December 26, 2007
NEW YEAR
O grande barato da vida é olhar para trás e sentir orgulho.
É viver cada momento e construir a felicidade aqui e agora.
Claro que a vida prega peças.
O bolo não cresce, o pneu fura, chove demais
(Perdemos pessoas que amamos muito)...........................
Mas, pensa só:
Tem graça viver sem rir de gargalhar, pelo menos uma vez ao dia?
Tem sentido estragar o dia por causa de uma discussão na ida pro
trabalho?
Eu quero viver bem... e você?
2005 foi um ano cheio.
Foi cheio de coisas boas, mas também de problemas e desilusões,
tristezas, perdas, reencontros...
Normal... às vezes, se espera demais.
A grana que não veio, o amigo que decepcionou, o amor que acabou.
Normal... 2006 não vai ser diferente.
Muda o século, o milênio muda, mas o homem é cheio de imperfeições, a
natureza tem sua personalidade que nem sempre é a que a gente deseja,
mas, e aí?
Fazer o quê?
Acabar com o seu dia?
Com seu bom humor?
Com sua esperança?
O que eu desejo para todos nós é sabedoria.
E que todos nós saibamos transformar tudo em uma boa experiência.
O nosso desejo não se realizou?
Beleza... Não estava na hora, não deveria ser a melhor coisa para esse
momento (me lembro sempre de uma frase que ouvi e adoro:
"cuidado com seus desejos,
eles podem se tornar realidade").
Chorar de dor, de solidão, de tristeza, faz parte do ser humano...
Mas, se a gente se entende e permite olhar o outro e o mundo com
generosidade, as coisas ficam
diferentes.
Desejo para todo mundo esse olhar especial!!
2006 pode ser um ano especial, se nosso olhar for diferente.
Pode ser muito legal, se entendermos nossas fragilidades e egoísmos e
dermos a volta nisso.
Somos fracos, mas podemos melhorar.
Somos egoístas, mas podemos entender o outro.
2006 pode ser o bicho, o máximo, maravilhoso, lindo, especial!
Depende de mim... de você.
Pode ser... e que seja!
Arnaldo Jabor
É viver cada momento e construir a felicidade aqui e agora.
Claro que a vida prega peças.
O bolo não cresce, o pneu fura, chove demais
(Perdemos pessoas que amamos muito)...........................
Mas, pensa só:
Tem graça viver sem rir de gargalhar, pelo menos uma vez ao dia?
Tem sentido estragar o dia por causa de uma discussão na ida pro
trabalho?
Eu quero viver bem... e você?
2005 foi um ano cheio.
Foi cheio de coisas boas, mas também de problemas e desilusões,
tristezas, perdas, reencontros...
Normal... às vezes, se espera demais.
A grana que não veio, o amigo que decepcionou, o amor que acabou.
Normal... 2006 não vai ser diferente.
Muda o século, o milênio muda, mas o homem é cheio de imperfeições, a
natureza tem sua personalidade que nem sempre é a que a gente deseja,
mas, e aí?
Fazer o quê?
Acabar com o seu dia?
Com seu bom humor?
Com sua esperança?
O que eu desejo para todos nós é sabedoria.
E que todos nós saibamos transformar tudo em uma boa experiência.
O nosso desejo não se realizou?
Beleza... Não estava na hora, não deveria ser a melhor coisa para esse
momento (me lembro sempre de uma frase que ouvi e adoro:
"cuidado com seus desejos,
eles podem se tornar realidade").
Chorar de dor, de solidão, de tristeza, faz parte do ser humano...
Mas, se a gente se entende e permite olhar o outro e o mundo com
generosidade, as coisas ficam
diferentes.
Desejo para todo mundo esse olhar especial!!
2006 pode ser um ano especial, se nosso olhar for diferente.
Pode ser muito legal, se entendermos nossas fragilidades e egoísmos e
dermos a volta nisso.
Somos fracos, mas podemos melhorar.
Somos egoístas, mas podemos entender o outro.
2006 pode ser o bicho, o máximo, maravilhoso, lindo, especial!
Depende de mim... de você.
Pode ser... e que seja!
Arnaldo Jabor
ARE YOU A VIRGO?!?!?
By BENEDICT CAREY
"Perfectionists need to realize they are actually trying to compete with God. Above all, be true to yourself."
It’s hard to argue with those maxims. They seem self-evident — if not written into the Constitution, then at least part of the cultural water supply that irrigates everything from halftime speeches to corporate lectures to SAT coaching classes.
Yet several recent studies stand as a warning against taking the platitudes of achievement too seriously. The new research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don’t turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress — as Freud, Alfred Adler and countless exasperated parents have long predicted — but also suggest that perfectionism is a valuable lens through which to understand a variety of seemingly unrelated mental difficulties, from depression to compulsive behavior to addiction.
Some researchers divide perfectionists into three types, based on answers to standardized questionnaires: Self-oriented strivers who struggle to live up to their high standards and appear to be at risk of self-critical depression; outwardly focused zealots who expect perfection from others, often ruining relationships; and those desperate to live up to an ideal they’re convinced others expect of them, a risk factor for suicidal thinking and eating disorders.
“It’s natural for people to want to be perfect in a few things, say in their job — being a good editor or surgeon depends on not making mistakes,” said Gordon L. Flett, a psychology professor at York University and an author of many of the studies. “It’s when it generalizes to other areas of life, home life, appearance, hobbies, that you begin to see real problems.”
Unlike people given psychiatric labels, however, perfectionists neither battle stigma nor consider themselves to be somehow dysfunctional. On the contrary, said Alice Provost, an employee assistance counselor at the University of California, Davis, who recently ran group therapy for staff members struggling with perfectionist impulses. “They’re very proud of it,” she said. “And the culture highly values and reinforces their attitudes.”
Consider a recent study by psychologists at Curtin University of Technology in Australia, who found that the level of “all or nothing” thinking predicted how well perfectionists navigated their lives. The researchers had 252 participants fill out questionnaires rating their level of agreement with 16 statements like “I think of myself as either in control or out of control” and “I either get on very well with people or not at all.”
The more strongly participants in the study thought in this either-or fashion, the more likely they were to display the kind of extreme perfectionism that can lead to mental health problems.
In short, these are people who not only swallow many of the maxims for success but take them as absolutes. At some level they know that it’s possible to succeed after falling short (build on your mistakes: another boilerplate rule). The trouble is that falling short still reeks of mediocrity; for them, to say otherwise is to spin the result.
Never accept second best. Always be true to yourself.
The burden of perfectionist expectations is all too familiar to anyone who has struggled to kick a bad habit. Break down just once — have one smoke, one single drink — and at best it’s a “slip.” At worst it’s a relapse, and more often it’s a fall off the wagon: failure. And if you’ve already fallen, well, may as well pour yourself two or three more.
This is why experts have long debated the wisdom of insisting on abstinence as necessary in treating substance abuse. Most rehab clinics are based on this principle: Either you’re clean or you’re not; there’s no safe level of use. This approach has unquestionably worked for millions of addicts, but if the studies of perfectionists are any guide it has undermined the efforts of many others.
Ms. Provost said those in her program at U.C. Davis often displayed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder — another risk for perfectionists. They couldn’t bear a messy desk. They found it nearly impossible to leave a job half-done, to do the next day. Some put in ludicrously long hours redoing tasks, chasing an ideal only they could see.
As an experiment, Ms. Provost had members of the group slack off on purpose, against their every instinct. “This was mostly in the context of work,” she said, “and they seem like small things, because what some of them considered failure was what most people would consider no big deal.”
Leave work on time. Don’t arrive early. Take all the breaks allowed. Leave the desk a mess. Allow yourself a set number of tries to finish a job; then turn in what you have.
“And then ask: Did you get punished? Did the university continue to function? Are you happier?” Ms. Provost said. “They were surprised that yes, everything continued to function, and the things they were so worried about weren’t that crucial.”
The British have a saying that encourages people to show their skills while mocking the universal fear of failure: Do your worst.
If you can’t tolerate your worst, at least once in a while, how true to yourself can you be?
"Perfectionists need to realize they are actually trying to compete with God. Above all, be true to yourself."
It’s hard to argue with those maxims. They seem self-evident — if not written into the Constitution, then at least part of the cultural water supply that irrigates everything from halftime speeches to corporate lectures to SAT coaching classes.
Yet several recent studies stand as a warning against taking the platitudes of achievement too seriously. The new research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don’t turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress — as Freud, Alfred Adler and countless exasperated parents have long predicted — but also suggest that perfectionism is a valuable lens through which to understand a variety of seemingly unrelated mental difficulties, from depression to compulsive behavior to addiction.
Some researchers divide perfectionists into three types, based on answers to standardized questionnaires: Self-oriented strivers who struggle to live up to their high standards and appear to be at risk of self-critical depression; outwardly focused zealots who expect perfection from others, often ruining relationships; and those desperate to live up to an ideal they’re convinced others expect of them, a risk factor for suicidal thinking and eating disorders.
“It’s natural for people to want to be perfect in a few things, say in their job — being a good editor or surgeon depends on not making mistakes,” said Gordon L. Flett, a psychology professor at York University and an author of many of the studies. “It’s when it generalizes to other areas of life, home life, appearance, hobbies, that you begin to see real problems.”
Unlike people given psychiatric labels, however, perfectionists neither battle stigma nor consider themselves to be somehow dysfunctional. On the contrary, said Alice Provost, an employee assistance counselor at the University of California, Davis, who recently ran group therapy for staff members struggling with perfectionist impulses. “They’re very proud of it,” she said. “And the culture highly values and reinforces their attitudes.”
Consider a recent study by psychologists at Curtin University of Technology in Australia, who found that the level of “all or nothing” thinking predicted how well perfectionists navigated their lives. The researchers had 252 participants fill out questionnaires rating their level of agreement with 16 statements like “I think of myself as either in control or out of control” and “I either get on very well with people or not at all.”
The more strongly participants in the study thought in this either-or fashion, the more likely they were to display the kind of extreme perfectionism that can lead to mental health problems.
In short, these are people who not only swallow many of the maxims for success but take them as absolutes. At some level they know that it’s possible to succeed after falling short (build on your mistakes: another boilerplate rule). The trouble is that falling short still reeks of mediocrity; for them, to say otherwise is to spin the result.
Never accept second best. Always be true to yourself.
The burden of perfectionist expectations is all too familiar to anyone who has struggled to kick a bad habit. Break down just once — have one smoke, one single drink — and at best it’s a “slip.” At worst it’s a relapse, and more often it’s a fall off the wagon: failure. And if you’ve already fallen, well, may as well pour yourself two or three more.
This is why experts have long debated the wisdom of insisting on abstinence as necessary in treating substance abuse. Most rehab clinics are based on this principle: Either you’re clean or you’re not; there’s no safe level of use. This approach has unquestionably worked for millions of addicts, but if the studies of perfectionists are any guide it has undermined the efforts of many others.
Ms. Provost said those in her program at U.C. Davis often displayed symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder — another risk for perfectionists. They couldn’t bear a messy desk. They found it nearly impossible to leave a job half-done, to do the next day. Some put in ludicrously long hours redoing tasks, chasing an ideal only they could see.
As an experiment, Ms. Provost had members of the group slack off on purpose, against their every instinct. “This was mostly in the context of work,” she said, “and they seem like small things, because what some of them considered failure was what most people would consider no big deal.”
Leave work on time. Don’t arrive early. Take all the breaks allowed. Leave the desk a mess. Allow yourself a set number of tries to finish a job; then turn in what you have.
“And then ask: Did you get punished? Did the university continue to function? Are you happier?” Ms. Provost said. “They were surprised that yes, everything continued to function, and the things they were so worried about weren’t that crucial.”
The British have a saying that encourages people to show their skills while mocking the universal fear of failure: Do your worst.
If you can’t tolerate your worst, at least once in a while, how true to yourself can you be?
MILKING THE BIBLE FOR LAUGHS
By Jay A. Fernandez
For many people, the holidays are a time for visiting with the extended family, reflecting on spiritual matters and relaxing by a toasty fire with something entertaining to read. In that case, the gleefully heretical "Year One" screenplay would have made a great stocking stuffer.
The story in its broadest terms involves a loony Old Testament road trip. Cocky, clueless Zed and his beleaguered friend Oh flee their isolated village and end up traipsing Forrest Gump-like through a mash-up of BC history. They have deliciously blasphemous run-ins with Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Seth and Lilith, and stumble upon Isaac and Abraham, who is suddenly struck by an impassioned commitment to circumcision.
Penned by writer-producers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg ("The Office") with director Harold Ramis ("Vacation"), the script has great anachronistic fun with the idea of applying contemporary characterizations and language to a biblical context, and vice versa (i.e. "I want to lay with her so badly" and "What happens in Sodom, stays in Sodom").
Ramis, who co-wrote and directed "Analyze This" and "Groundhog Day," here veers back toward the screw-loose zaniness of his early work in "Caddyshack" and "Stripes." "Year One" embraces all the raunchy exuberance that "Evan Almighty," which also played with Christian scripture, shunned (though it certainly shares some of Evan's juvenility).
It'll make a nice companion piece to Monty Python's "Life of Brian" and "Caveman," the grunting 1981 prehistoric comedy written by Rudy De Luca and Carl Gottlieb that put Ringo Starr, Shelley Long and Dennis Quaid in loincloths.
With a cast led by Jack Black and Michael "Superbad" Cera, "Year One's" irreverent material could beget big audiences. Zed is written so perfectly for Black that reading his dialogue is like hearing Black read the script to you (upon hearing that Sodom will be destroyed: "When do you think all this smiting is going to go down?")
Cera's vulnerable delivery was made for moments like Oh's response to a palace guard whipping him: "Why don't you try using your words for a change?" Filming on the Judd Apatow production will begin in January for a Columbia Pictures release in AD June 2009.
For many people, the holidays are a time for visiting with the extended family, reflecting on spiritual matters and relaxing by a toasty fire with something entertaining to read. In that case, the gleefully heretical "Year One" screenplay would have made a great stocking stuffer.
The story in its broadest terms involves a loony Old Testament road trip. Cocky, clueless Zed and his beleaguered friend Oh flee their isolated village and end up traipsing Forrest Gump-like through a mash-up of BC history. They have deliciously blasphemous run-ins with Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Seth and Lilith, and stumble upon Isaac and Abraham, who is suddenly struck by an impassioned commitment to circumcision.
Penned by writer-producers Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg ("The Office") with director Harold Ramis ("Vacation"), the script has great anachronistic fun with the idea of applying contemporary characterizations and language to a biblical context, and vice versa (i.e. "I want to lay with her so badly" and "What happens in Sodom, stays in Sodom").
Ramis, who co-wrote and directed "Analyze This" and "Groundhog Day," here veers back toward the screw-loose zaniness of his early work in "Caddyshack" and "Stripes." "Year One" embraces all the raunchy exuberance that "Evan Almighty," which also played with Christian scripture, shunned (though it certainly shares some of Evan's juvenility).
It'll make a nice companion piece to Monty Python's "Life of Brian" and "Caveman," the grunting 1981 prehistoric comedy written by Rudy De Luca and Carl Gottlieb that put Ringo Starr, Shelley Long and Dennis Quaid in loincloths.
With a cast led by Jack Black and Michael "Superbad" Cera, "Year One's" irreverent material could beget big audiences. Zed is written so perfectly for Black that reading his dialogue is like hearing Black read the script to you (upon hearing that Sodom will be destroyed: "When do you think all this smiting is going to go down?")
Cera's vulnerable delivery was made for moments like Oh's response to a palace guard whipping him: "Why don't you try using your words for a change?" Filming on the Judd Apatow production will begin in January for a Columbia Pictures release in AD June 2009.
CAN'T EVEN IMAGINE THAT
Such a feeling coming over me
There is wonder in the things I see
Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes
And I won't be surprised if it's a dream
Everything I want the world to be
Is coming true especially for me
And the reason is clear, it's because you are here
You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen
On the top of the world looking down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love put me on the top of the world
Top of the world
Top of the world
Top of the world
Something in the wind has learned my name
Telling me that things are not the same
In the leaves on the trees and the touch of the breeze
There's a pleasant sense of happiness for me
There is only one wish on my mind
When this day is through I hope I'll find
Tomorrow will be the same for you and me
All I need will be mine if you are here
On the top of the world looking down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love put me on the top of the world
December 24, 2007
December 23, 2007
EVERY CONCESSION MADE INCREASES THE DEMAND
sometimes i miss the funniest things... and then the memories just fill my body, my mind, my heart... and i have this sleepy and sheepish smile on my face...
from time to time i still try to figure things out and i don't heck know what happened, or what the heck is going on now. i mean, how can i figure things out like this? there's no way i can do that, jose!! this can either put me in a weird mood or it can push me towards the... future? emptiness? desperation? nothing? love? life? i don't have a clue and i guess it's better this way (?). funny thing is that nobody can explain things to me and we're all in this hubble together, all of us questioning the situation(s) and wondering about it... what the heck?!?!?!?
end of the year... throwing a clock in the trash the other day: "time certainly flies."
there's a moment from time to time that i cherish a lot: the afternoon chat, about whatever, that makes me want to be a better person. i'm truly blessed for having wonderful people in my life.
"you still laugh a lot, how precious is that?!?!?"
i can't eat anymore!! seriously!! this is too much! i had the longest lunch ever today: from 1 to 7 pm (never mind that i had dinner with friends at 7:30!!!). no wonder i can't eat or move at all!!!
i really can't deal with anymore. i tried, and i guess now i gave up. is it ok? of course not, but on the other hand there's nothing i can do if i'm kept in the closet.
amigo secreto is always so much fun!!!
now we are in 4 colors:black, white, yellow and red.
friends, food, laughter, deep conversation: priceless.
i'm still there, question is... until when?
i always leave things for the last minute and it's killing me this time more than never. i certainly never learn my lessons and that makes me a fucking dumb!!
i really don't have time or patience to deal with crap, period. however, crap finds me, lol.
cleaning up files the other day i found the funniest and loveliest things ever and i wonder what the heck happened in a moment in time, in a split second, in a lifetime. there is so much i want to understand, and i'm not even close to it!! oh well...
it's also funny how so many things were so important to me and now they are just faded memories... and no, i wouldn't go through them again just because there's no point in doing that. unless... hummm...
'august rush'... when will the universe stop throwing memories on (in????) my face?!?!?! too much to handle in one sitting, lol, but being transported to nyc was the best one!! i've been really in a ny state of mind, whatever that means. never mind that i was in a bahamas state of mind for a while. where next? according to m, Zimbabwe, which is not a bad idea at all!!!
it’s funny how time definitely flies and how so many people disappear in the cycle. on the other hand, the people i’d love to disappear keep coming back. what the heck?!!?!?
i flew a lot this year. i don’t remember flying so much as i did this year. there wasn’t 1 fucking time, either on my way or my on my way back, that i was able to fly without any problems. january, heading south: flight delayed on the way back to LA. spring break: ALL my flights were delayed (on my way to and back) and i spent a lot of time at the airports. summer… geez, where to start??? delayed in PA, missed the flight in london (the flight was at 5:10 and we got to at the airport at 5), delayed in dublin (forever!!!), moved to chicago, flew to LA through san francisco. hello!! NY? delayed forever too. brasil? aha, this one tops everything else, OMG!! besides having the worst (and funniest) time trying to confirm my reservation, my flights were cancelled before I even left LA!!! what a nightmare! i definitely have been flying AERO MYSTERY as i never know what’s gonna happen once i get to the airport. hopefully next year I won’t have problems like this anymore. not forgetting to mention the longest and the most random inspection when i left this summer. the guy was pretty annoyed by me, taking my very sweet time to organize myself again. Oh well... i’m not that sweet anyways!
i amaze myself sometimes. time is always against me, but i’ve been very good at doing whatever i need and want to do, especially this past week, where i got together with most of my beloved friends, watched tons of good movies, ran (finally), spent time with my martian children, and worked just as usual. of course i’d rather have a 30 hour/day… in the middle of this chaos, there’s no time for anything else, and i do need some time to unwind. i wonder when I’m going to do that.
one of my best and funniest xtmas present was a “for lease” sign. i had to wear it on my neck for a while, and the best part of it was that i was leased in less than 5 minutes by the best human being ever!!
i love love love the last day of winter break, it’s always so much fun! this year I told the kids that the last day was a drag, that they shouldn’t come, that i really hate it and blah blah blah. this year our gingerbread houses were a little healthier and we had to be more creative to build them. i wish i could post some pics of them, but stupid me lost the pics i took of them. i don’t heck know what’s going on with me, cameras and iphotos lately.
M, JJ!! So so sweet!!!
emily… small connection, but a meaningful one. i realized that i finally reached the 3 months mark of connections. phew, i was worried this was never gonna happen just because i’ve been in lalaland more than never.
i really don’t know what’s still going on with me. I’m so out of the loop since summer and things haven’t clicked quite yet. the bahamas keeps coming up and the desire to really get lost on the road is just beyond my capacity of thinking, breathing, living. what have i lost so badly that i need to look in a far away place for it?!?!? i don’t get it, i definitely don’t get it. sometimes i wish i was a normal person, with normal feelings, normal thinking, accepting a normal life. i had this conversation with a totally 80’s guy at the swatch store the other day and he said it was the first time he heard someone saying that aloud, and how much he agreed with me. good, i’m not the only insane and weird one, unless i’m singing ‘feliz navidad’ at lunch time, jumping up and down, wearing a burka. no wonder the kids don’t take me serious!! (not really, they get my wacko humor).
sometimes i really torture myself over nothing.
how come that was so much love and sweetness and now there’s nothing?!?! i really don’t get it.
i hate knowing that m is not happy. it’s been happening for a while and i wonder how i can help. funny thing is that i feel detached from it sometimes and it really doesn’t affect me as it could. i know where i stand on this and i know i have to let the venting happen and offer my shoulders, ears and hands. what else can i do?!?!? I feel so… useless. Why do I always want to help people?!?!? Why do I always butt in where I shouldn’t?!?!? Do people really want me to help them??!!? I have to stop acting like Mamma Bear, unless people ask for my help. I do this instinctively.
"even though my life before was tragic now I know my love for her goes on."
from time to time i still try to figure things out and i don't heck know what happened, or what the heck is going on now. i mean, how can i figure things out like this? there's no way i can do that, jose!! this can either put me in a weird mood or it can push me towards the... future? emptiness? desperation? nothing? love? life? i don't have a clue and i guess it's better this way (?). funny thing is that nobody can explain things to me and we're all in this hubble together, all of us questioning the situation(s) and wondering about it... what the heck?!?!?!?
end of the year... throwing a clock in the trash the other day: "time certainly flies."
there's a moment from time to time that i cherish a lot: the afternoon chat, about whatever, that makes me want to be a better person. i'm truly blessed for having wonderful people in my life.
"you still laugh a lot, how precious is that?!?!?"
i can't eat anymore!! seriously!! this is too much! i had the longest lunch ever today: from 1 to 7 pm (never mind that i had dinner with friends at 7:30!!!). no wonder i can't eat or move at all!!!
i really can't deal with anymore. i tried, and i guess now i gave up. is it ok? of course not, but on the other hand there's nothing i can do if i'm kept in the closet.
amigo secreto is always so much fun!!!
now we are in 4 colors:black, white, yellow and red.
friends, food, laughter, deep conversation: priceless.
i'm still there, question is... until when?
i always leave things for the last minute and it's killing me this time more than never. i certainly never learn my lessons and that makes me a fucking dumb!!
i really don't have time or patience to deal with crap, period. however, crap finds me, lol.
cleaning up files the other day i found the funniest and loveliest things ever and i wonder what the heck happened in a moment in time, in a split second, in a lifetime. there is so much i want to understand, and i'm not even close to it!! oh well...
it's also funny how so many things were so important to me and now they are just faded memories... and no, i wouldn't go through them again just because there's no point in doing that. unless... hummm...
'august rush'... when will the universe stop throwing memories on (in????) my face?!?!?! too much to handle in one sitting, lol, but being transported to nyc was the best one!! i've been really in a ny state of mind, whatever that means. never mind that i was in a bahamas state of mind for a while. where next? according to m, Zimbabwe, which is not a bad idea at all!!!
it’s funny how time definitely flies and how so many people disappear in the cycle. on the other hand, the people i’d love to disappear keep coming back. what the heck?!!?!?
i flew a lot this year. i don’t remember flying so much as i did this year. there wasn’t 1 fucking time, either on my way or my on my way back, that i was able to fly without any problems. january, heading south: flight delayed on the way back to LA. spring break: ALL my flights were delayed (on my way to and back) and i spent a lot of time at the airports. summer… geez, where to start??? delayed in PA, missed the flight in london (the flight was at 5:10 and we got to at the airport at 5), delayed in dublin (forever!!!), moved to chicago, flew to LA through san francisco. hello!! NY? delayed forever too. brasil? aha, this one tops everything else, OMG!! besides having the worst (and funniest) time trying to confirm my reservation, my flights were cancelled before I even left LA!!! what a nightmare! i definitely have been flying AERO MYSTERY as i never know what’s gonna happen once i get to the airport. hopefully next year I won’t have problems like this anymore. not forgetting to mention the longest and the most random inspection when i left this summer. the guy was pretty annoyed by me, taking my very sweet time to organize myself again. Oh well... i’m not that sweet anyways!
i amaze myself sometimes. time is always against me, but i’ve been very good at doing whatever i need and want to do, especially this past week, where i got together with most of my beloved friends, watched tons of good movies, ran (finally), spent time with my martian children, and worked just as usual. of course i’d rather have a 30 hour/day… in the middle of this chaos, there’s no time for anything else, and i do need some time to unwind. i wonder when I’m going to do that.
one of my best and funniest xtmas present was a “for lease” sign. i had to wear it on my neck for a while, and the best part of it was that i was leased in less than 5 minutes by the best human being ever!!
i love love love the last day of winter break, it’s always so much fun! this year I told the kids that the last day was a drag, that they shouldn’t come, that i really hate it and blah blah blah. this year our gingerbread houses were a little healthier and we had to be more creative to build them. i wish i could post some pics of them, but stupid me lost the pics i took of them. i don’t heck know what’s going on with me, cameras and iphotos lately.
M, JJ!! So so sweet!!!
emily… small connection, but a meaningful one. i realized that i finally reached the 3 months mark of connections. phew, i was worried this was never gonna happen just because i’ve been in lalaland more than never.
i really don’t know what’s still going on with me. I’m so out of the loop since summer and things haven’t clicked quite yet. the bahamas keeps coming up and the desire to really get lost on the road is just beyond my capacity of thinking, breathing, living. what have i lost so badly that i need to look in a far away place for it?!?!? i don’t get it, i definitely don’t get it. sometimes i wish i was a normal person, with normal feelings, normal thinking, accepting a normal life. i had this conversation with a totally 80’s guy at the swatch store the other day and he said it was the first time he heard someone saying that aloud, and how much he agreed with me. good, i’m not the only insane and weird one, unless i’m singing ‘feliz navidad’ at lunch time, jumping up and down, wearing a burka. no wonder the kids don’t take me serious!! (not really, they get my wacko humor).
sometimes i really torture myself over nothing.
how come that was so much love and sweetness and now there’s nothing?!?! i really don’t get it.
i hate knowing that m is not happy. it’s been happening for a while and i wonder how i can help. funny thing is that i feel detached from it sometimes and it really doesn’t affect me as it could. i know where i stand on this and i know i have to let the venting happen and offer my shoulders, ears and hands. what else can i do?!?!? I feel so… useless. Why do I always want to help people?!?!? Why do I always butt in where I shouldn’t?!?!? Do people really want me to help them??!!? I have to stop acting like Mamma Bear, unless people ask for my help. I do this instinctively.
"even though my life before was tragic now I know my love for her goes on."
JEAN-DOMINIQUE BAUBY
"my diving bell becomes less oppressive, and my mind takes flight like a butterfly. there is so much do to. you can wander off in space or in time, set out for tierra del fuego or for king midas'court."
"there comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decided to treat it all as a joke."
"their small talk has masked hidden depths. had i been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature?"
"capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest."
"today it seems to me what my whole life was nothing byt a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner."
"far from such din, when blessed silence returns, i can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. to hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. loud breathing is enough to drown them out. this is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet i hear them better and better. i must have butterfly hearing."
"does the cosmos contain keys for opening my diving bell? a subway line with no terminus? a currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? we must keep looking."
"there comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter - when, after a final blow from fate, we decided to treat it all as a joke."
"their small talk has masked hidden depths. had i been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature?"
"capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest."
"today it seems to me what my whole life was nothing byt a string of those small near misses: a race whose result we know beforehand but in which we fail to bet on the winner."
"far from such din, when blessed silence returns, i can listen to the butterflies that flutter inside my head. to hear them, one must be calm and pay close attention, for their wingbeats are barely audible. loud breathing is enough to drown them out. this is astonishing: my hearing does not improve, yet i hear them better and better. i must have butterfly hearing."
"does the cosmos contain keys for opening my diving bell? a subway line with no terminus? a currency strong enough to buy my freedom back? we must keep looking."
December 22, 2007
PROFESSOR NAO EH COITADO, MAS TAMBEM NAO SOMOS VALORIZADOS
"Certamente há muito que melhorar, mas é igualmente
certo que o nosso professorado não trabalha em condições
infra-estruturais sofríveis. A idéia de um professor acuado
pela violência também não se confirma quando contrastada
com a frieza dos dados"
O professor brasileiro é um herói. Batalha com afinco contra tudo e todos em prol de uma educação de qualidade em um país que não se importa com o tema, ensinando em salas hiperlotadas de escolas em péssimo estado de conservação. Tem de trabalhar em dois ou três lugares, com uma carga horária exaustiva. Ganha um salário de fome, é constantemente acossado pela indisciplina e desinteresse dos alunos e não conta com o apoio dos pais, da comunidade, do governo e da sociedade em geral.
Se você tem lido a imprensa brasileira nos últimos vinte anos, provavelmente é assim que você pensa. Permita-me gerar dúvidas.
Segundo a última Sinopse Estatística do Ensino Superior, em 2005 havia 904.000 alunos matriculados em cursos da área de educação, ou o equivalente a 20% do total de alunos do país. É a área de estudo mais popular, deixando para trás gerenciamento e administração (704.000) e direito (565.000). Ademais, é uma área que só faz crescer: em 2001, eram 653.000 alunos – um aumento de quase 40% em apenas quatro anos.
No mercado profissional, os números do professorado também são mastodônticos. Segundo dados da última Pnad tabulados por Simon Schwartzman, há 2,9 milhões de professores em todo o país. É provavelmente a categoria profissional mais numerosa.
Jose Patricio/AE
Professores em formação: uma profissão muito procurada no Brasil apesar das queixas
Surge o questionamento: se a carreira de professor é esse inferno que se pinta, por que tantas pessoas optam por ela? Pior: por que esse interesse aumenta ano a ano? Seria uma categoria que atrai masoquistas? Ou desinformados?
A resposta é mais simples: porque a realidade da carreira de professor é bastante diferente da imagem difundida.
A maioria dos professores trabalha em apenas uma escola. Segundo o Perfil dos Professores Brasileiros, ampla pesquisa realizada pela Unesco, 58,5% têm apenas um local de trabalho. Os que fazem dupla jornada são pouco menos de um terço: 32,2%. Só 9%, portanto, trabalham em três escolas ou mais. Sua carga horária também não é das mais massacrantes: 31% trabalham entre uma e vinte horas em sala de aula por semana, 54% ficam entre 21 e quarenta horas e o restante trabalha mais de quarenta horas. Os professores costumam argumentar que seu trabalho se estende para fora da sala de aula, com correção de tarefas, preparação de aulas etc. Nisso, não são diferentes de todos os outros profissionais liberais – qual o médico que não estuda fora do consultório ou o advogado que não pesquisa a legislação nos horários fora do escritório?
O que os representantes da categoria não costumam mencionar são as vantagens da profissão: as férias longas, a estabilidade no emprego e o regime especial de aposentadoria (80% são funcionários públicos) e, sobretudo, a regulamentação frouxa. No estado de São Paulo, 13% dos professores da rede estadual faltam a cada dia, contra 1% daqueles da rede privada. Há um amontoado de proteções jurídicas para que essa ausência não redunde em perda salarial – infelizmente, não conseguimos blindar o aprendizado dos alunos contra as faltas docentes.
Não é correta, também, a idéia de que os professores trabalham em estabelecimentos superlotados. Segundo os dados oficiais, há 27 alunos por turma no ensino fundamental (de 1ª a 8ª série). A relação só sobe nos três anos do ensino médio, para 37 alunos por turma – dentro da normalidade, portanto.
Tampouco procede a idéia de que as escolas não tenham as condições mínimas de infra-estrutura para a realização de aulas. As histórias de escolas de lona ou de lata rendem muito noticiário justamente por serem a exceção, a aberração. Mais de 90% de nossas escolas de ensino fundamental têm banheiro, água encanada e esgoto, e 87% contam com eletricidade. Quase um terço tem quadra esportiva, e 42% dispõem de computadores. Certamente há muito que melhorar, mas é igualmente certo que o nosso professorado não trabalha em condições infra-estruturais sofríveis.
Paulo Liebert/AE
Patrulha na porta de uma escola em São Paulo: os professores não estão mais expostos à violência
A idéia de um professor acuado pela violência também não se confirma quando contrastada com a frieza dos dados. Questionário respondido pelos professores quando da aplicação do Saeb, o teste do ensino básico, revela que apenas 3% deles haviam visto, em toda a sua carreira, alunos com armas de fogo, que só 5,4% dos professores já foram ameaçados e 0,7% sofreu agressão de aluno. São incidentes lamentáveis e que devem ser punidos com todo o rigor da lei. Essa quantidade de problemas, porém, está longe de indicar uma epidemia de violência tomando conta das nossas escolas.
Finalmente, a questão crucial: o salário. Há uma idéia encravada na mente do brasileiro de que professor ganha pouco, uma mixaria. É verdade que o professor brasileiro tem um salário absoluto baixo – o que se explica pelo fato de ele ser brasileiro, não professor. Somos um país pobre, com uma massa salarial baixa. O professor tem um contracheque de valor baixo, assim como médicos, carteiros, bancários, jornalistas e todas as demais categorias profissionais do país, com exceção de congressistas (e suas amantes). Quando estudos econométricos comparam o salário dos professores com o das outras carreiras, levando em consideração a jornada laboral e as características pessoais dos trabalhadores, não há diferença para a categoria dos docentes. Ou seja, os professores ganham aquilo que é compatível com a sua formação e o seu trabalho, e ganhariam valor semelhante se optassem por outra carreira. Quando se leva em conta a diferença de férias e aposentadoria, o salário do professor é mais alto do que o do restante. Estudo recente de Samuel Pessôa e Fernando de Holanda, da FGV, também mostrou que o salário do professor de escola pública é mais alto do que aquele recebido por seu colega de escola particular. Achados semelhantes emergem quando se compara o professor brasileiro com aquele de outros países. Enquanto aqui ele ganha o equivalente a 1,5 vez a renda média do país, a média dos países da OCDE (que têm a melhor educação do planeta) é de 1,3. Na América do Sul, os países com qualidade de ensino melhor que a brasileira têm professores que recebem menos: 0,85 na Argentina, 0,75 no Uruguai e 1,25 no Chile. Esses são dados um pouco defasados, de 2005. É provável que atualmente o quadro seja ainda melhor, pois os estudos sobre o tema mostram que os rendimentos dos professores vêm aumentando, à medida que mais deles têm diploma universitário. Segundo os dados da última Pnad colhidos por Schwartzman, houve um aumento de 20% nos rendimentos dos professores da rede estadual e de 16% nos da rede municipal apenas entre 2005 e 2006.
Apesar de todos esses dados estarem amplamente disponíveis, perdura a visão de que o professor é um coitado e/ou um herói, fazendo esforços hercúleos para carregar o pobre aluno ladeira acima. Longe de ser uma questão apenas semântica ou psicológica, essa caracterização do professor é extremamente daninha para o progresso do nosso ensino, porque ela emperra toda e qualquer agenda de mudança. A literatura empírica aponta que há muito que professores, diretores e gestores públicos podem fazer para obter melhorias substanciais no aprendizado de nossos alunos, mas é quase impossível ter qualquer discussão produtiva nesse sentido no Brasil, pois, antes de mais nada, seria necessário "recuperar a dignidade do magistério", "dar condições mínimas de trabalho aos professores" etc. A mitificação do nosso professor impede que o vejamos como ele é: um profissional, adulto, consciente de suas decisões e potencialidades, inserido em uma categoria profissional que, como todas as outras, abriga muita gente competente, muita gente incompetente e muitos outros medíocres e que, portanto, deve receber não apenas encorajamento e defesa condescendentes, mas também cobranças e críticas construtivas e avaliações objetivas de seus méritos e falhas. Só assim melhoraremos o desempenho das nossas escolas e daremos um futuro ao país.
certo que o nosso professorado não trabalha em condições
infra-estruturais sofríveis. A idéia de um professor acuado
pela violência também não se confirma quando contrastada
com a frieza dos dados"
O professor brasileiro é um herói. Batalha com afinco contra tudo e todos em prol de uma educação de qualidade em um país que não se importa com o tema, ensinando em salas hiperlotadas de escolas em péssimo estado de conservação. Tem de trabalhar em dois ou três lugares, com uma carga horária exaustiva. Ganha um salário de fome, é constantemente acossado pela indisciplina e desinteresse dos alunos e não conta com o apoio dos pais, da comunidade, do governo e da sociedade em geral.
Se você tem lido a imprensa brasileira nos últimos vinte anos, provavelmente é assim que você pensa. Permita-me gerar dúvidas.
Segundo a última Sinopse Estatística do Ensino Superior, em 2005 havia 904.000 alunos matriculados em cursos da área de educação, ou o equivalente a 20% do total de alunos do país. É a área de estudo mais popular, deixando para trás gerenciamento e administração (704.000) e direito (565.000). Ademais, é uma área que só faz crescer: em 2001, eram 653.000 alunos – um aumento de quase 40% em apenas quatro anos.
No mercado profissional, os números do professorado também são mastodônticos. Segundo dados da última Pnad tabulados por Simon Schwartzman, há 2,9 milhões de professores em todo o país. É provavelmente a categoria profissional mais numerosa.
Jose Patricio/AE
Professores em formação: uma profissão muito procurada no Brasil apesar das queixas
Surge o questionamento: se a carreira de professor é esse inferno que se pinta, por que tantas pessoas optam por ela? Pior: por que esse interesse aumenta ano a ano? Seria uma categoria que atrai masoquistas? Ou desinformados?
A resposta é mais simples: porque a realidade da carreira de professor é bastante diferente da imagem difundida.
A maioria dos professores trabalha em apenas uma escola. Segundo o Perfil dos Professores Brasileiros, ampla pesquisa realizada pela Unesco, 58,5% têm apenas um local de trabalho. Os que fazem dupla jornada são pouco menos de um terço: 32,2%. Só 9%, portanto, trabalham em três escolas ou mais. Sua carga horária também não é das mais massacrantes: 31% trabalham entre uma e vinte horas em sala de aula por semana, 54% ficam entre 21 e quarenta horas e o restante trabalha mais de quarenta horas. Os professores costumam argumentar que seu trabalho se estende para fora da sala de aula, com correção de tarefas, preparação de aulas etc. Nisso, não são diferentes de todos os outros profissionais liberais – qual o médico que não estuda fora do consultório ou o advogado que não pesquisa a legislação nos horários fora do escritório?
O que os representantes da categoria não costumam mencionar são as vantagens da profissão: as férias longas, a estabilidade no emprego e o regime especial de aposentadoria (80% são funcionários públicos) e, sobretudo, a regulamentação frouxa. No estado de São Paulo, 13% dos professores da rede estadual faltam a cada dia, contra 1% daqueles da rede privada. Há um amontoado de proteções jurídicas para que essa ausência não redunde em perda salarial – infelizmente, não conseguimos blindar o aprendizado dos alunos contra as faltas docentes.
Não é correta, também, a idéia de que os professores trabalham em estabelecimentos superlotados. Segundo os dados oficiais, há 27 alunos por turma no ensino fundamental (de 1ª a 8ª série). A relação só sobe nos três anos do ensino médio, para 37 alunos por turma – dentro da normalidade, portanto.
Tampouco procede a idéia de que as escolas não tenham as condições mínimas de infra-estrutura para a realização de aulas. As histórias de escolas de lona ou de lata rendem muito noticiário justamente por serem a exceção, a aberração. Mais de 90% de nossas escolas de ensino fundamental têm banheiro, água encanada e esgoto, e 87% contam com eletricidade. Quase um terço tem quadra esportiva, e 42% dispõem de computadores. Certamente há muito que melhorar, mas é igualmente certo que o nosso professorado não trabalha em condições infra-estruturais sofríveis.
Paulo Liebert/AE
Patrulha na porta de uma escola em São Paulo: os professores não estão mais expostos à violência
A idéia de um professor acuado pela violência também não se confirma quando contrastada com a frieza dos dados. Questionário respondido pelos professores quando da aplicação do Saeb, o teste do ensino básico, revela que apenas 3% deles haviam visto, em toda a sua carreira, alunos com armas de fogo, que só 5,4% dos professores já foram ameaçados e 0,7% sofreu agressão de aluno. São incidentes lamentáveis e que devem ser punidos com todo o rigor da lei. Essa quantidade de problemas, porém, está longe de indicar uma epidemia de violência tomando conta das nossas escolas.
Finalmente, a questão crucial: o salário. Há uma idéia encravada na mente do brasileiro de que professor ganha pouco, uma mixaria. É verdade que o professor brasileiro tem um salário absoluto baixo – o que se explica pelo fato de ele ser brasileiro, não professor. Somos um país pobre, com uma massa salarial baixa. O professor tem um contracheque de valor baixo, assim como médicos, carteiros, bancários, jornalistas e todas as demais categorias profissionais do país, com exceção de congressistas (e suas amantes). Quando estudos econométricos comparam o salário dos professores com o das outras carreiras, levando em consideração a jornada laboral e as características pessoais dos trabalhadores, não há diferença para a categoria dos docentes. Ou seja, os professores ganham aquilo que é compatível com a sua formação e o seu trabalho, e ganhariam valor semelhante se optassem por outra carreira. Quando se leva em conta a diferença de férias e aposentadoria, o salário do professor é mais alto do que o do restante. Estudo recente de Samuel Pessôa e Fernando de Holanda, da FGV, também mostrou que o salário do professor de escola pública é mais alto do que aquele recebido por seu colega de escola particular. Achados semelhantes emergem quando se compara o professor brasileiro com aquele de outros países. Enquanto aqui ele ganha o equivalente a 1,5 vez a renda média do país, a média dos países da OCDE (que têm a melhor educação do planeta) é de 1,3. Na América do Sul, os países com qualidade de ensino melhor que a brasileira têm professores que recebem menos: 0,85 na Argentina, 0,75 no Uruguai e 1,25 no Chile. Esses são dados um pouco defasados, de 2005. É provável que atualmente o quadro seja ainda melhor, pois os estudos sobre o tema mostram que os rendimentos dos professores vêm aumentando, à medida que mais deles têm diploma universitário. Segundo os dados da última Pnad colhidos por Schwartzman, houve um aumento de 20% nos rendimentos dos professores da rede estadual e de 16% nos da rede municipal apenas entre 2005 e 2006.
Apesar de todos esses dados estarem amplamente disponíveis, perdura a visão de que o professor é um coitado e/ou um herói, fazendo esforços hercúleos para carregar o pobre aluno ladeira acima. Longe de ser uma questão apenas semântica ou psicológica, essa caracterização do professor é extremamente daninha para o progresso do nosso ensino, porque ela emperra toda e qualquer agenda de mudança. A literatura empírica aponta que há muito que professores, diretores e gestores públicos podem fazer para obter melhorias substanciais no aprendizado de nossos alunos, mas é quase impossível ter qualquer discussão produtiva nesse sentido no Brasil, pois, antes de mais nada, seria necessário "recuperar a dignidade do magistério", "dar condições mínimas de trabalho aos professores" etc. A mitificação do nosso professor impede que o vejamos como ele é: um profissional, adulto, consciente de suas decisões e potencialidades, inserido em uma categoria profissional que, como todas as outras, abriga muita gente competente, muita gente incompetente e muitos outros medíocres e que, portanto, deve receber não apenas encorajamento e defesa condescendentes, mas também cobranças e críticas construtivas e avaliações objetivas de seus méritos e falhas. Só assim melhoraremos o desempenho das nossas escolas e daremos um futuro ao país.
December 21, 2007
FUNK COMO LE GUSTA, YEAH!!!
these guys are awesome!! just saw them and their music is just unbelievable!!! eles tocam muito!! muito sem noçao!!!! (alias, cedilha eh uma coisa de outro mundo para mim agora).
LE SCAPHANDRE ET LE PAPILLON
"Oh,you're changing your heart
Oh, you know who you are"
and again... para bom entendedor, meia palavra basta!!
priceless lesson: turning a 14yo into feist. oh yeah!!!
BMW(abreviatura de Bayerische Motoren Werke, em português: Fábrica de Motores da Baviera): i`m still the queen of useless information.
boy, what would i do without mr google??!?!? btw, google reminds me of funny situations and i believe at some point this past summer i had a google notebook (and i lost it somewhere between LA-europe-vegas).
one of the best things in my life is to spend time with friends. it doesn´t matter what we do together, or where we are, but i love picking their brains, laughing with and at them, making and hearing stupid jokes, hugging them, and the best of all, i feel so blessed for having wonderful people in my life. so much love around, it´s unbelievable!! it doesn´t matter how far we live from each other, it doesn´t matter how often we see each other, but everytime we get together it feels like time hasn´t gone anywhere. it´s beautiful. time stops when we´re together.
i also love love love spending time with my folks. i guess i finally grew up and learned that they are awesome. or i´m just plain scared to see them getting older and i´m not around as much as i´d like. nah, my parents are great and i´m so damn proud of them, for raising 4 ´normal´kids, for giving us a good life, for teaching us the beauty of japanese traditions while living in a flexible and fun brazilian culture. i´m also so proud to say we finally have an awesome relationship and scary and funny enough both comes to me for advice (me, from all people!!!).
i always get the best hugs from you. it´s just... scary???
this year was definitely a bad year to fly. however, i flew a lot this year, so i collected a bunch of good stories to tell whenever i sit down with people with a cold beer. believe me, i have some darn good airport/flights stories to tell!
funny how some stuff still keeps popping out of nowhere. even in brazil!! i wonder what the universe is telling me... i´m trying to understand this whole process, but it´s been quite hard.
one of the things that i love to do on a raining day: sit on a coffee shop with a journal and write my observations down. i did this today and i completely lost myself while writing and i lost track of time. just what i needed.
btw, what is time again?? i´m not sure in which time zone my mind, my body and my heart are woking on/at (i still hate prepositions!!!).
so many plans, so little time!!!
i learned my lesson regarding judging people by their appearance. i feel dumb because i know better. or at least i should know better.
nothing like being young and lazy... nothing like being a balzaquiana and free spirit.
"the one which you´re looking for, you´re not gonna find here"
meds advice without a visit, how funny is that!?!?!?
i need to write some long emails to a lot of people... hang in there people... in 2008 i will do better!!!
i finally can´t sleep. this will bite me on my butt tomorrow.
if you don´t know who kaka, martha and buru are, google them. you so should know who they are!!! these people make me proud of my country!!!
it´s been very interesting to have a different perspective of life from this side of life...
edy... what would i do without him in my life?!!? even from far away? actually, what would i do without a lot of people in my life?!?!? i´d be so damn miserable!! i´m the most blessed person for having the best friends in the world!! i´ll keep repeating it over and over and over again just because it´s so damn true!!! i had the best conversation about this today while hitting the road.
from time to time i´m able to see everybody and realize that i´m constantly working on one of my missions in life.
santa is bringing us 2 bottle of tequilas. can´t wait for that!!!
i´m actually running here, how bizarre is that?!!?!?
nothing like reading all the papers after a long hiatus... i feel connected to the outside world a little more, phew!!! funny how i crave information from time to time.
can´t believe i´ll miss persepolis!!!!
can´t believe they stole a portinari and a picasso in 3 minutes!!! crazy!!
grappete.
camburao, amiguissimo, oleo de azeite. sem comentarios.
i really need to write things down just because i really forget them! as i forgot to take tons of pics today. tsc tsc tsc.
not enough sleep. again. my body is screaming right now. why do i do this to myself.
watching the sunrise with people who matter is priceless.
estou avulsa e orgias. sem comentarios 2, lol.
funny kids, gotta love them.
it´s funny how i live life so differently from most of people i know. i admire them while they admire me. i don´t get it. do i really want what they have?!?!? do they really want what i have?!?!? i don´t think so, but i do question my choices. thing is that i´d never be happy living a cookie-cutter kind of life. however, watching some of them gives me hope. not sure about what.
i do talk to myself a lot and i also laugh at myself. i get the funniest looks here.
"Thank you for all you are doing to make life easier and sweeter for her."
little things that people pay attention to.
December 20, 2007
COOL STUFF
http://www.monoscope.com/2007/11/licorne.html
http://art.commongate.com/post/Show_Me_the_Moneygami/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7969902@N07/sets/72157600253743362/
http://art.commongate.com/post/Show_Me_the_Moneygami/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7969902@N07/sets/72157600253743362/
I don't usually regret the fact that my children are growing up. I enjoy who they are now too much to spend much time brooding about who they used to be. But this fall my son left home to go to college, and my daughter turned 11. When you go down to dinner and there are only three people sitting at the table instead of four, you notice. And as I was putting some of my daughter's stuffed animals in storage the other day, I started thinking about childhood's end -- theirs, and my own.
Zachary's departure has made me even more acutely aware of how close Celeste is to the edge. There's no bright line marking the moment when someone ceases to be a child, but she's definitely getting close. She hasn't abandoned her childish loves: She still plays with her American Girl dolls and devours books about clans of warrior cats and watches "SpongeBob Squarepants."
She may even still believe in Santa Claus, although that's getting shaky.
The other day as we were walking down the street, she asked me, not for the first time, if Santa Claus was real. I was tempted to tell her the truth. I'm not sure that it would be that traumatic a revelation -- most of her peers have been apostates for ages. But my wife and I have an agreement not to toss Saint Nick into the Easter Bunny bin until Celeste herself does. So I said yes, Santa is real. But this year, Celeste followed up by asking pointedly why no one ever sees him, and then volunteered that it's because he's magic.
Once they start having to come up with these kind of creationist explanations, it's all over. I'd say that ornament is hanging from the tree by a very frayed thread.
Childhood is like the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution. You go along for eons, and then one day this large new creature is in your house, drinking wine, buying condoms and kicking your ass in basketball. The changes are happening all the time and you just fail to notice them. I feel like I practically missed Zachary becoming an adult. I spent the last four years being a standard middle-aged zombie, shuffling to work and driving kids to soccer practice and waiting for the cocktail hour. They passed in an instant. But they were his high school years, blazoned and painful and wondrous.
Celeste is in one of those bursts now. It's the exploding brain show. Entirely new areas of her mind are blossoming, and you can see the still-coalescing outlines of her grown-up personality start to come into view, like a mask emerging in a vat of molten bronze. A month ago she began to patiently explain to me how to count dotted half-notes, and this is the last year I'll be able to even pretend to understand her math problems. It's only a matter of time before I'll be asking her for help with my homework. Strange new adult concepts like self-consciousness and politeness have begun to make their appearance. (Is there anything more bittersweet than the first time your formerly feral child does something genuinely polite? That moment marks the real end of innocence.) Looking at the different spot where we're going to put our Christmas tree this morning, Celeste said, "That's much better. There will be more room for presents!" Then, looking at me with a knowing little smile, she said archly, "Because for us kids, it's all about the presents."
That little moment of fledgling self-awareness reminded me of that shot in "2001: A Space Odyssey" when the ape-man throws the club exultantly into the air and it turns into a space shuttle. I close my eyes, and a wry comment from a little girl unfolds into a vision of a woman with a grown-up brain and a grown-up heart, laughing ironically at herself in a cafe.
But best of all are the conversations -- as in, we can actually have them now. I yield to no one in my goo-gooing over 4-year-old cuteness, but if I had a dollar for every time I've completely tuned out one of Celeste's monologues about the plot of some cartoon she just watched, I'd be rich. I have a Ph.D. in pretending to pay attention. But now every day I can hit the verbal ball over the net a little harder to her -- and sometimes she whacks one right past me. The game is on, and it'll last a lifetime.
Being a parent is all about loving a moving target -- it doesn't work to get fixated on changes, because if you do that, you'll miss the miraculous present. But I still confess to sometimes feeling a little melancholy these days, as we live out these last years of dolls and silly stories and big eyes full of everything and nothing.
Some of my regret is -- how shall I put this delicately -- vampiric. As I've begun crumbling into more or less picturesque, Transylvania-like ruins, I'm naturally drawn to the figure that leaps lightly over the fallen columns. She's young, I think as I sit creakily up in my earth-filled coffin. She's full of life. Surely she won't miss it if I siphon a little bit off. Hell, I've been doing it ever since she was born -- she ought to be used to it by now.
You can put down the phone to Child Protective Services. I'm no Charles Dodgson -- if the author of "Alice in Wonderland" really was "Lewis Carroll Carroll," the epithet with which Vlad Nabokov, creator of Humbert Humbert, impaled him. I'm not a bloodsucker. I don't want to freeze Celeste at age 9. But these days, I can't shake off the feeling Carroll evoked in his famous lines: "Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies/ Never seen by waking eyes." The feeling that a world is leaving me, and I need to stop and look at it before it goes.
I'm going against the grain. Some kinds of love swim against the current of time, some kinds float with it. In "To His Coy Mistress," the 17th century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell famously paints time as the enemy of romantic love. "Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime," he begins, before going on to muse how if they were lucky enough to live in such a timeless state, his "vegetable love" should grow "vaster than empires." Alas, he and his would-be love exist in the sublunary sphere, and "at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near." Warning his beloved that if she continues to resist him she'll end up in the grave, he enjoins, "Now let us sport us while we may;/ And now, like am'rous birds of prey,/ Rather at once our time devour,/ Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power." The poet concludes by celebrating a love that lives and dies in an explosion of fireworks: "Thus, though we cannot make our sun/ Stand still, yet we will make him run."
But that's erotic love. The love of a parent for a child doesn't fight time, but keeps pace with it -- languishes in its slow-chapp'd power, if you will. Parental affection is the "vegetable love" that Marvell so weirdly invokes. There is no contest, no victory, no fading beauty, no waning of the "willing soul's" "instant fires." You start out where you end up. You're in it for the long haul. Parental love is love's tortoise -- and if we are to judge by what happens to most marriages, the fable has it right: The tortoise wins. The crawling sun beats the sprinting one.
Yet it's good to break out of the zucchini patch every now and then to feel the pangs of fatalism. It's worth it to take in your child's life as if it were fixed, to remember their childhood as if it would never come again, as if there was no tomorrow, as if you really don't have world enough, and time. Because you don't.
When you freeze the moment, when you place your child in a picture frame, when you remember, you open yourself to the sadness of time. Paradoxically, utter stillness starts the clock ticking; a vivid memory makes you aware that the sun is running toward a finish line. This paradox was brilliantly explored by the French semiotician Roland Barthes in his book about photography, "Camera Lucida": The uncanniness of photography is its simultaneous evocation of presence and loss. A memory is a kind of photograph, developed on the human nerves.
Today my memory was triggered by a trinket -- a bib with a koala on it that hangs in my garage. Thinking of it, the strangeness of life overwhelms me: How did we get from that bib to here?
The impending end of Celeste's childhood touches me because it reminds me of other endings, ones none of us can escape. It touches me because it's the last personal encounter with childhood I'm likely to have. It touches me because the Celeste I loved for all those years is changing before my eyes.
And in the end, I realize, it's really not about her at all. She'll still be Celeste, but will I still be me?
My sadness at the end of her childhood is really sadness at the end of my childhood, the wondrous second childhood she brought me. It's coming to an end. No more pushing the swing, and throwing her on the bed, and telling endless stories. No more being a protector, a provider, an everything. No more being special without having to do anything. No more magic. No more mystery. No more of the great adventure.
Ever since Celeste was born, I've watched her, thinking that if I paid enough attention, I could bottle those years. I was wrong: I paid attention, but the time flowed through my fingers and spilled onto the floor. Now it's gone.
But I didn't understand. The gift I was given was not all those moments that have passed, nor all those memories I've lost. The gift was learning how to love.
I have a bottle of the finest wine. It was given to me 11 years ago. It has every flavor in the world in it -- rose and peach and blackberry and cherry and all the others under the running sun. It's Christmas time, and I would like to propose a toast: To you, my daughter, who gave me everything.
Zachary's departure has made me even more acutely aware of how close Celeste is to the edge. There's no bright line marking the moment when someone ceases to be a child, but she's definitely getting close. She hasn't abandoned her childish loves: She still plays with her American Girl dolls and devours books about clans of warrior cats and watches "SpongeBob Squarepants."
She may even still believe in Santa Claus, although that's getting shaky.
The other day as we were walking down the street, she asked me, not for the first time, if Santa Claus was real. I was tempted to tell her the truth. I'm not sure that it would be that traumatic a revelation -- most of her peers have been apostates for ages. But my wife and I have an agreement not to toss Saint Nick into the Easter Bunny bin until Celeste herself does. So I said yes, Santa is real. But this year, Celeste followed up by asking pointedly why no one ever sees him, and then volunteered that it's because he's magic.
Once they start having to come up with these kind of creationist explanations, it's all over. I'd say that ornament is hanging from the tree by a very frayed thread.
Childhood is like the punctuated equilibrium theory of evolution. You go along for eons, and then one day this large new creature is in your house, drinking wine, buying condoms and kicking your ass in basketball. The changes are happening all the time and you just fail to notice them. I feel like I practically missed Zachary becoming an adult. I spent the last four years being a standard middle-aged zombie, shuffling to work and driving kids to soccer practice and waiting for the cocktail hour. They passed in an instant. But they were his high school years, blazoned and painful and wondrous.
Celeste is in one of those bursts now. It's the exploding brain show. Entirely new areas of her mind are blossoming, and you can see the still-coalescing outlines of her grown-up personality start to come into view, like a mask emerging in a vat of molten bronze. A month ago she began to patiently explain to me how to count dotted half-notes, and this is the last year I'll be able to even pretend to understand her math problems. It's only a matter of time before I'll be asking her for help with my homework. Strange new adult concepts like self-consciousness and politeness have begun to make their appearance. (Is there anything more bittersweet than the first time your formerly feral child does something genuinely polite? That moment marks the real end of innocence.) Looking at the different spot where we're going to put our Christmas tree this morning, Celeste said, "That's much better. There will be more room for presents!" Then, looking at me with a knowing little smile, she said archly, "Because for us kids, it's all about the presents."
That little moment of fledgling self-awareness reminded me of that shot in "2001: A Space Odyssey" when the ape-man throws the club exultantly into the air and it turns into a space shuttle. I close my eyes, and a wry comment from a little girl unfolds into a vision of a woman with a grown-up brain and a grown-up heart, laughing ironically at herself in a cafe.
But best of all are the conversations -- as in, we can actually have them now. I yield to no one in my goo-gooing over 4-year-old cuteness, but if I had a dollar for every time I've completely tuned out one of Celeste's monologues about the plot of some cartoon she just watched, I'd be rich. I have a Ph.D. in pretending to pay attention. But now every day I can hit the verbal ball over the net a little harder to her -- and sometimes she whacks one right past me. The game is on, and it'll last a lifetime.
Being a parent is all about loving a moving target -- it doesn't work to get fixated on changes, because if you do that, you'll miss the miraculous present. But I still confess to sometimes feeling a little melancholy these days, as we live out these last years of dolls and silly stories and big eyes full of everything and nothing.
Some of my regret is -- how shall I put this delicately -- vampiric. As I've begun crumbling into more or less picturesque, Transylvania-like ruins, I'm naturally drawn to the figure that leaps lightly over the fallen columns. She's young, I think as I sit creakily up in my earth-filled coffin. She's full of life. Surely she won't miss it if I siphon a little bit off. Hell, I've been doing it ever since she was born -- she ought to be used to it by now.
You can put down the phone to Child Protective Services. I'm no Charles Dodgson -- if the author of "Alice in Wonderland" really was "Lewis Carroll Carroll," the epithet with which Vlad Nabokov, creator of Humbert Humbert, impaled him. I'm not a bloodsucker. I don't want to freeze Celeste at age 9. But these days, I can't shake off the feeling Carroll evoked in his famous lines: "Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies/ Never seen by waking eyes." The feeling that a world is leaving me, and I need to stop and look at it before it goes.
I'm going against the grain. Some kinds of love swim against the current of time, some kinds float with it. In "To His Coy Mistress," the 17th century metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell famously paints time as the enemy of romantic love. "Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, lady, were no crime," he begins, before going on to muse how if they were lucky enough to live in such a timeless state, his "vegetable love" should grow "vaster than empires." Alas, he and his would-be love exist in the sublunary sphere, and "at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near." Warning his beloved that if she continues to resist him she'll end up in the grave, he enjoins, "Now let us sport us while we may;/ And now, like am'rous birds of prey,/ Rather at once our time devour,/ Than languish in his slow-chapp'd power." The poet concludes by celebrating a love that lives and dies in an explosion of fireworks: "Thus, though we cannot make our sun/ Stand still, yet we will make him run."
But that's erotic love. The love of a parent for a child doesn't fight time, but keeps pace with it -- languishes in its slow-chapp'd power, if you will. Parental affection is the "vegetable love" that Marvell so weirdly invokes. There is no contest, no victory, no fading beauty, no waning of the "willing soul's" "instant fires." You start out where you end up. You're in it for the long haul. Parental love is love's tortoise -- and if we are to judge by what happens to most marriages, the fable has it right: The tortoise wins. The crawling sun beats the sprinting one.
Yet it's good to break out of the zucchini patch every now and then to feel the pangs of fatalism. It's worth it to take in your child's life as if it were fixed, to remember their childhood as if it would never come again, as if there was no tomorrow, as if you really don't have world enough, and time. Because you don't.
When you freeze the moment, when you place your child in a picture frame, when you remember, you open yourself to the sadness of time. Paradoxically, utter stillness starts the clock ticking; a vivid memory makes you aware that the sun is running toward a finish line. This paradox was brilliantly explored by the French semiotician Roland Barthes in his book about photography, "Camera Lucida": The uncanniness of photography is its simultaneous evocation of presence and loss. A memory is a kind of photograph, developed on the human nerves.
Today my memory was triggered by a trinket -- a bib with a koala on it that hangs in my garage. Thinking of it, the strangeness of life overwhelms me: How did we get from that bib to here?
The impending end of Celeste's childhood touches me because it reminds me of other endings, ones none of us can escape. It touches me because it's the last personal encounter with childhood I'm likely to have. It touches me because the Celeste I loved for all those years is changing before my eyes.
And in the end, I realize, it's really not about her at all. She'll still be Celeste, but will I still be me?
My sadness at the end of her childhood is really sadness at the end of my childhood, the wondrous second childhood she brought me. It's coming to an end. No more pushing the swing, and throwing her on the bed, and telling endless stories. No more being a protector, a provider, an everything. No more being special without having to do anything. No more magic. No more mystery. No more of the great adventure.
Ever since Celeste was born, I've watched her, thinking that if I paid enough attention, I could bottle those years. I was wrong: I paid attention, but the time flowed through my fingers and spilled onto the floor. Now it's gone.
But I didn't understand. The gift I was given was not all those moments that have passed, nor all those memories I've lost. The gift was learning how to love.
I have a bottle of the finest wine. It was given to me 11 years ago. It has every flavor in the world in it -- rose and peach and blackberry and cherry and all the others under the running sun. It's Christmas time, and I would like to propose a toast: To you, my daughter, who gave me everything.
2 MILLION????
12.18.2007
Tracking Apple's Leopard: It's pretty fast
Apple released Mac OS X Leopard on the last Friday of October, and in a couple of days it sold 2 million copies. Respectable, certainly: In 2005, Apple took four weeks to sell 2 million copies of Tiger, its previous OS. (The numbers represent sales of stand-alone OSes -- they don't count people who got Leopard or Tiger as part of a purchase of a new Mac.)
In the nearly two months since Leopard's launch, though, there have been few updates on sales figures, and as Wired News' Bryan Gardiner notes, "some began to speculate Leopard may have been a cat built for speed and not necessarily endurance."
But apparently not. Chris Swensen, an analyst at the market research firm NPD Group, now tells Apple Insider that in November, the first complete month in which Leopard has been available, sales of the new OS were 20 percent higher than sales of Tiger in May 2005, the first complete month of sales for that OS.
So Leopard's doing pretty well -- indeed, as some see it, Leopard's launch marks Apple's best OS release ever. Good for Apple.
Not for nothing, when Microsoft released Windows XP in 2001, it sold about 8 million copies in its first full month to computer makers and end users. And like Apple, when it released Windows Vista earlier this year, it also beat sales of its previous OS. Microsoft says it sold 20 million licenses of Windows Vista in February 2007.
That number was disputed by some analysts. But then Microsoft put up numbers to silence them -- from early March to early May, it sold an additional 20 million copies of Vista.
And they call Vista a failure.
Tracking Apple's Leopard: It's pretty fast
Apple released Mac OS X Leopard on the last Friday of October, and in a couple of days it sold 2 million copies. Respectable, certainly: In 2005, Apple took four weeks to sell 2 million copies of Tiger, its previous OS. (The numbers represent sales of stand-alone OSes -- they don't count people who got Leopard or Tiger as part of a purchase of a new Mac.)
In the nearly two months since Leopard's launch, though, there have been few updates on sales figures, and as Wired News' Bryan Gardiner notes, "some began to speculate Leopard may have been a cat built for speed and not necessarily endurance."
But apparently not. Chris Swensen, an analyst at the market research firm NPD Group, now tells Apple Insider that in November, the first complete month in which Leopard has been available, sales of the new OS were 20 percent higher than sales of Tiger in May 2005, the first complete month of sales for that OS.
So Leopard's doing pretty well -- indeed, as some see it, Leopard's launch marks Apple's best OS release ever. Good for Apple.
Not for nothing, when Microsoft released Windows XP in 2001, it sold about 8 million copies in its first full month to computer makers and end users. And like Apple, when it released Windows Vista earlier this year, it also beat sales of its previous OS. Microsoft says it sold 20 million licenses of Windows Vista in February 2007.
That number was disputed by some analysts. But then Microsoft put up numbers to silence them -- from early March to early May, it sold an additional 20 million copies of Vista.
And they call Vista a failure.
CROCS
By Meghan O'Rourke
In the demi-monde of footwear, the term croc was once synonymous with elegance—the reptile skin covering a pair of stiletto sling-backs. Today, it's synonymous with an entirely different—and altogether vegetarian—phenomenon. In just a few years, the exquisitely ugly shoes known as "Crocs" have spread around the world like a Paris Hilton sex tape, giving rise to an epidemic of croc babies and their more egregious counterparts, croc parents. The shoe looks adorable on sun-kissed toddlers, but, alas, the fad did not stop there. For such a modest item (a typical edition sells for $29.99), the Croc has traveled in high places, disgracing the extremities of such celebrities as Mario Batali (who prefers the bright orange variety) and George W. Bush (who paired them with shorts and dark socks).
As fans will tell you, Crocs aren't just footwear; they're the closest thing to religion that the foot has experienced. The company's stock has skyrocketed in value over the past year, and Crocs is now poised to launch a new product line this fall. Yet Crocs are heinous in appearance. A Croc is not a shoe; it is a Tinkertoy on steroids. How did this peculiar shoe-manqué achieve ubiquity—and can it possibly stick around?
In the interest of science and as a defender of fashion, I went to Paragon Sports in New York to buy my first pair of Crocs—the shoes were a bright patch in a sea of sportswear. A woman with petite feet may discover that the smallest size in a popular edition, such as "Cayman" (the Crocs aesthetic is eco-beach), will not fit her; instead, she will have to head to the kids' section—piling ignominy upon ignominy. The Crocs palette tends toward the bold: orange, primary green, bright blue, periwinkle. Having selected a periwinkle pair, I was approached by a young salesclerk, who had noticed my skeptical look. "These styles are very popular," he said reassuringly. "Can I help you with anything?" Yes. Would he be kind enough to reveal if he would ever wear a shoe like this? "Me?" he said, stepping backward. "Nah, they're too ugly. The flip-flop, maybe—but these go too far for me."
A first-time Crocs wearer will indeed find that the shoes are springy and light, as their fans aver, and cushion the feet with what some have called a "marshmallow fluffiness." On a muggy New York day, the holes punched in the toe box allow for a soothing breeze to cool the sweating foot. Even so, the ratio of shame to comfort was extreme. When everyone else on the avenue is garbed in proper footwear—even something as unpretentious as flat sandals or ballet flats—an adult, it seemed to me, must blush at the sight of her bulbous feet. But those who wear Crocs all day long swear that the springy material holds up like nothing else; one painter reported that his chronic shin splints disappeared after he began wearing Crocs. Thus was born what one blogger has labeled the "Croc conundrum": Crocs make you look absurd, but they can change your life.
Comfort and function were always the main Crocs pitch. The shoes' original home was Boulder, Colo. The early Crocs customer was probably a Pacific Northwesterner who liked to boat or garden—this was a niche shoe, after all. He or she was drawn in by the "no slip" grip on the sole, by the aerating holes, and by the featherweight heft of the thing (a pair weighs a mere 6 ounces). The clunky look was not a drawback (this is the region, after all, that brought us grunge), and many customers were pleased that the shoe was made of a proprietary nonplastic resin formula (known as Croslite)—it was, as one testified, "vegan." Because the material is soft, bacteria-resistant, and has a strangely "natural" feel, the Croc fits in with the Northwest's typically green and mildly counterculture ethos. Soon nurses, doctors, cooks, painters, and other workers who stand on their feet all day had discovered Crocs and found them to be life-changing. The company is careful to play up its shoes' supposed orthotic benefits, to the distress of some skeptical podiatrists; a new line for diabetics is in the works.
In the meantime, the company cleverly positioned itself as an eco-conscious no-frills-attached corporation. Crocs was conceived by three friends—Scott Seamans, George Boedecker, and Lyndon Hanson—on a trip in the Caribbean, when Seaman showed his friends the extraordinary slip-resistant clog he was wearing; learning that it was made by a Canadian company called "Foam Creations," the friends spotted an opportunity. Soon they had licensed and were trying to "develop" the shoe (by adding a strap to the back); the name was the first thing that had to go. They realized the tops looked like crocodile snouts from the side. Presto! Crocs was born. In 2002, the company earned a gross profit of $1,000 from sales in America. By 2006, following a series of strategic licensing deals (you can now get NASCAR and Disney Crocs, for example), it was earning more than $200 million a year from sales in 40 countries. (I even spotted knockoffs called Rockies in Jerusalem's Muslim quarter.) Nor have consumers' appetite yet been whetted: During the first quarter of 2007, the company's sales had increased 217 percent from the same period the previous year.
In moving from a niche shoe to widespread wear, Crocs capitalized on its several strengths. The first is that the shoes are ideal for kids, who like their brightness, their lightness, their squishiness, and the strange holes in the front, in which charms can be placed. (Perhaps the only thing uglier than a Cayman Croc is a Croc adorned with "Jibbitz," as the charms are called.) Meanwhile, their parents like that they are dishwasher-safe, waterproof, and odor-free. Their amorphous shape may be an aesthetic crime, but it lends the shoes a jovial quality that appeals to the knee-high and the anti-bourgeois everywhere. (One Slate contributor and early Croc-adopter reports that when she went to her daughter's school dressed in Crocs, the kids all wanted to know why she wore "clown shoes.") And the Croc fad, like the Ugg fad, benefits from the shoe's appropriation of an ethnic look (in this case, the Dutch clog) that one could deem "authentic." Ugly is OK, it would seem, as long as it's imported; then it's considered "practical" and earthy. In a classic cultural inversion, Ugly becomes Good: It represents an authentic critique of the marketing and branding that surround us every day. (Think of Ugly Dolls.) And so Crocs even ran ads in Rolling Stone proclaiming "Ugly can be beautiful." Finally, whereas Uggs were embraced by the fashion world, and became a status symbol, Crocs are a bottom-up brand, embraced by ordinary Americans everywhere. It is a democratic purchase. It looks painful to wear—like something you might find in the rock-bottom bins at Kmart—but is actually soft and high-tech, defeating class-based assumptions.
Footwear has always been particularly susceptible to fads, as the fashion authority Colin McDowell observes in Shoes: Fashion and Fantasy. Shoe fashion tends to swing dramatically on the pendulum from practical to beautiful, largely because shoes are even more utilitarian than clothes—and stylish clothes are rarely as uncomfortable as stylish shoes. Since everyone needs shoes, they are particularly susceptible to the tipping point phenomenon: When enough people are wearing ugly but comfortable shoes, others jump eagerly on the bandwagon, thrilled to be released from the bondage of straps and buckles. And so Crocs represent a kind of rebellion—a vanguard of the comfort movement. As footwear retailers reported this spring, shoe sales are unpredictable this year, with one exception: what retailers call "fashion comfort" styles—including ballet flats, shoes like Geox (which are popular among businessmen), and, of course, Crocs. One retailer called them "a category of their own."
The popularity of Crocs has also led to the inevitable backlash. Croc-mocking is rampant. The Web site Ihatecrocs.com chronicles its proprietors' attempts to destroy Crocs (using fireworks, scissors, and lighter fluid). According to Maclean's, some hospitals have decided to ban Crocs, citing the fact that they do not protect against infection (the toe box has open holes). Meanwhile, there are reports of mysterious "Crocs shocks" shorting out crucial medical equipment; allegedly, the resin formula doesn't just keep out bacteria, it stores electricity. This sounds like urban legend, but one nurse who was skeptical of such accounts did tell Maclean's that when she started wearing Crocs she began giving her patients small electric shocks. Tales have come in from Crocs-haters in Sweden about children whose Crocs melt on escalators or get otherwise stuck in the cracks between steps; the most horrific of these involves a little boy whose toe got "pulled off" when his Crocs got stuck. A crock? Probably.
What is more certain is that some podiatrists are alarmed by their patients' fanatical embrace of Crocs; most Crocs, doctors point out, provide only moderate support. "I'll get people with strained arches because they've been running around in Crocs for five days," said Arnold Ravick, a doctor of podiatric medicine in Washington, D.C., and a spokesman for the American Podiatric Medical Association. "When it comes to shoes, people mistake comfort for support. Comfort is fool's gold—a soft gushy shoe that makes your arches collapse," he told me. "Crocs are popular because they're inexpensive and interchangeable. For people with certain problems, they can be a good shoe. Are they good for your foot, in general? No."
Crocs may be popular, but it's the rare Croc lover who considers them fashionable. As Kim France, the editor in chief of Lucky, the shopping magazine, told me, "Uggs I can make an argument for. Jellies also had their moment of being cute and cool. Crocs are just a pox." The first time she saw a male friend in them, she recalls, she asked him, "Are you really going to make me walk down the street with you?" And so today, the company is at a crossroads. The public's affection for shoe styles is notoriously fickle. (Remember earth shoes?) In June, 50 percent of Croc's shares were sold short by short-seller investors who think that the company's stock will plummet soon. Though the company has made a series of strategic licensing deals and partnerships with subsidiaries, it is still largely dependent on its signature clogs and now flip-flops. Striving to position itself for a fall-off in demand, Crocs plans to launch new clothing and shoe lines this fall that will depart from its signature resin formula and will feature pieces costing between $70 and $100. Who knows whether this strategy will succeed, but at Paragon, one employee was waiting eagerly for the shipment of new flip-flop styles. "I hate the way the old Crocs look," he said. "But they are comfortable."
History suggests that Crocs are more likely to be a passing fad, like Dr. Scholl's, than a true innovation, like the sneaker. The very thing that has made them such a huge hit, after all—their ugly duckling distinctiveness—is also likely to make it hard for the company to go mainstream in any enduring sense. On the other hand, the trademarked Croslite material is an ace in the hole: If the traditional Croc clogs I tried on felt too confining on a summer day, the Croc flip-flops were delightfully springy. The company's sporty Sassari wedge suggests that when it comes to summerwear its designers may be developing at least some aesthetic sense.* But for now, my old platform flip-flops will do.
In the demi-monde of footwear, the term croc was once synonymous with elegance—the reptile skin covering a pair of stiletto sling-backs. Today, it's synonymous with an entirely different—and altogether vegetarian—phenomenon. In just a few years, the exquisitely ugly shoes known as "Crocs" have spread around the world like a Paris Hilton sex tape, giving rise to an epidemic of croc babies and their more egregious counterparts, croc parents. The shoe looks adorable on sun-kissed toddlers, but, alas, the fad did not stop there. For such a modest item (a typical edition sells for $29.99), the Croc has traveled in high places, disgracing the extremities of such celebrities as Mario Batali (who prefers the bright orange variety) and George W. Bush (who paired them with shorts and dark socks).
As fans will tell you, Crocs aren't just footwear; they're the closest thing to religion that the foot has experienced. The company's stock has skyrocketed in value over the past year, and Crocs is now poised to launch a new product line this fall. Yet Crocs are heinous in appearance. A Croc is not a shoe; it is a Tinkertoy on steroids. How did this peculiar shoe-manqué achieve ubiquity—and can it possibly stick around?
In the interest of science and as a defender of fashion, I went to Paragon Sports in New York to buy my first pair of Crocs—the shoes were a bright patch in a sea of sportswear. A woman with petite feet may discover that the smallest size in a popular edition, such as "Cayman" (the Crocs aesthetic is eco-beach), will not fit her; instead, she will have to head to the kids' section—piling ignominy upon ignominy. The Crocs palette tends toward the bold: orange, primary green, bright blue, periwinkle. Having selected a periwinkle pair, I was approached by a young salesclerk, who had noticed my skeptical look. "These styles are very popular," he said reassuringly. "Can I help you with anything?" Yes. Would he be kind enough to reveal if he would ever wear a shoe like this? "Me?" he said, stepping backward. "Nah, they're too ugly. The flip-flop, maybe—but these go too far for me."
A first-time Crocs wearer will indeed find that the shoes are springy and light, as their fans aver, and cushion the feet with what some have called a "marshmallow fluffiness." On a muggy New York day, the holes punched in the toe box allow for a soothing breeze to cool the sweating foot. Even so, the ratio of shame to comfort was extreme. When everyone else on the avenue is garbed in proper footwear—even something as unpretentious as flat sandals or ballet flats—an adult, it seemed to me, must blush at the sight of her bulbous feet. But those who wear Crocs all day long swear that the springy material holds up like nothing else; one painter reported that his chronic shin splints disappeared after he began wearing Crocs. Thus was born what one blogger has labeled the "Croc conundrum": Crocs make you look absurd, but they can change your life.
Comfort and function were always the main Crocs pitch. The shoes' original home was Boulder, Colo. The early Crocs customer was probably a Pacific Northwesterner who liked to boat or garden—this was a niche shoe, after all. He or she was drawn in by the "no slip" grip on the sole, by the aerating holes, and by the featherweight heft of the thing (a pair weighs a mere 6 ounces). The clunky look was not a drawback (this is the region, after all, that brought us grunge), and many customers were pleased that the shoe was made of a proprietary nonplastic resin formula (known as Croslite)—it was, as one testified, "vegan." Because the material is soft, bacteria-resistant, and has a strangely "natural" feel, the Croc fits in with the Northwest's typically green and mildly counterculture ethos. Soon nurses, doctors, cooks, painters, and other workers who stand on their feet all day had discovered Crocs and found them to be life-changing. The company is careful to play up its shoes' supposed orthotic benefits, to the distress of some skeptical podiatrists; a new line for diabetics is in the works.
In the meantime, the company cleverly positioned itself as an eco-conscious no-frills-attached corporation. Crocs was conceived by three friends—Scott Seamans, George Boedecker, and Lyndon Hanson—on a trip in the Caribbean, when Seaman showed his friends the extraordinary slip-resistant clog he was wearing; learning that it was made by a Canadian company called "Foam Creations," the friends spotted an opportunity. Soon they had licensed and were trying to "develop" the shoe (by adding a strap to the back); the name was the first thing that had to go. They realized the tops looked like crocodile snouts from the side. Presto! Crocs was born. In 2002, the company earned a gross profit of $1,000 from sales in America. By 2006, following a series of strategic licensing deals (you can now get NASCAR and Disney Crocs, for example), it was earning more than $200 million a year from sales in 40 countries. (I even spotted knockoffs called Rockies in Jerusalem's Muslim quarter.) Nor have consumers' appetite yet been whetted: During the first quarter of 2007, the company's sales had increased 217 percent from the same period the previous year.
In moving from a niche shoe to widespread wear, Crocs capitalized on its several strengths. The first is that the shoes are ideal for kids, who like their brightness, their lightness, their squishiness, and the strange holes in the front, in which charms can be placed. (Perhaps the only thing uglier than a Cayman Croc is a Croc adorned with "Jibbitz," as the charms are called.) Meanwhile, their parents like that they are dishwasher-safe, waterproof, and odor-free. Their amorphous shape may be an aesthetic crime, but it lends the shoes a jovial quality that appeals to the knee-high and the anti-bourgeois everywhere. (One Slate contributor and early Croc-adopter reports that when she went to her daughter's school dressed in Crocs, the kids all wanted to know why she wore "clown shoes.") And the Croc fad, like the Ugg fad, benefits from the shoe's appropriation of an ethnic look (in this case, the Dutch clog) that one could deem "authentic." Ugly is OK, it would seem, as long as it's imported; then it's considered "practical" and earthy. In a classic cultural inversion, Ugly becomes Good: It represents an authentic critique of the marketing and branding that surround us every day. (Think of Ugly Dolls.) And so Crocs even ran ads in Rolling Stone proclaiming "Ugly can be beautiful." Finally, whereas Uggs were embraced by the fashion world, and became a status symbol, Crocs are a bottom-up brand, embraced by ordinary Americans everywhere. It is a democratic purchase. It looks painful to wear—like something you might find in the rock-bottom bins at Kmart—but is actually soft and high-tech, defeating class-based assumptions.
Footwear has always been particularly susceptible to fads, as the fashion authority Colin McDowell observes in Shoes: Fashion and Fantasy. Shoe fashion tends to swing dramatically on the pendulum from practical to beautiful, largely because shoes are even more utilitarian than clothes—and stylish clothes are rarely as uncomfortable as stylish shoes. Since everyone needs shoes, they are particularly susceptible to the tipping point phenomenon: When enough people are wearing ugly but comfortable shoes, others jump eagerly on the bandwagon, thrilled to be released from the bondage of straps and buckles. And so Crocs represent a kind of rebellion—a vanguard of the comfort movement. As footwear retailers reported this spring, shoe sales are unpredictable this year, with one exception: what retailers call "fashion comfort" styles—including ballet flats, shoes like Geox (which are popular among businessmen), and, of course, Crocs. One retailer called them "a category of their own."
The popularity of Crocs has also led to the inevitable backlash. Croc-mocking is rampant. The Web site Ihatecrocs.com chronicles its proprietors' attempts to destroy Crocs (using fireworks, scissors, and lighter fluid). According to Maclean's, some hospitals have decided to ban Crocs, citing the fact that they do not protect against infection (the toe box has open holes). Meanwhile, there are reports of mysterious "Crocs shocks" shorting out crucial medical equipment; allegedly, the resin formula doesn't just keep out bacteria, it stores electricity. This sounds like urban legend, but one nurse who was skeptical of such accounts did tell Maclean's that when she started wearing Crocs she began giving her patients small electric shocks. Tales have come in from Crocs-haters in Sweden about children whose Crocs melt on escalators or get otherwise stuck in the cracks between steps; the most horrific of these involves a little boy whose toe got "pulled off" when his Crocs got stuck. A crock? Probably.
What is more certain is that some podiatrists are alarmed by their patients' fanatical embrace of Crocs; most Crocs, doctors point out, provide only moderate support. "I'll get people with strained arches because they've been running around in Crocs for five days," said Arnold Ravick, a doctor of podiatric medicine in Washington, D.C., and a spokesman for the American Podiatric Medical Association. "When it comes to shoes, people mistake comfort for support. Comfort is fool's gold—a soft gushy shoe that makes your arches collapse," he told me. "Crocs are popular because they're inexpensive and interchangeable. For people with certain problems, they can be a good shoe. Are they good for your foot, in general? No."
Crocs may be popular, but it's the rare Croc lover who considers them fashionable. As Kim France, the editor in chief of Lucky, the shopping magazine, told me, "Uggs I can make an argument for. Jellies also had their moment of being cute and cool. Crocs are just a pox." The first time she saw a male friend in them, she recalls, she asked him, "Are you really going to make me walk down the street with you?" And so today, the company is at a crossroads. The public's affection for shoe styles is notoriously fickle. (Remember earth shoes?) In June, 50 percent of Croc's shares were sold short by short-seller investors who think that the company's stock will plummet soon. Though the company has made a series of strategic licensing deals and partnerships with subsidiaries, it is still largely dependent on its signature clogs and now flip-flops. Striving to position itself for a fall-off in demand, Crocs plans to launch new clothing and shoe lines this fall that will depart from its signature resin formula and will feature pieces costing between $70 and $100. Who knows whether this strategy will succeed, but at Paragon, one employee was waiting eagerly for the shipment of new flip-flop styles. "I hate the way the old Crocs look," he said. "But they are comfortable."
History suggests that Crocs are more likely to be a passing fad, like Dr. Scholl's, than a true innovation, like the sneaker. The very thing that has made them such a huge hit, after all—their ugly duckling distinctiveness—is also likely to make it hard for the company to go mainstream in any enduring sense. On the other hand, the trademarked Croslite material is an ace in the hole: If the traditional Croc clogs I tried on felt too confining on a summer day, the Croc flip-flops were delightfully springy. The company's sporty Sassari wedge suggests that when it comes to summerwear its designers may be developing at least some aesthetic sense.* But for now, my old platform flip-flops will do.
SOMEONE GOT THE SECRET!!!
By Emily Yoffe
Decades before the best seller was published, my father knew the secret of The Secret. He was aware there were people with esoteric knowledge who controlled all the wealth, had all the power, and were specifically excluding him from getting any. He bought the books of his time that promised, like The Secret, to unlock these mysteries. I loved listening to him spin his theories about how things really worked—until either I got too old to believe him anymore, or his spinning took him further and further away from reality. He died with nothing, living under an assumed name.
So, I will acknowledge that I came to The Secret with a negative attitude. When I bought it, I quickly stuffed it into a plastic bag, glancing around Barnes & Noble to make sure I saw no one I knew. The last time I was this embarrassed at a bookstore was when I bought The G Spot, another best seller that provided instructions for achieving bliss. For the Human Guinea Pig column, I usually do things that readers are too embarrassed or too intelligent to do themselves—like entering a beauty pageant or entertaining at a kid's birthday party. I wanted to see if applying the rules of The Secret to my life would bring me the perfect happiness that it promises. But millions of you have already beaten me to this one. There are now 5.3 million copies of the book in print in the United States, and publisher Simon & Schuster says it is selling about 150,000 a week. A separate DVD version has sold at least 1.5 million copies. Groups have formed to discuss how to best live by The Secret's rules. It is a No. 1 best seller in Australia, England, and Ireland, and it is scheduled to be translated into 30 languages.
There's no secret to The Secret. The book and movie simply state that your thoughts control the universe. Through this "law of attraction" you "manifest" your desires. "It is exactly like placing an order from a catalogue. … You must know that what you want is yours the moment you ask." "See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person." The appeal is obvious. Forget education, effort, performance. Everything you want—money, power, comfortable shoes—is yours simply by wanting it enough.
There are certain caveats. Apparently the universe has a language-processing disorder and doesn't comprehend standard English usage of the words don't, not, and no. So, as the book explains, if you summon the universe by saying, "I don't want to spill something on this outfit," the universe translates this as, "I want to spill something on this outfit." If only Rhonda Byrne, the television producer who is the author of the book and creator of the DVD, had been there to counsel those negative authors of the Ten Commandments!
Byrne says Shakespeare, Newton, Lincoln, and Einstein all owed their achievements to their understanding of the law of attraction. She asserts that "the discoveries of quantum physics … are in total harmony with the teachings of The Secret." To prove this, she explains, "I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them." (Pop quiz, Rhonda: What is the energy of a single photon [in eV] from a light source with a wavelength of 400 nm?) The book is dotted with quotations from great men of history that supposedly back up The Secret's assertions. Take this one from Winston Churchill: "You create your own universe as you go along." Something about this struck me as sounding not terribly Churchillian. I looked it up and it turned out Churchill did write it, but it was his mocking characterization of the metaphysical twits of his day.
Given my skepticism, how could I make myself believe in The Secret enough to give it a fair test? To quote one of The Secret's avatars, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Clearly, The Secret is drivel, but why should that stop me from sincerely throwing myself into seeing if it worked? I am already deeply susceptible to superstition and seeing signs—if I find a penny (faceup only), I pick it up knowing something good will happen to me. As self-absorbed as I already am, I loved the permission the book gave to sink deeper into a Jacuzzi of megalomania. As The Secret points out: "You are the master of the Universe. You are the heir to the kingdom. You are the perfection of Life." Just as I'd always suspected!
So, I vowed to follow Byrne's simple rules for abundance and see what happened. The book encourages one to start big: "It is as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one million dollars." But I thought starting with the million-dollar manifestation was like saying, "I love you" on a first date; I didn't want to scare the universe into not taking my calls. I came up with three things I thought the universe would find reasonable: a kitchen floor, unclogged sinuses, and a new desk.
At this point I should add that The Secret is not only drivel—it's pernicious drivel. The obvious question that arises from its claim that it's easy to get what you want, is: Why do so many people get what they don't want? As Byrne writes, "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity's ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness." Yes, according to The Secret, people don't just randomly end up being massacred, for example. They are in the wrong place because of their own lousy thinking. Cancer patients have long been victims of this school of belief. But The Secret takes it to a new and more repulsive level with its advice not just to blame people for their illness, but to shun them, lest you start being infected by their bummer thoughts, too.
But look, I needed a kitchen floor, and if abandoning sick friends and loved ones was what was required—well, who really enjoys those bedside visits, anyway? We recently renovated our house, and everything went great except our kitchen floor. Remember being told in school that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire? My kitchen floor was supposed to be acid-stained concrete. And while it was a floor, it turned out to be neither acid-stained nor concrete. Instead it was made of some sort of epoxy, with a surface that looked as if my dog had fallen into a mud pit and then come inside and rolled all over it. I spent weeks attempting to find an easy, inexpensive way to resurface it. One concrete guy said if he came it to fix it, I'd have to remove all my appliances and baseboards, let him grind down the existing floor and pour a new surface, and pay him $4,000 to do it. Thankfully, he decided the job was too small and troublesome to be worth it. Covering the floor with cork tiles would also require appliance removal and an outlay of about $3,500. And so it went with every alternative.
So, I followed The Secret's recommendation and notified the universe's call center that I wanted a quick, economical, pleasing, and durable kitchen floor. Once I did that, the next step was to enter such an intense state of visualization that it was as if my new floor already existed. Byrne writes: "A shortcut to manifesting your desires is to see what you want as absolute fact." Although normally people who see things that aren't there are considered delusional, I went with Byrne's recommendation to "act as if you have it already." One day my husband called from work to check on various house issues, and I said, "I'm so grateful that I finally got a beautiful kitchen floor."
"Are you on something?" he asked.
It turns out I was on a universal high because a few nights later I awoke at 3 a.m. from a dream that had supplied the answer: Paint the floor to look like acid-stained concrete! The next morning I searched the Internet and contacted every faux painter within a 50-mile radius. Only one, Deanne Lenehan Cunningham, agreed to come and take a look. She had never done a floor and was concerned whether her products would adhere to the sealant now on my floor. She said she would talk to the manufacturer, see if was possible, then give us an estimate.
When a week went by without a callback, my husband suggested I phone her, and that I also explore other alternatives just in case. Normally I tend toward the anxiously obsessive, and I would have already been doing that. Instead I told him it wasn't necessary because we already had a perfect kitchen floor. Secret-speak requires this odd future-present construction, which my husband came to call, "sounding like a moron."
But as Byrne so amply proves, the universe loves people who sound like morons. Deanne finally got back to us, said she could do it, and that she would charge us $912. We now have a gorgeous, glowing floor. And I had to admit just sitting back and letting my desires manifest freed up a lot of time—and was much more relaxing than trying to take care of things myself.
With that success, I moved on to my sinuses. Each spring, pollen causes my nose to resemble a drip irrigation device. I spend months spraying my nostrils and popping antihistamines. Why not put in a Secret request to get rid of my allergies? After all, the fiftysomething Byrne describes how it took her only three days of proper thinking to get rid of her reading glasses and restore her eyesight to that of a twentysomething. So I shelved the drugs, walked my dog, breathed deep, and expressed gratitude for my sensational sinuses.
This worked great for weeks, through one of the most frigid springs on record, and I was starting to think that maybe my father was right, maybe people like Byrne really knew how the world worked. Then the weather warmed up and the air was thick with pollen. My eyes swelled, my nose started pouring, and I ended up with a sinus infection and a bag of medications from the otolaryngologist. Of course, one could say The Secret failed. But look at it this way: When I first started imagining myself drip-free, the universe responded by sending a cold snap! Then because I became so blasé about my sinuses, the universe decided to warm things up again. Surely there is a lesson here for Al Gore.
Finally, the desk. I had spent months dragging myself around to furniture stores and cruising the Internet for the desk, which I can see quite clearly: It's sleek and made of steel, L-shaped, with plenty of work space on top and storage below. Unfortunately, no one who manufactures desks also sees it. Following The Secret's precepts, I stopped wasting my time looking for it and instead expressed my gratitude for its arrival. I've now spent six weeks visualizing this desk to no effect. Perhaps the problem is signal interference from my husband, who keeps suggesting I manifest the word Ikea into my search engine and just order a damn desk.
Or perhaps the problem is that millions of people are now putting in their orders and the universe's servers have crashed. Or maybe it's something else. As one of Byrne's favorites, Albert Einstein, said (in a quote that doesn't make it into The Secret): "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
Decades before the best seller was published, my father knew the secret of The Secret. He was aware there were people with esoteric knowledge who controlled all the wealth, had all the power, and were specifically excluding him from getting any. He bought the books of his time that promised, like The Secret, to unlock these mysteries. I loved listening to him spin his theories about how things really worked—until either I got too old to believe him anymore, or his spinning took him further and further away from reality. He died with nothing, living under an assumed name.
So, I will acknowledge that I came to The Secret with a negative attitude. When I bought it, I quickly stuffed it into a plastic bag, glancing around Barnes & Noble to make sure I saw no one I knew. The last time I was this embarrassed at a bookstore was when I bought The G Spot, another best seller that provided instructions for achieving bliss. For the Human Guinea Pig column, I usually do things that readers are too embarrassed or too intelligent to do themselves—like entering a beauty pageant or entertaining at a kid's birthday party. I wanted to see if applying the rules of The Secret to my life would bring me the perfect happiness that it promises. But millions of you have already beaten me to this one. There are now 5.3 million copies of the book in print in the United States, and publisher Simon & Schuster says it is selling about 150,000 a week. A separate DVD version has sold at least 1.5 million copies. Groups have formed to discuss how to best live by The Secret's rules. It is a No. 1 best seller in Australia, England, and Ireland, and it is scheduled to be translated into 30 languages.
There's no secret to The Secret. The book and movie simply state that your thoughts control the universe. Through this "law of attraction" you "manifest" your desires. "It is exactly like placing an order from a catalogue. … You must know that what you want is yours the moment you ask." "See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person." The appeal is obvious. Forget education, effort, performance. Everything you want—money, power, comfortable shoes—is yours simply by wanting it enough.
There are certain caveats. Apparently the universe has a language-processing disorder and doesn't comprehend standard English usage of the words don't, not, and no. So, as the book explains, if you summon the universe by saying, "I don't want to spill something on this outfit," the universe translates this as, "I want to spill something on this outfit." If only Rhonda Byrne, the television producer who is the author of the book and creator of the DVD, had been there to counsel those negative authors of the Ten Commandments!
Byrne says Shakespeare, Newton, Lincoln, and Einstein all owed their achievements to their understanding of the law of attraction. She asserts that "the discoveries of quantum physics … are in total harmony with the teachings of The Secret." To prove this, she explains, "I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them." (Pop quiz, Rhonda: What is the energy of a single photon [in eV] from a light source with a wavelength of 400 nm?) The book is dotted with quotations from great men of history that supposedly back up The Secret's assertions. Take this one from Winston Churchill: "You create your own universe as you go along." Something about this struck me as sounding not terribly Churchillian. I looked it up and it turned out Churchill did write it, but it was his mocking characterization of the metaphysical twits of his day.
Given my skepticism, how could I make myself believe in The Secret enough to give it a fair test? To quote one of The Secret's avatars, Ralph Waldo Emerson, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Clearly, The Secret is drivel, but why should that stop me from sincerely throwing myself into seeing if it worked? I am already deeply susceptible to superstition and seeing signs—if I find a penny (faceup only), I pick it up knowing something good will happen to me. As self-absorbed as I already am, I loved the permission the book gave to sink deeper into a Jacuzzi of megalomania. As The Secret points out: "You are the master of the Universe. You are the heir to the kingdom. You are the perfection of Life." Just as I'd always suspected!
So, I vowed to follow Byrne's simple rules for abundance and see what happened. The book encourages one to start big: "It is as easy to manifest one dollar as it is to manifest one million dollars." But I thought starting with the million-dollar manifestation was like saying, "I love you" on a first date; I didn't want to scare the universe into not taking my calls. I came up with three things I thought the universe would find reasonable: a kitchen floor, unclogged sinuses, and a new desk.
At this point I should add that The Secret is not only drivel—it's pernicious drivel. The obvious question that arises from its claim that it's easy to get what you want, is: Why do so many people get what they don't want? As Byrne writes, "Imperfect thoughts are the cause of all humanity's ills, including disease, poverty, and unhappiness." Yes, according to The Secret, people don't just randomly end up being massacred, for example. They are in the wrong place because of their own lousy thinking. Cancer patients have long been victims of this school of belief. But The Secret takes it to a new and more repulsive level with its advice not just to blame people for their illness, but to shun them, lest you start being infected by their bummer thoughts, too.
But look, I needed a kitchen floor, and if abandoning sick friends and loved ones was what was required—well, who really enjoys those bedside visits, anyway? We recently renovated our house, and everything went great except our kitchen floor. Remember being told in school that the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire? My kitchen floor was supposed to be acid-stained concrete. And while it was a floor, it turned out to be neither acid-stained nor concrete. Instead it was made of some sort of epoxy, with a surface that looked as if my dog had fallen into a mud pit and then come inside and rolled all over it. I spent weeks attempting to find an easy, inexpensive way to resurface it. One concrete guy said if he came it to fix it, I'd have to remove all my appliances and baseboards, let him grind down the existing floor and pour a new surface, and pay him $4,000 to do it. Thankfully, he decided the job was too small and troublesome to be worth it. Covering the floor with cork tiles would also require appliance removal and an outlay of about $3,500. And so it went with every alternative.
So, I followed The Secret's recommendation and notified the universe's call center that I wanted a quick, economical, pleasing, and durable kitchen floor. Once I did that, the next step was to enter such an intense state of visualization that it was as if my new floor already existed. Byrne writes: "A shortcut to manifesting your desires is to see what you want as absolute fact." Although normally people who see things that aren't there are considered delusional, I went with Byrne's recommendation to "act as if you have it already." One day my husband called from work to check on various house issues, and I said, "I'm so grateful that I finally got a beautiful kitchen floor."
"Are you on something?" he asked.
It turns out I was on a universal high because a few nights later I awoke at 3 a.m. from a dream that had supplied the answer: Paint the floor to look like acid-stained concrete! The next morning I searched the Internet and contacted every faux painter within a 50-mile radius. Only one, Deanne Lenehan Cunningham, agreed to come and take a look. She had never done a floor and was concerned whether her products would adhere to the sealant now on my floor. She said she would talk to the manufacturer, see if was possible, then give us an estimate.
When a week went by without a callback, my husband suggested I phone her, and that I also explore other alternatives just in case. Normally I tend toward the anxiously obsessive, and I would have already been doing that. Instead I told him it wasn't necessary because we already had a perfect kitchen floor. Secret-speak requires this odd future-present construction, which my husband came to call, "sounding like a moron."
But as Byrne so amply proves, the universe loves people who sound like morons. Deanne finally got back to us, said she could do it, and that she would charge us $912. We now have a gorgeous, glowing floor. And I had to admit just sitting back and letting my desires manifest freed up a lot of time—and was much more relaxing than trying to take care of things myself.
With that success, I moved on to my sinuses. Each spring, pollen causes my nose to resemble a drip irrigation device. I spend months spraying my nostrils and popping antihistamines. Why not put in a Secret request to get rid of my allergies? After all, the fiftysomething Byrne describes how it took her only three days of proper thinking to get rid of her reading glasses and restore her eyesight to that of a twentysomething. So I shelved the drugs, walked my dog, breathed deep, and expressed gratitude for my sensational sinuses.
This worked great for weeks, through one of the most frigid springs on record, and I was starting to think that maybe my father was right, maybe people like Byrne really knew how the world worked. Then the weather warmed up and the air was thick with pollen. My eyes swelled, my nose started pouring, and I ended up with a sinus infection and a bag of medications from the otolaryngologist. Of course, one could say The Secret failed. But look at it this way: When I first started imagining myself drip-free, the universe responded by sending a cold snap! Then because I became so blasé about my sinuses, the universe decided to warm things up again. Surely there is a lesson here for Al Gore.
Finally, the desk. I had spent months dragging myself around to furniture stores and cruising the Internet for the desk, which I can see quite clearly: It's sleek and made of steel, L-shaped, with plenty of work space on top and storage below. Unfortunately, no one who manufactures desks also sees it. Following The Secret's precepts, I stopped wasting my time looking for it and instead expressed my gratitude for its arrival. I've now spent six weeks visualizing this desk to no effect. Perhaps the problem is signal interference from my husband, who keeps suggesting I manifest the word Ikea into my search engine and just order a damn desk.
Or perhaps the problem is that millions of people are now putting in their orders and the universe's servers have crashed. Or maybe it's something else. As one of Byrne's favorites, Albert Einstein, said (in a quote that doesn't make it into The Secret): "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."
WHERE TO PUT YOUR HAND...
Some conservative bloggers are furious about a photo showing Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama without his hand on his heart during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." Obama has countered that the photo was taken during the national anthem, not the Pledge of Allegiance—so he didn't have to. Is that true?
No. According to U.S. law, a civilian like Obama is supposed to stand up when the anthem is played, take off his hat, face the flag, and put his right hand over his heart. When in uniform, members of the military can keep their hats on and salute instead of placing their hands on their hearts.*
The rules of conduct regarding the anthem, the pledge, and the American flag weren't always a matter of law. At first, they were just tradition. "The Star-Spangled Banner" lyrics were originally written during the War of 1812. Later in the 19th century, the Army and Navy both began to use it during ceremonies, but it only became the congressionally recognized national anthem in 1931. Meanwhile, the Pledge of Allegiance was first used in public schools in 1892 to celebrate Columbus Day and only made it into the law books in the 1940s.
Specific customs for listening to the anthem or reciting the pledge were also slow to develop. The National Flag Conference, an organization made up of representatives from the armed forces and civilian organizations, created a guide to flag etiquette in 1923. But it wasn't until June of 1942, when America was fighting World War II, that Congress made this "Flag Code" official.
In its original form, the code called for a "Bellamy salute" during the Pledge of Allegiance. The salute was named after Francis Bellamy, who wrote the pledge and published it in Youth's Companion, a family magazine. Bellamy instructed people reciting the pledge to start with their hands on their hearts and then—at the words "to my flag" (later changed to "to the flag of the United States of America")—straighten their arms in a military salute. But in the late 1930s, the salute became controversial as people began to realize that this gesture looked quite similar to the arm movement favored by the Nazis. Schools in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere began to alter the salute, and in late 1942, it was eliminated from the code in favor of keeping the hand on the heart, as we do today. (Some groups, like the Daughters of the American Revolution, were initially resistant to the change from the Bellamy salute.)
So, does this mean that it's against the law to sit down for "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a baseball game? Technically, but you won't get in trouble. Though the procedure for listening to the national anthem is spelled out in the U.S. Code, you can't be punished for breaking the rules. That would likely be considered a violation of the First Amendment. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses had the right to skip the pledge.
No. According to U.S. law, a civilian like Obama is supposed to stand up when the anthem is played, take off his hat, face the flag, and put his right hand over his heart. When in uniform, members of the military can keep their hats on and salute instead of placing their hands on their hearts.*
The rules of conduct regarding the anthem, the pledge, and the American flag weren't always a matter of law. At first, they were just tradition. "The Star-Spangled Banner" lyrics were originally written during the War of 1812. Later in the 19th century, the Army and Navy both began to use it during ceremonies, but it only became the congressionally recognized national anthem in 1931. Meanwhile, the Pledge of Allegiance was first used in public schools in 1892 to celebrate Columbus Day and only made it into the law books in the 1940s.
Specific customs for listening to the anthem or reciting the pledge were also slow to develop. The National Flag Conference, an organization made up of representatives from the armed forces and civilian organizations, created a guide to flag etiquette in 1923. But it wasn't until June of 1942, when America was fighting World War II, that Congress made this "Flag Code" official.
In its original form, the code called for a "Bellamy salute" during the Pledge of Allegiance. The salute was named after Francis Bellamy, who wrote the pledge and published it in Youth's Companion, a family magazine. Bellamy instructed people reciting the pledge to start with their hands on their hearts and then—at the words "to my flag" (later changed to "to the flag of the United States of America")—straighten their arms in a military salute. But in the late 1930s, the salute became controversial as people began to realize that this gesture looked quite similar to the arm movement favored by the Nazis. Schools in New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere began to alter the salute, and in late 1942, it was eliminated from the code in favor of keeping the hand on the heart, as we do today. (Some groups, like the Daughters of the American Revolution, were initially resistant to the change from the Bellamy salute.)
So, does this mean that it's against the law to sit down for "The Star-Spangled Banner" at a baseball game? Technically, but you won't get in trouble. Though the procedure for listening to the national anthem is spelled out in the U.S. Code, you can't be punished for breaking the rules. That would likely be considered a violation of the First Amendment. For instance, the Supreme Court ruled that Jehovah's Witnesses had the right to skip the pledge.
December 19, 2007
XTMAS STORY
'Twas the night before Christmas--Old Santa was pissed.
He cussed out the elves and threw down his list.
Miserable little brats, ungrateful little jerks.
I have a good mind to scrap the whole works!
I've busted my ass for damn near a year,
Instead of 'Thanks Santa'--what do I hear?
The old lady bitches cause I work late at night.
The elves want more money--The reindeer all fight.
Rudolph got drunk and goosed all the maids.
Donner is pregnant and Vixen has AIDS.
And just when I thought that things would get better
Those assholes from the IRS sent me a letter,
They say I owe taxes--if that ain't damn funny
Who the hell ever sent Santa Claus any money?
And the kids these days--they all are the pits
They want the impossible--Those mean little shits
I spent a whole year making wagons and sleds
Assembling dolls...Their arms, legs and heads
I made a ton of yo yo's--No request for them,
They want computers and robots...they think - I'm IBM!
Flying through the air...dodging the trees
Falling down chimneys and skinning my knees
I'm quitting this job there's just no enjoyment
I'll sit on my fat ass and draw unemployment.
There's no Christmas this year now you know the reason,
I found me a blonde. I'm going SOUTH for the season...
Happy New Year's Anyway!!!
He cussed out the elves and threw down his list.
Miserable little brats, ungrateful little jerks.
I have a good mind to scrap the whole works!
I've busted my ass for damn near a year,
Instead of 'Thanks Santa'--what do I hear?
The old lady bitches cause I work late at night.
The elves want more money--The reindeer all fight.
Rudolph got drunk and goosed all the maids.
Donner is pregnant and Vixen has AIDS.
And just when I thought that things would get better
Those assholes from the IRS sent me a letter,
They say I owe taxes--if that ain't damn funny
Who the hell ever sent Santa Claus any money?
And the kids these days--they all are the pits
They want the impossible--Those mean little shits
I spent a whole year making wagons and sleds
Assembling dolls...Their arms, legs and heads
I made a ton of yo yo's--No request for them,
They want computers and robots...they think - I'm IBM!
Flying through the air...dodging the trees
Falling down chimneys and skinning my knees
I'm quitting this job there's just no enjoyment
I'll sit on my fat ass and draw unemployment.
There's no Christmas this year now you know the reason,
I found me a blonde. I'm going SOUTH for the season...
Happy New Year's Anyway!!!
FACAS GUINSU???
You likely need no introduction to the Blendtec Total Blender. Just a little less popular than the "Numa Numa" kid or "Dick in a Box," this kitchen gadget has become an online star thanks to "Will it blend?" a "viral" marketing campaign in which Blendtec's founder, Tom Dickson, attempts to liquefy all sorts of items to prove his blender's might.
He always succeeds. Watch him blend golf balls, glow sticks, marbles, Chuck Norris, imitation diamonds, and many others -- everything is obliterated, including, most famously, the iPhone, whose destruction you can witness above.
As part of kitchen gadgets week at Machinist, I've been reviewing zany food-related contraptions that seem to possess the capacity to improve life in immeasurable ways (I've already covered the Aerogarden indoor herb grower and the Back to Basics Egg &Muffin toaster).
Improving life immeasurably is the Blendtec's main sell. With a 1,500-watt motor, the machine is one of the most powerful home blenders you can buy (mainstream blenders typically offer about 600 to 700).
The power affords amazing utility, says Blendtec. The Total Blender can replace a juicer, a food processor, a coffee grinder, and of course a standard countertop blender. The thing is so powerful you can even "cook" in it, the company says -- fill it with cold ingredients, run the "soup" cycle three times, and your liquids will emerge hot, energized by the torque of the motor.
But such power will cost you. The Total Blender, which is available in either black or white, runs for $399. A sleeker model, the Blendtec Connoisseur, aimed at people building custom kitchens, sells at $799 (the blender's base can be sunk into the countertop).
About a month ago Blendtec sent me a Total Blender to review. My quest: To see whether a $400 blender was good for more than juicing one's testosterone. That is, was it necessary?
Like everyone else with a kitchen, I've got a standard blender, one that probably wouldn't do too well with an iPhone but that does a heckuva job on cooked carrots I want to puree for soup. I use it about once a week or so, mainly for the carrots or other purees or to pulse sauces. Rarely does my blender get a real workout. Once in a long while I'll make a smoothie, but I prefer the delights blended up by that famous chain store to anything I can make at home.
So what would I do with a Total Blender? Right, the same thing you'd do. Blend anything in sight.
Well, not anything: In his videos, Tom Dickson advises us not to try his tricks at home, and so I avoided electronic gadgets, toys, precious metals, and combustibles, and instead focused on food. As part of various recipes or on their own, cooked or raw or frozen, I tried carrots, squash, almonds, hazelnuts, coffee beans, apples, tomato sauce, ice, chocolate, and loads else.
And sure, for many jobs, the Total Blender proved very handy. Blendtec's not lying, this blender packs a punch. On full, the machine leaves nothing in its path; all emerges smooth liquid. When this is your aim -- as in a smoothie or a soup -- there is likely no better machine.
Besides power, the Total Blender feature a range of preprogrammed cycles meant for different kinds of foods. These modes -- one button for whole juice, say, another for smoothies -- cause the machine to speed up and slow down according to a timer, automatically mixing the food for the best blend (reducing the liklihood that you've got to stop the machine to scrape down the sides), and stop by itself when it's done.
Despite its intelligence and power, there are some foods the Total Blender -- or any other blender -- simply cannot liquefy. One of these, I found, is raw carrots. Fill the machine with carrots, press Whole Juice, and you don't get juice. You get shredded carrots (as well as a whole lot of noise; this machine should come with a set of earplugs).
In the pretty recipe book that comes along with the blender, the company advises adding water or another liquid to foods that don't liquefy. I added orange juice to the carrots to make an orange-carrot blend, usually one of my favorite juices -- but this concoction tasted off, sickly thick with pulverized bits of carrot pulp, more a paste than a juice. (A juicer, by contrast, extracts liquid from the fruit, making for thinner, tastier liquid.)
The machine is not too great as a grinder, either, if your aim is anything other than powder. I filled the machine with thick slabs of baking chocolate and let it rip. What I got after about 20 seconds was a wide range of different-sized bits of chocolate -- a mass of fine powder, a mass of millimeter-sized shreds, a few half-inch bits, and a couple badly beaten inch-wide blocks.
The same occurred with coffee beans, with bad results for your drink (good coffee, aficionados will tell you, depends on grind consistency -- that's why coffee snobs prefer burr grinders).
Amazon's reviews suggest that the Total Blender's owners consider the machine indispensable.
But after using it, I've got to imagine that such people constitute a narrow group. If you're into raw foods, love all kinds of liquefied vegetables, or need a machine to hide healthy vegetables in your children's meals, you couldn't do better than Blendtec's wares. Also, if you make mixed drinks or have another use for extremely finely crushed ice, this is your ticket. A Blendtec rep promised me that the Total Blender would turn ice into something like snow. So that was the first thing I tried, and he was right. The crushed ice was so light and fluffy I packed it into a snowball.
But I don't need to make snowballs at home, and I'll hazard you don't either.
True, the smoothies I made in my $70 Oster blender felt a bit less smooth on my tongue than the ones I made in the Total Blender. It's possible, too, that the Oster will wear out much faster than the Blendtec.
But I can buy five Oster blenders for the price of the Blendtec. Or I could buy a hundred or so delicious store-bought smoothies. Either option would be wiser.
watch the video:
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/12/19/blendtec/index.html?source=newsletter
He always succeeds. Watch him blend golf balls, glow sticks, marbles, Chuck Norris, imitation diamonds, and many others -- everything is obliterated, including, most famously, the iPhone, whose destruction you can witness above.
As part of kitchen gadgets week at Machinist, I've been reviewing zany food-related contraptions that seem to possess the capacity to improve life in immeasurable ways (I've already covered the Aerogarden indoor herb grower and the Back to Basics Egg &Muffin toaster).
Improving life immeasurably is the Blendtec's main sell. With a 1,500-watt motor, the machine is one of the most powerful home blenders you can buy (mainstream blenders typically offer about 600 to 700).
The power affords amazing utility, says Blendtec. The Total Blender can replace a juicer, a food processor, a coffee grinder, and of course a standard countertop blender. The thing is so powerful you can even "cook" in it, the company says -- fill it with cold ingredients, run the "soup" cycle three times, and your liquids will emerge hot, energized by the torque of the motor.
But such power will cost you. The Total Blender, which is available in either black or white, runs for $399. A sleeker model, the Blendtec Connoisseur, aimed at people building custom kitchens, sells at $799 (the blender's base can be sunk into the countertop).
About a month ago Blendtec sent me a Total Blender to review. My quest: To see whether a $400 blender was good for more than juicing one's testosterone. That is, was it necessary?
Like everyone else with a kitchen, I've got a standard blender, one that probably wouldn't do too well with an iPhone but that does a heckuva job on cooked carrots I want to puree for soup. I use it about once a week or so, mainly for the carrots or other purees or to pulse sauces. Rarely does my blender get a real workout. Once in a long while I'll make a smoothie, but I prefer the delights blended up by that famous chain store to anything I can make at home.
So what would I do with a Total Blender? Right, the same thing you'd do. Blend anything in sight.
Well, not anything: In his videos, Tom Dickson advises us not to try his tricks at home, and so I avoided electronic gadgets, toys, precious metals, and combustibles, and instead focused on food. As part of various recipes or on their own, cooked or raw or frozen, I tried carrots, squash, almonds, hazelnuts, coffee beans, apples, tomato sauce, ice, chocolate, and loads else.
And sure, for many jobs, the Total Blender proved very handy. Blendtec's not lying, this blender packs a punch. On full, the machine leaves nothing in its path; all emerges smooth liquid. When this is your aim -- as in a smoothie or a soup -- there is likely no better machine.
Besides power, the Total Blender feature a range of preprogrammed cycles meant for different kinds of foods. These modes -- one button for whole juice, say, another for smoothies -- cause the machine to speed up and slow down according to a timer, automatically mixing the food for the best blend (reducing the liklihood that you've got to stop the machine to scrape down the sides), and stop by itself when it's done.
Despite its intelligence and power, there are some foods the Total Blender -- or any other blender -- simply cannot liquefy. One of these, I found, is raw carrots. Fill the machine with carrots, press Whole Juice, and you don't get juice. You get shredded carrots (as well as a whole lot of noise; this machine should come with a set of earplugs).
In the pretty recipe book that comes along with the blender, the company advises adding water or another liquid to foods that don't liquefy. I added orange juice to the carrots to make an orange-carrot blend, usually one of my favorite juices -- but this concoction tasted off, sickly thick with pulverized bits of carrot pulp, more a paste than a juice. (A juicer, by contrast, extracts liquid from the fruit, making for thinner, tastier liquid.)
The machine is not too great as a grinder, either, if your aim is anything other than powder. I filled the machine with thick slabs of baking chocolate and let it rip. What I got after about 20 seconds was a wide range of different-sized bits of chocolate -- a mass of fine powder, a mass of millimeter-sized shreds, a few half-inch bits, and a couple badly beaten inch-wide blocks.
The same occurred with coffee beans, with bad results for your drink (good coffee, aficionados will tell you, depends on grind consistency -- that's why coffee snobs prefer burr grinders).
Amazon's reviews suggest that the Total Blender's owners consider the machine indispensable.
But after using it, I've got to imagine that such people constitute a narrow group. If you're into raw foods, love all kinds of liquefied vegetables, or need a machine to hide healthy vegetables in your children's meals, you couldn't do better than Blendtec's wares. Also, if you make mixed drinks or have another use for extremely finely crushed ice, this is your ticket. A Blendtec rep promised me that the Total Blender would turn ice into something like snow. So that was the first thing I tried, and he was right. The crushed ice was so light and fluffy I packed it into a snowball.
But I don't need to make snowballs at home, and I'll hazard you don't either.
True, the smoothies I made in my $70 Oster blender felt a bit less smooth on my tongue than the ones I made in the Total Blender. It's possible, too, that the Oster will wear out much faster than the Blendtec.
But I can buy five Oster blenders for the price of the Blendtec. Or I could buy a hundred or so delicious store-bought smoothies. Either option would be wiser.
watch the video:
http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/12/19/blendtec/index.html?source=newsletter
GIGGIO, THIS IS FOR YOU!!!!
By Jacob Leibenluft
When it does battle on the Web, Google rarely loses. Last year's closure of Google Answers, however, marked a rare setback for the search giant. An even bigger shock is that Yahoo! succeeded where Google failed. Yahoo! Answers—a site where anyone can post a question in plain English, including queries that can't be answered by a traditional search engine—now draws 120 million users worldwide, according to Yahoo!'s internal stats. The site has compiled 400 million answers, all searchable in its archives. According to the Web tracking company Hitwise, Yahoo! Answers is the second-most-visited education/reference site on the Internet after Wikipedia.
The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It's every middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web.
The site's home page, which offers a real-time snapshot of the dozens of questions posted every minute, provides a good sense of users' favorite topics: relationships, computers, homework, pregnancy. These queries reveal why something like Yahoo! Answers might draw so many visitors. The questions—"Why does the stomach make funny noises when it's hungry?" and "How do stoplights sense a car?" for instance—are difficult to answer with a traditional Web search. If you're looking for advice on your new haircut or help on the third question on your precalculus problem set, Yahoo! Answers might be your best option. Most strikingly, Answers draws a large enough crowd that you're likely to get an answer almost instantaneously. Post a semicoherent question and the responses will come within minutes, if not seconds.
For educators fretting that the Internet is creating a generation of "intellectual sluggards," the problem isn't just that Yahoo!'s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework. It's that a lot of the time, it doesn't help them cheat all that well.
Take a popular question asking about common customs and beliefs among Native Americans. In theory, this is the kind of query Yahoo! Answers is made for. It's more easily asked in the form of a complete sentence rather than in a series of search terms, and it has a factual answer some users might know.
How did Yahoo! Answers do? On the plus side, the question received an impressive 97 different answers, including a few knowledgeable responses and helpful references. But several of the postings were misleading, confused, or just plain wrong. If you started off uncertain, it's hard to imagine you would read the responses and feel any more confident. To top it off, the answer eventually chosen as the "best" was, enigmatically, "American pie."
In some academic areas—physics is one I've noticed—the Answers community consistently does an impressive job of providing accurate answers and a clear explanation of how to get them. But in other disciplines, the site's record as an educational tool is, to put it charitably, unreliable. A recent question about dual citizenship attracted 12 answers in just two hours; some of the responses were nearly accurate, many partially true, and others entirely false ("yes it is true they outlawed dual citizenship in 2001 due to people going to canada and the uk for free health care while they were not paying taxes in that country"). Another thread on the relationship between Iran, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden offered a few insightful responses about Sunni-Shiite politics surrounded by enough noise—"No one really cares except for people like yourself!"—to confuse or annoy anyone who might pose the question earnestly.
Some people might look at this mixed record and think that Yahoo! Answers is just like Wikipedia. But the differences between the two sites say a lot—about why Wikipedia has been such a success, why the Web's leading reference site is so hard to replicate, and how Yahoo! Answers has become so popular despite its flaws.
Like Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But for savvy browsers who know how to use it, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of factual information. In the last two years, there's been a heated debate over whether Wikipedia is as trustworthy as Encyclopedia Britannica. This obscures a crucial point: Wikipedia is at least reliable enough that such a question can be asked. Take my word for it—no one is going to make any such claims about Yahoo! Answers any time soon.
Wikipedia's greatest virtue is that it is self-editing and self-correcting. The site's draconian efforts to consolidate pages and remove entries that aren't deemed important have a crucial side effect: They focus users' energy on revision rather than addition. By contrast, Yahoo! Answers is more devoted to quantity than quality. It struggles to prevent repeat questions from appearing over and over again. And unlike Wikipedia, the Yahoo! community expends far less energy trying to hide dubious or just plain incorrect contributions, despite a community rating system designed to flag them. Often, a correct answer will be hiding somewhere on an Answers page, only to be obscured by a tide of wrong or off-topic material that never gets erased. Wikipedia pages are subject to constant revision. If a vandal screws with an entry, one of the site's busy janitors cleans it up. If new information becomes available or a new user devotes energy to making improvements, then a Wikipedia article will get better even years after it's first posted. Yahoo!, by contrast, "closes" questions to new answers after a week, although users occasionally post comments afterward. While the site's answers live forever on the Web, each question attracts only seven days' worth of collective wisdom.
The small, almost obsessive community that built Wikipedia created a culture of reliability. For contributors to see their writing on the site, they must submit information that's clear and accurate enough to survive the scrutiny of other users. Yahoo! Answers has created a more formal, yet far less successful, reward structure to identify top users. Every time you post an answer, you earn two points. If you win a "best answer" distinction, you get 10 points. (The person who asked the question gets the opportunity to select the best answer; if they choose not to, it is selected by community vote.) This system highlights the site's greatest strength and its greatest weakness: Everyone gets credit for answering, but there's not a huge push to make sure the answers are right.
As its devotees would point out, Yahoo! Answers allows you to ask questions Wikipedia would never touch. Many of the site's users are simply looking for advice, local knowledge (like a restaurant recommendation), or an opportunity to start a discussion. But for these questions, too, the quality of the responses varies widely, and users can be stuck struggling to separate the good answers from the bad.
Even though Yahoo! Answers is so frequently sloppy and inaccurate, it's still the juggernaut in its field. Despite a rapid proliferation of answer-giving sites—Amazon.com's recently inaugurated Askville just joined a crowded field that includes Answerbag, WikiAnswers, AnswerBank, and Ask Metafilter—Yahoo!'s is still by far the most popular. And in the question-answering game, size matters. While the others have a few clever features (like Answerbag's efforts to separate "educational" and "conversational" questions) or a more specialized community, the sheer magnitude of Yahoo!'s community gives it the upper hand.
After all, while Yahoo! Answers and its peers are classified as reference tools, what they actually provide is social networking. The thrill of Yahoo! Answers comes in the instant interaction: the scores of questions, the immediate back-and-forth discussions, the opportunity to feel like an expert, and, eventually, the promise a query will be labeled a "Resolved Question" no matter how difficult.
For a passive reader, this has the same value as listening to two random guys at a bar talk about what to do if you are driving during a tornado. You may not learn very much by eavesdropping—and you certainly shouldn't trust what you hear if disaster strikes—but that isn't really the purpose. The lesson Yahoo! Answers teaches is that, for millions of people on the Web, it's less important to get a good answer than to get someone to listen to your question in the first place.
When it does battle on the Web, Google rarely loses. Last year's closure of Google Answers, however, marked a rare setback for the search giant. An even bigger shock is that Yahoo! succeeded where Google failed. Yahoo! Answers—a site where anyone can post a question in plain English, including queries that can't be answered by a traditional search engine—now draws 120 million users worldwide, according to Yahoo!'s internal stats. The site has compiled 400 million answers, all searchable in its archives. According to the Web tracking company Hitwise, Yahoo! Answers is the second-most-visited education/reference site on the Internet after Wikipedia.
The blockbuster success of Yahoo! Answers is all the more surprising once you spend a few days using the site. While Answers is a valuable window into how people look for information online, it looks like a complete disaster as a traditional reference tool. It encourages bad research habits, rewards people who post things that aren't true, and frequently labels factual errors as correct information. It's every middle-school teacher's worst nightmare about the Web.
The site's home page, which offers a real-time snapshot of the dozens of questions posted every minute, provides a good sense of users' favorite topics: relationships, computers, homework, pregnancy. These queries reveal why something like Yahoo! Answers might draw so many visitors. The questions—"Why does the stomach make funny noises when it's hungry?" and "How do stoplights sense a car?" for instance—are difficult to answer with a traditional Web search. If you're looking for advice on your new haircut or help on the third question on your precalculus problem set, Yahoo! Answers might be your best option. Most strikingly, Answers draws a large enough crowd that you're likely to get an answer almost instantaneously. Post a semicoherent question and the responses will come within minutes, if not seconds.
For educators fretting that the Internet is creating a generation of "intellectual sluggards," the problem isn't just that Yahoo!'s site helps ninth-graders cheat on their homework. It's that a lot of the time, it doesn't help them cheat all that well.
Take a popular question asking about common customs and beliefs among Native Americans. In theory, this is the kind of query Yahoo! Answers is made for. It's more easily asked in the form of a complete sentence rather than in a series of search terms, and it has a factual answer some users might know.
How did Yahoo! Answers do? On the plus side, the question received an impressive 97 different answers, including a few knowledgeable responses and helpful references. But several of the postings were misleading, confused, or just plain wrong. If you started off uncertain, it's hard to imagine you would read the responses and feel any more confident. To top it off, the answer eventually chosen as the "best" was, enigmatically, "American pie."
In some academic areas—physics is one I've noticed—the Answers community consistently does an impressive job of providing accurate answers and a clear explanation of how to get them. But in other disciplines, the site's record as an educational tool is, to put it charitably, unreliable. A recent question about dual citizenship attracted 12 answers in just two hours; some of the responses were nearly accurate, many partially true, and others entirely false ("yes it is true they outlawed dual citizenship in 2001 due to people going to canada and the uk for free health care while they were not paying taxes in that country"). Another thread on the relationship between Iran, Saddam Hussein, and Osama Bin Laden offered a few insightful responses about Sunni-Shiite politics surrounded by enough noise—"No one really cares except for people like yourself!"—to confuse or annoy anyone who might pose the question earnestly.
Some people might look at this mixed record and think that Yahoo! Answers is just like Wikipedia. But the differences between the two sites say a lot—about why Wikipedia has been such a success, why the Web's leading reference site is so hard to replicate, and how Yahoo! Answers has become so popular despite its flaws.
Like Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia isn't perfect. But for savvy browsers who know how to use it, Wikipedia is an invaluable source of factual information. In the last two years, there's been a heated debate over whether Wikipedia is as trustworthy as Encyclopedia Britannica. This obscures a crucial point: Wikipedia is at least reliable enough that such a question can be asked. Take my word for it—no one is going to make any such claims about Yahoo! Answers any time soon.
Wikipedia's greatest virtue is that it is self-editing and self-correcting. The site's draconian efforts to consolidate pages and remove entries that aren't deemed important have a crucial side effect: They focus users' energy on revision rather than addition. By contrast, Yahoo! Answers is more devoted to quantity than quality. It struggles to prevent repeat questions from appearing over and over again. And unlike Wikipedia, the Yahoo! community expends far less energy trying to hide dubious or just plain incorrect contributions, despite a community rating system designed to flag them. Often, a correct answer will be hiding somewhere on an Answers page, only to be obscured by a tide of wrong or off-topic material that never gets erased. Wikipedia pages are subject to constant revision. If a vandal screws with an entry, one of the site's busy janitors cleans it up. If new information becomes available or a new user devotes energy to making improvements, then a Wikipedia article will get better even years after it's first posted. Yahoo!, by contrast, "closes" questions to new answers after a week, although users occasionally post comments afterward. While the site's answers live forever on the Web, each question attracts only seven days' worth of collective wisdom.
The small, almost obsessive community that built Wikipedia created a culture of reliability. For contributors to see their writing on the site, they must submit information that's clear and accurate enough to survive the scrutiny of other users. Yahoo! Answers has created a more formal, yet far less successful, reward structure to identify top users. Every time you post an answer, you earn two points. If you win a "best answer" distinction, you get 10 points. (The person who asked the question gets the opportunity to select the best answer; if they choose not to, it is selected by community vote.) This system highlights the site's greatest strength and its greatest weakness: Everyone gets credit for answering, but there's not a huge push to make sure the answers are right.
As its devotees would point out, Yahoo! Answers allows you to ask questions Wikipedia would never touch. Many of the site's users are simply looking for advice, local knowledge (like a restaurant recommendation), or an opportunity to start a discussion. But for these questions, too, the quality of the responses varies widely, and users can be stuck struggling to separate the good answers from the bad.
Even though Yahoo! Answers is so frequently sloppy and inaccurate, it's still the juggernaut in its field. Despite a rapid proliferation of answer-giving sites—Amazon.com's recently inaugurated Askville just joined a crowded field that includes Answerbag, WikiAnswers, AnswerBank, and Ask Metafilter—Yahoo!'s is still by far the most popular. And in the question-answering game, size matters. While the others have a few clever features (like Answerbag's efforts to separate "educational" and "conversational" questions) or a more specialized community, the sheer magnitude of Yahoo!'s community gives it the upper hand.
After all, while Yahoo! Answers and its peers are classified as reference tools, what they actually provide is social networking. The thrill of Yahoo! Answers comes in the instant interaction: the scores of questions, the immediate back-and-forth discussions, the opportunity to feel like an expert, and, eventually, the promise a query will be labeled a "Resolved Question" no matter how difficult.
For a passive reader, this has the same value as listening to two random guys at a bar talk about what to do if you are driving during a tornado. You may not learn very much by eavesdropping—and you certainly shouldn't trust what you hear if disaster strikes—but that isn't really the purpose. The lesson Yahoo! Answers teaches is that, for millions of people on the Web, it's less important to get a good answer than to get someone to listen to your question in the first place.
WOULD YOU VOTE FOR OBAMA OR OPRAH!?!?!?
By David Zucchino Sen. Barack Obama and media tycoon Oprah Winfrey brought their celebrity-endorsement tour to this pivotal Southern state Sunday, drawing thousands -- mostly African Americans and women -- in what Obama called the biggest event of his presidential campaign.
The visit was a test of the candidate's strength in a state that votes Republican in national contests but has a large black population. African Americans make up nearly half of all Democratic voters in South Carolina, and women account for more than half of the state's black Democratic vote.
Winfrey and Obama appealed directly to that demographic, peppering their speeches with "y'all" and "you folks." They made several references to church attendance, beauty parlors and God, and quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Winfrey received the loudest ovation of the hourlong rally when she was introduced by Obama's wife, Michelle, as "the first lady of television." But the Illinois senator had the crowd on its feet several times with promises to end the war in Iraq, confront inner-city poverty and revamp healthcare.
Obama repeated his signature campaign slogan: "Fired up! Ready to go!" The crowd chanted along with him. Thousands cheered as the normally reserved candidate began dancing to a Stevie Wonder tune.
The Obama campaign announced the crowd at 29,000. The number appeared to be slightly lower, with roughly one-quarter of the seats filled in the 80,000-capacity University of South Carolina football stadium.
Whether Winfrey's popularity will translate into votes for Obama in the state's Jan. 26 primary is an open question.
Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for the campaign, said the "Oprah effect," at the very least, means that voters who had not previously paid much attention to Obama had come out to hear his message in person.
Scott H. Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., who has polled the state's black electorate, said Winfrey's presence made Obama "salient" to voters -- even if some people came only to see her and might not vote.
"And a lot are probably already Obama supporters," Huffmon said. "The key to any endorsement, celebrity or otherwise, is winning over people who aren't in your column."
Other political analysts said Winfrey could give Obama a boost in South Carolina as well as the two other states she visited with the candidate over the weekend, Iowa and New Hampshire.
Dick Bennett, a pollster in New Hampshire who is not affiliated with a presidential campaign, said Winfrey's tour came as Obama had cut into Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's support among female voters in some states.
Winfrey's message is "take a look at this guy," Bennett said. "I think people will."
Bruce Nesmith, a political scientist at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said Winfrey could help Obama draw more middle-age and older women -- the core of Winfrey's talk show viewership.
Winfrey might also motivate more young voters and others who have not been politically active, analysts said.
A poll of black South Carolinians that Huffmon helped conduct for Winthrop and South Carolina's public TV and radio network found that 35% intended to vote for Obama, 31% for Clinton and 3% for native son John Edwards.
Huffmon said the poll was noteworthy for the 33% of black women who said they were undecided. The poll of 657 people was conducted Sept. 13.
"Black female voters are the crown jewel" in the Democratic primary, he said.
Those voters were clearly a prime target Sunday. Winfrey mentioned the large number of beauty parlors in South Carolina, saying, "We love to keep our hair done, don't we?"
She added, "I know what it means to come from the South," referring to her childhood in Mississippi.
The visit was a test of the candidate's strength in a state that votes Republican in national contests but has a large black population. African Americans make up nearly half of all Democratic voters in South Carolina, and women account for more than half of the state's black Democratic vote.
Winfrey and Obama appealed directly to that demographic, peppering their speeches with "y'all" and "you folks." They made several references to church attendance, beauty parlors and God, and quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Winfrey received the loudest ovation of the hourlong rally when she was introduced by Obama's wife, Michelle, as "the first lady of television." But the Illinois senator had the crowd on its feet several times with promises to end the war in Iraq, confront inner-city poverty and revamp healthcare.
Obama repeated his signature campaign slogan: "Fired up! Ready to go!" The crowd chanted along with him. Thousands cheered as the normally reserved candidate began dancing to a Stevie Wonder tune.
The Obama campaign announced the crowd at 29,000. The number appeared to be slightly lower, with roughly one-quarter of the seats filled in the 80,000-capacity University of South Carolina football stadium.
Whether Winfrey's popularity will translate into votes for Obama in the state's Jan. 26 primary is an open question.
Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for the campaign, said the "Oprah effect," at the very least, means that voters who had not previously paid much attention to Obama had come out to hear his message in person.
Scott H. Huffmon, a political science professor at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., who has polled the state's black electorate, said Winfrey's presence made Obama "salient" to voters -- even if some people came only to see her and might not vote.
"And a lot are probably already Obama supporters," Huffmon said. "The key to any endorsement, celebrity or otherwise, is winning over people who aren't in your column."
Other political analysts said Winfrey could give Obama a boost in South Carolina as well as the two other states she visited with the candidate over the weekend, Iowa and New Hampshire.
Dick Bennett, a pollster in New Hampshire who is not affiliated with a presidential campaign, said Winfrey's tour came as Obama had cut into Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's support among female voters in some states.
Winfrey's message is "take a look at this guy," Bennett said. "I think people will."
Bruce Nesmith, a political scientist at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, said Winfrey could help Obama draw more middle-age and older women -- the core of Winfrey's talk show viewership.
Winfrey might also motivate more young voters and others who have not been politically active, analysts said.
A poll of black South Carolinians that Huffmon helped conduct for Winthrop and South Carolina's public TV and radio network found that 35% intended to vote for Obama, 31% for Clinton and 3% for native son John Edwards.
Huffmon said the poll was noteworthy for the 33% of black women who said they were undecided. The poll of 657 people was conducted Sept. 13.
"Black female voters are the crown jewel" in the Democratic primary, he said.
Those voters were clearly a prime target Sunday. Winfrey mentioned the large number of beauty parlors in South Carolina, saying, "We love to keep our hair done, don't we?"
She added, "I know what it means to come from the South," referring to her childhood in Mississippi.
HAVING BOOBS CAN BE A PAIN SOMETIMES
http://salon.com/mwt/feature/2007/12/10/big_breasts/index.html?source=newsletter
btw, a lovely idea would be getting a nice and right size bra as a gift. i just know one man who did this once to a friend of mine, and he really got a lot of bonus points!!! boys, run to the nearest lingerie store!! ops, no, stop!! go find out the size of your girl´s boobs first!!! besides being the queen of useless info, i´m also the queen of useless advice!!! what the heck did i take tonight?!?!?!?
btw, a lovely idea would be getting a nice and right size bra as a gift. i just know one man who did this once to a friend of mine, and he really got a lot of bonus points!!! boys, run to the nearest lingerie store!! ops, no, stop!! go find out the size of your girl´s boobs first!!! besides being the queen of useless info, i´m also the queen of useless advice!!! what the heck did i take tonight?!?!?!?
SNOOPY IS A WISE DOG
'Don't worry about the world coming to an end today.It's already tomorrow in Australia ' (Charles Schultz)
The following is the philosophy of Charles Schultz, the creator of the 'Peanuts' comic strip. You don't have to actually answer the questions.
1.Name the five wealthiest people in the world.
2.Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.
3.Name the last five winners of the Miss America.
4.Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.
5.Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and
actress.
6.Name the last decade's worth of World Series winners.
How did you do?
The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.
Here's another quiz. See how you do on this one:
1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through
school.
2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult
time.
3. Name five people who have taught you something
worthwhile.
4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and
special.
5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.
The lesson:
The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care.
The following is the philosophy of Charles Schultz, the creator of the 'Peanuts' comic strip. You don't have to actually answer the questions.
1.Name the five wealthiest people in the world.
2.Name the last five Heisman trophy winners.
3.Name the last five winners of the Miss America.
4.Name ten people who have won the Nobel or Pulitzer Prize.
5.Name the last half dozen Academy Award winners for best actor and
actress.
6.Name the last decade's worth of World Series winners.
How did you do?
The point is, none of us remember the headliners of yesterday. These are no second-rate achievers. They are the best in their fields. But the applause dies. Awards tarnish. Achievements are forgotten. Accolades and certificates are buried with their owners.
Here's another quiz. See how you do on this one:
1. List a few teachers who aided your journey through
school.
2. Name three friends who have helped you through a difficult
time.
3. Name five people who have taught you something
worthwhile.
4. Think of a few people who have made you feel appreciated and
special.
5. Think of five people you enjoy spending time with.
The lesson:
The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards. They are the ones that care.
PLEASE JOIN ME!!!!
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/travel/09where.html?em&ex=1197608400&en=f76d519fab9f9917&ei=5070
AHA!!!
Brain 'irrelevance filter' found
Memory capacity may be linked to filtering out irrelevant information
Scientists believe they have located a new brain area essential for good memory - the "irrelevance filter".
People who are good at remembering things, even with distractions, have more activity in the basal ganglia on brain scans, the Swedish team found.
The work in Nature Neuroscience could help explain why some people are better at remembering things than others.
Clinically, it could also aid the understanding of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The ability to hold information in the mind so that it is immediately accessible is known as working memory.
We use working memory all of the time - for example, when doing a simple maths calculation in our head or recalling a telephone number.
There will be many brain regions that filter irrelevant information, so it is too early to tell if these findings will have a bearing on conditions such as ADHD
Its capacity is limited and seems to vary from person to person.
These variations are not just due to having a larger or smaller memory store, but also due to differences in how effectively irrelevant items are kept out of memory, the Karolinksa Institute researchers believe.
Distracters
Dr Torkel Klingberg and colleague Fiona McNab used a special brain scan called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track what was happening in the brains of 25 healthy volunteers.
The volunteers were asked to perform a computer-based task that required them to respond to target visual images, with or without distractions.
A noise informed subjects when an upcoming visual display would contain irrelevant distracters along with the targets.
When this cue occurred, neural activity increased in the basal ganglia and the prefrontal cortex before the visual display appeared, suggesting the brain was preparing to "filter out" the upcoming distracters.
Also, greater activity in a specific part of the basal ganglia - the globus pallidus - correlated with less unnecessary storage in another part of the brain, the posterior parietal cortex, which is sensitive to the amount of information held in memory.
The team is currently investigating methods of improving attention and working memory in children with ADHD and monitoring any changes with fMRI.
Medical Research Council scientist John Duncan said: "This is very interesting work and gives a window on important parts of the brain.
"The basal ganglia are very strong candidates for involvement in brain disorders where people have difficulty with attentional control.
"But there will be many brain regions that filter irrelevant information, so it is too early to tell if these findings will have a bearing on conditions such as ADHD."
Memory capacity may be linked to filtering out irrelevant information
Scientists believe they have located a new brain area essential for good memory - the "irrelevance filter".
People who are good at remembering things, even with distractions, have more activity in the basal ganglia on brain scans, the Swedish team found.
The work in Nature Neuroscience could help explain why some people are better at remembering things than others.
Clinically, it could also aid the understanding of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The ability to hold information in the mind so that it is immediately accessible is known as working memory.
We use working memory all of the time - for example, when doing a simple maths calculation in our head or recalling a telephone number.
There will be many brain regions that filter irrelevant information, so it is too early to tell if these findings will have a bearing on conditions such as ADHD
Its capacity is limited and seems to vary from person to person.
These variations are not just due to having a larger or smaller memory store, but also due to differences in how effectively irrelevant items are kept out of memory, the Karolinksa Institute researchers believe.
Distracters
Dr Torkel Klingberg and colleague Fiona McNab used a special brain scan called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track what was happening in the brains of 25 healthy volunteers.
The volunteers were asked to perform a computer-based task that required them to respond to target visual images, with or without distractions.
A noise informed subjects when an upcoming visual display would contain irrelevant distracters along with the targets.
When this cue occurred, neural activity increased in the basal ganglia and the prefrontal cortex before the visual display appeared, suggesting the brain was preparing to "filter out" the upcoming distracters.
Also, greater activity in a specific part of the basal ganglia - the globus pallidus - correlated with less unnecessary storage in another part of the brain, the posterior parietal cortex, which is sensitive to the amount of information held in memory.
The team is currently investigating methods of improving attention and working memory in children with ADHD and monitoring any changes with fMRI.
Medical Research Council scientist John Duncan said: "This is very interesting work and gives a window on important parts of the brain.
"The basal ganglia are very strong candidates for involvement in brain disorders where people have difficulty with attentional control.
"But there will be many brain regions that filter irrelevant information, so it is too early to tell if these findings will have a bearing on conditions such as ADHD."
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