Fair’s finale
44 pets taken from Marietta home
Pre-teen drug case brings call to resist pressures
Grand jury:
Plea agreement in theft caseTop Headlines Poll: How well do you keep up with the latest in cell phone technology?
Logging certain aspects of your life can be a surprisingly powerful practice – not because there’s much value in the record you create, but because the very act of recording exerts an interesting psychological effect. Spend a couple of days recording your time use in detail, several productivity experts advise, and you’re likely to find yourself using it more efficiently. Record what you eat, and you’ll find yourself eating more healthily, even without taking any other actions. (I tried both recently, for three days each. The time log alarmed me, by revealing how much time I’m capable of frittering away, but it helped, and the effects lasted beyond the three-day period. The food log turned me effortlessly into a health nut, but the effect was more short-lived.)
This is an individualised version of the Hawthorne effect, observed in the 1920s and 1930s at a Chicago factory. Experimenters from Harvard tried to boost employee productivity by adding rest breaks of different durations, and by changing the lighting, temperature and other factors. Many of the changes improved output – but so did changing things back. The mere fact of being observed, the study concluded, was what made people behave differently. Copious doubts have since been raised about the study, and besides, it’s easy to see how it could be used as an excuse for keeping workers under close surveillance. But as a personal technique, it seems to work, helping us make unconscious behaviour conscious.
The idea of making the unconscious conscious chimes with the Buddhist concept of “mindfulness” – what the author and meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein calls “the practice of paying attention in every moment of one’s day”. When I first encountered this notion, it was deeply unappealing: wouldn’t it just mean becoming hyper-conscious of your every move, unable to relax because you were engaged in obsessive self-monitoring? The answer, I think, is that it could, if you did it in a judgmental way, relentlessly trying to analyse whether or not each action was the “right” one. But the lesson of the “personal Hawthorne effect” is that you don’t need to make any such judgments. Merely observing your behaviour seems to make for better behaviour: just paying attention is enough.
Oliver Burkeman writing in his column will change your life for The Guardian.
Rule No. 62 – Eat Slowly.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
Almost a tragedy
Fair exhibitors put in a year of work
Just some good ol’ boys
Company continues cracker plant planning
New Dollar General coming to RenoTop Headlines Poll: How much do you plan to spend on Halloween costumes and candy this year?
Why do corporations think that sending that advertisements spam camouflaged as insincere birthday cards will make their customers feel better about their poor service?
Sometime this month I’ll get a another birthday greeting from my insurance carrier—which only gives feck when I’m a profit center—along with a worthless sheet of return address labels. At least that company recognizes my actual anniversary of my birth and doesn’t attempt to lump all of its customers into a single birthday month.
I am not impressed.
Cleveland Mayor Carl Burton Stokes
We are powerless. We are leaderless.
There seem to be no real voices of protest.
Thus no anger to play off. No squeaky wheel to arouse.
Not a media voice of even mild condemnation of what is. Or what should be.
A newspaper lacking even the pretense of debate or interest in the underdog. No critical voices rise.
Dull, disappointing, yawning. Only cheerleading expected or accepted. Crucial issues avoided.
Carl Stokes, a man of political passion so missing today, once said this about us succinctly. It still resonates.
We have in Cleveland developed the art of accenting the positive to the exclusion of remedying the negative. How difficult it is, but necessary, to advocate as a remedy the accenting of the negative. How else to strike at and endeavor to dispel the deep, almost indigenous false sense of security and accomplishment that pervades this city.
Or we can go back to Langston Hughes, who lived in Cleveland, and his question:
What happens to a raisin in the sun?
Where the explosion? Does it come when least expected?
We don’t like the thought. We’re directed elsewhere.
All out sports distraction. Yeah team! Johnny & LeBron Continue Reading »
Experience has taught me that there’s a significant problem attached to being the kind of person who gets excited by productivity systems – to-do lists, time management techniques, personal organisers, expensive notebooks and the like. Two problems, in fact, if you count the one about being ostracised by friends and widely regarded as not quite right. But, for now, let’s focus on the other one, which is that an obsession with productivity is, of course, anti-productive: a day spent tinkering with your system for getting things done is another day when you didn’t get anything done. Faced with books and websites offering a multiplicity of methods for living life more effectively and happily, the temptation is to borrow bits from each until you’ve built some huge, Byzantine structure with the twin disadvantages of requiring hours of maintenance and being useless.
So I’m pleased to report the arrival, on the web, of a backlash – not from the smug, non-anally-retentive people who gambol spontaneously through life like lambs, but from within the ranks of the nerds themselves. This is a radically stripped-down approach to productivity, championed above all by the blog Zen Habits (zenhabits.net), which focuses not on grand systems but on heuristics. A heuristic, loosely defined, is a rule of thumb: a very simple behavioural guideline, easy to remember and implement, which, when repeated over and over, will end up helping you achieve your aims. The idea is to drop all your finickity systems and just live by one or two of these principles. Here, culled from various blogs, are some of the most promising…
Oliver Burkeman writing in This column will change your life for The Guardian.
Have Coffee Will Write: Dinner conversation with a few good friends…
Real procrastination, which afflicts an estimated 20% of us, isn’t the same as laziness, being disorganised, or putting off boring chores. It’s an active avoidance strategy, and because it’s usually rooted in the fear of failure, or success, or loss of control, it most affects exactly those things that really matter to us, not the chores. Personally, I’ve spent many hours procrastinating by reading books and websites on combating procrastination—with the handy side-effect that I can summarise here what I reckon are the only three genuinely useful pieces of advice they contain:
- Motivation follows action—What if you dropped the requirement of feeling good, accepted that you felt bad and just started anyway? Motivation usually shows up quickly thereafter. (See the work of psychologist Shoma Morita.)
- Resistance is a signpost—You could adopt “Do whatever you’re resisting the most” as a philosophy of life.
- Schedule leisure, not work—If you plan in advance to do “x” hours of work in a day, anything less becomes a failure; if you make no such plans, every minute worked counts as a success.
Oliver Burkeman writing in Pro-active procrastination for The Guardian.
Rule No. 61 – Serve the Vegetables First.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
Hoping for sun
Phone leads police to robbery suspect
Common Core debate continues
Agriculture rescue training
Festival volunteer enjoys helpingTop Headlines Poll: Now that it’s done what’s your opinion of the revamped Pike and Acme streets intersection?
It comes as no surprise to discover that Congressman Bill Johnson might be reluctant to engage in an honest, one-on-one, debate with his Democrat opponent before the November 4 election. Johnson wants to rely instead upon the tried-and-true tea party tactic of staged “town-hall” meetings (where his pals can make him look good by restricting participation and posing pre-packaged “friendly” questions). Some of Johnson’s public appearances in the region—where he likes to claim credit for “creating” jobs that were actually created by others (or created despite of Bill’s obstructionist actions in Washington)—might remind history buffs of the gimmick used in 18th century Russia by Grigory Potemkin, Catherine the Great’s slippery Interior Minister, who created fake “villages” in the Ukraine in an effort to convince the Empress that all was well in the hinterlands.
So what is Bill Johnson hiding? Let’s look at his background—fully authenticated from newspaper accounts in Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, and Ohio.
In 2010, Johnson (a native of North Carolina) moved his base of operations to Marietta to take advantage of the newly Gerrymandered 6th District (which runs along the Ohio from Youngstown to Gallipolis) and, backed by local tea-party extremists, ran for Congress promising to be a “job-creator.” Before that he was a 26-year veteran of the Air Force (and we thank him for his service) and a slightly less-than-scrupulous purveyor of IT equipment to the military. In 2007, the State of Florida (which is not known for being especially strict regarding business dealings) revoked the license of Johnson’s J-2 Associates for failing to file required paperwork. Bill moved to Mahoning County, Ohio and became Chief Information Officer of Stoneridge Inc., an IT firm that originated in Sarasota, Florida. According to accounts in the Bradenton Herald, Stoneridge fired 300 employees in 2008 and shipped their jobs to Mexico, Estonia, Continue Reading »
When they can’t compete, corporations scramble for government protection.
The US telecoms industry called on the Federal Communications Commission on Friday to block two cities’ plans to expand high-speed internet services to their residents.
USTelecom, which represents telecoms giants Verizon, AT&T and others, wants the FCC to block expansion of two popular municipally owned high-speed internet networks, one in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the other in Wilson, North Carolina.
“The success of public broadband is a mixed record, with numerous examples of failures,” USTelecom said in a blogpost. “With state taxpayers on the financial hook when a municipal broadband network goes under, it is entirely reasonable for state legislatures to be cautious in limiting or even prohibiting that activity.”
Chattanooga has the largest high-speed internet service in the US, offering customers access to speeds of 1 gigabit per second – about 50 times faster than the US average. The service, provided by municipally owned EPB, has sparked a tech boom in the city and attracted international attention. EPB is now petitioning the FCC to expand its territory. Comcast and other companies have previously sued unsuccessfully to stop EPB’s fibre optic roll out.
So perhaps we [email] addicts should go easier on ourselves. If you can’t stop checking, don’t try to wage war on your impulses: just have a simple system to deal with the interruption swiftly. Here I’ll invoke (not for the first time) the productivity expert David Allen: if an email can be dealt with in under two minutes, deal with it. If not, have a single list where you keep a record of undone tasks. The point isn’t to get a million things done – it’s to know exactly what you’re not doing. Half the time, Allen says, our stress is due to the nagging worry that we ought to be somewhere else, doing something else. When you know that’s not true, you can get on with living life instead.
Oliver Burkeman writing in Email junkies for The Guardian.
Rule No. 60 – Consult Your Gut.
From Food Rules, an eater’s manual by Michael Pollan
Found in my electronic chapbook. See also Eating Mindfully by Jan Chozen Bey.
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