be invisible I saw no foxes. They out-invisible'd me.

Like a fox, the rest of this blog will seem to be invisible.

Depressed thinking

2007-05-14T13:25:00.000-07:00

There are few straight lines in nature. Right now I think this does not speak well for nature, which is a chaotic, pathetic excuse for a system unless you're the sort of person who likes chaos or its exuberant cousin creativity.

I find myself of two minds about nature, curved lines and creativity. One mind manifests when I am at the top of my game, healthy, alert, engaged and active. Then I am a nature nut, a chaos champ, a creative fountain of ideas.

The other manifests itself when I am at the bottom of my game, depressed, anxous, stupid and ill. Then I need straight lines, defined borders, organizational predictabilty to the point of boredom. I need security because I need control.

When I first saw the sculpture above at the Chicago Art Institute I thought it was wonderful. Now it looks quite terrifying to me.

Depression and I go back a long way. I cannot say we are old friends, but we are well acquainted. It always surprises me when people refer to depression as a mental illness. I never think of it that way. Winston Churchill called it "that black dog that lurks in the corner of every room." I think of it as a storm of black cloud just over my horizon, rarely visible, but sometimes, sometimes it creeps in and I realize it is suddenly upon me.

It is suddenly upon me. I know my blogging about it will distress my children because they will not like to think of me suffering from anything at all. But I can manage depression, and I will blog about it because so few people who suffer depression ever dare tell anyone about it. They suffer in dreadful silence thinking that something is wrong with them, (there is but not in the way they think,) they feel confused ("I have nothing to be depressed about!") and/or weak ("I feel so stupid!")

It's a very very common disease and very treatable.

The hardest part, I think, is realizing what's wrong. This time around it first showed up as an inability to complete very simple tasks like making lists or paying bills. Combine that with a growing sense of dread - anxiety growing to fear with no particular object, just the fear itself, palpable, oppressive, cruel in the way the ocean is cruel - it is completely unaware of your existance. The fear couldn't care less about you. It simply swallows you whole.

This time I caught it early enough, I think, to avoid the worst of it. I was sitting in my office yesterday bewildered (again) about my inablilty to address this one simple task that I've been putting off for weeks. The task will take an hour or less. It requires no intelligence, but it requires the ability to choose. And I suddenly remembered that, for me, that has always been a symptom of depression, the inability to make choices, even simple ones.

Then a whole bunch of other things popped up on my radar screen. Last weekend I had found it necessary to promise myself that I would accomplish one thing - either mow the lawn, pay the bills, anything at all just so the weekend wouldn't be gone without my having accomplished something, anything at all. I accomplished nothing. The previous weekend had been exactly the same. And there has been an undercurrent of fear in my belly for a long time now, fear with no object.

If I leave this untreated I can predict exactly what will come next. Over the next few weeks my ability to think will diminish - I will become stupid, really, unable to follow thoughts or conversations. Then the idea of suicide will begin to cross my mind. In the early stages I will recoil from it, but after a while it will begin to look like an old friend. After a while it will become welcome. In the meantime the entire atmosphere of my life will continue to darken until all is black, all is heavy, all is suffocating and poisonous.

I've never got past that darkest point without getting better. It's not so hard to figure out what would come next.

Yesterday, after I realized what was happening, I called my surfer-dude doctor friend. He's a good listener, and asked a lot of questions. He sat back and said, "Well, there's no question that you're suffering a significant depression." Notice that he did not say "severe." He's right. It's significant but not severe. Nice catch on my part! He went on to say that, if I could look back and start identifying problems starting two weeks ago, the depression has been growing a lot longer than that.

Depression is a chemical issue, not an illness of the spirit or a failure of the heart. It is a chemical issue and is treated effectively with chemicals. I started taking zoloft yesterday. I feel better just knowing what's wrong, and that it's being treated. In a few weeks the zoloft will kick in and the darkness will lift and I'll be fine again.

I won't need straight lines, I will love to look at the crazy Chicago sculpture, I'll embrace chaos, I'll generate ideas and I'll look fondly on the nuttiness of nature again.

Imprudent thinking

2007-05-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

Have you ever done something that you knew in there somewhere you really shouldn't do, but you just went ahead and did it anyway? And then you got nailed for it? Inside that pussycat up there there is a small voice saying, "I probably shouldn't do this, but what the heck, it's just a bird. How much trouble can I get into with a bird?"

And then the thought, "Big bird, mind you." Followed by, " Oh well..."

I do such things. I agree to take on tasks that I have no idea how to do. In there somewhere I know that I should just say no, just like the drug people tell me. Once I decided to back my car through a narrow space that I couldn't really see all that well. In there somewhere I knew it wasn't a good idea, and then I floored it and stripped the side mirrors off, clean as a whistle.

I am interested in the area that I referred to earlier as in there somewhere. What is that, exactly?

In my case I know where it is, more or less. It's in my stomach. I can feel it when I am acting imprudently. It feels like the memory of the echo of a pain... That's backwards... It feels like the foreshadowing... I don't what foreshadowing feels like...

In there, there are all these little guys like old fashioned bank clerks. They are wearing those funny visors, and their shirtsleeves are rolled up and held in place with elastic bands of some kind. They are smoking, they are nervous, there is sweat on their foreheads. They are not happy and they are trying to get my attention. Each of them is feeling faintly sick to his stomache, as if inside his stomache there were all these little guys like old fashioned bank clerks... On and on down through layers of hurty tummies all trying to warn one another that it's not a very good idea tell the boss that his wife dresses like a tramp even though that's important information that he ought to have.

The thing of it this: those sweaty little guys with the hurty tummies, by trying to help you, they also really really limit you. The best moment of my life came when they were screaming the loudest and I chose to ignore them.

I was in a lovely, peaceful, tranquil place and my heart was beating wildly. I had just realized that I was completely in love with the woman I was sitting with. She was married, and so was I (but not to her!) and I was in love head over heels for the first time in my life. Suddenly I knew what love felt like. She was married, I was too. Oh Jesus!

Inside me the bank clerks were raising merry hell. They were pounding on the walls, screaming at me, "Stop it you fool! Stop it! Don't! Don't! Do! It!" I could feel each of their little fists hammering against the inside of my belly. I must not say a word to her... If I do she will never speak to me again, she will hit me, she will hate me... I should just stay quiet for ever, suck it up... Don't say a word you fool...

I said a word. And then another.

Before I knew it I had told her everything, and then she told me everything back, and that was almost twenty years ago and we haven't ever stopped telling one another those things, back and forth, every day.

That's why I stripped the mirrors off my car, because when the little bank clerks start telling me what to do, I do the opposite.

The cat with the eagle up there? Maybe that could work out really well. Frankly, I don't see it myself, but it's his life he's living. There is a time to go out on a railing towards an eagle.

Leopard thinking

2007-05-10T13:38:00.000-07:00

Lemme tell ya, friend, this gal jus' loves to sleep. Ah loves to sleep, that's mah non-secret, mah gran' passion, mah ambition and mah joy.

I like the annelope huntin' jus' fine. Annelope huntin' is the necessary lead-in to a good sleep and I'm verra good at it.

What kind of annelope is the best kind? Some like yer dik diks, others like yer duikers. I'm a gemsbock gal myself, klipspringer in a pinch. But them's all good.

I walk up to a herd of them little guys in that casual way that says, "I ain't huntin'..." They lemme walk right up to them when I walk that way. I check 'em out, look for the fat ones, the tender ones. I know the book says you wan' the sick ones and the lame ones, but no, you don't really wan' them sick and lame ones at all. Not unless you're sick er lame yerself in which case yer days are nummered anyway, the big sleep juss 'round the corner.

So I walk up to 'em. I'm real up front about it. They don' mind a bit.

"Hi girls. It's juss me.... how are you? Say, you are lookin' good Sha'Quonne, real good..." You scope 'em out, charm 'em a little, make 'em feel comfor'ble. If you git a chance it never hurts to drive off a hyeener or two, establishes ya as a good person, a go-to kind o' gal. Everybody relaxes a little. Like, when you're around, nobody gots to watch out for hyeeners.

When the sun gets warm I lies down, right there amongst them annelopes. I love the sun, the dust, the flies, the whole gestalt of the place. The sweet smell o' warm annelope hide, warm annelope shit, warm annelope piss, it just kind of makes everythin' dreamy like. I rest while mah appetite prepares itself.

And when my appetite finds itself prepared I stand up and doggone it, right away everybody jus'knows mah appetite done prepared itself.

Then I gots to walk away and do mah spot magic, make mah spots do that mojo they do so well, and I kinda jus' vanish, like. An' when I all vanished I creep back up on 'em again, all down low now, belly-walkin' style, pressin' way down, only shoulder bones in the sand, thass all I am. Lookin' for Sha'Quonne, Sha'Quonne baby you is lookin' so damn good, shugah.

Then I eats her.

And then I sleeps. I do love to sleep.

Interviewed thinking

2007-05-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

Today I was interviewed as a prospective citizen of the United States. My interviewer was not quite what I had expected. I had expected three big guys in dark glasses, tall, broad-shouldered guys with crew cuts, white teeth and no smiles. What I got was one small, cheerful, gracious woman of Asian descent.

She had been to Russia in 2003, sent there to do refugee interviews at the Embassy in Moscow. She was really interested in my travels to Russia, and we compared notes. What did I like? What had she liked? We noted the inside-joke that Moscow Embassy staffers all know: there is a Cathedral across the street that has a stained glass window towering above the American Embassy. Staffers call the cathedral "Our Lady of Perpetual Surveillance." We both knew the joke, we were cool.

Even so there are protocols to follow. I had to answer, under oath, the question, "Have you ever committed a crime for which you were not charged?"

Heck, no.

Have I ever claimed to be an American? Have I ever trafficked in drugs or prostitution? Would I support the Constitution of the United States? Stuff like that.

Then my civics test: How many stripes on the American flag? How many states in the union? What entities comprise congress? How long is the term of a senator? What are the duties of the Supreme Court? She did not ask me to name the 13 original colonies, so I told her I wanted that question.

"Okay, what were they?"

I rattled them off. She laughed, shrugged and said, "I'm just gonna take your word on that."

My English test was brief. I had to read aloud the sentence "It's a good job to start with," and to write the sentence, "They buy many things at the store."

That was it. My application is approved. Sometime in the next three or four weeks I will be sworn in.

Nobody asked me what special favors I was prepared to grant in exchange for citizenship. I'd have granted a lot.

Apocryphal thinking

2007-05-09T01:36:00.000-07:00

Why are they all so calm?

Rightful thinking

2007-05-08T20:09:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow I will report to a building in downtown Honolulu at precisely 9:20 a.m.. To the armed sentry I will surrender my Alien Identification Card and a letter issued by Homeland Security on what look likes banknote paper. At the appointed hour I will be escorted into the presence of an Interviewer. The Interviewer will quiz me to determine just how grievous my character flaws actually are, to gauge my fluency in English, and to measure the depth of my knowledge about civics and history as they relate to the United States. If I pass this interview and its tests I hope to be granted citizenship in the country that has been my home for almost twenty years.

I have been studying for the civics test, and despite the fact that I have taught American History for years I have learned a few things. There are 96 questions to which one must know the answer. I appreciate the heads-up because I would have probably got some of them wrong by virtue of over-thinking them.

What is the constitution? Think about it citizens. How would you answer that?

The answer is "The supreme law of the land." It's that simple. Forget sacred documents, forget shared understandings, just go with the answer which is not a bad summary.

How about this one: what were the 13 original states? If that one doesn't stop you cold in your tracks, you're unnatural. Who would be able to rattle those off, and for god's sake why would you want to be able to? I won't list them all, but I will tell you the mnemonic device I created in order to answer the question. "Calm down, Granny! Many more new hamsters, new gerbils (and) new yaks, north and south, relentlessly pee on Virginia."

The rest are easy, except may be the one about"What constitutional amendments relate to voting rights?" (15, 19, 24 and 26, but you probably knew that. (Race, gender, poll-tax, age 18.))

There are also about 100 sentences that one might wish to memorize in order to display a working knowledge of written English. Among them are such treasures as:

1. The colors of the American fag (sic) are red, white and blue.
2. He is lucky to have such a good wife.
3. My car is broken.
4. It's a good job, to start with.

I am lobbying to have this sentence included:

5. I am trained as a thoracic surgeon but my goal is to become the best cab driver in all of New York.

One question/answer combination that leaves me uncertain is this one: Who is protected by the Bill of Rights? The answer is "Everyone who lives in the United States." I think that answer is misleading. Originally it meant white male citizens. Now it is much more inclusive, but I am not certain that it includes illegal immigrants, so-called terrorists, or, frankly speaking, non-citizens. I will research this and get back to you, but I do not believe that I have the right to bear arms until I am a citizen. Not that I want it or will want it later.

My authority for this information is a gun shop owner. I walked off the street a few years back and said, "Hi. I'm an alien. Can I buy a gun, a really big one?'

He said no.

I'll check into it further and report back.

Natural thinking

2007-05-08T16:43:00.000-07:00

Every now and again I have lost my mind and embraced the noble savage concept, fallen prey to the delusion that closer to nature means closer to humanity, or something like that. Thought erroneously that to sit in a simulated-leather-upholstered, comfy, made-of-artificial-stuff-as-well-as-the-simulated-leather chair, thought that that was wrong. A glance at the photo reassures me that natural is not better, it's probably a lot worse.

Parasites are natural. Dysentery is really, really natural, as are cholera and toe fungus and thirty foot long nematodes living in your gut (Yes, you. Your gut.)

Death at age 40 is natural. I learned this in a personal way when I was in my doctor's office some time ago, grousing. My doctor (I call him son, he calls me Christopher) is a laid back surfer dude with long blond hair and a very quick mind. I was reviewing with him my ailments, which I will not review with you, and I asked, "Am I doing something wrong here, that all these pestilences and afflictions so besmite me?" (I'm paraphrasing.)

"Yeah," he said. "You're livin' too long. You were supposed ta die 15 'er 20 years ago. The parts, man, they just, you know, like, wear out."

Thus have I bid adieu to any fondness I ever had for things natural. Artifical hips? Bring 'em on. Gamma knife surgery? Oh yeah, baby. More mundane things too: plastic bags work just fine for me, as do automobiles and word processors.

That said, I am aware that certain unnatural objects or practices are not in themselves all that hot either. Breast implants are grotesque, hydrogen bombs are a very bad idea by any measure I can think of, and the book Omnivore's Dilemma is leading me to think that raising cattle on feed lots is going to create an awful lot of problems for us. And for cattle, of course.

There evidently must be some balance. God, I hate that. Makes my head hurt. Makes me want to curl up in a comfortable chair and by god that chair will not made of branches held together with swallow spit.

Cyrillic thinking

2007-05-08T16:36:00.000-07:00

АВНИНЫ - участки поверхности суши, дна океанов и морей, характеризующиеся незначительными колебаниями высот. На суше различают равнины, лежащие ниже уровня моря, низменные (высота до 200 м), возвышенные (от 200 до 500 м) и нагорные (выше 500 м). По структурному принципу выделяют равнины платформенных и орогенных (горных) областей (главным образом в пределах межгорных и предгорных прогибов); по преобладанию тех или иных внешних процессов - денудационные, образовавшиеся в результате разрушения возвышенных форм рельефа, и аккумулятивные, возникшие путем накопления толщ рыхлых отложений. В совокупности равнины занимают большую часть поверхности Земли. Величайшая равнина мира - Амазонская (св. 5 млн. км²).

This post speaks for itself. But is that not a most beautiful alphabet?

Secretive thinking

2007-05-06T22:10:00.000-07:00

I know lots of secrets. Military secrets. And I'm prepared to spill them all here.

Frankly I'm discouraged that nobody is offering me large sums of money for them, for I can be bought. But all the military secrets I know are 30 years old or more and have appeared in popular literature (Body of Secrets, Blind Man's Bluff. etc.)

What is left that is cool, then, about knowing old secrets?

I was in Sochi on Augst 2, 2000. That was the day that the Russian submarine Kursk sank in the Baltic Sea. The Rusian navy denied it, obscured it, and finally came to terms with it. Vladimir Putin elected not to disrupt his vacation and he came to Sochi, where I was. (But not because I was there. I was staying very low-key and he didn't realize I was there. We just bumped into one another at a nightclub. )

He tied up traffic terribly and movement around Sochi (a resort town on the Black Sea) became difficult. It was a long time before he made a public statement, and the Russian navy was always vague about the cause of the Kursk disaster.

But I knew what caused it from the very moment I heard of it. It wasn't because I knew anything in particular about the Kursk, it was all the other little bits and pieces I knew that all fit together at that moment. Let me put some pieces together for you.

On public record, Kursk was carrying "experimental topedoes." I guessed that before I learned it from the Russian press. It was a very and thoroughly modern submarine. Of course it would carry such torpedoes.

On public record was that an American ex-navy captain had been arrested in Russia several years previously, before the Kursk disaster, for expressing curiosity in something called a squall torpedo, capable of travelling at speeds in excess of 200 knots. Inaudibly. If you are its target, you will have no idea until the explosion occurs and your lungs are implosively filling with water.

Squall torpedo is the name. Details are now readily available. But forget what we can learn in restrospect. Let's see how we could work it out on our own, and then check that against what we learned.

Goal: get a torpedo to travel at 2oo-300 knots, silently.

Technology - easy to do,at least in principal, and well tested.

What you need is a sheath of bubbles so that the torpedo body itself does not touch the water boundary. That provides both speed and silence. Then you need a motor that will move the torpedo, say 2 tons or more, at such a speed. What one chemical will produce both speed and a sheath of bubbles?

Answer: Hyrdrogen peroxide, the stuff you dye your hair with, only a lot more concentrated. Give me a 90% pure hydrogen dioxide mixture, and I give you navol, hydrogen fuel for the doomed.

Navol has been used as torpedo fuel since long before I was in submarine school and it is (and has always been) a horrible accident waiting to happen. It is hugely, massively and amazingly flammable because it brings its own oxygen to the party. (Chemical formula, written without subscripts, please forgive me: H2O2) Put it in contact with anything that can oxidise and you have instant combustion. And once you have that, how the hell are you going to put it out?

It is also notoriously unstable, breaking down into H2O and O2 all on its own and that's a problem nobody needs.

So hydrogen peroxide is used to fuel the motor, and also, unless I'm much mistaken (never happened before) to create the sheathe of bubbles the torpedo flies though.

I know my torpedoes, and I know torpedo fuels. Squall is a torpedo just waiting to blow up. Apparently that is what happened in the Kursk. (The explosion was in the forward torpedo room, which is where forward torpedoes are normally stored. Coincidence, or is it more?)

A horrible way to die, trapped for days alive deep underwater in the freezing cold waters of the Baltic.

Iran has purchased these torpedoes from the Russians.

They claimed to have developed their own, yeah yeah whatever. We wish your sailors much better luck. Your secret is safe with us.

Non-problematic thinking

2007-05-06T18:46:00.001-07:00

I am a lingua-liberal. I can speak the King's English or standard American English (I am bilingual) but I do not have any sense that the language should be spoken in either of those two ways. I don't get neurotic if language conventions change over time, including spelling. If night changes to nite I couldn't care less, not one iota.

I say that to establish my good-guy credentials immediately before going off on a language rant. There is an expression that seems now to be firmly established in our culture that I don't care for. I don't care for it one bit, and I blame young people for it. (Not a damning judgement. I blame young people for computers and the Internet, good medecine, good literature and bad food.)

Would you like me to tell you what it is, this expression I don't care for?

No problem.

That's the phrase I hate. No problem. It has replaced "You're welcome," but it implies something very very different. It implies that something that would have been a problem wasn't, only because of the very positive attitude of the person saying it.

I first encountered it at a fast food place. I had ordered the double lard-burger on garlic bun with mayo (hold the lettuce) and the cute-as-a-button little girl behind the counter, she of the bright and chipper smile, the maiden Bethanee I believe, was gracious and charming and agreeable. When she gave me my greasy bag 'o cholesterol I said, very sincerely, "Thank you."

"No problem," she replied.

I leaped to paternal conclusions. "Oh dear! Was the last order a problem?" I turned to find someone I could punch on her behalf.

"No," she said.

"Oh good!" I cried, relieved. Then, anxious again, "Have you had a lot of problems today?"

She fidgeted and glanced towards the corner where her manager lurked. "Not until now," she said hesitantly. I was growing unnerved, and suddenly I needed reassurance.

"My order - that was not problem, right?"

"Ummm... riiight...."

"Thank goodness." I was being completely sincere, but something was happening that I wasn't following. "What would have made my order a problem?" I asked. I was wanting to know what trap I had avoided so as not to step into it, ever.

"I dunno...."

Then it hit me. "No problem" meant "You're welcome." And the crabby old man gene kicked in. "Wait a sec... My asking you for an order of double lard-burger on garlic bread with mayo (hold the lettuce,) that didn't give you a problem, right?"

"Ahhh... I dunno..."

"It's your job, right? To give people stuff when they order it? That's what you do for a living, right?"

"Ahhhh... I guess....""

"And so you're saying to me that my asking you to do what you do to earn a living is not creating a problem, is that right?" She looked at me,blinked, and began to roll up the bottom of her T-shirt between two tiny fingers. Tears appeared. But I was on a roll and could not stop. "What exactly could I have done that would have made my placing an order a problem for you, ah, Bethanee?"

"You're doing it?" She spoke in a tiny whisper, tears growing. The manager appeared off to the right, slightly downstage.

I knew I had gone too far. Things were not comme il faut and I needed to beat a graceful retreat if possible and reflect on what I had learned. I beckoned the manager forward.

"You are the manager?"

"May I help you with something?" He didn't call me buddy, which surprised me.

I held up my dripping sack-o-grease and said, "This young lady... Bethanee.... has been very helpful to me. I want to thank you for training your staff so well and making this such a great place to come and.. ummm.... shop." I was running off at the mouth. I bit my tongue.

The manager looked warily at me, then at Bethanee, whose eyes were locked onto his, wide open and afraid.

"So... thank you very much...." I repeated awkwardly and turned to leave.

"No problem," he told my back.

Ererybody watched me on the way out. "There was no problem," I told them. "No problem, no problem at all, no problem..."

Bumbly thinking

2007-05-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

About two years ago I was walking by a neighbour's house when I noticed a swarm of bees on his tree. I've never seen one before. It was huge, bigger than the one in this picture. It was about three feet across at the top where it was widest, and three to four feet long. Many many thousands of bees in there, not aggressive but not looking entirely insignificant either, from the threat perspective. My first instinct as always was to throw rocks. Maybe I could drive them inside his house before he got home? Sort of a surprise for him. But I didn't do that. He drove up while I was considering how to do it.

"I didn't do this," I promised him.

We scratched our heads together, admired the bees a great deal, made jokes about bees, all pretty predictable. He called a bee keeper who came over a couple of nights later and, for $400, removed the bees. I didn't think about it again until this morning.

This morning I learned that about one-third of all America's honeybees are missing. Not dead, just missing. They leave home but they don't come back.

Speculation is rife.What could account for this? Bee rapture is my favorite. Strange mite infestations is good. Strange mites. The words conjure up strangely unnerving images, only half seen, murky but scary.

Cell phone interference is another proposal. This one seems far-fetched to me. According to this theory bees who talk on cell phones while flying don't pay attention to where they're going and have... accidents? I don't know but the consequences are important.

Bees, besides making honey, pollinate most of our crops. They go, there go the crops. I am beginning to feel hungry already.

Before the arrival of Europeans there were no honey bees in America. Pollination was done by a variety of insects - bees, hornets, other things, but not the hives of honey bees we take for granted. There must be an interesting story behind how the first European honey bees arrived here. Stowaways? Paying passengers? Insects seeking religious freedom? Bugs seeking a better life in the New World? Is it possible they're leaving again, for the same reasons?

Let us hope that that generic group of faceless saviours called scientists, whatever those are, figure this out pretty quick. Life without honey is not the end of the world for me but life without crops sounds bleak, exclusively carnivorous and brief.

Unbalanced thinking

2007-05-02T15:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was Lei Day in Hawaii. This has been a great celebration since sometime in the 1920's, and almost every school has a celebration of it, many of which are very spectacular, all of which are filled with love and aloha. (Aloha is a very real thing, not just a Hawaiian metaphor.)For the last 30 years the Brothers Cazimero have had a huge concert at the Waikiki Shell on May 1st to celebrate Lei Day, filled with aloha.

Last night I was there and watching the show was like watching a horrible accident occurring in slow motion. These guys are consummate performers, and the show should have been excellent and beautiful, but it spun terribly, horribly out of control.

There were glitches from the beginning, but nothing you couldn't overlook. For example one of the beautiful young hula dancers was introduced as "...a mother and a grandmother..." Significant accomplishments for a girl who looked 19. The intro was meant for another hula dancer who appeared 3 or 4 dancers later. Not a big deal, kind of amusing. But then there was continuing confusion about what year we were in... 2005? 2006? 2007? We never did clearly establish that.

Nevertheless the first half of the show was good and well done and moving, all that stuff. Intermission was good too. More than one woman used the men's restroom, like they do, and we men all teased them about the requirement that they leave the seat up, friendly inter-gender cammeraderie.

So far so good. Then quickly downhill in a major way.

A few weeks ago one of Hawaii's beloved entertainers, Don Ho, passed away. The second half of the show was to have been a tribute to him, featuring his music and friends. Oh Jesus.

About 3 songs in Don Ho's relatively young widow made what was apparently a surprise appearance to dance a hula in his honor. She is a very slight woman and a good dancer. But when she appeared, all was not well. The huge crowd watched in stunned silence as this poor lady lurched, recovered, staggered backwards, fell over, rose to her feet, lurched, fell over again. It was excruciating to watch. I was terrified that she would fall off the stage. As soon as it was clear that something was terribly, terribly wrong Robert Cazimero abandoned his bass and tried to catch her before she fell again. He failed. She fell backwards onto the stage and rolled over to push her way up again. Two young men entered stage right and helped her off, she on an angle and reluctant to go.

It didn't end there. While she was leaving and Robert was staring after her, obviously deeply concerned, brother Roland began to play and sing Don Ho's trademark, Tiny Bubbles. It may or may not have been fair. I like to think it wasn't but it galvanized one of her friends to walk onto the stage and take the microphone in order to defend her. His name is Kimo, and he is also a friend of the Cazimero's. In a passionate but semi-articulate way he pronounced her the finest woman in the world, more woman than any man could ever hope for because, well because "she was with Don Ho through all this..." I assume he was referring to his death, not her dance.

So far I think the audience was sympathetic, genuinely concerned, and engaged, with aloha. Then Robert reached out to take the microphone from Kimo, and Kimo pulled it away. He began to sing a Don Ho song. The Cazimeros gamely figured out the key and accompanied him. Then Kimo moved not-so-seamlessly into another song, the Cazimeros struggling to stay game and to be okay with it. At the third song Robert reached for the mike again, Kimo pulled free again. "Get off my stage!" shouted Robert, maybe four or five times, reaching for and failing to get control of the mike. "Give me that mike, dammit!" And on it went until Kimo was damned good and ready to hand back the mike.

Finally he did. Robert and Roland (gamely) allowed him to hug them (warmly) before he left the stage. Robert repeated over and over "This is one May Day I'm not gonna forget..." He had the house lights turned up, had all the audience members look around to get a picture - mental or digital - of the people around them, saying "You will always remember, 'I was there in 2006.'"

Whatever year it was the collision wasn't quite over. The fiasco had taken a lot of time, and the Waikiki Shell is required to end all performances by 10:00. There has been a rumor for a long time that this was to be the Brother Cazimero's last Lei Day celebration, and I think the planned finale was originally designed to leave an air of mystery around that question. But there was not time for a finale of any rehearsed kind at all. Robert simply ordered all the dancers to the front of the stage. He made a show of waving goodbye to them, but they didn't know what they were supposed to do. Some left the stage, others waved back at him, one or two made goofy gestures... then finally they all just drifted aimlessly away. Robert turned his back on the audience, and walked backstage. That was it.

I have not read a review of the performance. The newspaper reported only that Don Ho's wife had collapsed on stage and was driven home by a family friend. She did not require medical treatment.

Poor her, and poor Robert trying to control it all and being unable to do anything but watch his beloved Lei Day celebration teeter on the brink and then topple off. (Bombs away.) It was the stuff of nightmares.

Yachtful thinking

2007-04-28T17:12:00.000-07:00

If I owned a yacht I would sail away to Zanzibar. Zanzibar has always seemed a most mysterious and wonderful place, tropical and eastern and ancient. In fact Zanzibar is made up of two islands in the Indian Ocean, and these two islands both belong to Tanzania. On one of them cloves are still grown in an economically significant way, one of only two places in the world where this is true. I would like to watch cloves grow.

No I wouldn't. Good God, what was I thinking?

If I owned a yacht I would fit it out for deep sea research. I am particularly interested in the communications between squid (squids?), which use bio-luminesence to create amazing light displays that clearly have communication as a goal. I would like to learn what they talk about. Maybe mess with their heads a little bit... They do have heads, don't they?

I'd sing to them old sea shanties from Newfoundland like "Squid Jiggin' Grounds" to see what sort of reaction I'd get. I'd listen to see what sea shanties squids sing so bio-luminescently. What jokes do squid enjoy? How do they insult one another? What is the squid equivalent of "Huzza, huzza?" What do they pray for, and to whom?

If I had a yacht I would install a huge stereo and steer into the wind to Ride of the Valkyries, run before it to Bolero, tack across it to Carmina Burana, and run aground to Brick in the Wall. I have a confession to make - I put a submarine aground once. We kept it our little secret, but there we were, up on the mud right in front of a swanky hotel on the Carribean island of St.Thomas. Swacked tourists were toasting us from the bar with great hilarity while we churned, full speed astern both engines, and dragged ourselved slowly off the shore.

It was... It was a bad start for a brand new navigator. I misjudged the current while trying to come alongside the jetty there... I made my teetery way up to the bar and that's all I remember from that day.

If I had a yacht I would sell it and blow the money on a 5 star hotel vacation for 2 for as many days and nights as the money lasted. The last time I was in China a 5 star hotel in Beijing was $90/night. Unfortunately this is no longer the case. Too bad, it was fabulous, just down the road from Tiananmen Square. It had a glass front and was set to open just before the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. A tank passing by the day before the massacre machined-gunned the glass front (apparently out of nothing more than a sense of mischief) and destroyed $500 million worth of glass in just a few bursts. No injuries. It was the China World Hotel, and that same room now, about five years after my visit, is $290 a night. If you have a moment, check out the link to the hotel and compare it to the photo of the yachts at the top of the blog. And if you clicked on the link tell me honestly - if you were a young punk kid on important government business and you had a machine gun and you knew you'd get away with it - wouldn't you like to break those windows too? Just to say you did it?

The sort of yacht I had in mind when I started this blog goes for about $3,000,000 plus $10 for a license, so despite the grotesquely inflated prices that would still pay for over 10,000 nights at the China World Hotel - a little over 28 years.

How do people get yachts? And what do they do with them when they aren't communicating with squid?

Twenty eight years in a Shangri-La hotel in Beijing. A yacht.

It is so hard to choose.

Thoughtful thinking

2007-04-28T05:09:00.000-07:00

The word "thought" generates 412 million hits, taking 22 hundredths of a second to accomplish the task. That gives you something to think about.

"Think" gets 741 million, in only 6 hundredths of a second. The longer word "thinking" gets a third that number of hits, but still takes only 6 hundredths of a second.

What takes "thought" so long? Like, does it think I have all to day to wait?

Deadly thinking

2007-04-28T04:43:00.000-07:00

According to deathclock.com I have somewhere just over 276 million seconds to live. (This authoritative, sublimely confident number of seconds was apparently derived from my birthdate, BMI [standing for Beautiful Male Insouciance,] gender and smoking habits.) That's another 8.75 years, gaze on it ye mighty and despair.

Absent from the calculations were my country of residence (a long-lived one), proximity to landmines (not very proximal to the best of my knowledge), drinking habits (a serious omission on deathclock.com's part) and marital status (M, if it matters. But but very, very M.)

I never feared death until I had children, at which point I feared their deaths and they, as they got old enough to consider it, feared not their own deaths but mine.

Death is to be treated very very lightly unless it's someone else's death.

It's gonna be a great 276 million seconds. And then some.

Latitudinal thinking

2007-04-26T23:46:00.000-07:00

I was a navigator once. I know the word latitude and the word longitude and I know which is which. Left and right have always blurred together in my mind but I was never tested on them for my navigation certificate. Remembering my latitude from my longitude was far from instinctive.

Here's what I came up with: Latitude-Flatitude. (No relation to flatulence.)

Latitude lines lie flat like the slats (get it?) of the blinds above. Longditude lines go up and down. (I tried mneumonics like Longitude-Flongditude but they made no sense and I only needed the flatitude one, and then longitude was the other one.) When the position of a place on the Earth is given using "Lat'nLong" as we navigators like to call them, latitude is the first one, always. They come in alphabetical order, la before lo like in the dictionary. So the first number tells you how far north or south of the equator the place is, the second tells you how far around the globe it is from Greenwich, England, which apparently is the starting place for going around the globe.

This is what's tricky: lines of latitude, which are flat (as in horizontal) tell how far up or down the place is. (Go to the third slat up the blinds.) Lines of longitude, which go up and down (as in vertical) tell you how far the place is measured left to right.(Go to the leftmost window of the building you can see through the blinds.) That was very confusing for a while.

There are, believe it or not... I'm only showing off now so if I just taught you lat from long and you're celebrating this newfound knowledge, stop reading at this point because the rest will make you queasy... there are in fact six different ways to measure latitude just on the planet Earth, seven if you have broader horizons. They are...

Never mind, it doesn't matter. But my favorite of all times is called rectifying latitude (like it needed rectifying) and the reason it is my all-time favorite is because of this charmingly casual coment in the excellent Wikipedia article that I'm plagiarizing from, "... Unfortunately it requires elliptical integration..."

I had a girl friend once who was like that. She pretty much ended my fascination with elliptical integration.

Call me square.

Sibling thinking

2007-04-26T23:39:00.000-07:00

I love sibling rivalry. It always worked for me, never against me. My older sister, in an unsual move (very typical of her) decided to take the role of rebel, independant thinker, the baddy, despite the fact that she was the oldest child.

This left the role of goodie-goodie to me, and I exploited it fully. Most second children are forced into the baddy role by virtue of the fact that goodie-goodie was sewn up long before they came along. Not me.

My oldest sister became an artist, of course. Got divorced, if you can believe that. Then she became an aeronautical engineer and an early roboticist so her fall from grace was as permanent as it was catastrophic. Now she lives in Mexico and is an artist again. (You can see her work on the mafonga glassworks link to the right of my blog.)

The picture here is of my three children. The oldest is to the right looking hopeful. The second child is to the front, looking confident. The youngest is on the left looking like she's enjoying herself.

When they were young they had sibling rivalry issues. I always tried to play them off one against the other seeking maximum advantage for myself. At some point they figured it out and wound up best friends, and that's just wrong.

Princess thinking

2007-04-26T22:47:00.000-07:00

Ta Daaaa!

Chippy thinking

2007-04-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

I was just in Vancouver, Canada. (Not Washington State.)

Vancouver got hammered by a major winsdtorm a couple of weeks back and millions of dollars worth of trees were blown over. I don't know how many trees that is. In Stanley Park they - I'm not sure who they are - are working flat-out to remove the debris and make the park look un-devastated.

So there is a huge pile of wood chips filling much of a parking lot. When I took a picture of it my children all rolled their eyes and said, as one, "Chippy thinking..." They are the majority of my blog readership and I can't let them down.

In North America, I was surprised to discover, chippy is a word used to describe women of low repute, as it were. Probably came out of New Orleans, possibly because of a supposed similarity between the little noises made by women of low repute and those of chipping sparrows.

Chipping sparrows? And those noises? Okay. I have been hanging around with the wrong kinds of sparrows. Thank god.

In the UK the word chippy refers to a fish-and-chips shop, possibly because of a supposed similarity between the little noises fish-and-chips shops make and those of chipping sparrows.

The urban dictionary (available on-line) also uses the word to describe hockey games that get a little out of hand, and it is in this context that I first heard the word. It is this meaning that I prefer - a little attitude, a little je ne sais quoi that winds up as a high-sticking penalty and no front teeth. Cocky, cheeky, a little rude.

There is a similarity between the sounds made by teeth falling to the ice and those made by chipping sparrows.

It all comes back to those damned sparrows.

Flightly thinking

2007-04-18T19:43:00.001-07:00

I am about to leave for the airport - no posts today or tomorrow, I suspect.

Let us trust that the plane is more robustly constructed than the vehicle in the picture.

Forlorn thinking

2007-04-17T13:45:00.000-07:00

How awful it is to lose someone. To wake up for the sole purpose of spending a little more time with this person that you have loved, and love. The person who gives you the only reason you have to open your eyes, to roll from your bed, to wake up for, to keep breathing for.

But then, after the despair of finding them gone, after the stages of grief, and after the denial, the anger, the guit, the growing acceptance... how nice to find them stuck in the crack of your bum, there all along.

There is a god after all. He just has one bastard sense of humor.

Florange thinking

2007-04-17T13:24:00.000-07:00

My neice and her husband are here in Hawaii, to house sit while Glo and I go up to Canada for a week. House sitting in our house requires certain talents, given that we own two pretty neurotic parrots. From our point of view Kirsten and Kenny are here to take care of the birds.

Their point of view is quite different. They are here to get sun tans. At this moment their skin is no longer pasty white, but it's not red either. It's florange.

Check out the little guy under the sun lamp up there. That's what florange looks like. Embrace the word, use it liberally, let's get this word out there and into the general population.

Florangistas, we have a mission.

Orange thinking

2007-04-16T17:39:00.000-07:00

The claim, made by self-appointed self-styled lingua-pundits, is that there is no English-language rhyme for the word "orange."

I have three things to say.

First, before this entry has ended, I will disprove the hypothesis.

Secondly, shame on us all! Where has the creative thinking gone, folks? I'm mean it's like the weather with everybody talking about it and nobody doing anything about it. If you were smart enough to make up a name for your company that rhymed with "orange" you'd make the local news, maybe even national! Advertising would be all done for you, for free, and a whole new bunch of doggerel would be written, much of it ending with lines like, "And a smile of face of the orange..." and your company name up above somewhere.

Thirdly I will create a word that should exist, but doesn't exist. And yes, that word will rhyme with "orange."

Quickly though, the origin of the word "orange." It comes from Sanskrit, as do any number of other words in the English language including "huzza huzza" and "Oh, yeah baby..." The translation of "orange" as used in the original Sanskrit is "apple."

First item of business, disprove the hypothesis that there is no English-language rhyme for "orange." I draw to your attention the following fragment of poetry, found in an ancient Emergency Room. Internal evidence suggests that it was written after the advent of the automobile, but not all scholars agree. In any case, here in all its visually moving imagery and its own unique pathos, is the only remaining fragment of the work:

We're off on a lovely beach-walk,

The sun is setting orange.

But I cannot go with 'er;

Me thumb's stuck in the door 'inge.

Less academically satisfying perhaps, given that what appears may be simply a spelling error and not an actual word, is this anonymous quatrian:

Renovate? I can't wait

To paint the ceilings orange!

Gathering the furnishings

And putting them in storange.

Finally the creation of a new word. This word is inspired by quantuum physics, one of my hobbies. One of the fathers of quantuum physics was Neils Bohr. Another was Walter Heisenburg, he of the Uncertainty Principle. Combining the two:

bohrange: a measure of the extent to which uncertainty is widespread.

Thus, the wisdom of the war in Iraq has a very high bohrange. Impressions of W's intelligence, at least among my friends, enjoys low borange.

Green thinking

2007-04-16T13:25:00.000-07:00

Green is a good color, despite Kermit's whingeing about how hard it is to be green. (That is the British spelling of the word "whining." The British spelling "whingeing" looks more like it's whining than the other, do you not agree?)

Green is natural and indicates a healthy environment. But actually now that I've said that, there is a strange greenish pallor that comes over the faces of the really really seasick that doesn't look so good.

Green is often natural and usually indicates a healthy environment. When the sunlight drips through the canopies of leaves in my back garden the light becomes a soft, inhalable green, cool, refreshing, calming.

Green is de riguer today. We have finally got it, that we've screwed the planet up pretty badly and it's time to re-think our basic approach. This is a very desirable thing.

Take a look at World Change, which is filled with ideas about how we can be green using the technology we already have. I am not sure what to make of the announcement at the top of their home web page that the domain worldchange.org is for sale, followed by two telephone numbers you can call if you want to buy it. I don't want to buy it, but I called one of the numbers. I reached BuyDomain.com and spoke to Chris. He offered to sell me the domain name worldchange.org for $2,700. I asked if the domain name came with all the content included and he allowed as to how it did not.

I wonder if "they" will recycle the content? Or at least composte it? I am wondering what the composting of virtual stuff produces, and what it would fertilize. If they don't recycle or composte it, will they just drop it all in the trash bin for somebody else to worry about? Ship it to India, I'll bet, or China.

That is silly, of course. But you do have to wonder where ideas go when nobody is thinking them any more. And where "content" goes when it's gone. And what the owners of worldchange.org will do with their share of the $2,700 from BuyDomain.com. It seems a very small amount of money.

But then, one mustn't whinge about that. Money, after all, is green.

Refreshing thinking

2007-04-15T23:23:00.000-07:00

I have a vacation coming up! On this vacation I will:

read a book a day;

read three newspapers daily;

paint the guest room;

mow the lawn and red0 the floral thingummy;

get to that termite problem once and for all;

teach the parrot to cuss;

take over all housekeeping responsibilities including getting both of us started on the South Beach diet;

run five miles every day;

walk the dog along the beach including picking up after him;

clean out the garage;

watch a lot of television.

Hold on a minute. May be I should edit this list a bit somehow or I'm going to run out of time.

Try this - read Curious George each time I sit on the john, as many times as it takes until I'm finished the whole book. Screw the newspapers. Buy paint for guestroom and give it to Gloria as a mother's day present, with a nice brush and roller set. Pay the neighborhood kid to mow the lawn including the floral thingummy. Raise a glass to the termites, hard workers that they are and I admire that in anyone. Cuss at the parrot. Drink from the bottle so as to aviod making a mess for Glo to clean up, and eat lots of burritos which I believe is the South Beach way. Drive five miles a day, dropping the dog off at the beach to make his own way home. Tell him not to poop on the way. Close the garage door.

Watch a lot of television.

Optimisitc thinking

2007-04-15T18:19:00.000-07:00

I have decided to embrace optimism as a faith. Some of the central tenets of this faith will be:

Metamucil makes a man sexy.

Women love pot-bellied men.

Livers, like diamonds, are forever.

Flat feet are a sign of stability.

When they say of me, "There's no fool like an old fool," they mean that in the good way.

The brown spots on my skin are good omens put there by the skin fairy.

Not being able to hear much gives me an opportunity to spend quality time, albeit with silence.

Aching hips are the hallmark of physical fitness.

My toes are still there. I don't have to be able to see them. In fact they prefer it that way.

Milky thinking

2007-04-14T17:01:00.000-07:00

I don't like milk unless it's in the form of ice cream or whipped cream. Up until 7,000 years ago adult humans could not tolerate milk. About that long ago a gene mutation disabled the enzyme that kicked in at about puberty time and rendered milk no longer digestible. I think I did not inherit this gene mutation. I don't remember seeing my father drink milk, ever. My mother always demanded we drink it, but she never did herself. She was a gin fancier.

So I don't drink milk.

Lately I have been feeling a touch of wanderlust and have been doing research, like you do. A particular set of travel books has been enriching my life immeasurably. I am referring, of course, to the jetlag travel guide series, "for the undiscerning traveler." Their most recent travel guide is an in-depth look at Phaic Tan, "Sunstroke on a Shoestring." Listen to this description of the weaning process as practiced by the Phaic Tanese:
"... Phaic Tanese children are not actually named until they are one year old (although at three years of age they may legally take charge of a motor vehicle.) Most chidren are not weaned until the age of 14 and for some visitors the sight of a teenage boy attached to a middle aged woman's breast can be a little off-putting, especially when the two of them are not actually related." Interesting.

Some milk myths that are completely untrue, according to the dairy coucil of California:
Myth: Soymilk is just as nutritious as regular milk.
Myth: If you are lactose intolerant, you should avoid dairy foods.
Myth: Dairy foods cause weight gain.
Myth: Drinking milk causes early puberty.
Myth: Drinking milk when you have a cold causes mucus.
Myth: Organic milk is safer than regular milk.

Who would spread such lies? Notice in particular the third Myth, that dairy foods cause weight gain. This is especially untrue in the case of ice cream and whipped cream. The research has proven again and again that you consume more calories chewing than you ingest by swallowing either of these products. What's doing you in is the walnut pieces.

Venomous thinking

2007-04-13T16:14:00.000-07:00

I have been looking for good recipes that include scorpions as an ingredient. Most scorpion recipes have lots of rum and grenadine but no scorpions. But I found two recipes that look pretty good to me.

The first is from the Liverpool Museum. I am confused by this as I don't think of Liverpool as having enough scorpions to make a recipe of much use. Beatles maybe. Scorpions, I dunno.

Here are the first two ingredients, after which the rest are anticlimactic:

1/2 cup vegetable oil

30 - 40 live scorpions, washed

Hold up a moment. So I have this grocery bag with 40 live scorpions in it. Okay so far.

Washed?

"Honey? Let's cook together tonight? Like we used to? I'll heat the oil? Why don't you wash... the ummm... the stuff in the grocery bag...? Honey? Honey? "

So now the cooking directions: Heat the oil in a large wok. Stir-fry the scorpions for 20 seconds....

Hold on a moment.

There's an instruction missing somewhere. How do you get 40 live (clean) scorpions into a searing hot wok?

"Honey? I need a hand here...? Hmmmm... Okay guys, is everybody clean? Good... so now I need you just to hop in here to dry off.. Okay, think of it like it's a sauna... Nobody speaks Swedish?... It'll feel really good... Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!"

The second recipe is a little more helpful. Again, only the first two ingredients need be mentioned:
1 pint low-fat milk
8 frozen desert hairy scorpions, thawed

I am not making this up.

Among the cooking directions:

Dredge the scorpions through the cornmeal... place the scorpions in the hot butter and cook until they are golden brown, about 2 minutes. Then turn the scorpions over and cook until done.

Okay...

This recipe comes with some warnings, under the heading

Scorpion Cooking Tips: Handle With Care.
"Handle any live scorpion regardless of its size with the utmost care. All specimens that are destined for culinary use should go immediately into the freezer. After they are frozen solid, each scorpion should have its terminal tail segment, the one that contains the paired venom glands and the hollow, curved barb, removed with a sharp knife. This tidbit should go straight into the trash receptacle to prevent any accidental impailments during cleanup of the workspace."

That sounds like very sage advice to me.

I'm wondering, as long as you're frying them in hot buttter, why use low-fat milk?

Gentle thinking

2007-04-12T23:11:00.000-07:00

The man on the left, now deceased, was as Admiral. When I think of Admirals and others of general staff rank I think of warriors, men of steel, men able to make the tough choices. Rommel. Patton. Montgomery. Nelson. I don't necessarily think of gentle men.

But the more of them I have known, the more I have admired them for something quite different than toughness. It turns out that you don't get to that rank merely by being tough. You have to be wise as well and to care about people. It turns out that people don't do stuff just because you told them to - they do stuff because they know it's the right thing to do, and they know that because they know you, they trust you, maybe they even love you.

So by the time you tell them to do stuff that puts them in danger, they know you've done it, can do it, will do it, wish they didn't have to do it, trust them to do it well. There is a surprising amount of gentleness involved in that relationship.

When I was very young I admired strength. Then I grew older and brasher and I admired intelligence. Now I'm really old, and about the only thing that means a damn to me anymore is gentleness. The lesson he taught by example sank in eventually. He was one of the really good ones.

Sedentary thinking

2007-04-12T22:39:00.000-07:00

I confess that I am overly fond of a sedentary life. It is not an entirely desirable addiction , having perils of its own.

I notice that the less I do the less I want to do, and the closer to death I feel. This wonderful chair is a pretty good metaphor.

I think I will do something different tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will attempt to have an affair.... No, I won't. I don't want to have an affair. It would trouble my wife, which I don't want to do, and it would be far too much work. The reward no longer seems worth the labor. My wife, on the other hand, is worth the labor.

Tomorrow I will quit my job... No, I won't. I love my job and I have never been happier working anywhere. The people are interesting, smart, funny and I care about them a lot. And they care about me.

Tomorrow I will eat something I've never eaten before. Hmmm... let me think about that. What haven't I eaten... I've done duck's tongues, fish ovaries, snake, jellyfish... I haven't eaten scorpions but I don't know anywhere in Honolulu that serves them. Does anybody anywhere eat scorpions? Note to self - look for a menu with scorpions on it, tomorrow.

Tomorrow I will take up long-distance running again. Shouldn't be too hard, I used to do it a lot... Maybe I won't. A guy my age could have a heart attack.... But I'm going to drive four miles every day!

Tomorrow I'll join a cult religion and give my entire being over to Divine Mother... but Divine Mother spent her formative years as one of the toughest divorce lawyers in town, embracing sanctity only when the previous Divine Mother had the grace to kick the bucket and leave a VACANCY. My cycnicism might prevent my attaining nirvana. Poop.

Note to self: tomorrow, do some serious research about things to do.

Structural thinking

2007-04-12T13:19:00.000-07:00

Kurt Vonnegut Junior is dead. He was... he wrote stories that were filled with ideas that gave me a structure when I was approaching and in my early teens. It wasn't a rigid structure and I embraced its fluidity. It was almost a non-structure, like the space you see between two buildings. The buildings are structures, and they make the space between them look structured, but in that space everything is possible. Like the spaces between the strings of a cat's cradle.

Vonnegut wrote of the spaces in between.

Ice-9 captivated me and terrified me. It foreshadowed a scare that subsequently occured in the 1960's, when a number of scientists claimed to have found another form of water-ice that froze at a different temperature than regular ice. They called it polywater and the idea spread through portions of the scientific community (primarily in the Soviet Union) and is now used as an example of "pathological science." It seems ironic that the idea of polywater spread much the same way as ice-9 spread.

The book that most captured me was The Sirens of Titan. I think it was a combination of many things, not the least of which was my age, that made the book so iconic in my mind. Vonnegut wrote of the chrono-synclastic infundibulum, "those places ... where all the different kinds of truths fit together." For someone just old enough to be questioning a strict Catholic upbringing, such a thought was more than amazing, it was like breathing for the first time. I was never the same again.

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater brought rafts of new ideas to my mind, and Slaughterhouse 5 moved me. I don't remember why it did, I don't remember much about it, but I remember being very moved by it. Perhaps it was the co-mingling of Tralfamadorian fatalism as a philosophy and the the lusty promise of Montana Wildhack, the porn actress.

Maybe it was more the Montana Wildhack than the philosophy. I'm not sure.

I'll miss him.

Hi ho.

Intrepid thinking

2007-04-11T16:58:00.000-07:00

This photograph is of the USS Intrepid. Intrepid gained fame recently when she went aground in New York Harbour, not under her own power but while being moved by tugs.

I met the Intrepid in 1971. She was long in the tooth then, having been commissioned in 1943. She was the biggest target in a Hunter-Killer group that the submarine Ojibwa sometimes played with, me a young sub-lieutenant very excited by all this.

To get at her we had to slip through her screen of destroyers, evade sonar-dipping helicopters, and elude aircraft using Magnetic Anomaly Detection gear. On those occasions when we succeeded in all this we fired green flares to indicate that we had enough information for a "firing solution" and had we wanted to, we could have torpedoed her. In fact we went through the drill completely each time, firing what are called water-shots from the torpedo tubes. Usually the captain fired a spread of three or four of these virtual torpedoes before we fired the green flare.

When we fired the flare all hell would break loose. Because, of course, people saw the green flare so they knew exactly where we were. The Intrepid would agreeably play dead for an hour but everybody else went to town on us. Destroyers everywhere, pinging away, dropping teeny-tiny depth charges, two pounds of explosives each, to let us know that we were in big trouble now. From time to time they'd nail us really well. Even if it's only two pounds, a two pound bomb going off underwater just the other side of a pressure hull makes a really big noise.

Usually they didn't get us, though. Nowadays I think we'd be in a lot more trouble, but in those days we could get beneath a temperaure layer and suddenly become invisible to their sonar. Or, if we couldn't do that we could fire a cannister of lithium hydride into the water. This created a huge cloud of hydrogen gas which ships would a) think was us and bomb hell out it while we slipped away, or b) not think was us but not be able to hear us through it, and so off we went.

But the Intrepid was a great deal more than a target for the Ojibwa. During WWII she saw active service in the Pacific Theatre including the Marshall Islands, Truk, Leyte Gulf and Okinawa.

In February of 1944 she was approaching Truk, and a Japanese torpedo plane hit her off the starboard quarter (about 4:30 on a clock face, noon being dead ahead.) The torpedo struck 15 feet below the waterline, flooded several compartments and jammed the rudder hard to port. By using the engines to steer (a very rough-and-ready approach to steering) Intrepid made it to Truk and carried out operations for two days of almost steady combat.

She was a key player in the Battle of Leyte Gulf. Desperately hoping to keep control of the Phillipines, the Japanese war command sent its navy into Leyte Gulf from three different directions. There were four major naval engagements that took place, which are collectively known as the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

Intrepid was heroic and her aircraft were up and at'em with huge impact. Then she was struck by a kamikaze with the loss of ten men. She kept going. Some while later she was struck by two kamikazes within five minutes of one another. She never left her station.

Before she was finished in the Pacific she was struck again by a Japanase aircraft, this time without loss of life, nor of grit.

This ship earned her name the hard way. I am glad to have met her.

I didn't truly realize in those days that when we torpedoed her and she played dead for an hour, she was only playing. In real life she'd have fought like a tiger and won.

Scrappy thinking

2007-04-10T18:02:00.000-07:00

I meet often with teachers who wish to develop curricula, some of it academic in a traditional way, some of it much more adventurous, whimsical even, the sort of thing that creates an intellectual Disneyland for children to play in.

I just came from such a meeting, where the topic was manners. What are the social conventions that allow us all to function well together, and how might you impart some of those conventions to middle school kids in a way that is engaging and effective?

Inevitably the conversation turned to games. Inevitably because I was part of the conversation, and to whatever extent I have any power in a curricular conversation I force it towards games, simulations and real-life experiences, and away from "what I want kids to learn is..." The two are not incompatible, but once you have a sense of what you want them to learn, you gotta go to how they will learn it. Doing is good, listening usually isn't. Besides, the medium is the message. Good manners are not limited to listening well and they need to be done, not recited.

Let me admit it was a mistake to equate collaboration with good manners, and cooperation with bad manners. But I found myself thinking along those lines unconsciously.

We talked about games. The Prisoner's Dilemma is a good one to "teach" collaboration in a dynamic, exciting way. I found myself trying to think of other games that promote collaboration and cooperation, and not competition.

And then I got to thinking about the "humanistic games" and the "new games" that came out in the 60's and 70's. These games don't have winners and losers, just participants. And I found myself thinking, "Yukko!" As a steady diet such games are... let me think of a metaphor here... the metamucil of adolescent life.

I tried to list all the Olympic sports that have collaboration as the main outcome. Didn't take long. You could make a case that team sports are collaborative efforts, but you couldn't claim they were built first and foremost on cooperation. Even something as clearly collaborative as synchronized swimming is built on the premise that, okay girls, you're gonna get out there and kick some serious butt!

I like scrappiness. I particularly like it in young women because it's rarer (I think) in that demographic and quite possibly more important, given the way things are these days. I value their being scrappy more than I value their politesse.

It's not a this-or-that thing. At heart what I value most is directness, honesty and self-confidence. Good manners are good, but not if they interfere with directness, honesty and self-confidence.

To use games will be good, but the games must come in both flavors. New games should be taught every day and the kids should not be told, "This is a co-op game, guys'" nor "Okay, butt-kickers, here's a great one..." The game should simply be presented, and kids over time will learn to think a moment before beginning... which approach will lead to the most positive results, given the rules of the game? And, of course, how do I kick butt politely?

I think such a course could be great fun. Anybody wanna argue the point?

Surreal thinking

2007-04-09T17:58:00.000-07:00

See this book cover? Wierd, is it not?

Until my niece Kirsten, who edited the book, introduced me to the genre, I hadn't given pop surrealism a moment's thought. Surrealism, that I associated with what's his name, the guy with the mustache... Salvador Dali. Hip maybe, pop never.

Kirsten, who is a leader in the pop-surrealism field, wrestled for a long time about what title to assign to this type of art. "Lowbrow" is a name that has been associated with certain subsets of the art. I think I am correct in saying the picture of the cars (top center panel of the book cover) would be lowbrow. But much of the rest isn't lowbrow. Imaginative, maybe a bit punky, a little bit of 'tude, but assembled together it ain't lowbrow. It ain't highbrow either.

But it's good bloody fun.

I have taken an interest in the genre. Can't say I've raced out and bought a lot of it. It wouldn't fit in with my house which... actually that's not true. It would fit in with parts of my house. The part that has the delft hand-grenade in it. (If you want to see it, click on the preceding link. Mine is the one without the bunny attached.) Delft fragmentation grenades are part of the pop-surrealist movement. And part of my house.

If you are interested in the genre, check out Roq la Rue, Kirsten's gallery in Seattle.

But here's why I'm writing this. I'm boasting about it. Inside Kirsten's book is a table of acknowledgements to "contributing artists." My name is in there. I helped her a little bit and she put my name into this most unusual book.

I've made it into the the pop-surrealism scene. How surreal.

Wishful thinking

2007-04-08T16:55:00.001-07:00

If wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

I googled "I wish..." and got 278 million hits.

" I was I was..." got 180 million.

"I wish I had..." got 138 million.

"I wish she loved me..." 15 million hits.

"....... I loved her..." 11 million.

"I wish he loved me..." 78 million.

" .......I loved him..." 10 million.

"I wish my mother loved me..." 19 million.

" .......I loved my mother..." 22 million.

"I wish my father loved me..." 17 million.

" .......I loved my father..." 19 million.

"I wish my wife loved me..." 12 million.

" .......I loved my wife..." 14 million.

"I wish my husband loved me..." 7 million.

" .......I loved my husband..." 8 million.

"I wish God loved me..." 28 million.

" .......I loved God..." 3 million.

"I wish somebody loved me..." 1.5 million.

" .......I loved somebody..." 1.3 million.

"I wish you were still alive..." 6 million.

" .......you were dead..." 16 million.

"I wishI had a horse..." 3 million.

"I wish kings did not ride..." 1 million.

Honesty in advertising - I did not use quotes when I googled, so the results here are incredibly large and don't reflect the poignancy of the moment. Googling with quotes gives a much cheerier picture of life, cheerier but also more poignant. The subject of a different blog perhaps.

Jellyfish thinking

2007-04-07T19:55:00.000-07:00

The word jelly, when applied to things like jellyfish, is so misleading as to... well, as to mislead one.

(Thanks for the picture Bruce. Hope you don't mind that I came across it while swimming through the bloggosphere, paralyzed it, brought it home and am ingesting it here.)

The word "fish" is also misleading in this instance. Combine the two misleading terms and you get jellyfish. That's how they are made.

Jellyfish belong to a group of animals called Cnidaria, a Greek word meaning "Yecchhhh!", pronounced "jell-eee-fisssshhhh." One of our favorites in Hawaii is the Portuguese Man O' War. Within two weeks of arriving in Hawaii in 1988 I had my fourth grade class at Kailua Beach for a day's outing, and I got nailed by a man o' war right across the backside. That was one very sore bum, I can tell you. My students, painfully polite, bit the insides of their cheeks and looked at me with big, sparkling, tear-filled eyes. Not one of them laughed until they thought I was well out of hearing range.

I appreciated it.

Jellyfish have a digestive cavity in which the entrance and the egress are same. (There's food for some serious thought.) This simultaneously in and out passageway cannot be claimed for jelly- like jello - which is why I am disputing the use of "jelly" to describe these little bastards.

The Cnidaria I am considering have poisonous tentacles, another feature lacking in jello. And gonads and things called "oral arms." Oh, yes, I'm not making this up, and you won't find those in your average bowl of jello, at least not unless you really strike it rich on Saturday night. Take photographs.

Some jellyfish are more than 100 feet long, to the envy of jello everywhere. Some can kill a grown man in minutes, which your unadulterated jello won't do.

And I can testify to that fact that jellyfish don't even taste like jello. I tried them once at a Chinese restaurant. Do you know, they fry them? Who on earth figured that out? "Ling Ho, I have a jellyfish here. What do you think we should do with it?"

What was Ling Ho thinking?

"Let's fry it." (!!) Jesus.

Jelly has always meant jelly, since the word was invented. Whatever they are, jellyfish aren't jelly fish. Let us refer to them, from this blog forward, as "Oral-armed little bastards."

Teacher thinking

2007-04-07T18:41:00.001-07:00

Some years ago someone directed me to a site where students can rate their teachers.

I was drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I found myself nervously, and read the comments. Overall I come out okay, but some of them hurt. "He is absentminded" stung a little bit until I forgot who the pronoun "he" was referring to in this instance. "He teaches computer science but couldn't turn on the computer." Ouch. Do they have to be turned on? I thought that was automatic. Where did I go wrong?

Fortunately or otherwise, teachers don't have a comparable web page. If they did, most students would be rated really really well. I believe that. All the kids I've ever taught have been great.

But still, kids, you can't always tell how you come across to your teachers. Sometimes, if teachers left comments, the comments might make you wince. They might also help you see yourself as others see you, which is what I like about ratemyteachers.com, even when it stings a bit.

How sad that there is no comparable page for you to go to to see what teachers are thinking.

Don't click the title of this blog unless you can't stop yourself. Then, little moth, close your eyes and go for it.

Presidential thinking

2007-04-07T15:22:00.000-07:00

I am in the process of becoming a citizen of the United States. I hang around with mostly left-leaning pinko-liberal-socialist types who, when they find that out, ask two questions:

1. Why?
2. Will I have to give up my Canadian citizenship?

The answer to #2 is no, I can keep my Canadian citizenship. And I will.

And the answer to #1, why? Why? Because I like you!.... And I really really really want to vote.

I don't want to tip my hand here in case Homeland Security is monitoring my blog looking for seditious thinking, but click on the blog title for a picture of George W, I think that's who it is. Or Tony Blair, whatever. My political leanings are suggested here, although never stated explicitly. We Canadians are an apolitical people when circumstances permit. I think that time is long past, I'm just embarrassed that it has taken me this long to get off my duff.

Recursive thinking

2007-04-06T17:30:00.001-07:00

Recursive thinking is a miracle to me. I read Douglas Hofstader's book, Godel Escher Bach, and I think that was the first time I became particularly aware of it. He won a Pulitzer Prize for that book in 1980, the very year I read it. Rarely am I so current. Recursive thinking is thinking that takes itself into consideration. An example would be to ask oneself, in all seriousness, "What thought am I thinking now?" Think about the question for a moment. That's recursive thinking.

This is more interesting I think: read the instructions I will give you and then do what I suggest.

First, take a moment to think of yourself sitting where you are, reading this blog. Can you get a picture of that in your mind? Take a second and close your eyes and imagine yourself sitting where you are sitting, reading this blog.

Finished? Okay, open your eyes.

Next exercise. Take a moment to think of what you just did - see yourself in behind your eyes, seeing yourself sitting where you are, reading this blog. In other words, watch the watcher who was watching you while you were thinking. Take a moment, close your eyes, observe the watcher watching you.

Who is that back there, watching you watch yourself?

And then take the next step, picture yourself sitting there watching yourself sitting there reading this blog...

That is phenomenal. And the question remains, who is that back there, layer after layer of you, doing that?

I think it was you. Some fruit loops (forgive me, Deeprak) argue that it was a cosmic consciousness that we all share. Humbug, it was just you. (This is a hint of the overwhelming possibilities of the word "just.")

I don't know how you did that, but you are amazing. You did recursive thinking.

Divergent thinking

2007-04-06T13:16:00.001-07:00

The elegant shape to the left is called a Mandlebrot Set. I first encountered it when I read James Gleick's book Chaos some years ago. Chaos theory examines the way two things with almost identical starting conditions can wind up very widely separated before a whole lot of time passes. Click on the title, Divergent Thinking, for a lovely look at that in action.

If you would like to play with a Mandelbrot set for a while, do so. I'm not going to go into them here beyond saying that the shape, infinite in depth, reflects the rates at which numbers diverge from their starting positions when you do stuff to them. Specific math stuff. Discovered by a guy named Benoit Set, and named after him.

Just kidding. Benoit Mandelbrot.

Things that begin in almost the same spot wind up a long way away, when all is said and done. Brothers wind up fighting brothers across a civil war. Some American kid winds up as The American Taleban, his neighbours unable to comprehend it, pleased to see him in jail or, alternatively, not pleased. Hard to predict which neighbour will adopt which point of view.

When I was growing up I had five friends, we were inseparable. Everything we did we did together. I haven't seen them in years, don't even know where they are now. Don't hardly think about them.

I wonder what it would look like if I was tied to old friends by cords of colored light. The color would vary as I thought of them, or they of me. Most of the cords entering and leaving me would be colorless, but every now and again one would light up and remind me of friends I once knew.

Orange, he is still angry with me. I wish he could get past that, the anger is killing him. Perhaps I should make the first move, but I am afraid of him.

Blue. She misses me, she's remembering the time in Montreal when she said I was a sweet guy but she loved someone else. Do you think she noticed the blue and is reflecting it, or did she generate it spontaneously?

Black, dark black light. He is still lost, consumed by the demons that started eating him alive when he was thirteen.

Bright green. That one never changes, it seems, always full of life, full of dreams and hopes and confidence in herself and in her friends. Every time she thinks of me it's bright green light, the green of sunlight through the leaves, alive, exuberant. Intolerable!

Red, dark red, not like blood but yet like blood. Thick, rich, speaking of life and not-life, one diverging from the other so slowly. He is a dear, dear man, I think, unravelling with such magnificent dignity. I love that man.

I wish I knew where he was.

I wish I hadn't diverged.

Lovely thinking

2007-04-05T18:48:00.000-07:00

i carry your heart with me

by ee cummings

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or the mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

This is my wife's favorite poem. I wish I had written it.

Glassy thinking

2007-04-05T18:07:00.000-07:00

My sister Gillian thinks in glass. I don't know how she learned to do such a thing. It is a mystery to me that she can think in glass, that Owen can think in sound, that Bruce can think in words, that Crystal can think in dance. These things are inconceivable to me, and I take such great pleasure from them.

Glass is most... I was going to say it's unusual, but in fact it is nothing more than a very accessable form of a very common substance, sand. It is colored by the addition of various elements. Gillian can tell you what they are, but I'm thinking cobalt for blue, copper for green, gold (I think) for red. It takes the breath away.

Beyond the science of it is the magic of it. Gillian's right brain formulates some sort of vision of something, god knows what. She uses her left brain to work out what glass to put where, what colors will transform into what light, what light will transform into what beauty, what beauty will make the heart sing. And she puts it together, exposes it to tremendous heat and it works.

That's about the weirdest thing I can imagine. Who worked that out? How did she? She's my older sister, made her living as an avionics engineer, raised a passel of kids, loved me because that was her nature.

We went to a strange boarding school together when she was about 13, me about 11. In London, SW something-or-other. It was a horrible school. The Latin mistress was a predatory lesbian who spent too much time in the girls' dorm, the English master a predatory creep who spent more time with me than was good for me. The boy's dorm-master was a strange and sadistic man, and Gillian's room-mate howled at the moon, no kidding, for real, for hours and hours. It was there that Gillian and I became friends, working our way together through some very, very strange growing-up experiences. Neither of us emerged entirely unscathed, but we emerged together, alive together.

Like fused glass, elemental but changed, hardened in some ways but still brittle and vulnerable in others. Now she lives in Mexico and thinks in glass. She is amazing, quite beyond my ken. I wonder if we are one as we used to be or if time has, in fact, separated the elements.

Vanishing thinking

2007-04-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

Things vanish. Sometimes they fade away, sometimes they simply vanish.

Sometimes they vanish because we stop seeing them. Vanishing, in such a case, is something I did, not something it did. For an example of this click the title of this blog, "Vanishing thinking," and you will vanish. You'll discover yourself somewhere else most interesting. Stare at the cross for a while and relax. Reappear here when you're finished.

I am curious to know about the present, meaning the thin wedge of time that is this very instant, the tiny time-wedge surfing down the wave made by the colossal event of the future colliding with the past. The past is huge, goes back a long way, is filled with lots of stuff, like the ocean below. The future seems infinite, everything possible is stored there waiting for its chance to be, like the sky above. The wave is just a surface that separates the two, and it has no dimensions of its own, no material to call its own.

The present has no dimension, it is the translation from "will be" to "was", and then it vanishes to be replaced by some next instant. Where did it go? Will it be okay? Who is experiencing it now that it's gone? It wasn't is for nearly long enough, I want it to linger with me a while...

What about the instants coming towards me at the speed of light? Who is experiencing them before I do? Do they vanish for those creatures in the same way mine will vanish for me after will becomes is becomes was?

What are all these instants running from in such headlong haste? Why are they so desperate to slip away, to vanish?

Or is it not the present that vanishes at all? Is it something I'm doing or not doing that makes me think it vanished? Is there some funny analog of a green dot moving around erasing not the dots, but my ability to see them?

That would be weird, if that time I beat that kid up because he had a steel plate in his head is still happening. If he is still screaming and screaming and I am still hammering on him forever and ever, just an instant away and not visible. Me unable to stop punching him, unable to stop loathing myself for doing it.

Another thought: Is my heart still broken?

Is hers?

Let it vanish, after all.

Math-magical thinking

2007-04-04T15:42:00.001-07:00

Click on the name of this post, Math-magical thinking, and it will take you to a web page that will amaze you.

Do not read any more of this posting without examining the page and trying it out.

Surely it is magical!

Now let's do the required numerical thinking, not to diminish the magic of the webpage I sent you to, but to increase the magical-ness of math.

Any two digit number has two digits, call the first "x" and the second "y". When we place them together to form a two digit number, as in "xy", the value of the number itself is 10x + y. This is the difference I referred to in an earlier blog, the differnece between a number, and the quantity it represents. (Not all numbers do that, by the way)

"82", for example, is ten 8's + 2. Similarly "xy" is ten x's + y. We write that 10x + y.

So you made up a two digit number with the value 10x + y.

The puzzle now asks you add the two digits together. That give us a second number, x + y.

Finally you are to subtract the second number from the first, giving:

(10x + y) - ( x + y)

When you simplify that expression you are left with 9x. In other words, no matter what two digits you choose to use, once you perform the steps outlined, your final answer will be exactly 9 times larger that the digit you used for x, the digit in the tens place.

Which means that every possible answer is a multiple of 9. To whit 9, 18, 27, 36 and so on. No other answers are possible.

If you go back to Math-magical thinking link, look to see what symbols go where, and in particular notice the symbol matching multiples of 9.

That's math-magical thinking. Math is very, very cool.

Binary thinking

2007-04-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Do you remember the guessing game you may have played as a kid, where one person thinks of a number between 1 and 100, and the other person has to guess the number in as few guesses as possible? It's a great game to play with kids because after a while they begin to figure out, all by themselves, how to do what compter programmers call a binary search. It's an elegant piece of thinking that a kid can invent as soon as she understands how numbers are built.

If the kid guesses 67, and the number is 14, you say, "Too high." She may say 66 next guess, then 65, but after a while she'll figure out that counting down one at a time is boring and she'll get more adventurous.

If you play it in a way that keeps them interested, for example by having two kids compete to see who can accomplish the task in the smallest number of guesses, the loser being fed to the sharks or something, after a while they'll figure out that there is a "trick" beckoning them and they'll begin to hone in on it. The trick is to do a binary search, that is keep dividing things in half. Guess 50 first. Higher? Guess 75. Too High? Guess 62. And so on. If you do this you will always be able to get the right answer within 7 guesses.

Increase the upper limit of the game to 1000, which would be stunningly boring without a binary search. With 1000 you can nail the number within 9 guesses, every time. 10,000 can be cracked in 14 guesses. A million, not that I recommend it, can be cracked in 21 guesses max.

Segue from 21. Another great game, although not binary in nature, is the 21 game. One persons starts and can say 1, 2 or 3. The second person can add either 1, 2 or 3 to the number the first person said.

So I said 2, and you could say either 3,4 or 5. Suppose you said 5.

I can say 6, 7 or 8. I say 8. You say 11. I say 13. You say 14. I say 17, You say 19. I say 21.

Because I said 21, I win. You get fed to the sharks. Play the game a few times and a light will go on in the child's head - you can see it happen. She'll figure out that whoever says 17 will win. Keep playing, another light will go on. 13 is the magic number, because she who says 13 can say 17... And so on.

It's better to do this with a group of kids, otherwise you're just whupping some kid's ass over and over again and after a while she'll begin to resist. But if there's a bunch of them playing they have fun and whoever finally beats you feels like a champ.

I start every game with the question, "Would you like to start, or would you like me to start?"

When a kid says, "I want to start," and then chooses the number 1 in a strong voice, I know I'm shark bait.

Serendipitous thinking

2007-04-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

I don't know who took this picture but I find it endearing as well as intriguing. But it is the way I found it that I wish to discuss.

I stumbled upon it.

There is a link on my blog to http://www.stumbleupon.com/. It's like Google only when you click on Stumble Upon it takes you randomly across the web. Well, not entirely randomly. It first asks you what sorts of things you'd like to stumble upon, and then off you go. It was invented by some Calgary boys, go Stampeders! So it's like a search engine but fuzzier and a lot less predictable, which is its whole point.

Is it cheating to program a machine to provide seredipitous events for us? Inside me somewhere there is a cranky old man slapping his forehead and saying, "My god, just live your own life, will you? Discover your own ladybugs in curious juxtaposition with waterdrops and daisies. Don't have some machine doin' it for you!" (Ageing hippies, do those words sound at all familiar?) But responding to the cranky old man is another voice saying, "Yeah, but... what does curious juxtaposition mean?"

And then adding, "One more word and it's the dumpster for you, old man!"

Serendipity comes to those who put themselves in the position to stumble upon it.

Zero thinking

2007-04-02T23:28:00.000-07:00

I did a Google search for "zero" looking for a good graphic. "Zero" produced 252,000,000 hits. Two hundred and fifty two million. That's a lot of hits for nothing.

Those who read my earlier post, "Numerical thinking..." may be reaching for a calculator. Well done. For those who didn't, it would take me just under eight years to visit every one of those sites, one per second, 24/7. So I visited them all and none had a good graphic.

The correct graphic is not a graphic of nothing, but is no graphic at all. I hate that.

This is interesting - an African Grey parrot named Alex gave consistent, verifiable evidence of its ability to grasp the concept of "zero" as being meaningful in itself, not just as identifying an absence. I went out and bought an African Grey parrot right after I learned that. I explained to my wife that the parrot was a Christmas gift for my dog Vinnie, and she laughed in a way that said, "I'm not stupid, but I love you... Maybe I am stupid." She's very loving, I think.

So I have this African Grey parrot and I have a concept of zero. How to move my concept to the parrot? There's the rub. Along with, why bother? Because if I can teach it, I will know it, and right now I feel like I'm just faking that I know it. This is why I teach - so that I can know.

The direct face of zero is nothingness. Multiply any number, no matter how huge, by zero and you wind up with nothing. Zero is the great destroyer. The underbelly of zero is infinity. Divide any number by zero and you get... well you don't actually get anything, but "not anything" in this case is the opposite of "nothing." Dividing by zero is asking the question, "How many groups of zero are there in this number?" You can't say zero, because obviously there are more than that. A million? More than that... A trillion? More than that... A really huge number of zeroes lie inside every number, an infinitude of them.

Where's that damned parrot?

Spidery thinking

2007-03-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

As a kid I was always terrified of spiders.

There was a triggering event. We lived out in the woods in Ontario and one day every spider in the world came after us, creeping everywhere in our direction, scuttling across the ground, crawling up the walls, darting across the windows, skittling along the floor. I suspect someone had sprayed the area to eliminate gypsy moths or something, but what I know for sure is that there were spiders of all shapes and sizes everywhere and they were horrible, hairy, long-legged, sawdust-filled sacs of yechhhhh and there was no escaping them. Even my bed was crawling with them. My father collapsed and was rushed to hospital where he spent a week recovering from anaphylactic shock in response to a spider bite. I loathed spiders from that day on, loathed them with a visceral intensity, sick with fear.

As I grew older I developed a reasoned response to fear in general. I suspect it developed during military training when I realized I was afraid to do lots of things. Afraid to jump 30 feet into Halifax Harbour, afraid to wriggle into small underground spaces, afraid to take limpet mines apart, afraid to pull decomposing corpses out of the sunken wreckage of fishing boats. As one toughened drill sergeant or petty officer after another bullied, cajoled or shamed me into doing things I never believed I could do I developed the notion that whenever I felt fear the most gratifying response was to walk directly towards whatever inspired it, and thereby overcome it. Courage, for me at least, does not mean freedom from fear. It means doing things even though I'm terrified. After I've done those things often enough the fear fades, and with it so does the need for courage.

Spiders. Never had to deal with spiders in that time.

So I grew up and learned to do lots of brave things, nearly got killed a few times but never did. I left the military because when I got home after months at sea my children didn't know who I was and I decided against living that way. We moved to Victoria, British Columbia. We bought a house, a huge old thing that had been built in about 1890. We paid $19,000 for it, more money than I had ever dreamed of. It had a huge, completely undeveloped basement holding other people's "stuff" that had been consistently gathering dust down there for 70 years.

Guess what else was down there.

I decided at some point to clean up the whole mess, and build some rooms, but I had to handle the spider thing first. Everywhere down there was dark, gloomy, dusty and covered in a rich, thick layer of cobweb. Every nook and cranny, and there was nothing down there that was not either a nook or a cranny, was alive with them. Spiders everywhere, big, dark hairy spiders. Invisible when I disturbed nothing, but at the first agitation they became visible, scuttling across their webs, falling to the floor and giving me the heebie-jeebies.

I first tried using a long-handled broom. I flailed away until it became clear that I was really pissing them off but I wasn't getting rid of them. Just displacing them which meant they were more visible, not less. Then I tried using a vacuum cleaner with a really long hose, and that was far better. I could make them pretty much vanish with a soft popping sound as they and their webs pulled free of the structural filaments and simply disappeared. I don't know for sure who invented vacuum cleaners but in my mind I built a little shrine to Saint Electrolux and paid sincere homage to her.

The job took weeks. Ever so slowly I began to feel less fear - not because there were fewer spiders but because... No, I take that back. I felt less fear because there were fewer spiders.

I never got over the heebie jeebies. Spiders still do it to me.

Gritty thinking

2007-03-30T16:44:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of Michigan Avenue in Chicago, as seen from underneath. It's a great street, but pretty gritty down below. Down below there's rust and grime and smells that you don't really want to smell.

And an amazing canal that turns out to be a river once you get out from under the bridge. A river with old pilings, ancient buildings, and then new buildings and suddenly an outlet into Lake Michigan. It's quite wonderful.

But don't lose your head. Underneath Michigan Avenue it's pretty gritty. The bottom side is just the bottom side. The canal that turns into a river does that all by itself, as do we all.

Oval thinking

2007-03-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of Chicago, reflected in a huge titanium egg. I took the picture but I don't see myself in it anywhere. All of Chicago got reflected but I got left out, and it was my bloody picture! That's what oval will do.

A friend of mine has twin boys. One just breezed through everything, seemingly without effort, while the other, just as smart, often felt out of place, stupid and just wrong. When he was about 6 he tried to explain how he felt to his mother, and the term oval-headed was the one he chose to describe it.

Oval-headed. I know what that feels like. Sort of dorky, nothing fits quite right or feels quite right or goes quite right. Nothing is a complete disaster but you always feel like you're on the edge of discovering that you're naked in public when what you want to be is invisible.

So somehow I accomplished that. I took that picture. It reflects all of Chicago, a bunch of it anyway, and you can tell where I must have been standing to take the picture, and there's no reflection of me.

Cosmologists tell us that there is no center of the universe. I have always believed that were as many centers as there were intelligences wondering where the center was, each being at its own center. Over the years I have taught probably thousands of kids of all ages, each the center of his or her own universe. Most of them, at one time or at more than one time, have felt oval-headed, no longer at the center of their own universe, no longer visible, no longer wanting to be visible. It turns out that being oval-headed is a common experience. It is so nice to finally have a name for the feeling, and a picture that proves it's real.

Oval-heads, we are not alone. We just need to figure out a way to see one another.

Numerical thinking

2007-03-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

Listening to NPR this morning I learned that the latest budget "blueprint" (what the hell?) coming out of Washington is for an annual budget of three trillion dollars in the next fiscal year. Three trillion, got it?

Some grade school kids visiting the Capitol were asked to guess how big the federal budget was, and the guesses ranged from $2,500 all the way up to $75,000. When they were told the real number, three trillion, they all said "Ohhhhh...!" as if the number meant something to them.

It did mean something to them. It meant "really really big, so big as to be completely beyond my understanding." That self-imposed limit on understanding is a disease, metaphorically, that most of us suffer from. It has a cure.

Considered as a number three trillion is a Big Honker, no question. In the same category, Big Honking Numbers, are such numbers as a million, a billion, and a trillion. They get bigger as we read across the list, but they're all more or less the same - Big Honkers.

Put aside the notion that they are numbers and think of them as quantities and they will start to make sense.

NPR talked of dollars, so use dollars. Start with 1 million dollars. The government owes you 1 million dollars. (That's a hypothetical situation, not a legally binding admission of debt. In fact it's an understatement.) It is going to pay you back 1 million dollars, 1 dollar at a time, 1 dollar every 1 second, 24 hours a day until it has paid you everything it owes you. How long will it take?

It will take about 11.5 days to pay you. I used a calculator for that, it didn't take me but 10 seconds. $10 worth of time at $1 per second.

So 1 million is 11.5 days. What about 1 billion?

1 billion is 1,000 times more than 1 million, or 11,574 days. This number is too big. Turn it into years. It's 31.7 years (I ignored leap years.)

11.5 days compared to 31.7 years. The first two Big Honkers suddenly don't look anything like one another. 1 million is a piker.

1 trillion dollars gets paid back... get the calculator out again... gets paid back in 31,700 years. Damn! 1 trillion is really really big.

And three trillion is about 95,000 years.

1 million = 11.5 days
1 billion = 31.7 years
1 trillion = 31,700 years
3 trillion = 95,000 years

That's numerical thinking.

Shall we give them the money they ask for in the "blueprint?"

On a similar topic, the federal debt this year is $9 trillion. That's 285,000 years, truly a Big Honker.

Brittle thinking

2007-03-27T15:23:00.000-07:00

Will you just look at that building? How could anybody have the sheer audacity to think they could build something like that? Clearly it cannot be done.

Bridge thinking

2007-03-27T15:18:00.000-07:00

Bridges are more than roads. They not only take you to somewhere, but they do it by taking you above somewhere else, somewhere else where the going is rougher.

About ten years ago I spent the Christmas season in Krasnoyarsk, an industrial city located just about dead-center Siberia. Siberian winters are just what you think they are, colder'n hell. But I had a long, thick woolen coat, a good Russian fur hat, a scarf and gloves, and high, grotesquely ugly rubber boots that chafed.

One night my colleague Yevgeny invited me and a group of other Russian colleagues to travel with him to his dacha and experience a real Siberian banya. The banya is a combination of things - an incredibly hot room, birch switches that one beats one's friends with, and instant access from the hot room to the great outdoors, all million square miles of it, sixty feet deep in snow, the temperature conveniently at around minus 40. I call that convenient because minus 40 is minus 40 if you're using Farenheit as I was or Celcius as Russian colleagues were. Minus 40 needs no translation.

Among my shortcomings is a refusal to say "no" when presented with really bad ideas like Siberian banyas. So I said yes. And when other Russian colleagues muttered in angry Russian to Yevgeny, "Nyet-nyet-nyet," and one of them, Yvan, said to me, "No, no, Mark... eet ees too far... theesss eesss not goot idea..." I paid them no attention, insisting that they all come along for the fun.

We piled into a small Russian car of dubious provenenance. At five o'clock when we set out the night was already pitch black and a passing blizzard was making exploratory jabs in our direction. I remember being really, really surprised by how long we drove, me jammed into a small rusty car with four big Russian guys, three of whom didn't want to be there and talked about feeling that way a lot. The blizzard closed in around us and soon even the driver could see nothing. He sped on like a madman, steering by instict and encouraged by his huge, boisterous faith that nothing bad could happen when a foreign guest was in his car.

We stopped at about 7:00. We were at the huge Krasnoyarsk Hydroelecric dam on the Yenisey River, a dam two kilometers in width, a bright red portait of Lenin on it to inspire one to greater efforts and coincidentally to use up five hundred gallons of left-over red paint. Krasnoyark is downstream from the dam and Yevgeny's dacha is upstream.This picture shows it in summer, and Yevgeney's dacha is above the dam on the right hand side of the river. The expanse of water is known locally as the Sea of Kransoyarsk, and even though the picture makes it look really really small, there's a lot of water back there. Those distances are vast even by Siberian standards.

The car stopped in the inky blackness just the other side of the dam. No more road. Ahead of us - jack squat that I could see. The Sea of Krasnoyark was frozen and snow covered, there was no light, nobody had a flashlight. Russian colleagues muttered "Nyet-nyet-nyet." Yvan's glasses slowly glazed over with thickly inscribed frost crystals. Yevegeny gestured into the vastness of the Siberian blizzard and proclaimed, "Ees chust over there... Come Mark. Come. Soon you will bee enchoying goot Russian banya, goot Seebeereean banya." He pounded himself on the chest, inhaled deeply through the nose, exhaled through the mouth and then the lunatic set off on foot across the Sea of Krasnoyarsk. Cursing myself I followed, three murderous Russians cursing along behind me.

Across a frozen sea, in a blizzard, in the Siberian night. I began to reflect on my decision-making. My most immediate problem lay in the fact that the sea, while frozen, was covered in about three feet of loose snow, so we weren't strolling along humming skating walzes. We were struggling through the snow, in the darkness, minus forty degrees in both languages. My incredibly stupid bloody rubber boots filled up with snow in no time until each seemed to weigh fifty pounds. Twenty-something kilograms, in the spirit of cultural bloody sharing.

Imagine my surprise when, about 20 minutes into our death-march, I began to feel very, very hot. Under my thick, long woolen coat I was sweating. A lot. Sweat oozed from under my fine Russian fur hat. The snow in my rubber boots began to melt and to slosh around. I loosened my scarf. Ten minutes later I opened a couple of buttons on my coat. Yvan shook his head sadly and I heard a quiet chorus of "nyet-nyet-nyet's"as if from geese off in the distance.

I could see nothing much and so was terribly alarmed when I very nearly stepped through a hole in the ice. There was a hole in the ice! A bloody great hole for me to step through, vanish under the ice forever, leaving Yevgeny to wonder if I had changed my mind or something, Yvan to say, "I knew we were going to lose him... he had started stripping by then..." What the bloody hell was a bloody great hole doing in the ice in the middle of the Sea of Kransnoyark in the middle of the Siberian winter, minus forty for god's sake? I eased around it, trying to feel for ice cracking beneath me. I couldn't feel anything, only gallons of stinky water sloshing around in my boots.

With effort I caught up to Yevgeny and panted out "You know, Yevgeny, I couldn't, help but, notice just, back there, there was a hole, a hole through the ice..."

"Ah yess!" He beamed at me, proud of me perhaps? No, more like proud of being Siberian and having me discover Siberian things like bloody holes in the ice in the middle of bloody winter. "Ice fishermen," he explained, and made a gesture with his arms to show me how Siberian ice fishermen lift their poles up when they catch a fish. It was a very cultural bloody moment. "Don' fall een," he laughed, and set off again.

That's when I first began to think about bridges, and how they aren't just roads. They take you above places where the going is tough, and I wished I had a bridge.

After about ninety minutes of this, I was all but carrying my coat in my arms to stay cool, we reached the shore. Ahead dim yellow pools of light gave away the fact that there were little cottages here, including Yevgeny's. In fact it wasn't Yevgeny's but his father-in-law's. His was somewhat bigger than the others, with a sloping roof covered in snow piled at least five feet high.

We tumbled into the dacha - there were two women there, but they stayed well out of sight. Yevgeny's father-in-law greeted us and shepherded us out to the banya building itself. We stripped down to our bare bums, and then entered hell.

The banya per se was a small wooden room with a blast furnace going at full blast in the corner. The heat was like a wall you had to get through in order to sit on a wooden bench and wish you were somewhere else. The thermometer measured somewhere north of 100 degrees. Celcius.

Yevgeney, a demonic figure in my mind by now, grinned an unnerving grin and asked, "Eessss every-bodee ready?" He poured a big ladleful of water onto the blast furnace. The water hit the coals and howled bloody murder, leapt back into the room and seared us all to death. Almost. Instinctively I looked at the thermometer to see if it was north of two hundred yet, but of course it hadn't changed. The water didn't raise the temperature. It just used the temperature to boil me alive. I couldn't breathe. I thought I would surely to god pass out, the sooner the better.

Being beaten with birch branches was exactly as much fun as I had expected it to be.

Once we were all well beaten, completely awash in rivers of our own sweat (which felt like blood), dying for god's sake, Yevgeney threw open the door. The five of us scampered (in a manly way) across the pathway and leaped into the deep snow on the field out back. I dove face first into it.

Jesus.

The snow burned just like the steam burned. I lay stunned for a moment asking myself harsh questions with bad words in them. I tried to push myself upwards, but my arms only sank deeper into Siberian snow. I rolled over onto my back and tried to sit up. The snow gave way, my bum sank deeper. I vaguely remember wondering what my testicles thought of all this and noticing that they were nowhere to be seen. Finally I log-rolled to the cleared path and struggled to my feet. Then I lurched for the blast furnace room again wanting more than anything else to be near that wonderful little blast furnace and the banshee blasts of killer steam.

We repeated the whole exercise.

And then we repeated it again, and again.

As we did so, the experience began to change. I began to change.

My fatigue faded, melted away. The periods with the blast furnace became recharging times, powering up times, the birch switches an unlikely but real part of that process. The dives into the snow were the payoff, the reward, exultant moments of absurdity and energy and laughter. And pride, I confess. Look at me! Look what I can do! Energy became enthusiasm, became exhilaration, became exaultation. It was the most wonderful experience I had ever had. And to top it all off, at the zenith moment Yvan paused beneath the roof line... and just over a ton of snow slid down onto him with a soft "whoomph!" leaving only his eyebrows and glasses showing. I thought life was just about perfect at that moment.

Afterwards we ate great greasy slabs of duck or chicken or pork or something, I have no idea what, that Yevgeny's father barbecued, Russian shashlik style, hot and smoky and dripping with fat, washed down with cold Russian beer, there is no better beer on the planet. Pickled vegetables, cheese, caviar, vodka, it was amazing. I was so very, very alive in the moment at that moment, in a blizzard in the middle of a Siberian winter night, a million miles from everywhere with no bridge in sight.

Submarine thinking

2007-03-21T14:08:00.001-07:00

Maybe you wouldn’t think it but a submarine is a beautiful thing.

My first job after college was as a submarine officer. A submarine – now there’s a panoply of exciting stuff. It’s a whole underwater city with comforts (few), people to manage (too many), hydraulics, electrics, weapons, a million – no, five million parts all finely-machined and needing to work together with no grain of sand between them. Outside millions of tons of water looking for a way in, so there is emotional drama as well. Fear, excitement. And mind-numbing boredom on long submerged transits.

At times we ran on the surface and those were my some of favorite times. I loved the morning watch in heavy weather when we were on the surface. The morning watch rolls from 4am – 8am, through sunrise. In heavy weather I’d make my way to the top of what Americans call the sail, Canadians call it the fin, and I’d sit up on top of it, my legs braced around two steel struts, bundled in my heavy-weather jacket, binoculars tucked inside my jacket, out of the spray. Heavy, solid, military Zeiss binoculars tucked out of harm’s way. Only one lookout with me, located about ten feet astern, invisible. I felt alone and the submarine rode the waves like a monstrous dark horse in the gloom, the bow sonar dome a hundred and fifty feet ahead of me, shuddering down into the troughs and disappearing under steel grey mountains of ocean wall. Explosions of ice-cold white water bursting in huge arcs towering sixty, seventy feet into the air and the submarine rising relentless, driving through them, delivering me into them, the smash of the salt spray like broad hands pushing me back, stinging my face my face and eyes, making me laugh in loud exhilaration.

Other times were quieter and differently beautiful. One fall we crept up into the Arctic to follow a Russian submarine who we had trailed up from his station off Bermuda. We wanted to see exactly where he went for his under-the-ice transit back to his home, his vodka, his wife and son. We wanted to be able to kill him if he came back the same way under different circumstance, by surprise if at all possible. At some point, I don’t remember why, we were running on the surface through open water headed due north. It was early in the midnight watch and I was in place in my steel saddle on the fin. The weather was calm, the sky clear and black but for brilliant green living stars splashed in sudden surprise onto the night. And then, from nowhere and everywhere ahead, Color appeared. Not one color, but Color himself, bleeding down in rich layered ripples, pouring from above, every hue known to man in rippling, waving, damn-near tangible planes. And as I sat open-mouthed, Ivan completely forgotten, Color moved towards me, crept over the sonar dome, whispered down the blacker-than-night length of the hull, enfolded me, wrapped me in his existence, pulled me from my own, enchanted me, stole me. And then ever so slowly, slowly the submarine moved through him, carried me through him, and he fell silently astern and faded to black.

Damn, that was a panoply if ever there was one.

One more. Dived, in the deep ocean, hundreds and hundreds of feet down in the night, doing long, slow sonar searches. The boat was an Oberon class submarine built for the single purpose of hunting other submarines, a shark designed by god to eat other sharks. A silent submarine, everything in it shock-mounted on rubber to keep it quiet, so quiet. A football field long, every foot down either side studded with sonar transducers, passive, listening, listening, listening. To operate them we would find the sweet spot on the bathy, the depth at which sound waves would be trapped between temperature layers and travel undiminished for thousands of miles. We’d find the sweet spot, trim the boat into near-perfect balance, shut down one motor and make minimum revs on the other, eight revs a minute, one turn of the giant screw every seven and a half seconds. Everyone who wasn’t on watch lay down silently, not talking, just listening, rigged for silence. Then we’d turn hours-long, slow circles, listening, listening to three hundred feet of perfect sonar transducers, and we would hear everything for thousands of miles. A merchant ship, two screws, four blades, churning up the coast of Africa, a nick in one of the blades singing out its name and port of registry for us thousands of miles away, to note in our log before drifting slowly, implacably to a new bearing. Ship, ship, whale, power plant on the Connecticut coast, ship, whale, something unidentifiable. Listening always for single screw, five blades, turbine reduction noises, what we most wanted to hear, most feared hearing.

And then we found something awful. We found the screaming of a terrified woman in the night, screaming and screaming and screaming across a wide swath of bearings, obliterating every other sound, every other thought, just screaming and screaming at night far down in the ocean, the sonar trace of it pouring like bright green blood across the screen, the sound of it reverberating through the hull, through your teeth, through your hair, through your guts. And as we swung in our slow, lazy, terrified circle it gradually faded out and we never heard it again. A panoply of sound and emotion unaccompanied by anything else, understanding least of all.