Advice from the 1950’s from a career counselor, William J Reilly rings true to this day. As he says in his book, How to Avoid Work, “life really begins when you have discovered that you can do anything you want.” This echoes what Thomas Edison said when asked about his secret to success. ” You do something all day long, don’t you? Everyone does. If you get up at seven o’clock and go to bed at eleven, you have put sixteen good hours, and it is certain that you have been doing something all that time. The only difference is that you do a great many things and I do one. If you took the time in question and applied it in one direction, you would succeed. Success is sure to follows such application. The trouble lies in the fact that people do not have one thing to stick to, letting all else go.”
The good news [Song]
This song, written & performed by Sarah Thomsen was written in response to the church shooting in Knoxville, TN (in 2008) and in response to a news editorial in Duluth, MN (2010) titled “The Gospel can bring change into homosexuals lives.” Echoes of the past ring again after the massacre last week (mental health this time).
Grand – parents! [Article]
To add fuel to the grandparents competition fire, some researchers found that your mom’s parents are the better half of grandparents. Guaranteed to raise more than a few eyebrows!
Tragedy [Opinion]
I’m not going to link to another analysis on the tragedy that befell Newton, Connecticut over the weekend. The words that Helen Philpot wrote however are worth reading. I personally find it strange that the “richest” country in the world has more legislation on ladders than it has on the ownership of guns.
Clothing optional [article]
What exactly is the etiquette to be followed in a co-ed bathhouse where clothes are not allowed? American Brian Blickenstaff tries to breakdown the mental paradigm behind his experience in a German sauna. An excerpt: “Throughout our lives, how often are we actually in the buff? Excluding showering and (for some) sleeping, it happens pretty seldom, right? I mean, the only other time we shed clothing is when we’re getting intimate. Try as we might, it becomes difficult to divorce intimacy from the act of being n u d e, and this coupling casts a certain strange shadow over the proceedings at a place like Friedrichsbad.”
Eat & let live [article]
Food is the glue that holds civilizations together, says G. Murphy Donovan. In his eyes, there are four key threats to the modern family – cell phones, video games, the internet, and junk food. We allow the first three because they are cheaper than tutors, private schools, and nannies. Read on.
Topsy Turvy [Audio]
Could you handle a world that looked upside down? Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of The Annals of Improbable Research, shares a case study in which the subject was made to wear vision-flipping goggles. Ten days later, the man was riding a bicycle and playing catch in the park—his only impairment the strange headgear itself. Listen to this interesting conversation (short 4:38 audio)
Stuffed with memories [article]
This explains my constant hunger! Maybe I’ll pay more attention to my lunch (& dinner) – just after I finish reading this report!
“We’ve known for a while that people who are distracted while eating — such as by watching TV or typing — are not really thinking about what they’re eating. They’re not making memories of the food, and may be setting themselves up for later hunger.”
Dead People Like Facebook. [Article]
You use Facebook to connect with your friends. But a sharp eyed user had a disturbing occurrence – his facebook feed said one of his friends liked something. Except, that friend was dead. For a while.
The Refrigerated Workforce [Article]
This interview with Nicola Twilley about food ends with the following poignant statement about the direction that people who spend their working hours in refrigerated spaces are going in ”
When you spend a lot of time in refrigerated spaces, you slow down. In a lot of the frozen food warehouses, workers are not allowed to work alone. You don’t even realize that you are slowing down, and eventually you stop moving. We have these buildings that we maintain at extraordinary expense that we, physically, are not optimized for all. We are not optimized for spaces that slow down decay, to preserve “freshness” — whatever that means — in our fruits, vegetables and meats. On the temporal level, what refrigeration does is so weird. It is an extension that slows everything down.