If only I could do this on demand

Uploaded by jenny downing

Over on my other blog I have a little piece on how sometimes impassable writing problems can be solved neatly and easily while one sleeps.

Weeping because of all the attention

Perhaps we gents ought to give them a little room, if these two headlines from the Telegraph are to be understood in conjunction.

I also wonder how many months a man spends staring at women crying.

Roach Sushi makes Gregor Samsa miserable

RoachSushi 2,
originally uploaded by FeltedChicken.

This item makes me think there might be a market in making revolting tableaux as diet aids. You would put one or more of these around your kitchen and dining areas as appetite suppressants, and since they lack the characteristic odors and scutling noises of the real thing, when company comes around you could just sweep them into a drawer and they would be none the wiser.

As you become habituated to the fake roaches, you could achieve the same effect by coming up with more and more disgusting stimuli. It could be a subscription you would sign up for over six weeks, say, where a package would come to your house with more and more disturbing replicas so that you would not get too used to things.

The flaw in the plan, which I do not yet have a ready way to get around, is that one could simply leave the house to take meals elsewhere. It would generally not do for one to take one of the fake roaches along with oneself to a restaurant where it would be likely to disturb other customers and drive them off.

Reasons to be of good cheer

Back before the big Treo disaster I used to keep a file on my PDA called "Reasons to be of good cheer" which I would update from time to time. I needed it to help during the difficult times encountered during self-employment, to remind me now and then about the little things that would make life worth living.

Now Pam and I are out here outside of San Francisco for a few days of vacation, which is normally a happy kind of thing, but found ourselves dealing with some heavy issues involving some elderly family members, which was starting to lay a bring-down on the two of us. It was cold and drizzly as we drove around searching for a place to have a bit of solace one dinnertime when at length we happened upon the Nayeb Restaurant (aka Luxor) in South San Francisco.

The food was tasty, but that turned out not to be the point, when the background music suddenly was turned up a dozen decibels and the waitress announced the arrival of the Belly Dancer.
IMAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE
The young lady had long red hair and was several percent beyond the state of half-nakedness, I would estimate.

IMAGE NO LONGER AVAILABLE

She was generous in the way she bestowed her attention to the various tables, and the diners reciprocated in turn, tucking folding currency into the waistband of her garb. I learned that this operation was more difficult than it appeared, both because of the motion of the target and the way acute embarrassment affected performance. Ah well, I did only what was right. (No picture available.)

At last a reason to be of good cheer which I'd completely overlooked: the existence of belly dancing. Surely the only way one could grow tired of belly dancing would be to grow tired of life itself.

Google gives advice to the lovelorn

I'm envious about how this page at WikiHow gives much more useful advice about how to deal with infatuation than I did, but not very surprised.

What did surprise me, however, was the useful advice presented over in the sidebar courtesy of Google Ads:

That should do the trick: a drum crusher, to beat the man (or woman?) at their own game, thus leading to happiness! So sweet - it makes me want to buy this ultra-soft throwdown throw pillow.

On the closely related WikiHow page entitled How to Forget About Your Impossible Crush (which now redirects to the same link as above) there's this lovely sequence:

When given a choice, I should think it is always a good idea to go with the solution which has "Tertiary Impact" in its name.

Heads-up display for performers

Concept for augmented reality mobile phone,
originally uploaded by Leonard Low.

Yesterday, as sometimes happens, I sang a solo at church. It went pretty well, partly because I am one of the two or three people in the group who does not much suffer from the number one phobia: public performance. I think I got rid of this particular fear back when I was teaching college and got used to all those ravenous (or sometimes sleepy) eyes looking at me all at once.

Consider a visor like the one shown here, maybe slightly reduced in size to something like the thing Bono wears onstage, with the half-reflective properties of a heads-up display. If you adjust the lighting at the venue and the contrast of the display you could effectively blot out the sight of those threatening eyes. One could replace it with something calming or useful (such as the words of the psalm you are singing, often a tough thing for me to read given my recent turn toward farsightedness). Or, if you wanted more of a mood enhancer, you could just have a scene which enhances the emotional delivery of what you are singing or saying - for instance, if you were singing the beginning of The Sound of Music you could have a projection of the Austrian Alps spinning around. You could either keep your little technological hallucination to yourself, or you might choose to project it on a screen behind you simultaneously. It might work for some people to distract them from the audience they fear.

Gift idea #7: All human knowledge

The Vanity of Human Hopes,
originally uploaded by Lump Of Hesitation.

Did you know you can download a best-of collection of Project Gutenberg's collection of etexts to burn on a DVD, or, if you want to customize the selection, roll your own selection of books to burn onto disk? Combine this with some text-to-speech software and one would never need to feel deprived of something to learn about. The only better thing would be if they had perfected the skull jack so that you could just pipe all this information directly into your brain.

And it's all free. Free, I tell you!

It is true that for the most part, the texts in the collection are only those already in the public domain, and as such are some 80 years or more in age. But if you think about what has happened since the 1920s in human history, you might well conclude that the sum total of mankind's wisdom has not significantly increased since then, and one could even make the case that it has slipped down a notch or two. And there are some dandy selections in there. (Some of which I have even had the privilege of having edited.)

This concludes my little gift-giving series, which I hope has given you an outside-the-box idea or two - please let me know in the comments if you have any success with these. If you're up to it, since after all, Wittgenstein tells us "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." I should caution, however, that in a recent report, scientists tell us people suck at gift-giving for those they care about, so don't set your expectations too high.

Gift idea #3: Brains

Can I Pick Your Brain?,
originally uploaded by Nick Nick1.

In this information-heavy culture, it is rare that anyone would pass up any opportunity to boost the ability to deal with the complications of the world. Your thoughtfulness will surely be remembered for years and years to come when you give the gift of brain. Even if they are only sheep brains (try as I might, I was unable to locate a reputable establishment selling the Homo sapiens variety), this formalin-preserved item is still chock-full of folds and neurons and those other kinds of things which make your gift recipient uniquely human. Or conscious. Or whatever they happen to be.

You may want to pick up extra brains, just to have on hand for special situations other than gift-giving.

Impulse control

Some things one encounters in life are seductive, but dangerous to pursue. Consider the legal concept of the Attractive Nuisance, for instance. Oftentimes, the attractive object has actual benefits, whose siren call are liable to wear ones defenses down, despite all the rational arguments marshalled against the object.

In my experience, the most successful way to fight off the Attractive Nuisance does not rely on rationalization, but on fighting emotion with emotion. If you look hard enough, everything has a flaw of some sort — something unappealing, imperfect, or undesired about it somewhere, perhaps in the most minor of ways. Concentrate on this failing with all the attention you have, and the negative perception will eat away at the positive ones, and if you are lucky it will be enough to hold you back. The fancy new gadget has low battery life, the good-looking individual has hands which are too big or too small, the door to the new place to live is hard to shut. Sometimes, you have to work pretty hard to perceive or to imagine a blemish, and when comes to mind at last, it arrives as a relief.

This is not a strategy that is good to use for everything indiscriminately, because that is a recipe for sapping all enjoyment out of life. That is what Oscar Wilde meant when he defined a cynic as "someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." That's no way to live, in my opinion. I prefer to bring out this gambit only in the face of great temptation which my left brain recognizes as being a quick path to great danger.

Now, I just have to come up with a short and catchy name for the technique. It's something like "sour grapes" but with intention behind it. Any suggestions?

Achoo

There are times and places when I really hate having to sneeze: driving in heavy traffic, while cutting up food that I'm cooking, that sort of thing. I hope that someone somewhere is working on a way to override the sneeze reflex at least temporarily, for times when one is performing a task which one cannot afford to have interrupted.

From what I read on the net, the reflex arc for sneezing and coughing goes through the medulla oblongata and back to the musculature responsible for breathing. If we could put a cutoff switch somewhere in there, whether electrical, chemical, or physical, we should be able to affect the reflex. Alternatively, if someone had this installed and threw the switch hard in the opposite direction, we would have artificial snuff, which might also have its uses.

I can see that the military would be interested in this, thinking of all those scenes in the movie when some spy or scout is skulking around in a clandestine manner, and then his nose begins to twitch, and before you know it, the foe knows that someone is sneaking around, and things go bad.

I probably wouldn't want to turn off the sneezing reflex entirely or for a long period of time, because I am sure it is there for a good survival reason. But I think in most situations if you could inhibit it for a half hour or so that would probably be enough.