Cotton-Pickin' Days 1.0

Despite all the news about Google Book Search formerly known as Google Print, I hadn't bothered to check it out until river2sea72 mentioned it. Out of curiosity, I keyed in some thoughts that had been running around in my head these last few days (and my own name, but that turned up nothing). Based on these results, I think Google Book Search could be a success because I found a couple of books I'd be interested in buying.

"impatience is a virtue"

For me, impatience is a virtue, and patience a vice, since patience is so often an excuse for inactivity.
~Paragraphs on Translation by Peter Newmark

Impatience is a virtue and I get a little more angelic every day I live this shit.
~Displicit by Bob Janis

overreacting mothers

It's possible we devote most of our lives to fulfilling the craving for a positive self image. How often do we find ourselves: overreacting at even the hint of criticism?
~Buddhism for Mothers by Sarah Napthali

Overreacting when your child does something bad can be a natural part of parenting. Often this stems from fatigue, stress, and the belief that you should be able to keep your child from doing bad things; and that if she does bad things, it's because you're a bad parent. It is helpful to remember that one person can't really control the actions of another.
~Stepping Stones 10 Steps to Seizing Passion and Purpose by Timothy L Sams

"moving to London"

The two main reasons given for moving to London were to take up a job and to enter higher education; a few women moved either with a man or to join a man in London and then looked for a job after they arrived.
~Changing Britain: Families and Households in the 1900s

At lunchtime we Japanese staff sometimes went to a Chinese restaurant in the East End, where we would be less conspicuous - we weren't really supposed to go to cheap low-grade places like that. I was told before moving to London that Senior Clerks like me should make sure we ate at restaurants with proper tablecloths.
~The History of Mitsubishi Corporation in London: 1915 to Present Day by Pernille Rudlin

Kleenex Anti-Viral Tissue

Warning on the package:

It is a violation of Federal law to use this product in a manner inconsistent with its labeling. Use only as a facial tissue.

Pointer from MedPundit

xposted public_health

Marv has had a Dilbert daily calendar in his office for over five years now. Occasionally, I'll take a peek and it always makes me chuckle. Now Scott Adams has a Dilbert Blog that will probably be just as entertaining. The guy is prolific!

When I see news stories about people all over the world who are experiencing hardships, I worry about them, and I rack my brain wondering how I can make a difference. So I decided to start my own blog. That way I won't have time to think about other people.
*****
The blogger's philosophy goes something like this:

Everything that I think about is more fascinating than
the crap in your head.

~The Dilbert Newsletter, October 25, 2005

Via The Health Care Blog

Rosamond Purcell's full-size re-creation of
17th century naturalist Olaus Worm's "Wunderkammer".

The wunderkammer idea came about in a world before museums. Before there were cameras to capture the quirks, strangeness, and charm of the world, people would collect and display natural and manmade oddities in their homes, sometimes devoting entire rooms to their collections. Imagine shells, eggs, taxidermied birds and animals, travel souvenirs, and anything strangely shaped (a vegetable with a face? Yes, please!) arranged in tableaux to underscore their extraordinariness.

~Vogue, October 2005

Not being much of a collector and not having much space to display anything, I've never had a wunderkammer aka "room of wonders" or "cabinet of curiosities". lizardek keeps a small shadowbox that could double as a miniature wunderkammer. And my dad loves to collect curios that dangle from ceiling beams and lounge on every flat surface.

...initially, these universes in miniature were private pleasures, invitations to escape, to dream, to reflect on nature and our place in it.

When we finally settle down in our Singapore home, I may start one or two wunderkammers of my own. Perhaps with a window, book, or genetics theme.

"To build a wunderkammer, you need ingenuity, innocence, and eyes that go 360 degrees," says Kean Etro. ...You don't have to go out and actually scour the globe for reason-challenging bits and pieces.

What kind of wunderkammer would you create?

We were at my sister's house the other night when she asked who wanted coffee. Marv replied with his usual - "I'm OK." My mom, whose first language is Chinese, asked what he meant by that.

After we all discussed it some more and puzzled over OK's etymology (OK originated in the 1800's as a joke spelling "oll korrect"), we concluded that OK has so many different usages that it leads to frequent miscommunication. For most of us whose best language is English, "I'm OK" means "I'm fine just the way I am." But it can also seem confusingly similar to "Yes. OK."

Another example: if you say "OK" just to show that you've heard someone, it can also make it seem like you agree with them or are OK with whatever it is they're proposing to do. Dictionary.com has seven different definitions just for the adjectival form:

1. Agreeable; acceptable: Was everything OK with your stay?
   
2. Satisfactory; good: an OK fellow.
   
3. Not excellent and not poor; mediocre: made an OK presentation.
   
4. In proper or satisfactory operational or working order: Is the battery OK?
   
5. Correct: That answer is OK.
   
6. Uninjured; safe: The skier fell but was OK.
   
7. Fairly healthy; well: Thanks to the medicine, the patient was OK.

This reminds me to be more careful about the way I use "OK" in Vietnam where the official language is not English. I know my helper sometimes says "OK" when it's clear that she doesn't understand what I'm trying to tell her. I often ask her, "OK or not?" and even then, it's often not oll korrect.

How many different ways do you use "OK"?

If I were ever asked in a job interview about my strengths and weaknesses, one of the strengths I would talk about would be my ability to make decisions.

When it comes to my personal life, I can say without a doubt that all the decisions I've made have been right for me at that moment in time. When faced with a decision, I always have a strong gut feeling that tells me what to do. I may feel a twinge of regret sometimes, but most often, I am able to go forward and carry out my plans.

I think I live up to what Paul Wolfowitz*, current head of the World Bank, believes a good decision maker should be. In the July/August issue of The Atlantic (yes, I'm still making my way through it), he said this about decision-making:

I think someone once said that decision-making is usually trying to choose the least crappy of the various alternatives. It does seem to me that so many things we have to decide are fifty-five--forty-five decisions, or sixty--forty decisions. Arrogance is one of the worst failings in a senior decision-maker. I really admire people like President Bush and Harry Truman, who were good at it. Dean Acheson said about Truman that he was free of that most crippling of emotions, regret. Once he made a decision, he moved on. And I think that's what characterizes really good decision-makers.

There is this sort of intellectual notion that there is such a thing as perfect knowledge, and you wait to get perfect knowledge before you make a decision. In the first place, even if there were perfect knowledge, it would be too late by the time you got it. And secondly, there is no such thing. Accepting the imperfection of knowledge is a very important part of being a great decision-maker.

Are you a good decision maker?

*I'm not exactly a fan, but I did find his interview interesting.

John Evans at SYNTAGMA was kind enough to dig up the references to the concept of "originative intellectual workers" that I mentioned a few weeks ago. He quotes from HG Wells's autobiography and Colin Wilson's Beyond the Outsider.

If I'm interpreting the excerpts correctly, "originative intellectual workers" refer to people who are trying to break free of life's petty little concerns and divine a greater meaning or purpose. I'm still almost as mystified as before, though. Maybe I need to read the two references in their entirety to actually "get it".

Clive Allen of Gone Away left a comment in response to John's post that made more sense to me:

HG suffered from the common misconception of his time - the belief that science had freed man to become more than he had ever been and that this was a recent phenomenon (it might be called "generationism" - the belief that man's intelligence and understanding evolves further with each generation, thus leading to a form of "generation snobbism"). The plain fact is that man has always been an "originative intellectual worker" and that some generations produce giants that are not equalled for centuries (witness the Ancient Greeks, the Renaissance, cave paintings indeed). And the greater availability of leisure time that science has afforded us has done little but add a few inches to our waistlines. Man thinks best when under pressure.

John and Clive are clearly closer to being originative intellectual workers than I am.

Thanks to abigailvr, Stephen and I are totally addicted to watching Animal Planet's live Panda Video Cam. Mama Mei Xiang, a giant panda at Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo, is so in love with her newborn boy cub. She's always cuddling, cradling, and licking him all over. Kinda like me and Stephen!

The San Diego Zoo has another fun panda cam to watch along with a polar bear cam, ape cam, and elephant cam.

From the July/August 2005 issue of The Atlantic.

Kids who do well in school don't get as much time off when they misbehave. (Shucks.)

No Smart Bully Left Behind

[Referring to the U.S. 2001 No Child Left Behind Act which tied federal school funding to performance on annual tests.]

Because "suspended students [make up] a very large share of the students who do not take the test," the study concludes that testing may give schools an incentive to keep their best students in school even when they misbehave, and to keep low-performing students out.

Who's been refilling my bowl surreptitiously?

If You Serve It, They Will Eat

Researchers gave fifty-four test subjects bowls of tomato soup--half of which were "self-refilling" bowls equipped with a hidden tube that slowly pumped soup in through the bottom as the subject ate. Those whose bowls had been refilled ate 73 percent more than the others, but reported themselves no more sated. And when asked to estimate how many calories they'd consumed, the subjects with normal bowls were more or less on target, underestimating their intake by only 32.3 calories--whereas those whose soup had been replenished slurped up 140.5 more calories than they thought.

Writers are no longer just writers but, in H.G. Wells's term, "originative intellectual workers".

Finding a top-gun agent or publisher is all but impossible these days unless you subscribe to the block- and bonk-buster paradigm. On the other hand, the originative intellectual worker quickly masters a skill-set allowing proficiency across crafts and technologies. The OIW emerges on both sides of the track, as producer and consumer. In blogging it's almost impossible to separate the two.

~SYNTAGMA

I'd like to be an originative intellectual worker. It sounds both romantic and omnipotent at the same time. I've been trying to find more about this reference all day, but haven't succeeded. Has anyone else heard of "originative intellectual workers" before?

In the August issue of O Magazine, I learned a few things about dining etiquette.

• When buttering your bread, first cut a piece of butter off the slab and put it on your bread plate. Break, don't cut, bread and rolls, and then butter one bite at a time.
  
  Good thing I take big bites.



• Think BMW--bread, meal, water--when you look down at your place setting. Your dinner roll will always be on the left , your meal in the middle, your beverage on the right.
  
  At a company dinner I attended, there was so much confusion about which water or bread belonged to whom that it had the waitstaff of a very chichi restaurant rolling their eyes at us.



• Never lift your pinkie when drinking from a teacup or anything else
  
  I've never been able to lift my pinkie while drinking because I always get a cramp in my hand. I also get hand cramps whenever I use chopsticks for too long.



• Always hold your wineglass by the stem.
  
  This will take some balance. I once embarrassed myself at a course on political fundraising because I had trouble balancing my paper cup of soda with my paper plate of food.



• Never pick up a glass when you're being toasted.
  
  Must remember this if I am ever so honored. Perhaps at a fete thrown by Forbes.com?!



• Do not powder your nose or apply lipstick at the table, though a bit of clear gloss, dabbed on discreetly, is okay. If you have to cough, cough into your napkin, but never use your napkin as a tissue.
  
  Couldn't avoid using my napkin as well as everyone else's napkin to blow my nose when I was sick last week.



• Soup should be sipped from the side of the spoon.
  
  Sounds like something only a contortionist could do.



• Don't dive into your food until all of your dining partners are served. If they've been served and you haven't, advise them to begin so their meals won't get cold.
  
  So let me get this straight. If your food hasn't come, I shouldn't eat. But to be polite, you should tell me to go ahead. What's a hungry woman to do?!

Maybe it's safer if I just continue ordering delivery and eating at home.

We travel with Stephen at least five times a year. Four of those times are on short-haul flights to Singapore, each flight lasting about 2 hours. At least once a year, we make the journey back to California and that trip usually takes around 20 hours. Luckily, we fly Singapore Airlines, which has a great inflight entertainment system with dedicated kids' TV and radio channels that Stephen loves. And, the flight attendants are more than helpful and attentive.

As much as we love traveling on Singapore Airlines, though, they don't have a Sky Nanny like Gulf Air. Each Sky Nanny is apparently trained in childcare and childhood education at Norland College. Check out what they do for you:

• When you arrive at the airport, your Sky Nanny will be at the boarding gate to meet and escort your family onto the aircraft and take you to a dedicated seating area in the aircraft.


• They’ll also organise drinks for children and do their meal service during the main bar service so you’re free to assist your children if necessary - without interrupting your own meal.


• They’ll also find lots of things to keep your children occupied throughout the journey. We even have our own games we can loan them.


• ...a Sky Nanny will be keeping a watchful eye on your child should you doze off or just want to get engrossed in a book or a movie.

Maybe David Brooks of the New York Times should have considered hiring his own Sky Nanny. His family had trouble keeping it together on flights that were only four hours long.

...the pilots emerge to complain that because of the kids' crying they can't hear the air traffic controllers (this actually happened to my family).

Pointer to Sky Nanny from Asia Travel Blog, pointer to NY Times article from Blogging Baby.

Over the past few months, I've broken so much glass that I started worrying about bad omens. OldSuperstitions.com tells me there's nothing to worry about.

• To break uncolored glass in any form but that of a mirror or a bottle is a fortunate omen; but if the glass is red, future trouble and anxiety are implied. If green glass is broken, bitter disappointment will be your lot.


• Spilling wine is an auspicious omen, if it is done accidentally; while to drop a glass of wine and break the glass is a token of a happy marriage and enduring affection.


• Breaking a drinking glass is only bad luck when proposing a toast.


• Breaking a mirror is seven years of bad luck.


• Breaking a glass bottle foretells misfortune.

The most worrisome part about breaking glass is making sure that all the itsy bitsy shards are picked up. Because we rely on houskeeping to keep the floors clean (we live in a serviced apartment), I don't own a vacuum cleaner and have to use a broom and dust pan.

I'm hoping there won't be a next time, but if there is, I plan to try a couple of tips I found online: use a rolled up ball of masking tape with the sticky side out or a piece of fresh white bread. Just make sure to throw both away well-wrapped in a sealed plastic bag so nobody mistakes it for a snack.

It's hard for me to imagine Stephen as a grade schooler let alone a jowly 40-year-old. A British family gets to take a peek at what their two children might look like if they continue their slovenly habits, such as drinking two liters of soda a day EACH. (BBC News, June 30, 2005)


Ten-year-old Jason and 8-year-old Joanna and how they might look at 40.

I, myself, am getting close to achieving this look. When I hit 40 in seven years, maybe I'll indulge in some plastic surgery*.

*Just kidding! I'd rather spend my money elsewhere.

Pointer from Blogging Baby.

Internews founder and president, David Hoffman, is counting down the days with marbles.

Hoffman points to a basin full of marbles he keeps in his office. His two younger daughters, by a second and recently ended marriage, gave it to him. They used actuarial tables to calculate his life expectancy and put in the bowl one marble for each week the tables say he has left. Every Monday, he takes one and puts it in his pocket, carries it all week, then on Sunday throws it away. He takes this week's marble from his pocket and rubs it, then says, "There are plenty of marbles left."

~Johns Hopkins Magazine, June 2005

If I tried this, I'd be tempted to add marbles every now and then instead of taking them out.