Today’s piece is Stephen Leacock’s humorous short story, Borrowing A Match
What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
Today’s piece is Stephen Leacock’s humorous short story, Borrowing A Match
K is for klusterfuck! This is a beast to execute so a lot more practice needs to be going into this.
The exemplar is exemplary!
The wet weather broke for a bit this afternoon and gave us a chance for a long walk.
I could have frame this picture better: the pelicans in the background and the rippling reflection of the boat in the foreground as the wind gently blew over the surface created a beautiful visual that this picture will not show.
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Eddie Jaku, the self-professed “Happiest Man in the World”, died today, aged 101. His simple promise to himself after surviving the Holocaust and having his first child “..to be happy, smile, be polite, helpful, and kind” is the kind of system I aspire to for myself. It’s his reminder that happiness is a choice that I needed to hear again today.
I have seen the very worst in mankind, the horrors of the death camps, the Nazi efforts to exterminate my life, and the lives of all my people. But now I consider myself the happiest man on Earth. Through all my years I have learnt this: life can be beautiful if you make it beautiful … happiness is something we can choose. It is up to you.
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On a day like today, cloudy within and without, watching Jaku’s message again was a simple yet powerful reminder to count my blessings.
I’m grateful that I have people around me that I can talk to about how I feel without judgement. That I have good health. That I have a a choice to be happy despite everything else going on around me.
Venkatesh Rao’s post on the complexity – and more – of contemporary supply chains is a fantastic read:
Many engineered artifacts can be viewed largely in terms of their designed function without much loss in understanding. If you’re designing a truss, material properties and stress/strain calculations tell you almost everything you need to know about how it will perform in the field. You can go from paper-napkin sketch to CAD design, to prototype, to production artifact, via a largely one-way flow, with very little iteration, and not go too wrong.
This is not true of supply chains. Even though many of the pieces are designed and put together the way other engineering artifacts are, the effects of those behaviors are different. And they evolve over time.
A 5 minute reading of Anton Chekov’s short story, A Country Cottage
Incredibly hard to execute these, which of course is the reason for more practice.
Why is it so hard to put into words what the problem is? And when done, why do few people agree on it? And when agreed, even fewer agree on the solution for it?
It is incredibly hard to separate opinion from fact when describing what we see as humans. The stories we tell ourselves (and maybe even believe) are just that – stories. Someone else with a different story (based on another agenda?) might convince us to believe in it. As a friend said to me yesterday, there’s a fine line between influence and manipulation, and often we have no idea what it is.
Some people appear adept at defining problems. Some others are adept at persuading others that their definition of the problem is the only one, and investing time, money, and effort to solve that is the right thing to do.
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Something related from an article by Venkatesh Rao:
The wholes are too big to fit in a single human mind, and the physical embodiments are too vast to capture even on a single map, let alone in a single photograph.
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Note to self: I struggle with problem definition all the time. I tend to sleep on it. Often, that helps clarify fact from fiction. More often, the problem isn’t even there. Why don’t you do that sleep thing more often?
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It’s been a dreary day and no walk possible in this weather
If, by Rudyard Kipling.
Recording a poem once a week, and uploading the first take, doesn’t really feel like I’m doing any work. So this week, I’m going to try at least once every other day, given I’m reading a piece of text aloud.
Ideas, like seeds, need some way to spread. Our local community garden now has both a seed library and a book nook.
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The garden has borne the brunt of several vandal attacks, including a stolen car driven into a tree, arson attack on the shed that stored the tools, and the fences constantly defaced.
Despite all that, the group who tend to the garden have, like the plants, been remarkably resilient. The community resolve was so strong that a new modern structure has arisen in place of the old shed, supported by an eye in the sky that keeps close watch. Built almost entirely by the community that has banded together, the garden is now flourishing with all kinds of herbs, flowers and fruit, masking any signs of the damage that some unthinking humans caused.
At the beginning of the month, a seed library and a book nook were installed. A small number of good seeds and books ‘seeded’ this idea. Within a few days, both have gained traction: today I think there were 3x the number of seeds and 2X the number of books.
The shades are getting slightly less smudged and a little more fluid. The angle of the elbow to the desk, and the angle of the pen to the paper are a big deal.