Iraq: The faces of California’s War Dead

On this day in 2003, the United States, along with coalition forces primarily from the United Kingdom, initiates war on Iraq

The toll can be told partly in who they left be­hind: nearly 300 chil­dren, more than 200 spouses, 35 brides and two grooms who nev­er made it to the al­tar.

In cit­ies and towns across the state, me­mori­als can be found for the 483 Cali­for­ni­ans who have died dur­ing the con­flict in Ir­aq.

Their faces and stor­ies are re­cor­ded here:
Iraq: The faces of California’s War Dead – California’s War Dead – Los Angeles Times.

See my post Thoughts on the end of the war in Iraq.

Writing Well

Advice I’m following to write well

My writing stinks.

That’s what the negative voice inside my head tells me as I struggle to compose these blog posts.

Writing is such hard work. Having an angry, hypercritical perfectionist perched like a vulture in my brain doesn’t make it any easier. “You’re too boring and stupid to write,” the voice assures me. “No one wants to read your crap.”

Flinching from vicious self-criticism, I struggle to find my way, trip over tangled thoughts, stumble on senseless sentences, frantically toss words in and just as frantically toss them out.

I’m never happy with the results. “Proof you’re an idiot,” sneers my harsh Inner Critic, whom I imagine looks like Simon Cowell.

Steve, this post is idiotic 

You’re not a writer, never will be

Give up!

Just as I’m about to give up, conceding that my Inner Critic is right: I have absolutely no talent at all for writing, I come across wonderful examples of truly bad writing, and from people actually paid to write!

Bad writers lift me up. To my abusive Inner Critic, that unrelenting voice in my head that delights in crushing any creative effort I attempt, I can smile and say, “See? I’m not that bad!”

The late Carlos Fuentes, Mexico’s most celebrated novelist, said that writing is a struggle against silence. I say writing is a struggle against my Inner Critic.

Where to get help if your Inner Critic won’t shut up…

Four Ways to Silence Your Inner Critic
by Marelisa Fabrega
“Our inner critic develops early in our lives, absorbing what we hear from others and what society expects from us. It’s not a voice that’s meant to go unchallenged, but rather a part of ourselves, which we can choose to ignore or confront. In addition, we can choose to listen to our inner critic only at the appropriate stage of the creative process.”

Writing A Draft? Silence That Inner Critic!
AboutFreelanceWriting.com
“Every writer I know or have ever heard of has an inner critic or inner editor that, if not silenced, at least while they are working on a rough draft, means nothing gets done. We need that voice that helps us edit our work, but not until we’ve got some work to edit.”

Why Your Inner Critic Is Your Best Friend
by Mark McGuinness
“If you think about it, you’d be in big trouble without an Inner Critic. Without some kind of internal quality filter, you’d be happy to churn out any old rubbish – and join the ranks of mediocrities. A finely honed critical faculty is one of the things that separates a creative professional from the legions of amateurs.”
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The Lazy Writer’s Way To Riches

Hey! I found a way to become a successful published author without having to knock my brains out writing or ever hear a peep from my caustic Inner Critic. My computer will do all the dirty work; I’ll rake in the cash and glory!

Patented Book Writing System Creates, Sells Hundreds of Thousands of Books On Amazon
A computer programmer has “written” 800,000 books using an algorithm, reports David J. Hill in this eye-opening post on SingularityHUB.com. Here’s an excerpt…

“Philip M. Parker, Professor of Marketing at INSEAD Business School, has had a side project for over 10 years. He’s created a computer system that can write books about specific subjects in about 20 minutes. The patented algorithm has so far generated hundreds of thousands of books. In fact, Amazon lists over 100,000 books attributed to Parker and over 700,000 works listed for his company, ICON Group International, Inc.

“Now these books aren’t your typical reading material. Common categories include specialized technical and business reports, language dictionaries bearing the “Webster’s” moniker (which is in the public domain), rare disease overviews, and even crossword puzzle books for learning foreign languages, but they all have the same thing in common: they are automatically generated by software.”

“Because digital ebooks and print-on-demand services have become commonplace, topics can be listed in Amazon without even being “written” yet.

“To be clear, this isn’t just software alone but a computer system designated to write for a specific genre. The system’s database is filled with genre-relevant content and specific templates coded to reflect domain knowledge, that is, to be written according to an expert in that particular field/genre. To avoid copyright infringement, the system is designed to avoid plagiarism, but the patent aims to create original but not necessarily creative works. In other words, if any kind of content can be broken down into a formula, then the system could package related, but different content in that same formula repeatedly ad infinitum.”

Sampling of books attributed to Parker:

– Webster’s Slovak – English Thesaurus Dictionary for $28.95

– The 2007-2012 World Outlook for Wood Toilet Seats for $795

– The World Market for Rubber Sheath Contraceptives (Condoms): A 2007 Global Trade Perspective for $325

– Ellis-van Creveld Syndrome – A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients, and Genome Researchers for $28.95

– Webster’s English to Haitian Creole Crossword Puzzles: Level 1 for $14.95

So if it cost Parker, say, fifty cents to generate a book, even if he sells only a handful of copies, that’s a great profit! Parker and his company have more than 800,000 titles on Amazon… you do the math.

Here I am dreaming of writing a book that sells lots and lots of copies (“Never happen,” snaps my Inner Critic) while Phil Parker makes big bucks “writing” lots and lots of books and selling, at best, a few copies of each.

But it’s the last part of the article that really set my head spinning:

“So, what’s the next book genre Parker is targeting to have software produce? Romance novels.

“Although a novel is a work of fiction, it’s no secret that certain genres lend themselves to formulas, such as romance novels. That may not make these works rank high for their literary value, but they certainly do well for their entertainment value. Somewhat surprisingly, romance fiction has the largest share of the consumer book market with revenue of nearly $1.37 billion in 2011.”

Read the entire article here. Includes video of Parker explaining his process. 

I’ve heard about artificial intelligence, but artificial creativity? Artificial imagination? I doubt it.

Could Parker’s software really produce a novel in twenty minutes? Damn! I’ve been working on my mystery novel for seven years (thanks to the discouragement of my Inner Critic).

I can’t imagine the reading experience with a computer-generated novel. I could never get lost in the story. I’d always be aware that a non-human — a computer system – “wrote” what I’m reading.

Readers feel a close relationship with the author of a book they enjoy. You can’t have that warm, human connection with a cold, impersonal computer system. Author appearances? Autographed copies? Forget about it.

But I think I figured out how this could work.

Parker’s success is that he can compile, or customize, a book that fills a specific audience’s need or desire and do it super fast and super cheap. Doesn’t matter if that audience is really tiny – it could be just one person.

Parker could write  hundreds of thousands of custom romance novels.

A reader who loves romance novels could customize a novel. She could pick the novel’s time period and location from a pull-down menu – medieval Britain,  Antebellum South, a modern-day village on the coast of Maine.  She could pick scorching sex (as in Fifty Shades of Gray), soft porn, or G-rated everyone-keeps-their-clothes-on (for the Christian evangelical market). Pick everything she enjoys in her romance novels. Even pick the central character’s name, which could be her name.

Parker’s program could generate a novel packed with the reader’s favorite elements and based on the tried-and-true formula all romance novels follow.  She’d have her customized romance novel e-book in less than half an hour.

Imagine ordering a novel as you would a pizza with your choice of toppings!

Up till now, Parker has been happy to go after tiny, underserved audiences (how many people want a English-to-Haitian Creole crossword puzzle book?). How his system will work in the highly competitive, billion-dollar-plus romance novel market is anyone’s guess.

Oh, the first novel written by a computer was published in Russia five years ago. And Parker himself has written three books the old-fashion way.
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Seven Writing Tips for Better Writing

from Stephen King’s On Writing

• Get to the point
• Write a draft. Then let it rest
• Cut down your text
• Be relatable and honest
• Don´t care too much what others may think
• Read a lot
• Write a lot

I’d like to say I have these writing tips from Stephen King taped to my computer monitor or that I religiously follow them, but I don’t. As Mark Twain said, “The only thing to do with good advice is pass it on.”

“Here’s some good advice,” snarls my Inner Critic, “don’t publish this post. You’ll just embarrass yourself if you do.”
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Where I go for inspiration and to learn the mechanics of writing well 

• Daily Writing Tips
• Terribly Write
• The Writer’s Almanac Newsletter
• Writerly Life
  

See all my Writing Well posts. I’d love to hear your comments, unless you echo my Inner Critic.

Now, excuse me, I’m working on a list of what I want to see in the first romance novel I order from Phil Parker as soon as he has his system up and running.

Here’s my dream cover. I want a story where the hero — a young, handsome, talented writer named Steve — is persecuted by a sadistic critic but saved by the love of a beautiful, sex-starved blonde.

Unbelievable.  You’re pathetic, Steve.

100,000 Dolphins Party Off Southern California Coast

Spotted off the coast of San Diego: an enormous swarm of short-beaked dolphins, about seven miles long and five miles wide. An estimated 100,000 dolphins swam together.

Why such an incredibly large group would show up in one location is a mystery.  Dolphins typically travel in groups of anywhere between 15 and 200, which are called pods — this is a “super mega pod.”

My guess is social media. Dolphins are social animals, communicate with one another with sounds and body language, and, who knows, maybe they have their own Internet. A dolphin tweeted, “Hey, a feast here & weather’s great! Let’s party!” and it went viral.

100,000 Dolphins Are Partying Without Us Off the Coast of California by Lindy West on Jezebel.

If the dolphins decide to come ashore, here’s what happens…

And there’s also this dolphin news…

Dolphin Approaches Hawaiian Divers For Help After Fishing Hook Embedded In Fin click link to see video

Life & Death

Where death waits for us is uncertain; let us look for him everywhere

French Renaissance writer Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

First I find out I have heart disease and spend three days in the hospital. Then yesterday a big-ass asteroid nearly hits the earth, and at the same time a meteorite explodes over the Ural mountains in Russia injuring 1,000.

I go the pharmacy to pickup my new heart medications and I’m nearly hit walking across the parking lot by a guy in a BMW talking on his cell phone as he speeds along, oblivious to everything. I should have done a Ratso Rizzo on him: Hey! I’m walkin’ here!

I have to worry about my heart giving out, I have to dodge thoughtless drivers zipping through parking lots, and now I have to keep an eye on the sky for wayward meteors.

Death is nosing around, ready to jump out and snatch me away. I notice and begin to think about my own mortality. Something I’ve been avoiding. Who wants to think about their own demise, of The End?

Sure, I get a little paranoid. But now I’m really into this whole death thing. I’ve  already composed my last words: Wait a minute! I’m not done yet!

And I’ve come up with my preferred way to meet Death: At age 96, I’m shot in the back by a jealous husband as I walk home from my favorite bar.

Oh, just in case, my last thought is to accept Jesus Christ as my Savior. My many sins washed away, I go straight to heaven. If there is no God, no harm done (see Pascal’s Wager).

We come from nothing, we are going back to nothing  — In the end what have we lost? Nothing!
Monty Python’s Graham Chapman

Chart compares the odds of dying in any given year from things like accidents, gun shot, choking, lightning, bee sting, fire…

Oh, great. Heart disease is the number one cause of death — that’s the bullet I’m betting has my name on it.

Odds are also relatively good that one unlucky day an accident will get me — some asshole like that guy on the cell phone in the Walgreen’s parking lot will cause this horrific crash on the freeway, a scene right out of Red Asphalt, and I’ll be in the wrong place at the wrong time and air-expressed home to Jesus.

The least likely way I’ll be drop-kicked to heaven is by an asteroid or meteorite taking me out — the odds of that happening are about 75 million to one. See Death by Meteorite

All our days travel toward death, and the last one reaches it.
Montaigne

Death of Ratso Rizzo Poor guy dies just as he realizes his dream of moving to Florida

Beer fans line up for the limited Pliny the Younger

Russian River Brewing Company host Alex McLaughlin, right (back to camera), handles a long line of patrons Wednesday, Feb. 6. The Santa Rosa brewpub opened at 11 a.m. and people lined up for hours for a chance to drink Pliny the Younger, a legendary India pale ale that’s available only two weeks a year. Photo by Randall Benton, Sacramento Bee

Great article in today’s The Sacramento Bee about incredible demand, and sheer madness, for a seasonal craft beer called Pliny the Younger: Beer fans line up for the limited Pliny the Younger – Food & Wine – The Sacramento Bee. Some beer connoisseurs call Pliny the Younger “the perfect beer.” The challenge is getting your hands on a glass of Pliny the Younger, or even the Russian River Brewing Co.’s other popular beer, Pliny the Elder (brewed year-round).

Here’s an excerpt…

You could be in and out of the Russian River Brewing Co. in an hour. Or you could wait, as many have, for up to seven hours, in a line that stretches down the sidewalk on Fourth Street, around the corner and into oblivion.

Due to the enthusiasm — no, the madness — that accompanies Pliny the Younger, an India pale ale that’s available for just two weeks at the beginning of February every year, the brewery has had to post a list of expectations and rules.

Here, for example, is No. 6: “If you have a compelling reason for not waiting like everyone else, you will have to take that up with the 300 folks in line BEHIND you. Good luck with that!”

A 10 oz. glass of Pliny the Younger beer.

Beer aficionados know it as a triple IPA – meaning Pliny the Younger has triple the amount of hops in a regular IPA, which pushes the limits of flavor, intensity and alcohol content. The name Pliny refers to the Roman author and naturalist Gaius Plinius Secundus – Pliny the Elder – whom many credit with having a hand in creating the botanical name for hops, a key ingredient in beer. Pliny the Younger is his nephew.

The hype, the long waits, the obsession. It’s all very real and, in this case, makes perfect sense. Pliny the Younger is impossibly clean, crisp and smooth for a beer that’s 10.8 percent alcohol. The hops — a maestro’s blend of six kinds — offer a pleasing bitterness without being harsh or chewy. The beautifully balanced beer has an intense taste, but it’s also subtle. There’s a hint of fruitiness without being sweet.

The last day for the Pliny the Younger until 2014 is Thursday. If you miss it, the pub serves many other highly regarded beers with national reputations, several of which have provocative names like Sanctification, Perdition, Damnation and Consecration.

And for the diehards who wait too long to seek out the greatness and mystique of Pliny the Younger, there’s no more fitting name than a seasonal beer the pub will release soon: Procrastination.

Read the SacBee article by Blair Anthony Robertson here
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Check out the Beertone (named for the color guide, Pantone).

Beertone features 200 different kinds of beer with a color swatch representing each variety. The color tabs are packed with particulars for the beer connoisseur, including brewery info, alcohol content, a flavor description, and detailed color information—think RGB, CMYK, HTML, and SRM (the beer color scale).

Created by the self-described “Swiss Guy” (Daniel Eugster) and “Brazilian Guy” (Alexander Michelbach), Beertone is currently offered for Swiss beers only, but it’s rumored Brazilian and German versions are on the horizon.

Source: Webdesigner Depot

 

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/13/5184780/beer-fans-line-up-for-the-limited.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/02/13/5184780/beer-fans-line-up-for-the-limited.html#storylink=cpy

World’s Longest Word, World’s Weirdest Words

Wandering around the Web, I came across what’s called the world’s longest word.

I believe this really is the world’s longest word, even though I haven’t seen it. Well, I haven’t seen the whole word end to end.

This word contains 189,819 letters. It’s so long that stretched out in one long line, it would be like looking down an arrow-straight desert highway that disappears into a distant horizon.

If I were to show this word to you here, you’d be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling for I don’t know how long before you got to the tail end, the last letter.

This word is so incredibly long it takes approximately three-and-a-half hours to pronounce.

Here’s how the word starts: Methionylalanylthreonylserylarginylglycylalanylserylarginylcysteinylproly…

Yeah, I’m disappointed too. This mile-long word is the chemical name for titan – a human protein that, as its name implies, is the largest known protein. [Titans were a race of giants in Greek mythology; various large things have been named after the Titans — RMS Titanic, for example].

So the word titan, spelled with five letters, and [insert world’s longest word here], spelled with 189,819 letters, mean basically the same thing? That’s crazy!

But in a way, it makes sense. The world’s longest word mimics the titanic protein it represents – a long, long, long string of molecules. It is what it is.

By the way, my favorite long, long, long word is hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia noun fear of long words

Strange, Wondrous, Rarely Used Words

Outside of technical, scientific and medical terms, we rarely if ever use extra-long, multi-syllable words. Words like horbgorbling, mautuolypea, ozoamblyrosis just don’t come easily to mind. Spellcheckers don’t recognize them; most dictionaries don’t list them. These obscure words are difficult to pronounce and even more difficult to spell.

And if you should use such fancy, five-dollar words, only a tiny, tiny fraction of the population has the wide-ranging vocabulary to comprehend what you’re saying. Which in the case of ozoamblyrosis is too bad as that word means loss of sexual appetite because your partner has unpleasant body odor.  Ask someone you’ve just met socially if he or she has ever suffered from ozoamblyrosis – there’s a great conversation starter! (Though they may, against all odds, know what ozoamblyrosis means and complain that your question is not only rude and inappropriate but ostrobogulous as well).

Our quirky English language has plenty of words that are strange and wondrous in spelling – such as zenzizenzizenzic (meaning the eighth power of a number), and strange and wondrous in meaning: a retromingent is an animal that urinates backwards, as lions and raccoons do.

The strangest single word that I’m aware of is spangchew, which apparently means to throw a frog into the air, a concept so weird that you wonder why anyone would ever feel the need to coin a word for it.
Richard Watson Todd, Much Ado About English

Would you like to be a sesquipedalian (one who uses big words)? Check out BIGWORDS.com – “Type in what you’re looking for and we’ll hook you up with the lengthiest words we can think of.” People will think you’re sooo smart ‘cause you use such BIG words! Why don’t you drop the pretense and get down here with us and watch Honey Boo Boo.

Short words get all the action – easy to say, easy to spell, instantly understandable. Short words are so handy they often have more than one meaning. The simple word set has 126 meanings as a verb, 58 as a noun, and 10 as a participal adjective. (Source: Bill Bryson, Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words). Short words are broad and general in meaning; long words are pin-point precise and unique.

If obscure English words fascinate you – words like chankings, dishabillophobia, or philodox – may I suggest Charles Harrington Elster’s There’s A Word for It! A Grandiloquent Guide to Life.
chankings  food that you spit out, such as seeds and pits
dishabillophobia  fear of undressing in front of someone
philodox  someone in love with his or her own opinions

See & Hear the World’s Longest Word!

Want to see the world’s longest word in its entirety? You can download a 65KB text file of the word here.

Or you can watch this guy take three-and-a-half hours to read out loud the word in its entirety. Watch the flower bloom and wilt as he goes on and on, seemingly without a pause. You’ll see the guy’s beard grow as the pronunciation drones relentlessly pass an hour, two hours, three. You have to wonder if he was able to do this reading in one take!
Just click on the photo to view video and kill an entire afternoon. 

Homonyms, Homophones, and Other Confusingly Similar Words

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more     nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass 

The purpose of language is to convey meanings.

We depend on words to carry a thought from our head and deliver it to someone else’s head.

But sometimes words fail: they don’t communicate the meaning we had in mind.

When words fail, either we misused a word or a word misused us.

Mr. Dumpty misuses words; the words he chooses to express his thoughts only confuse Alice.

I don’t know what you mean by “glory,” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously.  ‘Of course you don’t – till I tell you. I meant “there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!”’       from Chapter 6, Through the Looking-Glass

On the other hand, the English language is as idiosyncratic and illogical as Humpty Dumpty. Many words in our quirky language delight in deceiving us, delivering an entirely different meaning than the one we intended.  These trickster words are called homonyms.

Homonyms are two or more words that share the same spelling, or the same pronunciation, or both, but have different meanings and origins.

So a word can look like duck, sound like duck, but not mean a web-footed swimming bird but something you do to dodge a blow or avoid an unpleasant task.

Mischievous homonyms can pull the pants down of the unwary writer, as seen in these newspaper headlines:
Prostitutes Appeal To Pope
Chicago Checking on Elderly in Heat
‘Bare Children in Mind’ Plea to Drivers [Sign seen on restaurant door: No Bear Feet Allowed]
Here’s How You Can Lick Doberman’s Leg Sores

Homonyms come in two flavors:

Homophones are words that share the same pronunciation but differ in meaning, such as ceiling and sealing, hours and ours, way and weigh.

Homographs share the same spelling, and sometimes the same sound, but have different meanings. Examples are close (to be near) and close (to shut), incense (a burnt aromatic) and incense (to make angry), and refuse (to deny) and refuse (garbage).

And then there’s just plain confusingly similar words, such as biannual and biennial, immanent and imminent, insolate and insulate.
I straighten out these tangled words for you in the list below.

Some (homophone: sum) of my favorite homonyms, homophones and confusingly similar words:

allowed  permitted
aloud  in a spoken voice; not silently
Steve protested that reading aloud is not allowed in the library

altar  raised platform for worship or sacrifice
alter  to change

biannual  twice a year
biennial  once every two years
Steve’s curio shop, Bizarre Bazaar, has a biannual clearance sale and a biennial going-out-of-business sale

bole  stem or trunk of a tree
bowl  deep, round dish or basin
bowl  participate in a game of bowling

eminent  high in station or rank; prominent; distinguished
immanent  internal or inherent
imminent  likely to occur at any moment

faces  have a difficult event or situation in prospect: the defendant faces a maximum sentence of ten years
feces  waste matter eliminated from the bowels; excrement
Following the dog feces fracas, Steve faces eviction

gull  to deceive or trick
gull  seabird
Steve tried to gull the gull with a plastic minnow

insolate  exposure to the sun’s rays
insulate  using various materials to prevent the leakage of heat
Insolate to get warm and insulate to stay warm

quail  lose heart or courage in difficulty or danger
quail  bird

shoe-in  common misspelling of word below
shoo-in  a candidate, competitor, etc., regarded as certain to win

soar  to fly aloft or about; to rise to heights
sore  painful

straight  having no bends, turns, or twists
strait  narrow channel connecting two bodies of water

wine  fermented grape juice
whine  to cry in distress, or in a high-pitched, complaining manner
Wine, wine, wine the night; whine, whine, whine the morning

See my master list of all the homonyms, homophones, and other confusingly similar words that I’ve posted to date.
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Animal Homophones

I have two bird words in my selection of favorite homonyms, homophones & confusingly similar words: gull and quail.

I’m working on a list of words for animals that are homophones, such as horse and hoarse. Gull and quail don’t count because they’re homographs — they have the same spelling as the words I pair them with. I just brought up gull and quail because they’re animal words and remind me of this list I’m working on, a list of animal homophones (same sound, different spelling). It’s a very interesting list and I’m having fun putting it together and …

Oh, you’re laughing at me. I know what you’re thinking: Dude, what a life you’re having!

Hey, what are you working on, a cure for cancer?

Anyway, here’s my work-in-progress list of animal homophones:
bear/bare
boar/bore
deer/dear
doe/dough
ewe/you
flee/flea  (you’re right: an insect, not an animal. So sue me)
fowl/foul
gnu/new
gorilla/guerilla
herd/heard
hare/hair
horse/hoarse
leech/leach  (leeches are worms, worms are animals, not insects)
lion/lyin’  (OK, I’m cheating a little bit here)
minks/minx  (a minx is a flirtatious girl; minks have beautiful fur)
owl/awl
tern/turn
whale/wail

Do any animal homophones occur to you? I’d appreciate suggestions, just use the comment box. Oh, the rule is, you can’t do a Google search. Has to come straight out of your own little head. Builds brain muscles that way, so you won’t get Al’s hemorrhoids when you’re old.

What’s In A Word: Hope

I look into words or phrases that catch my interest

Hope, like the gleaming taper’s light,
Adorns and cheers our way;
And still, as darker grows the night,
Emits a brighter ray.
— Oliver Goldsmith, The Captivity

Hope is a desire of something together with the expectation of obtaining it. Despair is the opposite of hope.

Hope flows from the human desire to control an uncertain future. Hope gives us the courage and confidence to take action, no matter what the odds against us. Without hope, we would never take risks, never believe we can change our fate.

“Everything that is done in the world is done by hope,” says Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

But sometimes hope can be counterproductive, even harmful, as you’ll soon see.

Hope Comes In Many Forms

High-flying Hope
“Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us… A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.”
President Barack Obama

Modest Hope
”I hope I’m not late to work Monday morning.”
The noble word hope is grossly overused and cheapened.

Low-flying Hope
“I hope they serve beer in Hell!”
People pervert and cheapen the word love, too.

Worried Hope
“I hope that gun’s not loaded.”
Please comment with your favorite examples of Worried Hope.

Superstitious Hope
When we use hope as a charm or spell for a positive outcome, regardless of possibility or probability. “I hope I win the Lotto! It’s my birthday.”

Reasonable Hope
“Hope is the belief that something is possible and probable, and the recognition that the degree of each is not necessarily equal. Hope supports realistic optimism, a necessary component of success. Optimists are powerful for solving wicked problems, the ones pessimists say can’t be solved.”
Deborah Mills-Scofield, Hope Is a Strategy (Well, Sort Of)

Fraudulent Hope
“Hope calculates its schemes for a long and durable life; presses forward to imaginary points of bliss; grasps at impossibilities; and consequently very often ensnares men into beggary, ruin, and dishonour.”
Joseph Addison, The Spectator, Nov. 13, 1712

Blind Hope
”Blind hope faces a blank wall waiting for a door in it to open. Doors might be nearby, but blind hope keeps you from locating them.”
Rebecca Solnit

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Hopelessness or Hope

two-and-a-half years of meth addiction

year and a half of meth addiction

three months of meth addiction

Look at these faces ravaged by addiction, the dead eyes.

We can see what’s happening to these addicts, but they can’t — they’re in denial.

Though it’s obvious to everyone else, an addict will stubbornly insist they do not have a problem, or their problems are someone else’s fault.

Denial traps addicts and alcoholics in a spiral of self-destruction. Denial makes them unreachable by any helpers.

Are the people in these mug shots hopeless cases?

When we believe change is impossible, that there are no options, that’s hopelessness.

I’ve known people who, because of alcoholism, were at one time in far worse shape than these meth addicts, people who had sunk about as low as they could possibly go. Families, friends, employers, the authorities — all gave up on them. He’s a hopeless case if ever there was one!

Yet today, these same people are sober, productive members of society, and they help make the world a better place. To look at them, you would never guess their history, the things they’ve done to themselves and to others.

Something happened; somehow they got off the merry-go-round of denial and admitted they had a problem.

At a fork in the road, they chose life over death, hope over despair. You could call it a miracle. “God did a drive-by on me,” a recovering alcoholic explains.

The people I mention, the success stories, they’re not cured. They struggle on a daily basis; alcoholism and drug addiction are a mandatory life sentence. But they have hope, awaken each morning with a desire to get through the day sober and the confidant expectation that — if they take action, take the necessary steps — they will go to bed sober that night.

There are no hopeless cases.

Call me a hopeless optimist, but I can imagine the above booking photos transposed, the before and after photos reversed, and “meth addiction” replaced with “sobriety.”

There is always hope. It’s never too late, no matter how low you go, no matter how many relapses. [With the caveat that you have to be alive and not have screwed up your brain too badly].

And hope, unlike dope & booze, is free.

The mug shots are from Faces of Meth, an anti-drug campaign in Oregon. The people in the mug shots agreed to participate in the campaign, in the hope their story and photos persuade others not to use methamphetamine (see? they are not hopeless cases!). Get more info in my comment to this post.

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Hope-In-A-Box

Most of us are familiar with the story of Pandora’s box. In Greek mythology, the gods give Pandora, the first woman, a gift — a beautifully ornate box.

“The gift is the box, not what’s inside it,” the gods tell Pandora. “Do not – repeat, DO NOT — open this box!”

Curiosity eats at Pandora, and, unable to resist, she lifts the lid. Out flies all the ills of society– hate, pain, poverty, violence, plagues, telemarketers, debt collectors, DMV clerks – everything that makes our lives miserable.

Pandora’s desire for the forbidden, much like Eve’s temptation in the Garden the Eden, leads her to defy the gods, with terrible consequences.

That, say the ancient Greeks, is how evil and trouble came into the world.

But that’s not the whole story, there’s more to the myth. As the evil spirits fly out, a terrified Pandora slams the lid shut, and traps the one remaining spirit in the box: Hope.

Why was Hope in the box with all those evil spirits? How did Hope finally get out of the box and into people’s hearts?

I’m going to tell you the full story of Pandora’s Box, my version of the myth anyway. I call it Hope-In-A-Box. I’m writing it now. Actually, I’ve been writing it for weeks; slow going, but I’m about half way finished.

I hope to post Hope-In-A-Box early in 2013. So bookmark this page. The link to my story of hope, evil, and crazy gods will be right here.

 

Giant Potato On the Move in L.A.

Screenshot via Idaho Potato Commission

(From LAist.com)
It’s not the largest item to get hauled around the streets of Los Angeles, but that massive 6-ton, 28-foot-long potato that was hanging out in Pasadena earlier this week (next to a giant fork, of course) will be on the move again today in L.A. as it makes its way to the Original Farmers’ Market for a weekend of fall fun.

Created for the Idaho Potato Commission, the giant potato is due to hit the road in Huntington Beach at 2 p.m. today, according to City News Service. The potato is being transported via a customized truck, but, unlike last Friday’s haul of the space shuttle Endeavour, will not require closed roads or trees to come down.

The potato’s scheduled route is the 405 Freeway north to the 10 Freeway to Fairfax. The spud is due to arrive at around 3 p.m. at the Farmers’ Market at Third and Fairfax, where it will stay put for the weekend for the venue’s 78th Annual Fall Festival.

via The Giant Potato Will Be On the Move Today in L.A.: LAist.
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LA hauls in new monuments

First, this spring, the LA County Museum of Art hauls a massive, 340-ton boulder from the desert near Riverside to LACMA’s new art installation, called Levitating Mass.

The museum is next door to the famous La Brea Tar Pits (one of my favorite LA attractions), and not far from Beverly Hills.

Over the course of 12 nights, the granite rock, slung from a giant transporter, moved at 8 mph along a winding 105-mile route to LA.

I joined the crowds gawking at the rock when it stopped for the day near my home. I wondered, “What’s the attraction? It’s just a big rock.” Wrapped in protective plastic, you could only see its shape.

But I was overwhelmed by the sheer logistics of moving such a massive object.

It reminded me of the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids.

The teardrop-shaped, two-stories-high rock is so heavy and bulky it took a specially built flatbed trailer the length of a football field to transport. 

Was I like the Egyptian peasants, thinking that the rich & powerful were mad, that all the resources spent hauling massive stones around could be put to much better use making life better for the suffering underclass?

But I guess man does not live by bread alone, and the poor will always be among us. Art lifts our spirits and feeds a deeper hunger, or so I’m told.

Then last week the nearly 300,000-lbs. space shuttle Endeavor creeps along the boulevards of south LA — where “the snakes hang low,” life is difficult and most people live in poverty — in a three-day trip from LAX to the California Science Center in downtown LA. (see following post).

Now we have a 6-ton potato moving 30 or 40 miles — this time along LA freeways and not side streets — to the Original Farmers Market, smack dab in the center of Los Angeles, close to the museum where the gargantuan rock guards the entrance to the art museum and the fake wooly mammoths flounder in the bubbling tar pits.

I have to say that the Farmers Market is my all time favorite LA attraction. A Sunday afternoon spent at the Farmers Market is about as good as life gets. If you were to ask me, what terrorist attack in LA would most piss you off? my first thought would be the Farmers Market.

A giant potato, with huge slabs of butter and dozens of gallons of sour cream & chives …  the incredible food stalls at the Farmers Market, just thinking of the scrumptious smells makes my mouth water … now that satisfies hunger! You can’t eat a giant rock or a space shuttle.

How are they going to bake that giant potato?

Click for LA Times story on the Original Farmers Market

See my Oct. 13 post ENDEAVOR’S LA JOURNEY

Endeavour’s L.A. journey

One of the greatest spectacles in the history of Los Angeles is underway!
The parade of the space shuttle Endeavor through the city is as magnificent and awe-inspiring as the grand triumphs of the Caesars in Ancient Rome. Crowds of people cheer Endeavor as the shuttle, still bearing the scars from its travels through outer space, crawls through neighborhoods and business districts, dwarfing everything in its path. “Not a once-in-a-lifetime event, a ONCE event!”

LA TIMES Photo

LOS ANGELES — At every turn of Endeavour’s stop-and-go commute through urban streets, a constellation of spectators trailed along as the space shuttle ploddingly nosed past stores, schools, churches and front yards.

LA Times photo

Having escaped out of Earth’s atmosphere two dozen times, Endeavour’s slow-speed trek Saturday to its retirement center took it through the working class streets of southern Los Angeles.

In an instant, the shuttle crossings became part of history.

Along the 12-mile course, people marveled at the engineering. Some rooted for Endeavour when it appeared it might clip a light post. Others wondered if it could just hurry up to its destination, the Science Center museum in downtown LA.

Great photos at (2) Endeavour’s two-day L.A. journey.

Endeavor crosses the 405 Frwy at Manchester, towed by a pick-up truck (Toyota flimed a commercial of its Tundra pick-up truck hauling the 300,000 lbs. shuttle across the freeway overpass). Over the shuttle’s left wing is the famous giant doughnut atop Randy’s Donuts! LA Times photo

Yumm! Donuts! You have to be a true Angeleno to appreciate this photo: to remember seeing the giant donut as a kid and to have logged way too many hours on the 405, a perpetually traffic-clogged freeway. This is so LA!