Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Monthly Archives: March 2011
Towers
This afternoon, we had our second class in the You Too Can Be A Leader! Leadership Training Seminar. (Not the actual name, but it could be.) As best I can tell, the theme today had something to do with a triangle. How you need three things to be an effective leader. Damned if I can remember what they are, but I do remember the activity with which we ended the afternoon: in groups of five or six, we had to build a tower.
We were given a large sheet of paper, scissors, masking tape, three styrofoam cups, three styrofoam plates, a few 3×5 cards, three sticks, and a marking pen. For the first ten minutes we had to plan our approach but we could not touch the materials. Then we were given eight minutes to build the thing.
Turns out, surprise surprise, that this is a well known technique for teaching team leadership skills. Our instructor followed the description given in that link closely, down to the reshuffling of members midway through the planning process.
I should have taken charge of my group but I didn’t, mostly because I have a tendency to ham things up and I had already made a spectacle of myself this afternoon*. Instead, I volunteered the biggest guy in our group, on the basis of him being the biggest guy in our group. And he got caught up in a design concept which I thought was inferior to the one I thought of (tripod base topped by a cylindrical tower). But then, I thought, how difficult can this be? I figured his design (much narrower tripod base topped by a cylindrical tower) would do fine. And, since it conserved materials, it would be a taller tower than mine, thus garnering extra brownie points.
Well, ours toppled. Turns out paper really does have mass, who’d have thunk. The win condition was: five feet tall at a minimum and able to withstand our instructor blowing on it. Ours was six feet easy, but it crumpled with a stiff blow. By which we all learned that it never pays to be an overachiever, particularly when surrounded by blowhards.
The other interesting activity this afternoon went like this: the instructor flashed eight words at us for five seconds, and then we had to write down what we could remember. I got seven of the eight. The eight words were all related: something like tired, bed, dream, night, and so forth. The point of the exercise was that many people came up with the word “sleep” in their lists, even though “sleep” was not one of the original words.
I did not come up with “sleep.” In fact, when the instructor said, “Show of hands, how many remembered ‘sleep,'” I blurted out, “That WASN’T one of the original words!” And then he seemed to be saying that coming up with “sleep” was a good thing, like that meant you were some kind of big picture guy. Right. I happen to think that recalling seven of eight words when you’ve only been given five seconds to look is a pretty damn impressive bit of memory, though nothing so impressive as what contestants do in the World Memory Games.
No, I’m really not sure what that activity was all about.
Next up, no doubt: we have to fall backward and trust that the others will catch us.
D.
*I really must learn that the phrase “try not to be a total douche” is not polite in mixed company.
Some Gnarls
I like Who’s Gonna Save My Soul a bit better, but I already posted that one to Facebook. Nevertheless, this video brings together Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell for the first time since Blue Velvet*.
Take that, Forrest Gump.
Yeah, I’ve had a singular lack of anything to say lately. Tomorrow I’m having Installment Two of my leadership course, so that ought to be good for a blog. If I can keep my eyes open. Do you suppose I’d lose Leadership Brownie Points if I brought my ebook reader?
D.
*I don’t know this for a fact, but it sounds true.
Could have used more Yiddish, but still a hoot
This weekend, I played through Shivah, by indie producer Wadjet Eye Games:
If you're that close to the third rail, don't mess with Rabbi Stone.
You play Rabbi Russell Stone, a New York City rabbi whose congregation has nearly abandoned him due to his absurdly gloomy sermons, and whose temple is seriously short on cash. After one particularly dismal Friday night service, a cop arrives, announcing that a man murdered three days ago has left Stone’s synagogue over $10,000 inheritance money. Stone recognizes the name of murdered man, but he’s puzzled. Jack Lauder was the last person Stone expected would leave him money. Smelling a pig*, Stone decides to investigate.
It’s an old-style game (think Space Quest, but with even lower production values) happily lacking in pixel-hunting and inventory-recombination puzzles. Most of the work resides in figuring out the dialog tree, which amounts to realizing that the “rabbinical response” (answering a question with a question) is usually the best option. Smooth sailing for the most part until the end game, where it is fiendishly difficult not to end your days as either a bullet-ridden corpse or a big yarmulkeh-adorned splat on the New York streets far below.
If you like the idea of grumpy rabbi as hard-boiled hero, Shivah is the game for you. And for only $4.95? Such a bargain!
D.
*Admittedly, rats are unkosher too (try to find a rabbi who will bless a dead rat), but smelling a pig is far less trite.
Friday’s arcana
Tonight we had our graduation ceremony for the Hippocrates Circle group. These are about 30 bright young middle-schoolers who want to become doctors; as I think I mentioned, I made a spectacle of myself a couple weekends ago by scoping my own throat twice to give ’em a good show. (I tried to convince our urologist that he should volunteer for Hippocrates Circle next year. Now that would truly be memorable.)
In the little graduation pamphlet that listed the kids’ names, someone had written, “In this group are four future pediatricians, nine general surgeons, eight family practitioners, five orthopedic surgeons,” and so forth. Numbers guessed at by yours truly — I forgot to bring home one of the pamphlets. When I read this, I wanted to get up and talk to the assembled students, teachers, family members, nurses, and administrators, and tell them the secret of medical school: it’s the exceptional student who leaves med school the same as he entered. Future Ob-gyns become pathologists, pathologists become radiologists, radiologists become orthopedic surgeons, and so forth.
Psychiatrists become ENT docs. There’s just no telling.
No alcoholism runs in my family, but I think I could seriously get effed up over Irish whiskey. It goes down like a dream, even the relatively cheap stuff. I believe that folks who shell out big money for aged scotch and other fancy shmancy whiskeys simply have not yet tried Irish whiskey.
Thanks, Dean.
So it turns out there’s a name for the music I like: post-punk. The list includes Laurie Anderson, Devo, The Cure, Swans, Violent Femmes, Bauhaus, Joy Division, Talking Heads. And it’s a pretty damned long list, too, probably hundreds of hours I could spend snooping You Tube to find bands on this list that I like. (Why aren’t The B-52s on the list, though?)
Just at random, sort of, I listened to some Josef K (meh) and Lydia Lunch (better). I wish I could tell Pandora, “Just feed me post-punk, ‘kay?” But Pandora always wants to branch out and give me pop. Which, you know, is kinda antithetical to the whole post-punk feel, The Human League notwithstanding.
And can I just say that the more I listen to Joy Division, the better they sound? It’s a good thing I wasn’t into them back in college . . . Is there a better song about depression and suicide than New Dawn Fades? Brought tears to my eyes reading those lyrics, knowing something of what Ian Curtis went through. And I’m relatively well adjusted now.
Back to the list.
Someone could make a lot of money by creating a combination cat piss detector and deodorizer. The deodorizer part is easy: CarraScent would detoxify a car that had harbored a dead badger in the Mojave Desert. But what is it that makes cat piss so noxious, and could anyone build a detector for it?
Quick google provides numerous answers, but the leading contenders are ammonia and musk. Since you don’t have to find every component of cat urine, just one part, why not go after the ammonia? And there are indeed ammonia detectors commercially available. And oh, goody, the cheapest one I could find is a hair over $300.
Still, it would beat having to get down on one’s knees to sniff the furniture.
Yeah I know y’all aren’t gamers, not many of you, but I want you to know that Dragon Age 2 rawks. I dig that my badass male warrior can romance damn near everyone regardless of sex or species and grin his way through all of it. The only negative feedback from my group came when I flirted with a male elf prostitute: my in-game sister took issue.
Which brings me to the game’s one flaw. It won’t let me romance my in-game sister, Bethany.
She has one hell of a grip on that staff.
D.
Right
I wanted to post Gnarls Barkley’s Who’s Gonna Save My Soul, but it has embedding disabled. This one’s pretty damn good, though:
Intense.
D.
With a hat tip to Julie :)
And to think: when Jake asked where babies come from — at age 5 or 6, mind you — I just told him. He said, “Oh,” and we were quite done with the topic. Ms. Sweeney would have done well to take such a direct approach.
D.
Someone tell me if I should give this book another 800 pages of my life
Am reading:
I'm still waiting for the bird.
Susanna Clarke is certainly a competent author, which is probably why I’ve made it through the first 100 pages. But really, I’m having trouble coming up with reasons to keep reading, chief among the few being “It’s taking up space on my Nook so I had better read it, hadn’t I?” Which goes to show how intolerant I am of books that lack narrative drive.
There are a few basic tricks of novel-writing which allow the author to hook the reader at chapter’s-end, compelling him to read on. Susanna Clark carefully avoids doing anything of the kind. Often the only indication I have that I’ve arrived at the end of the chapter is the sudden appearance of micro-font footnotes, most of which do nothing more than remind me how much I miss the hilarious footnotes of Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus trilogy. And how much I miss Bartimaeus in general. One of the reviews of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell made reference to the Harry Potter series; as much as I despise Rowling’s lack of technique, I miss her bitchiness and her slavish loyalty to fan service. She gives us some magic, is what I’m saying. Hundred pages into JS & MN (or at least it feels like I’m 100 pages into it) and all I’ve got are some talking bits of plaster and a forgetfulness spell. Talk about keeping your powder dry.
I do realize that Clarke is weaving a comedy of manners, as do I realize that comedies of manners are meant to stimulate the “Oh ho ho, isn’t she the clever one” smirks rather than the snort-your-coffee laughs that some of my other favorite authors manage as a matter or routine. And I’m fine with that. I knew what I was getting myself into. I simply wasn’t counting on so little happening.
So tell me, ye who have read this book: does it get better? Life is only so long, after all, and 800 pages (at the rate I read) is not an insignificant chunk.
D.
You know who else was a gamer? Hitler.
I’m sorry, but this never gets old.
My son asks what games would Hitler play if he were around (and not as old as Adam) today?
D.
No Country for Old Liberals
As many have pointed out, Ronald Reagan, patron saint of today’s Republican party, would be too liberal to survive in the current political climate. America seems to be swinging far to the right, even in the midst of a Democratic administration. If you’ll grant me that each Republican administration’s excesses have been greater than the ones preceding it, what will the next one bring?
We toyed with the idea of moving to Canada during the dark, dark Bush years. Now, well into Obama’s first term, we still have Guantanamo, rendition, and two (soon to be three) wars in the Middle East. But I suspect we’ll stick it out here, at least until it comes time for me to retire. My current job is just too great to consider making the change.
My son, on the other hand — now, there’s a different story. His whole life is ahead of him. So here’s the question: if you were a teenager and could do anything or go anywhere, what would you do?
We were trying to think of what sort of career (A) paid well and (B) provided the individual with a great deal of mobility. The best I could come up with was international law. Or Jake could become CEO of a multinational corporation, but I think I may be guilty of a little over-reach on that one. Medicine provides a certain amount of mobility, too, but he doesn’t have any obvious interest in medicine. (But you never know. Children of doctors tend to stay in the biz.)
What do you think?
D.
Qaddafi Strikes Back
According to Colonel Jack Jacobs, Libyan strong man Moammar Qaddafi’s “forces have been systematically routing the rebels.” The Empire has won this round; will the plucky rebels find the necessary allies to turn the tables?
Follow me on this. In the third* Star Wars movie, the rebels found a band of small, furry, feisty Ewoks who allied with them to defeat the numerically and technologically superior forces of the Empire. Who might the Libyan rebels find to assist them in this, their time of dire need? Well, think about it: who nearby are small, furry, and feisty?
The Israelis, that’s who! The Israelis should invade Libya on behalf of the rebels, saving the day, putting the Emperor in his place once and for all.
Which makes about as much sense as the US doing essentially just that**.
D.
*Talking the original trilogy here. Don’t even get me started about that other abomination.
**And we’re not as cute as Ewoks Israelis.
Obviously Israeli. The magazine is called Sabra, isn't it?