Lift Up Your Hearts!

King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, by Roger Lancelyn Green (Puffin Books, 2008)

I bought this book for my grandson, who so enjoyed Roger Lancelyn Green's The Adventures of Robin Hood.  His mother reported that the Robin Hood book was "perfect" for him, but I wish I had read it myself, first, so I could compare it with King Arthur, since I'm having second thoughts.  King Arthur has been read by and to children for half a century, and there's nothing at all inappropriate about it, but there are not a few battles in which people's heads get lopped off, and a few babies conceived under less than ideal circumstances (Arthur in a scenario not unlike Solomon's), and—perhaps more disturbing for a child—a couple of examples of children raised by others instead of their own families.

In other words, the stories are real, no matter how fantastic and mythical.  They have not been cleaned up, Disney style.  Which I say is all to the good, and makes this book great for adults as well as children.  The Knights of the Round Table are not born saints, but learn chivalry through trial, error, sin, and forgiveness.  Although the characters are shown to be complex, doing both good and bad, there is no question that sin is sin, and has terrible consequences, even though sometimes God brings good out of evil actions.  The Church is central throughout, and miracles and magic abound, not surprising for a collection of Medieval (and earlier) romances.

Everyone should read Green's book who is past the age of being overly disturbed by fears of being taken from his parents and given to someone else to raise.   Which brings me to the Digression:  How did I get through 17 years of education, and more than three times that many years of life, knowing so little about the King Arthur stories?  They make everything from the stories of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien to the operas of Wagner more understandable and enjoyable.  They are clearly part of the foundational education that such writers assumed every one of their audience would have.  They are a basic part of the heritage of Western Civilization.  So why were they lacking in my education?

There's enough blame to go around:  to me, for not seeking out the classics on my own; to my parents, for not seeing to this part of my education themselves; but mostly I am once again astonished that school should have devoured so many years of my life and not given back even the rudiments of this and other classic literature.  Have we traded our birthright for a mess of...Disney?

I'm tempted to keep King Arthur for myself, but would I then be any better than my schools? :)

I wasn't going to waste blog space on the Harvard prof flap, but since I took the time to comment on Facebook, I'll add it here.

• It's not about race, other than the understandable prickliness of one who has experienced racism. This kind of thing happens to while people, too, with exhibits A & B in my own family (no arrests but undeniably wrong behavior on the part of the police). But that doesn't make the news, and garners no presidential commentary.
• If a policeman had entered my house, uninvited and without a warrant, and asked for my ID I would have been on the phone to 911—or maybe a lawyer—if  not fleeing like a felon myself out of sheer terror. Didn't we fight a war about that sort of thing?  Back in the early homeschooling days, we were advised never to let an official without a warrant into the house, but instead hand them our attorney's telephone number.  That still seems like reasonable advice.  I tend to sympathize with policemen, who put their lives on the line daily for us—not to mention that a friend of ours is one of New York City's Finest—but that doesn't mean I trust everyone sporting a badge.
• Maybe it is about race.  Would the charges have been dropped like that if the person had been white, or poor? Would there be such an uproar? Unfortunately, I have enough experience with the system to doubt it.
• Lesson learned (or should be): Mouthing off is stupid. Sometimes it gets you suspended from hockey games, sometimes it gets you arrested, always it diminishes you as a person.

My sister called me a geek because I adorned reserved church pews with such labels as "DSTB 1" and "NMB 2."  To me, that was a compliment, but I still maintain I'm too old to be a geek.  Nonetheless, I was pleased to note that I scored higher than expected on Geek Dad's 100 Essential Skills for Geeks.

1. Properly secure a wireless router.  I can't count this one, as Porter has always done it for our systems.  But I could have figured it out and done it if necessary.
2. Crack the WEP key on a wireless router.
3. Leech Wifi from your neighbor.  Not for long, but I did occasionally back in the day when most people didn't bother to secure their routers and before there were air cards.
4. Screw with Wifi leeches.
5. Setup and use a VPN.
6. Work from home or a coffee shop as effectively as you do at the office.  My home is my office, so this is a given.  I'm not so comfortable with coffee shops, though I've done it.  If I were a real geek, maybe I wouldn't be so paranoid about security.  Or maybe I'd be more.
7. Wire your own home with Ethernet cable.  Porter did this.  I could have done the geek part, but I'm not so sure about the crawling-around-in-tight-spaces-in-the-attic part.
8. Turn a web camera into security camera.
9. Use your 3G phone as a Wi-Fi access point.
10. Understand what “There’s no Place Like 127.0.0.1” means.
11. Identify key-loggers.
12. Properly connect a TV, Tivo, XBox, Wii, and Apple TV so they all work together with the one remote.  Wouldn't want to.  :)
13. Program a universal remote.  Not high on my priority list, but I think I did it once.
14. Swap out the battery on your iPod/iPhone.  Hmm, this skill must be more difficult than it is on my non-i phone.
15. Benchmark Your Computer
16. Identify all computer components on sight.  Probably not.  But I bet I could identify some 1970's computer components that many modern geeks can't.
17. Know which parts to order from NewEgg.com, and how to assemble them into a working PC.
18. Troubleshoot any computer/gadget problem, over the phone.  Nope.  Few things are more frustrating.  I'm not bad if the other person has the same system, version, and set-up as I do, but does that ever happen?
19. Use any piece of technology intuitively, without instruction or prior knowledge.  I do like to play with things and figure them out without reading the manual first—more so now that mistakes only break my computer, not someone else's—but I want a real manual, not a booklet that's only more than a couple of pages by virtue of saying the same thing in 10 languates, and not a .pdf that I can't read until I've already installed the system.
20. How to irrecoverably protect data.
21. Recover data from a dead hard drive.
22. Share a printer between a Mac and a PC on a network.
23. Install a Linux distribution. (Hint: Ubuntu 9.04 is easier than installing Windows)
24. Remove a virus from a computer.  I don't ever want to have an opportunity to learn this skill.
25. Dual (or more) boot a computer.
26. Boot a computer off a thumb drive.
27. Boot a computer off a network drive.
28. Replace or repair a laptop keyboard.
29. Run more than two monitors on a single computer.  Aw, shucks.  When I first read this, I thought it said "two monitors," not "more than two."
30. Successfully disassemble and reassemble a laptop.  Never done that, but I know a completely non-geeky, blonde musician who replaced her laptop's hard drive using a screwdriver and tech support from India.  This is the origin of our family's "O as in Nancy" reference, that being a phrase said tech support used when giving her a key necessary for installing the drivers.
31. Know at least 10 software easter eggs off the top of your head.
32. Bypass a computer password on all major operating systems. Windows, Mac, Linux
33. Carrying a computer cleaning arsenal on your USB drive.
34. Bypass content filters on public computers.
35. Protect your privacy when using a public computer.  If there's more to this than clearing the cache and browsing history, and closing the browser, I don't know it—which is one reason why I avoid public computers when possible.
36. Surf the web anonymously from home.
37. Buy a domain, configure bind, apache, MySQL, php, and Wordpress without Googling a how-to.
38. Basic *nix command shell knowledge with the ability to edit and save a file with vi.
39. Create a web site using vi.
40. Transcode a DVD to play on a portable device.
41. Hide a file in an image using steganography.
42. Knowing the answer to life, the universe and everything.  Clever, though I didn't realize it until I added "42" to the list of numbers I could say "yes" to.
43. Share a single keyboard and mouse between multiple computers without a KVM switch.
44. Google obscure facts in under 3 searches. Bonus point if you can use I Feel Lucky.  I never use I Feel Lucky, but I am apparently better than most at finding what I want with Google.
45. Build amazing structures with LEGO and invent a compelling back story for the creation.  Too old for the LEGO questions.  Do Tinker Toys count?
46. Understand that it is LEGO, not Lego, Legos, or Lego’s.  Of course it's not Lego's.  Even geeks should punctuate correctly!
47. Build a two story house out of LEGO, in monochrome, with a balcony.
48. Construct a costume for you or your kid out of scraps, duct tape, paper mâché, and imagination.  This was SOP when I was growing up.
49. Be able to pick a lock.
50. Determine the combination of a Master combination padlock in under 10 minutes.
51. Assemble IKEA furniture without looking at the instructions. Bonus point if you don’t have to backtrack.  Would you believe I've never been in an IKEA store, as far as I remember?  There's one around here somewhere, but too far away for me to look for it without a compelling reason, and I HATE SHOPPING FOR FURNITURE.
52. Use a digital SLR in full manual mode.
53. Do cool things to Altoids tins.
54. Be able to construct paper craft versions of space ships.
55. Origami! Bonus point for duct tape origami. (Ductigami)  I have done some origami in my time, but when John Montroll is your standard, you don't claim to do origami unless you've made it all the way through one of his books, and I haven't—even though we own at least 15 of them.
56. Fix anything with duct tape, chewing gum and wire.  Does it count that on a high-school trip to Europe I fixed my camera with string and glue?
57. Knowing how to avoid being eaten by a grue. I've been eaten by one many a time, but finally succeeded in avoiding being lunch.
58. Know what a grue is.  Doggone.  I looked it up once, but as with many things I look up once, the definition currently eludes me.
59. Understand where XYZZY came from, and have used it.  Oh, the memories.  My first computer game ever, and still my favorite, despite its simplicity.
60. Play any SNES game on your computer through an emulator.
61. Burn the rope.
62. Know the Konami code, and where to use it.
63. Whistle, hum, or play on an iPhone, the Cantina song.  Many times, though not on the iPhone.
64. Learning to play the theme songs to the kids favorite TV shows.  I can sing "It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" and most of the songs from The Pirates of Penzance, which pretty much exhausts my kids' "favorite TV shows."
65. Solve a Rubik’s Cube.  Now that my five-year-old grandson can do better than me at this, maybe I'll resort to looking it up online.
66. Calculate THAC0.
67. Know the difference between skills and traits.
68. Explain special relativity in terms an eight-year-old can grasp.
69. Recite pi to 10 places or more.  Piece of cookie.
70. Be able to calculate tip and split the check, all in your head.  This is why I don't go out to eat without Porter.  I can do it, but I like to leave the restaurant before midnight.
71. Explain that the colours in a rainbow are roygbiv.  That's geeky?  I thought that was normal.  Geeky is "Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain."
72. Understand the electromagnetic spectrum - xray, uv, visible, infrared, microwave, radio.  Once upon a time...though "understand" is perhaps too broad a term.
73. Know the difference between radiation and radioactive contamination.  Radiation is what I was soaking up at the beach yesterday.  Radioactive contamination is what I was hoping was not present at the nearby nuclear submarine facility.
74. Understand basic electronics components like resistors, capacitors, inductors and transistors.  At one time I could have told you a lot about them, and even recited a rude mnemonic for remembering the resistor color code.  But I never could remember whether "bad" meant black or brown.
75. Solder a circuit while bottle feeding an infant. (lead free solder please.)  Illegal question.  What's that infant doing with a bottle?  This is merely a cover-up for the fact that approximately 50% of the potential geek population would be eliminated if the skill were "Solder a circuit while nursing an infant."
76. The meaning of technical acronyms.  I know many TLA's, but not nearly enough to qualify.
77. The coffee dash, blindfolded (or blurry eyed). Coffee <brew> [cream] [sugar]. In under a minute.
78. Build a fighting robot.
79. Program a fighting robot.
80. Build a failsafe into a fighting robot so it doesn’t kill you.
81. Be able to trace the Fellowship’s journey on a map of Middle Earth.  Despite my poor memory for such details, I could probably do it.  Having read the books a couple of dozen times can make anything stick.
82. Know all the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit.  To my embarrassment, I could only come up with nine of thirteen off the top of my head.  The rest would come with time, however.
83. Understand the difference between a comic book and a graphic novel.  I can do this thanks to Groshlink.  Prior to reading Tom's post I thought graphic novels were something to be avoided, like graphic violence.  I still think they're something to be avoided, but for different reasons.
84. Know where your towel is and why it is important.
85. Re-enact the parrot sketch.
86. Know the words to The Lumberjack Song.
87. Reciting key scenes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  I've never seen any Monty Python movie, so that probably disqualifies me completely.  But I can nonetheless recite, "Bring out your dead!"
88. Be able to recite at least one Geek Movie word for word.
89. Know what the 8th Chevron does on a Stargate and how much power is required to get a lock.
90. Be able to explain why it’s important that Han shot first.  I did not know this, but having looked it up, it is, indeed, critically important that Han shot first.  I am exceedingly disappointed in George Lucas for caving in to—what? Political Correctness?  I don't know how to name it—and with one seemingly minor change removing the depth and moral evolution of Han Solo's character.
91. Know why it is just wrong for Luke and Leia to kiss.  It doesn't take a geek to know this, merely someone who sees all kissing in sexual terms.
92. [Rude item removed.  See the original if you care.]
93. The ability to name actors, characters and plotlines from the majority of sci-fi movies produced since 1968.  I guess this assumes one has actually seen the majority of sci-fi movies produced since 1968.
94. Cite Mythbusters when debunking a myth or urban legend.
95. Sleep with a Cricket bat next to your bed.
96. Have a documented plan on what to do during a zombie or robot uprising.
97. Identify evil alternate universe versions of friends, family, co-workers or self.
98. Be able to convince TSA that the electronic parts you are carrying are really not a threat to passengers.  No, but I've had to convince a tollbooth attendant that the dollar coin was legal tender in the United States.
99. Talk about things that aren’t tech related.  Sure, as long as they're related to education, childrearing, genealogy, conservationist living, and whatever else I talk about on this blog.  Oh, you mean actual, physical conversation?  Hmmm....
100. Get something on the front page of Digg.  In my dreams.  Or nightmares, I haven't decided which.

I don't know why anyone would want to annoy a worm, but apparently lemon balm does the trick.  I had some less-than-perfect leaves that I didn't use in making my lemon balm tea, so I fed them to the worms.  Rather, I put the leaves in their bin; feeding was out of the question.  The next time I checked, all the worms were huddled on the side of the bin furthest from the leaves.  They didn't seem particularly unhappy, but they didn't return to the other side until a few days after I removed the offending foliage.

Making vegetables grow in our nutrient-poor, nematode-rich sand soil is always a challenge.  After the initial shock of moving here from a world where one puts the seeds in the ground and stands back, we pretty much gave up on gardens until a couple of years ago.  We do a little better each year, but at least financially the balance sheet is still dismal.

One plant that is still thriving, even in the oppressive Florida summer heat, is our lemon balm.   We planted it this year for no other reason than that it was available at Lowes (or Home Depot, I forget which) and I remembered that Porter had remarked on how good it smelled when we encountered it at Leu Gardens.  We let it grow untouched for a long time, mostly because I didn't know what to do with it, but when a friend mentioned making lemon balm tea, I had my answer.

Now I brew a pot of tea with one regular PG Tips tea bag and a handful of bruised, fresh lemon balm leaves.  I don't know how it tastes hot, as we're not in that season, but I can attest that it makes a wonderful iced tea.  I generally prefer my tea unflavored, but at least for now I can't get enough of this delicious combination.

The worms have completely devoured their Carnegie Mellon t-shirt moisture mat, except for places—stitching, and part of the design, I think—that were not natural fiber.  Therefore, since they are now more mature, and have clearly excelled in their majors of eating and excreting, I hereby declare that they have graduated, and confer upon them a new moisture mat.

It's possible they may end up in grad school—we have a couple of University of Rochester t-shirts that are getting on the worn side—but for now they are enjoying their venture into the wide invertebrate world.  (Or not so wide.  We still insist they stay in their dorm-turned-apartment.)

I'm thinking of moving to Canada, and it has nothing to do with avoiding the draft, nor with frustrations over our current political direction, nor because of the recent heat wave in which our near-100-degree daytime temperatures "cooled down" all the way to 85 in the middle of the night—and not even because Canada ranks close to Switzerland and New Zealand at the top of my list of the world's most beautiful places.  No, what makes being Canadian particularly attractive at the moment is this study of the relationship between body mass index and death of more than 10,000 Canadian adults.

Researchers found that while underweight and extremely obese people die earlier than people of a normal weight, people who are slightly overweight actually live longer than those of a normal weight.

[U]nderweight people were 70 percent more likely than people of normal weight to die, and extremely obese people were 36 percent more likely to die.  But overweight individuals were 17 percent less likely to die. The relative risk for obese people was nearly the same as for people of normal weight.

[T]his was the first large Canadian study to show that people who are overweight may actually live longer than those of normal weight.

But wait...there's good news...I may not have to move after all:

An earlier study, conducted in the United States and published in 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed similar results.

Gotta love medical studies. You can find one that proves whatever you want.  Now to get my hands on a copy of Chocolate Unwrapped:  The Surprising Heath Benefits of America's Favorite Passion.

I know enough about my computer's software to get by; in fact, I know enough to do many wonderful things.  But what I don't know exceeds what I do to a depressing degree.  Only today did I stumble upon the fact that with Office 2007 I can publish documents in Adobe Acrobat (pdf) format.

It's not obvious, because there's an add-on required, but the add-on is free and available from Microsoft.  It's a quick and very easy download and installation process; it would have taken less than a minute had I not bothered to read the directions and the license agreement.   :)

I don't know what I'll use this new-found ability for, but now that I know about it, I'm sure I'll think of something.

I'm filling out a political survey.  My friends can now pick themselves up off the floor, as they know that in our house such things go immediately into the trash without passing Go.  Political surveys, from either party, are inane nonesense with loaded questions on the order of, "You certainly don't support our evil opposition's murderous polices, do you?" and of which the true purpose is to solicit contributions.  But this survey is different.  Oh, it's inane, all right, with all of the above problems.  But this survey, which is REGISTERED IN MY NAME ONLY and MUST BE ACCOUNTED FOR, which requires my immedate attention, and which assures me that my answers are important in the battle against the Obama Democrats' aggressive push to expand the federal government into every area of our lives and businesses; this survey from the National Republican Senatorial Committee that is sent only to a select few to represent ALL Republicans living in my voting district because it is cost-prohibitive to send a Survey to every registered Republican in my area; this survey is addressed to me.

It appears to have escaped the attention of the National Republican Senatorial Committee that I've been a registered Democrat for all 38 years of my voting life.

Well, I commend them, inane questions or no, for reaching out to the opposition even at the cost of slighting the registered Republicans.  I hope they enjoy my answers, which for some questions will indeed sound as if I were "one of them" and for others will leave them scratching their heads.  But they're not getting the $11 contribution they ask for "to help cover the cost of tabulating and redistributing my Survey,"  even though $11 isn't out of line for a days' amusement.

To prove the Front Porch Republic isn't all academic discussions of too much length and intensity for the casual reader, check out Animals Were Definitely Harmed in the Production of this Story, explaining why, unlike modern movies, farm life entails "‘the harming of animals of every shape and in every fashion."

The story is less morbid than amusing, and rings true to life outside of Hollywood.  Here are a few excerpts to tempt you.

Maria and the girls had met a couple driving an old Amish buggy and wearing an odd mixture of Amish and Scottish garb (the broad brimmed hat, no buttons on the shirt, the kilt, the tartan, the whole nine yards).

Fortunately, even a dead horse’s head is extraordinarily hard to separate from its body (it does happen in the Godfather, but they don’t show how it’s done and it’s a movie after all)....

The whole area seemed to be populated by folks with a special appreciation for Jack Russell terriers, and these dogs were fairly efficient cat murderers, but they also proved to be a special delicacy for the local coyote population who, I can only suppose, used them as a solid kind of aperitif. I never saw a coyote, but we often heard them. Our neighbors lost not only Jack Russells but small calves to them as well. They never bothered our chickens, which must have been a matter of luck more than skill, because our beagle/basset hound would have proven to be merely a meatier version of the Jack Russell for the coyotes, and our golden retriever would have welcomed their company.

We kept the chickens for their eggs, so we never actually killed any of them ourselves. On occasion, however, the chickens were happy to kill each other. They loved the scent or taste of blood and pecked each other mercilessly, especially after drawing blood. My wife discovered that allowing the chickens to roam where they desired cured them, for the most part, of their chickocidal tendencies. Free range chickens are healthier not merely because they are "born free, free as the wind blows," but because they are no longer tempted to cannibalize their oh-so-close neighbors.

[I]t turns out that baby birds, like all other animals, sometimes go to sleep, and, that when they go to sleep, they can appear to be deceased, at least when inspected by greenhorns like me.

In case anyone got excited by seeing what might have been an new comment appear, only to be led to a couple of old posts, I apologize.  I've been finding and fixing some broken links and trackbacks, and my efforts to make them appear old rather than new failed.  Just maintenence, nothing new, sorry.

What a wonderful bird the frog are
When he stand he sit almos';
When he hop he fly almos'.

He ain't got no sense hardly;
He ain't got no tail hardly either.
When he sit, he sit on what he ain't got—almos'.

When the kids were young, we listened (and listened, and listened) to Mitzie Collins' incomparable Sounds Like Fun record (yes, it was an LP record) of children's songs.  Before we left Rochester, Heather had the privilege of attending a friend's Chanukah party at which Mitzie was the featured entertainer.  Janet was too young to attend, but in one of those amazing twists of life returned to Rochester for college and ended up working as an intern with Mitzie, and playing in some of her concerts.

So it was not all that surprising that this brief song should hop into my mind this morning, as I sat on our porch swing in the semi-darkness and watched a large, yellow tree frog's progress.  He started about 10 feet away from me, and his first movements were tentative; perhaps he was checking me out.  I must have passed, because he then leapt closer, and in less than a blink of an eye transported himself from the ground to the table next to me.  We watched each other for quite a while, but then I turned my head to look at the source of a noise behind me, and when I turned back, he was gone.  After some searching, I located him:  he was clinging to the back of a chair further away from the table than the table had been from the ground.  Then, as I watched, he apparated to the metal frame of our sliding glass doors, then used his sticky, splayed feet to navigate around the glass itself.  My suspicion is that he was attracted by the light.

"Fly almos'" isn't strong enough language to describe the frog's wonderful motion.  He was in one place—then in another.  I'm almost certain that a video, replayed in slow motion, would show that he passed through the intervening distance...but that's not what my eyes saw.

What a wonderful bird the frog are!

  The Element:  How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, by Ken Robinson (Viking, New York, 2009)

I've written before about Sir Ken Robinson, Creativity, and Education, and put an order in with our library as soon as I heard about his new book.  It finally came through, as library books are wont to do, at a time when hours for leisure reading are scarcer than arts classes in a standardized-test-obsessed school system.  But unlike Last Child in the Woods, The Element is a quick and non-technical read.  Robinson's 2006 TED talk is a good summary of the ideas in The Element.  The book goes into more detail, with more examples, and expands a bit further.

I use the term the Element to describe the place where the things we love to do and the things we are good at come together.  I believe it is essential that each of us find his or her Element, not simply because it will make us more fulfilled but because, as the world evolves, the very future of our communities and institutions will depend on it.

Robinson is convincing enough, and encouraging in his belief that it is never too late to find and nurture one's Element, but he is frustratingly short on practical advice.  So many of the examples he gives are of people who knew from childhood what they were good at, and what they wanted to do.  They may have been obstructed at every turn, may not have been able to do what they knew they were born for until much later in life, but at least they knew.

Now, I can quickly name three passions that at least begin to stir in me the excitement he speaks of, what another friend refers to as the "fire in the belly":  writing, education, and genealogy.  But not only were they not passions of mine during the years when I was in school and presumably focusing and honing my skills for the future, they were actually anti-passions:  I disliked my English and history classes, had negative interest in family stories, and teaching was not even in the vicinity of my career thoughts.  Nothing excited me, really.  I focused on science and math because I was good at them, which kept me going until some point in college, when they no longer came easily and my fair-to-middling interest was not sufficient to inspire the hard work necessary to master them.  How do we help the me's of this world to find their Element?

Here are some fairly random excerpts to give you a taste:

[I]ssues of attitude are of paramount importance in finding your Element.  A strong will to be yourself is an indomitable force.  Without it, even a person in perfect physical shape is at a comparative disadvantage.  In my experience, most people have to face internal obstacles of self-doubt and fear as much as any external obstacles of circumstance and opportunity....Fear is perhaps the most common obstacle to finding your Element.  You might ask how often it's played a part in your own life and held you back from doing the things you desperately wanted to try.

[Richard Wiseman, author of The Luck Factor] has identified four principles that characterize lucky people.  Lucky people tend to maximize chance opportunities.  They are especially adept at creating, noticing, and acting upon these opportunities when they arise.  Second, they tend to be very effective at listening to their intuition, and do work (such as meditation) that is designed to boost their intuitive abilities.   The third principle is that lucky people tend to expect to be lucky, creating a series of self-fulfilling prophecies because they go into the world anticipating a positive outcome.  Last, lucky people have an attitude that allows them to turn bad luck to good.  They don't allow ill fortune to overwhelm them, and they move quickly to take control of the situation when it isn't going well for them.

Effective mentors push us past what we see as our limits.  Much as they don't allow us to succumb to self-doubt, they also prevent us from doing less with our lives than we can.  A true mentor reminds us that our goal should never be to be "average" at our pursuits.

There is abundant evidence that opportunities to discover our Element exist more frequently in our lives than many might believe....I don't mean to say, of course, that we all can do anything at any time in our lives.  If you're about to turn one hundred, it's unlikely that you're going to nail the leading role in Swan Lake, especially if you have no previous dance background....Some dreams truly are "impossible dreams."  However, many aren't.  Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your Element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it.

In "The Pro-Am Revolution," a report for the British think tank Demos, Charles Leadbeater and Paul Miller underline the rise of a type of amateur that works at increasingly higher standards and generates breakthroughs sometimes greater than those made by professionals—hence the term Pro-Am....[They] call Pro-Ams "a new social hybrid," noting that they pursue their passions outside of the workplace, but with an energy and dedication rarely given to acts of leisure.  Pro-Ams find this level of intensity restorative, often helping to compensate for less-than-inspiring jobs.

In the last part of the book, Robinson deals with reforming, or rather transforming our educational system.

Public education puts relentless pressure on its students to conform.  Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism.  In many ways, they reflect the factory culture they were designed to support....This system has had many benefits and successes.  It  has done well for many people whose real strength is conventional academic work, and most people who go through thirteen years of public education are at least moderately literate and capable of making change for a twenty.  But dropout rates, especially in the United States, are extraordinarily high, and levels of disaffection among students, teachers, and parents are higher still.

Used the right way, standardized tests can provide essential data to support and improve education.  The problem comes when these tests become more than simply a tool of education and turn into a focus of it.

Many of the people I've talked about in this book say that they went through the whole of their education without really discovering their true talents.  It is no exaggeration to say that many of them did not discover their real abilities until after they left school—until they had recovered from their education.  As I said at the outset, I don't believe that teachers are causing this problem.  It's a systemic problem in the nature of our education systems.  In fact, the real challenges for education will only be met by empowering passionate and creative teachers and by firing up the imaginations and motivations of the students.

Too many reform movements in education are designed to make education teacher-proof.  The  most successful systems in the world take the opposite view.  They invest in teachers.  The reason is that people succeed best when they have others who understand their talents, challenges, and abilities.  This is why mentoring is such a helpful force in so many peoples' lives.  Great teachers have always understood that [their] real role is not to teach subjects but to teach students.  Mentoring and coaching is the vital pulse of a living system of education.

On June 12—tomorrow—Food, Inc. opens.  As usual, we'll probably wait for the DVD, but it's definitely one I want to see.  Do I really want to hear more about the dangers of our factory farming system?  Unfortunately, yes.  True, it produces plenteous, apparenly low-cost food—we spend less of our paychecks on food than in any time in our history—but the true costs are hidden, and high.  Did you know that 90% of the items in our grocery stores contain some form of corn or soy?  That our supply of beef, chicken, potatoes, and many other foods is driven by the fast-food industry? One reason I'm looking forward to the movie is that supposedly it is not entirely a doom and gloom horror flick, but also celebrates the power of the individual to make a difference.  We shall see.  Thanks to DSTB for the alert.

Here's the official Food, Inc. website, where you can see the trailer.

And a PBS show about the movie.

Last Child in the Woods:  Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv (Algonquin Books, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2005)

I'm sorry to say I gave this book short shrift, but reading time has been scarce lately, and I must return it to the library today.  I can say, however, that it is a must-read for anyone who is not already convinced that children need, as one of life's basic necessities, plenty of time in the natural world:  hiking, camping, and learning with their families, building forts and tree houses, exploring on their own, and just being in the world of bugs and fish, stars and sand dunes, trees and caverns.  If for you this kind of exhortation is preaching to the choir, it's probably still worth at least skimming it as much as I did, if only for the shock value of learning that today's children are even more cut off from such activities than you had imagined.

I grew up on the edge of a new housing development; unlike the projects I see today, this one was slow to develop, and so we enjoyed many years of free exploration in woods and field:  climbing trees, building tree houses, following streams, skating on frozen ponds, and observing wildlife.  Nowadays such activity is often illegal.

The cumulative impact of overdevelopment, multiplying park rules...environmental regulations, building regulations, community covenants, and fear of litigation sends a chilling message to our children that their free-range play is unwelcome, that organized sports on manicured playing fields is the only officially sanctioned form of outdoor recreation.

Children's play has become boxed in, tied up, neatly organized, and often commercial.  Parks favor sports fields—often used more by adults than children—rather than space for free play.

[V]acant lots are vanishing, and the nature of suburban development is changing.  Suburban fields that might have been left open in earlier decades are being erased, replaced by denser, planned developments with manicured green areas maintained through strict covenants.

It takes time—loose, unstructured dreamtime—to experience nature in a meaningful way.  Unless parents are vigilant, such time becomes a scarce resource, not because they intend it to shrink, but because time is consumed  by multiple, invisible forces; because our culture currently places so little value on natural play.

Fear is the most potent force that prevents parents from allowing their children the freedom they themselves enjoyed when they were young.  Fear is the emotion that separates a developing child from the full, essential benefits of nature.  Fear of traffic, of crime, of stranger-danger—and of nature itself.

The author deals well with this fear, debunking some myths, and more importantly encouraging parents to help ther children avoid and handle genuine dangers, teaching them specific skills and offering "controlled risk" situations for growth.

"Every year since 1950, the number of American children gunned down has doubled."  So goes a widely quoted statement, which originated in a Children's Defense Fund report in the mid-1990s.

I like that one.  Do the math.

Some of our most prominent and revered conservationists developed their love of nature through direct childhood experiences, including such now-distained activities as hunting, fishing, and pinging seagulls with a BB gun.  Today's environmentalists predominantly trace their activism to their own unstructured play in natural habitats.  Many of these same environmentalists, however, are curiously uninterested in reaching the next generation, or providing for them the same experiences that nurtured their own love of nature—perhaps, the author suggests, because children, overpopulation, and environmental degradation are solidly linked in their minds.  If so, they—and the environment they love—may suffer the same fate as the Shakers.  Even the national parks are in danger of losing support, as fewer families visit them for camping and wilderness hiking.

As [national park] officials work to make parks safer and more accessible, the outdoors often ends up feeling more like Disneyland than wilderness.  Some kids end up disappointed that the parks aren't more Disneyesque.  When middle school students sent me their reflections on nature, one boy reported visiting Utah's Rainbow Bridge National Monument, the world's largest natural bridge, which was carved out of the cliffs above modern-day Lake Powell over thousands of years.  "The bridge was somewhat disappointing.  It was not as perfect as in the brochure," the boy wrote.  His parents enhanced the family vacation by renting Jet Skis.

Even when I was young, the Girl Scouts were far inferior to the Boy Scouts when it came to wilderness skills and experiences, but the situation for girls has gotten far worse.  Madhu Narayan and Karyl T. O'Brien are executives with the Girl Scouts in the San Diego, California area.

[The] overwhelming majority of Girl Scout programs are unconcerned with nature.  Included (along with selling cookies) are such offerings as Teaching Tolerance, Tobacco Prevention, Golf Clinic, Self-Improvement, Science Festival, EZ Defense, and Financial Literacy.  Soon, Camp CEO will bring businesswomen to a natural setting to mentor girls in job interviewing, product development, and marketing.  The divide between past and future is seen best at the Girl Scout camps in mountains east of the city:  one is billed as traditional, with open-air cabins and tents hidden in the trees; the newer camp looks like a little suburbia with street lights.  "I flipped when I learned that girls weren't allowed to climb trees at our camps," says O'Brien.  Liability is an increasing concern.  "When I was a kid, you fell down, you got up, so what; you learned to deal with consequences.  I broke this arm twice," says Narayan.  "Today, if a parent sends a kid to you without a scratch, they better come back that way."

There's more book, but no more time.