Category Archives: Writing

They. Just. Don’t. Listen.

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My old friend Lido “Lee” Bruhl is a retired newspaper editor who enjoys the wordplay that happens in social media today. He passed along this poster:

“The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
–David Orr

Fredo “Two Fingers” Caronia was the first to respond.

“Amen!” he said.

18 more similar responses appeared, most posted from one or another flavor of Apple computer.

I counted six more knee-jerk agreements, two Make Love Not War bumper stickers, five bashing the one-percent, three people against Big Banks, one plea to kick the peace keepers out of Pakistan (?), and one that announced Ross Perot’s poodle had caused all of our country’s problems.

Hello? Somebody has to earn the gelt to pay for the peacemakers and healers and restorers and storytellers and lovers. If you want a world that is un-habitable and inhumane, try one where all the businesses are forced to fail and all the inventors and entrepreneurs are ostracized, wrote the one contrary voice in the Wilderness.

Apple computer was created and marketed by a remarkably successful kid who had been frustrated by his formal schooling and who dropped out of Reed College after six months.

“Words to live by! LOVED, ‘Liked,’ Shared. Thanks, Lee!!!” Fanny Guay wrote even after I had weighed in.

“To my perplexion,” Liz Arden said, “no one paid attention to the fact that the context they put Mr. Orr’s quote in dooms us to scrabble in the dirt eating bugs.”

The quote itself was lifted from environmental educator David Orr’s 1991 article, What Is Education For? in which he discusses six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them. He repeated it in the 1994 polemic Earth in Mind, a book that examines not the problems in education but the problem of education. It is a topic he has emphasized since the 1980s.

He argues that much of what has gone wrong with the world is the result of “inadequate and misdirected education that alienates us from life in the name of human domination.” He also quotes Thomas Merton who called education the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” (Mr. Merton’s advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”)

Meanwhile entrepreneur, Chess Master, PayPal co-founder, and Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel is paying college students to drop out.

I agree with most of the points Dr. Orr made. After all, a college education has indeed ruined many a good garbage collector. (He said “our education up till now has in some ways created a monster.”)

He lost me by quoting the Trappist monk and mystic, Father Merton.

See, the problem isn’t that we ought not prepare our students to succeed. I don’t want to scrabble around in the dirt eating bugs, either. The way to assure that I don’t have to is to keep teaching the next generation and the next and the next. The problem is that so so many people here equate success with bad.

Success is good. But the bashers simply don’t hear us when we say so.

Dr. Orr, by the way, is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. He holds a B.A. from Westminster College, an M.A. from Michigan State, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania.

Interesting that we the loudest critics of education already have ours, innit.

Of course I want change our schools so kids do gain knowledge, some culture, and the critical thought skills necessary to interpret next year’s data.

Going to the Mattresses

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In Diane Keaton: Here I Am in AARP Magazine, writer David Hochman writes that Keaton “acknowledges how challenging it is to juggle a still-busy career with a teen and a preteen at an age most women are feathering their empty nests with IKEA guest beds.”

leirvik bedThat annoyed a midwestern friend who responded, “But then I remembered: last year I bought one. For myself, true, but still…”

I had to go look up what an IKEA bed was.

My grandfather bought new beds for the Keys house but I have never bought a bed. Other than those, I think the newest bed in my inventory was bought in 1886.

“I sure hope you’ve bought mattresses for those old beds, Dick.”

Mattresses?

Horsehair lasts forever.

(I do tighten the ropes every now and then, though.)

The truth about mattresses.

I come from an old Quaker family that never threw anything away. I can about count on my fingers all the furniture I’ve bought in my life: an oak drawing table, a walnut sideboard, the double recliner, the dining room chairs we gave to our daughter, a bedside table, a hassock. Porch furniture doesn’t count. Nor do the beds I built in New Jersey or the shower seat and the built-ins in Vermont. Anne and I have never been able to agree on a sofa so we don’t have one.

My great-grandfather Enos Barnard was a very short man, so he had a full size low-post bed cut down — it is about 64 inches nose to tail. I slept in that bed as a six-foot teenager which is why I still sleep diagonally even in a California King. And my uncle convalesced in that bed when he returned from the War. He is 6’5″ tall. His feet hung over the end which is the actual etymology of that phrase.

In North Puffin I sleep in the same maple Sheraton “4-poster” bed with a flat tester frame that my parents did. That and all the other beds will just about fit a full size (54″ x 75″) mattress with only a wee little bit of slightly droopy overhang. Don’t sleep on the very edge. My guest room beds are the same size — my mother’s mother’s bed from uphome and the guest room bed from downhome. Someone Before Me removed their rope knobs.

The attic there has the three beds we aren’t using plus their mattresses and boxes. I think the newest bed, the 1886 iron frame I slept in after I outgrew my great-grandfather’s bed is also there but my cousin Terry may have it.

Box springs are more difficult with older beds that don’t fit today’s twin/full/queen/king/Cali king standards. The frame rails on my full beds are set too close together to accommodate a ready-made box so the choice is to custom make the box spring that will sit between the rails or use a sky hook to get into a bed with the frame 33″ off the floor, plus the box spring and the 14″ of poof-top modern mattress. That would be taller than the mattress is wide. It’s a good thing we have high ceilings, but I would knock that tester off with an errant elbow.

Can’t You Read the Signs?

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Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?
Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars this month (Apple marketing VP Phil Schiller immediately deleted his Instagram account and declared that Instagram had “jumped the shark”). Apple will probably buy Twitter next.Pictograms.

I take a lot of pictures both for the beauty and for the story they tell, but I tell most stories with words. 50,000 a year in newspaper columns. Nearly that many again right here. I could write a book …

That said, I just replaced my cellphone because its camera stopped initializing. When I need a quick note about a concert poster or a reminder of what that unusual car or eccentric person looks like, I prefer to snap a picture and text it to my emailbox. Sometimes I send it to one or two selected friends as well.

A quick and informal survey tells me that more than half the people I know do the same. Voice calls are down. Texting is up but texting with pictures and far fewer words is climbing exponentially.

Grocery fliers have both pictures and text, but the amount of text is dropping.

Gekko and I often Skype™ instead of “just” talking on the VOIP phone; it’s the next best thing to being there. OK, that’s not entirely true but having the (moving) picture is better than not having the (moving) picture to go with our words.

A recent story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel highlighted how our communications are changing: “On a cold October night a few years ago, I got out of bed and came downstairs because I realized my cat was still outside. I turned on the porch light, opened the main door, called him and went into the kitchen for a drink of water. When I came back, there was a young man standing in my living room.”

After worrying over the story itself, a cop friend suggested, “Put a Quarantined! Infectious Disease! sign out front.”

Private Property SignHe thinks home invaders can read. (Jeezum, what’s our school system coming to, teaching burglars to read!)

“. . . attached to an explosive charge.”

It’s not the sign that will stop the burglar or home invader. It’s not even the silhouette of a weapon on the sign. It’s the 700 security cameras that take his picture as he walks up the sidewalk, turns up the lane, and steps onto the porch.

The world is progressing back to cuneiform.

Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?

I carry a 17″ ThinkPad workstation that my friend Liz Arden dubbed the “patio stone” but I do hope the next big Android isn’t a stone tablet.

Literature?

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“Little men are covering my street with political ‘literature’,” Liz Arden complained this morning.

I’m maybe the wrong writer to tackle this. After all, my high school English teacher made us memorize John Donne’s birth date and Stevens Institute of Technology didn’t even know how to spell the word in the 70s.

Miss Spocketpump, the high school English teacher whose name I have changed to protect myself, taught a “Survey Course in English Literature” for us kids in college prep. I don’t remember much from that course other than a dense textbook with reams of writings by the greats of history. When she told me I would fail the final exam, I did something unparalleled in my academic history before or since. I anticipated how she could structure a test that would trip me. Then I memorized exactly what I needed to beat the test. It was half the grade.

quarryI spent all day on the Sunday before the exam at the Quarry, our “swimming hole,” reading and rereading the quarter-page biographies of more than 100 writers included in that tome. I knew Donne’s birthday (sometime between January 24 and June 19, 1572). I could tell you who Robert Browning married and when Tennyson died. I knew how much Dickens earned per word. But I had no Great Expectations stored about Morte D’Arthur or any words of metaphysical poetry.

Not a great introduction to literature or literary pursuits, I’m thinking.

“Little men are covering my street with political ‘literature’,” Ms. Arden had said. “Why can’t they just call it spam?”

Literature has a much broader definition than I remembered:

Literature (from Latin litterae (plural); letter) is the art of written work, and is not confined to published sources (although, under some circumstances, unpublished sources can also be exempt). The word literature literally means “acquaintance with letters” and the pars pro toto term “letters” is sometimes used to signify “literature,” as in the figures of speech “arts and letters” and “man of letters.” The four major classifications of literature are poetry, prose, fiction, and non-fiction.

The art of written work. Art. That’s more what we mechanics think of as literature. The O.E.D. points us to written works with “superior or lasting artistic merit.” Expression and form, topics of universal interest, and some degree of permanence are essential to my definition and to Ms. Arden’s.

booksBut there is more. We allow the writings of a country or on a particular subject in the broad category of literature. It can be English or scientific or music or it can concern a group of items such as automobiles.

When my mom earned her B.A.-English, she read literature from Shakespear to Saroyan. She used the word properly.

When your doctor says he’ll “consult the literature” to determine if your symptoms show you have sarcoidosis (They do. Trust me on that.), he uses the word properly.

When I need to know the allowable deflection in a frimjamb or how to hardwire a network conniption, I “consult the literature.” OK, I Google™ but the results are the same. And I used the word properly.

The four major classifications of literature are poetry, prose, fiction, and non-fiction. Both Homer and Herodotus explicitly excluded spam, the fifth element in the written classes, from the list. After all, there may be considerable art in selling a sexual aid by email or a candidate by door hanger, but literature it ain’t.

GIYF

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Have a little whine with your cheese and crackers? I have mine right here:

Rufus is fond of believing he knows everything and that anything anyone else says is wrong. Period. Paragraph.

That’s healthy.

Except when the anyone else is, well, me.

Rufus particularly likes to dispute pronouncements on technology, on God, and on history. He insists, for example, that there’s no advantage to increasing the sensor size in a digital camera. Doesn’t matter that I’m a pretty knowledgeable daylight photographer. Doesn’t matter that most other digital camera experts agree with me. Doesn’t matter that large format film cameras have already won the “size” battle. Rufus knows better.

The most recent example comes from the very large (about 800 million population and growing) world of very small issues (Facebook). Our mutual friend Brock posted a note about why a cop should take a gun to a knife fight; I added an anecdote about the army adopting the .45 Colt after Philippine-American War. Brockley Mann is the chief of the South Puffin Police Department.

The “suspect’s momentum may continue forward with enough force for the edged weapon to end up injuring the officer” even after the suspect has been shot, Brock posted.

I recalled that the reason the army switched from a .38 to the Model 1911 Colt was to stop the Filipino Moros running full tilt (a “bolo rush”) with their 18″ machete-like swords at the officers who had only side-arms. Even a dead running man can decapitate a soldier on sheer momentum. Experiments showed the .45 caliber punch could almost stop that rush. Almost.

Unfortunately, the M1911 design wasn’t finished and it never saw service in the Philippines.

Rufus responded that he “thought the ‘service .45’ was ALWAYS a .45 starting with the original Colt revolver. But you say the Army had a dalliance, for a time, with a little .38. How long did that last? (I could Google it, but YOU brought it up…)”

Let’s keep that thought. Rufus could Google it, but I brought it up…

Another poster commented, “I can’t imagine the Army using .38s. I have a .38 and it is really small.”

I might note that it’s not the size. OK, it’s the size.

Thanks to Liza Arden who spent the 30 seconds on Google that Rufus had no time to do, there is plenty of firearms history available:

I cited these examples not (just) to pick on Rufus. OK, maybe to pick on Rufus, but also to talk about how so few people are willing to reach out to the sources we have to store our history even when it is crucial.

You might have a problem reconciling your checking account and need to look for calculation tools. You might need to know when Louisville Slugger first produced a bat with a knob on it (Babe Ruth ordered the first one in 1919). You might have a leaking PVC sink drain and need to look for repair techniques.

I mostly enjoy researching, but I don’t enjoy doing your research. Or Rufus’.

Google Is Your Friend.

It was not always thus. I grew up before the Internet so I had to use the books in the house, the books in friend’s houses, the books in the library. Remember e-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-as? Me, too. I still have a Marks’ Handbook that I rarely use and a Machinery’s Handbook that I use all the time. Mine is the 18th Edition, printed in 1968, because tap drill hole sizes haven’t changed much in the intervening years. I don’t have the CD version but I do look up work gear temperatures online more often than in the Handbook. And I’m more likely to find the mechanical engineering facts, figures, standards, and practices of the Marks’ online. On the other hand, my favorite reference book here is the Oxford English Dictionary my folks gave me more than 30 years ago.

See, it doesn’t matter if you use an Internet search engine or the local library to find your answer. It just matters that you find the answer.

Of course, where ever one reads the data, there remains the small problem of remembering what you read.

(I found that 2010 essay by Googling.)