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Open Mike: New Habits

Monday, 06 March 2023

Happy to report that my lifestyle changes are going swimmingly*. My problems are worse than some others have, and not as bad as some others deal with. But they're mine so they're all I can share.

I'm either supposed to do, or trying to do on my own, five things:

Go back to my plant-food diet, and stop eating sugar;
Wear compression socks;
Lose weight;
Resume using CPAP; and
Exercise.

The Five Doctors (I seem to keep seeing different people) are more or less agreed that I was having heart problems caused by sleep apnea—my heartbeat had become uncoordinated and irregular and my heart wasn't pumping enough blood, so I wasn't getting enough oxygen. This was causing all sorts of symptoms. I've been back on the CPAP for 31 days and the difference is...astonishing. I've gone from extreme fatigue (four naps in one day being the signal that got me to the doctor) to no naps; from oxygen hunger and shortness of breath to breathing normally; from lethargy to energy; from badly fractured sleep (with an avalanche of nightmares) to almost normal sleep; from confusion to normal mental sharpness (such as it is, yuk-yuk).

I've been off sugar and back on my plant-food diet for a mere eight days, and have been working out for only six days, and I've already lost 9.3 lbs. (.66 stone). (I weigh myself first thing in the morning on an excellent scale.) Who knows if the weight loss is attributable to the return of normal heart function, or the diet and exercise, or the resumption of normal sleep, or all those things?

The exercise is interesting. I rather enjoy it. I just take my tablet and read, and that makes the time fly by. I use some combination of a total of five different cardio machines, alternating sitting with being on my feet. I get my heart rate to between 90 and 100 BPM and keep it there. It isn't hard. I'm going to add workouts with dumbbells sooner or later.

Books, books!
I'm really enjoying Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. I love love love his guided tours of subjects far from my usual field of interest; I lapped up his lovely book on physics, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Body is equally entertaining, and bits and pieces of fascinating information fly by. For instance, babies who grow up in houses with cats present almost never get asthma. (I'm on the chapter about the lungs now.) His vivid account of how long it took before we accepted that smoking was linked to lung cancer is very telling. There's certainly a parallel to the obesity epidemic: as Dr. John McDougall says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."

Speaking of which, that's what I'm working on now, habits. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll report back in a month or two. I hope I can do this. (I initially mistyped "can't" for "can"...Freudian slip?)

And speaking of habits—to briefly get back on topic—I'm carrying the camera again. Too many pictures were going by in my daily life. From now on, where I go, the camera goes.

Mike

*Except that I'm having trouble with time management.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Keith Mitchell: "I also enjoy Bryson's writing. Despite being a recently retired registered nurse, The Body left me with a sad sense of my lack of knowledge but simultaneously a sense that more work and research will still facilitate big improvements to our health.

"Glad to hear you are on the right side of your health concerns and hope that your new habits become embedded quickly."

Steven ralser: "If you want to read further about one of the reasons why it took so long to recognize the link between smoking (and second hand smoke)and lung cancer, read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes [and Erik M. Conway —Ed.]. See also https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org."

JoeB: "Good to hear the phoenix is rising from the ashes. I have found going to the gym an excellent way to organize my day—I enjoy the routine. I also enjoy the results of my workout. The social aspects of seeing the same folks at the same time of day cannot be discounted. Diet cannot be ignored. What and how much is eaten make all the difference in our life. I should have turned green if the saying 'you are what you eat' is true!"

MikeR: "Yay for you! And aren't those sleep apnea nightmares horrifying?"

Mike replies: They certainly are. I didn't think I was going crazy, but I did think the cause was fundamentally psychological. I didn't realize it was a symptom of sleep apnea.

Posted on Monday, 06 March 2023 at 09:51 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (7)

Friday, 28 February 2014

The World's Best Job, Con't.

[This week is Off-Topic Week at TOP. This is just a temporary interlude, not a permanent change of direction. Please join us next Monday morning when we'll resume normal programming. —Ed.]

You might remember a former post about the world's best jobs. According to a report I read once that evaluated jobs by a number of basic parameters, including how many people had the ability to do the same job and work time spent outdoors, the world's best job is left fielder for a professional baseball team. I thought that was greatly eclipsed by Dan Castellaneta, who currently earns $300,000 per episode for providing the voice of Homer Simpson and several other characters on the Fox TV show "The Simpsons." Vanna White, the mostly silent woman who touches the letters on the game show "Wheel of Fortune," ranks way up there too. (Oddly enough, both Castellaneta and White are my age, White to within a few days; maybe I'm just considering my own age group?)

But this ain't a bad gig either—this woman is paid $500,000 a year to be the television spokesperson for Progressive Insurance. She plays a character named "Flo." Her real name is Stephanie Courtney. She's a standup comedian and comic actor.

Now that's "nice work if you can get it," as the old* saying goes.

Actually, these might not be the best jobs, just the easiest ones. But then, I've never done well with the question, "What job would you want if you could have any job you wanted?" I think my true answer would be, the job I have now...but maybe with Flo's salary! :-)

Mike

*Depression era, I think. It's a Billie Holiday song, that much I know (written by the Gershwins).

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David Miller: "There's another old song with the line, 'When I'm not near the girl I love, I love the girl I'm near.' With that in mind, most of the 29 different jobs (including three major careers of 10 to 25 years) I've had have been the ones I've wanted most…at the time. Life is too short to spend doing anything else. Bringing enthusiasm to the job is my responsibility and when I can't do the task with my whole heart it's time to move on. (This was a bit of a challenge during the summer I spent cleaning hog barns, but it was only a summer job and I was able to keep the attitude going until going back to school in the fall.) If you're just in it for the money…well look for the best financial return you can get and take pleasure in your bank account. But if you work for the pleasure of the work, you'll be the envy of the world, and you'll know when it's time to move on to something else. (I'm 65. So far it's working for me.)"

Mike replies: Americans know that lyric as "When you can't be / With the one you love / Love the one you're with," from the song "Love the One You're With" from Stephen Stills' eponymous 1970 album.

And more to the point, what you're describing about jobs takes a lot of courage, and, I would imagine, a fair amount of ability (ability, because otherwise people just wash up on the rocks of unemployment, a fearsome place where I've spent too much time). It's not something everyone can manage, so you should be proud of yourself that you were able to accomplish it.

Chris Pisarra: "The best job in the world is lead driver for the Ferrari F1 team."

Rod Graham: "In defense of 'Flo,' maybe her job looks easy because she's good at it? Full disclosure: I'm kind of smitten by her. Lol. But I think there's a kernel of truth in there."

Mike replies: Are you smitten by the character, or the actress? In other instances, I keep getting smitten by characters. Currently I'm smitten with the woman in the recent "Chevy Connected" commercial. That actress plays that part to perfection, even in the space of a few brief shots.

Kenneth Tanaka: "Of course there is no such thing as 'The World's Best Job.' There is only 'YOUR World's Best Job,' defined loosely as something you absolutely love and live to do every day.

"Yes, money can be a distracting factor on both sides. Being richly rewarded to do something that's killing you is no good; I have known my share of these folks. But nor is being impoverished by work you love. I've known some of these, too. Surveys suggest that sweet spots are rare. I am certain that you have more than a few readers who sit at their office computers each day occasionally fantasizing about writing TOP for a living."

Mike replies: And I try to feel grateful every day that I get to do that, my recent difficulties aside.

Tim Fitzwater (partial comment): "Easy jobs are far too boring for me."

Bob Burnett: "But...as actor/writer friends have told me, Stephanie gets $500,000 a year to be Flo—now. Her bio says she's been an actor since 1992. She's been a secretary, caterer, etc. over the years while honing her craft, going to auditions and all the challenges a $10,000-a-year lifestyle that brings. It is nice work if you can get it but it's also only fair to take into account the many, many lean years most actors-writers go through to get to the 'Flo moment' that few get."

Mike replies: True dat. Could be said of many successful photographers, too. Oops—gotta stay off-topic.

Posted on Friday, 28 February 2014 at 05:04 AM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (23)

Wednesday, 26 February 2014

The iPad Air for Reading

[This week is Off-Topic Week at TOP—Ctein's forthcoming column (the post above this one) excepted. This is just a temporary interlude, not a permanent change of direction. Please join us next Monday morning when we'll resume normal programming. —Ed.]

Despite owning a Kindle Paperwhite, which I do like, in recent months I've taken to doing almost all of my book reading (and a little more—see below) on my iPad Air. I have the basic 16 GB Wi-Fi model (in white), which currently costs $493.94. Unlike Ctein I am not a power user: I use the iPad Air for reading and surfing and little else, so 16 GB is plenty. I also have the Smart Cover in black (it comes in a number of colors as well). Some people hate the Smart Cover but I like it a lot. The new one has three sections, so, unlike the older one, it doesn't overlap when it's configured in a triangular shape to use as a stand, but I don't have any trouble with that or any objection to it.

I find the iPad Air to be an immensely pleasing device, but not necessarily actively so—for the most part, for me, it has simply become transparent. I take it with me when I might need something to read (in doctors' waiting rooms or when I'm dining in restaurants alone) and I read with it in my armchair and in bed. I also use it for surfing the Web when I'm watching TV. Battery life is excellent and never an issue for my uses, although charging time is relatively slow. The size and weight are just about perfect—I wouldn't want it any smaller or larger and I don't even think I'd prefer it to be lighter—it has a nice heft and is light and easily hand-holdable as it is. As I say, it disappears for me.

The only time when this transparency in use fails is in particularly bright light or outdoors, when the screen becomes dark, sometimes even too dark to read. If you read outdoors or on the beach, the Paperwhite pulls ahead. I seldom read in bright light so this is rarely an issue for me.

Both devices have illuminated screens, which is much more of a factor for me—my favorite Japanese restaurant is usually too dimly lit to comfortably read print magazines, and I read in bed in the dark. Which screen you will prefer is a matter of taste—the conventional wisdom is that iPads cause "eyestrain" and that the Kindle is better, but the conventional wisdom is not true for me. I'm continually conscious of both the grayish look of the Paperwhite screen and its unevenness, and find the exceptionally clean, bright, crisp look of the iPad Air screen to be much more pleasing. "Eyestrain" is not an issue.

The best thing about an e-reader, apart from the illuminated screen and the absence of physical bulk of files as opposed to stacks of bound paper, is that every book has variable type size. You can make every book a "large print" book or, in my case, a "right-sized print" book, adjusting the font size to taste for any file and reading situation. Very nice.

I still do think that e-readers are best for "read straight through" books of text, but publishers are getting better about illustrations. The last book I finished, Charles C. Mann's 1491, Second Edition (an excellent and fascinating layperson's survey of the current state of pre-Columbian archaeology, a gift from my friend Steve Rosenblum), has a number of black-and-white illustrations. Enlarging the illustrations to full page size is easy and makes them adequately legible, but throughout the book the captions for each illustration appeared on the screen following the image, often above the next image. They'll get it right eventually. Illustrations fare much better on the iPad Air than on the Paperwhite.

I do my reading with the Kindle app and use my computer or the Kindle Paperwhite for purchases from Amazon.

Recently, I've been experimenting with reading magazines on the iPad Air as well. I subscribed to the late David E. Davis's Automobile magazine and have been reading the electronic version. Magazines are a different kettle of fish, because they're so much more illustration-intensive, and I would imagine that each one is different, depending on how good each publisher is at setting up the files. I haven't investigated magazines on the iPad deeply enough yet to know. I'll find out, because based on my good experience with Automobile I'll be reading more magazines on the iPad Air in the future.

E-readers have changed my book buying habits. I now seldom buy reading material in print form, although in certain rare cases I will buy a hardcover version of a book I particularly love after reading it on the e-reader, just because I want to have it. My book buying has thus shifted almost competely to the purchase of photographic books. I have one photographic book in electronic format and actually didn't mind reading it and looking at the pictures on the iPad Air at all—I wouldn't hesitate to buy another—but I prefer ink on paper with photographs.

The bottom line is that I now prefer to do my reading on e-readers, and I prefer the iPad Air above all the other e-readers I've owned (it's my fourth one) or seen. My current book is How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It, Arthur Herman's classic (and wonderful) account of the Scottish Enlightenment, which I'm reading for the second time. Even though I have the print version already, I bought the Kindle version this time around, and am reading it on the iPad.

Highly recommended.

Mike

UPDATE: Kindly commenters have reminded me of three important things I left out of this article. First, that the magazine on the iPad allows for links and multimedia presentations—the current issue of Automobile has two or three videos inline with the contents, which is really pretty great.

Secondly, price: the iPad is overkill as an e-reader, whether compared to the Kindle Paperwhite or to competing tablets. The Barnes and Noble Nook (which might not be around much longer) is dirt cheap by comparison, and the Kindle itself is a fraction of the cost of the Apple product (although as you can see from Ctein's post above this one, the iPad Air is useful for a lot more things, too, including editing pictures, and displaying pictures—not to mention taking pictures! As an e-reader it's expensive, but as an auxiliary computer it's quite reasonable).

And thirdly, the Kindle app allows for syncing between the Kindle Paperwhite and the iPad (and, presumably, other devices). Regardless of which one I pick up or take along, each device remembers what page I'm on even if I'm switching from the other one. Very convenient.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Rob (partial comment): "As far as I am concerned, the Smart Cover is a work of genius. I cannot understand how anyone could think otherwise."

Rowan: "Interesting article. I still far prefer reading paper books over e-books, but well over half my magazine consumption is now done through my iPad, and I read a lot of magazines. I think I see books as possessions, but magazines as consumables."

Moose (partial comment): "You...don't mention the cost differences. I recently bought a backup Nook for our two on sale for $39, less than 1/10 the cost of the iPad Air. That makes a really big difference in how casually one may treat it, more like a book. If it gets lost or broken, it's no big deal, so I'll take and use it anywhere.

Dennis Mook: "To surreptitiously bring in a photographic reference to this non-photographic week, I download and keep a PDF copy of all my cameras' user manuals on my iPad for instant reference. Very handy when you can't quite remember how to get from here to there on our electronic marvels."

Pat Trent: "Mike, reading your column is always a rewarding experience, but especially so today. Thanks to you I learned of two books, 1491 and the companion volume, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, both of which I just purchased for our Kindle Fires. My husband and I will thoroughly enjoy them over this coming rainy weekend while my cameras sit on the shelf awaiting drier weather."

Posted on Wednesday, 26 February 2014 at 12:01 PM in Books, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (31)

Tuesday, 25 February 2014

Yr. Hmbl. Ed. Goes to the Car Show

[This week is Off-Topic Week at TOP. This is just a temporary interlude, not a permanent change of direction. Please join us next Monday morning when we'll resume normal programming. —Ed.]

Continuing "Off-Topic Week" here at TOP, yesterday I unchained my leg from the leg of the desk, popped a new batt into the trusty NEX-6, and hied meself down to the Milwaukee Auto Show.

I really should make the effort to drive down to the Chicago show, which is bigger. The Milwaukee show is something like 70% of Chicago's. In addition, a number of the national brands don't bother to show up here—the BMW and Porsche exhibits, for example, and several others, are stocked and staffed entirely by local dealerships.

I play "eccentric beardy guy" at the car show, wandering around and striking up conversations with strangers. The only other time I do that is when I am out walking the dog—other pet owners being susceptible to random conversation. At the car show, the cars function as pets.

Even given our smallish city's lower status, this year's show seemed a bit depleted compared to past ones, with less on display. Maybe that's because Harry's Toy Store (above left) had fewer cars that appealed to me this year. (No link, and that's deliberate. Not that you'd visit TOP from work, but if you do, and you Google ol' Harry, be sure to turn your sound down first unless you're in a private office with the door closed. Harry's site will make noises that others will identify pretty easily as not being work related.) Harry had some Bentleys and a few 911s and a couple of Excaliburs. The latter are the precise opposite of the kind of car that appeals to me. And Harry himself was not there.

I thought the new Mustang would be thronged with crowds, and evidently it was on the weekend, but on Monday just after the show opened there wasn't a soul around.

American muscle cars are not my thing, personally—they're generally all about twenty to thirty percent too big and fat. The friendly Ford guy I talked to said the new one, like the old one, is sized for "regular guys," which I translated as "obese males." Although the styling of the new one is the definition of conservative (frankly, I have a bit of trouble telling the two apart), it's handsomer than the old one, and Ford is indicating that the improvements under the skin are more extensive. Nobody knows because no one has driven one yet.

Murcun musclecars are not my thing. The only time I'm interested in a Corvette V8 (this is the GM LT1 in the new 2014 Stingray) is when it's in a Miata.

Personal favorites
So I'll get right to my favorite cars from the show, starting with...

...The Mazda 6, which I think is the best midsized sedan right now. I'd buy one over an Accord, Camry, Legacy, Verano, Fusion, or the recently Americanized Passat. The car you see here has but one engine option—a 184 HP I-4—but you can get it with a proper manual transmission if you want.

Incidentally, the guy you see polishing the handsome Mazda 6 in this pic gets the nod as the most interesting guy I talked to at this year's show. He has a detailing business in Miami and works for Mazda during show season. Fascinatingly, he subcontracts for a company that supplies test cars to automotive journalists—they have a warehouse full of the latest models that they deliver to journalists all over the Southeast. I'd never before heard about this aspect of magazine journalism straight from the horse's mouth so to speak. He said he can always tell how well a particular journalist liked a particular car based on the mileage when he goes to pick it up and how much detailing it needs before it's ready to go out to the next guy.

Oh, and he drove one of these from Atlanta to Miami—on one tank of gas. Mazda, whose products historically have a reputation for poor gas mileage, has been busy optimizing its engines for mileage lately, the so-called "Skyactiv" technology, currently applied to three of its vehicles, the Mazda 3, the Mazda 6, and the CX-5, a small SUV. He said he got very close to 40 miles per gallon in one of these on his trip.

He says I'm in the wrong business, by the way—he regaled me with tales of some of the quite considerable perks enjoyed by automotive journalists.

Next in the favorites parade is the only BMW that interests me any more, the littlest coupe, which will henceforth be called the 2 series. This is the M235i with the proper and necessary I-6, which in this case comes with an unnecessary turbocharger (I like naturally aspirated engines. SOL these days). The 1-series, which I've driven several times, was as odd-looking and frumpy as bowler hat—it had melted side slabs, among other egregious visual faults—but the 2 series fixes the car's appearance adequately. As I've (somewhat snarkily) opined before, BMW aspires to make all its cars look like Pontiacs now—the company turned its back on it iconic design language in the woeful (IMO) and still-controversial Chris Bangle era—but that tendency is minimized in the 2-series too.

I would have to become an actual Internet tycoon before I could afford one of these, but I like 'em.

Being of a photographic mindset even when acting the snapshotting tourist, I always appreciate it when manufacturers bother to light their cars nicely. And as I am secretly European at heart, how could I fail to like the Golf, which is the bestselling car in Europe year after year? This is the first time I've laid eyes on the new gen 7, which has not arrived in North America yet.

The interior struck me as "optimally contented"—i.e., what you get when a very large, very capable car company works very, very hard to maximize the appearance of value and quality while minimizing actual cost. On the evidence of this car, Europeans are very practical (inexplicably, Murcuns don't like hatchbacks) and also have good taste.

I can't wait to see the better versions, mainly the GTI. The ultimate Golf will be the gen 7 Golf R, which should be something really special...except that it will cost roughly as much as the base version of the car pictured just above this one, which would make for a dilemma of the first order were I shopping in that price class. The gen 7 Golf R won't arrive here until the Spring of 2015. Maybe I'll see it at next year's show.

The surprise Best of Show for me—with one big fat caveat, namely that I haven't driven one yet—was the 2014 Acura ILX. Fit me like a glove, and I loved the plain but very nice interior. And it struck me as a very right-sized car.

It's essentially the opposite of the high-value base Golf. Generally, I tend to like cars that are simple and straightforward in design, but that have higher-than-necessary build and materials quality. Which goes directly against the grain of almost all industrial consumer product these days.

Including most cars. With very few exceptions, high build and materials quality comes only hand-in-hand with electronic frippery and unecessary luxo feature-creep. It's very unusual to see a relatively simple car that's built considerably better than it has to be. The ILX is essentially an overbuilt, higher-quality Honda Civic. And God bless Honda—with the ILX, it has mated the slower, smaller engine to the slushbox, and paired the faster, higher-horsepower engine (the same one found in the Civic Si) with the stick shift. That is the proper order of the Universe, so thank you, Acura.

Would that Mazda could get with that program. In the new Skyactiv Mazda 3, Mazda continues its brainless historical practice of pairing the stick shift with the worse engine, and not offering a stick with the better engine. Which, for enthusiasts, is backwards. The old Mazda 6 came with an underpowered 4 that you could buy with a stick, and a great 6 that was a much better motor for the car but that was only available with an automatic. When I informed the rather officious Mazda product rep factotum person that if I could have gotten an '07 Mazda 6 with both the 6-cylinder engine and the stick shift I would have bought one (true), he said, dismissively, "You and three other people."

Oooh, wrong answer, Mazda man! Very wrong. You need to pander to me even if I'm an idiot, and pretend I'm right even if you think I'm wrong—it's an auto show, and those are the rules.

Meanwhile, I'm almost scared to drive an ILX. I really would like to like it, and I'm more than a little afraid I won't. I think I'll hold off on that, and just continue to imagine, for a while, that it's as good as I think it might be.

Finally, my sentimental favorite of the show—but one I couldn't get a halfway decent picture of because of the cramped space and the barricades in front of it that ruined the view. A proper "chairs and flares" (i.e., the desired seats and fender flares) Dino 246 from the early '70s. I was a good student in high school and was rewarded with unsupervised study halls, most of which I spent in the library reading car magazines. The Dino was one of the cars I daydreamed about from the printed page in those days. A small, low car with a midships-mounted 6-cylinder engine (the reason it wasn't called a Ferrari—to Enzo, Ferraris were 12-cylinder cars), it was intended to serve as a low-cost entry into the Ferrari marque. Kind of ironic, given that they are currently collectors' darlings and go for between $300,000 and $600,000. It actually looked a bit odd in the '70s but has aged very well. They seem to get prettier with every year that passes.

Really nice to see.

Mike

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Colin Dixon: "I think I always knew you were a secret European. Here's a link to something that probably wasn't at the show but which, since I read a review of it, has seriously affected my ability to be rational about any other car. Fortunately the price is too silly even to start saving for it."

Mike replies: Didn't Jeremy fall for the open-top version of that on "Top Gear"? Me, I just think of how hard it would be to get something like that serviced.

Luke Smith: "I'm really enjoying OT Week. I mostly agree with your general car philosophies, but...modern (twin-clutch, not slushbox) manually shiftable automatic transmissions have become far, far better, more enjoyable, and yes, more 'involving' than stickshifts. Turbo motors have likewise improved. A very small, lightweight motor with a ton of torque is just fun. And coupled with nearly instant shifting, really fun."

Jim: "Will keep my '82 VW diesel Rabbit. Fifty-four miles per gallon on the highway, 46 mpg on the back roads as I am out photographing in the Utah and surrounding desert areas. Paid for more than 25 years ago; 450,000 miles and still going strong."

Posted on Tuesday, 25 February 2014 at 09:57 AM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (50)

Monday, 24 February 2014

Scoring System Idea for the Olympics

[This week is Off-Topic Week at TOP. This is just a temporary interlude, not a permanent change of direction. Please join us next Monday morning when we'll resume normal programming. —Ed.]

Sorry to go on about this, but I've had a brilliant idea and I just have to put it forward where it will doubtless get shot down from every angle—because that is the sort of thing I do.

Here's how figure skating (and other subjective sports) should be scored at the Olympics. First, the judges watch everyone perform. Once everyone has had a turn, everyone gets a medal of some metal or another—all the performances that are very good would get silver, all the performances that were particularly outstanding would get a gold, and all the performances that were not quite as good or that contained faults or mishaps would get a bronze. A version of the old 1-2-3 sorting method.

The "big reveal" comes at the end of each contest.

At the end of the entire proceedings the person with the most gold medals in the various programs would be the overall gold medal winner. And if there are ties, so be it—don't ties make sense when two or more competitors do particularly well?

Same for high diving and gymnastics in the Summer games—anything with a subjective component and without a hard measure of ordering. Yes, it would make for more medals passed out in subjective pursuits, but since when has that been an issue at the Olympics, where there are more medals available for ping-pong than for the decathlon?

That seems to me a much more accurate, and sensible, not to mention humane method of subjective judging. If you think of it, the whole notion of awarding arcane numeric scores down to tiny fractions and insisting of rigid rankings is utterly absurd in an activity with so much subjective individuality. As if figure skating were a bobsled race. It's not.

Because, really, why should we have to decide whether Adelina Sotnikova is a tick better than Kim Yu-na or the other way around? Weren't they both excellent? Our insistence on pretending it's a straight contest with an absolute measurement of victory is untrue to the reality of the activity.

Somebody needs to start a movement. :-)

Okay, fire away, flak gunners.

Mike

P.S. For some reason I have a particular fascination for fresh rethinkings of existing sports. There was a recent attempt to create a new pool game to address some of the competitive deficiencies in existing games. It's called "American Rotation." (You can look it up yourself if you happen to be interested.)

P.P.S. I'm off to the Milwaukee Auto Show after my doctor's appointment this afternoon, so next up in OT Week will be a rundown of my fave cars from the show.

Mike

TOP's links!

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

richardplondon: "One of the BBC commentators a few days ago, was talking very... hopefully about one British competitor as 'a concrete medal contender'—upon which a colleague quipped, to the effect: 'Is that what the Russians make the medal out of, when you are delighted to come in fifth?'"

Nick Cutler: "That's a very sound approach to scoring activities that have a component of 'style,' subjectivity, or arcane rules. How will you apply this to an exhibition of prints? or a photo contest?"

Russ: "Nope, sorry. All 'sports' that need to be judged should not be at the Olympics fullstop. Highest, fastest, longest I believe is the way to go."

Posted on Monday, 24 February 2014 at 11:56 AM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (29)

Sunday, 23 February 2014

Open Mike: Site Style

"Open Mike" is this site's editorial page, which frequently wanders off topic. It appears only, but not always, on Sundays.

Every responsible publication has a style sheet.

What's a style sheet? It's a set of institutional guidelines for the presentation of formatted material—mainly, the verbal material. Every time a consistency issue comes up, an editorial decision as to how to handle it is made, and then, assuming all goes smoothly to plan, that's the way it's done from then on.

Some such decisions that need to be made, for example:

Are italics or quotation marks used for movie titles?

Is "ƒ/11" written thusly, or F11, f/11, f11, ƒ/11.0, or some other way?

Is it "12 mm" or "12mm"?

Is it "RAW," "Raw," or "raw"?

Are you going to use periods after initial letters, for instance in "U.S." and "U.K.," or not?

And so on. And on and on—there are literally hundreds of items on any given publication's stylesheet. (Even if most of them reside in one person's head—e.g., mine—and aren't actually written down.)

A publication's style doesn't have to accord to one of the standards such as the Chicago Manual of Style. They can, or they can devise their own. Some use a standard but with certain deviations.

Different publications have different rules about conformity. At one publication I worked at, an editor could override the style sheet if he or she deemed it advisable. At another, the rules were very rigid and could not be broken by anybody for any reason (for example, one rule there was that a widow line—the last partial line of a typeset paragraph—had to contain at least two words. Never mind if the one word was a long word like "disproportionate" or the two words were short ones such as "it is," the two-word rule was inviolable).

Note that style is not the same as copyediting, although the two are related. Copyediting just cleans up written language and makes it conform, more or less, to standard grammar. And both are different from proofreading, which refers to going over the material to make sure there are no typos, misspellings, or typesetting mistakes. TOP has no copyeditor and no proofreader, although helpful readers sometimes alert Yr. Hmbl. Ed. to errors.

Some publications have notoriously quirky style points. For instance, the New York Times still uses titles and surnames (Mr. Smith, Ms. Jones) rather than first names or unadorned last names for named persons, which has not been common elsewhere in America for decades. The New Yorker uses quotation marks for book titles, which is wrong, but it has done it for many decades and it continues to observe its own tradition. (The current editor, David Remnick, got rid of many of that magazine's quirky style points along with its delightful old-fashioned font, but maintains that one.)

(Referring to a company or a publication as "it," as I just did, was also old-fashioned editorial practice, one that TOP adheres to because the opposite sounds fey and puerile to the ear of Yr. Hmbl. Ed. There is no monolithic "they" at a place like Canon Inc.; everyone answers to someone and no one is making decisions alone, much less all together. But I'm unusual in this regard.)

The Atlantic divide
A frequent cause of confusion and error is the many differences between British and American typography. A few examples:

"Mrs Smith" is proper in the U.K., while in the U.S. it would be "Mrs. Smith."

Commas are placed within the quotation marks when a quote is contained in a sentence in the U.S., "like this," but outside of the quotation marks in Britain.

A long dash is set as an em dash with no spaces in America—like this—but in Jolly Olde it's typeset as a half space, an en dash, and then another half space. Since half spaces aren't common or easy on computer keyboards, this gives rise to the use of full space / hyphen / full space "dash," like this - which is both wrong and ugly on both sides of the Atlantic. At the very least, those aping British typesetting should use full space / en dash / full space – like this, even though that's not quite correct.

There are many differences between British and American typesetting. It's good to stick to one or the other and not mix them up randomly.

It used to be that the Internet held itself above such details, but I notice lately that more and more sites are using conventional editing practices and fewer and, thus, fewer and fewer of them read like they were written by high school sophomores.

Conforming to a stylesheet isn't a requirement. It simply makes the publication easier and smoother to read for those loyal readers who regularly peruse it—it's a courtesy to readers. That's a good enough reason to make the attempt in my book.

Mike the Ed.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Joe Holmes: "Oh man. You think Mac vs. Windows was an ugly debate, or Nikon vs. Canon? Start asking people to weigh in on the serial comma, or whether a question mark belongs inside the quotation marks!"

Mike replies: There are no arguments when it comes to site style. As Michael Reichmann once memorably said about running one's own website, "It's good to be the King." Of course the kingdom is small and its borders inflexible....

cfw: "'High School Sophomores'? You are too kind. More like 7th graders with a solid 'C' average."

David Miller: "Your intentions are honourable, sir. (My spelling gives away my English heritage—and the em dash reveals the linguistic schizophrenia which is the Canadian's lot in life.) I think standardization of style is essential within any publication…if only for the pleasure of tossing it to the four winds and shocking or irritating your readers from time to time. As a copyeditor and former proofreader—and hand type setter, if you can believe it—I find TOP to be admirably consistent and usually quite free of typos. Bravo!"

Mike replies: Thank you! I am a terrible proofreader, so I put in a lot of time hunting down those typos.

You might be interested to know that I had an opportunity to photograph the last hot lead press in Washington, D.C., and missed it—by three weeks. Before that happened, I did get 500 letterpress business cards for $50, however, which was cool.

Hugh Crawford: "Mike, you are remiss in not mentioning this [we use 'em —Mike] or on the other hand more to the point when discussing a publication's house style there is this example.

"According to ASA standard PH2.12-1961 'The symbol for relative apertures shall be ƒ/ or ƒ: followed by the effective f-number.' ƒ/11.0 or ƒ:11.0 with the hooked italic f. [We always use ƒ/, but I never use .0. —Mike]

"As for capitalization of file formats, if you want to make sense it is TIFF or TIFFs, when talking about .tif files but never TIFF files and JPEG or .jpg files but never JPEGs because you should always capitalize acronyms. Americans never seem to capitalize FIAT or SAAB for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino and Svenska Aeroplan AktieBolaget respectively. The usage of all caps RAW for raw files is truly WTF IMHO."

JK: "The problem when you become professionally involved with style sheets is that you (by which I mean 'me') can easily become a total bore on your choice of pet peeves. One of mine happens to be that 'f/' for aperture. I used to do work for a few camera companies in Japan, where the rather odd convention is to use an upper-case F, e.g. 'F2.' Now I suppose that's fine if you're writing in Japanese, but if you're creating materials in English for the international market, it just looks bizarre and wrong. Most of the clients I dealt with eventually came around to understand that. But there was one that never did, instead always insisting on changing every 'f/' to 'F.' And now, years later, I see they're still doing it. Sigh...."

Mike replies: Barbarity. :-)

Sven W: "Whether it's writing a blog, taking a photograph or skiing down a slope, a lot of technical details need to be addressed to make it look effortless!"

Posted on Sunday, 23 February 2014 at 02:33 PM in Blog Notes, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (52)

Friday, 21 February 2014

Kim Yu-na Wins Gold (OT)

So I watched figure skating this year. There was a judging controversy; I gather this has never happened before. (Sarcasm.)

Any South Korean readers out there? It's incomprehensible that Kim Yu-na's masterpiece of a final performance didn't sweep everything before it. Amazing artistry, on a different level than what we had seen before it, including the athletic but workmanlike performance of the hometown-favorite gold medal winner. (No offense, Russian readers.)

Then again, in 1956, when Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai was in worldwide release, Around the World in 80 Days won the Oscar for Best Picture. That's sort of equivalent to the figure skating competition last night.

And speaking of dubious judgment, what's with this "medal count"? Take a look at what I found at a U.S.-centric news outlet:

(As of 2/20 in the U.S.)

How does it make any sense to count a gold, silver, and bronze medals as being equal in the medal counts? The above data shows that Norway is first, not fourth. And Germany is tied for second. The U.S. is only first in one thing: third-place finishes.

I'd be interested to know how the standings are being reported in Norway. I'll bet they're not all bowing and scraping to the U.S.'s obvious superiority in bronzes.

It's all suspicious, if you ask me. You might as well count per-capita medals relative to the number of athletes on any nation's team.

When they put me in charge, golds get five points each, silver three points, bronzes one point. Why hasn't the Olympic Committee worked this out?

...Although I notice to my own amusement that this little system, which I just thought up on the spot right this second, puts the U.S., Germany, and Norway into a dead tie...! Maybe I don't know best, as I kibitz from my armchair. Maybe golds should trump everything in the standings and the next tier down should break ties.

Then again, haven't I just been complaining that not all gold medals are well deserved?

Because I don't know skating. But I know art. Surely it's not always clear who skates best. Last night, though, it certainly was.

Mike

UPDATE Sat. 2/22: See Mani Sitaraman's analysis in the Comments section for the best analysis of how to present the medal count. An excerpt: "The logic of counting gold, then silver, and then bronze is unassailable. Just to refresh our memories, competitors don't 'win' medals. They win events. [The medal count] first measure[s] which country's athletes have won the most events."

And the nation-against-nation enterprise is essentially jingoistic anyway, because, as Scotto points out, the Olympic Charter says that it's the athletes who should be emphasized, not the countries they represent.

Obviously U.S. outlets are pandering to U.S. readers with their "totals first" medal count presentation, and as a dutiful U.S. citizen I resent it. I don't need to be pandered to.

I'm happy to root for other countries who are competing in sports their populations care about and have a tradition with. I root for Austria in skiing, for example, absent a U.S. kid competing who has a chance. And although I root for our hockey teams, I'm quite happy when Canadia* wins. I mean, it's their thing, you know? And we like Canadia:

(Source. Thanks to Dennis Fallon for the link.)

Similarly, I'm not quite sure how I could be accused of pro- South Korean prejudice, especially in a sport I don't know anything about and don't follow. I hadn't ever heard of Kim Yu-na before about a week ago. This is the first year I've ever paid attention to figure skating. (Next Winter Olympics, if I live that long, I'm going to follow curling. You have been warned).

*I think that's the name of the place where Canadians come from—it's up by the North Pole somewhere**.

**We like you, but we still like to twist yer tails. :-)

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David: "The official medal count is from the IOC."

(IOC medal count, Sochi 2014, as of the morning of 2/21 in the U.S.)

Hans-Olav Andersen: The Norwegian view."

Dennis Fallon: "The graphic ('How Sotnikova Beat Kim, Move by Move') and this comment...

"Yu-na Kim outskated her, but it’s not just a skating competition anymore—it's math,' Browning said, explaining that Sotnikova racked up little points here and there to move ahead of Kim.

...were very enlightening. Corruption aside, people were always uncomfortable with subjective judging. But the points system leads to skating to math. Teaching to the test. Designing lenses to DxOmark. At least Dpreview awards a gold or silver award subjectively based on the experience of shooting with the camera, rather than based on the (useless IMO) numeric rating it gives.

"I enjoyed watching the skaters, but I treat it more as a show than a competition. And I feel bad that they spend all those years training so hard just to put on a show. Overall, the placements weren't bad, I don't think. I think Ashley Wagner's scores were unreasonably low (loved that short program to Pink Floyd), yet there were at least four skaters who were better. Gracie Gold was excellent, yet the medal winners were probably all just a tad better. Mostly, it's the gold medal award to the home country skater that smells a little foul. She skated well, no doubt. And maybe the judges car argue that she racked up points. But she wasn't the best skater out there (and I enjoyed the Italian skater better, too).

"Maybe they should drop all pretense of artistry if they're going to score based on technical points. They have ice dancing. Maybe create a solo ice dancing category. Why waste the choreographers time? Skip the music and just skate around doing jumps. The Russians clearly know how to work the system. The 15-year-old who had top marks in the team competition said all her focus is on the components and not artistry because without the components, you have nothing.

"At least the fans appreciate good skating, and the uproar should bring some consolation to the other skaters."

Marcin: "Mike, I think you are a bit biased here. I watched the skating competition, too, and afterwards I honestly couldn't tell whether Sotnikova beat Kim or vice versa, but it turns out (look at NYT's move-by-move)that the Russian chose more difficult moves and jumps, she took more risks and succeeded so why shouldn't she win the gold? She was a better athlete. Competitive skating isn't just about grace. If you are interested in pure ice entertainment, there are dedicated shows for that, but the Olympic Games is about sport. Also, look at the scores, Kim did get more points in the 'Skating skill and artistry' category, but it wasn't enough to beat her rival."

Mike replies: Maybe I am not sufficiently appreciating Adelina Sotnikova's accomplishment. She certainly has a winning personality, and her joy after winning was a pleasure to watch. She did skate beautifully. Still, if you Google "figure skating gold," you arrive at a number of articles about the scoring—with titles such as, "Did the Right Female Skater Win Gold, or Was the Competition Rigged?" on Slate, "Russia's figure skating gold was surprising, not shady," on USAToday, "Gold for Russia, silver for Yuna Kim, and controversy ensues" from CNN, "Figure skating fans outraged over Adelina Sotnikova's gold medal win over Yuna Kim" on sports.yahoo.com, and so forth. So I'm not the only one.

John Camp: "Trying to figure out 'national' scoring in Olympic games is not rationally possible. You suggest that perhaps Norway should lead...well, why not, there are (I think) 33 medals available in biathlon, but only 30 in alpine skiing. Really? Lots of big temperate countries have snowy mountains, even India and China, but the tradition and terrain for the biathlon? Thirty-three medals? It's sort of like how in the summer Olympics, there are 30 medals available for fencing. Really? Support your local fencer. Did you know that there are 48 medals available in various forms of...canoeing?"

Mike replies: And still not even one for cue sports. I'm with Efren Reyes, who thinks pool should be in the Olympics just so the Philippines can get a gold medal!

Dennis Ng: "Korean are not fair when they host the Olympic. So, it is fair to be unfair!"

Mike replies: You make a good point. A certain "home country advantage" is indeed taken for granted by most. In part because of the crowd, in part because of the judges, and in part because athletes seem to be somewhat more inspired when competing on their home turf—witness Britain's extraordinary achievements in 2012.

Posted on Friday, 21 February 2014 at 09:46 AM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (43)

Monday, 17 February 2014

New Favorite Sport: BX (OT)

I sometimes call the Winter Olympics the "fall down Olympics," because it seems like that's what everybody is either doing or trying not to do. Most everyone is skidding or sliding or skating or skiing or sledding over ice and snow and—oh no! Sometimes falling down.

But have you seen this sport called boardercross? A.k.a. snowboard cross or boarder X or BX. It's like a surfboard race over frozen waves and jumps, with wipeouts. I never could see what the big deal was with the "halfpipe," whatever that one's called (or the original skateboard version), but I think I love boardercross, which I'd never seen before this very day. Not least because the best boarder usually wins big...sorry, but I just can't see how a speed skater or a two-man bobsled team that edges its rival by a couple of hundredths of a second qualifies for a gold rather than a silver. That's just too close to "they went the same speed" to me. Snowboard cross is awesome. I gotta get cable.

This would greatly improve downhill ski racing too...send a half dozen of 'em down the mountain at once. Now that would be cool.

Mike
(Thanks to NBC)

ADDENDUM: I'm not serious about simultaneous downhill ski races. Obviously that would not be prudent. Simultaneous racers makes snowboard cross much more interesting, though. And come to think of it, I enjoyed the BMX bicycle version of the same idea at the last Summer Games, too. —Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Michel: "Just seconds before I clicked over to TOP, I was telling my wife that this was really exciting. We had just watched the women's final last night (go Canada). This is crazy, but crazy fun."

Speed: "Wintersports: The orthopedists' full employment scheme."

Posted on Monday, 17 February 2014 at 05:09 AM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (28)

Sunday, 09 February 2014

Open Mike: Against a Headwind

My head is full of pictures I didn't take, and they're all eloquent, perfectly composed and thought-provoking. Here's one I missed:

The entire world seems crusted in snow. It's eight degrees out (–13°C) and the wind is blowing, which makes the cold worse. A major thoroughfare near where I live, 50 mph (80 kph) speed limit, three lanes, no sidewalk. The landscape beyond is bleak, white, white steam escaping from squat buildings. Spindrifts of powdery snow in sheets blow across the surface of the roadway. And at the edge of the road, a middle-aged man, bundled up, head down, is cranking a bicycle against the wind and the cold. Pedaling laboriously. A mile away I encounter another citizen on a bike.

'Kay, you don't know much about what's happening there. But here are a couple of things that are pretty safe to infer:

Those people have somewhere they have to get to. You don't go out in this kind of cold on icy roads on a bike because you feel like a burrito or because it occurred to you that it might be time for a haircut. Who knows—but what's the thing most people don't have any choice about when it comes to getting somewhere on time?—work, probably.
They have no other possible mode of transportation—no car, no cab fare, no friend or relative with wheels to give them a lift. Because, again, the only mode of transportation that's worse than a bike in this weather is walking.

It's not the rich getting richer that I worry so much about in my town here in the heartland; it's the poor getting poorer. My guess is that being out on a bike in weather like this means you're in pretty dire straits.

Not too long ago a young man at the Walgreen's told me disgustedly that all the retail jobs in town were cutting back their hours, and that he was down to 22 hours a week behind that cash register. Worse, he said, the store wouldn't give him regular hours—each week his schedule changed. Why was that important? Because it meant he couldn't get a second job—the arbitrary schedule meant he wouldn't be able to guarantee his availability at either one. "But how am I supposed to live on 22 hours work a week?" he asked me, rhetorically.

Didn't sound like fun to me either. But it could be worse. You could have to ride a bike to get there, in the bleak February cold.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP. It pedals laboriously past on Sundays.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Thomas Tveit Rosenlund: "I usually do ride my bike to work all year round here in Oslo, Norway. I guess it's about 10 km each way. Most of the winter it's below freezing, and with plenty of wind from time to time, snow and ice are among the other obstacles (but the spiked tires are really good these days). I actually kind of prefer it to my car (parking is impractical), bus (I don't like the bus, it's slow), train or tube (not nearly as flexible). But most importantly I think biking to work is the perfect way to start the day as I work in an office, it's good to have one outdoor activity on the daily schedule."

Mike replies: Ah. So if I had taken that photograph, my interpretation of the photo would be only provisional. And if I were a reporter, then I would have had to talk to the cyclist to see why he was riding his bike.

Mark Steigelman: "You did take the picture, just not photographically. I saw it in my head as soon as I read your terrific description. I, though, imagined the people on the bikes have lost their licenses because of DWIs. The beauty of being the viewer or the reader is that we bring whatever we want to the story or picture. You never know the reality of the situation."

Mike replies: Ah, DWI is a possibility that didn't occur to me. Very plausible.

I do make these same kind of interpretations with photographs, by the way. Well, with some photographs. You're presented with a certain amount of evidence, and you weigh some possibilities as to what might be going on. With me it's seldom just fantasizing, however—I don't bring "whatever I want" to the picture, but try to see the evidence of the picture for what it might be trying to tell me. Always accepting that I might be wrong.

And I think you can know "the reality of a situation"—though perhaps only to a certain level or depth. For instance, with a photograph of a person riding a bike in a snowstorm, assuming you believe the picture at all, you know that a person was out riding a bike in adverse weather. In that case you can reasonably take the word of the photographer about certain things—for instance, the location, the time and day, the velocity of the wind and the temperature—because photographers are people who are as likely to tell the truth as other people are. You might be able to glean other true things from the picture, from his clothes, his bike, his posture or expression, and so forth. You don't know a lot of other things, some of which could be discovered by talking to the bike rider and asking him. My point is that what's usually true is that you can discover some things about the reality of the situation from photographs, a lot of which admittedly you don't know absolutely for sure, and then there are a lot of other things that you really don't know. It's just like evidence of every other kind—it needs to be weighed, considered.

John Denniston: "Peter Penn in his book It's All About the Bike tells a story of moving to a small village in Wales where the only people who were seen riding bikes were those whose driver's licence had been suspended for some reason or other. After living in village for over year and still riding his bike bike every day, a local leaned over to him in a pub and whispered in his ear, 'Did you kill someone?'"

Posted on Sunday, 09 February 2014 at 05:13 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (44)

Open Mike 2: The Problem of Translation (OT)

A week or so ago there was an interesting article in the Times called "Translation as a Performing Art." The author, Antony Shugaar, points out that there are really no untranslatable words, but that there are untranslatable worlds.

I thought what follows might be interesting for those who read my short book review of the Feng/English/Lippe translation of the Tao Te Ching the other day. I simply went to Amazon and made clips of a few translations, which you can compare for yourself.

These are all of the relatively simple first chapter. If even these are too much to ingest, try just reading the last sentence of every version (summarized below).

First up is Arthur Waley, an immensely well-respected earlier scholar (d. 1966):

Next, Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo (the latter famous for his "relevant" translations of the Odyssey and Iliad, intended to be simple, plain and direct in order to appeal to college-age young people):

Now the Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English, and Toinette Lippe translation I wrote about:

Here's James Legge, the Scottish sinologist who died in 1897:

Robert G. Henricks:

Red Pine:

Thomas Cleary:

Stephen Mitchell:

Note that I made no effort here to find translations that differed from each other; I just grabbed a few that came up relatively early in Amazon searches or that I knew about—or, in the case of the Addiss and Lombardo and Red Pine, that readers mentioned in comments to the earlier post.

Looking at just the last lines we have:

The Doorway whence issued all Secret Essences

The gateway to all mystery

The gate to all mystery

Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful

The gateway of all subtleties

The door to all beginnings

The mystery of mysteries / is the gateway of marvels

The gateway to all understanding

So you can see what English-speaking readers are up against here. To really understand which translation might be best for you, you have to read a bunch of the commentaries on each chapter, to get an idea of which interpretations you tend to agree with, and then evaluate which translations tend to provide that viewpoint.

I might (gently) point out, however, that many translations have both certain felicities and certain shortcomings; none are superior in all ways, especially in light of the many interpreted meanings. For example, the first line of Chapter 60 in Feng/English/Lippe says "Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish" with no further explanation. The generally accepted view of this sentence is that when you fry a pan full of small fish, if you try to stir or flip the fish too much, they'll just disintegrate and you'll have a mess on your hands; so you have to be patient and keep your hands off and just let them cook, slowly. My preferred translation doesn't even hint at this explanation, but a number of others do.

And that's just one line of one chapter.

And then (whoa) consider that there are literally hundreds of translations...many more than just the ones available on Amazon now.

Holy mountain-dwelling Sage, Batman.

In the 1950s and '60s, when LPs first began to appear and there were only a few classical music performances available on records, audiophiles identified that people tended to be most loyal to the performances they encountered, and got used to, first: the first performance you engaged with tended to be the one that seemed most "natural" and "right" to you and that you continued to feel sounded like the piece "ought" to sound. The same might be true of Tao Te Ching translations—however you encounter the work first, the one you engage with first, is the one that seems the most right to you going forward.

The Feng/English/Lippe book is the one I encountered first, my gateway to the mysteries of the Tao as it were. Maybe that's why I like it best. But throughout all my subsequent happy tourist wanderings through various versions, interpretations, and translations, it has held up for me compared to many alternatives.

Mike

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Featured Comments from:

psu: "You will generally find that the 'you like what you learned first' rule also applies to software user interfaces."

JK: "I won't try to pass judgement on these translations, but I can tell you that the one with the Chinese next to it is, by far, the most literal. I've found the same thing myself: if you ever have to publish a translation accompanied by the original language (especially something as impossibly distant from English as classical Chinese), it tends to keep you honest.

"As the old saying goes, the beautiful ones aren't faithful, and the faithful ones aren't beautiful."

FrasSmith: "My current favourite is the Ursula K. Le Guin version (possibly because it's the only one I own).

The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

"I like it; it seems to make more sense to me."

Mike replies: As Ursula herself says, her version is a rendition, not a translation: she bases it on the 1898 transliteration version by Paul Carus. She doesn't speak or read Chinese. This doesn't make it worse, necessarily, but it's worth mentioning.

I haven't read her version but based on the 'taste' you've given above, I think I should.

Jim Bullard: "As a student of biblical history I wonder if translators of the Tao run into the same problem biblical scholars do, namely that there are no original texts, only later copies of copies of copies. Before printing presses books were duplicated by hand and changes crept in, mostly inadvertently but sometimes deliberately by copyists 'correcting' what they thought were mistakes in the version they were copying. As a result (in the case of the bible) a comparison of say the 1200+ oldest copies we have of the New Testament, no two are identical. Granted most of the differences are minor but some are not and some of the differences lead to significantly different interpretations.

"The Tao is, I believe, about six centuries older than anything in the New Testament and the oldest existing copies are at least two centuries later than the original.

"And then there is the imprecision of language. One of my favorite pieces of music from Cat Stevens/Yosuf Islam is the Foreigner Suite. Near the beginning and repeated near the end is the lament 'There are no words that I can use because the meanings are left for you to chose,' a thought that I hear echoed in the beginning of the Tao."

Burton Randol: "The inherent ambiguities which are aspects of translation between natural human languages are well-known. I don't read Russian, but have been told by many highly educated bilingual (English/Russian) Russians that it is impossible to capture Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' in English. Vladimir Nabokov, who was natively trilingual in English, French, and Russian, certainly thought so, and as a corrective published a literal prose translation intended to precisely preserve the sense, if not the rhyme and meter, of the poem.

"A story, quite possibly apocryphal, but which I have heard since the 'sixties, involves a supposed early machine translation from English to Russian:

'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' > 'The vodka is good but the meat is rotten'

"Another similar anecdote, this time from from English to Chinese, or in some versions, from English to Russian:

'Out of sight, out of mind' > 'Invisible insanity'

"For anyone wishing to evaluate the level of truth in these old stories (it's not really absolutely clear), a useful reference is a June 1995 article in MT News International."

Ken Rahaim: "'Holy mountain-dwelling Sage, Batman'— just imagine the variations in the future translations of that line some 2,000–3,000 years in the future :-) ."

Posted on Sunday, 09 February 2014 at 05:05 AM in Books, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (32)

Sunday, 02 February 2014

UnSuperbowl (OT)

As I write this there's about ten minutes left in the Rottenbowl—and I'm watching pool on YouTube (American Rotation, a recently invented new game). Expectations for a well-fought, evenly matched game could almost not have been higher, but Denver picked the wrong occasion to play their worst game of the year by far.

It's almost an insult to Seattle—they didn't get to earn their win over a worthy opponent. A really good Dallas-area high school team might have given the Seahawks a better fight. Shades of the '80s, when blowouts in anticlimactic Superbowls were threatening the popularity of the big game (that's the era that established the popularity of showpiece Superbowl commercials—there was little else about those games that was fun to watch).

Huge letdown, huge disappointment. Denver has been on the losing side for some of the worst blowouts in Superbowl history—Superbowl XXII when my Redskins (it's now more politically correct to call them "The DC NFL team" because of that ever-more-cringeworthy name) beat them 42-10, as well as the most lopsided score ever, two years later, when Joe Montana and the 49ers beat them 55-10 in Superbowl XXIV (still the most points ever scored in a Superbowl). But man, nobody expected that this year. Even by Denver's historically spotty standards, this was baaaaad.

Fun to watch if you're a Seahawks fanatic, but for the rest of us, a great big thudding dud.

Well, you know what they say: "There's always next year."

Mike

ADDENDUM: The above might not be a fair or a very astute interpretation of the game; it merely expresses my feeling of disappointment that we didn't get to watch a better game after all that (in my mind, perfectly justified) buildup.

Sports fans do have to deal with the games they actually get. In fact, that might even be main psychological aspect of sports from a viewer's perspective: learning to reconcile what we hope will happen with what actually does.

I'm still very disappointed. Feels to me like an interesting season fizzled like a firecracker that failed to go off.

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Featured Comments from:

Curt Gerston: "Ah, but here in Seattle: thirty-eight years of frustration...then sixty minutes of sheer delirium."

Mike replies: True dat. I said the same thing after Superbowl XXII. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Posted on Sunday, 02 February 2014 at 10:11 PM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (27)

Monday, 27 January 2014

Open Mike: The Indestructible Squeaky Toy (OT for Dog Lovers)

Lulu at twilight in the park, 2009

Medical science cannot cure the common cold. Add to that that human engineering and materials science apparently is incapable of creating a dog's chew toy that a) squeaks and b) that my quarter-pit cannot rip to shreds in a matter of minutes.

Take for instance one particular $9 pet shop toy widely advertised as "indestructible" (the ongoing experiment at TOP World HQ has comprised a statistically significant sampling):

"Indestructible" squeaky toy's best record: approx. 1 hour and 50 minutes (in timed 15 minute daily sessions)

Lulu's best record destroying the same $9 "indestructible" squeaky toy: approx. 7 minutes 30 seconds.

Lulu's groomer Nicole also has a bully-breed who is larger and even stronger and more exuberant than Lulu, which is saying...well, a lot. I asked her if there was such a thing as an indestructible squeaky toy, and her answer was a very emphatic "NO!!" She said she even found a chew toy advertised as "tiger tested," which supposedly survived being gnawed on by full-grown tigers. Her part-pit had it strewn all over her living room in an hour.

This seems like a challenge that humanity ought to be up to, now that it's 2014, but guess not. Just sayin'.

Mike

"Open Mike" is TOP's weekly ramble in the park. Published occasionally on Sundays. A day late this week, and yes, Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is also typically a dollar short.

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Featured Comments from:

Rick Grant: "When I saw the title of this post in my RSS reader I jumped into it straightaway in the hopes of finding the indestructible squeaky dog toy. But alas, there has not been a breakthrough in toy technology. I keep Border Collies and there isn't a squeaky toy that a Border Collie cannot reduce to fragments within half an hour. But for some perverse reason I keep buying them, only to be bitterly disappointed."

darr: "Human engineering and materials science do not equal the indestructible willpower and determination of a bored canine."

Posted on Monday, 27 January 2014 at 01:31 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (21)

Monday, 30 December 2013

Open Mike: Monday Morning Quarterback...LAST Monday (OT)

You remember my football picture:

For those of you who weren't in on the joke at the time, the Green Bay Packers' colors are green and gold, the Chicago Bears' colors are blue and orange.

The caption when I first posted this was "Coming Dec. 29th." The date of the second Bears-Packers conference meeting for 2013. For the first time since I moved back to Wisconsin, I was rooting for the Bears against the Packers yesterday.

I think Bears fans might want me to stop doing that.

I couldn't have foreseen how dramatic the teams' second meeting would be. By virtue of a tie with the Vikings many games ago, the Packers could knock the Bears out of the Division title with a win yesterday. By virtue of the fact that the NFC North leaders have the worst records of any Division champs, the losing team would go home.

It was winner take all.

So here's what I wrote to both a couple of Packer-fan friends and a couple of Bear-fan friends last Monday:

Here's what SHOULD happen: AR [Aaron Rodgers, Packers quarterback] should not play, and the Packers should lose to the Bears. AR can have a solid offseason to recover. Then, with a rested and rarin' to go quarterback and running back in the prime of their respective careers, and defensive draft picks in the offseason, Green Bay will tear up the League next year and win another Super Bowl. And this year, Chicago will go on to at least the NFC Championship game.

Here's what WILL happen: The Packers will beat the Bears with or without AR. The reason is that Green Bay always breaks Chicago's hearts, and what better way to break their hearts than to knock them out of first place AND the playoffs at the same time, in a game which will most likely remain meaningless for the Pack either way? It's karma; it's destiny; it has to happen. Packers 21, Bears 20. The Packers will take the lead for the first time in the last 40 seconds, just to grind it in.

And here's what did happen. Aaron Rodgers, knocked out for half the season by the Bears in week 9, did come back. At the end of the game, the Bears were leading by the ominous-looking (to Packers fans) score of 28-27. The Packers, making one last desperate drive for a possible field goal to eke out a win, were being pretty well stopped: they had already survived one fourth down and had fourth and eight near mid-field with 38 second left to play—for you European readers, that means they have one chance to make at least eight yards or they lose the ball—and Aaron Rodgers threw a giant arcing touchdown to Randall Cobb (also newly returned from a broken leg). Packers 33, Bears 28.

I was two seconds off.

Well, and had a few details wrong. But still, that's the spookiest football prediction I've ever made.

Aaron Rodgers unloads the game-winning pass.
Photo by Rick Wood, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

I thought the Bears would have gone further in the playoffs.

If San Francisco thrashes the tar out of the Green Bay defense next weekend it will be hollow consolation to all my Bear-fan friends, who know that the Upper Midwest's very own private Super Bowl took place yesterday...and those @!#%! Packers did it to them again.

But for Bears fans smarting over that weird fumble-recovery touchdown: notice in the replay that #50, Bears linebacker James Anderson, got to the live ball first. If he had scooped it up and run with it, that whacky TD might have gone the other way. It was really his assumption that the play was dead that made that play unfold the way it did.

I actually don't know how to feel about this. I feel elated...and I feel stunned. I've lived in Milwaukee, and I've lived in Chicago. I love the Bears, and I love the Packers. I have Bears-fan friends and Packers-fan friends. I even live between Green Bay and Chicago, more or less. By all rights, Sunday's game should have made my head explode....

But what a game.

Mike

"Open Mike," a day late this week, is the off-topic editorial page of TOP.

Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

John Haines: "As you say, what a game! Glad for the Pack and especially for Rodgers, who after having his collarbone broken by the Bears Shea McClellin in game 9 that sidelined him for the remainder of the season, until last night when he rendered his own kind of poetic justice. I too had mixed feelings about the game. My wife is from Chicago (we live in NY) but I've always liked the Packers, at least partly because they are the only non-profit, community-owned major league professional sports team in the United States. Chicago has the loop, the second tallest building in the world, the Art Institute, and so much more. Green Bay has meatpacking plants and the Packers. What else do they have to cheer for up there in the frozen tundra?"

Mike replies: Well, the Packers are really the team for all of Wisconsin...which has approximately the same number of people as the city of Chicago and environs. And the tundra here where I live is pretty well frozen today, lemme tell ya.

Al Benas: "Wow; talk about weird coincidences. I graduated from Virginia Tech—founded in 1872—which only gained initial national recognition when Michael Vick played there. I always root for pro teams with Tech alumni (Carroll Dale played for the Packers in the first Super Bowl). So now Tech alum James Anderson (Bears) watched as Tech alum Jarrett Boykin (Packers) picked up the fumble and scored. Somebody wasn't listening to Coach Beamer's fumble recovery lecture. Bittersweet day :-( ."

Posted on Monday, 30 December 2013 at 01:59 PM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (16)

Friday, 27 December 2013

What is Time? (OT)

The annual "X" column by Ctein

Seasonal greetings to you all. As is my tradition, my X-mas present to you is another "X" column that addresses one of the mysteries and wonders of the physical universe.

This time I'm going to take on the preeminent culture war of modern physics. No, not string theory—although all the spleen that's being spewed about over that topic does have a certain entertainment value. We even have a famous physicist raging that it has ruined an entire generation of scientists. Really, dude? I haven't read such pointlessly fiery rhetoric since the debates of the mid-1800s. I'm staying away from that one.

The question that splits the community and interests me is considerably more subtle and profound. I can state it in five words:

Is time a "process" or "content?"

I'll spend the rest of this column explaining just what the hell that sentence means.

The thing is, while we all experience time, we don't actually understand what we're experiencing. There is no physics, no experiment that really addresses this. We can measure time. Well, actually, spans of time...but we don't know what we're measuring them in.

The common idea is that time is content, a real, physical thing. That's embodied in a lot of the way we talk about time. Einstein brought us the concept of space-time, which no one really disputes (at least, no one who should be taken seriously), conceptualizing it as another dimension, the so-called "fourth dimension." Bodies move not just through the three spatial dimensions but the fourth time dimension as well. A standard way of visualizing this is a "world line." Think of a planet in a circular orbit about a star, viz. figure 1. The star's at the center, and the planet goes round and round. But in this flatland world, if you draw in the "third dimension" of time, as in figure 2, you can describe that same path as a spiral, where the planet moves ever forward in time, around the star.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

The concept of time as a real physicality is embodied in a lot of real physics and, more fancifully, the whole idea of time machines and traveling through time.

So, why don't we just accept this notion of time? It lets us make excellent physical predictions about the world, and, as I often say, data trumps theory. When the data seems to say that's the way it is, why even consider that it might not be?

Because there's one big problem with this notion of time as content. We can't observe the content! So far it has proven utterly impossible to experience any point in time except the present. We cannot move freely in time, like we can in the three spatial dimensions. Every attempt to come up with a real physical model that results in "travel through time" fails. It doesn't matter whether it's forward or backwards. We are stuck in time, moving forward at the rate of one second per second.

Now, the fact that every time machine theory has been disproven (or is, at least, unverified), so far, doesn't make it impossible. Some of them have come close. But that doesn't actually prove anything. The folks who designed perpetual motion machines came close. That doesn't mean that they are actually possible (hint: they're not). Close-but-no-cigar still means no cigar. So far, so far as we can tell, time travel is not possible. But we can't prove that.

(I should mention at this point that the kind of time travel that comes up in relativistic time dilation is a peculiar special case. It really involves the transformation of coordinates, it is not a free motion through time as a physical entity. It doesn't come into play in this debate, and I won't be discussing it further.)

And that's why there's a really, really big problem with the idea of time as content, because we have absolutely no idea, no physical model that can explain why we can't access other parts of the content than "now." The simplest and most satisfying explanation for that is that the reason we can't is because they aren't there. There are no other parts to time than now. Time is a process, the evolution of the universe second by second. It's a little like the universe is a great big grandfather clock, and the pendulum swings and the gears go tick tick tick, marking the passage of time. But that's just what the clock does; the clock is not time.

Much of modern physics incorporates this notion of time, too. A lot of quantum mechanics doesn't include time explicitly—it's something you apply to see how a wave state changes. Time is that second-by-second progression of physicality. there isn't really anything before now or after now. It is entirely now.

So, why is the debate so hot and heavy and laden with florid rhetoric. Because, not to put a fine point on it, this is philosophy, not really physics. Not yet. Both perspectives are equally attractive (or unattractive); the appeal of one or the other defaults back to an unstated sense of what "obviously makes sense" about the nature of reality. Once you buy into the axiom, the rest follows logically. But you have to buy into the axiom, and if two different philosophers buy into two different axioms, well, then there's no meeting of minds.

It is a wonderful puzzle and a profound question: What is the nature of time? Everyone's got an opinion, and none of us really have a clue.

Ctein

Physicist Ctein dabbles in photography and/or photographer Ctein dabbles in physics. We are not quite sure which is the correct philosophical model; but it's always fun to go with the flow column (tick) by column (tock).

Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Erik Petersson: "This is an old problem. In the fifth century Augustine of Hippo said: 'For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken of by another. What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not. Yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away, there would not be past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time. Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not; and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present, and should it not pass into time past, time truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present—if it be time—only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even this is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be—namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be?'"

Posted on Friday, 27 December 2013 at 04:03 PM in Ctein, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (37)

Invisible Post (OT)

Those of you who don't like my other enthusiasm can pretend this post isn't here. For those who do, this is a great match if you haven't seen it—Johnny Archer vs. England's Karl Boyes in the 2010 Mosconi Cup. Short (race to 6) but exciting, with some great shotmaking and lots o' dramatic tension.

Mike the Beginner

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Posted on Friday, 27 December 2013 at 03:25 PM in Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (2)

Monday, 09 December 2013

Football Day (OT)

Coming Dec. 29th

As regular readers know I am not allowed to write about pool, so I never do, even when I must forebear from linking to great matches like this one from the 2010 Mosconi Cup in which Darren Appleton makes not one but two spectacular shots. Half-table draw (translated into English, "screw") is tough enough, never mind from nine feet away. For the second one, watch from about 33:00 when he gets badly out of position after hitting a side pocket point and then...well, you can see for yourself. My point here is that the shot above is not a pool picture, it's a football picture. NFL fans will understand.

I'm off to the Chicago-Dallas game today, thanks to TOP reader and photographer friend Michael McC. (check out his neat new Paris 2014 calendar). I'm taking my friend Cynthia, an expatriate Bears fan who lives and works in Wisconsin and yet never wavers from her Bears loyalty. This brings her in for quite a bit of persecution because she never thinks the teasing is funny...she takes every bit of it completely seriously. Which of course inspires more of it from everyone, from her co-workers at the hospital to her son-in-law, who according to her is raising her grandchildren in the wrong religion. And she's never been to Soldier Field before in person. As an added bonus for her, they're even retiring Ditka's jersey tonight at halftime. This should be fun.

I am prepared, except that I do not own warm footwear*. So unless I lose both feet, I will be back tomorrow with some very interesting news.

In the meantime, GO BEARS!**

[UPDATE Tuesday a.m.: Despite taking 4 1/2 hours to get to the stadium, we, and the Bears, had a fabulous night...we walked into the stands literally as the ball was being kicked off, and the Bears played as if they were charmed...long drives and a score on every possession, no punts and no turnovers. Amazing. The crowd loved it. The Bears won going away. It wasn't even as close as the final score.

All the more amazing in that it was just cold as billybejeezus. I had on an undershirt, shirt, fleece jacket, heavy down parka, a scarf, two hats (the outer one a Bears hat borrowed from Cynthia), my hood, ski mittens, long underwear, flannel-lined jeans, two pairs of heavy wool socks, and shearling boots, and Michael kindly supplied chemical hand-warmers—and I still wasn't dressed warmly enough. I had to go inside for a while after halftime to warm up. At the end of the game when the people in front of us left and deprived us of our windbreak, and Michael left to beat the crowd out of the parking lot with five minutes left and took his lap-blanket, I started thinking of poor Rob Hall sitting on top of Mount Everest freezing to death in 1997. I still don't know what the temperature was, but whatever it was, it was a lot colder than that. Thanks to the wind, I mean.

I didn't take a single picture with my iPhone. I had Siri giving me directions to the stadium, and the inch-by-inch drive took so long that by the time I got to the game the battery was kaput.

But that didn't spoil the evening. Far from it. Just a wonderful experience. It was great to see Michael again (more knowledgable company at a Bears game would be hard to imagine, and we talked photography a fair bit). And about the game, what can I say? Winter Bears in the heart of beautiful downtown Chicagger***—pure old-style Murcan football, as good as it gets.

Mike
(Thanks to Michael)

*I also do not own a pocket camera, apart from my iPhone 4S. It's because I can't justify the high cost of one of these just for occasional use. Tonight will mark the first time I ever deliberately took just an iPhone to a photo opportunity. I'll let you know how that goes.

**Every team I've ever rooted for has had a rivalry with the Cowboys.

***Although not known as a tourist destination, Chicago really is one of the most beautiful cities in America, especially in the wintertime and especially at night.

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Featured Comments from:

Jayson Merryfield: "Honestly, I'd rather read about pool on here than football. The world is already awash with football news, analysis, anecdotes, and opinions. Pool though...that's a fun world to digress into."

Mike replies: Sorry, you will never read a word about pool in these precincts. The readership will not stand for it. Of course, you might occasionally see a photo essay or hear about what I did on my day off. But nothing about pool unless it's entirely coincidental.

Steve Smith: "'They're even retiring Ditka's jersey tonight'...Translation to English please!!"

Mike replies: I'm just a casual football fan, but I'll do my best: Mike Ditka was a member of the 1963 Championship team, founding coach George Halas's last Championship, and later returned to coach the team to its only Super Bowl win so far, in 1985, an event and a team which is still remembered with great pleasure in Chicago. Coach Ditka is still widely recognizable nationally, has been lampooned on Saturday Night Live (a satiric variety show), and continues to do commercial endorsements. Teams "retire numbers" to honor particular players; the idea is that the number 89 will be forever identified with Ditka and no future players will be allowed to wear it.

Ironically, Mike Ditka came very close to running for the Senate from Illinois in 2004, and it's widely believed that if he had run, he would have beaten the person who eventually did win the Senate seat...one Barack Obama.

The Bears have a small problem with retiring jerseys...they're one of the oldest teams in the NFL and have retired so many numbers that...well, they're running out of numbers. So they've said that Coach Ditka's number will be the last number ever retired. They'll have to find a different way to honor future stars such as, quite possibly, Alshon Jeffery, who last night made the most spectacular catch I've ever seen. It was magnificent in real time, take my word for it.

Bears fans, how'd I do?

Posted on Monday, 09 December 2013 at 12:16 PM in Blog Notes, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (25)

Wednesday, 04 December 2013

Irony (OT)

I've decided recently that I really don't like American irony. It's too...ironic. I'm tired of it.

I mean, the star of Fast and Furious dying in a car wreck?

Back to local...on Monday we had a worse day than usual. That is, fewer people shopped through our links and bought stuff on "Cyber Monday" than on a normal Monday. A mundane old nuthin' special Monday.

You know what they say: Oh well. Thanks to those of you who did.

I just don't like irony any more.

Mike

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Arg: "You need a 'Like' button. Your posts are funny. Even when you're losing money. (Is that another irony?)"

Jack Nelson: "Maybe your typical TOP shopper is just a tad too sophisticated to pay attention to manufactured events like 'Cyber Monday.'"

Mike replies: Good point. After all, I can't picture TOP readers slugging it out on the floor of Wal-Mart on Black Friday.

Posted on Wednesday, 04 December 2013 at 12:49 PM in Blog Notes, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (15)

Sunday, 24 November 2013

Open Mike: Turkeys

"Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Sundays. Sometimes. When I feel like it.

I have to be a little careful here. One way to make writing vivid is to hit things a little too hard. You know. Exaggerate. Overstate.

I could offend people if I hit this too hard, so I gotta keep the reins in hand.

But I just thought someone should state the obvious: America is officially no longer thankful. We're now just greedy.

We probably always were, but, like...like...well, like little kids on Christmas morning, we restrained ourselves a little for the sake of decorum. We waited until the Thankgiving leftovers were in the icebox, figuratively speaking, before we stormed the doors of the Wal-Mart and trampled a few of our less-nimble fellow shoppers underfoot.

(Whoa, boy. Easy.)

I'd like to say that I enjoy Christmas as much as anyone. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be quite honest. It's a Type A holiday, and I'm a Type B personality. Well, maybe Type Z. My goal in life is to have only one thing to do every day, and then put that off until tomorrow. The Type A's, on the other hand, just can't wait to get started charging around hither and yon buying up small mountains of presents for the landfill, dragging trees indoors, slathering the house with blinky lights, and blaring that insanely chipper "holiday music" from every fencepost until every public space in the land has been transformed into some sort of Yuletide North Korea.

I'm personally afflicted by getting songs stuck in my head, so I don't even want to hear the titles of Christmas tunes. It's nothing against the tunes themselves: as Edgar Allan Poe wrote, describing "earworm" in his short story "The Imp of the Perverse," "Nor will we be the less tormented if the song in itself be good, or the opera air meritorious."

Like the rankest conservative, I am in favor of a number of social-engineering laws. Except the laws I would favor would be somewhat different. For example, one would be that no citizen shall under any circumstances be subjected to commercial advertising against his or her will. This would get rid of billboards, television commercials, painted public busses, and about 85% of what makes Christmas so oppressive*. I am also in favor of a law which would forbid exposing citizens to Christmas music against their will. I partly define my freedom in a free country as the right to not listen to any music I don't want to listen to.

A move toward legislation of this sort currently does not have support in Congress, that I've heard.

But look, on a more serious note, speaking of freedoms: it is truly obnoxious—no exaggeration—that businesses are allowed to destroy Thanksgiving for tens of thousands of their employees. The powerless shall forever be persecuted, and the religious will evidently fight with firm resolve and spirited purpose any effort to allow the meek to inherit more than the meagerest share of the earth. That much I understand. But let the little people enjoy their freakin' turkey dinners, you goddamn greedy ogres.

That really should be a law: No shopping till sun-up on Friday.

Meanwhile, I will not be doing any shopping at any store that opens before 12:01 on Friday. After Thanksgiving is over. First, we give thanks.

Of course, my little personal protest will have no actual effect. I already have to scrupulously avoid all retail establishments at this time of year, on account of that little problem I have with the music.

Mike
(Photo by Christy of The Daily Dish, used with permission)

[NOTE: TOP will not be updated this coming Thursday, in honor of the quaint and antiquated old holiday of Thanksgiving.

NOTE #2: Six additional paragraphs were sacrificed in the writing of this post. If you think the ones that are left are over the top, you should have seen the ones you're not seeing. :-) —Mike the Ed.

NOTE #3: And bravo to Tim Cook (thanks to Chuck Lavis for this.)]

*As you might expect, I really appreciate the emerging trend in online videos of allowing people to skip ads after the first five seconds. Bravo to that. Of course, since I like it and approve of it, it means the practice will soon be extinct.

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Featured Comments from:

Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "Over the years, the holidays from Memorial Day to New Year's have blended together in retail America like the East Coast megalopolis from Bangor to Washington D.C.—one giant smear.

"In the spirit of the holidays, I refrain from more than a glancing reference here to the preferred public punishments and pillories of yesteryear, like the stocks, flogging and liberal application of tar and feathers. Ha-rumph."

Ed Hawco: "I feel ripped off. Give us back the missing six paragraphs! ;-) "

Rob L.: "Amen. I also really love B&H and I believe Adorama, who shut down their web ordering as well as their stores for religious holidays. Although, I think at least one of them is open on Thanksgiving...so ya can't win. :-) "

ADDENDUM in the cold light of Monday morning: Regarding Christmas, I might be guilty of self-referentialism. George Carlin has a great joke about drivers. Ever notice, he asks, why everyone who drives slower than you do is an idiot, while everyone who drives faster than you do is a maniac?

The psychological insight behind the joke is fairly profound. It's the reason everyone approves of their own politics. You drive the speed you do because that's the speed you feel comfortable driving. It stands to reason, then, that you believe that speed is the best balance to choose.

If you make the mistake of being self-referential, then everyone who drives faster or slower is in error. They're either driving slower or faster than the speed you think is best. So they're either idiots (i.e., incompetent, compared to you) or maniacs (i.e., reckless, compared to you).

Except, of course, they might not be. What's needed, of course, is a "theory of mind" of other drivers. That is, you have to set aside your attempt to calibrate everyone else to your own comfort level, and first consider that they simply might be doing exactly what you're doing yourself: driving as fast as is comfortable for them. Maybe a faster driver is not being reckless; maybe she has a better car and better skills, and youthful eyesight and youthful reflexes, so she feels comfortable driving more quickly. And maybe she's absolutely right: that is, she really is driving perfectly safely, for her. Maybe a slower driver is an older person who doesn't drive as often and doesn't see as well, so he thinks it's prudent to drive more cautiously. And maybe, for him, it is. Only after you detach the other person's behavior from your own self-selected norms can you more accurately evaluate whether they're actually acting poorly.

It's usually charitable to assume that others are doing the best they can. At least at first.

So here's why this is relevant: the way my own family celebrates Christmas seems just right to me. We strike the perfect balance, I think. It's neither too much nor too little.

So is everyone who chooses to celebrate more or less somehow wrong?

Only if you're being self-referential, assuming that what you do is the reasonable choice and holding everyone else to that standard.

It's quite possible that some people are idiots and some people are maniacs when it comes to Christmas—it's always entertaining to spot the outliers. But of most people, really, you have to step back and say, well, maybe they're just doing what they think is best...for them, and by their way of thinking, and according to their own family customs and their personal energy and level of enthusiasm.

It's not Christmas that I object to. It's the excessive commercial exploitation of Christmas by businesses and corporations—the worship of Mammon.

I especially object to the asinine notion that it's worth obliterating the Thanksgiving holiday just to give Christmas shoppers half a day more shopping almost a month in advance of Christmas. That really does offend me. And I am absolutely offended by corporate bullies who wantonly ruin the Thanksgiving holiday for their dependent employees. That's just wrong.

Preserving Thanksgiving won't hurt Christmas one iota.

It might hurt businesses; but just a little. And it's not the right of business to destroy an old an honored American holiday just for their own gain. It's not like they're being asked to sacrifice all of their Christmas profit; just a little of it.

I'm not anti-Christmas. I'm becoming pretty militantly pro-Thanksgiving, though. Unfortunately it seems like it might be necessary, these days.

Mike

Cyril: "It says a lot about the state of the public debate in North America that a writer has to pre-emptively (and profusely) apologize for writing an opinion piece about...Christmas, of all important things. You should be happy you live south of the border, though. Due to Canada's Thanksgiving being placed in October, the Christmas season here starts on the morning after Halloween, Christmas music and all, making November an even more miserable month than it already is (at least for people who enjoy the sight of a sunny day from time to time)."

Posted on Sunday, 24 November 2013 at 10:37 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (81)

Wednesday, 20 November 2013

OT: A Tale of Two Movies

This week's column by Ctein

This fall I saw two movies that were conceptually so similar that they could share the same description. Both were, for the most part, successful, and I can recommend them both. The ways in which they approached their subject, though, were different enough, artistically speaking, to make for an interesting compare-and-contrast.

Both were suspense movies, and for that reason this review is going to be entirely "meta." I hate having a suspense movie ruined by knowing details of the plot before I'm supposed to. Consequently, I am going to tiptoe very carefully around all the plot details. I request that you be equally circumspect in your comments. Assume that even the least spoiler or reveal will be redacted by Mike's mallet. Okay? We're good? Let's continue.

Both directors are from south of the border (Mexico and Ecuador respectively). Both movies are about how astronauts deal with having a space mission go seriously wrong; both focus on people, not technology, while making serious, and mostly successful, attempts to be as scientifically accurate as possible. Both got praise from serious critics.

The first movie is one you may never have heard of, due to its limited release. Happily, it's a movie that should play quite well on the small screen.

Europa Report by Sebastián Cordero has an ensemble cast with no big-name actors. It's a cinematic version of an investigative report on the mission failure of the first crewed spacecraft to visit Europa. It is a suspense mystery, related in a nonlinear fashion. The movie opens with a technical failure midway through the voyage, and part of the puzzle is just what that failure was. The movie unfolds from there to what happened before and afterwards, from several viewpoints—record footage from the mission, extensive statements by the pilot on what went wrong, and the reactions of the project manager and staff back on earth. The story unfolds in real (if nonlinear) time, spanning two years.

It really does play like a real world space mission gone awry. Europa Report resonates with the Columbia investigation, the Challenger report, and, if you're old enough to remember, the Apollo 13 postmortem. The movie takes place after the fact; the suspense and the mystery derive from the viewer being in much the same position as the investigators. You don't know the totality of what has happened; you have to assemble the pieces and develop a coherent whole picture.

For anyone with any affinity for the space program, it's an extraordinarily moving movie, due to the technical and human realism. When the project manager expresses her anguish at not knowing what has gone wrong, it brings you to tears.

Two flaws keep the movie from being entirely successful. The lesser is that the initial technical failure turns out to have a completely implausible explanation. Non-technical viewers won't catch it, but for a movie that is attempting verisimilitude, it's, well, lame. That particular failure mode simply never, ever would happen on a real mission. That wouldn't matter, except it's the very first mystery you're presented with and so it demands a believable answer.

More seriously, the movie becomes predictable. Once you discern the pattern (most viewers will), you know that when the astronauts behave in certain ways, there will be certain consequences. It's not like a bad teenage horror movie where they stupidly split up to explore the haunted house, with inevitable carnage. The characters in this movie have very sensible and believable reasons for doing everything they're doing. But when the consequences become predictable, there goes a lot of the suspense.

Still, I recommend it. It's rare to see intelligent, accurate space drama. I doubt it will pick up any awards, because pictures this low-key rarely do, but it is a very good movie. Fortunately it will play very well on a small screen, since you'll likely not get to see it in a theatre.

The second movie is, of course, Gravity by Alfonso Cuarón. Instead of being a suspense mystery, this is a suspense thriller, one that demands the biggest, clearest screen you can see it on. I saw it in IMAX 3D; I've never felt any other movie needed that.

Instead of an ensemble cast, 99.9% of Gravity involves just two major stars. Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are at the very top of their forms. It is all about them. This is, in my opinion, where one of the few weaknesses shows up in the movie. The movie drops us right into the thrill ride with hardly any foreplay. I think the movie would do much better with just ten more minutes of character development at the beginning. These are characters you're supposed to genuinely care about. Clooney and Bullock are amazingly good, but I think that's asking a bit too much from the very weak character development the audience is given in the few minutes before things go all roller-coastery. It worked for me, but I know some viewers who just couldn't engage with the actors.

But so long as you can, you're off and running. The script is excellent and the dialogue is realistic and believable, carried by exceptionally capable actors who know that the entire movie is riding on just them. There should be a couple of Academy award nominations coming.

I feel obliged to point to the most evident technical inaccuracy in the movie, because this movie also strives for extreme verisimilitude. Fortunately, it's an inaccuracy you can entirely ignore, as it's just a plot device, not a central mystery as in Europa Report. The orbital mechanics in the movie aren't real. You'd think that would be a big deal for a movie set in Earth orbit, but it's not! The friend who recommended Gravity to me is a genuine rocket scientist working for SpaceX. It didn't bother him; it didn't bother me. Don't let it bother you.

This wasn't done out of ignorance; the technical advisors knew how to do the orbital mechanics correctly. The problem is that if the orbital mechanics were done correctly, the events of the movie would take place over months or more, as they do in Europa Report. That becomes an entirely different movie, especially when the point of the movie is about two characters and how they deal with adversity and each other.

One last observation. I'm pretty well convinced that Cuarón worked with two different endpoints in mind. The movie as shown plays great. But I'll bet anything that he also considered ending the movie after the last bit of spoken dialogue. That works, too!

That's it for this time. Next week I'll be reviewing the new Apple iPad Air.

Ctein

The Ctein show plays on TOP's big screen on Wednesdays.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Spencer H.: "I'm glad someone else watched Europa Report. I have always really been into astronauts and space, and this was a very rare movie that really got it right in the believability department. I did find that the 'found footage' documentary style was most likely the most successful and well done I had ever seen. At times I was almost buying it, really getting invested in the whole thing. I agree with you 100% on the issues with the movie, but in the end, it was still very fun, and one of the better 'hard science fiction' movies made in a long time."

Stephanie Luke: "I've seen both of these movies—one in glorious 3D and one through Netflix on my computer screen—being a fan of space stories and special effects. I enjoyed both immensely.Your reaction to them was very similar to mine. I only had one little carp about Gravity. Sandra Bullock, though a lovely woman, is, after all, over 40, and no one can have skin that perfectly smooth and flawless without liberal application of Photoshop (or some similar software). I'm a huge fan of Photoshop—as anyone knows who has ever seen my photographs—and 'making the world more perfect one image at a time' is my dearly held motto, but it was so unreal in an otherwise very realistic-seeming film."

Ed Hawco (partial comment): "Regarding the character development, I wonder if the lack of it was a deliberate choice based on the idea that we, the viewers, are supposed to put ourselves in the shoes of the characters and to wonder how we would feel and what we would do. You could argue that any good piece of fiction uses this device, but in this case I think it was more deliberate than usual."

John Robison: "Well, I guess we are all different. I happened, and I mean 'happened' to see Europa Report. I was waiting for the glue to dry on a 4x5 plywood box camera and looking through Netflix when I came upon it. It is so hard to make fiction look like authentic reporting and this just did not seem to me like something real. Besides Apollo 13 (and yes, it had its inaccuracies) the last film that felt real to me was Good Night and Good Luck. When a movie is filmed so as to look like reportage then the bar is very high."

Rob Reiter: "Saw Europa Report at home and Gravity in 3D IMAX and I agree completely with your comments on both. It's like you read my mind. Should I be concerned?"

Mike replies: Ctein cannot actually read minds. On the other hand, he knew I was going to say that.

Posted on Wednesday, 20 November 2013 at 10:23 AM in Ctein, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (26)

Sunday, 17 November 2013

Open Mike: Weight-Loss Diet Update

"Open Mike" consists of Yr. Hmbl. Blggr. going off-topic in a concerted way. It shows up here on some Sundays.

I'll try to make this short. A lot has changed since my last post on this subject.

I've reached the half-way point in my weight-loss diet. I committed to stay on the diet for 70 weeks, with a target weight loss of one pound a week, because when I started I was 70 pounds overweight (according to conventional BMI calculators, which can easily be found online).

My requirements are a bit demanding. These are my limitations:

I'm quite lazy (about many things, definitely including food);
I can't cook, and I'm unlikely to learn—I just don't like it, and have no talent for it; and
I'm not gonna suffer. I tried "torture diets" and calorie-restriction diets, and they're not for me. Anything that requires the consistent application of extraordinary willpower just ain't gonna cut it for a lackadaisical undisciplined lazy dude who hates to cook.

Here's where I stand:

Week: 35
Weight loss: 35 lbs.

So I'm doing okay. So far.

Note that this level of exactitude is not the result of luck or wisdom, but adjustment: when my weight loss has been more than one pound a week, I took steps to slow it down; and when it was less than one pound a week, to speed it up.

My diet, which I call by the awkward name of "The Gruel-and-Grass Diet" (I was never good at naming things), is very simple. Here it is:

Restrict yourself to three meals a day.
One meal (breakfast) is 1/2 cup of oatmeal, with a few additives to make it more pleasant, and nuts.
The second meal should be 1/2 cup of converted rice, perhaps with a few additives to make it more pleasant.
The third meal should be a sensible prepared meal of your choice. That one meal is where you can introduce variety to your daily fare, and also where you can indulge whichever theory of healthy eating you happen to believe in.
Strictly avoid salt, sugar, fat, and any processed food products designed to induce and encourage cravings.
Weigh in once per week at the same time of the same day, and keep adjusting your habits so you average 1 lbs. of weight loss per week. I use one of these, because I got frustrated with my obviously imprecise bathroom scale. Too much weight loss is as bad as too little.

That's pretty much it. It's not a "lifetime eating plan." It's meant to be a temporary weight-loss diet for normal people who find they are obese and need to lose a great whackin' pile o' poundage. (Losing 70 pounds is not trivial.)

I'm perfectly happy with my breakfast. I eat my half cup of oatmeal with some cinnamon and one level teaspoon of sugar, usually with a small amount of fruit added (raspberries, strawberries, bananas, blueberries, or kiwi). I also eat one-third of a cup of mixed nuts. I mix at least five types of nuts, including pistachios, almonds, cashews, pecans, Brazil nuts, and filberts. Nuts are very good for you, but they're also highly caloric, as I discovered one week when I snacked on them liberally.

With anything you're prone to overeat, such as nuts in my case, it's good to measure it.

I'm not entirely happy with my other two meals. Still tinkering. Mostly, I find it difficult to plan ahead and then cook. To my rice in the evenings, I will sometimes add a cup of cooked wild rice, and I'll use different sauces and marinades to vary the flavor; however it's not easy to find sauces that aren't loaded with sodium and sugar. Sometimes I add half a can of red beans and a dollop of barbecue sauce, which is tasty. Often I have my rice and a large bunch of salad greens, which seems to do the trick. As with the nuts, I mix many different kinds of lettuces and greens, including spinach greens.

Symptoms
I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I really like eating this way. It makes life easier, and I'm mostly very comfortable—I'm only mildly "peckish" for a few hours in the evenings (which is when I used to overindulge). And I miss sweets, which are very similar to a drug for me.

And, as you will hear from lots of people who've lost a significant amount of weight while getting adequate nutrition, I feel so much better it's amazing. I can really hardly believe it.

Of course I still have a long way to go.

I began the journey that resulted in this diet a little over three years ago, in response to a suggestion from my brother, Dr. Scott Johnston, a Ph.D. psychologist. Since then I've surveyed a cross-section of the popular literature (I've read approximately 55 books on dieting and nutrition). My conclusion is that the science of nutrition is currently in a primitive state, about like medicine before William Harvey or epidemiology before John Snow. We lack fundamental clarity. Accordingly, devotees of various belief systems are full of a passionate intensity (exactly as theorists of disease transmission were before germs were discovered), even though the beliefs to which they adhere are widely divergent.

That third meal
It's impossible to dictate to others which belief system they ought to choose. So, for that third meal, you'd follow your own course.

Personally, after reading The China Study at the suggestion of a few readers here on TOP and watching the companion film "Forks Over Knives," available on Netflix, I've adopted for my third meal what a TOP reader named Grant Sellek (he comments as "Arg") named "V+1." Except I'd call it "V+x," where V = vegan and "x" is the number of pounds of animal protein you'll allow yourself to consume per week.

Note that you can be a vegan and eat very unhealthily (what are called "junk food vegans"—after all, caramel popcorn is vegan!), so it's probably better to refer to it as a "whole food, plant based" diet like T. Colin Campbell does.

For me, x = about 1 cup of whole milk a day (split between two large mugs of coffee, the second of which I seldom finish) and maybe a third of a pound of raw and cooked fish and seafood a week (I go out for sushi).

My suggestion is that for your third meal, you should cook for yourself (i.e., don't rely on restaurants) using ingredients (i.e., whole food), and observe reasonably judicious portion control.

Cravings
The principal failing of the current Western industrial diet is cravings, and you're not necessarily to blame. Three years ago, I was deeply curious about the obesity epidemic; I'm not any more. Michael Moss's recent book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (a must read) answers that mystery convincingly. Faux-food producers work very hard, with teams of marketers and scientists and virtually unlimited resources, to induce you to overindulge in unwholesome, unhealthy, heavily adulterated foods. You do this "voluntarily," but it's a designed program and they're very, very good at manipulating you.

You need to resist.

The bad news is that temptation is everywhere, and nearly everybody not on a self-regulated diet suffers. The good news is that cravings can be banished relatively quickly if you just cut out the offending substances from your diet. The worst cravings will subside after three days of abstaining, and are nearly gone after ten days. You'll still feel the pull of old habits when you're tempted, but, as new habits take hold, resisting the worst salty-sugary-fatty concoctions becomes manageable.

I will say it's not easy at first. Here are the main things to stay away from:

Sugar, overt (candy, ice cream, pastries, etc.) and covert (hidden in a wide variety of products, from ketchup to packaged bread);
Cheese, especially processed cheese, and all processed meats;
Chips and crackers of almost every sort;
Adulterated and alcoholic drinks including all sodas whether sugared or "diet." ("Don't drink calories" is very good starter advice for people who want to lose weight.) Drink water.

I've also recently been staying away from red meat and milk, but that's my current personal "diet ideology" as mentioned above, so I can't really add those to the list. Maybe you think so, maybe you don't.

The bad side is that consuming these salt-, sugar-, and fat-riddled faux-food concoctions will trigger the cravings anew. So it's very difficult to have "just a little" on the grounds that just a little won't hurt you. Any food carefully engineered to induce cravings will induce cravings not only for more of that substance ("Betcha can't eat just one!"), but also for more food in general. You need to stay away.

Sugar is my weakness. During my 35 weeks, I've lapsed twice—once when I had a very large (and I must say, incredibly delicious) dessert while out at a restaurant with friends, and once at Halloween, when I had candy in the house and was unable to resist pigging out on it. In both cases, it took me about a week to get on track again, and those two weeks were the hardest of my diet period so far. It's like starting over. The cravings are relatively easy to banish, but they will also return easily. You have to be on guard.

Until next time
The good news I'll leave you with is that The Gruel-and-Grass diet is easy, comfortable, and effective. It's a temporary diet intended for weight loss, although I like it so much I'll probably stick with some version of it after the 70 weeks are up. I just need to find more energy for planning and cooking that third meal.

If you're suffering from overweight, I highly recommend the project, however you go about it. It turns out that a lot of the ill effects I'd been ascribing to aging just weren't—they were the effects of overweight and poor diet. The former, of course, is not reversible. The latter very much is.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Romano Giannetti: "I was in a quite easier challenge than you (just 30 pounds to go), and liking cooking and having a normally a Mediterranean diet (I normally live in Spain) so for me the famous diet recipe of Karlos Arguiñano—Just Eat One Half—worked beautifully. But the lesson I learned is that you need to actively control what you eat. The market offering (even in so-called healthy food countries like my Italy and Spain) are mischievous, and evidently the evolutionary mechanisms of autoregulation of our bodies are not working for our modern lifestyle."

BH: "Some of this sounds familiar to me, particularly your long-term, measured approach. I'd tried all the different diets but it wasn't until I changed my mind—my expectations and timeframe—that I started getting a handle on things. I'm currently 12 weeks into a 1.5 lb./week loss plan, and have lost 20 lbs. with very little suffering.

"I have to mention one product that has helped me immensely: Fitbit. (www.fitbit.com). Once I started collecting and analyzing data over periods of time greater than one day, I really changed my approach. My diet is no longer 'blown' by one night out with friends, because I'm always looking at the big picture. Recommended for people who have been easily derailed in their efforts."

Mike replies: Good point. I agree that thinking in terms of longer periods of time really makes a big difference. For example, if every day is a torture to get through, you immediately know you're not on a workable plan. Because although deprivation might seem tolerable for some amorphous undefined period of a few weeks or a month or two, it becomes obvious that it's not tenable if you're planning your diet for a year or more. Also, I agree that it helps you overcome difficulties like lapses and plateaus—if I put on a pound one week instead of take it off, it's not a disaster. I just adjust going forward.

You're right that this is probably a very important mental adjustment to adopt.

Chris Malcolm: "I had to retire early because of ill health. I'd had a heart attack and discovered I was diabetic. I'd lost about half of my sugar-controlling insulin capacity. Instead of the easy option of taking the pills my doc wanted to prescribe, I tried the option of avoiding eating more carbs at any one time than my damaged pancreas could handle.

"My diet ended up quite unlike yours except in three important respects: I avoided junk food; I naturally ate less than I used to; I didn't get hungry. The effects of this diet over the next few years were that I lost weight at about a pound every few weeks, started feeling a lot better, and all sorts of physiological failings which my doc had assured me were the inevitable result of aging started improving. We allowed a huge complex of food supply industries to develop which profited from persuading people to eat more. What on earth did we expect would happen?"

Posted on Sunday, 17 November 2013 at 11:08 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (37)

Tuesday, 05 November 2013

Topsy-Turvy (OT)

I awoke this morning at dawn to see the sun going down. The sky was mustard yellow; the rain was coming from the ground and falling up. The cars were going down the streets backwards. Birds were flying north. I saw a house painted blue and orange.

Today I fully expect that right-wing talk radio will be singing President Obama's praises; all of Britain will wake up, come to its senses, and admit that baseball, football and pool are in fact far better, more sensible, easier to understand, more fun to play, and vastly more entertaining to watch than cricket, soccer and snooker; and the city of Washington, D.C. will change the racist-ass name of its football team to "The Washington Warriors" like it ought to have done in, oh, 1968.

It apparently really happened. I thought I was dreaming, but no, I wasn't—unless I'm dreaming now. It was "The Battle of the Backups," but the bottom line was that...the Chicago Bears came into Lambeau Field and they had the better quarterback. Or, to state the exact same thing using slightly different words, the natural order of the Universe was turned all upside-down. Did not compute.

Congratulations to Bear Nation and our Bear-fan friends. Including my nurse friend Cynthia*, my brother Charlie the Chicagoan, and of course Michael. See you on December 29th!

Mike

*Cynthia recently suffered the trauma of arriving for a visit and finding her toddler grandson dressed in a Packers jersey. Being an intelligent, analytical adult, she rationized that he will grow up being loyal to the team of his home State just like she did, but emotionally I'm sure it was not easy for her to, um, Bear.

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Posted on Tuesday, 05 November 2013 at 01:56 PM in News and Occasions, Off-topic posts | Permalink | Comments (17)

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