great questions

Since everyone is heading home, to spend time with family or friends who are like family, I thought now might be a good time to post about StoryCorps.

"StoryCorps is an independent nonprofit whose mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening. Since 2003, more than 50,000 Americans have interviewed family and friends through StoryCorps, making it one of the largest oral history projects of its kind."

For those of you who have not heard the stories on NPR, I am telling you to click this link and go listen NOW! For the rest of you, I hope you will take the questions below home with you and try some of them out...I would love to hear the new stories you hear because of the questions.

Great Questions

Who was the most important person in your life? Can you tell me about him or her?

What was the happiest moment of your life? The saddest?

Who has been the biggest influence on your life? What lessons did they teach you?

Who has been the kindest to you in your life?

What are the most important lessons you've learned in life?

What is your earliest memory?

What is your favorite memory of me?

If you could hold on to one memory from your life for eternity, what would that be?

If this was to be our very last conversation, what words of wisdom would you want to pass on to me? (or more simply: Are there any words of wisdom you'd like to pass along to me?)

Have you had any experiences or moments in your life that you might consider sacred?

What are you proudest of in your life?

When in life have you felt most alone?

What are your hopes and dreams for what the future holds for me? For my children?

How has your life been different than what you'd imagined?

How would you like to be remembered?

Do you have any regrets?

What does your future hold?

Is there anything that you've never told me but want to tell me now?

Is there something about me that you've always wanted to know but have never asked?

Click this sentence to find more ideas for questions.

movie: sita sings the blues

This movie is so much fun...and it is free. The woman who wrote it made it without a copyright, which I think is so much fun. In the creator's words:

"I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.

"You don't need my permission to copy, share, publish, archive, show, sell, broadcast, or remix Sita Sings the Blues. Conventional wisdom urges me to demand payment for every use of the film, but then how would people without money get to see it? How widely would the film be disseminated if it were limited by permission and fees? Control offers a false sense of security. The only real security I have is trusting you, trusting culture, and trusting freedom.

"That said, my colleagues and I will enforce the Share Alike License. You are not free to copy-restrict ("copyright") or attach Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) to Sita Sings the Blues or its derivative works."

We are planning on watching the whole movie soon! To read more about the movie, click this sentence.

indecent cookies

from my friend Marika's cookie party. nicely done.

book review: the boys of my youth

By Jo Ann Beard

Everyone loves this book. No one writes bad reviews of this book. The Boys of My Youth is Jo Ann Beard’s only book to date. Everyone is right. The book is amazing, but I am going to tell you what I did not like about the book.

Beard’s descriptions of childhood are just too well done. While reading them, memories of your own childhood bubble up. And not just the good memories, but also the memories that sting, the memories you thought were gone.

And really, as you are reading the book, she flits around in time. You really don’t have any idea what she is doing, until your bathwater is past its prime temperature, and you are still in the water trying to finish the book. You read that last line and it all comes together: this is a book about the end of her youth. You get it finally. She has described for you what growing up means, as though you have never done it.

Finally, I really don’t like the cover. I suppose it is a photo of a child’s bed. I would have done something different, but the different idea is not coming to me.

The book was published in 1998 and I must say, she needs to publish another book. I mean really people.

book review: born standing up

By Steve Martin

The book tells beginning, middle, and self-imposed end of Steve Martin’s stand up comedian career. He explains his theories, and thoughts, and all of the crazy reasons he is funny.

The only thing I did not like about this memoir was that the title was totally wrong. The title implies that Steve Martin was always as funny as he is, and that it took no effort. Anyone who reads this book will understand the craft and hard work that went into his stand-up routine.

At 207 pages, the memoir is a quick read. He only glances over his family and past relationships. We do learn, towards the end, about how violated he felt by this fame, and why he has become a very private person.

The pictures included in the book are great fun. And I think sometimes he is letting the close reader in on a few jokes. In one section of the book, he describes meeting a fellow comic after having watched his show. The other comic recycled some material from a more famous comic, something Martin strongly eschewed. Neither comic talked about it then, and Martin refrained from using the comic’s name in text. But, then, the companion image plainly states that Steve Goodman was the comic. Funny.

Go out and read this book. What an interesting look on history, and boy, are they’re a ton of really great one liner’s. From Elvis calling him obliquely funny, to Linda Ronstadt asking him, “Steve, do you often date girls and try not to sleep with them?” you really can’t miss with this book.

this american life: my professor

So, Brent and I get into the car at 12:07 in DC today, and on "This American Life" is a woman talking about her book about her father's murder. Brent keeps chatting, and I shush him.

Brent asks, "What?"

"Brent I think that's my writing professor..."

Sure enough it was her. How fun! Well the topic is not fun, but that she was on one of my favorite shows is fun.

Here is a link to Rachel Howard on the radio:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/. You can hear her voice on the introduction.

She wrote a book, The Lost Night, about what happened to her father that is next to my bed, and I have started reading it, but got sidetracked by something else.(To see book at Amazon, click this sentence.) What I have read is gripping.

octopus using tools

You have to go to the link:
http://museumvictoria.com.au/coconut-carrying-octopus

"The Veined Octopus, Amphioctopus marginatus, using coconut shells as tools. Video shot in Indonesia by Julian Finn between 1998 and 2008."


I would never eat one, but even if I did like seafood, squid and octopi are so smart, I couldn't do it.

a house

We all know I desperately want a house right? Oh, wait, I don't want a house. I like renting. I like calling someone else and spending someone else's money when something breaks...but I love to decorate.* In fact, I wanted to be an interior designer when I was a child.

So I am following with glee this blog, Keeping Up With the Johnsons at the Readymade website. They bought a house in northern California and are redoing it.

I like their style, sometimes. The times where they go all modern, I love it...but sometimes it is horrible. They painted a wall all green. And their art, well, I don't have to live there!

They have put up some really neat instructions for fixing things or redoing things. And they have an awesome clam-shaped bed from the 70's with a built in stereo!

Take a look. Some fun stuff there.


* See post of photo shoot of our apartment for confirmation.

book review: an unquiet mind

By Kay Redfield Jamison

I am pretty sure someone in my writing class recommended this book. And since I have recently re-discovered the library, I got it there.

The book chronicles the author’s life as a closet manic-depressive, aptly showing the reader how it would feel to have this illness. You really feel the euphoria of the manic phase; times when she needn’t sleep, can write papers in a day, and generally gets shit done with great speed. And then the panic when she feels herself slipping in to the depressive phase; where she can’t do anything. Not even get out of bed.

You also learn how she tries to hide her illness. She tells her lovers haltingly, concerned about who they will respond, if they will decide to no longer love her.

And to top things off, the author is a Professor of Psychology. So she knows that the data all say the same thing: take your drugs or risk killing yourself. She tried on occasion, but failed.

In one poignant scene, she tells of the realization that she haden’t a clue about what it would be to be blind. Her student of some time, she met the blind student in the blind reading room one day. Naturally, the lights were all off, but he thought to turn the lights on for her.

“It was one of those still, clear moments when you realize that you haven’t understood anything at all, that you have had no real comprehension of the other person’s world.”

I would highly recommend this book to anyone trying to understand manic-depression, and its cycles and its tolls.

book review: the messengers of death

by Pierre Magnan


A retired inspector is brought out of retirement to help the local Judge figure out what happened as people start dropping like flies. They all receive a letter in the mail that says one thing: The measure that you give will be the measure that you get. Avarice. This French book covers the topic of avarice with abandon. I did not know what the word meant when I first started reading. Just in case you don’t know: greed. The book explores the greed of towns, ideas, histories, and most of all people.

The mystery takes place in Provence, at the base of the Alps. The descriptions of the regions are at odds with that well-known American book about Provence, A Year in Provence. It sounds cold and desolate and someplace I don’t want to visit for any amount of time.

I enjoyed the book, as I am enjoying translated works a lot recently. But I felt a little set apart from the characters. I had a hard time identifying with them. And while many footnotes helped the foreign reader understand cultural references that would be lost without these footnotes, I felt like I still missed a lot of references. In any event I feel like I learned a bit, and while the book might not be something I would normally read, I enjoyed it.

another little video: not sad

Elio from Rob Diaz on Vimeo.

gingerbread party

The party was a smashing success, even though it was snowing outside. :)

Good times. Click here to see pictures!

french video

nanobacterium

We were at a meeting today, and someone brought up nanobacterium. I had never heard of such a thing. It is what it sounds like: nanosized bacteria. No one knows if they are 1. alive, 2. contain DNA, 3. what they are really.

Apparently they have been found in meteorites from outer space, and in many minerals all over the world. Wikipedia has some great information on nanobacterium, and it is all kind of mind blowing.

Just take this one quote from a recent article on nanobacterium:
"Recent evidence suggests a role for nanobacteria in a growing number of human diseases, including renal stone formation, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer."

I am now wondering if nanobacterium can only eat nanosized particles? Anyway, chew on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanobacterium

forget viral, it's pandemic

super cute.

secrets

PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God from Frank Warren on Vimeo.

wanna share any secrets?

i feel less valuable because my dad left me too, when he divorced linda. but i don't miss him any less.

book review: mindset

by Carol S. Dweck, Ph. D.

This book somewhat subversively takes on the overachievers in America, well the overachievers who think that they are entitled to their status by nature of their genius.

Let me start over: Dweck posits in the book that there are two types of people: fixed mindset people and growth mindset people. The fixed mindset people feel that whatever their intellectual status is currently, that is fixed, and really they can’t do anything about it. No getting smarter or, for that matter, growing dumber. In the overachiever crowd, many of these people were in the gifted and talented classes at school and now, as they have aged, rather than fail at a new endeavor, they decide to avoid any project where there is a potential for failure. The growth mindset people, by comparison, are always looking for new things to try, are not afraid of failure, and they know that through hard work, you can become better at things.

Dweck then reviews different areas in our lives where our mindset might be beneficial or detrimental to our lives: school, work, children, relationships, and leadership. Not being afraid to fail can make us stretch further and try new things. We might be capable of more than we expect. Maybe failure is ok sometimes. While fixed mindset people are good to have in jobs which are highly repetitive, as they prefer to master a topic, and continue working on that topic.

Peppered throughout the book are stories of people who have changed their mindsets or who have begun to better understand the mindsets of their colleagues.

In first or second grade I was not put into the gifted and talented program...and I am still trying to prove I belonged! :)

(Click the image above to see it in more detail.)

californication

Really people, this is a great show. And while the summaries of the show say it is about a writer who is on the skids, and his family...well, that is what I think it is about. We just finished the whole first season and LOVE it. LOVE. Best show ever. Really. Watch it on Netflix.

book review: stop getting ripped off

by Bob Sullivan

One of my favorite personal finance books is, Getting A Financial Life: Personal Finance in your 20’s and 30’s. I bought the book for all of my siblings at one point or another because I think the book has a lot to offer. I really like this new book as well. The book is subtitled, Why Consumers Get Screwed, and How You can Always Get a Fair Deal. Sullivan does a great job outlining how industry’s goals, making a profit, are not aligned with your best interest, getting things at the best price.

What I found most useful in the book was how he outlined in detail the fees associated with purchases such as buying a house or your cell phone contract. He goes through the HUD-1 form, explaining, for example, fees associated with Title Insurance should bring up a red flag in your mind at closing.

He also separates the readers into three buckets when he talks about credit cards: 1. People who pay off hteir card in full every month, or deadbeats to the credit card industry, 2. People who sometimes carry a balance, and 3. People who always carry a balance. Sullivan then explains how best to utilize your credit depending on the type of credit user.

The most useful chapter to me, however, was the chapter on “Getting a 21st Century Raise.” He explains how you can go about utilizing your off hours to generate extra income. I really liked some of his ideas about “having the conversation” with your boss about a raise, what you need to put together to get the raise, and what to do if you don’t get the raise.

As some of you know, Brent and I conceptualize money differently. He is great at tracking where he is spending money, but I need a plan looking to the future. For me, spent money is gone, so of little consequence. To get over this difference, we created a one page document. The first chart has our each of our incomes, yearly and monthly, gross. The second chart lists all of our debt: student loans, etc, laid out in total, and with our monthly amount owed. The third chart lays out our fixed expenses for the month: cell phones, TIVO, rent, etc. I then take table one (income) and subtract table three (monthly expenses) which equals the amount of money we have left at the end of the month to tackle our combined debt. We update the page monthly and have been using this method for about a year, to great success. It really allows us to see how much money we are paying off. (If you would like a copy of our sheet, drop me an email.)

Sullivan advocates a similar approach in his book, and calls it a debt map.

I think this book is great. By the way, this is another “early” review…which I think is pretty fun. The book is due to be published January 2010.

rainstorm and a guy walking down the street

Took this shot the other evening out my favorite window in our apartment.

fun short video of an artist at work

Chris Piascik from Quarter Productions on Vimeo.

article review

I think I sent this article out to most of my readers, but just in case...

The first few paragraphs of the article is below (click below to go to the whole article). The article says, in very short, that:

1. Taking vitamins is at the least a waste, and at worst, harmful for your health.
2. Taking tamoxifen can reduce the incidence of breast cancer in half.

Yet, we continue to take vitamins and not tamoxifen.

Why? Why wouldn't we take the wonder drugs? Money? Capitalism? Someone can't make money on the drugs that work, so they aren't proscribed? People avoiding breast cancer would be bad? A drain on society?

Interesting, especially given the recent recommendation that mammograms begin when women turn 50, rather than 40.

I am not sure what to make of this other than I am frustrated. I just picked up another weight loss book this week at the library and all I kept thinking while reading was this is all crap. In one part of the book they are telling the reader to eat better, exercise more, and take vitamins, while in another part of the book they are saying that my thyroid is out of whack. Great. How do I re-whack it? That would be news I could use.

NYTimes, November 13, 2007
Medicines to Deter Some Cancers Are Not Taken

By GINA KOLATA

Many Americans do not think twice about taking medicines to prevent heart disease and stroke. But cancer is different. Much of what Americans do in the name of warding off cancer has not been shown to matter, and some things are actually harmful. Yet the few medicines proved to deter cancer are widely ignored.

Take prostate cancer, the second-most commonly diagnosed cancer in the United States, surpassed only by easily treated skin cancers. More than 192,000 cases of it will be diagnosed this year, and more than 27,000 men will die from it.

And, it turns out, there is a way to prevent many cases of prostate cancer. A large and rigorous study found that a generic drug, finasteride, costing about $2 a day, could prevent as many as 50,000 cases each year. Another study found that finasteride’s close cousin, dutasteride, about $3.50 a day, has the same effect.

Nevertheless, researchers say, the drugs that work are largely ignored. And supplements that have been shown to be not just ineffective but possibly harmful are taken by men hoping to protect themselves from prostate cancer.

As the nation’s war on cancer continues, with little change in the overall cancer mortality rate, many experts on cancer and public health say more attention should be paid to prevention.

the value of a newspaper

I was talking to my co-worker today, a former documentary film maker, about the new media model. He pointed out something that I think gets lost a lot when we talk about the end of media as we know it. Namely, that paying for a newspaper was basically having that media filter out what was important to you. I think that today, we are more self-centered and therefore less interested in reading about topics that might not be of interest to us, but are good for us to know about. Kind of like eating your veggies. The more you eat, the more you want to eat.

Sorry to be behind on the blog. Visitors are gone, so game on! I have a few books to review, and some other thoughts of feminism coming up.

from brent's blog: the future of news is NOW

We've been hearing a lot lately about the impending demise of the mainstream news media. Newspapers around the country are failing or in big trouble, including some of the premier names. Ditto for the major (American) newsmagazines and even the network TV news divisions. It is true that businesses--even whole industries-- come and go. But many people fear that the decline of news organizations could leave us without an important check on government corruption, abuse, and oppression.

Most commentators are blaming the Internet for these changes. Craigslist allows anyone to post for free the kind of classified ads they once had to pay a newspaper to print. Google News allows anyone to browse the stories from news sites around the world. And many papers themselves put their content on the web for free. Certainly the Internet has already changed the music industry and seems poised to change television and the movies. Why should newspapers be immune?

But there's one type of news source that no one seems much worried about even though it faces intense pressure from the internet: celebrity news. While the Great Recession has taken a toll on even the venerable People Magazine, this area of news seems vibrant and healthy. It seems that because celebrity news isn't considered "important news" by the traditional media, no one has spent much time wondering what it might have going for it.

First off, millions of people actually find celebrity news to be interesting enough that they're willing to shell out money for it. The fact of the matter is, a lot of people just aren't that willing to pay for news about corruption in City Hall. They may be glad that the newspaper is out there exposing it, but they'd rather not shell out to read about it. Lack of interest isn't created by Craigslist or Google News. More likely it's created by Facebook and Twitter and the bazillion other things that people have to entertain themselves with. Competition for our attention spans has never been spread over a wider spectrum o media: live performances, print, radio, television, movies, gaming platforms, Internet websites, cellphones, cellphone apps, and on and on.

But there are those who are still interested in the news and willing to put down the game controller long enough to read a magazine or newspaper. So far, however, the traditional news media hasn't been very creative in thinking about when and where to reach them. Where do most people buy their celebrity magazines? At the checkout stand. You're standing there in line and you see an intriguing cover. Jumping online to TMZ.com isn't an option in the grocery store line (at least not just yet) and so the magazine has you. The downside to this approach is that People and the like don't have a lot of steady subscribers. But the upside is that they have found a way to position themselves in a time and place that works for them.

Now think about your local newspaper. It probably gets delivered to your door every morning (or it would if you actually subscribed to it). When you wake up in the morning do you want to sit down and read the paper with your coffee like grandpa used to? Or are you checking your Blackberry and looking up what the morning commute is like right now? If you drive to work you cannot safely or efficiently read the newspaper (no, seriously, you cannot read and drive, yes I mean you). Would your boss approve if the first 30 minutes of your day was spent reading the newspaper? Finish your workday, drive home, put the kids to bed and all you want to do it watch some entertaining TV.

The newspaper is obsolete. The general interest news magazine is obsolete. This is not something that will happen in the future--this has already happened. A generation has grown to adulthood without the habit of reading the paper in the morning. No amount of handwringing will change this back. Although it's dangerous to generalize from one's personal experience, the way I interact with the news is drastically different from the way I did when I was in college. I used to subscribe to the paper Wall Street Journal. I now read it only online, along with the New York Times. But I also use Google Reader to subscribe to a number of blogs and news feeds (including a couple of blogs by the Wall Street Journal). On my walk to work each morning I listen to podcasts from NPR and the Economist, but also to recorded speeches from my former law school and elsewhere. Today I was listening to Alan Greenspan speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations about the financial crisis--a speech which I'm not even sure I saw reported anywhere. And perhaps worst of all from the perspective of my local newspaper, lately I've taken to picking up a free copy of the political newspaper Politico. While most of the country can get Politico only online, actual paper is given away free in the DC area. I take it to my desk and peruse it each morning it's printed. But it's short and focused and relevant.

I'm a news junkie and yet my local newspaper, the venerable Washington Post, is not in the mix. I don't have time to read the physical paper; the website is poorly designed and frustrating to use; the blogs I followed for a while were uninteresting; and the podcasts nonexistent as far as I know. If there are great blogs or podcasts why isn't the Post doing a better job of letting me know they're out there? I get a letter every month urging me to buy a subscription to a format I'm unlikely ever to go back to. And I like newspapers, I genuinely miss getting the physical object. I remember from my earliest days seeing my dad at the kitchen table drinking coffee and reading the paper and thinking, "this is what grownups do." I subscribed to the Wall Street Journal as a senior in high school and read every single issue (really) for 15 years. But my nostalgia isn't strong enough for me to go back to a traditional newspaper subscription and I doubt that nostalgia will be a viable business model for the newspapers.

I don't have all the answers and maybe I don't have any. But the traditional media had better recognize that you cannot save something which is already extinct. If anyone in my generation ought to be reading a newspaper, it's me. But I've moved on. My children won't even know that there was something to be nostalgic about. We so readily and condescendingly accept that factory workers displaced by globalization need "job training" and "new skills." Why should white collar reporters be immune. Buy a Flip video camera and make us a video, get a decent microphone (actually, shell out for an excellent one) and make us a podcast. Do it now. Do it like your future depends on it.

obama weather

http://obama-weather.com/Obama/s/20001