I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning gas pump rant I present: From My Dad.

0713 Ad Age – you don”t get it.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

Finally, the temporal processing theory clarifies some of the mystery underlying the left hemisphere dominance for language in most people. It turns out that the left hemisphere is specialized for rapid sequence recognition, which it does better than the right hemisphere. This would explain not only why languages end up in the left hemisphere, but also other features of hemispheric specialization, such as the fact that in music perception… (T) p. 180

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

I’ve already run into a bit of challenge with ubiquitous capture: I don’t have a lot of pockets to carry my Moleskine and pen in. When I was an editor and wore a suit everyday to work, I had shirt and jacket pockets to drop items into.

But since I simplified my wardrobe more than 10 years ago to consist primarily of black jeans (shorts in summer) and black, mostly pocket-less t-shirts, I’ve lost those handy collection points. Sure I have pockets in my jeans, but items other than wallets, keys and change don’t carry well there.

I also have lots of bag options. I have my Arkel laptop bag, a black leather Smith & Wesson book bag and a larger Land’s End nylon day pack. All have lots of pockets and none can hold everything. Right now, I’m carrying the laptop 95 percent of the time and the book bag 50 percent of the time.

I haven’t used the day pack in a couple of years, but maybe I need to reassess if it’s multiple pockets make more sense than the book bag.

Or maybe I need to look into some kind of light, unconstructed jacket that I could wear even in summer that would provide a better solution.

How many pockets do you need?

In my work as a teacher

Holding on to a philosophy of non-violence becomes near impossible when faced with mass destruction and despair of relief. Rare souls hold tightly to their principles and serve as lights in the darkness. In the wet hell that is Myanmar I know of no such light. The common people have passed their breaking point. The riot police should be afraid.

The BBC buried these quotes at the bottom of its story:

“People don’t want to come out onto the streets. But the people are very angry and they want to take some kind of revenge,” he said.

“This is very horrible. I don’t want to take revenge. But our people now want to kill.”

This sentiment was echoed by the man who approached me at the temple.

“A lot of people are angry at the government,” he said. “Near my village people are fighting the military for food, water and medicine.

“They are hungry, they are thirsty. They have the food, the water, so why don’t they give it quickly to the people?”

Uh, because they’re power-mad fecks? Continue Reading »

Nouriel Roubini wrote:

I had the pleasure to meet and speak at length over the weekend with Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany and one of the deepest geo-strategic thinkers in the world.

He argued with me that – as he fleshed out in a a recent article he wrote for the Project Syndicate – Israel will attack Iran”s nuclear facilities before the end of the Bush administration and that Israel effectively received the green light to this action from Bush during his recent visit to Israel.

Fischer was recently in Israel to attend the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of Israel creation. A variety of factors and conversations – fleshed out in his article – have led him to the conclusion that Israel will attack Iran before the end of the Bush administration.

This is just an opinion of one – however influential and well-connected – observer; but the arguments that Fischer makes on why Israel may go ahead sound compelling. We certainly don”t know if Israel will act that early – and certainly Israel has signaled that it will not accept an Iran that is nuclear…

This afternoon I went to the 3:30 showing of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I picked this weekday afternoon showing because it had a low risk of loud obnoxious kids ruining the expensive experience for me. (And I was right, I shared the theater with one other person.) I’m glad that that I saw it on the big screen, but it wasn’t nearly as satisfying as the Raiders Of The Lost Ark.

As much as I wanted to savor my movie experience in peace, how much more important might it be to avoid disruptive children at a religious service? We do expect parents with babies to move to the foyer or the crying room when their child becomes restless and loud.

Ought we to expect this for all children? Would you feel the that way if you knew the disruptive child involved suffered from a brain disorder? Where would you draw the line?

I ask because I read this morning about a more than six-feet-tall, 225 pound 13-year-old Autistic boy who has been banned from the regular Mass at his family’s Catholic Church in Bertha, Minnesota. And the family is angry.

The northern Minnesota church has obtained a restraining order to keep Adam away, an action that has been deeply hurtful to the Race family and has brought them support from parents of other autistic children.

“My son is not dangerous,” Carol Race said. The church’s action is “about a certain community’s fears of him. Fears of danger versus actual danger,” she said.

In court papers, church leaders say the danger is real. The Rev. Daniel Walz wrote in his petition for the restraining order that Adam — who already is more than 6 feet tall and weighs more than 225 pounds — has hit a child, has nearly knocked over elderly parishioners while bolting from his pew, has spit at people and has urinated in the church.

“His behavior at Mass is extremely disruptive and dangerous,” wrote Walz. “Adam is 13 and growing, so his behaviors grow increasingly difficult for his parents to manage.”

I’ve gotten in trouble before talking about issues around Autism Spectrum Disorder. Symptoms and behaviors vary greatly from child to child. Some are meek. Some are violent. Some are a danger to themselves and those around them. Some are brilliant. Some lack any hint of social skills the ability to interact. Generalizations are impossible.

The only common thread I’ve observed are the parents. The exhausted, frustrated parents. Parents who get no answers and cope the best they can with children that don’t get better.

For whatever reasons — and there are many, many theories — the number of children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder is growing at a horrible rate. A Center For Disease Control report in 2007 estimated the numbers to be 1 in 150 children in the United States.

I can’t begin to imagine how that number must terrorize new parents.

For my part, I think that Rev. Walz and the leadership of St. Joseph made the correct decision. But that doesn’t mean I feel good about it.

As a nation we have come to grips with physical disabilities, going so far as to make the American with Disabilities Act law more than a decade ago. But a person in a wheelchair or with visual impairments may communicate and interact in socially appropriate ways.

What can society do with an individual when that is not the case?

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Structured Procrastination.

Bill Bishop wrote:

It turns out that West Virginians were entirely average in the percentage of voters who considered race an important consideration in their vote. In Alabama and Mississippi, three out of ten voters said race was important, and 62 percent of those voted for Obama. Two out of ten voters in Georgia said race was important, and 72 percent of those folks voted for Sen. Obama. In Illinois, 23 percent of the Democratic voters said race was important – a higher percentage than West Virginia – and 73 percent of those voted for Obama. In America, there”s a lot of sorry to go around.

Hat tip to Sherry Chandler.

Karl Ritter wrote:

Young adults experience news fatigue from being inundated by facts and updates and have trouble accessing in-depth stories in their daily news intake, according to a study unveiled at a global media conference Monday.

I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning gas pump rant I present: From My Dad.

Mark Vernon said:

Oddly, to be able to be alone with yourself is a condition for the ability to love. If someone is attached to another person because they cannot stand on their own two feet, love may feel like a lifesaver, but the relationship is one of compromised love because it does not allow the other person to be themselves. To put it another way, if you are not capable of solitude, you might love to remove your loneliness, not to know another. Or you could say that the best relationships are about just being together, not doing stuff together. And being with someone requires you being able to be yourself.

Found in my electronic chapbook.

As attractive as the visual deficit theory of dyslexia is, more evidence has built up for a second theory, which explains dyslexia as a defect in auditory processing of language. Identifying the sounds (phonemes) that make up words is strikingly hard for dyslexics.

This difficulty would produce errors not only in language, which requires discrimination between words parts as quickly as hundredths of a second, but also between errors in other sensory and motor tasks. (T) p. 176

From The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer”s Block and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty.

When I have attempted to make changes in my life one of two results came about: I made the change or I didn’t make the change. In every case I know what the difference has been. When I chose to change one small, discrete portion of my life I was most usually successful. When I tried to change every negative aspect of my life I was most usually unsuccessful.

In other words, New Year’s resolutions don’t work.

I’ve found that Leo Babauta agrees with me. In Chapter to of Zen To Done, Leo writes:

Just like losing weight through crash diets, changing your ways through crash programs set you up for failure. Leo recommends as the first step that I adopt the habit of ubiquitous capture. What that means is having one, ever-ready way of collecting my thoughts for organization later. In my case, it is my Moleskine (pronounced mol-a-SKEEN-a, it’s Italian) and a TÅ«l gel pen.

What’s your ubiquitous capture device of choice?

Take 2.2 million people, destroy their homes, their food supply, their water supply, the infrastructure to escape the devastation or to bring in relief supplies; use your military to keep out foreign aid and then kick people out of temporary camps with just a tarp and a few bamboo poles. Do you think they might riot? Myanmar’s military dictators do.

From the AFP:

Burma has deployed armed riot police in one of the regions hit hardest by the cyclone, stationing them along a few kilometres of road leading to the Irrawaddy Delta.

Up to 10 riot police were stationed at more than 10 posts along the road linking the towns of Kungyangon and Dedaye, an AFP reporter witnessed on Friday.

They were deployed with armoured cars, and armed with shields, batons and guns. The police stopped some passing vehicles for questioning, but otherwise appeared to be standing guard along the roadside.

The police would not say why they were stationed on the road, and residents in the towns declined to speak about the security measures. Continue Reading »

There was a time when I respected Greg Easterbrook as a journalist. He has clearly stepped into the realm of John Stossel, Geraldo Rivera and other media crackpots.

I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is 20 Types of Freelance Work Identified and Explained.

When he was young he used to spend the whole summer
in the abandoned slag heaps around the old mines
outside the city of Scranton. It would take him hours
to pick through the shale stacks, the sweat writing lines
in the dust on his face, and the old ball peen hammer
slung from his belt pinching his belly button.
Some days there was nothing to read but the signatures
of ice and erosion and tools. Then he’d find one,
a slate unnaturally filigreed with the fright masks
of a trilobite, ferns, the inferior commissures
of ancient clams. He would wrap them in moist newspaper
and carry them carefully home. Once his teacher asked
him to talk to the class about fossils.
Satan plants them to trick us,
he said. When I get home I smash them to pieces.

From Fossils by J. T. Barbarese.

Any one out there know what’s going on?