Ridiculous pursuits, matters solemn and less so
Answer: roll the car window down sometimes.
(We do have a little nervousness about doing this, with reason; The Pooch gets so excited that she seems to lose her basic sense of or concern about where she is in 3D space. Which isn’t a prescription for keeping the windows rolled up — it’s a prescription for keeping hold of her collar. :))
A great back story, great voices, professional recording job, words and music by Neko Case… and a ukulele! What’s not to like???
[Lyrics]
[h/t to Jules]
From Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang:
And then there was Black Ceremony, a recent daytime fireworks exhibition in the desert sky over Qatar, kicking off his exhibit at the Arab Museum of Modern Art:
…which, of course, is a long way from saying that being a blogger pays no rewards at all. I know some people who do it for money, and I know some people who do it because they think it will eventually, indirectly, lead to the making of money. But I know waaaay more people who do it with no expectation at all — or at most, with the simple, touching, ever-so-slight hope of connecting, sometime, with someone like-minded.
Thanks, always, for coming to Running After My Hat.
When I was a sophomore in high school — this was just a plain old everyday public high school, not a school for high-achieving nerds or anything — our English teacher let us write an end-of-year research paper on any topic we liked. I have no idea why, of all possible subjects, at the age of 15 I decided to research Old English. (And then, a year later, to continue the investigation by focusing on Middle English.)
Whatever the reason, and no matter in how many forms I see it covered, the topic never gets old for me. This was sheer pleasure:
[Hat tip to Jules, via Facebook]
Its style reminds me a little of something which might have appeared scattered throughout several episodes of the old Rocky & Bullwinkle TV show: kidding, but not quite.
[Original image found at the MathWorks site (slogan: “Accelerating the pace of engineering and science”). It seemed too good not to use.]
I haven’t read the book in question (Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman), but this book review got it a spot in the queueueueue. Especially this bit:
Kahneman’s approach to psychology spurns heart-sinking tables and formulae in favour of short, intriguing questions that elegantly illustrate the ways our intuitions mislead us.
Take the famous “Linda question”: Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that’s logically impossible. (It can’t be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the “conjunctive fallacy”, whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.
We are much better storytellers than we are logicians. Reassuring news, if true, for anyone aspiring to write fiction!
By the way, the piling on of specific details also tends to make jokes funnier. A loaf of day-old Wonder Bread mistakenly shelved with the canned hams might be the starting point for a stand-up comic’s routine; a loaf of bread on the wrong shelf is just… dull.
For more information about the “conjunctive fallacy,” see this Wikipedia entry. There you’ll also learn about an opposing point of view, under the heading Gigerenzer (which is, alas, merely a person’s name and not a Clausewitzian military tactic).
Of course, as the image at the top of this post suggests, greater specificity doesn’t necessarily make a given utterance matter more. Ha.
Yeah. That, alas — for the first time in twenty years.
We’d known the day was coming, known it for months now. A sad realization, to be sure. But not the same sort of sadness as to find it suddenly so…
Katie lived longer than the other two indoor cats we had — somewhere around 16, maybe 17 years. We can’t be sure because she came to us fully-formed, as a stray. This was when we lived at our previous place, the rented house on the west side of town: deep in the heart of college-student apartments, but on a very large block at whose center was an old, heavily treed forest which butted up against our back yard. Like other strays who visited us over the years there, she (and/or her mother) possibly had belonged to a student who left for a summer and just “released” her into the wild.
In any case, one day I came home from work one day to find The Not-Yet Missus eager to tell me of the epic animal-kingdom moment I’d missed: this mottled tortoisheshell cat had appeared from nowhere and simply leapt, in a single fluid movement, to the top of the wooden fence surrounding the artificial pond in the back yard. Striking enough, just that much. But what elevated it to the level of a National Geographic feature was this: the four-foot-long blacksnake trapped, writhing and whipping about, caught in the cat’s jaws.
Spike Jonze’s short film Mourir Auprès de Toi (To Die By Your Side):
Spike Jonze: Mourir Auprès de Toi on Nowness.com.
Read about it — and watch a brief making-of film — at Brain Pickings. (And I should probably add, “…of course.”)
Every dog owner thinks he knows how his or her canine companion thinks. I doubt that many dog owners already know everything covered in this single one-hour program on PBS’s Nova series, (re-)broadcast last night. Here’s a brief intro:
Watch Dogs Decoded on PBS. See more from NOVA.
Sample tidbit: genetically, via mitochondrial DNA (passed down, unchanged, in the maternal bloodline), dogs are gray wolves. Not similar to gray wolves. Identical to them. MicroPooches, Irish wolfhounds, chihuahuas, mutts, pit bulls, Labradors, collies, shar-peis, Afghan hounds, setters, Mexican hairless, basset hounds, German shepherds, poodles… gray wolves.
For now, if it’s not being rebroadcast any time soon on your local PBS station, you can watch the whole thing online, in eight- or ten-minute chunks, by following the link highlighted above, just below the embedded video.
[Image: note dropped by South Vietnamese Air Force Major Buang-Ly onto the deck of the USS Midway on April 30, 1975. It says, “Can you move the Helicopter to the other side, I can land on your runway, I can fly 1 hour more, we have enough time to mouve. Please rescue me. Major Buang, wife and 5 child.” See the marvelous Letters of Note site for the complete story.]
From whiskey river (italicized portion):
Our Valley
We don’t see the ocean, not ever, but in July and August
when the worst heat seems to rise from the hard clay
of this valley, you could be walking through a fig orchard
when suddenly the wind cools and for a moment
you get a whiff of salt, and in that moment you can almost
believe something is waiting beyond the Pacheco Pass,
something massive, irrational, and so powerful even
the mountains that rise east of here have no word for it.You probably think I’m nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.
They maintain that huge silence we think of as divine,
a silence that grows in autumn when snow falls
slowly between the pines and the wind dies
to less than a whisper and you can barely catch
your breath because you’re thrilled and terrified.You have to remember this isn’t your land.
It belongs to no one, like the sea you once lived beside
and thought was yours. Remember the small boats
that bobbed out as the waves rode in, and the men
who carved a living from it only to find themselves
carved down to nothing. Now you say this is home,
so go ahead, worship the mountains as they dissolve in dust,
wait on the wind, catch a scent of salt, call it our life.
(Philip Levine [source])
…and:
The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.
But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think… The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.
So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.
(David Foster Wallace, from Oblivion: Stories [source])
