Witness, accept, love, and know thyself. Life boiled right down to its essence.
I urge you to subscribe to dailygood.org for an exciting and eye-opening way to begin each day.
Paths Are Made By Walking
Coaching for the third act of life. 65+
Witness, accept, love, and know thyself. Life boiled right down to its essence.
I urge you to subscribe to dailygood.org for an exciting and eye-opening way to begin each day.
As you must know by now, America’s foremost movie critic, Roger Ebert, passed away last week. I had read a few of his reviews over the years but knew little/nothing about him as a man. As it turns out, I wish I had known him. As part of the commemoration of his life which I read somewhere on the Internet, I ran across this blog of his written four years go. At that point he was suffering with thyroid cancer and the treatments that subsequently removed part of his jaw. In the midst of his trials and tribulations and pain–never mind the embarrassment he must have felt with his appearance and inability to talk–he penned this essay for his blog.
As I read Ebert’s words, I felt like I was reading my own mind–his thoughts and feelings so closely mirrored my own. This was a surprise because I had never really talked very much to anyone else about what I thought about my own death, probably because my ego is so invested in being alive forever (so to speak) that it (ego) was incapable of contemplating its own demise or non-existence.
Thinking about death for me is scary. What am I scared of, you ask. As Ebert suggests, it’s the “approach path” more than the fact itself. His final remarks about kindness sum up a lot of what has been my conscious rationale for living. Add to “kindness” my desire to make people laugh, to do what I could to relieve pain and suffering in the world, and to help folks discover how to use their minds to grow intellectually, spiritually, and to cultivate their dreams. Maybe this is “what it all means!”
(For additional pleasure you might want to read Ebert’s last blog: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/a-leave-of-presence ) Also, you might find the “quiz” Ebert mentions in the last paragraph (see link) stimulating for your self-understanding as well. I did. I just received a copy of Ebert’s book, Life Itself, which also bears mention. The chapters are relatively short, first person, and confessional. Bedtime reading for me.
GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT
by Roger Ebert
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to
animals. I don’t respect the law; I have total irreverence for
anything connected with society except that which makes the roads
safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper, and the old men and old
women warmer in winter and happier in summer.
Oh, but this struck me as a message worth me hearing and repeating. What I do every day in the name of efficiency, convenience, and security–not so much profitability–is astonishing, even sickening. This article from one of my favorite magazines, Orion (great writing, no ads), is a more than gentle reminder of some basic lapses in my daily pursuit of what’s important, what makes a difference, what’s right. Shape up, Mark. Back to basics.
People elsewhere are better at this language. At a certain fork in the road of automatization, Europeans chose to have more time, and they work far less than we do and get much longer vacations. We chose to have more stuff, the stuff sold to us through those beckoning adjectives—bigger, better, faster: Jet Skis, extra cars, second homes, motor homes, towering slab TVs, if not the time to enjoy them or to enjoy less commodified pleasures. These may be the wages of inarticulateness.
Yesterday, one of my earliest heroes died. Van Cliburn was the youngest person (age 23) ever to win the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow, the same year I graduated from college. This was the year I also listened to Saint Saens Third Symphony for Orchestra and Organ for the first time and wept copious tears for its sheer beauty (the piece was later a favorite of my former parents-in-law). And 1958 was just a three years after I was first swept away by the last movement of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, once again attended by tears.
Maybe what moved me so much was that I was roughly the same age as Van Cliburn when he won the prize–as an American (for the first time) and as the youngest pianist ever, in 1958. I was finishing college; he had accomplished a miracle. I was humbled by his feat, awed by his talent and self-discipline, and vaguely jealous of his popularity and almost “rock star” fame. At the time, I saw
what an incredible distance there was between what he had already accomplished and what might be possible for me…ever…in any field.
This gave me food for thought for a lot of years. Now, as I read of his death, I have grown beyond youthful envy: he’s gone, I’m not, and there is much more left for me to do, but probably not at the keyboard. My life performance has been played at a different tempo from his, in different keys, and in wildly different concert halls with mixed reviews, and no prizes yet. But I plan to play on in my own way, trying new melodies, techniques and venues, driven no more by envy or despair–but only by hope and love for those around me.
Here are two selections of music you might enjoy, the pieces Van Cliburn played at the competition. The first is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto played by the master himself; the second piece he also played at the competition, Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. However, this rendition is performed by Olga Kern, whose playing was introduced to me by Elizabeth Van Ingen. Van Cliburn would certainly have approved of the way Kern plays from her soul with passion and deep feeling. I think she’s great.
Just click on the photo.
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It’s about time, I’d say. I can’t describe the amount of time I’ve wasted trying to figure out the CAPTCHA in order to send a poem or interesting article to a friend or two. Good riddance I’d say.
However, I’m not sure the replacement is a whole lot better. I don’t know about you, but after the last election campaign–in fact, well before that–I have become sickened with advertising in general and especially with ads that are intrusive and virtually mandatory. For example, when I go to Yahoo to check out an article–perhaps one about the budget or war–I am subjected first to a 30 second ad for a new car, lite beer, or a remedy for erectile dysfunction, delivered at increased volume, before I can even begin to view the site I’m interested in and make a decision about whether it’s worth my time or not. That means listening to 30 seconds of nonsense as a requirement to make a five second decision. And there’s no way I know of to bypass or squelch those ads. If I want to evaluate the news site, I have to listen first to an ad. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Internet advertisers kill text-based CAPTCHA
Rather than taking just a mere glance to figure out, recent studies show that a typical CAPTCHA takes, on average, 14 seconds to solve, with some taking much, much longer. Multiply that by the millions and millions of verifications per day, and Web users as a whole are wasting years and years of their lives just trying to prove they’re not actually computers. This has led many companies to abandon the age-old system in favor of something not only more secure, but also easier to use for your average Webgoer: Ad-based verification, which can actually cut the time it takes to complete the task in half.
Now when performing a Web task, such as purchasing event tickets fromTicketmaster, for example, you may no longer be met with a swirling mix of letters and numbers, but instead by an advertisement or common brand logo. Rather than demanding that you decipher a completely pointless combination of fuzzy words, you could simply be asked to recite a well-known company slogan. The security pop-up might even ask you to view an ad image and then type the company’s name.
The new system is turning out to be a big time saver for just about everyone, and Web users are typically able to confirm their humanity much faster than with the standard verification tool. New York-based Solve Media—one of the leaders of the ad-based verification revolution—claims the ads it uses for user confirmation take about seven seconds to complete, cutting wasted time in half.
But ad-based verification isn’t the only revolutionary idea looking to usurp the standard CAPTCHA’s throne. Both puzzle and math-based variations on the tool have also started to gain traction. Puzzle versions of the tool ask you to perform a simple task, like draw a circle around a specific object in an image, while the mathematical option requests that you solve some simple arithmetic. Both of these variants allow you to confirm your humanity without deciphering a garbled string of text, but they lack the revenue-generating capability of the ad-based method. And because of this added monetary bonus of the commercial model, both the puzzle and math verification tools have less of a chance of becoming commonplace.
CAPTCHA—which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”—first gained prominence in the early 2000s as a way to keep Web forms from being spammed by computer bots. It’s impossible to tell how much time Web users as a whole have wasted as a result of the increasingly difficult text strings, but with much simpler alternatives finally beginning to catch on, it appears that the fuzzy text nonsense is finally meeting its end. Advertisements in general are usually seen as a hindrance to daily life, but in this case, ads will actually make your life easier. What a novel concept!
I happened upon the following Blog quite by accident. Glad I found it because it saves me the work of writing an almost identical piece myself–(I deliberately omitted the blog’s last line.)
After the 1982 Tylenol Tampering scare, where someone laced bottles of Tylenol with cyanide, manufacturers of nearly all food and drug products have begun making (and marking) their products ‘tamper resistant’ and the user must bear this cost built-into the price of the product. To make you feel safer, they have adopted the phrase “Sealed for your protection”
If you know me… I see things differently. It’s really not sealed for your protection.. it’s sealed for THEIR protection. No company wants to be affected with product tampering. They all learned from Johnson & Johnson, certainly the lawsuit repercussions could drive any healthy business into financial ruin.
How ‘resistant’ are these packages? Actually, some are very little.
Years ago a box of pills had a folded tab for easy open and close. Many are replaced with a glued flap… Tamper resistant? maybe not… Tamper evident? Yes.
English is a lovely language, probably the word ‘resistant’ has more legal or marketing sense than the word ‘evident’. Either way, we must tear off, zip, strip, fold, crack & peel off layers of plasticized foil just to get at the product. It is what it is… this is the world we live in now and it’s not going to be any less….(last line omitted)
* * * * *
The Tylenol events that initiated the “sealed for your protection” regulations can be traced back to 1982 when 7 people died in the Chicago area after ingesting cyanide-laced Tylenol. The FDA responded to this crisis by requiring OTC medications to have packaging that is what we now call “tamper-evident.” After the seven deaths, the FBI investigated 270 more copy cat product tampering incidents and found a number of guilty individuals. It was estimated that the FDA’s new regulations initially cost between $500,000,000 and $1 billion as industry redesigned packaging, purchased new equipment and even built new manufacturing facilities. Now, the regulations cover almost anything ingested or used by humans from containers bought in stores.
This is what my father used to call “a fifty dollar reaction to a 10 cent offense.” Not that any death for any reason, should be marginalized.
An aside: in contrast, consider this massive governmental response to a fairly limited number of “deaths-by-poisoned- medicines” contrasted with the government’s puny reaction to people killed in schools and theaters and bars and homes in large numbers by military style weapons. (But that’s a topic for another blog: see “More Guns Needed?”) Or think about deaths caused by driving while texting or drinking, or exposure to radioactive materials etc.
Anyway, we now know who to blame or thank for the “protective packaging” and its various permutations that both save and plague consumers, old and young, healthy and arthritic, every day. Try this experiment: be in a hurry, and then try to get the top off (or back on) a bottle of Ibuprofen, Milk of Magnesia, Pepto-Bismol, eye drops–you name it–in the middle of the night, or with a screaming headache or child, or just sensing the first intense urges of diarrhea. At least we now know who to blame when we break our fingernails on plastic seals, or fail to release our heart medicine from its plastic-foil bubble, or cut our hands trying to remove rigid clamshell packaging surrounding a single little item, or lose the battle of getting into a bottle of Nyquill because it is impossible to push the top down with sufficient force while turning it at the same time.
In my case, I even go to war when trying to get into my single portion of apple sauce without spilling it— as the foil cover initially resists, and then splits when it finally succombs to my tugging. Never mind that the tab that is provided to pull the top off is both too small to be gripped effectively by large, old fingers or resists the grip of fingers that have been exposed to even the thinest film of hand lotion or cooking oil? All of these problems are exacerbated by the decisions of companies to really protect the consumer, (and themselves), by using Super Glue to affix the “removable” foil to the carton.
The only response that I have found to be even minimally effective is laughter–mostly at myself, as the applesauce spills onto my shirt or the counter, the slippery coated Advil pills scatter themselves all over the bathroom floor at midnight, or the bottle of MOM that I thought was closed and sealed tips over and spills down the shelves of my medicine cabinet.
As I say, laughter may well prove to be the best medicine and fortunately, it does not reside in a “tamper evident” container.
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As passed by the Congress:A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a Free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
As ratified by the States: A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The Second Amendment Defined:
The Second Amendment is a part of the Bill of Rights, which are the first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution and the framework to elucidate upon the freedoms of the individual. The Bill of Rights were proposed and sent to the states by the first session of the First Congress. They were later ratified on December 15, 1791.
The first 10 Amendments to the United States Constitution were introduced by James Madison as a series of legislative articles and came into effect as Constitutional Amendments following the process of ratification by three-fourths of the States on December 15, 1791.
Stipulations of the 2nd Amendment:
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects the right of the individual to keep and bear firearms.
The right to arm oneself is viewed as a personal liberty to deter undemocratic or oppressive governing bodies from forming and to repel impending invasions. Furthermore, the right to bear arms was instituted within the Bill of Rights to suppress insurrection, participate and uphold the law, enable the citizens of the United States to organize a militia, and to facilitate the natural right to self-defense.
The Second Amendment was developed as a result of the tyrannous rule of the British parliament. Colonists were often oppressed and forced to pay unjust taxes at the hand of the unruly parliament. As a result, the American people yearned for an Amendment that would guarantee them the right to bear arms and protect themselves against similar situations. The Second Amendment was drafted to provide for the common defense and the general welfare of the United States through the ability to raise and support militias.
Court Cases Tied into the Second Amendment
In District of Columbia v. Heller the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm to use for traditionally lawful purposes, such as defending oneself within their home or on their property. The court case ruled that the Amendment was not connected to service in a militia.
Controversy
The gun debate in the United States widely revolves around the intended interpretation of the Second Amendment. Those who support gun rights claim that the founding fathers developed and subsequently ratified the Second Amendment to guarantee the individual’s right to keep and bear arms. Those who want more stringent gun laws feel that the founding fathers directed this Amendment solely to the formation of militias and are thus, at least by theory, archaic
Maybe I have heard more of this than most people because I helped found one alternative school and led another.
I guess I sort of look at my marriage as Jack Gilbert looks at Icarus flying in this poem. I got married, and after 33 years, was divorced, and they said: “He failed.” A beautiful and wonderful woman to relish each day for thirty three exciting years, two magnificent children, a constellation of dynamic in-laws, four inspiring schools, one crazy hardware store in the Adirondacks–failed? I don’t think so. So 1997 was merely the end of a major triumph. And I’ve had more since.
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph. |
As the New Year dawns, I find guidance in Mary Oliver’s poems about “mornings.” I trust that you will also appreciate the wisdom contained in these three poems.
This selection comes from The Writers’ Almanac 12/30/2012. I include the program’s prelude as well as the three poems.
Happy New Morning.