The Travels of Mickey Tom (2)

by 2 Comments

[This post continues yesterday’s. I won’t redefine any of the terminology here, so if you find yourself a little confused it probably just means you need to read that one.]

In the fall of 2003, The Missus and I were preparing to host her sisters, brother, and their families for Thanksgiving.

At the time, the four families were holding annual “reunions” like this, one purpose of which was to remember their parents, Mabel and Tom, who had died a few years earlier. “Events” (such as they were) thus were frequently on a Mabel-and-Tom theme; for instance, since Mabel loved playing Bingo, there was an annual “Mabel Bingo” night. They also gave out prizes for this sort of thing, such as used books by people named Mabel or Lyndall (which was Tom’s real first name).

Now, The Missus and I love games: cards, PC and console-video games, board games, and yes, Bingo. She tends to be the more aggressively competitive one; I like to win, of course, but also tend more to trying to figure out in advance how best to achieve victory.

So we decided that year that we would come up with a new “game” for the four families to play. We called it Tom’s Snipe Hunt.

[Read more…]

Share

The Travels of Mickey Tom (1)

by 7 Comments

In the second part of this two-part series, I’ll introduce you to a handsome fellow named Mickey Tom. I’ll tell you where he started out, where he is now, how he got to where he is now, and where he’s headed.

But before I can do any of that, I need to provide some background for readers who might not be familiar with a particular, some would say peculiar… hmm… pastime? hobby? obsession? adventuring nerd’s side quest?

Any of those terms might suffice as a descriptor for the mysterious word geocaching.

If you’ve paid attention to car commercials in the last couple of years, you probably already know the phrase “GPS unit.” This is a small boxy electronic gizmo, typically mounted on the dashboard, which displays a real-time map of the route you’re currently driving. Sophisticated GPS units allow you to specify a destination, for which the machine will select an optimal route to follow; some of them even “talk,” instructing you audibly to (for instance) “Turn left here.”

The main technology which allows car GPS units to work is a network of satellites, collectively called the Global Positioning System. The idea is fairly simple; at root, it’s just geometry: If you know the positions of at least three objects, and can determine your distance from each of them, then you can determine your own position. As the GPS satellites circle the globe, they beam down to earth a signal reporting their current positions. Any device which can receive those transmissions thus can figure out — to a more or less accurate degree — the device’s own latitude and longitude.

That’s all you need to understand in order to “understand” how geocaching works. But that still doesn’t say much about geocaching itself, does it?

Read on.

[Read more…]

Share

Fact, Fiction, and the Gray In-Between

by 2 Comments

In a college linguistics course, I first encountered the work of the Institute for Propaganda Analysis (IPA), a pre-World War II organization — we’d probably call it a think tank, nowadays — which (per Wikipedia):

…formed with the general concern that increased amounts of propaganda were decreasing the public’s ability to develop their own critical thoughts. The purpose of the IPA was to spark rational thinking and provide a guide to help the public have well-informed discussions on current issues. “To teach people how to think rather than what to think.” The IPA focused on domestic propaganda issues that might become possible threats to the democratic ways of life.

I’m not going to use RAMH for political commentary, in one direction or the other. But in light of the political atmosphere in the US this year, I thought it might be useful to reiterate, briefly, the seven categories of propaganda techniques which the IPA identified:

  1. Name-calling
  2. Glittering generalities
  3. Transfer
  4. Testimonial
  5. Plain folks
  6. Card stacking
  7. Bandwagon

Each category is covered separately in links from the Wikipedia article. Another couple of excellent resources for further reading on this subject are:

  • Dr. Ronald B. Sandler’s 2005 essay, “Propaganda and How to Recognize It”
  • Aaron Delwiche’s propagandacritic Web site (which is where I found the image at the top of this post, “Glitter,” by Carol Lay)

For now, though, I wanted to highlight one specific tactic which politicians of all persuasions are especially fond of. It’s a sub-category of category 2, “glittering generalities,” and it’s summed up in a phrase which I still remember from that linguistics course: mere assertion.

Mere assertion is exactly what it says: the propagandist says that something is the case — is true — (that’s the “assertion” part) but does not offer any sort of substantive support for the claim (hence the “mere”). This tactic most often becomes useful when the politician is speaking under time constraints; the implication is, I could cite numerous pieces of evidence for that claim, but unfortunately I don’t have time.

I’m not going to quote mere-assertion examples from last night’s Vice-Presidential debate, although it wouldn’t be difficult. Instead, I’ll direct your attention to the transcript, available from numerous sources:

And, of course, don’t forget to visit the FactCheck.org site to help sort out the wheat of fact from the chaff of fiction and propaganda.

Edit to add: Bear in mind that FactCheck, and sites like it, seldom point out the true statements; they focus on the false, questionable, and/or fuzzy ones. So knowing that two debaters have a roughly equal number of bogus claims doesn’t mean much unless you account for the overall number of factual claims made by each of the two. (That is, for example, if both “teams” made 10 erroneous statements but one of them made a total of 50 factual claims while the other made only 10 — well, you see where this is going.) Also note that these sites don’t weight the importance of a false claim: someone who’s wrong on the average household income in Country X, but otherwise right, isn’t at nearly as much fault as someone who’s wrong on Country X’s ties to terrorism (and hence on its invasion-worthiness), but otherwise right.

Share

Don’t Embarrass the Dog

by 2 Comments

As I’ve mentioned (briefly) before, The Missus and I have a recent addition to our household population: a Yorkshire terrier named Sophie. That is not Sophie over at the right — it’s one “Lexi Ann,” from the dogsinduds.com site. But it’s a good place to start this post.

We got Sophie as a “rescue dog,” which is to say that she was extracted from a bad, potentially dangerous situation by our local Big Dog Rescue group. (Yes, big: ha ha.) Many of the dogs in such situations have been in them from the start; Sophie’s case was different, in that her original owners had loved the bejeezus out of her, had taken exceptional care of her. It was just that their situation was about to change, and change radically.

From the evidence provided by Sophie’s behavior, we’ve concluded that she was probably very much spoiled by her original owners. For instance, together with her favorite toys and beds and such, we also got an entire basket of doggie clothes — some at the extreme of the “bad to the bone” outfit in the picture. We have almost never put any of these clothes on her and she seems happy with their absence. (Apparently kinda like the way many humans feel when they first “go commando.”)

The other night, The Missus’s sister and brother-in-law were coming over. Laura had already met Sophie, but Gary hadn’t. In order to give him the full benefit of The Sophie Experience, The Missus decided that Sophie should be wearing something cute when she met him. So saying, shortly before L&G’s arrival, The Missus put the dog into something that resembled a pale-blue pullover sweater.

[Update 7:06pm EDT: The Missus informs me that per usual, I here demonstrate shaky memory of a lady’s wardrobe. Only vaguely, apparently, could Sophie’s outfit be described as a pullover sweater, nor was it pale blue. It was a purple T-shirt… perhaps with some pale-blue trim and/or rhinestones. Please make the necessary adjustments as you continue reading, with gratitude for The Missus’s zeal for accurate reportage. :)]

Here’s what happened:

First, when she saw The Missus get the basket of clothes, Sophie meekly sat at her feet, her shoulders hunched over. She knew what was coming, see? And with an air one could describe only as glum, she accepted the selected sweater.

Second: The Missus brought Sophie out of the bedroom into the hall. However, Sophie would not by herself come into the living room. She lay down right at the threshold. C’mon, Sophie, said The Missus, it’s all right. Come on into the living room.

Nothing doing.

So then The Missus picked her up and carried her. When she placed the dog on the living-room floor, Sophie immediately sank to her belly and slunk around to the back of a chair.

If The Missus hadn’t removed the sweater at that point, we’re convinced Sophie would still be there. Cowering, in the glare of public attention.

But — surprise! — this isn’t a post about Sophie, not really, nor about dog ownership in general. It’s a post about writing.

In her two most recent posts over at the writing on the water blog, Marta has asked two seemingly unrelated questions which, it happens, are actually two sides of the same coin.

In the first of these two posts, she asks a writer’s eternal question:

…how do you know when a story is done?

In the second, the question is thornier (because its answer depends on the answerer):

What do you do if your negative feelings about your work threaten to overwhelm you? What convinces you that a writing life is not so bad?

Now, in the first, she’s asking about a story; in the second, about writing — the process, the career, the life. Yet the questions both boil down to the same thing: How do you know when to stop?

Of the replies to those questions, I think I most liked Shelly Lowenkopf‘s; he was answering the first, but (again) it works for the second as well:

I know a story is done when the things I attempt to pile onto it will have none of my embellishments and keep falling off of their own accord.

That (for me) is exactly the point where I know I’ve gone too far. It’s the point where the Yorkie, having meekly accepted the human’s decision, nevertheless slinks away to a corner — where someone new to it will (if the Yorkier is lucky) not see it at all.

And like I said, if you think the preceding paragraph is talking about a dog, you’re not reading carefully enough.

Apropos of nothing, although I guess if pressed I could say I’m trying to balance doglove with catlove, here’s a poem which will mean a lot to feline enthusiasts — and to any human, really, willing to accept the notion that cats might have something to teach us. It’s from today’s edition of The Writer’s Almanac.

[Read more…]

Share

Puzzlin’ Evidence… Done Hardened in Your Heart

by 8 Comments

Talking Heads was one of those bands which I probably never would have picked up on — not on my own, anyhow. Predictably, in retrospect, it took a nudge from my brother.

Or rather, a couple of different nudges. One of the later ones came in 1986, with the release of the musical film True Stories. Mike pointed me to a couple of reviews and then, somehow, he managed to corral a bunch of us to accompany him to Philadelphia to see it one night.

Nominally, it’s a Talking Heads film: the group released a not-quite-soundtrack album containing its versions of the songs. But in the film — written and directed by, and “starring,” the Heads’ lead singer, David Byrne — with few exceptions, the songs are performed by other people in the cast. For instance, a voodoo priest (played by gospel/R&B star Pops Staples) sings a song called “Papa Legba” to bring love and good fortune to Louis (The Dancing Bear) Fyne (played by John Goodman).

The general idea for the film came to him, Byrne has said, from tabloid stories — how they might represent people from a single town.

[Read more…]

Share

A Bout of Gout

by 4 Comments

'The Gout,' by James Gillray

From Richard Selzer’s Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery, quoting Lady Mary Wortley, via Hugh Walpole:

People wish their enemies dead — but I do not; I say, give them gout, give them the stone.

From “When in Gout,” by Allison Williams, Time Out New York, April 16-22, 2008:

You would know if you had gout because it’s associated with the most excruciating pain this side of childbirth. “The classical gouty attack hits the base of the big toe, and it will wake the patient up,” says Dr. Stephen Honig of NYU Hospital for Joint Diseases. “Just the weight of a sheet on the toe can be painful.” So if your bedmate wakes up screaming bloody murder, and their cries only escalate when you poke their big toe, don’t take it personally.

****

Back in the days when The Missus was buying and selling antiques, she came across a curious little piece of wooden furniture. About a foot long, upholstered, its surface on an incline, the upper end curled around itself, it resembled one of those old Victorian-era fainting couches.

“What is that?” was the obvious question.

“Oh,” came the non-obvious answer, “it’s a gout stool.”

That was some time before I had my first gout attack, and shortly The Missus managed to sell it anyway. So I never really got to appreciate the point of a gout stool until later.

The first time gout afflicted me it was in a big toe, which was red and swollen. Wearing sandals, I went to the doctor. He smiled when he saw the toe, touched it with a fingertip, and when I jumped six inches he smiled even more broadly and said, “I thought so!” Alas, he couldn’t really do anything for it except order up some prescription-strength version of an anti-inflammatory/painkiller. He said I might want to drink cranberry juice, too, and sort of half-frowned when I told him of my two- to three-cups-of-tea-a-day habit. “Tea? Hmm. You might want to rethink that…”

Later, more than once, I got it in one knee or the other.

I called my boss on one of those occasions, said I didn’t think I’d be able to come in to work because all I really wanted to do was stay immobile as long as possible — preferably with that leg elevated. She told me her deceased husband had had gout, and it would get so painful that he could go up and down the stairs only by sitting on them and pulling himself up or easing himself down, one at a time.

This time around, the demon has for two days had its teeth sunk into the right ankle.

Until experiencing it, I’d never appreciated how difficult it is to keep your ankle from bending. The optimal step, it seems, requires that you turn the foot to the outside — go splay-footed on that one side, à la Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp character. And you also learn how to negotiate a step: when going down, you keep the ankle straight and step down with that foot first (because the ankle with the trailing foot will always have to tilt to move your weight forward and down). Going up, of course, you again lead with the gouted foot. Although putting weight on it does cause a bit of a twinge, it’s nothing compared to the fiery clamp which seizes the ankle when it bends.

Meanwhile, my childhood friend Jim is up in New Jersey Philadelphia, recovering from Monday’s spinal-fusion surgery which will — we all hope — finally free him of the devil of pain which has plagued his back for many years.

Hang in there, Jim. (And you know, you might want to drink some cranberry juice.)

Share

!?$%*#@!!

by 4 Comments

Sarge curses at Beetle Bailey using odd typographical characters

I’ve always liked punctuation; some would say I like it a little too much. For my junior-college newspaper, I wrote an opinion column called something melodramatic and “clever” like “The Outspeaker.” […checking yearbook… yeah, that was it, all right] I was convinced that the only thing anyone would notice about the column was the eloquence and subtlety with which I wrote. So I was quite surprised and confused, then, when my journalism instructor and newspaper advisor presented me with a bogus certificate, awarding me a prize for “parentheses, colons, and dashes.”

As you may know, tomorrow, 2008-09-24 is National Punctuation Day in the US. It seemed a good day to trot out some typographical trivia.

[Read more…]

Share

Art, Meet Life. Life, This Is Art.

by 2 Comments

You may remember my 10(ish)-year-old story “The Bug,” which I posted here a few weeks ago. In it, the protagonist — home at work with a fever, some kind of bug anyhow — stumbles upon a very strange cable-TV channel. Its name is The Dead Channel; all its programming has to do, somehow, with death. While some of its schedule is devoted to features (talk shows, old movies like The Loved One, and so on), the bulk consists of what our hero thinks of as “deadcasts.”

You’ll be familiar with the format of a deadcast if you’ve ever seen the regular programming of The Weather Channel. A suited announcer, perhaps armed with a pointer, stands before an electronic wall-sized radar or satellite map of the US. The person waves his/her hands over the map, as the map itself is painted over with glowing-green, -yellow, and -red swatches of color representing storms and other conditions.

On The Dead Channel, the maps don’t show stationary fronts, temperature bands, and the like. They show, oh, well… Take the deadcaster named Jack Llongo, for example. He’s obviously new at his job, a little nervous, and keeps muffing his lines, ad-libbing inappropriately, and so on. At one point he’s got a map behind him labeled MORBIDITY INDEX:

[Read more…]

Share

The World Has Not Ended, But the Day Is Still Young

by 1 Comment

Another brief, YouTube-salvaged entry today to work on a review for the Book Book site…

Libba Bray (link to her site over there on the right, under the “Je Ne Sais Quoi…” category) is a funny YA author, and an all too infrequent blogger. In her most recent post, she mentions being a physics freak and takes the opportunity to draw our attention to news of the Large Hadron Collider:

Tomorrow [Editor’s Note: i.e., TODAY, Wednesday, 2008-09-10], on the border of France and Switzerland, way underground, The Hadron Super Collider will be turned on, and physicists will search for answers about the universe. What’s out there? What is dark energy? When the Big Bang happened, where did all that matter go, and would it have been such an imposition for it to have sent us a few postcards over the years? Is there a Higgs-Boson (aka “God Particle”) or is that just the name of some disaffected aristocratic particle who drinks too much and lives in a crumbling estate on the edge of the universe? (You know, next to the restaurant. Sigh. Douglas Adams. R.I.P. Did you know Douglas Adams and I share a birthday? You do now. Plenty of time to shop for it, too. Well, for me. Mr. Adams did not leave a forwarding address that I know of. But I digress.)

We were talking super colliders. And what the universe is made of. And why gravity is so weak in our world. And why we’re here. And whether there might be other dimensions and if they have malls and if those malls are more evolved or do they still have a Hot Topic right next to the Jamba Juice.

…There are naysayers who worry that the Hadron Super Collider will create a black hole that will swallow the earth and annihilate every single thing including the cockroaches and Paris Hilton. You know, there are always drawbacks, people. This is science.

To reassure us, though, she also directs our attention to this video, courtesy of the scientific community:

Share

Celebrity Moments (Bogus Edition)

by 7 Comments

I love finding new, really well-written blogs. But I don’t like using services like StumbleUpon and Technorati et al. to find them. Many of my favorites I came to almost accidentally; someone comments astutely on someone else’s blog, for example, and I follow up the link from the commenter’s name, and lo, there I find a rich verdant pasture of daily commentary and/or howling snarkery, or whatever.

So it was that I landed on The Misssy M Misssives (yes, those are triple S’s), subtitled “Stories from a Besom and Blether.”

In particular, I landed there on a post from May, entitled “David Bowie sold me a raffle ticket”:

…in my life, it appears that I have met quite a few famous people. I thought I’d list some of them for you for a laugh. They are all true.

True. All right then. That’s interesting. And they are funny. (Likewise all the comments, in which visitors listed their own brushes with the notable.)

(Note, though, that not all these celebrities will be familiar, capital-N Names on this side of the Atlantic — or maybe just on this side of 40-some years of age. Like, Christopher Lee? Sure. Even Roland Gift, whose name gave me a little ego puff because I knew who he was before she said so. But “Wet Wet Wet’s Marty Pellow”? Sheesh.)

I’ve got no “celebrity moments” to report at the moment. But I thought it might be entertaining (well, to one of us, anyhow) to riff on the idea of celebrity encounters which never actually happened…

[Read more…]

Share
Verified by MonsterInsights