Lift Up Your Hearts!

This actually seemed like a good idea at the grocery store.

V-Fusion, by the same folks who brought you, "I could have had a V-8."

I should have had something else.

It's a good idea.  I love passionfruit juice (at least when I can get it without sugar, as we did in Brazil), and I love tangerine juice.  It's 100% juice, and not just fruit juices:  there's enough carrot and sweet potato juice in there to allow them to claim that an eight-ounce glass provides a full serving of vegetables as well as a full serving of fruits.  Should be good, and good for you.

But oh my, how sweet it is.  Sickeningly sweet.  Not even the passionfruit and tangerine flavors could redeem the taste.  There's no "sugar" added, but sweet juices (apple and grape) in abundance.

It's just as well.  At $4.99/bottle it cost too much anyway.  And that's not sour grapes, though sour grapes would improve the juice.

Funny how things click together in this world.

I would never have heard of the award-winning Swiss movie, Vitus, had it not happened to be featured in an article in the Hartford Courant when our daughter's Swiss in-laws happened to be in Connecticut, and happened to look through the newspaper.  (Why, O why does English not have a word for the "our child's in-laws" relationship?  I have need of it often enough.)  Knowing my interest in Swiss German, her father-in-law cut out the article and sent it to me.  (I am going to have to invent my own term, I can see.)

I've deliberately not included any links to Vitus, because they contain spoilers that I certainly would not have liked to have known about before seeing the film.  But I do recommend it, as we thoroughly enjoyed it.  It's PG, with a few words I wouldn't want the grandkids to pick up, but that would require reading the subtitles.  I'd say they'd probably lose interest in a foreign-language film, but Swing Girls was a hit even though in Japanese.

Vitus combines some of my favorite themes:  brilliant children, music, and loving families.  Sure, I could complain about one or two things, but overall it was a delightful movie.  Actually, the main disappointment was the language, which was falsely billed as Swiss German.  I caught a few Swiss German words (and felt for the student being told by his teacher to speak High German only), but mostly I'd say I understood far too much of the German for it to have been anything other than High German throughout most of the film.  I'd be interested in the verdict of those who know better, however.  The characters freely mix English words and phrases in their speech, so maybe they are equally freely mixing the two Germans, and I'm only catching the few High German words and the much fewer Swiss German phrases I know.  Or Swiss German words similar enough to High German that they sound familiar to my ear.

One question I had from the beginning was how they managed to get the actors to look so much as if they were really playing the piano—it looked far too good to be fakes.  Here's the answer:  Teo Gheorghiu, who plays the older Vitus.

Studies showing that teachers will form expectations of a student's character and ability based on nothing more than his or her name are unfortunately nothing new.  Students with "traditional," common names are more likely to receive higher ratings on both academic performance and behavior than those with names perceived as odd.  What makes this article worth commenting on is not the results of the study, but the names themselves.

The study reveals that . . . traditional names such as Charlotte, Sophie, Marie, Hannah, Alexander, Maximilian, Simon, Lukas and Jakob are consistently linked to strong performance and good behaviour. Non-traditional names such as Chantal, Mandy, Angelina, Kevin, Justin and Maurice, on the other hand, are associated with weak performance and bad behaviour.

That's when I ceased skimming the article and paid attention.  Traditional names?  Maximilian?  Sophie?  Ah, the ".de" in the url explains everything.  It's nice to see another perspective on the same problem.

But why do the Germans have such a prejudice against Kevins?  All the Kevins I know are really nice people and far brighter than average.

The name Kevin was perceived as being linked to especially poor behaviour and performance, with one study participant even writing that, “Kevin is not a name—it’s a diagnosis!”

Bizarre.

When we first moved to Central Florida in the mid-1980s, the region was setting record lows.  Freezes, and the subsequent descent of developer-vultures, killed off most of the local citrus industry.  No one who was not here during those times can believe we had fired up the furnace by the end of September—we, who were fresh from the north country and happy to keep our home cooler than was comfortable for our neighbors.

Theoretically we should be no more miserable than in mid-summer, or even less.  Our 90-degree highs this week are, after all, an improvement over 95 or 98.  But it doesn't feel like it.  Somehow the body rebels, knowing that it's October and high time we were given a respite from the unrelenting heat.  In my case, having recently returned from a visit to Pittsburgh, where the temperatures were decidedly not in the 90s, it could also be that my internal thermostat has been reset.  Whatever it is, I'm looking forward to the time when I can go on my daily walk without needing a bath and a full change of clothes on my return.

My recent visit with our grandchildren reminded me of why I don't like video/computer games. I don't mean I don't like to play them; I know all too well how addicted I can get if I allow myself to get started.

Well, not that glowing opium box, anyway.

It was Marie Winn's The Plug-In Drug—confirmed by my own experience—that showed me the greatest problem with television, as a medium, and it's not the content.  Certainly, content is important:  it's better to eat nutritious food than junk food, and better to eat either than poison.  But as many of us can attest, even good food, in quantity, becomes poison to our bodies. Television, at its best, is an unparalleled tool for learning and cultural enrichment.  But it has a terrible tendency to become addictive, fostering increasing demand and decreasing quality.  There is a version of Gresham's Law for television viewing, apparently.

Eschewing broadcast and cable television for carefully selected DVDs, while certainly a good thing, often misses the main point.  The question ought always be asked, "Is this a better use of my (or my children's) time than the alternatives, e.g. reading, making Lego creations, or playing outside?"  One of television's very unfortunate effects is to make itself more attractive than other, more valuable activities, just as lesser shows are almost inevitably more attractive than the better ones.  Why this is true is a mystery.  Some have posited physical changes made to the brain by the medium itself, which would also explain the similar addictive properties of video/computer games and computers in general.

As a mother and homeschooler I learned that children have a marvellous capacity to entertain and educate themselves, and can be trusted to make good use of every waking moment—and to accept sleep when that is the best use of their time.  The more I observe, however, the more I realize that what has been true for millennia is no longer.  Children who have been crippled by television and other video screen experiences have lost this capacity.  Even in our grandson I saw the terrible tendrils of whatever it is that sucks the life from us:  although his family owns no television, and only occasionally watches DVDs; although the computer games he sometimes plays with his dad are of the older, less flashy variety; although he has a wonderful, vivid imagination and can entertain himself (and his siblings) for hours; nonetheless, when I was in charge for a day, pretty much the only thing he wanted to do was play video games—at least until Grandma hardened her heart and proved she wasn't quite the soft touch he had hoped.

Who has not known college buddies who will spend every free moment (and many that are not, technically, free) with online, multi-player games?  Whose Second Life is more important than their first?  Teenagers retreating to their iPods/iPhones and choosing games over real-life interaction?  Young children in cars with the wonders of the countryside flowing past them but their eyes unmoving from their flickering portable DVD players?  Middle-aged wanna-be writers and amateur genealogists who spend so much time at the computer that OSHA would crack down if it were a workplace scenario?

Computers, video games, and television are wonderful, useful additions to our collection of tools for living and learning.  Even for loving; if e-mail, Skype, and blogging will never replace physical interaction, anyone who has family in faraway places knows how valuable they are for nurturing human relations.  The price exacted may be terribly high, however, if we cannot be the masters of our tools rather than their slaves.

Abstention, if difficult, is always easier than control, as any Alcoholics Anonymous member knows, but when the thing is good, control is the better path.  Sometimes, as with eating, it's a necessary path.  These days, computer use is nearly in the category of necessity, and therein lies my problem.  Nearly everything I do involves sitting down at the computer.  Writing, reading, researching, communicating, paying bills, organizing photos, staying informed, shopping, creating educational materials, keeping track of finances, organizing addresses and other information—all these and much more are now done, and often done better, with the use of a computer.  No doubt this tool saves us time, but as with most so-called time-saving devices, it may give us minutes with one hand only to take away hours with the other.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal, physician Scott Gottlieb blames governmental overcaution for the shortage of H1N1 flu vaccine.  Unlike Europe, the U.S. (1) does not allow additives to the vaccine that stimulate the immune system and make a smaller dosage effective; (2) requires single-dose syringes, which require less of the mercury-containing preservative thimerosol than do multi-dose vials; and (3) continues to use the slower, egg-based manufacturing system rather than a new procedure using mammalian cells.

President Obama, the doctor believes, should be pushing us forward, dropping the precautions put in place to protect us.  Perhaps the doctor has forgotten 1976, when President Ford's swine flu vaccination program resulted in an unacceptable level of fatal or debilitating side effects.  Perhaps he has also forgotten the thalidomide tragedy, in which our cautious Food and Drug Administration's refusal to approve the new drug largely spared our children the horrible birth defects that afflicted the Europeans.

School at the Daley household could hardly have been called normal, since Grandma was there as a distraction and Mommy was sick for the first part of my visit.  Nonetheless, I enjoyed my glimpse into the official, sit-at-the-table side of their 24/7 educational process.

Jonathan is not at the moment as excited about math as he is about reading—unlike his Aunt Janet at that age, for whom reading was all right but math was a bowl full of candy.  He's doing well, though, with basic addition and subtraction (and even some simple multiplication and division), and enjoys the "math paths" that Grandma sends him in the mail, problems like this one:

The Advent Conspiracy has nothing to do with my favorite computer adventure game.

That's the theory anyway.  In practice, it's a hard season to observe in a culture where Christmas events start before Hallowe'en* and the celebrations—instead of extending from Christmas Eve until Epiphany on January 6^th—end abruptly about noon on December 25^th.  Between Hallowe'en hype and Christmas hype, Advent—like Thanksgiving—gets lost.

Someone told me last year about the Advent Conspiracy, and I hope whoever it was will forgive me for not remembering.  I've searched all my e-mails and family blogs and come up empty.  This year, however, it was my sister-in-law who brought it up; her family is spearheading their church's incarnation of the idea.

I have a natural suspicion of "movements" and bandwagons, but so far I've seen nothing wrong, and much good, about this one.  It's a simple formula for making Christmas more delightful:

Worship Fully  It starts with Jesus. It ends with Jesus. This is the holistic approach God had in mind for Christmas. It’s a season where we are called to put down our burdens and lift a song up to our God. It’s a season where love wins, peace reigns, and a king is celebrated with each breath.  It's the party of the year.

Spend Less  We like gifts. Our kids really like gifts. But consider this: America spends an average of $450 billion a year every Christmas. How often have you spent money on Christmas presents for no other reason than obligation? How many times have you received a gift out of that same obligation?....We’re asking people to consider buying ONE LESS GIFT this Christmas. Just one.  Sounds insignificant, yet many who have taken this small sacrifice have experienced something nothing less than a miracle: They have been more available to celebrate Christ during the [A]dvent season.

Give More  God’s gift to us was a relationship built on love. So it’s no wonder why we’re drawn to the idea that Christmas should be a time to love our friends and family in the most memorable ways possible. Time is the real gift Christmas offers us, and no matter how hard we look, it can’t be found at the mall. Time to make a gift that turns into the next family heirloom. Time to write mom a letter. Time to take the kids sledding. Time to bake really good cookies and sing really bad Christmas carols [or really good Christmas carols]. Time to make love visible through relational giving.

Love All  When Jesus loved, He loved in ways never imagined. Though rich, he became poor to love the poor, the forgotten, the overlooked and the sick. He played to the margins. By spending less at Christmas we have the opportunity to join Him in giving resources to those who need help the most. When Advent Conspiracy first began four churches challenged this simple concept to its congregations. The result raised more than a half million dollars to aid those in need. One less gift. One unbelievable present in the name of Christ. 

Advent Conspiracy accepts no money and encourages participants to share a variety of ideas on how to give presence this Christmas.  But they also have a particular concern for the millions of people who suffer and die for lack of clean water, and for three years have supported the work of Living Water International.

The solution to this problem is directly beneath our feet. Drilling a fresh water well is a relatively inexpensive, yet permanent solution to this epidemic. $10 will give a child clean water for life. That's not an estimate. It's a fact. And here's another fact: Solving this water problem once and for all will cost about $10 billion. Not bad considering Americans spent $450 billion on Christmas last year. Our hope is that, by celebrating Christ in a new way at Christmas, the church can serve as the leading movement behind ending the water crisis once and for all.

LWI earns a four-star (highest) rating from Charity Navigator.  So does World Vision, one of my favorite charitable organizations, which has a Gift Catalog filled with ways to help, from water wells to farm animals to (one of my favorites) microfinance loans.

Your church doesn't participate in Advent Conspiracy?  You don't have a church?  Not to worry!  Participation in this conspiracy is open to all.

President Obama has declared the swine flu outbreak to be a national emergency.  I'm not sure that's all that bad of a measure, given that it lifts some governmental rules for hospitals that probably weren't a good idea in the first place.  But as Susan McWilliams points out in this Front Porch Republic post, our media-hyped fears seem 'way out of line.  It's hard not to quote her entire post.

What Thucydides helps us to see [in his description of a plague in Athens during the Pelopponesian War], as George Kateb has written, is “the ways in which fear of death through contagion disorganizes all human relations”:

It is the peculiar power of contagious disease to isolate people from each other; normal communal ties give way before the desire of every man to avoid contact which could bring on the disease and with it, death. The wish to remain free of sickness overrides all duty and all affection.

The plague resulted in what Kateb calls “a kind of negative state of nature: instead of the war of all against all, there was the avoidance of all by all.” What is ultimately most horrifying about the plague is how it exposes the fragility of civilization.  You might not be able to build Rome in a day, but you can destroy Athens in a few weeks.

[F]ears of the swine flu have curbed many of life’s rituals in the United States. Employers are forcing employees to stop sharing candy. Colleges are forcing students—heaven forfend!—to stop playing beer pong. People are cancelling holiday parties, or serving hand sanitizer instead of punch.

Religious institutions have seemed especially willing to change generations-old rituals on the chance that they might spread contagion. Churches are instructing congregants not to shake hands at the sign of peace, emptying the holy water fonts, and putting away hymnals. Many churches have stopped offering a shared sacrament, thereby taking a lot of the communing out of communion.

The North American Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention, which is the nation’s largest Protestant group, has raised the possibility of cancelling all mass gatherings: weekly services, weekday events at church, weddings, and funerals.

Keep in mind a few things here: 1) although swine flu is not pretty, most people recover from it within a week, without needing any medical care; 2) Americans who do get sick with the swine flu may be treated with antiviral medication; 3) there is a vaccine available to protect against this flu; and 3) according to epidemiologists, there isn’t even that much of a swine flu resurgence in American cities this year to begin with.

When even our religious institutions—the places that in theory are devoted to the primacy of spiritual health (and the attendant conviction that the health of the spirit might be more important than the health of the body)—are willing to dismantle themselves at the idea of what is for the most part a transient and nonfatal illness, I think we should be getting more than a little nervous about the spiritual health of the country.

The greatest horror of the Athenian plague, as Thucydides says, is not the number of the dead but the degradation of the terms of life for the living.

That understanding—which sees death as something that you must risk in the name of a good life—has in the past been central to American thought and practice, evidenced by homestead wives and warriors alike.

In all this fear about exposure to the H1N1 virus, our willingness to abandon core rituals and community life might be the most frightening thing out there.

I know I've been out of the comics loop for a while—having recently had three grandchild-comics available for my entertainment—but what's with the volunteerism theme?  I'm all for volunteer work, and think that one of the sad results of the "women's movement" was the conversion of so many volunteer hours into paid employment.  But when comic strip after comic strip at the same time starts pushing volunteer work, it sounds creepy, like groupthink.  Like the Florida public school system, which several years ago began requiring volunteer work from their students, many of whom probably cannot spell, much less define, "oxymoron."

Thirty years ago today was one of the most difficult and delightful days of my life.  To our wonderful firstborn, I wish a

HAPPY 30^th BIRTHDAY!

(You were worth the effort.)

Like many people, I have mixed feelings about Facebook, finding it simultaneously useful and annoying.  But here's a funny thing about Facebook, as reported by Eric Schultz, who is the Chairman of the Board of the New England Historic Genealogical Society and writer of The Occasional CEO. (The NEHGS library, both online and in person, is one of my favorite and most helpful resources for genealogical research.)

This last summer, in the midst of its 164^th year, NEHGS had the single greatest month of membership growth ever.  Ever.

The reason?   Facebook.

Yep, that surprised the board, too.

Tales of Ancient Egypt, by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, 2004)

King Arthur was my introduction to Roger Lancelyn Green's books, and this inspired me to find more by the same author.  Tales of Ancient Egypt did not disappoint.  Egyptian gods, goddesses, stories, geography and history are rather muddled in my head, and this book is a great help in beginning to sort them all out.  Like Green's Arthur stories, the tales are simultaneously appropriate and enjoyable for children and adults.

Two stories particularly interested me.  One is the Egyptian take on the story of Helen of Troy.  (Hint:  The real Helen remained safely hidden in Egypt until Menelaus could reclaim her; it was a sort of spirt double that went to Troy with Paris and inspired all the Greek-Trojan bloodletting.)

The fascination of the second, entitled Se-Osiris and the Sealed Letter, lies in what it did to my understanding of the Biblical story of the Exodus.  In The Sealed Letter, Egyptian magicians boast of their prowess with claims such as, "I could bring a great darkness over the land of Egypt that would last for three days," and "I...could bring a blight upon Egypt that would destroy its crops for one season."  The Exodus story of Moses and the plagues always seemed unsatisfactory to me, first in the very strangeness of God using plagues of blood, locusts, darkness, etc. to motivate Pharaoh, and second that the Egyptian magicians would counter Moses's plagues with plagues of their own, rather than the much more logical (and useful) removal of the effects the plagues.

Our own homeschooling experiences were far shorter than I would have liked, so it has been fun watching other family members in their adventures.  (It has also been nothing short of astonishing to see what resources are now available, rather like the difference between a gas station convenience store and a Super-Wegmans grocery store.)

It is especially fun to watch the grandkids' schooling, since our own children were in public school at this stage.  On the one hand, school time is very short, even for kindergarten, when measured by organized, sit-at-the-table time, and Heather's still working on the best way to balance everyone's needs.  On the other hand, education, if not school, is clearly going on 24/7, and one cannot argue with the results.

Jonathan can read.  It is still laborious enough that he tires easily, but he has reached the stage where what he needs most is simply to read, which he is happy to do, whether to himself or to others. And not only books, but signs, maps, computer screens, anything and everything.

I think more reading goes on here than anything else.  Noah asks to be read to at any spare moment (or not so spare), usually the same books over and over and over again, until he knows the story well enough to "read" it himself.  It's a hoot to hear him tell The Three Billy Goats Gruff:  You wouldn't understand much if you didn't already know the story, but he has all the nuances and tones of voice down pat, from "It only I, the little billy goat," to "I coming to GOBBLE YOU UP!"

If there's an advantage to Mommy being sick, it's that Grandma got to supervise, i.e. watch, Noah doing his chores.  His is not a difficult regimen, but still pretty impressive for a three-year old, particularly the enthusiasm with which he demonstrated his skills.

• Clear his own breakfast dishes off the table and put them in the dishwasher.
• Brush his teeth.
• Make his bed.
• Sweep under the table, which is only fitting, since most of the crumbs seem to be his.
• "Help Mommy," which on this particular day meant cleaning the tub in the bathroom.

If you were to suspect that a tub cleaned by a three-year-old does not get quite as clean as it might, you would be right, particularly since his cleaning agents are baking soda and water.  But the result is good enough, and the investment in future "help Mommy" assistance priceless.

I did not watch Jonathan doing his chores, so I can't chronicle them, but he did proudly show me his sparkling clean bathroom sink.

The boys also do laundry, taking the clothes downstairs, putting them in the washer, adding the detergent, and making sure all the settings are correct.  (Some strategically placed stickers help with the last.)  Later, they do similar honors for the dryer stage.  A rug covering the basement floor in the laundry area mitigates any problems when articles of clothing get dropped in the transfer process.

As a child, I always had trouble cleaning my room.  What should have been a 10-minute exercise turned into an all-day project, because of course the most important part of cleaning my room was reorganizing the bookshelves, and a book, once in my hand, demanded to be read.

Tonight, trying to get my office in order, and with no time to spare for distractions, I came upon the paperwork I received along with my seasonal flu shot.

Plus ça change:  Twenty minutes later, I finally tossed the papers in the trash, and will be back to work as soon as I've posted this—meaning what should have taken half a second to deal with will have eaten up about 40 minutes.  I was inspired to try to find out where the vaccine had been manufactured, hoping it was in some country whose quality control I thought I could trust, i.e. not China.  The information is surprisingly hard to discover.  Although the papers were covered with remarkably fine print, I could see no point of origin.  "Manufactured by..." does not necessarily indicate where.  Once I found out the names of the company and  of the vaccine, however, I could do an Internet search.

How Tim Keller Found Manhattan.  Although a church in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination gave us our best church experience, it also gave us our worst.  What I have since learned about other PCA churches leads me to believe that, although they are a sound, orthodox (small "o") denomination, with many wonderful people, there appears to be something congenital that predisposes PCA churches to the sins of arrogance, pride, and distancing themselves from the real world.  I'm not particularly picking on the PCA here—my own current denomination-of-choice, the Episcopal Church, has its own sins aplenty, and persists in displaying them prominently in public.  But our PCA experience was bad enough that I had been fairly determined never to set foot in a PCA church again.

Until now.  I haven't done so, but should I get the opportunity, I think I will be pleased to visit Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan.  The first chink in my armor was the Christianity Today article (linked above) on the church, the pastor, and their vision.

The Kellers stick to a few rules. They never talk about politics. Tim always preaches with a non-Christian audience in mind, not merely avoiding offense, but exploring the text to find its good news for unbelievers as well as believers. The church emphasizes excellence in music and art, to the point of paying their musicians well (though not union scale). And it calls people to love and bless the city.

The point about the musicians seems minor, but is illustrative of the way the church reaches out to the people who call New York City home.  A glowing article may be taken with a grain of salt, but we were privileged to spend an evening with a lovely young couple who are part of the city's artistic community, and they confirmed the church's positive presence in the city, from its rigorous intellectual honesty, to its respect for New York's harried businessmen and struggling artists, to its emphasis on mercy and justice for the poor.

Why We Need Earthquakes.  Another Christianity Today article with a new take on the old "If God is all-good and all-powerful, why is there evil?" question.  Moral evil—the bad things people do to each other—may be explained by human free will, but what about earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes?  It violates no person's free will to prevent an earthquake.  As it turns out, however, it may violate the fundamental structure of our earth that is necessary for life as we know it.

While natural disasters occasionally wreak havoc, our planet needs plate tectonics to produce the biodiversity that enables complex life to flourish on earth. Without plate tectonics, earth's land would be submerged to a depth of several thousand feet. Fish might survive in such an environment, but not humans.

What the New Atheists Don't See.  Theodore Dalrymple, while not shy about proclaiming his own unbelief, takes on Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others in the currently popular anti-religion movement.

Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”

What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news...that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.

A Scientist Who Believes in God!  John Stackhouse on Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project whom President Obama named to be head of the National Institutes of Health.

What makes this news is the breathtaking idea that someone could be both a scientist and a believer in God.

Like Isaac Newton. Or Johannes Kepler. Or Galileo Galilei. Or most of the other leaders of the Scientific Revolution. And a large number of scientists today.

This isn't news. What is news instead is the continuing ignorance of people who think that science and belief in God are incompatible.

Why Christianity Is Believable: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, and Part Four.  Challenged by Richard Dawkins' assertion that theologians don't do anything useful, Stackhouse presents his case:

What are the grounds—and by “grounds” here I’m going to mean “publicly accessible and decidable grounds”—for Christian belief (and therefore for the work of theologians)?

On the Nobel Prize system, that is.

I mean, it's bad enough they don't have anything for mathematicians.

When I was in college, my roommate's father was a chemist.  Whether he ever had a chance at a Nobel prize I never knew, but we always watched the Nobel news carefully because he certainly knew many fellow chemists who did.  In the process, I learned that there was often a signficant time lag involved, the work for which the prize was given having been done many years earlier.  When I thought about it, that made sense:  one never knows the true impact of a discovery or an action until one can look back on it from a more distant perspective.

But now we have the Nobel Peace Prize given, not for actions proved peace-promoting from the perspective of history, but to encourage actions that might, maybe, possibly, we hope will do so?

President Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in a stunning decision designed to encourage his nascent initiatives to reduce nuclear arms, ease tensions with the Muslim world and replace unilateral American action with international diplomacy and cooperation.

If you'd told me I'd be the regular reader of a business blog, I'd have thought you crazy, but Eric Schultz is Chairman of the Board at the New England Historic Genealogical Society and once wrote a genealogy-related post that hooked me.  Hiis blog, The Occasional CEO, is about business, yes, but more about people and history and innovation and instersting ideas.  Best of all, he writes really well.  This is old news to regular readers, as I've quoted from The Occasional CEO several times.  Here, in brief, are five of his posts—spanning more than a year—from my backblog.

The Incalculable ROI

The Erie Canal was 363 miles, 83 locks, 675 feet up and down, and cost $7,143,789 to build. A calculation of the ROI [Return On Investment] on the project would show that the construction cost was paid in nine years. In 1882, when tolls were finally abolished, the canal had produced revenue of $121 million, more than four times its operating costs....But, what did the Erie Canal really do? How do we, in retrospect, measure the incalculable ROI?

It Turns Out You CAN Buy Happiness

[O]ne of the best predictors of happiness is a strong social network; spending money on others is the one thing sure to make us significantly happier. “Money makes you most happy if you don’t spend it on yourself”—not giving it all away, but “just reallocating as little as $5 on a given day can make a difference in happiness.”

The Great American Export:  English

[If you] ask the question, “What did the Americans ever do for us?”...there will likely be a strong argument that the single greatest export in American history turned out to be the English language, with an obvious and major assist from the British Empire....If you wish to land your jumbo jet at an airport, or practice any kind of international commerce, you’d best do it in English. Over 80 per cent of the world’s electronically stored information is in English and two-thirds of the world’s scientists read in English. English is an official language, or has a special status in over 75 of the world’s territories....It will be a truly bizarre day when the entire world conducts its business in English, except for the United States, where one can get by swimmingly without ever having had to learn the mother tongue.

Broken Pines and Stuck Bolts

Focusing hard on a stuck bolt allows us to peer 4 billion years into the future.  Driving our car into a 34-foot pine tree destroys Western Civilization.  Multitasking makes us stupid, especially behind the wheel of a car.  It’s not exactly a recipe for life, but—it does give you pause, eh?

It's Beginning to Look (A Lot Less) Like Christmas

According to our local stores, who have already put out Christmas merchandise, we're nearing that time of year when I gripe about Kwanzaa as a made-up "holiday."  This is a good reminder that while Christmas is a bona fide "holy day," commemorating an event of incalculable historical and spiritual significance, much of the American secular holiday of the same name is as contrived as Kwanzaa.

Santa...was essentially invented in the 1820s and co-opted almost immediately by the rising material tide in the early Republic. He did...help to soften the season, which was violent and drunken in post-Revolution America.  But Santa was and is part and parcel of our economic history, and has been intimately bound to our financial fortunes for two centuries.

John Pintard was a prominent NYC merchant and civic leader...and a major player in establishing Washington’s Birthday, the Fourth of July and even Columbus Day as national holidays....[F]rom 1810 to 1830 or so Pintard took the responsibility of inventing Christmas rituals to try to create the perfect-remembered holiday. He led the effort to bring St. Nicholas to America....

I'm sure there must be a legitimate reason behind the new Federal Trade Commission rules for bloggers, but it looks pretty nonsensical from my perspective, another example of one-size-fits-all rules that inconvenience millions in an attempt to collar a few offenders.  It invites comparisons with the TSA's airport screening, except that I'm a lot more worried about terrorists than about those "I lost 300 pounds on this simple diet" ads.

The Federal Trade Commission on Monday took steps to make product information and online reviews more accurate for consumers, regulating blogging for the first time and mandating that testimonials reflect typical results.  Under the new rules, which take effect Dec. 1, writers on the Web must clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.  Testimonials will have to spell out what consumers should expect to experience with their products.  [From the Hartford Courant, October 6, 2009]

So here goes.  I suppose I'll have to put it in my About link, too.

I have no idea what others should expect from anything I review or comment on.  I'm one person, not a research laboratory.  You may love a book I find objectionable; you may dislike the recipe I say is fabulous.  Such is life.  Sometimes I get books for free, from publishers, which I'll acknowledge in the review, but no small tip is going to make me say I liked a book when I didn't.  (So far, I've received all of one book this way, and I haven't read it yet, which is why you haven't seen any such acknowledgement.)  I also get incalculable return from Lime Daley, but I like to think that's because of my familial relationship with the owners, not because of any endorsements I make on this blog.

Thirty years ago we entered the world of adventure gaming.  We had graduated by that point, so I believe it was my brother who first hooked us up to the University of Rochester's computer system, on which was installed ADVENT, the one, the true, the original computer adventure game—running on a DEC-10, I'm pretty sure, though my memory is misty on the details.  After ADVENT we moved on to the original Zork, which was just as much fun.  No devotee of today's high-action, graphic-heavy, semi-realistic games will ever understand the delight of those simple, text-based games.  (The links will take you to Wikipedia's description of the games, but I'd avoid them if you ever think you might play them yourself.  The ADVENT—Adventure—entry especially gives too much away.  And if you're wondering why the name was ADVENT rather than Adventure in those days...believe it or not, it's because "Adventure" has too many letters.

The game went on well into the night—that is to say early morning—though we were not all of us fully conscious the whole time.  I, for one, had a month-old daughter to tend, and retreated upstairs for whatever sleep I could get, though I stumbled back downstairs with her every time she awoke to nurse.  My father, too, tended to fall asleep, though he chose to doze in the living room chair with the game going on around him.  This rarely hampered his puzzle-solving abilities.  During one game (this may have been during the Zork years), the crew was stuck on this riddle:  What's tall as a house, round as a cup, and all the king's horses can't draw it up?  Dad was asleep, and they didn't want to disturb him, but they'd grown desperate.  This was well before the days when one could google the answer to nearly everything.  So they shook him gently, and when he showed signs of consciousness asked him the riddle.  Immediately he responded with the correct answer, and went back to sleep.  In some ways life was more fun before Google. 

On the other hand, it was through Google that I discovered that the original (or close to it) ADVENT and Zork are available to play online!  (Along with many other classic games, some good, some decidedly not.)  I'm not exactly recommending them, as even a brief trip down memory lane sucked up more time than I can afford, at least for solitary play.  Worse, the "save/restore game" feature doesn't seem to work.  That may be the fault of my computer settings, but I'm not working to solve the problem because it leads me away from temptation.  Other than that, however, ADVENT is all I remember—I haven't tried Zork yet—and I highly recommend it as a party game for a group of three to eight people.  On the condition, that is, that they agree not to resort to the Internet for hints and puzzle answers.  The joy is in the process; rushing to the end only subverts and diminishes the fun.

Learning the lesson of Napoleon and Hitler.  Never underestimate Russia.  C. S. Lewis observed that mankind tends to alternate between taking the Devil too seriously and not taking him seroiusly enough.  Without making any implications on the order of "the Great Satan" or "the Evil Empire," it's a good analogy for the way we look at other countries, whether friend or enemy.  During the Cold War, for example, our fears of Russia—especially in the 1950s—were probably exaggerated, and it's likely that now we're not sufficiently worried about how far the influence such a large country with so many resources might reach.  Here's a New York Times article on the activities of Moscow's mayor, not to provoke fear, but to make us think.  The article is a bit dated, but the ideas are not.

And it doesn't even mention health care.  This analysis of then president-elect Obama's upcoming challenges was written nearly a year ago.  It is left as an exercise to the reader to decide how well he is meeting them.

U.S. President George W. Bush demonstrated that the inability to understand the uses and limits of power can crush a presidency very quickly. The enormous enthusiasm of Obama's followers could conceal how he—like Bush—is governing a deeply, and nearly evenly, divided country. Obama's first test will be simple: Can he maintain the devotion of his followers while increasing his political base? Or will he believe, as Bush and Cheney did, that he can govern without concern for the other half of the country because he controls the presidency and Congress, as Bush and Cheney did in 2001? Presidents are elected by electoral votes, but they govern through public support.

My favorite section of the newsletter we get from Wycliffe Bible Translators is where they give some interesting example of the challenges of accurate translation.  The "back translation"—translating back into English something that had been translated from Engilsh to the new language—often reveals subtleties and misunderstandings that can be quite funny.

As it turns out, one doesn't need to be documenting a rare, unwritten language to find translation humor.  Our new printer came with the following warning:

This product is supplied with a plug that has a protective earth pin.  This plug will fit only into an earthed electrical outlet. This is a safety feature.  To avoid risk of electric shock, contact your electrician to replace the electrical outlet if you are unable to insert the plug into it. Never use an earthed adapter plug to connect the product to an electrical outlet that lacks an earth connection terminal.

First we made pets of our children; now we make children of our pets.  The title of Caleb Stegall's Against Pets might make some turn away in reflexive disgust, but it is a reasoned and worthwhile commentary on the bizarre twist our relationship with animals has taken.  How far we have come from the shepherd's down-to-earth love for his sheepdog, and from C. S. Lewis's description of the ideal earthly relationship between man and beast:  Man is no longer isolated.  We are now as we ought to be—between the angels who are our elder brothers and the beasts who are our jesters, servants and playfellows. (That Hideous Strength, chapter 17.)

The first principle is that nobody should be ashamed of thinking a thing funny because it is foreign; the second is that he should be ashamed of thinking it wrong because it is funny.

Oh, and the part about the U. S. asking visitors if they're anarchists, polygamists, or support the overthrow of the U. S. Government by force?  It's true.  The other day I was looking at a 1921 ship's manifest for arriving foreign passengers, and the questions are right there, just as Chesterton reports.  To his insightful analysis of the reasoning behind such questions, I would add this pragmatic consideration:  No, they weren't foolish enough to expect a terrorist to answer truthfully, but—like the "tax evasion" conviction ploy used against American gangsters—if they couldn't convict him for throwing the bomb, they might be able to deport him for lying to the immigration authorities.

Books:  The Original Plug-In Drug.  Everyone from parents, teachers, and librarians to corporations and the Federal Government laments that children do not read for pleasure anymore.  What little unstructured time they have is sucked up by television, video games, and computers.  How do we get children to read more? is the question of the age.  I'm here to question that question.  I'm an avid, voracious reader, and in general I side with the librarians on this one:  I'm more concerned by adults who do not read for pleasure, but realize such habits begin in childhood.  I'm certain there's causation as well as correlation between my love of reading and the fact that television did not enter my life until after my seventh birthday.

Nevertheless...I feel the need to sound a cautionary note, one probably familiar to all bibliophiles, but which I'm not hearing:  It is possible for a child to read too much.  Reading, just like video games, TV, and computers, can keep people from experiencing real life.  There were couch potatoes before there were remote controls.  When I was 16, my family took a once-in-a-lifetime car trek across the United States.  Unfortunately for me, our first stop was to visit my aunt and uncle.  My uncle was as much of a science fiction fan as I was, and he had a wonderful collection of books, a large stack of which he lent me for the trip.  I was in heaven—but spent the journey seeing more of the words on the page than the fruited plains and purple mountain majesties.

John C. Wright gets it.  SFSignal asked a group of science fiction writers what books held special memories for them.  Wright's response is at the bottom of the page, and is well worth reading in its entirety because of the commentary that accompanies his list.  But the immediate inspiration for this post was the following:

The difference between a bookish person and a non-bookish person...is that our formative thoughts, memories, and ideas, the things that shaped our character, come largely from books rather than from real-life experiences.

"Any decent society needs to defend itself from armed aggression without becoming a society not worth defending. This is never simple to accomplish."  Jim Manzi, writing in National Review Online, makes an eloquent case against the use by the United States, or any civilized nation, of waterboarding as an interrogation technique.  Most arguments on the issue, for or against, are hardly worthy of the name because they assume what they think they're proving.  Manzi acknowledges the complexity of the issue, examines the historical record, and concludes that our current situation is not one in which the tactical advantages gained by waterboarding would offset the strategic losses.

The music is a little too red, don’t you think?  Although true synesthesia—the bizarre crossing of the senses that enables some people to hear colors and taste sounds—is rare, researchers have discovered that most of us have this ability to some degree.

Br'er Rabbit rules!  Katherine Dalton makes a poignant case for why Uncle Remus should never have fallen victim to Political Correctness.

Of all the folk and fairy tales I know, the Uncle Remus stories are rivaled only by the Brothers Grimm as a powerful and memorable expression of a people’s mind and spirit…. They are not always predictable, and often fantastic and amoral, yet they all resolve in ways that seem right because they feel culturally and humanly true.  There is something both stirring and instructive about them.

These stories are so powerful, I believe, because they express the collective experience of many authors and editors under the stress of slavery, and so capture the essence of human nature and the human condition with the heightened understanding that comes to people in difficulty.  And like the Grimm stories, these tales are not only for children and originally weren’t even principally intended for children.  They are the stories adults loved to tell each other, back when many of us were illiterate, and had much more of a culture.

Most of what we know as the Uncle Remus tales began as trickster stories in west Africa.  They were then transformed through retellings in the American South during its slave period, influenced by American Indian and European stories, and collected by a white man during Reconstruction.  The versions Joel Chandler Harris started publishing in 1879 were stories he had heard as a young man in central Georgia.

[The character of Uncle Remus is] an old family servant and former slave who tells the Brer Rabbit tales to the little son of the family.  The child’s mother is a Southerner, the father a former Union soldier, and Uncle Remus, though a strong and even imperious character, is loyal to his white family and has a strong tie to this child.  It is a frame Harris expressly constructed to help his white audience heal the wounds of war and Reconstruction.  As such it now angers some readers, and most modern versions leave it out and let Brer Rabbit take center stage alone.  Also, because the dialect is thick, it has been softened in the more recent retellings… and Uncle Remus’s occasional use of the word “nigger” has been left out as offensive.  For children these changes make sense.

But adults should read Harris’s original, to hear the stories as he heard them.  He took his work as transmitter as seriously as any ethnographer.  It is especially sad that the dialect he worked so hard to reproduce accurately is now blasted as demeaning, when to Harris’s mind it was integral to the stories themselves.  He felt the tales would be diminished by being translated out of their vernacular—and so with no training but a good ear, he recreated several black dialects of the mid-century in a way scholars today judge to be accurate.  This dialect is presented without irony or mockery.  The stories are told as a black man might have spoken them, not in blackface.

It's a pretty random collection of tidbits this time.  Enjoy them or ignore them as you like.

• Eat your heart out, Imelda Marcos.  People will collect anything, but I have to wonder if even Otto C. Lightner (the “collector of collections”) would pay $2000 for a pair of sneakers.

• Each man under his own vine and fig tree—in a neighborhood.  How Germany Made Us “Conservative” is a Front Porch Republic post that presents several glimpses into much that is wonderful about European life.  There’s plenty to argue with, but I offer it because it reminds me of a lifestyle that many I know in the U.S. are attempting to (re)gain.  Realization of what Europe lacks (and justifiable fear that we are losing it in this country) should not blind us to what they have of real value.  If there is any hope that we might recover that value without losing our own particular treasures, it lies in such understanding.  Mutual understanding.

  [O]utside every town are breathtaking vistas of rolling landscape with miles and miles of forests and farmland, all oriented toward local food production, hunting and forestry. Nearly every household seems involved with the land in some way or another, whether through a small garden and wood stand or a larger farm. In the backyard of many homes one still finds chickens that roam free, fruit trees that are now bearing apples, pears and cherries that will be made into jam, water barrels that catch rainfall with which families water their plants. Nearly every yard has an enormous pile of wood, stacked carefully and in perfect symmetry, already today in use as the temperatures dip into the 50s here. Also, in every backyard one sees a compost heap….

  Towns are towns: houses are generally not permitted outside the town limits due to strict zoning laws….This makes for greater population density…and hence also makes feasible vibrant regional and national public transportation systems. One enters a town defined by visible town limits, and nearly every town has at least a local baker and a local Metzger (butcher)....Store closing hours have traditionally favored small business owners who hire few or no employees, and who thus must be home to care for schoolchildren during the afternoons and in the early evening. Most businesses still close for several hours at lunch and at 6:30 in the evening.

  [O]ne family we got to know well through our church there, a family with three children, were desperate to move to America—they wanted to buy a house of their own, with a yard the kids could play in, rather than just trucking them to the local (though admittedly, very nice) park and contributing to the community garden for the next twenty years of their lives while they saved up for something that was prohibitively expensive for young people at that stage of their careers. They looked at our living experience in America, and they envied us, and the genuine and virtuous desires behind that envy are worth contemplating.



• How long could you last without saying something negative?  I tried that as a Lenten discipline once, and it’s hard.  Tim Ferriss signed on to the 21-Day No-Complaint Experiment and reports the results are life-changing.

  Will Bowen, a Kansas City minister…recognized…that word choice determines thought choice, which determines emotions and actions. It’s not enough to just decide you’ll stop using certain words, though. It requires conditioning.  Will designed a solution in the form of a simple purple bracelet, which he offered to his congregation with a challenge: go 21 days without complaining. Each time one of them complained, they had to switch the bracelet to their other wrist and start again from day 0.

  I made it 11 days on the first attempt, then I slipped. Back to zero. Then it was two or three days at a time for about a month. Once I cleared 21 days at around month 3, I no longer needed the bracelet.

  Ferriss changed Bowen’s rules a bit, to fit his own needs:

  I defined “complaining” for myself as follows: describing an event or person negatively without indicating next steps to fix the problem. I later added the usual 4-letter words and other common profanity as complaint qualifiers, which forced me to reword, thus forcing awareness and more precise thinking.

  Thus “Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude jerk for 30 minutes. What a waste of time,” would require him to switch the bracelet and restart, but “Man, I went into the post office and had to stand behind this rude guy for 30 minutes. It was a waste of time. From now on, I’ll go in the mornings before 10am to avoid the crowd” was acceptable.

  The benefits?

  • My lazier thinking evolved from counterproductive commiserating to reflexive systems thinking. Each description of a problem forced me to ask and answer: What policy can I create to avoid this in the future?
  • I was able to turn off negative events because the tentative solution had be offered instead of giving them indefinite mental shelf-life…resulting in better sleep and more pleasant conversations with both friends and business partners.
  • People want to be around action-oriented problem solvers. Training yourself to offer solutions on-the-spot attracts people and resources.

As an avid fan of mystery stories, I’m sure I would enjoy The Da Vinci Code, especially since I’m attracted to Robert Langdon by name alone.  As a rational human being, however, I’m reluctant to open its pages.  Not knowing any better, I’ve enjoyed such quasi-historical movies as Amadeus and Braveheart, learning only later how fast and loose the productions had played with the facts.  Now it’s too late:  the false images are burned into my consciousness, and it will be difficult, if not impossible, to replace them with the truth.

Who can say why one book becomes a best-seller and another doesn't?  Who could have predicted the Harry Potter phenomenon?  (Certainly not his creator.)  No doubt there are many reasons for the wild success of Dan Brown's fiction, not the least of which is the intriguing stories.  Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times considers another factor: Dan Brown’s ideas speak to the heart of American popular religion today.

It isn’t just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain—to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.”

In the Brownian worldview, all religions...have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah—sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message...can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling...nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—jealous, demanding, apocalyptic—may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

The Teaching Company lectures

• Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code:  Constantine and the Formation of the Christian Canon
• Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code: Jesus of Nazareth and Mary Magdalene