Happy Summer!

June31ptpWell I actually have managed to do my “31 Point Plans” all the way up to June now!  And this one took me a while to draw.  I’m not as pleased with it as I might be, but I am seeing that it would be cool done as a painting, so perhaps I will visit this theme in future.  And something different appears this month:  I have added “play piano” in one spot (as I mentioned in my last post, I am now making this part of my schedule).  And the piano tuner was here yesterday trying to make this old piano sound as good as possible.  Happy music!

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“Stuckness”

A nearly life-long challenge for me has always been being able to plan my days in such a way that I take care of the things I need to do while also having time to do the things I want to do (probably most people experience this same challenge at times).  But more than that, I have trouble “changing gears.”  In other words, when I am working on a particular project or endeavor, I am apt to become overly-obsessed with what I am doing and let everything else fall by the wayside.  I have always been guilty of either working too hard and not doing anything for fun, or else “playing” too hard and not being responsible.  I have at times found myself at the end of a month without any time billed for working – and that obviously has a very detrimental affect on my financial situation and well-being.  And it is quite shocking to realize that I have actually forgotten to work

I have tried a number of different schedule variations with different degrees of success (or failure) and little by little I seem to be getting a better handle on it by observing and learning what works best for me.

Where I have seen some success lately has been my ability to do this Blog, keep myself working for the most part (and see better financial management because of it), as well as being able to draw and spend time in ways that I choose.  But I do have setbacks.  About a month or so ago I had started writing this post when it came to my awareness that all the time I had been spending putting this Blog together had been done at the expense of doing anything else.  I had not been working very much, and, much to my distress, I found I had not done any drawing AT ALL during this time.  I have a tendency to try to take a task all the way to “completion” before being able to start on or work on anything else.  This is what I want to change.

So I had started out writing this post around the middle of last month, calling it “Stuckness” because after getting to a point where my Blog was “complete” (other than writing new updates on a regular basis and on which I’d determined I would only spend time one day a week), I found I was “stuck” and couldn’t maneuver myself back to my other goals, i.e., to draw, and to start working on the garage.  It was a situation in which I asked myself, ‘ok now where was I?’ and found it was too hard for me to “go back.”  I, pretty much, only operate in the PresentBut why be constantly reinventing the wheel by setting myself the same goals all the time, only to work on one and forget the rest? 

Well I didn’t write that post then, and I did get past my “stuckness” – first by being slammed with client work, and then finding myself starting on a new drawing that I have been enjoying doing, and with my determination to ensure I lived in “balance” like I want to, I created a new system for myself, setting specific days wherein I would focus on one particular task or endeavor and then have time left over to “tweak” where necessary.  And so far, so good.  I haven’t yet started to work on the garage, but I am seeing how and when I can fit time in for this without sacrificing anything.  And I intend to apply myself to that task seriously over the summer.

Basically, I am setting myself the directive to DRAW and do creative projects on Mondays. Then, Tuesdays and Thursdays are for CLIENT WORK.  Fridays, I am going to WRITE, meaning Blog posts or whatever other writing tasks I decide.  And Wednesdays, I will designate for errands, grocery shopping, and whatever odds and ends I need to attend to, with a goal to also DRAW if possible (and/or perhaps an “Artist Date”).  Then on Saturdays I will attend to housework-type chores and anything that I feel I have neglected to give enough attention to during the week.  Sundays I want to leave open as much as possible for R&R and family, or whatever I determine that is fun and pleasurable.

The idea here is that it is flexible, as it must be, but yet gives me a built-in system to ensure that all things get attention.  And there is plenty of time and room for flexibility without me “wasting my days” and not accomplishing anything due to being so “scattered.”  So far, so good.  I think I like it.

Well.  Then something else popped into my life.

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Oprah’s Harvard Speech

Today my son finishes the 7th grade, and how strange it is to me to see my not-so-long-ago little bundle of joy becoming a young man, soon to be out there facing the world.

And this morning on the news I heard about the commencement speech that Oprah Winfrey presented at Harvard University.  I have always felt that Oprah is a remarkable woman with her head squarely on her shoulders, full of wisdom and good common sense.  Here are some of the things that she said in her speech that I especially like:

Tyler Kingkade, writing at the Huffington Post, reports:

I know you know the truth,” Winfrey told the Class of 2013. “We all know that we are better than the cynicism and the pessimism that is regurgitated throughout Washington and the 24-hour cable news cycle — not my channel, by the way.

Winfrey got one of her few bursts of applause when she got political, embracing expanded gun background checks, a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and expanded education and opportunities for the poor.

We understand that the vast majority of people in this country believe in stronger background checks because they realize that we can uphold the Second Amendment and reduce the violence that is robbing us of our children,” Winfrey said to applause.They don’t have to be incompatible.

She evoked the Newtown, Conn., school massacre, encouraging people to pull themselves out of darkness and devote themselves to something positive.

There’s a common denominator in our human experience,” Winfrey said. “Most of us, I tell you, we don’t want to be divided. … What we want is to be validated. We want to be understood.

And, according to Melinda Henneberger, writing at the Washington Post:

…the best thing she said was this: In doing more than 35,000 interviews, she’s learned that everybody wants to be validated. Everyone she’s ever sat down with, from George W. Bush to Barack Obama to “Beyonce in all her Beyonce-ness,” has asked, in his or her own way, after the TV lights went out, “Was I OK?” Just like we all want to know, “Did you hear me? Did what I say matter to you?” So on the campus where Facebook started, she challenged grads to “have more face-to-face conversations with people you may disagree with.” Which is purpose enough, given how little this occurs now…

Then there are the American University grads of 1963, who 50 years ago on June 10th heard JFK make history by speaking, at their graduation, about “not merely peace for America, but peace for all men and women — not merely peace in our time, but peace for all time.” Those words so moved Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev that he actually allowed the address to be broadcast in the Soviet Union, and the address led quite directly to the signing of the nuclear test ban treaty later that summer.

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Anna Karenina

Anna Karenina

by Leo Tolstoy

After reading “Darkness at Noon” I was inspired to read more about the time period and about Russian history in particular.  I have never read any of the classic Russian authors, but my sister owns this copy of Anna Karenina, so I have started to read this book, as gigantic as it is.  I am enjoying it too.  More on this later….

7/7/13:  I finally finished this last night – July 6th.  What a wonderful book!  I might want to put some comments on it here – but we shall see.  On to the next book!

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Darkness at Noon

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

I started reading this book on May 15th.  The funny thing about this book is that I once owned a copy (with the cover pictured at left, which is different from the library copy that I show below).  But, back when I was getting ready to move and trying to thin out my books, it was one of the books that I apparently decided I did not need to keep and I donated it, along with many others, to my local library.  It was just an old paperback, I didn’t remember where or when I’d gotten it, and I knew nothing about it or about its author.

Then I recently came across information about it that made me very much want to read it, but alas, it was gone.

So I got a copy from the library to read.  And I finished it on May 24th.  And I loved this book!  I made many notes, thinking that if it was my book, I would have highlighted a number of passages.  I decided to go down to the library store to see if they might have my donated copy (or any copy) for sale, in which case I would buy it back.  But I couldn’t find it.  Oh well.  At least I was able to read it though, and I am glad I did.

First, for background, here is what Amazon.com says about this book:

Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler’s modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s.

During Stalin’s purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation.

A seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary.

As for my notes, there was a lot in this book that I found very profound and thought-provoking.

As the character Rubashov ruminates over the idea of “the ends justifying the needs” in the context of history he says:

“… The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood.  He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

“But who will be proved right?  It will only be known later.  Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history’s absolution.

“It is said that No. 1 [i.e., Stalin] has Machiavelli’s Prince lying permanently by his bedside.  So he should:  since then, nothing really important has been said about the rules of political ethics.  We were the first to replace the nineteenth century’s liberal ethics of ‘fair play’ by the revolutionary ethics of the twentieth century.  In that also we were right:  a revolution conducted according to the rules of cricket is an absurdity.  Politics can be relatively fair in the breathing spaces of history; at its critical turning points there is no other rule possible than the old one, that the end justifies the means.  We introduced neo-Machiavellism into this country; the others, the counter-revolutionary dictatorships, have clumsily imitated it.  We were neo-Machiavellians in the name of universal reason – that was our greatness; the others in the name of a national romanticism, that is their anachronism.  That is why we will in the end be absolved by history; but not they …

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INSANITY?

CONNECTIONS…

I often tend to see the “connectedness” between seemingly disparate things; I constantly see examples of the ways things are connected.  But sometimes it can be hard to pinpoint just how a thing might relate to another thing, even though I know the connection is there.  For example,

On March 24, 2013, I began reading “The Nuremberg Interviews” by Leon Goldensohn, and I finished it on May 15th.  Concurrently with reading this, around the 1st of May I began reading “Oryx and Crake” by Margaret Atwood and I finished this book on May 12.

On May 4th, I read an article entitled “Capitalism is killing our morals, our future — In a Market Society, everything is for sale.”

On May 8th, I read a New Yorker article called “Living-Room Leopards –A new group of breeders want to undomesticate the cat.”  Cat Breeders, it seems, have now gone crazy – and I wonder how this might relate to capitalistic extremism.

Then the other day I started wondering if our beautiful and much-loved Northern California Eucalyptus trees were native and I learn that, not only are they not native (they are from Australia), but they are in a number of ways detrimental to our natural ecosystem.

So, I ask, what do all of these things have in common? 

Well, what do we have here:

And, I find myself increasingly disturbed and distressed at the current state of affairs in this country.

America.     The US of A.     Land of Opportunity     “The Great Experiment.”

Our government is now a Disaster.  Politics as usual IS NOT WORKING.  It is a CIRCUS.  It is a SHAME.  IT IS SHAMEFUL.  It is short-sighted, irresponsible, and detrimental to AMERICA.  Frankly, it is EVIL.

POLITICS SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO INTERFERE WITH THE WORK OF RUNNING THE GOVERNMENT. 

Who is doing this?  Well, I would imagine the truth is that both sides are probably involved to some degree.  But, since the current Administration is Democratic, it seems the Republicans are working extra hard to go against the President and they have become nothing but obstructionist.  And while I admit that Democrats are also capable of taking politics too far at times, I am remembering all those dreadful Bush years not so very long ago – and did the Democrats do the same kinds of things then that the Republicans have been doing now and ever since Obama became President?  I THINK NOTBut then again, the Republicans have Fox News.  And how they can call themselves “news” is anyone’s guess – it makes no more sense than how a group of supposedly intelligent people can claim that “corporations are people.” 

What we have now is a Republican Party that has become unrecognizable to what they used to be.  They have in many ways gone so far Right as to be coming a little too close to the kind of extremism that became Nazism.  They may not be capable of brutally exterminating thousands of people, but they are still killing people by virtue of their stubborn resistance to intelligent gun laws and their failure to use any common sense in regards to their responsibilities.   And it is almost eerie how many and how often tragic shootings have been occurring just since these ridiculous gun policy political games began. The worst part is how many of the victims are children.  It is inexcusable and criminal that this has been going on and continues to go on.  It is positively shameful.

And this is just one example of the alarming ways Republicans have started to look a lot like Nazis.  There are too many startling and disturbing similarities.  But all that aside, our government is completely crippled because of political irresponsibility.  I have found some rather pertinent quotes lately from my friend Dr. Mardy:

“The aim of an argument or discussion should not be victory, but progress.”

“Those who never retract their opinions love themselves more than they love truth.”

-Joseph Joubert

“Thou shalt not carry moderation unto excess.”

– Arthur Koestler

It’s all gone crazy.  This is not America.  This is not how we were meant to be, or even how we used to be.  Who is it that we are trying to be?  Anyone?  Or is it that we have simply become BLIND.  GREEDY AND BLIND. 

Which leads me to CAPITALISM.  “Corporations are People.”  Everything has a price-tag, including even people, apparently.  How far will we go?  It isn’t just about our Economy, it’s also about our Quality of Life, and there are Ethical Considerations.  The “Land of Opportunity” does not mean opportunity only for the wealthy.  We have become so greedy, so short-sighted, so BLIND.

What about letting our corporations become bigger and bigger and more and more powerful – we already are letting pharmaceutical companies dictate our healthcare and how our healthcare providers provide treatment.  I won’t even go into all the implications of that here. 

One of the television shows that I have enjoyed lately is called “Continuum.”  While primarily it concerns time-travel in what is essentially a crime drama show, the “future” from which the main character travels (and ends up in our present time) is one in which giant and all-powerful corporations have taken over and now run the world.   It does not appear very desirable or pleasant. 

This also recalls to mind the book I recently read called “Oryx and Crake.”  In this fictional future, corporations have similarly become impossibly big and powerful and, in this story as well, nothing good comes from it – but at the same time, it is relatively easy to envision.

It’s easy to envision these things because some of us can see just how short-sighted and greedy we already are and if we don’t start making some changes, we just might be destined for a very unpleasant future of some kind or other, particularly if we manage to completely kill our planet and render it uninhabitable – which we are already doing by continuing to destroy the rain forest and pretending that global warming is a joke or a political “scam.

And when I hear about cat breeders trying to develop wild cats that behave like house cats – primarily because of how lucrative it can be, I can’t help but think about Oryx and Crake and all the animals they have engineered for similar reasons – like the “racunk” and the “pigoon” – well, how can I help seeing similarities:  if we had the technical knowledge right now to do the kinds of things they did in this book, then we’d most certainly be doing them – and to our detriment.  In the book, everything ended up being destroyed.  But this could be where we are headed if we let capitalism go off the deep-end. 

Finally, concerning eucalyptus trees, we obviously didn’t know any better 200+ years ago.  We still had a lot to learn about a lot of things, as do we still, and we have made many mistakes in our history due to ignorance.  But we have also learned a lot.  To make such mistakes when we know better is inexcusable.  And when we purposely make such mistakes because of the Almighty Dollar, it is absolutely wrong.  The only thing is, who is actually guilty of reaping the monetary rewards from these greedy and shortsighted actions?  Perhaps 1 or 2% of the population?  I do hope that MOST of us are wiser and less selfish.  But then, shouldn’t we be doing something?

It often seems like it always costs money to do anything – and therefore we will feel, perhaps, HELPLESS.  How might this compare to the German people who were stuck living in a Nazi regime – were they powerless?  Or were they content to mind their own business and close their eyes.  Are we the same?  Where do we draw the lines…

  • with Capitalism?
  • with Politics?
  • With tampering with Mother Nature?
  • Where is our future heading? 

I have just started reading another book, a novel, about Communism.  I am sure this will provide me with plenty more insights and evidences of connectedness.

But I believe we need to connect to our HistoryWe need to learn from the past.  And sometimes we can also learn a lot by considering theories about the future.  The problem I have right now is that I am not seeing much intelligence these days on the whole.  And I find that not only discouraging and unsettling, but it is also quite frightening

 

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The Nuremberg Interviews

The Nuremberg Interviews by Leon Goldensohn

I started reading this book on March 24th, and didn’t finish it until May 15th.  This was a “heavy” book to read, and often very disturbing.  I found that I generally could only take so much of it at a time.  Then I read 2 or 3 novels during the same time that I was reading this book.  But now that I have finished it I want to document my impressions:

First, some notes about Hans Fritzsche – senior official in Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.  He speaks of “the democracy which shows up in the United States and in England [as not being] an ideal democracy, because the will of the people is under the pressure of property, which is in the hands of the wealthy capitalists.”  He goes on to try to show how becoming a Nazi might be understood and justified when all things are taken into consideration.  And later Fritzsche, in relation to the Nuremberg Trials, says that “I hope that a least after the trial they will be objective enough to investigate [relating to outside factors that influenced the things that happened in Germany and the start of the war]. I hope for it in the interest of my people, but God knows I hope for it in the interest of humanity.  Because I want to make an end to all this tragedy.  If one places the guilt of these tragic six years of war upon the wrong place, there will be always the terms of repetition, which will be kept alive, and perhaps another tragedy will befall mankind.” 

CHILLING WORDS.  (I note that Fritzsche was found Not Guilty in the Nuremberg Trials.)

Hjalmar Schacht, president of the Reichsbank (and also found Not Guilty at Nuremberg), talks about how “there was only the choice between Communism and Hitler,” and that the reason that Hitler won was that “people will not give up religion, rights, freedom of personality, [and] the opportunity to develop by individual effort – which includes private property. …Just as every single individual needs and must have self-respect, just as every family is proud of decent traditions, so every nation wants to maintain her individual manner, culture, language, and customs.  It was in these respects that Communism failed.”  And then Hitler came along and “he affirmed [the] things which Communism denied.”  When asked if he thought that the morals of Germans had suffered as the result of National Socialism (Nazism), Schacht replies that he thinks “Bolshevism is much more dangerous [to morals] than Nazism.”  Then he says that he knows that “the Bolsheviks have never exterminated 5 million people, but aside from that… the Red idea is immoral because of its contempt for private enterprise” and goes on to explain that “if you do away with the institution of private property, the fundamental element of social life is undermined.”  He says he is “in favor of allowing everyone to become wealthy.  But to take the property of another man is criminal.  This was introduced by the Bolsheviks and by the Versailles Treaty.”  Then, he says that “the only big power which tried to build up a foreign policy based on morals has been the Americans for the past thirty years.” 

INTERESTING.  Schacht then concludes his interview by saying, “I have never believed in war.  It is a crime against humanity whether you win or lose.  I just read an article in this magazine… that one day the moon will fall on the earth, but it is my feeling that until then, we should try to make the world a better place to live in.”

I certainly have learned a lot of history by reading these books lately, and I’ve gained some different perspectives about the nature of people and governments and politics.  Each of the interviewees in this book had their own take on how things conspired to create Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Paul O. Schmidt, who was Hitler’s interpreter in the war, and who had much knowledge about diplomacy and international affairs through his work as translator in several different international arenas, speaks of his opposition to Germany’s breach of the terms of the Versailles Treaty.  He speaks about the League of Nations and how if they had succeeded in putting through the oil sanctions, the Abyssinian war would have been avoided:  “it all depended on oil.  If that one thing had succeeded, war would have been averted.  The oil sanctions would have served peace and would have been a warning to the people who later made trouble.”  How much of the time do things happen or not happen because of money?  How many wars could’ve been avoided if just one little thing happened to go a different way?

It is interesting to hear what went on in the minds of these Nazis.  And I think it is important to realize that things are never clearly black or white.  While the Nazis unquestionably perpetrated inhuman and hard to conceive of atrocities against fellow human beings, the German people, including some who actually worked for the Nazis, were not much different than anyone else.  There are always reasons and repercussions for how things happen, inexcusable and evil or not.  But in order to prevent things from recurring, it is important to understand all sides. 

Most of the Nazis interviewed in this book were understandably trying very hard to prove their own innocence and pass the blame for any atrocities onto someone else, in general Hitler or Himmler or some of the others who were most conveniently already dead.  That is, of course, only a human tendency.  Many of these guys were found guilty and executed (as they probably rightly should have been, as much as I hesitate to condone capital punishment).

As for some examples of Nazis who were found Guilty at Nuremberg and hung, Dr. Goldensohn, the psychiatrist who conducted the interviews contained in this book, writes of Kurt Daluege, an SS General during the war, as follows:  “Emotionally, he seems callous, affectless, unimaginative, and there is evidence of obsessive character.  …He presents himself as being just an officeholder, the son of an officeholder; knows nothing about atrocities and so forth… improbable to get much emotional response out of this man.  There is a long-conditioned hardness, an outer shell which has been worn and used so long, probably nothing exists beneath it.  Having dealt with force, violence, and easy dispositions of the lives of others, it is questionable as to how much value he puts on life in general, including his own in particular.  …Getting a sincere or emotionally meaningful answer from him is like trying to bail water from a long-dry well.”  What could have made someone this way?  How did the Nazis get so callous, so inhuman and monstrous, to have been capable of doing the things they did?

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Thought Experiment #20130514-1

I am thinking about the concept of “MOTHER” today.  And I believe we would all agree that, on this planet at least, the concept of “mother” is a Universal one.  This is, of course, due to the fact that our planet is all we know of the Universe, and all Beings in that Universe that we know of, are born, live and die – and have or have had – a mother.  [Of course, there are those who will bring up the idea that there was an Original Mother, aka Eve.  And that Eve had no mother.  I, however, choose not to go down that particular path, ok?  Good.]

So here’s a thought:  What if there are Beings besides us, Earthlings, in the Universe at large – is it possible that these theoretical Beings could exist without virtue of having had a mother?  Say they are Immortal and do not die. Hmmm…

If that were true and there were no mothers, was no concept of “mother” – then there would be no reproduction either.  No mothers, no Fathers, no Babies.  And that would make sense if the original inhabitants never died.  So it follows that there would also be no sex, no gender, no differences in anyone other than the basic differences between every individual, regardless of sex.  There would be no sexual competition, no mates.  Perhaps there would be a type of “pair bonding,” but it would have nothing to do with the primary attraction factors that go into play when humans choose a partner.  Interesting.

Something to think about whenever we find ourselves wishing we didn’t have to ever die.  Would we be willing to give up sex as we know it for immortality – I wonder…

And this also brings to mind the book “Oryx and Crake,” that I just read.  This story assumes that humans in the future will still be searching for immortality.  And there are some interesting concepts concerning the idea of procreation and reproduction in this book.  Very interesting…

As for Mothers – my sister, my son, and I visited my mother’s resting place on Sunday.  We took the time to walk around the cemetery and look at gravestones.  Some of them are very old.  It is interesting to think about all those that went before us, and how connected we all are in our Humanity.

And how we all eventually come to grieve for our Mothers. 

Here is my Mother as a baby, with her Mother, sometime in 1930 or 1931:  babymervilyn

Mvc-0081f

(This pic makes my son’s eyes look crossed! Weird, he has perfect eyes!)

…And here I am 13 years ago, with my Mother and my young son.

 

 

Time goes by so fast….

 

Happy Mother’s Day

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ORYX AND CRAKE

ORYX AND CRAKE – I started reading this some time around the last week of April or 1st of May, after I finished reading “The Phantom” and went back to reading “The Nuremberg Interviews,” and I read the two books concurrently.  Then I finished reading Oryx and Crake last night, but am still working on “Nuremberg.”

Margaret Atwood depicts a near-future world that turns from the merely horrible to the horrific, from a fool’s paradise to a bio-wasteland. Snowman (a man once known as Jimmy) sleeps in a tree and just might be the only human left on our devastated planet… after …powerful corporations took mankind on an uncontrolled genetic engineering ride.” –from amazon.com

And I can’t say much more without giving it all away, but like many such “prophetic” books as this, it brings some alarm, such as:  Can we imagine biotech/pharmaceutical firms becoming so big and powerful?  The fear is easily there.  Or how about what our scientists are already able to do in the area of bioengineering and what repercussions this might bring?  Books like this can sometimes be terrifying.  How easily might a theoretical, fictional future become our Real Future.  Scary – but worth considering in my opinion.  Hindsight is often too late. 

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We love our Eucalyptus…

Here in Petaluma, and in many other parts of the Bay Area and California, these lovely eucalyptus trees, many of them more than 100 years old, can be found everywhere, in shady groves, and alongside and canopying our roadways.   But while these trees provide homes for herons, egrets, owls, hawks, and golden eagles, they are not native here.

IMG_3438I have always loved these trees and while I was out walking the other day I found myself thinking about them and wondering if they were, indeed, indigenous.  (I was thinking that they probably were not.)  So I went home and looked it up.  Then I remembered:  that’s right, they are from Australia.  But they have been here in California since the 1850s.

In an article by by called “Gone Native: California’s love-hate relationship with eucalyptus trees,” he says that “introducing gums to the Golden State was a beautiful mistake. In certain nature preserves and in certain fire-prone neighborhoods it is worth the effort to remove them or to thin their numbers. But in other places — especially highways, parks, and campuses — the non-native trees have become vital elements of the California scene. This is the only place outside of Australia where eucalyptus — like them or not — remind people of home. Their loss would be our loss.”

Picture-3

John King in “Eucalyptus: Invader also holds Bay Area identity” (sfgate.com), speaks of “the palpable essence of a Northern California we all know,” and instead of being “transfixed by the appearance of Tomales Bay and, beyond it, Point Reyes… he enters a stand of eucalyptus and “was transfixed – by the leathery trunks along the road, the silvery-gray branches and leaves above…  the aroma through the open window, and the slits of light through steep shadows.”

To learn how these Australian natives became part of our California heritage, here is an article written by Teisha Rowland in the Santa Barbara Independent:

How the Eucalyptus Came to California

A Cautionary Tale

Jan. 15, 2011

It seems harmless enough; how can releasing just a few plants or animals into a new area hurt anything? But again and again, we’ve seen just how devastating introducing a foreign organism can be, whether it was on purpose or inadvertent. This has led to declining populations of bats, honeybees, and amphibians, among others, and explosive population increases among garden snails in California. Even when it doesn’t look like the non-native organism is doing any harm, it’s still tilting a biological scale that had carefully balanced itself over millennia.

The blue gum (Eucalyptus globulus) has become embedded in much of California’s scenery, though how this came to be is a cautionary tale that emphasizes the importance of thinking before planting.

 [Courtesy Photo]

When we think of organisms being introduced to new lands and wreaking havoc upon the natives, animals more readily come to mind than plants do. But the often over-looked plant invaders have significantly sculpted the California landscape to become what we know it to be today. Europeans started to settle in California in the late 1700s, and soon many non-native plant species made their way to California as well. By the early 1800s, there were 16 non-native plant species, but this jumped to about 134 species by 1860. The number has been increasing ever since; today, there are over 1,000 non-native plant species living in California (and nearly 5,000 native species). While less than 10 percent of these non-native plants are considered to be a “serious threat” to native organisms, every new plant affects its environment in ways both subtle and profound.

Introducing “aliens”: Just how much damage can a few non-native plants do? A great deal. For example, they compete with native plants for nutrients. They can in some cases alter nutrient levels in the soils (such as nitrogen levels) such that the entire local environment becomes changed and undesirable for native plants and animals. This can in turn prompt even more non-native plants, animals, and microorganisms to become established in these “disrupted” areas. The entire ecosystem’s balance can be thrown off.

While not all non-native plants and animals cause such noticeable damage to their new environments, the potential for serious disruption is always present, and each should be introduced with premeditation and educated planning. The story of how the eucalyptus came to be embedded in much of California’s scenery is a great example of lack of forethought when introducing a plant to a new area.

Australian roots: In 1770, eucalyptus specimens made their way to Europe for the first time. On his first Pacific Ocean trip, Captain James Cook explored part of the Australian coast. Botanists on board catalogued and collected several different species along the way, taking them back to London. European botanists gave the trees the name “eucalyptus” because of how the flowers are in hard, protective cup-like structures: The Greek root “eu” means “well” and “calyptos” means “covered.”

Soon, interest in the eucalyptus swelled in Europe. In the early 1800s, wealthy merchants and aristocrats were excited about rare or “exotic” plants and, together with people in the plant business, made cultivating eucalyptus trees popular. Horticulturists also wanted to better study such novelties, to understand them scientifically and see what their potential economic value might be. And of course, the new European settlers in Australia were eager to make some money selling the abundant eucalyptus. Promoters touted the trees as not only aesthetically pleasing, but as capable of satisfying many practical needs. The eucalyptus quickly spread in Europe.

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Cat Breeders gone WILD

I quote here an article from The New Yorker wherein I learn that people are now breeding wild cats with domestic cats.  At first this seems like a rather neat idea to me, a major cat-lover, until I read on and find I am completely appalled and distressed by this news.  It seems that cat breeders have become extremely greedy and irresponsible.  And people are increasingly revealing just how short-sighted and ignorant about consequences we can be.  Read on…

Living-Room Leopards

A new group of breeders want to undomesticate the cat.

by Ariel Levy May 6, 2013

When Anthony Hutcherson was a little boy, what he wanted most was something wild. But he was growing up in a very tame place: Helen, Maryland, a small farming community named after the postmaster’s daughter. “I wanted a kinkajou and a monkey and a skunk, a pet leopard,” he recalled—something unlike the cows and sheep out in the meadow. One day, when he was ten years old, waiting with his mother to check out at the grocery store, he saw something that thrilled him. It was a picture in Cat Fancy of a pretty woman in California, holding an exotic golden cat that she’d bred by crossing a domestic shorthair with an Asian leopard cat—a foul-tempered little beast with a gorgeous spotted coat. She called the result the Bengal, and touted it as “a living room leopard.”

His family didn’t understand his passion, he told me one recent afternoon. Hutcherson, who is African-American, offered a cultural explanation: “Generally, black people don’t like cats.” So he wrote to the woman in California, Jean Mill, and, to his delight, she wrote back. They have been friends and collaborators ever since. Hutcherson, now thirty-eight, is the chairman of the International Cat Association’s Bengal Breed Committee and a past president of the International Bengal Cat Society. He and Mill, like many of their colleagues, share a dream: to breed a cat that “looks like it just walked out of the jungle.”

We were sitting in Hutcherson’s living room, in Aquasco, Maryland, across from a glass cage where his kinkajou, a ferret-like nocturnal creature, was sleeping under a blanket. Hutcherson works as an event producer, and also runs a cattery, called JungleTrax, out of his house. When I visited, he had half a dozen sleek Bengal kittens, coppery creatures with well-defined dark spots—“rosettes,” in cat-fancier parlance. As we talked, he flung a cat toy in the air, and they leaped after it with astounding speed. Several times, they scratched us as they went by, so Hutcherson decided to trim their nails, holding the scruff of their neck in his mouth while he clipped. “When I’m gardening or mowing the grass, they all come outside with me,” he said. “And they really do look like little leopards. It’s really rewarding and humbling when you forget the bead of time, and you are watching a cat chase a bug up a tree—two thousand years ago, somebody probably watched a cat that looked like a leopard chase a bug. It is beautiful and transcendent.”

 . . .  continued at www.newyorker.com 

And Madeleine Davies comments at jezebel.com as follows: 

Meet the Delusional Breeders Behind the World’s Wild Crossbreed Cats

As a kid, you probably imagined what it would be like to have a pet lion or tiger … Then, ideally, you grew up and learned that having a pet wild cat, while totally glamourous seeming, is not at all practical.

Not only are big cats likely to click into their natural instincts at any moment and turn you into lunch (or at least a rather bloodied hacky sack), but being removed from the wild and forced to be a domestic animal is no fun for them either. Again, you‘ve probably realized that…unless you’re one of the purrfectly delusional people who hasn’t.

In the past decade, exotic crossbreed cats such as the Bengal, the Savannah and the Toyger have experienced an increasing demand in homes across the world, with some being sold at as high a price as $15 thousand. A huge part of these cats value comes from their genetic makeup (Bengals are domestic felines crossed with Asian leopard cats, Savannahs are domestic cats bred with servals and toygers are just a lucky mix of various tabby cats). It makes sense to want one — not only are they gorgeous, but they’re also huge status symbols. Oh, and they’re often inbred, dangerous and terribly abused by their obsessive breeders.

In Living-Room Leopards, a piece written by Ariel Levy for the New Yorker, Levy visited several of the catteries where these wild crossbreeds are bred and spent time with the people designed them.

While we all have hobbies or pastimes that might be a little weird, these people’s devotion to cross-breeding and bringing wild animals into the home easily goes from quirky to upsetting. Furthermore, their defense of their breeding practices and their products (the cats themselves) is contradictory and, quite frankly, often idiotic.

Let’s start with the moral issues and severe mistreatment of animals that occurs in these catteries.

Meet toyger breeder Judy Sugden:

“I’m an artist!” Judy Sugden declared one evening in her kitchen in Covina, California, as she prepared supper for a couple of hundred cats.

Here’s what Levy discovered upon being given a tour of Sugden’s in-home cattery:

Inside Sugden’s house, she showed me a group of cats she called “faans.” They were cross-eyed, cow-hocked, and splayfooted, and, though you couldn’t tell from looking, many of them had hydrocephalus, a condition in which “there’s nothing in the middle of the brain except liquid.” But faans also have a trait that Sugden considers crucial for the perfected toyger: small, rounded ears, very different from a typical domestic cat’s pointy triangles.

Then there’s fellow toyger breeder Nicholas Oberzire whose female cats have been so overbred that they can a.) barely carry their kittens to term and b.) no longer react defensively when you pull a nursing kitten away from them.

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Capitalism Gone Wild

My sister posted this Wall Street Journal article on Facebook the other day and, after I got around to reading it, I decided it was worth posting here:

Capitalism is killing our morals, our future

Commentary: In a Market Society, everything is for sale

April 29, 2013|Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, capitalism is working … for the Forbes 1,000 Global Billionaires whose ranks swelled from 322 in 2000 to 1,426 recently. Billionaires control the vast majority of the world’s wealth, while the income of American workers stagnated.

For the rest of the world, capitalism is not working: A billion live on less than two dollars a day. With global population exploding to 10 billion by 2050, that inequality gap will grow, fueling revolutions, wars, adding more billionaires and more folks surviving on two bucks a day.

Over the years we’ve explored the reasons capitalism blindly continues on its self-destructive path. Recently we found someone who brilliantly explains why free-market capitalism is destined to destroy the world, absent a historic paradigm shift: That is Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, author of the new best-seller, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” and his earlier classic, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do?”

For more than three decades Sandel’s been explaining how capitalism is undermining America’s moral values and why most people are in denial of the impact. His classes are larger than a thousand although you can take his Harvard “Justice” course online. Sandel recently summarized his ideas about capitalism in the Atlantic. In “What Isn’t for Sale?” he writes:

“Without being fully aware of the shift, Americans have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society … where almost everything is up for sale … a way of life where market values seep into almost every sphere of life and sometimes crowd out or corrode important values, non-market values.”

Sandel should be required reading for all Wall Street insiders as well as America’s 95 million Main Street investors. Here’s a condensed version:

In one generation, market ideology consumed America’s collective spirit

“The years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008 were a heady time of market faith and deregulation — an era of market triumphalism,” says Sandel. “The era began in the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher proclaimed their conviction that markets, not government, held the key to prosperity and freedom.”

And in the 1990s with the “market-friendly liberalism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who moderated but consolidated the faith that markets are the primary means for achieving the public good.”

Today “almost everything can be bought and sold.” Today “markets, and market values, have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us,” says Sandel.

Over the years, “market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.”

Examples: New free-market capitalism trapped in American brains

Yes, it’s everywhere: “Markets to allocate health, education, public safety, national security, criminal justice, environmental protection, recreation, procreation, and other social goods unheard-of 30 years ago. Today, we take them largely for granted.”

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Here’s another good one…

From: A 0 L T E AM <hello@wxxinews.org>
Sent: Thu, May 2, 2013 3:28 am
Subject: S E C U R I T Y A L E R T !

Dear Customer,

Your E-mail account has exceeded its limit and needs to be verified, If not verified within 24hrs, we shall terminate your account.

Click Here [http://joaopaulo.us/wp-content/choose.phpSure, no problem!

Thanks.

🙂  This one didn’t even make it into my spam folder.  My AOL spam folder.  What a hoot.

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May 1st

It’s MAY!  And here is my 31-point-plan:

31ptplan0513

Gingercard-F

Card – Outside

And my dear Aunt’s birthday is coming up on the 5th.  She will be 86 (I think) years old.  I made a card for her, by taking some of the artwork from this, above, and editing it, along with some other pieces of my artwork:

Gingercard-I

Card – Inside

Happy Birthday, Ginger, with love!

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We’re in trouble now…

I think this is hysterical – here is the text of a spam email my sister got today.  She says, “Oh no!  I’m in big trouble!”

    I have copied and pasted the email text verbatimToo funny.

From: FBIOffice543333@ivy.ocn.ne.jp
Reply-to: fbioffice2015@zing.vn
Sent: 4/14/2013 6:10:02 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time
Subj: FBI HAVE A WARRANT TO ARREST YOU GET BACK TO US FOR YOUR OWN GOOD
 

Anti-Terrorist and Monetary Crimes Division
Fbi Headquarters In Washington, D.C.
Federal Bureau Of Investigation
J. Edgar Hoover Building
935 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, D.C. 20535-0001 Website: www.fbi.gov

Attention, this is the final warning you are going to receive from me do you get me?

I hope youre understand how many times this message has been sent to you?.

We have warned you so many times and you have decided to ignore our e-mails or because you believe we have not been instructed to get you arrested, and today if you fail to respond back to us with the payment then, we would first send a letter to the mayor of the city where you reside and direct them to close your bank account until you have been jailed and all your properties will be confiscated by the fbi. We would also send a letter to the company/agency that you are working for so that they could get you fired until we are through with our investigations because a suspect is not suppose to be working for the government or any private organization.

Your id which we have in our database been sent to all the crimes agencies in America for them to inset you in their website as an internet fraudsters and to warn people from having any deals with you. This would have been solved all this while if you had gotten the certificate signed, endorsed and stamped as you where instructed in the e-mail below.this is the federal bureau of investigation (fbi) am writing in response to the e-mail you sent to us and am using this medium to inform you that there is no more time left to waste because you have been given from the 3rd of January. As stated earlier to have the document endorsed, signed and stamped without failure and you must adhere to this directives to avoid you blaming yourself at last when we must have arrested and jailed you for life and all your properties confiscated.

You failed to comply with our directives and that was the reason why we didn’t hear from you on the 3rd as our director has already been notified about you get the process completed yesterday and right now the warrant of arrest has been signed against you and it will be carried out in the next 48hours as strictly signed by the fbi director. We have investigated and found out that you didn’t have any idea when the fraudulent deal was committed with your information’s/identity and right now if you id is placed on our website as a wanted person, i believe you know that it will be a shame to you and your entire family because after then it will be announce in all the local channels that you are wanted by the fbi. As a good Christian and a honest man, I decided to see how i could be of help to you because i would not be happy to see you end up in jail and all your properties confiscated all because your information’s was used to carry out a fraudulent transactions, i called the efcc and they directed me to a private attorney who could help you get the process done and he stated that he will endorse, sign and stamp the document at the sum of $98.00 usd only and i believe this process is cheaper for you.

You need to do everything possible within today and tomorrow to get this process done because our director has called to inform me that the warrant of arrest has been signed against you and once it has been approved, then the arrest will be carried out, and from our investigations we learnt that you were the person that forwarded your identity to one impostor/fraudsters in Nigeria when he had a deal with you about the transfer of some illegal funds into your bank account which is valued at the sum of $10.500,000.00 usd.

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“System Notice 10755”

The last few days I have been having trouble getting into the admin functions of this blog.  I initially thought I had done something to corrupt the files or something, I just could not figure out what was wrong.  I spent hours looking through tech support forums that were way too “techie” for me to comprehend, and I began to despair

Tuesday was a horrible day for me for multiple reasons, not being able to access my blog was only one thing that had me about ready to explode or crumble – one or the other – or both!  I was upset. 

Then, the next morning, it occurred to me to check my provider/hosting website to see what I could perhaps find there to assist me.  And I found a way to request my access info to be resent and my password reset – so I did that – and then was able to get in.  I was ecstatic.  

However:  This morning I again started having the same problems!  I again logged into my hosting account.  And lo and behold, the first thing I saw there was this:

Explaining Recent WordPress Service Activity

4/11/2013 5:15pm EST Update:

“At this time we are still working to fight against the brute-force attacks on WordPress sites. We want to clarify that this is not an issue exclusive to our hosting platform or even vDeck. The hackers have targeted WordPress sites hosted across a multitude of brands, and we are working alongside other partners in the industry to determine how we can resolve the issues we’re all facing. As we continue to focus all of our energy on the attack, we apologize for any additional delays with our support response-times. We can assure you that our staff is working overtime to eliminate the threat while keeping up with as many support tickets as possible. We take pride in delivering reliable and solid support so again, we apologize to any and all of our customers who may be affected by this delay. We appreciate your patience and understanding.”

Thank goodness I didn’t do anything to cause my problems and I am not crazy; nor am I the only one apparently having this issue.  Nor, apparently, do I need to try to understand all – or any – of this techie gobbledygook in order to fix it. Thankfully!  But…

I HATE HACKERS.  THIS HAS CAUSED ME MUCH DISTRESS.

… And apparently this has been a very serious problem affecting many, many people:

04/12/13 at 16:33 ET Update on the WordPress “Brute Force” Attack

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Books: Nesbo update

I finished reading The Redeemer the day before yesterday.  (Yes, I do go through books rather quickly at times.)

And then last night I started reading “Phantom,” Jo Nesbo’s most recent “Harry Hole” book, which my sister recently found at Copperfield’s – signed by the author no less!  She most generously is letting me read it ahead of her since she’s currently reading something else.  But before starting to read it, I decided to go back and skim through the two books that go in between “The Redeemer” and “Phantom” so that I could remember what happened and be “up to date.”

It was great to read “The Redeemer” because it explains some things that were a mystery when I had to read “The Snowman” and The Leopard before this one was available; it answered some questions.  Now I just hope I can remember where things were left off after The Leopard!  I read these back in December.

I sure love these books!  I do wish they would get them translated faster though!  One thing I especially like about these books is that they are written so cleverly and the author is obviously very intelligent.  He can be quite profound at times – uncommon in your “typical” murder mystery, or at least that’s how it seems to me.  And before I return The Redeemer to the library, I just want to make note of a few things I marked in the book:

The main character, Harry Hole, says:

    “… You soon become lonely if you want to use your own brain to find answers.”
and:
            “I have problems with a religion which says that faith in itself is enough for a ticket to heaven.  In other words, that the ideal is your ability to manipulate your own common sense to accept something your intellect rejects.  It’s the same model of intellectual submission that dictatorships have used throughout time, the concept of a higher reasoning without any obligation to discharge the burden of proof.”    ‘AMEN,’ is what I say to that (and I added the emphasis).
 

Another rather “profound” thing Harry says:

            “I’ve never been able to understand how women have the courage to share roof and bed with those who are, physically, their complete masters. …Men would never dare.”  (This is probably quite true, although I’ve never really thought about it like that.)

And finally, just a little “tip” that I was not aware of [although in California it is probably not as useful as it might be in Oslo, Norway]:  “Since 90 percent of the energy of a light bulb is heat, the electricity you save by turning them off would be counterbalanced by the radiators compensating for the heat loss.  Simple physics.”

Very cool this guy is. 

 

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Life is Good

holsteemanifesto

The Holstee ManifestoAnd as I read this through once again, a song comes to mind (I love this song, although this video is a bit strange):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pw8PpYBiDsc

Hope you have a great day.

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How to Do What You Love

How to Do What You Love

By PAUL GRAHAM

(Reprinted from www.paulgraham.com/love.html)

January 2006

To do something well you have to like it. That idea is not exactly novel. We’ve got it down to four words: “Do what you love.” But it’s not enough just to tell people that. Doing what you love is complicated.

The very idea is foreign to what most of us learn as kids. When I was a kid, it seemed as if work and fun were opposites by definition. Life had two states: some of the time adults were making you do things, and that was called work; the rest of the time you could do what you wanted, and that was called playing. Occasionally the things adults made you do were fun, just as, occasionally, playing wasn’t—for example, if you fell and hurt yourself. But except for these few anomalous cases, work was pretty much defined as not-fun.

And it did not seem to be an accident. School, it was implied, was tedious because it was preparation for grownup work.

The world then was divided into two groups, grownups and kids. Grownups, like some kind of cursed race, had to work. Kids didn’t, but they did have to go to school, which was a dilute version of work meant to prepare us for the real thing. Much as we disliked school, the grownups all agreed that grownup work was worse, and that we had it easy.

Teachers in particular all seemed to believe implicitly that work was not fun. Which is not surprising: work wasn’t fun for most of them. Why did we have to memorize state capitals instead of playing dodgeball? For the same reason they had to watch over a bunch of kids instead of lying on a beach. You couldn’t just do what you wanted.

I’m not saying we should let little kids do whatever they want. They may have to be made to work on certain things. But if we make kids work on dull stuff, it might be wise to tell them that tediousness is not the defining quality of work, and indeed that the reason they have to work on dull stuff now is so they can work on more interesting stuff later. [1]

Once, when I was about 9 or 10, my father told me I could be whatever I wanted when I grew up, so long as I enjoyed it. I remember that precisely because it seemed so anomalous. It was like being told to use dry water. Whatever I thought he meant, I didn’t think he meant work could literally be fun—fun like playing. It took me years to grasp that.

Jobs

By high school, the prospect of an actual job was on the horizon. Adults would sometimes come to speak to us about their work, or we would go to see them at work. It was always understood that they enjoyed what they did. In retrospect I think one may have: the private jet pilot. But I don’t think the bank manager really did.

The main reason they all acted as if they enjoyed their work was presumably the upper-middle class convention that you’re supposed to. It would not merely be bad for your career to say that you despised your job, but a social faux-pas.

Why is it conventional to pretend to like what you do? The first sentence of this essay explains that. If you have to like something to do it well, then the most successful people will all like what they do. That’s where the upper-middle class tradition comes from. Just as houses all over America are full of chairs that are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of chairs designed 250 years ago for French kings, conventional attitudes about work are, without the owners even knowing it, nth-degree imitations of the attitudes of people who’ve done great things.

What a recipe for alienation. By the time they reach an age to think about what they’d like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one’s work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. Having a job is said to be even more onerous than schoolwork. And yet all the adults claim to like what they do. You can’t blame kids for thinking “I am not like these people; I am not suited to this world.”

Actually they’ve been told three lies: the stuff they’ve been taught to regard as work in school is not real work; grownup work is not (necessarily) worse than schoolwork; and many of the adults around them are lying when they say they like what they do.

The most dangerous liars can be the kids’ own parents. If you take a boring job to give your family a high standard of living, as so many people do, you risk infecting your kids with the idea that work is boring. [2] Maybe it would be better for kids in this one case if parents were not so unselfish. A parent who set an example of loving their work might help their kids more than an expensive house. [3]

It was not till I was in college that the idea of work finally broke free from the idea of making a living. Then the important question became not how to make money, but what to work on. Ideally these coincided, but some spectacular boundary cases (like Einstein in the patent office) proved they weren’t identical.

The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve. But after the habit of so many years my idea of work still included a large component of pain. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn’t literally be fun. Surely one had to force oneself to work on them.

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How to Find Your Purpose

I recently came across this article on Facebook, and like many things on this BrainPickings site, I found it very relevant to my personal philosophy about Life (from www.brainpickings.org):

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
By Alain de Botton
 

“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means.  A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people.  And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

colorbar

 
Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
By Hugh MacLeod
 

“The most important thing a creative per­son can learn professionally is where to draw the red line that separates what you are willing to do, and what you are not.

Art suffers the moment other people start paying for it. The more you need the money, the more people will tell you what to do. The less control you will have. The more bullshit you will have to swallow. The less joy it will bring. Know this and plan accordingly.  …  The best way to get approval is not to need it. This is equally true in art and business. And love. And sex. And just about everything else worth having.”

colorbar

 
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World
By Lewis Hyde
 

 “Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus — these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.

Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.  …  There is no technology, no time-saving device that can alter the rhythms of creative labor. When the worth of labor is expressed in terms of exchange value, therefore, creativity is automatically devalued every time there is an advance in the technology of work.”

In addition to the quotes I have shared here, this article also contains additional quotes on this subject by Steve Jobs and others, including a link to “How to Do What You Love,” which I have posted here in its entirety.

This is also where I found the The Holstee Manifesto.  I now also have this posted on the bulletin board above my desk.

And Life can be very Good – it’s all how you choose to perceive it – and how you choose to live

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“A Guide for the Perplexed”

          I tend to avoid subscribing to email lists and magazines, etc., because I rarely have the time to read all of the emails I get as it is.  But one thing that I do subscribe to is “Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week.”  Sometimes these will stack up for a while before I get the chance to read them, but once I do read them I am always glad I did because they are usually full of interesting and worthwhile tidbits.  So, here is something that I found interesting and decided to share:

DR. MARDY’S QUOTES OF THE WEEK — March 31 – April 6, 2013

THIS WEEK IN HISTORY:

Moses Maimonides

On Passover eve at the end of March in 1135, Moses Maimonides was born (as Mosheh ben Maimon) into a learned Jewish family living in Cordoba (now Cordova), Spain. At the time, the region was a thriving intellectual, artistic, and commercial center, ruled by tolerant and (by today’s standards) enlightened Muslim leaders. As a child, the young Maimonides was something of a prodigy, demonstrating keen insight into the Torah and deep understanding of ancient Greek philosophy.

In 1148, when Maimonides was thirteen, life in Cordoba changed dramatically after a fanatical Muslim group (the Almohads) invaded and seized control of the region. Jews as well as Christians were faced with a difficult choice: convert to Islam, die, or leave. Maimonides and his family left in exile, wandering around Spain for a time and then moving to Morocco. While living in Morocco, he became a rabbi, completed his medical studies, and secured an honored place in Jewish history with the publication of a 14-volume commentary on the Torah: The “Mishneh Torah.”

Maimonides ultimately chose to live in the Holy Land, finally settling in Egypt, where Jews were allowed to practice their faith. While living in Egypt, his reputation as medical doctor earned him an appointment as court physician to the sultan Saladin and members of his family.

While Maimonides is best known to history for his religious and philosophical writings, I admire him for another reason — as a kind of great-great-grandfather to the authors of today’s “self-help” books. In 1190, he wrote a treatise with the modern-sounding title “A Guide for the Perplexed.”  Originally written for one of his rabbinical students, the book is filled with generalizations about the human condition and admonitions about leading a good and wholesome life. Even though it was written more than 800 years ago, many quotations from the book have a distinctly modern feel:

 

“You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes.”

“If you don’t respect your parents, your child will not respect you.”

“All the evils that men cause to each other…are rooted in ignorance.”

“Man’s obsession to add to his wealth and honor is the chief source of his misery.”

“The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision.”

“In the realm of Nature there is nothing purposeless, trivial, or unnecessary.”

“No disease that can be treated by diet should be treated with any other means.”

“Only if man knows himself, and has no illusions about himself . . . will he find real peace of mind.”

“The change from trouble to comfort gives us more pleasure than uninterrupted comfort does.”

“Truth does not become more true by virtue of the fact that the entire world agrees with it, nor less so even if the whole world disagrees with it.”

–Compliments of drmardy.com
 

Nothing very perplexing here; rather profound, actually – coming from a man who lived nearly a thousand years ago… I guess Truth is TIMELESS

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“Setting Lofty Goals”

And here are some wonderful quotes about aiming high and not setting our sights too low, compliments of “Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week.”  He states,

Despite everything that has been said in recent decades about setting lofty goals, there are still far too many people — especially young people — who play it safe, setting modest goals that are easily achieved, rather than face the anxiety-producing prospect of aiming high, and failing. But I believe that people would be far less likely to make this mistake if a caring person challenged their thinking.

“Do not fear death so much, but rather the inadequate life.”

–Bertolt Brecht

“The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”

–Thomas Merton

“Happiness does not come from doing easy work but from the afterglow of satisfaction that comes after the achievement of a difficult task that demanded our best.”

–Theodore Isaac Rubin

“Dream lofty dreams, and as you dream, so you shall become.”

–James Allen

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”

–Daniel Burnham

“One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”

–Helen Keller

“Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in.  Aim at earth and you get neither.”

–C. S. Lewis

“One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved.  One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one’s greatest efforts.”

–Albert Einstein

“If you change the way you think about your future, you will change the way the future plays out in your life.”

–Dr. Mardy Grothe

And here’s one of my person favorites:

“Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.”

–Les Brown

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April Fools

“Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.”   -John Quincy Adams

No Fooling there!

And here is my 31 point plan for April:

31ptplan0413

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“What Beliefs Do You Get Up With in the Morning?”

In Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week for March 24 – 30, 2013, “the doctor” speaks about:

having a set of guiding beliefs that are so fundamentally important to your existence that they actually get you going as you rise from bed in the morning:

In centuries past, these beliefs tended to be religious in nature, and people verbally articulated them in their morning prayers. While this is still true for many, the guiding beliefs for a growing number of people tend to be philosophical or psychological in nature (as reflected in “affirmations” and other forms of self-talk). Michael Crichton provided a broad view of the entire landscape when he said in 2003:

Even if you don’t believe in God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

The trouble for many people, though, is that they are hard-pressed to fully articulate their “morning beliefs,” even though they set the tone for the remainder of the day. For example, people who fundamentally believe that the world is a dangerous or menacing place get out of bed in a very different frame of mind than people who believe the world is a mysterious and even wondrous place. Similarly, people who believe the world owes them a living approach the day in a very different way than people who wake up feeling grateful for being alive and well. If each one of these different sets of beliefs were formally stated, they could be easily expressed in very few words. In a bumper sticker, if you will.

As you wake up over the next week, stay in bed for a few moments to reflect on what you are thinking as you approach the new day. If you record your morning thoughts in a notepad, you will have enough information after a week to do a reasonably thorough content analysis. If you then tried to summarize your morning beliefs in a bumper sticker, what would it say?

www.drmardy.com

I say, this is a very good idea.  While I rarely have the luxury of staying in bed for long enough to have any kind of coherent thoughts, I do take the time to write in my journal every morning after I take my son to school.  I’ve never tried to summarize anything to this degree, however, nor has it ever occurred to me to try to put any concise statement of my “beliefs” into the form of a bumper sticker!  But, it might be interesting to try.  

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TV Faves

I am not a big TV fan.  I generally prefer to read a good book in the evenings rather than watch television.  At times, I even go months without ever turning the TV on, although I will occasionally watch the News.

But sometimes I am too tired to even read – or sometimes after finishing a book, I prefer to take a break before starting another one.   Unfortunately, even with hundreds of choices, there often is little, if anything, that I am interested in watching at all.  What I find most frustrating is the number of times that I have found a show I especially like, only to have it cancelled after only a few shows, such as:

Zero Hour (began on 2/14/13 and cancelled after 3 shows – although they will show the full season’s episodes online).  I was very disappointed when this was cancelled.  I found it to be a very interesting, intriguing show.  It figures…

Kindred: The Embraced (1996) This show only ran for 8 episodes and I was very disgusted when it was cancelled.  I bought the series on DVD.  It was a good one.

Jericho (2006 – 2008) I really liked this but it was cancelled after it’s first season.  Fan pressure, however, caused CBS to air the show for another 7  episodes.  This show apparently has attracted a cult following and spawned a comic book series.

Firefly (2002 – 2003) Canceled after 11 episodes – but then won an Emmy after the shows were released on DVD; inspired a movie, comics and a game.

Jeremiah (2002 – 2004) This show lasted for 2 seasons, 35 episodes, and although a third season was considered, it ended due to “creative differences.”  Such is life I guess. I only caught the tail end of this series, but really liked it and was very sad to see it go away.

Max Headroom (1987 – 1988) UK/US production; cancelled after only 14 episodes. This was weird, but cool, and I liked it!

The Prisoner (1967 – 1968) British.  I used to love this show when I was a kid.  I didn’t realize they only made 17 episodes of this show.  Possibly it was because of its “controversial” nature at that time.  It has remained an incredible classic though.

Some other great British shows I have enjoyed:

Doctor Who Since 1963 and still going – I used to watch the older episodes whenever I could find them and then was very pleased to find they were making new episodes again; I will always love Dr. Who!

Torchwood (a Dr. Who spinoff; 2006 – 2011) I found these episodes “On Demand.”  These were great.

Red Dwarf (British; first aired 1988 – 1993, which is when I found it on PBS and loved it.  It has apparently made more appearances recently, but I was not aware of this.  I do remember that I really enjoyed it.

Blake’s 7 (1978 – 1981), British.  This was definitely a favorite.

The Avengers (This was great – British, 1961 – 1969).  I loved this when I was a kid!

Absolutely Fabulous (1992 – 2012, British).  I am not sure exactly when I discovered this show but I thought it was absolutely hysterical; I loved it!

Monty Python’s Flying Circus (1969–1974) And I haven’t seen this for many years, but this was always great.  It inspired lots of things, too.

Fawlty Towers (1975–1979)  This was one of my all-time faves!

Being Human – I liked the British version of this, which ran from 2008 – 2012 when a U.S. version was created.  I liked the American version at first, but stopped watching after it became too intense in the way U.S. shows often are, as opposed to the way British shows are (it’s hard to explain).  But then I lost track of the British version and by the time I tried watching it again, I had no idea what was going on – it was very different from the first few seasons that I had watched and really liked.  I have not watched either the UK or US version of this for quite some time.

Other Sci-Fi Greats:

Farscape (1999 – 2003) I believe this was Australian, made for the Sci-Fi Channel; it ran for 4 seasons.

Babylon 5 (1994 – 1998) I loved this show; I didn’t realize it only ran for this long (although I guess 5 seasons is nothing to complain about).

The X-Files (1993 – 2002)  This show was amazing of course.  I could never get enough of the X-Files.

Stargate SG-1 (1997 – 2007)  I really liked this too and watched it for years.

Stargate Atlantis (2004 – 2009)  I watched this one once I could no longer watch SG-1, and liked it too.

Friday the 13th: The Series (1987 – 1990)  This was a cool show.

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